Lol. Seems like my countrymen are delusional. I don't blame them, though. Democracy = Good has been forced down the throats of people all over the world.

The benefits of democracy are numerous. Democracy allows citizens to participate directly in government. Practiced the way it is meant to be practiced, democracy allows for personal freedom.

The ‘majority rule’ applies in either direct or representative democracy where the winning vote is that of the majority.

Democracy advantages include:

* Democracy provides for frequent elections after a specified period of time. This ensures that unpopular governments are voted out of office and replaced by a new administration that will be forced to implement favorable policies so as to stay in power.

* Democracy affords citizens their right to elect the representatives of their own choice.

* Democracy affords the most popular candidates the opportunity to be elected.

* Democracy ensures that wealth is evenly distributed. This is possible as the peoples representatives fight to have their fair share of development funds.

* Through democracy, a people have the opportunity to have their voices heard and their wishes fulfilled.

* Democracy allows for many political parties to compete for power. This gives candidates and the electorate a broad field of parties for candidates and different candidates to chose from for voters.

*Unpopular governments need not be bad governments. Similarly, popular policies need not be good policies, where "good" as defined as a) being in line with reality and b) ensure the continued well-being of a society. In fact, since the lumpenproletariat are cognitive misers, the converse is actually true: what is popular is bound to be bad.

The tying in with political parties and by extent legitimacy of rule to policies means that a policy, even if provably bad for the nation or society, cannot be halted or reversed without the state losing its legitimacy in the eyes of the voters. Stupid idea.

*Points two and three are exactly the same. Popular leaders need not be good leaders and in fact, are more likely to be bad leaders. This is, of course, discounting modern marketing techniques and knowledge in which the opinion of "the people" is manipulated like so much jelly.

*Even distribution of wealth is not per se a good thing. Also, non-sequitur in that how does democracy ensure that representatives "fight to have their fair share" of "development funds", which never happens in any real world democracy, and it is not explained how this will lead to a more even distribution of wealth. If someone thinks that Singaporean Ministries and other government offices are budgeted according to the number of seats a party has won in parliament, they clearly have no idea as to simple information that is available to the public on Google.

In short, useless feel-good leftist redistributionist twaddle.

*Identical to points two and three. Being cognitive misers, "the people" should not have their voices heard and wishes fulfilled. A child should not be able to choose to have sweets for dinner.

*Time, energy and resources which should have been allocated to solving problems are wasted on politicking and power struggles which are amplified in a democracy. The reactionary consensus is that politics should be kept to a minimum. Furthermore, actual implementation of such merely provides a smokescreen for a united political class, hence the red team/blue team phenomenon in which voters are presented with a false choice.

The main failure of this so-called list is its assumption that popular = good. This is clearly not the case. I may be a midwit, but even I can junk this pile of trash easily. Dear God.

Entryism in Video Games.

Roguelikes are a sub-genre of role-playing game that center around randomised environments, often brutal difficulty, and permanent player death. Implementations vary, but the core game mechanics of the subgenre are listed here. One particular aspect I'd like to highlight is listed below:

Roguelikes take Final Death to the extreme. When your character dies, that's it - he's dead for good. Saving the game is often possible, but it is only used for having a pause from playing. Save Scumming is thus flatly disallowed.

A player on the forums has appeared, claiming to want to "improve" the game in various ways. First off, the removal of anti-save scumming features:

I would like to have the option to quit without updating my save.
That Is to say that the next time I loaded the game I would pick up at the last time I hit "Save and Continue"; rather than picking up at where I quit. I'm sick of having to shut down the game from the task manager. 

[...]

I am of those standards; but we don't all have to be sheep and do what everyone else does. 

[...]

I could ask a similar question of you. Why should the game be needlessly restricted other than rigid adherence to meaningless tradition?

 Removal of core game mechanics:

I would like to have an option in tweakDB to have all corruption effects instead instantly kill the character. Quite frankly it would be more fun to have to reload from my last save than have all my equipment ruined (quite frankly this is what I do half the time anyway, but this suggestion would save me the trouble of having to end the game through the task manager). 

And decreasing the difficulty:

As one progresses through the game the frequency at which one levels up slows to an intolerable crawl. This factor conspires with several others (such as inventory management) to make the game become progressively more dull as one plays through a game.

