Bye, 2005

Goodbye, 2005. You were a great year.
But may 2006 be even better.
May 2006 bring far more joy than you did.
May we receive God's blessing and grace more in 2006 than in you.
May the trials that come our way bring greater resolve, strength and purpose than they did in you.
May this dark, cruel world show a little more light in this new year than in you.

God bless us all. More soon.

A little beef with the news

What's up with the standard of newspapers in Singapore nowadays? I read some Irish and British papers my brother brought home, and they're like Frosties with milk, raisins and strawberries compared to our very own ST, which is like regular cornflakes with no milk even. When I opened it I got rich commentaries, witty articles on why the Queen of England should visit Northern Ireland and other subjects (no pun intended), and plenty of stating that this political strategy or that is flawed.
Now the last point is touchy, touchy, and I'm willing to let it go at that. But if the newspaper columnist doesn't point out what detriment something like the casino (oops, Integrated Resort) will have, then any scepticism we'll have will simply be ill-informed.

I am NOT saying this is a delibrate attempt by the Powers that be to keep all protest ill-informed... but come on, SPH, a little wit and opposing viewpoint never hurt anyone. Maybe that's how the Opposition can air their views! Have someone who can write, who can show courtesy, pen something agreeing (hey, we've to have some common ground somewhere, right???) or disagreeing with Gahmen policy.

That's the spotlight for you. Bad ideas or good, here's one way for all to hear them. C'mon ST, a little more gusto would be nice...

"Good tidings of great joy..."

It's that time of year again--out with the old, in with the new!!! so the old cliche goes. But remember the angels' proclaimation that night so long ago. The Good News is still there--what was promised in December is still promised in January. The God of your Christmasses is the God of your New Years, your Good Fridays, your Easters, and everything in between.
Let's see Santa try to top that :)

More boredom and daydreaming in my own little universe, but now both my elder brothers are home things are really going to pick up. More soon, dinner's calling...

Sixty percent

It's about three-fifths of the way through--my first novel. Just a plug post, since I've not very much to right about write now. (sorry, couldn't resist. Please don't groan and stop reading)
So yeah, it's a post-apocalyptic world with a difference, and not everything is what it seems. That's all I'm revealing for now, but more later as I flesh everything out.
Writing's long and time-consuming, but what joy is found in the attempt.

Speaking of books...

I had a book-related dream for the third time last night, and I remember it was some horror story and the pages were made of glossy paper. What is it about books that I even read them in my sleep?
Had a great Christmas 2005, and as the year draws to a close, yeah, I'm still here by the grace of God. It's something I thank Him for every year.

Now if I can just read That Hideous Strength without getting worn out... there's plenty of good stuff in there, if I can just endure the wordiness.

Cheers!

That Hideous Book

The festive joy's in the air, and I just got an early Christmas present--the three space trilogy books by C.S. Lewis. Having read his 7 Narnia books and The Screwtape Letters, I turned to Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra and That Hideous Strength.

If you don't take your science too seriously (Venus is a bit the hot, leh) and go along with Mars as a life-rich world with three sentient races, Venus as a lush, Eden-like world, etc. they really are a fun ride through Lewis's imagination. And Perelandra ends with a battle scene that has to be the most chilling portrayal of evil and its ability to destroy a person's humanity I've ever read.

As a science student and sometime writer, I feel Lewis may be at the top of his game in vivid description, although the long stretches in which nothing much in particular happens drag into a torture to read. Just don't let that get in the way of your enjoyment of the books, and all will be well.

Blessed Christmas!

The holiday spirit is in the air... and it smells of consumerism. One thing that still rankles me is a Christmas episode of Archie's Weird Mysteries I watched several years back--and I thought of all the following in those 20 minutes of TV time. In it, he solves a Christmas mystery of a evil ghost haunting Mr. Lodge's department store. I won't spoil the ending, but here're some observations:

Archie pontificates about the 'true meaning of Christmas', which he quantifies as the spirit of giving, friendship and trust. Just wondering, where does this come from? The cartoon doesn't say--it euphemises the Advent into a feel-good story of trusting your friends and giving presents (did I mention consumerism a while back?)

Santa is portrayed as agreeing with Archie that all the spirit and meaning has gone out of Christmas. Now that I can agree with, but his solution? Give Archie a mystery to solve, and teach his friends to trust in each other and remember what Christmas is really about; giving and caring and sharing! Ironically, the real St. Nicolas wouldn't have wasted any time going straight to the source of this: God the Son, coming to earth as a man to give His life as a ransom for many.

It's rather a pity that we've focused on the second part of the angels' song: "And on earth peace, goodwill toward men." at the expense of the first: "Glory to God in the highest."

