This should have been a post about programming, because for some reason I found myself installing Ruby two days ago and fooling around with some simple scripts, and then last night getting the crazy idea of burning pretty much every stage in between and teaching myself some basic D. There were some things to say about that, even though the latter attempt seems doomed from the start because I can’t seem to grasp the first thing about it and tutorials are few and far between, most of the existing ones also being meant just for C++ programmers who want to switch, but I won’t bother anymore.
That’s because I just noticed today that Jen removed me from her friends list on Facebook as well. At least she didn’t put me on ignore yet, but that may well be the next step. So of course I sent her a message, asking once again what the fuck did I do to her to make her ignore me, but not exactly expecting a reply, though I really fear getting one.
I really don’t have the slightest clue as to what I could have done, so tend to assume that she either did, does or is about to do something she doesn’t want me to know about or knows something she really doesn’t want to risk making me aware of, which makes ignoring me a safety precaution. Being removed from the friends list serves only to strengthen that assumption, as it prevents me from seeing her status updates or pictures, which is where such information may be revealed. And that’s the reason for my fear, as the first thing my mind jumps to is obviously the thought that she may know something about Andra, especially since she was about to go on a trip to London when she started ignoring me.
That’s really all I can think of, though there may be two potential things about her as well, namely that she may have gotten or may plan to get pregnant or married. Though I somehow doubt the latter would make her ignore me, as I obviously wouldn’t approve and nag her about it but don’t think it’d be bad enough to justify such a course of action. So that leaves me thinking that it either has something to do with Andra, in which case, as much as I want to know, the impact of learning anything that could be going on in her life but not somehow make her seek me out herself could only range between being devastating and utterly deadly, or that Jen has at least thoughts of pregnancy, in which case I guess she only saved herself one exchange, as learning that would just make me send her a very vicious message and then ignore her myself.
In fact, that’s very likely the main reason for the feeling of imminent doom I’ve been experiencing lately, because both those options are in the “worst case scenario” range. Of course, as long as Andra doesn’t have and isn’t about to have children and Jen would have gotten back in touch with her, it would be nice to get some information out of her, learn how Andra’s doing at least, but if she does know anything she’s obviously determined to hide it, so that’s an impossible scenario, which only leaves the devastating ones, as I said. And, of course, my constant fear that Andra may have or may be about to have children is only worsened by this, and since that’s absolutely the worst thing that could ever possibly happen, I’m sure you can imagine my state of mind…
Now there is also a second important reason for that feeling of doom, or actually a series of reasons, but they all seem to pale more and more in comparison to these…
But I doubt there’s anything I could possibly do about any of that, not that there has been anything I could do to get any bit of the life I want for the past five or so years… So the only thing I can try to sort out is this blog, which is hosted by Jen and therefore quite likely to vanish soon enough. In fact I also noticed that the backup link was gone when I checked last week. I worked around that, but next time I try I may very well find that the password is no longer valid, so it may already be too late if I want to move without losing anything. I’m even taking a risk with this post…
Fact is that I really need to find a decent cheap hosting plan and move right away, because I don’t seem to have any other options. I’ve been fearing this moment ever since she stopped talking to me, but the priority was to somehow figure out what happened and then sort it out… Until now, when I guess the only thing left is to put her next to Elena G. on the list of people who started ignoring me without any apparent justification and move on to damage limitation…
Of course I know the domain name I want, or at least I know what my second choice is, seeing as my first choice is taken, and also have an idea about the host, but really worried about that due to all the problems a wrong choice would end up causing. And there’s also the fact that, while I want a paid host just to be able to do whatever I want with the site, I’m as insecure as ever when it comes to my abilities to even keep the blog functional, much less actually do something that would justify having my own site as opposed to throwing it all on a free blogging site.
If she will reply something, I guess you may well get another post from me tonight or tomorrow, depending on how badly it will affect me, assuming I’ll still have access. If it’s that absolute worst case scenario that I mentioned above, it hopefully will also be the last thing anyone will ever hear from me, though I still fear I’m way too much of a coward for that…
Been saving this result for a time when I’ll get to the end of the week with a single post and in too crappy a mood to write anything non-personal but not quite bad enough to feel sorry for myself in writing yet again. And this is such a time, so here it is.
