Move out Marines!

I'm back. I was slipping out of my old routine and slacking, so am here to attempt to get back into things. There is only one thing to blame, really (other than myself of course), and that is Battlefield 3. What a glorious, epic game that is. It lives up to all my expectations and surpasses some. The single player is an intriguing story, and although the overall length of the game is a little shorter than most would like, I found it reasonable. The action is intense and varied, thanks to the mechanism of switching between several characters to tell different parts of the same story, with brilliant building of suspense during cut scenes and plot moments.

I think this game wows mainly because of the graphics and effects. The Frostbite 2 engine used by DICE is absolutely breathtaking. The sheer beauty of the world allows you to overlook pretty much any flaw. With lens flare glinting off the spray-flecked glass canopy of your F-18 as you take off from the deck of U.S.S George H W Bush in the Persian Gulf on a stormy, moody day, streaking through clouds towards an Iranian airbase, you really feel part of something on a huge scale, and you absolutely do not care about anything other than nailing those bogeys.

LOOK AT THE SHINY!

The lighting, the shadows, the smoothness of the soldiers' uniforms, their animations, the detail on vehicles, the environment, on your weapon.. everything. It's phenomenal.

Multiplayer is where the game really shines. The maps are great and offer everything from close-quarters inner city combat with tight alleys (The Grand Bazaar, Seine Crossing) to long range vehicle warfare (Caspian Border, Kharg Island), with variations on each map depending on game mode. The weapons are suitably meaty, sound effects are great (especially player call-outs, when they are pinned down or out of ammo), ground vehicles are easy to pick up, difficult to master, whereas helicopters and jets are just... difficult.

There are a few flaws. Some menus are difficult to navigate, and a glaring omission is the ability to quit between games.. you have to wait for the map to load before exiting the game, which does get annoying. Sometimes changes you make to your kit or solider aren't saved between sessions, and EA's whole 'Buy an online pass' thing is a horrific money-grabbing scheme that means BF3 is going to be more expensive as a second-hand game, due to having to buy a new code for online play. There is no manual included with the game so unless you can find the controls in the menus or remember them from the tutorials forever, good luck. Ridiculous.

Still, those technical faults aside, I think this is a truly brilliant game, and one I am not ashamed to be wasting my days playing.

Freshness

I have a new computer!

It's a rather impressive beast, the main tower unit is roughly half as big again, (if not more) as my old one, all matt black metal, plastic and hexagonal fan vents. My old PC was a faithful if tired old companion, having been with me for four years or so. During that time he had multiple nervous breakdowns, a pretty serious one leaving him somewhat crippled a few months ago. The version of XP was corrupted... somehow... so the hard drive had to be split up and a clean new version put on beside it - it worked, but he was never the same after that. He got slower and slower, and had repeated issues with memory running out and so on.

It was time for a new one, and I am very, very grateful to my partner for hooking me up with my lovely new machine. The old one is going to be put in the living room with a new hard drive and hooked up to the TV as a media PC, which is cool, but I'm not sure how much use it will get, considering we have an Xbox 360 and the V+ Media box already hooked up.

My new PC is named Ceres, mostly after the dwarf planet that inhabits the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, but then I soon realised that is also the name of the Roman Goddess of agriculture, grain crops and fertility. My huge, hulking computer is a girl!

Oh well. So far everything has been great. I'm loving Windows 7, and the ability to run more than two programs at once is refreshing. One thing I realised yesterday whilst transferring my most valuable files (music albums) across the network, was just how much clutter I had accumulated across various folders - things I had held onto because they might be useful or valuable someday - and when it came down to it, I realised they were useless and that I would not miss them. So I didn't transfer anything except my music collection, some photographs and a few stories and things I had written that I intend to work on again someday; I left 98% of the couple hundred GBs worth of stuff behind - and I was right - I don't miss it. I feel great having a clean, empty, fast computer that isn't bogged down by years of collected garbage.

Perhaps it would be good if we could upgrade our lives sometimes and leave all the baggage and trash behind us..

Glitch in the System

My recent lack of posting is due almost entirely to a game called Glitch. Pretty much every spare minute of my time has been taken up by dipping into this fascinating world. At first, I was overwhelmed and confused, but I am glad I stuck at it.

