Rant 835 / Overwhelming Underperformance

Oh wow I must have been lucky that I didn't end up like that when I finished Shivering Isles.












http://sg.news.yahoo.com/blogs/singaporescene/borders-closes-flagship-store-wheelock-163750813.html

The Borders att Wheelock was closed because, officially, due to a late rental payment.

My bullshit sense is tingling. Pretty hard.

It's been there since I was a kid, so obviously a late payment should not harm their business relationship.

So my conclusion is that this is merely an excuse. Something else is happening there. Maybe the landlord wants more rent but was unable to get it from Borders due to various reasons. This would make a legal reason to kick Borders out and get a store that's willing to pay a lot more for the huge space, or multiple smaller stores.

More likely the latter is a plan.













GABE! You've got to make these toys! Like NOW!












Back during the '97 financial crisis, I didn't understand what was happening. More specifically, where did all the money go?

They can't just disappear, right?

I did ask my friends but nobody gave me a satisfactory answer. The adults, I couldn't expect an answer that I could comprehend from them.

Now I understand.

Money can really just disappear.

What I didn't know was that circulating everywhere in the global economy is a whole load of imaginary money.

One economic theory which I've mentioned long ago explains that when a bank loans money that was deposited into a savings account, the money exists in both the hands of the borrower and the bank since a savings account comes with a guarantee that the account owner can withdraw his money at any time.

The moment the bank lends a person the same $2000 that another had deposited, $4000 now exists in the economy even though only $2000 were ever issued by the country's central bank.

I guess the same could apply in all situation where a person pays a debt after a period of time, whether through loans or credits or trade contracts. It would be as if the money is already in the debtor's hands and still in that person's hands at the same time.

In other words, the economy is based on trust and faith. If the depositor didn't have faith in the bank, he'd not have deposited his money there. The bank then wouldn't have the $2000 to lend someone else in the first place.

If lots of people stop trusting the bank and stop depositing, the bank will not have all that money to lend. Worse if they all started withdrawing their savings.

This looks just like a religion, doesn't it?

It works only because people believe in it.

And that is the cause of economic troubles. People just stop trusting others and just hang onto whatever money they have.

Money seems to disappear only because people no longer produce imaginary money to spend.

It was never about all the things people talk about; it has always been and always will be about confidence in the economy.

It doesn't actually matter whether a country is heavily in debt.

It only matters whether everyone trusts everyone else to pay up on time.

I believe that is actually the crux of the whole story.

And it paints such a strange picture compared to the one I'm used to.

Like the current depression, if it is one. Money didn't disappear. All money that was printed and minted is still there but people just aren't spending or borrowing anymore for fear that they won't be getting more money for whatever reasons.












Ok, I've adapted to the camera of Fable 3 somewhat and I just discovered the first major bug: the dog's pathfinding AI.

It's horrid as fuck.

I have no idea why it has to loop around absolutely nothing on the dirt path, or get stuck behind a circular pillar.

If the dog was just an eyecandy I wouldn't mind, but I have to rely on the dog to find treasures that I miss or buried items that a human cannot detect.

Another thing is how long it takes to raise the relationship level with everyone to earn Seals, a currency used for buying abilities and certain game features. I don't like how I have to hold buttons and watch the entire animation over 9000 times for each place just to make friends with everyone.

Who makes friends through purely making heroic poses and whistling random tunes anyway?

More importantly, who the heck doesn't get creeped out by some dude who just jumps in front of you out of nowhere and start shaking your hands as if you're some long lost buddy of his?


As for the camera issue, it's solved. Apparently I could solve it by turning off VSync and mouse smoothing. Now my guy just simply takes time to turn, but it's not a serious problem.

Still there is that slight issue of the camera turning to where the guy is facing when I'm making him move sideways. What I mean is that when I want to look to the right without having him to stop moving, I turn my camera 90 degrees to the right and make him move 90 degrees left of my camera's direction.

When I do that, the camera would try to face his direction instead of stay in mine, making me move my mouse to the right constantly just to hold it still.

