Rant 240 / Fallout 3 Out; Sacred 2 In

Spending time at the largest forum on the net does have its advantages. Lot's of different people talking about all sorts of stuff. Learnt about this "Forer effect" just now which gives a name to the way horoscopes work. That very generalized style that has many positive details that you would either have a little of or, at the very least, want to have. Now I know it's called the Forer effect. Very interesting. By studying this, any Tom, Dick and Harry can be a freakin psychic. For a little description that's easy to understand, click here.






It's irritating, the advertisments in Windows Messenger v2008. It used to be that it will pop up only if you leave your mouse on it. Now it pops up whenever your mouse even swings over it and stays open till you touch it with your cursor again. I'm extremely annoyed by this new method of forcing users to see it. In fact, now I have another reason to NOT open Messenger. I simply hate how it pops up and distracts me whenever I click on a name on the list because I accidentally let my cursor come into contact with the damned ad box.

Fuck you, Microsoft!







Sacred 2 seems like a nice game. Despite using the classic (and cliche) style of action RPG popularized by Diablo I and II, the developers added some humour everywhere that sometimes breaks the fourth wall. It makes fighting enemies interesting where I am (at the beginning) because I kill enemies just to hear what they have to say.

The system is also different, but not exactly a breakthrough. Just changed from the stereotype.

Graphics are excellent. No comment about the music yet.

I'm playing on Silver mode, which I assume is the hard mode. It also offers the Hardcore mode in which your character dies permanently, but I did not choose that. I may be confident, but I know I make mistakes too. I'm only human. I don't want to ruin the game for myself on my first run.

The start for the female Mage or whatever the woman is called was quite ridiculous. All it took was a shot of fireball and a stab from my dagger to defeat the opponent, and voila! I graduated from the academy just like that! I was like, "WTF?" C'mon she studied all those years (according to the background story) to learn to shoot a lousy fireball? What?

I expected the usual mission to get some stuff from some noobie dungeon but this is retarded. If only exams in real life are that simple!

So I'm only at the first town. Have to go further to better understand the game.







Been forgetting to play the Trade Up game on Facebook. I checked yesterday and I saw that I'm back down to 4.7M... Fortunately I don't care anymore since I have better games to play.







Singaporeans in NTU seem to prefer to join sports clubs as their CCAs. All other clubs seems to be full of foreigners. Take the NTU Toastmasters Club, for example. Half the Exco positions are filled by non-locals. The members population is worse. It's like we're exclusive to Indonesians and Chinese mainlanders. A few Singaporeans and Malaysians thrown in the mix like a dash of salt in a pot of stew and we have my club.

I know, foreigners have a greater incentive to join clubs and get Exco positions because that's the only way they are guaranteed a room in our campus hostels. Failure to get those rooms means living in small HDB flats with higher rents and worse living conditions. Plus the need to pay for public transport everyday.

Still, for full-time students to refuse to join any club in order to "focus on studies" makes university sound like a chore. "Just get it over and done with." Hey, it's not like you will die if you don't do so well in university. The difference between a 2nd lower and 3rd class honours is only a hundred or two in the starting pay and it's not like you will definitely stay in your first job for long.

Of course, people should join a club because they're interested in the activities. With the wide range of clubs available in our universities, few things are actually unavailable. Therefore there has to be something for just about everyone. Unless they have no interest in anything but sex and drugs. That would be sad, because these are the only things that are not available in any CCA.

There are probably things that I still don't understand.








I've noticed what irks me the most about a rigid lifestyle - the necessity of waking up at a predetermined time. Worse are those times when I must wake up in the morning. I've always preferred to sleep at dawn, give or take an hour or 2. That's precisely what I do now during my holidays. Fuck sleeping at night! Night is the best time to work and play because it's so quiet! Maybe I'm a night person but I prefer to do everything at night after everyone is asleep.

What sucks is that I can't socialize at those hours, except for online games because the Americans and Europeans play at these times. But European servers tend to lag more than US servers for reasons I don't really understand. I've always thought Western Europe is closer to me than the American west coast. It's not like I live in Japan.