So what is Glitch?

I'm not sure I can explain it properly. To play, it feels like a platformer, but it also has resource gathering, character progression and items to buy and sell. On top of that, it has a buddy and auction system, turning it into a very social and friendly game. You get bonuses if you help people, rather than ignore them. You can trade goods between characters so that everyone can find what they need to complete their next challenge or build their next item.

The world is based, apparently, inside the dreams of some giants, and ranges from craggy mountains and caves to grassland, mudflats and dense temperate pine forests. There are islands with far more abstract areas located on them, all bright purples and yellows, populated with spice trees and bubble plants.

Character customisation is both cosmetic and skill-based. There are a huge range of clothes, hair, ears, skins and so on to allow you to craft your Glitch into your ideal protagonist. My Glitch, named Hyperdoodle, rocks a long old navy-style trenchcoat, a cargidan, some boots and bright blue-silver spikey hair.

Skills initially seem rather confusing. You have limited options to start with that all seem to revolve around picking fruit, making sandwiches, and befriending animals. It takes time to unlock the ability to train in, what I consider, the far more fun fields of mining, alchemy, meditation and teleportation. Every skill is useful, and you eventually have the chance to learn them all - the best thing is that you can study them while outside the game - which is good, because some take more than 24 hours to complete!

It really is a fun little game, and it is very hard to convey the epic scale of it here, I think you'll have to check it out for yourselves. A basic account is free to play, and for the moment at least, they offer a free month's upgrade to a subscriber account, which allows access to far more character parts and clothes. You can find the game here:

http://www.glitch.com/

No Surrender

Hiroo Onoda was a Second Lieutenant in the Imperial Japanese Army, an intelligence officer, trained in guerilla warfare and commando tactics, with express orders to under no condition surrender or take his own life - he was told that the Japanese Army would return for him eventually. He took this order to the extreme when it emerged that he and his small unit of three men were still fighting long after the war ended.

They were located in the jungle of Lubang Island in the Philippines and harassed the civilian population there for decades. All attempts to convince the men that the war was over failed - they assumed that pamphlets, leaflets, letters and even family photographs dropped from planes were hoaxes constructed by the Allied forces. One of the men, Yuichi Akatsu surrendered to Filipino forces in 1950, after walking away from Onoda's unit.

Parties were sent into the jungle to find the three remaining men, who were still harassing locals and waging war on what they thought was an enemy dressed in civilian clothing. In 1954, Shoichi Shimada, a member of the guerilla group, was killed by a shot fired by a search party sent to find them, leaving just Inoda and his last man, Kinshichi Kozuka in the unit.

Kozuka was killed by local police in 1972, when he and Onoda were burning rice collected by local farmers.

Norio Suzuki, a college drop out who was travelling the world, looking for "Lieutenant Onoda, a panda, and the Abominable Snowman, in that order", actually managed to find the Lieutenant in February of 1974, when dozens of search parties had failed, and tried to convince him that the war was over and he should surrender. Onoda refused, saying he was waiting for orders from a superior officer.

Suzuki returned to Japan with photographs as proof of their encounter, and the government located Onoda's former commanding officer, Major Taniguchi, who had since become a bookseller. He flew to Lubang and on March 9, 1974, finally gave Onoda the orders he had been waiting for the past 30 years. He was relieved of his orders and post without having to surrender. He handed over his rifle, still in good working order, his sword, some grenades and 500 rounds of ammunition, as well as the dagger his mother had given him in 1944.

He had killed some 30 Filipino inhabitants of Lubang, and had been engaged in several shootouts with police, he was pardoned by the president of the Philippines, Ferdinand Marcos, due to the extraordinary nature of the situation. Onoda returned to Japan as something of a hero - he wasn't the last Japanese soldier to be found fighting the war, but he was definitely the most popular.

Now, reading about Onoda got me thinking. What if I had been in that situation? Would I have surrendered sooner, or carried on fighting for thirty years? You may think it was common sense to assume that the war could not possibly have lasted so long, but to the highly patriotic Japanese soldiers, that notion was more believable than the concept that Japan would have lost the war. Ultimately, it was a combined sense of honour, duty and patriotism that led Onoda to carry on fighting for so long. Would I have been able to exhibit similar qualities in a similar situation?

