All posts by Wan Kong Yew

Fun

Anime Contacts

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Not too long ago, I had a conversation with my wife about how infuriating I find young girls posing for photos by opening their eyes wide, pouting their lips, tilting their heads at an angle and flashing the V-sign with their fingers. I find them so repulsive and ridiculous that I assiduously avoid sites like Myspace and Facebook which seem to be infected by them.

Well, guess what, now they’ll get to be even more infuriating thanks to the ever-inventive Japanese. Someone had the bright idea of making extra-wide contact lenses, so that girls can now have the huge, insect-like eyes of anime characters. Can someone please tell these girls already that no, all this does not make them look cute and attractive?

Science

Recent Interesting Science Articles (July 2008)

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I haven’t been as up to date as I should this month, but nonetheless I have three articles. The first and the most exciting one is the announcement by NASA confirming the presence of water on Mars. Now, we’ve had indirect evidence of water for a while now, but this is the first time that a robot, in this case the Phoenix, has actually tasted it by melting a piece of ice. The next step will be to bring it to even higher temperatures to try to find any traces of carbon-based compounds.

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Religion

The Sanctity of Symbols

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Just a quick post to draw attention to a recent blog post by PZ Myers that’s been making the rounds lately. Here’s a summary of the story so far:

A student at the University of Central Florida, Webster Cook, attended a Catholic Mass on the 29th June, and after accepting a Communion wafer, believed by Catholics to be sacred and a piece of the flesh of Jesus Christ after being consecrated, pocketed it instead of consuming it immediately as he was required to do under the usual rules. His claimed reason for doing so was so that he could show the wafer to a friend.

This relatively innocuous action managed to turn into a huge firestorm, with Catholics calling on him to be expelled. In response, PZ Myers posted in his blog that he would desecrate a wafer, and he did so, by nailing a cross on it to a stack of pages from the Qu’ran and Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion and then throwing the whole thing into the trash. The point of including Dawkins’ book is of course to demonstrate that nothing is sacred. It’s just a cracker and the pages are just papers, but as PZ Myers learned and as you can read in his blog, that’s enough provocation for some people to threaten to kill Myers’ son as well as Myers himself.

Games

A Game: NWN2 Mask of the Betrayer

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If any RPG fan is still wondering whether or not to get this expansion for Neverwinter Nights 2, I have one single irrefutable argument to offer: Chris Avellone. That’s right, the lead designer of the celebrated classic Planescape: Torment is on the design team of Mask of the Betrayer, and, boy, does it show. From some of the craziest, oddest companions you can meet in any RPG since the afore-mentioned PS:T, a story of personal redemption that’s more about saving your own soul rather than the world to the multitude of genuine choices with lasting consequences, this is one of the very few RPGs that actually deserves the moniker “role-playing”.

Mask of the Betrayer picks up directly after the ambiguous ending of Neverwinter Nights 2. Following the player’s climatic battle against the King of Shadows, the entire cavern collapses and buries the player and his whole party. You wake up in a cave, but a different one, far, far away from the Sword Coast, disoriented from the cave-in and with only vague memories of what happened. A female Red Wizard of Thay retrieves you from a binding circle within the cave and as you make your escape, you discover a dark hunger within you that consumes spirits and you must either find a way to end this curse or have it destroy you from within.

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Films & Television

The Golden Age of Comic Book Movies

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I realized after watching The Dark Knight last weekend that ever since Iron Man in May, nearly every movie that I paid to watch in a cinema has been a comic book movie. The sole exception was Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, but Indy’s roots lie in pulp comics anyway, so in a way, that still counts. I suppose that this is partly due to the current state of film-making and CGI technology that allows directors to fully recreate the fantastic visuals of the comic book medium on the big screen and partly due to the successes of X-Men in 2000 and Spider-Man in 2002, which opened the eyes of the studio bosses to the commercial lucrativeness of comic book licenses. Not every comic book movie since then has been a success, Spider-Man 3 in particular was a disappointing dud even with Sam Raimi still at the helm, but there have been enough films that “get it” to make this a great time to be alive for a comic book fan. Here’s a quick recap of the comic book movies that I’ve watched so far this year.

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News & Politics

Zimbabwe Inflation Rate Now at 2.2m%

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Back in February, I blogged about Zimbabwe’s $10 million note and received a ton of hits when it got stumbled. At that time, Zimbabwe had an official annual inflation rate of over 150,000%. Now that Mugabe has blatantly stole the elections, inflation has again shot up so ridiculously high that it makes the previous rate look like just a milk run.

According to this report in the Guardian, the official, and hence woefully under-reported, inflation rate is now at 2.2m% and the largest bank note is now denominated at $50 billion, with a value of around 18 British pence. The government can’t even print money fast enough, so that ordinary people are now limited to only $100 billion of withdrawals a day.

Just another day in the ongoing trainwreck that is Zimbabwe.