Today must be my lucky day. First some guy in my guild in BTO sends me an expensive vehicle for no reason, then I won a red employee from a routine daily attempt at a gambling game in BTO.
First the expensive vehicle is much better than the one I have, and the chance of me getting it is negligible because I don't spend money on it, which that guy does. He's one of those who has such vehicles to spare, though I have no idea why he would send me one since I haven't done anything significant in the game. In addition, it is better than the best vehicle available to people who don't spend money on the game.
FYI vehicles in BTO make us earn money faster. The better the vehicle, the faster it gets.
Second the red employee is an extremely rare class of employee. Employees in the game raise the revenue of the store they work in, and there are 5 colour classes of them. Red is the second highest level, which is kind of common only for people who spend thousands of USD on the game. In other words, the chance of me getting such employees is also negligible since I haven't spend a single cent on it.
Even though it kind of drained my hard-earned ingame money to retrain her to suit my industry, it is definitely cheaper than the cost of time and money needed to train one of my crappier employees to that level.
Just found out about the Rugged laptops from Panasonic during a conversation in BTO in which one of the guys mentioned that he worked in some mining company and he was given a semi-rugged laptop.
Those things are amazing. First of all, they're completely sealed! According to him, those computers don't need ventilation because they only use heatsinks. That's some pretty extraordinary heatsinks, or maybe I'm just outdated.
Secondly, his friend who has a fully Rugged laptop demonstrated its shock absorption by dropping it at about 6 feet above ground. It was totally fine. His friend then dropped his semi-Rugged laptop. It broke a little but it merely took some screwing to fix it.
(6 feet = 1.8m)
Those computers use Intel i5 and i3 processors, so they don't suck in terms of performance either.
Toughbooks aren't new, but I haven't heard of them probably because I don't look at laptops much anymore. Most people don't need them, but for that guy working in a mining company, it's obvious why his company picked them.
Is it just me or have the McGriddles shrunk recently?
The history of copyright laws is actually surprisingly different from what I expected. It actually originated back when printing presses first proliferated in England and the English government came up with the copyright law to help censor certain materials from being printed.
It was never designed to protect the artists and still isn't. That's what the part of the essay in the above link is saying. Copyright saving the livelihoods of the artists is a merely a side-effect... when it works.
Yet we still have to take into account the livelihoods of the other people who help to produce the works, so the copyright laws still do have a sort of purpose.
However I still believe that it needs to adapt. With the Internet, we can practically have any movies, games and music for free with no fear of consequences. I like the analogy used in one of the comments. Imagine an episode of Naruto as a can of Coke. Now the Internet in this scenario is a magical machine that can instantly clone the can of Coke perfectly at no cost, and there are people around the globe just using this machine to clone the cans for free.
It practically defies common sense to believe that people would resist taking them! There's a reason why saints are so rare - it's against human nature to be saintly.
Therefore, the present business models used by distributors need to be changed, and it is already in some cases.
For example, the recent revival in computer games due to online gaming is one way to adapt to the new technology. DLCs and updates, as much as I dislike their implication that what we bought is incomplete, is another.
Here's another article authored by an actual musician. I'm not sure if I've mentioned this before, but I'm pretty sure I have thought about it long ago. If artists really need copyrights to make a living, how did they survive before the introduction of these laws? The same is described in the article:
Humans have walked this earth for about 195,000 years. We don’t know exactly when music emerged, but it was certainly a very long time ago, long before recorded history. There is evidence that music may have been integral to the evolution of the human brain, that music and language developed in tandem. The first recording device was invented just 129 years ago. The first mass-produced record appeared just 110 years ago. The idea that selling permission to listen to recorded music is the foundation of the possibility of earning one’s livelihood from music is at most 50 years old, and it is a myth. The fact that most musicians today believe in this myth is an ideological triumph for corporate power of breathtaking proportions.
A fact as described by another paragraph in the same article is that today, an artist can perform a piece of music just once in his/her entire lifetime and have it enjoyed by others forever. Combine this with the fact that people who attend concerts have proven to be unable to tell when the performer lip-synchs and we have a rather interesting concept here.
Gah! I can't think anymore. It's been over 30 hours since I last went to sleep, or 22 hours since I woke up. It's 6.41pm now. But you can mull on this question if you want. :)
Oh btw HoN is like DotA but better. Just tried a few games today. I still suck at it. You can play it on Garena.
Sunday, 12 September 2010
Thursday, 9 September 2010
Rant 614 / One Step Further
Just stick one into your kid's butt and see him poop stars!
At first I thought this was some sort of enema syringe for kids, which is a slightly better idea although it's not saying much, but after some googling I found that this is a fictional device for shaping shit.
I'm sure most guys should have heard of Fleshlight. In fact I know one guy who told me he ordered one of those. According to him, the billing company on the credit card bill doesn't even hint at anything sexually-related, and the same goes for the mailed package. Of course he was fortunate that his mum didn't open it when she took it from the postman for him, unlike the case below.
Sex dolls, though, are much less popular, obviously because of their inconvenient size.
My knowledge about sex dolls had always been limited to girl-shaped inflatable floats ( they do resemble those things kids hold on to or wrap around their arms in swimming pools, except those aren't supposed to resemble people), so imagine my surprise when I learnt that today's sex dolls have gone way past that level.
Modern expensive sex dolls are woman-sized statues that have some sort of metal skeleton wrapped in a flesh-like silicone material. As tall and heavy as an average person, they look as real as wax statues and supposedly feel like they're made of flesh and blood, except cold. I believe they have movable limbs too.
However these cost at least US$6000, with the price rising according to the degree of customization requested, eg skin colour if you want a fictional character who isn't yellow, brown, white or black. Just when I thought Fleshlight and Tenga were the state-of-the-art sex toys, I find out about these life-like silicone dolls "with holes in all the right places" called Real Dolls.
(Here's a pic of a completed Real Doll customized to look like a race from Star Wars; it's probably X-rated, R-rated, NSFW, etc etc if you think that doll breasts are obscene)
I have no idea if they are really X-rated because on Youtube there are videos in which they censored it and those that didn't. Other than their faces and elbows, those dolls look almost human to me and in one video, the guy slapped a doll's butt and it sounded pretty real.
