McTeeth

The Dark Brotherhood questline I actually found to be really engaging, much moreso than any of the other guilds.

I had a permanent zombie thrall that was a dead goat. I called him motherfucker. He fucks shit up.

I think that not being able to read journal entries is potentially an issue with your screen and not with Morrowind. Kind of like saying Guitar Hero was hard because the sound on your TV is broken. While carrying a calcinator into battle was undoubtedly a pain, you would just leave it at home - having to use your home alchemy setup is equally realistic. It was actually really hard to cast powerful spells in Morrowind to raise your spellcasting skills. Why? Because they usually cost more magicka than your low-level character even has, and then your magicka points don't regenerate unless you sleep making the whole process laborious and inefficient. There were a lot of things in Morrowind that made the game difficult, were redundant, or were otherwise just plain annoying but for some god-forsaken reason I love them all. Reading this back I sound like I may as well be writing Nerevarine + Azura fanfiction... maybe I am just an annoying, irrational Morrowind cheerleader..?

Skyrim also adds back some of the fun of exploring dungeons - in Oblivion you would NEVER find any good items that weren't directly related to a quest, unlike in Morrowind when you could just stumble across Ibar-Dad, jizzign your pants and then realise you would never have found it unless you happened to walk by and check. That was the beauty of Morrowind. Skyrim has still fucked up by losing spellcraft, limiting the amount of spells, giving spells to characters that are only available as you increase levels (I liked being able to buy a REALLY powerful spell that I had enough magicka to cast once at level 3), fucking with the amount of things that can be enchanted (no more permanent effect damage fatigue/health/magicka and pickpocketing them onto an enemy?), getting rid of chameleon, getting rid of levitation/jump spells (don't care if the cities are closed cells, if a mod can fix it in oblivion then they should have made it that way), getting rid of collectable crafting tools (loved being able to find grandmaster quality retorts, calcinators etc), making it so only one enchantment can be placed on an item (or 2 [WOW!] if you have 100 in enchanting), still leaving out mark/recall and the intervention spells, unkillable core characters, making good weapons armour not worth shit (ebony and glass items were like.. 12,000 gold apiece in morrowind... well worth collecting), providing quest markers on the compass/map (doesn't matter if you can turn them off, the game wasn't designed to be played with it off - Morrwind relied on the journal to provide directions to where you needed to go and if you had to find something, you actually had look), putting fucking 8 gold pieces inside a chest with a master lock rating, including SO MANY doors with a 'needs a key' rating that just simply shouldn't be there, giving characters keys that cannot be pickpocketed because of some irritating script event relying on you killing them, getting rid of unlock/lock spells, getting rid of spears, including so much dull real-world fauna, and probably a lot more that I can't remember. It also did a lot better in some regards: alchemy is now actually interesting as well as restoration (wards were a good idea), dual hand control (awesome), companions (just waiting for that multiple followers mod... going to outfit all of them with masks..), shouts are interesting, physics used well, giving more options for raw resource collecting for smithing/alchemy/enchanting was a great addition, as well as the keeping of the black soul gem thing which was always lacking in morrowind. Also some improvements to the conjuration school (though the limitation of the actual list of things one can conjure is severely disappointing), the landscape looks beautiful (though after a while mountains begin to shit me and snow gets a bit old), the inclusion of an interesting faction-vs-faction conflict that the player can be involved in and, again, probably a lot more that I can't remember. EDIT: also !?WTF!? no daedra other than Dremoras in Skyrim?

Sick of hearing some lowly warrior belittle me and then after a thunderbolt to the head realising that the bastard is unkillable. Also - totally need a mod to show those obnoxious children who's boss, am I right? (I'm right.)

22/dark elf/wizaarrrd. Skyrim is good so far, but still lacks a number of things that made Morrowind the superior game (and not insignificant things either). I was so excited when I picked up Torsten's Skull Key, I took a screencap but then lost it somehow...

I will stop clogging this thread but apparently the regulations I mentioned have only been put in place this year

My inference was drawn from this - "Diabetes is such a profitable business that physicians will put pre-diabetic patients, with only marginally high blood sugar, onto diabetes drugs before even trying weight loss and exercise." Does that not seem to imply that physicians are supposed to be reaping some profit from prescribing medications unnecessarily? I don't know which doctors you've been to but I've never had one neglect to tell me that diet, exercise, alcohol etc are all not doing people any favours and to try and stay healthy. As you say, innovation is a byproduct of maximising profits. Without innovation in medicinal chemistry they will not expand their business and without expanding their business they cannot innovate medicinal chemistry. Thus, the two are inherently interrelated. How am I 'confusing' the two when they are products of the same process? I take it that you're not a fan of the medical profession as it is, what with the constant 'quacking'. Edit: Really interesting Torsten, bad news for the industry and my insistence on restrictive measures being in place to prevent that. Not going to insist I'm right when I'm not and this brings up a number questions I'm going to pose to a few people..

