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CAPTCHAS should be swirlied

Especially the one I just spent 5 minutes figuring out, when I was signing up for a forum. It made me type in the capital of the UK, but didn’t tell me it was case sensitive and required “london” instead of “London.” Thanks…dickface!

Opinions

Just about every discussion we have revolves around our opinions. But if opinions are subjective, why do so many people have disagreements over them? “That movie is gay!” “No it rules!” “It’s gay!” and so on.

I often see people state opinions and other people interpret them as if they are stating facts that can be proven or disproven analytically. Want an example? This dude on an internet forum says that a movie sucks.  Another person replies with “got any proof?” How do you prove an opinion? I find that if you don’t want to get flamed on internet you have to constantly preface your statements with “in my opinion” and “from my perspective”, otherwise people think you’re stating inviolable facts and you’re just daring them to disagree. Why do some people find it hard to separate fact from opinion?

This only applies to subjective things, of course. “Rain falls up and money grows on trees”…well, obviously that’s not an opinion.

It smells like Captain Planet took a crap on the front lawn!

It’s really hard to go outside the house now. Our landlords were trying to unblock the septic tank, but they made a mistake and it’s leaking raw effluent out somehow. Now the whole place stinks.

But let’s look on the bright side, the grass around the septic tank is a lot greener. =)

I don’t trust the disclaimer at the end :(

Technology is amazing

Here’s a mechanical war dog built by the US military: 

Some people would think it’s scary that machines are replacing men on the battlefield, but I think it’s great. It takes us closer to the day where wars can be fought with no human casualties.

It’s been one hell of a busy 2 weeks

An update on the happenings in my life…

On the 7th, the family rented a marquee and went to Coastfest. The idea was that I’d man the marquee and collect email addresses etc. However, the weather was not on our side and we were flooded out on the second day by heavy rains and gale-force winds. It didn’t help that most of the people we worked with were incredibly incompetent (example: our tent was shipped to the site with no sides, and when the sides were delivered they didn’t fit properly). I still spent one night out in the storm, suffice to say I didn’t get much sleep.

My dad is seeing a nuclear medicine physician at Kanwal, and he’s undergoing a multiple-series process known as “stress testing”, and yeah, it’s just as bad as it sounds. I’ve had to drive him there several times in the last week (he’s a paraplegic and there’s no freaking disabled parking at Kanwal) and he will have many more tests ahead of him before he is readmitted to Royal North Shore. But it’s worth it, as it should speed up the process for his kidney operations and help the old guy live a better life.

Lastly, the family has gone on a five-day trip to Bondai. We’re staying at a really expensive hotel, and it’s been a great experience so far. Helpful staff, great food, lots of things to do, it’s hardly worth leaving your suite. I have gone and visited various places in Bondai (it’s hard to forget that I partly grew up here) and it’s been great. There’s lots of small differences to living on the Central Coast (you tip shopowners here, while you don’t do that there), and the beach is beyond awesome. The prices are a gouge though. Would you believe it that bottled water in the suite costs $6.50 per 1.5l bottle? Which doesn’t make sense since tap water is free.

My reactions to Google’s new browser…

…are good. It’s very fast. Pages load almost instantly now, and there’s no lag in switching between tabs a la Firefox. Even the Damocles Sword known as “Myspace” is pretty snappy.

The layout is insanely minimalist. You have a UI that’s about 80 pixels high, a scrollbar down the side, and the rest of the screen is content. There’s no useless status bar down the bottom of the screen, either.

Unlike most programs, it doesn’t sacrifice functionality to obtain minimalism. Everything’s right where you need it, 1-2 clicks away. This is a relief, as there are many browsers out there that were obviously designed by graphic designers with no regard to how the program would actually be used.

Some stuff I’m used to seems to be missing. How do I view a page’s source? Maybe the feature exists, but I can’t seem to find it. Other than that, my only reservation is that Chrome seems to ignore my middle mouse button (which I use a lot), but it’s a beta so I’m not going crazy about it.

Children

I never would have guessed it, but people are telling me I’m good with little kids. Yesterday I spent few hours helping a three year old build a house with building blocks. Initially I thought she was put off because I spent so much time correcting her on what blocks to use, but today’s she’s asked me three times if I’ll help her build another house!

I don’t use “goo goo ga ga” baby talk (why should I? Kids should learn to speak like grownups, not the other way around) but treat kids like adults with a limited vocabulary. I also get on well with old people. Strange, isn’t it?

Ouch!

It appears that I will be manning a display stand for 72 hours straight

As some of you are aware, Coastfest 2008 is on in a few weeks. My family has been tapped to provide a display stand there, where we can sell products and things. One problem: it runs for 3 days, and we won’t have the option of packing our stuff up at night. This means someone (=me) will need to be present at all times to make sure our stuff doesn’t get stolen by hippies.

It will be an interesting three days. The place will be full of alternative bands and artists and everything else you expect at a folk festival. I might even bring my guitar and see if I can get lessons.

Hypnosis

I succesfully hypnotised myself today. I put on a DVD, lay back on the couch, followed the instructions, and soon found myself in a deep, trancelike state.

Hypnosis isn’t like I thought it would be. I had complete control and self-awareness, and could have broken the trance at any time. The best way I can explain: it’s like being asleep, except you’re conscious of being asleep and can choose when you wake up.

My father was a skilled hypnotist, and had talents like putting someone deep under and convincing them that their own purse was too heavy to lift (he told me that he once saw a strong, fit woman struggling and straining to lift a purse that couldn’t have weighed more than 2kg). Also, you can modify your brain and behaviour while under hypnosis, for good or for bad. I must explore the possibilities of this.

“Feeling! Feeling! FEELING!”

Youtube is full of retards. I was just searching the site for stuff like “fast guitar” and “fast shredding”, and in almost every video I see comments like “sure you can play fast, but you have no emotion” and “you need to play with feeling.” And this isn’t just in one or two videos, but nearly every one!

Since when are these weenies experts on guitar technique? Not only do I suspect most of them have never touched a musical instrument in their lives (Guitar Hero Zero 3 doesn’t count), but they’re offering their backhand “critiques” just as a way of boosting their own ego. The internet has become just another venue where insecure kids rubbish people who are genuinely talented, and it’s a shame it has to be that way.

And about this “feeling” and “emotion” business. This of course is subjective, which is the whole reason why people use it so often. If someone sucks at guitar it should be immediately obvious, but if someone plays well there’s nothing you can bash him about…except…he has no emotion! Yeah, that’s right! It’s a bulletproof criticism because there’s no response to a subjective assertion like “your playing lacks emotion”.

It’s time all of these self-proclaimed Youtube critics shut up and went back to what they’re good at…playing GH3 alone in their bedrooms.

2nd movie thing

That animated Star Wars movie really got its ass kicked by the critics. I haven’t seen the movie so I can’t comment on it, but the trailer left me feeling very perturbed. I mean, you have an epic Hollywood sci-fi adventure story rendered in anime style computer graphics with sharp angles and distorted proportions. It just looks wrong.

I’m sure they were trying to capture the feel of the TV show, but they’re missing the point. TV cartoons are made on the cheap. The flat, angular, cell-shaded visuals are a necessity. Why you’d want to keep that in a feature movie is a bit beyond me, but like I said I haven’t seen it yet.

Why so serious?

I went and saw Batman: The Dark Knight yesterday after hearing nothing but good things about it. For the first part, I was amazed. Heath Ledger’s Joker is fantastic. But after I realised that a) 90% of the movie was about the Joker and b) there’s really nothing except the Joker, my interest level kinda dropped.

The movie’s main problem is…well…Batman is barely in it! He appears unmasked in about three scenes. He gets perhaps 20 lines in total. Most of the movie is about the Joker, with a side helping of Harvey Dent aka Two Face (who is so unlikeable you almost can’t wait for bad things to start happening to him). It’s like watching a Rocky movie where Rocky Balboa has a 10-minute cameo.

There was good stuff, of course. The scene involving the fake Batmen was quite clever (“What’s the difference between you and me?” “I’m not wearing hockey pads.”) As a bit of Bat-trivia, Batman never uses guns. Indeed, he has only pulled a gun on a criminal once (see the first episode of “Batman Beyond”), and that was enough to cause him to retire in shame. As soon as I saw a guy in a Batman suit charging forward with a machinegun, I knew he was fake. Other good parts were the scenes with Gordon’s son (whom I’m sure will grow up to become Robin) and the final clash with Two-Face.

But back to the Joker: Heath Ledger has dispensed with the silly Joker of the first movie and now plays someone who looks like a cross between Sweeney Todd and Marilyn Manson. Mere words cannot describe how effective this character is. He’s not a goofy comic-book villain, he’s a psychopathic freak who thinks of murder the same way most people think of going to the bathroom. Another piece of trivia: during the movie the Joker tells two conflicting stories about how he got his scars. This is consistant with the personality of the Joker, who invents and fabricates past lives for himself until not even he is sure what the truth is.