I understand that this is something that occurs in many RPGs but I see no reason why you should seek to emulate the extremely poor design of other games. Especially since the issue could be corrected, both here and elsewhere, simply by increasing the xp values of higher level monsters.

The thing is, all of these are amongst the reasons why Roguelikes have a very small fan following and are hence often only developed via open source or by indie developers; there simply isn't enough for a fanbase for an AAA game studio to justify making one worth the time and money spent. And that's fine. It's part of the culture.

And there is a culture amongst the roguelike game community. We play these games because they are unfair, because we like randomly generated stuff, because we like having to deal with our mistakes instead of using the save/reload feature to wipe them all out at will. We enjoy the brutal difficulty.

And here comes some guy demanding that stuff be changed. What is this fellow's definition of "meaningless tradition" and "poor design"? Apparently, "anything I don't like."

What makes things worse is that the modding tools provided with the game allow him to do all those and more, with little more than notepad and a quick find and replace/delete, if he so desires. If people want to play a game the way they want to personally, hey, that's fine. If you get enjoyment from turning all the cheat codes and messing around, sure. But that isn't enough for this fellow, he needs everyone to follow his schtick. No matter there's a reason such traditions are around, no matter that his demanded changes would cause the roguelike to cease to be one, which was what we all came and paid for in order to enjoy.

This is what happened to SFWA, only on a smaller scale. An organisation or group gets infiltrated by external agents, it gets improvemented, as Tex Arcane would put it, and if not checked, eventually looks nothing like the original. A standard tool of the left in their long march through the institutions.

Jim calls this phenomenon "entryism", and has listed a number of historical and ongoing examples, as well as counter-measures to it.

Happily, the developers appear to be ignoring this particular loudmouth, so he doesn't seem to be so much of a problem, and there's not as much at stake here. However, when applied to societal institutions...yeah.

Weaselly Mainstream Media is Weaselly.

"Gripping spectacle as 18-year old girl wrestles 3 men at Kampong Ubi CC"

Taking out three heavy men in the wrestling ring is no easy task - especially for a petite 18-year-old girl.

Last night, Republic Polytechnic student Lee Xin Yi was seen attempting to do just that. (Bolded emphasis mine). Spectators cheered as she dodged blows from her much bigger opponents while trading dropkicks, cross-body blocks and headlocks.

The video provided in the article was not of the event itself, but a demonstration headed off by two muscular guys.

Could she be one of those +3SD upper body strength women that Vox talks about? Why, sure. But given all things, I'm betting on a case of Curie-Hultgreen syndrome and the press needed something to create social opinion. Note the implication in the first paragraph, that she actually took out three guys, and then the weaselly bolded quote in the second.

Psht.

Foreigner comes to Singapore to work, demands locals change culture to suit her.

Somehow, this sounds familiar...

I am from the Phillippines and I first came to Singapore 2 years to work as a bank manager. I would love to know the Singaporean culture better but while people pay respect to the dead during the Hungry Ghost Festival, they should not leave incense papers scattered all over the place

[...]

I hope I do not offend the Chinese or Buddhist community in Singapore but can't they not burn so many incense paper as I am sure many will know this kind of superstition is no longer valid in the current modern world.

I am planning to bring my kids over in the next few years and I hope that they will not have to suffer from any respiratory problem in the "7th Month" every year.

I have already email to the relevant authorities and hopefully the government will listen to my advice and ban burning of papers in the public.

Foreigners coming to a country and demanding legislation be changed to suit their wants and preferences. Now, where have I heard of that before?

Oh, right.

"I love the culture here...but want to ban it anyway." You don't "fundamentally change" something you love.

If you don't want to take it as a religious issue, then it's a damn cultural issue. Really, banning burnt offerings altogether, a custom that's persisted for more than a millennium, because you don't like it.

We are nice people. We use incense bins, or burn the stuff on the grass, and do it away from storm drains, potential fire hazards, and roadsides (or at least, less than before). It used to be that people didn't even bother using cages when burning paper cars and mansions.

People don't clear up the ash piles or hell money because it's supposed to belong to the dead now.

Now, could this be a fabrication? Well, of course it could. But the shitstorm of a response provoked shows that even the local lumpenproletariat are beginning to be more than a little incensed (no pun intended), and the local Brahmin class appears to be either ignorant or dismissive of the concerns raised. Interesting.

