Bullethead

I so need to buy a house. I'm getting loaded down with heavy junk that I don't use every day but don't want to sell, either. Problem is, Skyrim's economy sucks due to the civil war and dragon invasion, so there's a credit crunch. I just can't find any bankers willing to write me a mortgage so there's no alternative but cash up front, and I just don't have that kind of money. BTW, I stumbled into a quest rather like that movie "The Hangover", where you try to figure out what the Hell happened to you the night before

Heheh, me too :). Yup, OBD has really come a long way.

Thanks. Be sure to video all your dragon fights in case you get that same "bull-riding" death scene. Your guy is dressed better for it than my guy. I think elvin armor looks rather lame but us light armor types must wear it.... This was all just a random thing. The dragon was just one of those that shows up periodically and I'd met that bard before. He wanders around Skyrim hoping to see epic fights so he can write songs about them. He just happened to be in the neighborhood. The fight itself was pretty chaotic because the dragon had many targets in the neighborhood so didn't circle often but mostly zig-zagged along a more or less linear path. It was night and I was in hot pursuit, looking up trying to get a clear shot through the trees, so wasn't watching where I was going. Thus, I was forever running into treestumps, falling off cliffs, and tripping over campfire equipment. The whole countryside was awake and pissed off, so I was frequently beset by angry beasts during my chase. Several groups of bandits were particularly mad at me for kicking over their tea kettles. Each time I had to fight them, the dragon would pull away and in my haste to catch up again I left many unlooted bodies where they fell, without hope of finding them again. Between the dragon's strafing and my slashing through whatever stood between us, we created an impressive swath of devastation stretching from just south of Riverwood nearly to the west end of Lake Ilinalta. Here's what old Snotr One-Eye (and his packmule Lydia) look like these days. I made all my own armor and also improved all gear shown here to (Superior).

I'll watch that for sure when I get broadband again, perhaps next year sometime. Long story.... Just now, I was wandering around at night and a dragon appeared. I was in the wilderness but it was densely populated with various nasty critters so the dragon was raining its frosty death down on them all as it circled around above me. It being dark, I couldnn't see the dragon itself very well except for when it was shouting. As it happened, I was close up against the bottom of a cliff that marked the saddle between 2 mountains, so as the dragon circled me, it crossed the ridgeline after about 270^ of its 1st circle. It went out of sight behind the top of the cliff but from that direction there sounded a series of the most horrendous roars you ever heard. Not the rather shrill shrieks of the dragon but some basso bellowing that shook the earth itself. This was accompanied by a huge number of bright white flashes, the tops of which were visible above the ridgeline, and all of which looked the same as when the dragon was breathing frost on my side of the ridge. This all continued for about 15 seconds as I tried to find a way up the cliff. But at that point, the red dot on my compass marking the dragon, and the "dragon" health bar under the compass (which was nearly full), both disappeared. When they went, the lights and noise also stopped. Needless to say, I made a note to myself NEVER to bother whatever was on the other side of that ridge

Well, I like it. Never heard it before but I've been jamming to it a lot since you pointed it out. Now you need to do another vid with Man O'War's "The Crown and the Ring", which puts a bayonet into a similar spiritual ganglion BTW, cool Franzetta "Deathdealer" poses, too I wish I was taking videos. I just killed a dragon and 1) got the epic 3rd person slo-mo view where I jumped on its neck and rode it like a bull for a while before plunging my Skyforge Steel Sword (Superior) into the top of its skull, and 2) as the smoke cleared, there was Talscar the Wanderer, bard by trade, standing next to the wreckage, praising me for my feat, and singing "The Dragonborn Comes". So I'm now officially a figure of legend . But it would have made a great video.

