Seems like it's very easy to break away from routines for me - just pause for a few days and it's all gone, like confetti in a hurricane. Oh well, nobody seems to be complaining. But whatever, going to keep at it.

There are non-depression related reasons for why there have been no posts. For one, I've significantly upped the search for a job of some kind, and moreover I'm lazily working some more on the blog over at Blogspot. Fine-tuning the code is going to be hard - I'm learning some new stuff as I go - but I'm damn glad that there's the freedom to dig around in it to begin with. Perhaps it's standard, but after the highly proprietary nature of Livejournal, it's a big upgrade.

A bunch of stuff happened over these past week or so. Apparently, it has surfaced that on January 30th, an unidentified object passed in front of the sun. It's apparently a quarter of the size of Earth (how do they know?), and it resolutely could not have been Mercury because Mercury last transited the sun in 2006 and will not transit again until 2016. Wonder what it was.

Wired has published a brief article about DARPA finally beginning to get its shit together with synthbio. I can't fucking wait. This is just a baby step, of course, one of many - judging from the pittance of a budget it has been assigned... Let's not forget that the common sequence of technological advancement is scientific >> military >> industrial >> commercial >> widespread, which means that we're not even close to our glorious biohacker future (or our glorious bio-apocalyptic future).

Also! Here's a resource that I just cannot bear to keep to myself, though it's probably not entirely appropriate to post here. The Big List of Porn is a directory of various non-garbage free porn sites. It also has links to online porn fiction and so forth. All the sites linked there contain no malware, spyware, browser hijacks, link redirects, or bogus content. Obviously the link is NSFW, so don't click it if you don't like/may not view porn. On a related note, Australia has outlawed the depiction of small breasts and female ejaculation, so keep that in mind before clicking if you live in that Jesoid-overrun festering wound on the buttock of planet Earth.

Life is still pretty shitty right about now. I guess it's kind of a zigzag curve; at the very least it's not dipping as low as it did about a week ago. Much of it stems from completely unreasonable fights with my mother, who has gotten more entrenched than ever with her conservatard politics and is going on the offensive every now and then. Trench warfare, in other words. Brutal, filthy, and altogether miserable in its utter inability to advance either way. Curiously appropriate analogy.

The binoculars arrived today. In case you were wondering, they're the model seen here - 7x35 Wide-Angle Outbound. Let's all briefly smirk at the outrageous gouge-price seen on that site, considering how I effectively paid less than a tenth of what's listed there. They're pleasantly excellent (but then again, what do I know - my prior experience is effectively limited to childrens' and theater binoculars). The image is clear from what I can gather. The binoculars have no focus knobs and are instead permanently focused on infinity, which means objects less than 10-20 meters away look blurry, but then again such is the philosophy of use for these: appraise distant scenes at a glance without worrying about focus. Stars and look decidedly pretty in these: they ought to, what with how I'm in light-polluted NYC and haven't properly seen them before. Still have yet to try the moon on for size. There's also a kinda flimsy removable cap at the longitudinal pivot joint which conceals a tripod mount screw. Seems like these would make good hunting binoculars, if they turn out to be hermetically sealed (against water, fog, and condensation). I feel good about the purchase.

Been reading up some about the prospect of scoring a teaching job; namely, took a look at the NYC Teaching Fellowship site. No good. They all require college commitment to validate potential types, except for special ed - but I might as well just off myself if my future is going to commit me to "teaching" retards. The little inner-city slideshow on the site's main page also dug up some bitter memories from junior high. Fuck 'em. I'm not asking for luxuries - hell, I can get by with very little - but this wouldn't even be living; it would be eking out an existence. My psyche couldn't weather such long-term punishment.
Fired off an e-mail to the counseling department of Brooklyn College. Got to try getting back in there... Time's ticking away on jack shit, at least I ought to be earning a degree doing just that.

A classic. A lot of similarity can be seen in this guy's works and those of kawa/yoo. Are these the signs of a defined art style? I sure as hell hope so. I've posted Arma Eater's art before.

See his website and his Pixiv page. His site is relatively difficult to navigate, but that's not a problem overmuch.
The image below, depicting a bunch of fantastical youkai gathered for drinks, is a commissioned piece for a bar called Vanilla Mania in the busy and well-known Ginza district of Tokyo. Take a look at their website, which sports this image right on its main page. I certainly hope you like it as much as I do, and kudos to the bar for supporting aesthetically pleasing progressive art.

I'm taking some days off from the blog due to being depressed as fuck to the point of feeling physically ill. The worst is past; getting better, slowly. This is going to mean skipped posts. Come back on February 1st, I promise a good old-fashioned art post that day.

It's high time I switched over to Blogspot, so that's coming up in the near future too. Long ago, I already squatted dracova.blogspot.com, so it's just a matter of surmounting some procrastination.

Snagged a pair of Carson binoculars on eBay for a total of ~$5, after applying a discount earned for buying box components in October. The binoculars are 7x35, wide-angle, with BK-7 borosilicate glass lenses. Old, discontinued model (hence cheap); new in box, however. Careful analysis suggested that they were good, but I could be wrong. Still worth the gamble given the price. Have you seen the prices on some of the NIB brand-name optics? Insanity; over a thousand dollars sometimes. Perhaps it's all because I grew up in a sociopolitical anomaly, but no practical pair of binoculars should cost over a hundred dollars. Then there are all those crazy numbers, like 10x21 for a pair of compact hunting binoculars... Does it really have to be 10x with such a relatively small front aperture? Compact emphasizes stealth, so does it need to have such a magnification with an obviously small view angle? And then there are all those continuous zoom binoculars with loopy numbers like 20-60x. From what I gather, continuous zoom is garbage with binoculars because it invariably uses a mechanical linkage to synchronize and results in shifting focus. Select-zoom is the only proper way about it.

