Rant 433 / "Right" And "Wrong" Are But Names And Nothing More

I've found quite a number of first- and second-hand accounts of Lockerz users actually receiving what they redeemed. Now I'm considering the idea of making 10 emails a day to make a 40 more PTZ daily (VIP status = 4 points per friend). It's a hassle though, so I'm not sure if I should. Takes an hour to make 20 emails and register all of them.

I did consider spending 35 PTZ on one of the new accounts to redeem an iPhone skin, but there is only 1 left (use to be like 20+ when I first joined) and it's a freakin pink one. Even the Macbook and LCD TV are gone.

As for the other 2 categories, 1 is for charities where you redeem points for a $10 donation to some charity of your choice. The other is for fashion stuff like rings and watches. The only 3 things left in this category is a Ruffian scarf (300PTZ), a Ruffian Inside Out book (85PTZ) and a Fly 150 Piaggio scooter (7500 PTZ). As you can see, there is nothing cheap to redeem here either.

I joined somewhere last week and most stuff were already gone. According to the archived news, they last restocked the stuff on the 15th of September, just a few days before I joined. I bet most of the stuff were redeemed on that day itself.

Making additional emails isn't as easy as just typing since they do not accept easy-to-make disposable emails addresses. I have to use hotmail and such established emails, which require a lot of details and do that bloody bot-test for every email signup. You know, the one where they ask you to type what you see in that picture.

Doing it once is fine, but try doing it ten times. Sometimes it's so jumbled up even two human eyes can't tell what letters are actually being displayed.

Another hurdle is the way hotmail allows you to make only a few emails per day.

Yahoo mail stops giving you ready-made IDs after the 3rd signup, so you have to type a random name. Yahoo also stops checking whether the name you typed is available at that point, and it will keep alerting you that your zip code is wrong (even though clicking on Confirm still works). Only when you click on Confirm will you find out if the email ID you typed is still available.

On the other hand, some of the stuff actually looks good enough to be a very expensive gift. I can even sell it to one of you for real money.


As you can see in the scroll bar on the right, this is just a tiny portion of the menu. Well, half of it is filled with crap games and iPhone skins, but the other half actually contains things that people would buy like the ones shown.

At the moment I don't have the PTZ for any of these, so maybe I will have to make some extra emails when they announce that they are going to restock. Making emails on all the English Yahoo's everywhere in the world is a chore, seriously.

This is actually legal because each person in each household can have one account. I have at least 50 people in my household, so that is not a problem. Last I counted I have 70, including my grandparents, my maids and butlers, and my cousins. Yes they all live with me. They do. I know because they are here and we share this common computer to save costs. And we are going to redeem something when they finally restock their freebies.













Does the internet empower or censor?

I'd say it does both. If anyone supports the freedom of speech, they should know that it works both ways. Can't give everyone the ability to speak freely, then expect them to say they support your ideals.












OMGOMGOMG! I didn't know that Romero just made his sixth movie in his Dead series. I have Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, Day of the Dead, Land of the Dead and Diary of the Dead.

Night of the Living Dead is probably the first modern zombie film. It was the one that created the modern zombie stereotype, though a newer stereotype has been created more recently by 28 Days Later.

Anyway, Survival of the Dead was shown in some film festival in Toronto earlier this month and will be released in US cinemas in 2010.

I like zombie movies. They're like reality shows, but more gory.

Vampire movies are fine too, except Twilight. Blade was nice though it wasn't a horror movie either.













Yesterday I watched part this conservationist show on Nat Geo Channel where they were showing how they breed fishes in fisheries. Since I kinda know how they breed horses from watching CSI, I was wondering how they were going to masturbate the fish to get the sperms.

For horses they have this specialized object they use to rub a stallion's penis and at one end is a container for storing the semen. I think this method is used for stallions with good genes (eg won many races) because their semen is actually worth quite a bit of money.