Thanks for the tip. I hadn't thought about changing my stone. Sounds like a good strategy. I'll have to try something more magical my next go-round. BTW, I found out how companions die permanently. It's when your "friendly fire" drops them below 0 health. If the enemy does that to them, they lie there licking their wounds for a while then get back up. But if it's your hit that puts them down, then they stay down. Absolutely. Weapons (including any combat-related magic you use in most fights) and armor are the places to put the vast bulk of your perks. You can never be too good at fighting. And while the combat perk "constellations" might have the same number of stars as some of the others, many of those stars can be taken multiple times, so you can end up with 100% above the base level in both offense and defense, besides any special things like decapitation :). I see no point at all in perking lockpicking, for example. I'm only about 20 in that but I can pick any lock in the game because I'm used to how that works from FO3 and FONV. Same exact thing in Skyrim. Picking a master lock might cost me 8-10 picks but never more than that. Expert locks might use 3-4 and I only break picks on adept and novice locks when they've already seen a lot of use on previous locks.

Upon further review, the above is a bit harsh. It is possible to catch your combat skills up more or less with your overall level if you fall into the trap of craft-grinding early on. But it requires a lot of time combat-grinding, the 1st 1/2 of which will tend to suck because you're starting at a significant disadvantage. In my case, I reached smithing 30 at 6th or 7th level, at which point my armor and 1-handed weapons skills were still about their starting position of 25 or so. Since then, I've abandoned smithing completely except to temper and sharpen new gear I've found, not made--all the rest of my time has been hacking and slashing. I'm now 15th overall level and am just starting to feel fairly confident facing the critters I'm meeting toe-to-toe. So at the bottom line, it's best to view craft skills as constituting a full-blown character class. IOW, being a warrior-smith takes as much away from your warrior skills as being a warrior-wizard, and is not as effective in combat. Compared to a plain warrior of wizard, the warrior-wizard of the same character level isn't as good at either type of combat, but the flexibility of tactics often makes up for this. A warrior-smith, OTOH, just has better warrior gear, but lacks the warrior skills (and therefore warrior perks) to use it to best advantage, so is much more likely to get pwned by some bandit leader, let alone a frost troll. Thus, it seems to me that the best strategy for crafting is to NOT treat it as your multi-class. Instead, treat it as a hobby. And only have 1 hobby. Either be a smith, an enchanter, or an alchemist, but not more than 1 of these. And ration out your crafting skill increases to no more than 1 per overall character level. Try to stay being able to make the same sort of stuff you commonly find as loot and content yourself with just improving it slightly. This is because you can't help but increase at least 1 other non-combat skill per overall character level, such as speech just from buying and selling loot. It's very important not to detract any more than absolutely necessary from your combat skill increases per character level if you wish to remain competitive with the increasingly difficult enemies your character level entails. You can, to a very limited extent, make up for this with shouts, but any more than the Greybeards teach you requires killing dragons, and that again brings up the relative weakness of your warrior skills. But all this might sound like I don't like Skyrim. Far from it. I'm enjoying it immensely. I do wish I'd made different choice early on, but I hold no grudge against the game because it's my 1st character still. For instance, I'm currently exploring Shroud Hearth Barrow, which has quite a few cool traps and puzzles to figure out and just looks cool besides. I recommend it as a travel destination for those who haven't seen it.

Stunning! I'm really looking forward to seeing this on my new box, which I hope will still be new when P4 comes out. I can already hear its biological clock ticking

