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.
A-Team: There is no plan B! DV8 [2010-01-28 16:49:37]
Dying being the operative word....as in it would almost be preferable to watching that movie. Btw, they're making another sequel to Predator with Adrien Brody, Lawrence Fishburne and Danny Trejo. Grifter [2010-01-26 00:44:40]
Yeah, aren't you just dying to see that? DV8 [2010-01-25 16:15:00]
Wait, they made a /second/ one? Oookay. Flak [2010-01-25 13:36:15]
Man, after the first, I couldn't bear to stand the second. Which is weird, cause I'd happily watch the first one again! DV8 [2010-01-24 14:50:31]
Oh, is that on? I could do with a laugh. And to think the second one was even worse. Grifter [2010-01-24 02:07:04]
I'm actually listening to AvP (the movie) on television. Boy is that bad. :) DV8 [2010-01-24 02:01:10]
I believe it won't be out until the 10th of February. And though it looks good, I'm more interested in Aliesn vs Predator, simply because I loved the original game and I think multiplayer could be awesome. Grifter [2010-01-23 18:48:08]
Did I see that correctly? Is BioShock 2 already out? DV8 [2010-01-23 16:40:32]
Sherlock Holmes was very entertaining :) Glorfindel_II [2010-01-21 03:02:13]
I also saw Law Abiding Citizen which was quite good. The ending could have been better, but it's still a good film. DV8 [2010-01-03 15:43:29]
I saw it in the U.S. and thought it was rather entertaining. It's not a Holmes film, it's a Ritchie film, so it's not a very good Holmes story, but it's hella fun! DV8 [2009-12-31 20:07:08]
It'll be in cinemas here as of next week. Glorfindel_II [2009-12-31 16:22:14]
Didn't know there was a Sherlock Holmes film. I'll keep my eye out. Thanks for the update. Tiny DV8 [2009-12-30 17:50:11]
If you haven't been planning on seeing it go see Sherlock Holmes, it's a fun film. Flak [2009-12-27 21:35:50]
