Bill Hicks is the late comedic great who was the inspiration for many of today's talent - though few of them have the stones to be as confrontational and ahead of his time as he was. (Some have tried by blatantly ripping off his material - here's looking at you, Leary.) He was an intellectual, and some of his comedic pieces were more spoken word than him trying to be funny, and he was probably the best at showing and highlighting our dissonant idiosyncrasies and idiotic behaviour. When I read his book, he often talked about censorship and the effect the disappointment of censorship had on him. One of the worst blows was his network television debut on the Late Show with David Letterman, where he performed and network management pulled the piece from the broadcast for not meeting regulations of the standards and liabilities department. I just stumbled upon an episode of the Late Show in which his mother was a guest, Letterman apologised for the incident and they aired the piece that was pulled more than a decade before. Enjoy.
One of the most famous and most important "contemporary" physicists is Richard Feynman, and I just stumbled upon a series of interesting "Fun to Imagine" videos that he did. This one is about fire and plants. He has a great way of explaining things.
I recently saw a short documentary on killer whales (orcas.) Apparently, they found a pod of killer whales who had found a new way to hunt for stingrays by swimming upside down, biting down on them and then swim the right way up, flipping the stingray over and therefore putting them in a state of tonic immobility. The physiology of stingrays is such that they become docile and eventually asphyxiate when they are flipped up side down, so they don't fight back. What was even more interesting was that they seemed to teach each other this new technique. Also, when the scientists who were observing them caught up with them several months later, they found that almost all of the orcas in the pod displayed vicious scars and signs of struggle, probably with sharks. They soon found out why because this pod had developed a shark hunting technique. They would flank a shark, ram it, stun it temporarily and then grab it, flip it upside down, putting it in a state of tonic immobility and suffocating it. The scary thing; they're teaching it to other orcas. The great white shark is no longer the top of the food chain in this planet's oceans. :)
I was always a fan of Yoshihiro Akiyama - or Sexyama, as he's called by his fans. When he moved from Dream to the UFC he stunned everyone with his amazing entrance. He walked out into the arena with his team, went down on his knees and bowed. Of course, those who knew him knew that that was his customary entrance. Coupled with the fact that the Japanese always have more window dressing than the UFC ever did, it looked nice, but it didn't really shine like his entrances normally do. Here's an image of his entrance at UFC 100:
Now compare that to his entrance at Dream 5, where he fought Misaki (ruled a no contest due to an illegal soccer kick to the head of Sexyama.) What's also interesting is the stark contrast between Sexyama's entrance and that of Misaki. :)
Before I say anything, let me preface all of this with the answer to the very first question you are likely to ask; do you think pedophilia is okay? No. No, I don't. Don't for one moment take the following as an endorsement of pedophilia or pedosexuality. Morally, ethically and legally wrong.
However - there would be no point to this post if there was no however - it is understandable (up to a certain point.) 300 years ago it was normal for people to be married by the age of fourteen and have children a year later. Especially in the case of girls it was normal to have them married off to a far older man. An elderly man is more established and financially more secure and was able to provide for her and her children. A young woman was still strong enough to go through childbirth and hopefully have many children before she'd become either barren or too old. Nowadays, through the wonders of modern medicine a woman can have children up to her fifties if she's inclined to accept the elevated risk of birth defects. Also, in most developed societies the church (and specifically the Catholic church) no longer pushes the idea of having as many children as possible, so a woman doesn't have to start early and she can decide to provide in her own financial security as to not be dependent on a man. All in all very good developments, I would say. But it doesn't deny where we came from and who we were not so long ago.
I often see younger girls and appreciate their budding beauty, thinking to myself "Wow, she's going to a heartbreaker when she grows up." Immediately following such a thought I realise I shouldn't speak such appreciation out loud for fear of judgment, even though there was nothing lecherous about my appreciation. And still, I feel like I am biologically driven to take note of a young beauty and show appreciation for her appearance. If she had nothing to offer me on a biological level I'd have little appreciation for her.
I guess there's a digressively sliding scale, ranging from appreciation to lecherous to predatory the younger a woman becomes. If I appreciate a thirty something it's because of her beauty, strength and confidence. If I appreciate a twenty year old (having passed the thirty mark myself) it might be considered lecherous and if I appreciate a girl in her teens my feelings could be labeled as predatory. Anything younger than that as sick and deranged.
Nowadays, girls reach physical maturity usually by the time they're twelve years old, which might have been the age to start looking for a husband 300 years ago, but nowadays it is about the time the put their dolls down. Boys are much the same, physically ready to procreate but nowhere near the emotional and intellectual maturity to raise a child. Over the last few hundred years the moment of emotional graduation to adulthood has been pushed back further and further - myself, I am a 31 year old child - while physical adulthood has stayed virtually the same. We are fortunate enough to live in a time where we can keep our children from being bogged down by responsibilities, unencumbered and unobstructed from getting the best possible education their intellect can handle. A side effect is that we tend to keep our children as ignorant and innocent like children. They don't mature until they really really have to and when they do they are not eased into it naturally, but it is thrust upon them by things like work. When work is generally a nine-to-five affair and also the first contact we have with responsibilities, we generally choose to remain kids for even longer in our private lives. Years after our first real job we're often still not emotionally mature enough to deal with the momentous task of raising a child. All in all, our emotional maturity usually trails far behind out physical maturity. So we end up with all these urges but no concept of the possible consequences of those urges.
