Rant 058 / Games, Life and Books

NS2 concept art:
Marine in railcar pissing in pants while facing a charging onos

NS2 isn't anywhere near completion, but what they're revealing to us players are really interesting. The onos will be there, and it will be bigger than ever! Or so it seems in this picture.

Me luv ONOS!

Okay, I admit: I suck at onosing. A proficient onos never dies. It is able to ass-rape several marines who are firing at it the whole time, dance on the corpses for a bit and run to a gorge for heals.

Me?

Let's just say I don't know when to retreat. I charge into a group of marines, ass-rape a few, and die in their midst, wasting 75 res for 2-3 enemies. And to explain the significance of 75 res, usually it takes abt 8-10 mins from start of game to accumulate this much.

I'm much at better as a gutless lerk. Never the sort who flies in for a few bits. Not me. I prefer to fly to a remote spot, spray gas, and fly off. Let the skulks do the biting; I'll soften the enemies for them with my gas. I'm an Adrenaline Lerk, not a Celerity Lerk.



Today, a professor was telling my lecture group about this genius senior who got a scholarship from MIT 7 years ago. Absolute genius, publishing a textook, several international research papers, a patent, but no girlfriend. And one friend of mine later attributed it to the reason: "God is fair."

We all LOL'ed.



Just when I got a new router to replace my old one, my desktop breaks down. For $35 I had it checked at Sim Lim. And the problem? MOTHERBOARD KAPUTT!!! AAAAAA!!!!

This is so fucked up! Just when I thought I will be able to play the whole night without disturbance. Well, I still can, but this is only 'cos my bro just went to bed. Tomorrow, I will have to return to Sim Lim to pick up my desktop. Not my bro, who's the one who needs it most, but me, 'cos he needs to go do some stuff for NDP.

That comp is only 1+ year-old!!! This totally sucks!




Ilium is the best Sci-fi novel I have ever read. Its sequel, Olympos, is equally outstanding.

Ilium is like a modern translation of the Iliad, set in the distant future of our Solar System. Apparently, the Trojan War is occuring again 6000 years after the actual War we have all read about! This time, there are reconstructed (or cloned using their ancient DNAs) scholars, who are experts in the Iliad, watching the whole event in the background, and reporting to a Muse daily on how close things are following the real Iliad.

Futuristic technologies are employed by these scholars (aka scholics here) and the immortals, like Quantum Teleport (QT), nanocytes (nano-robot healers) and etc.

Almost all the Greek gods and goddesses and heroes are in this story, just like the Iliad. Zeus is the ultimate Greek god, and he actually shows his strength in the story. He is the only god in this story who knows how the events will turn out, and will stop at nothing to make things happen that way, including banishing fellow immortals to the pits of Tartarus.

Archilles is god-like in the Iliad, and he is still so here. In fact, he gets to kill quite a few gods in the war, like Hades, for one. He is able to move ultra-fast like the gods, which helps him kill the gods before they can QT away. And he is inhumanly strong and etc.

Unfortunately, gods are gods. Here, they can be resurrected in "healing vats" on Mount Olympus, as long as at least a sliver of their body remains undestroyed.

So what's the difference between reading the Iliad and this? Big diff! The actual story starts when Aphrodite, the goddess in charge of the Muse controlling the scholics, summons our hero, a 21st century classics professor, and instructs him to find an opportunity to kill Athena. Giving him the Hades Helm(every teenage boy's dream: invisibility even from the gods, except Aphrodite herself) and a QT medallion which can trace other QTs' destination.

This wasn't mentioned in the Iliad. Scholics don't exist there! And this is where all the actions starts.

There are lots of fighting scenes in the 2 novels. In one part, Pallas Athena injects certain nano-robots into Diomedes, which transforms him into a superhuman for a while and amplifying his natural electro-magnetic fields into "an aura of fire", making him just like what Homer (author of the Iliad) said he would be. He became so strong, he managed to injure Aphrodite in spite of the forcefield around her.

And who can forget Helen? The most beautiful woman in the world - and a slut, according to this book. Yes, she is one of the more important people in the story, and she's having sex with not just Paris this time.

Sci-fi always has robots, and here, robots come in swarms. In this story, our robots are called moravecs, and are a combination of organic material and metals. More metals and organic stuff here, but they have a combo of organic and electronic brains. Convenient, when you want to forget something. Just shut away the organic side, and delete the memory in the electronic side.

The weird thing is, the robots here are often fans of our classical masterpieces. The 2 most important robots in this story are practically experts of Shakespeare and Proust respectively. I skipped many paragraphs in their conversations out of my complete ignorance of these 2 guys' works.

And Earth! Earth is still here, but humans here are evolved to such a degree that they are born with nano stuff that allows them to connect to much higher forms of the Internet. In this era, there are the proxnet(like radar on your palms), farnet(the higher form of the Internet, allows users to even see other people through invisible cameras from the air at any angle), and the most amazing Allnet(allows user to see ANYTHING, even flows of photons in place of sunlight, every molecules in everything and etc).

Dan Simmons, author of Ilium and Olympos, seems to be really good. I'm going to buy his older works some day. Like Hyperion, and its sequels.


By the way, Ilium is Troy. And Patroclus is revealed to be the gay buddy of Archilles! More depth, woohoo!