De Helaasheid Der Dingen, Translation idea

Seeing as it is lying around for quite a bit at our place I thought I should make it accessible to the internet to read, just for fun... Problem is: there is no English translation to be found (as far as i know (there is a translation of the movie, "Misfortunates", but I prefer the more literal translation "The Shittiness of Things")).

So, why shouldn't I (try to) do it?

Well, first of all, I know myself and how most long-term commitments go... They'll probably end up somewhere far away from any progress, but I still want to try to do this. Let me start with the blurb:

In The Shittiness of Things the writer returns to his birthplace, the Flemish village of Arsefeatherham. We meet his father, Pierre, who introduces his hour-old son to all his friends by carrying him in a mailbag on his bike past all the pubs in the village; his grandmother, whose night's rest is often being disturbed because of her drunk sons being delivered at home; and of course the unemployed uncles Potrel, Herman and Heavy, who consider the world championship drinking to be the highest obtainable goal and who live by the adagium "God created the day and we drag us through it"
The Shittiness of Things is both a sensitive ode to as well as a hilarious reckoning with the village of a youth. Verhulst is a strong stylist, who keeps the attention of his readers from the first page to the last with a good sense of timing and a lot of narrative power.

 The book is written by Dimitri Verhulst in 2006 and now I'll try to translate it as best as possible.

Anyways, if there'll be any progress you'll see it here.

-ThOR

Half-Life

Let me start by saying this is all my opinion. I'm not the most professional or the most subjective on this matter so I won't be mad if you disagree, that's where you can use the comments.

All pictures i use in this article are taken from their respective Wikipedia pages... 

So yeah, I've played through pretty much all official versions of Half-Life (Half-Life, Half-Life 2 (I'll abbreviate them with HL and HL2), Episode 1 and Episode 2) and I liked it.

Why?

Well, the games don't consider their players to be the largest retards ever. In the first game there wasn't a tutorial incorporated in the story (you could play the tutorial if you really wanted to know what ways of movement are possible but nothing too complicated...) and in the second one it was a very minimalistic one in a (later in the game unexisting) HUD popup (wsad to move and picking stuff up).
Further on there are no indication of where to go to, which way to go or what to do, you have to figure that out for yourself. Of course there's only one right way which becomes obvious after a few tries, but still, that isn't too obvious from the start.
The game does tell you a lot of things indirectly. When introducing a new enemy for example it does this from a distance and mostly while fighting something else so you already know how it attacks and how to avoid it. Usually there are a few health packs lying around for the hard learners and the usual way of killing it is by firing a lot of bullets at it.

The game takes its time to give you a weapon. In the first one you get the crowbar pretty early, but only receive a gun once someone carrying it dies. Later you may find a shotgun laying in some guard's locker or an assault rifle after you've shot a trooper... It's never handed to you, you have to "earn" it in some way.

Introducing new areas happens in an interesting way. For example Ravenholm in HL2. Before you even get there you hear the sentence "We... We don't go to Ravenholm".
Eventually you wander in and see some improvised traps, mangled zombie limbs and some booming voice you are not sure to trust. Combine this with a new howling zombie type, a town without any visible human residents and a pitch black night and you have one hell of a level.
Sure, everything is linear, But it doesn't feel that way. There are no invisible walls, if the level designer doesn't want you to go some way there is a pretty good reason for. A giant canyon, a huge wall or a radio-active river prevent you from wandering off course.
Sure, in the original game some level elements aren't logical ("Why is there a railing here?", "How would anyone get up here?", "Where was this ladder supposed to lead to?") but this is less the case in HL2. Not only that, but the source engine in HL2 was used to its maximum to show off that can be done. This with an improved level design makes HL2 one of the best looking games I can run on my laptop.

The Half-Life series ware also the inspiration for many mods that in some cases became even more popular than the original game. CounterStrike, Portal and Team Fortress are all spin-offs or mods from one of the HL games and have a huge player base.
There is even a Half-Life revisited mod available for free, called Black Mesa, that recreates the original story of HL in a more recent Source engine, making it more beautiful to play and still keeping as close as possible to the original story. Only the last chapter is unfinished and should be released some time next year.
The mod didn't just take all the original HL models and placed them in the Source engine like Half-Life: Source did? The team recreated most of the models and sometimes they used models from HL2 or Garry's mod. They also re-imagined most of the levels so every platform has a (closed) door leading onto it, every ladder seems to have a purpose and sometimes they improved the design of some levels to look better.