I was one post away from putting the blog back on track, but no. It just doesn't work like that, apparently. Combination of sloth and a wave of depression due to some IRL nonsense (it really is nonsense: don't worry about me). Worried sick about some stuff, been putting off a trivial phonecall for almost a month now due to being scared shitless of it in a most irrational way... Ergh.

Today is supposed to be another kanji day, but it's really dragging on since it's hard to focus on learning kanji with all the distractions and so forth. I've come up with a new system: irregular kanji posts. If I don't have a kanji post ready, it gets pushed further back. That way I can at least keep cranking stuff out... Regular updates are one of the very few things I've to offer anyone reading this thing.

Speaking of deadness: take a look at Zombie Driver. I've played it for a couple days now. The graphics are gorgeous (at least I think so), but the gameplay is pretty frustrating at times. Especially the nigh impossible final mission... In any case, this is like an improvement on the Zombies vs. Ambulances concept.

It has become shockingly obscure, that's what. It is nothing short of my duty to speak out about it.

Here it is on IGN, if you doubt the game's existence or something. It was a very early project by Southpeak Interactive, a game which was developed as a marketing prong to accompany the high-budgeted Wild Wild West movie. Despite being panned by critics for having measly character development and overall cheap gimmickry, it nonetheless laid some of the groundwork for what we now readily recognize as steampunk.
Way back then, when I was still new to the whole Internets thing, I used to take all the advantage I could of that Access1 56k connection. Part of it was using the "holy shit, this is awesome" Streambox VCR to download many game demos (not warez, no - remember: this was before torrents, Kazaa, and even Napster. Warez sites were a horrid roundabout of top-lists, and the real stuff was stuffed around darknets accessible speakeasy-style through IRC contacts). One of these demos was the aforementioned game. I thought it was very interesting. A 2.5D adventure game with combat elements; graphics were excellent (for the time), moreover I was captivated with the possibilities.
Well, a decade later, I downloaded this game after finding a chance link to the ISO. It can't be gotten anywhere except the Internet anymore, and the game makers won't even acknowledge its existence anymore, so downloading it is no disservice. It almost runs on Windows XP. That is to say, there are no crashes and everything seems to work - except overlays. In-game journal pages flicker madly, and some puzzles have an annoying blink effect; but I was ready to put up with all of that, because the game was pretty good. Unfortunately, it's impossible to converse with NPCs: the instant a multiple-choice conversation menu comes up, it vanishes and the game becomes stuck.
Digging around for a solution reveals two things outright: there isn't a single informative forum topic related to this game that comes up on Google, and no patches exist for the game (so it was stable after all, at least). Backtracking from the ISO links, I found a thread from 2007 on a Russian forum that discussed the game. They were talking about some entirely different bug. However, a tip-off solution was there... Reducing hardware acceleration from your graphics adapter, and/or downgrading DirectX. I did so (just the couple ticks, to disable hardware handling of bitmap overlays and stuff); it seemed as though the flickering stopped! Unfortunately, it made my mouse cursor lag badly, so to hell with it. I don't have enough patience when I need to be doing a multitude of other things... To speak nothing of downgrading DirectX.

If you for some reason have Windows 9x, give this game a try. It's not even necessarily a fighting game, since there are two different "paths" you can go on - James West is the path with gunfights and fewer Myst-like puzzles, whereas Artemus Gordon is the path without any overt combat. Probably a significant landmark of sorts in the evolution of steampunk, worth at least that.

I highly encourage you to explore topics which are close to my heart over here. It's the site of Nick Bostrom, director of the Future of Humanity Institute. Don't get worked up, it sounds impressive but it's actually a small joint at the University of Oxford philosophy faculty.
Nick Bostrom's site has a whole bunch of rather excellent papers, all penned by him. He happens to be the author of the famous Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant, an allegorical piece on the virtues of engineered senescence - long-winded but powerful. Spread it far and wide.
I came upon this stuff in my search for research materials related to Hellstar. It's actually lurching forward, paragraph by paragraph (finally started writing it seriously). The chief topic of the book has also shifted a bit away from future prediction to ponderings on the subject of extraterrestrial life - though the book is much the same after that redirection. Of keen relevance to this subject is this paper; it actually resonates with some not-yet-mature ideas that have been dancing around in my head for a while. Essentially, the author writes, finding pond scum on Mars would reveal to us a great existential risk. If there's life on Mars, that means life on Earth isn't the result of remarkable chance - but is rather piss-cheap and likely to be very common among the stars out there. This comes to a speeding trainwreck with the demonstrable absence of ET signals (our own radio has already radiated beyond many light years). The combination of common ET life and nonexistent ET communication suggests that there might be something decimating ET civilizations, making them too unstable to survive for any reasonable length of time (e.g. a miserly million years, at least). Nick Bostrom calls this the "Great Filter" - I forget if it's his original term or something he lifted elsewhere. He goes on to point out that there might be more Great Filters in our past - evolving into eukaryotes, evolving into multicellular constructs, evolving intellect... However, all of these are increasingly easy. It is that hypothetical survival-oriented Great Filter that's still in our future which is cause for worry. Perhaps it's as simple as one of the proverbial Four Horsemen: War (two minutes to midnight style), Famine (running out of resources), Pestilence (biotech apocalypse/gray goo), and Conquest (getting pwned by something alien). Of course, the Jesoid concept of the Four Horsemen neglects to fathom the possibility of Strange Apocalypse by way of Satan's Stargate, heh heh.
It's not the point I want to stress in Hellstar, though. It seems to me like we'll survive for the time being. Our likeliest risk is that of global thermonuclear war; lest the peaceniks forget, USA and Russia still have thousands of mighty nukes pointed at each other, and thousands more in storage - ready to get assembled on short notice. However, this devil isn't as scary as they paint him. Here's an excellent, reasonably accurate analysis of a hypothetical US-USSR thermonuclear war in 1988. A couple billion dead, northern hemisphere ruined for half a century and turned to Third World for centuries to come; but Nuclear Winter is basically a sham and human civilization will endure. The casual mention in that analysis of how Utah Mormons fare better than average in the wake of thermonuclear war reminded me of this dystopian feminist sci-fi novel about a thoroughly Jesoid-headfucked United States in the 'near future'. It was so fucking depressing that I couldn't bring myself to actually read the whole shit - a plot synopsis had to suffice. If it depressed you too - go cheer up with some Insanity Wolf.

