Personal Life

Holiday in Hong Kong

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In retrospect, scheduling a holiday to Hong Kong at this time was probably not the smartest decision possible. Between the H1N1 fears and the bad weather, our experience left much to be desired, but we still managed to have an enjoyable time overall and got to know Hong Kong more. Part of this was because it was a last minute arrangement and we were originally supposed to go with a tour group including older family members to Taiwan, but it was cancelled and my wife and I had to decide where to go on our own during our scheduled holiday time. And so to Hong Kong it was, including a day trip to Macau as pictured above.

What I mostly learned about Hong Kong is that it’s one huge contiguous crowd of people! Having never been to HK or even any part of China before, the sheer number of people was staggering to me. And all of them constantly walking briskly and purposefully from one place to another too. Indeed, one evening spent in Causeway Way on the day before the Rice Dumpling Festival was nearly standing room only on the streets. We met up with a couple of friends from high school who showed us the ins and outs of living in HK. To get a restaurant table, we had to get waiting tickets from four or five different restaurants and see which queue was the shortest. At the longest queue, the number currently being served was 61 while the ticket we had was 161. Between this sort of thing and the need to constantly walk between bus and MTR stations since hardly anyone actually drives in HK, I see that Hong Kongers get much more exercise than Malaysians.

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Games

A Quick Guide to the Ljosalfar

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Far from it for me to call myself any sort of expert on Fall from Heaven 2, but I thought there might be some interest in some simple guides for playing each of the factions in the game. They’ll include both stuff from my individual playing experiences and advice that I’ve read elsewhere on the net, most notably from the Civfanatics forums. I don’t know if I’ll ever actually complete playthroughs for each of the factions, but I’ll keep it up for as long as it holds my interest.

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Games

A Hero for a day

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The bad news is I’ve still yet to receive my copy of Grand Theft Auto IV, so no new game for me. The good news is that since I’m leaving on holiday on Thursday anyway, I probably shouldn’t start a new game for real just yet, so I decided to download a free trial for yet another MMO. The game I picked was City of Heroes, one of the more unique MMOs out there and one that I’ve often wondered about.

Until Champions Online launches later this year, CoH is still the only MMO that lets you play as a superhero (or a supervillain if you so choose). This means that it has an extremely powerful and versatile character creation system and is set in a contemporary cityscape, the so-called Paragon City. Unusually for an MMO, it has no auto-attacks. All attacks are essentially powers that must be manually activated. Furthermore, characters in CoH can physically obstruct one another and a crude physics system allows characters to be knocked down or even blown away a fair distance when hit by the appropriate power.

A few things were apparent from the first moment I started up the game. This game is old and looks it. Not only is the graphics engine terribly dated by now, but its interface, user friendliness and general game design all mark it as very much a pre-World of Warcraft MMO. What’s surprising is that even though CoH launched only a few months earlier than WOW, it looks a lot older, with plain textures and blocky polygons and is far less polished.

The character creation system is indeed as powerful as advertised and to me was probably the most fun part of my short trial. While the combat system felt suitably visceral compared to other MMOs, I was bothered by the fact that although characters use their powers on each other, there’s next to nothing that they can do with their powers to the environment. This felt silly to me and detracted from the experience. You’re not superpowered unless you can throw cars around and blow buildings up in my book. I was annoyed that gameplay seemed to consist mostly of grinding on random mobs or running missions in buildings with the same layouts over and over again. It reminded me unpleasantly of my very first MMO experience with Anarchy Online.

One nice thing that I noticed was that players were generally serious about their character and took the time to design a cool costume and picking an appropriate name. People who are already used to the multitude of dumb and meaningless names in MMOs should know how significant this is. Unfortunately, this game is still too dated and too clunky to warrant any extended interest on my part. I am however looking forward to Champions Online.

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Films & Television, Science Fiction

Star Trek is dead. Long live the new Star Trek

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Inevitably, I went to see the newest Star Trek film with my wife on Sunday. Now, I’ve always thought of myself as a Star Trek fan, even though I’m too young for The Original Series and it’s The Next Generation that is the most memorable for me. I never did get around to watching Deep Space Nine, only watched bits and pieces of Voyager and made a deliberate effort to avoid watching Enterprise.