Sadly, while the villains were great, the main characters were anything but. You have Harvey Dent, who is supposed to be a sympathetic character but comes across as a nominee for Knob of the Year Award, and Commissioner Gordon, who is a bit more tolerable but still annoying. And then there’s Rachel, who was unmemorable and generic beyond belief. Throughout the movie I was asking myself “hey wait, have I seen her before?….ah forget it.”

Overall, this movie was pretty weak.

Just when you think you’re out, they pull you back in

My dad is out of hospital, but he has to go back in on Thursday (tentative). It’s been a one-thing-leads-to-another medical adventure. He first went in to get his knee fixed, and then they discovered that he has kidney stones the size of the moon, and they also found a blood clot in his leg. It all adds up to a lot work, and it’s lucky he has Medicare.

It really makes me value my health. If there’s anyone reading this who has perfect health…hang on to that bastard! Don’t drink, don’t smoke, look both ways before driving into a T-intersection, and stay out of moshpits. If someone mugs you, it may be better to give them your wallet than to try and fight. And above all, watch what you eat.

As an interesting coincidence, the Royal Northshore Hospital is where my dad met my mum…30 years ago. And it will probably be the place he dies. Wouldn’t that be something?

Joke

What’s the difference between a tyre and 365 used condoms?

The first is a Goodyear. The second is a great year.

What would you do if…

…you were in a car underwater?
On the radio yesterday there was a story about a man who’s car skidded off the road and ended up in the Cooks River. There was a window open, and water flooded in. Within minutes, the car was at the bottom.

What would you do in a situation like that? The man giving the interview on the radio was quite knowledgeble. He said that it isn’t a case of opening a door and swimming to the surface. The water pressure means it is very difficult to open a car door deep underwater. And you can’t smash a window either, the water pressure on the outside and air pressure on the inside will stop the window from shattering.

At the end of the day, what did the poor guy in that the airbag deployed, and trapped him in his seat. How…ironic.

Woah, is WP laggy!

It takes like 20 seconds to bring up the New Post screen. Maybe I should have gotten a LiveJournal.

Anyway, I just discovered that my blog was set so that the last 100 (!) entries display on the main page. I changed it to a more reasonable number: 20. Sorry about that.

I’m learning to play guitar

With no help, since I can’t afford lessons. I found a battered old acoustic guitar in the garage, and decided to, yeah, learn it.

There was a lot of stuff I had to improvise on. The strings were very old and dull, so I bought new ones and spent an hour trying to change them before I realised that two of the bridge pins on the guitar were broken. Solution: I tied the new strings in a knot around the bridge. They tend to spring loose occasionally, but it’s playable. Also, I didn’t have a pick, so I used a paperclip.

I’m busy learning chords and scales right now. I can do A Major, A Minor, C Major, D Major, G Major…and some other one. (So I’m basically on the level of Nickelback’s guitarist) No plans to buy an electric guitar just yet. I want to see if I like playing first.

Stick Arena pt 2

In relation to my last post I thought I’d post my strategies for playing Stick Arena

1. There are six weapons in the game, three melee and three ranged. They are graded by how powerful and fast they are. For example: the sledgehammer is slow but powerful, the katana is fast but weak, and the baseball bat is in the middle. It’s the same with the shotgun, the pistol, and the machinegun.
2. Ranged is not necessarily better than melee. On open maps with lots of space, ranged weapons (esp. the machinegun) are effective. But on crowded maps without much space, I usually get better results out of melee weapons.
3. Never attack unless there’s an enemy in your sight. The sound will echo around the map and other players will track you down. This is especially true if you don’t have a weapon. People will hear the sound of fists and know that there’s a vulnerable player nearby.
4. Camping doesn’t really work in this game. Always be moving around the map, picking up weapons, searching for weak players, etc.
5. Sometimes you will get a mosh pit with 3 or so players crowded in the same room. The sledgehammer can be very effective in these conditions. I once scored 2 kills with one hit.
6. Take advantage of the game engine. When you move forward, the screen will scroll at a slower rate and you can’t see what’s ahead of you. So when you get into a firing position, make sure you move back a bit so you have a better view of enemies coming at you.
7. Always make sure you’re standing in a “blind spot” such as the corner of a wall, so enemies don’t have a clean line of fire in your direction.
8. Cowardly as it may seem, you should run away whenever possible when someone has an equal weapon to you (ie, don’t fight katanas with katanas), instead, tackle someone with a weaker weapon. You get better odds that way.

Stick Arena

Do you folks remember XGen, those guys who made that awesome “Defend the Castle” game? Well, they ride again with a kickass new game, Stick Arena! It’s  lots of fun and I can see myself getting addicted to it.

It’s basically a multiplayer game where you play as a stickman and have to fight other stickmen using weapons like baseball bats, pistols, and shotguns. Gameplay is bare-bones, but that’s OK. The best thing about it is you don’t need to spend any time signing up and logging in. Just click “Quick Start” and you can start playing straight away.

One small problem: the game is full of hackers. If you get into a game, and there’s this guy on the leaderboard with 99 kills and 0 deaths, don’t bother playing. Exit out and join a new game.

Meh

My dad is in hospital because of an infected knee, so I took the train up to St Leonards (a cool place) to visit him.

What has happened is that his left knee has severe pressure sores (he’s crippled in both legs and uses a wheelchair) and the skin has broken and peeled off in places, exposing discoloured bone. With a normal infection, you can beat it with antibiotics. But when the bone gets infected, it’s pretty serious. You need surgery. We took him to Royal North Shore Hospital, and he goes into the theater tomorrow.

He seems to be going OK. He reads John Grisham and chats with the other patients. He has a lot of funny stories (like how a madman escaped from the psych unit and tried to burn down the ward, it’s a long story) and seems to be in good spirits. Hopefully the surgery will go well. There’s still no discharge date yet, but I’m hoping it will be soon.

Food

In the old days people put spices on their food not to improve the flavor, but to disguise the fact that it was rotten. I decided to try it out myself when there was nothing in the house except 2 week old mince. I microwaved it and firebombed it with salt, pepper, mixed herbs & spices, and sauce that I found in the cupboard. It was still pretty bad.

In other news, tomorrow I will be going to Canberra on secret mystery business. Luck.

Top Gear

I watch it a lot, and I can’t wait for the new season to start here.

If you’re American, it’s an automobile show from the UK. “Blah, another candy-ass car show for rich people. Who cares?” Because it’s funny, that’s why. The presenters are hilarious. In between the car whoring, they do stunts, and some of these stunts are so ridiculous it boggles the mind. You could get Howard Hughs, Evel Knievel, and the Marquis de Sade in the same room, hand them a blank cheque, and the results wouldn’t be as hilariously high-concept as the average Top Gear episode.

I remember the episode where a 4WD (driven by Clarkson and Hammond) raced against a team of sled dogs (led by May) to get to the north pole. The 4WD was a huge distance ahead, but they encountered a field full of icy boulders that they had to chip through by hand. You had to savor the moment, when, after 10 hours of chipping ice, they finally break through…and see a second field of icy boulders just up ahead.

Or how about the one where they took a second-hand bomb, strapped it to a rocket, and ACTUALLY TRIED TO LAUNCH IT INTO SPACE. They failed, but it was still impressive to see so many studio dollars get wasted like that.

And who could forget the episode where they drove all the way through Alabama with slogans such as “Hillary for President” and “Man Love Rules OK” painted on their cars, and ended up being attacked by a gang of rednecks?

Bottom line: it’s a great, great show. I can’t wait for the new series.

Religion and logic

For a long time I’ve been a supporter of religion. Organised or otherwise, it has many positive and helpful uses in society. It can unite people in a way that transcends government and culture, even if the claims it makes about the afterlife and the supernatural are untrue.

One of the things I often hear about religion is that it’s irrational. This is quite true. It makes claims that no-one can test or prove. But what’s wrong with that?

Our society is full of irrationality that goes embraced and endorsed by so-called rationalists. Want examples? Funerals. Why on earth do we have little ceremonies when someone dies? They’re dead. They don’t care. How about national holidays? Is there any rational basis for those? That they bring people closer together? That’s an emotional reason, not a rational one. How about teenage love? When you crush on a girl, are you logically working through the possibilities in your mind, thinking “okay, she has good future prospects, a nice family, her genes seem to be in good order” before you decide whether you want to mate with her? Of course not. Your emotions and hormones are making a decision on their own. The logical part of your brain is MIA.

Now, for the most part, rationalism is far better than irrationalism. You don’t want to be irrationality in, say, the sciences. But why must we strive for rationality in, say, culture, entertainment and art? We need to remember that logic is merely a way of finding the truth, not truth itself.