But there's something in our hearts that still brings us back to the Christ child, through the layers of human adornment of what God did. Prayers are offered. Gifts are sent. The poor, the disadvantaged, and the disabled are honoured. It's our duty to use this time of perceptiveness to point out what C.S. Lewis called "the Eternal Fact, the Father of all other Facthood."

Caffeine buzz

I drank too much coffee and tea yesterday, screwing up my bedtime. Too tired to get up and too alert to sleep, all I could do was roll about. Is it just me, or do my ears ring every night when I'm normally asleep? Ah, well. One of those great mysteries of life.

PC game review: A great comeback for a great Prince

"All right. I will admit I was not expecting that."
--The Prince

It was my idea to get Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones; I wanted to find out how he defeats the Bad Guys and reclaims the throne so evilly taken from him by an Osama bin Laden-lookalike. My brother bought the game and I fired it up, expecting a rich conclusion to the tale I'd been following (but not participating in so far, I'm afraid).
I got all that and more. A lot more.
T2T is extremely story-driven--it is a grand story of redemption and self-discovery, beginning with the Prince returning from the Island of Time with his new love Kaileena, the Empress of Time. The opening is a tutorial that gets you acquianted with the Prince's moves, and it's only a matter of time before you progress from getting him thrown off ledges and falling to his death to swinging through the streets of Babylon like Spiderman in the Big Apple. The PC's controls take some getting used to; it would've been easier with a gamepad, I will admit.
Spidey's got nothing on the Prince's new alter ego. Following his corruption by the Sands of Time, the ruthless and selfish part of his nature becomes personified in a playable Dark Prince that takes over his body at key points during the game. With a cool new weapon, you're well on your way to dishing it out to those big, bad sand monsters that have taken over your city. That is a good point... and bad. The DP continually loses health, forcing you to keep running and puzzle-solving and escaping deathtraps and killing baddies within a very tight time-frame. Waste a second and you'll have to reload. As he himself taunts the Prince, "Time is short. Time is fleeting."
Speaking of reloading, the game has a reloading mechanism that raises its dial to inhumanly difficult levels. Instead of the traditional save-anywhere system, the game lets you rewind time by a few seconds to undo that mis-timed jump off the wall, or that fall under a level biggie's sword. But when the enemy or the level kills you when you run out of sand... it's a long way from the previous autosave. The infutriating thing is, you can only stop playing at preassigned intervals, and many was the time I had to explain the game wouldn't let me stop and allow someone else to use the PC.
Sand got used up much more quickly than I thought. Sometimes the camera would turn 45 degrees, leaving me unsure which direction keys to press at a microsecond's notice. That said, our Prince is capable of both incredible agility and stupidity so sad it's laughable. And a few graphical bugs and illogical aspects (why can't the Prince slow his chariot-horses?) crept in, but they're insignificant dents in a grand and beautiful conclusion to the Sands of Time story.
Maybe I'm just a lousy platformer. The game's horribly time-consuming, but trust me, it's more absorbing than it's frustrating, more worth it than it's flawed. The voice acting and story are top-notch, and have to be seen, heard, experienced to be believed. It's well worth the trouble, and if you don't give up it will be a fun ride indeed. That the Bad Guys are defeated is all I can drop.

Get this game. I can't recommend it enough; just don't try to play too much in one sitting.

Final score: 8.4 (out of 10)

Pseudo-pseudoscience

I normally love Phil 'The Bad Astronomer' Plait's website, but this time I must point out some disagreement. Amid the debunkings of astrology and myths perpetrated by conspiracy theorists, which I support entirely, he sneaks in pro-evolutionary biases and attacks on the idea of God. It's otherwise quite a good site, with movie reviews based on adherence to scientific fact, such as Revenge of the Sith, The War of the Worlds, etc. Go check it out; I heartily recommend it to anyone wondering if this space phenomenon or that is true. (Yes, people really went to the moon, despite conspiracy theories to the contrary.)

Now one thing that's still uncertain is whether or not the Judeo-Christian creation story should be taught in classrooms, but Plait effortlessly slides from "Creation should not be taught in schools" to "Creation is false". Now this is something even the best scientists trip up on thanks to biases even older than any human reading this, but that's another discussion for another time.

I'm a Prince (of Persia, lah) fan!!!

Haven't posted for quite a few days now, seeing I've been playing the new Prince of Persia title, The Two Thrones (T2T). The game rocks, and I must say I now deeply care about what happens to the Prince and the people of Babylon.
This first look isn't a full review, just a summary of my opinions. That said, T2T rocks!!! There is a likeable Prince, not the havoc-wrecking maniac from Warrior Within (The line from T2T "You are a prince in title only!" comes to mind.). But come to think of it, the puzzles don't feel like puzzles, just facilitations to allow our acrobatic hero to reach places he normally can't. And his alter ego is just way cool.
Sure, there are camera glitches here and there, but they don't pose too much of a problem and go away rather quickly. What you have is a solid platformer which doesn't disappoint. I'm proud to say I'm hooked, no, addicted to the brand of gameplay Ubisoft has created out of Jordan Mechner's hero.

