Saturday 19 September 2009

Rant 427 / Hitler Was A Vegan! Don't Be A Nazi! Stop Eating Your Greens!














Fallout 3 has become so much fun! Custom mods make things hilarious!

At the moment I have 4 mods and many custom models.

Mods:

- ArchiveInvalidation
- Fallout Mod Manager
- Groovatron
- Umpa Animation

The first two are the prerequisites for installing custom mods as they tweak the game's codes to allow custom stuff to be used.

Groovatron makes all non-playable characters (NPCs) dance, pose, undress, freeze and etc. Umpa Animation allows the NPCs to do animated poses and actions like dancing and posing, which means it's a prerequisite for these stuff. Without Umpa Animation, Groovatron cannot make NPCs dance and do moving poses.

Now it's so fun! All I do when I see monsters or hostile people is shoot them with the Groovatron, click on "Toggle Restrain" on the menu that pops up and voila! The NPC is restrained and I can kill it when I feel like it. I can even loot its body (Access Inventory is one of the options in that menu) and leave without ending its miserable existence.

Generally I kill everything in case not killing them would screw up my quest objectives or something. This is especially true in the Mansion I visited in the new zone from the Point Lookout expansion. In this mansion I have to help a good guy defend the house from several waves of insane natives.

Mmm... there were lots of freezing, undressing and slow murders done that day. It's not that I wanted to kill them slowly - it's incredibly boring to shoot at unmoving objects - but I had picked the hardest difficulty in the game so even a point-blank shot from a classic double-barrel shotgun (both rounds at one push of the trigger) aimed directly at their heads barely takes out a bit of their HP.

I ran out of ammo so much I had to resort to melee weapons. Of course I took theirs. Loot them from the natives' living body and kill them with it. Didn't want to waste my best friend, the Shishkebab, on them.

Frequently when travelling between quests, I would just ignore all the low-exp-yielding monsters and just focus on the more rewarding kills. I'd freeze them and make the weaker monsters dance/ make sexy poses while I snipe the tougher monsters' heads from a metre away.

No, monsters doing sexy poses do not look sexy.

Anyway Point Lookout is a real place just like everywhere else in the Fallout series. In the game, no bombs fell here, but the fallout from all the other bombs elsewhere affected the local flora and fauna anyway, hence the monsters and crazy people.





As for the final expansion Mothership Zeta, it is about the player who tries to escape from the alien spaceship that captured him. This addon is very difficult because it takes forever to kill some of the aliens that wears their special shield. However, there are lots of very interesting alien weapons for the player.

Personally the most interesting part about this addon was the other prisoners. When I first met the little girl who was kidnapped by the same aliens, she claimed to be from about 200 years before the game's time. There were other prisoners who were from even further in the past, including a Japanese Samurai who, naturally, speaks only Japanese and cannot be communicated with unless the player actually knows Japanese.

If the player can understand him, he would understand that he is looking for something that can be found during the course of the game. I didn't know about this until I read on this addon at the Vault, an excellent wiki for all Fallout games. It really doesn't matter since he would end up helping the player even if he didn't find the sword for him.

Various audio logs from other prisoners (both dead and alive) can be found throughout the ship, which adds a little background story for this expansion. From these logs, the player can listen to various responses to their contact with aliens, ranging from attempts to make peaceful contact to going hysterical.

Looking forward to Fallout: New Vegas and Fallout Online if it's ever going to be released.










The ancient world just keeps getting smaller and smaller. The Romans had more contact with the Han Dynasty than I'd ever imagined. Roman glassware and silverware had been found in Chinese tombs of that dynasty, while the Romans had many records of Chinese people in Rome and the silk they sell.

No Roman ever found out the exact mechanisms of the production of silk, though they came close.

"The larva [of the 'bombyx'] then becomes a caterpillar, after which it assumes the state in which it is known as 'bombylis', then that called 'necydalus', and after that, in six months, it becomes a silk-worm. These insects weave webs similar to those of the spider, the material of which is used for making the more costly and luxurious garments of females, known as 'bombycina'. Pamphile, a woman of Cos, the daughter of Platea, was the first person who discovered the art of unravelling these webs and spinning a tissue therefrom; indeed, she ought not to be deprived of the glory of having discovered the art of making vestments which, while they cover a woman, at the same moment reveal her naked charms."

- Pliny the Elder, The Natural History XI, 26

Apparently it took the Romans quite a number of years before they got used to seeing Roman women wearing transparent clothes.

The Roman historian Florus also describes the visit of numerous envoys, including Seres (the Roman name for the Chinese) to the first Roman Emperor Augustus who reigned between 27 BC and 14 AD:

"Now that all the races of the west and south were subjugated, and also the races of the north, (...) the Scythians and the Sarmatians sent ambassadors seeking friendship; the Seres too and the Indians, who live immediately beneath the sun, though they brought elephants amongst their gifts as well as precious stones and pearls, regarded their long journey, in the accomplishment of which they had spent four years, as the greatest tribute which they rendered, and indeed their complexion proved that they came from beneath another sky."

From this it can be deduced that it took about four years to get to Rome from China (or India). And the Romans thought they were darker because they lived nearer to the Sun.














Rick Astley's Never Gonna Give You Up must be one of the most popular video on Youtube, with over 19 million views and still rising.












Haven't really been playing RoM much these few days. It gets boring within an hour ever since my Rogue/Priest started levelling in the Savage Lands. The monsters here have like 3 times the HP of what we expect, because it takes 3 times as much time to kill each monster in this zone as it took in previous zones. It is boring to kill the same monster for 1 whole minute.

