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canicus
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Name: Canicus
State: Texas
Gender: Male
Interests: Religion, Ancient Texts, Computers, Video Games, Philosophy, Dead Languages, Comic Books
Occupation: Other
Industry: Other
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Member Since:
11/23/2005
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| I fulfilled my New Year's Resolution:
Do not make any New Year's Resolutions except this one.
I manage to keep this resolution every single year. It's a very nice success rate :p. | | |
| Kissel gave me a copy of Sins of a Solar Empire that he'd used. This game is, frankly, hard. It isn't the Age of Kings, because it has Civl-level complexity. I breeze through that. It isn't Civilization, because it doesn't have turn-based strategy. That also means that it isn't Total War. It's different. I had passed over it as another cookie-cutter strategy game when I saw it in the store and never gave it a second thought. That was a mistake.
First, this game is huge. The scale on this game makes the battles in TW games seem small. It doesn't deal in "thousands" of units, but, then, on a practical level, neither does TW. It just looks that way. TW actually deals in a few dozen units at a time that are animated as groups. This makes sense from both a practical programming standpoint, and an practical command standpoint; one doesn't control armies of thousands by giving commands to every individual. SOSE, though, lets you control hundreds of units individually. I don't know the cap. I haven't even gotten half my upgrades, and I've already seen a cap of over 400 (I'm not sure precisely how many, since I don't know how many vessels I had). This massive fleet is designed to conquer planets, asteroid fields, and so on. It doesn't stop there, though; you also do this with multiple star systems. I played on the smallest map possible. It had seven "planets," some of which were asteroids. After six hours of gameplay, I had yet to secure even 50% of the map...and that was one map.
It has tech trees like you see in Civ, but the tech trees are unique to each race. The game doesn't differentiate races by giving a few techs then a handful of bonuses here and there (which won't matter in the long run). The three races are different, different units, different techs, different strategies. There aren't as many techs as there are in Civ, but there is more diversity still due to the multiple civilizations.
The unfolds in real time, but this isn't an RTS like Command and Conquer. It moves at a slower, more deliberate pace. You can make tactical decisions adequately. Victory does not go to the one who memorizes the shortcuts. It also includes the Age of Empires' improvement over C&C as well: multiple types of resources you must balance. This moves it further from making it a speed marathon. The overall speed is what you would need to manage a turn-based strategy game's depth if you had to do it real time. It's fast enough, however, that when the fights start, you can make mistakes.
It can also run on really low-end machines, even below the system specs. I don't know how low, but it can go pretty low (fortunately, I don't have that problem). It's thus a good game for strategy buffs who don't have a decent box.
For some reason, my play style simply hasn't jived with it. It moves slow enough, that I don't play my usual rush style. In AOK, I used to have a villager building a castle in my opponent's territory in under eight minutes (I was slow compared to the good guys), and I was generally mining resources closest to him well before that. I play aggressive. In this game, I didn't, because it seems slower. My current strategy hasn't worked for me. I've won every battle, but when I checked the statistics at the end of the game, my opponent had me outclassed in every area. I'm doing it wrong, and I'm going to have to find a gameplay style that makes sense to me in it and suits my personality. That could take a while. It's kind of like Chinese chess in this respect. I do OK at chess, but when I pay CC, I can't beat even the most rank beginner. It doesn't click. I'm losing on easy in this game, and I'm going to figure out how to make it click.
The game feels new to me. Civ felt great when I picked it up way back when. AOE felt like a breath of fresh air. When I played LotR2, I loved it due to its mix of RTS and turn-based strategy. The same thing occurred with the TW series, since they simply updated the formula in LotR2 and put it in a contemporary skin (LotR2 had gotten old by the time S:TW came out). This game has the feel of those games. It feels fresh and awesome, while building on formulas of previous games to deliver what worked in a new way. I'm going to enjoy this even if I get thrashed for a good while to come. I don't feel completely incompetent often :). | | |
| A friend of mine asked me to post this. It's a list of "Why I changed to Orthodox," but it's not small enough to fit in a single post. I have enough quirks in my personality and unique tendencies that I should probably explain them. I started to post this, but I hit C-W and killed the browser window. I really need to compile vim so that I can safely input unicode; I'm just lazy, though.