Anyway I guess there are worse ways to spend money, like on actual prostitutes.
Imagine combining these with Japanese robotic technologies. Man's new best friend right there.
Not to mention those guys in Japan won't have to marry their DS anymore (BDSR?). Heck, even right now guys like this need a Real Doll shaped like an anime character. It's definitely not the most normal thing to do, but IMO loving a life-like doll is slightly healthier than having a boy-pillowcase relationship (BPR). Probably will cost about US$10,000 or more though, since they're so anatomically different from actual humans.
I think it's easy to see why some Japanese men these days like their games and animes so much that they have to resort to hugging pillows.2060 :(
By then our electricity demands will have risen too much for this to be very useful.
Oh wow, Space Siege was such a forgettable game, I forgot I had completed the game before and played it again. I was thinking that Space Siege was some unknown new game that was just released since I didn't remember seeing it before today when I found it on sale on Steam.
So I got a copy and installed it. It was only when I was about to double-click on the icon that I thought it looked a little familiar. Then I recalled a sci-fi action RPG that I had played a long time ago whose details I almost cannot remember other than it was all about running around and shooting aliens.
The opening cinematics triggered no memory either so I was beginning to be believe that this was something I've never played before. Next I started a new game, which dropped me right into battle immediately. It was deja vu. The environment and camera view was familiar, yet I don't remember the aliens or the skills I began with.
Next came the conversations. It was when the AI began to speak that I finally remembered it. So I opened the skill menu and BOOM! It all came back to me. The available skills and the Humanity level were what confirmed it for me.
Obviously this game was not a memorable one. It's not a bad game but it just lacks that something would leave a mark in our memories.
Can't wait. Screw the gambling. I just want to bash my way in, guns blazing, and rob casinos. Or sneak in and out with the money a la Ocean's Eleven. Also interested in how we're going to save the world in a place like Vegas. I mean, that's like the standard recipe for RPGs, right? But wtf has such human vices got to do with mass destruction?
Watched a live stream of some guy playing Amnesia: Dark Descent. It's the same sort of game as Metro 2033 where you go around in first-person view and explore stuff, except in this game there is no combat. So it's all about solving puzzles and looking around for clues in a constantly dark and eerie setting.
The plot, with minimal spoilers, is that you woke up one day remembering nothing. You find a note nearby that said that you had given yourself amnesia by drinking some magic potion. After that you go on to find out why you did that by looking for pages of your diary that were scattered everywhere in some dungeon-like place while avoiding monsters and insanity. It seems some things in the game can drive you crazy and as your sanity drops, your orientation degenerates such that the screen gets tilted and etc.
Pretty scary actually. Shocked the players I watched on several occasions even though 60-150 people were watching and chatting with them. I could tell the fear was real because one of them couldn't stop talking sometimes to himself like he was nervous while the other, at one point, didn't dare to look back while running from monsters even though everyone was spamming "LOOK BACK!" and " TURN AROUND!"
IMO it's yet another interactive movie, but now I see why they didn't just make a CG movie instead. The difference between these two is that with such games, you can allow the player to absorb the story at his own pace by reading stuff and observing his environment slowly and in detail. In movies you have to direct the eyes towards important things and it is extremely hard to show unspoken thoughts and written notes left behind by people who are no longer around.
So this article is implying that Singaporeans suck at internet security. It may be true. I can't believe the kind of spams I'm getting from my friends because their emails have been hijacked or they may be having viruses.
It's stupid. It's like everyone has cars but they haven't learnt to wear seatbelts and not to stick their limbs out of the windows. Seriously, scan everything you download. Even though it's troublesome, it just takes one single infected file to give hackers free access to your computer and emails.
I still recommend using NOD32 because it automatically scans every file you download. ZoneAlarm is good but I find it to be overly sensitive. Back when I was using it, it caused crashes while playing and installing games because it stopped everything to tell me the games/programmes are doing something suspicious or something like that.
Also, one thing I've observed is that when you are dealing with zip files or rar files, you should scan before and after extraction. Once my scanner picked up nothing until a file has been unzipped. Close shave.
Suddenly the question of "To speak Singlish, or not to speak Singlish?" is revived.
If you feel embarrassed about Singlish, you are feeling embarrassed about your national identity. I'm still agreeing with the view that the first priority is the ability to speak normal English. Speaking Singlish is relatively unimportant but doesn't hurt to use it to fit in.
Getting rid of it would be an overreaction. After all, it is a natural result from the culmination of our history and assortment of cultures. In other words, it is us.
Not speaking proper English doesn't make us less educated, less civilized or anything like that. This view is akin to the view of Europeans centuries ago that all non-Christians were heretics who must be converted for their own good, or the view that African slaves were enslaved for their own good so that white men can show them how to be civilized people.
Personally I don't agree with the slavery part but I think they need to be taught to be better people, or at least be more united. I believe it is their inability to work together that is ruining most of the African continent.
Anyway, I have nothing against Singlish. I just wish we can all speak normal English when necessary.
Opentrolley is having a discount till the 20th of September! Yay!
He's got so much bullshit in this speech I can't believe he's even a pastor with followers at all! For example, he first preaches about the original form of Christianity that followed the Bible literally, then criticizes Islam for, among other things, its oppression. What?! Talk about pots and kettles. :\
This guy defies common sense! He should be repelling believers, not attracting them.
But technically speaking, it probably can be considered right that Christians should see Islam as a Satanic religion. Actually, it's not just Islam but all the other religions that worship deities that aren't Christianity. I mean, c'mon, they've fought for centuries, and tortured and massacred uncountable lives for this very reason. If it really doesn't make sense at all, I don't see how so many generations of people could be convinced by it to do things that would normally have required a lot of motivation.
Surely, the reasoning behind today's Christian's religious tolerance must have sprung up somewhere during those times. Someone must have said something similar, and too few must have listened. Some Christian leaders must have at least got tired of the killing, if not object to it outright, and yet there were over ten Crusades, not to mention other crazy stuff like witch-hunts in which they test suspects, usually homeless women or just normal women who pissed off their neighbours, by drowning them (those who didn't die were considered witches).
