Some notes and brainstorming

Bored and insomniac, ergo, this blog post.  Brainstorming ideas about Homestuck, because a friend got me in the mood for it.  As such, this will be a very, very different blog post.  It's unlikely that anything will come from this, but it is a fun exercise nonetheless.

Melissia Solanace

• Mage of Void
• "Messiah of Ignorance", "Prophet of Mystery", "Saint of the Unknown"
• Prophetic visions of unknown events and locations.
• Natural illusion-based powers. 
• God tier powers focusing on reducing knowledge, obscuring things, etc.
• Uses revolvers as a weapon.  Secondary type being daggers, due to focus on practicality.
• Plothook:  Visions of her planet keep showing up, until she has explored it all, and pacified the violence on it, allowing her to grow in to her class.

"Your name is MELISSIA SOLANACE. Today is your WRIGGLING DAY, a momentous day to anyone who cares. Which most assuredly is not you. 

What you DO care about, however, are your varied and numerous INTERESTS. You have a passion for FANTASY MOST BIZARRE, especially for the much-derided BRIGHTHOPEFUL WARGAMING SCENE, for which you collect and paint ELEGANTLY CRAFTED MINIATURES. You like to play COMPUTER GAMES, especially VIOLENT ONES. This is appropriate, because you are described as so FULL OF RAGE that you could make a lower class troll bleed to death through SHEER HATE. Related to hatred and rage, you find other trolls UTTERLY ABHORRENT, and you have to struggle against your BLINDING HATE in order to not murder most of them due to your royal purple blood. Also due to your royal purple blood is your astounding MARTIAL PROWESS, which you use to wield ROTARY CANNONS which also happen to be REVOLVERS. 

With said MARTIAL PROWESS you are surely destined to join the powerful yet wild and unpredictable band of MAVERICORSAIRS in time. Or you would, if they had not involved themselves in one of your favorite literary tools, the GLORIOUS LAST STAND. You do happen to love LAST STANDS and REVOLVERS and related to these you also enjoy a particular, peculiar, and obscure genre of movies called WESTERNS from an alien culture so few have learned about and will NEVER BE RELEVANT TO ANYTHING THAT EVER HAPPENS TO ANY TROLLS EVER. Your trolltag is terminalAnimus, and you type in extremely proper grammar, despising such non-sense as contractions and compound words. You also have a fondness for FINE SUITS and FORMAL WEAR, of which you are unique amongst trolls for your impeccable dress. 

You are soon to wear one such FINE SUIT in a game with trolls you do not abhor enough to consider immediately killing them. What do you do?"

Remaining characters, question marks indicating the most unsure parts are.

Elazarus Skiernos (?)

• Knight of Heart
• "Defender of Souls"
• Protects other players from harm, especially preventing destruction of their dream-selves (?)
• Strong martial prowess, intuitively understands dreamworld.
• God tier powers help keep other players from dying (?)
• Uses umbrellas as a weapon, due to a strife specibus mix-up early on.
• Assists with frog breeding.
• Plothook:  Has to defeat a soul-destroying monster and confront their own mortality?  Seems too cliche, but it fits with what is known about the Knight class thus far.

???????? ????????

• Rogue of Light
• Able to steal luck in order to help teammates.
• Possible fixation on romantic interests (?)
• Uses a staff as a weapon, quarterstaff style.  
• Doesn't likely get along well with the Mage of Void.
• Plothook:  Has to make sure love interest sees the error of their ways, perhaps?  Or possibly has to overcome obsession with romance and give up their chase in order to help the group?

???????? ????????

• Thief of Time
• Steals time to benefit self.
• Possibly quite selfish (?), if well-meaning in the end.
• Uses stolen time to create time loops and perform time based shenanigans.
• Beat Mesa equivalent for performing the Scratch.
• Uses an edged weapon, related to her ability to start the Scratch if necessary.
• Perhaps a hatchet, matching her thief/bandit theme?
• Plothook:  Mistakenly believes they stole the time of a region of their planet; the region is actually "locked" in time, and she has to "break in" like a thief.

???????? ????????

• Witch of Breath
• Manipulates force, "the windy thing"
• Offensively very powerful, can destroy massive amounts of enemies very easily.
• Friendly, but awkward.  
• Pre-emptive dream-self awakening?
• Uses "magic" daggers as weapon (keris/kris/kalis style?), perhaps helping Mage of Void with obtaining a more functional kind for her strife portfolio.
• Plothook:  Must attempt to unlock her "magical" power by learning to manipulate The Breath / The Windy Thing, to clear the diseased fog of her planet?

???????? ????????

