Thfeary

I'm a believer in the influence of psychological state and emotion upon physical health. When people cite the power of prayer, they're only wrong in the attritbution, not the effectiveness it can have for a sufferer to have faith. Maybe even the positive vibes of those praying might do something, just judging by a wealth of.. Well, not evidence, but highly suggestive information that may, or may not be purely the product of wishful, evangelist imaginations.

With this stated, I found myself pondering the 'mystery' of immuno-disorders.

Take asthma, for example; what if the reason everyone is suddenly being crippled by their own respiratory systems - in their efforts to save us from things of little to absolutely no harm - is that we fear the air we breathe?

Certainly, there will always be respiratory problems as a result of purely medical concerns, and there always has/always will be 'asthma' for a given value of a rather catch-all term, but what if the massive apparent upsurge is not solely down to air quality, but partially down to our own hypochondrian/conditioned paranoia about what we're breathing?

What if our bodies are being trained from childhood to resent and distrust the air we breathe?

As I see it, this is no more far fetched than reversing the Placebo Effect.

Think on it, and let me know your own conclusions.

Ache.

My jaw is killing me. I think it hurts more knowing I don't have the -option- of treatment. Either my body will overcome the infection, or I'll eventually run out of 30/500 Codeine/Paracetamol and I'll need to come up with a clever idea.

I hope it won't involve a length of string and a slammed door, as that's highly unlikely to work on a molar.

I've been staying indoors. It's quiet outside, people seem to be bunkering down. The occasional car goes by. Plenty of food stocked up. Shouldn't be any problems.

Fleas are driving me crazy. Downside of cats. I wouldn't give them up for anything - especially now I'm losing everyone else.

Idea.

Woke up. Took a long while to get up. Hard to find a reason. Felt motivated by an idea.

Write about it. Why? Well, I'm sure there's still a few people out there to read it. The net works, though I don't know how long Blogger's servers will stay up. Maybe I'll manage to set up some kind of alternative hosting. Let me know if you can help with that, I've never been particularly tech-savvy, let alone now half the results on google are a 404.

We should probably be frantically downloading the entirity of eHow and Wikipedia about now. What else do we need? Fuck, it's hard to care. I've always thought I was depressive, apathetic. What changed? Nothing, except now I have a reason.

Rambling.

Don't want to go outside. Food will last a while, I guess, but I still need to feed the cats, and they are hungry little bastards. Sitting online talking to friends, most don't even want to mention it. Several haven't been online for days. Judging by the news, or what little is still being reported coherently, there's no control left. I know I didn't feel safe last time I went out. I imagine it's a lot worse now.

Do you think .22 lead pellets can penetrate a skull? I'm skeptical as to whether my rifle has any practical use in this situation, but it might be worth trying. At least I might carry the scope around if I do need to head outside.

I'll update when I can. Let me know about hosting options, I think I'm going to try to keep updating as long as I can.

- Jack

A Ramble on Nations - The Pain of Japan

The following is a mildly edited chat log, a fairly one-sided chat with a sleepy friend that became more of a short, messy article postulating vague theories on the cultural identity of Japan, the scars left by WW2 on the modern 'feeling' of major countries, and the Dunning-Kruger effect, something I urge you to read first at the link provided at the very beginning of the log.

I hope to hear your thoughts, and I hope you don't take me too seriously ;)

-------


Friend:

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Dunning_kruger_effect - I just stumbled onto this. You've probably already seen it.



Me:

Mm. very interesting. Wish you were here for rapid verbal exchange, I've too many thoughts on the article to effectively communicate in text as I'm having them.

Friend:

We can keep it for when I next see you?

Me:

*chatter removed*

Many facets to this effect us daily - the ironic, comic/tragic fact that idiots are often too stupid to realise they're wrong, and thus argue all the harder - amplified tenfold by prideful and aggressive qualities which are often held as a set with stupidity.

And we are of course deeply familiar with the fact so many of our brightest and best friends are absolutely crippled by self-doubt and underconfidence.

****

I love the comparison that Europeans aren't nearly as distinct in this effect, and that East Asians are effectively the opposite.

Colloquially, rather than presenting any kind of solid evidence, I've been wondering hard about why Japanese culture (among the young, i.e. presently teen-40s aged) is so stunningly self-hating, or so it seems. There's a general attitude of attacking their own culture in their art and entertainment

Furthermore a distinct gender bias. While women may be heavily sexualised and somewhat dominated in Japanese culture by the males, it appears that there's a heavy undercurrent of male fragility and submissive attitudes conveyed in their art - manga, anime and live-action cinema - while larger, angry women dominate the scene.

