Rant 417 / Runes Of Magic Is Racist - I Can't Make Black Characters

After reading on the deeds of Raffles in regards to Singapore, I find that the account as told by the local textbooks were omitting a lot of things. I understand that no country would want to discuss the uglier side of its history, not without trying to make it look better anyway, so I have nothing against that.

But now that I'm an adult, I should not just stick with the official stuff they teach in school. So here is the real story without the sugar-coating, summarised by yours truly.

Raffles, working for the British East India Company (which did a lot of things I don't agree with), was looking for a way to fight the strong Dutch influence in this region. He had been considering several spots, including Bintan, but eventually decided on the island that is now Singapore.

Now at this point, what I remember from my textbooks in primary/secondary school is that Raffles negotiated with the local Temenggong (probably equivalent of mayor or something) and they signed a treaty recognizing British rule on the island.

The truth is that the Temenggong was not the only guy in charge. There was a Sultanate of Johore, but nowhere was this mentioned in the story fed to local children today. Of course it wasn't, because it leads to a dirty little political ploy.

You see, when they first arrived the Sultan of Johore had just died. The Crown Prince, aka the supposed heir, was away to get a wife during this monumental event (at least for the people of Johore). The sneaky little brother, together with some of his traitorous supporters and the Dutch (hey, who doesn't want a ruler they can control?), did a coup d'etat and rose as the official Sultan of Johore.

Actually it wasn't called a coup d'etat by anyone since the rules for succession were supposedly rather unclear. I may be exaggerating here a little.

So at this point, Farquhar (the man we used to call Fucker, ah the good old days) arrived at the scene looking for the man in charge to sign trade agreements. They haven't tried to take over the island yet, but this was probably the precursor.

Since the British were trying to compete with the Dutch, of course Farquhar didn't want to negotiate the treaty with the Dutch-supported Sultan of Johore. So the answer to this problem was to sign it with the Temenggong.

Farquhar then claimed the negotiation was a success and reported this to Raffles. Raffles arrived and made contact with the local bigshots. Eventually his men decided to ask for the man with the most power sign a formal treaty with them for a more complete control of this island. They requested to sign with the Sultan, or whoever held the power, so the elder brother of the Sultan, Hussein Shah, came instead.

To avoid talking to the Sultan, Raffles made him a deal: the British would recognize him as the rightful ruler of Johore and Hussein would grant them control of the island. After several months, he left Farquhar in charge and returned to Bencoolen where he was supposed to be governing.

Obviously the Dutch were pissed. They made threats and stuff but never actually sent any soldiers to take back the island. The validity of the treaty was also debatable, but the Dutch somehow lost interest when they saw how fast Singapura was growing. About three months after, all the noise had died down and Singapura had grown from a bunch of kampongs sheltering 500 people to a town of 5000.

I remember that little was mentioned about Farquhar in the textbooks. It turned out that he wasn't exactly a capable governor. In fact, he sucked and Raffles actually took direct control of the settlement when he returned again three years later.

Moreover, Raffles also made repeated requests to the Company's HQ for a replacement for Farquhar. In the end, they appointed one of the men who had been following Raffles for a long time as the Resident.

One reason why Farquhar sucked was because he didn't bother with a plan for the growth of the colony. When Raffles came back he was not happy with the mess Singapore had become, even if it was a rich mess filled with money and trade potential.

That was when he had the Jackson Plan made, leading to what is now the CBD. By the way don't let the name European Town fool you - rich Asians were also allowed to live there.











Someone used a Watchmen trailer to make a video for Billy Mays, a well-known TV salesman in the US who passed away just after MJ. He is probably best known for selling Oxiclean and dying suddenly just like MJ. The other Pitchmen are also salespeople who have appeared on American TV.



Best quote in the show IMO:

-"Pitchmen television series is over. What do you suggest we do about it?"

-"Reruns."

Here's the original trailer.



