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Everything's out of focus - could just have been a cloud to cloud lightning strike - the "ball" here seems to be clouds lighting up from the strike. Nope. Don't believe it.

Cool, though.

I though it was like a basketball? ball lightning that is.

I've seen ball lightning, or something that seemed terribly similar to the descriptions, once. As a wild, midwestern thunderstorm was rapidly approaching, there were two glowing balls around 3-4 foot in diameter "bouncing" along above a set of power lines. They lasted just a few seconds, fizzling out about the time the rain hit.

I think the duration alone disproves this being normal lightning at a strange angle.

Could it be a standard cloud to cloud arc but seen end on so that it appears ball-like? I know that the existence of "ball" lightning is disputed, and to me the end-on-view seems the simplest explanation, so Occam's razor and all that.

When I watched the first Star Wars movies, it always seemed that the Jedi were just extremely long lived due to the Force and that the Empire had been in power for such a long time people had forgotten about the republic. Even Yoda mentioned he was many hundreds of years old.

It wasn't until the horrible prequels that this was shown to be incorrect and that it had only been a couple of decades. Of course the prequels also introduced other stupid crap like midichlorians (sp?), ship and vehicle designs that seemed far more advanced than anything the empire had 20 years later, tech like robot sized force fields that block light sabers, the Emperor's face being caused by force lightning (instead of just being ancient), etc etc.

Plus, it wasn't just Han Solo who felt this way. For instance:

Tarkin: The Jedi are extinct. Their fire has gone out of the universe. You, my friend, are all that's left of their religion.

Motti: Don't try to frighten us with your sorcerer's ways, Lord Vader. Your sad devotion to that ancient religion has not helped you conjure up the stolen data tapes or given you clairvoyance enough to find the Rebels' hidden fort-(begin force choke).

So, to be fair, either the Jedi should have had very little presence in the Republic in the prequels (like to the point that nobody really believed in them beyond 'that's a bunch of hokum), or it should have been many years between the fall and the rebellion. Of course, that means that Luke and Leia would have to have been like great great great grandkids of Vader's, but either way would have made more sense. Having them basically 'running' the Republic's military and people seeing them use the Force all the time just doesn't fit.

I'm too busy punching the snot out of peoples faces in Deus Ex 3.

However, I prefered Skyrim (it's crack) over Fallout (it's a grind) simply for the fact that I can be the bastard child of Palpatine and Conan, shooting lightning out of my hands while wielding big swords. Also, I fatally shot a bear into its asshole twice. I'm quite proud of that. Fuck Bullseye, I'm Brownseye.

@VoodooV! Great to see you back, man!

For everyone else, I backed this game and then I dropped ~$100 on extra ships.

I hope it's all its promised. I hope it's basically Star Wars/Trek/lightning in a bottle. I hope Chris Roberts makes enough to buy Facebook from it.

Do I think that will happen? Not bloodily likely. Am I expecting the greatest game ever? Not a chance.

But fuck me, I don't regret backing it for a second. If all I get is some shiny videos and the promise of something great, then that's worth more than any number of Ubisoft open world fetch quest-a-thons.

This is someone truly trying to push the envelope. To make a game that we dreamed of as kids, and who doesn't give a fuck about commercial realities.

It was so, so, SO fucking worth it to actually see a dec reach for the stars and push everything, especially PC technology.

If it fails ( and it probably will), then fuck it, they failed GLORIOUSLY.

I'd give them another $100 just for that.

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Apparently long enough for the FD to get there and evacuate the house.

Looks almost like lightning set it off though...

Lightning in a bottle - blip.

Got it! With all that safety instruction out of the way I'm off to lightning some wood.

To take a less emotional counterpoint :

a) Internal attacks like this, when considering the massive population of people (1/3rd of a billion), are extremely rare. Lightning strikes compete very well with these in terms of lethality. So what exactly do you do? Turn the country inside out (do things legislatively/executively that affect everyone) because there's a chance that 1 in 300 million people will once every year or two do something like this?

Also) Southern generals fought over secession. Today, the civil war is taught as being largely over slavery - but that's heavily revisionist, since at the time of the civil war the war's implications on slavery weren't even mentioned outside of black newspapers. White people were fighting over who gets to run the south, the south, or the much richer and better politically connected north.

To illustrate, the emancipation proclamation only freed slaves in the states participating in the cesession, not elsewhere. The remainder were freed after the civil war. Reason dictates that it was done primarily to cause disruption in the rebelling south, and not for any particular racial sympathy. (Here's a map for those interested. States marked in blue got to keep their slaves : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Emancipation_Proclamation.PNG).

In general, throughout human history, the defeated are usually historically revised to appear as bad as possible, so there are no questions about whether the right thing was done, and no sympathies linger for the defeated. So the south being turned into a ~1~dimensional~evil~enslaving~caricature~ of history is rather normal. Although, critical thinking people should probably know better than to fall for ancient propaganda.

-scheherazade