The Catholic Church has rightly been put under a microscope when 4 percent of its priests were involved in abuse,
Four percent! Statistically speaking, a priest has a 4% chance of secretly having certain sinful desires. Churches are dangerous places! The chance of your kid getting sexual abuse from priests while visiting a church is a few hundred times higher than the chance of him getting bitten by a shark while swimming in the sea (0.0127% in Florida in 2005)!
Anyway, it certainly doesn't seem right to me that they would raise all that nonsense to free a paedophile.
(>'_')># I was going to give you this waffle. #<('_'<) But then I was like. (>'#'<) I'm hungry. (>'-'<) So I ate it.
Alright, this is going to be mean, but I just can't resist posting these images. Try to be alone when you look at the following pics so that no one can watch you laugh.
I'm not opposed to cosplay and neither do I have anything against fat/skinny/cross-dressing people. Confidence in oneself is great, but so is the taste in picking the right outfit. Unfortunately cosplaying is too dependant on your actual looks.
Seeing some of these pics ruined the good memories I had about those games/anime.
The Legend of the Seeker began with a 2-episode special. Watched 3 episodes so far (counting the first as two episodes) and I'm not impressed.
Despite the USD1.5 million per episode budget, I could tell that most of the money went into the computer-generated special effects. There were more of them than I ever saw in Hercules and Xena, both of which use mainly costumes (and sometimes the lack of one) and paint to create a sense of a fantastical world.
Insufficient funds is my guess for why they didn't use many of the elements/characters in the book. The TV series basically used the magical objects and some of the people from the book to create a new plot that bears a little resemblance to the book series.
This makes sense too because viewers who have read the books wouldn't have any strong reason to watch the show if the plots are identical. Also, castles are expensive.
At first I thought I was a little dizzy (blood pressure, maybe), so I just ignored it. Then my mum opened my door and told me it was an earthquake and I should prepare to flee. So I just ignored it.
I mean, seriously, I'm living more than twenty stories above ground. How do I flee? Back to Legend of the Seeker. It was interesting how I could feel the building sway for a few minutes, since I have never felt it before. The last time something like this happened, I was on my bed and didn't notice it.
If the building had collapsed, I wonder how the government was going to explain this despite their claims that all buildings in Singapore were designed to handle earthquakes. But that didn't happen, so I guess they were honest enough decades ago when they constructed this flat.
After the episode I was watching ended, I was imagining in amusement how some people must have been running out of their homes/offices. Personally I find the distance from this island to the nearest fault line to be too large for a huge destructive earthquake to find it's way to us. In other words the possibility is too minuscule. But for people who were working at construction sites, I would totally understand if they ran like there was no tomorrow.
Anyway, some funny quotes:
One man said: "There were a lot of office people on the roadside. We felt it for about five to ten minutes."
Others said their neighbours were screaming and shouting.
And I bet some of the people who tried to get out took elevators. ROFL!!
After yet another depressing rant, let's discuss something brighter.
KITTENS
Some reviews I read online say they taste like chicken. In an effort to cope with climate change, I'm planning to eat strays for food. At this moment I'm sharpening this big stick I found under a tree at my void deck and practising my downward thrust.
I've heard of this Chinese delicacy called 龙虎凤 (translation: Dragon Tiger Phoenix), which combines the flesh of these 3 creatures into a single dish. The dragon is represented by snake meat, tiger by cat meat and phoenix by chicken. Snake can probably be found somewhere in some stores; chicken is easy. Cats are tough to catch though.
What do you mean? Of course I love animals! Especially cute animals because they make great-looking dishes!
Look at this baby porcupine! It's so tiny and adorable! One can easily deduce that its meat has to be very tender and hence doesn't require much cooking, though it may be too bony to make good food at this stage. I should fatten it up for a couple of months before putting it to sleep and giving it a decent burial in my belly.
See? I like beautiful art pieces inspired by cute animals too. Bambi must be one of the most famous fictional (read "inedible") animals in the world.
Eating animals isn't barbaric! This is barbaric - eating human foetuses/babies. If eating non-human meat is barbaric then only vegans are civilized people! This concept is so ridiculous it's laughable. Carnivores are AWESOME!