In the end it isn't surprising that men, especially, can appreciate the beauty of a young woman due to hundreds, perhaps thousands of years of biology. The cognitive dissonance you experience, between the physical attraction and the ethical repulsion, can be very troublesome for some people. We've found an age of consent that is completely arbitrary and it is one of the great examples of law where one size fits no one. It is, however, the common agreement that we live by and those who seek to break that law should lawfully pay the price for that unfortunate decision, because no matter how you look at it, most under aged people are no longer capable of realising the full range and extent of the consequences of having sex.
Last week I decided to go back to training and thinking that perhaps BJJ wasn't the greatest idea due to all the wrestling, I thought I'd start out with Sanda (kickboxing). While the training was very light, and mostly focussed on technique rather than conditioning, my back blew out three minutes into the warm-up. Being stupid, I continued training and by the end of the two hour class I was crippled. The following day I had a lot of trouble even getting out of bed, and my back was stiff and painful. That evening, however, I joined Eva for "a few drinks" and I didn't feel my back at all during that time. (Probably on the count of the bottle-and-a-half of wine I had consumed.) The next day my back felt better and it continued to get better. I'm not sure what to think about this, but I'm not going to question it. I'll take it easy for another week or two and see if I can start doing some stuff again.
In the meantime, my buddy Jim is going to have a kickboxing match this friday evening. (Low kicks and all!) Very excited. Hopefully he'll do better than the last two people I rooted for; Marloes Coenen and Melvin Manhoef.
I was recently told a story about a guy who wasn't cut out to be a lawyer at a big law firm because he was more of a "heavy metal guy" than a lawyer. It struck me as odd that those things could be mutually exclusive until I realised that a large law firm probably don't want non-conformists - at least not in a certain sense. I'm sure they'll be delighted with someone creatively non-conformist who can get attain success by looking at things in a different light, but I can see how that person not being the suite-and-tie type might interfere with their view of how their business should be run. I think that what you'll get is the belief that a choice of profession - in this case, being a lawyer - is a choice of lifestyle; dressing a certain way, acting a certain way, doing particular things, etc. If you're surrounded by the same type of people at work for twelve hours a day, who all try to act according to what they've been taught someone in your profession looks and acts like, you'll become convinced that the stereotype - or rather, the archetype - is true. It's a self-affirming situation.
I understand the push to remove individuality in the military. I understand that large companies might want to do the same; conformity is easier to manage, after all. It does offend me, however, to think that I would have to move away from desire to be stereotype disconfirming in order to excercise a particular profession. Companies like Google embrace the differences that define us as individuals instead of part of the herd, and yet, they can probably also only allow that up until a certain point before your quirks and oddities start interfering with their ability to get you to do what they need you to do, so even there individual expression, while not stifled, is put to bounds. Perhaps people's tendency to be underachievers, coupled with the unnatural instinct to be individuals, free to express themselves however they feel, leads to less success driven people who have jobs rather than careers. It's often said that in order to be successful at your career, you have to live your chosen field, rather than just work in it.
And yet, the concept of letting your profession dictate your life to the extent that your profession has become your lifestyle, bothers me.
.: My Back
So as you may or may not know, I injured my back late in December of 2009. It started out as a sprain as I lifted some boxes improperly after a rough evening of BJJ which hardly gave me reason to pause, especially as it seemed to have sorted itself out the following day. Sadly, the following day I spent all day in an aeroplane, proceeded by five night's on Jim's sofa, and another aeroplane ride back to .nl, which compounded the problem. I started feeling as if my back was tired, as if I had a bad muscle-ache in my lower back. New Year's Eve came and went and the 2010 training season was supposed to start but I thought I'd take it easy, as my back really started to hurt now. I decided to visit my physiotherapist, since he'd berated me quite badly for waiting so long to have my shoulder checked out back in 2008 when it was in fact broken. He told me I was being a big pussy and not to waste his time with little aches like that (mixed signals, dude!) and that it's something to be expected if you do things like grappling or kickboxing, let alone both! He told me it would sort itself out, but I'd be wise to do a lot of continuous walking, preferably about 30 minutes, every day. I've been doing that, and I have to admit it's not so bad any more, but it's also not gone. I have to remain patient and let my back heal up, which has proven to be very difficult for me.
.: I Torture Myself...
...with books I don't understand, because my brain is like a block of obsidian, coated in Teflon, impervious to the uptake of knowledge, and the only way to learn anything is to just smash information to particle bits on my skull until some of it seeps in through a small crack, or something! Currently, I'm reading Full Metal Apache: Transactions Between Cyberpunk Japan and Avant-Pop America by Takayuki Tatsumi, which is a deconstruction of orientalist and occidentalist influences in post-postmodernist literature. In terms of how interesting it is, it sounds far worse than it is. In terms of complexity, it sounds just as bad as it is. About twenty-five percent of the book is annotations. Yeah, it's one of those books where you need two bookmarkers, one for your place in the book and one for your place in the appendix.