• Maid of Rage
• Capable of vastly increasing her rage and combat prowess, especially offensively.  
• Very hard to kill, but has weird shenanigans around her dream self and real self.
• Very polite and nice person, until she awakens her god tier powers.
• After awakening, she becomes a handful for her moirail (Mage of Void?)
• Uses a bastard sword as a weapon.
• Plothook:  Something keeps happening, or several things both minor and major, that eventually cause her to snap in a terrifying murderous rage, which she must learn to control, almost as an opposite to the Mage of Void.

???????? ????????

• Heir of Space
• Has control of size and mass of various objects.
• Stokes the session's forge.
• Frog breeding duties.
• Makes use of a club/mace or shield, is somewhat brutish at least in combat.  
• Plothook:  Clumsy and introspective, the Heir makes many mistakes which hurt both himself and his fellow players.  Eventually, though, he grows to become a very powerful player, making perfect use of his space powers.  Perhaps it is because of the frog breeding?

???????? ????????

• Sylph of Life
• Helps others heal, shares abundant life force, etc.  Perhaps can revive teammates?
• Very friendly, down to earth type, probably enjoys sharing information.
• Uses something silly as her weapon, perhaps a broken bottle picked up out of necessity?
• Plothook:  Has to try to create life from her lifeless home and planet?

Misuse of the term "tsundere"

Yes, I know, two angry posts in a row, meh.  I need a specific reason to post, and I haven't had enough time or money to get new gmaes recently (although someone did give me a copy of Dead Island so I might review that-- the few hours I have spent on it have been quit enjoyable, albeit a bit ), but still-- I'm getting a bit tired of this.

A woman who is a nice person generally, and who says something harsh, is not a "tsundere".  The term and concept for "Tsundere" came about because Anime writer shave no damned clue how to write women, and so they almost always wrote about a plucky girl or about a proper housewife.  Tsundere was an attempt to deepen the female characters by adding one (1) new element of their personality-- usually a mean streak on an otherwise nice girl.  However, it is still lazy writing, because the "tsundere" character is almost invariably very, very shallow.  The term itself comes from "tsuntsun", IE aloof or irritable, and "deredere", IE lovestruck.  And its use goes way too damned far for such a lazy, condescending term.

Unfortunately, Japan being what it is (royally fucked up), and Japanophiles being what they are (also royally fucked up), the term has been used to describe real people instead of half-assed constructs by lazy writers.  A normally nice woman who is groped and tehn gets mad about it is called "tsundere".  Because... what, she's supposed to LIKE having her breast grabbed by impetuous little turd of a man or something?  The man DESERVES the anger.  She isn't being tsundere, she's defending herself from an asshole.   Similarly, if one percieves a woman as a mean bitch but then sees her doing something nice, this also desn't mean she's a tsundere either.   More likely than not it just means that you probably gave her no reason to like you in the first place, or the time you've known her she has been in a situation that you keep caching her in a bad mood due to reasons enitrely beyond her control.

People are more complex than anime constructs.  There are a wdie variety of different personality quirks in a single person, and attempting to define them by comparing them to definitions of pop culture concepts is a stupid endeavor.  Get to know them as people instead, and you'll find that they're far more interesting that way.

Homeopathy is a lie, and other frustrations with modern idiocy.

I'ill just get the first part out of the way.

Homeopathy is a lie.  Homeopathic practitioners are liars, fools, and/or idiots.

Homeopathy presumes to work on "resonance", which is an unproven pseudoscientific idea (calling it a theorem or a hypothesis is too kind, it is neither of these) that chemicals maintain a "memory" of atoms they have bumped in to.  This is ludicrous, and completely unfounded.  If that was the case, then every drop of water we drink would have the resonant "memory" of dirt, shit, piss, blood of various species, diseases, salt, mercury, the various organic compounds that compose what we refer to as "oil", semen of various species, just an incomprehensible amount of chemicals which water has come in to contact with over the eons of geological history.  But it doesn't, of course, because the homeopathic "vibrations" concept is utter bullshit.

Following on that, one of the basic principles of homeopathy is that the more dilute a solution is, the stronger it is.  This is because to prepare a homeopathic "remedy", one puts a small amount of it in water, then shakes it, and then dilutes that further, then shakes it, then dilutes it further-- supposedly making it stronger each time.  This goes against every single basic concept of chemistry.  The reason one dilutes concentrated sulfuric acid is to WEAKEN its effect, not to strengthen it.  And we shake/stir/etc our goddamend H2NO3 quite well thank you very much, you fucking lying, thieving charlatans.