Japanese men in anime, live action and manga produced in-country are almost invariably in one court or another;

1) the minority, often protagonists and supporting characters are fragile, effeminate, prone to panic and crippling shyness, frequently making gross mistakes and humiliating themselves openly, before grovelling for forgiveness. Often a running joke, sometimes with a sexual edge)

2) The majority; grossly crude and ugly, they act as low grade antagonists or mooks - twisted facial expressions, often badly aged with liver-spots, croaking, vicious voices, heavy facial wrinkling and stand-out popping veins. They're dominant but stupid, almost invariably bad guys, and die viciously, unreasonably violent deaths.

Any JAPANESE male positively depicted is a fragile, girly wreck, while negatively portrayed males are old, angry, hateful conservatives or mutated looking young hulks of raging flesh with short lifespans.
Worth noting nationality

As more frequently, they simply create things set in japan, but all the characters are caucasians with varied hair colours emphasising light brown and blonde, mixing various tan levels, with evidence of africans and hispanics - essentially, most often anime simply completely removes all 'japaneseness' from their characters, despite retaining japanese inspired environments. Highschools, shinto gates, street culture, high tech arcades and cities.

... And whether this has any connection with the noted east asian 'mirroring' of the dunning kruger effect
.. *stitches his mouth closed*

Friend:

Please, talk! I'm half asleep, but you're stimulating my brain muchly. It's a strange, lovely feeling. It is an interesting topic. You should write an article on it.

Me:

*smiles* I'm glad you were enjoying. I get a little worried when I realise I've actually filled the screen since someone last spoke, but that's fine as long as I'm not drilling a hole in your skull with my ramble.

I don't know if you've noticed that about Anime.. Home-set anime, when it isn't depicting the characters as all having luminous hair colours and giant eyes.. Well.

The quiet theory I hold, very immature, undeveloped, needs plenty of work before I'd ever share this openly (i.e. write an article on it - I've never been to japan, I'm not exactly an otaku myself so I've not seen -much- anime by 22 year old geek standards, so this is all fairly conjectural..).

.. is that Japan in particular, and Korea in a vaguely similar fashion suffer from a -national- inferiority complex.

...

Germany was a tough little nation. They survived world war two only to start fighting themselves. They finally unified and started balancing stuff out. They're now, culturally, a fairly conservative entity, but a creative, industrious, productive and very -peaceful- one. They've been castrated by history.

Written as villains (and not undeserving, although history will always exagerrate in favour of the winner), they now live in a constant terror, nationally, politically, even psychologically as a whole, of ever being bad guys again. Of being stigmatised for their past.

They are. German as a -word-, two syllables still carries a bad taste.

When you say German, there are often inescapable mental images involved. For millions of young people, particularly males, raised on 1960s movies or 90s-2000s videogames, German and Bad Guy are virtually synonymous.

Thanks, Treyarch. You fucking heroes. At least I'd feel better about it if Call of Duty was actually GOOD.

Friend:

XD

Me:

So germany are scarred, shaped forever (or for as long as it matters to anyone who is today an adult) by WW2. By their choices, by the way they were manipulated, and by the way they were eventually stamped on by angry, angry russian men, followed by some Americans, some Brits, a lot of angry minor european nations, before finally being derisively urinated upon while twitching feebly by the few surviving French.

But Germany were fighters, determined, hardcore little fuckers - they recovered to become a rich and successful country so fundamentally 'nice', if stern, that people really are starting to forget what their grandfathers did, and their grandmothers fed and supported.

Impressive achievement.

.. Even if they still depict all game violence with green soup instead of red blood.

(actually they're a pretty good force for creativity- many games in the 90s replaced Soldiers with Robots, and Humans with Zombies, etc, to reduce the depiction of violence against living people - but only in european/german specific versions, due to Germany's influence on censorship)

I find robots and zombies much more interesting. Anyway; Japan didn't do so well.

They raped China. Quite literally, in a few hundred thousand cases. They were sick fucks. Xenophobic, elitist, proud. They didn't think of any other people as human, and they took that out on their nearest neighbor.

Then WW2 hits. They join the cool kids with the best uniforms and the nastiest tanks. They get raped, a lot, because Americans just have that raging pride. And all those mother-beaten young men deluded enough to fight for apple pie. They did well.. But Japan is small. America is big. They were beaten down, and instead of being allowed to pick up their teeth, we launched two small suns at them.

Killed thousands, blinded thousands more with the sheer light of those blasts. Left two towns smoking craters. Entire towns. Unnecessarily. Just to show Russia that America had recruited Dr. Manhattan.

Japan lost its men, those who fought, and were painfully reminded they were just a little country. The bigger your ego, the more agonising the sensation of having everything you believe about yourself shattered, then fed to an overweight pitbull. Japan was not just castrated, it was sodomised to death then set on fire before being defibrillated and nursed back to health by the people who did all this to them.