And here's the Slap Chop remix starring another well-known TV pitchman, Vince. If you watch the Pitchmen trailer after this, you'd recognize Vince there.









A simple bus chase turns into something extraordinary.

http://www.youtube.com/user/ExplosmEntertainment#play/uploads/1/kRPJh-LJq1o










Ever thought about the unimaginable number of coincidences that eventually led to... you?









I forget. Do you see how scary it is to forget? How frustrating it is to not know what you do not know? That is why I'm so obsessed with pictures and videos and screenshots. I know I will forget, and I will forget what I forgot. And I will forget how scary it is to forget.

What is a man who has no memory?

A man is a product of his memories and his reactions towards them.

They say people are products of their environment. I say they are the products of their perception of their environment. What they think of it, what they remember they thought of it.

If one cannot remember how one got to the present state, how can one be?

Similarly for society, it cannot exist without knowing how it formed. A civilization without a history would crumble in an instant.

If only I have ROM in my head instead of organic memory.

Rant 416 / New Mail - Oh Wow Another Penis Enlargement Ad

How huge must my penis get before they would finally shut up?









After a short visit to the Elements forum, I learnt that rainbow decks are the most popular in this game. So it wasn't my complete lack of talent in strategy games, but that there really are too few cards in each colour to form a good deck. Hope the game creator can make more cards soon so that mono-colour decks would become a feasible idea again.

Right now I'm just outdecking my AI opponents most of the time. Outdeck is a term in this game's community which refers to winning by outlasting the enemy's deck, ie the other guy draws his last card of his deck before you. When a player has 0 card on his turn, he loses automatically.









Raphael (the Italian Renaissance artist, not the Ninja Turtle) was such a successful painter that many people who worked in his huge workshop became successful artists after his death. His youngest pupil then was so talented, it is actually difficult to tell if something was painted by him or Raphael himself. Another guy, a labourer who carried stuff for the artists working at the Vatican, managed to get himself a job in Raphael's workshop and also became a well-known painter after Raphael's passing.

I don't know much about art, but this painting by Raphael has to be the closest thing to a photograph I've ever seen. Hell, it's better than many handphone photos out there. Then again, I haven't actually looked closely at any painting for most of my life.











English is such a terrible language to learn. The multitude of synonyms for "penis" and "breasts", "pint" is pronounced "pie-nt" and words beginning with the letter u is preceded by either "a" or "an". Someone should just make a language that doesn't have all sorts of inconsistencies, a language that actually serves the purpose of being a form of communication that allows people to understand each other perfectly. Right now, an Irishman wouldn't be able to understand me, and I wouldn't understand him, even though we're both speaking English!

Oh wait, someone did make a new language like that. Too bad no one gives a fuck about Esperanto. All that crap about sticking to your roots is bullshit. All that is important is to know your roots, but that doesn't mean you have to live and breath it too.

Just because of my skin colour doesn't mean I must speak a certain language. I know more about Chinese history than many Chinese people but my verbal Mandarin and Cantonese is, at the very best, decent. Does that make me more or less Chinese? Am I a still so-called "banana" (yellow outside, white inside) if I know which town my ancestors were from, my exact ancestral ethnic group and my birth date according to the traditional lunar calendar?

I've met people who told me that if my skin is yellow, I am Chinese and hence I must speak Chinese. Not joking here. They know the world is becoming smaller, but they don't see the world's people are also merging together at the same time. Not even when they see increasing numbers people of mixed racial heritage appearing in the media. They look but they don't see!

It is good enough to know what it was before. To insist on living in the past is idiocy.

Hence one should learn the language that most suits one's needs. After all, what would be the point of learning a language if it is pointless for the user to do so? For example, there is little reason for any non-Trekkie to study Klingon.

The purpose of a language is to allow smooth communication between its users. Any hindrance in that process is an issue of inefficiency - and the English language (as used by different people around the world) has fucktons of those. The main thing going for it is that it's the second most widely used language in the world, albeit in rather different forms everywhere.