But what's going on - it's happening at a smaller scale than in the West, but still happening nevertheless.

"I-it's not my fault!"

 
Well, the job hunt continues. Went for some more interviews, mailed in my CVs, went for a walk-in interview or two. No dice. Seems like the global joblessness plague is hitting this lovely little island as well.

In any case, this little tidbit caught my eye. Our glorious leader LKY denies that Singapore's low birthrate is his fault in his new memoirs:

In his new book 'One Man's View of the World', Lee Kuan Yew shares that he has given up on solving the problem of low fertility and also emphasised that money won't solve the problem.

He suggested that if he were the prime minister, he would introduce a huge baby bonus which was equal to 2 years of the average Singaporean's salary.

He expected that running such a scheme for 1 year would prove beyond doubt that even super-sized monetary incentives have only a marginal effect on fertility rates.

This would prove that "low birth rates have nothing to do with economic or financial factors, such as high cost of living or lack of government help for parents.

Locally, the Stop at Two policy wins the award for the greatest "keblekan pusing" (Malay: about face) that the incumbent government has done. Is he right? Partly, yes - the effects of atomised people, hedonism, political freedom, breakdown of patriarchy and traditional social support networks, etc, etc - these factors are all universal across time and cultures to bring on the downfall and resultant zombie apocalypse of the golden masses in every civilisation in which they manifested themselves. This is, after all, the cycle of history. One can no more expect things to be different today as opposed to the women of Sparta, who refused to partake of the very activity which made them so valuable.

At the same time, it cannot be denied that Lee's government back in the day actively pursued policies that contributed to this situation. Legalising abortion, selling sterilisations and abortions door to door to the point when a single doctor found themselves performing nine sterilisations per day, exponentially increasing fines and hospital fees past the first two children, denial of education to third and fourth children, and that's from the policy alone. Not to mention the targeted (whether intentional or not) breakup of the extended family structure, then once those support ties were severed, refusing government assistance to women with more than two children - a policy which continues to this day with the lower class. (In this last point I can see why dysgenic fertility should be discouraged, but the means should be a 'discomfiture at the bottom rung' that's socially imposed. More on this another time.)

Things would have gone downhill eventually, as Mr. Lee suggests. But people respond to dis/incentives, so that doesn't excuse him from blowing the brakes to hell and claiming "not my fault". Dis/incentives are why some cycles take longer to turn than others - hardship, affluence, decadence, destruction, back to hardship. At this point, the only way to fix this is what history has gone through before - destruction of affluence and artificial governmental constructs leading to the family being net positive to those who don't eat their seed corn, and a return to the patriarchal social structure. It's only a matter of time now.

On a side note, the idea of overpopulation is nothing new - it's been bouncing about since at least the second century AD with Tertullian. Apparently having a track record of being wrong for 1900 years hasn't dampened their enthusiasm any.

What I find curiouser and curiouser is that manosphere ideas are beginning to permeate the local culture as well, although it seems that the authors of these articles haven't quite grasped the full extent of human realities the average game blogger might, let alone a reactionary.

Gresham's Law - it just gets worse and worse and worse...

From Wikipedia:

Gresham's law is an economic principle that states: "When a government overvalues one type of money and undervalues another, the undervalued money will leave the country or disappear from circulation into hoards, while the overvalued money will flood into circulation."[1] It is commonly stated as: "Bad money drives out good".

Aurini has written a small piece on this little law, which examines how it applies to sex and culture. He concludes:

"The result of the interplay between Cad/Dad and Lady/Slut-Bitch is a mating market that’s slightly more focused on meaningless sex, and slightly less focused on emotional bonding.

That was the first iteration: now repeat ad nauseum."

Just fine, innit? An escalating arms race where good behaviour is rapidly driven out by the bad. Just a couple of hours ago, I wander by Mr. Sturges' and see this post:

He has this to say about these "gags":

"Well isn’t that nice. How many of you guys out there when faced with a fake pregnancy test that results in a positive every time would know the difference from a real one? Definitely not me, it’s something that I never concerned myself with. Can you see the consequences of this? Some poor sclub has sex with some predatory bitch hitting the wall hard and then is confronted with one of these fake tests. Well the poor bastard just thinks he hit the jackpot, finally he thinks to himself, “I’m going to have a kid!” Not so fast bucko, what’s going to happen next is she’s going to want to get married and then when he does, all of the sudden there’s a miscarriage the response of which she’s going to fake all of the appropriate emotions that someone who’s lost an unborn child is supposed to go through. After a couple of months of grieving here come the divorce papers, she’ll tell the judge that the “trauma” of losing the unborn child was too much and there goes half his property. Notice that the person that is on the losing end of this “prank” is called the “victim“. Given the implications of what could happen with something like this it makes perfect sense.

