I will be hesitant to leave my house for several weeks.

I hate haircuts. Nine out of ten of them are horrible. I've also noticed a trend, in that the ones where I specifically ask for an extremely short trim are the best. You see, those hair-cutting people seem all to have this microchip built into their brains, that automatically multiplies length by a factor of 1.5 or so. Well, the factor varies for different people. Sometimes they're not really all that off. Other people seem to have a randomising unit as well. One time they get it wrong, the other time the get it really wrong.

And there are the people who do that thing that involves pushing your fringe down so that it hangs in front of your eyes. What happens is that they also push a bunch of hair that is never in the front of your face together with your fringe. After which, SNIP, and there's a goddamn hole in the hair that should normally cover your temple.

... I really hate my hair right now. It's going to take weeks for it to grow back out again. I should never have gotten a haircut. Next time, I'm going to fork out cash so that there'll be a smaller chance of getting a crappy haircut.

Or maybe I'll just grow it really long and only cut it when it's absolutely impossible to turn it into a horrible secondary school cut.


...



Aaand everyone seems to be not very happy with their promos. I can identify, seeing as that I go through almost every examination the same way. However, when people talk to me about it, I can't really say anything, since I can only guess at what kind of demonic questions were asked.

Come to think of it, even when I have taken the paper/studied the same content, I am almost never a good person to discuss exam papers with. It usually goes something like this:

"Man, what the hell? The metabolism section made no sense at all!"
"Metabolism, difficult? There could not have been a more straightforward essay..."

On other occasions, I would be interrogating everyone about a question that I did not quite understand, usually with the intention of confirming my suspicion about the question being botched up. Of course, this does not go well for me all the time. Every so often, I realise my mistake halfway through aggressively explaining what was "wrong" with the question. Ah, the memories.


...



In other news, Heroes is back, and it's turning into Bioshock: The Television Series.

"...plasmids changed everything. they destroyed our bodies, our minds... we couldn't handle it. Best friends butchering one another, babies strangled in cribs, the whole city went to hell..."

Okay, not really, but they've decided to implement a plot element that involves being able to give yourself powers by injecting certain stuffs into your blood. So I guess the theory about Mohinder having the ability to bestow powers on others wasn't quite so off.



-Joe

Hi, so... I know I haven't been updating in a short while. That is largely due to those never ending adventures in Azeroth, and the exploration and colonisation of the universe in Spore.

Some time ago, I thought that I had lost all interest in RPGs. As it turned out, that was merely due to the fact that I had not found an ideal role-playing-game. My recent experiences prior to that period of time were likely to be to blame. Reason being, people are idiots. Also that game had close to zero role-play potential. It just was not immersive.

So I gave up on RPGs for a while... Thinking that I'd probably never play another one ever again. And now here I am, spending a large amount of my waking hours running around on grassy plains and fighting dangerous beasts and demons. It is probably the most fun I have had with a game for more than a week since Diablo 2.

I think a big part of it is the lore. I was never a fan of the Warcraft universe, but given its popularity, it is probably no surprise that I have picked up a bit of knowledge of it. The point is that it is really, really extensive. It has a proper backstory, and scores of history. Relationships between races and their roles in the world. Why they're there, how they got there, and why they love killing each other so much.

And I suppose the classes are somehow easier to get into. I'm playing a paladin, a warrior of the light. So I go around healing and protecting members of the Alliance, while speaking old English whenever possible.

"Have at, foul demon! Feel the bite of mine blade!"

Unfortunately, members of the Horde play their part a little too well. Ruthlessly killing lone travellers and raiding villages. Those guys are a pain in the ass.


...


Dadadada...




-Joe

Has the world been destroyed by the Large Hadron Collider colliding things yet? How do we know that, as we slept, the world had not been sucked (literally) like a string of spaghetti into a black hole yet? Experts discuss, has the Earth been destroyed by CERN's LHC?

-Joe

Having been in a (albeit less militaristic) uniform group in the past for roughly four years, I have come to be familiar with the phrase "all for one, and one for all". All those damn camps played a big part in that, too.

At its conception, the phrase was probably intended to build a sense of unity and belonging among individual groups. The ideas of "taking one for the team" and "your mate's in deep shit. Help him." were condensed into a single phrase that also sounded pretty catchy. And so just about every society that involved the need for each participant to be highly cooperative eventually incorporated the phrase into their list of cliché sayings.

However, despite the obvious benefits of an unbroken team and a nice ring to it, the phrase does come with a few rather annoying things. As examples, I will use my own experiences. Oftentimes, a member of the band would break a rule, and not own up to it. That would be for several reasons, such as not wanting to pay a fine, or that he was going to leave soon and didn't give a damn about what happened there. Naturally, a leader or a teacher would eventually gather the lot, and interrogate them.