But even worse than that, they also try to claim that they can violate the laws of physics and statistics with their remedies.  Their "strongest" solutions are so dilute that they pass a crucial point in chemistry and physics-- Avagadro's Number.  This is roughly 6*10^23-- once a dilution gets past this point, there is only a chance of there being one single molecule of the substance in the mixture.  Some of the "strongest" medicines are so dilute that there is only a one in a million chance of there being only one molecule in the mixture.  This is equivalent to taking a grain of rice, grinding it in to a powder, and then mixing it in to a pool of water the size of the solar system, then adding the same amount of water a couple dozen times, and then taking a single sip out of that mass of water.

THAT... is fucking dilute.  The reason I rage so hard about this, aside from being professionally offended as a chemist who knows that every lie they spout confuses the scientifically illiterate, is that they're fooling people.  Stealing their money by selling miracle water and snake oil.  They're liars, they're cheats, they're worthless trash and scum, every single one of them, and yet they make millions and even billions off of ripping poor, unfortunate folk off, people who don't really understand the science (or lack thereof) behind this quack system of remedies.  They prey on fears, taking advantage of people who are afraid of anthrax attacks.  They prey on the unfortunate, selling miracle water to cancer patients and ripping them off as the cancer patient suffers and gets worse because of their lies.





There's plenty of this crap going around.  Faith healing, psychics, ghost whisperers, and other liars prey on the grieving, the unfortunate, the suffering.  These aren't merely hobbyists, no, if that were the case they'd be magicians/conjurers, doing it for entertainment value.  No, they're predators.

To a lesser extent, this sort of thing has involved itself in the political system of the US as well.  People believe what they want to believe-- damn the facts!  Obama is a jew-hating muslim who wants to sell us to the chinese!  Romney will force everyone to take multiple wives!  Bush is a backbiting hick who sold the country to private military contractors!  And so on and so forth.  People allow themselves to be distracted by the spectacle of it all, they get caught up in the emotional lies that are told to gain their support.

Doesn't matter which side you're on-- think for yourself, not for your party.  Skeptical thinking should be applied to people you disagree with, certainly, but even moreso it should be applied to those you agree with, because they're the ones that can fool you the easiest otherwise.

DVD Burning is a pain in the ass.

Every single dvd burning software is full of bugs, bloatware, spyware, bugs and bloatware, bugs and spyware, or bugs and bloatware and spyware.  No exceptions.

They all require me to jump through hoops just to get their basic fucking functions to work-- just to burn data to a dvd so I can back up files and save space on my hard drive.

Every single time I try to burn a dvd something goes wrong and I have to spend hours fixing it-- and, inevitably, the customer service of every single one of these programs sucks more proverbial ass than a gay black hole with a scat fetish, telling you a few basic things you need to do, then ignoring you after you say you've done them (or just repeating them, which means they're probably actually forum bots rather than real human beings).  

ArcSoft, Nero, DeepBurner,  CDBurnerXP-- no exceptions.  They're all like this.  Why the hell can't someone create a simple, barebones dvd burner for backing up files that actually WORKS without having to reconfigure your computer a dozen times and restart it half another?

So, I've been reading Left Behind

... I honestly don't know if I've ever read a more abhorrent book, that goes so contrary against Christian beliefs.  Even satanist books offer more for the soul than this tripe-- because even most satanist books don't pray for the end times to come so that all non-believers (and most believers who aren't part of their specific denomination) can burn in hell for eternity.

Yes indeed, that's exactly what this book prays for.  It's not an uplifting book.  It is a veritable "take that" at anyone who doesn't believe in the author's skewed and hypocritical version of so-called Christianity.  And this book is an American best seller.

For those that don't know yet (IE those outside of the US and those with little exposure to evangelistic movements), Left Behind is a series of atrociously written books about a skewed and inaccurate, and often hypocritical, view of "rapture" and the end times-- oftentimes pulled from sources other than the bible.

It follows two misogynistic, homophobic, occasioanlly racist, and even biased against left-handers (What.) "heroes", a sociopathic (and occasionally psychopathic)  pilot who constantly uses and strings along women, emotionally cheating on his wife despite his constant assertions that it's okay cause his pants never came off, and a "greatest reporter of all time", who never actually does any real reporting, and conveniently ignores all of the death and destruction around, to instead go hunt Jews.

And before you forget, these are supposed to be their GOOD side.  For reference, another supposedly good character is a doctor that helps stop the pilot's head from bleeding.  Sounds nice?  But wait, there's more.  He sat there complaining about BOREDOM, while outside the window of the airport were dozens of wrecked planes, the bodies not yet pulled from their flaming carcasses, the wounded not yet cared for.  The so-called heroes are more concerned with the fact that all of this death and destruction is slowing down their travel than they are about the fact that all of the world's children vanished at once, including their own.