By the way a female wizard is not a frickin witch. Don't listen to all the bullshit in the Harry Potter series. A female wizard is still a wizard. A male witch can be called either a witch or a warlock, depending on whether you're into Wicca or Christianity respectively.
Wednesday, 8 September 2010
Rant 613 / Victoria II
Just installed Victoria II, another game from Paradox that isn't too different from the rest of its other games like Europa Universalis III. This time, the game is set mostly in the 19th century when the world was not yet changed by the two World Wars and the world was still mostly European colonies.
I have to say that the map stunned me. The world was so different just 200 years ago, even though many of the countries that we know today are mostly there! For example, the size of Russia was nothing short of amazing. When I scrolled the map eastward after looking at Western Europe and saw the gigantic green mass (green being its representative colour in the game) I could not help but say," Holy shit..."
Let me show the other areas of the world before Russia to give you a sense of scale. First is Western Europe. See the R on the east? That's Russia.
Next is North Africa, the Middle East and South Asia.
China! Also known as Manchuria in this era.
Okay, here's Russia.
Holy shit, right? Anyway, the part of Russia across the ocean is now Alaska. It's not as wealthy as its proportion would imply because, obviously, the landmass is mostly too cold to be very useful.
Another surprising thing is the USA and Mexico.
The white parts are unexplored as of the first of January 1836. I didn't know Mexico was this big back then, and that Canada has remained mostly unchanged since 200 years ago.
Wanted to show Australia but it's so boring because it's just all British territory. Nothing to see there.
But let's not forget Southeast Asia!
See why Raffles wanted Temasek so much he'd resort to dirty tricks to gain this island? The Dutch practically controlled the entire region!
Now to the tiny bit of land now called Singapore.
Okay so it's not as accurate as expected. But the focus of this game is on Europe and there is no harm in making Singapore larger than it actually is. I'm surprised it's even there at all!
As for the game itself, I'm not as interested as I thought I would be. It's just too complex for a simple mind like mine. You'll have to have a lot of free time and nothing to think about to like this game. Just look at the top left portion of the screenshots to get an idea of how many factors I have to watch all the time.
I have to say that the map stunned me. The world was so different just 200 years ago, even though many of the countries that we know today are mostly there! For example, the size of Russia was nothing short of amazing. When I scrolled the map eastward after looking at Western Europe and saw the gigantic green mass (green being its representative colour in the game) I could not help but say," Holy shit..."
Let me show the other areas of the world before Russia to give you a sense of scale. First is Western Europe. See the R on the east? That's Russia.
Next is North Africa, the Middle East and South Asia.
China! Also known as Manchuria in this era.
Okay, here's Russia.
Holy shit, right? Anyway, the part of Russia across the ocean is now Alaska. It's not as wealthy as its proportion would imply because, obviously, the landmass is mostly too cold to be very useful.
Another surprising thing is the USA and Mexico.
The white parts are unexplored as of the first of January 1836. I didn't know Mexico was this big back then, and that Canada has remained mostly unchanged since 200 years ago.
Wanted to show Australia but it's so boring because it's just all British territory. Nothing to see there.
But let's not forget Southeast Asia!
See why Raffles wanted Temasek so much he'd resort to dirty tricks to gain this island? The Dutch practically controlled the entire region!Now to the tiny bit of land now called Singapore.
Okay so it's not as accurate as expected. But the focus of this game is on Europe and there is no harm in making Singapore larger than it actually is. I'm surprised it's even there at all!
As for the game itself, I'm not as interested as I thought I would be. It's just too complex for a simple mind like mine. You'll have to have a lot of free time and nothing to think about to like this game. Just look at the top left portion of the screenshots to get an idea of how many factors I have to watch all the time.
Monday, 6 September 2010
Rant 612 / Firefall Looks Good
I didn't know there are such videos of Fallout 3 out there.
I just love the long awkward silence at the end.
This is also where I got the screenshot of the Old Lady Palmer with her huge boobies.
Old Lady Palmer FTW!!
Ok this isn't a funny video. I just thought it's quite an interesting thing to do in Fallout3. The freedom to be creative is one reason why I like this game.
Other weird things I can do include:
- toggling noclip so that I can fly and go through walls and floors to see the stuff the game developers covered up instead of erasing, and enter places that are supposed to be inaccessible
- using console commands to make NPCs do crazy things, eg what Old Lady Palmer became in one of the vids above
- killing entire towns and piling their bodies or heads in one neat stack
- blowing up Megaton (the town that can be destroyed) while still inside
- playing with mines and mini-nukes to induce human flight
- being god-like in general via console commands (eg teleporting NPCs, cloning NPCs, making NPCS invulnerable, teleporting self, etc etc)
If I bother to learn to use the GECK (game editor), I can even create structures and new textures and models for the characters.
So today I cleaned the fridge. I was actually scavenging for food when I finally got really annoyed by the state the interior of the fridge was in. My mum has this habit of putting all leftovers in the fridge, just like everyone else. But unlike them, she does not have the habit of remembering when everything was put in and hence does not remove anything from it.
No one's ever told me to do it and I usually don't because our family never had the habit of cleaning the fridge regularly anyway. Just one of the two things I've only recently learnt that should be done on a regular basis, the other being to dry the dishes after washing and before stacking them.
So I did it today out of pure annoyance. I had half a mind to just dump everything down the chute, but in the end I left all seven packets of margarine and all the stuff her acquaintances from work sent her from HK plus some stuff that haven't expired yet. Everything that had no expiry date, even if they don't look colourfully disgusting, goes out and down.
What I observed during the process was akin to what I saw in some US TV show in which they sent people to clean houses that haven't been cleaned for years. There were red goo underneath everything on the top level which I eventually traced to a packet of oyster mushroom which I did not try to look closely at, an unidentifiable brown powdery stuff over half the stuff the second level and some light brown watery liquid on the third.
The mild smell resulting from my uncovering all the decomposing matter was not nearly as disgusting as what I saw. The glue-like goo on the first level is the main reason why I did not bother to wipe it. First, it meant taking out the plastic board and clearing an area in the kitchen so that I can clean it without worrying that some of the dirty water might splatter into something that I'd have to clean later. Second, it's going to take a long time to scrub that off. Third, I'm pissed.
