Miniature Painting

Another set of pictures... turns out close range focusing on my camera isn't too hot... focus on the backpack, and the arms and legs are blur... focus on the arms, and the body is blur.. probably something to do with the depth of field.. any suggestions?

Maybe I'm Back

I used to be a shutterbug. I stopped taking pictures for awhile - for some reason. Maybe I lost the habit of bringing my camera around - the big heavy bulky thing that it is.

This is the only good picture I've taken all year. Or at least, I like it a lot myself. I was supposed to frame it on the right with the Tram pole sign - and leave the Stop number and Route number more visible, but space and angle considerations beat me. The focus was originally on the chill, foggy night, the ghostly lit skeleton of a tree glowing quietly in the darkness, but now it seems the picture is more about this particular Stop - somewhere, for many of us, we've spent the best years of our life, loved and lost and lost some more. And then, like the turn of the seasons, we move on. There's always this longing to rewind the clock, to do things again, except that you're afraid that it will turn out the same again.

Would we do it all over again, if we knew it would end up like this?

Microsoft(R) Firefox

Microsoft(R) Firefox | We've Made it Better

So true >_<

The video is pretty cool though.

Grid Wars 2

Link for description and download

Grid Wars is quite a marvel of a game, clocking in at merely 3 megabytes - complete with retro graphics and sound effects.

It's an age old concept and game style - you control an amazingly agile spaceship, and armed with a puny antimatter cannon, you have to dodge and destroy the seemingly endless hordes of neon coloured geometric shapes thrown at you.

This game is absolutely chaotic, but the key to playing it is seeing the patterns in the chaos. Each type of "enemy" on the screen has their own subtle behaviour patterns -> the cyan diamonds will move directly towards you, the green squares will actively avoid your attacks, the red interceptors have a frontal shield which repels your attacks, the tiny dark blue seeker circles move at high speed towards you while ignoring gravity wells. There are ways of dealing with each type of enemy, but the trick is surviving when a whole bunch of different shapes are closing in on you. There are literally dozens of different colored shapes to learn to handle in the game.

The real twist that this game has, is the implementation of black holes. They are a random spawn, like the enemy shapes rushing towards you, but they exert a gravity well around them drawing in everything (including you!) while repelling your antimatter attacks. As it swallows more enemies, the gravity field grows more intense, evidenced by the increasing distortion on the grid background and the higher pitched humming the black hole generates. If a black hole hits critical mass it detonates, sending a hail of deadly sharpnel towards you. The black hole gravity field and mass can be diminished by firing your antimatter cannon directly at it, (to counteract the repelling effect of the gravity field on your cannon you must sometimes position yourself dangerously close to the black hole)

Destroying a black hole with your cannon yields points based on how many enemies it has swallowed, on an exponential scale -> a black hole that has swallowed many enemies can be worth a lot of points, however those points are "locked" in the black hole and you risk losing all those points if the black hole implodes or you perish before destroying it.

The black holes are essentially the terrain upon which the game is played -> the gravity field can be a blessing and a curse, shielding you and simplifying your defensive solutions against an insurmountable rush of enemies, yet hindering your movement and sometimes slowing your movement when you need to get away quickly, and sometimes rapidly reaching critical mass when you are not in any position to get near it to pacify it. The game would be close to impossible to play at higher difficulties without black holes shaping the terrain -> a mass of 50 squares approaching you from all directions is impossible to dodge or destroy, however with a scattering of black holes many squares will be deflected and swallowed leaving clear paths of movement.

Playing this game does feel like farming : you are shepherding masses of enemies into the black holes and keeping their size under control, zipping to and fro between different black holes, deciding when one has gotten too dangerous and "harvesting" it for points.

Well enough of ranting =p Great and simple game. Highest score so far is 700,000-ish on Hard difficulty. (found the lower difficulty settings too slow to try playing).

hunters ^_^

I have been dabbling in some PvP with my hunter... they're an amazing class to play, even with relatively inferior gear I am regularly topping the charts.

Highlight of tonight in AV - met an opposing faction warrior on his mount, I waved to him, and he dismounted and swapped to Battle Stance. Aha... lay freezing trap, fire off a shot at him and take a few steps back, he charges, and bang he's frozen 10 yards before he reaches me.

I hop skip away to 41 yards, then fire off in quick succession an aimed shot, concussive shot, autoshot, multishot, autoshot, watch him swap to Zerker stance, limp forward, then use Intercept. He foolishly uses his rage to Whirlwind instead of Hamstring - I retaliate with scattershot, dazing him for a few seconds, flip backwards back out to 10 yards, amd multishot + autoshot again.

