Supreme Court Gives Major Victory to Gay Couples
The U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday struck down a controversial federal law that defines marriage as a union between a man and a woman, in a major victory for supporters of same-sex marriage. Read more
Dream and Death
Shawn McManus
I love this
Thonis-Heracleion (the Egyptian and Greek names of the city) is a city lost between legend and reality. Before the foundation of Alexandria in 331 BC, the city knew glorious times as the obligatory port of entry to Egypt for all ships coming from the Greek world. It had also a religious importance because of the temple of Amun, which played an important role in rites associated with dynasty continuity. The city was founded probably around the 8th century BC, underwent diverse natural catastrophes, and finally sunk entirely into the depths of the Mediterranean in the 8th century AD. (via)
It’s been a long time since i posted screenshots from Skyrim, so i can’t even come close to posting all of my favorites, but… oh well. I finished both the cor game’s main questline and Dawnguard’s main quest, so some cool stuff. I may make a second post for the ones I had to leave out, we’ll see. Completing Dawnguard was especially big with this character because Aleddor is a vampire AND a Snow Elf, so meeting Gelebor was cool for him. th maion quest the highlight was Sovngarde, just because it’s pretty. During this time I also bumped my difficulty up to Master, and that plus the mod ‘Resilient Dragons’ which basically just adds HP to the dragons, the dragon fights are exciting again. So all that was cool, but I’ve had problems of the technical kind…
I love mods, but they can cause problems. Along the way, I had some mods that stuck some bad scripts into my save game, it ballooned to around 40MB. I won’t name the mods because I am not sure if the scripts themselves are at fault or if it was me removing the mods improperly. Either way, the end result was and the game was crashing very frequently, and I was afraid I may have to retire this character because his save games were becoming pretty much unplayable. I tried the tricks of making a ‘clean’ save by waiting in game for 31 days in a quiet place (one of the patches Bethesda added removes inactive scripts from a save after 30 days of in game time) and using the ‘pcb’ (Purge cell buffers) console command, and SKSE’s Clear invalid Registrations function, but to no avail, the scripts kept running and the save just kept growing to ridiculous sizes. Luckily, this tool: http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/31675/? came along and was able to fix it. But I lost oh, a good 10 hours or so, because I realized the first time I tried it, I uncovered a bug with this tool which completely broke the Civil War questline (I am in contact with the creator of the tool and they were able to reproduce the issue, so hopefully it will be fixed soon) and I had to revert back to before I had used it and take a more advanced targeted approach using that tool to removing the rogue scripts. Game is stable now.
But then (well, around the same time as this was going on, i guess) I finally caved and installed the Unofficial Skyrim Patch. Big mistake. One of the reasons I had been staying away was because it seemed like whenever Bethesda released a patch of their own, if you had the USKP, it would break the game because you then had fixes fighting with eachother. But now that Betheda has stopped patching the game… that issue is gone. But another reason was because I find it too all encompassing, fixing things I don’t think need fixing, and it’s all or nothing. But I installed it hoping it may fix the Civil War issue (it didn’t because it wasn’t a regular game bug) Then discovered it messed up the lighting added by Enhanced Lights and FX and it ‘fixed’ the Necromage vampire… well, I hesitate to call it a bug or an exploit, because I’m pretty sure that Bethesda knows about it and chose to leave it in because *it makes sense*. The Necromage perk simply states that any spells used on an undead target will be 25% more effective, if my character IS undead, why shouldn’t self buff spells be stronger? And I have an absolutely absurd weakness to fire and regen debuff in the sunlight because the debuffs are 25% stronger as well, and as both a Snow Elf and a Vampire, both of which have innate weaknesses to fire which stack… it gets pretty nasty when faced with fire, so it balances out. And I had to buy/grind my way to 70 Restoration to get it, and I almost never use Restoration spells aside from Stendarr’s Aura (which I bought from the Dawnguard by using charm spells on them to stop them from attacking me. hee hee!). So to have the patch ‘fix’ that was very annoying, is what I’m saying. (also they ‘fixed’ the physics of giants hitting you so you don’t fly 100 feet in the air, I mean come on, that was hilarious, why take that out when it only ever happens after you’re dead anyway?) It feels like they ran out of actual bugs to fix, so are moving on to rebalancing the game and sucking some of the charm out of the game, and that’s not what I want from it. I want bugs that break the game fixed, that’s it. Superficial things like lighting, balance issues and the like, no. There are other mods that address lighting glitches in a much better way, and there are other mods out there to rebalance the game in various ways if I wanted to rebalance it, I can use one of them. So yeah, when I reverted back to the old save, I ditched the USKP, and went back to a loose assortment of mods to fix the problems that affect me.
And finally! I collected all 15 Daedric Artifacts needed for Oblivion Walker, and the achievement wouldn’t pop. :( Look, screenshot to prove it: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=152993633 and I didn’t use the console for any of them (I dropped the Oghma Infinium after reading it to i could keep it to display in my house.) so.. I’m pissed off. That was one of the reasons I made Aleddor. I would have let the Skull of Corruption and Mehrunes Dagger get destroyed if I had known it wouldn’t pop anyway. I saved Boethia and Namira’s quests to last so i could just do them quick and get the achievement, then reload before doing them. Vampire or not, Namira’s quest is a step too far for me, so I went there after reloading and slaughtered the lot of them.
The Elder Scrolls Online Coming To PS4
I don’t care what some of the haters say, (I swear, Elder Scrolls has one of the most insanely picky fandoms on the planet) I think it looks really cool.
“The Ride” by Rodolphe Guenoden
wow
this is FANTASTIC!
“I’ve noticed a lot of metalheads play Skyrim. I like that.”
Should have used a screenie from this mod: http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/3538/? I found it yesterday and thought it was awesome, especially Turisas because they’re all viking and all, and one of my favorites. Though I would prefer if it was just facepaints you could apply to you character instead of having EVERY Nord in the game look like Warlord.
so, about warren ellis’ stormwatch/the authority and planetary…
both jenny sparks and elijah snow were century babies, and jenny sparks died on new year’s eve 1999, at the age of 99, cheated out of one more year due to a collective misconception of how the Gregorian calendar works by most of…
Jenny was the Spirit of the Century, which is a special kind of Century Baby, so somewhat different rules apply. There are many Century Babies, who have powers and long lives, but their powers don’t really reflect anything about the century they were born into. But among any given batch of Century Babies, there is a Spirit of the Century; she is always female, and her powers reflect a guiding principle or discovery of the age she represents. She subtly, without even realizing it, guides the direction of humanity, which other Century Babies generally do not. There can only be one Spirit of the Century alive at once, so she dies as the new Spirit of the Century is born.
Absolutely fascinating analysis about the Antikythera mechanism .
…We report progress in reading a passage of one inscription that appears to describe the front of the Mechanism as a representation of a Greek geocentric cosmology, portraying the stars, Sun, Moon, and all five planets known in antiquity. Complementing this, we propose a new mechanical reconstruction of planetary gearwork in the Mechanism, incorporating an economical design closely analogous to the previously identified lunar anomaly mechanism, and accounting for much unresolved physical evidence.Credit: Tony Freeth and Alexander Jones
Source: The Cosmos in the Antikythera Mechanism. New York University.