Well, I wasn't asked, but I'll chip in my $0.02 review and opinion.... I can't say "Apocalypse Now" vs. "Avatar" because I didn't like the former and never saw the latter. What makes more sense to me is analogizing to aqua vitae. This scale runs from Lagavulin 16 at the top end to Old Forester on the bottom. There are worse whiskeys than Old Forester but I won't mention them in polite company and do my best to forget my experiences with them. On this scale, I rank Skyrim as Maker's Mark: very good but not an all-time classic. Why don't I think Skyrim is an all-time classic? Because Bethesda will out-do it incrementally with its next release, as it has its previous would-be all-time great games. Skyrim is better than Fallout 3, which was better than Oblivion, which was better than Morrowwind, etc. IOW, Skyrim doesn't break new ground, it just incrementally enhances what's been done before, and the next incremental improvement will eclipse it. Now, the basic formula is EXCELLENT, so I'm not complaining about incremental improvements. In the case of games like this, I LOVE more-of-the-same. It's why I buy the damn things. BTW, I like FONV also, but not as much as FO3 because FO3 was much more twisted than FONV, so I don't see FONV as an incremental improvement on FO3. Does Skyrim draw me into immersion? Absolutely. Can I waste entire days doing nothing else? Already have. Measured by all that sort of thing, plus general lack of bugs and overall stability, Skyrim is excellent. It's exactly what I expected it to be, given where it came from. Perhaps even better, because it has noticeably fewer bugs at this early stage than previous Bethesda games. The only one I've really noticed is the way dragon skeletons bounce around each time you revist the kill site. My main gripe with Skyrim is the new character stats/leveling system. I REALLY like it in general--the basic concept is a vast improvement over the traditional attribute system. However, in this, its original form, it might could use some tweaking. Or maybe as players we just need to get used to it. The system contains a very dangerous trap for the unwary, and on everybody's 1st time through, we're all unwary so heed this warning... BEWARE of grinding up non-combat crafting skills. Grinding them is very easy to do in perfect safety--you just need money, tools, and materials. OTOH, combat skills only increase in actual combat or expensive training from NPCs. The trap here is that each crafting skill increase moves you closer to the next overall character level just as much as combat skill increases do, and are much easier to get. Thus, if you grind crafting, you can find yourself with a relatively high overall character level but relatively low combat skill levels. And it's your overall character level that determines the strength of the enemies you meet, and also what's available in stores and as loot. This means grinding on crafting is a great way to find yourself badly outclassed in combat. Here's what happened to me... My guy likes light armor. I've put a lot of perks into getting better at using it. But Skyrim has much more heavy armor generally available in stores and as loot than light armor and after a while, I decided the only way I could get better light armor than leather was to grind my smithing up until I could do elvin. So I did, and found myself rather outclassed in combat. But because my overal level went up in the process, the enemies started wearing elvin armor instead of fur armor. Thus, the very 1st guy I killed after learning to smith elvin armor was wearing a complete set of the stuff. I could have saved myself a lot of effort and made the fight easier if I'd just concentrated on combat skills and taken his stuff as loot. The ONLY advantage of being able to make the stuff myself is that I can get a couple extra armor rating points out of stuff I make and temper myself compared to what's found out in the world. Not a good trade IMHO when my relative weakness in sword skills for my overall level makes fights much more problematic. So at present, IMHO crafting is not really a good idea for a successful character. Which is too bad because it's fun to make your own stuff. But in the long run, it seems better to concentrate entirely on skills with direct combat relevance like weapons, armor, destruction, and conjuration. Everything else is best left to the REMFs safe back in town. Sure, sharpen your new sword and mix the odd potion, but don't even think about becoming self-sufficient because your combat skills can't stay abreast of your overall level. It might help if non-combat skill increases weren't counted as heavily toward character level as combat skills, but if that changes it'll be a while before we see it.

Hey Mike, good-looking character. Too bad he's one of those scumbags trying to reimpose foreigh rule over my homeland, so I guess I'll have to kill him BTW, here's something that will pucker your butt when you're off in the middle of nowhere all alone.... I don't like tangling with a dragon unless it's got other things to get mad at besides me. But at this point, there was absolutely nothing for miles, not even a bunch of bandits (because I'd just killed them all). Fortunately, my guy is sneaky enough that the dragon couldn't see him unless he was moving, at least at night. So the dragon was circling overhead and each time it was facing away from me, I ran for it then stopped as it come back over, repeat. All the while looking for something, anything, to train it into as a distraction--a giant herd would have been nice--but nother. It took me about 3 game hours to go a mile and all the while that dragon was overhead, but eventually it lost interest and I made it back to Whiterun.

