See that text under my name? Right underneath Sludgelord? That's right, it says moderator. I have the power and authority to ban you whenever it suits me. If I see you breaking a rule, that's it, you get the banhammer. No warnings. No notifications. You've all been here for long enough to know the rules by now.


Oh, and I also have the authority to change the rules at will. I can and WILL ban you for retroactively breaking one of the new rules.


My suggestion? Stay on my good side. You don't want to see my bad side.

Here are some beautiful pictures of Russia. They were taken 100 years ago by Sergey Prokudin-Gorskii and haven't been digitally altered or anything; Prokudin-Gorskii developed a method of taking color photographs over 100 years ago. He traveled all over the Russian Empire and took pictures of people and places he thought were interesting. The Russian Empire was massive and spans many people and cultures and Prokudin-Gorskii's pictures reflect its breadth of diversity. The empire collapsed a few years after he took the pictures and many of them were confiscated or destroyed. Here are some of my favorites.





































Ivan Bilibin was a Russian artist of the late 19th and early 20th centuries who illustrated Russian folklore.







































Viktor Vasnetsov was another late 19th and early 20th century Russian artist that illustrated Russian folklore and history.

























I thought these pictures were pretty neat and thought I'd share them. Post whatever you want here. Art you like your stuff about Russia or whatever. I might post some more in a little bit.

GZ it's your birthday

happy birthday GZ

 

ramirez broke his brother's arm.

"Fi syrthiedig angyles dim ewyllys cyfnewid hyn. Fi cael syrthiedig gan graslonrwydd. Fi cael syrthiedig gan cariad."

- The Boondock Saints

ragnar you need to get twitter because you are the best poster on gw and i want to read ragnar thoughts 24/7. also dietcoke too.

this my tooter

what ya tweet'n?

I remember awhile ago someone posted a website where you can download school textbooks. I don't feel like paying $600 for books this semester so I was kind of hoping someone would know where I could download books or get them for super cheap.

So I really like going out to eat. I'm pretty adventurous and I like to try new and exotic things pretty often and I guess I'm fortunate in that I live in an area with a huge selection of restaurants. Actually, I'd be surprised if there are any places in the US outside of New York that have a wider variety than DC. I think my favorite restaurant is Bangkok Garden, which is this Thai restaurant in that I've been going to for as long as I can remember. It has a really cool atmosphere, all these Buddhist statues and Thai decorations in front of a picture of the king of Thailand that looks like it was taken in the 70s. The coolest part is this indoor stream with a little bridge going over it. The food is fantastic and every time I go there I always get the thad munn appetizer, which is this fish cake with peanut sauce. Just about everything on the menu is excellent, but I always enjoy the fried rice. It's also pretty cool going there because the management knows me and I always get free stuff.

A couple of my other favorite restaurants are China Bistro, which is this hole-in-the-wall Chinese place with 4 cramped tables that serves the best dumplings I've ever had, Sadaf Halal, an excellent Persian kabob restaurant with an adjacent market, Negril, a Jamaican place near one of my school campuses that serves really huge roti, and Legano, which is this Ethiopian place near me. I think one of the best indicators that an ethnic restaurant is really good is when it's filled with ethnic people, which is always the case with the places I go to.

So yeah, what are your favorite restaurants and favorite kinds of food? What dishes do you like the best and what kinds of food would you suggest to someone with an adventurous taste like me?

Also now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure I took ramci to every single one of these places.

Hey, so I was wondering if anyone knows anything about MSX emulation, or the MSX in general. I really don't know too much about it other than that it was a popular console (computer???) in Japan in the 80s and early 90s. I have no idea if it ever left Japan or what games it even has. The reason I'm asking is that I've found two translated games that seem pretty interesting that I'd like to try out. The first is Illusion City, which is an RPG that takes place in a post-apocalyptic Hong Kong. From it's brief description, it sounds a little like Shin Megami Tensei without the demon summoning. The other game I've found, and the game I'm more interested in, is XZR II. Here's the description I found.

XZR 2 (also known as Exile) is the second part of an action RPG trilogy by Telenet Japan.

It features Sadler, an Islamic assassin. The plot of the game details Sadler’s adventures during the Christian crusades (roughly 1120 A.D), to attempt to unite the world under one god and achieve world peace. He meets historical figures, such as Hugues de Payens and Pythagoras. Along the way he also performs a Masonic ritual in an attempt to revive Noah, and kills several god-deities from other cultures.

