Days off and catching up
All the stuff that had piled up in my RSS Reader during my 16 days of absence of civilization came crashing down on me today. I spent most of the day catching up with news that were two weeks old, and I’m not even through one-third of them yet. Seven TV episodes and the live event quests in EQ2 were also on the pile.
A couple new quests were unlocked due to people contributing to and filling up the required bone shards to the brim. I got down to investing the murder of Seeress Ealayna Ithis right away. These quests were extremely well done, backed by a compelling storyline, in contrast to the previous live events that were mindless rinse and repeat ones. The conclusion of the quest even comes with a cut scene! I’d have loved to get them done on as many characters as possible, but with only a short few days of freedom, I don’t have the luxury of time. Sigh.
I also canceled a bunch of subscriptions. I’m actually considering placing my EQ2 account on hold. I want to take this chance (that I’ll rarely be home) to live a life as frugal as possible. The pay, or rather, allowance for National Servicemen is a pittance. Roughly calculated (assuming a 6-day week and 17-hours a day, since we only get 7 hours of sleep) it’s somewhere in the range of a dollar per hour for a Recruit. It makes being employed as a toilet cleaner in the private sector something of a luxury job.
As Murphy’s Law of Combat puts it, “always keep in mind that your weapon was made by the lowest bidder”, so are the men who are supposed to be defending this country (being paid the least).
Days 1 to 16
It was Auschwitz with better food, although most days the food sucked, at least there was food.
The first thing that caught my sight as the taxi I was in turned it’s way into Pasir Ris bus terminal was the long line of waiting of buses. They were not the typical green army buses, or army lorries, but rather, plain civilian style buses. As I, with my parents, joined in the group of enlistees being herded up into them, a vivid scene of prisoners of war boarding one of those windowless trains, being sent away into a faraway concentration camp came into my mind.
It had started raining by the time buses pulled departed for the ferry terminal, as if the heavens were sympathizing with me. The buses led us to a ferry terminal where a fifteen minute boat ride took us to a remote island where the camp was located.
It is worth noting that almost everything in the army is outsourced to external contractors, from the buses that drove us to the ferry terminal, the ferries that carried us to Pulau Tekong (where the camp is situated), the food served, the laundromat that cleans the bedsheets to the gear we were given. It’s our very own brand of a military-industrial complex.
Up to this point, everything had been civil. However, once my parents are I were separated, the atmosphere changed quickly from what could have been mistaken as a leisure ride to a resort to that of a regimented military.
The hours that followed were boring. Gear was handed out, checked, and rechecked. Lots of paperwork had to be done and it was nightfall by the time we received our haircut and had time off to ourselves, which wasn’t much at all. I didn’t even have time for a shower. The first day came to a conclusion. There was gradually more free time as the days came by, but the hours that they came at totally sucked for me, as they fell during when the people I would want to contact were asleep.
The army feels very much like an Orwellian society. We’re constantly reminded about how much the army cares for each and every of us, and are here to help us. Realistically, we’re nothing more than numbers in the system.
Twice a day, during flag raising and lowering, we’re expected to suspend all activities for the duration and face, in attention, at the direction of the flag. This reminds me of the scene in the movie, Dark City, where all activities come to a halt as the city’s inhabitants fall unconscious while the city is being reshaped in a process called “tuning”.
On the third day, we had our weapons presentation ceremony. This was preceded by a mock fire drill, which had us fall in not knowing what to expect next. From there, we marched off in darkness to the stadium ground, which was illuminated only by two camp fires, each burning from three tin cans. A short speech was given by the commanding officer of our company, and each of our names were called our and handed a rifle, the SAR-21, during which, the theme song from Star Wars (opening sequence) was played, which I felt was completely inappropiate. Instead of taking up arms in defense, it made me feel as if I were part of a big bad empire that was going to come crushing down on some small fellows. They might as well go all out and play the Imperial March instead.
In addition to being an Orwellian society, the army is also the prime example of a bureaucracy. When I finally gave in to my throat which was waging a war of insurgency against me and requested to see a Medical Officier (i.e. doctor), I felt a lot like the Land Surveyor in Franz Kafka’s book, “The Castle“, getting pushed from one place to another without getting anything accomplished. It took me three days of getting pushed around before I got what I wanted. It really is a process that would even daunt Kafka himself.