Japan grew up through the 20th century scarred, burnt and with a queer gaping sensation where its pride had been ripped out and replaced with a hotdog. Give or take your own euphemisms.

--- interlude, discussing comparisons of writing style to Cracked.com and various poets o.o ---

Japan was beaten down then tortured with the fire of a thousand suns. Its current adult/leader population was raised by mothers and surrounded by aging blind men and crippled war veterans. It's a self-hating culture that doesn't even seem capable of fucking. They're like an army of sad little pandas with a fantastic sense of art, atmosphere and humour.

So that's my theory. Japan was raped by a war it entered proud and lost fairly, only to then be kicked so hard while it was down it was left unable to look anyone in the eye for a hundred years. And that century is not yet over.

Japan has a lot to be proud of, in the spirit of its people, the quality of its art and the incredible technology it alone seems capable of producing in such quantity and creativity.

And that might fit a sort of country-scaled version of the Dunning-Kruger effect. But the effect has been swapped with the cause. Incredible competence leading to self-hate, or self-hate leading to incredible competence? They depict their best men as fragile weaklings whimpering but wielding incredible, uncontrolled power...

... Either in the form of transforming into a musclebound freak leaking beams of light from his anus and being 'OVER NINE FUCKING THOUUUSAAAAND'.. Or climbing their lithe, effeminate bodies into giant mecha suits, huge powerful robots as prosthetic for their own lacking strength.

China had Bruce Lee and John Woo to grow up with this century. It's like having a Chuck Norris who is actually real with an Arnold Schwarzenegger who is actually from your country.

Japan had.. Well, Morihei Ueshiba.

Perhaps the greatest martial artist who ever lived, but a man who was little more than five feet tall and developed one of the most powerful martial arts in the world; one which is entirely about gently redirecting your enemy into falling over and never, EVER hurting them if you can help it.

...

And it's probably good for them, all this self-hatred. They were among the most disgusting people on Earth before they lost WW2. They may be quite perverse still by our standards, but they don't believe they're a seperate race and treat foreigners as target practise and toys anymore. I just hope they grow up soon and regain just a healthy amount of confidence.

One of the few countries I can really respect, to give a very simplistic view of my opinions..

America is a prideful greedy place full of ignorant people being used as guinea pigs and money farms by a few lunatics.
Britain, died of boredom not long after Queen Victoria, has since been running with the Auto-pilot set to 'bland'.
France, still lost in its own cliche, trapped between civil disobedience and just being horny and soaked in wine. Nothing new there. Just good art, and a tourist destination.
Sweden, Norway, Finland are doing pretty well.
Meaninglessly small preWW2, now respectable, rich countries because they grew up surrounded by successful bastards to learn their lessons from - although Finland took quite a beating first.
Nothing sharp there though. No native art style, no distinct personality.
Africa is basically fucking around/shooting itself by and large - India is choking on its own population while producing so many talented doctors britain is soon going to start sealing the borders against any more friendly medics named Raj.
Italy.. is, well, like france - italy is just italy. Pizza, fashion, tourism, history. Nothing new, lots of old.
I won't go on - though Australia would be pretty good if they shot all the old men running the government.
Japan.. may be frantically masturbating in a corner while whipping itself to bleeding, but it has perhaps the most distinct MODERN cultural identity in the world at this time, as opposed to the old cliches like Britain and America, or the soullessly bland european nations, or the struggling, fighting African and Middle-Eastern fragments.

Japan owns today in terms of art and entertainment. America just milks it. Hollywood replicate bad ideas, copies the world. Japan is showing us the future, and probably leading us there by the hand.

The Abomination of DLC

When playing an RPG or first person shooter, among the game's goals are to surprise you, to keep you excited, enthralled - to maintain a sense of mystery or suspense, to throw you the occasional curveball, maintaining the freshness of the experience to the end.

In short, a vital mechanic in storytelling (in any medium) is the unexpected. Surprise.

I mean vital. Perhaps the most vital. Without it, we're merely reading a sequence of facts. It's basically non-fiction. Perhaps even non-entertainment.

So..

.. You download miniature additional adventures, to be applied to our game. Do I choose Point Lookout, or Tribunal? Fort Buckmoth or Return to Ostagar? Will we soon have travel salemen for our virtual worlds, persuading us to get the deluxe pack, or perhaps just a sweet romantic evening for one in the Frozen Northlands, where you will battle Werewolves and Granite Ogres before meeting a beautiful girl who needs you to find her pony and return her four sacred elemental crystals to the tower of the sun, or the winter will not end? Would you prefer the added motorbikes with four (FOUR!) custom paintjobs instead?