Speaking of eating meat, I should start to marinate my chickens. Notice how we pamper our chickens, post-mortem?
Real leaders eat meat. Feel the spirit in the eyes of the Japanese Colonel Sanders? That is what eating animals does - it makes us true leaders!
Leaders who don't eat meat always fail. If you doubt me, then take Hitler as an example. He was a vegan with a completely meat-free diet, thus his political career ended horribly.
It doesn't even matter how capable you really are! If you don't eat meat, you're a loser even if you achieve amazing things.
So eat meat! Any meat! Even meat that looks like a pussy. Because pussies are edible too.
Offals are good, wholesome, nutritious meat. There is no such thing as an inedible part unless you're eating fugu.
Go ahead and eat some delicious meat! I'm going now to find myself some urban wild game in my neighbourhood. May the Force be with me!
And remember, don't eat babies!
Because if you do, I'll hunt you down. Wherever you may hide, I'll find you...
Just watched Mad Max 2. OMG The leather jacket is identical to the ones in all 3 Fallout games!! The distinctive flaps at the collar and the single shoulder pad are instantly recognizable right from the start. The raiders are also the same with their punk hairstyles and one of them even wears a hockey mask.
Mad Max 2 is about Max, now older and living in a world that actually looks post-apocalyptic this time, fighting for a small settlement built around a small oil refinery, one of the last in the world. It's a much better movie than the first just because of its depiction of how the world would look like if everything is destroyed.
Mad Max 3 is even better because not only did Max find an actual town, but he also found a tribe of children who survived a plane crash. Apparently, a Boeing 747 crashed some time after a nuclear war, which was preceded by an energy crisis. Most of the adults, led by the plane captain, left the children behind to find help. Obviously they never did return, but when they found Max, his resemblance to the captain made them think he had returned to bring them back to civilization.
LOL I can't tell the whole story. It's not nice to tell spoilers.
What I found interesting was the way they made the whole story sound like some sort of mythology. It didn't make much sense, seeing how the crash couldn't have happened more than two decades ago. Even if every single one of them were babies when it happened, it probably would have only been 15 years since the adults left. Which wouldn't be possible in the desert where they lived.
There were no adults, so they must have been the survivors of the crash, not the children of the survivors. Fifteen years isn't enough to reduce a group of people into a more primitive tribal state.
Oh well, it's just fiction after all.
There was another thing that showed that a nuclear war happened. When Max entered Bartertown, he encountered a water-seller asking him to buy some water. Max then took out his Geiger counter and swept it around his water tank, causing the counter to buzz loudly. Totally reminded me of Fallout 3 since radiation is a major part of the game.
The Mad Max movies prove that once upon a time, sequels were better than their prequels.
I remember seeing this somewhere in one of the CSI episodes, in which this victim who was completely paralyzed was given something similar, except the machine says "yes" or "no" instead of moving a wheelchair.
This, when combined with RTS games, would make them what they are supposed to be. I've always thought my hands move too slowly for my mind, that the effort it takes to click tiny buttons is very distracting.
At first I was thinking maybe they could use voice-identification as controls, like when I say a certain word, it records the sound and I can bind it to a certain key. The problem is some commands take too long to say and are slower than clicking, like telling the units to move to a certain point. In addition, people tend to speak at different speeds depending on their mental state, like a nervous player may speak much quicker (and louder) when microing during a battle.
So voice-control alone doesn't work. But if combined with mouse and keyboard, it would be interesting. For example, a player can record himself saying "A" and bind it to make a structure build certain units. This way, he is able to build units without looking away from the frontlines.
Or better still, a player can record voice commands for the entire tech tree, so that researching stuff merely requires a certain word/phrase to be spoken. Games would become much smoother in terms of gameplay and even noob players would be as good as some of the pros of today.
Seriously, this can be done. If Rosetta Stone can teach users languages by comparing the user's speech with a recorded standard to check the user's pronunciation, I don't see how voice commands cannot be implemented in games. Maybe players would need a better sound card than a generic integrated one, but I bet sound card makers would be happy about that.
Too bad I'm in neither electronics nor computer engineering.
Sometimes when I feel like eating something light and bland, my mum thinks I want to lose weight.
And hence from her, I learn that I know nothing even when I think I know something.