The first thing I have to explain is that I have a rather earthy outlook on a lot of things. I can entertain myself by spinning on a stool. If it wouldn't cause offense, I would just assume run around in the country naked. Part of the reason I drive a motorcycle is that I'm not sealed in the fiberglass bubble in a car. It has its downsides, but it has a lot of ups (Scary as snow is, it's extremely interesting to drive a bike in it). Before I converted, I had no interest in prophets or Scriptures, and I especially disliked God (who I had a rather low opinion of when I even acknowledged that there was a God).
I have a reputation for having my head in the clouds, but that's more because of my curiosity than it is what I speculate most on. The best example of this is that if something extended beyond my knowledge, and I didn't have a reliable source on it, then I was quite comfortable with paradoxes. When asked if I believed God predestined us, I said "yes" and "no" in the very same sentence. I could do that because Scripture seemed to teach both (this is after I became a Christian). Experience seemed to yield fodder for both positions. I would try and understand how this could be, but I was never willing to give up one for the other. Election wasn't the only doctrine I did this with, and any time Scripture seemed to teach multiple positions and my experience couldn't give me any reliable certainty, I would simply affirm all possible positions and move on. Even when I tried to speculate or reconcile them, I was unwilling to give up one for the other.
That outlook had to be developed (and it did help in conversion, since Orthodoxy takes a pernicious pleasure in saying things like "Mary contained the uncontainable God," "He Who does not sleep slept on a boat," and "He who hung the earth upon the waters is hung upon the tree."). Initially, though, I was rather trapped. I had taken my Father's question "How do you know that the dream isn't real and this is the dream?" and my uncle's "Don't believe anything you hear and only half of what you hear" rather seriously (one has to be careful with what one tells children). Consequently, I did doubt whether I even existed. It certainly did not help that my Father had me read Plato at a very young age (who champions an idea like this and can be very convincing).
This is a rather serious problem. You cannot simply assume the world just exists, because that doesn't answer the question. It dismisses it. I don't like doing that, never have. I'd rather say, "I don't know" and hold the possibilities in tension. On a question like that, I had to live as if it were real even with my skepticism. It wasn't worth the experiment to run out in front of a bus. I also disliked the possiblity that I may not be real. I disliked it a lot.
Consider, though, how hard the question is to answer. You cannot use your senses. The nature of the question bans them in every instance except to evaluate how you the world you see works (it was no coincidence that I had an overwhelming love of science at this time; it was an unquestionably valid use of my senses). Your mind itself could be a machine. If you've ever tried to write a program, then you know that the AI makes "decisions" based on the algorithm. There is a serious possibility we could ourselves be an AI, and this is so even granting the existence of the world.
Questions like this are not easy to answer, and they are extremely important and practical. Why bother taking care of your body if it isn't real? What about that child on the side of the street? Should we feed it? If you beat someone, and they aren't really there, is it wrong? The highest ethical and human goal we can have is to live de natura nostra. Simply assuming an answer to anything this vital is not an option. It would be intellecutally dishonest on the most fundamental level.
Of course, when you couple this with a desire to take things as they are, then you have a real problem. You can't really discuss this with people, becuase 99% of anyone you mention it to cannot see the real practicality of the question. People who knew me as a child probably didn't realize this was going on, but it would explain a lot of behavior and why that behavior changed so quickly on conversion. It wasn't just religious zeal. I wanted to understand the world, and I wanted to live according to what I was (I really didn't give a fig what people told me, still don't), and I greatly loved the natural world. Give me a rattlesnake, a trantula, a goldfish, a ground owl, a horny toad, or whatnot, and I was happy as a lark.
This tendency to question coupled with my lack of skill in manual labor led people to characterize this as having my head in the clouds, when it is really a result of my curiosity and unwillingness to accept an answer that wasn't, well, an answer. Most people would just assume pinch you, cut you, or something like that and point the pain out as an answer. There's no way to make them understand the question.