The neckbeard

I can’t wait for some fashion trends to end…

I now know how to surf the web through a proxy

My normal IP originates from Australia. But five minutes ago, it told me that I’m living in the United States. Interesting stuff.

Longest night of the year

Yes, it’s the winter equinox here. It was also my 19th birthday. I type this in a new pair of pyjamas. My other gifts included socks, shirts, and an electric razor. Those may sound like crappy presents, but karma reasserted itself and my final present blew all the others away.

It’s a $400 mobile GPS system. You plug it into your car’s utility port, type in where you want to go, and it actually tells you what turns you have to make and what you need to do. How cool is that? It also makes a loud beeping noise when you go over the speed limit. Devices like that must kill more people than they save.

I might have a real party, with friends and everything, later this week.

Can animals do maths?

I believe that mathematics is perhaps the hardest intellectual discipline in the entire world. History, philosophy, languages, and the other humanities are easy by comparison. They’re all about learning and remembering places, dates, names, and concepts. They can be difficult because of the sheer volume of stuff you have to remember, but they are still fundamentally simple. If you can remember who’s screwing who on a TV sitcom, then you can be a good humanities student.

But maths is different. You need to understand abstract concepts, understand more abstract concepts that build upon the abstract concepts you’ve already learned, and be able to make rapid and accurate connections between these theoretical ideas. It’s like a pyramid, if even one of the foundation bricks is missing the building falls down. I suppose this is why students who slack off in primary school find maths nearly impossible when they enter high school. The groundwork isn’t there.

I have a question…can animals do maths? I don’t mean being able to count, that’s an entirely different thing. I mean being able to add up sums and visualise math concepts in their heads, the way we humans do.

We have animals that can use tools, and we have animals that have languages. We even have animals that seem to understand simple morality and right-vs-wrong (mostly dolphins and primates). But I have never heard of an animal that was able to do maths. Does one exist?

Uh…what?

Here’s what you need to do to get a copy of your Birth Certificate in NSW.

It all looks good, until you get to the requirements:

If born in Australia:

• An Australian Birth Certificate

I must be…missing something.

Lying your way to the top

I’m sure that we’ve all had at least one experience where a lie worked out in our favor. And likewise, an experience where telling the truth got us in trouble. Does this mean that lies can be good and the truth can be evil?

Once, many years ago, I saw a family struggling to get their child inside a car at a service station. Eventually, the mother said “We have a cake for you at home! A nice big cake! Get in the car, and we can go home and eat it!” As the child jumped into the SUV, I heard the mother whisper to an older relative “There’s no cake, I just wanted to get him in the car.”

A small incident, you might say. But it made me wonder. Does this stuff happen often at his home? If so, he could grow up thinking that “truth” is whatever you want it to be, and you can be honest and dishonest whenever it suits you. What sort of person would that philosophy turn you into?

Uneducate yourself

Do you want to know how to speed up your mail delivery? Watch this video. Do you want to know how to protect your computer from daylight saving changes? Then watch this one. Or how about this one, which shows you how to recharge batteries?

These videos are really helpful and educational…until you realise they’re total bullshit. This one about hunting for dinosaur fossils more or less gives the game away, though.

It’s a scary how idiocy can sound believable when told with a straight face. Remember that when you next get solicited by MLM agents.

Car graphics

Well, my dad and I know a guy who builds and collects racing cars. And he had an interesting idea: start up a racing club, here on the Central Coast. The idea is still in its formative stage, but our friend has a lot of contacts and is trying to swing some deals. My dad agreed to do some promotion and web work for him.

Our friend likes to import cars (or car parts) from overseas, because there really is no market here for the sort of thing he does. He has an 5 Exy (0-60kph in 3 seconds!) and also some classic show cars like the Marlin Sportster.

My Dad wanted some simple graphics done of the Sportster, and while I don’t pretend to be a professional graphic artist, I had a go at it. Here’s the image (click to enlarge):

I’m very impressed with Xara. It is a powerful program and you can do things I didn’t think were possible before.

Awesome, forgotten blogs

Some years ago, I was an avid reader of a guy called Francesco Poli, who ran a blog called Videogames are Only for Those Who Deserve Them. He was one of the most prolific bloggers I have seen, writing somewhere around 800 posts a year. You would leave his blog open in a window, refresh it 10 hours later, and he would have posted three or four more dense 1k word slabs of hard-hitting game criticism. It was unbelievable.

His opinions were “unusual”. He was a borderline neo-Nazi, praised Microsoft, loathed Linux, and thought that Firefox and Thunderbird promoted communism. I didn’t always agree with him, of course, but in a blogosphere filled with left-wing liberals and whiny open-source fans, his opinions were a breath of fresh air.

Go here to see what he was capable of. He had a witty writing style that made his blog very easy to read. He seldom used curse words, although when he brought out the big guns and blasted a game he hated it was a sight to behold.

He had an encyclopedic knowledge of games. There seriously did not seem to be a single release for a single platform that he hadn’t at least looked at. And of course, there were his huge 10 thousand word end-of-year roundups that packed more entertainment than most gaming blogs manage in their lifetimes.

But one day, his blog went dark. He stopped writing posts, and eventually the blog was taken up by a cybersquatter. I have never heard or seen of him since, and only a few pages of his blog are available in internet cache.

To the chase…does anyone else remember this guy or know what happened to him?

An anecdote for your day

I was at a friend’s place, and the discussion turned to the upcoming Batman movie. I casually mentioned that I hadn’t seen Batman Begins.

He reacted with shock and indignation. “You HAVE to see that movie.” And before I could say anything he had reached into a pile of hundreds of DVDs and pulled out Batman Begins. “Here, you can borrow it.”

Well, I don’t have my license so me and my sister still rely on our parents to take us places. Our mum had pulled up in front of his place and we were almost in the car before we remembered the DVD. “Don’t bother,” she said. “I rented it earlier today.”

Strangely, this annoyed me. We had someone who was offering to let us watch the movie for free…and yet we had already rented it! Why can’t amazing good luck happen when we really need it?

The final part of the story came when we got home. My mum hadn’t rented Batman Begins at all, but the first Batman movie. WTF? Was this where I kicked a kitten in a previous life?

Ghost

One day at a football stadium

Someone recorded an entire day in two minutes at Lambeau Field using time-lapse photography. You can watch it here:

http://www.jsonline.com/story/index.aspx?id=684920

I guess they edited the parts that involved football players homoerotically touching each other.

5 Great Tips for Playing Risk

So you think Monopoly is boring, skill-less, and emotionally traumatic? Well, don’t underestimate Risk, the game that kills your friendships.
There are many sites out there that teach you how to play Risk well. All of these are pointless, as no matter how skilled you are, you will still lose the game. I used to play with a bunch of friends, and there was this one kid who always got lucky rolls. I could never understand it. He would pick up the dice, and get two sixes and a five, time after time. Maybe there’s a special way you twist your wrist when you throw. Needless to say, he won all of our games. They should have called it Risk (Unless You’re the Annoying Candy-Ass who Rolls Three Sixes in a Row, then it’s a Breeze)

So instead of teaching people how to play the game, I decided to teach people how to make the game more fun. God knows this is something Risk needs.

1. Do not try and take over Asia or Europe. It’s impossible. There’s too many attack points, and no-one’s going to let you have all of those extra men. If you have to control a continent, make it North America or Australia. And don’t attack anyone if you can help it. Over-aggressive players usually end up with like 10 territories and only one man on each of them. It’s a good idea to take over Australia, pile all your men on Siam, and just sit there.

2. Constantly bitch at other players. If they attack you, whine loudly about how they hate you, how they are singling you out, how they broke an agreement they made earlier, and so on. This may sound stupid, but it is scarily effective. If you do it enough, players will become wary of attacking you because they don’t want to deal with the real-life whining it will unleash. Cheap emotional manipulation allows you to get ahead in this game.

3. Constantly challenge other players’ interpretations of the rules. “You’re not allowed to place two more men for each pictured territory! You can only do that once!” Like the above, usually they won’t bother debating you and let you have your way.

4. The time spent playing a Risk game follows a bell curve depending on how many players there. If there’s just two, you’ll be done in one hour. If there’s three, it might take two hours. If there’s four, it will be four hours. If there’s six, eight hours, and so on. Be sure to bring something like a book to read, and maybe earplugs so you don’t have to listen to the arguments going on around you.

5. When you’re in a battle and get a series of lucky rolls, tell people it was all skill. It will drive them up the wall. When you capture a territory, wag a finger in their face and say “neener neener neener.”

Some of you are probably saying “but Ben, doing those things would just make the game more annoying for other people!” Yes, and in turn, make them not want to play Risk, which is the whole point. As the enemy of my enemy is my friend, thus the enemy of not-fun must be fun. Bottom line: don’t play Risk.