And this is exactly how the author says you should act.  These are not Christian books.    These are ugly, hateful, spiteful books, books that in their poor writing don't offer a hand of salvation but instead waggle a finger of "oh, just wait for the end times, because THEN you'll be sorry!".  The emotions it extols from its readers are not the Christian emotions of love, acceptance, and joy-- but instead of vindication, wrath, and juvenile jealousy and hate.

These are the kinds of books the supposed anti-Christ would write, except at least said mythological (and not necessarily biblical) anti-Christ would write a more competent and interesting book than this.

And they sell them at bookstores in colleges around the nation.

I'm scared, hold me.

Duke Nukem Forever

Pardon the shortness of this entry, I'm using a keyboard with a broken space bar, it's tiring to type too much right now.

So a lot of people are really hating on this-- and I honestly can't figure out why.   The game is great fun, it has a sense of humor, it's well paced, has good variety... it's certainly no game of the decade, but it's still hella better than games such as the CoD/MoH/BF series as far as single player goes.

The driving sections which I normally despise, are short enough with enough breaks in them to stay acceptable, the shrink ray sections I wish were more frequent (not necessarily longer, but in more places) but they're still excellently done and played with quite well, the normal FPS gameplay is superbly done, etc etc etc.  The only real problem I had with it was the alien hive, which was just... too dark.  Not metaphorically dark (no, that art fits in quite well), but literally too dark, too... colorless.  Sure the Nevada desert areas are a bit drab, but at least they have an old west appeal going for them, and they aren't quite as monochrome and visually dark and... well, boring.  The casino/duke's hotel was excellent, and I enjoyed the water battles at the end as well.

The weapons are nicely varied, with only the M1911A1 being taken from the real world (though the shotgun is at least feasibly an RL shotgun), the sounds are excellently composed, and the storyline works as well as any Duke storyline has, which is to say, it's an excuse to kick ass.  Hearing duke actually pissed of (and not just dryly saying he's pissed off like normal) was an excellent touch for this duke nukem fan.

All in all... I've spent ~50 bucks on far worse than this.  Certainly I have no regrets, unlike my purchases of BFBC2 and CoD:BO.

As predicted....

...I forgot about this blog.

But then, given the name of the blog, that's probably expected!   Recently, I received Rainbow 6 Vegas 2 and R.U.S.E. for my birthday, and purchased DoW2: Retribution and Homefront for myself with my own money.  So I have had a lot to play over Feb and continue to have tons to play over Mar, to say the least.

R6V2 is a wonderful procedural shooter, although not as complex a shooter as SWAT 4 it makes up for it by not being as brain-bustingly hard and yet still retains replayability.  Its character customization is awesome, and I really regret not getting this game in its prime.  But to be fair, I have the first Rainbow 6, and it sucked more than a black hole crackwhore on a money run, so I had good reason to shy away from everything Tom Clancy.  That said, the gameplay well above adequate and the storyline continues from the first Rainbow 6 to a very good twist at the end, which I won't spoil for you (but then if you're interested in the game you probably already have it anyway).

R.U.S.E. is a very well done RTS game, with a somewhat simplistic approach to units and control, but it's made up for by the use of intelligence and the titular ruses.  Things like switching units on the radar so infantry appears like tanks and tanks appear like infantry in a sector, or putting camo netting on buildings for a sector, a fake (and completely free) tank assault force in which to distract the enemy by making them think you're massing in a certain sector or simply to hide actual tank units in.  Despite its apparent simplicity, it has complexity through its ruses and intelligence scheme.   It does have its issues though, the factions don't appear at all balanced, but that might just be me.  I haven't gone to the forums since the beta to see what the overall opinion on balance is, so I'm not gonna dwell too much on that.

Dawn of War 2: Retribution is the second expansion to the second installment of Relic's 40k license for RTS games, and it improves on the series even more than Chaos Rising (the first expansion) did.  With the addition of the Imperial Guard, the game actually feels semi-complete as far as forces go (the four remaining factions being somewhat niche, despite the fact that I like most of them at least in concept).  The Guard are done extremely well, and truly feel different from the other factions with their weak and cheap shooty units, supported by excellent vehicles and auxiliary units such as Ogryns.  The campaign picks up ten years after Chaos Rising's campaign, with the Ordo Malleus (Order of the Hammer-- the daemon hunters) arm of the Inquisition deciding they've had just about enough of the daemonic/heretic infestation in the sector after well over ten years of constant uprising and daemonic infestations, and so they're just going to destroy every habitable world in the sector, and your faction is, for whatever reasons, attempting to stop it.

Homefront hasn't come out yet, but I will try to remember to write a review of it when I get it on the fifteenth.

Good day to y'all :)