What the hell is this crap, I'm already well-underway to generating a brand new monster backlog of posts in 2010... That's no good. Mustn't fade away into that good night, no.

Well, here's some filler. See Tale of Tales, a scratchware Belgian game development studio. Their projects emphasize artistic presentation - not gameplay (that is to say, the games are moreso toys than games: non-challenging interactive experiences that even a cataleptic cretin could play). The art style can probably be described as a sort of contemporary abstract, reminiscent of American McGee's Alice and Dreamfall. I tried a game of theirs just recently - The Path. It's kinda meh, but manages to fulfill its spookiness quota more or less. It's a sort of snuffy fairy tale based on the good old Red Riding Hood; here, read a review that's much more generous on the wordage than I am right now.

Artistic games like these are hit-or-miss, really. Give the stuff a try if you'd like, and mind the spooky value - it's even more of a niche quality, but then again, kindred souls who like artsy games in general tend to have robust tolerance for that stuff.

Days ago, a strong earthquake hit Haiti. I don't normally give a damn about localized disasters, but it's hard not to give a damn about this one because everyone is going completely nuts over it. France is canceling Haitian debts, half a billion dollars from Europe accompanying that; US is sending thousands of troops, celebrities have sent millions of dollars, and on top of it all there's even a grassroots donation drive at Reddit.
Needless to say, holy shit. This is altogether quite different from the response to Katrina. It makes a bit of sense, though: back then was Dubya's administration, which nobody liked - and it was also a disaster in the US (Haiti has imperial acquisition potential; New Orleans, however, is already in the bag).

Being the inhuman monster that I am, this entire brouhaha can't help but reignite my age-old argument of the wisdom in rewarding people for living like animals on the edge of a loose tectonic plate in a coastal city without building codes. Is it any surprise that nature has bitten them in the ass? Wouldn't all that aid money be far better spent on reinforcing the future disaster sites, so to say? Like this, it's just being thrown to the dead.

To hell with it: I'll rant a tiny bit about almsgiving in general. I consider almsgiving to be downright opprobrious. Alms can be defined within the confines of my argument as unconditional gifts to random persons (a mother feeding her child is not alms; neither is a gift to a friend, nor is aid to someone on an ultimatum that they must get a job or pay you back). You might say that aid to Haiti is justifiable because the Haitian people are our friends; but this is absurd, because they are even more remote to me personally than the beggars on the New York subway. Said beggars look incredibly offensive to me, especially if they try to guilt you by acting frustrated when nobody gives them anything. Furthermore, the notion of charity - giving your money to persons who claim to distribute it amongst the 'less-well-off' at no obvious profit to themselves - is downright outrageous and should be considered default as con artistry to a sane observer. Government-subsidized charity is to me nothing short of a grabasstic affront. I practice what I preach, it warrants mentioning - despite how I easily qualify for welfare, I've refused it (against my greedier judgment). I am on Medicaid, though, but I haven't got much against socialized medicine: it's a way to protect oneself by protecting others, understandably. Epidemics aren't pretty.
In case what I'm saying takes you aback, keep in mind that I actually mean these things in good faith. If more people were like me, we'd have more skyscrapers and fewer cathedrals. A random stranger on the street telling me "spare a dollar?" feels to me rather equivalent to how it would be if he were to say "lick my asshole?" in the same neutral way - grossly disconcerted and worried for my safety.
The fact that so many people seem to think of almsgiving as acceptable and even noble makes me feel like I'm in a world gone mad.

I was initially going to post about a dream where a Deagle-like gun (with a little bayonet, no less) figured as an item - but the dream was overall stupid, so I'll just nix that. I want to talk a little bit about this abomination. Actually, go watch this review by a satisfied owner first.

