Guest posts by Astrocyte

85

Humor / Re: Say This "x" Times Fast!

« on: July 12, 2011, 12:40:03 am »

I'm a mother pheasant plucker.
I pluck mother pheasants.
I'm the best mother pheasant plucker in the mother pheasant plucking world.

never heard that before  , do you mind if i use it?

I didn't write it, but you have my permission to use it 

86

Introduce Yourself / Re: New to the Forum - Not new to Elements

« on: July 11, 2011, 12:50:09 am »

Welcome! I for one am always happy to see more X-Men references on the board.

87

Humor / Re: Say This "x" Times Fast!

« on: July 07, 2011, 02:11:45 am »

I'm a mother pheasant plucker.
I pluck mother pheasants.
I'm the best mother pheasant plucker in the mother pheasant plucking world.

88

Politics / Re: Is living a life of luxury while others starve immoral?

« on: July 05, 2011, 11:55:59 pm »

If you're paying for anything you don't need, then by definition you are allowing others to starve while not acting to prevent it when you could help to prevent it without losing anything you need.

So what do we really need though?

I guess it depends on the value one places on access. You don't NEED anything but food, water, clothing, and shelter -- but in most industrialized countries, living without electricity, transportation, telephones, etc. pretty well excludes you from participating in normal society. You won't be able to hold most jobs and will have a lot of difficulty moving to find one, most people are not going to want to socialize with you, you won't be able to live in places that are generally considered safe or secure, etc. Are all of these points of access things that one "needs" ?

89

Game Suggestions and Feedback / Re: Issue with game..

« on: July 05, 2011, 11:35:05 pm »

I agree with you Voxen. The game is geared towards playing a certain way with certain cookie cutter decks and doesn't really allow for variation if you want to be successful. They tell you to visit the tutorials or get starter decks because you have to play a certain way. And now with the arena, which is garbage, there's absolutely zero options to create your own deck that you want to play. If you want to be competitive, you have to have certain decks or strategies. With a game that has so many options, there's very little variance that you can use and be successful. Just look at the arena for examples. Every deck has 6 of one kind of card or several cards. I've stopped playing because of the very strict conformity that's needed to progress.

Wut? 
Can't agree with a single word here.... Are we playing the same game?  ???

Yes.

There is no incentive for a new player to design your own deck or play around with strategies, because unless you are a naturally good or very lucky player from the start, this leads to losing score and money until you're in a hole you can't possibly dig out of (unless you want to grind AI1 or 2 for hours), and you have to start all over.

If you want to get to the fun parts (PvP, having enough cards to do tournaments and leagues and build decks for Arena) without days or weeks of going in circles, really the only thing to do is pick a deck someone else already made and researched, and use only that deck for ages.

90

Game Suggestions and Feedback / Re: Daily Quests

« on: July 05, 2011, 11:25:53 pm »

"Here, bash your head against that rock over there and I'll give you a shiny new card"

Or we could make the quests enjoyable.

Ok, so what would make the quests enjoyable?

91

Serket / Re: Oracle : Serket

« on: July 02, 2011, 03:26:19 pm »

Wow, it's like Wings was made specifically to mess up Serket. Beauty!

92

Religion / Re: Logic Restriction

« on: July 02, 2011, 01:52:19 am »

Right now you might not have evidence of God, but some people do, so their 'leap of faith' isn't really much of a leap because it's based on evidence.

I have evidence that the teapot orbiting Mars is real. You don't have it, but I do. So that's proof. Obviously.

93

Philosophy / Re: i wednor, can you raed tihs?

« on: June 28, 2011, 07:14:17 pm »

Ooh, a chance to swing my linguistics degree around!

People learn several things when they learn to read languages with alphabets or syllabaries (where each grapheme stands for more than one sound):
1) Learning that graphemes stand for sounds, and what sounds each one stands for
2) Learning what words look like
3) Learning how words are combined in print

When you're first learning to read (at any age, although it's significantly easier for children due to neuroplasticity), you depend on the letters to tell you what the word is. Try to think back to when you were really little and trying to read, or watch a newly-reading child or adult, or think about reading in a foreign language that you're just learning -- there's a lot of pointing, a lot of staring hard at one word at a time, a lot of effort.

As you see words over and over again, you begin to memorize the appearance of the most common words. Some literacy programs specifically train these so-called "sight words" in order to speed up the learning process. You also learn what words are likely to follow other words (and in most languages this also ties in with your knowledge of the spoken language).

So, if you see a three-letter word that starts with T at the beginning of a sentence, you know that it's highly likely to be "The" -- so you won't immediately stop to read and process the whole word, you'll check to see if it's "The" and stop to read it if it's not. You also know that "the" is almost guaranteed to be followed by a noun or adjective.

However, as the examples have shown, memorizing what words look like is not a guarantee that you'll be able to read fluently -- you still have to spend more time and attention on longer and less common words. For proficient readers, this process is largely unconscious and you probably won't even be aware of the effort unless you encounter tons of unusual words, unusual usage, or words you don't know. For less proficient readers, an unusual pattern or a rare or large word can almost stop them cold.

So it's not that the letters in the middle don't matter, it's that your brain is very efficient at something you've been doing for a long time! It predicts based on probability, then once it's analyzed enough features to confirm the identity of a word, it stops analyzing that word and moves on to the next. (Again, there's some good examples in this thread.) You might've seen articles saying that we don't read straight across each line of a block of text, but that our eyes jump around the sentence or even the paragraph -- and that's for the same reason. This is why you can often get a good amount of information from "skimming."

NOTE: The learning process is significantly different for ideographic written languages, such as Chinese. I believe research there is ongoing.

94

Books & Comics / Re: Marvel or D.C. whos your favorite.

« on: June 28, 2011, 06:42:15 pm »

Marvel is where I started reading comics (as a huge X-books fan) and I'll always have a soft spot for them, but I honestly like DC better right now. DC has historically been sillier and hokier, but they've consistently had better writing than Marvel over the past 15 or so years. Almost everything Marvel does lately comes across as a gimmick... not that I'm super excited about the reboot DC is planning.

95

Game Suggestions and Feedback / Re: Daily Quests

« on: June 28, 2011, 06:08:50 pm »

Maybe one quest could be to defeat a half-blood with a particular name.  (There are 144 different names according to http://elementscommunity.org/forum/index.php/topic,23323.0.html (http://elementscommunity.org/forum/index.php/topic,23323.0.html)).  It could provide some incentive to grind the oft-underused (compared to the other levels) ai5.

Excellent idea. "Hunt Aquonos" or something

96

Competitions / Re: MS paint #4: VOTING

« on: June 23, 2011, 12:13:24 pm »

We've got some strong contenders here!
#16 is obviously the best though