Religion

Christians Praying to Golden Calf

5 Comments

I love the wonderful, wonderful irony in this. Apparently a large group of Christians organized a mass prayer at banks, stock markets and other financial institutions all over the world to ask for God’s intercession into the current financial mess. Here’s an excerpt from the original call to prayer as reported by the Christian Broadcasting Network:

For these and other reasons Cindy is calling for a Day of Prayer for the World’s Economies on Wednesday, October 29, 2008. They are calling for prayer for the stock markets, banks, and financial institutions of the world on the date the stock market crashed in 1929. They are meeting at the New York Stock Exchange, the Federal Reserve Bank, and its 12 principal branches around the US that day.

“We are going to intercede at the site of the statue of the bull on Wall Street to ask God to begin a shift from the bull and bear markets to what we feel will be the ‘Lion’s Market,’ or God’s control over the economic systems,” she said.  “While we do not have the full revelation of all this will entail, we do know that without intercession, economies will crumble.”

The photo above, taken from Wonkette, is of the said group praying at the aforementioned bull statue on Wall Street. The irony is obvious to anyone with even a passing knowlege of the Bible since the bull statue on Wall Street is a huge golden bull, and instantly brings to mind the story of the Golden Calf from the book of Exodus. As the Wikipedia entry indicates, one interpretation of the story, apart from the more obvious one as an example of the sin of idolatry, is that it was intended as a Biblical criticism on the pursuit of material wealth. A double irony indeed.

I can only guess that these Christians haven’t been reading the Bible much.

Games

Sex Cards in The Witcher

5 Comments

I’m now playing the recently released Enhanced Edition of The Witcher. I’d originally bought the game at the beginning of year but put off playing it after reports came in about its lack of polish, garbly translation from the original Polish, frequent crashes and extremely long loading times. The Enhanced Edition of the game, which was made available as a free download to customers who had already purchased the original, fixes many of those problems, and I’m happy to say that even though there are still too many crashes for my comfort, I’m very happy with the game. I’ll write a full review when I’m finished with it, but so far, the game easily matches Mass Effect.

One of the most controversial aspect of The Witcher are the infamous sex cards. As an M-rated game, it presents plenty of opportunities for sexual activities, and it’s fair to say that the protagonist, Geralt of Rivia, is more than a bit of a ladies’ man. Each time you manage to bed a lady in the game, an entry is recorded in your journal together with a “sex card” of the lady in question, something like a collectible card. I was leery of this aspect of the game at first, but after having played the game for over a week now, I have to say that it’s damn refreshing to play a no-holds-barred, mature RPG that doesn’t skirt around sex and morality for once.

I note however that the copy of the game I purchased in Malaysia turns out to be the U.S. version, which is censored. The original Polish and European versions of the game had uncensored sex cards and in-game textures. Of course, this being the Internet age and all, it’s easy enough to get a look at the uncensored versions if you know where to look.

Games

A Game: Medieval 2

1 Comment

I’ve long had a love-hate relationship with Creative Assembly’s Total War series. On the love side of the equation, the basic formula of a turn-based strategic game coupled with real-time combat, unchanged since Shogun: Total War was released in 2000, is supremely satisfying. The combination of deep decision-making played out on the grand stage of history with a graphically rich and detailed tactical combat phase just scratches all the right strategy itches. At this point, I’d play total war anything. Robotech: Total War? Warhammer Fantasy: Total War? Romance of the Three Kingdoms: Total War? If they’ll make it I’ll buy it.

On the other hand, CA’s failure to update the interface for the strategic portion of the game is an endless source of frustration. It is wholly unacceptable that the Total War games still don’t have the basic tools to streamline gameplay, such as the ability to quickly check which units still have unused movement points, that the Civilization series has had since its inception. This means that actually playing through an epic campaign is unnecessarily daunting and time consuming. Medieval 2 continues this trend and actually adds to it by making the strategic portion more complex compared to previous games. This means that the latest game in the series is epic, beautiful and grand, but, boy, but does it take a long time to actually get through a campaign.

