Why thank you Fusionaut! You got me on a Luke Kelly vibe there, I was enjoying a selection of old tunes. Just saw on the news in the last 10 mintues that Liam Clancy died. Another of the trad. guys gone. I'll have to seek out some Liam Clancy stuff next I get a chance.


In reply to this comment by Fusionaut:
Thank Moo Youdonia!


In reply to this comment by moodonia:
*promote

And you, sir!

^Fusionaut:
quick *quality before it heads to pqueueland

In reply to this comment by Fusionaut:
Thank you EndAll!

In reply to this comment by EndAll:
*quality

Thank Moo Youdonia!


In reply to this comment by moodonia:
*promote

Thank you EndAll!

In reply to this comment by EndAll:
*quality

As down the glen one Easter morn to a city fair rode I
There Armed lines of marching men in squadrons passed me by
No pipe did hum, no battle drum did sound its loud tattoo
But the Angelus Bell o'er the Liffey's swell rang out through the foggy dew

Right proudly high over Dublin Town they hung out the flag of war
'Twas better to die 'neath an Irish sky than at Suvla or Sud-El-Bar
And from the plains of Royal Meath strong men came hurrying through
While Britannia's Huns, with their long range guns sailed in through the foggy dew

'Twas England bade our wild geese go, that "small nations might be free";
Their lonely graves are by Suvla's waves or the fringe of the great North Sea.
Oh, had they died by Pearse's side or fought with Cathal Brugha*
Their graves we'd keep where the Fenians sleep, 'neath the shroud of the foggy dew.

Oh the night fell black, and the rifles' crack made perfidious Albion reel
In the leaden rain, seven tongues of flame did shine o'er the lines of steel
By each shining blade a prayer was said, that to Ireland her sons be true
But when morning broke, still the war flag shook out its folds in the foggy dew

Oh the bravest fell, and the Requiem bell rang mournfully and clear
For those who died that Eastertide in the spring time of the year
And the world did gaze, in deep amaze, at those fearless men, but few,
Who bore the fight that freedom's light might shine through the foggy dew

As back through the glen I rode again and my heart with grief was sore
For I parted then with valiant men whom I never shall see more
But to and fro in my dreams I go and I kneel and pray for you,
For slavery fled, O glorious dead, when you fell in the foggy dew.

Voting for this poll ended with the majority of users voting Foggy.

Some years ago on an eerily foggy morning before school I did this (to a lesser extent) and right as I am bounding over the hill a cop car comes strolling through the fog going the other way. Needless to say I made a hasty retreat.

Ahh, I remember this game. I got it for my 13th or 14th birthday from my sister. She bought me that, and a walkthrough to go with it, but I played the other game I got (max payne) for the first couple days after because I knew absolutely nothing about silent hill 2, or silent hill 1 for that matter.

Finally I got bored of max payne, but it was foggy and dark outside so I decided I'd test out this second game.

It scared the shit so badly out of me that I still haven't finished it to this day.

i have a problem with this counterpoint babymech.
i hope you are not devaluing the lessons history can teach us.

and the first time society is "truly" progressive....
how about taking a long look at abolitionist history, the new republican party, the labor movement of the late 19th/early 20th century, rise of anarchism in america, the history of the naacp, populism movement, the womens christian temperance union, birth control, the great migration, womens suffrage, the new deal, womens refusal to leave their factory jobs after ww2, all the way up to civil rights, womens equal rights movement, and now were working on gay rights.

our history is wholly progressive. always. just because old foggies accomplished it before we were around and now it seems outdated, that doesnt mean it wasnt progressive. in fact, looking at the list above i see most of these events could have happened in one persons lifetime. how much social change has occured in my lifetime? instead of nirvana we have nickleback, mtv quit showing videos and now airs reality shows, cartoon network..... please someone add something redeeming to this list... oh wait... the end of the cold war, but noone my age had anything to do with it...

i do agree that a society relies on young minds for new innovation, but i think my generation would be better innovators if a well rounded education was easier to come by than pop culture trivia and material consumption.

>> ^antonye:
To be fair to the marshals, they work under direction of race control so it's not their fault that they weren't told to hang out the slippery surface flag. They were doing their job with the waved yellow when the first rider went down (you can see it in the clip) but they have to be instructed for all other flags.
You've got to feel sorry for backmarker Kraus (#73) who got punted off by Foggy though; he didn't really do too much wrong except to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and get side-swiped by Foggy which was a pretty shitty thing to do. Yes, there should have been a blue flag (aka the "There's a Race Going on but You're Not In It" flag) out so he knew the leaders were coming through.
Oil on the track is a nightmare; you don't know it's there until you're sliding along on your arse, watching the bike tumble and thinking "oh no, not again". Been there, done that. Many times.
Great to see Aaron Slight out there too - one of the reasons I ride as #111.

