Luminara

As I said, the history is very long, but the process of making sausage wasn't an epiphany. No-one woke up one morning and said, "You know what, I'm going to shove some inedible meat up this dead animal's ass and eat it later!" Okay, someone probably did, but that person's genes self-selected out of the pool. There were a lot of discovery steps leading up to making sausage. There's a condition known as protein poisoning, but it's more commonly referred to as "rabbit starvation". That's because rabbits are very low in fat content, and while you might be able to feed yourself indefinitely on nothing but rabbits, you'd eventually die with a full stomach due to the lack of fat intake. Interestingly, when the human body is approaching the point of rabbit starvation, the brain reacts by telling the body that it wants fats. And most of the commonly hunted animals in that period had plenty of fat. There are also cultures in which fats are considered delicacies, which may have come about from primitive people craving fats to balance their diets. Regardless of how, or even why, early humans came to the conclusion that they needed fat, they started taking the fat as well as the meat when they butchered their kills. No longer were they just carving off the good bits, they were starting to take as much as they could, including the not-as-good bits. Now the human species has fat with their meat. That's good, but the meat's still spoiling pretty quickly, and while some very basic preservation methods would've been available to paleolithic people (smoking in wet climates, air-drying in dry climates), they're not going to preserve it for a long time. Even dried meat will start to spoil as it absorbs moisture, and smoked meat would have to be smoked again and again as pieces were removed, because the smoke curing process doesn't penetrate very far. Plus, primitive humans weren't building smokehouses, they were getting lucky when they left meat next to a fire, so that was unreliable. But some bright pennies did notice that fats were more resistant to spoilage than raw, or even cooked, or even smoked or dried meat. And that the fats congealed into a mass if they were captured in something and cooled... say, a rudimentary bowl. So someone leaves some cooked, fatty meat in a shell or a concave rock or a skull, the fat congeals, and they forget about it until a week later, rediscover their forgotten morsel and find that it doesn't smell rotten. If it happens often enough, they start making an intellectual connection between "white stuff on top" and "not spending today dead". They wouldn't have rationalized their observation as an understanding that the fat created an anaerobic environment which was hostile to most bacteria, but they got the important bits of it without the lingo being necessary. Fat-covered meat didn't spoil nearly as quickly. Bam, pemmican (which traditionally has other things mixed in, like nuts and berries, but we're just concentrating on sausage here). This is a simple enough progression that even primitive people can figure it out, as they obviously did. So now our species has achieved the precursor to sausage, fat-covered meat. Problem was, there were no handy dandy cardboard boxes, or shopping bags, or Saran Wrap, or Ziploc bags or anything else to make it easy to carry the meat. And skulls get heavy. So do rocks. They could throw it into a skin and carry it that way, but sooner or later, the layer of fat protecting the meat would break after being jostled about so much. But early humans were hunters, and more than that, they were adaptable and intelligent and increasingly driven toward efficiency. They were changing their methods to use as many parts of game as they could, because the more food they could bring back to the main site, and the longer it lasted, the less they had to work. There weren't a lot of uses for intestines... but they could carry water... and food. Most cuts would've been too large to stuff into those butt tubes, as would the offal, but the thin slivers that they were cutting off of the bones, the bits they scraped off of the ribs, those went into the intestines that they cleaned in the cold, clear streams. Coincidentally, it also protected the meat for even longer, something they'd discover through experimentation and experience, which would eventually lead to using them to store meat long-term because it wasn't just more portable and a more efficient way to recover meat from an animal, it also helped the meat last longer. The mold part... that had to be an act of desperation. We're instinctively repulsed by moldy food. That shit'll kill you, right? As we discovered much, much, much later, not all molds are bad. Someone got so hungry that he/she scraped the mold off of that proto-sausage that he/she'd left sitting in the cave eight or nine months ago and bit into it... and found that it was not only still good, the flavor had changed! That had to have been something new and exciting, as revolutionary to them as cooking. Primitive people have finally progressed from gnawing on carcasses to storing food for the winter, and having a bonus new flavor on top of it. That's when we started making sausage. It took tens of thousands of years to get there, but once we were there, we started really focusing on it. It became more than just a convenient way to preserve food, it helped us make more efficient and thorough use of the animals we killed, it provided better food security, it increased our lifespans and allowed us to spread out more rapidly and into areas where finding food may have been more difficult. And that last part is probably why we started using spices. When you're traveling and have only the food you can carry with you, or what you hunt/gather along the way, you can start to lose your appetite. Spices, though... that changed the game entirely. Suddenly the meat wasn't just edible, it was bursting with flavor, and in the form of sausage, you could carry a lot of different flavors. Sausage-making goes at least as far back as Mesopotamia. It's likely that the proto-civilization preceding that was making sausage. But it took around 35,000-40,000 years and a lot of unexpected discoveries before we became sausage gourmands. And I'm not going to cover Mesopotamia to now, you can Google that.

