Rant 479 / Braise Yourselves

One morning I was on this bus, sleeping (I'm not a morning person). It was kinda crowded and there was this girl sharing the seat with me. Didn't look at her, too busy going unconscious.

Anyway I woke up halfway through the trip with an itchy nose. Rubbed my nose and felt something tug deep in my nasal cavity. You know, the part that gets horribly uncomfortable if you accidentally breathe in water. So I rubbed again with a more sensitive part of my hand and found this hair sticking out of my nose. I pulled it, and... HOLY FUCK I ALMOST BREATHED IN A FUCKING LONG STRAND OF HAIR! AND IT'S NOT EVEN MINE!

That ruined my sleep for the rest of my trip.













FoM forced me to learn a lesson on trading: demand isn't logical. Throughout this protracted war between EC/BoS and GD, ammo isn't selling as briskly as I had expected. C'mon, it makes sense that bullets and guns would sell well in a long war, but no, that isn't happening.

In fact, it's medkits and pizzas (one of the performance boosting foods) that are selling like hotcakes especially in warzones.

Speaking of warzones, I LOVE them! Now I understand why there are warmongers - demand for certain things always spike when there is fighting. It's such a dramatic rise, I can even tell which colony is being raided solely by the sales of my products. I have to keep running into warzones and through the battles to restock my goods.

The profits are so good, I don't even hesitate to enter those places (350uc per resurrection, pretty cheap relatively speaking).










I didn't know there were any Singaporeans in FoM till today. I was busy restocking and sending warnings to fellow members for undercutting me (I'm, after all, a mid-ranking VI) when a fellow VI told me in Faction Chat to read General Chat.

So I switch the Chat mode and found this Mercenary trying to talk to me. I was trying to cut the awkwardness by saying "Hi! Sup" when he greeted me with "Ho sei bo"

After so long in FoM I finally found a fellow Singaporean. And just when I thought he's the only other Singaporean in the game, he told me there are others. I am kinda surprised.












This month's National Geographic magazine's article on Singapore describes the country the same way as what I've seen on the Internet all along by foreigners who know about us.

The entire essay, to me, could be summarized into just the single question asked by the author near the beginning: What price prosperity and security?

The island city is portrayed as somewhere close to the extreme end of the Order scale - law and order is almost perfectly maintained but with little freedom to do anything but what the government wants you to do.

The writer even mentioned North Korea, making Singapore sound like what it would be like if Kim Il Sung had succeeded. Not that it's bad; success is never a negative thing.

Or is it?










The last book of the Dune series contained a couple of philosophical ideas that put into words what I have thought of before. The most important idea was one of the rules the Mentats follow - that to learn, one must know nothing.

In this, to "know" something is to be completely sure it is true. The truth is perception, facts included. I find it very true because most adults hold so many things as perfect, unyielding truths that they refuse to accept alternatives.

We have so many examples that teach us that, yet we find it so hard to remember the lesson. One major example would be Newton's Laws which have been proven wrong by Einstein. Now we all know it's not completely correct, but no one thinks about how they were treated as perfect truths till Al arrived on the scene.

The truth is not definitely the truth and once we get that, we learn and think better.