Smitten by who?

Took me a while to find again but there was an interesting forum discussion here. One of the questions raised was, “If the Christian God was in a computer game what would he be like?”

Some of the other gods are pretty easy to determine, like Zeus, Ra, Thor & Wukong. They could fairly easily be incorporated in to Xmen for example and nothing would be amiss. Then in Buddhism and Tao there isn’t really a god you can work with. The Christian God the Father is a bit like that, an omnipresent all powerful authority figure who wont act in a way that definitively proves he exists, (apart from maintaining gravity and DNA replication and stuff). Thirdly is the Spirit who has two avatars “like a dove” and “tongues of fire” Luke3:22 and Acts2:3 respectively. So then you have a bit to work with, there isn’t really a physical form so immunity to physical damage makes sense. The Spirit is also multilingual and can live within people, making them hear and see better. Then there is Jesus who has a nice physical avatar which is easy to relate to, so totally human with all the normal squishiness (unlike Thor). Jesus also has heaps of miracles, turning water into wine, calming a storm, walking on water and lots of healing, even bringing Lazarus back from the dead. Defiantly a support healer. All in all the Christian Deity has a rather dull and practical set of abilities. Compared to Zeus who is responsible for lightning, Ra kind of is the sun, Thor’s hammer is faster/harder/heavier than everything and Wukong has a staff multitool, flies on a cloud and didn’t get hurt when a mountain was dropped on him.

Whats your take? hase Smite gone too far? Would Jesus fit in a computer game? Should Kali be dressed more modestly?

Something about the esoteric knowledge of a linux sailor

Some days at work I feel like a sailor returning home. I know what I’ve done but nobody else seems to.

It was a hectic day on the sea, I had to cry for buoy room because a cleat gave way whilst we were on starboard tack, the jib luffed until I could reef the sheet back on but by then we were in irons and had to get close hauled again before attacking the buoy.

Today I was stumped by a genie, seems each component in most of the BGA screens has been manually configured and grouped together. Nobody has updated them since 5 so the variables are in an old format. They still work but it’s worth replacing them whenever you find one. But the main reason the genies don’t function is that the tag nomenclature has changed and I’m used to using Units to describe Loops, but in BGA it seems the boiler title is used instead. I cant even show what I’m talking about because it’s a dynamic system and only a few things are visible at any one time. For the most part the changes I’ve don’t are invisible and if I do a really good job nobody will notice any difference at all.



Despite how much I dislike jargon in church I seem to use a lot of it at work and around the place. Then occasionally somebody will make the joke about knowing a second language and its called C++. I’m not sure that really counts.

Five Basic Tastes

Bitterness, Saltiness, Sourness, Sweetness and Umami. Doesn’t include spicy, I wonder why? I like spicy foods, we used to grow our own birds eyes chillies and used them in a lot of cooking (Scoville 50k-100k). Now I have some plants of Habanero but I find them too hot at 100-350k Scoville units.

I remember one time I made a curry for the Bowes and it mostly had cinnamon and cumin as the spices, nothing I’d consider remotely hot. I’d actually though t the meal was a bit sweet. But Cameron in particular didn’t like it because it was too spicy. I had to take this to mean too many flavours.

Needless to say I rarely make something as hot as I like and then add a bit of perri perri sauce or something at the end. Never as good when its not mixed through but a decent compromise to be able to share my cooking.

I don’t quite follow the Umami taste category, apparently it’s the reason to add cabbage to chicken soup and the reason parmesan cheese goes well with tomatoes and mushrooms. The chemicals pertaining to it produce a long lasting meaty or brothy flavour. It also seems to require combination with another source of umami flavour in order to be pleasant.

Coincidentally Sun Tsu also mentions five basic tastes near the end of chapter five. I wonder if he includes spicy? Or maybe Acid is the last taste he considers?

12: Tao Te Ching

I am reminded by my Beta testing post the Tao Tea Ching verse #12.
It’s about desensitisation. The more we seek something, especially where it is the primary goal of life we can never be satisfied. If I aim to eat nice food and am always trying new things and going to far away places to taste local delectable delicacies. But my tastebuds will never be satisfied. Even if I take the flavours and textures home I will only be able to temporarily sate my hunger. The more sweeter and enjoyable the things we find the greater out demands become, it’s a logarithmic progression.