.: Shadowrun: Corrosion
My back being in the sorry state it is has afforded me some time to spend on Corrosion, which is really coming along nicely. We've got a solid grasp on everything, and a working, functional framework for everything but the missions (the combat stuff.) I've got some ideas on how to go about this, but first I want to finish up all the other stuff so that I can concentrate on that. It's going to be complex, and I'll have to make use of AJAX, which will be new for me. By that point, I can also start instructing my brother on some of the additional coding that undoubtedly will have to take place.
I have many other things left to tell, but I'll leave them for another time.
We decided to not implement the idea of dice pools into Corrosion for the simple reason that it's a complex mechanic to maintain. Combat Pool, Magic Pool, Karma Pool, Hacking Pool, Control Pool...I'm not looking forward to implementing that. At first it seemed like that wasn't much of a problem; the lack of dice pools just means that the progression through the game gets controlled a little bit since it means fewer dice to roll and thus less successes on your test. A case could be made to implement the Spell Pool, as it's dice that usually get split between the Sorcery test and the Drain Resistance test. You could assign them fifty-fifty, or with whatever division you'd like to apply. Combat Pool becomes harder, since it's situational. People will generally keep some dice back in order to assist dodge rolls or Damage Resistance tests when needed. Corrosion needs to be quick and you don't want to have to decide how many dice to assign to one test and to the other between one round and the next.
So we chucked them, thinking that the lack of situational modifiers like visibility, movement and range would balance each other out.
Yesterday, right before my brother fell asleep mid-conversation (okay, that might not be entirely true), we discussed how many actions a player can take and what mechanism governs how much you can do. We have to limit a player's actions, if only to keep the pressure on our webserver to a minimum and slightly distribute the amount of play users put in.
At first, we thought we could govern that by using the stun monitor as an indication of a character's fatigue. So instead of the possibility of taking damage on a player's stun monitor, all damage would be physical and the stun monitor could be used to keep track of amounts of actions left. Over time, say every 15 minutes or so, you'd get an automatic 1 box of stun wiped off the stun monitor. Unfortunately, that would break from the SR3 rules we're looking to implement, and it would mean a limitation on gameplay - no more stun-dealing weapons and spells, for instance, no target number penalties based on stun damage received, etc.
However, we came to the conclusion that another stat was needed - action points. If all damage was physical, there'd be no reason to not cast spells above your magic rating, since drain was going to be physical damage anyway. You could cap it by not allowing any spells with a force higher than your magic rating, but that would damage some of the versatility of a mage or shaman. Weapons or spells that dealt stun damage would by and large have a far more dangerous reputation than the ones that deal physical damage, since the amount of actions you have are the most valuable commodity in the game. This would mean that during PvP people will start using stun weapons just to fuck with each other and I am not too keen to have to start dealing with grievers. It's one thing if you lose some life (essentially some nuyen since you can always get patched up) rather than losing your ability to generate some money and experience.
That and more made is re-evaluate our decision to use the stun monitor as an indication of action points. Now we're still looking into how many action points someone gets. Currently set to 10, perhaps we'll have to turn it up to twenty if it turns out to be too little. Also, we still need to firmly determine what will and what won't cost an action point.
Worst Life Ever: The Story of Kazuyuki Fujita's Skull By: Seanbaby - January 14th, 2010
Kazuyuki "Iron Head" Fujita made a fighting career out of having a thick skull. This is that skull's story.
Like many mixed martial artists, Fujita started as a wrestler. Unlike many mixed martial artists, he never learned a second skill. It would take him 60 minutes to describe to you what he thinks a kick is, and he attempts submission holds the same way he tries on hats - confusedly pulling in random directions with no results. That's because his skull is measurably thicker than a normal skull. If you were to take an x-ray of it, you'd fire your medical equipment for coming in to work drunk. He was created by filling a cement truck with coconut sperm, and no one was more surprised than that cement truck.
Since he was diagnosed with this head, he has been searching for the man who would one day destroy it. I understand many readers don't follow or relate to the sport of mixed martial arts, but those readers are in luck because I speak fluent Nerd. Each section will have a Nerdsplanation to help everyone enjoy this skull's terrible and ridiculous journey.
Fujita's Skull vs. Mark Kerr
The Birth of F.F.S.
In Fujita's fourth professional fight he faced 260-veiny-pounds of world-class wrestling and emotional issues named Mark Kerr. Using a style of kickboxing based around the tango and signaling rescue planes, Fujita hopped around like a scarecrow in gunfire while Mark Kerr blasted him in the face with punches and knees. Mark Kerr wasn't exactly Bruce Lee himself, but when you bench press 600 pounds, just swinging your paw through the air is going to knock salmon out of every river for two miles.
Nerdsplanation: To put the damage Fujita's face took into perspective, steroid users couldn't measure their dicks for an entire year when Mark Kerr hit a button on a calculator and killed the number 2. I'm sure you've seen a shortened bus filled with retarded children. Well, that was just a regular school bus before Mark Kerr waved at it.
