Saturday 31 January 2009

Rant 295 / CNY Ain't Over Yet!

Why do so many people say they tried their best when they did no such thing?

I believe most of us don't really know what "our best" really is. No one dares to test his limits, therefore no one knows how hard to push to be at their best.

Seriously, if everyone knows their limits, then why would there be such phrases as "beyond my limits" and "at my 110%"? Obviously, people who thought they did more than their best didn't know what their best was.

It is impossible to go beyond your limits because you'll collapse either physically or mentally. You'd come close to killing yourself if you do your best. To pant a little when you run isn't your best. If you didn't grind your joints to dust, or at the very least, feel as if your lungs are on fire, that wasn't your best.









One guy I know has an uncanny knack of being antisocial naturally. By "antisocial", I don't mean quiet and reluctant to participate in conversations; I am referring to the other definition which can be summarized in one word: asshole.

He wasn't always like that but as time passed his behaviour just degenerated from friendly to barely civil. I don't even need to irritate him to hear thinly-veiled insults.

I have an example in the form of a recent conversation. By the way, I set my Messenger to automatically record all conversations because I sometimes accidentally close my chatboxes and occasionally forget what I say.

Here it an excerpt with the grammar slightly editted. I'll name him A, and the other as B and C.

...
B: Ok creating game. C: A, want to play DotA? A: Only the 3 of us? A: Ok just 1 round. A: Don't want to lose too often.


There are others but this is good enough to illustrate my point. First of all, he isn't playing DotA competitively. Second, the wins/losses aren't recorded anywhere. Third, he isn't that great a player himself.

I wasn't part of it because I was AFK, but after seeing that when I returned, I just left the chat. We are old friends, but at this point, he doesn't seem to remember that fact. The way he grudgingly agreed feels more like he was just trying to humour them just so that they wouldn't ask more questions.

Once he refused to play with another old friend just because he "didn't want to lose". So fine, that friend wasn't good at the game at all, but c'mon these are the only opportunities to interact with the gang during school term and he's rejecting it. I'd always thought that it wasn't necessary to keep asking him to join us in anything because he doesn't seem to want to have anything to do with us, but it feels inappropriate to say this about a guy I've known for over a decade.

So if you are one of those who know what I'm talking about, stop forcing him to join us. He has made it abundantly clear that he doesn't want to play with us. Let it be. All he does is sulk and whine anyway. The only times when he seems to be able able to win at DotA is when he's in a very good team, and he doesn't seem to recognize the implications of that. Either that or he's deluding himself intentionally so that he won't an hero.

(If you still don't get what "an hero" means, try to picture how you would hold the gun above and where it points.)

This meme originated from the Virginia Tech massacre in which the Korean guy kill lots of people before committing suicide. People on 4chan called him a hero but some of them made typos, calling him "an hero". Somehow it stuck and thus "an hero" means committing suicide with or without killing other people beforehand.









My comp is going crazy. Just now when I closed my Garena client and Warcraft 3, my Rainmeter said that CPU usage was at 100%. For some reason, everything opened only slightly slower, not the usual dramatic lag I'd experience when the comp is very busy.

When it didn't stop after a minute, I press Ctrl+Alt+Del to open the Task Manager. The first thing I noticed was that there were multiple svchost.exe running simultaneously. I'm not sure if that is normal, but I googled "mulitple svchost.exe" and every single link given were labelled "This website may harm your computer."

Seriously, all the links were thus labelled. So I googled something else just to test it out, using "piratebay". It was the same - each link was labelled as harmful. So I clicked on piratebay.org and it gave me a malware warning.

What the heck?

Right away, I did the only thing I know would solve minor problems - restarting the comp. It worked. Now everything is back to normal, but I still see 13 instances of svchost.exe running.

Apparently, this isn't abnormal because svchost.exe is a part of Windows. So, nothing wrong here. But something has to be wrong with my comp or all those labels wouldn't be there and CPU usage wouldn't have risen to the max if nothing was wrong.

I just don't know what the problem is.

Rant 294 / Save The Planet, Kill Yourself.

The aura of the Necro in DotA v6.59 seems to be much better. I swear, there were at 3 times in the last game I played when an enemy hero just dropped dead right at my feet. I was surprised when they died just at my arrival because I was preparing to spam my 1337 skills into their faces. I thought someone else had killed them but the text credited me for the kill.

What the heck? Sure feels different from the old aura, probably because the range is already 700 at level 1 while the old version was 250. So that means about 3 of my 13 kills (13/5 RAWR!) in my last game were caused by my aura skill. Woots!









Recently, I received an email from Care2 about Ethiopia's need for food aid. Apparently, an increasing number of Ethiopians are needing food that they can't get in their country. So this email is asking me to spread the news.

Right, so I'm spreading the news by mentioning it here, but that doesn't mean I totally agree that we should all donate money and food. They aren't the only people dying from hunger in the world. If anything, I'd donate food to the poor in countries with a more stable situation rather than help feed people who may someday join in the conflicts that wreck their country in the first place.

So what I'd suggest is that instead of giving them free food, provide condoms and free abortions instead. Those will work better and they can get rid of the root of their problems.








Having been spoilt by my ample supply of Stimpaks in Fallout 3, the latest expansion, Operation: Anchorage caught me totally off-guard. In the simulation of the battle to liberate Alaska from the Chinese, I have not seen a single Stimpak so far. Of course, all I've done at this point was destroy the artilleries.

That doesn't mean there wasn't anything to heal me with. At regular intervals there would be a health replenishing machine which I also assume to be safe save points. But it did get pretty hard sometimes when I kept missing their faces.