Rant 415 / Whose Wife Is This Anyway?

While reading on Chinese history (mainly on the end of Qing) at Wikipedia, I stumbled upon this picture of the Empress and Consort of Emperor Guangxu, the predecessor and uncle of Puyi.

(Imperial Consort Zhen left, Empress Longyu right)

GAH!! No wonder he died young, at 37. Also, Consort Zhen was his favourite concubine, so I thank the powers that be that I did not see the photos of his other wives.

They could probably make a shock site out of them. Here's a link for an explanation of the term "shock site".

Apparently the Manchurians then not only suck at ruling but also at making up.








Like I said in the last rant, don't just click on any link you see online, no matter what others say it is. Google it first.










Can't stop playing Elements. I've got a rainbow deck that has no specific strategy but wins most of my games against the AI. Well it's a vaguely creature-oriented deck mixed with a few of everything. I know it's trash, but it requires no thinking to use and still wins my games.

Winning is important because I can earn coins with it. Coins are used to upgrade both my cards and my ego. This (the former, not the latter) is necessary in order to form a good deck to play against the highest AI level, which nets the most coins if I win.

Time passes really quickly when you play Elements, so beware. This rather reminds me of the time back when I was still playing Magic: The Gathering.

Rant 414 / E-stalker

I was rudely awaken by my bro this morning. The sun wasn't even visible yet and he was already out. Called me at NINE in the morning, when my room was still dark with the curtains drawn. And for what? He needed a lousy file from his laptop, wanted me to log on to Windows Messenger on his laptop to send a Text Document over.

After a very long absence on Windows Messenger, I was not surprised to see a stack of offline messages. Most of them were trash spams due to some naive acquaintances clicking on every link they see. Seriously guys, stop trusting everything you find online. You're contributing heavily to the GDP of Nigeria.

But one message did surprise me. Someone I'm rarely in contact with actually did remember my birthday, a stunning feat that even I have not been able to accomplish by myself after more than two decades!

Shit, that person must be e-stalking me.











After reading Ilium and Olympos yet another time, I've suddenly got this urge to read À la recherche du temps perdu by Marcel Proust. Of course I'm going to read the translated editions; my French isn't good at all. The only French word I know is merde. =P Well not really but I'm not exaggerating much here.

So I've included the first of the seven volumes, Swann's Way, in my cart at OpenTrolley. In Search of Lost Time is, according to most sources, a series of books that centres of the theme of memory.

While Shakespeare explores the meaning of life through the responses and reactions of people to different situations, Proust does the same by analysing the different aspects of memories. Or so I've gathered thus far.

When they finally get my two other books in stock, I will buy all ~$250 worth of books in my cart. At the moment I'm waiting for The Restaurant at the End of the Universe and The Wyrmling Horde.

I like the email notification system they have at OpenTrolley. When you mark a book that's out of stock, they would email you when the stock arrives. Better than the call notification at Acmabooks, since I don't answer calls from unknown numbers.











Re-watched Rush Hour 3 just now and somehow it felt much more hilarious than before. Wonder why.

Rant 413 / Teleporting Mouse... Again!

I have a pretty good confirmation that it's my network adapter that had been giving me all my PC problems. Solution? Temporary solution is to use my USB modem. Sooner or later I will need to buy a new network adapter. Obviously I'm not diligent enough to buy the type that needs to be screwed in. A USB network adapter should work fine.

I used to have one, but it has died of old age. =(

Anyway I'm blacklisting D-Link. The only two products I have ever bought from them keep giving me problems. The first was the router, which died from unknown causes. This network adapter in my PC is the second.

The USB modem has a much smaller bandwidth than what I'm used to. It's not that it's slow but it can only handle so much. Even today I've managed to use too much bandwidth just by opening and refreshing too many tabs, causing it to die for a few minutes.

I'm going to need a new network adapter pretty soon, or I will have to start using my laptop for surfing the net and leaving my desktop for gaming alone.






