Hamstersss

So, come one come all, except for that Chai Tea guy, and join in the row to end all rows. Think evolution is just a load of horse puckey??? I want to hear your silly argument. Never knew that our government fed little retarded kids plutonium in their corn flakes??? I want to hear your shock. Don't know existensialism from post-modern humanism??? I want to mock you. Think I'm a pompous, mean-spirited jerk who would be better off loaded into Dora and fired into the Baltic??? Well, that's just mean. ------------------ Did someone compare this to the Ealing comedies? I've shot people for less. -David Edelstein

Oh no, the Roster War II... ------------------ Did someone compare this to the Ealing comedies? I've shot people for less. -David Edelstein

First off, a little clarification. Pillar, you made a weird post that weirded me out, as well as quite a few others, I'd wager. Gunslinger, this board's understanding of a mod is different from that of the mod communities out there. As BTS hasn't released any development tools, there's little customization available other than changing faces, uniforms and camo patterns. When guys like Gunslinger talk about mods, they're talking about doing total conversions using the 3D engine and basic framework of CM but creating their own weapons, vehicles, etc. To do this, you either need some support from the developer (BTS releases a development kit) or someone hacks into CM and figures out the formatting. Before anyone starts to talk about this being immoral, mod makers don't warez the game, they just make full-featured add-ons for it. Hence, if someone made CM:Nam, you would still have to buy CMBO, then you would download CM:Nam. This is why Half-Life has enjoyed such longevity. I've brought this issue up before and would love to hear BTS's take on it. ------------------ Did someone compare this to the Ealing comedies? I've shot people for less. -David Edelstein

I just wanted to mention that I'm that jerk on the other end of you guys. Piat, zook or shrek, my guys never miss, as long as it is an amazingly long shot or moving target. Just feel good to know that those of us who have the shaped-charge sharpshooters can't hit dink if you're at 30m and not moving a muscle. In all seriousness, we remember the remarkable and the frustrating but we tend to take for granted when things go like they're supposed to. This leads us to think that the exceptional is the norm but it isn't, it's just more exceptional and hence, more noteworthy. ------------------ Did someone compare this to the Ealing comedies? I've shot people for less. -David Edelstein

1) Dunno. 2) Cesspool (That 1200+ Thread). Just act cocky and everyone tries to kill you. Then they start games of CM with you. 3) Yes. ------------------ You wouldn't know the dust of Thermopylae if it came up to you, handed you a business card reading "Dust of Thermopylae, 480 B.C.E.", then kicked you in the shins. -Hakko Ichiu

Please send it my way, it sounds immensely fun. ------------------ You wouldn't know the dust of Thermopylae if it came up to you, handed you a business card reading "Dust of Thermopylae, 480 B.C.E.", then kicked you in the shins. -Hakko Ichiu

Well if you're soooo damn eager, send it to my Hotmail address. Just make sure to zip it as Hotmail is EVIL. (The address is in the profile you boob) ------------------ You wouldn't know the dust of Thermopylae if it came up to you, handed you a business card reading "Dust of Thermopylae, 480 B.C.E.", then kicked you in the shins. -Hakko Ichiu

That is true and it is being rectified... Now stop airing my dirty laundry for all the community to see. ------------------ You wouldn't know the dust of Thermopylae if it came up to you, handed you a business card reading "Dust of Thermopylae, 480 B.C.E.", then kicked you in the shins. -Hakko Ichiu

I'm sorry, I misread your post. I've never experienced this issue, has anyone else? ------------------ You wouldn't know the dust of Thermopylae if it came up to you, handed you a business card reading "Dust of Thermopylae, 480 B.C.E.", then kicked you in the shins. -Hakko Ichiu

That is the next battle. CM operations take place on a single, generally large, map. ------------------ You wouldn't know the dust of Thermopylae if it came up to you, handed you a business card reading "Dust of Thermopylae, 480 B.C.E.", then kicked you in the shins. -Hakko Ichiu

I beg to belabor the point, Jeff, in that this conversation will change us and what is the world but a bunch of us? ------------------ You wouldn't know the dust of Thermopylae if it came up to you, handed you a business card reading "Dust of Thermopylae, 480 B.C.E.", then kicked you in the shins. -Hakko Ichiu

Jeff, Philisophical ponderings have far more of an effect on humankind than any tool. You can shoot and kill a man with an M1 but can you define what makes a man with an M1? Can you explain purpose and existence to a Jagdtiger? Can you argue the merits of freedom vs. safety using an MP40? These tools are excellent catalysts but they have a base effect. Or, to make it plain, your psyche is an island, it only has what you bring. ------------------ You wouldn't know the dust of Thermopylae if it came up to you, handed you a business card reading "Dust of Thermopylae, 480 B.C.E.", then kicked you in the shins. -Hakko Ichiu [This message has been edited by Elijah Meeks (edited 08-31-2000).]