Seriously they should do that even for movies. Stop the movie the moment someone's phone rings. I mean, warnings have been appearing before the start of every movie for years, and if you still can't learn to switch your phone to silent mode before entering, you need a good solid lesson in basic etiquettes.
This would also be a good idea for Toastmaster meetings. I hate it when a phone rings during someone's speech, especially when the speaker is a newbie. It can make an inexperienced speaker forget his script when something like that happens. And we do remind everyone to switch their handphones to silent mode before the start of the meetings.
Hugh Jackman is now a real life hero.
Just found this image two days late for the part of the last rant that this applies to. This is just a failed meme-wannabe about hating liberalism but I thought it's actually the closest to the truth than all the other crap made into this "meme".
If you want someone to speak freely, be prepared for anything. But then, I'm pretty sure some people don't understand what "anything" means.
The Sword of Truth series was made into a TV series last year. It's supposed to be not very good since the creator (who adapted the book series into a TV series) is the same one who made Hercules and Xena. I totally expect it to be similar to those two, except with a running storyline stretched from one book to an entire season.
I don't know. Doesn't seem too appealing but I just can't resist watching after reading the entire series twice.
The world's sea level will rise at least 2m whether we do anything about it or not. The best scenario would be that the sea rises gradually over centuries, giving mankind time to adapt. More likely, it would accelerate "as less ice reflects less heat, warming the local area" creating a form of momentum in the melt rate of the ice caps.
"The crux of the sea level issue is that it starts very slowly but once it gets going it is practically unstoppable," said Stefan Rahmstorf, a scientist at Germany's Potsdam Institute and a widely recognized sea level expert.
His best guess was a one meter rise this century, assuming three degrees warming, and up to five meters over the next 300 years.
Speakers in Oxford used history to back up their arguments on rising seas. Three million years ago the planet was 2-3 degrees warmer and the sea 25-35 meters higher, and 122,000 years ago 2 degrees warmer and 10 meters higher, they said.
I predict that coastal protection is going to be the next big thing. You guys may want to switch to the sand bag industry.
According to this, Singapore would have the opportunity to turn into the Venice of Asia by 2100, while the real Venice would become the next Atlanta. Exciting.
If nothing is done, our island nation would be just Bukit Timah Nature Reserve within the century, and your descendants will cohabit with chimpanzees in their multi-storey tree-bungalows.
There aren't many options in general. We can wall up ourselves, or we can raise our platform. Walling isn't an attractive idea, so we're probably going to raise our city like the Romans did, building new things over the ruins of the old.
Also, major flooding and hurricanes will be possible even in this calmest region of SE Asia.
Time to GTFO? You bet!
On a larger scale, things will get worse. Unless new ways are found to grow more food in a much smaller area of land, or to grow significant amounts of food underwater (excluding seaweed, of course), food will become scarce. Much of the world's fertile lands are actually pretty low, so if they aren't protected, they will be under the sea in this century or the next.
Food is the foundation of civilization. This isn't my gluttony speaking, but logic. People stop being nice when they starve. Hell, people stop being nice when food prices rise. As food supplies are reduced, some people will need to find other people to blame.
It's human nature to need scapegoats. Someone needs to be blamed for everything. For example, if food prices go too high, the masses will start to think that it's the government that is doing something wrong. Maybe they will suspect it's hoarding food for the social elites, or the bureaucracy just suck at its job. No matter what, civil unrest will begin.
What can a country do to solve this? Several common ways come to mind.
In Soviet Russia, Stalin removed any signs of discontent with brute force in the form of the secret police. In ancient Rome, huge investments went into various forms of entertainment to distract the general population from their troubles. In the events preceding the first Gulf War, Saddam invaded Kuwait to gain more resources in order to recover from its impoverished state.
Obviously if any wars happen in the near future, they aren't going to say that the countries involved are fighting over resources. No, the real reasons can only be seen in hindsight, in the words of history books. Rarely has the casus belli of wars been about wealth because it is never good to admit weakness.
On one hand, I find it more likely that countries will make war to gain wealth. On the other hand, wars don't seem like a very good way to make money today. I don't know, the US seems to do that a lot these days, but it doesn't appear to be very profitable yet. I mean, they've been fucking around in the Middle East for a decade already, and what have they got to show for it other than the execution of Saddam Hussein?