[...]

"Well, isn’t this nice too? If it is convincing enough to fool the requisite gullible guy can you see this getting out of hand? Given that 90% of the guys out there are gullible as hell, look for sites like this to proliferate. All because these bitches know that with very little evidence they can extract the hard earned resources from men with very little evidence and by preying on the gullibility of men who just want families.

Good grief, I’m glad I got snipped 15 years ago. But I’m going to make a prediction here that you might not believe, but given what I’ve seen over the past decade, is quickly going to come to pass.

This bullshit site is just the beginning. As more women hit the wall and more women become single mothers without support, look for sites catered to these whores where if you’re a man and leave behind so much as a spent cigarette butt, a hair or your saliva on a drink glass that she can get possession of, there will be services and websites that will make sure that the bitch’s bastard spawn matches your DNA whether you even met her or not. Given the family court system these days you are going to be screwed even if you didn’t lay the cunt. And, with ubiquitous DNA testing that surrounds us these days and the faith the general public puts into the results of any test like this, look for these types of tests to be abused. Especially if resources can be extracted from a productive male."

Oh, but the men aren't going to lose out. Gone are the days of poked holes in condoms - as Mister Grumpus comments:

"On the other side of things, there are plenty of sites selling fake (but of course real-looking) sets of birth control pills, replete with fake prescription documents, etc.

Which of course reminds me of that one outfit that sells fake ATM balance receipts. The more money you want it to show that you have, the more you pay.

Try to cheat and end up surrounded by cheaters, I guess."

Commenter Earl has some other ideas:

I have a great idea.
Act like you are poor and insane.
Tell her your job is part time greeter at the Sizzler.
And that you see snakes all the time…there is even one on her face.
Demonstrate low value to every slut you encounter.
If they are going to go the route of lying to get what they want…so will I.

Wonder what the next iteration will be?

Bad money drives out the good. Bad sex drives out the good. Bad behaviour drives out the good.

I think I can say we're in a free-fall spiral right now, and from within the safety of my reinforced box, I can say I'm loving every single moment of it as a young curmudgeon.

Not so different.

 
Have you ever played Half-Life 2?

Did you notice that the Gordon Freeman character has similarities to Snowden?

Not just in looks. The world of HL2 is impoverished and highly militarized, with spy and killer drones.

Not to mention relentless propaganda about how all of it is for their own good. And how 'citizen' means a compliant slave.

Then there is the part about how 'this lowly physicist' becomes impossible to catch in spite of universal surveillance, and how small cells of underground resistance can outflank far larger organized institutions.

At this moment Snowden is "Anti-Citizen One"

"Feeling it in your soul is where it starts. From there, it migrates to your daily thinking. And from thinking about it you start to change how you live your life. You become more deliberate, determined, relentless.

More ruthless.

You change things and you don't care who notices, because you must. And then suddenly the bad feeling passes. Because you recognize that you are no longer part of the problem but part of the solution. In this way we may all save ourselves, as each becomes first uneasy then thoughtful then deliberate. Maybe it will be enough, in the end. If not then at least we will have each learned how to deal with heartache, and how to go forward no matter what."

Stop feeding the cats, damn it.

There is an orphanage-cum-nursing home within walking distance of my home. This does not count for much, considering how cramped most of Singapore is, but the location harbours an alley of the sort that's formed by two high walls, one of the orphanage proper and the other of a condominium complex.

When I go get my morning tea, there's this middle-aged woman who lugs around a huge sack of dry cat food and paper plates, and sets out food for the local strays. Shielded from view by the high walls, the cats emerge from wherever it is cats go, and congregate to feed.