For three minutes, everything either fighter did resulted in a hard part of Mark Kerr getting smashed into Fujita's medically impossible head. It looked like an industrial training video on how to turn a human into soup using just one naked man. If I was Fujita's family, I would have already been ordering a box of gorilla-sized diapers and flash cards so he could relearn all our names. But this face-suicide was all part of Fujita's plan. After five minutes of savage anaerobic assault, Mark Kerr's brain and body agreed that it was time to give up. He went fetal and Fujita punched the back of his head for 10 minutes. Which, in back-of-the-head time, is fucking forever. This surprising win led to the invention of the F.ujita F.ight S.ystem which would serve him well throughout his career. Let's go over the basics: 1. Receive beating until opponent falls asleep.
2. Maul opponent's unconscious body.
3. Realize that the celebration banana was a trick and that you've once again been led into a cage for safe transport.
Fujita's Skull vs. Ken Shamrock
Helmet Laws Are For Pussies
Next, Fujita fought Ken Shamrock. Throughout Ken's long MMA career, this is easily the greatest performance he has ever had. He unloaded on Fujita. Every punch and kick of every combination landed exactly on Fujita's chin. I swear Fujita mailed Ken Shamrock a list of every move he was going to do and Ken got together with Jean-Claude Van Damme to plan the most destructive and beautiful ways to counter them. Jean-Claude maybe did a little consulting on Fujita's side too, since the only move that Fujita landed in the entire fight was a crotch attack.
This showdown continued for six minutes: Ken Shamrock's extensive martial arts training vs. a mixup in Fujita's head DNA. But Shamrock was no match for F.S.S. Something strange happened. Ken beat this man so hard that he, no bullshit, started having heart palpitations and his corner threw in the towel. Seriously: Fujita took a beating so severe that the man doing it had a goddamn heart attack. I guess it was a strategy devised by his stand-up coach, Anna Nicole Smith's vagina. And while doctors were treating Ken Shamrock, the only thing that was hurt on Fujita was the team of archaeologists that happened to be exploring his skull's upper mantle at the time.
Nerdsplanation: When creating characters in video games, you often have to make sacrifices. For example, your rogue doesn't have enough points to learn Mutilate AND Killing Spree. It's the same thing when scientists create igneous-skulled punching bag monsters. If you spring for Invincible Head, there aren't enough points left over to put into Agility. Fujita actually has a -65 to Dodge which means cars instinctively swerve into him, and it takes him 10 minutes and a man-shaped hole in the wall to get through a doorway.
Fujita's Skull vs. Cro Cop
Fujita's Skull Takes a Job at the Female Ejaculation Plant
Japan has a childlike fascination with strange match-ups. If two things are stupidly different, Japan will put them in a cage and see what happens. All their fight cards have at least one match between a giant fat guy and something that looks like it should be making Christmas toys. If a man with no arms and a man with no legs started learning karate, the same light bulb would appear over every head in Japan. That's right: Glue them together and see if it can kill a panda. Through their own experiments, every Japanese parent knows exactly how many rhinoceros beetles you have to put in a baby's crib to make it a fair fight. And I guarantee you that when the first cheeseburger comes to life, Japan will throw it in the ring with a sumo wrestler before it ever gets a chance to lead us to our better lives in the sky.
So it's no surprise that fight promoters decided to put him in the ring with Cro Cop. Take the man with the crazy hard head and put him in the ring with the guy who kicks heads crazy hard. The result might surprise you: partially exploded head. In an explosion of blood and duh, Cro Cop measured Fujita's slow motion takedown attempts and threw a knee into his eyeball just as he was coming in. Fujita didn't even notice. It takes so long for light to reach the center of his head that he wouldn't even know one of his eyes was gone for 11 minutes. So all he did was finish the takedown and try to drown Cro Cop in ocular blood. The referee had to inflate a life raft just to paddle over and stop the fight.
Nerdsplanation: For a Japanese fight promoter, Fujita's cranium is like a boss monster they're seeing for the first time. They are so compelled and excited to destroy it, but the only thing they can do is hit it with every weapon in their inventory until something works. This was their eureka moment. "Holy water bounces off, Ifrit hits for 0, Bubble Lead actually heals him... fuck, look at how much Cro Cop took off!"
Fujita's Skull vs. Cro Cop Again
We Must Destroy That Which We Love
After engineers designed a needle capable of it, they stitched Fujita's skin back together and he was given a rematch against Cro Cop. Fujita should win this one, right? I mean, what are the chances that something with almost 100 percent certainty will happen twice?
In what took him 29 seconds, Fujita watched the 18 seconds of the first fight carefully and devised the perfect plan to defeat Cro Cop: exactly the same thing. He charged in with takedowns and Cro Cop countered by kneeing him in the head. But instead of taking them with the front of his head, he blocked them with top of his head. For crashing knee after crashing knee, Cro Cop's giraffe legs were screaming for Fujita's spine to become paralyzed and the fucking thing was too stupid to understand.