I dislike that.











Watched a few games of DotA 2 on Steam. It's a remake of DotA with most, if not all, of the original DotA heroes and abilities. Just new graphics, animations and probably some tweaks that the developers probably wanted to do but couldn't on Warcraft 3.

Nice and should probably attract a lot of DotA players.

And it better be free, although I'm not going to bet on that.

F2P with item shop is probably the best way to get Asian players to try it and get the thousands of players over from Garena. "Thousands" just from the Singapore Rooms alone.












I feel like buying mooncakes from two well-known shops at Chinatown: Tai Tong (大同) and Da Zhong Guo (大中国)。

My mum said Tai Tong sells Teochew mooncakes which won't suit my tastes, but I just feel like trying them just to see what makes them different.

Usually in the past we just buy from the shops in my neighbourhood because I only started liking mooncakes last year. My father was the only person who liked mooncakes before that, so those were bought mainly as offerings.

Anyway, I'm planning to buy them about 5 days before the Mid-autumn Festival on the 12th of September. Since long queues are expected, I'll go during the afternoon of a weekday. That's why I'm not going to ask any of my friends to go with me. I'm probably the only person who's able to get out during that time of the week.

Furthermore, there's a shop at People's Park Complex nearby which sells our goods where the buyer isn't aware of who I am, so I'll probably just walk in and take a look.











If you somehow amazingly noticed that my blogs are getting longer, it's because I'm more bored than before.

That, in turn, is because I've decided to stop browsing the EDMW forum for good.

It's kinda like the SG version of 4chan /b/, except infinitely milder and owned by our state media, SPH.

My reason is simple: the seemingly free speech has been polluted by people hell-bent in persuading netizens to support opposition parties.

Sad.

It's now apparent to me that there are people who dedicate themselves to smearing the image of our authorities in any way available to them, to the point where they are digging up 30-year-old news reports to try to ruin the reputation of the presidential candidates.

C'mon, think about it. If you've made a huge mistake 30 years ago, obviously you have to be smarter than that by now, especially if you were intelligent enough to become a political leader in the first place.

Yet there are people who are convincing others that if they vote for one of them, he's going to be as bad as the news report proved he was.

Worse is that there are people who seemed to believe the illogic. It is sad that there are so many who want to believe that others are always dumber than they are. I said they "want" because it is a universal truth that people will always see what they want to see.

That is just example of how these trolls create an illusion of a problem out of what is actually nothing.

Based on my observations, there are people who are really getting trolled and brainwashed by the online propaganda that is not necessarily completely true or false.

Or perhaps, the trolls aren't really trolling.

Whatever the case, there are now xenophobic Singaporeans who hate our political leaders no matter what they do.

That didn't use to be normal. Everyone used to be so nice to us back when we first came to Singapore even though we barely spoke any English and were very bad at Mandarin. My bro and I even used to play with the local kids at our block and some others.

It is a sad state of affairs, something I hope Singaporeans will recover from.

But they won't if they keep listening to the biased words of the trolls.

Yes, biased. Just like how our local media phrases their words to suit their purposes, so are these trolls on the internet.

News reports are supposed to be objective, and our state media is mostly that, except it loves to omit tiny parts of the truth and subtly manipulate the phrasing of their words.

Yet the ones on the internet are worse. Seriously, they just openly inject their personal opinions into the reports and mention things that are almost unrelated and would incite unhappiness.

For example, any news report regarding an incident with a non-citizen will always include a mention of how our government is inviting lots of foreigners into the country every year.

The latter serves no purpose but incite unrest.

Freedom of speech is a respectable ideal, but like someone I met once said, it's a whole different story when the right is abused.

Creating problems out of non-problems is tantamount to an abuse of this right. So is the exaggeration of minor issues.

And inciting unrest where the people are generally content?

Call me paranoid, but I have a sneaking suspicion that these trolls aren't even Singaporeans.

What good would significant unrest in Singapore do for other countries?

Lots of things, but that's a box I'm not going to open.