*sigh*
No idea how long it'll be before Vista is sunsetted, but it's not going to be very long, I expect, and then all the people with Vista will want 10. That period will last about ten or eleven months.
I'm not putting 10 on my system here, at least not before SP1 comes out. An OS upgrade is always a major project and I'm positive that I'm going to have enough of Win 10 just by going to work. What a f-in' thrill.
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Last night's Game of Thrones--wow.
They used motion capture to animate the undead, and it was pretty damned cool to see it. Nice touch: the first undead we see in the whole series is a little wildling girl, and she made an appearance in last night's ep.
Cersei Lannister continues to get hers, and it's refreshing to see someone smack her over the head with impunity. She's had free rein (almost typed "reign" there, but that would also be more-or-less correct) for far too long, and she's discovering the hard way that when you think you're smarter than everyone else, you forget that just because others are not as smart as you it does not mean they're stupid.
Meanwhile, Samwell Tarly continues to be the most sympathetic character in the series.
Two episodes left this season. Oh, dick.
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Watching the epic battle scene last night, I kept being reminded of my early D&D days. "Skeletons" were approximately the weakest monster you could enounter--animate skeletons, usually human--and as our main characters advanced in levels, we came to disdain them. But that was only because we were beyond them; for lowbies they were a terror.
Edged weapons did half damage, and arrows did one point of damage per hit, regardless. To get full damage you needed a blunt weapon--mace/club/flail/morning star--and nothing else was really effective when you're second level and your best attack will do 1d6 plus maybe a strength modifier of 1 or 2. Against a skeleton with, say eight hit points, you never took them out with one attack unless you got extremely lucky--and considering that you might have eight or ten hit points yourself, they could easily kill you if you weren't lucky.
GoT (and the fight scene in last night's ep) is not based on D&D, but there are parallels--and I saw plenty of walking corpses get skewered with arrows and keep right on fighting, which is correct considering what we're talking about. Okay, if that particular corpse is missing half its skull, what difference does it make if you put an arrow between its eyes? What vitals does an arrow pierce on its way through an empty rib cage?
So humans fighting undead the way they normally fight humans ain't gonna work all that well.
The real surprise came when Jon Snow fought a White Walker--but that is a spoiler so I shan't say more.
Here's what I think, then: there's an alchemical substance called "dragonfire", a green liquid which bursts into searing hot flame upon contact with air and the slightest provocation. That substance would be dynamite against the undead coming down from the north. There was formerly a great deal of it available in King's Landing before Tyrion Lannister used it to repulse the invasion by Stannis Baratheon and his army. I have no idea how much is available now. If any.
Barring that, the dragons themselves--three of them--which can fly and breathe fire. That would also be an effective weapon against the undead. "Kill it with fire" is the best thing you can do to undead, primarily because anything else is second-best.
Men with swords and shields? They'll get slaughtered...and then rise to fight for the other side. No thank you.
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There are so many things I have to do today. I guess I'd better get started. *sigh*