The Deagle is very popular. It has appeared in a whole mess of movies and games (that's only a partial list, believe you me: it neglects to mention Haruhi, for instance, albeit those Deagles were in BB gun version). If you've privy to societies like 4chan's /k/ and Opchan, you'll also know that the Deagle (especially in golden tigerstripe) has in-joke status.
Anyhow, let's take a look at this thing. It's a massive (~1.9 kg, close to double the bulk of the M1911), semiautomatic, magazine-fed gas-blowback handgun. It's chambered for huge fuck-off rounds, most of them designed for revolvers: the daintiest (and most reasonable) caliber it's chambered in is .357 Magnum, and the most redonkulous caliber for it is .50 AE (Action Express, not American Eagle as many idiots tend to call it after being tricked by the Magnum Research eagle logo). A casual look at listings brought up by AmmoEngine shows that .50 AE is sold for upwards of two smackers a pop. A pop! If your handgun round is more expensive than .454 Casull, you're doing it wrong.
Anyway, the gun was originally designed for the Israeli military; apparently this was just another tangle with the dubious manstopper concept; as can be seen from freak cases like this one, a human being can withstand a lot of punishment - over a hundred rounds' worth, indeed. The supposed "manstopper" effect is actually from psychological shock of impact. The key to actually taking out an enemy is shot placement, targeting vital organs... No such thing as hitpoints in real life.

To put it quite simply, the Deagle is a bastard middle child. On one side of the family, there are semiautomatic magazine-fed handguns which can rapidly fire many shots. Semiautomatics use mid-to-low calibers. They're slim and light, very practical. At only a century old, they're the younger kids on the block - the breadwinners, too; having worked out early reliability problems, every military and police force in the world issues semiautomatics, but only some police forces issue revolvers. On the other side of the family are revolvers. Old and venerable, they're a 19th century development - though the revolving chamber cluster idea goes back to at least the renaissance. Revolvers are mechanically simpler and don't normally use coil springs in their workings (coil springs are the bane of reliability, first things to go). Revolvers cannot have feed jams because there is no feeding mechanism - every round has its own chamber. They are also inherently more accurate due to having an immobile barrel (no inertial blowback to rattle the barrel - the whole gun recoils as one), though the accuracy advantage is infinitesimal at typical handgun engagement distances. Lastly, due to their robust simplicity, revolvers admit the full range of calibers - from the gargantuan 500 S&W to the tiny functional toy Swiss MiniGun.
The Deagle is stuck at one of the, so to say, Lagrangian points of practicality. It's a semiautomatic, but it's also ridiculously powerful, which means it's nigh impossible to shoot like a proper semiautomatic. It can only be realistically shot one burp at a time, re-acquiring the target after each; in effect, that makes it no quicker than a revolver. Its magazine is huge since the rounds are huge, which widens the grip (not good). Despite that bulk, the magazine only holds between seven and nine rounds. Revolvers usually have six, with some having seven or eight. That magazine advantage is meager at best, as you can see. Worst of all, it's massive. More massive and less concealable than a comparable revolver. So there you have it: a semiautomatic that tries to be a revolver. Now, let's see a quote.

Bullet Tooth Tony: So, you are obviously the big dick. The men on the side of ya are your balls. Now there are two types of balls. There are big brave balls, and there are little mincey faggot balls.
Vinny: These are your last words, so make them a prayer.
Bullet Tooth Tony: Now, dicks have drive and clarity of vision, but they are not clever. They smell pussy and they want a piece of the action. And you thought you smelled some good old pussy, and have brought your two little mincey faggot balls along for a good old time. But you've got your parties muddled up. There's no pussy here, just a dose that'll make you wish you were born a woman. Like a prick, you are having second thoughts. You are shrinking, and your two little balls are shrinking with you. And the fact that you've got "Replica" written down the side of your guns...
[Zoom in on the side of Sol's gun, which indeed has "REPLICA" etched on the side; zoom out, as they sneak peeks at the sides of their guns]
Bullet Tooth Tony: And the fact that I've got "Desert Eagle point five O"...
[Withdraws his gun and puts it on the table]
Bullet Tooth Tony: Written down the side of mine...
[They look, zoom in on the side of his gun, which indeed has "DESERT EAGLE .50" etched on the side]
Bullet Tooth Tony: Should precipitate your balls into shrinking, along with your presence. Now... Fuck off!

That's from the movie Snatch. Why does the media go hawg wild over this absurd monstrosity? Well, that's easy. It's fuckhuge. It's the Hummer of handguns. The feeble-minded, easily impressionable, puerile atavists of our world love nothing more than shiny things, huge things, and dangerous things. The Deagle is ALL THREE. So now you know, and knowing is half the battle.

Been searching for the damned thing since at least 2008. Honest. ISBN 4-57-529579-5, it's for sale nowhere and it's for download in even fewer places.

What it is happens to be a 100+ page concept art book from the creators of The Big O. It's keenly relevant to my interests due to being very retrofuturist in a style I refer to as "raygun gothic"; of greatest significance are probably those road vehicle designs... A single page of this concept art book can be seen at the Big O megadeus wiki, which lends hope to the fact that this book has indeed been scanned. It's been footnoted as having come from Paradigm-City.com, a site that I've known of for years now, having found it back when Cartoon Network still showed Big O dubs at night. Wherever those scans are isn't listed on Google, at least; if anywhere, it must be on some darknet that I'll probably never find. Depressing indeed. It's next to impossible finding Big O manga, even.
I wonder who were the specific people involved in creating those designs. Could it possibly be that they were the same ones behind Sunrise's involvement in Batman: TAS? Hm.

Anyway, on a related note, here's a fansite to R. Dorothy Wayneright. Not many people are aware of it, which sucks; it's rather well-made as far as fansites go. If you're like me, you'll also be interested in this steampunk/dieselpunk forum (mainly dieselpunk). Also affiliated with an active blog.