Found a free Flash game that's basically a trading card game. Gameplay is very similar to Magic: The Gathering, but one major difference is that creatures do not block each other in battle. It looks quite new due to the fact that it only has about 20 cards for each colour. On the other hand, it has a dozen colours plus one colourless faction.

With a limit of 30-60 cards per deck, it offers a huge variety of cards to experiment with. In fact, almost all the colours have cards that use mana of different colours for their abilities. Hence mixing of colours is strongly encouraged.

Forming a great deck with just 30 cards is easy, since smaller decks are simpler to plan. Having a 60-card deck that is just as good or even better is a much tougher challenge.

When I first tried I thought it would get boring quickly, but in the FAQ it says that rare cards can only be won in the slot-machine-minigame that you get to try when you win a round. When I beat a round of a certain difficulty, I get a certain number of tries on this minigame. If all 3 slots display the same card, I get one of that card.

So far I haven't won anything I can't buy.

Rant 412 / 100k ms Ping Is No Joke

There's no charge for awesomeness.






If you're a fan of CSI:Miami, here's an epic Weebl and Bob parody.

http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/376252









I wanted to make profiteroles (aka cream puffs) but I don't know how to make the custard filling. In the recipe it requires custard powder, but I couldn't find it in the supermarket I visited. I supposed I could use the yan4 cai4, that stuff they use for making jelly, but I'm not sure if that's a good idea. I could also use cornflour, since it's the main ingredient of custard powder anyway.

Or maybe I should try something else.










Argh! It is so difficult to make money in RoM right now! Prices are dropping for everything and people who usually buy my materials either don't need it anymore (upgraded to better stuff) or are broke like me.

Worse is that I can't gather materials very often these days. I'm anticipating a new sale on the 15th of September when the new expansion, aka Chapter 2, is released. This means I need to accumulate diamonds now, and in as large a quantity as I possibly can!









I'm now quite sure the problem lies in my network adapter. I tried using my old USB adapter but it has recently died of old age while stored in the box. After seeing the lack of response from the deceased electronic device, I was left with no choice but to test it with my Starhub USB modem.

I played RoM for half an hour using it to connect to the Internet, with my default adapter disabled. Usually in the past few days I would get 50k-80k ms ping spikes a few times everyday, but so far I haven't experienced anything beyond 2k ms.

Well 30mins isn't really long enough for me to judge, so I will continue the testing throughout this weekend.

The reason why I'm doing this after a few days since it started is because I died twice due to these lag spikes. Since I'm at the maximum level, the experience debt I get when I die is around 300k, which is huge.

Bleh...










I knew that the Mongol Empire stretched all the way to Europe, but I didn't think they fought the Egyptians too. Apparently, the Egyptian Mamluks were the first to beat the Mongols in close combat.

By using their advantage of being familiar with their home ground, the Mamluks were able to lure the Mongol army into an ambush, hence defeating the famous Mongolian light cavalries and mounted archers.

Though I've read some European history, I never thought that the Kingdom of Jerusalem were in any way connected to the Mongol Empire. But they were! Remember the movie Kingdom of Heaven? The events that this movie was based on happened only less than a century before the Mongols came!

Saladin conquered the city of Jerusalem in 1187, which was how the movie ended. The Mongol Khan Hulagu (a grandson of Genghis Khan) arrived and demanded the surrender of Cairo in 1260. At the same time, the Mongols demanded the submission of the last bit of the Kingdom of Jerusalem that was struggling to stay alive at Acre.

Suddenly, a few pieces of the gigantic puzzle is forming a larger scene. I've always read those historic stories and never once thought they would be related. Now I know many things were happening everywhere consecutively.

Another interesting bit of story is that while the Mongols here were busy losing to the Egyptians, Kublai Khan was fighting his own brother for the Khanate and eventually set up the Yuan dynasty. Also, the Seventh Crusade was happening at the same time in Europe. You know, that Crusade started by the rich French king who failed at this quest but still became a saint anyway.