The thing is, I'm a melee weapon specialist and all they gave me for this category was a lousy Trench Knife. No flaming sword attached to a motorbike fuel tank. With the poor damage and my crap armour I had to run as fast as I could, which wasn't very fast either since I didn't put many points on Agility, towards my enemies and slash at their heads.

When I hit their heads enough, they will be "crippled" and get stunned for a while. Crippling their heads also dramatically lowers their accuracy with weapons if they survive my slashes while they were stunned. Crippled body parts also seem to receive more damage, as if the armours over these areas were broken.

Anyway, destroying the artilleries was merely the warm-up. The next stage involves 3 suicide missions, with me armed with the same damned Trench Knife as my only melee weapon. At least I also have seven of the damage-increasing meds, Psychos.

I'll also be leading a team of 4 into the mission. I could have gotten a huge robot in the team but robots use weapons that may hit me, like flamers and missile launchers.

So I recruited 2 Snipers and a normal Assault soldier together with the default special NPC sergeant. They may still accidentally hit me when I'm sating my bloodlust during my slashfests, but at least I don't burn nor lose a limb.

Thursday 29 January 2009

Rant 293 / In The US, You Find Party. In Soviet Russia, Party Finds You! This Is The Origin Of The Soviet Russia Meme.

Yesterday I asked my mum about the different titles I should use to greet my different relatives. In Chinese culture, almost every single relative has a different name for him/her, unlike in English in which there are only variations of "aunt","uncle","cousin" and etc. For example, whether he is your grandfather's elder/younger brother/sister (伯公/叔公/伯婆/叔婆), or whether this male/female cousin's born to your parent's elder or younger sibling and is from your father's side of the family or your mother's (表哥/表姐/表弟/表妹/堂哥/堂姐/堂弟/堂妹), the titles are all different. In English, it's just "cousin"... LOL!

She told me to check the fortune-telling book instead, the annually published manual written by 林真 (lin4 zhen1). Within were several pages of what I thought to be those names I was looking for, but she told me those were for writing letters.

I was shocked. There was a separate set of titles for writing to each relative!! Speaking and writing both have their own set. I didn't know that before. Just one set is complex enough, but TWO?! No wonder my mum laughed at me when she saw me learn to write letters in Chinese in primary or secondary school. It was probably not even a piece of cake for her!

Anyway, the set I was searching for turned out to be missing. That wasn't abnormal because such contents are usually inconsistently included in this book. Oh well...

That's one advantage of living in a nuclear family - less need to learn all these terms. When my mum was little, she used to live in a gigantic family so she had to learn all these titles by heart. She probably didn't find it difficult since she'd have to say them all the time anyway. But for me, the only relatives I know whom I can regard as "distant" are my granduncle and great-grandaunt. So all I know are the titles for these two, plus the usual cousin and uncle/aunt stuff. If I ever have children, they'll never need to know all these. I find this thought sad.







Hackers changed road signs to warn drivers of zombies ahead. I think this is pretty hilarious. Of course, that is assuming the signs weren't actually displaying anything important like a warning of an accident ahead or something.






I'm curious about Little Lamplight in Fallout 3. It's little city of children in a huge underground cavern where anyone above 16 would be kicked out. The thing is, it's been 200 years since the original children survived the nukes in there, so... where did all these children come from? They definitely didn't come from those monsters next door in the Vault. Speaking of which, how the heck did mere children protect themselves from the Super Mutants next door for 200 years? How much lead did they pack in there? The Fallout Wiki states that there is no answer to all that. They just happened in the game. :(






I was right about the Shishkebab being the best melee weapon in Fallout 3, but there are guns with better damage than it. The best I see so far is the Experimental MIRV that deals over 30 times as much damage (I'm looking at the Damage Per Second, aka DPS, here so while my Shishkebab deals 80DPS the MIRV deals over 2500DPS).

I'm probably going to choose that together with specializing in Sneak if I'm ever going to play this game again. However, that's not exactly going to be easy to use since its ammo is the Mini-Nuke while is rather limited in supply within the game. Plus the Mini-Nuke is exactly what its name says, so it's pretty poor for close combat.

According to the Fallout Wiki, the Experimental MIRV is like an automatic bazooka that shoots nukes. Though its damage is the most obscene in the game, it uses up its ammo really quickly. The reason behind this is that it shoots exactly EIGHT Mini-Nukes per shot. Therefore, it kills anything in the game with one shot, even the Super Mutant Behemoth. I so want to see it now that I've read this.

After a while, melee fighting is getting too boring. It's so easy! This is even more true when I'm walking towards places I haven't discovered and meet some Raiders on the way. I usually don't even see them till they shoot at me. Then I'd run towards them, all the while thinking," Why hello there! Nice to meet you too," as I slash at their heads.

Maybe some sneaking around would make it more fun, plus attacks while undetected will cause extra damage. If I use VATS to attack, it'd be even better since VATS is supposed to increase damage at the expense of the condition of the weapon.








Gradually, the Sword of Truth series has been increasingly filled with long speeches that are very likely the author's own beliefs. Mostly, these long speeches deal with life, the meaning and the importance of it.

However, the final book, Confessor, has so many of these rants I actually skipped a number of pages. This was especially true at the end where Richard Rahl, the main protagonist, made a speech of about 5 pages long. Wtf dude? I read half a page and realized he wasn't going to stop, so I flipped the page and scanned through the next two pages. Realizing that there was no pause nor interruption, I flipped again to find that Richard was indeed a very long-winded guy.

The whole series bears a similarity to my blog - it's filled with rants, except that his rants are usually about life. Mine do not have a consistent topic.