It made me ooh and aah more than once, laugh at some details and sometimes jump up from my chair when something jumps out of a dark corner... I'll embed their launch trailer which shows only in-game footage. It's just incredibly beautifu

There is even a comparison video that compares the first few scenes of the original with the Black-Mesa version. IGN did a commentary video with two Half-Life veterans where they give their opinion on what's awesome about the game.

Best part of all: Half-Life has no cutscenes. if you have a gun and a guard is giving you directions of where to go you can go and shoot him, cutting off his monologue and continue playing the game. If that guard was supposed to open up the next part of the level you're stuck. There is also a lot that can be going on in the background (a scene comes to mind where a scientist smashes a headcrab with a monitor, but still gets headhumped by one behind his back) which you can miss without being too much in a rush, which may be not optimal, but you as player of the game stay in control of your character at all times.
Compare that to some modern shooter (Spunkgargleweewee if you like) where you as Tanker McTank get bitchslapped around by some dude with only a handgun while you have a minigun on your back but can't use it because it's a cutscene...

Anyways, I like the Half-Life series a lot, if you haven't figured it out yet. I recommend you to go and play at least one of these games to know for sure what I've been talking about..

Thank you for reading all this and see you next time.

-ThOR

Abomination

I saw an abomination a few days ago.

It was a Macbook Air.

Not that it's a Macbook, not even because it's the way-too-slimmed-down version on it. It was because the owner (a nitwit to be honest) installed Windows7 on it.
No, he did not install Win7 via a virtual machine. Win7 is since the installment his main operating system. I'll let this sink in for a minute.

I can accept that he (the owner of the laptop(I can't even call it a Macbook anymore)) is using Apple hardware because he can afford it and thinks it's superior, and I can accept that he thought Win7 is the OS he can cope with best and fits his requirements, but those 2 things are not meant to ever be together in one laptop.
 I can imagine that the guy who got the assignment of installing Win7 as the main OS on that Macbook felt like he had to do a hellish task, because someone who's capable of doing such things should know what monster it will become.

Not that it ran badly, no, it started up like any newly bought laptop would do. It's just the moment someone told him to bringing up the context menu he started wondering how to accomplish such a thing without a mouse.
You see, Apple has a few was to accomplish this where Windows has right-click. You could for example press "ctrl" and click at the same time. It would've worked, but Win7 doesn't recognize this. Windows on the other hand has the open-context-menu-button on the right of the space bar, but sadly Macbooks lack that kind of feature.
This, combined with the fact that the poor owner doesn't really understand computers at all made me feel like I've seen an act of defiance to all the good that is in this world.

It was such a horrible thing that I wanted to share this so you would know to avoid this kind of things.

-ThOR

PS: I may have exaggerated with my feeling over a simple right-click function, but please, for the sake of all that is good, remember that 2 good things together may become much worse that they were good.

Angels

I've talked earlier about spirit, souls and bodies, and somehow I believe in angels. How could i possibly connect that as they are more than just material creatures and still manage to exist somehow on the material plane (you can call it the "dimension" of matter).

Well, inspiration for my view on angels come from the "His Dark Materials"-trilogy by Philip Pullman.

Angels are ancient and immortal beings whose true form is composed of intelligence and feeling, since they are structures of Dust. 

Angels are creatures with a spirit, a soul and a body, but their body is an abstract something. They don't consist of material, so their form is not fixed. They appear to us as we think they should appear, we see them as we expect them to be seen.
If you think they are all sexless and winged, then they are. If you think they are all child Putti like many baroque painters imagined them to be, then they are. There are many ways to perceive angels because they are immaterial, our minds give them an appearance.
What that appearance is is not important to them, but they still need some place in the world to occupy, otherwise they would not exist.

Believing or not believing doesn't matter. If your mind cannot give they an appearance they'll be just a voice if they need to transfer a message to you, or a bright light if they need to show you something or whatever you more can imagine, as that's what limits your mind from seeing them.

