Larian Studios Forums General Chat Another life

Well, I have read a lot about French history. I find it very interesting. I know that Marie was Austrian and that her mother was the empress Marie-Theresia (sp?). I also know that she was very young when she was maried to Louie. But even french people didn´t like her, as Al said she was a tragic person and I think that her only fault is that she was raised in a short of way that she couldn´t imagine about poorness and poverty in France during that period. In any case in French history I have read about very interesting people, Voltaire (sp?)among others that I really enjoy their books or just reading about their life. I am really gratefull about French literature.

Greek Mythology is really more interesting than modern Greek History. <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/biggrin.gif" alt="" /> Trust me <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/biggrin.gif" alt="" />

I would like to be the "God(King)" of Maia Society.

I do like English, Scottish and Irish history.
As well as Canadain, though it is not near as intresting as English history. <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" />

Hmm <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/ouch.gif" alt="" /> well probably in Forgotten Realms, since I would be feeling somewhat at home <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" />

i would be a Nubian Orc....

living at an all inclusive resort spa

somewhere deep in the tropics....... Ahhhhhhhh. <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/cool.gif" alt="" />

P.S. with my own personal weapons manager! <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/biggrin.gif" alt="" />

oh yes and high speed internet....so i can check the forums daily!! <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/up.gif" alt="" /> <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/biggrin.gif" alt="" />

What are the times when people lived without Steam, YouTube and Instagram, and the Internet was a thing for geeks? Without Covid-19, terrorism, bitcoins and serious games were released on CD and not on floppy disks? Truly wonderful times of Another life!

Guillotine ftw
And twitter without fleets.

Boring. Sunday afternoons as a kid were hell: dragged off to the grandparents so the grown-ups could talk about dull grown-up stuff, nothing on the telly, nothing to do as all my friends were in another town and even the shops were shut, no internet (I mean it was a established at that time but not outside a handful of universities and other stuff not available to a 10-year-old) and... yeah. Once computers became popular when I was about 12 there wasn't really internet; just a few dial-up services and competing stuff was often more popular such as Prestel, but all out of the range of a 12-year-old's pocket money and would tie up the family's one analogue dial-phone which could only realistically be used with an acoustic coupler.

No floppy drives either, at least not for me: if I couldn't afford Prestel, I definitely couldn't afford a floppy drive and controller which between them would set me back probably more than the cost of a high-end gaming rig would today when allowing for inflation. It was all wrinkly cassettes, which may or may not load and while some games were excellent, others were less so. Saving was even more problematic so I usually didn't bother...

I thought I'd get a warning for necroposting. This topic is like a little time machine. 100, 200 years after the people of the future will study people of the past on such topics in the forums. I say hello to future generations!

Some people get very upset about necroposting, but as long as it's on topic I don't see the problem with it. Pretty much everything in "Chat" is on-topic! (I mean other than the usual stuff like spam and and posting the same thing everywhere, iow spam).

I periodically reply to emails from over 30 years ago just to show how late I can be with my replies. I generally get around to it... eventually.

Oh, now I know when to wait for an answer to my request to the Wizard of the Coast

It wasn't a statement of intent, though a rather protracted episode of severe insomnia isn't helping me keep up with stuff. Hmm, thinking back to a 34-year-old email saying I was always falling asleep.

34 years ago, I was working at my first real job (i.e. not casual warehouse, catering or fast-food work). I was an office boy, wore colour-matching shirts and socks in pastel shades, and was a complete prat.

I definitely be a fantasy character in a FRPG, so long as I was the GM as well as the PC. It would also have to be the world I created, because I wouldn't want any nasty surprises.

Well 33 years ago I was trying to not end up being expelled from college due to creative misuse of the internet. Probably the less said the better, though I did get a write up in the monthly JANET security newsletter in a rather resigned tone by a long-suffering sysadmin, which I feel was heralding my own future right there. I somehow managed to talk my way out of it not by any CHR/WIS rating but I guess quickly learning how to play that particular speechcraft minigame in record time.

While I wasn't doing university things I was earning money at a local lawnmower factory as a data entry clerk. They ancient IBM System/3x was bloody horrible but the 5250 terminals had the most awesome keyboards in the history of ever.

The cafeteria also did wonderful cheese sarnies. Pretty much half a baguette, as much butter as they could splat on it and what seemed like an entire block of the most mature mouth-burning cheddar I've ever tasted.

We had two IBM 286s and one IBM 386 PC (the posh one). I also recall that the ink-jet printer (kept in a secure room so they could monitor who was printing on it) was a pain in the bum because it needed its own special paper.

I also recall with much fondness the drawing office archive filing room for which only I had a key.

I remember trying to get Doom to run on a 386. That wasn't a fun experience and that evening spent with the monitor perched on a coffee table, a Post-It sized window with ChunkyVision graphics, me in a quite severely pre-hungover state with the main lights still on and some weird Frank Zappa CD playing combined into quite a surreal experience. Not the good sort.