Raised in the way he would have been, with his mindset and beliefs that were drilled into him from an early age, perhaps I would. Of course, being an insulin-dependent diabetic, it's highly unlikely that I would have been sent anywhere - but mentally, I think I could do it. It would get easier over time, not harder. You'd fall into a routine, a strong sense of purpose and you'd find it ever easier to justify your activities. Couple that with the extreme paranoia of war, the undying patriotism and loyalty of soldiers in that period, but especially that of the Imperialist Japanese Forces, and orders that not only require you to keep going, but also promise specifically how you will be relieved... and you have an understanding of just how easy it would be to hide in a jungle for thirty years, taking the odd shot at a local and burning their rice harvests.

Onoda was not a hero or a villain. He was just doing what he was told.

Graffiti

Something that has always fascinated me is graffiti. I'm not talking about scrawling your name over a wall with a fat pen, I'm talking proper, artistic, beautiful masterpieces.

As I grew up, I found the drab greyness of suburban life rather a drag; the average building around where I lived (Uxbridge and Hillingdon, North-West London) was decidedly dreary in comparison to the beauty of the natural world. There were parks, sure, but they were boring, built not for attractiveness but for functionality: all children's play areas and football pitches. The urban environment lacked imagination, sparkle and colour.

I started to notice graffiti at quite a young age and immediately found it interesting. Why would someone go to the time of spraying such elaborate designs on a public wall? Why would they risk getting caught by the police for the sake of painting? The rebelliousness really struck a chord with me. I will be the first to admit, I was a  good kid. Maybe too good. I never did anything wrong, and part of me regrets that these days - to have been out there exploring and messing about must have been exciting.

My younger brother used to go out tagging at night, he would take a thick yellow or black paint pen and doodle his name or a signature 'tag' on some wall somewhere. He'd spend hours practicing on sheets of A4 paper, wasting hundreds of them, and it boggled my mind, how someone could be out there doing this stuff and not want to actually create something beautiful. At that moment, I realised I understood proper graffiti - it is art. Tagging is just destroying property, it's ugly and pointless, whereas someone who can put even a moment's thought into an original and quality design before spraying can be regarded as an artist who wants to brighten up the bleary, grey urban landscape.

For my birthday this year, my partner bought me a book called Graffiti World by Nicholas Ganz. If you've ever had more than a passing interest in graffiti, I highly recommend it as a rather detailed and thorough guide to street art all over the world. Reading interviews in the book with these artists has helped confirm my belief that ultimately, graffiti is a good thing. It not only pretties up the place, but it can also be used to convey important political or ideological messages, or simply provide a moment of insight and inspiration.

My favourite pieces are usually very simple messages that contain a great truth or idea in very few words.

My other favourite type of graffiti are those that combine epic characters and abstract murals and paintings.

Seak

Faith 47

rockGroup

Daim

Corail

Maybe someday I will try to develop and perfect my own writing style, but I am very unlikely to ever use it out on the street. Luckily, I am quite happy to bask in the magnificence of these writers and their art without going out and practising it for myself.

The Aral Sea

If I asked you to point to the Aral Sea on a map, you might guess somewhere in central Asia, you know, one of those places like the Dead Sea or the Black Sea that sounds vaguely exotic and mysterious. It was, in fact, on the border between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, not far to the East of the Caspian Sea.

I say 'was', because it has shrunk at a horribly alarming rate. In 1985, the Aral Sea was the fourth largest lake in the world, covering approximately 26,000 square miles. This is a view of it from the north side, taken by a Space Shuttle.

Over the next couple of decades, the sea began to shrink quickly, due to irrigation works carried out in the 1960's by the Soviet Union. The canals they built diverted water away from the two main rivers that fed the Aral Sea, to cotton farms in the surrounding areas. Soviet Engineers predicted that this would cause the lake to dry up, but the projects went ahead anyway, without regard for the impact on the environment and people that lived around the Aral Sea.

August, 2009. The Aral Sea is now only the world's eighth largest lake, and is split into two portions that cover barely ten percent of its original surface area. The Little Aral Sea is the blob at the top (north) of the image, located within Kazakhstan. A dam has been constructed to hold the water in, and to slow evaporation. Water levels are now rising in this smaller portion of the Sea, enough to reduce salinity and allow fish stocks to recover. However, the southern Aral Sea, located in much poorer Uzbekistan, has no such project, and with no major source of water flowing into it, is likely to have vanished entirely by 2020.