F.F.S. doesn't work against Cro Cop. Instead of throwing frantic combinations, Cro Cop likes to take his time and throw one big kick that only gets described during a eulogy. You can't tire him out or give him a heart attack by pretending to be his soccer ball. The only thing Fujita's invincibility did for him in this fight was let Cro Cop's knees manufacture cubic zirconium against his forehead until time ran out.
Nerdsplanation: Imagine for a moment that Scooter, the Go-Bot that turns into a scooter, fought the Constructicons. If moments into the fight, they formed Devastator and stomped on him, you'd be surprised at how simple and unsurprising it was. That's what this fight was like. No one could have predicted that every single obvious thing we expected would happen.
Fujita's Skull vs. Fedor Emelianenko
A New Hope
By this point in his career, the world now knows that Kazuyuki Fujita has only two assets: a clumsy takedown and a forcefield where his brain's reflexes should be. So PRIDE Fighting Championships decided he was ready to take on the best fighter in the world, Fedor Emelianenko. Fight promoters apparently gave up on finding someone who could beat the guy and now they were just using him to conduct further stress tests on Fujita's head. They were sure that Fedor would be the thing to finally crack it open and allow evil scientists to reverse engineer his remains, almost certainly to grow a more durable sex melon and unkillable robots to fuck them.
Then Fujita did something that surprised even him- he almost won! He landed a knee-buckling counter punch that to this day is the closest anyone has come to beating Fedor. In a waste of his body's natural punching bag camouflage, he was about to beat someone by hitting them. Unfortunately, Fedor found a practical solution to Fujita: get behind him, grab his unbreakable head, and yank it the fuck off his body. The official fight records call it a "rear naked choke," but that's like calling Tiananmen Square a wet t-shirt contest. If the ref hadn't stopped him, Fedor was going to take that head home to his spaceship and polish it.
Nerdsplanation: I think that last part was already in Nerd.
Fujita's Skull vs. Wanderlei Silva
On The Wings of Hope
Cro Cop proved that Fujita's head is living tissue over a metal endoskeleton, and then Fedor proved that it will surrender if you start to sever it from its body. But Japanese fight promoters still hadn't gotten a chance to see someone just pound on it until it cracked. Will it explode when you expose its core? Is it filled with something that you can rape with an octopus? That's when it hit them: Wanderlei Silva. That guy hates skulls.
At the time, the country of Japan was using Wanderlei Silva to control the fighter population and they occasionally dragged him on a chain through the ocean to hunt whales in the least humane way possible.
The fight was a massacre. Fujita tried every both of his techniques against Wanderlei. He slowly waited to get punched and laid on top of him without doing anything. Neither worked, and Wanderlei eventually got to his feet and stalked Fujita like a Japanese octopus in an all-female prison. He hit him as hard as you can hit someone, many times. And every time Fujita fell down, Silva kicked him in the head as if he was going for a 70-yard field goal. None of this did anything! Half the arena was crying since they thought they were watching one ape administer the death penalty to another and the other half was dead from shock waves. Silva kept punching him down, kicking him, watching him get up and starting from the top. Someone outside the ring (or probably just a chunk of shrapnel) hit the bell and the referee declared it a "knockout." But Fujita was already back up before the words were out of his mouth. Why'd they stop it? He had Wanderlei right where he wanted him.
Nerdsplanation: Science can't explain this. Wanderlei dropped a Shock And Awe campaign on that head and couldn't hurt it. This fight was stopped only to get everyone's car alarms to shut up- it had nothing to do with Fujita's safety. Fujita was probably back to identifying simple shapes that very same night.
Fujita's Skull vs. James Thompson
Don't Call It A Comeback! I Was Kind of Never Here!
James Thompson is an imposing figure. So imposing that during the staredown, Fujita admired his abs and groin area and gave him an approving thumbs up. It was unprecedentedly inappropriate, but there was a science to this flirting. F.F.S. works a lot better if your opponent comes at you in a completely incoherent homophobic rage. And James Thompson did. Thompson manhandled him, hitting him with hundreds of unanswered punches and knees. He was going to prove he wasn't gay even if he had to thrust every last bit of his vitamin-supplemented shirtless body against Fujita's beast-like hide. It probably smelled like a leather smoothie, but gayer than that sounds.
Nerdsplanation: After taking an eight-minute beating that mocked mankind's entire understanding of physics and medicine, Fujita started throwing his own punches. Drunken, woman-like punches. But when you're James Thompson and you recently spent eight minutes heaving 550 pounds of violent meat around a ring, you'll take any excuse you can get for a nap. By this point of the fight, Fujita could have screamed boo and knocked him out. But he had to save his voice. He had a screaming date with Lou Ferrigno later.
Fujita's Skull vs. Alistair Overeem
The Final Crusade
Alistair Overeem is a Dutch kickboxer who looks like someone at Marvel comics drew a man genetically engineered to fuck your girlfriend. And at the end of 2009, this giant, black Thor beast hit Ewerton Teixeira with a knee that adjusted the Earth's tides. Police were already taping off Alistair's leg before Ewerton dropped face-first onto the canvas with his eyes open. During the replay, you can actually hear the knee call gunshot wounds pussies. Japanese fight promoters saw this and had a great idea: restraints that taste like fish! But right before that: This could be the man to finally shatter Fujita's Iron Head.