Naw, you use the souls to refuel your magic itens

This pic was taken by the 2nd guy to arrive on scene. It shows me, the 1st guy there, cursing the photographer for taking pictures instead of pulling hose . This particular house was about 100 years old and built of heart pine, so it went up like napalm. This photo was taken about 10 minutes after the fire was reported and already there's not a board that isn't burning. Even the grass in the yard is on fire. I have another pic, taken by the resident just after he bailed, which has the rear end already engulfed and fire streaming out the front door. That tells you how fast a fire can spread. Luckily, only the 1 guy was home and he got out OK, but lost everything except the clothes on this back. Obviously, there was nothing us firemen could do to affect the outcome, just limit the spread of the fire among the surroundings. What a way to start the 236th birthday of the Marine Corps, which was supposed to be a day off for me . Anyway, consider this a reminder to be careful with space heaters. I know it's getting cold out there this time of year but you sure don't want to get too hot......

I bet I know the place you're talking about. Real Indiana Jones-esque in places. My funniest moment had mostly to do with the character statistics page, where I noticed at the bottom there's a tally kept of "bunnies slaughtered". So I've made it a personal goal to rid Skyrim of its lagomorphs and one day, after knocking a rabbit about 20 feet with a massively powerful bow shot, I decided to try my "Raise Zombie" spell on it. Thus, for a while, I had "Snotr One-Eye's Rabbit" scampering along with me, trailing clouds of black smoke. A couple bends later along the road and I came across a vampire conjurer lurking in ambush. My zombie bunnie immediately charged him, interrupting his casting some spell to summon Akatosh-knows-what monstrosity to fight for him. But as the vampire turned to defend himself from this unexpected attack, my zombie spell duration expired and the rabbit fizzled out into a pile of glowing goo at the vampire's feet. However, the distraction allowed me to put a clothyard shaft between his 3rd and 4th cervical vertebrae and down he went. So I dug around in my stash of potion ingredients and dropped a handful of various flowers on the oozing remains of my zombie rabbit. If there's a vallahala for such abominations, he earned it. Then I immediately set out to create more zombie rabbits

Around here, our most common duck is the wood duck. IMHO, it's one of the prettiest types of duck and it's rather unique in that it nests up in hollow trees instead of on the ground. As soon as the eggs hatch, the mother duck literally kicks all the babies out of the nest so that they plummet 6-8 feet to the ground. Once the last duckling is out, mother jumps down herself and leads them out into the water. The bizarre thing is, this rather brutal fall is essential in the ducklings' lives. If you hatch wood duck eggs in an incubator, you have to pick the hatchlings up and drop them that high or they will never eat a bite of food and will starve to death.

When I build my next house, I'm definitely going to contact contat you or whoever you sold your inevitably successful business to. That wall looks like it would stop a Hellfire missile . Now just combine that with a roof to keep out bunker-buster bombs and I won't be paying taxes ever again, and will defy the government to come collect them .

So, the floor of the attic / ceiling of the top floor is also concrete? Not pierced in any way for lights, pipes, or ducts? Speaking of which, how do you run pipes, wires, and ducts in a stone house? Yeah, from the POV of construction, those pre-fab trusses are great. They're cheap and quite strong under normal loads. But they come down with deadly speed in fires. In buildings where they're known to exists, we do NOT go inside unless the fire is still tiny when we arrive. Usually, they fall down at or shortly after we get there if the fire has grown any. These gusset plate things aren't confined to the roof trusses, either. A lot of multi-story wooden buildings are built with pre-fab zig-zag trusses under the upper floors. This is to create a big void about 2 feet high and horizontally the same area as the floor above, between the ceiling of the lower story and the floor of the story above, through which run ducts, wires, and pipes. This is most common in multiple occupancy buildings like apartments/flats, office buildings, etc., but also happens in some large mansion-type homes with huge living and/or dining rooms on the ground floor. Once fire gets in there, the upper floors themselves quickly collapse. As to burning off the roof being a good thing, it's usually not. It's only good if the fire burns a hole straight up above the room of origin, which means it self-vents. This substantially limits horizontal fire spread. In fact, if the fire hasn't done so itself, we sometimes cut such a hole ourselves, although it's a risky move and NEVER attempted on light truss roofs. But what usually happens is, the fire goes out a gable end of the attic before making a hole in the roof, because the gable ends are usually easier to burn away. The problem is, if the fire starts at a place with no gable end above it, and there's a gable end on the other side of the house, then the fire will fill the attic. Now, when the fire burns a hole above itself, that's OK because the falling debris lands in the fire, which is already untennable even to firemen. But when the whole attic's on fire, the whole roof comes down more or less at once, taking the attic floor with it into the occupied spaces below which probably aren't yet on fire so people might be in them. This is why firemen worry so much about attic fires and always pull down the ceiling to see what's going on up there before advancing down the hall towards the room on fire. Prestige in housing tends to be a combination of overall building size plus location and general decor. You can plaster over cheap structure just as long as the place looks impressive on the outside.