XZR2 takes the form of overhead map screens where you wander towns and speak with people, and side-scrolling action-platform stages. It was also released in the West, in English, on the Sega Megadrive and the NEC Turbografx CD-Rom, under the title Exile (the third game was released only on the PCE-CD under the title Exile: Wicked Phenomenon, and was translated into English by Working Designs).

The original translation of XZR2 on other systems changed several religious names and details, and also removed a lot of drug references (originally healing items included cocaine and hasheesh). So if you enjoyed the MD/PCECD versions, this should allow you to experience the story in a truer form. The original game in the trilogy, XZR, was released only on the MSX and at this time is untranslated. This translation of XZR2, by Django of MSX Passion, is a partial translation, which also includes a help file in French.

That is the most unbelievable plot I've ever seen. I really don't care about the gameplay, I want to play a game where you're an Islamic prophet/assassin that attempts to resurrect Noah, uses cocaine to heal, and symbolically destroys entire cultures by murdering their gods.

So yeah, tell me about the MSX and MSX emulation. What are some other games worth checking out?

So I'm getting groceries later today at the Super HMart, which is this Korean grocery store a couple blocks away. I've been there a few times before and it's pretty cool. There's a lot of really wild foreign stuff, not just Korean, that I've never heard of before and a lot of fruits and vegetables that you can't pick up anywhere else. I'm going today specifically because I want to get some durian, which apparently smells like shit and is really creamy. I also like to pick up lots of tofu and weird Korean snack foods that don't give you any idea of what they actually are from the packaging. I've gotten a few really weird drinks there too, like this one corn silk tea that tasted exactly like popcorn and this really good cinnamon drink called soo jeong gwa. What I like best about this place is that everything is a completely new experience for me; I have no idea what any of this stuff is, which makes it sort of exciting and mysterious. It's also all really reasonably priced and even the food I can get at the regular grocery store is priced less.

So yeah, have any of you guys ever been to Super HMart or a grocery store like it before? What do you like to pick up and what do you recommend? I want to pick up something completely new and bizarre to me so any recommendations are good.

So a couple months ago I started listening to classical music. I'd listened to it before, I'd always liked Claude Debussy and Sergei Prokofiev, but my knowledge was limited to pretty much JUST THEM. I think that classical music was something that I took for granted; I recognized a lot of it but didn't know its name or composer or anything about it. I decided recently that I wanted to educate myself on classical music and I've found that I really enjoy a lot of it. I think my problem with classical music, or the reason I didn't really listen to it much before, was that I associated it with boring and stuffy baroque chamber music, which I'm discovering a lot of it is not, and that that's pretty much all they play on classical radio stations. I also feel like a lot of classical music (particularly from the classical and baroque periods (I feel kind of weird calling all of this music classical when it's pretty different, but I'm not sure what to call it)) has been played so much and become so much a piece of our culture that it's lost a lot of its meaning and impact. I am completely indifferent to a lot of it.

I'm still kind of learning about the distinctions between the romantic and classical and baroque periods, but so far, a lot of the music that I enjoy most is from the romantic period, which is the 19th and 20th centuries. A few of my favorites so far are Saint-Saens, Grieg, Borodin, and Dvorak, although I've liked almost everything I've listened to in-depth so far. I've heard a few pieces by Stravinsky, Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Smetana, and a few others that I liked and I plan on listening to more of when I get the time and finish listening to everything else. Definitely give me some suggestions on what I should listen to next.

I really want to share a lot of the music I've listened to recently with you, so I uploaded a compilation album I made with a few of my favorite songs in it. It's kind of large and I know a lot of you probably have the same associations with classical music that I do, but I genuinely think the album I've made is very good and that you'll like it. In fact, you'll probably recognize most of the songs in it; I don't think there's anything particularly obscure in it. So anyway, here's a link to the album if you want it. Check it out. I seriously think you'll like it. Here are a few of the songs that are on it.

Borodin - Polovtsian Dances
Dvorak - Op. 46 No. 7
Ravel - Pavane
Grieg - Solveig's Song

So yeah, throw out some recommendations or talk about the composers you like.

happy 14th birthday 

Joke: Why didn't adeline win the election?
Joke answer: Hanging chadelines.

Joke: Where in Oregon did bort move to?
Joke answer: bortland.

Joke: Why didn't Mark graduate from school?
Joke answer: He didn't get good marks.

Joke: Why didn't climbtree get swine flu?
Joke answer: Because climbtree's swine free.

Joke: Why did Velfarre fall down the well?
Joke answer: Because xsmfpt.

Post Your Joke's Here.

