RPG Articles

Oh lord. If you can get someone to strip an hour or two out of this abortion, then watch it for the awesome visuals. Looking further into the title, it seems it was based on a 70’s anime. Now, this will be tough to believe, but the anime storyline actually makes ten-thousand percent more sense. There are spoilers here, so don’t read on if you care.

What the crap man. Here’s what I could figure out about Casshan, the anime- Pollution is killing the plants, so Dr. Azuma builds robots to… somehow… protect and presumably encourage plant life. Their leader decides that eliminating the humans is the only long term solution, and Azuma’s son turns himself into a cyborg so he can take on the robots.

Nice, simple-ish, and with at least the potential for some meaningful moral tension.

The movie, despite receiving nothing but blowjobs from the public, breaks down into almost totally insensible crap.

There’s some war going on… some ethnic purging… so on. Dr. Azuma is researching Neo-Cells… which are like stem cells but apparently grow tentacles, and can be used to create tissues which will adapt to any host, avoiding rejection. So far, so good. His son runs off to the war, to do the patriotic thing. His wife is dying from the Industrial Disease, which is presumably what drives his research, though the connection is a little tenuous, but hey, I can let some vagueness slide for the sake of entertainment. His son dies, though his spirit seems to still be running around.

Some soldiers are bringing his body, for whatever reason, to the same place as Dr. Azuma’s lab. Lightning strikes, burrowing down into the lab, where a pool of Neo-Cell tissues are being kept. The lightning solidifies into a sort of zigzag pillar. Yeah… ok, I can let that slide too. The tissues start pulling themselves together, whole people crawl out, and start being shot down by guards. Eventually several of them make it out, dragging Azuma’s wife along, because she showed concern for one of their wounded.

The son, Tetsuya, is carried into the Neo-Cell vat by his father, and is brought back to life. He’s all superhumanly jacked up now, like the Neo-Sapiens, so another scientist drops him into a pressure cooker which grows armor around him, in order to “prevent him from tearing himself apart”. Whatever dudicus. So far, I’m still forgiving and enjoying this.

The Neo-Sapiens trudge into some high assed, snowy mountain range, where they find a castle filled with robots and robot factories. Now, looking into it, this is related to the original show. That aside, it didn’t make any sense in the context of this story. Not at any single point. Ever. Still, I let it go, but my eye began to wander some, and disbelief was beginning to seep back in.

Eventually bad guys cause Tetsuya to be released from the pressure cooker, and he kicks some robot ass. Like that, I’m ready to forgive, because these scenes are fantastic.

Bunch of crap happens on all fronts, and now I’m skipping about 6 hours into the movie. Turns out that the Neo-Sapiens are reformed villagers, killed by the soldiers, Tetsuya included. And everyone indicates that Dr. Azuma’s research never produced his magic cells. So… why the fuck do all these guys have super powers then? Not to mention just getting up from being dead AND dismembered. There’s some vague bullshit symbolism which you _could_ take as divine interference, but fuck that, it’s just lazy and amateur writing. We also get to see some plants, which are hyper important to the anime storyline but are completely unrelated to the movie story.

Finally, the last Neo-Sapien releases the Metal Gear, I mean… a giant construct with missiles, cannons, and a nuclear bomb. Which makes as much sense as anything by this time. Around this point you’ve heard no less than 8 speeches about how war is wrong, and that you shouldn’t hurt people different than you. Not strung out through the film either, but almost back to back.

So, Tetsuya tries to stop the bomb from going off and fails. He lives, somehow, and so does his chick Luna, somehow. His father shows up, to take his dead wife (Industrial Disease got her), but Tetsuya won’t let him resurrect her “because of all the suffering caused by his coming back”. What? All homie did was kill robots and 4 people killing civillians, mostly with robots. Yeah, awesome logic there super-fuckup. Anyway, his dad shoots Luna. She survived a ground zero atomic weapon, but apparently bullets are her weakness. I can’t even remember if Tetsuya kills him, that’s how retarded this shit got. Anyway. Luna gets back up because her Neo-Cells activate. Yeah, re-read that and don’t ask me to explain. The writer couldn’t, so I have no chance. So, they hug, and the souls of the dead on the battlefield rise up and boil them into nothing.

Then there’s a 20 minute montage of people running around being happy.

Now, the power jack is an Achilles heel for a lot of laptops/notebooks, but this one takes the cake. The jack is totally unsupported aside from the the posts on the board, which while crappy is also normal, but for the connection it has a springy lump at that top, causing the insert to cantilever the whole thing a little, especially when stressed at all, and pop the negative terminal post, which is the one towards the back.

It’s also a pain to get apart, but I found this great writeup on doing it. The model is different, but it’s 90%+ the same.

Your Score: Multi-Faceted Soul

You scored 0 Extroversion, -4 Sensitivity, and 1 Openness!

In a way, you are a truly balanced person. You have a good sense of self, but you periods of worry and self doubt. You don’t like to be alone a lot, but you don’t like being constantly surrounded, either. You can be shy in some situations and bold in others. You can tell people how you feel, but you don’t wear your heart on your sleeve. You aren’t “TOO” anything: You aren’t too shy, you aren’t too aggressive, you aren’t too extroverted, you aren’t too introverted. However at any one time you can be any combination of these things.

You tend to adapt yourself to match the situations in which you find yourself. You may be quiet and sensitive with some people, or joking and loud with others. These are all facets of your personality. People tend to perceive you as they want to perceive you. They may even tend to idealize you a bit. Then, when you do something that doesn’t fit their concept of who you are (like have an outburst of anger, or a fit of shyness, or make an insensitive joke)they can be shocked and surprised. Does anyone know the real you?

