JetFable’s Gamer Writer’s Block

Exhausted after my trip to Europe, I am finally back to the cyber world. I checked emails and other stuff intermittently but lasted five days in paris without net access. That was amazing, but in conclusion, Internet is an addiction, my hands must have been shaking without holding a mouse, but it’s a benevolent addiction, for the flow of information is the source of knowledge, and knowledge is power. And I had so much information to absorb this morning I was swamped, and now I finally find some time to reminisce and write a few things.

The two places I remember most about Europe, among other things, well one of them is the painting Birth of Venus by Sandro Botticelli in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. The painting really took me by some unmeasured serenity and beauty that was too breathtaking to describe. I found that more impressive than the Sistine Chapel and the Mona Lisa, perhaps it was becuase I visited the gallery near closing time, instead of fighting through the crowds at every step, I was able to just sit in the middle of the room with my travelling companion and breathe in the atmosphere of the masterpiece. I could have sat there for hours but we were apparently pressed for time, but being there for a few minutes it already felt like hours, but hours not enough. The goddess Aphrodite simply captivated me. And yes, for some reason the greek name just seems more appropriate for the goddess of beauty, and it is more original.

The second place I happened upon was the Shakespeare & Co bookshop in the Latin Quarter in Paris. It was a good thing my DK travelling guide mentioned it for I just happened to be on the same street without prior plans to visit the place. It’s an antique bookstore (similar to sister bookstore City Lights in San Francisco) not unlike the one I wrote about in my novel Pillars. Well it so happens I walked in and the man from the bookstore annouced that the owner would be having tea upstairs, so we followed the crowd upstairs. The owner George Whitman is an Einstein-looking 91 year-old gentle looking man, who, I found out later, is supposedly pretty famous. He said “Ni Hao” to me and my companions when he saw us. It’s not hard to identify us as Chinese (maybe harder for Westerners) but I was a little bit fed up with waiters and others alike speaking japanese to us. I guess with age it comes wisdom. While we drank English tea Whitman came over to me and a set of keys dangled from his hands, he said he offered me to stay at his house for free. I politely declined telling him that I was leaving in 2 days. He asked me what I did and I said I was in computers and he told me if I knew any Chinese writers I should tell them that they could stay at his house. So I told him I also write, and he said that if I come next time I could stay. I wish I could have talked to him more afterwards but the place was soon getting crowded so I left soon after tea. As I walked out on the store I wondered why he talked to me out of all people and offered his key before even asking me what I do, I wondered if he sense of people was keener than most of us without his years of experience, I wondered if he could tell that I write even before asking me. Perhaps I possessed a writer’s aura? I’d like to think so.

Perhaps I will talk more about my trip if I feel like it, but I have to admit, each time I travel I learn something new, sometimes it’s even about myself, though everytime before a trip I usually don’t want to leave the comfort of home or prepare for it, but I probably should do that more often. And for the moment I vow to stay away from red wine, Cappuccino, pizza, art galleries, museums, and churches. I am seriously sick of them. Well, perhaps not Cappuccino.

I often joked about the guy cleaning toilets at Google is probably richer than anyone I know. Today I read this: Even the Masseuse is a Multimillionaire at Google (what they pay whores with stock options? just kidding, I know Masseuse aren’t whores, at least not all of them, the 2nd question is, Google hires masseuse?), now isn’t that just sick? I had 20 shares of Google I bought at 400s and people think I am rich. Yeah, right. I always say that we don’t always get rewarded for hard work, so don’t work hard, work smart. Now i have no advice for people who want to start or work for the next Google, but you can invest in the next Google. For a while I invested and traded a lot, I still do, but I find that researching sometimes don’t really pay off, now I try not to read the news, the charts (damn if I can read the charts), and even look at it less. I try to look at other people’s blogs, people who know what they are talking about. If there’s a central place where more knowledgable than you people share what they find, you spend less time to look for them, and spending less time to know more is always a good thing in my book. Freakonomics said that there is not one economist that can predict the future of the US economy (unless its Greenspan), by that rule you sould know that one person can’t really predict the market, but 10 economists can usually come up with something better. This guy’s Z-stock’s blog is pretty educational (and really complex), while the economy seems to be going to hell for the last few days, he has pretty high target for the stock market based on EPS growth (QQQQ:60, SPY:1675, DIA:15,000), this guy uses math to explain everything, and for 90% of the time it works. He said he’s read the Foundation series 10 times, which is about using math to predict the future of mankind. The other times I go here, Beanie’s Blog, which has pretty good long term picks, and usually interesting and lively discussion (and also pictures of beautiful women). The other day he said that his astrologer predicted a worldwide market crash, and it is interesting science that if you map market cycle to planet movements, well, you get something out of it, so believe, or not believe it at your own risk.