I accepted that the world around me was orderly and rational. Everything operated for a reason. It did so consistently (one of the big reasons I tend to be skeptical of the claims of quantum mechanics). I didn't believe we were doing something "unnatural" when we built houses or towns, even if I do dislike them quite a bit. We are just acting out our nature. Consequently, history became very important to me. I found my uncle's principle to be unworkable (I believed in Rome, but I had never been able to go to Rome and fantasized about it often). So I believed that there was a way to evaluate history to come to some reasonable certainty. History, after all, is more valuable in learning our nature than is any study of wildflowers or any other science. It is about what we did and, therefore, the best indicator of what we are.
I, thus, had a very historical view of things. The world is constantly changing, but you can step into the same river twice. If the world is illusory, then it is consistently so, and thus studying it is immensely valuable even from that perspective. An increased willingness to accept uncertainty and a healthy view of history helped to prepare me for Christianity.
It should go without saying now, that my first questions regarding a thing are precisely these sorts: "Can I see it?" "Where is it?" "What does it do?" "How does it do it?" "When did it come to be?" "How?" "When will it pass away?" and so on. I only think about metaphysics after I've thought about these things. Metaphysics, after all, comes after physics. Thinking about theological concepts this way is vital to understand my tendencies. I did not read the Psalms often as a Baptist, but I read the prophets, histories, Law, and Gospels over and over. That's where my questions were addressed.
The worldview I held in this was really very simple, but sad. I knew there was a God. The world was too pristine. I also felt that this "God" was a real son of a *****. He created all sorts of suffering and violence. The world was one long cascade of force A, whatever its nature, overcoming force B. History had no aim but was driven by the need to conquer and have sex (being a sheep herder, I saw a lot of that as well). All life was our efforts to channel this to gain pleasure and power in a world we don't even know exists. Is it a sad paradigm? You bet. Could anyone really present me with an alternative? Nope. The world was uncontrollably violent, people hateful, and I generally ran from them since I had no defense (I still tend to circle the wagons and not talk to many people).
I had a coach (Stout I believe his name was) who tried to evangelize me in school. I'm aware that that's against the rules, but he was concerned about me and felt that was the only way to help me. In all truth, he was right. Some schoolmates would try (often after beating the crap out of me). Generally, the message was "God sent Jesus died on the cross to save you from your sins." In my mind, God created this world, made us the way we are, then He threatens us with eternal torment if we don't put much stock in a story about a Jew being murdered by Romans when we don't even know if we're real? Who cares? I hadn't looked at the evidence for the New Testament, I certainly didn't see much reason to. I knew there was a "God," but I didn't necessarily believe He was anything more than some giant calculating machine, certainly not a person. If there were other "gods," they were malicious and arbitrary. The images in my mind were always those of the gods in Clash of the Titans playing chess or the petty competitions in the Iliad and Odyessy. It's not a very pretty picture. I believed in powerful entities, but they, like us, had to be material (this was my evaluation of the ancient gods). As far as I was concerned, they could all kiss my butt.
All of this was in a very childish fashion, but I read some pretty heavy material. By the time I was in my mid-teens, the worldview was pretty complete. It was certainly more thought out than most adults', since I took the questions seriously. Nonetheless, it was still quite naive. It would probably flip my lid then if I had access to the data I do now. This description of my mindset is aimed mainly at how I thought when I converted. I do not remember my thoughts from when I was pre-pubescant.
When I was converted, it was at a youth camp that we had been shunted to after my Father's death. When I spoke to the counseller there, he made his case two-fold. He didn't offer me the usual "You must accept Jesus or go to hell," but two-fold. First, he argued for the historicity of Jesus. I probably wouldn't be as impressed now if I heard the arguments, knowing much more than I did then, but I didn't. The second prong was the argument that God was the one who died on the cross.
Now this is a different Gospel than the other Gospels I'd heard. First, I would never see Zeus die on a tree. He'd break the tree then go to work on the people dumb enough to try it (probably rape a few women in the process). Would Hera? Not a chance. None of the gods I knew a lot about would do this. What about the "Christian God?" Nope, he'd order the Israelites to commit genocide, conquer, rape, and pillage (incidentally, on one funny incedent we were in church for some reason, and I'd hear the preacher say "Joshua did this" "Joshua did that", and my poor litle brother was about ready to cry; he hadn't done any of those things). He'd give decrees, but not become a person, put on filthy flesh, then allow himself to be tortured to death. The fact that it was God that was tortured like that had never really made it into the proclamations I'd heard. I'd been to VBS weeks (I think to give my mother a break), but that wasn't what I heard. When schoolmates or teachers would try to evangelize me, that wasn't what I heard. The idea that God would put on flesh, become a man, and allow Himself to be tortured to death was, frankly, something I couldn't imagine. It was, in some respects, scandalous to me. Not only did I consider doing that a sign of weakness, but it was an image of God that I couldn't look down my nose at.