Ingots usually aren't available for sale or plunder in the quantities you want, so you might have to make your own. That's a rather involved process. First, you have to find an abandoned mine and clear out the monsters. Second, you need to dig up the ore (which requires a pickaxe, but you can usually find one lying around inside the mine). Third, you need to smelt the ore into ingots. This requires a smelter device and I haven't found one of those yet (not that I've looked too hard). I believe you have to bring a pile of firewood to run the smelter (which requires a woodman's axe and a chopping block device), too. THEN you have ingots, which you then take to the forge and/or grindstone and/or workbench to make or improve something. But all that's for folks with panzer fetishes. I personally prefer light armor because 1) you can carry more loot and 2) you make a lot less noise wearing it. And as it happens, you can make leather armor for free out of the hides of any fur-bearing critters you run acorss in your travels. The bigger the critter, the more leather you get out of it. Just take the hides to a scraping rack, turn them into leather, turn a couple of leather pieces into strips, and you're all set. In this scenario, you only use the odd ingot to sharpen your sword or make a better one when you up that skill enough. If you end up with more ingots than you want to carry, make some metal weapon or armor and sell it.

I decided to try installing Skyrim on my laptop, which is only 2 years old. It runs fine but has to be in low detail so I'm eagerly awaiting my new desktop to really crank things up. Anyway, I managed to spend some hours yesterday playing it while at the fire station. On Saturdays, it's only 1 guy on duty so the work outside of calls is light and calls were few until well into the night when the drunks hit the road. Managed to reach 5th level without trying hard, as my habit is to talk to every NPC in every town I come across and do any quests they have, or at least add them to the list to do later. So I haven't seen much of the world and, of course, am gaffing off the main quest until much later. And as usual, my 1st character has turned out to be a sort of jack-of-all-trades, master of none. He's fairly decent at sneaking because I learned several games ago that just charging in isn't a good idea. I tested that in Skyrim and it's still true. However, he's not a thief, he's just tactical. Sneak up, take a sniper bow shot, run away and hide. Repeat until the enemies are thinned out, THEN charge in with melee and a bit of Destruction magic. And in between, make better weapons and armor. So here's my guy, Snotr One-Eye. Everything he's got he made himself.