Mmmmm, babies.

Intellectual pornography is a little better, M. It really depends on how you approach a debate. If your purpose is to ctrl-v your opinion in as many places as possible, then it isn't even that. If you just want to expound on your own philosophy, maybe. If, however, you interact with your fellow posters and come away from the discussion a little more educated then, no, I think this would be considered education. ------------------ You wouldn't know the dust of Thermopylae if it came up to you, handed you a business card reading "Dust of Thermopylae, 480 B.C.E.", then kicked you in the shins. -Hakko Ichiu

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by infohawk: Elijah Meeks said "Valve is a company made up of millionaires from Microsoft. They set out trying to build a community and have shaped their efforts toward that. Unlike BTS, they have the support of two major publishing houses and the multi-million copy sales of Half-Life. Comparing BTS's business practices to Valve is like comparing the old (British owned) Jaguar to the modern-day Ford." What does that have to do with anything? They're both businesses. They both provide a service. Just because one is smaller doesn't mean anything with regards to customer service. [This message has been edited by infohawk (edited 08-31-2000).]<HR></BLOCKQUOTE> I'll spell it out for you. You cannot get a game like CM from a company like Valve, just like BTS could never produce Half-Life. Hence my comparison of Jag and Ford, you would never get the E-Type from Ford and you would never get all the junk produced by Ford from Jag. These are the tradeoffs. If you don't like them, you go try to convince a bunch of millionaires to fund your project, all the while telling them that it is only directed at a very small demographic (Smart, serious wargamers). You'll find you'll have a better chance pitching a 3D FPS version of Survivor. ------------------ You wouldn't know the dust of Thermopylae if it came up to you, handed you a business card reading "Dust of Thermopylae, 480 B.C.E.", then kicked you in the shins. -Hakko Ichiu

This is a joke and your demeanor demonstrates an extreme lack of understanding in what is going on in the computer game industry. Let's start with your view of Valve. Valve is a company made up of millionaires from Microsoft. They set out trying to build a community and have shaped their efforts toward that. Unlike BTS, they have the support of two major publishing houses and the multi-million copy sales of Half-Life. Comparing BTS's business practices to Valve is like comparing the old (British owned) Jaguar to the modern-day Ford. As far as the quality of CM, this is not some kind of half-assed buggy release. The comments on these boards are spurred by BTS's desire to improve the game, not fix it. The gold demo of CM is a better game than most AAA titles. Again, while Valve has a massive Mod community (Far different from what CM players consider mods) for CM, BTS is the mod community. In short, CM could have been dropped three upgrades ago and no one here would have been angry. That BTS has been willing to improve the game further goes above and beyond the responsibility of a developer to their audience and, though we're immensely grateful, BTS should not be expected to do this. When you paid your $45, you were paying for CM version 1.X (Whatever was released when you bought it) and nothing more. ------------------ You wouldn't know the dust of Thermopylae if it came up to you, handed you a business card reading "Dust of Thermopylae, 480 B.C.E.", then kicked you in the shins. -Hakko Ichiu