I have no idea why this woman feeds the cats. Maybe she's just a crazy cat lady. Maybe she believes that feeding the cats will earn her merit. Maybe she thinks the cats are just starved, the poor things. Maybe she's just plain crazy. Whatever the reason, it doesn't change the end result: the cats come to be fed, and she feeds them. In considerable numbers, too: to and from watching the old folks hang up their songbirds in the morning, I've counted anywhere from between twenty to thirty different cats lounging about in the alley each time.

A point of amusement.

One of the things I like to do with my spare time is that I enjoy modding for Dungeons of Dredmor, a roguelike which doesn't take itself quite seriously. For those unfamiliar with the genre, a roguelike is a form of RPG which is made distinct by the following traits:

*Dungeon layouts that are randomly or psuedo-randomly generated.
*A high degree of unpredictability. For examples, potion effects may be randomised between games.
*Brutal degrees of difficulty.
*High importance of resource management and prioritisation. Creating and safeguarding caches can be vitally important in some games.
*All sorts of inanities; due to the open-source or at least highly-moddable nature of most games in the genre, there're enough people to think of anything and everything.

Occasionally, I get feedback on my mods. Since I do a lot of different stuff, I get a wide variety of it - some I agree with, such as making things more modular so people can pick and choose what they want or don't want to add, and I spend a night or two working on rectifying the problem. Others I don't agree with, and if the fellow is decent enough, explain why I see things differently, or just ignore them if they aren't.

Recently, though, I received a complaint that was just bizarre.

Ahem:

"Fairness". Pfah!

An equalist appeals to us as to why meritocracy is bad, and we should embrace fairness instead:

"Why is fairness a virtue - that is, why is it inherently good? I do not profess to have the best answer, but I shall share my views through a thought experiment.

Imagine leaving your current dimension and entering a state of non-existence. You have no idea what wealth or resources, material and non-material, you will possess at your point of birth. The only thing you are certain of is your own will - your freedom to choose what you want to do with your possessions, whatever they are.

This is what the American philosopher John Rawls called the veil of ignorance. As you put it on, ask yourself: would you prefer a fair society that rewards traits such as diligence (resulting from free will), by allowing everyone to start on an even playing field, or would you rather have a society that (unfairly) rewards individuals based on, for example, what material resources they possess at birth, something which you lack control over?

The intuitive choice would be the former - the fairer option. Fairness is a virtue because we desire it independently of worldly possessions. It is something that is so appealing to when we are stripped bare of our property and thrown into uncertainty. This is an important frame of mind to view things for a compelling reason: the living consists of only a single generation, while an infinite number of generations exist in exactly that state - unborn. Unlike in the thought experiment, they cannot choose the society they are born into, but we can. Thus, fairness becomes an inherent human endeavor, not just to create a society we desire for ourselves, but for future generations as well."

Let's take this apart piece by piece.

"As you put it on, ask yourself: would you prefer a fair society that rewards traits such as diligence (resulting from free will), by allowing everyone to start on an even playing field, or would you rather have a society that (unfairly) rewards individuals based on, for example, what material resources they possess at birth, something which you lack control over?"

The problem with this is that in order for this argument to hold water, one has to assume tabula rasa, which is a) not only falsifiable but b) the greatest lie of our generation. People are inherently different by virtue of their genetic makeup leading to physical/mental/behavioural/so forth differences demarcated along racial/sexual/so forth lines, and nurture has to work within the bounds set by nature. The author assumes that worldly possessions are the only factor that contribute to success.

The author would like a world to be what ought to be, instead of what is. And in the battle between is and ought, is will always win out in the end.

One might argue that the author is only arguing for equality of opportunity. Yet, as affirmative action and other such "positive discrimination" programs throughout the world prove, equality of opportunity invariably leads to equality of outcome, since opportunity is so nebulously defined and I'll wager the percentage of people who will admit they had every opportunity but blew them will be miniscule.

While the petty man can be uplifted to some extent and whipped into line, the gentleman has far more potential (and by definition of "gentleman", of course he exercises it). Once again, as various "fairness" and "equality" policies prove, they always involve dragging down the gentleman to the level of the petty man, since the latter cannot be uplifted to the level of the former. Hence, Harrison Bergeron.

We lack control over so many things in our lives. We lack control over our genetics, we lack control over how people react to us, we lack control over acts of nature, we lack meaningful control over how our governments act - what, are you going to bitch that you didn't have control over how that guy/girl blew you off? You're dealt a hand, the best thing you can do is play it to the best of your ability instead of coveting someone else's cards.