Geez, that really doesn't sount too effective. Over here, firestops are made of the same size boards as the studs and they're at rather closer spacing. However, you have to watch the carpenters to make sure they fit them in well without gaps at the ends, and the electricians and plumbers aren't supposed to run their systems in that stud gap but sometimes they do. However, the true purpose of fire stops is to stop vertical fire spread from floor to floor. That was an issue back in the day with balloon framing but no longer with platform framing, because the floor sills cap all stud caps at the level of the ceiling. So if you have platform framing, fire stops don't really make a difference and mostly serve to brace the studs horizontally because sheetrock really isn't good for that. So the way fires typically go in US wooden houses built in say the last 60 years is that the fire starts within the room and spreads to the flashover stage while involving only the contents. The sheetrock on walls and ceiling pretty much confine the fire to that room, especially if the door is closed. However, if there are light fixtures or HVAC vents in the ceiling, the heat can go up through them from the get-go and will soon start another fire at a higher level, either the attic (in a 1-story area) or the duct space between floors (in a 2-story area). These spaces are playgrounds for fire because they don't have sheetrock, just exposed wood everywhere you look, and attics at least are well-ventilated by a combination of soffet and gable and/or ridge vents. But these are big spaces so at first the heat spreads out and you don't get that much of a fire in there. But once the whole space heats up enough, it suddenly erupts. Thus, what appears from the outside to be just 1 room on fire can suddenly blossom into massive involvement. And once the attic is well alight, it's game over. If we get there with several minutes to spare before the attic goes poof, we can probably save the house. Otherwise, there's not a lot we can do except protect neighboring buildings. This is all greatly impacted by the modern prevalence of light-weight truss construction. What they do is, the may pre-fabricated trusses that aren't even nailed together. Instead, they lay the boards out on a jig and beat steel gusset places over all the joints. These gusset plates have hundreds of little teeth cut into them and bent over to face 1 side, which only go into the wood about 1/4". Besides that, they're triangular in shape. So what happens is, the gusset plates heat up and expand, and when they expand, the teeth squeeze themselves out of the wood and the plates fall off, leaving the boards completely unconnected. Thus, the whole truss collapses long before it burns away. We used to reckon on 20 minutes available for interior fire and rescue work. But with light trusses, it's 5-10 minutes tops, most of which is used up in the process of calling 911, 911 notifying us, and us driving there. The real problem is, you can't tell by looking at the house from the outside. Thus, the rapid collapse of light truss houses has killed a lot of firemen the last few years. Very, very true. In fact, the insurance companies don't even care about saving residential structures, just commercial structures. Absolutely. Besides fire, things other than wood also avoid termites and rot, and make it harder for mice, roaches, and such to live in there. But in the US, wood owns the housing industry because it's fast and cheap. Other types of construction required more skilled labor than the companies are willing to pay for, plus takes longer and time is money. Actually, the big timbers do burn, and they burn with huge fires that throw off gobs of heat and require oceans of water to extinguish. The effect on the timber itself is slow as you say and they last a long time while burning, but if they get going, they'll obliterate everything else around them. Also, you have to consider the type of construction. If you go for a log cabin, you want the logs touching each other with as little gap as possible. The best is squared logs or round logs with their lower surface scooped away to fit the contour of the log below. Then you lay some fire-reistant foam between them to seal the joint. By fire-resistant, I mean stuff that will burn if flame touches it but goes out once it's removed. This stuff doesn't contribute to the flammability of the wall as a whole. What you do NOT want is large gaps between the logs that you fill up with polyurethane foam and cover with stucco to look like traditional clay/mud chinking. When that foam burns away, and it will almost instantly, what you've got is just like a celebratory bonfire: big logs with large gaps between them. One of the biggest fires I've seen recently was such a house. It was made out of heart cedar planks 4-6 inches thick, 2 feet wide more or less, and up to 60 feet long. These had double dovetail joints at the corners and the 2-4 inch gaps (caused by the top and bottom edges following the gnarly outline of the tree) had that foam in them. This was a huge house, about $1M, and we flowed water on it for 8 hours straight before we got the last of the big logs out. It looked great before the fire but damn, what a firebomb! On top of this, it had a light truss roof so that fell in as we arrived. Fortunately, the arsonist struck when nobody was home. @ Flyby PC: Best of luck in your endeavors to get your product on the market in a big way. I'd really like to see that sort of house be universal. It wouldn't put me out of a job because there'll still be scads of people to cut out of wrecked cars, which I prefer to fighting fire anyway As to our local materials, no boulders of any kind. The biggest stones in the entire state of Lousy Anna, which weren't imported, are about 4 inches long, and these are only found in a few creeks--most pebbles are much smaller. Also, our local clay isn't that great for brick. Finished bricks are so soft that swallows dig holes in the sides of old chimneys to make their nests. Thus, brick was mostly used only for chimneys back in the day. These days, most brick is imported, too. We have a lot of brick veneer homes, but they're just wood with 1 layer of bricks on the outside (usually not all the way around, either) for show.