Still, I’m reasonably up to snuff on the best parts of TOS and combined with the best parts of TNG, I have a very firm idea of what it is that makes Star Trek great: as a mainstream platform on which to tell high-brow science-fiction. After all, it’s not a coincidence that many of the very best episodes were written by the most notable writers of print-based science-fiction, for example, City on the Edge of Forever (TOS) by Harlan Ellison, The Measure of a Man (TNG) by Melinda Snodgrass, The Doomsday Machine (TOS) by Norman Spinrad etc. Plus, there’s the fact that Star Trek always had a single very clear vision: creator Gene Roddenberry’s dream of a unified and noble humanity venturing out to do good amongst the stars.

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Politics

Just who is an African-American?

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I’ve done my share of railing against political correctness in this blog, so here’s another. As this news article from abc News relates, Paulo Serodio, a naturalized American citizen, is suing a New Jersey medical school, claiming that he had been harassed and ultimately suspended. His crime: for self-identifying as an African-American. The thing is, Mr. Serodio was indeed born and raised in Mozambique, but he happpens to be white, not black. From the article:

After Serodio labeled himself as a white African-American, another student said she was offended by his comments and that, because of his white skin, was not an African-American.

According to the lawsuit, Serodio was summoned to Duncan’s office where he was instructed “never to define himself as an African-American … because it was offensive to others and to people of color for him to do so.”

“It’s crazy,” Serodio’s attorney Gregg Zeff told ABCNews.com. “Because that’s what he is.”

The problem of course is that the term African-American doesn’t really mean an American citizen of African ancestry. Instead it’s a code-word for being black, but due to political correctness, actually calling someone black is considered offensive these days. In the US, being labelled African-American opens the possibility of being eligible for affirmative action programs and other forms of assistance that specifically target minorities, but the unstated assumption is that the aid is supposed to be directed to blacks, so things get ugly when a white guy calls himself an African-American.

More generally, this case represents yet another example of why special assistance directed towards specific groups based on their culture or ethnicity always run into problems of defining just who is a valid member of the targeted group. It just makes more sense to qualify aid using objective criteria, such as poverty, scholarly excellence etc. It’s just another case of trying to shoehorn people into pre-defined groups, instead of seeing them for the individuals that they are.

Games

A Game: Fall from Heaven 2

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One of the most important lessons any aspiring designer can learn is to heed Sid Meier’s dictum that a good game is a series of interesting decisions. This is precisely what the dark fantasy-themed Fall from Heaven 2 is all about. There is no point in the game where a particular path of action becomes so overbearingly obvious as to make the choice a non-decision. While the ultimate objective remains, as in any 4X game, to achieve complete dominance over the other factions, there are many different paths to this end and countless means within each path to advance along it.

Fall from Heaven 2 of course benefits from being a mod of Civilization 4 which provides it with a sound base to work on, but the new mechanics, factions, units, religions and events it adds makes it a worthy game more than capable of standing on its own. The cornucopia of choices begins with choosing one of a total of 21 available factions. Each faction generally has two different leaders available. Then there’s a total of 7 religions to pick from, each of which offers synergies different enough to drastically alter your playstyle. Next, you’ll want to think about which victory condition to shoot for. In addition to the ones already in Civilization 4, the Alpha Centauri victory is replaced by the Tower of Mastery victory inspired by the venerable Master of Magic game and there’s a religious Altar of Luonnatar victory condition.

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Politics

BN politician compares himself to Mandela and Gandhi

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I admit that I’ve been a bit too apathetic of late to pay much attention to Malaysian politics. This means that most of the subtleties and intricacies of what’s going on in the power struggle over the state of Perak has gone way over my head. Still, when a politician from the ruling Barisan Nasional coalition is oblivious enough to compare his struggles with those of Nelson Mandela and Mahatma Gandhi, even I have to sit up and take notice. An excerpt from an article from The Star that’s looks like it should have appeared in a Malaysian version of The Onion, but sadly isn’t:

He said a person did not need to hold a post in his struggle to uphold the truth, and likened the recent struggles faced by him and his “comrades from the Barisan Nasional” to those endured by politicians like Nelson Mandela and Mahatma Gandhi.

“Nelson Mandela sacrificed his freedom for 27 years in order to free South Africans from the grip of ‘apartheid.’

“Gandhi also sacrificed his life for the sake of India’s independence and so his people would be able to live without caste or religious boundaries,” he said.

Dr Zambry said however that it was lucky for him that his struggles had not caused him physical harm or loss of freedom.

“I only had to withstand the negative perceptions that Nizar and his people have created of me and the Barisan’s image.

This is a truly a wtf moment of mindblowing proportions. The Barisan Nasional, which has ruled the country uninterrupted since its independence, being cast in the role of the poor underdog. Let’s just say that some people have really thick skins.

The unexamined life is a life not worth living