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Monday 24 March 2014

Curiosity






Omega Centauri is a spherical star cluster in the Centaurus constellation. There are strong leading indicators that the cluster is a remnant from a dwarf galaxy that once collide with the Milky Way. The system is isolated from any other celestial body when seen from the southern hemisphere, thus not visible anywhere in Europe. Its mass is not accurately determined by astronomers from European Southern Observatory in Chile.

Friday 21 March 2014

Lafayette


Marie-Madeleine Pioche de La Vergne (Paris, 18 march 1634 - Aldaar, 25 may 1693), also known as Madame de la Fayette ) was a royal French writer. her most known work, La Princesse de Clèves, brought forth a new literary genre: the psychological novel. Her work is considered to be the first published French historic novel. She is widely regarded as one of the best french authoresses of the 17th century.



Works

In 1659, Madame de La Fayette settled in Paris for good. Under a year she would debut as a writer by writing for a publishing house run by Huet and Jean Regnault de Segrais. In 1661, she carried through to completion a novel titled La Princesse de Montpensier, which would eventually be issued a year later under the nom de plume of Segrais. In 1669 the first review about Zaide was released, an adventure story issued again under Segrais' name but which again had probably been co-authored by the striving female writer. The second half of the work was finished in 1671.

Madale de La Fayette's most famous work, La Princesse de Clèves, presumed to have started in 1672, was first issued in march 1678 by someone part of her circle of acquaintances. A narrative from around 1560 based on the court of Henry II tells the life story of the princess of Chartres, whom was limerence-struck by the Duke of Nemours. Since he is a different man than the one to whom she is married, it consitutes one of the first literary accounts of female infidelity and an early example of game dynamics played out in the wild, complete with the whole alpha male and beta male roles played to the hilt. Along with a typical female rationalisation hamster going the predictable path of gravitating towards the man with the perceived higher sexual market.
 
Three more works authored by Madame de La Fayette were eventually issued several years after her death: La Contesse de Tende, Histoire d' Henriette d'Anglaterre and Mémoires de la Cour de France.

Monday 3 March 2014

Feminism is eating away at the influence of the Western Church

The real query is, what's behind all the accurate link play responsible for the Church's stooping to such a toxic idealism?

Acquiescence to what feminism preaches is just one problem of the Catholic Church. Not that they're supposed to stamp out any ideology bent on wreaking havoc on biological male/female dynamics, they can just overlook it and get on with their lives. Maybe their topsy turvy state is not even a result of their involvement with feminism, but there has definitely been a feminisation of their thought pattern. Now the Church seems it fit to word everything in a weepy, treacly way. It's just like feminism was once an important member of the Church until they got away with some embarrassing secret their pontiff masters held, like a treasure that had been improperly squirrelled away.

By the looks of it, it's hard to draw a different conclusion. The Church once held more power than they could handle, an abundance of influence that made they almost come apart at the seams. Now they have been demoted to something people pay heed to in case they have nothing else to fret about. And this is talking about religious people. The number of irreligious people has never been on the rise like this before. It then becomes something of an ineffectual countermeasure to try to tailor their structure and teachings to appease feminism, since they're contrasting entities and it's impossible for both to boost themselves through shared resources without skewing their original doctrine. Invariably, one of them will bear the burden of heavily altering their point of view in favour of conformity with the other party. This becomes even more twisted because the Catholic Church has many been the historical venue of vicious raids, unfair trials and corruption running riot wherever they were allowed to flourish. Now with them appeasing to feminism agenda we're supposed to believe this will assuage the historical ailments they've1 inflicted on our civilisation.

It's akin to listening to a senile aunt. "My heart weeps for the tragic loss of precious life, and I grieve the loss of those due to the lack of compassion of this world.

Enough with the compassion crap already! This is the same political entity that used to raise arms to do away with whatever opposition they ran into while making forays into new territory in the name of "progress".