He quickly closes the distance, and I feign death and reset another freezing trap, just before he reaches me bam he's frozen again. I run back out to 10 yards, arcane shot + autoshot and he's dead.

I didn't even have my pet around =p

it all makes a twisted kind of sense

The tentative attempt at a 48 hour ceasefire - was announced by the Americans - but the very vast majority of the Israeli public was of the opinion that there should be no ceasefire - and then the Israeli Defense Minister comes out and immediately says he has no plans for a ceasefire and vows to expand the scope of the war. If the majority of the people want it, well that's democracy for you.

Fifty civilians, the majority of them children, are killed in an airstrike on Qana, drawing international condemnation against Israel. Strictly speaking, Israel did nothing wrong -> Qana is a hotspot for rocket launches into Israel, and according to them, it is the Hezbollah who have commited the war crime. Targeting military equipment and installations and then getting civilians killed in the process isn't a war crime - using civilians as shields to protect military equipment is. Yet when this happens, opposition towards the Israelis deepen while sympathy for Lebanon increases. Great strategy.

Hezbollah and Hamas both declare their ultimate goal is the destruction of Israel as a state. This is war, and it will not end until one side is completely eradicated or loses the will to fight. Nobody wants to lose.

Ultimately everything comes down to how much it costs. Israel could send in teams of ground troops to do house to house searches to destroy and disarm rocket sites instead of sending in precision bombs to do it from the safety of the air. House to house searches however would put many Israeli soldiers in danger. But of course, the lives of Israeli soldiers are more valuable than the lives of Lebanese civilians, so bombing is the logical strategy for them. Whereas for the Hezbollah, the Lebanese civilians are less valuable than their political goals so they are used as human shields.

Everyone believes they are right.

It all makes a twisted kind of sense.

Interested if somewhat farfetched

perspective on the escalation of the Isreali conflicts - that they are trying to establish an undisputable link between Iran and terrorism (support of the Hezbollah movement) so they can legitamately (hmm) preemptively strike and destroy nuclear weapons research / production sites in Iran. Considering they have done this before, by striking and crippling Iraq's nuclear weapons programme in 1981, it's not such a far fetched idea. Ironically, the attack in 1981 was to be a joint effort with Iran who was at the time at war with Iraq.

/read from various newsfeeds and opinion reels online

Oddly fun

World of Warcraft : did a 5 man Scholomance run with 3 rogues (all combat spec), 1 paladin (holy spec), and myself (protection spec warrior). Maybe I'm just amused because all 3 rogues were, in fact, girls. Or that, anyone who has ever played this game would know this group setup is illogical and funny. =p

More fun probably because we've all known each other for a long time, and have full confidence in each others skills - we're all near the best that our classes can be, skill and equipment wise, and also that we're doing Scholomance not for gear but for fun. (Scholo drops ceased to have any relevance to us about 5 months ago).

Eh I know what's fun about it, it's watching 3 combat specced rogues with epic gear burn down mobs and bosses in mere seconds.

Dark Reading - Host security - Social Engineering, the USB Way - Security

Social Engineering and computer security

An interesting take on an innovative way to compromise a secure network from the inside. Basically, plant infected USB thumbdrives around the facility you want to compromis. Wait for employees to discover these "lost" thumbdrives. Rely on them to plug them into their computer out of curiosity, infecting their computers with a trojan that collects and emails out password data.

Written by VA and founder of a network security company.

Snippet from comments


- Yes, disabling autorun helps mitigate some risk. However, users are probably going click on just about anything with an intriguing file name so this is not a complete strategy.
- USB and firewire specifications are fundamentally flawed, allowing direct memory access which enables execution of code without user action or autorun.

this is what happens

in a country with the "gold standard" of gun control law.

-~-

In 1999 Tony Martin, a 55-year-old Norfolk farmer living alone in a shabby farmhouse, awakened to the sound of breaking glass as two burglars, both with long criminal records, burst into his home. He had been robbed six times before, and his village, like 70 percent of rural English communities, had no police presence. He sneaked downstairs with a shotgun and shot at the intruders. Martin received life in prison for killing one burglar, 10 years for wounding the second, and a year for having an unregistered shotgun. The wounded burglar, having served 18 months of a three-year sentence, is now free and has been granted £5,000 of legal assistance to sue Martin.

-~-

I did read about the case as it happened, back in 1999. It was quite an issue, I recall. I did not know the outcome of the case, but now I do.