Then again, how are they able to survive despite their trillions of dollars of debt?
The deal it previously offered was rejected on the grounds that its business model was a low-growth one, which Cadbury's shareholders do not like. I am sure it's also more likely the British confectionary doesn't want to be part of the US corporation for more than just the way it does business, but they use this reason because it sounds more politically correct.
Business drama?
TIME magazine may be sold soon. Time Warner must be making huge losses to want to sell all its assets outside the film industry. By the way, notice it isn't considering losing its film industry stuff?
"Time Warner just spun off their cable division, they are going to sell their print division, they are going to spin off AOL and they're just going to be Warner Brothers, HBO and the Turner Networks," said Crawford, managing director of The Capital Group.
It seems the losses aren't coming from Warner Brothers. Or maybe they just want to keep it for sentimental values. XD
So piracy hurts box office revenues, but a major corporation would rather keep its movie brand than one of the most significant magazines in the world?
I pity Obama. First is the trouble with the economy, then he had to keep his promise by giving the US healthcare system a major overhaul which half the US population didn't agree with. Now that the objections have kinda died down, it's Afghanistan giving him trouble.
Last week, news report say that their top general in charge of the operation is asking for more men. Today, people are discussing the possibility of not fighting the entire war but concentrate on terrorism. Let the Afghan troops fight the rest of the war, while the NATO soldiers will just search and kill terrorists.
Seriously, no one wants to put more troops in the Middle East, not US, not the UK, not anyone. All of the European countries were investing soldiers against the wills of their people in the first place, and now with many of these countries encountering certain incidents (eg Germany has just killed quite a number of civilians accidentally, Britain's number of casualties has reached the highest in the generation since WWII), they all want to pull out.
Obama is right there, fighting his predecessor's war and placed in a no-win situation. If he goes on fighting, he loses popularity. If he loses the war, he loses popularity. If he doesn't throw in more men and loses the war in the process, he loses popularity. If he dares to send more soldiers, he loses popularity. If he uses the backup plan mentioned in the first paragraph, many people expect that the Afghan soldiers aren't going to be as effective and hence Obama loses popularity.
There is basically no way out for him but somehow win without using more soldiers. If that can be done he would have long ago.
One thing about wooden floors is that the boards don't stick together forever. Already gaps are appearing between the wooden planks, for some reason I don't know. It seems the planks don't fit my floor perfectly, and I worry that dirt would accumulate in the empty space between them or worse, gather water when it's being cleaned.
I probably need to use that special paste to fill up the gaps, but I don't want to have a patch of it right in the middle of the room. I don't really know how to shift the gap since only the planks in the middle of the room are loose.
But... Polanski's crime was having sex with a 13-year-old girl. How can they disagree with his arrest?? French Culture Minister Frederic Mitterrand said he was "stunned" by the news, adding that both he and French President Nicolas Sarkozy wanted to see the acclaimed director returned swiftly to his family.Poland's film-makers' association also rose to his defence.... "We regard that as a scandalous situation and an example of incomprehensible overzealousness."
People don't seem to understand that sincerity changes according to circumstances. A person when faced with the possibility of punishment, will become proportionally sincere in his apology and desire to change. But once the judgement is done and the sentence is given, it is entirely possible that he will return to his old habit if the punishment was not traumatising enough.
I do not believe that people will change just because they're threatened with punishment. Circumstances can change people. If someone points a gun at my head and make me swear not to eat so that I would starve, I would do so sincerely from the bottom of my heart. But if you hand me a meal 3 days later, who knows?
I am sure many people have been in similar situations, where they promise very sincerely (to themselves or to others) they would do something, only to break the promise when the time came to actually commit the deed.
Just like the way many Christians try to follow the rules of their religion(s) only because of their belief in an afterlife. Or else, why would there be so many names for Hell in the English language, including the Netherworld, the other side, Hades and etc? Things that people think about very often tend to have a number of names roughly proportional to how frequently the idea enters their minds.
Anyway back to the main topic, Polanski's punishment is long overdue! Child rapists, not matter how sorry they are without being punished, need to be sorrier. And it is definitely child rape because a 44-year-old man cannot possibly have consensual sex with a 13-year-old girl. Doesn't matter if she was willing.