Stumbled upon something fun, wanted to share. Future GI, as envisioned in 1959. It was the topic of a /k/ thread on the 15th, which is when this post is actually getting written. See here for a condensed illustration lifted from that thread, including the stuff from that Modern Mechanix blog. Also, two more images, in color (are these from a vintage Life magazine?): one, two. This sheds some light on the mentality of the Golden Era (heat-resistant mask and gloves: to protect against nuke thermal radiation!) and is also fanciful to an authentic degree ("jump belt" is exactly what you think it is: a mini-jetpack, and those "explosive foxhole diggers" - shaped charges used to create an instant foxhole - are a textbook example of a mid-century military chindogu).
Overall though, the concept gets a bunch of things right. For one, the implementation of helmet-mounted infravision. Body armor, as seen in the pictures, is also a big one. Believe it or not, World War II was fought essentially without armor: aside from some Russian experimentation and the famous English flak jackets adopted by US military, armor was simply too weak and bulky to be effective on the early 20th century battlefield. It wasn't until the Vietnam War that body armor started getting implemented, and it actually did resemble the jacket worn by the sap in these photos.
The gun in the pictures, an M14, was indeed new in 1959 - having been introduced a mere two years earlier. It was quite unfortunate how it didn't prove to be suitable as a general-issue gun, although it eventually became a venerable military and police sniper rifle - the M21. The geniuses who put this future soldier ensemble together probably couldn't have envisioned that an M14 contemporary, the AR-15, would become the mainstay of American arsenals in the latter 20th century. It was put into service in 1958. Also they couldn't have envisioned the ephemeralization of electronics, and the veritable onboard computers that modern jarheads lug around... But hey, then again, it's not like they were predicting the 21st century here.
I found it quite amusing that a soldier of the future would have a hexagram on his uniform (pictured was the 6th Army insignia, not intentionally the Star of David). That little gaffe is not so funny and even a little bit spooky, heh.

Today sucked bigtime. You see, it would appear that I have developed lactose intolerance at some point. This came as a rather nasty surprise given that I really pigged out on milk the day before and today; it wasn't pretty. Excruciating pain for hours, accompanied by puke and general suffering. Combined with having been awake for over twenty-four hours, it was pretty fucking awful and really made me think.
I've said this before: no other part of my body has caused as much aggregate pain and suffering to me as the digestive system. Forget the rare events like gallstones back in 2008, or the vile rice on New Year's Eve. The guts never feel good; at best, they feel decent. Perhaps that has to do with my abysmal diet, and also the fact that neither my parents nor I have skill or interest in cooking; but let's not forget the unpleasantness of hunger and vain appetite - the latter is the scourge which makes the First World grossly obese. Our guts are very stupid and incapable of signaling to our brains for precisely what nutrients they require, and as a result we pig out. Then there's the matter of waste. Don't quote me on the statistic, but something like four fifths of all disease is caused by exposure to shit. It's also a vile inconvenience, and we haven't really improved on dealing with that inconvenience since the invention of the flush toilet in the 19th century. Just as an aside, I'd like to voice an opinion that toilet paper has got to go sometime soon: it's unhygienic and actually rubs fecal matter into the skin. Some washing machine or an even more elegant and ingenious solution should ideally take its place. Three seashells, anyone? Heh heh.
Obviously, something as frivolous as dealing with the digestive system is nowhere near the priority of dealing with the circulatory system - that great source of death. Nor is it as important as curing (or at least developing practical, efficient strategies for treatment of) cancer. However, if we do stabilize the circulatory system with biomechanoid augmentations in the near-to-mid future, doing something about the ruinous digestive system is not far behind. I've considered the possibility of something like a "fuel tank" for a few years now. An organ which would replace all the guts in the abdomen; it would be filled with a specially synthesized nutrient 'soup', and easily dispense that 'soup' into the bloodstream as nutrients. Probably refilled/cleaned through a socket in the abdomen (the navel would be a good candidate for discrete placement). It's possible to leave a more rudimentary through-gut in the stead of what we have now, in order to allow for fluid intake at least - since our bodies still demand a lot of water. Besides, getting rid of the guts altogether would also possibly mean getting rid of the mouth; our civilization is nowhere near ready to look like Protoss, let alone something even more abstract.

Been long enough without art posts, I'd say. Time to rectify the situation. Today I've got the art of humi for you. He's got an O bloodtype, it would seem (see here for the uninitiated). I'm also a type O, or at least so I think, not having been to a doctor in years. Yet the ketsuekigata system would suggest I should be a type AB... Heh, there's a reason they call it pseudoscience.

The image below (source) is a good example of this guy's art. It's called 虚空のリング ("gokuu no ringu"? Or should the kanji be read in kun yomu?) - "ring of nothingness", perhaps... Hm. I wonder what this is supposed to mean, or if it's part of some series. Very evocative, isn't it? Just from the colorful, glistening eyes alone; but also from the general composition of the scene. Looks positively alive with action, and the characters' expressions are striking.
Go see more of his work through that Pixiv link above. It's worth it, he's got like four pages of the stuff! Some of it's more fantastical, and like the picture below, there's a prevailing urbopunk/chaotic city motif.

