Can't believe I didn't know about this trailer until after I got the game.
When I first saw the world "unfriend" (yes it's a real word now) I thought it was related to the word "friend" the way "undead" is related to "dead". Like a friend, who isn't exactly a friend but not an enemy either. Like if you make friends with enemy POWs during a war, those can probably be defined as that. Or if you raise an enemy from the dead with necromantic arts and then bury the hatchet, you'd gain an unfriend.
Anyway "unfriend" is a really verb, an action. It refers to the removal of someone from your friends list in Facebook or similar stuff. Reminds me of how, when I was primary school, friends would threaten to "not friend you anymore" if you do something that they don't like. I guess this means children now can say they're going to unfriend you instead.
Looks good.
Want to live like a hamster? Apparently people are paying money to run in a giant hamster wheel and sleep on hay. Wonder if anyone wants to live like a pig.
I did it. I actually did it. I posted shitty Youtube videos in my blog. I've no idea what possessed me to do that in the last rant, but what's done is done.
There exists a primitive can-opener known as the P38.
All three of the above are called P38's and all are able to open cans. Technically speaking, a can that's blown to smithereens can be considered as opened.
Anyway I'm referring to the first device, the simple thing with the hinged blade. Apparently it's a pocket can opener used in WWII to open combat ration cans. Canned rations, poor things. Their field packs must have weighed a ton.
And thus reading the Wiki article on this can-opener led me to the article on K-rations.
I guess the history of combat rations is a sad one that still hasn't risen from its Dark Ages today. Just read this excerpt:
One of British General Orde Wingate’s units in the Dehra Dun area was visited by quartermaster logistics officers some months after they had last eaten K-rations. At the sight of a box of K-rations carried by the visitors, two of Wingate’s men vomited.[18]
It was that bad. To have such a strong reaction to the mere sight of it, they must have been crying when they last ate it.
This led me to another article on military rations, the D ration aka US military chocolate.
The word "chocolate" made you assume it was delicious, didn't it? Well it was anything but. I know I know, it's hard to make chocolate taste bad, but they did it. This is exactly what is happening to the combat rations issued in the Singapore military too - they make good food taste horrible. It's probably a secret art, I tell you, something like the way magicians work - they'll show you the results but never tell anyone outside their circle how they did it.
When the D ration was first designed, the officer in charge of the project made 4 requirements, one of which was that it must taste "a little better than a boiled potato". Cheapass. His logic was that if it tasted good the soldiers would eat them when they didn't need to instead of saving them for rainy days.
Unfortunately the chief chemist took his words so seriously his final product became known as "Hitler's Secret Weapon". It was bitter and hard enough that only people with strong teeth could bite into it.
In 1945 this was replaced by the Tropical Bar.
The Tropical Bar (it was always called the D ration throughout the war, despite its new appellation) had more of a resemblance to normal chocolate bars in its shape and flavor than the original D ration, which it gradually replaced by 1945. While their attempt to sweeten its flavor were somewhat successful, nearly all U.S. soldiers found the Tropical Bar tough to chew and unappetizing; reports from countless memoirs and field reports are almost uniformly negative. Instead, the bar was either discarded or traded to unsuspecting Allied troops or civilians for more appetizing foods or goods. Resistance to accepting the ration soon appeared among the latter groups after the first few trades.
This is yet another piece of solid proof that life not only imitates art, it can be even better than most comedies out there.
Hershey must have made a fortune during the war.
It is estimated that between 1940 to 1945, over 3 billion of the D ration and Tropical Bars were produced and distributed to soldiers throughout the world. In 1939, the Hershey plant was capable of producing 100,000 ration bars a day. By the end of World War II, the entire Hershey plant was producing ration bars at a rate of 24 million a week.
Even if the profit per bar was very low, 24 million bars per week is still a huge number.
Anyway I understand that it has to be very hard to design combat rations. The food needs to be easy to eat, nutritious and has a long shelf life (ie years). Among normal food I have never heard of anything tasty that can satisfy all your daily nutrient requirements without being "fresh".