Anyway, sucks that I have to wake up later at 9am. It's 3.54am now but I don't care. Haven't slept this early for a few days already. I'm beginning to sleep at 7am now and will most likely continue to be later until it goes all the way back to the original 10pm after a few weeks if it's not interrupted.

To sleep at any time I want is probably one of the conditions of what I call living comfortably. I'm not the sort who can sleep once I fall onto the bed, unlike so many people I know. The last time I was able to do that, I had just left the army and was waiting for university. I had absolutely no worries then.

Those were the days.

The price of desire. How I hate paying!

If only I don't need to eat at all. If only I can survive by standing in the sun and absorbing sunlight! Oh wait, if humans could do that, I'd probably be wishing that I didn't need to even stand in the sun to survive.

Fuck that. Life has a price, but it's such a hassle to pay it. Living is a troublesome matter. Bleh!

Sometimes, you don't really have a choice, not if certain instincts are naturally imprinted in your psyche. For this case, it's the instinct to stay alive. It's like the BIOS in your computer, can't delete it. No human can choose to die without a strong reason to overcome this.

Since I have no other options, I might as well go along and see what happens. Maybe something might just happen, though I'd prefer if nothing does. If something happens, there's always that chance that something negative might happen.

Brings to mind those situations when people make bad choices at important crossroads in life without thinking much on it. When the consequences become visible and they become helpless to stop them, they'd say something like "I never expected this to happen!" If that happens in fiction, it usually turns me off. I'd want to turn off the TV, close the player in the computer or put down the book.







Will the USA ever annex Canada in the next 100 years? I think so. Singapore being annexed by another country in the near future is also something I find quite possible. Human history has never been quiet for long in any place at any time. Even the great Roman Empire was fill with uprisings, from which the word "decimated" is derived. The punishment for rebellions was to kill one of every ten men in the rebellious villages. Therefore, to decimate a group of people does not mean to kill most of them. Got that from the book Olympos by Dan Simmons. No it's not fiction, the story behind the word "decimate".

The Holy Roman Empire also didn't last forever. Imperial China was never known as China until the Europeans came along. Before that, they called themselves by the name of their dynasty. Like during the Ming dynasty, the land was called Ming, not China nor PRC. Therefore, it can be said that even China didn't stay as the same country for the whole 4000 years.

Strange that people always said China has 5000 years of history when its earliest records were from the Shang dynasty that began at about 1600 BC. There was also the Xia dynasty before that but there's no written record from that era, only indirect descriptions by later generations. Recent excavations have been connected to this dynasty which is estimated to exist in the year 2000 BC.

That only makes 4000 years of history as of 8 years ago.

Unless we count the years when humans settled in this land. But that occured in 7000 BC. Plus history only begins when there are written records on a certain time, that's why Xia is considered history even though no one has found any writings dating from that dynasty.

Anyway, the word "dynasty" has misled me for many years. I've always believed that the different dynasties were merely different kings/bloodlines for the same empire. In fact, those Chinese dynasties can be considered as different countries. At some points in Chinese history, there have been multiple dynasties coexisting at the same time. Therefore, laymen like me can say that "dynasty" here is synonymous with "country" or "kingdom".

So no country, kingdom nor empire in human history has ever lasted for more than a millenium. Most only last several centuries. If anything, history has taught me that the smaller the land, the shorter it will stay sovereign. Also, the so called "casus belli" of most wars were bullshit. I knew about it from the game Europa Universalis III and later read more from the Wikipedia articles on several wars.

Anyone can come up with a casus belli. Some of them were basically nonsensical, too whimsical for anyone to die for. Yet die they did, millions upon millions of people in human history. The real reason, usually greed or personal motives, is never the official cause of most wars. Take WWII for example. The casus belli was... tiny little Poland attacked a German radio station out of spite... And thus began a war that cut short countless lives. Oh the bullshit people can swallow! No wonder there are religious zealots.







"Spite" cannot be found in www.dictionary.com for unknown reasons. Holy cow!