But it's weird to find that eventually, everyone seems to talk like Richard. Even Nicci was able to give long speeches in this last book. I think this series is really one whole rant disguised with some fiction to make it look like a novel series. The author is really trying to convince his readers to make choices about their lives and etc. Some sort of propaganda.

The way I see it, the author probably had very strict parents who didn't give him any freedom. Either that or he feels he doesn't have any freedom in is life.







Another set of octuplets born in California with all of them still alive as for this moment. If a normal childbirth is magic, I can't find the right word to describe this.







So I was told that my great-grandaunt didn't go to university and only my paternal grandfather did. Instead, she only had secondary-school-level education and became a midwife somewhere in Penang. Never really returned to Indonesia where she and my great-grandfather were from. For one, there was and still is rampant racism against the Chinese.

So my grandfather was born in Indonesia. She was adopted by his mother, my great-grandmother. After my father was born, my grandfather went to China due a combination of the racism mentioned and the propaganda that reached his ears about how well the Chinese live together in mainland China.

I guess it was probably good at first till the chaos came. The idea of Communism was not the killer, but the masses twisted the whole thing to hurt all those people they were jealous of, mainly anyone who was wealthy and/or well-educated. My grandfather, being a pharmacist with a Bachelors degree, could not escape from the unfair persecution.

It sucks, that's for sure. For an educated person who even knew Latin, it definitely sucks to find himself out of job while living in a society where the poor reigns. Well, at least no one commited suicide in the family, though my father did get conscripted and brainwashed by Mao's charisma.

Though it probably wouldn't have been very healthy for me if he told me about why he loved Mao Zedong so much while I was younger, I'm now actually quite interested in his side of the story. I find all those things I read too Americanized, ie everything is biased against Communism. You win some, you lose some.







I knew my ears were always too waxy. Not that I don't wash them, but they just produce inconvenient amounts of wax all the time. And I can't wash them as often as it'll take to keep it completely clean since ears need wax. The last time I cleaned it everyday, I eventually got an infection in one of my ears and the doctor told me to clean them less frequently.

By the way I'm referring to the insides of my ears where you can only either dig or rinse.

It is quite annoying because I don't have the solid sort of wax that most people seem to have. Mine is quite fluid, so I can feel it flowing inside my ear sometimes when I tilt my head for long, eg when I'm sleeping. It is a little disturbing when you feel stuff flowing inward.

But today I just realized another inconvenience - I can't put on my earphones for hours. This is rather disgusting but... wax flowed onto one of the earphones. It was extremely annoying, to say the least. Of course I cleaned it immediately, but it was hard to keep it off the part where it produced sound.

Headphones would be the only alternative, but it's not convenient to wear it constantly the way I do with earphones, which I hang around my neck like some sort of necklace. A headphone can be worn the same way too, around my neck, but it's irritating if I have to turn my head.

I have seen some students walking around with a headset around their necks and sometimes on their heads, but somehow I don't think it's comfortable. At the very least, earphones don't weigh anything. Plus headphones press my hair down, making some sort of horizontal valley on top of my head after a few hours of usage, unless I get those that go behind my head when I wear them.

Anyway, I wonder why I seem to be the only one who wears earphones with the wire down the back, instead of the front. I keep the wires hidden inside my shirt on the back and I wear it constantly when I'm out. The main benefit is that it never gets in my way. Out of sight, out of mind, whenever I'm not using it. I keep the earphones under my collar sometimes when I don't need them.

The only thing that isn't good is probably the sweat that may make the wire sticky. Somehow I don't think that's a problem since I don't feel anything after months of wearing it.

Rant 292 / Acer Is Recycling Their Rejects By Using Them As Replacements?

Guess what I've just discovered. This replacement computer isn't actually new. I accidentally deleted my Powerpoint for my role as Table Topics Master for the next Toastmasters meeting, so I used my TuneUp Undelete to recover everything that contains the filename "TT" which is short for "Table Topics".

Here is what it found:

Notice the year 2002 for the last files? I received this from Acer Support in June 2008. At first I thought it was for testing purposes or something. Maybe it was how they operate in their Quality Assurance policies.

Then I looked at the files in the middle and noticed the year 2003, then 2005. Obviously, something is quite wrong here. So I did a two more searches using "exe", then"dat". The search using "exe" gave me only files deleted between 2007 to 2009. The next search was a little more interesting.


At this point, it is quite easy to see that this hard disk has been in use regularly since at least 2002. Therefore I'm using a 7-year-old hard disk, minimum. Being a curious guy, I did yet another scan, this time for "wav".

This shocked me. The folder name says "Florensia", which is a MMORPG I had tried once. The date made me doubt my memory. Did I get this comp before 2008?? Then I scrolled up.


Phew. This means the previous owner of this comp played Florensia too. Unless this isn't a coincidence and TuneUp Undelete is giving me screwed up dates/times. The latter is quite unlikely but the former isn't any more possible either.

Acer, what is this? You gave me an antique to replace my first laptop! Are you recycling your rejects in this manner? Never mind. I've already decided to buy a new com when the next expo is open.

Then again, were there any 250GB hard disks in the market in 2002? I can't remember. If they were already in existence then, I'm right. If they weren't, I'm wrong and this whole rant can be deleted.

Wednesday 28 January 2009

Rant 291 / You Can't Reap What You Sow If You Die Quickly Enough

Guess how mermaids feed.


You know those times when you stare at something and all you can think of is "What the heck?". This is now one of those moments.