Forgot how exactly did I get to that site again a while back, but since I was there I took their Belief-O-Matic test again, and here are the results:
1. Neo-Pagan (100%)
2. Unitarian Universalism (89%)
3. Theravada Buddhism (85%)
4. New Age (83%)
5. Secular Humanism (79%)
6. Mahayana Buddhism (76%)
7. Jainism (73%)
8. Liberal Quakers (70%)
9. Nontheist (63%)
10. Mainline to Liberal Christian Protestants (58%)
11. Hinduism (54%)
12. Reform Judaism (54%)
13. Taoism (54%)
14. Baha’i Faith (50%)
15. New Thought (46%)
16. Sikhism (46%)
17. Orthodox Quaker (45%)
18. Orthodox Judaism (43%)
19. Scientology (41%)
20. Islam (31%)
21. Seventh Day Adventist (27%)
22. Christian Science (Church of Christ, Scientist) (27%)
23. Mainline to Conservative Christian/Protestant (25%)
24. Eastern Orthodox (24%)
25. Roman Catholic (24%)
26. Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormons) (19%)
27. Jehovah’s Witness (12%)
The test is obviously biased towards Christianity, considering the number of denominations it includes, but it can produce decent results even so. Should note that it doesn’t say exactly how closely you matched a certain belief system, but automatically lists 100% next to the one you matched most closely and then the other percentages are relative to your top match, so if for example your top two matches would be 60% and 54%, it’ll list 100% and 90%, respectively. So I’m clearly not a perfect Neopagan, but simply more Neopagan than anything else, which should be quite obvious to anyone.
I do wonder about the exact match though, because some of the percentages that come afterwards seem too high, which would imply a relatively low match with Neopaganism as well, possibly not far from the example I gave above. Which likely wouldn’t be far from the truth, in fact. Having Unitarian Universalism show up second is probably quite accurate as well, as is the fact that Secular Humanism is creeping up the order, though that’s probably more an expression of doubt and hopelessness than anything else.
In addition, their What’s Your Spiritual Type test correctly listed me as Active Spiritual Seeker, which was described as “spiritual but turned off by organized religion”. And that was despite it also being biased towards Christianity and having questions about “God” that did not provide suitable answer choices from my point of view, making me struggle to pick something at least somewhat suitable.
Yesterday’s news when it comes to environmental issues was that an ecoterrorist attacked Discovery Channel offices, eventually being killed by cops. His demands, which can be seen on his site, make him an early victim in the coming Population War, because his main concern was obviously overpopulation. (In case that site will be taken down or is already blocked by your ISP, I do have the page saved. I won’t upload it here, for obvious reasons, but leave a comment with a valid e-mail address if you want to see it and can’t and I’ll get back to you.)
I’d look for more articles about this, trying to find a better one, but I dread the prospect because I saw a few and don’t exactly feel like wading through countless others that just depict him as insane and the concerns regarding overpopulation as ravings of lunatics. Which is not to say that he wasn’t insane at the time he took this action, or in fact at the time he wrote those demands, but focusing solely on that and dismissing the valid concerns he pointed out produces articles that I just can’t stomach anymore. Seen way too many of those, since generally people don’t even need a reason to start calling anyone who brings up that topic lunatic, Nazi or just plain evil.
What James Lee did was undoubtedly a terrorist act. Now I’m not against radical action and ecoterrorism in itself, quite the contrary, but the problem here was the target he picked and the way in which he chose to act. When you do something like this, you need to strike at those directly responsible for causing the problem and do it in a way that will help the cause, while also making full use of any media attention you will receive to make your opinion known in a rational manner. However, he did pretty much everything wrong and therefore at best sacrificed himself for nothing, and most likely did more harm than good.
He seems to have subscribed to the idea that commercial television should educate people, which is quite simply wrong. Or, sure, it would be nice if it happened, but it doesn’t and you can’t demand it of them. So, while Discovery Channel is quite obviously not part of the solution when it comes to the overpopulation problem, they’re not directly responsible for perpetuating it either. But it seems to have been an ongoing conflict between him and Discovery Channel, as he has repeatedly protested and demanded using their programs as an active method of coming up with solutions for the major environmental problems the world is facing.
