Mad Max 2 is about Max, now older and living in a world that actually looks post-apocalyptic this time, fighting for a small settlement built around a small oil refinery, one of the last in the world. It's a much better movie than the first just because of its depiction of how the world would look like if everything is destroyed.
Mad Max 3 is even better because not only did Max find an actual town, but he also found a tribe of children who survived a plane crash. Apparently, a Boeing 747 crashed some time after a nuclear war, which was preceded by an energy crisis. Most of the adults, led by the plane captain, left the children behind to find help. Obviously they never did return, but when they found Max, his resemblance to the captain made them think he had returned to bring them back to civilization.
LOL I can't tell the whole story. It's not nice to tell spoilers.
What I found interesting was the way they made the whole story sound like some sort of mythology. It didn't make much sense, seeing how the crash couldn't have happened more than two decades ago. Even if every single one of them were babies when it happened, it probably would have only been 15 years since the adults left. Which wouldn't be possible in the desert where they lived.
There were no adults, so they must have been the survivors of the crash, not the children of the survivors. Fifteen years isn't enough to reduce a group of people into a more primitive tribal state.
Oh well, it's just fiction after all.
There was another thing that showed that a nuclear war happened. When Max entered Bartertown, he encountered a water-seller asking him to buy some water. Max then took out his Geiger counter and swept it around his water tank, causing the counter to buzz loudly. Totally reminded me of Fallout 3 since radiation is a major part of the game.
The Mad Max movies prove that once upon a time, sequels were better than their prequels.
I remember seeing this somewhere in one of the CSI episodes, in which this victim who was completely paralyzed was given something similar, except the machine says "yes" or "no" instead of moving a wheelchair.
This, when combined with RTS games, would make them what they are supposed to be. I've always thought my hands move too slowly for my mind, that the effort it takes to click tiny buttons is very distracting.
At first I was thinking maybe they could use voice-identification as controls, like when I say a certain word, it records the sound and I can bind it to a certain key. The problem is some commands take too long to say and are slower than clicking, like telling the units to move to a certain point. In addition, people tend to speak at different speeds depending on their mental state, like a nervous player may speak much quicker (and louder) when microing during a battle.
So voice-control alone doesn't work. But if combined with mouse and keyboard, it would be interesting. For example, a player can record himself saying "A" and bind it to make a structure build certain units. This way, he is able to build units without looking away from the frontlines.
Or better still, a player can record voice commands for the entire tech tree, so that researching stuff merely requires a certain word/phrase to be spoken. Games would become much smoother in terms of gameplay and even noob players would be as good as some of the pros of today.
Seriously, this can be done. If Rosetta Stone can teach users languages by comparing the user's speech with a recorded standard to check the user's pronunciation, I don't see how voice commands cannot be implemented in games. Maybe players would need a better sound card than a generic integrated one, but I bet sound card makers would be happy about that.
Too bad I'm in neither electronics nor computer engineering.
Sometimes when I feel like eating something light and bland, my mum thinks I want to lose weight.
And hence from her, I learn that I know nothing even when I think I know something.http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSTRE58S02J20090929
Seriously they should do that even for movies. Stop the movie the moment someone's phone rings. I mean, warnings have been appearing before the start of every movie for years, and if you still can't learn to switch your phone to silent mode before entering, you need a good solid lesson in basic etiquettes.
This would also be a good idea for Toastmaster meetings. I hate it when a phone rings during someone's speech, especially when the speaker is a newbie. It can make an inexperienced speaker forget his script when something like that happens. And we do remind everyone to switch their handphones to silent mode before the start of the meetings.
Hugh Jackman is now a real life hero.
Just found this image two days late for the part of the last rant that this applies to. This is just a failed meme-wannabe about hating liberalism but I thought it's actually the closest to the truth than all the other crap made into this "meme".If you want someone to speak freely, be prepared for anything. But then, I'm pretty sure some people don't understand what "anything" means.
The Sword of Truth series was made into a TV series last year. It's supposed to be not very good since the creator (who adapted the book series into a TV series) is the same one who made Hercules and Xena. I totally expect it to be similar to those two, except with a running storyline stretched from one book to an entire season.
I don't know. Doesn't seem too appealing but I just can't resist watching after reading the entire series twice.
The world's sea level will rise at least 2m whether we do anything about it or not. The best scenario would be that the sea rises gradually over centuries, giving mankind time to adapt. More likely, it would accelerate "as less ice reflects less heat, warming the local area" creating a form of momentum in the melt rate of the ice caps.
"The crux of the sea level issue is that it starts very slowly but once it gets going it is practically unstoppable," said Stefan Rahmstorf, a scientist at Germany's Potsdam Institute and a widely recognized sea level expert.
His best guess was a one meter rise this century, assuming three degrees warming, and up to five meters over the next 300 years.
I predict that coastal protection is going to be the next big thing. You guys may want to switch to the sand bag industry.
According to this, Singapore would have the opportunity to turn into the Venice of Asia by 2100, while the real Venice would become the next Atlanta. Exciting.
If nothing is done, our island nation would be just Bukit Timah Nature Reserve within the century, and your descendants will cohabit with chimpanzees in their multi-storey tree-bungalows.
There aren't many options in general. We can wall up ourselves, or we can raise our platform. Walling isn't an attractive idea, so we're probably going to raise our city like the Romans did, building new things over the ruins of the old.
Also, major flooding and hurricanes will be possible even in this calmest region of SE Asia.
Time to GTFO? You bet!
On a larger scale, things will get worse. Unless new ways are found to grow more food in a much smaller area of land, or to grow significant amounts of food underwater (excluding seaweed, of course), food will become scarce. Much of the world's fertile lands are actually pretty low, so if they aren't protected, they will be under the sea in this century or the next.
Food is the foundation of civilization. This isn't my gluttony speaking, but logic. People stop being nice when they starve. Hell, people stop being nice when food prices rise. As food supplies are reduced, some people will need to find other people to blame.
It's human nature to need scapegoats. Someone needs to be blamed for everything. For example, if food prices go too high, the masses will start to think that it's the government that is doing something wrong. Maybe they will suspect it's hoarding food for the social elites, or the bureaucracy just suck at its job. No matter what, civil unrest will begin.
What can a country do to solve this? Several common ways come to mind.
In Soviet Russia, Stalin removed any signs of discontent with brute force in the form of the secret police. In ancient Rome, huge investments went into various forms of entertainment to distract the general population from their troubles. In the events preceding the first Gulf War, Saddam invaded Kuwait to gain more resources in order to recover from its impoverished state.
Obviously if any wars happen in the near future, they aren't going to say that the countries involved are fighting over resources. No, the real reasons can only be seen in hindsight, in the words of history books. Rarely has the casus belli of wars been about wealth because it is never good to admit weakness.
On one hand, I find it more likely that countries will make war to gain wealth. On the other hand, wars don't seem like a very good way to make money today. I don't know, the US seems to do that a lot these days, but it doesn't appear to be very profitable yet. I mean, they've been fucking around in the Middle East for a decade already, and what have they got to show for it other than the execution of Saddam Hussein?
Then again, how are they able to survive despite their trillions of dollars of debt?
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