Now I find those traditional Chinese preserved fruits/veg too sweet. I could barely finish a piece of preserved lotus seed pod just now. Bleh. The sticky rice cake, nian gao, is worse. Either the cake itself is too sweet or my tolerance for sweetness has lowered, but I found it to be so sweet it was bitter. Not exactly bitter, but it was more of a feel than a taste. Ever ate something so sweet the back of your throat tasted sourness? Imagine it gone so far that it became bitterness instead and that's what I'm talking about.








Democracy is a civilized chaos. When everyone has their say in things, how can it not be chaotic? Democracy is an idea that deludes the masses. By allowing everyone to have equal rights, the stronger will be able to eat the weak. Democracy does not protect the weak! It merely enables our natural chaos while removing the element of violence.

In no way does providing equal opportunities for everyone means everybody will prosper. Everbody can't prosper. If every single one of us gets a raise, it's called inflation. And that sucks.

Theoretically, communism protects the weak at the expense of reducing the motivation to work in everyone. If there isn't more reward for working more, why do more?

Similarly, if everyone is really taxed more heavily when they make more money, there is little reason to work harder. That is why there are so many legal leeways to escape heavy taxes for wealthy people, like using company funds for travelling during vacations in the guise of a business trip. This only works for large companies because for sole proprietorships, it's basically a one-man-show. Taking money from the business is the same as taking money from his own wallet.

The only way democracy works best is to work in the form of direct democracy. It is not perfect but it is the most effective version. Its efficiency leaves much to desire, but if democracy means everyone has an equal say in all major issues, this is what it is.

Therefore the most democratic society must be a small society, a town or smaller. Unfortunately, something of that size can not retain its sovereignty for long. Other, less democratic societies will attempt to swallow it up. It can be out of greed, or that they think it's best for everyone. For protection or prosperity for everyone. Whatever. Either way, the more people there are, the less power they have in anything.

In a large country, the amount of influence of the average guy in national issues is close to none. Of course, if many people are saying the same thing at the same time, all their soft whispers will form a scream. If the scream is loud enough, it can have enough influence on these matters. That is what democracry is. But in a representative democracy, many people pick some guy to represent them in this screaming contest. The direct link becomes indirect.

Fewer people having a say means each would have much more influence. On one hand, it's easier for the people because most of them don't really care about anything. On the other hand, when any of these people actually cares, their representative may not agree with their views. In addition, these representatives may try to change their peoples' views to suit theirs.

This is still democracy, but it's lost part of its meaning in order to gain efficiency and convenience.








So the Commonwealth in the Fallout world refers to the former state of Massachusetts and the "Institute" from which the android escaped from is quite possibly the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Interesting. Apparently there is very little data about it because this appearance in Fallout 3 is its first. There is no way to go there because Fallout 3 only contains Washington DC. I hope it appears in one of the future expansions.

But I don't see how that will happen. None of the future expansions will feature the Commonwealth. The first expansion features Alaska, the second Pittsburgh and the third goes back to DC for a final showdown with the Enclave.

Oh shit! The first Fallout 3 expansion is already out! It was released yesterday, on the 27th!!! OMGOMGOMGOMG!! It's a simulation of the liberation of Alaska from the Chinese during the Great War of the Fallout world, and it's similar to one of the main quests except it's filled with fighting.

They should have hired some real Chinese speakers to be the voice actors of the Chinese soldiers in that main quest. Since they weren't programmed to kill me, I was able to interact with them like trying to talk to them or hitting them. Some of what they say were real Mandarin that I could barely understand, but some were pure nonsense that sounded Chinese. They probably got some ABCs to do it.








Picked the Explorer Perk for my 20th and final Perk in Fallout 3. It reveals all places in the map of my Pipboy. I wanted to find the Nuka-Cola Plant and also thought this Perk would make it easier for me to explore the world. Unfortunately, the moment I saw the map with everything labelled, my interest in the game dropped.

Part of the fun in exploring is finding something you don't know about. You may or may not know that the place exist (better if you don't), but the moment you discover it, there's always the joy, the exhilaration and the uncontrollable curiosity about what mysteries it holds. Knowing exactly where the place is spoils part of the fun.

Now there's only the curiosity left. I don't see how I will play this game a third time. Damn I just spoilt the game for myself.







I had a shock just now when I discovered my bro playing CS: Source. He must be really running out of games. Not enough good games being released except for MMORPGs, which he can't play during the school term.

Speaking of MMOs, Fallout is going to have its own MMORPG, known to fans as Fallout Online, or FOOL. It is, as yet, unannounced and is only known as Project V13. The major clue for fans to believe it's FOOL is that the Fallout 3 team is involved.

It's a very good idea, since most of the geography is already done for them - they just need to copy the world map for their first template. Major American landmarks will be there, so those will be some of the dungeons/towns. All they need is to add more instead of starting from scratch or vague descriptions like WoW or any other MMOs.

It'd be even more interesting because everyone would want to see the virtual counterpart of the landmarks. If it gets big enough, the developers may even create the whole world some day. Then players can travel around the world without leaving their homes, Fallout style.

Rant 290 / A Brief Tour of Fallout 3's Washington DC

Went travelling in the DC area last night. Took some photos and here they are.


It took some heavy fighting before I reached this area. Apparently it's the battleground for two or three factions: the Talon Company Mercs, the Super Mutants and maybe the Enclave (not sure about this last faction because they may be there due to my main quest which involved them invading the DC area).

The Lincoln Monument. Had to kill the Slavers (and brought the escaped slaves here to build their shelter for some good Karma) to get here. Lincoln didn't have his head until the escaped slaves arrived and reattached it.

The National Archives. I haven't been inside yet since I don't have any reason to.