I think the main problem today is with the nutrition. Shelf life can't be hard to extend with modern food technologies. I've heard that pasteurization changes the taste of milk. Maybe they pasteurize combat rations and thus ruins the taste of the food.
Left 4 Dead 2 was released earlier today and the pirate scene was incredible. Even before today, copies of the game were already out but could not be played. These were the legit Steam rips that required activation keys from Steam. The plan was to allow everyone to download it at a faster rate (Steam is believed to be slower than hundreds of seeders) and the hackers could release just the cracks when they're done.
At the moment, this isn't happening. No one has successfully cracked the game within 24 hours, but failed cracks by amateurs have been found just hours after release. Established groups like Skidrow and Reloaded have yet to produce a scene release, which most leeches rely upon. One group, Pirategay, did manage to crack the game for its single-player mode. Not good enough.
According to some comments that came with the non-working uploads, the original version being uploaded before the release couldn't be cracked because of some technical reasons. Doesn't matter though, since most games take a few days to be cracked. No one is worried, just impatient.
One thing I've noticed from the leeches comments is how a few are seeing these cracked games as a right. I don't know about everyone else, but to me it's always been a privilege that the authorities can remove if they really want to.
How can it be a right if it is technically illegal in most parts of the world?
We're just taking them because the governments allow it. This is especially true in Singapore, where the ISPs are all government-run. Two of the four top shareholders of Starhub are STT Communications (owned by Temasek) and the state-run Mediacorp; Singtel itself is majority owned by Temasek.
Already Starhub has tried to block bittorrent traffic once, which proves they're capable of it but reluctant to for some reason. If the government wills it, they can probably track down all the high-bandwidth users and filter their download traffic. Right now, they still don't care. All the international attention is going to other countries like Sweden and its high-profile torrent site Piratebay.
The thing some people don't get is how ISPs will bow to the will of the governments, if the governments are willing to sacrifice the goodwill of the people to stop piracy. When the problem gets big enough, when the studies dig up enough negative evidence, someday they just might do it.
Seriously, it's not a right. We have a right to information, nothing more. Not yet anyway.
Anyway it Razor 1911 released their cracked L4D2 on 21st of November, Saturday, at about 1am (GMT +8). All is well.
Ferrero and Hershey are considering a bid for Cadbury. A white knight (or in this case, two) would make it interesting. However, they haven't said whether they will be bidding separately or making a joint bid. Meanwhile,
Cadbury Chairman Roger Carr has dismissed Kraft's offer as "derisory."
LOL! That's US$16.8 billion worth of derision.
This video is amazing. It's so offensive I'm amazed it exists and has almost 700k views on Youtube.
Complete equality is incompatible with our world. Nature simply does not allow everyone to be equal. There's this lie that many adults tell kids, that "if you work hard enough you can be anything you want to be". Well, that's exactly what I said it is - a lie.
The fact is that something exists within everyone known as "talent". It's what made Einstein such a superb scientist, Martin Luther King a great speaker and Bill Gates an insanely rich businessman.
Together with a natural phenomena such as "survival of the fittest" and evolution, it is inevitable that inequality arises. The strong have more opportunities to get stronger and the rich, richer. Just look at your bank accounts. If you're wealthy and have lots of money in your account, you get more interest. It's only right; it's only natural. You get paid for being wealthier. The smart get the better places in the research sector, hence the knowledgeable gets to gain more knowledge.
If everyone is equal and there is nothing to differentiate the fit from the unfit, evolution would stagnate. Why? Because there would no longer be a "fittest"! When everyone's the same, the smart would have as much chance of leaving no descendants as the stupid. While others gradually grow smarter by the generation, these people would remain the same. That defies the laws of nature and logic says they will be exterminated some day.
It seems earlier this month a document was leaked regarding the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA). According to it, all ISPs are going to be forced to monitor their traffic for copyright-infringing materials. The consequences of not obeying this is that when their users get sued for piracy, the ISPs themselves would get sued too.