I just realized I am probably never going to get to talk about my topic, but as you know me I am ill stricken with long windedness, and I am long overdue to write something. I have been busy making some of my Europe Trip preparation. I find that Yahoo Travel is quite useful, for making a trip plan and looking up recommended places. And Google Map reaches everywhere, even the outskirts of some undiscovered country. Other than that, they Eyewitness Travel guidebooks are quite good, even if not totally informative, they are pretty to look at (yeah just like how I like my women). And the funny thing is, I made all my travel preparation at work (I hope my boss is not reading this now, but not that I care). While I was messing around at work, my coworker called me, and I just realized he took a vacation day, and he asked me to send him some code from work. He said he was bored at home and wanted to work on something. Well, what I really want to say is, that people should get a life? If you are on vacation, even if you are at home, fuck your wife, play with your kids, fuck your wife again, play video games with your kids, whatever, you know, dont fucking work? And he wasted 5 sec of my work time hunting down files and attaching them in stupid Lotus Notes. I just realized how different people really are.

The other day I was stuck at a traffic jam. So I busted out my Ninendo DS (yes I recently got one) so I no longer need to stock my PSP in the car. I played Trauma Center on it while moving less than 5 miles per hour. Yes I know, its incredibly dangerous, so kids, don’t try this ever, unless you are the king of multi-tasker, have an IQ of 130 or above, and half as awesome as I am, or you will really end up in the Trauma Center. The funny thing was as soon as I passed the point where there was an accident, I noticed every car was suddenly racing towards the other end of the empty freeway. I was going about 90 miles per hour then and was literally the slowest moving car. Yes, even the grandma driving an old Buick next to me with a dead orangutan clanking in her trunk was driving faster than me. Hay, I had a sports car so I really had to drive closer to a hunderd just to be faster than everyone else. It’s funny because everyone wanted to make up that loss time and they knew that every cop in the vincinity was probably attending to the accident so you can’t really get caught for at least the next 5 min (hay, afterall the traffic handbook says you follow the flow of traffic, not the maximum speed), in an event that all cars are speeding, only the slowest one get caught. Freaknomics author said that when he visited LA, he noticed one of the things is that everyone uses thier Blackberry to send messages in the car, and the other thing is that people keep telling each other how beautiful they are (but we won’t get to that). The thing is that the traffic situation breeds really pissed off drivers in LA, and I become a pissed-off homocidal curmudgeon every day when I go to work. Trauma Center really works on the DS (yes I know, I am about 3 years late to the game), but yes it works much better than the one on wii because using the stylus to perform surgery is much more like surgery than using the wii-mote (oh and its very challenging when you are driving). That comes to my topic, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. And since I recently finally get to play the DS castlevania games, I can attest to that, the same old formula works, and it work wonders. I grew up loving Castlevania and I still love it. Dracula X is also recently released on the PSP, and yes, it comes out of Symphony of the Night. I lost count of how many versions of this great classic there are out there.