They set up the fight for New Year's Eve. The 39-year-old wrestler with an advantageous birth defect vs. six-and-a-half-feet of death-dealing emasculation. This wasn't just a battle between genetic perfection and someone born out of head sorcery... it was possibly Japan's last chance to experiment on this skull that had given them so much joy and baffling medical data over the years.
Just short of the literal definition, the fight began with Alistair beating the shit out of Fujita. Kazuyuki Fujita has been in a constant state of what you and I would call "near death" for 10 years, but this is the first time I've ever seen him look scared. After Overeem lands two knees, Fujita backs into the corner then sheepishly tries sneaking past. Alistair punches him back into the corner and lands a third knee that I swear lights on fucking fire before it impacts.
Fujita goes down.
Here's the crazy part, though: he doesn't get back up. He stays on the ground holding his head, as baffled as the rest of us. I have a theory that the previous 17,000 blows to the head all gave him amnesia and this one Looney Tunes bonk gave his head all its memories back. Japan finally got what it wanted, only there was no candy surprise inside Fujita. There was no tiny pilot demanding to know why you humans broke his apeship. Just a guy with a decade's worth of fist craters and bad decisions catching up to him all at the same time. It'd be almost tragic if you could look away from the slow motion rippling of Alistair's muscles in the instant replay.
Nerdsplanation: In the Secret Wars, the Human Torch was being choked by Ultron, a robot completely encased in Adamantium. Obviously, fire doesn't do much against any metal from the Coolnamium family, so Torch went nova, so he would at least look awesome as he died. However, Ultron stopped. His shell was intact, but the nova flames melted something important inside him. I think that's what we're dealing with here. Alistair couldn't figure out how to crack Fujita's skull, so he simply hit it hard enough that everything in it turned to liquid. One would imagine that we're talking about a brain, but remember: This is the same man who fought all these terrifying people with his face alone. Would a brain come up with that plan? There's still so much we don't know! I say we go back to the drawing board with the Fujita skull experiments, Japan. I miss them already.
I'm feeling good; I've got a project to work on again - a private one, not a professional one - and it's got me excited, which, in turn, has lifted my spirits considerably. It's even made my back-ache manageable and given me some energy while I'm unable to train. All together good developments I should say.
After a few weeks of really rapid development and many brainstorm sessions with Robin, we've come upon the part where most of the thinking has been done and most of the grind needs to be taken care of. Adding content, mostly, while looking ahead to the next challenges. There's still so much to be done, so much to be made, torn down, restructured and evaluated. We've got a few contacts populating the Seattle sprawl who will sell you a few goods, offer you jobs, get you in contact with others or are able to help you improve your character. We're drawing our inspiration mostly from our own Sunday evening game but I'm not entirely sure how long we can keep that up since our campaign has a flavour that can't be captured in a browser game.
We'll likely have to be very careful with how much money a runner can earn, what the prices of items and training is going to be to balance incoming and outgoing cred. I'd like to think that with the right tweaks we could prevent inflation and the destruction of the economy. This becomes especially important when characters start trading weapons, drugs, items and accessories between themselves.
I do admit that I have some suspicions that we might run into legal issues with Catalyst Game Labs if the game becomes popular. I have no intentions of making any money off of this game so it should be alright - especially if you consider there's been a few Shadowrun MUDs running for a while and I don't think it's all that different. Hopefully they'll see it as a positive tool to promote Shadowrun.
We really have to keep ourselves from getting too excited about this thing, especially when it comes down to over stretching ourselves on our goals. We need to remain conservative, finish what we start before moving on to the next item. With our excitement to tackle everything at once we run the risk of not finishing anything. Luckily, we've got some smart people interested in beta-testing for us and I'm sure they'll point out any flaws and security holes sooner or later. :)
An acquaintance of an acquaintance I know through work had been trying to have a child for a very long time, but sadly it never worked out for him and his wife. So he decided to adopt. During the adoption procedure a miracle happened and his wife became pregnant. They decided to adopt the child anyway, feeling up to raising two children together. The child was born and healthy, but they had to leave it in the care of their parents as they had to pick up their adopted child from its homeland; Haiti. Can you feel the conclusion coming? Yes, they both died on Hiati as the earthquake hit. So not only did they not manage to adopt an orphan and become the kid's parents, their own child is now an orphan as well. How bloody, bloody ironic and sad.
So now, apparently, I'm a liar. I'm a liar because I have been busy lately - too busy to call or write an e-mail, but I'm not busy enough to pick up a friend from the airport. Yeah, never mind the fact that I was busy because I wanted to pick this friend up from the airport. Never mind the fact that calling or replying to those e-mails drains me of all energy and take up more time than I care to invest consider how I get absolutely nothing out of it except raised expectations, more demands, conversations I don't want to have and questions I don't want to answer. Sure, I'm a liar. Fuck you. You're destroying any possibility of friendship. When was the last time you told any other friend that they were ignoring and neglecting you because you hadn't spoken to them in a week? When was the last time you told another friend, repeatedly, how disappointed you were with them? When was the last time you questioned the motives, actions and reasoning of any other friend and crossed the boundaries of civility? When was the last time you accused, again, your friend of being a liar without having anything but assumptions and suspicions? And how many of these friends kept returning your calls?
