Games

Jah, sure, it couldn't take long before even I'd react on the latest news event.

Wondering what I'm talking about?
Google "Breivik video games" and read the most recent entries.

I just opened the first one, read through it and i the end it adds 5 examples how some murderers (including the most recent, Breivik himself) were inspired by movies/books/games to commit some murders.
Note, there are only 5 listed, 5 cases between 1974 and now.
Sure, these aren't the only 5, but it's still not terribly much compared to the total amount of murders committed...

But now they are all blaming it on video games, saying Breivik used them to prepare for the final "attack" he planned. All those articles against video games, but none noting Breivik himself never said such a thing. He for example played WoW for more than 16 hours a day over a year to "take a sabbatical" (his words), to not be preoccupied planning all that stuff, to do something he'd love to do before he'd die (as he planned his actions to be suicidal).
Not many sources mention his extensive planning BEFORE playing these games, his many hours in a shooting range, perfecting his aim, his claims to be a member of a "anti-Jihad crusader-organization" and his legal/illegal acquirement of his weapons. Nope, it's just video games.

No, I don't want to defend his cause in any way. What he did is horrible and he should be trialed for what he did. But don't blame it on video games. As realistic some first-person-shooters claim to be, they still don't prepare you in any way on the real deal. You can't revive after you die in real life, you can't heal instantly from a bullet in your arm by picking up some health-pack, you can't run around with a rifle, waving it around like it's made of plastic and then kill someone (accurately) seconds after rolling into position by simply playing video games.

You seriously CAN'T.

I remember my first time I fired a bullet.
Yes, it was in an ex-soviet state.
And yes, it was a AK-47 or Kalashnikov.
And no, after all those hours playing Counter Strike 1.6 (I can't link too much, I never exactly know who my audience is...) I still wasn't prepared on anything that thing did.

First off, that thing's HEAVY. You try holding a 5 kg (11 lb) bag of potatoes with arms stretched and imagine shooting stuff with it... take a break before your arms fall off.
The kickback is also a surprise. It's those same 5 kg stomping you in the shoulder every time you pull that trigger. After the first bullet I already had a bruise and I was deaf for the next few minutes. Because that small detail game designers tend to leave out: The bang is so loud you can only understand your own words after 5 minutes. To understand others it takes even longer...
No movie, no game ever actually tells you this, it's all soldiers that storm into battle, screaming to their brothers in arms who understand them from 2 meters away, waving their guns without real fatigue...

As far as I remember I only saw one movie that kinda did show this correctly. And it was some strange French movie we had to watch with school for some reason...

So no, nothing in popular media can prepare anyone on a real battle, only hard training can.
But as long as no one talks about it they all tend to forget about this and blame only video games.

As a final thing I would like to link a more gamer friendly article.
Sure, it starts with the usual panic-inducing headline, with some more panic blah that should accompany these articles, but halfway the writer quotes gamers (more than 30 year-old-gamers) that express their concerns on the current situation.

-ThOR

PS: I found a funny quote in the last linked article:

Breivik said a holographic aiming device used in Modern Warfare helped him develop skills with a real gun.

...
Now think about it.
How could a virtual "holographic aiming device" possibly help someone aiming a real gun?

PPS: Oh, hey, turns out there's more articles up now. Go read this analysis posted yesterday (currently second result when googling...). I started writing this yesterday, there were more "doom is upon us because video games" articles then, so the current google search may not be all that correct...

PPPS: Thank you for reading.

The Other R*****

Dear readers.

A few days back I happened to be in the center of a heated discussion concerning my name.
Quite unsettling for me as it's the very first discussion on the internet with me in the center of it (mostly I'm what some call a lurker, I don't really say much)

I had registered on the forum of Notch's new game (0x10^c, may you wonder) and I posted a small introductory post saying hi and stating who I am...

First reply is made by someone named Comet:

Nice post, but please let me know if your name is intended to be funny or an attack at people who think it is? If it's the prior, change your name. It's offensive, and even though i take it you don't mean it, you should know better.

Until now I still don't actually know what the guy meant, I just sent him a PM as a request for more information on his arguments.

And why could I use my name for about 3 years without anyone pointing this out to me?
A short list to all my identities as TheOtherRetard or alike on the internet:

• CounterStrike (and Steam in general) 
• LeagueOfLegends 
• O-Game 
• Minecraft
• CastleStoryOnline
• Twitter
• Youtube
• here
• Wikis
• Weekly Pickaxe
• ... (This is just what I could remember from the top of my head, if you Google me you may find even more...)