Currently considering the idea of keeping no leftovers at all. I think I'll do it. I don't care if it pisses her off anymore. She's not the one cleaning the fridge. This is the third time I'm cleaning the fridge in recent years, and I'm the only person doing it my family. The housekeepers never do it other than one of the Chinese ones we used to hire, but she's married and disappeared now.
...
Done. Now, other than the milk and fresh meat, there's nothing in the fridge that's going to rot within 3 months from now. Completely sure the milk will be consumed very soon, so no worries there. But I've thrown away four of the older-looking packets of margarine. She probably won't miss them anyway, because if she remembered about them she wouldn't have bought more.
Yes I'm pissed but I'm also the only fridge cleaner here.
The freezer is still full of stuff though. I'm going to clear it someday, once I figure out how I can pick the crap from the stack without nearly getting frostbite. Have to clear it soon because my ice cubes are beginning to develop a tiny, almost-undetectable flavour, including the less-than-seven-days-old batches. A few days ago I added some of the half-melted cubes from my mug that had previously contained iced Pepsi into my tea. The tea then tasted kind of funky. Yea, I'll never do it again.
All I wanted was some food. :-\
But some things have to be done, and someone's got to do them.
Actually that isn't the most disgusting rotting stuff I've ever had to clear. Once I found this packet of raw vegetable stacked in the giant stack of... well, stuff in the kitchen. The vegetables had decomposed to the point where the packet was dripping some sort of liquid I really don't want to think about down into the rest of the stack.
Fortunately most of the stuff below were wrapped in plastic and the flow was concentrated in one stream, so I just had to rinse the bags. Unfortunately the stream ended in the little basket of spices and onions and ginger, the bottom of which collected all the liquid.
Again, I was lucky enough that the basket was layered with a piece of aluminium foil before the other stuff was placed in it. So all I had to do was try to pick the clean garlic cloves, give up after removing a few and flip the basket over a plastic bag so that the foil and throw it away.
Covering the basket with foil again was easy. Forgetting the stream and the pool was not.
But the most horrifying thing I've seen at home was not that either. My mum cleaned that, not me.
The drain next to the washing machine was clogged. The plunger did not work. So my mum removed the cover and HOLY FUCK ALL THE THE BLACK STUFF HANGING BELOW WAS BEYOND DISGUSTING!!!
So after typing the above I did some googling and found that baking soda and vinegar is a good way to clear clogged drains. But that doesn't clean the drain filters, which apparently is a necessity. That means I have to leave the drain filter on and, someday, clean it. Definitely not looking forward to that.
I still don't completely understand why Christianity is criticized so much more than other religions and yet remain one of the largest today (ignoring the differences between denominations).
Why doesn't anyone mention this sort of thing about Buddhist scriptures? I don't see Muslims spamming similar websites about Islam either. Is it because Christian history is different from, say, Jewish history?
I'm pretty sure all the religious people in all ages in all religions sincerely believed they were interpreting their texts correctly, no matter what they actually did by following their interpretations. I'm sure it won't change too.
This is an example of how all logic is based on certain assumptions, and it is these assumptions that make debatable issues debatable. Actually, they aren't debatable if you really think about it, since there's really nothing to say if the logic on all sides is sound. In the end you will never get anywhere but "I'm right and you're wrong."
But how can one change these assumptions? This is actually close to impossible because to change them is to change the very foundation upon which the person made his past decisions. Once they are changed, some of the choices he has made can no longer be justified. Depending on the seriousness of these, the person may persist in believing in his original assumptions so that he would not be devastated by the emotional impact that would follow the change.
This may be one reason why it can be hard to convert a Scientologist. All that money that they have to spend needs to be justified. Or, for that matter, any religious leader because they have dedicated their lives to their religions. If they convert, they would go something like "OH SHIT I HAVE WASTED SO MUCH OF MY LIFE!" except a million times stronger.
Now I'm beginning to see 4chan being trolled by this very interesting line of reasoning that buying second-hand games is no different from piracy.
When you buy a game from your friend, the developers make no profit from the second sale, yet the both of you have enjoyed the game.
When you download a game from a software pirate, the result is the same.
Therefore, when you buy a second-hand game, it is the same as pirating it.
Along the same line of thought, one can also say that if you wait till a game's price drops from $50 to $10 before you buy it, you're only slightly better than a pirate (though to the game developers the difference is negligible so you're as good as a pirate anyway).
So I'm going to try to spot the fallacy here. The only difference here is that when the friend sold you the game, he exchanged the right to replay the game for the amount of money you paid him, which I'd say is a fair deal.
Actually this logic is true from the point of view of the developers. To them, second-hand sales do not benefit them financially anymore than piracy does. The same goes for the point of view of stores that sell first-hand games.
However in the larger picture, pirates spread the games to more people than second-hand sales would per first-hand sale, assuming the first pirate had to buy a copy in the first place.
Just found this Sarpino's flyer at home recently. The prices actually look pretty good. I think I will switch to Sarpino's next time.
Firefall looks very good and it's going to be f2p (free to play) with an item shop. Too bad it's expected to be released in the end of 2011 (which translates to somewhere in 2012 in our time :P). Looking forward to trying it. Already bookmarked the website.
I just love the long awkward silence at the end.
This is also where I got the screenshot of the Old Lady Palmer with her huge boobies.
Old Lady Palmer FTW!!
Ok this isn't a funny video. I just thought it's quite an interesting thing to do in Fallout3. The freedom to be creative is one reason why I like this game.
Other weird things I can do include:
- toggling noclip so that I can fly and go through walls and floors to see the stuff the game developers covered up instead of erasing, and enter places that are supposed to be inaccessible
- using console commands to make NPCs do crazy things, eg what Old Lady Palmer became in one of the vids above
- killing entire towns and piling their bodies or heads in one neat stack
- blowing up Megaton (the town that can be destroyed) while still inside
- playing with mines and mini-nukes to induce human flight
- being god-like in general via console commands (eg teleporting NPCs, cloning NPCs, making NPCS invulnerable, teleporting self, etc etc)
If I bother to learn to use the GECK (game editor), I can even create structures and new textures and models for the characters.
So today I cleaned the fridge. I was actually scavenging for food when I finally got really annoyed by the state the interior of the fridge was in. My mum has this habit of putting all leftovers in the fridge, just like everyone else. But unlike them, she does not have the habit of remembering when everything was put in and hence does not remove anything from it.