Assuming that the rule-breaker in question is hard set on not taking the fall, and that the teacher is unable to identify to culprit, the teacher would then turn to that "all for one, one for all" philosophy. This translates directly to punishing the entire group for one person's misdeeds. The purpose of this is to cause that person to feel guilty about having gotten his group into trouble.

Depending on the person, it might work.

But knowing people, the success rate of such a process would be equivalent to that of a Stormtrooper landing a hit on a protagonist.

In the end, the culprit would have essentially avoided any real consequences for his actions. He would have never been identified, and would therefore look no worse in the eyes of the authorities. His group-mates, using the philosophy themselves, would forgive him, seeing as that none of them had to have to deal with anything much, and that they still consider him as part of the team.

So, the purpose of the teacher using the philosophy is that he is unable to single out the rule-breaking individual, and thus resorts to casting an Area of Effect spell. (Sorry, couldn't think of any other way to put it.). It's sort of the equivalent of nuking a city because of one escaped criminal, only on a smaller scale. But then, the group is also doing this, in reverse, by not surrendering their teammate.

The final products of these interactions are: a lot of wasted time, and an unsolved mystery.


Personally, I dislike the saying. It's like tying radio-linked explosives to the back of your heads. When one of your teammates dies, all of your explosives go boom. It's also usually an excuse to make people do things that they don't want to.

...

Well, I get the feeling that I stopped making sense about halfway through that. I can't really tell.

In other news, the LHC has been operational for... Some hours! Awesome. Already, some people have committed suicide, thinking that the LHC would bring about the end of the world. Which, is kind of stupid, seeing as that you'd might as well go out with a bang, instead of killing yourself in some emo fashion.

Guy A: Hey how'd you die? I shot myself.

Guy B: Toaster and bathtub.

Guy C: I got sucked into a freakin' black hole. Beat that.


Anyway, +score for Darwin.


-Joe

So it wasn't a raptor-cake.

It began as a cell, that interestingly, already had eyes. You know, fully formed mammalian eyes. It came from outer space, brought to my planet, Cakeulon-74 by an icy meteor. It was carnivorous, and quickly rose in the food chain and proliferated.

Throughout my creature's evolution, it simply destroyed everything that it didn't like. As a semi-intelligent creature, it made a few attempts at forming relationships with other animals, but most of them were failures. Thus, I decided that my race need not suck up to other animals in order to survive in the world. I gave them large skulls and sharp teeth, as well as long bladed claws. I took their social features away and turned them into killing machines. From then on, they went on a path of destruction, driving eight viable species to extinction.

After denying each species' any form of genetic heritage, my own species evolved to become faster and deadlier, and even more intelligent. Soon, they developed a primitive language and formed simple hunter-gatherer settlements. At this phase of their history, they were simply able to articulate their violent message in a more sophisticated form, with spears and fire.

Soon enough, my species became the dominant sentient life-form on the planet. They constructed cities from reinforced minerals and aggressively advanced to become a militaristic civilisation. History repeated itself, only this time with nuclear weapons.

That was pretty cool, nuking those rival cities. Especially the religious ones.

So then I sat back and admired my creation, what amazing and destructive creatures they had become. Who knows what else they will do, now that they have unlocked the secret of intergalactic travel? (I do. Kill more stuff.)


Spore is now the king of Sandboxes. Nothing is more fun than flying a spaceship around, abducting people and plants. And then bringing them to an uninhabitable planet and releasing them. I spent about an hour doing that, just to see if they would freeze, fry, or explode because of decompression.

If you aren't so keen on that, you can just fry them with your laser. It's awesome.

I have yet to unlock most of the intergalactic functions, so I don't know how much more there is in store for me. I'll probably find more user-generated content and decimate them, though. So, it's a great god game.

However, I do wish that they had randomised the colour of blood, among certain other things. It seems like every creature in the universe has red blood. Why would every creature in the universe use haemoglobin as an oxygen transporter? Even on Earth, there are creatures that have blue blood, such as horseshoe crabs. Also, sexual dimorphism seems to be impossible in this world. That kinda took something out for me, because I was anticipating something a bit more lifelike.

Also why no larvae? I wanted to make a race of intelligent insects, with exoskeletons and all. However, there's just no way to do that. My little baby insects would look exactly like the adult insects. Maybe in the next version...

Anyway, it's time to explore the universe. Gotta go!


-Joe

And behold! The great lord, the mighty and all-powerful Joseph looked at an empty universe, and decided that he could really use a hobby. Thus, he said "Let there be freaky little monsters that defy the laws of physics!", and the raptor-cakes were born.