Continue reading A Game: Medieval 2 →

News & Politics

Greenspan says “Oops!”

2 Comments

Two weeks ago, I wrote a blog post saying if any public official in the U.S. ought to be blamed for the current mess in the financial markets, it ought to be Alan Greenspan, the former Chairman of the Federal Reserve. A couple of days ago, at a Congressional hearing, Greenspan admitted that he had made mistakes, while stopping short of taking full responsibility. He also admitted that he had failed to take action earlier for idealogical reasons, believing that the markets would be self-correcting.

It’s a bad time to believe in capitalism. As a poster on QT3 remarked, Greenspan was “like BFF with Ayn Rand and everything”. Hopefully, I’ll have time to write a spirited defense of capitalism next week.

Films & Television, Politics

Culture. Who owns it?

3 Comments

I’ve seen meaning to make this post since I got around to finally watching Kung Fu Panda a couple of weeks ago but didn’t find the time. It’s an awesome film as its poster claims, but more importantly, it’s an awesome kung fu film, easily the best one of the year, and it was made entirely in the U.S. This makes it a great example of a point that I’ve been wanting to make. One of my pet peeves is that whenever some Chinese patriot tries to make a case for Chinese nationalism, the issue of Chinese culture and its 5,000 history invariably crops up. This is annoying for two reasons.

One, it seems to imply that Chinese culture and history is somehow better, or more special, than that of any other solely by reason of its longevity. As this old article explains, that’s a poor argument. Chinese culture is indeed worthy of attention and study, but then nearly every corner of the Earth is just as steeped in history. Chinese apologists try to make the argument that Chinese identity is unique in that it alone of all other cultural identities in the world can trace an unbroken lineage up to 5,000 years back, but as the article also explains, that relies on a rather slippery definition of what China, and what being Chinese, means.

Continue reading Culture. Who owns it? →

Games

Religion in Medieval 2

1 Comment

I finally finished my epic campaign as England in Medieval 2. Boy, did that take longer than I expected. The next game on my play queue is the Enhanced Edition of The Witcher. Since it might take a while for me to get to writing a full review of Medieval 2, here’s a screenshot of it showing my English pope who is secretly female!

Religion plays a fairly big role in the game. The nations are divided into three different religions: Catholic, Orthodox and Islamic. In addition, there are heretics and pagans, both of which are bad from a gameplay perspective. Basically, if you play a Catholic faction and attempt to conquer a region that isn’t Catholic, you’re going to have huge Public Order issues. Heretics are particularly bad in that even a very small percentage of them in a given population will cause tons of unhappiness all around. In order to get around this, you need to recruit and send priests (or imams in the case of the Islamic nations) to the regions that you intend to conquer and convert their population to your own religion. Here’s a picture of my God squad busy turning the Middle East from 100% Muslim to 100% Catholic.

Catholic factions (including England, since King Henry VIII only broke ties with Rome in 1534 and the game takes place from roughly the 12th to 15th century) are also hampered in their plans of conquest by the Pope who hates it when Catholic factions fight each other. If you annoy him too much, he might excommunicate your faction, which really makes your people mad. Fortunately, he can be bribed with money and lands. He also likes it when you build lots of cathedrals all over the map. Orthodox and Islamic nations don’t have the equivalent of a Pope so they can freely fight whomever they want. A new Pope is chosen whenever the old one dies by the College of Cardinals, which is essentially made up of the Catholic priests with the highest piety scores. Since priests can get the “Secretly Female” trait randomly when recruited, getting her to become Pope was a simply a matter of levelling up her piety by converting lots of heathens to Catholicism.

Catholic nations can also ask the Pope to call for a Crusade while Islamic nations can call for a Jihad whenever they want. They work the same way in that they target a specific city owned by an enemy religion, allowing the formation of special Crusader / Jihadist armies to have formed to conquer that city. These armies benefit from special bonuses including greater movement speed on the strategic map, being free from upkeep costs and being able to recruit special reinforcement units while in the field. The caveat however is that they need to make progress towards the targeted city every turn or units will begin to desert from the army.

The unexamined life is a life not worth living