From Wikipedia, on his conviction 30 years ago:
Polanski was initially charged with rape by use of drugs, perversion, sodomy, lewd and lascivious act upon a child under 14, and furnishing a controlled substance (methaqualone) to a minor. These charges were dismissed under the terms of his plea bargain, and he pleaded guilty to the lesser charge of engaging in unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor.
This means his sentence was already a very much lightened one. Yet he still tried to escape and avoid serving what he had agreed to.
What is even more ironic is that Poland had just implemented the law that castrates child rapists last Friday!! That they have taken such an extreme stance against sex crimes involving children and yet be unhappy when a known child rapist, no matter how distinguished, is arrested is nothing but
I've found quite a number of first- and second-hand accounts of Lockerz users actually receiving what they redeemed. Now I'm considering the idea of making 10 emails a day to make a 40 more PTZ daily (VIP status = 4 points per friend). It's a hassle though, so I'm not sure if I should. Takes an hour to make 20 emails and register all of them.
I did consider spending 35 PTZ on one of the new accounts to redeem an iPhone skin, but there is only 1 left (use to be like 20+ when I first joined) and it's a freakin pink one. Even the Macbook and LCD TV are gone.
As for the other 2 categories, 1 is for charities where you redeem points for a $10 donation to some charity of your choice. The other is for fashion stuff like rings and watches. The only 3 things left in this category is a Ruffian scarf (300PTZ), a Ruffian Inside Out book (85PTZ) and a Fly 150 Piaggio scooter (7500 PTZ). As you can see, there is nothing cheap to redeem here either.
I joined somewhere last week and most stuff were already gone. According to the archived news, they last restocked the stuff on the 15th of September, just a few days before I joined. I bet most of the stuff were redeemed on that day itself.
Making additional emails isn't as easy as just typing since they do not accept easy-to-make disposable emails addresses. I have to use hotmail and such established emails, which require a lot of details and do that bloody bot-test for every email signup. You know, the one where they ask you to type what you see in that picture.
Doing it once is fine, but try doing it ten times. Sometimes it's so jumbled up even two human eyes can't tell what letters are actually being displayed.
Another hurdle is the way hotmail allows you to make only a few emails per day.
Yahoo mail stops giving you ready-made IDs after the 3rd signup, so you have to type a random name. Yahoo also stops checking whether the name you typed is available at that point, and it will keep alerting you that your zip code is wrong (even though clicking on Confirm still works). Only when you click on Confirm will you find out if the email ID you typed is still available.
On the other hand, some of the stuff actually looks good enough to be a very expensive gift. I can even sell it to one of you for real money.
As you can see in the scroll bar on the right, this is just a tiny portion of the menu. Well, half of it is filled with crap games and iPhone skins, but the other half actually contains things that people would buy like the ones shown.
At the moment I don't have the PTZ for any of these, so maybe I will have to make some extra emails when they announce that they are going to restock. Making emails on all the English Yahoo's everywhere in the world is a chore, seriously.
This is actually legal because each person in each household can have one account. I have at least 50 people in my household, so that is not a problem. Last I counted I have 70, including my grandparents, my maids and butlers, and my cousins. Yes they all live with me. They do. I know because they are here and we share this common computer to save costs. And we are going to redeem something when they finally restock their freebies.
I'd say it does both. If anyone supports the freedom of speech, they should know that it works both ways. Can't give everyone the ability to speak freely, then expect them to say they support your ideals.
OMGOMGOMG! I didn't know that Romero just made his sixth movie in his Dead series. I have Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, Day of the Dead, Land of the Dead and Diary of the Dead.
Night of the Living Dead is probably the first modern zombie film. It was the one that created the modern zombie stereotype, though a newer stereotype has been created more recently by 28 Days Later.
Anyway, Survival of the Dead was shown in some film festival in Toronto earlier this month and will be released in US cinemas in 2010.
I like zombie movies. They're like reality shows, but more gory.
Vampire movies are fine too, except Twilight. Blade was nice though it wasn't a horror movie either.
Yesterday I watched part this conservationist show on Nat Geo Channel where they were showing how they breed fishes in fisheries. Since I kinda know how they breed horses from watching CSI, I was wondering how they were going to masturbate the fish to get the sperms.