"Fairness is a virtue because we desire it independently of worldly possessions."

False. "Fairness", more often than not, is driven by envy, most often caused by a lack of worldly possessions. Even in the case of Cappy Cap's crusaders, they take up a cause because their lives are otherwise meaningless and they want to feel important. Psychopathic impulses may be desired by an individual independently of worldly possessions (for example, mass shooters have come from all walks of economic backgrounds in the name of all sorts of ideologies) but that does not make mass shootings a desirable occurrence.

"It is something that is so appealing to when we are stripped bare of our property and thrown into uncertainty."

Here we see the proof of envy showing up. "If I have nothing, other people should give up their stuff in order to make me feel secure!"

In short, "fair" is used in much the same way as "equality" is: a rhetorical platitude used to disguise envy and redistribution. It is intuitive, sure, but then again, even monkeys have been shown to show envy intuitively, so I fail to see how intuitive = good in any sense.

"This is an important frame of mind to view things for a compelling reason: the living consists of only a single generation, while an infinite number of generations exist in exactly that state - unborn. Unlike in the thought experiment, they cannot choose the society they are born into, but we can. Thus, fairness becomes an inherent human endeavor, not just to create a society we desire for ourselves, but for future generations as well."

"B-b-but it's FOR THE CHILDREN!"

Disgusting.

So, to sum up this fellow's argument:

-Look at all those fat cats hoarding all the advantages you should have!
-Appeal to nature (or in this case, intuition)
-If you support fairness, that shows you are so much more enlightened and virtuous because worldly possessions don't matter to you!
-Won't you think of the children?

The implications of the argument are clear: in order for a "level playing field" to be enforced, the wealth of parents should be confiscated and redistributed through taxation so each child has an equal amount of worldly possessions to start with regardless of innate ability or inclination to learn.

Well then. Why bother getting an education in the first place and making all that money if it's just going to be taken away anyway? For a society to prosper, there always needs to be a mild discomfort at the base levels, a hunger to improve, tempered with shame. Redistribution kills that dead.

The worst thing is that redistribution doesn't even solve anything barring the worst-case scenarios (such as dumping a kid in a third-world country). White lower-class students routinely score higher on average on standardised testing than black upper and middle-class students. Head Start in the US has been a tremendous failure, putting paid to the idea that racial differences in IQ and ability were due to nutritional deficiencies. Material wealth and standards of living have been repeatedly shown to have a far less marked effect on intelligence or academic ability than the cathedralists would have the masses believe; "10,000 hours of practice" is scarcely enough, but it perpetuates the pretty lie that you can do anything you want.

The rise of indie gaming - a small exercise in skill and talent getting some light.

Some time back Dr. Faust did a small post on the second decline of the gaming industry. In a nutshell: mainstream games are getting worse these days because they're being rushed to meet schedules simply for the sake of staying afloat. Quality is being sacrificed for quantity, and people in suits are somehow forgetting that games are supposed to be fun.

This, of course, does not stop the average consumer from buying the next installment of the Call of Duty or EA sports or Assassin's Creed franchises. Which says as much about the average video game consumer as the companies which make said games.

I suppose this post will be somewhat disjointed and rambling, but it needs to be said anyway. Here's a game which took the spotlight some time ago: Dungeons of Dredmor. 

Does Dredmor have amazing graphics? Heck no, it uses indexed .pngs as sprites.

Does Dredmor have a compelling main gameplay plotline? No, it's essentially "bad guy in bottom of dungeon, kill him."

Does Dredmor have DRM? No, but strangely enough people want to give their money to the developers for their work anyway. Sometimes even if they aren't buying anything.

Such a fascinating concept, eh? If only people loved you so much they gave you money for nothing.

What Dredmor does right is that it's fun. It doesn't take itself seriously. It's accessible, without being dumbed down for the average two-bit drooling idiot that mainstream games are these days. The developers speak directly to the players instead of through "community managers" and "customer service representatives".

And if a player doesn't like any aspect of the game, then they are free to mod it as they like with nothing more than notepad. Not to mention the modding community that's sprung up, of course.

Here's the head coder for the game, Nicholas Vining, speaking about how his team went about doing the writing for the game:

Because Gaslamp Games is small, they can do all this - and thanks to digital distribution, they can circumvent having to grovel at the feet of giant publishers and work on their own schedule.