SPORE. SPORE. SPORE. SPORE. SPORE.

Can't stay for long. I must create.

Why Google created Chrome, I do not know. It may only be in its beta stage, but it is really not that different from Firefox.

Sure as hell is a huge step-up from Internet Explorer 7 though.

I downloaded Google Chrome to see what all the hype was about. As it turns out, nothing much. The window is similar to that of Opera, and it is definitely not slow or clunky. Instead of tabs being below the address bar, they're right at the top. Why they would do that I do not know. I have not had any issues with the tabs being below my bookmark and address bar.

The bookmark bar itself works in a way similar to Firefox's. Except that you can't click-and-drag icons into it. Which is a pity, but and easily remedied problem. Hitting ctrl+d will add we

The entire thing is designed to have a futuristic, clean look. That is certainly not a bad thing. Also, the slim address bar is non-obtrusive, and there is nothing separating the taskbar of your desktop from the browser itself, giving Chrome a full-screen appearance. That in itself is not a bad thing, either, but it's really up to personal preference.

Google Chrome took a leaf out of Opera's book, having a home page that contains big, friendly bookmark buttons, that also have a little screenshot of the webpage that they link to. Very similar to Opera's "speed-dial" function.

A nice thing about Chrome is the intelligent address bar, where it gives you web address suggestions when you type stuff in. This is... Quite cool, I suppose, but I don't think that it is going to make much of a difference. The address bar only does searches based on what you have typed in, and the corresponding website addresses with names containing those key words. And therein lies the problem. As an example, I will use the Panda's Thumb, a nice website for news on the evolution/(un)intelligent design debate. Nothing about the topic that you type into the address bar is going to get you there.

All in all, not a bad browser, but it does not offer much more than what Firefox users have already been experiencing. So basically, get Firefox. Wait until Chrome comes out in its full version(it's in beta now) before switching over.

-Joe

Oh, my eyes. Guess what, people? I've recently got sucked into another MMORPG. You know, when I thought that I would never play another MMORPG again.

This one, is none other than one of the most popular MMOs out there: World of Warcraft. As luck would have it, I managed to get an account and I have been playing as a Night Elf priest, with a classmate of mine, who is playing a druid.

It was quite a big leap. I had sworn off MMORPGs for their various flaws and time-eating prowess. However, as I found myself in a period of way-too-much-time, I agreed to play. I was sort of curious about how WoW worked, anyway. That was important, because gameplay mechanics are a large factor in deciding whether or not to play a game. I did not want to play another MMORPG with clunky fighting and "sandwich-ness".

What exactly is sandwich-ness, you ask? Well, there's really no good way to describe it. Basically, sandwich combat is a system that binds your character to the target he/she is attacking. Instead of leaving you free to blast at everything(and nothing, sometimes), the game only allows you to use skills and shoot stuff when there is an opponent nearby. And also the bindy-ness. They stick you into combat and make you unable to run away, or at least, not easily.

This makes using ranged weapons a real pain, because you can't employ hit and run tactics. Instead, you shoot your target until he gets close enough to you to whack you, then you shoot him in the face at point blank range, hoping that your weak fabric armour saves your life.

The best comparison I can make for RPGs is... Diablo 2- Not sandwich. Hell, even Diablo 1 doesn't have sandwich-ness. Just about every MMORPG- Sandwich.

I get the feeling that no one really understood that. I probably would not understand it, either.

Fun fact! Sandwich-ness plagues every MMORPG out there, that isn't a two-dimensional sidescroller.

The closest I have ever gotten to a non-sandwich, 3D game, is probably Priston Tale. Which, unfortunately, is a money-guzzling grindfest that just takes too much effort to be rewarding. You would agree with me if you spent over a hundred hours to get to level 15, and then realised that you would need three times that amount of time to start using some mildly interesting skills.



I digress. World of Warcraft, while not being a classic sandwich game, still falls under my definition of sandwich. So the combat can only be described with "meh". The world, on the other hand, is amazing.

It is huge. Amazingly large. The starting island of the Night Elves is what appears to be this giant tree stump. I can't really tell. The edges of the island are all planty and root-like. About the edges... You can actually fall off the branches. I fell off, landed in the sea(died) and when I respawned, I swam over to the mainland.

That in it self was really cool to me. Being able to swim from one island to another. Basically, World of Warcraft breaks away from one of the issues that older MMORPGs had, which was that the world was cut up into a series of maps that had a portal/opening that lead to the next map. In more graphically intensive games, there would be a loading screen. WoW doesn't do any of that. Instead, it boasts a seamless world. Even the caves and dungeons don't have annoying little loading screens before you get into them.