Actually, no. Sausage-making has a long and interesting history, and is a fascinating process in and of itself, but the most fundamental aspect of it is that it relies on spices, a high fat content, and mold to prevent spoilage. Traditionally, sausages are made by taking shavings and otherwise unpalatable or unusable pieces of meat, mixing them with fat and spices, stuffing the resultant mixture into the intestines of an animal (washed, of course), then hung in root cellars, caves, barn lofts or even in out-buildings, where they'd very slowly dry while a layer of mold would grow on the outside. The mold would actually prevent bacteria from attacking the meat (you know how penicillin was discovered? same basic idea, and many of the same species of mold) while the meat dried, and since the casing kept air out, the fat also dried without spoiling, and the spices not only flavored the meat/fat mixture, they also increased the drying action and reduced the likelihood of spoilage further. When left undisturbed, the sausages would eventually dry to a very low moisture content and become extremely resistant to spoilage in the long term. Also of note, spices weren't just to help with the preservation. Sometimes those unpalatable pieces of meat were right on the verge of spoiling. Other times, the meat might be too gamey, or particularly unpleasant (from what i've read, opossum tastes like a dumpster smells). The right spices could make the difference between inedible and downright delicious. Sausage-making and consumption was necessary because it wasn't until the 20th century that refrigeration became ubiquitous. There were many places where ice couldn't be easily acquired, or saved in ice holes/ice houses/caves, so people learned to make foodstuffs which were less prone to spoiling. Sausage, cheese, dried grains or flour, smoked meats, salted meats, cured meats, pemmican, the human species created numerous ways to preserve food when food preservation was much more difficult than "stick it in the freezer". Learning to preserve foods allowed us to travel farther, work longer and harder, and survive better. Food preservation is one of the cornerstones of our ability to thrive as a species. Without it, we'd likely still be living like paleolithic people. Farm-fresh eggs which haven't been washed yet can be left unrefrigerated for several months, too. This allowed people to harvest eggs when chickens were laying frequently and save them for the months when egg production slowed or stopped (late fall through early spring), even without refrigeration of any kind. Consequently, sausage and eggs became a very common breakfast across much of the United States and Europe (i have no idea about Asian practices, i haven't gotten that far yet), because they were always available, even in seasons when other foods weren't, and because they were resistant to spoilage, could be eaten with less risk of spending the entire day puking instead of working... or dead, which is always a bummer. No-one likes to spend a day dead.