Another well-known indie game developer is Edmund McMillen - his work is amazing, and yet often disturbing. Due to the content of his games, no mainstream publisher would dare to touch titles like Time Fcuk or The Binding of Isaac with a ten-foot pole (play them and you'll understand why), and his sheer genius would have gone unnoticed. Hell, if not for Newgrounds, where he got his start...

Derek Yu? Masterpieces like Aquaria and Spleunky.

Hour of gameplay per dollar spent on the game, indie games generally tend to yield far more than the 50-60 dollar nonsense on store shelves.

The gatekeepers of the old media, be it books, electronic media, music, video games - they are quickly falling apart thanks to the many-to-many model the internet has made possible. The future of media - and gaming in particular - seems to be indie, especially as game publishers become increasingly feminised and inefficient; a small start-up comprising of two pimply-faced nerds in their garages and bedrooms banging away at keyboards can reasonably compete with them, because first and foremost, games are supposed to be fun. Is there going to be a lot of crap? Sure, Sturgeon's Law applies in all fields; one look at the offerings on Steam Greenlight is going to prove that beyond all doubt.

But this is where they are allowed to ferment, to flourish, and the wheat separated from the chaff. The future, it would appear, is small-scale: while others are extrapolating this to the rest of humanity with predictions as to people moving away from cities and into villages, I'm going to stick with what's observably happening now in this regard.

Another music post.

Sorry, folks. Nothing to report today, and I get the feeling that if I waxed philosophical I'd take a sharp turn into negative territory, and we've had enough of that yesterday.

In lieu of my exams, why don't you folks have some music?

 

 

Are we all mind-readers?

Nothing interesting to report today, or at least, that hasn't progressed to my satisfaction, so you all get a small thought from me.

I'm not quite serious, but still, you've got to wonder.

Free Northerner and Dalrock both make a post each about modern love. I write a piece. Roissy writes a piece as well. Then we get a journal saying arranged marriages end up with couples that are more in love with each other than those who married for love.

It's almost as if we're connected by some frequency...maybe the world is waking up...or maybe it's just coincidence.

Heh.

Edit: seems like Jim has one too!

What I want.

Wald over here has done a small list of what he wants in a woman, so I felt compelled to start-up a me-too business and get some things down for posterity's sake:

I've already previously expressed my psychological/personality/ideological requirements, so I won't go over them again. Ladies who don't meet the requirements of my moral code - nexted immediately, no matter how hot, pretty or cute you are, or how many of the below points you fulfill. Sure, the back of my mind will probably be panting and begging for a fuck, but my face isn't going to suffer living with someone who cuts on deal-breaker issues. Yes, it's short but fairly demanding for the average modern woman, to which I say fuck it. If I'm going to improve myself to shake off my mountainous gammatude, then I am going to be worthy of my demands. You don't qualify me, I qualify you.

Anyways:

1. Short. For a more exact definition, top of your head not over my shoulders, and I'm 170 cm tall (5'7" for you Imperialists.) Happily, I don't have that much of a neck, making me taller at the shoulders than a good proportion of people I know. Yes, I do find petite women adorable, especially those whom I conceivably can pick up with one arm; it makes them all the harder to take seriously, which helps my game a lot. We NE Asians are tiny people.

2. Tits. Will agree with Wald here. Handfuls would be ideal, but so long as not flat, they're not a deal-breaker. Again, we NE Asians are tiny people, and our women have smaller breasts on average. Fact of life, gotta deal with it

3. Hair. Agree with Wald again. No shorter than shoulders, otherwise, it's over. Small of back is better, but quite hard to find in this warm climate.

4. Face. I'm not too exacting - so long as you don't have buck teeth or coffee stains like some women I've encountered, I'm fine. I can overlook freckles or a bit of acne. What's more important - eyes. Widely spaced, big eyes (both horizontal and vertical length), preferably falling away at the corners.

There we have it, short and simple.

Rainfall collecting - experimentation.

Today I woke up just in time to see dark clouds gathering on the horizon for an incipient thunderstorm. Rain was imminent in about fifteen to twenty minutes, considering it was already drizzling, and although this usually means it's the kind of day where I can stay in bed while I can help it, today I had a small experiment to perform.