Opportunity

Two shoe salesmen went to Africa. After a short while, one of them phoned home, saying “I can’t possibly sell shoes here! Everyone in this country is barefoot!” Not long after, the second salesman phoned home, saying “This is the business opportunity of a lifetime! EVERYONE in this country is barefoot!”

- A parable

Man vs beast

Foxes are funny creatures. Back when I had the luxury of not needing to worry about them, I thought they were cool.

But now, living on a property that borders on to a nature reserve, I understand why farmers hate foxes. They devastate fucking everything! Here (in chronological order, spanning a few years) is the story of my family’s adventure with one fox. It’s like the script of an Oliver Stone movie.

• 5 yrs: we move up from Sydney, and find a lovely pair of peacocks sitting on our front lawn. (for the sake of correctness, only male birds are referred to as “peacocks.” The females are “peahens.”) The landlords explain that the peafowl aren’t pets but aren’t entirely wild either. They hang around the house in exchange for seed. This was majorly awesome. We had peacocks in our back yard!
• 4 yrs: one of the birds (the peahen) mysteriously vanishes. She stops visiting the house, and the male is left alone.
• 3.5 yrs: the male peacock also disappears. Around the same time, we find some old bird bones lying in a clump somewhere, with a few tattered feathers. We suspect this was the female’s remains.
• At the same time, we notice a red fox on our property. Our father has photographs. It’s gigantic, almost the size of one of our neighbour’s guard dogs. There was little doubt that it had killed our peafowl.
• 3 yrs: our beloved cat Misty dies of natural causes. We bury her in the valley next to our house. In less than a week, the grave has been disturbed and our cat’s body has vanished. Her remains were never found.
• 2 yrs: to save money, our family bought 6 or so egg-laying hens. Our landlords build a little hen house for them. Because it’s small, we let them free-range over the property during the day.
• Over the next couple of months, our Eiserbrown hens are slaughtered one by one. One night, only 5 of them come back, then later, only 4, and so on. This was distressing but there was little we could do. Eventually, all of our hens are dead. The fox is never caught.
• 1 yr: the red fox is sighted again. We receive a new cat as a gift, and decide to keep her indoors.
• 6 mos: we get 6 new Eiserbrown hens. This time, we build a run next to the hen house. This gives them room to walk, while at the same time keeping them safe from the fox…or so we think.
• 4 mos: one night, the fox gets inside the hen run. We had covered the perimeter with large stones, but the fox pulled them away with its paws and dug its way in. It mauls one hen and carries another away into the night. The injured hen is paralysed and in a lot of pain, so I kill it with my hatchet.
• We realise that if we don’t act, the fox will kill our hens one by one like before. So, we took unorthodox action, and allowed the hens to sleep indoors during the night (the fox wouldn’t attack during the day). We would put them in boxes in the garage overnight and put them back in the pen the next morning.
• 2 mos: this gets annoying, so we spend about 10 hours in one day digging around the henhouse, laying down steel mesh, and covering the mesh with dirt.  Now, we thought, surely the fox can’t dig in and the hens can live in the hen house again.
• Yesterday: I look at the hen house and the steel mesh has been partly uncovered and has also been pulled back and bent in many places. WHAT. The fox is still trying to get in!

It’s like being stuck in one of those nightmares where you run and run but can never get away. Hopefully our hens will be safe, but it’s scary that a single animal can be that persistent and relentless over a five year period of time.

Once, in my father’s time, you could earn money by killing foxes and selling their pelts. Not any more. With stricter gun laws and harsher hunting measures, the population of foxes (and other wild predators) is increasing. They really are a hazard to native forms of wildlife, and as we have discovered they kill and eat practically everything with fur or feathers. We need to find out some way to kill the bastard. How long do the fuckers live, anyway?

Bart the General

This was a meme that circulated the internet around two years ago, and has now been forgotten. It’s a Simpsons parody. Sort of.

Bart the General

It’s funny not because it’s incompetent, but because it’s just so…weird. You have all sorts of freaky shit happening for no reason. As an example, at 3:02 you have Homer scooting back and forth on his ass with his head in his hands, growling like a bear. What does it mean? I don’t know.

Anyway, the modified theme song was a hoot.

The 7 Commandments All Video Games Should Obey

This article has been doing the blog-cha-cha the past few weeks. It’s really funny, and has a lot of good points. I thought that I would post my comments here:

The numbers:

7.  I completely agree. One of the reasons games like Super Smash Bros are so popular is that they bring people together. You’re not playing with someone 2000 miles away, behind the safety of an internet screen name. You’re there, in the same room with them. You laugh together, you share drinks together. This is how friendships are made, and playing the same game over Xbox Live or Gamepark just can’t compare. Another advantage is this, if they cheat you can reach over and give them a nipple cripple.

6.  Once again, the article is spot on. Games cost money to make, and developers are tempted to (instead of releasing a short game), take a short game and pad it out with filler. “Based on the Movie” games are notorious for this, but every game does it to some extent.  Even Silent Hill 2 has its moments when the whole horror thing gets abandoned while the player searches for coins and shit. It’s annoying, and should have been put out to pasture a long time ago.

5. Quite true. Incidentally, repetition isn’t just a modern problem, old-school games were full of repetitive parts. The difference is, now games have a smokescreen of photorealistic graphics to stop the player from realising that he is doing the same thing over and over. Ask yourself “would this game be fun with 1997 graphics?” It works every time.

4. This is why FEAR was such a big success. It felt like you were actually firing a real gun. You had the recoil, the delay time, the satisfying impact. It just felt good. Compare this to bullshit like Serious Sam where you’re killing billions of identical enemies with a toy gun that fires a zillion rounds a second. On the flip side, I guess you could say that games like Serious Sam are teaching us nice morals by showing how boring murder is.

3. This is what’s called a “brain bug.” Developer 1 implements an idea that may be good or may not be good. His game becomes a hit (for whatever reason) and many developers clone his game verbatim, using that good/not good idea simply because they think that if they do things the way he did, their games will also be a success. This is why many modern games have old-fashioned conventions that simply do not add to the game and should have been eliminated years ago. For example, strategy games have long restricted the number of units you can move at once. Even Starcraft only lets you move 9 at a time, if I recall. Why? There’s no reason an artificial restriction like that should be there.

2. Trust me, I was caught in the neck by this when I bought Alexander. Bugs all over the place. And because the game wasn’t a financial success, no patch was released. I paid money for a game that will remain eternally broken. It’s not an unreasonable expectation that our games should work, guys. I’d love the idea of a warranty of sorts when you buy a game.

1. It’s like the retarded horsepower wars currently raging among American car manufacturers. People want bigger, better, stronger, or at least corporations think we do. I well tell you right now that I do not care about graphics in games. In fact, I usually play with all of the advanced graphics options turned off, so that I get smoother gameplay.

Marketing and PR might have something to do with the “bigger is better” trend. As an example, the UAE is currently building a skyscraper that is somewhere in the zone of 800 meters tall. Why? Will it be a huge boon for their economy to have an 800 meter tall building? Of course not. They simply want to claim they have the biggest building in the world. It is the same with video games. It is easy to convey beautiful graphics in a magazine screenshot, but not so easy to convey great gameplay or awesome storyline. If there was millions of dollars on the line, which would you go for?

If you liked that article, check out the Gamer’s Manifesto. It was written by the same guy and covers most of the same points (in fact, this new article is a rewritten version of the old, out-of-date one) but is equally funny. Just remember it’s from 2004, so much of it is out of date.

RL n00bs

The things I don’t understand could fill many books. Why are dogs so afraid of vacuum cleaners? Why do people compete in the Special Olympics when everyone gets a medal anyway? Why are Fall Out Boy and Nickelback massively popular when everyone agrees they suck? It doesn’t make sense.

Anyone, something that keeps me awake at night is MMOs, their popularity, and why people substitute them for social contact. I simply do not see their appeal. In 2001-2003 I used the online game site Neopets, but that was simply to play games. If I wanted to make friends, I opened the door and went outside.

I do not think the majority of MMO users are gamers anymore. We have Second Life, IMVU, the Sims Online, and many others that only exist for networking purposes (in other words, it’s a fancy way of letting people chat). Weird huh? You have a digital, 3D recreation of the real world that people use only to chat in. Why not cut out the extra step and talk to people face to face?

Then…it hit me.

People play Second Life because they aren’t happy with their First Life. I admittedly haven’t spent much time on Second Life, but I haven’t seen many ugly or fat people there. Everyone’s a supermodel. There’s no crime or pollution. And there’s perfect anonymity. If things go to hell, you can just delete your character and start over.

Is this bad? Probably not.  Social misfits have been habitual roleplayers for many years now. But…why?!

The scariest thing that ever happened to me

Lots of people [don't] ask me this, so I thought I would answer it here. It’s only a small thing, and it didn’t even seem scary at the time.