So yeah, on all those communities, on all those websites, after my 400+ posts on the Minecraft forum only 2 have openly opposed and demanded me to change my name because of possible offensiveness...

First of all: I don't use the word Retard as an offensive word. In my opinion it's used for someone who acts stupid. And I do lots of stupid stuff...

Let me tell you a bit more about myself.
I know what it's like to be called names. I was that one kid that liked to play alone, I was that kid that was the first one of my class to wear glasses (at the age of 7), I was that kid that didn't do or say much during lessons, but still could score above average on most tests...
Per definition I was the one they (the other kids, you know which ones) picked on. Well, me and the fat kid. And when they were picking on the fat kid I never participated, just because it wasn't as fun as they made it look like...

Anyways, this made me have quite an aversion from calling names cursing and stuff, which I still have (if you hear/read me cursing you know I'm agitated...). So when i use the word Retard I mostly just refer to myself...

Oh, I didn't tell about the creation of TheOtherRetard.
It dates a few years back, to when I was playing Counterstrike 1.6 with my (younger) brother. One day we had the idea to name ourselves alike and have some kind of a "clan" feeling. After some suggestions we stopped on "Retard", since we never took ourselves quite seriously and did a lot of stupid stuff while playing the game...
This discussion was followed by a few days of me being away from the computer and when I came back my brother had taken "The_Retard". I quickly settled for "The_Other_Retard" and we went on shooting...

And I liked being the Other Retard. No-one expects much from me, so when I screw up they can say "What a retard!" ending up with me smiling.

One letter too long to fit on a sign...

Ever since that I kept on using the name for pretty much every other game I played, just to have something of a continuity. After the realization that my name was 1 letter too long to fit on a Minecraft sign I dropped the underscores in other games and went on playing.

It never occurred to me people could consider my name as an insult as I clearly name myself a retard, and no one else.

After all that time I'm proud of that name, I'm identifying myself with it and I don't plan on dropping the name because 2 people (of the millions on the internet) want me to change it.

I ended up changing my name as they added "Slurs and insults" to the Forum Name Rules, so I'm now registered as "ThOR"...
I won't fight this decision, there's been enough discussion on it. I'll still use "TheOtherRetard" as a first choice, "ThOR" if Retard is considered insulting and if that's taken I'll think of something similar.

Anyways, thank you for having read all this. If you have any comments, please post them, I'll respond on them as soon as possible.

-ThOR

PS: The story hasn't ended yet, there is a Part 2 of this post.

Steampunk

Anyone who is a bit  often in my presence probably already heard me talking about it (I tend to not shut up when I'm in some kind of mood), but let me explain anyway.

Steampunk is a retro-future/alternate-history genre. You go back to some time in history (in this case the industrial revolution/Victorian age) and you imagine how the current age would've looked if that style persisted until today. Add in some alchemy, some magic if you would like and build a story upon that.
This is originally very fitting for novels, where Steampunk actually started (Jules Verne is often addressed as the "father" of this genre), but lately also appears in art, fashion and design.
For more info, there's a Wiki on this and Google is still your friend.

Quite recently I got caught again in a sudden burst of appreciation for this and I started looking for more on it. I found a lot of lookalikes but I won't get offended if someone switches some, because the difference sometimes isn't very big. Back to what I found: several Steam-themed websites: Dieselpunks (I'm liking some of the music) and Davenport & Winkleperry among others, but I also found Abney Park, a band that created an entire Steampunk related story around itself and with it also released a novel and a tabletop role-playing game next to their usual music. Let me try and embed another video.

At a certain moment I even found Steampunk themed W40K conversions, but I forgot to bookmark the page and now I can't find it. But still, 2 things that can capture my imagination for a while. Together!

The most interesting part of the entire Steampunk genre is (according to me) the general aesthetics behind it.

For example this. It's a gameboy classic that someone painted in a brass color, glued some cogs and "pipes" on it and called it steampunk. How good some may say it looks, it isn't steampunk enough. If he had removed the casing altogether, organized it in a wooden box and made it look like a "ye olde arcade game" with actual cogs turning on the sides with some retrotronic elements on it I would agree with it being steampunk. Now it's just a golden gameboy with bits glued on it.

The steampunk cellphone does stuff correctly in my opinion. No internet connection, no SMS, no full qwerty keyboard, hell, no keypad at all. Some gauges on a wooden box, punch-cards to dial numbers. Not over the top, aesthetically pleasing, if the Victorians had wireless communication this might have been the "ultralight version" of the busy man.