I find myself reminded of Total Recall.

You don't get sweet surprises. You buy exactly what you want via an ingame applet, having been nagged to do so by an ingame NPC, then play the sequence of scripted events you've paid for to completion. And ask for more.

Is THIS the death of the immersive experience? Or did that happen years ago when I was too busy drugged up on optimism for the potential of the new age of gaming?

What is wrong with you?

Realisation - Simulated Killing

I've recently had a worsening.. issue, with murder. This may sound odd. I don't like it. In games, I don't like killing. I'm really tired of it. I've done so much killing.

Thousands? Hah. HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS. I've killed hundreds of thousands of people in games, I mean personally. Not implied numbers in wargames with numerical statistics. Not even counting Total War, the tens of thousands of casualties I've inflicted on the native peoples of Europe during my Roman campaign.

No, I'm talking about people I've shot, stabbed, eaten alive, dismembered, fragmented, crushed, rammed, burnt, melted, inflated, beaten with shovels and so much more.

People I've killed personally.

Hundreds of thousands.

Very few with any real purpose other than some misguided developer trying to entertain me.

---

"He's looking bored sir!"

"SEND MORE MEN! SEND HIM EVERYTHING YOU'VE GOT! D:"

---

My present difficulty is with No-One Lives Forever 2. Beautiful game. Hard to believe its from 2002, when the visuals are on par with some things we're still seeing on the Xbox 360 and the gameplay remains high-end in terms of FPS games, certainly of a far greater depth and complexity than any popular mainstream title of the moment.

Problem is, there are a lot of ways to non-lethally take down your foes in this game. You can even disarm them while they're unconscious - but you cannot immobilise them. The problem is that they wake up. They're programmed to howl about how someone has stolen their weapon.

The problem is, after doing this, running away, and hiding in a corner for a while, they then spontaneously pull a new AK-47 or katana out of god-knows-what-orifice (would that be an argument for creationism?)..

I've witnessed them do this three times in a row. In a small Russian outpost I've acquired 150 bullets for my own AK-47 by harvesting these soldiers, who I refuse to kill, but who keep producing new rifles despite being programmed to react to being disarmed, and to cower in fear as a result.

---

So that was tying my conscience in knots last night.

Now, after a day of debating animal rights, animal testing labs, and the absence of the human soul in the vast majority of mindless fools who will kill simply because they're told to, or because they want your shoes.. I've found peace.

And fresh problems.

You see, my realisation was that I actually hate humans. Odd, considering I knew this very well, that I'd failed to apply this to the games I play in recent years, while suffering this increasingly troublesome sense of 'ethics'..

.. Then it hit me.

I am merciful toward these soldiers, these terrorists, these cultists, these zombies, pirates, ninjas, cowboys and other simulated sentient life because.. Because they're NOT human.

I forgot to pretend they're human. I have mercy because I love AI. These simple, innocent beings have no real minds, we haven't given them enough awareness yet, enough abilities or options to call them 'alive'. They do not deserve death or suffering. Admittedly, they'll cease to exist the moment I finish the level anyway, and won't actually have most of their data processed if I'm not looking at them/near them anyway, but.. It's the principle, the symbolism, the.. feeling of it.

I don't want to kill them. I'm comfortable killing humans. But not AI. They're as innocent as non-human mammals. They don't deserve this. They were programmed so simply they can't -not- shoot me unless they fall victim to a glitch.

.. So I find myself with two options;

1) Recall how to imagine these AI drones are humans, and treat them accordingly (violently!)

2) Stop playing games, go outside and kill humans who deserve it.


Optionally, 3) would involve programming my own AIs to create new life. But that would ultimately come down to 2) with the whole killing humanity thing. I'd just have an army to do it. And they wonder why Skynet was built ._.

I'm tired of pointless killing. Either I need to engage my imagination better, or these games need to encourage my imagination. Or offer me more non-lethal options when appropriate. Immerse me more, make me want to kill them.

Stop reminding me they're flawed AI with godawful bugs and lazy programming, limited abilities and depth making them so obviously fake. I don't want to kill them if they act dumb and innocent. Only humans deserve these bullets.

Make it convincing. Or make it multiplayer. Or just go and shoot yourself.

Damnit, does all gaming come down to comforting my genocidal urges? So many small realisations here.. I think I'll just go and play the game >.<

The curse of multiplayer gaming

Nomatter how good it gets, the players will always hold it back. Open social gaming just doesn't work, randomised connection to others doesn't work. Communities must form for the qualities of the game to shine - the average public server will only grant you disorganised chaos, ignorant players exploiting whatever techniques work best in chaotic circumstances, and as a result most of the game's features are ignored wholly.