More similarities to that of a concentration camp, bunk inspections started taking up pace towards the end of the second week. We had as much as three inspections on a really bad day. It seem to very much like how guards in concentration camps would constantly ransack bunks for contraband and other concealed items that might aid in escape.
Army life is extremely routine. I wake up at the same time everyday, go through the sequence of events, and sleep, or at least try to (for I commonly have difficulty sleeping), on the clock.
If I had to single out one thing that I dislike in the army, it would be foot drills. Foot drills are a relic of old when armies marched towards in line and faced each other off in formation on the battlefield, which we no longer do today as everyone understands the pure stupidity of that due to the invention of the machine gun. It’s one of those things preserved for the sake of tradition, which looks good on the parade square but serves no other purpose.
Personally, I’m having a hard time time trying to integrate with people. I don’t share the same level of enthusiasm as most of the people, and it’s hard for me to do something which I do not believe in, and this extends even to singing the army songs - I’ve to force myself to utter out the words and sang them, although I felt none of that excitement or euphoria or fighting spirit as the army loves to call it, no matter how hard I tried. I felt very much like Bernard Marx did during the communal singing session in the book, Brave New World. I’m of a personality that is on the opposite end of the spectrum compared to the rest, and also I’m far back in my physical abilities, among many others. Often I feel as if I’m persona non grata in my platoon. And sometimes, I feel like Leonard Lawrence (better known as Pvt. Gomer Pyle) in the movie, Full Metal Jacket.
I realize that I’m drawing a lot of analogies to other characters in fiction/non-fiction. This is due to my inability to express precisely how I feel in words, and I hope I could be pardoned for that.
Well, that was sixteen days compressed into one entry. A lot of content has been left out as I felt that I shouldn’t bore my readers with more of the mundane details. I do keep a diary and wrote a few short stories during what free time I have, for writing is the only thing that keeps me sane. If my fellow readers would prefer, I could post an entry for almost everyday.
I book back in on the evening of the 1st of October. Until then, time to catch up life, and thank you to the people that communicated with me while I was in camp. I was ill-prepared and ran into a whole bunch of issues such as running out of battery on my mobile phone and my Gmail app not functioning correctly, but I’ll step up communications in future I promise (getting more batteries later today). My overfilled RSS Reader is calling, in no small part thanks to Stargrace and Tipa, who both have managed to write over 30 articles during the 16 days I was gone for, and RailGun too, with 13 articles. Time to sift through them.
Why I don’t watch the Olympics
My dad just walked in and informed me that the opening ceremony for the 2008 Olympics just started and told me to tune the TV in to watch the live telecast of it. I told him that I’ve zero interest in the Olympics whatsoever.
Being a spectator of sports has never interest me, even though I might enjoy the sport itself. I enjoyed playing soccer after school hours when I was in secondary school with my classmates, but I’ve only watched the World Cup once. I don’t know any of the players personally, so who cares which team wins? It doesn’t affect me in any possible way.
A favorite author of mine, Noam Chomsky, sums up how I feel towards such events well, and I couldn’t put my feelings in better words than he did. I’ve been reading Noam Chomsky since late 2006, when a book of his was recommended by President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela during a speech at the UN. The following is what he said in the book, Manufacturing Consent (online excerpt available here).
Take, say, sports — that’s another crucial example of the indoctrination system, in my view. For one thing because it — you know, it offers people something to pay attention to that’s of no importance. [audience laughs] That keeps them from worrying about — [applause] keeps them from worrying about things that matter to their lives that they might have some idea of doing something about. And in fact it’s striking to see the intelligence that’s used by ordinary people in [discussions of] sports [as opposed to political and social issues]. I mean, you listen to radio stations where people call in — they have the most exotic information [more laughter] and understanding about all kind of arcane issues. And the press undoubtedly does a lot with this.
You know, I remember in high school, already I was pretty old. I suddenly asked myself at one point, why do I care if my high school team wins the football game? [laughter] I mean, I don’t know anybody on the team, you know? [audience roars] I mean, they have nothing to do with me, I mean, why I am cheering for my team? It doesn’t mean any — it doesn’t make sense. But the point is, it does make sense: it’s a way of building up irrational attitudes of submission to authority, and group cohesion behind leadership elements — in fact, it’s training in irrational jingoism. That’s also a feature of competitive sports. I think if you look closely at these things, I think, typically, they do have functions, and that’s why energy is devoted to supporting them and creating a basis for them and advertisers are willing to pay for them and so on.
