Blog fixed

So I looked around and tweaked lots of stuff, and behold, it's no longer broken.

I still have no idea what that was all about.

Things tonight

Just a few minutes ago, I basically exploded over a largely meaningless argument about trivials things regarding a computer game.

It was with a group of people who support what I find to be a morally repulsive series of changes to the gameplay.

Needless to say, the result was I blocked them from ever communicating with me again after the argument -- an action I somewhat regret now but will live with.

Unapologetic and stubborn over moral issues, that's me. I do stuff like this regularly even to my family and the few friends I have -- a personality flaw, no doubt, to have in human society.

I'm not even a rational person, as I believe biased rationality all too often blinds perception. Although, of course, I seem to be rationalizing things all the time. I live only to die, despite all my fears, so perhaps that hypocrisy is not so bad.

Who cares, though? The world doesn't need me, and the people that live in this world certainly won't do anything when I die. The voices of laughter and accusations will probably also drown out the tears that are shed, if any.

Not dead... yet

No, I'm not dead. I'm just really tired. Sure, I play the craptastic game called City of Heroes a lot, but I still have plenty of free time. It's not really the reason that I'm not writing anything.

Well, in other not-too-exciting news, I'm going back to university in September. Is that good or bad -- I don't know. I'll tackle it as it comes. At least it'll give me free access (well, included in the student fees and balanced out by ridiculous tuition fees) to the counselling service, which may help with my deteriorating mental health.

As for how City of Heroes has turned out, I must say it's come to the point where I have no choice but to give up my expectation to have any semblance of fun there. At best, I'll have all my characters powerlevelled to level 40 for the costume slots and use the game as a virtual shopping mall, at least until my subscription runs out. Otherwise, I'll just have to let my addiction dissipate through frustration, which the devs and their fanboys have no trouble providing.

The edge

Rekindling fires of fatalistic thoughts--
A world apart, I'm severed by a rising sun,
Whose heat has set aflame my soul, my heart;
My destiny now sealed and wasted for
The eye that cannot see beneath the fog,
I raise a patriot's unfit mind, held
Within a crystal ball that somehow smashed
Against my forehead, telling me the lie
Of truths and those imagined, fading glints
That mark my spirit's shadow, so far stretched;
It never ends in its abandoned state.

Tell me where I have found the path
And show it to the world of mine:
The heart that bleeds;
The rift that screams;
The two are one;
Time limping past,
And falling down the precipice.

Why let them see where I am now,
When we may just as well pray for
The days yet to arrive on my
Doorsteps, paved neatly with the milk
Of goats I have kept in my shed
And chickens flying o'er the roof?

Sing us a song of fearful joy, and
Teach it to the wailing toys.
Fake it well, and free the fools,
The joking masters of the house,
Because they'll do as you say to
My lying waist that's cut in half.

The pleasantries are well for my adventures' end,
As I have toiled for far too long to move
The mountains standing in my way to truth.
Instead, I shed a tear and lift it up,
And then I see a shining sword of fire,
And then I brandish it and cut myself
In half, which gave a smile to my stern face.
So resting on a pike o'erlooking lakes of gold,
And rotting bodies slammed up 'gainst the weir,
Harpooned by fish that hunt the living souls.
What life, what sin, what statesman there e'er was,
The fish here do tricks with impunity.

Tell me where I have found the stream
And show it to the heart of mine:
The lake that slays;
The light that mauls;
The two are one;
Death crawling by,
And rolling down the precipice.

Why let them see how I hate life,
When we may just as well pray for
The days yet to arrive on my
Doorsteps, laid neatly on the kind
Remarks I have received from him,
My teacher's dying vengeance wreaked?

Read us a poem from your book, and
Flush it down the toilet seat.
Fold it well, and let it go,
The fairy tales that get reruns,
On my own channel, viewer-free,
Which means no bias from no dolt.

Rekindling fires of fatalistic thoughts.