Which leads me into the other problem: the Church’s ecumenism. This implied the ditching of their role to herald a life based on faith. Now a rift has begun to form from within the Church's upper hierarchy members, with some favouring third world immigration while some opposing the death penalty. But the real political powder keg rests on the Catholic Church in Europe, which purposefully enforces immigration from non-christian groups into traditionally Christian sites at the same time they exhort against xenophobia.

It's enough to make die hard churchgoers quit going to church.

Hong Kong 97 (snes videogame)



After seeing numerous games about the withdrawal of a group from the authority of a state and the subsequent transfer of sovereignty to their former Union, I have concluded that most of them suck, whether they be evil businesses plotting to wipe out a country's entire population, the deployment of murderous agents to carry out the equally gruesome duty or the resulting fracas being the main plot of a misbegotten game. Unfortunately for the elements populating this game, all three happened in a terrible unison. Things do not bode well for the target audience (if there ever was any).



Hong Kong 97 is a 1995 game by HappySoft, a homebrew game company for the SNES. A game designed through means that many would consider criminal. The in-game plot involve the return of Hong Kong to their rightful sovereign state, the People's Republic of China after years under the rule of the Brits. This took place in 1997, at the same time that crime rates were on the rise. This was pegged to the fact that people from the Chinese mainland started to mass immigrate to the tiny nation, forcing the local government to cast about for a solution. They do find one in the hope of using the services of Chin (Jackie Chan in his Wheels on Meals persona). He makes for the stricken country with one instruction only: to eliminate all 1.2 billion people of China. The plot alone is enough to make the game atrocious enough. But Chinese's hubris won't allow them to make light of the situation. They have been overseeing the whole situation all along and have plotted to offset the scheduled mass killing with a lethal weapon of their own: the resurrection of "Tong Shau Ping" (actually played by Deng Xiaoping). Curious tidbit:

"When the game was released in 1995, Deng Xiaoping, said to be dead in the game, was still alive. However, he did die months before the handover, which is when the game's plot actually takes place."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hong_Kong_97_%28video_game%29

Now on to gameplay.


Upon turning on the game a short rendition of I love Beijing Tiananmen plays relentlessly in a loop. They could have made the loop longer, but I guess that making it the way they did made it somewhat amusing. The voiced sample of this sung track also provides a worthy distraction from the threadbare tone of the game. It'd become unplayable if they had put on something else than this soundtrack. However, the game doesn't contain any sound effect, so making a sound test option would be redundant.




With the helpful addition of this tune, it's time to select which language to play the game in. At least the game offers 3 options for the linguistic savvy, although this might put people off a bit because the text in the English version contains some easy to catch flubs. I wasn't able to judge the textual quality in the Japanese and Chinese scripts, but if they're on par with their Anglicized counterpart, things would look gloomy for those wanting to practice either Japanese or Chinese (or both).


Next up is the storyline. The basic premise is the concern brought on by droves of people rushing in from the mainland. That would be China. So the government strikes a deal with the protagonist and off he goes. The action stage kicks off without any prompting whatsoever so if the player is careless he could easily have his ass handed to him. He is supposed to be ready to dodge awkward sprites of people, cars and bullets, sometimes in a wiggling pattern. The enemies' post-death animation comprises at times of something that I could not describe. It seems to be a bloody likeliness of something, but I was unable to discern further. Some enemies (using indefinite pronouns this often makes me uncomfortable, but this helps define the path that this game has taken so far) drop pellets of invincibility. That or instant death. Again, I was at a loss to differentiate one from the other. After defeating enough enemies, a boss battle takes place. The MS Paint-style severed head of (presumably) Deng Xiaoping. It's a hard boss battle and I couldn't vanquish him to find out what wondrous mysteries awaits me. Most likely, you'll die too, and then back to the tile screen you go. Then the big wheel turns.

Dismal Charnel extends its deepest sympathy and condolence to the victims, condemning the ruthless attack this game brought on the bereft families.

Listen to the soundtrack here.