No one's ever told me to do it and I usually don't because our family never had the habit of cleaning the fridge regularly anyway. Just one of the two things I've only recently learnt that should be done on a regular basis, the other being to dry the dishes after washing and before stacking them.
So I did it today out of pure annoyance. I had half a mind to just dump everything down the chute, but in the end I left all seven packets of margarine and all the stuff her acquaintances from work sent her from HK plus some stuff that haven't expired yet. Everything that had no expiry date, even if they don't look colourfully disgusting, goes out and down.
What I observed during the process was akin to what I saw in some US TV show in which they sent people to clean houses that haven't been cleaned for years. There were red goo underneath everything on the top level which I eventually traced to a packet of oyster mushroom which I did not try to look closely at, an unidentifiable brown powdery stuff over half the stuff the second level and some light brown watery liquid on the third.
The mild smell resulting from my uncovering all the decomposing matter was not nearly as disgusting as what I saw. The glue-like goo on the first level is the main reason why I did not bother to wipe it. First, it meant taking out the plastic board and clearing an area in the kitchen so that I can clean it without worrying that some of the dirty water might splatter into something that I'd have to clean later. Second, it's going to take a long time to scrub that off. Third, I'm pissed.
Currently considering the idea of keeping no leftovers at all. I think I'll do it. I don't care if it pisses her off anymore. She's not the one cleaning the fridge. This is the third time I'm cleaning the fridge in recent years, and I'm the only person doing it my family. The housekeepers never do it other than one of the Chinese ones we used to hire, but she's married and disappeared now.
...
Done. Now, other than the milk and fresh meat, there's nothing in the fridge that's going to rot within 3 months from now. Completely sure the milk will be consumed very soon, so no worries there. But I've thrown away four of the older-looking packets of margarine. She probably won't miss them anyway, because if she remembered about them she wouldn't have bought more.
Yes I'm pissed but I'm also the only fridge cleaner here.
The freezer is still full of stuff though. I'm going to clear it someday, once I figure out how I can pick the crap from the stack without nearly getting frostbite. Have to clear it soon because my ice cubes are beginning to develop a tiny, almost-undetectable flavour, including the less-than-seven-days-old batches. A few days ago I added some of the half-melted cubes from my mug that had previously contained iced Pepsi into my tea. The tea then tasted kind of funky. Yea, I'll never do it again.
All I wanted was some food. :-\
But some things have to be done, and someone's got to do them.
Actually that isn't the most disgusting rotting stuff I've ever had to clear. Once I found this packet of raw vegetable stacked in the giant stack of... well, stuff in the kitchen. The vegetables had decomposed to the point where the packet was dripping some sort of liquid I really don't want to think about down into the rest of the stack.
Fortunately most of the stuff below were wrapped in plastic and the flow was concentrated in one stream, so I just had to rinse the bags. Unfortunately the stream ended in the little basket of spices and onions and ginger, the bottom of which collected all the liquid.
Again, I was lucky enough that the basket was layered with a piece of aluminium foil before the other stuff was placed in it. So all I had to do was try to pick the clean garlic cloves, give up after removing a few and flip the basket over a plastic bag so that the foil and throw it away.
Covering the basket with foil again was easy. Forgetting the stream and the pool was not.
But the most horrifying thing I've seen at home was not that either. My mum cleaned that, not me.
The drain next to the washing machine was clogged. The plunger did not work. So my mum removed the cover and HOLY FUCK ALL THE THE BLACK STUFF HANGING BELOW WAS BEYOND DISGUSTING!!!
So after typing the above I did some googling and found that baking soda and vinegar is a good way to clear clogged drains. But that doesn't clean the drain filters, which apparently is a necessity. That means I have to leave the drain filter on and, someday, clean it. Definitely not looking forward to that.
I still don't completely understand why Christianity is criticized so much more than other religions and yet remain one of the largest today (ignoring the differences between denominations).
Why doesn't anyone mention this sort of thing about Buddhist scriptures? I don't see Muslims spamming similar websites about Islam either. Is it because Christian history is different from, say, Jewish history?
I'm pretty sure all the religious people in all ages in all religions sincerely believed they were interpreting their texts correctly, no matter what they actually did by following their interpretations. I'm sure it won't change too.
This is an example of how all logic is based on certain assumptions, and it is these assumptions that make debatable issues debatable. Actually, they aren't debatable if you really think about it, since there's really nothing to say if the logic on all sides is sound. In the end you will never get anywhere but "I'm right and you're wrong."
But how can one change these assumptions? This is actually close to impossible because to change them is to change the very foundation upon which the person made his past decisions. Once they are changed, some of the choices he has made can no longer be justified. Depending on the seriousness of these, the person may persist in believing in his original assumptions so that he would not be devastated by the emotional impact that would follow the change.
This may be one reason why it can be hard to convert a Scientologist. All that money that they have to spend needs to be justified. Or, for that matter, any religious leader because they have dedicated their lives to their religions. If they convert, they would go something like "OH SHIT I HAVE WASTED SO MUCH OF MY LIFE!" except a million times stronger.
Now I'm beginning to see 4chan being trolled by this very interesting line of reasoning that buying second-hand games is no different from piracy.
When you buy a game from your friend, the developers make no profit from the second sale, yet the both of you have enjoyed the game.
When you download a game from a software pirate, the result is the same.
Therefore, when you buy a second-hand game, it is the same as pirating it.
Along the same line of thought, one can also say that if you wait till a game's price drops from $50 to $10 before you buy it, you're only slightly better than a pirate (though to the game developers the difference is negligible so you're as good as a pirate anyway).
So I'm going to try to spot the fallacy here. The only difference here is that when the friend sold you the game, he exchanged the right to replay the game for the amount of money you paid him, which I'd say is a fair deal.
Actually this logic is true from the point of view of the developers. To them, second-hand sales do not benefit them financially anymore than piracy does. The same goes for the point of view of stores that sell first-hand games.
However in the larger picture, pirates spread the games to more people than second-hand sales would per first-hand sale, assuming the first pirate had to buy a copy in the first place.
