This Foreign Policy blog post chose to highlight the cost of assisted suicide in Switzerland, but what struck me most about this news item was really how dignified the couple’s choice was and indeed how touching. The wife was aged 74 and suffering from terminal cancer with only weeks left to live. The husband was aged 85, going blind and deaf (which must have been especially painful given that he was a prominent conductor) and simply did not want to live without her, after having been together for 54 years.
This isn’t terribly surprising coming from someone like me, but I most definitely would want this option to be available to me. I can imagine few other cases that would serve as a better example than this one of why choosing to take one’s own life can sometimes be just the right one.
Or so Public Mutual tells me anyway. I received my Quarter Account Statement for the period ending 30th June 2009 on Saturday as you can see from the picture above (edited slightly to remove some personal information). Most of the report looks okay (actually more than okay due to the gains the markets have made in the last quarter). Then my eye wanders down to the Asset Allocation area of the statement and my eyes pop out.
Yep, it claims that I have a whopping RM42,385,804.10 in fixed income funds with Public Mutual. Naturally, as much as my wife would prefer otherwise, it’s a mistake as I’m worth nowhere near as much. After asking around on LYN, it seems this is a common error in this quarter’s statement. Everyone seems to have an incorrect entry in the Fixed Income portion but the actual amount varies from person to person. It does make me a bit uneasy that my mutual fund company would be making mistakes like this.
Incidentally, my blog hosting company Bluehost.com had some connection problems for the past two days, which explains why this post is late. Very annoying.
This chart is the funniest thing I’ve seen so far this week. You can view the full version of it here. To be fair, it’s just something the Republicans cooked up to mock the Democrats’ plans to reform healthcare in the U.S., so it’s meant to be frighteningly complex and byzantine. Even so, it’s clear that the health care system is a huge mess that I wouldn’t want to be tangled in. I’m a libertarian, but healthcare is one of those things that I think government should provide, at least at a basic level, and for this at least, I’m glad that we have, if not exactly good, at least fairly decent public hospitals here in Malaysia.
I have a confession to make. Until now, I’ve generally detested Japanese games.
I suppose it doesn’t help their case that the Japanese games that are most likely to appeal to me, such as Dead Rising, Shadow of the Colossus or Demon’s Souls, never get ported to the PC which is my preferred platform. Still, the fact remains that many aspects of Japanese games turn me off: cutesy anime art, ridiculous hair styles, emo characters, overwrought and melodramatic plots, grindy gameplay. What’s more, the big name Japanese titles, such as Final Fantasy and Metal Gear Solid, tend to be the worst offenders. That they’re widely held up as the most famous icons of gaming culture constantly infuriates me to no end.
No, I haven’t watched the second one and I have no plans to give Michael Bay any of my money. However, I can’t ignore the huge media phenenomenon it’s become so my wife and I decided to rewatch the first film over the weekend. Another reason was that she had fallen asleep while trying to watch it when it first came out. As it turned out, she fell asleep this time too, so we started watching it on Saturday night and finished it on Sunday morning.
Unsurprisingly, I didn’t like it the second time around either. In fact, seeing it again just put me in a position to run a constant commentary on how stupid the things in it are. Did Michael Bay really think it would be funny to have giant robots trying to hide in a backyard? How is it supposed to be a good action movie if we can’t tell who’s fighting who most of the time? Why would that generic U.S. soldier who misses home and family help out Sam when they don’t know each other? Does it make sense that the U.S. military’s best plan to hide the cube is in the middle of a metropolis with its millions of civilians? And, as That Movie Blogger Fella put it, why are they trying to have Sam escape on a helicopter when Megatron transforms into a plane?
Barely two weeks ago I wrote a post bemoaning the low quality of the hugely popular games on Facebook. So coming across Warstorm is kind of funny. To be fair, it’s not actually on Facebook itself, though it does offer the option of signing in through that social network and using it to connect with your existing contacts. It’s basically a simplified collectible card game with a focus on building and tweaking decks. The mechanics are streamlined and simple enough that the duels play out automatically and you only get to watch what happens. All of the decision-making takes place only while constructing decks.
The game itself is free to sign up for and to play, and there are single-player missions to do that will earn you packs of cards as rewards. But if you want the really good cards you’ll have to pony some real, hard cash. It’s pretty obvious that this is an absolute necessity if you want to have any hope at all at competing against other players. For example, two cards can have the exact same statistics, but the good one will have a drastically lower playing cost than the bad one. No prizes for guessing that the good cards only come from the packs that you have to pay cash for, as opposed to the free “Novice” packs that you get for completing in-game objectives.
It’s not a bad little game but it won’t win any prizes against the real CCGs. I notice that Magic: The Gathering is enjoying a bit of a revival recently, probably due to the release of the Xbox Live Arcade version of the game with pre-made decks. So you want to have a small taste of what CCGs are like without needing to pay any money upfront or are just feeling a little bit nostalgic about your Magic playing days, checking Warstorm out won’t be a bad idea at all.
It’s been a while since the first of these strategy guides, but as I’ve said, I expect Fall from Heaven 2 to be a game that stays permanently on my hard drive and that I’ll come back to again and again, so here finally is my guide for playing as the Grigori. In many ways, this faction is considered the easiest for newcomers to the game to pick up and play as even the manual uses it in its introductory walkthrough. They’re certainly the most vanilla of the various factions available.
The reason for this is that in the lore, the Grigori are plain, unmodified humans who have rejected the Gods. They don’t have any special powers or abilities and most importantly, they can’t adopt a state religion. In game terms, this is a huge disadvantage as having a state religion opens the door to special buildings, units and even civics. To make up for this, the Grigori are the only faction who can access the special Adventurer units, which have the potential to become some of the most powerful units on Erebor.