I'm finally seeing that all those stories I've read are in fact parts of one really ginormous epic, greater in scale than anything we can imagine. Wonder what was happening during this period of time in the Americas. Not interested enough to check. Maybe they had just perfected their spicy chocolate drink recipe at that time.

Rant 411 / O Cunning Love!

A proposal to tax soft drinks to combat obesity! Now that's something I'm pretty sure the Singapore government would be glad to oblige. Too bad it's being proposed to the US government instead.










I'm interested in the movie Gamer, so I checked its release date in Singapore. That was when I saw this discrepancy - in IMDB it was rated R but in Yahoo! Movies it was rated G. I was actually considering the idea of watching it in the cinema before this but now I'm much less inclined to do so.










I think I'm an abnormally warm person. It was raining quite heavily today when I finished class and I got pretty wet getting through the crowded bus stop to the bus. That's normal because my size makes it too hard for me to try to avoid the rain.

On the bus, I was the only one from that bus stop who adjusted the air-conditioner to aim straight at myself. And you know what? The wind was warm! The bus driver must have raised it to the highest temperature for the sake of the drenched passengers.

I was feeling hot, as usual. I always feel hot when I walk to the bus stop from the lecture halls. Apparently, my body's heat generation is unaffected by rain, in addition to the air conditioner aimed towards me at full blast while I'm sweating profusely. It was then that I remembered the time I was sweating profusely during a visit to Tokyo many years ago.

It was winter then.

It seems it has only gotten worse, not better. Or better, not worse, depending on the situation.

The girl sitting next to me on the other side of the bus had gotten on the bus behind me, and was desperately rubbing her hands and legs (short skirt, too bad for her, she asked for it) after 10 minutes. She didn't even have the air conditioner vent opened at all!

And no I didn't sneeze a single time, so it wasn't fever. It's still not fever.

When I reached home, I thought it would be safer if I took a hot shower instead of the cold one that my body was telling me that I needed. I had gotten a little wetter again during the walk back home in the rain despite my umbrella, so I didn't know if the warmth I felt was the usual heat I always feel or if I was feverish.

The hot shower gave me the answer.

Have you ever taken a hot shower when you're hot and sweaty after a workout?

So I'm impervious to heavy rain and cold wind after all. Fuck yeah!













I was reading an article in this month's Nat Geo on solar power and electricity generation. It was written in a rather positive tone but the facts were incredibly negative. The one example that stood out was the comparison of a major US solar power plant, the Nevada Solar One, and the Hoover Dam.

Nevada Solar One:

- Went online in 2007
- World's second largest solar power plant
- Cost US$266m to build
- Estimated to generate 134MWh per year

Hoover Dam:

- Completed in 1936
- 35th largest hydroelectric power station today
- Cost US$49m in 1936, or US$736m in 2008 after adjustment
- Approximate electrical output from turbines is 4,000,000MWh per year

Feel the hopelessness? Costs 1/3 the money, produces negligible electricity compared to the 73-year-old Hoover Dam. Solar technologies - full of hype... and nothing more.







This month's National Geographic also had another interesting article. Apparently, many species of the orchid flower are amazing at their sexual deception techniques.

In one photo, it showed an orchid with petals that looked just like the back of a female orchid bee. It even produces the pheromones and scents to smell just like one. This tricks male orchid bees to have sex with its petals, or at least try to do it. After some frustrating attempts at copulation, it would leave... with sacs of pollen stuck on its back.

So there was sex involved, just not bee sex but orchid sex. And with the poor bee acting as the penis substitute. Seriously, I'm not kidding here because according to the writer, botanists have been known to call pollen-carrying bees "flying penises".

Oh yes, if you have been taking certain health-supplement products made from pollen, you're really eating plant sperms. Just in case you haven't figured it out yet.

This kinda reminds me of people who buy blow-up dolls from sex shops.

And this guy.

(replace the r's with l)