The FPS situation isn't getting any better. Well, that's to say, my average accuracy has gone up to 12% and there have been a few games (against pseudo-noobs...) where I've broken even with my kill/death ratio, but in games with actual experienced players I get my ass handed to me repeatedly. It's clear that my hand-eye coordination is gone to shit for some reason. Or was it always like this? Did the competition just get more hardcore? No matter. I'm starting to lose motivation. If I can't be top-of-the-line, what's the point?

To hell with all of that. Here's a manga recommendation. I've been reading Kami nomi for a while now, it's cute and fun. The story is that a lowly janitorial-type cute girl demon from hell (Shinto hell, not Jesoid hell) has been sent on a mission to capture rogue spirits in the human world; these spirits possess young girls (not Exorcist-type possession; more like surreptitiously hitching a ride) in an effort to become reincarnated as the future children of those girls. To temporarily chase the spirits out, the host girl needs to experience strong affection. To that end, the cute demon has enlisted the services of a "capture god", a love relationship expert, who turns out to not have any IRL experience: he's a renai game and visual novel otaku! Worse yet, there's no going back, and both the otaku and the cute demon have Battle Royale-type explosive collars. Ok, so let's say it's cute and fun for a certain audience.
Go read it OneManga. Man, been using these sites for a couple years now and still get awestruck by the convenience. Back in the day I had to scour IRC for manga scanlations...

"Something more substantial", my ass. Here's what happened. I remembered that I have a Quake Live account, so went over there to play a couple quick games. The peers, however, wiped the floor with me. Couldn't even survive long enough to pwn some obvious noobs - and my average accuracy was something like 5%. Horrid. This is what has happened to me because I stopped playing FPS games for nearly a year... Indeed, I stopped playing action games in general, and went completely out of shape.
This is not a front that I can accept a surrender at. Years ago, I had some relatively glorious successes in BF2 and UT2003 (I also played the original UT a lot). My best skills were probably evasive action and tackling (short-to-mid range takedowns of moving enemies). Spited by my sudden failure, I did the logical thing and stayed up until about seven in the morning playing Quake Live. Pleased to say that I'm refreshing my kinesthetic memory and no longer die nowhere near as frequently, and my accuracy has gone up to about 9% average. Still miserable, though. I should be easily capable of at least 15%.
Aside from that, Quake Live has a bunch of new maps now. Some are quite pretty. Colorful, well-decorated, with pretty lighting... Then again, I'm going on UT2003 standards here, haha.

I can give you a few important pointers, if you're a noob and want to get into FPS games. FPS and the like are really the equivalent of sports for computer geeks... The improved hand-eye coordination as a result of play is helpful, as is the boost to your perception and multi-tasking abilities. Basically, the most important thing is to keep moving. You stop, you die. Campers forget this very important lesson; there's nothing wrong with being a camper, but you must remain mobile and at least move from one camper nest to another. Weapons in abstract FPS like Unreal and Quake don't get any less accurate when you move, and a skilled, boosted enemy won't have any trouble replying to your sniper fire with rockets. Second in importance is cohesion. Stick to your teammates; indeed, if you're completely new, simply follow one of your guys around (just not too close). Help him kill whatever he's killing; find someone else to follow when either of you dies. Chances of survival skyrocket if two players encounter one enemy, as opposed to a one-on-one encounter; faced with superior numbers, the enemy will place a lot more emphasis on flight as opposed to fight. Just by being there you accomplish this.
Finally, practice attacking moving enemies. It's harder than you might think. A good rule of thumb for new players is, when you're leading a moving target, double the compensation distance (i.e. aim in front of your enemy, then double that gap, since your estimation is probably too small). Also, when using a weapon which does splash damage (e.g. rocket launcher, flak cannon, grenade launcher), aim at the ground and walls where your enemy is going to be. Firing dead-center at him is nigh guaranteed to miss. When using rapid-fire guns, learn something I call the "jimmy hands" technique: rapid twitch-flailing of your aiming reticule in a small horizontal arc. It's a very simple way to improve your accuracy against especially slick operators. Feel free to disregard whatever; losing is fun, as they say in Dorf Fortress. You can find a bunch of Quake Live tutorials over at holysh1t.net.

No Internets can ever be complete without cat macros.

My mother has started to stock up on dry beans. When I questioned the rationale behind it, she basically told me that Glenn "Froggie Stew" Beck has instructed his sheep to prepare for the coming civil war or some other thing like that. Oh well, it's not the worst thing he could tell them to do. The beans have a good shelf life, so I'm not really complaining.
Conspiracy scaremongering brings me to the subject of UFOs. UFOs are perhaps the only brand of tinfoil-hat stock that I regard with a modicum of respect, because it's plausible for them to exist (as Terran vehicles of some kind, not extraterrestrial ones). I've been reading UFO Casebook from time to time; it's a good resource overall, albeit script-laden and with a crummy Flash navigation bar. Facts are spotty, too. For instance, there's this snippet - no links are there, but there should be. It's the case of Aleshenka, alleged EBE found by a mentally ill old woman. I, personally, think it was a deformed premature infant, possibly warped through radiation exposure (since, after all, it happened in Kyshtym). Some areas of the site are good, like the best UFO pictures gallery (there are multiple pages). Anyway, have fun with that. I'll try to post something more substantial tomorrow, ha.

For some extra redeeming goodness, here's a survival textfile directory. It's pretty sucky though, and some of the information ranges from dodgy to dangerous. Also: that "Assassin's Handbook" is actually a handbook for creating d20 roleplay characters of the Assassin class, which suggests whoever put the page together didn't even look at the contents being uploaded.