Well, I don't speak for anyone else, but the sausage problem is of interest to me because I've seen it happen several times already. Do you remember a little game development studio known as Blizzard? Oh, good, you've heard of them. We're on the same page. Let's continue. Blizzard started out tiny, did what they wanted to do, made money and sold out. The company changed hands several times in the late 90's, but it remained relatively unencumbered by the demands of their publishers. They made good games, the games sold well, everyone made money and everyone was happy. Their popularity and reputation grew continually, culminating when they released World of Warcraft. They were swimming in success at that point. And then... Ultrabig Money Publisher acquired them. And it all started to fall apart. The quality of their products started declining, then they started avalanching. WoW expansions had less and less content, more and more bugs, entire areas incomplete, broken or despised mechanics, inexplicable retcons, gaping plot holes, quest lines which petered out to nothing. Their Diablo franchise suffered as well. Diablo 3 required an always active Internet connection, to the dismay of millions of gamers. Their fourth Diablo game turned out to be a mobile app out-sourced to a developer notorious for making bad games. And then the real world dramas hit the fan. Dramas. Plural. Sexual harassment. Discrimination. A hostile work environment. Censorship of users of their product. A fucking "Cosby room" where execs would take women for exactly what the name implies. Even China, with whom they'd had a mutually beneficial arrangement for over a decade, decided they didn't want anything to do with them. China. A communist nation with re-education camps, and censorship laws with prison time, and constant surveillance, and work conditions so harsh that employees commit suicide. They decided that Blizzard was too unethical to deal with. After Ultrabig Money Publisher stepped in, Blizzard fell apart. Their IPs went from some of the most lucrative in the industry to barely scraping in enough to keep going. And now they, and Ultrabig Money Publisher, have been purchased by another Ultrabig Money Publisher, which is supposedly cleaning house and trying to unfuck the whole mess they made so they can restore the franchises to their previous lucrative state. At which point, I fully expect that Ultrabig Money to screw the pooch, too, but we'll have to wait to see. No? You don't like that one? How about Ion Storm? Or Bioware? Black Isle? We, gamers, have seen the results of Ultrabig Money taking over a smaller company over and over again. Company becomes successful, Ultrabig Money buys Company, and the downward spiral begins. It's almost inevitable. I say "almost" because there are occasions when Ultrabig Money pulls its collective head out of its fat ass and stops fucking with Company (SquareEnix is the only one i can think of at the moment), and everything works out for the best. Not often, though. In the vast majority of cases, it all goes to shit. In the short time since Marvel was purchased, we've already seen projects cancelled, scandals and controversies, products being shipped in an incomplete state because they were rewritten and reshot at the last minute... it's remarkable how familiar that is to me, as a gamer. If they're true to form, they'll start cutting budgets, then jobs, then entire divisions. Oh, my, the same thing is happening to Lucasfilm. Imagine that. It's almost like... this is a pattern which keeps repeating itself, with the same situations and conditions leading to the same results, even across different industries (there are actually a shocking number of parallels between game development and film development). That's why I look forward to these off-topic side discussions. I'm watching a train being driven along the exact same track where other trains have wrecked, and I'm pretty sure this one's going to be a twisted heap of smoldering metal soon, too. And while I did say that I don't speak for anyone else, I'm also betting that this sentiment is shared by a lot of people reading this. As tragic as it is to watch something you love burn to the ground, it's also rewarding, because watching people enact their own ruination via willful ignorance and abject stupidity is almost as entertaining as Marvel films used to be. And, before you ask, or start assigning labels, this isn't a rant about capitalism. The problem is, as it always is, the people. The people making the decisions to cut jobs, cut wages, cut content, cut corners, cut their assets right down to the bone, do shady things, treat their employees and associates horribly, hemorrhage money on legal fees and settlements, never once seeing that they're just repeating history. I don't know, maybe there's something about money that makes people really stupid when they get too much of it, or maybe they're just following some unfinished or half-assed business plan that's been passed around for decades, or maybe it's simply that shit floats and that's how all of the people making these bad decisions end up at the top. It always goes back to the people, though. The people who make the same boneheaded, moon brained, numbnuts decisions that end up tanking their companies. In any system, regardless of how it's constructed or managed, when things go tits up, it's always attributable to people.

Immerses self in time sink (video game). Complains about time sinks. Self-created drama confirmed.

I had a very long paragraph about him (i think he's an excellent "idea man", but a bad script writer. he's the kind of writer who needs to be kept in check, not given uncontested control), but I removed it because ultimately, that falls on Kennedy's shoulders, too. Maybe he was given too much control over TFA, but even if that was the reason it ended up like it did, it's still on Kennedy's shoulders. She was the shot-caller. She had months to ask for revisions to the script before principle photography began, she had two years to ask for reshoots after that, and she either did nothing, or asked him to double down on the worst aspects. Either way, she was responsible for the finished product.