Then there was the fact that I was presented with a fair amount of arguments for the historicity of the man Jesus. I could know, within my range of reasonable doubt, what He did, where He lived, when He lived, even things like what He ate. I wasn't even shielded from this image of God by the fact that God was beyond the veil. This man acted and spoke.
There was a corrollary to this. I already knew that if there was a God, He was the ground of existence. Everything is, because He is. This image, though, was different. The world doesn't exist from some overflow of His being; He made it. I would hold Him accountable for evil on that point, but He was, Himself a victem of it, a willing victim. Evil and suffering weren't neutral parts of a reality rooted in an impersonal deity. It certainly had no room for the emanations I read about in the pagans. What's more, the world couldn't be some shade or illusion, if God lived in it. It was validated as true and valuable. Given the nature of a suffering God, it was also good. Consequently, John 1, especially 1.1 and 1.14, were my favorite verses and the first ones I memorized in Greek.
Anything less than the crucified God just isn't worth my time. We live in this world like this, and if He just sat up on high and made declarations, I really wouldn't care. I'd probably just give Him a fig newton on principle. That, however, is not He Who Is. Instead I have a God I can follow alongside a creation that is good. The alternative is satanic. There's a reason it causes revulsion in people.
This also set the trajectory for my thought after that. I occupied myself with the study of Scripture over science. Why? Because I wanted to learn what is, how it is, why it is, and so on. This is a much more credible source. In light of it, it really doesn't matter what happens to time at high gravity. It's a moot point.
The Trinity developed next. The Son isn't the Father, yet the Son is God. The Spirit isn't the Son or the Father, yet the Spirit is God. There is, and can be, only one God. The "gods" are lesser divinities when compared to God, more like angels, and had a beginning and thus an end. They were contained and short-sighted. God is unbound and uncontained, and thus, there cannot be more than one God even if there were three hundred Persons instead of a Trinity, for there is no division between the Persons. This is not so of the pagan gods.
The most important part of Scripture to me were records of what happened and direct statements by God. This revealed the answers to the who, what, when, how questions that I could not know otherwise. It didn't contradict reason (e.g. one cannot establish the Virgin birth by reason, but given the an interventionalist deity instead of naturalism, it's not unreasonable either). I would question it if it did. It did involve paradoxes, but there are real limits to our reason, and I knew that.
I became less utilitarian. Before I converted, I never asked for a radio or tape player (or a CD player for that matter), though admittedly I enjoyed music enough to be loyal to certain varieties. If I put up posters, they were usually a woman to look at when I was a teenager. My entertainment was limited to games and comics, because we need some diversion. In general, though, I had absolutely no use for the arts. After my conversion, I started listening to "Christian" music and got a player. I would actually stop to look at things from a more utilitarian point of view. Still, this distrust of the arts was firmly entrenched. Biblical passages admonishing against the use of images were easy for me to focus on (and though I would pause over contrary passages, I didn't give them much thought, since I was already iconoclastic). This would cause trouble later and eventually have to go, but it was part of my trajectory.
Outside the Scripture, my belief in history led me to read the Fathers, but I didn't trust them too far (though I did trust them more than the Reformers). This passive knowledge would shape a lot of my thoughts. Would Jesus have become man without sin? I, and a friend of mine named Gene, both came to the affirmative conclusion in the university. I could recognize theosis as a patristic doctrine and separate it from Mormonism, but I didn't understand it.
I was never quite comfortable with mere confessionalism. I never stayed in a charismatic group or in a messianic Jewish group, but I did dabble in them. However, everyone perpetuated the tension between reason and faith (which was equated with emotionalism). I liked answers to be consistent and rational, not emotional, but not opposed to emotion nonetheless (though when push came to shove, I almost always chose reason earning the nickname "Data"). I had inherited this dualism, but I was not comfortable with it in the least, neither did I like the hard division of spirit from body. In general, I wanted a more simple view of these things and to smooth them over, but while remaining within the bounds of historic Christian faith (which as time went on I would find myself more and more on the outside of).