The Washington Monument. I could have gone up to the top and taken a photo there but it was too cramped and I couldn't get a good angle. There was too much radio equipment from the nearby Galaxy News Radio station.

The Pentagon, or what's left of it. Over twenty years before I arrived, the Brotherhood of Steel swept this place clean and made this their HQ for the DC area. For all Fallout 3 players, this picture may be the least interesting of all since visiting this place is compulsory.

The most important place to go to and the hardest to reach in the whole map. This is what is left of the White House in the Fallout world. This, according to the backstory from Fallout 2, is Ground Zero, where the first nukes landed when China attacked the US at full force.

Highly radioactive, it took a combination of this Power Armour which gives me some radiation resistance, a Rad-X pill (dramatically increases radiation resistance) and over 60 points in Med skill (which further increases the potency of the Rad-X) to reduce the radiation I receive to 1 rad/sec.

I had to take the Utility Tunnel to this point where I am standing in this picture just so that I can have a closer view. This is the closest I can get. The rest of the area was walled off by rubble and blockades.

According to the Fallout Wiki, I can get a better view by cheating through the console and flying above. However it is currently pointless since there is only unfinished terrain in the crater.

Anyway, the backstory is that when the nukes landed in 2077, the US President and the Enclave (the remnants of the US Government) were already safely hidden around the globe. Therefore there is probably not going to be any quests that involve entering the White House to search the underground bunker.







After years of screwing with my sleep cycles, I have confirmed that eating a light meal will wake you up whether it is your normal sleeping hours or not, for at least half an hour. Two butter-and-ham sandwiches can wake me up for an hour at night. Milk doesn't do shit for me. Nothing I eat makes me sleepy, unless it's a sleeping pill or cough syrup.

Tuesday 27 January 2009

Rant 289 / What Would I Do If I Find A Fifty Dollar Bill On A Street? I'd Look Around To See If There Are Anymore Nearby.

Yet again I learnt something new from 4chan. Apparently there is something called a bidet that is used in France and other parts of Europe. It is basically a basin specially designed to wash the lower body. You use it by facing the tap and wash your genitals/ass like the way you wash your face - by splashing water up to yourself.

Read about it from a seemingly pointless thread that was asking whether /r9k/ users wash or wipe after passing motion. Personally I always wash when I can because it just seems much cleaner, especially if I use soap.







For everyone who's looking for a way to cook for yourself but under a tight budget, here's a pretty interesting blog to follow. Oh no it's not like the last guy I mentioned who spent only a dollar a day on food. You go follow that if you want to end up looking like a WWII POW. This is more relevant to our lives though some ideas need to be ignored or adapted to my situation in Singapore.

For example, you cannot just buy any "off-brands" of food in Singapore. As I've mentioned once in a previous rant, there is a seriously cheap brand of sardines that is rather... inedible... available in NTUC Fairprice supermarkets. Can't remember the name right now but I do recall that it was made in Thailand and costed me $0.60 per can.

You'll have to do your own research before buying stuff you've never tried before.

The link above goes to the first article you should follow - about stocking up.







Just watched Madagascar 2. Thought it was better than its prequel. The penguins are always the most interesting part of the movies.



"In case of a drop in pressure, place the mask over your face to hide your terrified expression from the other passengers."



"Sir, we may be out of fuel."

"What makes you think that?"
"We've lost engine one... and engine two is no longer on fire."








In Fallout 3, I still haven't found Paradise Falls. Spent most of the time completing the main quests in order to find the Brotherhood of Steel and getting the ability to wear Power Armours. The extra Strength they provide is useful for carrying loot. It's also because my guy looks better in Power Armour. Meanwhile, I still can't find a better melee weapon than the good ol' Shishkebab.

I'm still curious about where the Commonwealth in the game is. Supposed to be up north. Do they mean Canada? Maybe I should check Wikipedia after I finish the game... for the second time.

Monday 26 January 2009

Rant 288 / A True Rant Always Derails

So one day when I was typing some rants, I wondered whether I should use "a" or "an" before unique. After some googling, it turns out that the trick to knowing which to use before words that begin with the letter "u" is to check its pronunciation. If the word sounds like it begins with a "y" instead of the "u", I should use "a" as if the word really begins with the consonant. Examples of such words are unique and university. Words like umbrella and underground are preceded by "an".

English is so hard to learn. It is as commonly spoken as it is now only because it's the legacy of the global British Empire. Mandarin Chinese is a much more efficient language. At the very least, its rules don't get bent as often, most phrases can be shortened and there are idioms and shortened proverbs to express just about everything.

And there aren't as many words that can easily be mistaken as something vulgar.








Fallout 3 is full of places where side-quests are possible. Just found something quite interesting.

Let me start from the beginning. I was almost reaching Reilly's Ranger's HQ somewhere north of Rivet City when I heard this mad rant everywhere on this street. Next thing I know, I found this back alley with this playground. Nothing unusual, so I went ahead.

Suddenly, I heard a beep from a mine being triggered. Since I'm tough enough to withstand a mine blowing up under me and I didn't see any mine in front of me, I just stood still and waited for it to explode.

Surprise~! Boom! Boom! BOOOOOM! BOOOM! BOOOOOM!!!!

Thus I watched as my body flew up to the sky with my left arm and right leg mysteriously and conspicuously missing.

I didn't give up. Reloading the game, I went back to that alley to in order to deactivate all those mines and bring them with me. All mines have great value/weight ratio. Usually weighs 0.5 and sells for 25. All that money lying on the ground was reason enough to reload and retry many times over.

Second time, I died again. I didn't see any mine near me but I heard the beep. I thought there must be a mine hidden in a bush nearby. But as I flew I saw my corpse, lacking a leg, flying by a person. Holy cow! What the heck? I didn't see anyone anywhere on that street before.