A cultural necessity

While I have no doubt what the MPAA and RIAA want most out of their frivolous lawsuits is more profit and the freakish fulfilling of their pathological desire to control what they "own", I think there is also something deathly sinister about their draconian actions.

You see, copyright applies to intangible things -- ideas, thoughts, words, or pure sounds that make no sense but still manage to transform society and culture, step by step.

Do you wonder what culture is? Culture... When we think of that, we may immediately think of the great poets throughout the ages and the great artists who have left behind inspiring arts of work. Then, we may start thinking of the more recent artists, films, TV series, music, and so on. What else, though, is there? I think there are many subtle things, such as the way we express ourselves; the tinted glass through which we see things with a collective mind; and the many, many ideas that are just there, left behind by their nameless thinkers.

And yet, culture does not define people; it is intangible. It may roughly be used to categorize a large group of people who share many things in common, but it is never the only way people are labelled. What am I getting at?

Where do you think culture comes from? Does it somehow spawn out of nowhere, as people just randomly started toying with weird combinations of ideas and styles of virtually everything? No, of course not. Culture starts as a sort of necessity, and then eventually evolves as people mould different parts of it into something else that may be purely artistic and useless for practical needs.

The creation of art, as well, is merely the rearrangement of parts of different cultural schemata. Brilliant minds do not give birth to artistic creations; they merely perceive what can be best put together in the legacy that culture has left them to build beautiful things upon and present them in the most appropriate manner befitting the culture from which it has come.

In that regard, the modern concepts of copyright and plagiarism merely serve to slow the momentum of the evolution of culture, by giving undue credit for creating what is rightfully part of culture to the minds that should have contributed to the momentum; rewarding the establishment that schemes to halt the movement of culture by preserving parts of it and denying the rest of the culture access; and punishing the culture itself, in many ways preventing it from evolving and spreading itself at the natural pace.

What does this do? It causes division -- not diversity, as diversity often implies the absence of friction and the freedom to choose. The division of classes and the creation, preservation, and collapse of hierarchy are born and put into a violent cycle that causes great cultural dissonance.

Who stands to gain from all this? Short-sighted human beings whose pathological need to feel in control can never be sated. It is, indeed, always those who fail to understand humanity that exploits it the best.

London bombed...

My deepest sympathies to those who were harmed in any way during this ordeal.

Powerlevelling and City of Heroes

It seems bashing powerlevelling is the popular thing to do today, so I'm going to chime in and insert my unusual comments. The only online games I've ever played in depth are Neverwinter Nights and City of Heroes, so I will refer to the two for examples, although this post is primarily about powerlevelling on CoH.

I'm primarily a roleplayer, and thus, my experiences on NWN mostly took place on RP PWs. As for City of Heroes, well, that's a game designed for non-RPers.

I don't know how everyone views powerlevelling on NWN PWs, since I haven't been to many, but where I came from, we considered anything that was done purely for experience points powerlevelling. Quite frankly, I also apply this reasoning to games like CoH; very simply, pretty much everyone on CoH is a powerleveller from my perspective.

So now that my stronger bias is there, let's get back to the more narrow (and popular) definitions of PLing. A few think repeating quests or missions that are heavy on XP or spawns basically amounts to PLing, and most people feel that PLing is strictly the act of higher levels doing all the work while the lower levels sit there and mooch. I've seen the term used both passively and actively; i.e., low-level characters can get powerlevelled or they can powerlevel by leeching off high levels.

But what do I think of it? I think PLing is very much justified in a non-RP environment.

Why? Well, let me say that I'm no powerleveller, in the sense that I do not let others PL me, nor have I ever PLed someone.

Personally, I find City of Heroes to be extremely lacking in content. Being a new player, I have quite many characters, one at level 38, one 26, one 21, one 17, and one 15. You'll notice that this means I have gone through the low level grind quite many times, and I have also experienced some of the higher level content, having sidekicked with some high levels occasionally.