I used to have strange eating habits…I didn’t like cooked things. I’d eat raw potatoes, raw pasta, raw carrots. One time, when I was about six, this almost got me into very big trouble.

I saw an open packet of noodles on the table, so I grabbed a handful and started munching on it. I tasted something strange and metallic (yeah, you can see where this is going) and something very sharp pricked my tongue. I spat out the noodles, and saw a small needle lying in two pieces in the middle of the chewed up noodle mess. I guess my teeth must have broken it.

I was young, so I didn’t give it a second thought. But looking back, I realise that if I had swallowed it, I might have died. People have been killed swallowing small needles by mistake. What would have happened? Would I have gotten to hospital in time? And how did that needle get there?

That is the scariest thing that ever happened to me, and this is the first time I’ve told anyone about it.

I watched Vantage Point

Will someone please fire the camera-man? Or at least explain to him that it is not necessary to shake the camera around like a macarena? I made the mistake of watching this movie with an empty stomach. Several times I thought I’d have to leave and vomit in the bathrooms, that’s how nauseous I was becoming. Vantage Point shows off a loathsome trend Hollywood is riding on: they think that they can make the movie look chaotic and exciting with lots and lots of short edits that last for 1-2 seconds and by flailing the camera around so you can’t see anything.

I could barely tolerate the battle scene in the second LOTR movie. The Bourne Supremacy was pushing things. Cloverfield and Blair Witch were annoying, but at least they had an excuse for shaky camera work (both films are framed as amateur documentaries). But Vantage Point is over the limit, half the time it seems like the guy holding a camera is having a seizure. It makes the movie that much harder to watch, and it’s a shame since the movie was otherwise fairly good.

That second last sentence has given me an idea for a comedy. The mob loans a starving young director 3 million to direct a movie, and if he doesn’t deliver it on time they will sell his children to the child prostitution rings in Cambodia. Midway through shooting, the camera man has an epileptic fit. They’re already behind schedule and they can’t afford to re-shoot anything, so they must work around it and try and make sure the action is always happening in front of the flailing camera, no matter how stupid or retarded it looks. Would you watch this movie? I would.

Brawl

My close friends know that if it says “Super Smash Bros” on the cover, I’m THERE. Whether it’s the original version on the N64 or Melee, I love them all. They’re the most fun and addictive fighting games ever made. Great gameplay and graphics,  cute stages and goodies, and no real problems. Well, OK, I don’t like the cheap characters with unfair attacks and no weaknesses. I have a friend who picks Captain Falcon every time and Falcon Punches you all day long. And another friend who plays as Fox…dear god, don’t get me started on him. And I have a third friend who loves playing as Pikachu, probably the lamest, most over-powered character in the whole series. What were they thinking when they added that lightning storm attack?
Anyway, what I’m saying is I want to play the new game, Brawl. But I don’t have a Wii. And since Brawl is the only Wii game I want to play, I would basically be paying $200 to play Brawl. To my mind, that is a ripoff.

So now what I’m trying to is make friends with people who own a Wii so I can play Brawl and their house. I really am pathetic sometimes…

Google vs Britney Spears

Google has released a list of misspelled searches that were autocorrected to “Britney Spears”. If you don’t understand why this would be funny, read to the end of the list where people are searching for stuff like “Buttney Spears”.

Urban myths

One of the differences between small town and big city life is urban myths. You know, the stories people tell about weird murders and supernatural events and mysterious crimes that supposedly occurred in the area. If you live in a big city you can go for years without hearing one. But if you live in a small town with only one movie theatre and no broadband internet, you hear them all the time.Here’s a good one. A boy and his girl are driving along a deserted road in the outback when their car breaks down. The boy walks to the nearest town to get help, while the girl waits in the car. Many hours pass. Suddenly, the girl here’s a thump thump thump sound, as if something is hitting the car’s rear window. She turns to have a look, and sees a crazy, haggard old man, dressed in rags…hitting the car’s rear window with her boyfriend’s severed head.

Another one. A woman driving to her daughter’s school play, and she stops at a service station to get gas. While filling the tank she meets a man who is desperate for help. He says he is urgently late for a business meeting and his car has been stolen. He would be very thankful if he would be able to drive her to (address). It’s close to her daughter’s school, so she agrees. He throws his suitcase in the back of the car and says he just has to quickly visit the men’s room, and then they can leave. She’s waiting, and suddenly in a blind panic realises that her daughter’s play starts 30 minutes earlier than she had thought! She is so panicked that she forgets about the man and drives off. Later, she’s filled with remorse and tries to get in contact with the man so she can apologise. She opens his suitcase to look for a phone number…but finds nothing except a knife and a roll of duct tape.

Great, aren’t they? Most of them just sound like fairy tales gone out of control but some of them…you wonder if they really did happen.

The defining trait of an urban myth is VAGUENESS. No-one can tell you exactly where it happened. No-one can tell you when. No-one knows what the peoples’ names were. And none of them can be traced back to a reputable source. If you ask the person who told it to you where they heard it, they will always say they heard it from a friend, who in turn heard it from another friend, etc. I’m sure many of them are based on real events, but they’re most likely so distorted that they’re unrecognisable from anything that ever might have happened.

It’s in our nature to seek after the exciting and interesting and avoid the boring and plain. Let’s say you’re a kid and your dad works at a morgue. He tells you they had accidently buried someone before their death certificate had been signed. Now, that story has promise, but if you really want to gross out your friends, it needs some extra juice. You pass on the story to your friends, but tell them THAT THEY HAD DUG UP THE BODY AND FOUND SCRATCH MARKS ON THE INSIDE OF THE COFFIN LID. Your friends will tell the story to their friends, but with some added details of their own. I don’t know, maybe they dug up the body and found that the person had bitten their own tongue off and choked on their own blood.

Now, I know not all of us are mercenary enough to lie like that, but you can still see how an urban legend can spread. Given a choice between and interesting lie and a boring truth, many people choose the lie. And the world can be a very boring place sometimes.

Urban myths have an appeal even once you’ve dismissed the story itself as frivolous bullshit. They are a case study in human behavior. It has been said that a lie travels halfway around the world before the truth has its pants on, so should we be surprised that small town citizens and overeager net users alike latch on to sensationalism?

(This is an 8-second clip from The Wizard of Oz. There is a strange moving shape in the background. According to legend, it is a disgruntled employee hanging himself. Why none of the actors seem to notice it is a mystery.)

I Wanna Be the Guy

I found a free game called I Wanna Be the Guy, make from a ROM hack of Battle Toads. It is very, very difficult. The creator says he wanted to make it as brutally hard as possible. It keeps track of how many times you’ve died and I’m now at 300 after only a few hours play.

It’s torture, but I know I will not be able to rest until I beat this.

How to get free food at McDonalds’

Order something, and then change your mind or make some excuse that will prevent you from paying (“Oh shit! I don’t have enough money!”). Store policy says that all rejected orders must be thrown out, so most of the time they will give you your meal for free.

I have gotten two cheeseburgers and a Big Mac using this trick. Remember: do not it too often, or they will get wise and refuse to serve you. I suggest you memorize the three or four closest McDonalds’ outlets, so you can hit them one after the other.

The Amen Break

Does anyone know about the Amen Break? It’s a drum solo that goes for six seconds and is very famous. Trust me, you’d recognise it if you heard it. I just finished watching a documentary about the Amen Break.

It’s incredible, isn’t it? A six-second drum solo from the disposable b-side of an ancient single that an obscure R&B band released way back in the 60s has the potential to become the most widely-recognised drum solo on earth. It’s like the urban myth about a kid who accidentally leaves his band’s demo tape at a recording studio, and the next morning his song is being played in commercials all across the country.

The documentary also has some interesting history about electronic dance music and music copyright law. I suggest you watch it.

Bioethics

Here’s something I’ve been wrestling with lately.

Let’s say genetic engineering has improved to the point where we can prevent birth defects, ie completely remove the mutations in the genome that cause problems such as cancer, Alzheimer’s, and spina bifida. If we could do this, it would be horribly cruel not to, wouldn’t it?

And let’s also say we are able to remove things like speech impairment and hyperactivity. Stuff that isn’t dangerous but nevertheless makes life hard for people. We’d do this if we could, wouldn’t we? After all, we want our kids to have the best life possible.

How do you draw the line between this, and engineering our babies to be as socially desirable as possible? If we can snip cancer and birth defects out of our DNA, why can’t we also snip things like depression and sexual perversions like pedophilia. Hell, why shouldn’t we engineer all of our babies to be beautiful, charming, Mensa-class geniuses?

I’m talking about bioethics. It’s what you and I will have to deal with in our lifetimes. Frankly: I find the idea of a society filled with genetically-engineered superhumans repulsive. But I can’t find any logical arguments to why it would be a bad idea.