That perked my curiosity to the max. At that point, nothing could have stopped me from trying everything possible to find that guy.

That person had to be nearby, so I went to that alley again. I found this second storey of one of the buildings that had its wall facing the alley and its ceiling destroyed. That made me suspect that the person was there, but because of my angle I couldn't see anyone without stepping onto the place where I suspect the hidden mines were.

So back to the mines and nukes. This time I did it very cautiously - I press F5 to Quicksave after each nuke or mine I loot. And again I died, but I was able to reload back to the last mine I looted nearby.

After 3 more tries, I thought I knew where the hidden mines were, but when I stepped into the bush on my left I saw only dirt.

Huh? Then boom boom leg gone arm gone etc etc...

I didn't know what was happening and suspected a bug that made the mine invisible. So I went to my right the next time and... no invisible mines! Woot!!

Finally I knew the radius of the area on this side that triggered those invisible mines. So I walked through the alley while sticking to the wall on the right and explored the other side. Eventually I spotted a nuke under an empty oil drum. Because of its position when I went close enough to take it, the angle was too steep for me to see it. So I had to squat down to loot it.

You see, in Fallout 3 squatting down = activate Stealth mode. In stealth mode, the top of my screen tells me if I'm spotted or in danger of being spotted by someone.

So when I squatted down, I saw that I was "DETECTED". Right away I knew it must be the guy I was looking for. I picked that nuke, Quicksaved and looked around. Sure enough, I saw a man on the alfresco second floor.

Instintively, I stood up and ran towards him, thinking that maybe there was a way to jump up to that level and speak to him. Boom boom limbs blown apart etc etc.

I reloaded and this time, instead of running to him, I look around to find a way up. I didn't see any, so I continued away from him out of the alley. At this point, I suspected that maybe the hidden mines were linked to him because the area I found to trigger those mines were in his line of sight.

At the exit though, there was this guy huddling down in the corner. I spoke to him and found out that the guy upstairs was the mad man on the speakers and he was the one holding the trigger to the mines and nukes in that alley.

Using my 1337 Charisma, I persuaded him to run to that guy and tell him to shut up. As he ran I retreated to somewhere safer. It was then that I saw the size of the mushroom clouds. Those weren't from the mini-nukes I was trying to loot. Probably specially programmed only for this alley.

I ran to the alley after that and found the mad man gone and the speakers mute. Nothing was left except for pieces of the poor fool. No trace of the mad man could be found though.

Curious, I googled and found that there was nothing to be done for that guy. No side-quests nothing. Not even a conversation was possible unless I cheated using the console and made myself fly to that guy.

Oh well.


Fallout 3 is so full of possible side-quests and stuff that don't need to be there. This is just one example. Though they are from the same developers, I couldn't find such nonsense in Oblivion. I like these things though, because they made the world appear more real. Erratic stuff that has nothing to do with me and what I do is common in the real world. Similarly, this suicidal lunatic has nothing to do with my quests and was there merely for the sake of being there.

This sort of thing is also quite unlike bonus stuff because it serves no purpose at all. It doesn't give me loads of money, only a few mines and mini-nukes. Neither does it reveal any background story or bonus content. It is just plain pointless, which makes Fallout 3 all the more realistic.

I'm not sure if you can think of anything that has totally nothing to do with you throughout your life. Maybe a neighbour living five stories above you whom you've only glanced once in the last 10 years?

I don't know about you, but occasionally I do see people I've never seen before take the lift up with me in my block. Young people wearing school uniforms and carrying bags are usually residents.

Of course, the times that I leave/return home are usually non-peak hours, so I'm usually alone in the lift. This means I don't really know any of my neighbours except my primary school friend. Heck, I don't even know who lives in one of the units on my floor. And there are only 4 units on each floor of my block. Either they're very quiet or it's empty.







I fear getting old. I saw my great-grandaunt a few times within the last couple years before her death some years back. She didn't recognize me and my brother, only my mum. Yes she was smiling and seemed happy, but I don't want to end up like that if that's what longevity means.

The last time I saw her, she was in a home for old folks waiting to die in Penang. I seriously don't want to end up like that. She had 2 children, both adopted. Probably had to do with the fact that she was an uni grad. Too rich, standards too high, who knows?

Both her children are successful people today but there she was living in a place where nobody seems to want to talk with anybody. Probably too old to talk. Many of them had difficulty just moving around and the rooms I saw were double rooms which means very few people.

At that last time, she could barely remember my mother and my bro and I had to reintroduce ourselves. I wouldn't be surprise if she was really pretending to remember my mum just so that she had someone to talk to. She knew she was just waiting for the end and had already surrendered to it. Just spent her last days in her bed with the TV.

Typing about her makes me curious about her story. What was it like to be an uni grad back in her day? To be my great-grandaunt (in Chinese it's 姑太, and grandaunt in Chinese is 姑婆), she had to be over 80, maybe even over 90. This means she was already a teenager when WWII started, when WWI was still called "the Great War".

OMG! I sense epicness in her tale. Damn, I think I'll have to ask my mum some day, though I suspect she doesn't know much about her past either. My paternal relatives would know more, but we don't keep in contact with them. Dang...

Rant 287 / Unleash The Fury!

This month's issue of Nat Geo has an article about gold. There were several astonishing facts about this precious metals that made me rethink its value.

First, in all of human history only 161,000 tons of gold were ever extracted. According to Wikipedia, which used the figure of 158,000 tons of gold mined till 2006, that amount of gold is really just a cube with dimensions 20.2m X 20.2m X 20.2m. That's bloody little!