Thanks I was wondering what he meant by a blue flag. So there's a flag to let you know you're better off packing your bags?

To be fair to the marshals, they work under direction of race control so it's not their fault that they weren't told to hang out the slippery surface flag. They were doing their job with the waved yellow when the first rider went down (you can see it in the clip) but they have to be instructed for all other flags.

You've got to feel sorry for backmarker Kraus (#73) who got punted off by Foggy though; he didn't really do too much wrong except to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and get side-swiped by Foggy which was a pretty shitty thing to do. Yes, there should have been a blue flag (aka the "There's a Race Going on but You're Not In It" flag) out so he knew the leaders were coming through.

Oil on the track is a nightmare; you don't know it's there until you're sliding along on your arse, watching the bike tumble and thinking "oh no, not again". Been there, done that. Many times.

Great to see Aaron Slight out there too - one of the reasons I ride as #111.

Long road,
Foggy Toad
what a load

-not a haiku But fun any way!

^Thanks Deano! Its like 80 and not foggy in SF but like every summer prior, it won't last. Here's to the last few days of August!

LOTS of nitpicking, and although I almost always agree with Yahtzee, I'd have to disagree with quite a few of his points.

He's right about the turning, but only because it's a rough transition after so many years of GTA car-turning being so loose and arcadey. This is more realistic, but also a bit stiff. Which leads me to my next point.

I think Yahtzee should rethink his point about games trying to become too realistic over arcade-style. All of the GTA3 games had very arcade-like reactions and physics to it. Take for example, the headshot, making the head disappear, and in it's place a stream of blood shooting straight upwards for several feet from the neck, before the body just falls over. Now, that's funny at first, but after so much of that, it got a bit too cartoony, and I was hoping for a more 'realistic' reaction. Now look at GTA4's physics. They're jaw-dropping. When you hit somebody with a car, they act so accordingly, thanks to the Euphoria physics engine (basically a much smarter, and more natural ragdoll type of physics). I mean, hell, the cars had Euphoria as well. When you hit another car hard enough, the driver dies from the impact, and his face plants into the steering wheel, leaving the car horn blaring continuously. Little details like that also make it really cool. Is Yahtzee honestly saying he'd rather a cartoon reaction over something so impressive as the Euphoria physics?

And the coloring of the city was not brown and grey. Only during cloudy/rainy/foggy days were they greyish/blue, and some point of the day was the city brown. Other than that, I was absolutely AMAZED with how pretty the daytime was. Noon-time actually looked like noon, with a natural looking sun beating down on the sidewalk and cars, etc. Dawn looks like dawn, and so forth.

All in all, he seemed to have liked it. I was a skeptic of GTA4 before I got it, and I honestly was THAT impressed with it, that I'll argue in it's defense against one of my all-time favorite reviewers. Different strokes for different folks, but I think sometimes people should take a step back from their nit-picking, and appreciate what I'd like to consider real quality. I mean, people love ripping on bad games, and rightly so. But I think we as gamers have become somewhat spoiled in the sense that we feel we should rip apart absolutely everything. I'm not directing this towards Yahtzee specifically, but sometimes it just seems that people will have a problem with something just for the sake of having something to complain about to the point of missing the entire point of healthy criticism. This game wasn't perfect, but it's obvious that instead of putting out much of the same, they came together and made something if good quality, and I think people should at least acknowledge that. Whew, sorry about that.

But he's absolutely r ight about one thing. What the hell was Rockstar thinking when they made trees the only thing in the whole game completely indestructible? You can run through newspaper stands. You can bulldoze straight through trash-cans, leaving trash littered in it's path, etc etc etc....and then smash straight into a tree without it budging an inch. The effect of flying through your windshield is really awesome though .

Donations are one thing, but if you don't have the campaign organization to spend it properly (which he's admitted), it doesn't do you much good. As for media coverage, well that's just one of many problems with an uninformed and uneducated electorate.

Arsenault - follow that math a little further. Let's assume roughly 400,000 donors, and 10 RP supporters for each donor. Now spread that across the U.S. - 4,400,000 RP supporters amongst 150,000,000 voters. Now do the polls make sense? That equals roughly 3%, which is basically in agreement with the polls (I think). For the record, I did not work that backwards. I basically came up with the assumption #s off the top of my head and foggy memory of how many legal voters there are in the country.

>> ^MaxWilder:
the idea is that individuals can purchase an education and healthcare for themselves if the economy was allowed to flourish.

Purchase an education and healthcare? That'll work for about 2 generations, at which point the entire economy will implode, because the vast majority of citizens will not be able to afford both and the few that could won't be able to find a worker that can count change, much less be competent enough to do any real work. Your economic success is intimately tied to the economic success of everyone else.