On the other hand, the way in which his demands were written clearly shows that he was in a very unstable state of mind, which does nothing but undermine the causes he was fighting for and put the rest of us who share those concerns in an even worse light, though it often seems like the public’s perception of those who wish to reduce the human population can’t exactly get any worse. In addition, he’s demanding an end to wars, which sounds quite hypocritical considering the violent method he used to make his demands known. At least I never claim to be a pacifist in any way…
Quite frankly, his actions set us back and we’ll need to figure out how to recover from this. For that reason, I most certainly won’t call him a hero and shy away from calling him a martyr as well, but he is a victim of the Population War. And make no mistake, there will be one, if it hasn’t started already. It would all be very peaceful and simple if people would understand that this is by far the world’s biggest problem and that it can rather easily be solved by simply reducing fertility rates well below replacement level until the population will get back within sustainable limits, which can be anywhere between 100 million and three billion, depending on the studies you check and each person’s environmental footprint. But people will never do that willingly, so the end result is inevitable, but his actions were still unwise to say the least.
So now I’m looking for solutions, because the wave of bad press this generated will be hard to counter. But, while I saw attempts, perhaps we shouldn’t even try to counter it, but instead hit the ground running and see where can we go from here. The media is there to be used after all, and sensationalism sells. Plus that heavy-handed methods are needed if we’re to get anything done anyway, so we should look more into what would actually be effective ways to use radical action and ecoterrorism in the future. I’m not particularly worried about the backlash, because the people who started posting comments all over and saying they’ll specifically go against environmentalists and do things that harm Earth in response to this are those who were doing such things anyway and the chance of making them see the error of their ways nicely is slim to none.
If I let my mind drift down that path I can actually come up with several interesting ideas, not to mention targets. But I’ll dwell on them a while longer, though I already mentioned a couple in another place. There are probably some law enforcement agencies getting a bit interested in me already, considering how they track everything…
Back to James Lee, I’ll say again that he seemed to have serious mental problems, picked the wrong target and acted unwisely to say the least. He also went too far for my liking with his demands, obviously supporting a policy similar to that of VHEMT, which I don’t agree with simply because we still need to be around to fix the damage we have caused and prevent it from happening again in the future, when perhaps other similar species would evolve or land on Earth. So his mind was seriously flawed, but in principle his heart was in the right place. I fully share his concern about overpopulation, the belief that civilization has brought about so many evils and that those who most need saving and better living conditions are the other species we share this planet with.
What’s left to ponder now is whether this will start something or end it. I do hope for the first option, though also hope that any further action will be much more rational and done in such a way as to aid the cause instead of harming it. When it comes to this issue, we’re but a few Davids facing a huge army of Goliaths, so we must stay on our toes and make every shot count. One way or another, it will get very ugly very fast… Even if only because nothing will be done and more and more people will be fighting over fewer and fewer resources and struggling with more and more pollution and environmental damage.
I find it quite nice that “the 2010 version of the space race”, as someone put it, seems to focus on finding extrasolar planets quite a lot. This has become much more noticeable over the past few days, when the HARPS, HATNet and Kepler teams have all announced new discoveries. The rush was apparently caused by a conference on this topic which was held this week in France.
By far the most notable is the HARPS discovery: A system with no less than five confirmed planets, which would match the record currently held by the 55 Cancri system, and two more candidate signals with a very high probability of also being planets, which would make this system the new record holder. Under these circumstances, the eight new planets (different link on each word) announced by HATNet only grant them a very distant second place, mostly thanks to HAT-P-20 b, which is a hot megajovian about two and a half times denser than Earth, therefore some ten times denser than Jupiter. The Kepler discovery of the first system with two confirmed transiting planets and another candidate signal which is very likely to be a third planet, with a radius only about 40% larger than Earth’s, seems to trail behind the rest…
I need to get back to the HARPS discovery, because it’s really interesting. The number of planets alone is enough to warrant special attention, but the distances between them tell another interesting story. The five confirmed planets, all of them with a mass roughly comparable to that of Neptune, are at about 0.06, 0.13, 0.27, 0.49 and 1.42 AU, respectively, from the star, with the two very promising candidate signals being on either end of the line, the small one, with a mass estimated to be only about 40% higher than Earth’s, a mere 0.02 AU from the star and the large one, with a mass roughly comparable to that of Saturn, orbiting at 3.4 AU. That means the distances between the planets, including the candidate signals, are about 0.04, 0.07, 0.14, 0.22, 0.93 and 1.98 AU, respectively, roughly doubling except between planets e, f and g, where it initially increases by only about 50% and then suddenly quadruples.