Why would they need to be seen, why would they need to contact us, why do they exist?
Those are big questions we can't even answer for ourselves, but important is that they with their knowledge and their existence in this world can transfer messages from forces even greater than ours.
So why?
God knows why, and we can only guess.

There's one angel that I find interesting. This idea is not exactly from the above-mentioned trilogy, although a slightly inspired. Death.
Yes, Death too is an angel.
Maybe a bit of rephrasing is necessary: Your own death is an angel.

There are many stories about people meeting their Death. Greek mythology had Thanatos, we have the Grim Reaper (not necessary cloaked skeleton with a scythe) and there are many more personifications to be found on wikipedia and seeing most of them predicts an untimely death, sometimes even creating a "self-fulfilling prophecy" (man sees his Death-vision, runs from it and because he ran he dies/passes away/causes a lethal accident/dies of a stroke).

A few interesting examples are the Japanese "Shinigami" (very close to the western Grim Reaper they represent a horrible creature, not necessarily a skeleton (not even humanoid) and haunt people dealing with death or who are about to die), the "Doppelgänger" (an unexisting twin who is often just seen by the person he's impersonating, sometimes by more, puzzling all of them, sometimes no more but a shadow of the person), known deceased friends (calling to join them in death) and many more.

Reason for so many "visions" of death?
They are angels.
They bring the message of "You're going to die" or "Remember you're mortal" which are basically the same.
Don't get me wrong, they don't kill people, they just tend to be present at those moments. And again, they rely on the mind of the person to be perceived. Some may be accompanied constantly by their Death, others may never see it. Or they may see one after they passed away to guide them to wherever they go after this life.

I often think immortal people are in constant company of their own Death angel. These immortals would have to find a way to live with their Death, even though they can't experience it. They can hate them and try to run away from them, or they could accept them and see them as an old friend.

Speaking of immortals, there is this Dorian Grey, a guy who sold his soul for immortality and transferring his aging to a portrait of himself. In some way this portrait also could've been seen as an angel of death, as it reminds Dorian of every year that has passed without him aging and keeping every wound that was inflicted to him.
This lasted until Dorian Grey couldn't bear to look at it anymore and put a knife into the portraits heart and so killing himself.

I have no idea what I will do if I ever see my own Death. Now I think I could live with it, but I'm afraid that may not be the case when the moment actually comes. Anyways, I'll write some more until that moment comes, so I'll see you next time.

-ThOR

Creating a Texturepack: Part 1, Planks

"Why wouldn't I create a Minecraft texture pack?" I thought, faintly remembering my previous attempt that didn't get farther than cobblestone and planks...

Being in the middle of discovering the many possibilities of Tekkit and dreaming of steampunk I thought I could create a texture pack combining those 2 elements... No idea if I'll ever get this actually going.

In my enthusiasm I almost started changing every texture in the game to my heart's desire, but then I remembered something: it is quite some work.
So I had to make some decisions. First of all I would start with Vanilla Minecraft, changing only the original textures. I would also go for a 32x32 resolution (double the original 16x16) to have a bit more space to mess around with.

For the style I would like to have something steampunkish, but a subtle one. Not just placing a gear on every other block, that would just look stupid.
I also want it to be functional, meaning if you play regular Minecraft you will know what you're looking. I've seen packs that change stuff around (for example wool no longer being wool, but some decorative block) and that's not what I want.
Other than that I want to combine mechanical and magical elements, but not too much.
Once I've finished doing a vanilla pack I'll add Tekkit stuff, starting with Redpower (to have most worldtextures under my control and changing tungsten so I would stop confusing it for coal). So basically my aim is having a texture pack that is made steampunk by using it with Tekkit.

But first vanilla.

Where to start?

I always wanted to change the plank texture, as no plank ever runs on forever and is that straight. So there I have my first block to work on.

Wood planks: normal, pine, jungle and birch planks.

So that's where I started.
I eyedroppered the darkest color on the original planks texture, used that to draw some lines, divided that into planks, placed nails in, played around with the L of the Lab color picker and added a bit more texture.
Further was easy: copy the texture 4 times, use with different Level-layers, make the jungle wood more orange (I hate them being pinkish) and paste them in the terrain.png.