Any arguments I can find against “designer babies” sound silly in light of the huge benefits they would bring to society. If we could engineer all of our babies to be smarter, then research and development would jump forward and the human race would improve faster than ever. If we engineered our babies to be compassionate Mother Teresa types, we could potentially eliminate famine and poverty within 20 years. Fighting a war? Why not build super soldiers? If that sounds horrible to you…why?

“But we shouldn’t interfere with nature!” Sorry, but anyone who has ever worn glasses or driven a vehicle is interfering with nature. Even aside from the hilarious irony this argument wouldn’t fly. If you were dying of cancer and were told that your parents could have saved you but elected not to because it would “interfere with nature”, how would you feel?

Religious types might say we shouldn’t mess around with God’s creation. Problem is, we’re already doing that. All the vegetables we eat are many times bigger than they would naturally be. Farmers have enhanced their size over many years by collecting strains of larger and larger plants. Changing the DNA would be a shortcut, that’s all.

“But it would tear society apart! The gulf between the rich and poor would become even bigger and society would revert to a caste system and blahblahblah…” y’know, I have the feeling that similar arguments have been raised against every movement in history, from gay rights to abortion. People seem to think we are as liberal as we can get and any more will tip us over the brink and reduce the world to an anarchistic pile of crap. The facts don’t support this. Yes, the potential is there for abuse. But to assume it a) can only lead to abuse, and b) the abuse will outweigh the benefit is a slippery slope argument unsupported by any evidence.

So as much as I don’t like the idea, I can’t refute it. Will our descendants be denied a utopia because we have cold feet about the issue, or are my intuitions justified and it is the wrong path to go down?

Sydney Trains

I was visiting friends and took the train down from Eastwood to Sydney Central Station. The Sydney trains aren’t as bad as they used to be (there was a time when trains were often 10-15 minutes late), but they are still terrible.

Five disturbing facts about Sydney Metro trains.

• The trains are usually driven by morons who can’t speak English properly. They mumble their words and you can’t hear them through the crackly intercom.  This is particularly bad when they are announcing the next stop.
• 75% of the people you see are Asian, and most of the remainder are Arabic. (I was the only Caucasian in the cabin)
• Everyone has cell phones. You hardly need on-board lights at night because the train cabin is lit up by retards texting each other!
•  All of the trains are covered in graffiti, inside and out.  People slash the upholstery with switchblades and even carve their names on the train windows. (Like you’d expect, much of the graffiti is in Mandarin)
• The ticket machines suck! If your ticket has so much as a tiny crease in it, the machine won’t accept it and you’ll need to give it to a train operator in person. If there isn’t one around…too bad, you’re stuck!

Not to mention it’s expensive, $6.50 for a 30-minute trip is a ripoff even if the trains do arrive on time. At least the trains aren’t overcrowded any more…you can almost always get a seat by the window.

My favorite site ever (this week, anyway)

Some web sites you have to look at and think “is this person crazy, or an undiscovered genius?”

Recently, I stumbled across Ulillillia, a site run by a 21 year old whose brain seems to be wired quite differently to yours or mine. He does four-digit multiplication in his head, listens to songs literally thousands of consecutive times, keeps an exhaustively detailed diary of all the dreams he has (and turns them into animated gifs!), and does not appear to have any social life as far as I can tell.

There’s so much stuff at Ulillillia you could spend weeks there, but I want to draw your attention to his videos, because they give you an accurate view of what sort of person he is. He spends hours playing video games and doing useless shit like measuring how fast the background scrolls in Sonic the Hedgehog. I wish my entertainment needs were half as simple.

Here are his views on dating and relationships:

“Most my age would normally be looking for a mate or girlfriend/boyfriend. I have almost no interest in either of these. The bulk of it comes down to cost, but there are other reasons. I’ve heard that marriage costs several thousand dollars (I’ve heard $25,000 somewhere). From this, I will almost certainly not want to get married. I have no close friends to do anything with. Only the forums are about as close as I can get. I just don’t have any intent or interest in finding someone. I’ve heard that just preparing for a baby can cost upwards of $500 let alone having to feed the baby and other things while it grows up.”

Y’know, I’m leaning towards “undiscovered genius.”

Reminder

For anyone who has wandered in, I have a web site at http://ben-ts.net which contains short stories, poems, essays, and lots of other things. It’s updated almost daily.

Don’t be a loser! Check it out!

FREEEEDOM!

I’ve completed my TAFE course in carpentry/construction. I now have a certificate level 3 in OH&S, Building Materials & Hand Tools, Floor Systems, Wall Frames, Roof Frames, and Scaffolding, and am legally qualified to be employed by a builder and work on worksites. I even got a Worker’s Green Card…yippee! I won’t know for a few weeks what my scores were, but I’m fairly sure I did well. I was the only person in my class who completed every exercise they set us (these weren’t written exercises, but physical exercises that involved building things, cutting things, and reading plans). Some of it was fun, but some of it was a real drag.

The worst was scaffolding, where we actually had to carry around huge steel poles and build 6 meter high scaffolds from scratch.Get this, I was standing on top of a huge 30-foot scaffold, carrying a 20kg piece of metal, with no guard rails to stop me from falling. And the scaffolds were swaying around like a ship at sea, since we didn’t have enough time to install bracing. It was like being on a huge amusement park fun-ride, minus the fun. After the bracing and guard rails were installed it was OK but until then it was bloody terrifying. We would never have been allowed up there at all if we hadn’t completed our Occupational Health and Safety course.

Well…it’s over. Party’s over here, guys!

Politics, diabetes, bullshit

I’ve got a few things to blab about. Firstly, the Australian elections ended yesterday. This was a big deal for me, as I just became old enough to vote.  The Liberal Party (represented by John Howard) was ousted from power by the Labor Party (Kevin Rudd) after 12 years in office. I voted Liberal, and it was depressing that we lost. They’re still working out which electorates voted for which candidate, but that’s just house-cleaning. Labor has won. I stayed up late watching the election results on TV, and I feel really tired and crappy. The following morning it was the only thing my friends wanted to discuss, and I was like “can we please talk about something else?”

It only gets worse. You see, one of the greatest men I know of is in hospital. He’s a 70 year old Dutchman I met at church once, and after spending a few years in his company I’ve realised he has all the qualities I want to have as an adult. He’s incredibly kind-hearted and selfless (example: he tutored me in Ancient Greek and refused payment) but unfortunately he has some relationship problems with his daughter. He was under a lot of stress and, as a result, starting drinking large amounts of wine. He has diabetes and shouldn’t have been doing this. Now he’s in hospital with a bad pancreas. It’s upsetting, and I wish there was something I could do about it.

In all, it’s been a crappy weekend.

Voice blog

http://ben-ts.net/multimedia/stupid.wav

Hazards of working with carpenters

I’m at Ourimbah College learning carpentry and construction. A few days I took my lunch break with an experienced carpenter. He pointed to a wooden retaining wall behind us and asked “what do you think of that wall?”

I looked and it was really crappy, like it had been built by an amateur. It was bent out at the middle and wasn’t nailed in properly. “It sucks!”

“I built that wall, you little bastard!” It turns out he had been on the Uni construction team 10 years ago. It was really embarassing.

…in more positive news, I built this!

(click to enlarge)

The body battery calculator

This site tells you how much electricity your body is producing.

327 WATTS Body Battery Calculator – Find Out How Much Electricity Your Body is Producing – dating

For people with too much money

I’ve often wondered what our culture would look like to Aliens who only had engineering publications to look at. No doubt they’d conclude we live in a perfect utopia with no crime, pollution, or poverty, and that everyone in the world lives in unreserved luxury. Why? Look no further than lavish projects like the Freedom Ship, a one-and-a-half kilometer long ship that will, if it gets off the ground, cost at least 11 billion dollars to build. From the Freedom Ship web site:

“With a design length of 4,500 feet (1400 m), a width of 750 feet (230 m), and a height of 350 feet (110 m), Freedom Ship would be more than 4 times longer than the Queen Mary. The design concepts include a mobile modern city featuring luxurious living, an extensive duty-free international shopping mall, and a full 1.7 million square foot (160,000 m²) floor set aside for various companies to showcase their products. Freedom Ship would not be a cruise ship, it is proposed to be a unique place to live, work, retire, vacation, or visit. The proposed voyage would continuously circle the globe, covering most of the world’s coastal regions. Its large fleet of commuter aircraft and hydrofoils would ferry residents and visitors to and from shore.”

Hey, why not. But can I please have one of those flying cars?

Spiders

Yesterday I (and 15 other guys) were helping a friend take down a wall that had been partly caved in through storm damage. It was made of huge 20-kilo cement bricks and we had to lift them off one by one.