That may mean there could be another planet in that area, though an asteroid belt would be another possibility. To be fair, an asteroid belt seems more likely, because if there would be a planet at roughly 1 AU the distance between it and the next one would be equal to that between it and the previous one instead of doubling. But that would be possible, seeing as the distance didn’t double between planets e and f either, so I can’t rule out the possibility of a small terrestrial planet having such an orbit, seeing as its gravity shouldn’t have much of an effect on those beyond it, but could perhaps interact with the one right before it, thus explaining both anomalies. And that possibility would be of particular interest because the star in question is a G1V, so only a tenth of a class above the Sun, meaning that its habitable zone would be comparable to Sun’s, so right in that area where something appears to be missing…
But so far, with the possible exception of Gliese 581 d, we don’t have any confirmation of a planet that would fit our criteria for supporting life. Not that those criteria have to be correct, not to mention that the discovered gas giants are likely to have moons, some which could perhaps even support life as we know it. But finding a planet of just the right size and just at the right distance from its parent star remains the elusive goal of all these searches, though discovering such a small planet at such a distance from its star with our current technology would seem almost a miracle.
Yet every such discovery is interesting in itself, because it helps us paint an ever clearer picture of the galaxy we live in and better determine our place in the universe. So I’m pleased that such discoveries are getting more and more frequent and can only hope that such efforts will be encouraged even more in the future, because it’s a worthy endeavor even without discovering “another Earth, with kittens and butterflies”, as someone was saying recently.
On the other hand, I’m pleased that the Kepler team finally decided to announce something new, even if it wasn’t much. Now I’m quite sure it was just because somebody lit a fire under them because everyone else had important announcements and it would have looked really bad if they’d be the only ones with nothing meaningful to report, but a step forward is a step forward, even if it was caused by a kick in the butt.
They did recently announce that all their candidate signals have been observed with Earth-based equipment at least once and only a dozen have been ruled out as false positives, or more specifically eclipsing binaries. If you keep in mind that, according to what they said so far, they’re working on those 400 candidate signals they didn’t make public out of those found in the first 43 days of observations, that should mean that 388 are quite close to being confirmed as actual planets, or possibly 385 if the two confirmed ones and the third candidate signal noticed in that system they now announced were from that lot. So there should be one huge announcement at some point, assuming they’ll ever get to verify all of them. But I seem to remember them saying that the Earth-based observation season for the area they investigate is between March and September, so they’re unlikely to be able to do much more until next spring…
Of course, those are signals noticed in 43 days of data, though later observations have more than likely been used for confirmation. But they now have no less than 15 months of data, which should likely include thousands of candidate signals. And even that number should be extrapolated, since the transit method can only detect planets whose orbits are just at the right angle to make them pass between their parent star and us, which is in fact extremely unlikely to happen. One has to wonder how many planets would a similar mission that’d use the radial velocity method find in the same amount of time, assuming it’d get similar benefits out of gathering the data in space as opposed to from Earth.
If memory serves, I played and finished this game at least two and a half years ago. Yet I still remember it quite fondly, perhaps even more so just because I actually played Diablo II shortly after it and that showed me just how much better Divine Divinity is in every aspect. It’s true that it takes the basic Diablo II recipe and builds upon it, but it adds a lot to that recipe and in doing so it does nearly everything right, while Diablo II did pretty much everything wrong. At least that’s my opinion, regardless of how many will be bothered by it.