Just found this Sarpino's flyer at home recently. The prices actually look pretty good. I think I will switch to Sarpino's next time.
Firefall looks very good and it's going to be f2p (free to play) with an item shop. Too bad it's expected to be released in the end of 2011 (which translates to somewhere in 2012 in our time :P). Looking forward to trying it. Already bookmarked the website.
Saturday, 4 September 2010
Rant 611 / WGW
My ELT107 tutor whines a lot about her life during class. "A lot" is a relatively term here and none of the other tutors talk about themselves during their classes. Just today she was trying to show us some papers via the UniSIM web portal and she had difficulty finding the correct subject to click on. That started a short rant on how the website is so unnecessarily complicated, followed by an apology and an explanation that was along the lines of how she had no one to complain to at home.
Then at the end she complained to us about this student in a previous year who typed in his online feedback nothing but "The teacher is very pretty." And she started asking us whether we have this belief that better looking people are not intelligent.
I think she needs a blog.
Personally I just whine about everything I need to whine about here and when I talk in real life, I don't really have anything to say anymore. All the random stuff I want to talk about is here and anything else is too personal for anyone to know.
This is one reason why I don't bother to have a Windows Messenger anymore, other than the fact that I found it annoying to have to worry about whether anyone has any urgent messages for me while I was out slashing Super Mutants in the Wasteland. Breaks the immersion, this distraction.
Women Gone Wild. Fuck no! Anyway IMO the GGW series is overrated, or maybe I just don't like teenage girls.
He's got a point. I think I've mentioned something similar before. Technology has not made our lives simpler. They merely made tasks simpler, hence causing us to have more tasks piled onto us and hence complicating our lives. Yes it's easier to do everything and everything is faster but now everyone expects everyone else to do more tasks proportional to how much less effort is required per task. Life never got any easier. Things just got easier but more complicated.
MODALS HAVE NO TENSE! MODALS HAVE NO TENSE! MODALS HAVE NO TENSE!
Shit I think I lost like 10 marks in the assignment (which is like a test/homework hybrid) for the module on grammar that I'm taking because I forgot that MODALS HAVE NO TENSE!!
That's not the main reason for why I'm annoyed. The most horrifying reason is that I WROTE IT IN BIG CAPITAL LETTERS IN MY NOTES!!!
Furthermore, I remember noticing it as I was flipping through the book to look for something else while doing this assignment!!!
FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCKKKKKKK!!!
For people who didn't study grammar as a module in uni, modals are words that determine the possibility of the event, like "shall" and "could". For example, in "I will be the best," the word "will" functions as a modal auxiliary verb and it has NO TENSE! Not present and definitely not past tense. Here's the surprising thing I learnt about English grammar in this module: there is no such thing as future tense in the English language.
Anyway I like this tutor's style of marking the assignment and how she rants in class to break the monotonously boring atmosphere. Since I've already discussed the latter, I'll just talk about the former here.
She actually typed comments to explain my mistakes at the end of the assignment. We got our papers (.doc files, since it's all done online) back after she marked it so that we could read it and see where we made mistakes.
Basically she analysed our mistakes and typed about why we were wrong, like "MODALS HAVE NO TENSE FFS!!!" except without the caps, the "FFS" and the exclamation marks, and sometimes even telling us to read specific pages of the textbook (not notes) again. She did that for each of the four questions in the paper.
I'm impressed. Even if she had a list of comments for every possible mistakes that we could make in the assignment so that she just copied and pasted according to what we got wrong, it's still pretty amazing.
Because of this, I decided to look at the other modules to see if our papers were available to us. Found that the tutor for the module on evaluating discourses and writing critiques also did the same thing, while the one for Managing Personal Finances didn't tell me much other than that my answers were too brief.
I'm quite happy with the former. She did the same as the grammar tutor, except this one was briefer in her criticisms and advices. In fact she didn't really tell me how I lost those marks such that the only relatively significant mistake I made was how I did not write in the writer's perspective when summarising his/her views in the first paragraph.
The latter was annoying. What the heck was I supposed to expand on?? It's like if you cook a dish and I taste it before merely telling you that it sucks and lacks something. WHAT DOES IT LACK?!? Salt? Sugar? Frickin caviar?!?
The SGD has hit a record high vs the USD of about 1.346 SGD per USD. When we buy foreign currencies, the bank usually converts our SGD to USD before buying the currencies, so now is a good time to buy foreign currencies.
I don't remember how many runs I've done in Fallout 3 anymore. This is my nth run now. It's actually pretty hard in the beginning at the highest difficulty when I didn't have about 80 points in melee. Yea I'm still using my Shishkebab, but now it feels like my weapons wear off much faster at this difficulty. So I've resorted to carrying two of them so that I don't have to get desperate enough to use Sledgehammers or Super Sledges which are both inferior weapons that are insanely heavy.
I'm now at the Little Lamplight part, which is IMO the later half of the game. Things are still a little hard. I wonder if I had changed anything that I have now forgotten. Those Super Mutant Overlords are tough!
Then at the end she complained to us about this student in a previous year who typed in his online feedback nothing but "The teacher is very pretty." And she started asking us whether we have this belief that better looking people are not intelligent.
I think she needs a blog.
Personally I just whine about everything I need to whine about here and when I talk in real life, I don't really have anything to say anymore. All the random stuff I want to talk about is here and anything else is too personal for anyone to know.
This is one reason why I don't bother to have a Windows Messenger anymore, other than the fact that I found it annoying to have to worry about whether anyone has any urgent messages for me while I was out slashing Super Mutants in the Wasteland. Breaks the immersion, this distraction.
Women Gone Wild. Fuck no! Anyway IMO the GGW series is overrated, or maybe I just don't like teenage girls.
He's got a point. I think I've mentioned something similar before. Technology has not made our lives simpler. They merely made tasks simpler, hence causing us to have more tasks piled onto us and hence complicating our lives. Yes it's easier to do everything and everything is faster but now everyone expects everyone else to do more tasks proportional to how much less effort is required per task. Life never got any easier. Things just got easier but more complicated.
MODALS HAVE NO TENSE! MODALS HAVE NO TENSE! MODALS HAVE NO TENSE!
Shit I think I lost like 10 marks in the assignment (which is like a test/homework hybrid) for the module on grammar that I'm taking because I forgot that MODALS HAVE NO TENSE!!