If you've been following the news yesterday, you've heard that Sea Shepherd lost a ~$2m trimaran in a collision with a Japanese whaler. The trimaran in question was a ridiculous high-speed plaything made out of plywood, carbon fiber, and hemp; its powerplant was powered by biodiesel and hippie farts. This thing, capable of ~40-knot speeds, was hit by the steel bow of a research whaler, the Shonan Maru 2. Why were they in the vessel's path? Because they were throwing rope nets in an effort to tangle its screws. I have slapped together a little something in YouTube Doubler to illustrate the event.

No ecoterrorists were killed in the process, unfortunately. All were rescued by another Sea Shepherd vessel, the Bob Barker (named after that commie traitor who donated a whopping $5m lump sum to the ecoterrorists, which funded its commission). I am quite dumbstruck by the tactics the 'tards are using: if they were so loaded, couldn't they use the money to lobby the Japanese government? Instead they want to play pirates on the high seas, and in the process paint the actual, reasonable ecologists and preservationists as nutso lunatics.
Fuck Sea Shepherd. They math the definition of "terrorist" to a tee, and worst of all, they're not even being terrorists for a remotely reasonable purpose. The international community needs to finally acknowledge them as a hazardous nuisance and allow them to be hunted down. Preferably with a Stingray torpedo. Get it, heh heh?

Skipped a week there, eh. Oh well, what's wrong with pushing it a week further into 2010? Also: the first late post of the year. Don't worry though, this one's definitely a single and not the start of something enormous. These posts always take me longer to piece together, and worst of all, it doesn't even feel like anything's getting learned... Still, even mere shuffling though kanji is better than nothing.
Curious thing about having shaken the post backlog... It's harder to think of things to write about, haha. When I had everything planned out days in advance, it seemed obvious.

Recently I've been going over the 500 most common kanji in newspapers, on this page. It's not bad, in a sort of flashcard format; however, it's not informative enough in and of itself. Supplement that stuff with Jisho.org for good measure.

已: i. Sude(ni), nomi, hanahada, ya(mu). Stop, halt; previously, already, long ago. Very similar to 己 (onore, snake); tough to discern because of it... You know, they say you should avoid dealing with similar-looking kanji when learning them. It just confuses you, and interferes with the learning process... Demoralizes you, too. I remember a thread on 2ch.ru once, that had posters showing insanely similar kanji; made my head spin... Fortunately, those were very rare. The first few hundred kanji, by order of popularity, make up the bulk of all text and are overall sufficient.
証: jyou. Akashi. Certificate, evidence, proof. Has the 言 (gen) bushu, which suggests that it's a more abstract term with something to do with language, communication. 証人 (shounin) means "witness".
部: bu. -be. Class; bureau, department; part, portion, section. 本部 (honbu) means "headquarters".
内: dai, nai. Uchi. Among, between, inside, within; home, house. Obviously an important particle. Not so hard to remember, either... It's like a little guy (人) peeking out of a box (冂).
関: kan. Kaka(waru), karakuri, kanmeki, seki, -zeki. Barrier; connection, relation, involve; gateway. Curiously enough, it does look like someone or something going through a gate (gate is 門, mon).
通: tsu, tsuu. Kayo(u), too(shi/su/ri/ru), -too(ri), -doo(shi/ri). Avenue; commute, traffic, pass through. 通り (doori) is probably the most common word for "street". Curiously enough, "doori" might have been one of the earliest words in Japanese I heard - though it didn't catch on. It's because of Kimagure Orange Road, how they say "Kimagure doori"... Or am I confabulating?
決: ketsu. Ki(maru/meru), -gi(me), sa(ku). Decide, agree upon; appoint; fix. 俺の値段を誰が決めた? - "Ore no nedan wo dare ga kimeta?", "Who decided my worth?" (Skip to about 0:42).
最: sai, shu. Tsuma, motto(mo). Utmost, most, extreme. Watch enough anime and you're bound to hear "saigo" (final, last, parting moment), or "saikou" (supreme, excellent, the best), or "saika" (lowest, worst). Frequently uttered by energetic kids.
産: sen. Ubu-, u(mareru/mu), mu(su). Produce, output, yield, bear; childbirth, give birth; native; property, products. 共産 (kyuusan) apparently means "communism". Would "communist" (noun) be "kyuusansha", then? Hmm, apparently it's actually 共産主義者 (kyuusanshugisha). Quite a mouthful. Remember, kiddies - communism is a lie. Learn that lesson second-hand if possible.
総: sou. Su(bete), sube(te), fusa. All, full, general, total, whole, overall. Once again a common word... If you haven't heard an animu character say "subete" at some point in a dramatic speech, you're not paying attention.

Saw a spectacularly stupid thread on 4chan about this. Age-old argument. I could go on and on, but that'd be just as stupid of me as that thread, considering how there are sites like this one and this.