Am I the only one who sees a gross miscarriage of justice? How can the citizens of that country (UK) stand by and allow such a thing to happen?

Why aren't there mass protests to set him free? Can anyone who lived in the UK in 1999 help answer that question?

Possessing the means of self protection is dangerous, but completely giving up the right to do so and leaving it in the hands of the police isn't much better or smarter. The police aren't there 24 hours a day to hold your hand, and in the end, you can only rely on yourself. Think about it, it's not like the police are going to be there when you get robbed - the robber will just bide his time and wait for another day.

Gun Control

"A new study suggests the use of handguns in crime rose by 40% in the two years after the weapons were banned."
BBC News, 2001

Some interesting debate on this subject, triggered by a comment I saw posted online. Basically the view advocating gun ownership goes as such.

Crime, is an inherently risky profession. Take for example mugging (which I have been a victim of). If on average 5% of citizens carry a gun and are willing to use deadly force in self defense, statistically a mugger will only go for a few months before either being killed or becoming a murderer and hunted by the state. Plainly put, mugging and violent crime does not pay when your victims can fight back.

Disarming the population by not allowing them to own guns, turns mugging from a risky, dangerous act into harvesting.

-~-

A common situation : it's a dark, lonely footpath. You suddenly notice several people coming along from the other direction. You have 3 seconds before they reach you. Automatically you step far off the pathway to give yourself a larger clearance : to your dismay, they leave the path as well and walk briskly towards you.

You freeze. Now for sure you know they have hostile intentions. In one second, they will be close enough that you cannot use your gun.

If you draw your gun and shout a warning for them not to come nearer, the hesitation before shooting would be enough for them to easily overpower and disarm you, being outnumbered, even if one of their number is shot.

If you draw the gun and instantly fire on them, well... that would be kind of difficult when it turns out they were going to ask for directions.

If you choose not to fire, they overpower you at close range. They steal everything, find a gun, maybe kill you with it.

-~-

Or even in what I experienced : 4 vs 1, cornered in on all sides with no way to escape. They basically overpowered me, restrained me and took a few swings at me then pushed me to the ground, took what they wanted, and ran. No visible weapons I noticed, except wooden club. Maybe they had weapons in case I decided to resist.

I doubt shooting them in the back as they ran away would have been very justifiable, much as I would have liked to. Shooting before they overpowered me wouldn't have been justifiable, either. There is absolutely no way having a weapon would have helped me.

-~-

But maybe that's not the point. Maybe the point is, those criminals would not be alive to rob other people. Maybe their deaths would have deterred every other criminal friend they had from commiting crime, if they knew that more and more, civillians are prepared to retaliate, even if they go to jail themselves.

It's surprisingly difficult to conclusively say which situation is better. On one hand we could have a society where there are civillians armed and prepared to defend themselves, so the assumption is that 90% of criminals are deterred from commiting crime in the first place. On the other hand we could have a completely disarmed society where mugging becomes "harvesting" - no one gets hurt, the criminals just pick up the wallets and everyone goes their seperate ways.

Sex Advice From . . . Role-Players

Nerve.com - Sex Advice From . . . Role-Players by John Constantine

Linked off an RP forum, pretty funny + interesting article. And well, it's Nerve =p

(so yeah, geeky cosplyers do get some, hehe)

Excerpt

What characters and costumes should never be brought into sex?
Anything with a lot of armor or spikes.

Well duh!

How do two people who are friends make the jump to sleeping together?
That's complicated. I really feel that there's a window in the friendship when that's possible. If you know someone for, say, more than a year, you kind of missed that gap. Around the three-month mark, try to move things in that direction. If it hasn't worked around nine months, you have to ease off.

Hmm. Sounds about right =p

More on Left Behind

One of the interesting liberal christian viewpoint posts by Fred Clark on the Left Behind series. Good take on things, and he's got a lot more on the index page.

Excerpt

-~-

"What must I do to be saved?" the young ruler asked Jesus.

"Sell all you have and give it to the poor, then come, follow me," Jesus replied.

L&J's reply is quite different. They're not alone in this -- I've heard thousands of evangelistic sermons, but I've never heard an evangelist answer the young man's question the way Jesus did. Evangelists don't like Jesus' answer because they're intent on asking the same question the young man asked, and the whole point of Jesus' answer is that it's the wrong question. If your concern is with yourself and securing salvation for yourself, you're going to ask the wrong questions.