That's not the main reason for why I'm annoyed. The most horrifying reason is that I WROTE IT IN BIG CAPITAL LETTERS IN MY NOTES!!!
Furthermore, I remember noticing it as I was flipping through the book to look for something else while doing this assignment!!!
FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCKKKKKKK!!!
For people who didn't study grammar as a module in uni, modals are words that determine the possibility of the event, like "shall" and "could". For example, in "I will be the best," the word "will" functions as a modal auxiliary verb and it has NO TENSE! Not present and definitely not past tense. Here's the surprising thing I learnt about English grammar in this module: there is no such thing as future tense in the English language.
Anyway I like this tutor's style of marking the assignment and how she rants in class to break the monotonously boring atmosphere. Since I've already discussed the latter, I'll just talk about the former here.
She actually typed comments to explain my mistakes at the end of the assignment. We got our papers (.doc files, since it's all done online) back after she marked it so that we could read it and see where we made mistakes.
Basically she analysed our mistakes and typed about why we were wrong, like "MODALS HAVE NO TENSE FFS!!!" except without the caps, the "FFS" and the exclamation marks, and sometimes even telling us to read specific pages of the textbook (not notes) again. She did that for each of the four questions in the paper.
I'm impressed. Even if she had a list of comments for every possible mistakes that we could make in the assignment so that she just copied and pasted according to what we got wrong, it's still pretty amazing.
Because of this, I decided to look at the other modules to see if our papers were available to us. Found that the tutor for the module on evaluating discourses and writing critiques also did the same thing, while the one for Managing Personal Finances didn't tell me much other than that my answers were too brief.
I'm quite happy with the former. She did the same as the grammar tutor, except this one was briefer in her criticisms and advices. In fact she didn't really tell me how I lost those marks such that the only relatively significant mistake I made was how I did not write in the writer's perspective when summarising his/her views in the first paragraph.
The latter was annoying. What the heck was I supposed to expand on?? It's like if you cook a dish and I taste it before merely telling you that it sucks and lacks something. WHAT DOES IT LACK?!? Salt? Sugar? Frickin caviar?!?
The SGD has hit a record high vs the USD of about 1.346 SGD per USD. When we buy foreign currencies, the bank usually converts our SGD to USD before buying the currencies, so now is a good time to buy foreign currencies.
I don't remember how many runs I've done in Fallout 3 anymore. This is my nth run now. It's actually pretty hard in the beginning at the highest difficulty when I didn't have about 80 points in melee. Yea I'm still using my Shishkebab, but now it feels like my weapons wear off much faster at this difficulty. So I've resorted to carrying two of them so that I don't have to get desperate enough to use Sledgehammers or Super Sledges which are both inferior weapons that are insanely heavy.
I'm now at the Little Lamplight part, which is IMO the later half of the game. Things are still a little hard. I wonder if I had changed anything that I have now forgotten. Those Super Mutant Overlords are tough!
Thursday, 2 September 2010
Rant 610 / Gurkhas!
I wonder if it is really worth it to order 20 sets of $2.50 combo that consists of a McMuffin and a coffee. Since I usually order $50 every time (lasts 2-3 meals always), it wouldn't be exceeding budgets or anything.
Oh wait - 20 coffees.
:P
Today was my first ever attempt at boiling my kitchen rags to disinfect them. Had always wanted to try it since I was told that they would melt or something (which contradicts what I've read online and what I imagine ancient people used to do when they had no detergent).
Nothing big really. Just a slight odour that I was not prepared for due to the state of the rags.
This is a new one for me. There's a phishing scam email in my Inbox telling me that Hotmail needs me to log in to the link provided to verify my account. Problem is that the link goes to www.cava-something (can't remember the entire URL).
Now they even scam for email addresses too!
Holy shit! They arrested ANSON WONG! Anson Wong is one of the biggest, if not the biggest, wildlife smugglers in Asia. Read about him in National Geographic some months back, didn't think he'd do the dirty work himself.
He got arrested because his luggage broke on the conveyor belt in the airport at KL. That's a pretty stupid accident. He's probably crying right now.
Must have been like hitting the jackpot for the Malaysian police.
Never got tired of these.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sher_Bahadur_Thapa
No wonder Gurkhas are so highly respected in the military. This guy's as good as a real life Rambo! Single-handedly took down multiple machine gunners, saved 2 platoons and then got shot and killed while trying to rescue another Gurkha! That's like a frickin one-man-army!
Oh wait - 20 coffees.
:P
Today was my first ever attempt at boiling my kitchen rags to disinfect them. Had always wanted to try it since I was told that they would melt or something (which contradicts what I've read online and what I imagine ancient people used to do when they had no detergent).
Nothing big really. Just a slight odour that I was not prepared for due to the state of the rags.
This is a new one for me. There's a phishing scam email in my Inbox telling me that Hotmail needs me to log in to the link provided to verify my account. Problem is that the link goes to www.cava-something (can't remember the entire URL).
Now they even scam for email addresses too!
Holy shit! They arrested ANSON WONG! Anson Wong is one of the biggest, if not the biggest, wildlife smugglers in Asia. Read about him in National Geographic some months back, didn't think he'd do the dirty work himself.
He got arrested because his luggage broke on the conveyor belt in the airport at KL. That's a pretty stupid accident. He's probably crying right now.
Must have been like hitting the jackpot for the Malaysian police.
Never got tired of these.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sher_Bahadur_Thapa
No wonder Gurkhas are so highly respected in the military. This guy's as good as a real life Rambo! Single-handedly took down multiple machine gunners, saved 2 platoons and then got shot and killed while trying to rescue another Gurkha! That's like a frickin one-man-army!
Tuesday, 31 August 2010
Rant 609 / French Tanks Have One Neutral Gear And Five Reverse
One study shows that Omega-3 may not be as beneficial to your health as previous studies had reported. Since I don't eat butter/margarine much, I'll stick with butter. Anyway I think a lot of people have forgotten the delight of eating a plain butter sandwich with lots of butter. When I say "lots", I mean when you've finished spreading it, the surface must be perfectly smooth.
/drool
It's the next best thing to eating butter. Now that is an expensive habit.