Same goes for other desires, anything with goal setting or continual improvement. Be wary that the search for fulfilment doesn’t overtake your life. The only exception I can think of is Z loan where this continual search keeps you human. In all other occasions the Sage would advocate “everything in moderation”, don’t desensitise yourself to the pleasures of life but allow them to be pleasant surprises along the way.

The beautiful colours make people's eyes blind,
The appealing music makes people's ears deaf,
The delicious flavours make people's mouth numb,
To indulge in hunting makes people's heart wild,
To pursue rare treasures makes people's behavior improper.
So, as the sage attends to the inner world, not the outer world,
Throw away the latter and adopt the former.

wikisource.org

Always be a Beta tester

Recent upgrades at work have highlighted the fact that I deal quite well with broken computer systems and a lack of support. But that’s because I’ve been beta testing games for a while. But in the workplace programs really should work the first time, be reliable and give informative errors.

For example:
Programmer sitting at PC with Win7, running Citect HMI on primary monitor.
Second monitor running windows remote desktop to a factory PC, also running Win7 and the new Citect HMI 7.20.
The programming PC is working fine and Citect properly communication between the two PCs.
The factory PC showing all local variables, but nothing that is being passed from the Programming PC.
Using the windows remote desktop opened command prompt on factory PC to ping programming PC.
No response, this computer is not on the network
:(

Also
Refinery PC sending steam usage data back to the boilers station.
Of the 4 boilers PC’s this data is visible on the 3 where it is not usually used.
The one where we want steam usage occasionally shows the correct value/ #COMS / #BAD
This was due to a security patch, blocking offsite use of the refinery data. The patch failed 3.5 times out of 4.
Workaround is to create individual login data for each of the 4 boilers PC and hardcode it into the Refinery PC.
Thereby allowing the boilers PC’s to see the data from the Refinery PC.

Also
Nearly all the settings from the ini file are now options within Citect
Conversely nearly everything that was a option is now defined in the ini file.

Also
Everything with an icon now has a new icon, nothing looks quite the same as it used to. For no apparent reason.

Also
I go away on the weekend and shutdown my PC when leaving.
Come back monday morning to see a notice "this program has stopped responding do you want  to close it anyway?"
Well, no, not anymore now that I am back. I click cancel.
PC shuts down to spite me...

While win7 is new for the factory PC’s its not new software and this version of Citect was released in 2010. The reason for the update is the supposed lack of support and security on the XP machines. While its not supposed to be a downgrade there doesn’t seem to be many improvements as yet, just a lot of changes.


Thus I’m happy to go home and play with RazerComms and assume it will break but not be too worried if it does. Mostly though I’m pleasantly surprised how smoothly RazerComms runs. I hope I can always be a beta test and am always looking for ways to improve and acknowledging defects. This also gets back to my enjoyment of learning.

Another recent one is Warframe, its nice to see the game developing from player suggestions. Seems every week there is a UI tweak that makes it easier to use and they usually add more ingame items. Though the ingame items are where they make their cash.

Also turns out that I was an Alpha tester for Hawken, though we haven’t been really keen on that game. I like MWO better, but I;m biased from putting some cash into that one.

A Space Ninja Co-Op FPS

Warframe seems like a good replacement for Berserk the cataclysm, which irritated me. There is still a collectible card game that is gradually growing in size. And the cards do interesting things. The base damage of all the weapons doesn’t change but the cards you collect change the special abilities. And the more you practice with a weapon more (powerful) abilities can be applied to it. This is just the sort of level up system I like. More exiting special abilities to lean how and when to use rather than a dull increase in strength.

So for example I can chose to build a gun with greater critical hit chance and crit damage. Or go for an increase in ammo and clip capacity. If I know the map has heavily armoured opponents I may remove all my other abilities and use flat armour penetration. Currently the game has only 4 energy types: Electricity, Fire, Frost and Armour. Then there are a few mechanical upgrade cards. I haven’t yet seen an electric or frost enemies, but have seen a few that are weak against each of these elements.