That, my friends, is truism.
Custom interfaces
It is both a good and bad thing that applications are skinnable or extensible. Being skinnable or extensible means that an application is well written enough that there’s a certain level of abstraction between the interface and the application itself. It also means that users can customize it to their preference, and implement their own features on top of what’s available.
At the same time, when the first thing most players do after installing World of Warcraft is to look for a custom interface at one of the humongous sites dedicated to providing them, and people constantly talk about a list of “must have” addons, it becomes obvious that the default UI is sorely missing much needed features that should have been available right out of the box.
This is not a problem unique to WoW, it applies to any application that presents themselves as being extensible. The same charge has been levied at Firefox again and again - why don’t the developers look at the top five extensions people are using and incorporate them directly into their product?
Hosted vs Self-Hosted
I’ve recently dabbled with microblogging, and I quite like it. Twitter provides an excellent source of output when I’m feeling bored and have no one to talk to (which sadly happens a lot), and Tumblr extends on that, working as a brain dump to paste bits of information, information which I find highly interesting but I’m unsure if anyone on my MSN contact list would be quite interested in.
The question is should I just go with Twitter and Tumblr, or should I attempt to host an equivalent of them myself? Laconica and Gelato comes to mind.
The plus side to using a hosted service such as LiveJournal or Twitter or Tumblr is that it provides an existing community to build upon and therefore allows for your content to be easily discovered by others. Whereas the positives of a self-hosted service, such as running your own WordPress blog, or using Gelato in place of Tumblr/Twitter, is that there is a strong sense of ownership. I am in charge of my own content and not locked into any system. Sure, there is always import/export services provided by most of these services nowadays, but nothing is able to set my heart and mind at peace other than having direct access to the database itself.
I’m an indecisive person, and this doesn’t make the decision making process any easier.
Naming
There is no doubt that the naming process is the bane of anything I create or own. Having to name something is a show stopper for me. When creating an MMO character, I spend hours staring at the character creation screen not knowing what to come up with. When I had to give my blog a name, I couldn’t think of one either, nor my domain. I couldn’t come up with names for the small applications that I’ve written for my own use, the computers in my network, and the list goes on, and in the future, naming my kid, if I’m ever fortunate enough to get married, that’s going to the biggest pain of them all.
Turns out that I’m not the only person that’s struggling at coming up with names. There are guides at coming up with (network) names here and two RFCs that talk about naming, RFC1178 - Choosing a Name for Your Computer and the slightly humorous RFC2100 - The Naming of Hosts that consists of a poem. There’s even an entire site that’s dedicated to helping you chose a naming scheme at http://namingschemes.com/Main_Page.
One thing I learnt from all of that is having a theme largely simplifies the naming process when you need to come up with a large number of names. It might already be obvious to you, but it wasn’t to me. I ought to name all my machines after the deities in the Forgotten Realms, which is by far my favorite D&D setting.
I hate arcades and musings on my gaming history
ArsTechnica recently ran an article on the dying of classic video game arcades and many gamers today talk about them with a kind of wistfulness. Unfortunately, despite being a gamer myself, I am unable to share that same nostalgic feelings.
I don’t fancy arcades. Wait, that sentiment is not strong enough to express what I feel. Let me rephrase my point.
I hate arcades.
That is not to say that I’ve always felt this way towards arcades. I did beg my parents for money to allow me to visit arcades when I was still in primary school, that is to say, when I was between the ages of six to twelve. Past that however, I cannot recall a single instance of wanting to be in an arcade voluntarily.
It would seem that as I grew older, I actually started to despise the arcade more. Right now, I see them as a horrible entropy of noise and light, blaring and flashing at me from every direction. It’s a seizure inducing place. I love being able to sit in the quiet comfort of my chair, being in an room that has just the right temperature, and completely immersing myself in a virtual world with zero distractions. The arcade just isn’t a conducive gaming environment.
