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Aion Shaping Up For US Launch
One of the most promising MMORPGs in development these days is NCSoft's Aion, a fantasy-based offering built on CryEngine. It makes heavy use of flight as a gameplay mechanic, allowing aerial combat and easy travel around the visually stunning game world. There are four basic classes — Warrior, Priest, Mage, and Scout — each of which have two subclasses. For example, Warriors can be tank-like Templars, or berserker-like Gladiators, while Mages can turn into a scholarly Sorcerer or command the elements as a Spiritmaster. Early previews of Aion almost universally comment on how polished the game seems — this is partly due to the fact that it has been up and running since November in South Korea. "Being stable, scalable, reliable and fuss-free is far from a given in MMOs, but Aion is all those things, and can already stand alongside the genre's usability kings, EVE Online and World of Warcraft. Its expansive, zone-free open-world environments look terrific and run smoothly on a wide variety of systems. It just works." Since the game is already in a relatively complete state, NCSoft has been running closed beta "events," where a portion of the game is opened for testing. MMOGamer has a write-up from the latest such event. Aion is due out in September.
Back in my day, we didn't even have days. We just had nights, we were too poor to afford days. Heck, sometimes we could barely afford to pay attention.
What was I saying? Oh yeah. Back in my day, we had nights. Not days. But we liked it that way. And we didn't have no fancy-schmanzy graphics for our video games. In fact, we didn't even have screens. We had dirt and sticks and used our imagination. But it was damned hard to do, sonny-Jim, cause it was always night...cause we couldn't afford to pay for daylight. Well, I do remember we got daylight twice back in Naught three, but that's cause Al Gore's dad, you might remember him, built a name for himself in the Lincoln Log industry, anyway, ole Pappy Gore felt bad about all us kids playin in the dark all the time, so he traded some Lincoln Logs for daylight from Johnie Rockefeller and we got to actually SEE the dirt we was drawin in. That was a great couple of days. I set two high scores those two days.
*sighs wistfully*
Go get your Grandpa his teeth, will ya sonny-Jim?
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No? Well, then i'll pass, thanks :)
Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful.
- Atheism is not a religion, it is the absence of religion.
No. It's the absence of belief in god(s), nothing more or less.
- Agnosticism is the absence of decisiveness.
No. It's the absence of KNOWLEDGE of god(s), nothing more or less.
One concerns belief, the other is about knowledge. Knowledge and belief are different.
A Venn Diagram of atheists and agnostics would look like two discs stacked almost exactly on top of each other. The idea that agnostic is some sort of halfway position is a pop culture myth. It's also a myth that atheists believe there are no gods.
Don't be fooled by dictionaries either. Dictionaries record how words are USED (rightly or wrongly), not just what they mean. If people used 'bagel' to mean "stuff a cabbage in your ear on Tuesday", Webster would create an entry for it. Fucking descriptivists.
All living people are agnostic. They might believe there are gods, they might even belief they KNOW there are gods, but they don't actually know. Some people are honest enough to admit it, so aren't.
Here is the test:
Do you KNOW god(s) exist(s)?
If the answer is no, you're agnostic.
Do you HOLD a belief that god(s) exist(s)?
If the answer is no, you're atheist.
Most people who say no to one would say no to the other. It's hard to imagine someone saying they know gods exist but don't believe they do. Virtually all atheists are agnostic and vice versa.
Why does it matter?
Whenever we use words incorrectly we reinforce that mistake and encourage spreading it. We lose meaning and distinction as we make words less and less meaningful. We non-believers have a hard enough time dealing with zealots who misuse words that we shouldn't make it worse. If we get people to understand what these words actually mean (and what they DON'T mean) we can maybe get them to understand rather than assume. Many theists think that atheism means denial of god(s), when that's just not the case. Some people mistakenly think that agnostic is some sort of safe/golden mean... it isn't. It's just an adjective that names the state on not knowing there are gods.
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