Suddenly, I realize life is about grinding! We're all in a gigantic MMO!!
I was so wrong about Heroes of Might and Magic Online! I have completely no idea where I got the idea from that this game only accepts IPs from the US! It's completely the other way round - only Asian IPs are allowed!!
So I downloaded and tried it. It's free to play with cash shop.
The game is really 2.5D, ie 2D with nice sprites. It's an online version of HoMM 5 but with much worse graphics and slightly different game mechanics.
For example, your skills are no longer as simple as just 3 levels. In HoMMO (other meaning is coincidental), all skills have 9 levels. You gain skill points as you level and you spend on to learn these skills. As the levels rise, so do the skill point costs.
You can choose to PvE or PvP depending on whether you feel like playing against the AI or a real player. From what I've seen, there are ranks for PvP, which works the same way as blings irl.
There are also daily quests to keep you occupied for a while daily but I've not gone any further than that.
Your town in the online game is much more expensive to upgrade. Resources aren't found lying everywhere since it's a single persistent world. Instead you have to complete quests for them and many of these quests involve fighting with AI. Oh, and there are random encounters.
Combat is similar except the special abilities of the units are absent, at least in the beginning for newbies.
Title of this rant is something I saw a conversation in UWO when we were discussing European history. Thought it was pretty funny. It's a reference to how France surrendered in two wars, WWII and Vietnam War.
So one thing led to another, and I returned to this article on Westboro Baptist Church. They are an independent group of Christians that got famous when they decided to visit the funerals of homosexuals and put up signs that say, "God hates fags," in bold and taunt the parents saying their sons are going to Hell.
So this is a strange problem: are these guys going to hell themselves?
This church is also saying that the Roman Catholics and Muslims worship Satan and that members of all other Christian groups that do not hate homosexuals are destined for Hell.
In other words, if you're not with them, you're fucked. Which coincidentally is what Islam is saying too.
This is getting complicated, man. Which one should I pick the day before I die?
Last surviving participant of the first World Cup ever has just died. Another piece of history withers away. Soon there will be no one alive who has witnessed that event first-hand, then it becomes ancient history.
So the other day when I mentioned I preferred the slice of pizza to watching the movie, I also noticed the pizza appeared smaller than I remembered. Not only that, but the crust seems to be quite different.
So I checked the website again and holy crap! The pizzas from Pizzahut have shrunk again, but only for Family Favourites.
Now Family Favourites come in 12-inches instead of 13.
Though it wasn't mentioned in any of their flyers, their crusts for pan pizzas have also changed a little, being flatter than before. The taste remains the same however. Maybe they switched suppliers.
Digital girlfriends are now getting more real, at least in Japan. I guess that's a great idea for getting them out of the house and seeing actual girls.
So Uncharted Waters Online is getting more interesting, but still not interesting enough to keep me glued to the screen. I've just learnt that there are several skills that I can learn that will keep my crew's maintenance costs (food, water etc) down. All I need to do is complete some quests to gain some port permits to go to several towns.
Btw if anyone plans to join, tell me here by posting a comment. There are rewards for getting friends to join :P
/drool
It's the next best thing to eating butter. Now that is an expensive habit.
Suddenly, I realize life is about grinding! We're all in a gigantic MMO!!
I was so wrong about Heroes of Might and Magic Online! I have completely no idea where I got the idea from that this game only accepts IPs from the US! It's completely the other way round - only Asian IPs are allowed!!
So I downloaded and tried it. It's free to play with cash shop.
The game is really 2.5D, ie 2D with nice sprites. It's an online version of HoMM 5 but with much worse graphics and slightly different game mechanics.
For example, your skills are no longer as simple as just 3 levels. In HoMMO (other meaning is coincidental), all skills have 9 levels. You gain skill points as you level and you spend on to learn these skills. As the levels rise, so do the skill point costs.
You can choose to PvE or PvP depending on whether you feel like playing against the AI or a real player. From what I've seen, there are ranks for PvP, which works the same way as blings irl.
There are also daily quests to keep you occupied for a while daily but I've not gone any further than that.
Your town in the online game is much more expensive to upgrade. Resources aren't found lying everywhere since it's a single persistent world. Instead you have to complete quests for them and many of these quests involve fighting with AI. Oh, and there are random encounters.
Combat is similar except the special abilities of the units are absent, at least in the beginning for newbies.
Title of this rant is something I saw a conversation in UWO when we were discussing European history. Thought it was pretty funny. It's a reference to how France surrendered in two wars, WWII and Vietnam War.
So one thing led to another, and I returned to this article on Westboro Baptist Church. They are an independent group of Christians that got famous when they decided to visit the funerals of homosexuals and put up signs that say, "God hates fags," in bold and taunt the parents saying their sons are going to Hell.
So this is a strange problem: are these guys going to hell themselves?
This church is also saying that the Roman Catholics and Muslims worship Satan and that members of all other Christian groups that do not hate homosexuals are destined for Hell.
In other words, if you're not with them, you're fucked. Which coincidentally is what Islam is saying too.
This is getting complicated, man. Which one should I pick the day before I die?
Last surviving participant of the first World Cup ever has just died. Another piece of history withers away. Soon there will be no one alive who has witnessed that event first-hand, then it becomes ancient history.
So the other day when I mentioned I preferred the slice of pizza to watching the movie, I also noticed the pizza appeared smaller than I remembered. Not only that, but the crust seems to be quite different.
So I checked the website again and holy crap! The pizzas from Pizzahut have shrunk again, but only for Family Favourites.
Now Family Favourites come in 12-inches instead of 13.
Though it wasn't mentioned in any of their flyers, their crusts for pan pizzas have also changed a little, being flatter than before. The taste remains the same however. Maybe they switched suppliers.
Digital girlfriends are now getting more real, at least in Japan. I guess that's a great idea for getting them out of the house and seeing actual girls.
So Uncharted Waters Online is getting more interesting, but still not interesting enough to keep me glued to the screen. I've just learnt that there are several skills that I can learn that will keep my crew's maintenance costs (food, water etc) down. All I need to do is complete some quests to gain some port permits to go to several towns.
Btw if anyone plans to join, tell me here by posting a comment. There are rewards for getting friends to join :P
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