ardecila

Last week, a friend of mine and I were talking about TV shows. He recommended Lost. Apart from Seinfeld a few times per week, I don't watch a lot of TV. But I decided to watch Lost for the heck of it. Enough backstory, though. I like it a lot! Unless you follow each episode closely, you have to think about things, which piqued my interest. Now it's over, and I assume reruns will take place eventually. I've only seen the last two episodes, so that might clear some things up. Discuss freely!

Could you make the top cornice on that building, in the recesses, about.. 40 or 50% taller? Just pull down the bottom edge or something. The way it looks now, the capitals on the columns make the cornice in the recesses look thinner, which in turn makes the building look unfinished.

No one's disputing the handles.. we are just asking for another style. For a realistic one, perhaps smoncrie's Simple Road/Rail would work nicely.

Qurlix - what type of model are you using for the bridge pieces? BAT-generated, or full-3d? If they are full-3d, then style packs should be an easy thing to do, provided someone is willing to model. Those supports are totally awesome, but I wouldn't even expect to see something like them in Japan.

Predictions for the Chicago Metro The CTA Circle Line will finally be completed. We will have several mini-skylines in the city, probably in Evanston and maybe Oak Park, as well as one or two other areas. (United Center area, c’mon!) The downtown high-density area will fill in west to Halsted Street, south to Cermak, and north to Division. People will finally become disgusted with sprawl, and ambitious densification projects will occur in inner suburbs like Niles and Westchester. New exurban developments will be designed similar to Olmsted's Riverside, (or Chevy Chase, MD) with smaller lots and houses, winding but still connective streets, and much more evenly-distributed parkland. Vice will grow in the city again, as gambling, prostitution, and drug use increase. IL-53 will finally be extended to I-94 in Northern Lake County, and re-designated as part of I-355. Long Grove can and will suck it. I-355 will be extended southward to I-57, but not as far south as Peotone. It will then be extended north-eastward to meet up with I-65, thus relieving congestion on I-80/94. The Chicago Skyway will finally be modernized, and people will cease to refer to it as anything other than I-90. All highways in the state will become tolled, but at lower rates than we have today. Metra will finally build its STAR Line making an outer rail beltway for intersuburban traffic. It will start in Lake Geneva, WI and roughly follow the Fox River southward to Joliet. A second line will be built with a smaller radius, connecting Lake Forest with Des Plaines, south to O'Hare Airport, and then through Melrose Park and LaGrange, eventually ending up through Tinley Park to Homewood-Flossmoor. Both rail belts will be heavy electric rail, like the IC, but more modern. The Heritage Corridor will densify, adding stops along its line outside of major towns to get subdivision riders, and also extend a spur out to Plainfield. The Dan Ryan, Eisenhower, and Kennedy will all add 30% more lanes in the form of tunnels underground. The Circle Interchange will be completely rebuilt. Traffic will be diverted onto sidestreets, causing Greektown to go into a mini-depression. The new Circle and I-90/94 northwards to Hubbard's Cave will be widened and buried. Buildings will be built on top. Chicago will rediscover its boulevards, again using them as major arteries. Big-box development will be outlawed in the city proper. A huge blackout will hit the city around 2012, causing an outbreak of food poisoning that will kill hundreds of people. Sandburg Village will finally become the public-housing project it resembles. Wow, 30 minutes coming up with stuff. I'm kinda tired now.. *goes to bed*

Ratieya, a lot of it has to do with the uniformity of modern brick. The brick used in old buildings, like the ones on university campuses, as well as old townhomes and Independence Hall, is bumpy, irregular, and the size from brick to brick can vary as much as 3/4 of an inch or even more sometimes. The masons of the time just used what they had. Today, bricks are exactly rectangular, all the same size to a millimeter or two. It makes laying brick much easier and systematic, but also gives the wall a modern look. However, people liked the older look, so they now also make bricks with inexact methods, to replicate that older feel. My family bought several pallets of these older-looking bricks to make paths. It was difficult, because we did it without using mortar. My dad and I had to improvise systems to keep the bricks straight and flat, when some bricks were clearly much wider or higher than others. As for the sections of brick - I believe that with this method, it is possible to create sections of brick that can be built and set in place much faster than building a wall from the ground-up, one brick at a time.

I'll have Shadow render it, and once he does, I assume he'll release it. If he doesn't, I'll send it to you myself.

For some reason, carriage returns aren't working (i.e. the Enter/Return key in posts). It'll show up in the text editing stage, but then they are removed when the message is posted. I've had to use the "hr" line break to seperate paragraphs. See? Also, but this is more nitpicky; could you find a better way to highlight the active page in the page number section of a thread? You use green squares with the numbers in them, and all the numbers are bold except for the active page, which is not bold. This is really hard to distinguish. Would you mind making it italic or something, so you can tell more easily? Thanks.

I can send you a fully-textured Hawkeye model, but you'll have to BAT-render it yourself. It's the same one that's on the deck of the NSS Equinox. PM me with your e-mail address.

There's been extensive discussion of this over at Cyburbia. One guy claimed that a high school wall was made of poor EIFS, and when the students learned its consistency, stuck hundreds of pencils into it. On top of that, a leak had developed near the roofline , which rotted the EIFS from the inside-out. hym: Asphalt or concrete? It's a pretty famous decision when building a new road or repaving an old one. Asphalt is cheap, but it lasts 1/5 the time that concrete does. Concrete costs 3x more, but lasts longer. Often, the municipality will go with the asphalt, because it's easier to get more money over a longer period of time than a big amount up-front. EDIT - sorry about the line breaks, guys. for some reason, ST doesn't recognize returns in posts at this point in time.