That was easy I thought.
Well, it turns out it's not that easy. I had some alignment issues to fix after the "pasting into terrain.png", because in older versions of this picture I had strips of the old texture running from top to bottom, meaning I had mispasted something. But for some reason I insist on having the entire pack unpacked in a projects folder with some template files sitting a folder above it. So every time I have to change something I have to open both terrain.png as the template files, paste the correct texture into the correct place, save both, zip the pack folder, cut and place the .zip into the correct folder and hope I didn't mess up somewhere.
After having done this a few times I started looking for ways to automate this. I downloaded 7zip for commandline zipping, learned some batch programming syntax, did some test runs, noticed 7zip likes to save a folder in a zip folder, so I have to give it every subfolder and every file one level below the level I want zipped (if you have messed around with it you'll understand) and after some time I came to this code:

  REM delete the original file
DEL %AppData%\.techniclauncher\tekkit\texturepacks\ThORVanilla.zip

  REM run 7zip and pack a new .zip file
C:\7-Zip\7z.exe u "H:\Projects\Minecraft\TexturePacks\ThORVanilla.zip" "H:\Projects\Minecraft\TexturePacks\ThORVanilla\achievement" "H:\Projects\Minecraft\TexturePacks\ThORVanilla\armor" "H:\Projects\Minecraft\TexturePacks\ThORVanilla\art" "H:\Projects\Minecraft\TexturePacks\ThORVanilla\environment" "H:\Projects\Minecraft\TexturePacks\ThORVanilla\font" "H:\Projects\Minecraft\TexturePacks\ThORVanilla\gui" "H:\Projects\Minecraft\TexturePacks\ThORVanilla\item" "H:\Projects\Minecraft\TexturePacks\ThORVanilla\misc" "H:\Projects\Minecraft\TexturePacks\ThORVanilla\mob" "H:\Projects\Minecraft\TexturePacks\ThORVanilla\terrain" "H:\Projects\Minecraft\TexturePacks\ThORVanilla\title" "H:\Projects\Minecraft\TexturePacks\ThORVanilla\font.txt" "H:\Projects\Minecraft\TexturePacks\ThORVanilla\pack.png" "H:\Projects\Minecraft\TexturePacks\ThORVanilla\pack.txt" "H:\Projects\Minecraft\TexturePacks\ThORVanilla\particles.png" "H:\Projects\Minecraft\TexturePacks\ThORVanilla\terrain.png"
  
 REM Move the new file to the texturepacks folder
MOVE H:\Projects\Minecraft\TexturePacks\ThORVanilla.zip %AppData%\.techniclauncher\tekkit\texturepacks\ThORVanilla.zip

 REM wait "some time" before closing in case there is an error message
PING -n 9000 ECHO OFF

I know I didn't have to make everything a direct path, but I wanted to be sure it worked. And it does so stfu.
So now I only need to run this .bat file to have my entire folder packed and moved to the correct place.

Next will be stones, but that will be for another time.

-ThOR

PS: if you figure you want to use this code don't forget

Damn you Brent Weeks!

I'm very sorry if the title may provoke, but it's exactly what I thought while reading the Night Angel Trilogy by mentioned author. He has a very interesting imagination, one that sometimes is very close to mine (A black stuff that can adapt to the bearers wishes? An old master training a young fellow? Magic that uses some form of energy and has to be replenished after use? Magical energy that can be stored somewhere for other magicians to use? Get out of my head! (but not really)).

Don't get me started on the characters. A prophet who's losing his mind because of his ability, a dangerous organization that has more power than the king actually has, with a leader no one knows about... it's too much to spoil it all before you read it.
Seriously, read it if you're even slightly into fantasy. Magic, but not too much, fighting, assassins (even if it's wrong to call them that) that (depending on their preferences) leave pools of blood or no trace at all ("That's why assassins have targets. Wetboys have deaders. Why do we call them deaders? Because when we take a contract, the rest of their short lives is a formality." - Durzo Blint), a hated king and a loved successor, a Godking, a godess, conspiracies, magical artifacts some forgot they existed, Night Angels and more to keep you reading to the last letter.

I must say I read it all and absorbed a bit of his ideas (like it happens with most stuff I read) and I'm very glad he left out a part that I would've made important if I would write a similar story: spirituality.

You know what's even better? The writer still lives and still is writing. There may pop up some more books that I'll devour with a lot of joy...

Enjoy reading!

-ThOR