Anyways, I don't know what else to tell here. If anyone has any more questions: there's a comment section for that...

Let me end with another video, I couldn't resist to not putting this in...


I hope you enjoyed it.

-ThOR

Downloading

There's been a lot of attention to it some time ago: Illegal downloading.
Lots of protests against SOPA and PIPA (what was ACTA again?), lots of lobbying to get it through anyway... Why?

Yes, I do download.
And some of those downloads aren't the most legal content.
But I must say: sometimes I want to play a game that's long gone from the stores (Homeworld, Descent: Freespace, ...) and knowing the original creators already got involved in bigger stuff, stopped caring about their first spawns or maybe just don't exist anymore I'd think they wouldn't mind that I enjoy their stuff and praise it without actually buying the game.

It's not that I refuse to buy the game... I'd buy it if I had the money. After all it's easier to do so than waiting for a few-Gig-file to download, installing the software, running activation blockers, or finding the folder the game got installed in to replace some files with cracked (and possibly virused) files. I'd rather insert the disk, let it run and play right away, while being assured of a decent support center when something goes askew...
Not to mention the (mostly) broken multiplayer you get with an illegal copy, which sometimes is basically the other half of the fun.

On the other hand, some software just is a tad bit expensive. Buying Adobe Creative Suit 4 as a requirement for your studies, using it for a year and then having to buy CS5 the year after was really an attack on my bank account...

But I still don't get why Big Companies are playing witchhunt on those who extend their software's user base and increasing potential buyers. After all, if it wasn't for illegal downloads I would've never thought of getting a Steam account where Valve could dangle some 5$ games in front of me, making it very attractive to buy more...

And what the hell happened to demo-versions? The only things you sometimes see when a game gets promoted are pre-rendered trailers and you basically have to rely on your computer to be strong enough to handle the software you've just bought...
For example: I (being a total hardware noob) am considering buying Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 (purely hypothetically speaking). There is absolutely no way to test if my computer can handle the game or not, I have to rely on my own knowledge (very little) and the info given under "Minimal System Requirements" (note: unexistant on the main website) to understand whether my 5 year old laptop would survive it when I install such a thing. What do all those numbers and letters mean? I tend to figure it out, but I can imagine a lot of people who wouldn't know where to start...
A demo would be nice in those situations to see if your system is willing to handle all that violence and to see if the game is what you expect/want/like it to be. That's mostly what I use cracked games for: to see if my computer would run it may I want a good multiplayer.

(a small remark on MW3: Don't think I'll ever buy the game. The best military shooter has been made already (CounterStrike), now I would like a shooter with more challenge/imagination/creativity (Half Life 3 would be nice))

Anyways, I'm glad there are other approaches. For example (you may have wondered why I waited so long to bring this one up) Notch, creator of Minecraft has tweeted that he's pretty fine with someone pirating the game. "It's a minor offense in the scale of things". Sure, it's quite illegal, but in comparison to the number of people that actually bought it there isn't much reason to worry. Especially knowing Notch is currently a millionaire by making a (relatively) cheap but more than awesome game from scratch and with a completely new/original idea (something we don't see that much lately).

Especially knowing this I don't quite get why the Big Companies keep hammering on "their intellectual property" and how no-one else should have the right to do anything alike except for themselves. Want some more info on what copyright has currently come to? CGPGrey did a very nice instructional video explaining what the current laws are capable of doing.



(Ahh, the joy of successfully embedding videos in you own page)

This post is goining on longer than I originally intended.
Let me wrap this up...

I do download different stuff.
I don't like Big Companies with a lot more digits of income limiting us in distributing/recreating stuff they made.

Heh, that's about it.

Thank you for reading all this.

-ThOR

Religion

I want to tell you about my opinion on religion.

I believe in a God, in an allmighty being. How to call this being doesn't matter to me, be it God(s), Allah, Jehovah, Zeus and Hades (and an entire parade of other characters), Mystical power(s) of Nature or whatever name you want to give it...
I call It for convenience God.

But I admit I do not (and can not) know for sure what It is, or even if It's aware of us.

To clarify this I've heard a very good comparison:
So you have the 3 dimensions. you can observe these 3 dimensions, move in them, feel everything that's in those 3 dimensions and manipulate it with the right tools.
Now, if you think logically the next dimension is time (as I said in an earlier post). None of us (beings in these 3 dimensions) have control over Time. We know it's there, we know it goes on, we can name it and imagine grasping it, but we can't control it.
Now imagine a being that HAS control over time. It lives within these 4 dimensions and can  observe it,  move in it and manipulate it. This being is everywhere, knows everything and can observe the limits of our 3 dimensional space.
This being would be God.
This being may also be not only in his kind.
But we don't know all of this because we're like the Flatlanders looking at the 3rd dimension.