The actual Warframe is like a skin-tight Mecha and so you also gain experience at using it and can give it different flavours with your collectable cards as well, like move speed or better shields. Some of the warframe abilities are more reminiscent of Dragon Ball Z than any Mechs I’ve seen.

Another similarity to Berzerk is the daily login reward. But better than berserk it doesn’t demand I play for an hour every 8hours. I can just login, look for an alert and leave.



Other than that the plot and world remind me of E.Y.E Devine Cybermancy and the foundry is a bit like TF2. I’m hoping it will allow us to trade cards at a later date and open up the resource items to an auction house. The gameplay is also reminiscent of Tribes Ascended in which I had great fun skiing but never really bothered fighting. Though in this one there are a lot of wall runs, backflips and general matrix fighting techniques I’ve found that I lack fingers to press all the required buttons on the keyboard.



The four player limitation is interesting. It’s certainly not an MMO, but single player is really hard so playing with at least one other person is best. I think it’s a good design decision especially considering the stealth elements of the game and the nature of the quests. Then again the stealth feels a bit unfinished. Currently you only gain experience from kills and loot is only found on corpses so there is no tangible benefit of being a ninja.

Maybe if there were missions that required you to never set of the alarm. Or you could hack the terminals, so the alarm cannot be activated in that room. But there also needs to be a card/resource/xp reward equivalent to all the minions you don’t kill to make the effort worthwhile.



The death mechanic could do with some work, failing the mission makes sense. But then I’m immediately safe back in my space station. Possibly if there were alert missions for emergency extraction it would be a bit more seamless. I know there are prisoner rescue missions but they are all set pieces and I’ve no personal attachment to the prisoners. I’d be happy to do an emergency extraction every time I failed a mission, then have it kept score like a Kill:Death ratio.



Overall it’s already been more fun than Mechwarrior Online. And also may take the place of LOL as my quick co op game. Depending on what happens at the guild level it may eat into my GW2 time. Defiantly also has more staying power than something like Deus Ex.

Amulet of Life Saving

It was a “charm of food preservation”, not an “amulet of life preservation” not that anybody noticed the difference until it was too late. I was a rather poorly child growing up, at least my mother though so. So she bought this for me from some old dude in a back ally. Not knowing what an “Amulet of Life Saving” was supposed to look like, or that they were illegal. It seemed unusual in the way that magic usually does. The chain was made of “preservation Charms”, often a single charm would be nailed to the door or your pantry to keep food from going stale. Only one charm is really needed though some people may put another on a luchbox or the like for travelling. The pendant was supposed to have been enchanted with troll’s blood for regeneration and fast healing. But eventually we found that the symbol ☣U+2623 was in fact made of vampires blood and was cursed, not that I noticed. Why would you want to remove your healing charm?

As for its effectiveness, well it didn’t make me any less healthy and rare meat sure rejuvenated me, never thought to try it raw. Nothing terribly bad ever happened to put it to the test either. Until … well I don’t really want to talk about that.

But yeah, I cant remove it and I cant really die, not that I look particularly alive. I do heal up, but that’s only really effective if I drink the blood of the living. I’m happy enough eating raw meat, but living like a vampire is a little extreme. Better I think to cover up with a coat and gloves, occasionally pretending I’m a leper or some such. I wasn’t always a free man, so this has only been a recent concern.

You see it wasn’t me who first found out I couldn’t properly die. And then by the time they killed me enough to make me realise my Amulet should have broken everything I was already trapped. I suspect at first it was some sort of assassins guild that bought me to practice on but then I had a fair bit of freedom. Well they were trying to take me by surprise as well as kill me. But at some point things changed…messily. Then I was imprisoned more literally and practiced on by several of the more unpleasant underworld professionals. Not something I can spend much time dwelling on. Eventually I wasn’t rescued but the dungeon that was my home was, unmade. Then being who I am I was able to extrude myself from the wreckage. It seems nobody was left that knew I would survive something like that. Thus my freedom was gained, such as it was.

I suppose you are wondering what happened to my necklace, well the few people who may have been able to help remove the curse chose instead to “improve“ on the enchantment, or attempted to copy it. Well I’m not really sure where it is, but I know that it’s magic lingers still.

And so I remain, cursed to preserve, not able to die and because of that not really able to live either.