Anyway in the fishery they showed how they did it - with brute force. This guy held up a female fish (and it was pretty huge, as long as an average forearm and hand combined), used his other hand to squeeze the belly from near the head to the tail. When he was squeezing, a thick greyish-white liquid poured out of somewhere near the tail into a bowl.

In the next scene, he held up a male fish and did the same, but only a tiny stream of runny stuff flowed down the tail into the same bowl filled with eggs. He then added some water into the bowl "so that the sperms can swim", implying that there is no or not enough semen in the stuff he squeezed out.

That was fertilization.

The mixture was then poured into an incubator which simulated the environment in a real river, including the currents and stuff. According to this guy, the eggs would hatch in twelve hours and will take some more time before they consume their nutrients completely and require real food.

I had expected something less brutal, like poking a needle into the belly and sucking out the eggs/sperms. What they did was akin to squeezing your balls till sperm comes out of your penis. Not very nice at all, but at least the fish couldn't scream.










Finally book my Remedial Training after so long. I had to book it within the first month of my new window, which is this month. I knew I had to book early to get a slot at Maju, but I guess it doesn't matter for this month.

All the dates are atrocious, to say the least. Most of them begin just before my exams, and some of them begin during the exam period. Only Schedule 28 doesn't interrupt anything (I think) which coincidentally is the only one which is held at Maju Camp, the most convenient of the three. It's supposed to be the most popular choice for RT too, probably because of its location.

Four hours of exercise, twice per week for 4 weeks, then thrice for another 4. This is going to be like the bad old days when I was in the JJC rugby team. My guess is it's going to be worse. =(

And right after that I have to book a slot for IPT so that I won't have to go through the same shit again for the current window. Heard from a friend that IPT is much better than RT, which would make sense since IPT is voluntary while RT is essentially punishment for failing.

I had expected to book dates beginning in the coming week/month.












The Great Wall of China is longer than we thought. They just found new sections of it 11km from what was the eastern end of the Wall. Not really a big deal to me since it was already the longest wall in the world and the most visible achievement of ancient China. It's like discovering that the Mariana Trench is 1km deeper than previously thought.












Apparently the post-apocalyptic dystopian background that the Fallout series uses is inspired by the Mad Max series. Two other things were also from the Mad Max movies: the leather jackets and the one of the ending scenes of Fallout 3, which includes a picture of the Lone Wanderer (the player's character) and his dog walking on the road.

So of course I went to get a copy of the three Mad Max movies. As of this rant I've only seen the first Mad Max, a 1979 film. Not a very good movie in many ways, but I'm using a modern standard to judge a 30-year-old film.

For example, the level of violence is... sissy, at best. The most violent scene was probably when a biker crashed into a truck and got crushed. The most bloody scene was when the hero, Max, got shot in the knee. They didn't even dare to show the burnt face of Max's friend after he got roasted alive in his car by the biker gang. Even today's CSI dares to show bloated drowned corpses on TV.

What violence? It was more like a G-rated film, in today's standards. The skinned rabbits I posted in the last rant were more gory than any part of this film.

Anyway it was also bad in another way - I couldn't tell it was supposed to be a dystopian world. It looked more like it was set in some under-developed communities in the poorer regions of some developing country. There was nothing to suggest there was a breakdown in society, or that there was a better society before.

At least in Fallout 3 players can see right away that everything is dead and the entire land was dead-brown. Gives a sense of hopelessness and despair that is what "post-apocalypse" is supposed to be. Although I still find the notion of eating 200-year-old canned food and drinking bottled soft drinks of similar vintage a little ridiculous. Would a bottle of Coke still be fizzy after 2 centuries?

Anyway, it was supposed to be a very good film since it had the highest profit-to-cost ratio until the Blair Witch Project came along. That is 21 years of holding that record.

I hope the next two movies are better. They have to be, or they wouldn't be making a fourth movie that's coming together with a game right now. But Mel Gibson, aka Max, won't be in this movie because of his age.