"Actionable Intelligence"

I guess it's been a few days since I have actually posted. I went to my mom's house this weekend; I was going to hang out with a friend up there. But it was his brother's birthday so I couldn't really do anything.

I did rent a movie I've never heard of by the name of The Returner. Judging by the cover I thought it would be a Matrix rip-off. But I thought I would like it judging by the description of the way too convoluted plot. Turns out it's a live action Japanese film. It looked and acted an awful lot like an anime flick right down to the costumes and morphing mechanized robots. Except for a few rather annoying touching-moments complete with soft piano music I did really enjoy this movie. The ending is actually very good. Actually there's at least two endings. The ending that you think it is, the camera starts to pull away, then something happens and the music starts again and it turns out much different. I liked that sort of unpredictable ending sequence.

For this first time watching I did leave it on Japanese speech with English subtitles, and that was fine; it worked perfectly. For the fun of it I turned on the English voice-overs and skipped ahead to some scene to see just how bad the voice acting and how much the dialog had changed. As predicted both the voice acting and the replacement dialog was absolutely horrific. Most people who would rent this movie to use the English voice dub-over wouldn't like this movie because the voice acting was so terrible.

So I finally started another class. It's called "ethical hacking" and it sounds like it could be interesting. No text book, only two units, I hope we get to something challenging soon.

The other things I've done since the last entry is finish this game I think I've mentioned called Dungeon Siege. The game keeps track of the time you've been playing: I beat it in 30 hours. And I took my time. I really didn't find it at all challenging. Every so often one of my characters would be die and I would have to resurrect them, but that's about it. Now I did have about 6 characters plus a pack mule for all the extra stuff. I outfitted all of them to the absolute limit of their respective armor abilities. You can't actually control any of the characters with the keyboard as in NWN, only select then point-and-click to move them around.

Towards the end of the game I traded in one of my characters for a new one who had some "natural magic" abilities and she became what I have coined a "heal mule". Her job was to cast a spell called "healing winds" every time any of the characters started to get low HP, causing regeneration of the HP rather quickly. This made way, way more easy. What I found annoying was a lack of a really in-depth plot and virtually no perplexing puzzles. You just go from room to room killing all hostile enemies. Talk to different NPCs to get quests, other NPCs to buy/sell junk then repeat.

It reminded me of an old console game I would play as a little kid. You didn't really care who the characters were or why they were killing everything in view, you were just having fun playing the game, thoughtlessly. And that's what this game is for: thoughtless play. I think I was entertained for those 30 hours so I'm not really complaining too much.

Seems ironic I'm playing this game instead of the game I will soon be writing a module for, NWN. Dungeon Siege and NWN are quite similar in many respects you see, except NWN is much more depth, including a limit to how much weight a character can carry, adhering to "3rd edition D and D rules" and all that other stuff. Dungeon Siege just seems too short, even for what it is. There is of course a re-package of Dungeon Siege that includes an expansion pack to continue the story. I didn't realize at the time I bought Dungeon Siege this would be happening, and Dungeon Siege at the time was only $20.

Fair warning, the following will be controversial personal political views:

I made the mistake of turning on the 9/11 commission hearing today. I had my expectations before I turned it on, and those expectations turned out to be largely accurate. The liberal/left wing types are feeling guilty, and worry blame will be placed where it should be placed: on an obviously bad and wrong policy regarding stopping and holding terrorists responsible. The leftists know this was and is the wrong policy and they know they are to large degree responsible for many deaths via this policy. So before anyone can accuse them they accuse and blame everyone else. So if anyone tries to accuse this policy or any of them personally it will look like a defensive gesture responding to an accusation.

The policy I am referring to is treating the terrorists and terrorist organizations like a criminal matter as opposed to a war matter requiring urgent, non-ambiguous actions.

And, of course, they know they're going to lose the election, by a lot. This prospect they're having trouble dealing with, so they're acting crazy and saying crazy things, even for them. They just can't deal with the prospect of more GWB and John Ashcroft.

The thing that really bothers me is that Bush will win by default, not because he's so strong.

I also found it funny one of the council members went on to blame Fox News Network on some information released discrediting the guy who was saying the things this council member wanted to hear. The funny thing is the council member said something to effect of "Fox News should hardly be on the air after such a thing was released" along with some mocking of the Fox slogan "Fair and Balanced". But I had just been listening to Rush Limbaugh who was also citing this Fox News document while discussing the most recent episode of 60 Minutes, Limbaugh saying something to the effect of "60 Minutes shouldn't even be on the air any more after this". I'm sure this was just a coincidence however. After all the commission was going on at the same time Limbaugh was on so unless the commission members had radios next to them no one was ripping anyone else off.

  ¶ 12:59 PM