I can’t really say the same for Silent Hill Origins. Weapons break. Come on, a wrench, after 3 whacks on a zombie, it breaks, when have you ever seen a wrench break ever in your lifetime? I don’t know whether the game is good, or bad, since I hardly played it, but I know they broke the “If it ain’t broke” rule, and that’s not good. But the game does look amazingly good on a handheld, and I wonder, if we will ever need another next generation handheld ever. While the DS continuously amazes in the fun factor, the PSP amazes in its graphical abilities. The controversial Manhunt 2 looks almost identical to the PS2 version on the PSP, and better yet, you can hack it so that the execution scene are not faded out, which is I think necessary to fully enjoy what the creators intended. Yes, parents out there, a plastic bag kills, your kids should learn that. We die from lack of oxygen, it is very simple. That’s how Manhunt is educational in teaching kids. Yes well, in order to hack Manhunt, you most likely have to pirate the game. I had recent long discussions about pirating, whether it is good or evil. I don’t advise people to really pirate (because its almost equivalent to stealing, and it hurts the developers), but I don’t think pirating is immoral. Sometimes paying extra to get an inferior product is stupidity, and being stupid in life is not a very good thing. Why pirating gets you a better product sometimes? At least in the PSP case, it elimintes the load times from the UMD and let your get a crack at the original content which isn’t available from the original disk, also it most likely saves you money and time to drive out to the store to get it. Yes, we all know that pirating hurts the developers, but has any creator of something really popular ever gone out of biz because pirates were around? I really doubt it. Pirating is a necessary evil, how I arrive at that is, through numbers, not statistically real numbers, but my assumptions. Lets say if 25% of Gamers have a firm stance of always paying for what they play (the true moral people), 25% of Gamers have no technological knowledge to have any access to pirated content (the idiots), 25% will never pay for the content unless they have pirated copies (the cheapskates), 25% can be swayed either side and they most likely wont pay for it if they can pirate the game (those who don’t give a damn). OK, so even in the existence of hackers, developers still gain 50% profit, but they would have gained 75% if pirates did not exist, but in the lights of pirates, 100% gamers get to play the game, and if the game is really any good, the word gets spread. What I always say is that true art only gets destroyed when it doesn’t get distributed. There really is no good or evil in life, there are only consequences and cascades of chain reaction. Consequences are that even people who make money from pirating (yes, those of you shamelss people in Asia) have mothers and starving children too. If your money don’t go to the developers, it goes to someone else’s. People buy the DS and if they want to pirate it they need a micro SD card and I am pretty sure Nintendo and Scandisk benefits from the sale, and Sony benefits from the 2 gig and 4 gig pro-duo memory sticks they keep releasing. Yes, sometimes the developers get screwed, and that’s not fair, but at the end of the day, has anyone really gone out of business because of pirates? And even if they had, is it because people pirated their kick-ass game and nobody bought it because it sucked? A good way to really counter piracy is selling content directly online, like the Xbox live model and the Sam & Max episodic content. I think people actually care less about not paying money to gype the developers than really getting things conveniently, and this way, the developers get to bypass the publisher fee and the evil GameStops that put the games on the shelves. Can you believe that, one time a GameStop employee kept badgering me to buy a used game for 5 bucks less. I kept telling him no, but he kept asking me if I was sure. I would have gladly stuffed him 5 bucks to shut him up. Buying used games is the equivalent of piracy, for the developers don’t get any profit for it, and you should never do it, unless it is under 10 bucks. Anyway, as opposed to what they teach you in school, this world isn’t black and white. And for the while, happy whipping.

Geez, the title sound a bit too sentimental, even for me (so I added a second part). I heard this quote from watching El Cazador de la Bruja, which is in fact a real quote from a famous person. I forgot who, but I’d have to look that up later. The first and only rule of love, is that one must do everything to make the beloved happy. That’s a very simple rule if you ever pondered whether you loved a person, or another person loved you. I used that rule and I asked myself whether I love my parents, the conclusion is that I am probably not a very good son, I try to play my role as a dutiful, moral son, but thats about it. But if I use that rule and apply to whether they love each other, they probably love each other less than I love them, because they are both not quite happy people. The conclusion that I arrive at that I am not a very good son, is because their happiness just isn’t my priority, when they refuse to make each other happy. I use that rule and ask whether I love anyone else, I am not quite sure (or I probably wont say it here). When there’s a certain someone lying next to me in my bed, I don’t think I have ever looked upon that certain someone with the feeling of love. I gaze upon her and would feel one of the following:

1) A combination of disgust and shock. She looked much better in the dark, much much better.
2) She’s great looking, but I want to do something else now, so when is she leaving?.
3) A combination of disgust and shock. Wait, this is not a recap of #1. Now I wonder how much it is going to cost me, I am broke.
4) All of the above (minus the great looking part from #2)

The point is that I never really looked at someone (in bed) and thought, hay maybe this is the rest of my life and it would not be so bad, maybe I want to make her happy. Hay the blog is supposed to be sarcasticly philosophical, so not many of you are going to take me seriously, not unlike my friend from Thailand, who still refuses to speak to me as of, now. But the fact is that, I really don’t give a damn. One part of the Tipping Point (yes I am still reading it) says that absolute personality is really a illusion. We all play different roles in front of different people, and we wear different faces. I am awesome here and mostly everywhere else, but  never in front of my parents. They still think I can’t do anything and don’t know anything. A nice and generous person may only be nice and generous to his friends, and a stingy person may only be generous to his family. There are no absolutes, thus in fact, different people bring out the different personalities in us (for many different reasons). That’s why we sometimes like a group of people, or we like a single person as a companion, is because maybe we like ourselves for what personalities they bring out in us. How this have anything to do with the Tipping Point is really for you to find out. But I have again gone off track.

Actually, I really wanted to talk about religion more than anything else. I know many religious people and also many firm-stance athiest. If you still remember the first and only rule of love, well someone told me he started believing in God because he felt God’s love all around him. He told me God’s love was not a reward-based system because when we usually love somebody we expect something in return, and that is not true with God. But of course the first and only rule of love does not require reward. Do people seek religion for reward, of course they do. Everything in this world there is a trade-off. We trade the time for worship and in return we gain guidance, happiness, or even immortality (life after death). I think those of us who are athiest are often approached by Christians that say if we do not accept God we will not gain entry into heaven, but according to the first and only rule of love, if God loves all of us, does it really matter if we love Him back? Do you really think He cares? Or should He? As long as we live our lives as a good person and love those around us (if you even believe in judgement). A good friend of mine says he asked a chrisitian this question: If a person chooses to not accept God then he cannot be saved. But then if a person lived in some remote island (a tribe without outside contact) and never gotten that choice, what happens when he die? If he’s outside the system (but still saved) then is he really better off without contact with those who may seek to convert him. At the end, I have said that many times, is that I think religion is a good thing, and I am never against it, but I question it, like I question everything in this world. I don’t think we have so much free will as we would like to have, as our genes from those who came before us, and in combinaion of our environment (which we also lack a choice of, in our childhood), shape us into what we are, whether we are a free-thinker, or a religious person. And since we don’t have a choice, what happens when we die?

I think Oblivion awaits us. That scares a lot of people, but it doesn’t scare me. A friend, who is a scientist/doctor, told me that the soul violates the first law of Thermodynamics. Of course I don’t believe everything about science, since science is created to explain the illusion that is presented to us. I do believe in people who says they see ghosts, though I can’t validate their claim. My friend told me that ghostly images is the result of the Grudge (yes, similar to the movie), the negative energy energy one unleash upon this world when he dies (usually not a very happy death). As long as those images (and they do not have a will) feed on the lifeforce of this world, it does not violate thermodynamics. I do not doubt that is a possibility, but possibilites are possibilities. I think people who are born with the “Ghost Eye” sees a dimension collapse, when the past and future collide, and images and footprints spill across their mind, are they really ghosts or are they just like us living their daily lives in their own time and oblivious of our existence? And there is also the possiblity that it is the untapped potential of the human brain that creates and give life to ghosts and gods. If you have read C.S. Friedman’s ColdFire Trilogy (one of the best of all time), there’s a substance call Fae that lives on that planet, and whatever the human mind thought of that substance took the shape of our imagination, and that gave rise to monsters, demons, magic, and gods. At the end, what I really want to say is, this world is still an interesting place. It is worth uncovering the secrets of this world, even if oblivion (or something worse, what can be worse? eternal damnation?) awaits us, and loving someone else sometimes make us happy, even if we get absolutely nothing back, in return.