One’s personality also changes over time, and so does the activities that he indulges in. The same applies within the context of gaming. Aside from all that noise and crowd, it seems that the genre of games that I play shifted. I used to be a huge FPS (first person shooter) fan. I played every sequel of Unreal Tournament, every sequel of Quake, Counter-Strike, Day of Defeat, Battlefield 2, and most recently, Team Fortress 2. However, I am no longer able to obtain the same sense of gratification from these games that I was able to before. I am only able to manage perhaps, two or three hours a week playing Team Fortress at most. Past that, it feels like “why bother?”.
The above mentioned games all share common similarities with arcade games. There is no compelling reason to play them. They’re all in essence, an infinite loop of a grinding treadmill. It is not the same as in an MMO, whereby I might spend ten hours getting a level, but that one level is as intrinsic as it can get. I get to keep that one level, and as long as that virtual world exists (the game isn’t pulled offline), I’ll forever be one level higher than I was before. In an arcade game however, when I come back tomorrow, even to the same machine, I’ll have to work through all of that again. There is no persistency, there is no goal and hence, actions simply have no resulting effect.
Not all shooters are the same however. Single player shooters generally much more like an RPG. They have a compelling storyline to follow. Sure, I might have to kill a couple hundred Covenant grunts in Halo along the way, but there is real and visible progress being made that is relayed through the advancement in the finely crafted story.
A huge sandbox is what these shooters and arcade games are, and being placed in a sandbox with another individual so that we can spend the next couple hours trying to mindlessly blow each other up over and over again is no fun. Remember that episode of Stargate SG-1 where Jack O’Neill and Daniel Jackson got stuck in a time loop? It’s exactly what these games are. No matter what you do, you always start back at zero again. That’s the reason why I choose to play RPGs and MMORPGs, and I can never bring myself to play the same kind of shooters I once did before.
The Big Bang Theory
I don’t usually do shows reviews and I don’t think I even capable of writing one, but The Big Bang Theory has to be one of the best sitcoms ever. Don’t let its name fool you, it’s more than just a geek show. I’ve been repeatedly watching it ever since I came across it and the jokes never get old. It is that good. I wouldn’t say it is my favorite TV show, because first place would be a tough fight between this and The IT Crowd. I’m not quite sure why I enjoy watching shows that sometimes tend to seem like parodies of my life, but I guarantee that you won’t walk away from this one disappointed. There are episodes on the official site linked above that you could watch episodes if you’re in the US but if you’re outside, I’m sure it’s still pretty easily obtainable through your favorite distribution channel.
What do you do with all that screenshots?
I’ve been trying to be a bit more organized recently, sorting out my the huge mess that is my digital storage, and clearing out a years worth of the stuff in the folder labeled ‘Incoming’. As the name suggests, is where every file coming in to my computer is stored, regardless of their source. This includes random stuff I copy from my laptop over to view temporarily, files downloaded from the Internet, more random bits of files I get sent over MSN and so on. If my mom could visualize my incoming folder as my room, she’ll go ape. It is that bad.
One thing I’ve always had problems sorting out is my screenshots folder from whatever game I’m playing. I’ve the tendency to take a lot of random screenshots, but never go through the process of sorting them. My question to you readers are: how do you organize them screenshots? Do you rename them? (not that my uncreative naming conventions for my L2 screenshots of “lol1v1.jpg”, “lolraped.jpg”, “omglololol.jpg” help me in anyway) Put them in different folders? Or do you make use of some photo album program to organize and tag them (Flickr comes to mind)?
And you wonder why piracy is rampant here
I decided to give Amazon’s MP3 download a spin today, and this what I end up with, including several attempts to baffle the system (entering a US billing address/VPN in through a computer located in the US) which I could assume works by the location where the credit card was registered.
We could not process your order because of geographical restrictions on the product which you were attempting to purchase. Please refer to the terms of use for this product to determine the geographical restrictions.
We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you.
That’s one more to the list of services that block purchases outside of the US. Recently Direct2Drive started restricting majority of its catalog for sale only to US addresses. Maybe those CEOs in their big suits should question themselves as to why certain regions, like Southeast Asia, is rampant with piracy. How do you expect us to be good customers when we’re being denied to purchase something legitimately in the first place? Torrentfreak has a good article about this.