Among the countries in the ACTA negotiations is Singapore, so this is of concern to me. At the moment this ACTA is being developed secretly, so whether the above is true isn't confirmed. However, it is definitely not unlikely.
If this treaty goes into effect in the state as the leak describes, I'm pretty sure the pirates in Malaysia will flourish. By the way, Malaysia isn't one of the countries involved in making this treaty. Even if it signs it in the future, I have not a single shred of confidence in their enforcement of the related laws.
With flash drives being so tiny these days, I'd say it's entirely practical to bring them along with a laptop, test and rip the pirated discs, hide the flash drive somewhere and return home. Games may go up to 4GB, but 8GB flash drives are costing mere dollars these days.
In the bigger picture, it means that websites like Youtube, Flickr and even Blogger won't exist in the future. The amount of manpower required to make sure the insane amounts of data being uploaded every second aren't infringing any copyright will obliterate any possibility of profit. Obviously the ISPs are not going to pay for that without a very good reason.
This second video is worth watching till the end just to see what happened to the guy in red.
If you want to learn a new language you should listen to songs in that tongue.
At the rate I'm going, I'm going to have enough for a laptop at Lockerz soon. I've almost 500 PTZ and the Dell Inspiron Mini 10inch laptops cost 750. Anyway they're still preparing for the next restock which will be only for Z-Listers and will be announced on the day itself. So I'm logging in at least once a day from now on.
Getting 8 PTZ a day means about 240 PTZ per month. Not too hard to get enough PTZ for the good stuff (XBOX 360 and PS3 only cost 675 and 625 PTZ respectively). Problem is with redeeming the stuff quick enough.
The first book of the Wheel of Time is going to be made into a film. Universal Pictures bought the rights in a seven-figure deal. After watching half of the first season of the Seeker of Truth though, I am worried.
The Seeker of Truth was a TV adaptation of the Sword of Truth series. But here, "adaptation" means more than just converting words into action - it adapts the books to the viewers' desires.
In the TV series, the protagonist Richard Cypher did things that he wouldn't have done in the book, like saving everyone no matter the consequences. The Richard in the books wouldn't have done that because defeating Darken Rahl and other villains is too important a mission to jeopardise. In the show, we see him sparing the lives of those who would serve the villains - absolute heresy to the principles of the author.
To Goodkind, people who voluntarily chose to serve evil must be made to suffer the consequences of their actions. Richard Cypher was therefore not the white knight who goes around saving damsels in distress, but a man on a mission to save the woman he loved and the innocents along the way.
Same with the Wheel of Time. There are instances where people are sacrificed in order to defeat the Shaitan. Saving the entire world is too important a goal to be jeopardised by sparing those who would betray them when given the opportunity. But on TV and in film, could they depict the heroes the same way and still make them appear as heroes?
Wouldn't they become anti-heroes then?
The news of the film was started last year and it was supposed to be in pre-development. Probably still getting scriptwriters and cast. No major news this year though, so it might just... go away. All that's happening in 2009 is the new replacement author meeting some guys from Universal. Nothing big, nothing solid.
Not exactly disappointed, not after watching the Seeker of Truth. It may even be a blessing. Surely I don't want WoT to be so terribly degenerated as the SoT by the conversion process.
Why you shouldn't molest women in crowded trains.
Forgot about Sexy Losers since I last visited it at least a year ago. Only finished Volume One back then. Anyway some of the humour is pretty sick (eg necrophilia, incest) and most of the comics are adult-oriented. This is one of the milder ones.Comparisons between male protagonists in the FF series (Cecil from FFIV, Cloud from FFVII, Squall from FFVIII, Tidus from FFX).
No offence but I find this rather accurate. Not about the stupidity but that Tidus did seem much brighter than the rest. This is especially true if you compare him with Cloud, who's freakin emo to begin with. I bet one of his hobbies is wrist-slashing.
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