Today, I merely logged on to check what's available for the Daily Sale. They have this continuous sale everyday in which they post a random item which would be sold for 50% of its normal price just for that day. Weekends are even more interesting because the Daily Sale would become the Weekend Sale which contains even more items but usually at 30% discount.

RoM is now boring.













It was only last night that I realized how poor my emergency response is. I need to do something about this.

Last night I woke up to a scream and some knocking(?) noises that sounded like gun shots from a distance. I got up and tried to find my glasses ( 75 degrees isn't perfect eyesight, especially when I need to look down from over twenty stories up in the sky).

I had to search for about 10 seconds before I realized my bag containing my specs casing was placed somewhere other than the usual spot by the housekeeper yesterday morning as she cleaned my floor.

Then I looked for my video camera. While pulling it out from my shelf I almost knocked down my piggy bank (for coin storage, because I hate coins) and a large can of... something. Anyway it took 15 seconds to get the bag containing my video camera out of a seemingly convenient spot.

By the time I looked out of my window, nothing seemed to have happened. In all probability nothing likely had happened since it was a Saturday night at 12am. Probably some drunk bitch fresh out of Holland V screaming while playing with her friends.

Speaking of screaming bitches...

IT'S FUCKING TWELVE MOTHERFUCKING MIDNIGHT, BITCH CUNT!! HAVE SOME FUCKING DECENCY AND LET THE REST OF THE FUCKING WORLD SLEEP!!!

And the noise was probably from the cars moving over the rumble strips (just found this name from Wikipedia, it's the white and really flat stripes that are spread over the road and make the cars vibrate).

Returning to my main point, it took me half a minute to get myself ready for an emergency, which is unacceptable. I need to place my camera kit somewhere easier to reach.

Yes, my specs and video cam is what I call my emergency response kit.











In a stunning move to counteract poor time management habits, Senor_Hybrido has deleted Runes of Magic from his PC.












So I was reading this thread about sex advices. Some guys were asking for help because they were ejaculating too fast. One guy even said he has to stop frequently and pretend to want to try a different position in order to stop himself from coming too early.

Several females then gave them some links and tips. I won't mention the pills they recommend, even though they claim it works. But here's a helpful link.

It was on this webpage that I read the following:

Biologically, men experience climax much earlier than women. They do so 2-3 minutes after penetration, in contrast to women who take their time (about 12-14 minutes).

The advice from it is to exercise your PC (pubococcygeus) muscles. I've actually heard of this quite a few times in the past, but just in case you don't know where the PC muscles are, they're the ones you use when you try to stop pissing before your bladder empties. No, this won't stop you from ejaculating when you reach orgasm, so don't try( it's painful).















The most outstanding tower I've ever seen. This looks like something from Warhammer 40k, or maybe Diablo.












Replaying SimCity 2000 reminded me of one of my bad habits - I don't leave enough buffer money for rainy days. When my power plant finally exploded, my city almost died. Having less than $1000 to spend, I issued a bond (borrowed money) that gave me $10k but at an interest rate of 6%. I couldn't scrape up enough money to pay the annual 6% interest , so my city really died in less than 2 decades.












Kanye's publicity stunt is quite effective. It's even spawned a potential internet meme, but I don't think it's catching on.












Blind people. We never really think about them. We build stuff for cripples and stuff, but we don't really care about the blind. Right, the bumps on the ground in MRT stations, but that's about it.

I've never thought about what happens if a blind person is in a public place when he suddenly finds himself in need to answer nature's call urgently. How does a blind person find a public washroom?

How does a blind person buy groceries? How does he cross the road if the traffic lights do not announce the green man with the beeping noise (seems to me only traffic lights at high-traffic areas do that)? How does he know when to stop wiping his ass?

?

During one of the TMC main committee meetings last year, we were discussing insignificant issues trying to make ourselves feel important when a blind person exited the washroom in the cramped KFC outlet. I assume she was able to even find it because she asked the employees to guide her, but they wouldn't be able to wait for her before guiding her out.

So she had to ask us to guide her to the exit. It was probably impossible to navigate through all the chairs and tables without seeing them. Good thing the place was empty, or the path would be even narrower and she probably wouldn't be able to get a KFC guy to bring her in in the first place.

So what happens if it's crowded?

Most likely, they stay home.

And how does a blind person know when to stop wiping? Most likely, they sniff it.












Citizen Kane is considered one of the best movies ever made. I didn't know what it was about, so I got myself a copy and watched it. If you haven't heard of it, it's probably because it was released in 1941. Black and white, with voices.

The film centres on a very wealthy man named Charles Foster Kane. He grew up with a silver spoon and died alone in his palace, the stereotypical rich guy. What was interesting about him was his last word: "Rosebud."

No one knew what it meant, and as journalists from a newspaper he owned digged into his past to find clues, we see parts of his life pieced together like a jigsaw puzzle to form what "rosebud" was referring to.

Other than the film being black and white, one major difference I noticed was the succinct credits at the end. Usually in today's movies they would have to type all the roles and names in fine print, scroll them so fast we can barely catch one out of every thirty names and still take over 15 minutes to finish displaying everyone who deserves credit for making the films.

In this movie, the credits took almost exactly two minutes, with the main casts introduced slowly. One of the greatest films in history, made with a much smaller team than those that made the worst movies in the last decade. Anyway, watching this film also teaches viewers about the innovations that the film industry has made over the six decades since its release.

Personally I find the movie not as superb as I expected it to be. But I have to admit I judged it with very different standards than I should, since it was a film from a very different era. And "rosebud" is still a mystery. In the final scene of the movie what "rosebud" was referring to was revealed, but I still don't get why he said it. Maybe it was something in his mind that represented the better days in his childhood before he was rich.











Yep, screw the vegans. Fukin Nazis.

No comments:

Post a Comment