Second, one picture in the magazine shows a tiny pill gold coated with mercury. It is about half the area of a Singaporean 5 cent coin. Apparently, it can bring the Indonesian miner who was holding it US$25. Imagine how much it'd cost by the time it reaches us as part of some jewellery.

In fact, gold is so valuable it can be profitably mined even at microscopic scale. One miner in the article admitted that she had never seen a trace of gold even though she has been operating an ore-hauling vehicle in a gold mine for years!

Third, over half of that 161,000 tons of gold was mined in the last fifty years. Enough said.

Fourth, according to a source in Wikipedia, the current estimate is that gold will run out in 45 years. That is, no more new gold and we'll have to reuse our old stuff. But that's not a problem since over 2/3 of all our gold mined every year is used to make jewellery. All those gold bars you see in banks are about the same as a tenth of that 2/3.

Fifth, to mine the amount of gold required to make a typical gold ring, over 160 tonnes of waste has to be extracted and removed. So the next time you buy gold jewellery, think about the blood and sweat it takes to bring that to you. Yes I mentioned blood, because about 25% of all our gold comes from small-scale miners, eg illegal miners. Also, in the poorer regions like Indonesia, gold miners use mercury to extract gold. Mercury, as you know, is dangerous in both liquid and gaseous forms. However, it is very useful for gold extraction because gold dissolves in it but doesn't react with it.

It is strange that one of the least useful metals to ever exist is also so rare and precious. All it's good for is electrical conduction and its resistance to rust and corrosion. And to look at, of course. People love shiny stuff.

It is pretty screwed up that the environment and everything that lives near gold deposits die because of this useless element and people are willing to ruin their health for tiny bits of it. Humans are quite willing to kill for pretty stuff, it would seem. Oh right, that's actually true. Just remembered the Trojan War.

Does the following picture quicken your heartbeat?







The final episode of Heroes Volume One was a complete letdown. All those tension they built using the preceding 22 episodes was totally wasted in a really unexpected epic fail.

Sylar killed so many "special people" to absorb all their abilities, including the ability to melt anything, ultra-sensitive hearing and etc. Peter has also met many "special people" and absorbed all their abilities like invisibility and Sylar's original telekinesis.

Yet the storyline, so filled with potential, culminated in a lousy fistfight. A fistfight, of all things!

What. The. Heck.

Screw you and your budget constraints!!! I wanted to see an incredible battle filled with explosions, fireballs and absolute mayhem. And you gave me just two freakin punches between two Supermen? FFS, it would have been the absolute best TV show ever if something more had happened, something more related to all the members of the cast using their special powers!

RRRRRRRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!








So now in Fallout 3 I accidentally found Underworld, the city of Ghouls. It turns that I didn't find it because I skipped the quest from Three Dogs the DJ. Now that I'm helping him restore his radio signal, I happened to pass by the Museum of History and found Underworld at the back of this place.

Now I want to find Paradise Falls. But it's so hard! The last time I went too far North, I was attacked by two Deathclaws! I can hardly handle one, let alone two. One slash from it takes out a third of my HP. I have to keep spamming Tab to use Stimpaks from my Pipboy in all my fights with Deathclaws.

I refuse to check online forums for it. Where's the fun in exploring new places if they're already found? The feeling of finding a place that no one knows about is quite exhilarating and that was what drove me to find all the unopened areas during my days in WoW. It was illegal to enter areas that are close, but there are always bugs that we could use to enter them. Now this feeling is what drives me to explore the world of Fallout 3. I don't care about the plot - I already finished it a few months ago.

Rant 286 / Ha!

It's Monday, 1.46am. The first day of the first lunar month. I'm not celebrating. The only thing that happens in my home on Lunar New Year is that we have offerings for my late father. And red packets. Yu sheng, that intensely sweet dish that no one likes except myself (I like everything so that's not saying much), is bought only when someone wants to eat it. I know this is completely redundant but it's always I who ask for it.

After all, it makes for a great dessert.







Playing Fallout 3 again. Surprisingly, it hasn't crashed yet except for that one time when I exited tha game. Weird. Nothing goes wrong when I use Alt+Tab. Once, the music from GNR kept playing even after I went to Windows to check on something. And it didn't crash when I went back to the game.

This time, I'm taking things slowly because I know the story already. I take my time to loot everything that has a value/weight ratio of over 2 (eg valued at 50 and weighs 25, I'll take). I have 9 on Strength just so that I can carry tons of loot at one go.

I'm also exploring more of the map. Haven't found Paradise Falls nor the Ghoul city, but I'm trying. Map's too big to search randomly. I'm also intending to find all the vaults, which are even harder to find at random because all their entrances are built into giant boulders/hills.

For now, I'm still doing some quests to gain levels in order to get more loot. Mainly trying to complete Moira's Survival Guide and all the optional parts in the series of quests. For example, I went into the Mirelurk habitat and placed the observer without killing a single Mirelurk. Pretty difficult to find and I used up both my Stealth Boy to maintain my invisibility throughout my search and then my escape.

All those effort in looting is needed because I need a lot of the healing stuff aka Stimpaks. With over 50 points in my Barter skill, it is barely enough for me to buy up all the Stimpaks available from the 3 vendors in Megaton.

I keep as many of it as possible because I use a lot in every battle. Right now I have about 160 but I need more. I'm a melee fighter using the Shishkebab or whatever they call it. It's the best melee weapon I've found in the game in my first run. But melee fighting means I suffer heavy damage every time I fight. Oh well, at least the enemies also die quickly.