Remember Flatland?
The world where everything is two-dimensional.
Where two-dimensional beings reside, live, die, ... are.
We can kinda imagine something like it, because we can represent it by taking a sheet of paper and draw something two-dimensional on it.
But still, these Flatlanders...
We've never seen them and we don't know if we ever change things in that Flatland they live in.

And that may be the same with the 4th dimensional beings... They may have the freedom over Time, but they may have no idea if and how they influence us...

Or they may, we can't know...

But anyway, back to religion.

As I'm raised as a Christian (Greco-Catholic I think, it's hard if you have eastern European roots) I know and accept Christian faith as my own. Yet I do not judge others based on religion or from the point of view of the religion.
As my friends tend to be quite various in their belief: Mostly atheïst, a few Muslim, some Christian and even a Jehova's Witness, all in one group of friends. Yes, we do have differences in opinion and we acknowledge them, but we won't fight each other just to get the others to believe something else.
This is how I would see the perfect community.

But then again. We aren't more than people, we have flaws and that's why the Perfect Community will never exist on a bigger scale.
These imperfection is also why I don't believe in the Church as an institution. Going to church isn't that important for me, actually believing is harder and gives you more...

On a side note: I don't quite believe the "God creating us after his image". I think this is humanity giving God a relatable figure, as we tend to personificate quite a few things...

I see believing or not believing as a matter of opinion. It's completely personal and it shouldn't be used to attack and kill others because they tend to disagree with your belief/opinion. Just accept that other people may tend to disagree with you...

Heh, turns out my opinion on religion is that it's an opinion.

Phew, I think this post deserves the label "long"...
If you tend to disagree with things I said you may use the comments to tell me what you didn't like about it...


-ThOR

P.S.: Let's add something:

tl;dr: I believe and that's an opinion. Face it.

Weekly TWP article dump

Hmm. I don't know if Issue 8 of the Weekly Pickaxe has been released yet, but I'll release my articles already.

Mojang news:
Carl Manneh signed lots of stuff this week: Not only a contract for the new Mojang office, but he hired no less than 2 extra developpers, bringing the total count of Mojang employees on 20.
To anyone waiting for news on the Minecraft Xbox release: the coverart is more or less finished. of the release of it there isn't really a date, only "spring", so we'll have to wait a bit more.


Minecraft Snapshot 12w05b

Weekly Snapshot!
No new additions, mostly tweaks and bugfixes:
- Mob related bugs got fixed.
- Some new mob behaviours got added, for example to the creepers: now they also have the new pathfinding AI.
- Villagers will try to detect village houses and will try to live in them. So when it gets dark villagers go inside to hide and come out again when it's light again.
- Villagers are able to open and close doors. This ability could possibly be extended to many other mobs, but for now it's a villager only feature. There is a small bug with this: they can't register wether a door is open or closed, which may lead to villagers being stuck opening an opened door...
- Ocelots are easier to tame and cats can be told to sit.
- Creepers run away from cats and wild ocelots, so they are useful after all.
- Updated language files (now with 50% less profanities!)
- Lava received sounds: well, bubbling in particular, but this will make it easier for the player to know when there's lava around
- Abandoned mineshafts received an extra generation feature: When they cross ravines they won't have any more floating poles, since it will generate bridges between the two ends.

This snapshot has been reuploaded pretty quickly because there was a fatal bug that made the game crash on startup...
Also there were some gameplay bugs that accidentally were added and got fixed in an other release of the snapshot, resulting in a "B" in the end of the current version. these bugs was the Shift-Clicking while crafting consuming all items and giving only one crafted product in return. with this upload also came the ablility of making the cats sit with an empty hand.

Downloads for the client and the server are available for download as usual.

For the next update some flaws are already being fixed. Jon tweeted that the AI will know if a door is open or not.

-TheOtherRetard

Minecraft news

Anyone having the Minecraft pocket edition?
Well, if you have it expect an update during the next week.

As you noticed, there's a bit of door changes comming up in a next update. Jeb has already posted a reddit thread explaining some difficulties on doors in Minecraft (the right hinged doors in a double door are actually lefthinged and opened when closed. This is why they react weird to redstone). this may be changed in the next update but it will require you to check all doors in your world to check if they are still like they should be.

-ThOR