HEALP

So I'm selling my XBox 360 and I figured I'd offer here first before I try on ebay. I have whatever the best model is called, it's got a 120 GB HD I think (I don't remember how big it is, I just know it has the largest hard drive available), it's got at least one controller, maybe two, a certificate for 1 full year of XBox Live gold that I never used, two games (GTA4 and Land of the Dead or Left For Dead or whatever that zombie game where you're in a mall is called), and some device that cost me $100 that automatically picks up nearby broadband signals and connects your XBox to them. I'm selling it because I never used it and it was a horrible waste of money. I don't want an XBox! I wish I didn't buy it! I've used it maybe 4 or 5 times total so it's pretty much brand new and I've never had any problems with it. So yeah, if you're interested in buying this then make an offer.

so i've been wondering where a good place to buy clothes from online is. i've been looking around for a plain, brown hoodie for the past 2 or 3 weeks and every store i've been to has brown hoodies with shit all over them. i don't want shit all over it! since apparently the 5 billion stores in my area don't carry them, i figured the best place to get one was online, but i honestly have no idea where to buy clothes online. i've never done it before! i checked ebay and i really couldn't find anything, but i only looked for maybe 5 minutes. so yeah any suggestions.

So Jamie and I have something in common. When we were kids, Shining Force 2 was our MAIN GAME. That's the game that got us both started. We would both rent it every weekend and try to get as far as we could (every weekend without fail my save would be deleted for whatever reason). It got to the point where I rented it so much that my parents just decided to buy it for me, and I still remember how excited I was when I got it. Jamicus told me he played it all the time with his dad and still does every once in a while. It's something we enjoy both because it is a good game and that it was our first.

If you don't know what Shining Force 2 is, it's strategy RPG for the Sega Genesis that featured tons of characters and exploration. I don't feel like typing up a whole lot about it but it was a super good game that had one of my favorite battle systems and some of the best character designs ever. I'll post a couple youtubes to give you an idea of what this game is.




So what Jamicus and I plan on doing is playing a game of Shining Force 2 together. He's going to start it, do the first battle, and then send it to me. I'll do a battle and send it back to him. This will go on until we beat it. Here's the catch though: we can't use the spell "Egress". Egress lets you escape from battle to try again, but you retain all of your stats and level ups after escaping. It's the best way to train your guys, which is why we're not going to use it. It's not cheap, you're supposed to use Egress, but we want this mutual playthrough to be challenging and we want to... TAKE IT TO THE NEXT LEVEL! When you die, you also get sent back to town, which is basically the equivalent of Egress, so if we die we're going to reload too.

We want to know if anyone wants to join us on this. Doing it together is probably going to be a lot of fun so we figured it would be even more fun if we get even more people involved. This isn't a real obligation or anything, if you sign up for this and decide you want to drop out later it's not a big deal and we're not going to hold you to anything. This is just something we're doing for fun.

So yeah, here's the current turn order.

1. Jamie
2. Chef
3. Boulvae
4. Dead Phoenix
5. Goat

Sign up pals.

So I've got to do this project for psychology where I get a number of volunteers, ask them about their levels of optimism and motivation at the beginning of a 30 day period, and then again after the period is over. During the 30 day period, the volunteers work towards bettering themselves in some way; you might work a little harder in school or quit smoking cigarettes or try to exercise - it really doesn't matter (and you really don't need to do anything). As a volunteer, you'll need to occasionally look at a blog and give an update on your situation - did you RESIST TEMPTATION by not going to McDonalds or stay up late to work on a paper instead of watching TV?

To be honest I think the project is pretty dumb but I need a few more volunteers for it. I'll ask you a few questions occasionally about any progress you're making (you really don't need to do much) and I'll ask you to post on the blog maybe 3 or 4 times in the 30 day period, but you don't have very much to do. Even more than participating in this stupid project, I'm asking you to HELP ME GET AN A.

So yeah, I'd really like a few volunteers for this. I'll explain it a little better to anyone who decides to sign up or whatever, but it's not at all difficult, you don't have to do very much other than look at a blog occasionally, and it helps me do well in my psychology class.

[topicinfo topic=3228]Move target[/topic]

so a couple months ago, an expansion for gothic 3 came out. i'm a pretty huge gothic fan and was really disappointed by how unplayable and terrible gothic 3 was, so i'm hoping this fixes a lot of that and makes it worth playing. i have no idea what it's about or if it's good or if it's buggy. has anyone here played it? is it worth playing? also, does this patch up the original gothic 3 at all or make it remotely playable? i've looked around for opinions and information on this game and i've literally been able to find nothing so yeah, i'm sure some people here have played it!