And I still think CoH has very little content to offer.

The missions are simply all the same. There is little to no variation or creativity. Nearly everything is about hacking your way through a maze, literally or at least metaphorically. Or clicking on a blinking object, or defeating everything in sight to save someone or something. Whatever the background stories, the missions are all identical with very few exceptions.

CoH, probably like many other games, suffers from a lack of quality content. Even though it has a fairly interesting and solid gameplay system (if all too combat-oriented and monotonous), it has limited content to offer. Mission maps are recycled from a very limited pool of tilesets, and even worse than that, they all feel like mechanical, randomly generated mazes rather than natural buildings designed by real architects or natural caverns.

What does this mean? It means much of CoH's content offers little more than boredom and frustration, especially at lower levels when characters feel nothing like superheroes, a contradiction that I think nearly renders CoH worthless for its marketed purpose. At higher levels, the powerless feel starts to be less obvious.

So why should a player be stripped of countless hours crossing the horrific abomination that is the Hollows? If you're not a CoH player, the Hollows is basically an area where parts of the town have sunk into the ground due to excessive tunnelling. While graphically interesting, it is a pain for a low-level character to manoeuvre around, since the area is one of the few places where low levels can easily team up. It is also easily one of the most monotonous and frustrating hazard zones that people go to. Missions here often take place in dark abandoned offices or caves, and the enemies are quite challenging for their worth.

Now coupled with the ludicrously weak state of low-level characters, a deadly combination is produced, trapping many players for months grinding in that largely pointless zone, fighting a fight that can never be won, and experiencing the persistent world (in the sense that nothing ever changes) that is Paragon City.

Now let the anti-PLing crowd yell at me that every player should waste hours travelling slowly to experience the "content" --the content that involves trying to climb out of bottomless pits while enemies camp nearby to smash you to pieces and then repeating the whole process all over again when you are hit by a boulder and sent to the hospital.

Well, more time wasted is more subscription money for the devs, which may convince them to get off their nerfing trip and start making real content or fixing bugs and spelling mistakes. Oh yeah, keep on dreaming.

I'll list some anti-PL arguments and try to debunk them:

1) Why are these people levelling faster than I am? I'm levelling slowly and they ought to, too.

Ideally, equality is achieved by bringing everyone up to the highest point, rather than dragging everyone down to the lowest standard. In a non-zero-sum game like CoH, meaning that you lose nothing when someone else gains something, this is a ludicrous comment.

The problem can be solved by the devs bringing down the XP requirement for each level, or making PLing more accessible. The purists can do as they please.

2) PLers skip the learning process and are horrible on teams.

Irrelevant. Many PLers are also experienced players with many characters that are tired of the low-level grind. In addition, PLing to high levels takes forever in CoH, and unless someone's very first character is PLed from level 1 to, say, level 30 without interruption, there is little learning process to speak of.

The argument is a gross generalization that concludes all players are the same. They are not; long-time players are often as horrible as new players, depending on their ability to absorb information and learn quickly. I've seen some experienced non-PLers constantly jeopardize the team throughout low-level Task Force missions, despite repeated warning from others, because of their inability to "get out of tanker mode". This has nothing to do with PLing, but how well the player copes with experience.

3) I find PLing to be morally/ethically wrong.

What morality? Go back to church/philosophy class, please. This is a game, not a preaching ground waiting to be sanctified.

4) PLers harrass me to be their bridge; also, PLers get me killed or steal my kills in hazard zones.

People who ask you to team up when you don't want to are similarly harrassing you. Should teaming between strangers be banned or discouraged? People running around with pets also frequently get others killed and kill what other people are fighting. In addition, "kills" cannot be "stolen", because there is no ownership. If you wish to prevent that, ask the devs to implement measures to stop others from "stealing" your "kills". Never mind that it is an extremely stupid concept brought about by typical MMORPG treadmill.