Your daemon would represent your multi-faceted and ever-changing personality, as well as people’s tendency to idealize you. He or she would get angry when you did not, be calm and poised when you felt ruffled and anxious, and always be the voice of emotion and reason in your ear.

Suggested forms:
Swan, Elephant, Koala, Panda, Chameleon, Wolf.

Well, to be interesting to anyone important anyway.

This interview with some asshat behind Second Life has the following-

Q: Have you ever read Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson? I don’t know much about Second Life but it sounds similar to the Metaverse in the fiction novel.

A: When Snow Crash came out, I was already really intent on the idea of creating a virtual world like Second Life — I had been thinking about it and doing what small experiments I could since I was in college. But Snow Crash certainly painted a compelling picture of what such a virtual world could look like in the near future, and I found that inspiring.

See, now, while the _idea_ of Second Life isn’t inherently bad, the crap level is all explained by this one question and answer. Why? Because Snow Crash was a shitty book, by a shitty dude, with a shitty vision of a virtual experience. Sadly, since it was total crap, many of the world’s tiny minds relate to it easily.

Is bitchin.

Company decides that this year isn’t going to be profitable. People following this are shocked, since it’s the end of the year and they haven’t made any money. Wait, what?

Opera whines about Internet Explorer. Never understood this argument, since there isn’t anything preventing you from installing whatever else you want, and not having _some_ browser right out of the box is retarded.

People are easily angered and confused. Seriously, I hope the comment about truthiness was a joke. I am, personally, shocked that a company picking arbitrary words would stoop so low as to pick something so arbitrary.

The Army has too much money. Still. I’d say that or really bad budgeters, but it doesn’t matter, just keep taking money away until they shape up.

For some reason Time is telling you something that your doctor should be. And I’m spent.

Either wouldn’t be in a Google search, or relevant to an ad campaign.

The places I go on the internet would kill some people. They would literally tear their eyes out and show them to you. This is a combination of trawling the interwebs via random searches, chasing links from site to site, and so called friends. That aside, nothing saved by Google has any direct bearing on who I am, or my actual privacy. People who whine about Google stealing their souls, or whatever, are just embarrassed about the dumb things they’ve made PUBLICLY AVAILABLE ON THE INTERNET. They sat there, posting on some incestuous little board about how much they like buying underage sex slaves from their dude in Tijuana, using some or all of their real life information, then they get upset because a search engine indexes a PUBLICLY VISIBLE WEBSITE.

Sigh.

So, let’s address these hard hitting questions being posed to Google, shall we? Refer to the article, I’m not recreating them here.

1. None of this is important. Your ISP, who is way more dangerous to you, knows way more about what you’re doing.
e) Are you retarded? Why would they randomly delete and scrub your email? If you do that, it isn’t email anymore.
f) It counts unique hits and click-throughs. Shove off.
l) Cookies. How quaint.

2. They feed results into a program that tries to optimize the ads you see. What the fuck do you think they’re doing? Naming puppies after you?

3. What does it matter? It’s a pile of data loosely related to what you did, not who you are. 18 months or 18 years, it’s all the same.

4. Wait, you already asked that. See answer 2, and maybe get a reading comprehension tutor.

5. I certainly hope so. I’d rather not have ads for pizza places in a different city.

6. Actually, I recall reading this in the gmail user acceptance bit. Which is to say, yeah, your email is indexed for keyword targeting stuff. Oh noes! They know you like cheese and want to show you ads with cheese you might like instead of shoes!

7. Tutor, fuckup, get one! Privacy policy is there to read, and not only can YOU do it, but you are in the position to make someone else do it for you. RIF.

8. Man, you have a stunted vocabulary.

9. How does I shot web?

10. Doesn’t matter. The only people who read those things are people that don’t use whatever service they’re attached to. The same is true of all EULAs. They exist solely because of people like you.  Should it be on there? No. Why? Because the more I read this the more I dislike you.

11. Jesus dude, read a book.
a) I’m gonna guess they know how to read and understand what reasonable means.
b) Die.
c) What? No. It’s an arbitrary number assigned, and often recycled, by your ISP.
d) I… man. This guy really is dumb.
e) Uhhh… and senile? I guess?

12. Definitions are in dictionaries, easily accessible to all.

13. Is there a handbook on asking pointless questions?

14. This is like asking how you anonymize someone’s order number at Taco Bell.

15. Have you looked at a google cookie? No, because you don’t know what that means.

16. I hope so, it’s practically the mission statement. Except for the applications you listed, which don’t do dick about jack in terms of finding anything of ad importance.

17. Translation of this question- I’m too important to read, or have read to me, information that isn’t related to you specifically, so do go on, fill my tiny head up with things I’ll fail to comprehend.

18 & 19. Go to google. Use it. Examine cookies. Bugger self.

20. Hopefully a lot!

21. You search for double ended dildos 6 hours a day, and the Adsense ads you see are geared towards your interests.

22. Ask them. Ask Jeeves maybe.

23. I admit, I don’t know what the hell this is. Sounds like a job for a lawyer.

24. Uh huh. SPY ACT. Cute.

In closing- Our government is an enormous waste of time, and so are, conservatively, 85% of the people it governs.

Give it time to load. So worth it.

My roommate/landlord… roomlord?… has been acting strange the last few months. Sort of like a guy that’s doing steps from AA. He’s been contacting all these people he used to know, sort of making new friendships out of old ones.

I understand it, but only this completely removed, intellectual way. The idea of talking to anyone I knew from “back in the day”, that I don’t already, makes me cringe. Some of them would send me into an outright panic attack.

That’s really only part of it though. People are either loved, unloved, or are akin to furniture. If you’re moved from loved into either of the others, well, I won’t say it’s impossible to get back, but it hasn’t ever happened.

You can see where Aaron’s totally reasonable point of view doesn’t quite mesh with my worldview.