So basically, you can run from one end of an island to another, and not stop to load.

Another great thing about the world is that it actually makes use of the 3D engine it runs on. In the past, the most 3D you had was characters and buildings made out of polygons, not sprites, and having slightly different ground levels. World of Warcraft decided that it was going to use the third dimension a little more. We now have buildings that reach up into the sky, being beautiful (albeit troublesome) skyskrapers that elevate the statuses of various NPCs.

You know, if elves are so magical and all, why don't they invent some kind of elevator? Or do they enjoy running up immense flights of stairs, laden with weapons and heavy armour, just to visit some old kook who'll charge you money to talk to him?

Oh, and not to mention jumping down. That was hilarious.

In a nutshell, great World, great Warcraft. Not enough war.

This is one of those games that is going to help me wait Diablo 3 out. I downloaded the gameplay video, so that I could watch it in full screen.

I watch that thing at least twice a week.

(Read it from the bottom up. Also, a Dark One is a low-leveled cannon fodder kind of monster.)

-Joe

In the 1800's, a brave Scottish man sailed from the Mosquito Coast over to England. When he returned, he brought splendid news, that a native king had bequeathed unto him over thirty thousand square kilometres of fertile land. A democratic social system had already been set up, and the place was rich and beautiful; one could not walk off the road without tripping on gold nuggets. The man promised wealth and happiness to the American people, and many of them left their old lives to sail to this wonderful land.

It turned out that this magnificent tale was as spun as a gyroscope. Instead of friendly natives and a pleasant climate, the migrants who had given up their old lives in America found nothing but enormous expanses of dense jungle, laden with poisonous animals and tropical diseases. There was no native king, nor was there anything remotely like a civilisation present. Of the 240 travellers, 180 died, either from the hostile environment, or by their own hand. Many committed suicide upon realising that they had practically plunged themselves into Hades.

That was probably one of the greatest hoaxes in all of Western history. I can't say much about Eastern history, because I know little to nothing about it. In my defence, Chinese history is mixed in way too much with gods and magical beings. Seriously, there isn't a piece of Chinese history that I know of, that does not include people defying the laws of physics or having inhuman cunning. Anyway, this was the fictional nation of Poyais, created by the evil mind of a man with a horrible name.

His name was Gregor MacGregor. Seriously, what kind of parents name their child Gregor MacGregor? It's basically the same as calling your kid "Dick Dickinson" or "Dingle Berry". What the hell were they thinking? I can imagine why he wanted to become a soldier. In the military, I don't think they referred to you by your first name, so MacGregor was spared the embarrassment.

I would've had my name changed. Wouldn't you?

The best part about the Poyasian scam was that it didn't end there. I would expect that due to the massive death rate and inaccessibility at the time, the news that Poyais did not really exist never reached the mainland. So MacGregor went on to sell land and property(that obviously, was non-existent) to more and more people desperate for a better life. Real-estate agents(or their equivalent of the era) began investing in Poyais. It became so profitable, that other people began opening rival Poyasian Offices to lease land.

...

I have probably gotten a bunch of facts wrong here, but the gist is there. Gregor MacGregor scammed a lot of people.

Which sort of brings me to a second point. People are really gullible. Not that those poor souls in the 1800's could have done anything about it. But people of today really have no excuse when it comes to certain things. Take those Nigerian scams for example. People basically get an email from a guy that is about to get a lot of inheritance, or receive a large sum of money in one way or another, and that he will split some of it with you. But, there's aways a catch. Often, the guy will say that he needs some money for some purpose before he can be entitled to his inheritance.

Basically, it goes like this: I'm going to inherit a million dollars. If you help me, I'll give you 20% of the sum. But I'll need $8000 first.

So basically, the victim of the email scam thinks that, oh well, eight thousand is hardly anything compared to what I will get after that. And so, he pays this deposit, only to never hear from the scammer again.

Now, you'd think, what kind of an idiot would fall for something like that? Why would anyone literate enough to use a computer, be unable to see through the obvious lies(guy from Nigeria asking a complete stranger in a different country to share his inheritance?)? It is just, really difficult to believe that financially responsible adults with $8000 to spare can get tricked in such a way.

But then again, why am I so surprised? I go to internet forums, those hives of idiocy and breeding grounds for retards.

The point is, that no one would be talking about Nigerian Scams if they did not happen, and Nigerian Scams would not be happening unless they are still effective. They are most definitely still working, which means that there are most definitely people getting scammed out of their savings.

Oh, and don't even get me started on chain letters.

-Joe