Kudos, Phillistine, no truer words have ever been spoken. -Oh, and for those of you who want to argue on the merit of various truer words throughout history, it's a compliment, dammit, not a statement of fact- -Second oh, when I said that people who thought Pearl Harbor was an isolated event were stupid, I was not directing that at anyone here but rather at the masses of people who have no more than a Hollywood education- Steve et al, I think we agree on the major issues but disagree on the specific definition of war. Atomic particles are not at war with each other. The lions and zebra on the Serengeti are not at war with each other. The oxygen and our lungs are not at war with each other. Finally, a drunk driver is not at war with his victims. All of these are cases of conflict, though, and result in destruction or damage of various degrees. I regard war as something higher, involving metaphysical goals as well as material ones, and including men, animals and tools whose purpose is to wage war. I also think war has a longer lifespan than simple conflict. In evolution, a population of marmots may be kept in check by disease, predators and the occasional woolly hamster but these forces do not wage war on the marmots any more than lightning wages war on the ground. Its easy to mistake correlation with causation from a geological perspective but we must remember that no antelope thinks itself a soldier, the wind does not sit in a grand council planning the erosion of the mountains and a wolf pack only hunts when it's hungry. ------- History is not was, its is. -William Faulkner [This message has been edited by Elijah Meeks (edited 08-31-2000).]

quote: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- To think that Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor was a sudden event, isolated in history, is, well, stupid. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Ah... but where do you draw the line? Even what you described goes back further. With historical events like this it is best not to go back too far or you get into a situation like in Bosnia where the various sides traced back their reasons for killing each other hundreds of years. Now THAT is stupid. Please reread my post, as I've added some supporting work. I consider events two years before the outbreak of war to not be going "back too far." As to the ant colony metaphor, an ant colony more resembles an individual creature than a group of individuals. As to splitting hairs, that's what science is about. Conflict is inherent in man, along with everything else. Strategy and tactics, however, is a higher form of activity, along the lines, as I said, of language. CM proves that there is a difference between two mobs beating on each other and a well thought out assault on a fortified position. ------------------ You wouldn't know the dust of Thermopylae if it came up to you, handed you a business card reading "Dust of Thermopylae, 480 B.C.E.", then kicked you in the shins. -Hakko Ichiu [This message has been edited by Elijah Meeks (edited 08-31-2000).]

To think that Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor was a sudden event, isolated in history, is, well, stupid. Japan invaded southern China for resources, steel and rubber mainly. They did this because we cut off our export of such resources to them. Their attack was bogged down, as any major land war in Asia is destined to be, and so they looked elsewhere, Indonesia, India, Australia, the Phillipines. To attack these meant to go to war with the U.S. This is why they bombed us at Pearl Harbor. For Japan to not go to war with us would have meant pulling out of China, which was impossible given the social mindset of Imperial Japan in the late 30s. We pushed them into war, the argument is whether it was justified or not. Everyone is so well versed on the Western part of World War II but the war in the east was going since 1932 and had a web of convoluted politics all its own. The short of it being, yes, I did mean what I said. Support from Lords of the Rim by Sterling Seagrave, pgs 163-165 "Despite stunning military victories, success eluded Japan. The drive into China bogged down... Financing such an open-ended war was an unbearable burden that the militarists in Japan had not forseen. By the end of 1937, over seven hundred thousand Japanese troops were stuck in China, at the cost of 5 million dollars a day, and mounting. National debt skyrocketed. After 1938, rationing and other emergency measures had to be introduced to keep Japan on a war footing... As the stalemate dragged on, reserves of foreign currency and raw materials evaporated. Tokyo was dangerously dependent on imports from Western-controlled markets, including Oil from the Dutch East Indies. A strike south would enable Japan to guarantee supplies of oil, rubber, tin, bauxite and foodstuffs... Thanks to intense lobbying in Washington by Madame Chiang Kai-shek and her brother, China's Foreign Minister T.V. Soong, and with help behind the scenes from well-connected Americans, President Roosevelt found ways to get around Congress and actively to aid Chungking... US trade with Nationalis China was minimal, while US trade with Japan was increasingly steady. Even so, in 1939, the Soongs and the China lobby persuaded Roosevelt to have the Secretary of State Cordell Hull denounce the 1911 commercial treaty with Japan. US embargos of Japanese goods went into effect. The stalemate in China put Japan in a position where she had to either abandon the China campaign at great loss of face or go on to sieze all South Easy Asia, to obtain its oil and raw materials." ------------------ You wouldn't know the dust of Thermopylae if it came up to you, handed you a business card reading "Dust of Thermopylae, 480 B.C.E.", then kicked you in the shins. -Hakko Ichiu [This message has been edited by Elijah Meeks (edited 08-31-2000).]