My salary was bad enough and my mortgage big enough that I couldn't afford a PC so I had to use whatever I could beg, borrow or steal from work, and neither Philips nor DEC were really very PC oriented. I did have a Vax in the spare bedroom which dealt with my email (DEC installed a leased line for me: a KiloStream sounds pedestrian by today's standards at 64 Kbit but that was way faster than anyone's modem at a time when 9600 was still rare) which, in spite of being just a little one, really nommed my electricity greedily resulting in large electricity bills before that was really a thing and getting very hot over summer as the boiler was in there too (it lived in the airing cupboard: small terraced house with a tiny kitchen and it had to go somewhere). Still, in spite of melting it was worth it to have a commute that just involved staggering across my landing.

What was interesting is that even then (this would've been 1995) working at home was not a new concept and I got the leased line because it'd already been extensively studied and made workable years previously, and saved money for both the employer and employee, and resulted in the employee getting less stressed and the employer getting more productivity and better quality. Ever since I moved on a couple of years later I've never been able to find anyone willing to allow home-working and it's been like that pretty much everywhere. It's taken this lockdown 25 years later for anything to happen and the unwillingness and foot-dragging are still a sight to behold, usually supported by the same old excuses, "but employees can't be trusted to work", which was not only debunked at least 30 years ago (employees are more likely to overwork), it says a lot about what is wrong with UK managers. I've actually spent a lot of time working out what managers actually do, especially once you factor in timesheets since that's the absolute basic: they should know what their staff are doing and timesheets should only be necessary for contractors. Then I spent nearly a year with no manager after he flounced off in a strop due to one of us being paid almost as much and... nothing bad happened. Whereas lots of good things happened: allowed to manage ourselves, productivity and morale both soared and problems and miscommunication with other parts of the organisation became a thing of the past.

Until some higher-up eventually decided we should have a manager, offered me the job (thinking back to the one good manager I had, a former techie who now hated his job, I told them to piss off because I wanted to actually do my job and not faff about dealing with time-wasters) so they recruited someone. He was the manager from hell. Accomplished nothing, blew the entire budget on pointless vanity projects, hired all his cronies from elsewhere and obstructed any actual work being done. Which I think sums up managers perfectly.

So this is now the nostalgia thread?
So let's remember a distant past, a time of wonders and dragons: The year 2000
People could shoot their air rifles on fields in peace.
Children could hunt each other with airsoft guns in the forest without being disturbed by multiple special forces helicopters looking for the terrorists some "concerned citizens" (R) were telling them about.
One could walk through a fairly large town without being seen by a single surveillance camera.
People did not have their neck stuck in a smartphone friendly position.
Some politicians were serious when talking about the importance of freedom of speech.
The internet was still a bit of wild west and many sites offered utterly uncensored speech the likes of which is now rare outside the darknet.

Work from home is ok for some things, not so much for others. I am disturbed by the fact that even some defense companies have introduced the concept and even allow people to use their own devices. Patches should come in by data diode and nothing should be connected to an external network, ever. I fondly remember proposing a suse linux fork called paranoia for the power platform that would have pushed user friendlieness to lows not seen since the early days of IT. Good old days.

Fantasy worlds?
I would move to Vvardenfell (the whole volcano eruption is just some weird bethesda fanfiction and did not happen)
Northern Faerun would also be a nice place to live, given enough wood for the winter

I'm glad I'm not the only person who thinks that Skyrim is practically non-canon. Vvardenfell's destruction, the nords being utter miserableists who are surly and hate everyone, the charmless wall-to-wall bleak... I admit I'm probably more fangirly about Oblivion than is entirely excusable, though tbh nearly all of the complaints levelled against it (which were ironically the result of listening to feedback a bit too earnestly) were comprehensively addressed by mods. The only things that weren't were its crashiness (though there were some things that mitigated it, I've seen an interesting analysis on why it is essentially unfixable) and the perplexing lack of beards, which would've offset a lot of that potato-face criticism. There was no particularly good reason to not include them and they would actually be incredibly easy to implement... except there isn't a beard slot, and the hair slot (which would otherwise colour and render them correctly) is disabled when wearing a helmet. :| Oh well.

As for the other stuff, the UK has led the way in a lot of that sort of crap thanks to our "worst in the Western world" media and craven politicians who are always looking to garner their approval. So we'd had most of that long before Y2K. Including the phones: I was commuting into London in the late '90s and they'd become such a nuisance that there were incidents of people having their annoying contraption hurled out of the window by someone who couldn't take it any more. Speaking as someone who would hear the same people, day after day, yelling into their phone I'm on the train! YES! ON THE TRAIN! at 200db and wondering to myself, why aren't you bored with this yet?