Fuck you. Fuck your dysfunctions. Fuck your "love." That's not love, that's dominion. And don't pretend like I haven't told you this before. I've been telling you that for years! Even if you read this, which I hope you don't, I'd be surprised if your response to this would be any sort of self-reflection. Regardless, you need a little self-reflection and if the first words out of your mouth or by your hand are not "I'm sorry," I don't ever need to hear from you again.
So, I've split this up to make it more overviewable.
Mood.
I still don't feel right. The lack of proper sleep has been affecting my mood a bit. I don't seem to have control of my emotions like I used to have. I can't regulate anymore. I either get angry, or keep it all inside. I can't let it flow out when the pressure builds like I usually would be able to. Now, its like the floodgates open up. The few times I got angry these weeks I got furious, frothing at the mouth and shaking. The other day it was with my sister, and it was a harmless comment she made, which I overreacted to. I could control myself, more or less, untill I hung up the phone. Afterwards I proceded to shout at the phone in my hand untill my throat got sore. After calming down via gratuitous profanity, slightly, I was able to convey to my brother what had happened and he fixed it.
Dreaming awake.
My dreams have become more elaborate, detailed, nonsensical. I've always been a vivid dreamer, but its never really been this interesting. Its rare butsometimes they don't exactly seem to stop when I wake up. Little things travel with me from the dream-dimension on occasion, sand in my hair or in my shoes, or bugs in my nostrils. (I had a dream that everyone stank, and the only thing I could do was cram two dead flies in my nostrils.) I still know whats real from fake, so theres nothing to worry about. Its just, interested. I see things less, but I hear more.
Voices.
I've been hearing voices as you've probably read. These only say my name, over and over again, like they're asking me for my attention. These have grown more strong, sometimes shouting close to my ear. Also, they've become more frequent as my visual hallucinations have grown less. Compensation perhaps, maybe its a sort of height of the storm thing. Top of the peak, before I decline into the valley of normal, so to say.
Whatever it is, I feel better, yet worse. I feel different, which is a pleasant turn of events. I'll keep you updated..
.: Moving
So, the move is now pretty much complete. It struck me as interesting to see that even with my compulsive minimalism I had gathered more things than I expected I had. I think it's in part to do with the fact that Moulsari and I had quite a bit of storage space that you couldn't see. Out of sight, out of mind. It was easy to put a few things up in our storage area every once in a while and forget how much stuff had been piling up there. Also, I had a few boxes with schoolbooks that I thought might be handy in the future and they went untouched during the three years I lived in that beautiful apartment, so I thought it was time to throw those out as well. So I am once again the owner of even less stuff. I gave a lot of things away, threw things away, and borrowed a few things that I don't want to get rid of just yet to my brother, like my computer screen. The only two pieces of furniture I owned I donated and loaned to my brother; my desk and my deskchair, respectively. I am now down to two boxes of DVDs, two boxes of books, one box of CDs, one box of administration a box of random things and a baseball bat. Then I've got my laptop, a computer and my clothes.
My thanks go out to Moulsari, Ruurd, Robin and Eva for helping me out. Also, I was really glad that my sister was okay with me storing the boxes at her place. At least for now.
The only things that remain is to register at my sister's, cancel a few subscriptions and notify the different institutions of my change in address. Sounds easier than it is, but whatever, I'm sure that my dentist can do with the wrong address for a little while until I get around to it. :)
.: Eddie Izzard
I already mentioned this in a previous entry, but I went to see Eddie Izzard live on stage in Amsterdam some time ago. It rocked, but what I probably didn't mention is that he's been doing quite a few marathons lately. And when I say "quite a few," I mean that he's done 43 marathons in 51 days, totalling a stunning 1110 miles. He did it for sportrelief.com. Here's a great BBC article on his achievement. Last Saturday he was a guest on the Jonathan Ross show where he said that he had to continue doing marathons in order to "cool down," so that his body wouldn't crash from the lack of exercise. He was down to two a week now. Isn't that absolutely nuts? I think it's an amazing feat.
.: Shadowrun: Corrosion
Shadowrun: Corrosion is coming along well. The character generator has been all but finished and now we're planning on designing, developing and populating the sprawl with locations. We're looking at putting up a map of the sprawl with different clickable locations on it. I had found this great Manhattan map taken from the excellent DOS game Bloodnet and I would really want it to be just like that. Sadly, none of us have the graphic or design skills to actually realise a map like that so we're going to have to find something else. Hopefully, I can manipulate the map in my old Shadowrun section to do what I need it to do. I've also looked at 3D Google Maps type stuff, but that is too inflexible and too...ugly to do the job. Also, I'm afraid that such a third-party application is going to slow down the interface to the point of being unworkable. We'll figure something out.