That's because poetry doesn't work unless it's timely. The point of poetry is to put words together in such a way as to get more meaning from them. Poetry also tends to use symbols and references a lot. Here's where it breaks down; old poetry is based on a set of symbols and references that has much less meaning now, so it's harder for us to interpret it. Doesn't mean that the poetry wasn't amazingly-written for its time, or that the emotions in the poem aren't still relevant today. Back on-topic: Ace, I love these poems. The first one I especially understood. I like your idea of a road; in a recent English assignment (making a coat of arms; symbols to encapsulate ourselves) I chose as my central theme a staircase, ascending towards my goals, which are social, academic, and athletic. I feel most strongly about the social ones, though: "me alone outside looking in" really fits my current state.

Tea's fine, actually, so long as you drink unsweetened. It's the Nestea Raspberry and Lemon, and other sweetened teas, that rot your teeth. AFAIK, unsweetened tea has virtually nothing in it save water and tea-leaf particles.

Ooooh... excelente. The colors are much better now. They remind me of ST 3.0, which I liked a lot more then 4.0, at least color-wise. BTW - anyone notice a similarity to the EA April Fool's Site?

Wow, I actually feel pretty good about myself now.. j/k. I think you got a point there abou the lack of morals. The problem with our democratic system is that we have no common religious, moral, or cultural tradition, and so it is very difficult for us to have the kind of morality and unity that allows us to be strong. I don't like a world where we ban good books because they might be offensive to certain racial groups. I don't like a world where every single action of a schoolteacher, mayor, governor, etc, regardless of whether it's justified or not, has to be carefully weighed to avoid offending people. In schools today, there are many problems, but I think that success is still possible for most students. We here in America have a very rigid definition of what 'success' means today (getting good grades, a college education, a wife/husband and 2 kids and a house in the burbs). Unfortunately, this cannot represent the majority of the country. Whatever happened to the old days, where people could be be successful not on how much education they had, but on how much initiative they had? There are plenty of stories about people buckling down and studying in the worst school environments (ghettoes, etc.) and coming out well. Most anyone who blames bad grades on a repressive school environment is not working very hard. As fun as it sounds, I hate hearing things like Duke's desire to challenge useless authority. It's part of life, and you can't easily change it. You definitely can't change it by being defiant, because then people will lose all respect for you and you'll just strengthen the desire for strict control on the authority's part. In other words, people like him are the very reason that people try to exercise authority uselessly.

Ooh, excellent idea, with one limitation: nightlights don't always work on props. It's a bummer - got any ideas to work around that? I hope you can get this done well!

I know. Making it transparent was really kinda pointless, except that I normally plop it in shallow water. This leads to a graphics bug, though.

My Torii lot is a 2x3 transparent. It doesn't cause underground-mode problems because it's a water plop.

Date: 2/15/2006 7:17:06 PM Author: Valiko87 So, using the overhanging prop method, would one be able to accomplish the following: If, say, I've created a custom Suspension Bridge model...if I were to make it an overhanging prop, with a little screwing around with bridge height and such, could I conceivably plop this massive prop on top of a normal Maxis bridge (ie, something like the 'level bridge', it obviously wouldn't work for a suspension or cantilevered)? If so, I may have finally found a way to make the Ambassador Bridge workable in-game, at least by appearance...quote> Yes, you can do this. I BATted some of our Chicago bridges here, and then made overhanging props and put them over the level road bridge. I had to do some substantial modding to the bridge exemplars, but it was worth it. (lowered the min. length to 3 tiles, and the min. height to 0).

Today we got 4 different types of precipitation, plus a generous amount of thunder and lightning.

In elementary/middle schools, I had almost no friends. MY 1st and 2nd grade teachers wanted to make life hell for me. The 2nd-grade teacher, upon any sort of minor attitude (I'm not exaggerating), would send me out into the hallway. So, rather than being in class and actually learning, I would be undergoing punishment. It wasn't that bad, but I remember it was quite boring. The advantage is that I would often see the gifted services teacher walking past me. I formed a friendship with her, and apparently she saw something in me, because she recommended me for special 3rd-5th grade classes at another (regular) school on the other side of town. I learned much more there, but I still had no friends, really. I had one good friend in 5th grade, but then we got split up because we lived on opposite ends of town, and went to different middle schools. Middle school was absolute hell, though, socially. The classes weren't bad, and neither were the teachers, but everyone was so incredibly cruel back then. I met a girl that I really liked in 8th grade, and we became friends, but her normal clique didn't like me, and so it often led to some awkwardness. I'm now a sophomore in high school. I'm much more accepted now by a lot of people, largely due to the fact that I'm much more participatory now, what with swimming, debate, Club Rock, and such. I still feel left-out sometimes, tho, because although there are people whom I'm familiar with, and who'll associate with me freely during school, those same people will have nothing to do with me outside of school. I haven't been invited to any place outside of school with other people my age in several years, and it really annoys me. My parents always stressed that I should never force yourself upon anyone else (e.g. inviting yourself to someone else's house, etc.). The problem is that such concerns now affect my actions, so I'd feel really bad if I tried to join other people without being invited.

Yeah, they are the same. Me and some of my friends were discussing this today. How about that snowboard cross, huh? Pretty exciting, especially the turns. Wescott was pretty sweet coming into the finish. I also enjoyed the halfpipe last weekend. Autti had the absolutely coolest-looking performance, along with Aguirre. White might have gotten more air, but him and Kass were boring out there...

Yeah, Marrast also has a stair set that would work well with the Ped Malls.