That's not war. War is the systematic, social mobilization to defeat another society. What you describe is conflict, a byproduct of evolution and the necessary result of the interaction between any two forces. Though the two may be superficially similar, conflict in evolution is the ends, conflict in war is the means. Conflict has and always will exist, war is a recent creation, like language, society and tool use. Granted, though it may be based on our primative experiences with conflict, war is as far removed from it as we are from the apes, or hamsters for that matter. ------------------ You wouldn't know the dust of Thermopylae if it came up to you, handed you a business card reading "Dust of Thermopylae, 480 B.C.E.", then kicked you in the shins. -Hakko Ichiu [This message has been edited by Elijah Meeks (edited 08-31-2000).]

All right Def, now that I've been called out, I'll really let loose. Strat, I don't think Christov's girlfriend much cares about any such reasons for war. I think the issue is, really, how can a people who believe that murder is a crime, as any society must, band together for the mass murder of the men of another society? What drives such a thing is greater than lebensraum and political expediency, and goes behind the myth of socialized hatred. People don't go to war for simple, black and white reasons, they go to war because convoluted plans, misunderstood philosophies and machismo force them to. America went to war in WWII because the Chinese pushed us into it -An aside for old Seanie- Though we vied politically with Japan for the Chinese market, exports to Japan were FAR more valuable than those to China. The Chinese Lobby pressed Roosevelt (Franklin but especially his wife) to side with China in the upcoming conflict. Lady Chiang Kai-Shek was a popular speaker in the late 30s and convinced many American politicians that Japan was the enemy, even though a continued peaceful relationship with Japan was far more desirable than anything China could offer. Our civil war started because both sides were so damn tense that action was like an involuntary reflex. Germany was at war with the UK despite every desire on the part of Hitler that they stay at peace and all logic saying that Britain had nothing to gain from another continental war. There are more, the American Revolution due to agitation, Vietnam because we painted ourselves into an ideological corner, Korea because of a social hiccup, WWI because, well, because of more reasons than I'll ever know. Look to China's Warring States period, there you will learn everything you ever wanted to know about the reasons for war and the best ways to start one. Sun Tzu predicted the outcome of the Cold War saying that war was impossible between two rational states that knew the cost of it. ------------------ You wouldn't know the dust of Thermopylae if it came up to you, handed you a business card reading "Dust of Thermopylae, 480 B.C.E.", then kicked you in the shins. -Hakko Ichiu [This message has been edited by Elijah Meeks (edited 08-31-2000).] [This message has been edited by Elijah Meeks (edited 08-31-2000).]

War is the final act of diplomacy. If a group of people are doing something reprehensible, you try to talk it out. You try to limit their access to dangerous tools. If all else fails, and they don't listen or change, then you destroy their infrastructure and their ability to do whatever it is they were doing that was reprehensible, emasculate their leaders and impose a new system that limits their ability to commit this reprehensible act in the future. That or, in the words of Conan, "To crush your enemies, see them driven before you and hear the lamentation of the women." ------------------ You wouldn't know the dust of Thermopylae if it came up to you, handed you a business card reading "Dust of Thermopylae, 480 B.C.E.", then kicked you in the shins. -Hakko Ichiu

Of course you will. Please repost this message in our "Helpful Players in support of Newbies" section, the thread with the topic "Peng, I take our challenge public." There, dozens of hardened CMers will help you get acclimated to this wonderful game and its confusing terminology. ------------------ You wouldn't know the dust of Thermopylae if it came up to you, handed you a business card reading "Dust of Thermopylae, 480 B.C.E.", then kicked you in the shins. -Hakko Ichiu [This message has been edited by Elijah Meeks (edited 08-30-2000).]

My post was related to my numerous grammatical errors. As I corrected them, I kept a running tally. With that out of the way, perhaps you could edit your post to make it a little less inflammatory. These people are not brown-nosers, they are protective of a company that has been so good to them. (You don't see Relic checking their forums for game-altering feedback, do you?) ------------------ You wouldn't know the dust of Thermopylae if it came up to you, handed you a business card reading "Dust of Thermopylae, 480 B.C.E.", then kicked you in the shins. -Hakko Ichiu

Lol! Maybe Molinari (Sp?) can do a POTD based on this on CombatHQ. ------------------ You wouldn't know the dust of Thermopylae if it came up to you, handed you a business card reading "Dust of Thermopylae, 480 B.C.E.", then kicked you in the shins. -Hakko Ichiu