-~-

*edit* and a from cute quote going This unrecognizable, heterodox puree includes chunks of John's apocalypse, mixed together willy-nilly with the stranger bits of Daniel, Ezekiel and the minor prophets and slices of St. Paul's meditations on death and Christ's warnings of judgment. It also includes lots of other things, like numerology, an aversion to historical context and whole passages apparently taken from the AD&D Monster Manual.

Left Behind: Eternal Forces

GameSpy: Left Behind: Eternal Forces Preview

It was a post on Mefi which got me started on this, but it did look interesting. The linked article was sensationalist of course. "You are on a mission - both a religious mission and a military mission -- to convert or kill Catholics, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, gays, and anyone who advocates the separation of church and state"

Well forget the religious angle on it, the gameplay mechanic is a fresh idea and the plotline intriguing enough. I only wish I had thought of it first. =p

The end of Eternity

"The end of Eternity" is one of those rogue Asimov novels that don't fit within his Foundation / Robots universe.

Ignoring all the plot devices, the background tells a tale of an elite organization which continually alters reality with time travel devices, tasking themselves with the job of pre-emptively preventing suffering and unhappiness.

They ultimately cause the demise of humanity, since their actions delayed the development of interstellar travel.

People happy -> no incentive to move or expand their horizons. The invention of many new technologies were prevented, because they were inevitably misused and caused more suffering than happiness, and thus deemed undesirable. Any deviation from the norm suppressed -> evolution of mankind was halted for thousands of years.

Asimov has this way of presenting his facts and theories in a "matter of fact" way which goes a long way to convincing you that there's no reason they couldn't be true.

Well it was a cute idea. =p But I'm all for increasing happiness and reducing suffering, thank you very much =p

the other side of the fence

Carbon dioxide: They call it a pollutant. We call it Life.

That's the latest ad tagline of an environmental think tank called CEI funded by, surprise, the oil industry.

This is their response to Time magazine's "Special Report" on Global Warming.

I thought the points they made were interesting and valid, but I doubt many people will bother to read through it. =p Their stance in general is that the hype about the dangers of Global Warming is unsubstantiated, fuelled through sensationalism in articles from supposedly reputable publications like Time =p

cool =p

Found posted by an anonymous user, I had a few laughs =p

(yes, anonymous never forgives =p)

-~-

I'm sick and tired of all this America bashing. We OWN the fucking world. We're the only super power left, which means we're the rulers. Don't like it, go move to Mars or turn your shitty little country into a super power. Oh yeah, that's right. You CAN'T!

Yeah there's wars and shit, but that's only because you won't get into line. If everyone would just accept it the entire world could be living like the USA under a Pax Americana. Look at Japan and Canada. They gave in and accepted American superiority. They got to keep the elements of their culture they liked and filled in the rest with American culture. They do what they're told and they live happy prosperous lives. Every other country in the world could have it just as good if they'd do the same thing.

You cause shit with us, don't fall into line, we spank you with bombs. Do what we want and EVERYONE wins. Why is that so fucking hard for the rest of you to get through your dumb-fucking heads? America doesn't hate you. America doesn't WANT to bomb you. But if you get in America's way, if you make yourselves into problems and start hating on America, what the fuck are we supposed to do? If it wasn't for America you wouldn't even have an internet to bitch about us on.

Seriously, I'm getting sick of all this anti-America bosnian bullshit. We can all get along if we all DO WHAT WE'RE TOLD!

So here goes nothing.

We move on: people come and go: I loved every one of you, in my own inadequate way, both too little and too much at the same time.

Signing off.

Points of Authority

The Crystal Method remix was never released commercially, only available as part of a fan club membership perk. Their remix of it is faster, edgier, more chaotic, uses a lot of synth and distortion. I like it, but I'm sure most people won't =p

The first verse has always held a strange appeal to me : evokes feelings of the hardcore competitive gaming clique : the need to prove your worth, pull your weight, or you're out.

Forfeit the game
Before somebody else
Takes you out of the frame
Puts your name to shame
Cover up your face
You can't run the race
The pace is too fast
You just won't last

edit: the remix of this same some from Reanimation by Jay Gordon (and the accompanying music video) is also worthy of a mention, quite enjoyable stuff =p

mystery of happiness

In response to Xany.

Being perpetually happy necessarily involves some level of self delusion, overestimation of abilities, letting go of some issues which you should have tackled, and rushing headlong into certain situations which could bear more careful thought.

It's within the realm of possibility that perpetually unhappy people actually might have a better life, make less mistakes, and are better organized, but too bad they might not enjoy it as much.