Since both Star Wars and Star Trek are vying for much the same customer base, there's obviously a lot of friction between the two; but not from the companies involved, of course. It's a fan rivalry. Ever since the 90s or so, when TNG came out, there has been intense debate as to which sci-fi franchise can beat the other one up. Well, here's what I think: it's inconclusive. Shut the hell up. Stop arguing. Asking what the outcome of a Star Trek and Star Wars battle would be is like asking what would be born if a rabbit fucked a duck. It does not compute, because both franchises have a fair deal of handwavium shitcrock (criminally so in the case of Star Wars), and wipe their asses with the laws of physics in wildly differing ways. For example, look at that link above. It's a ST vs. SW argument from a Warsie. Look at those numbers! Holy fuck! The ships in Star Wars can apparently move at ~2000 times the speed of light. here you can see that apparently in Attack of the Clones, they moved at ~1350 times the speed of light. You don't have speeds like that in Star Trek, simply because the creators decided such speeds were absurd; it's not like we're looking at a technology gap here! Then there's "the force", and "midichlorians", whatever those are supposed to be; George Lucas sometimes resembles L. Ron Hubbard... You don't have those in Star Trek, because Star Trek was decided to only have generalized psychics. And what of the Q? How will Star Wars chew on that one? I mean, hell, if we're going to have magical Jedi knights and shit, why not even the playing field a little? Also, who's fighting whom - Empire versus the Feds? Why not Empire versus the Borg, for a laugh?
I'd just like to focus on the bullshit numbers in Star Wars a smidge more. It was a good point brought up in that 4chan thread. The Slave I is the ship used by Jango and later Boba Fett. According to the Warsie analysis, the Slave I has 64000 gigawatts of power on its blasters, and its missiles pack 190 megatons of whoopass. Watch this, please. It's the Tsar Bomba, the most energetic device ever used by mankind, and it's 57 megatons. Now, watch this. It's from Star Wars Episode II, and it depicts the Slave I using its armaments (including those '2 kiloton in each shot' blasters - note when they actually hit Obi-Wan's ship). The missile looks puny as fuck and appears to pack less whoopass than a Tomahawk cruise missile. Case in point, the Star Wars people are basically just pulling scary-sounding numbers out of their asses. There can be no statistical number-brandishing; NONE.

Figure I'll still try to make a point, what with how you expect me to make a verdict anyway. I'm a Trekkie, though. Bear that in mind. I've got a whole lot more exposure to Trek than Wars, and frankly Wars makes me retch due to a prevailing dark-age theme (people live and die, civilization doesn't change over thousands of years, mysticality beats reason, etc).
Now then. Since we have established that numbers are utter claptrap, all we have to go on are canon visual depictions in the series. Here, we can immediately see that Star Wars ships are slow as hell. A Star Wars fleet battle looks like the equivalent of a World War II battle between carrier task forces, and moves at the same speeds. Star Trek vessels, however, appear to be a lot more nimble, especially the huge ones. Then there's the issue of fighters: they just plain don't exist in Star Trek, because in Star Trek, computers can instantly acquire targets and fire at them with perfect accuracy. That's why there are no missiles in Star Trek, either. This negates the agility advantage. Computers bring me to the next point: Star Wars has its head up its ass when it comes to computers. They use gunnery crews in Star Wars, like it's the damn 19th century, while simultaneously having amazing robot AI (albeit bizarre and offensively clueless in its execution). That makes no sense whatsoever.
When we get to weapons, things start to look a lot worse. Star Wars has crazy planet-cracker beams... That need the whole ship to reposition itself for firing, and as seen in Episode III, they have trouble hitting even their own lumbering turkeys. The real firepower, however, seems to come into play when the ships get within "orchestra" range ("orchestra" is a slang term for the smaller-caliber guns on a ship, e.g. the anti-air guns, the anti-PT boat guns, and so forth). Star Trek, however, is all about range. What's more, there are planet-cracker beams in Star Trek, too.
Another thing about weapons is the fact that Star Wars uses lasers (or at least something they call lasers). In the Star Trek universe, lasers are considered shit technology unsuitable for combat, and shields stop them effortlessly. Of course, that's not fair. Apparently though, the "lasers" in Star Wars are actually plasma blasters - which would make sense since they don't look like beams, rather more like lozenges of some glowing goo. Meh, fair enough! Except seeing as how Star Trek shields are strong enough to protect a ship diving through a gas giant's atmosphere, it doesn't look too good for those blasters. Do Star Wars ships have shields? Beats me. They apparently do have some kind of shield technology in Wars, but don't use it for ship protection! In Episode V, we see one of those enormous Star Destroyers get hit with an asteroid... It doesn't go so well for the ship, and not even a hint of shields is evidently present. That ship destruction segues me to another point: engineering. Star Wars ships (actually, Star Wars everything, for that matter) seem to be engineered so poorly, it's downright comedic. They have shit all over the place. It's even worse than what Borg have. Now, I'm not exactly a fan of the 'plucked chicken' appearance of Star Trek ships; personally, Star Wars ships look a lot prettier on the surface - but have you looked at those official cutaway design books? Hot damn.
Finally, I'll touch on man-to-man combat. Star Wars wins this one for me. That's right, you heard me. Infantry blasters appear to be far more effective than anything in Star Trek; they also look a lot more practical, and Star Wars characters at least have pockets, for crying out loud. Honestly, Star Trek would be a lot more awesome if they used kinetic weapons (i.e. firearms, like what we have now). Those phasers are... Miserable. The equivalent of lightsabers being the Bat'Leth is not exactly encouraging, either. Star Trek has transporters though, which also means they'll be able to teleport bombs right in the enemy's face during combat, too. It's a well-known tactic, actually, when the shields drop.

...What the hell. I went right ahead and disregarded my own advice, didn't I. Went on and on, like I said I wouldn't. Tch... Oh well, enjoy. I'm in favor of Star Trek. It makes more sense, at least. Logic and reason versus myth and magic.