.: Winter
So it's winter and I know this because the country has been swallowed up whole by Snowpocalypse, the angry snow god. I don't think I remember the last time there was snow in December, and definitely not a significant, lasting amount of snow. It's funny to see people go nuts and the whole country basically closing down due to the snow. We're not used to it, we weren't prepared for it, and it's funny to see the panic spreading needlessly. What I also found cool was to see a whole new economy spring up at the shopping street around the corner from my office. Homeless people were offering their services in removing the snow and ice from the sidewalk to different stores. What a clever way to make a buck, man!
In the mean time I'm wearing leggings underneath my trousers and I've considered wearing my rash-guard when things get really cold. It's working out well and lends credence to the saying that "there's no such thing as bad weather, just bad clothing." The only thing that I might need to do soon is get some winter shoes. The only shoes I have that can withstand the snow a little bit are kind of dressy shoes, and they've got next to zero grip. I think they might also come in handy when I go to Chicago. "Chicago!?" I hear you say...
.: Chicago
So I'm going to Chicago between Christmas and New Year's. I had a few days off, had a bit of financial breathing space and Jim couldn't make it to Amsterdam even though he did everything but threaten the CEO of his company. We decided I should come over to Chicago. Not a bad idea. Initially it looked like it wouldn't be possible because the tickets were hellishly expensive, until Jim brought the collective weight of his trillion frequent flyer miles to bear and managed to widdle down the price to 70 US dollars, which is krankzinnig. So yeah, I'm departing around noon on Christmas day and I will be spending most of Christmas on an aeroplane, which suits me just fine. Unfortunately, I have a 7 hour lay-over in DC, but hopefully I'll manage to blag an empty seat on an earlier flight to O'Hare.
.: Fifth Element
I've always been fond of the Fifth Element opera bit. Here's someone who's done it live, without auto-tuning or processing. Enjoy. :)
As some of you might have heard, my brother and I are developing a browser game together, which is awesome since if you've been paying attention to this blog, you might have seen a post by my brother a few entries down and seen that he's in a massive existentialist crisis. In short, this game is either going to suck, or it's going to be absolutely brilliant, but there's not going to be a shortage of excitement. :)
The game concept is definitely not new; a browser based game that's mostly statistical in nature with heavy Roguelike influences. (Anyone not familiar with that term and interested in games should really have a look at the Wiki page I linked.) There's a ton of those games out there, a lot of them migrating to Facebook, something I'm not considering (unless there's money to be made, then I'd be happy to jump on the bandwagon), like Mafia, BiteFight, The Dead Awaken, Starfleet, etc. and it'll follow in a similar vein. Since I don't particularly feel called upon to design an entire game system myself, I have decided to base the game on the world and rules of Shadowrun and try to stay as true to it as possible while still trying to shoe-horn it into a browser game.
The game is currently being developed under the working title SRx: Corrosion, is set in Seattle in a year that's yet to be determined (2055-2060) and will feature metahumans, cyberware, magic, hacking and guns...lots of guns. There will be Fixers and Johnsons and Streetdoctors and many more. If you're interested in being a play-tester you can send me or my brother an e-mail or put up a post here. We can always use fresh new ideas.
So far we've made quite a bit of progress about the shape we want the game to take, how to deal with some of the design decisions - like how to deal with ranged vs melee weapons - and we've got some idea about what we want everything to look like. I've also started doing some of the preliminary coding, created some of the database tables, set up parts of the frame work and started designing the character generation process. We should have something for the current play-testers to look at pretty soon.
Meanwhile, we're still taking suggestions as to what the official name of the game is going to become, so let us know if you've got a good, catchy title!
I'm excited about this, I haven't really had a good coding project to hobby at for a while. :)
Everybody knows YouTube, but for those few that don't: YouTube is a website where you can upload videos for free, enabling you to share them with anyone you want. YouTube's motto is "YouTube, Broadcast Yourself!" Their website went live in February of 2005, created by three former employeers of PayPal, first as an unofficial project and later as a new business opportunity. In April of the following year 35.000 videos were uploaded every day and according to the site more than 40 million videos were being watched daily. YouTube is so popular that TIME’s Person of the Year for 2006 was “you,” referencing the rise of personal broadcasting.
YouTube has recieved a lot of criticism due to the low quality of the videos and the video- and audiostreams not always being in sync. Also, a lot of copyrighted material is uploaded to YouTube, angering organizations like the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America). Only four employees check the uploaded videos for copyrighted content, so it can take a long time before these videos get taken down.
Being a proponent of free distribution of information, I’m big fan of YouTube. Everybody can let their voice be heard and there is always someone out there willing to listen. I love the website even though I don't always agree with the changes they make. YouTube has regular updates to the site, changing the layout and user experience.
Now, this isn't a problem if they would take it slow. But sadly, YouTube regularly changes their layout so drastically that people have to relearn how to navigate the site. People are creatures of habit, and the longer they are used to one thing, the harder it gets learn another. Because it's such a popular site, navigation becomes almost second-nature to the visitors and changes to those habitual actions is best introduced gradually, giving everyone a chance to get used to it. If they don’t take it slow they risk bombarding and frustrating the visitor. When they fix this, they won't need to worry about any competition from other sites like Vimeo.com which has been steadily rising in popularity.