For horses they have this specialized object they use to rub a stallion's penis and at one end is a container for storing the semen. I think this method is used for stallions with good genes (eg won many races) because their semen is actually worth quite a bit of money.
Anyway in the fishery they showed how they did it - with brute force. This guy held up a female fish (and it was pretty huge, as long as an average forearm and hand combined), used his other hand to squeeze the belly from near the head to the tail. When he was squeezing, a thick greyish-white liquid poured out of somewhere near the tail into a bowl.
In the next scene, he held up a male fish and did the same, but only a tiny stream of runny stuff flowed down the tail into the same bowl filled with eggs. He then added some water into the bowl "so that the sperms can swim", implying that there is no or not enough semen in the stuff he squeezed out.
That was fertilization.
The mixture was then poured into an incubator which simulated the environment in a real river, including the currents and stuff. According to this guy, the eggs would hatch in twelve hours and will take some more time before they consume their nutrients completely and require real food.
I had expected something less brutal, like poking a needle into the belly and sucking out the eggs/sperms. What they did was akin to squeezing your balls till sperm comes out of your penis. Not very nice at all, but at least the fish couldn't scream.
Finally book my Remedial Training after so long. I had to book it within the first month of my new window, which is this month. I knew I had to book early to get a slot at Maju, but I guess it doesn't matter for this month.
All the dates are atrocious, to say the least. Most of them begin just before my exams, and some of them begin during the exam period. Only Schedule 28 doesn't interrupt anything (I think) which coincidentally is the only one which is held at Maju Camp, the most convenient of the three. It's supposed to be the most popular choice for RT too, probably because of its location.
Four hours of exercise, twice per week for 4 weeks, then thrice for another 4. This is going to be like the bad old days when I was in the JJC rugby team. My guess is it's going to be worse. =(
And right after that I have to book a slot for IPT so that I won't have to go through the same shit again for the current window. Heard from a friend that IPT is much better than RT, which would make sense since IPT is voluntary while RT is essentially punishment for failing.
I had expected to book dates beginning in the coming week/month.
The Great Wall of China is longer than we thought. They just found new sections of it 11km from what was the eastern end of the Wall. Not really a big deal to me since it was already the longest wall in the world and the most visible achievement of ancient China. It's like discovering that the Mariana Trench is 1km deeper than previously thought.
Apparently the post-apocalyptic dystopian background that the Fallout series uses is inspired by the Mad Max series. Two other things were also from the Mad Max movies: the leather jackets and the one of the ending scenes of Fallout 3, which includes a picture of the Lone Wanderer (the player's character) and his dog walking on the road.
So of course I went to get a copy of the three Mad Max movies. As of this rant I've only seen the first Mad Max, a 1979 film. Not a very good movie in many ways, but I'm using a modern standard to judge a 30-year-old film.
For example, the level of violence is... sissy, at best. The most violent scene was probably when a biker crashed into a truck and got crushed. The most bloody scene was when the hero, Max, got shot in the knee. They didn't even dare to show the burnt face of Max's friend after he got roasted alive in his car by the biker gang. Even today's CSI dares to show bloated drowned corpses onTV.
What violence? It was more like a G-rated film, in today's standards. The skinned rabbits I posted in the last rant were more gory than any part of this film.
Anyway it was also bad in another way - I couldn't tell it was supposed to be a dystopian world. It looked more like it was set in some under-developed communities in the poorer regions of some developing country. There was nothing to suggest there was a breakdown in society, or that there was a better society before.
At least in Fallout 3 players can see right away that everything is dead and the entire land was dead-brown. Gives a sense of hopelessness and despair that is what "post-apocalypse" is supposed to be. Although I still find the notion of eating 200-year-old canned food and drinking bottled soft drinks of similar vintage a little ridiculous. Would a bottle of Coke still be fizzy after 2 centuries?
Anyway, it was supposed to be a very good film since it had the highest profit-to-cost ratio until the Blair Witch Project came along. That is 21 years of holding that record.
I hope the next two movies are better. They have to be, or they wouldn't be making a fourth movie that's coming together with a game right now. But Mel Gibson, aka Max, won't be in this movie because of his age.
