10 years since RPGe

I intended to write something for March 19 to coincide with the day I left RPGe. Real life jumped in and this is coming 10 days late. Hey, at least with this delay it is now 10 years and 10 days, and that has a damn nice ring to it.

A decade is not a short time.

RPGe died 9 years ago. I left it in a total mess. I am not sure if I gave MagitekKn the e-mail addresses of the group’s other members. It was a disaster — one that made me look bad and crippled what was the first translation scene group, and up until that time the biggest.

Everything is gone. The older patches were never archived. The Web site, despite having more than a million hits, never made it into the Wayback Machine. Only one page survives, dating from the summer of 1997 — the first time I considered jumping ship. It is a humbling experience to see how something that was the talk of every Squaresoft fan page — then a huge chunk of the Internet — can be so easily lost.

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Critical look at the Tibet troubles

I hope you appreciate the risk I am taking in writing about this on my Web page. The Golden Firewall and the Nanny are not the most sophisticated of filtering softwares, and I may easily spit out the string of words that will make my own Web page forever inaccessible.

However, amidst the international hysteria surrounding what is going down in Tibet, I feel compelled to write my take on it.

This is not a news article. I am not going to cite every single source for everything I have heard. I am merely putting to word all that has been kicking about my head since Friday, but without the charge found in most media coverage. AFP and Reuters were quite objective, but the New York Times continues to tow strings of unsubstantiated claims and misrepresented facts.

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From polygons to pixels: Final Fantasy VII

It was a very troubling time: 1997. The Super Nintendo had perished, the Sega Genesis was on its third revision with little new to offer and gamers were flocking to the banner of Sony, then a newcomer on the video game scene with its PlayStation console.

Gone were the blocks of the Atari 2600. Gone were the pixels of the 8-bit Nintendo Entertainment System. Gone were the vibrant colors of the Super Nintendo.

Polygons were all the rage, and every game had to have them. For myself, as well as many other gamers, Final Fantasy VII (FF7) was our first immersion into the world of what would end up being the RPGs of the next decade. Some loved it, some hated it. I loved it and hated it.

Over the years, pictures would turn up showing off Final Fantasy games that were finally terminated, such as the 8-bit version of Final Fantasy IV. Aside from a few fluff ports of old titles to new hardware, the series would never really go back to its roots no matter how much anyone wanted it to.

Until now.

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FBI Ate My Balls

If one of the Internet’s “older” denizens, you may remember “Ate My Balls,” one of the earliest examples of an Internet meme to spread off the web and into commercial press. “Ate My Balls” graced the pages of many authors, including the Miami Herald’s Dave Barry.

There were many “Ate My Balls” sites: Charles Bukowski Ate My Balls, Mr. T Ate My Balls and, most special to me, Faelan Ate My Balls.

Now, this is not special to me because Faelan ate my balls; it is special to me because I hosted it, along with the rest of Emucult.

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Someone let out the stupids

It’s Sunday in Beijing, and for those of you who live here, you know what that means: the stupids are on the loose!

Yes, everywhere you go, you will find hundreds of people doing everything they can to possibly inconvenience and aggravate you.

Today, I had the misfortune of meeting a shop clerk who apparently does not understand English or Chinese.

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“Jew Techniques for Making Money”

One of my coworkers pointed me to a book allegedly titled, 《犹太人赚钱的方法》. He said it was comical in how many endless bigoted stereotypes it provided. Given I love anything in bad tastes, I immediately went hunting for it.

In the end, I never found it. But I did find this similar article on the GuangDong Securities Web site, 《犹太人赚钱研究》, or, “Jew Techniques for Making Money.” It’s worth a note the two English phrases KingSoft’s PowerWord brings up for the word “Jew” are, “Worth a Jew’s eye” and “Rich as a Jew.”

I need to note, I do not endorse any of the information contained in this post. I am merely reporting facts which I find extremely amusing in the same way I find South Park amusing—the difference being this is real.

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How To: Improved Chinese fonts on Ubuntu

Since this is only on the Chinese Ubuntu wiki, I figured some people might miss it.

Shawn Ling wrote up a guide on how to get Vera Sans YuanTi working in Ubuntu. The steps are pretty simple.

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Sailing off the edge of the map

While walking home today, musing on the latest tidbits of gore news I’ve been glowing over the last week, my again thoughts turned to language and the words we use to express ourselves. The best part about gore news is how every story ends the same: in death.

No matter what language we use, death seems a sticky topic for us humans: especially in common speech. Reporters may use that sterile, icy word to describe the ‘passing’ of a celebrity, but we mostly avoid it in polite conversation.

Humans never die.

Your cat can die. Your cell phone battery can die. Your computer’s network connection can die. The chrysanthemums you keep on your windowsill will die if you don’t water them.

But grandma? Grandma doesn’t die: she ‘passes away’ or ‘passes on.’

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Harvesting the homeless, a modern proposal

According to the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS), there are around 92,500 people waiting for an organ in the United States as of 11:40 p.m. August 1. However, this list has a problem: it is not compiled by UNOS, only maintained by it. The list is actually compiled by 256 different centers around the country who decide who lives and who dies based on their “own criteria,” that being how much money you have.

According to an ABC News story, as many as 25 percent of organ donations come from people with no insurance who, though they donate, will never be able to receive an organ transplant since hospitals will foot the bill for neither surgery no recovery.

The ABC News report quoted Laura Siminoff, a bioethicist, as saying.

From a very clinical point of view, you can ask what is the difference if the donor is dead? Except as a society we don’t view dead people as garbage.

Realistically speaking, we all know anyone without money to be in the overlords club—the rich WASPs who control America with an iron fist and make sure there’s plenty of Sesame Street and pornography to keep the rest of the country distracted—gets fucked by the system. That’s the way we decided the United States could best serve the interests of its people, so I don’t think anyone would argue against the right of the rich to harvest organs from the poor.

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Childhood

When I was in fourth grade, I remember my parents had to sign a permission script for sex education class. This was a time when they had the one male teacher in the school take all the boys in one room, then send all the girls to another room, and they showed us a video that would supposedly answer all the questions none of us even had.

I would like to describe that video.

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