Totally agree Faustus, Poisonshroom and Qualia. Definitely not in defence of the system, I just personally think that its all too easy to demonise. I don't appreciate being called naive, nor the assumption that the information I have I got from 'the media'. The information I have is from people who have worked for the pharmaceutical industry (GlaxoSmithKline) and other people who I would trust to know due to their positions. While pharmaceutical companies can TRY and bribe doctors into prescribing their products, if someone were to whistleblow a doctor for accepting gifts or a company for sending them then the matter would be taken very seriously by the related authorities. This is not to say the pharm reps cannot go to a convention or find an influential physician and try and get them on side. They are absolutely allowed to do that. However there are even regulations surrounding the maximum amount of money that is allowed to be spent on a dinner by a pharmaceutical company trying to argue their case (I think it is $100). Don't go thinking that your GP's new Jaguar was a present from Pfizer for agreeing to prescribe Zoloft instead of Prozac. If, somehow, it is? Well that's not a poor system working, its a system poorly working. There's a difference. But yes, my main gripe was that the evidence for a valid criticism was insubstantial and ineffective. I don't have a problem with the argument, just the way it was constructed. (someone please tell me honestly if I just sound like an arse-hole - I will take it on board)

I wrote a big response to this without reading the full article but now realise there would be no point in what I was originally going to say. I just want to preface this comment with a question: How many people that read this and got furious have any background in pharmacology? Reading through this article made me really annoyed because it took a valid point - pharmaceutical companies are CAN BE ruthless profiteers - and then went on to badly attempt to stitch together evidence to supposedly support it. Some of the points raised seem (to me) to even be in support of the opposite opinion of pharmaceutical companies. -"The industry must make large profits to realize a return on investment, particularly in a regulatory system where it costs $100 to $200 million dollars to bring a new drug to market". I don't think people grasp the importance of this. Of course the companies need to make money. Without that kind of money there can be no new drugs and medicinal chemistry cannot progress. at all. -"Diabetes is such a profitable business that physicians will put pre-diabetic patients, with only marginally high blood sugar, onto diabetes drugs before even trying weight loss and exercise". I'm sorry but since when do physicians get profits from pharmaceutical sales? There are also strict regulations about the kind of advertisement allowed for drugs and the kinds of bribing tactics allowed in getting physicians on-board to prescribe drugs. Certainly it used to be big practice to coax doctors into recommending your company's drug but that is no longer protected by the system. If anything this is a problem with physicians being careless with prescription, not the companies that make anti-diabetic medication. I don't have the time or energy to nitpick the entire thing and I don't disagree with many criticisms of the way the pharmaceutical industry is set up but I think that people may need to actually re-evaluate the importance of pharmaceutical businesses. Sure, if you don't think that western medicine has anything to offer and you wouldn't use it even if you had severe diabetes, parkinsons, cancer, a stroke, a heart attack, chronic neuropathic pain, surgery, a bacterial infection, meningitis or were poisoned by a nerve agent then that's fine, I have no problems with your position on Big Pharma. If, however, you would ever choose to use any pharmaceutical (whether it exists yet or not) for any reason then maybe such a crucifixion is biting the hand that feeds (in at least some small way). Call me an idiot if that's what I'm being, it is late after all and rather than seeming aggressive (which I hope I'm not) I am hoping to just open up the discussion with an opposing viewpoint.

I too hate the 'sodium flouride is a poison' argument. Personally I feel the opposite, I don't want any water contaminating my sodium flouride! Have you heard that stuff can cause hyponatremia? Paracelsus - "Poison is in everything, and no thing is without poison. The dosage makes it either a poison or a remedy." ^^^ Remember that.

Piper auritum/subpeltatum leaves can be used to wrap rice or fish in central american cooking. May add its own particular spicy aroma to food but it smells lovely. They are often available at SAB and mine does well in the non tropical climate (mine is subpeltatum)

THANKYOU! You're absolutely right, after briefly perusing legislation.vic.gov.au it was clear that austlii is awful

Ah I see. That's a shame, I was hoping that the availability of the various reagents from Australia-based online retailers was a sign that the reagents were legal to distribute via the post. I have looked up the precursors scheduled for Victoria and until 2007 they presented a list of substances within a certain schedule accompanied by an amount over which that substance was prohibited. Currently they only have the list of substances without the accompanying weight threshold and schedule 2 includes formaldehyde and aqueous solutions of formaldehyde (formalin). This information was found on the austlii website and are relevant to victoria as of January 2011. Perhaps Mecke reagent is more likely as a project and would mean that I don't have to go ahead with finding and purifying a formaldehyde mixture from other colouring components. Maybe then I would just try and get it out to people at meets or something like that. DXM is the main adulterant of concern nowadays anyway. Everyone's thoughts are greatly appreciated

royksopp you say..