For the first hour it was hell. But as we worked down it became kind of fascinating, like going back in time. We uncovered a chip packet that had expired in 1998, plastic bags that were covered in dirt and fungus but hadn’t rotted at all, and old-fashioned childrens’ toys. It was like a time capsule you had to break your back to open. There were also huge nests of cockroaches (some of them were white and transparent…albino cockroaches?) that lived in between the gaps in the bricks , and of course spiders.

While working, I found one of these crawling on my wrist.

It’s a red-back spider. Their bites are potentially fatal. There are 13 deaths on record. I threw a fit and started flailing my fist around like nun-chuk, trying to get the spider off. I swear, it probably ended up 20 feet away. After that event I carefully checked each of the bricks for more spiders.

I’m afraid of poisonous spiders. I have no problem with snakes and stuff, just spiders. Australia has about a million breeds of spiders, including the most deadly in the world (funnel-web tarantulas). I know they keep away pests and shit…but they scare me.

Sydney Royal Easter Show 07

I went to Australia’s biggest country show, The Royal Easter Show, on Wenesday. The pricing was a gouge ($31AU for adult tickets) but man, it was worth it.

The layout of the showgrounds is such that you can access all the rides, exhibitions, etc from one central point. There are tons of visual aids and you can often find your way around without even using a map (example: there is a path of pawprints leading you around to all the animal exhibits around the Show, cool idea). It was mostly a look-but-don’t touch experience, but there was so much stuff there you could entertain yourself walking around nowhere for hours. My family and I got there as early as possible so we could spend the day there, particularly as most of the good stuff seemed to be happening in the morning.

The first thing we went to see was a woodchopping contest. A bunch of blokes had 1-ft rounds of wood and had to cut completely through them horizontally. I thought it would take them ages but all the contests ended in 20 seconds or less. Either they were really strong, the axes were really sharp, or the wood was really soft. No shit, huge chunks of it were flying away with every stroke. It wasn’t a contest of strength but one of technique, the disadvantaged skinny guys would do tricks like hacking from both sides.

Then we went on the animal walk and saw dozens of farm animals, including sheep, pigs, horses and cattle, including a Brahman (I had to look it up on the internet when I got home to find ot what it was). We watched sheep get sheared and I optioned out of shearing one myself.

There was a ton of other stuff we got a look at: a fisherman showing off lures he had invented, an Xtreme Sports skater park, the usual carnival shit like rides and snack stands, even a wine-tasting stand. One thing that depressed me was how Americanised everything was. Almost all the kids’ showbags were Disney or MTV-themed and no-one seemed to find this peculiar. And the snacks were all equally consumerized, although I did find one guy selling traditional gelatos. YEAH, YOU GO BROTHER! FIGHT GLOBALIZATION! FIGHT POSTMODERNISM!

I didn’t get a showbag, which was a letdown, and if I’d been thinking properly I would have bought some souvenirs. At least I’ve got photos…

The Titanic truth movement

When I saw this I almost crapped my pants laughing.

IE vs Firefox, a case of not caring

To new internet users: if you haven’t run into a Firefox evangelist yet, don’t worry, you will soon. Ignoring retentive debates about whether Firefox is genuinely a better browser, these are among the weirdest people you can find on the internet and among the most persistant. Go to any forum and you’ll see signature quotes like “In a world without walls or fences, who needs Windows or Gates?” as well as slogans straight out of Mozilla’s marketing campaign like “Take back the web!” And do not even contemplate starting a debate with them if you have to be somewhere on time.

One day I visited two different forums and was force-fed pro-Firefox slogans by two different people. Why? You don’t even know me. What difference does it make to you if I…say…want to use Internet Explorer? Are you getting a commission for this or something?

For the record I use Firefox. I think it’s a good browser. But if I had to change back to Internet Explorer I would do so without hesitation.  Really I think this whole “Internet Explorer vs Firefox” thing is an exercise in retardation. Computers are tools. They exist only to get a task done, be it an invoice or a blog post or in some cases sex. If someone genuinely prefers to use Internet Explorer why try to stop them? And additionally I have yet to see any convincing argument that Firefox is a real step forward compared to Internet Explorer. In-built popup blocking and tabbed browsing is nice, but they’ve both got basically the same security issues, the same crap support and in some cases Mozilla is actually beaten by Microsoft. If you go do your research you’ll find that the Opera browser is superior to both browsers on many counts, so where are the Opera evangelists?

OK, so a bunch of internet flame warriors force-feeding you their browser is bad enough, but even worse is the disturbing trend of web designers who their sites inaccessible to non-Firefox users. While it is a small problem at best and is not representative of the Firefox community as a whole, I find it singularly impressive that anyone can restrict a good 80% of their users on an issue as petty as what browser they choose to use and still espouse the idea of free markets and open source programs. You can spot a small amount of hypocrisy there if you look hard enough.

This is the same delusion that has led countless Firefox fanboys into the imaginary battle lines against Microsoft, whom they see as the evil capitalist pig dogs enslaving the internet and its users. Like I said before, computers and software are tools, and yet people are treating them as some kind of moral issue and are stepping up their campaign to degrees seldom seen outside of religious and political platforms. What business do you have trying to force a browser on someone else as part of a personal crusade, something they don’t even care about.

How to get instant traffic to your web site

(This blog post is very deep, very sensitive, and very Zen, so STFU)

The internet works by a process of natural selection. Bad web sites are in the soil the good web sites grow from. Becoming a good web designer takes more than simply mastering the technical and artistic aspects (code, layout, visual appeal) but also getting people to visit. This is easy if you know the correct technique…getting someone else to promote your site.

Just as with natural selection, there are no rules and it is often possible to make it to the top through sheer laziness (i.e., piggybacking on someone else’s hard work). Nature has provided us with a great example of this: the cuckoo. The cuckoo will steal another bird’s eggs and replace them with her own, and the unwitting bird will end up nurturing the orphaned cuckoo chicks, not realising they are not her species. Basically, she is working her butt off for someone else’s profit.

We must learn from the cuckoo, my friends.

A while ago I built a fan site for David Gemmell’s Troy series of books, you can find it here. I did all the usual stuff (spreading the link around in forums etc) and I stumbled upon a great way to get hits: Wikipedia. Anyone can edit Wikipedia, and they can link to anywhere they like! I decided to take advantage of this and started linking to my site everywhere I could on Wikipedia. In the David Gemmell article I linked to my site. In the Troy article I linked to my site. In the historical fiction article I linked to my site. I couldn’t blatantly linkspam or my IP would be banned, I only linked to my Troy site in articles that had some kind of context. Wikipedia gets a lot of traffic, and before long people were visiting my site through these random Wikipedia links.

It also had a double-bonus. Wikipedia has swung a deal with Google so that their articles will always appear near the top of search results. Try it: search for any real-life thing in Google and at least one of the top-10 links will be a Wikipedia article. So, in a roundabout way I was getting hits from Google as well as Wikipedia. Brilliant.

The end result was that I was getting hits galore, and for only 15 minutes of work. And unlike large-scale linkspamming you only look like a small asshole if you get caught. (Note: all the links to my site have since been removed by Wikipedia editors, but at least I got the ball rolling.) This is probably the simplest and most time-efficient to get small volumes of visitors to come to your site.

Try it. You’ll be impressed by the results.

Is hatred necessary?

This is something I’ve come to understand over the years. For some people, as important as food and water and air is having someone to hate.

A prime example is Fred Phelps. He is a charming man who runs the “ministry web site” godhatesfags.com. Now, I’m an Australian and don’t have much interest in American politics, but it’s amazing how you sometimes only need to read 500 words of a site’s text before deciding the writer belongs in a booby hatch. Everything about GHF screams that the author finds gay people extremely repugnant, and this has less to do with religious beliefs than personal loathing. It’s the rantings of a deranged man.

It is one of the most repulsive things a man can do: dressing up their personal agenda in the guise of piety.

Haha, owned

If these guys really are “the nation’s number 1 publisher”…

http://www.publishamerica.com/index.asp

…We’re all doomed.

I’ve been reading Atlanta Nights, a hoax book written by some people trying to write the worst book ever. Despite being intentionally retarded, full of stupid cliches and soul-destroying prose, and with somewhat more spelling and grammar errors than you will find on this blog, it was accepted by PublishAmerica.

PublishAmerica has endured a shitstorm of negative publicity after the hoax was revealed, and they immediately began doing double-takes about how they knew it was a hoax all along, how it would never have appeared on bookshelves, etc. Basically, PublishAmerica is a vanity publisher where you pay for your book to appear in print (and usually to be ignored by everyone except your close family and friends). However, they advertise themselves as a traditional publisher that pays royalties and actively promotes books. The fact that they’ve gone for so long without getting caught is un-damn-believable.

