Rant 773 / Dosh!

So I watched someone complete Nightmare House 2 on Vidyavidya just now. NH2 is a singleplayer mod for Half Life 2: Episode 2 and was surprisingly scary for a mere mod (ie free of charge for anyone who has HL2). It was obvious that tons of effort was put into the game because of the heavy use of atmospheric build up to create the fear in the player.

Initially I thought I may try it someday (I wonder if I can at all since I only have HL2: Ep 1) alone with my lights off, but I found it scarier than watching Amnesia. Honest.

If I had played this alone with my lights off, I'd have shat bricks and needed multiple changes of pants.

Too bad the streamer didn't switch on his webcam to show us his face. I'd have kept a finger on the Print Screen key constantly. He screamed so often, I'd have gotten lots of great reaction pics.











The world smells different at night. Last night when I got up at 5am just for a while to confirm my death in Die2Nite, I smelled the air coming from outside.

It's so familiar yet I realized I had forgotten the smell of damp air before dawn, when there's no car exhaust and coffee and cooked food mixed in it.

Anyway the coalition I was in lost some important people who can be considered as the core group who's always on their IRC channel even when they're sleeping.

It was a silly mistake, most likely because they don't read in detail all the new rules just like the first time I met them when they joined my town before they realized it wasn't ranked. This time, they weren't aware of the fact that the more people camping on a tile outside, the less likely they're going to survive.

All they knew was that camping outside raises the possibility of find good stuff, and 5 of them camped out there in a tile called "Duke's Villa" which I believe is one of the best places.

The next day, 2-3 of them died. Can't remember exactly. All I know is that I recognized one of the names immediately, and she was one of the most, if not the most, active members in the coalition. When they posted a note in the game saying they're all suiciding that night, I was not surprised.

By that point (5th day) they had lost more than 5 people out of the 40. Not a good sign, especially when you need over 100 APs to build each of the better structures, multiples of which we have to construct each day.

So I had to get up at 5am just to confirm I'm dead in order to be able to automatically join them when they chose a new town to go to.









Since I closed Outpost and stopped it from running during startup, I haven't got any BSODs involving NTFS.sys.

But I'm still getting BSODs. The first was a non-paged memory pool error, the other was "IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL".

The first, I suspect, was caused by me. When I plugged the new WD HDD in, I'd chosen to let Windows find the driver automatically. But a few seconds in I read the manual and realized I should have manually installed the Smartware programme from the files inside.

I couldn't stop the automatic search, so I went on with the installation anyway. Later I watched some streams on Vidyavidya and I guess the player also takes a lot of memory and competed with the still-running search till the computer crashed.

The other, I have no idea. It's supposed to mean I'm using hardware that's not compatible with my Windows.










So I've finally found some Shishkebab in New Vegas. It's my favourite weapon in Fallout 3 and I've never seen it anywhere in New Vegas till now, and even this was due to my reading its article in the Fallout Wiki, which said it's very rare and most often found being sold by the Quartermaster at Hoover Dam.

I had to restart the game from Main Menu 7-8 times to reset the list of items sold by him till I found it. Now I've got it but its condition is like 20-25%. I wanted to the Quartermaster to repair it but it was going to cost me over 3k caps which I couldn't afford. Still, at such a poor condition, it could do more DPS than most of the other melee weapons I have excluding Combat Knife and the Humble Cudgel, the latter I had accidentally found while randomly exploring the sewers.

But now it's boring again.








I think I've just hit upon the flaw in the logic that GST raises will hurt the rich more than the poor.

It's true that the poor buy a lot less than the wealthy simply because they can't afford it. This appears to mean the wealthy pay more GST.

Furthermore, the wealthy waste more because they can afford it. This implies they pay more GST than is necessary.

This sounds perfectly logical... except it's incomplete.

The poor also spends a larger portion of their income (the poorest can hit 90% more more) while the wealthy save a large portion of theirs plus they are better equipped to reduce their income taxes via various means.

Therefore, proportion-wise, the poor pays more GST than the wealthy do compared to their income.

Of course, this is lacking statistics and hence doesn't mean a thing until some research is done.










The last WWI veteran died yesterday. It must have been so lonely during his final years being the last person in his part of the world (Australia) to have seen what he'd seen and did what he'd done.