I'd wait a week or 2. Right now, friggin' Steam is so clogged up with thousands of people downloading the 5.1gig game itself and/or the 400meg patch it's already got that you'll have trouble just logging in to register.

I think over here they can only be 4 stories and have to be sprinklered. Glad none are in my bailiwick, though :). I understand you offer a competing product but seriously, where do you live? I live in a very swampy, humid place, without any stone bigger than creek pebbles. Hell, the Indians mostly used sharp sticks and garfish scales instead of proper flint arrowheads. We can make brick, mortar, and concrete from abundant local materials but don't use either very much for structures. Almost all buildings have been built of wood since Indian times. If it's made out of anything else, it's all-metal, but those are all commercial like barns, churches, warehouses, etc. Anyway, despite all our moisture, wood buildings around here don't rot just from the damp atmosphere or fungal spores in it. They WILL rot in very localized spots around leaking pipes, but not otherwise. What eats up wood buildings here are termites, which thrive in several varieties. I spend about $1000/year keeping them out of my various buildings. But if you do that, then wood buildings last forever (unless they burn or a tree falls on them during a hurricane). We've got quite a few within 10 miles of me that are over 100 years old (like the one that burned here), and quite a few about 200 years old. Also, in almost all wood buildings constructed since the early 1900s, there's no air circulation between the studs inside the walls. Fire codes saw to that. The space between the studs is filled with insulation of some sort (even newspaper in old buildings), blocked top and bottom by the sills of the floors, and covered by something both inside and out. Hell, there are even required to be horizontal boards between the studs, called "fire stops", every so often. Now, some of these have small holes in them for wiring and plumbing, but most of them don't. It's only in wood buildings from the 1800s that we see "balloon framing", where there are voids in the walls running from the foundation to the attic past however many floors. These will indeed function as chimneys. However, that type of construction quit being used decades ago because 1) it requires longer boards, which aren't readily available these days, 2) it's a lot more labor-intensive than the modern "platform framing" method, and 3) it's illegal under all modern fire codes because of the chimney-like voids. There are still quite a few old buildings around with balloon framing, but most of them either burned down or fell down long ago and have been replaced with platform-framed structures, so it's nowhere near as common as it used to be. All wood-framed buildings can burn down. However, you might be surprised as to how well they resist fire these days. Sheetrock does an excellent job of protecting the wall and ceiling structure from fire, so normally the paths of fire spread are limited to holes in it like for light fixtures and ducts. So in general, fires in wooden houses these days are much like in stone houses, mostly involving the room contents, not the structure, at least to start with. However, fires left undisturbed will eventually spread to other rooms. Thus, saving a wooden house is largely a function of response time. If we get there within the 1st 10 minutes, we can limit the major damage to 1 room. If we get there later and multiple rooms are involved, then it's probably a total loss--even if most of the structure is still standing, it's beyond economical repair. But we do save quite a few wooden houses. The house in the pic above went up like napalm mostly because it was made out of very well-seasoned, highly flammable wood. That rosin in the heart pine and cypress boards is great for deterring termites but burns very, very well, especially when its been cut for a century. It's quite common on old buildings around here from before the days of Terminix and treated lumber. Plus, most old houses around here don't have sheetrock or even plaster, but usually more wood on the inside of the walls. Thus, fire gets into the structure immediately.

Yup, SP works great. It's just that Steam has no intention of giving up its monopoly, so there's a war on about that. Back to the personal side, here I am trying to install Skyrim from DVD and as usual, stupid Steam is fighting that tooth and nail, trying to force me to download the whole damn thing anyway. And the usual tricks to get it to accept a DVD installation ain't working. Geez, I hate Steam.

<br><br><font face="Courier New">Oh, the basic idea is great. However, Steam's support completely blows, which is why I don't like them personally.<br><br>On the professional side, my company has recently made a competing product to Steam, so Steam is the enemy.</font>

Likewise. And also happy 236th birthday to the USMC

I hope no users get hurt by this, but I hope Steam takes it in the shorts. I hate Steam, both personally and professionally.