This is not some small puddle. The amount of water lost from the Aral Sea is equivalent to completely draining Lake Erie and Lake Ontario, the two smallest of North America's five Great Lakes, some 900+ cubic kilometres of water. The fishing industry on the Aral Sea once employed 40,000 people and is now utterly destroyed. The main fishing town is now miles from any water, and the few fish that do remain have to compete with increasing salinity - more than 20 species of flora and fauna have become extinct. Boats litter the desert that was once the sea bed, a desert that is poisoned by chemicals and toxins from farming cotton, and from the Soviet chemical and biological weapons testing facility on Vozrozhdeniya or "Rebirth Island" (which is now no longer an island and is merely part of the exposed lake bed). Dust storms whip up the toxic sand and blast it across the basin, causing serious health problems for those who still live in the surrounding areas.

All in all, the Aral Sea is a tragic example of a government putting short term financial ideals ahead of long term environmental and human needs. Work is underway to try to save the Aral Sea but most projects are prohibitively expensive and totally impractical. It is very likely that the only remains of this once vast body of water will be a small lake and a poisoned, lifeless desert.

Quotes

Today, I'd like to share some of my favourite inspiring quotes with you. The thing about a good quote is that it has to be succinct, direct, and ultimately strike you as the truth. In everything from speeches to song lyrics, there are lines and phrases that grab hold of me and drag me to another place - often one of clarity and inspiration, but sometimes quite the opposite. I'll try to explain why I love each quote as we go along.

"Imagination is more important than knowledge" 

- Albert Einstein

I often list Einstein among my favourite people of all time, and for good reason. Not only was he quite possibly the greatest physicist of the 20th century, but he was also a campaigner for human rights, equality and education. You need only look at his Wikipedia page to see just how much he contributed to the world of science. His most famous work is surely the E=mc^2 equation, which states that the mass of a body is a measure of its energy content. I do feel that imagination is more important than knowledge, but it took this quote to help me realise it - you can know everything in the world, but without imagination, you can't dream of what to do with that knowledge.

"Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter" 

- Martin Luther King, Jr.

I've always held the ideals of equality close to my heart, and MLK is possibly the finest example of a modern human rights leader as you're likely to find. His speeches were utterly intoxicating, and I could give you several fantastic quotes from him that have inspired me in the past. I think his assassination was ultimately, not such a bad thing; he became such a powerful symbol in death, more so than he ever could have in life.

"A conservative is a man who believes nothing should be done for the first time"

- Alfred E. Wiggam

I am strongly opposed to conservatism in all of its forms, and this quote beautifully sums up my feelings about those who wish to 'conserve' whatever ideal they promote - whether it is a return to an older system or way of life or maintaining things as they are and opposing progress on principle. The state of the world now and in the past is a shocking, horrible mess, unfair and unjust - to keep it the same or send it backwards, is, in my view, to remove basic freedoms and securities that people need in order to survive. Progress is a positive thing, always - to work towards a goal, to improve and grow, is surely the natural desire of all living things - to conserve and regress is to stunt, limit and wither.

"To laugh often and much; to win respect of intelligent people and the affection of children... to leave the world a better place... to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded."

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

This quote pretty much sums up my entire philosophy on life. Success cannot be measured by how much money you earn or how many fans you acquire, but by the positive impact you have made on other people's lives - to be remembered fondly is the greatest achievement that I can imagine.

"Whatever you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it."


"You must be the change you want to see in the world."


"When I despair, I remember that all through history the ways of truth and love have always won. There have been tyrants, and murderers, and for a time they can seem invincible, but in the end they always fall. Think of it--always."

- Mahatma Gandhi

Three epic quotes from one epic person. They speak of personal responsibility, the reality of an individual's limited effect on the world, but the huge effect he will have on those around him, the dangers of hypocrisy and the hopeful, beautiful idea that all bad things come to an end.

"Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart."

- Steve Jobs

Say what you like about his company, Apple, but Jobs himself was a rather brilliant man, and I know he will be missed.