This isn’t an isolated case of PA retardation either, search the web and you’ll find reams of complaints about broken contracts and scams associated with the company. All the more fuel for why the vanity press is bad news.

Enjoy a sample of the novel the “nation’s number 1 publisher” deemed good enough for print:

“Richard didn’t have as sweet a personality as Andrew but then few men did but he was very well-built. He had the shoulders of a water buffalo and the waist of a ferret. He was reddened by his many sporting activities which he managed to keep up within addition to his busy job as a stock broker, and that reminded Irene of safari hunters and virile construction workers which contracted quite sexily to his suit-and-tie demeanor. Irene was considering coming onto him but he was older than Henry was when he died even though he hadn’t died of natural causes but he was dead and Richard would die too someday…”
– Atlanta Nights, chapter 22

Graphics Programs

I recently got Xara Xtreme Pro and Xara3D. Enjoy your $400, Xara. Up until now I’ve been using MS Paint, IrfanView, and a really old version of Paint Shop Pro that I got on a games CD (it’s dated April 1998) for all my web graphics. This may actually be the first image editing program I own that came in a box. I farted around with Xtreme Pro for half an hour and produced this masterpiece:

Hey, I like it.

FAMILY FILMS YAY!

Against the advice of friends I went to see Eragon last week. Rest assured this was one of the instances where the majority of critics are right. I mean, come on! It was the poor man’s Lord of the Rings! Now, I understand that with any piece of licensed material the film-makers are automatically in a bind (book narrative and and film narrative are two different things) but it was like the movie was directed by someone who had not read the book but only a summary. Huge pieces of plot were left out, important characters got axed to save space, and yet they wasted close to two hours with sappy melodrama (cue the violins! He thinks his dragon is dead!) and lame battle scenes, complete with special effects that look cheap even by Fellowship of the Ring standards.

On the other hand, I went to see Happy Feet and that made up for Eragon. I wasn’t completely sold on the dancing penguins but the plot carried through and it was a lot less shallow then your average CG family film. Definitely worth downloading…er, I mean watching.

It’s a bad time to be a PC gamer

I aware that by writing this I’m becoming the 249157985239807532th person to blog this, but frankly I can’t remember a time when games on the PC were on such a low ebb. Once consoles began to equal PCs in power (as well as outstrip them in affordability, which they’ve always done) it was really just a matter of time before we saw a shift in the gaming audience.

PCs continued to hold realestate in several select genres because, frankly, they don’t work well on consoles. This isn’t bigotry here; can you really imagine playing a point-and-click real-time-strategy game like Starcraft or Total Annihilation using a controller? With any degree of comfort? Yeah, I know strategy games get made for consoles, but they suck with very few exceptions. At least until the Nintendo Revolution comes out (I’m interested in seeing how well the Wiimote handles point-and-click games), there is no ready made market for strategy games on consoles. Adventure games were also more or less exclusive to the PC.

But adventure gaming is long gone, and RTS gaming is starting to look as if it may be heading the same way. Major releases are getting fewer and fewer, and the last true megahit the genre enjoyed was Warcraft III several years ago. Honestly, Age of Empires III was fun, but will anyone care about it in three years time? Turn based strategy gaming is always around, and it probably would translate easier to a controller as it isn’t so dependent on lightning reflexes as RTS games are. It’s OK in a turn based game if you spent a few seconds fumbling with an analog stick. Still, the PS2 port of Civilisation 3 didn’t exactly cause stampedes to the nearest Electronic Boutique.

So in other words, genres that flourish natively on the PC seem to be dying, leaving only genres that can be played easily both on PCs and consoles. This opens up what I really want to talka about: porting.

Without getting too melodramatic, ports are killing PC gaming. It is now far more profitable for companies to make games for consoles, and then port them to PC almost as an afterthought. Don’t believe me? We’re seeing it happen all around us. Almost every major release on the PC these days is a port of an existing console title. Even games that don’t come out on consoles first bear the stigma of being obviously designed with consoles in mind (i.e. tiny levels, weird controls, huge fonts).

Now, I have nothing against Xbox owners who want to play Ninja Gaiden without buying a PS2. This is the good aspect of porting. But we’re at the stage where almost every game on the PC is console afterbirth. This opens an interesting question to PC loyalists: why spend hundreds of dollars per annum upgrading your machine, just so it can play something that was made for a console? Why not just throw in the towel and buy a PS3 or X360 instead?

Of course, the 50 billion crappy console ports being made aren’t the only thing killing PC gaming. There’s the issue of cost (even the AU $800 PS3 looks pretty cheap next to the cost of an equivalent gaming computer) and the fact that it’s far easier to develop on the standard, unchanging hardware of a console. And of course, console games are generally much more stable — unlike PC gaming, where we routinely hear of games that need two or three patches just to get them to a playable state. But if I had to point a finger at someone, it would be console ports. With PC games playing second fiddle to console games in the eyes of money-hungry developers, PC gamers have increasingly less reason to stay around…unless you’re into indy gaming, in which there’s still plenty of mammon to go around.

Is anyone else sick of coming into a gaming forum and finding every single thread a Sony/Microsoft/Nintendo catfight?

Christmas lights?

If you’ve ever had the misfortunate of parents who want to go out driving for hours on end looking at christmas lights you’ll understand what I mean. Maybe christmas lights aren’t such a big deal in other countries, but in my neighbourhood there are so many lights you could probably see it from space.During the days leading up to Christmas I have seen probably every combination of lights and decorations possible in the physical universe. Styrophoam Santas standing on chimneys? I’ve seen it. Lights that hang from peoples verandas in the shape of icycles? I’ve seen it. Life-sized nativity sets in peoples’ front yards? I’ve seen it. Codpiece-wearing elves holding up Gay Pride signs? OK, I haven’t seen that, but I’M SURE IT’S OUT THERE.

What is the point of it all? Why do people do it? Is it some kind of peer pressure thing, where someone gets really fancy candy-ass lights so all their neighbours also have to get really fancy candy-ass lights? Or is it part of a massive insecurity complex?

There are people where I live who probably have spent thousands of dollars on tacky decorations and subsequent electricity bills. Which is a big ask when you consider that those decorations will be sitting in a garage 11 months out of the year (except for those people who leave their lights up until the middle of March, they deserve a separate rant on their own).

When I move out, do you want to know what my deccies will consist of? A small $20 tree, and maybe some baubles. That’s it. If I want to “spread the holiday spirit” or whatever the current catchphrase is I’ll do a good deed or an act of kindness, something that people will actually care about. Spending hundreds of dollars on tacky lights serves nothing except to make a few miserable bumsods who don’t care jackshit about us rich on the back of slave labour in 3rd world sweatshops where unions are illegal. I urge other people here to make similar commitments. Let’s preserve some sanity here people.

Stephen King’s definition of talent

Always trust Stephen King for non-bullshit writing advice.

“If you wrote something for which someone sent you a check, if you cashed the check and it didn’t bounce, and if you then paid the light bill with the money, I consider you talented.”

Wikipedia-bashing

For anyone wanting a laugh, read this article by Sam Vaknin from the American Chronicle. He basically goes on a great Seinfeld-esque rant about how crappy the free encyclopedia Wikipedia is.

To sum up that 3000 word article, here is what Sam Vaknin thinks is wrong with Wikipedia
1. There is no accountability. Users can post whatever they like and get away with it.
2. It is a complete anarchy. Perfectly good articles are destroyed and rewritten on the whims of users.
3. The opinions of qualified experts are treated as no more valuable than those of 14 year olds, or of people with a political axe to grind.
4. It promotes “might makes right” (i.e., the more you contribute the higher your standing is, regardless of what those contributions are)
5. It isn’t even an encyclopedia, but rather a collection of information that may or may not be true.
6. It is protected from legal action despite the fact that it has hundreds of copyright infringements.

What I perceive as the biggest danger of Wikipedia is that it is rapidly becoming the one-stop knowledge shop of the internet. Want to know who played a character in a movie? Want to know the definition of a legal term? Want to know what climate agapanthuses are suited to? You can find it out on the Wikipedia, and just a click away from each other. There is nothing else on the internet (heck, nothing else anywhere) that can trump that. The Wikipedia is not so much an evolution of net culture (as many seem to think it is) but a killer app, combining a great idea with great execution. On one hand, it is an excellent platform to collate and compare infortion. That’s a good thing. But on the other hand, there is no guarantee that anything you read there is correct, and in many cases it isn’t. And that is bad, very bad.

Personally I don’t have any problem with Wikipedia, but provided it stays free. They probably should stick a dislaimer above every page saying “THIS IS A FREE RESOURCE. USE IT AT YOUR OWN RISK.” If they ever expect us to PAY for information that could be complete bullshit…well, then they’ll be problems.

The grand opening of the Ben Sheffield blog

All the statisticians out there saying that there are 50 million blogs are wrong. There are now 50,000,001.