I'll weigh in on this, and hopefully help shed some light on the discrepancy between opinion and statistic. The movies are crap. The Force Awakens was "Mary Sue versus the emo boy with daddy issues and a penchant for breaking his toys when he throws a temper tantrum". It had a shit plot, shit storyline and shit execution. It did extremely well at the box office because it was a Star Wars film released after a content drought. It could've been about Admiral Akbar fisting randomly selected 8-bit cartoon caricatures of previous cast members while light sabers twirled in the background and Star Wars fans would've flocked to see it for the same reason a starving person will gobble down a hunk of spoiling, moldy meat and declare it the best thing he/she had ever eaten: if you're hungry enough, you're grateful for anything you can get. The Last Jedi was even worse. The villains were so thin you got a paper cut every time one of them appeared, the heroes were whiny and irritating and the movie packed a lot of badly used comedy in as padding to cover for the lack of compelling content and uninteresting, one-dimensional characters. And a lot of people interpreted the burning of the Jedi books as a message, a "Fuck you, we're not interested in the legacy" letter to fans. People watched this one because they hoped it would redeem the travesty of TFA. The massive decline in sales proved that it didn't. Rise of the Skywalker was a desperate attempt to change direction, a maneuver performed well after the entire franchise had passed the event horizon of the black hole of suckage. Too little, too late and badly done. And everyone knew it was going to suck, that there was no way to pull it back on course short of a full reboot, but they went to see it anyway, for the same reason people stop to watch a multi-car pile-up happening on the highway. Morbid curiosity. Solo was a lot of lovingly crafted, deeply thought out shots of... iconic props. And some guy motormouthing his way through a performance as our favorite quiet, brooding smuggler turned hero of the rebellion. Small wonder everyone left the theater asking themselves, "What the fuck did I just watch?" Kennedy was responsible for all of that. She was the producer, she was the head of the entire LucasFilm division, she should've burned the script for TFA the day she saw it. She didn't. Instead, she ran with it. She approved the script. She approved the changes. She watched the dailies, the reshoots, the rough cut, the edits and the final cut, and put her stamp on all of it. And then she fucking did it again with TLJ. And then she started scrambling to fix things with RotS, which proved that she was aware of the problems she created. She should've been removed from her position the day TLJ went to theaters, because letting that garbage loose in the world was a sign of either incompetence or a deliberate decision to milk Star Wars fans by delivering a crap product, knowing they'd pay for it no matter how bad it was. She either made mistake after mistake, or she realized that she could peddle anything to Star Wars fans, cash in on the franchise now and let someone else worry about fixing it in the future. Neither is a good quality to have in the person heading up the most popular and historically successful franchise that exists. Rogue One was the only good one to come out of her run at the head of LucasFilm. Rogue One was magnificent. Heartbreaking, but wonderful. It had all of the notes of the originals. Epic, sweeping scale, relatable characters with real flaws and real development, villains who didn't make us feel scornful, heroes who rose to the occasion, joy, sorrow, nobility, fantastic battles... it was the best Star Wars film since The Empire Strikes Back. But it was under-marketed and quietly shuffled off to the side in favor of the major films. And that was on her, too.

When people are paying for something expensive, they're interested in knowing what makes it so expensive. Movie tickets are expensive. Due to the non-centralized nature of streaming services (everyone has a streaming service now, they're all separate and they all have their own cost), streaming is expensive. We know what makes a shoe cost what it does, or a phone, or a cutting board. We know where they're manufactured, we know how they're made, we know what it cost to make them and we're free to determine whether they're worth paying for. We're even at the point of including ethical considerations in the value and cost of things. Was it made in a sweat shop where the workers only get $0.42/hr., or was it made by people being paid a fair wage, and which do I want to spend my money on? And there's the movie industry, keeping everything hidden while demanding ever-escalating fees to see their products. Hidden gender gaps in wages. Hidden hiring practices. Hidden assets. Hidden bonuses for executives who push films out the door, regardless of success or quality. Hidden expenses, hidden practices, hidden legal fees to cover inappropriate behavior on- and off-set. People want to know if what they're spending on a ticket or streaming service is justified. We know Hollywood is as corrupt as Washington DC, we're tired of it and we're asking questions. Considering that they've spent decades accusing the general public of being thieves, I doubt you'll find much support for the position of letting them keep their own shady practices and expenditures under wraps.

The concept is rooted in mythology (of course, because isn't everything?). In Homer's Odyssey, Aeolia is the floating island home of Aeolus, the "ruler of the winds". The concept was further embellished upon by Aristophanes, about 400 years later, in The Birds. Around the 9th century AD, Bishop Agobard of Lyon posited the existence of a floating island where sky pirates might live. In modern literary history, Gulliver's Travels picked up the literary device for use as the home of the Laputans. From the 20th century onward, it became a somewhat common trope in sci-fi. In video games, the original Final Fantasy is where most of us likely encountered it. It then appeared in a few 1990's games, such as Stratosphere: Conquest of the Skies and The Granstream Saga. Japanese developers have exhibited a fondness for the concept and used it more frequently in their works, including several times in the Zelda and Final Fantasy series'. It appears to be most commonly portrayed in RPGs and side-scrollers, which makes sense because those are the types of games which best use the unique aspects of a floating island. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floating_cities_and_islands_in_fiction

It would have to be rotating binds, due to the character limit. targetcustomnext <name>$$ uses a minimum of 19 characters plus the object name, plus the 9 characters just to make the bind. Even confined to a single bind file, you'd be unlikely to squeeze in more than 8. Cut it down to 7 to make room for bindloadfile filename.txt. So if there were 100 object names, you'd have to use a 15 file rotating bind. If there were 500 object names, 72 bind files. Or @Healix could just bind a key to /interact, which is probably exactly what she wants.