Did I mention that T2T rocks?

(PS-- The baddie does look more than a little like Osama bin Laden... haha)

What is the world coming to?

Plenty of people have asked this question, and I'm no exception. How many of you have flipped through the newspaper? No demands here, just today's issue.

Race riots tear Australian community apart.
Rich nations dally while poor ones starve.
A president euphemises 'Christmas' with 'holidays', insulting Christians and non-Christians alike.
Radical Islamists in Iran call for Israel's removal.

Over here in Singapore,
Someone is jailed for filming up women's skirts.
A mentally-ill man allegedly attacks his mother, fracturing her skull.

Isn't it time for someone to ask it even now? What the world is coming to implies a time things were better before, when good was good and bad was bad. Whenever we did something we didn't ask, "How does it make me feel?", but "Is this good? Is this loving?" And Christmas does remind us of a time this was so.

Think of it. When God saw the mire of humanity and what it had become, He was repulsed. But repulsed at the filth we're in, the filth we've become. I'm sure you know the feeling. What's the world coming to? What have I done? The stink of our sin has barely reached God's nostrils, and we instinctively know His judgement is deserved.
Oh, you can deny it's coming. You can deny He's even there (The anti-ID crowd, wink wink). You can deny the Earth, the universe and everything in it is His, if only to escape the moral cesspool we can't deny exists.
Just look at the paper.

But when we accept He's real, when we realise our sin is just too much, what do we do? It's amazing that the most blatant sinners fled towards Jesus, instead of away from Him like so many of us. Because of who He is. Because of what He came to do.

Because of who He is. God in flesh. The God of the universe taking on our weaknesses, our limitations, our trials and temptations.
He understands what it's like to not get your rights.
He understands what it's like to have your hormones awaken, your body changing, and that flush of love.
He understands what it's like to be too busy for what you want to do.
And he understands how you feel that flash of anger, that lure of sin, and those lies we're told by the devil that our faith cannot withstand public scrutiny, that other racial groups aren't to be respected as fellow brothers and sisters, that our industrial success cannot be compromised to save millions of lives, that it's okay to insult a woman's decency.
He knows where they come from. An evil influence in a corrupt heart.

And because of what He came to do. The Bible's most-quoted verses are John 3:16-17. "For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish but have everlasting life. For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through Him might be saved."
God hates our evil and corrupt hearts. He hates them so much He kills His own Son to rescue us from them. He loves us enough to not only rescue us, but to become one of us. A holy, pure, infinite God becoming a puny, timebound human weakened by hunger, birthed in a dirty manger.
Not only that. A puny, timebound human mocked by men and put to a shameful and extremely painful death. A death that forever changed the course of human history.

Into the tomb He went, and on Sunday out He came! Don't imagine our leaders, sincere though they are, can make a utopia on earth. Sin, fear, guilt and death. Those are the scourges He frees us from. Those are the scourges He understands, the burdens He lifts. He is the One who announces:
"Come to me, all you who labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest." (Matthew 11:28)

And sure is the destination of those He continues to guide. That's what all began in a Bethlehem manger two millenia ago.

(Apologies to Max Lucado, Philip Yancey and any others I may have borrowed from. This was just the way my thoughts came out.)

PC game review: They could give it so much better

What is it with 1997's Starship Troopers that we love? Is it the bugs (NOT arachnids! Who got that horrid, not to mention biologically inaccurate, idea)? Is it the guns? Is it the action? If so, the 2005 PC game's got all three.
But is it enough? Sadly, no.
When I played the FPS game it seemed so fun despite the relatively bad graphics and voice acting. What could be more fun than ploughing through thousands and thousands of giant bugs after your blood?
I hit upon the answer. Doing it with fellow characters you care about, solid people with personalities instead of generic plasma/mandible/tanker fodder. That's what made the film so darn good--characters who interact, who fight, who bond. You eventually begin to really care for Rico & Co., and the bugs are just excuses, excuses for the characters to do something and get killed off in gruesome ways. In fact, you could replace them with marauding humanoid aliens or modern-day terrorists or WW2 Japanese soldiers a la Windtalkers and nothing much would've changed.
That said, the game can be summed up with the Franz Ferdinand album title You Could Have It So Much Better. Characterisation, the key that made the movie so darn good, is missing for the most part (an early attempt of making your character look like a badass s.o.b. of a soldier just falls flat).
And what is it with the cutscenes? This game is supposedly set five years after the movies, but they all come direct from the films themselves! Let's all say with F.E.A.R.'s archvillain Paxton Fettel, "Is it Hesperus? Is it Klathandu? It makes no difference." Add a horribly underpowered rocket launcher, and you've got a generous dash of fun-spoiling.