For science. And survival. And science, of course.

For this experiment, I required a small frame which I'd put together over the last couple of days. Nothing fancy, just three comparatively short lengths of bamboo lashed together in a U-shape and a sheet of plastic about a couple of square meters in area. Next came two plastic stools as support.

Added to this were three identical five-liter buckets I temporarily purloined from my mother's laundry supplies, and armed with these, I headed downstairs where there was a reasonably open area.

Not much to report in today:

So you can have an oldie, but goodie.

On Brian Sanderson's "The Way of Kings" and masculinity.

Some years ago, I used to be more involved in the SF/F genre, mostly as a reader and as an amateur writer. I still am, to some extent, but the current degeneration of the genre and indeed, publishing industry as a whole has driven me away from the old stacks which I used to wander amongst on a regular basis. For the record, I still have no idea why librarians insist on classifying paranormal romance under fantasy, since there're entire tags for paranormal and romance, but hey, it just means I get to snerk even more at the silly book blurbs on some of those knock-offs.

Anyways, most people will know Sanderson because he was picked to finish Robert Jordan's Waste of Time series, which I've never really bothered with in the first place. I first found him through his novel Elantris (2004), and followed him through his Mistborn books (which I'm somewhat so-so about), but today I'm going to be talking about his novel, The Way of Kings (2010).

Heh.

Bwahaha.

Found this in my webcomic roundup today:

"This comic presents all the major weaknesses of this generation. We can’t work with our hands. We are dependent on our parents. We have been trained to think that we are special, unique, and wise. We whine articulately in order to defer responsibility without taking any action ourselves. We, being moral relativists, don’t believe in virtue or honor (like Dickinson).

Dickinson is the manifestation of much that we are missing and much that we are yearning for. He is an honorable and capable man. He does what is hard even when it seems hopeless.

Metaphorically speaking, Dickinson isn’t punching some jerk named Nigel. Dickinson is punching all of us. He is punching us awake."

Do I bellyache about the degeneracy of society a bit too much? Oh sure, I do, especially for the sheer relief of having vented. But the thing is, afterwards one has to do something about it. Like Cappy Cap says, you've got to have something backing up your currency. Improve your body and mind. Read books and articles. Work out. Improve your inner game. Build yourself and other people as a person. Then maybe one can start bellyaching a little more about how society is going down the drain.

Nigel doesn't have anything backing up his words, no gold behind his paper. Dickinson does.

Singaporean animosity towards "foreign talent" increases.

Seems to me that the whole immigrant issue in Singapore has been heating up, uniting the local Chinese, Indians and Malays in their resentment. Nothing to bring a diverse people together like an external enemy, eh?

 

One fairly new example would be the resentment against Indian immigrants for supposedly giving preference to their fellow Indian nationals for jobs, passing over even the local Singaporean Indians.

"He said that his Indian company in Singapore did not have any Singaporean employees because their boss wants to save more for money for himself, and thus, he said, with approval of the MOM, the boss went to India to hire them."

Hmm, hiring even skilled professionals from foreign countries because they'll work for peanuts. Where have we seen this before? Note that Singapore does not have a minimum wage (not that I'm advocating for one, it's just an observation), so there's a lot less stigma over cheap foreign labour staying here.

Employment exclusion has been a thorn in the Singaporean anti-immigration side for a little while now, with more and more cases popping up recently - like Phillippines' Jollibee fast food chain setting up in Singapore, which supposedly also discriminates against Singaporean employees in favour of Filipinos, a lot of Singaporeans are discovering a whole lot of ways in which they're being held down by foreigners, although to be honest, foreigners in Singapore have been doing the exact same thing they've been doing for the past couple of decades. Domestic maids didn't just pop into existence within our homes overnight, and now that there's not enough pie to go around for everyone to gorge themselves silly, the locals are saying they were at the table first.

Guess the rules are quick to change when there isn't enough to go around, eh? "They took our jerbs!" has been a rallying cry of the masses since time immemorial.

Now there's another anti-immigration protest planned on May 1 -  or labour day, to be exact.

Of course, there's the other side of the equation, with those against immigration being lambasted as xenophobic and racist.

In the end, though, the whole argument is moot; the government will do what it wants anyways and everyone else be damned. This whole thing is just hilarious to watch.