Streisand Effect. Hollywood works so hard to conceal their real expenses and profits that they've drawn attention to them.

Yes. The only way anyone else could see it would be if you shared the mod. As long as the name of the texture file isn't changed, the game uses it. It doesn't even check file size or date of creation. You could extract a hat texture from the relevant file, overwrite it with your cocknose, save it with the same file name and drop it into the correct folder and it'd work. But, again, all mods are client-side only, so the only way anyone would see your mod would be if you uploaded the file for them to use. Numerous texture mods there, if you want to see how they're done. https://forums.homecomingservers.com/forum/60-tools-utilities-amp-downloads/ <-- also might have some which haven't been uploaded to that tool's cache.

From the linked article: Not every game company uses patents to outright prevent others from using their systems. In January, Sega's head of Corporate Development HQ, Kikuo Masumoto, explained that Sega allows others to use their patented ideas if they're willing to apply for a license. The general manager of Konami's legal department, Shunsuke Murase, added that this offers a way for companies to recuperate investment. recuperate investment recuperate investment Who do I defenestrate, the person who wrote the article or the editor who allowed that to be published?

Plesiosauce is now in my lexicon. I wonder how many cryptozoologists I can bullshit into believing it's a relative of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Eh, probably all of them. Pseudo-scientists will believe anything.

That's where we get the phrase, "Everything in moderation" from. They gettin' jiggy up in the hizouse.

7) Your character heard Sally make a yo momma joke.

The Otter-Man Empire.

Yeah... Thanks for keeping me in check, @GM Crumpet, @GM_GooglyMoogly, @GM Impervium, @GM Kaiju, @GM Tock, @Jimmy and @Widower (they've all spanked me (some more than once)). I don't like it, but I understand it.

Oh, you silly goose, you don't have to flirt with me, I already think you're peachy keen. Not that way. Don't touch my butt.

You keep going around and around in this circle as though someone were standing behind you with a gun pointed at your head, forcing you to take the power, then forcing you to use the power at the most inopportune moments. Naw, dawg. You're doing it to yourself. Methods to deal with Devolution have been posted. Pick one and use it instead of pissing in the wind and passive-aggressively telling everyone off for not agreeing with you.

Someone who makes better builds than those shitty ones that have to juggle Hasten and Domination. Duh.

Homecoming has several dormant social media accounts. Mount Saint Helens was dormant, then it blew up. Conclusion: The Homecoming team is going to blow something up.

Every one of my dominators has perma-Domination and doesn't have Hasten. Most are over 200% global +Recharge, and those who aren't are very close to that number (195+) And, again, that's without Hasten. Hasten doesn't need to be changed because people make shitty builds, people need to stop making shitty builds that require juggling the auto. /thread

@Cipher, you really need to take that away from @Jimmy. And tell him to stay off of the damn counter. He's getting butt dust all over the coffee maker.

Any HP an NPC loses counts against XP. If an NPC falls off of a building, or is teleported to max range straight up and dropped, or stands in a red crystal on an Oranbegan map, or is attacked by another hostile NPC, whatever the reason, you can only receive XP for the percentage of damage you dealt to defeat it. Confuse is the only exception to that rule. In all other cases, if your character, your ally NPC, your pet or your teammate isn't the one dealing damage, XP is lost.

False equivalency. Secondary Mutation is the self-affecting version of Mystic Fortune, and the Devolution power was a thematic replacement for The Tower. Secondary Mutation doesn't have a "million dollar wedge" because Mystic Fortune doesn't have one. These two powers are balanced against one another, and Devolution is the alternative, thematic approach to The Tower's -HP and +Damage. What you're requesting is for Secondary Mutation to be redesigned outside of that balance paradigm. You want the thematic element replaced with crippling debuffs and clearly overpowered buffs, and in complete disregard for the ramifications of such a change. It's not even close to balanced, either against Mystic Fortune or in the game as a whole. It's a non-starter. They're not going to do it. And going back to the beginning... You complain about a 3% ToHit Debuff, refer to it as "nasty", as something you have to "power through", and then ask for a 50% ToHit Debuff? Really?