Since this game really isn't about accurate shooting, the gameplay is poorly designed for gun users. More specifically, they lack the suitable crosshairs for each gun. Instead they use the same tiny crosshair for all the guns despite having different accuracy.

With a good crosshair, the player can tell roughly where his bullets will fly. But in Fallout 3, I can't, and the guns are horribly inaccurate. So melee weapons are better and the Shishkebab is the best. It's essentially a flaming sword made from a motorbike tank and a lawn mower blade, among other things. Looks nice and kills fast. Only disadvantage is that sometimes I encounter gun turrets attached to the ceiling and I either switch to a gun in my loot or try to jump and slash it. Sometimes it is too high and I have to run instead until I find a gun.

Anyway so that's what I'm playing mostly for the last 2 days. Nothing special. Still waiting for the expansion for Fallout 3 that's going to be released soon. If it's released soon enough and I play slow enough, I may not have to stop in between.







So I have a bottle of gin at home that needs to be drank. I dislike the smell of it and need to mix it with something more palatable before downing any of it. But I only have lemon tea, orange juice and milk. The XO is out of bounds, access restricted only to my mum and my late father. XO and gin don't mix anyway, so it's not a big deal.

I've tried gin with orange juice but it tasted just like the original orange juice but slightly bitter. Lemon tea with gin sounds plausible but I don't see anything like that when I googled. Milk is obviously wrong. The idea of gin with milk really doesn't sound like it will turn out well.

Hmm....

Saturday 24 January 2009

Rant 285 / Bon Appétit

Some people look at the skies, the stars, the heavens and see that as their proof of Intelligent Design, that all that wonderous beauty cannot be an accident.

Unfortunately, they seem to have forgotten that beauty is subjective.

I'm glad I've heard no one mention Intelligent Design in Singapore. I've seen screenshots of college science forums filled with Christian quotes. "For this and this, all your answers can be found in the Bible. In that chapter, the Bible says that blah blah blah blah..." That doesn't happen here.

Religion is religion. But when religion becomes part of science, or vice versa, something is quite wrong somewhere. No one should mix them up. They are quite different.

For one, religion is quite comfortable with self-contradiction, eg lightning rods on top of churches. Science isn't. It may be that Darwin was wrong somewhere and his theory of evolution wasn't quite right, but that doesn't automatically imply that everything was made in seven days (and why seven days anyway? Why not just a split-second?).








So today I was in a DotA match in Garena that kinda killed some of my misconceptions about maphacking. Maphacking is basically a cheat that allows a player to see his enemies' positions constantly.

First thing I noticed about real maphacking is that you cannot always tell if someone is doing it. It can be done very discreetly, such that we don't always act on what we know. In fact, my team didn't know that the host (fellow teammate) was using a maphack till he announced to the team in midgame.

Second, just because a player has great strategic advantage derived from this cheat doesn't mean the team is guaranteed a win. Apparently, either the maphacker in the game was a retard or he was doing it way too discreetly so that he appear a retard.

In short, we lost despite having a maphacker in the team. 天理何在?!?!?



Let me elaborate on this fantastical tale of magical beings, alchemy and epic fail.

Once upon a time at a comp not quite far away, there was me in Garena looking for a DotA game. I easily found one and joined it.

Nothing out of the ordinary. The moment the game began, the host told us he was going to farm on the Neutral Creeps and leave all 3 lanes to us. We were fine with that. Another guy said he was going to choose Sniper and solo the top. Okay too.

Bottom lane was the one outnumbered. Our team's Alchemist did his best not to feed while his 2 opponents prevented him from killing anything. An Alchemist should not solo in the first place, according to the other players. But I was NOT going to the bottom lane because I was planning to farm some NCs at lvl 5.

Turned out the Alchemist was pretty decent and didn't feed much, but he soon lost the two towers. Not pro. Meanwhile, I was at the mid lane with another guy, in a 2v2 battle . The opponents were very good and denied a lot of our creep kills. We were annoyed, but we couldn't gank him because there simply wasn't anyone else. Furion was farming all the NCs while the bottom was doing all he could to slow them down.

At the top lane, the arrogant Sniper fed the most somehow. Eventually he asked for help, when his first tower was destroyed. Furion doesn't answer. Bottom was silent. Us, we could weren't quite eager to help since it was pretty much a stalemate at our lane.

Eventually they started hunting us. The Alchemist was violently bullied and this hastened the destruction of the bottom towers until they reached our base. We were alarmed but Furion didn't seem to do much.

Then Furion announced his supreme advantage of epical proportions. Born in the murky depths of the Internet, right from the hackers' legends passed down since the ancient times, the omniscient powers of a MAPHACK was ours! Victory was at hand! God was a Sentinel and fought on our side! Allah Akhbar!

Thus started a string of beacons from him in the Fog of War. Each time he did that, someone was there when we arrived. Each time they hunted us in our NC area, we ganked the first enemy to reach there. However, we suffered more casualties than them. Though we prevented further ganking from them, we were unable to fight them off adequately.

Furion was fat with all his constant farming, but he was also a casualty in every confrontation with them. Everyone wanted him dead because he was fat. As for me, because I couldn't farm NCs, I was weak. Also, I couldn't help them much if they couldn't hurt the enemies enough. After all, my skill damages injured enemies only.

And thus we fed them too much despite having a maphacker, leading to our loss. We were quite speechless at the end.









The Dune books aren't all that great. The second book was, in fact, bordering on boring. So I skipped the third book and went on to reading Confessor from the Sword of Truth series.

I control the spice, thus I control the Universe. RAWR!

Confessor is a much needed improvement from the literary fare I've been having in the last few months.