Being very interested in game mechanics, I’ll start listing this game’s many good points with the huge amount of freedom you have in developing your character. Yes, there are three classes and your choice when you create your character does have certain effects, such as a wizard getting twice the amount of mana a warrior with the same intelligence would have or a warrior getting four times the damage bonus a wizard with the same strength would have, but you are completely free to raise those attributes however you wish and to pick any skills you think will better suit your playing style. That’s right, all 96 skills are available to all three classes, so you can mix and match at will. Luckily, you will get a few skills for free over the course of the game and most mage skills can be learned from books, which can be found or bought, though the prices are steep. Even so, with each skill having five levels and the vast majority of the skills being useful, the 60 or so skill points you will obtain by the end of the game will need to be distributed carefully, making for several character development paths that could be just as good, depending on your playing style.
The game world is large and reasonably interesting as well. It will take a long time to explore every area, but you will likely find it worth your effort, as this game offers way more than swarms of enemies to kill and lots of nice loot to use or sell. Sure, there is a pretty insane amount of that as well, but there are also a whole lot of side-quests and even more NPCs that will have something to tell you, a fair portion of those discussions being quite humorous. And the music is excellent as well, adding a lot to the atmosphere of every section of the game. (For those who are interested, it is available for download from the composer’s site. Though it loses its meaning when separated from the game, seeing as it was made to perfectly accompany the various areas you will end up exploring.)
Another interesting thing that I need to mention is the kind of information your journal provides. Sure, it does the usual job of keeping track of quests, but statistics regarding the exact number of enemies killed of each type are also available, including some of the attributes of each, which can be nice if you simply want to keep score but can also provide some useful information that you could use in preparing for future fights. Also, you’ll be able to see some detailed information about your character on a screen that adds descriptions for each attribute, including your level and your resistances. And many of those descriptions will tend to be at least somewhat humorous, which to me says that the developers enjoyed making this game and wanted to provide the players with as many reasons as possible to enjoy playing it as well.
But not everything is good, of course, and likely the main issue has to do with the combat system. As one would expect, it closely follows the Diablo recipe, as many other games did as well, meaning that most fights just require you to click a button countless times. And sometimes you need to click that button as fast as you possibly can, for example if you are using the lightning spell, which hits the enemy instantly, so any fraction of a second lost between clicks translates into less damage done and therefore a higher likelihood of the enemy managing to hit back. That, coupled with the relatively small number of quickslots compared to the number of available skills, tends to diminish the positive value of such a varied and open character development system.
Another significant problem is the fact that the attributes of items are determined randomly when you first pass your mouse over them, the game only sticking to a general overall value of the item in question, roughly represented by the color of its name. So you may well need to first learn the location of any important items and then save before passing your mouse over them, reloading if the attributes you see are not suited for your playing style. It’s quite a tedious process, made worse by the fact that adding charms to items that have free slots is a permanent decision. That can cause quite a lot of frustration if you add your good charms to an item and a short while later find one that’s more useful for your particular playing style, even if perhaps its overall value would be lower, but also if you decide against adding any charms but fail to find a better item for a very long time, meaning that you struggled with weaker equipment for no reason.
I also need to make note of the size of the dungeons. The world itself is large and quite interesting, but the dungeons tend to get tedious after a while. And the real problem with that is that they’re absolutely huge, usually spanning several levels, each of those levels being large in itself. There are usually a few interesting moments in each, for example I still remember the skeleton who very bluntly hit on me, but for the most part you’re just running through seemingly endless catacombs, fighting wave after wave after wave of enemies…
And then you have the main story, which isn’t noticeably better than you’d expect from such games, being one you have likely heard hundreds of times before and will likely hear hundreds of times more in the future. Thankfully, the side-quests, NPCs and humor save a good part of the overall impression, but it would have been much better if the main story would have avoided at least a couple of clichés…
Overall, despite its flaws and the uninspired name, I certainly have to say that Divine Divinity is Diablo II done right. If item attributes wouldn’t have been randomized, or at least not randomized so much, it would have probably been about as good as a game of this type could possibly ever be, seeing as the other problems are more or less inherent to the genre.