This is long enough. My friend will have to make do with limited posts for quite some time. My decision wasn't simple, after all, and involved a lot of internal trends, many of which I didn't articulate to anyone.
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| The game came out in Japan. There as a post with some links to some information on FFXIII. What I learned is:
a). The game is super linear just like X. I hated X. I didn't abandon the series at VIII, it had enough that I came back, but X absolutely killed the series. Linear gameplay and maps were a key reason for this. If I want linear, I'll go play an action game or platformer. I don't want it in an RPG.
b). It's a movie-fest. That was another reason I gave up on it. I like fancy CGI, but I prefer to play my games, not watch them. If it was just a few, it'd be great, but it's supposedly more heavily movie-laden than previous titles.
c). You can't control all your characters. I'm sorry, but I liked controlling characters the way I used to. This is a no-go. It might be fun, but I am extremely skeptical.
My personal hope is that if all this is true, the game flops badly and and is widely panned so that Square loses tens of millions of dollars. If this happens, then we'll get a better FF in the future. | | |
| I just that ebooks outsold regular books at Amazon this year. This is a rather sad fact.
Ebooks are simply ephemeral. First, the formats change rapidly. When you get something in an electronic format you have no reason to believe that you will be able to access it in twenty years unless it's in plain text format, which is neither comfortable nor the format of ebooks. Outside of ASCII, very few digital formats has lasted for a couple of decades. They just generally do not last, and those that do are always open standards (which ebooks are not sold in). Readers who spend hundreds of dollars buying titles will most likely not be able to read them after a relatively short time.
The books are doubly vulnerable to damage. First, there is damage to the device. If your ebook reader is damaged, you lose your entire collection. If something happens to its read/write process, you lose all your books (how many times have we encountered corrupted files on our HDD?).
It is more vulnerable to censorship. Amazon has already demonstrated that they have the ability to remotely delete any book they choose. They claim that they did away with the ability, but a) we have no reason to believe them, and b) if they disabled the functionality they can re-enable it just as easily. We have no reason to believe that other ebook manufacturers do not have the same function built in. Books and speech have always been subject to censorship, and these ebook readers make it easier (well, not all formats: PDF, PS, DVI, and so on are not so vulnerable).
They're great for novels. Heck, even with serious study, I've been tempted to get them so I can read a PDF of my GNT, LXX, some lexicons, and Homer on the go. I will not, however, make these my primary copies if I ever get a reader. I will keep dead trees versions as my primary study; these would be travel editions (not having to carry around a couple of dozen books to make a minimal study room would be most convenient, especially on my motorcycle). The ebooks have a genuine use. I am not a Luddite, but we should generally abstain from making them the standard format for study or anything serious. The medium is too volatile.
I do realize, however, that my protests have a long history before them. The first written texts were written on stone. When papyrus first appeared, the initial response was that it was an inferior medium, unworthy of the written text, because it was so easy to damage and lose. The same thing was alleged of the papyrus codex vs. the scroll (the binding was heavily subject to wear and damage, which I think is the principle reason we do not have the original full ending of Mark). Since vellum and rag paper were always known to be a superior format to papyrus, when the Muslims cut off the papyrus trade, the shift was easy. In the nineteenth century, however, the shift from rag paper to pulp paper was itself opposed on the grounds that pulp paper rotted away almost as you looked at it. In this case, I sympathize some. I do wish we could still purchase Bibles, important historical works, and reference works on rag paper. It would be more expensive, but imagine buying just one Bible for your entire life o_o. However, pulp paper dominated due to its convenience.
I have no reason to believe this cycle won't repeat itself now. It will be sad if it does, though. An electronic format is simply too vulnerable and vulnerable in ways none of the preceding formats were vulnerable. The fight is already pretty one-sided. I expect ebooks to win, and win handily, but I hope that physical books can maintain their hold. It may even have the benefit of bringing rag paper back for important books. After all, if you're going to pay more for a physical book, why not pay for the highest quality? I hope that it works out that way, but I'm not going to hold my breath. | | |
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