So much for the bad--on to the good. There's quite a lot of good stuff here, even if you have to revisit the quickload screen many, many times.
For one, I love the Mk. 4 rifle. Unlimited ammo and a grenade launcher--cool! And the shotgun's one of the best renderings I've ever seen in a game. Half-Life 2 and Halo's can't hold a candle to this awesome beast. The mission variety involves much more than just ploughing through bugs, rinse and repeat; it's got to be seen to be believed. Save a compound from bug invasion. Take out those big bad plasmas and save the fleet. And is your own side really what it seems? The story's quite well done, although, like I said, a Medal of Honor: Pacific Assault-style squad would've made kicking bug butt so much more fun and crucial.
On the technical side, I think I understated the graphical quality. Enemy rendering is excellent, with bugs in yellow, green, chrome and black. Developer Strangelite has done a great job... but need we neglect friendly modelling? It's not just generic grunts; these guys' lips don't even move when they talk!
In short, Starship Troopers has many redeeming features, though it's still pretty frustrating. I'd recommend it if you've $50 to burn.

Some additional comments: (WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD)

-- What is it that you need a special dropship all to yourself?
-- Why aren't the grunt dropships armed to clear landing zones? You'd think in the far future they'd have solved that problem. (We have; gunships and helicopter-mounted cannons.)
-- Why are infantry sent to clear large land areas when a strategic airstrike would've done the same thing?
-- What's wrong with the Fleet? One person's sent into a bug party with no artillery or air support; again, are we really that much stupider than the bugs are? (They have plasmas, hello? What do we have?)
-- Your pilot talks big for someone who's nothing more than a glorified taxi driver. Why isn't she shot down so you can rescue her and provide a little characterisation? Would've helped the game a lot.
-- Overall, the tactics and technological level are very Korean War-era. That's forgivable given Robert A. Heinlein wrote ST in 1959. But you'd think this far ahead of him we'd have wised up.

END OF SPOILERS

Overall score: 6.5 (out of 10)

Smut is smut

I'm not sure what to make of this idea. Wonder if Max Lucado (it's his city) has anything to say about it?

Speak no evil (of MoaG)

The Hollywood movie Memoirs of a Geisha is controversial, to say the least. That's why I will NOT be publishing my theory why Chinese actresses are cast in Japanese roles :p
Not that I fear having an opinion on controversial issues, but it's just what science fiction writer James Alan Gardner called "the disconnect between what I say and what people end up hearing."
So, nothing from me about it.

We need a HERO!!!

Just to kick off, here's a suggestion for our very own land.

Illegal drugs are more of a problem the world over than I thought. What does a super-problem need to solve? A superhero, of course!
We need a hero to defend this noble country (and indeed the entire world!) against the scourge that the international drug trade has become. No longer are we to be satisfied with the arrest of small fry; we go after those taking these people to their doom. We need a hero to rescue the trade's victims the world over! A hero to bring the full weight of justice against these perpetrators of destruction! A hero with powers enough to bring down barons and drug-pushing governments, a hero we all can look up to in our moments of darkness.

You probably won't be seeing Captain Narcobuster in comics anytime soon, though, much less in real life. (A short story maybe; I may get round to it sometime) But then again, haven't we solved superhero-type problems before?

So, leaders, loosen your ties. Imagine what CN would to to the illegal drug trade had he the international power. For by examining our heroes, we examine ourselves. What we want, what we dream. And what we would do.

Why I write

I'm anxious to get started... what are you waiting for, ZP?

In his book The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, C S Lewis symbolised the necessary punishment of wrongs ("Deep Magic") and a higher Law that enabled grace to triumph where justice could not, a "Deeper Magic" of atonement and love.

I played with the idea of blogging for a while, having read plenty about people sueing and getting sued, flaming and getting flamed. That's not something I want... I believe in free speech so long as we're responsible and respectful, even with those we disagree with.
The apostle Paul said we must speak always with grace, seasoned with salt (Colossians 4:6). If you're reading this, thanks a million. It's nice to meet you; you've entrusted me with time and intellect, and I want to be a good steward of both.

This isn't just about what goes on in my life (not too interesting), oh no. This isn't just leaving you an opinion in the hope you'll adopt it (pleeeeasssseee?). I like to maintain the good side of blogging, and the possibilities are just too big for that. I write to get these opinions off my chest, put it somewhere I can help, somewhere I can reason.

After you drop by, do please leave a note; what do you think. It's important to me.

PS-- it's only polite, leh! Haha...