Category Archives: review

Google+ +1

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Privacy issues is the most cited reason why people move from Facebook to Google+.  Me, I’ll probably be both places until all my friends are on Google+.

As a long-time fan of Google (I wrote about them when they were just a research project), I applied for my Google+ account about a day after the news broke. I got a couple invites from early adopters, including one old friend now working at Google, but it still took until yesterday late afternoon before I got in. Ironically, I first got through on my mobile phone.

If none of this makes sense, “Google+” is the name of Google’s new social network. Google actually had a couple of these before, Orkut being popular in some non-English-speaking countries, and Buzz being popular mostly with rabid Google fans and the extremely social. (Needless to say, I was on, but  squarely in the first category, so it was mainly used as en echo of my Twitter and Blogger accounts.) I would never join a social network whose name reminded me of workout.

Google+ has been so hyped in media lately, I really expect you all to have heard about it.  The question asked in mainstream media is: “Is Google+ the Facebook killer?”

I don’t think it is a Facebook killer, simply because  Facebook has ruled the roost for so long, it has picked up virtually all the people who don’t really care, and just joined because everyone was there already. They are not going to leave unless Google buys Farmville.  So Facebook will probably continue to exist for the foreseeable future.

The question nobody asks yet is: “Is Facebook the Google+ killer?”  The answer to this is clear: It is not. Only Google can be the Google+ killer, and with the current popularity they would get a lot of badwill if they shut it down. If they commit some atrocious privacy blunder, like reversing the visibility of entries or something, they may yet lose. Otherwise not.

Google+ is simply superior. It caters to the people who actually care, the people who join a social network to stay in touch with people they actually know (or, in some cases, wish they knew). In Google+, you don’t have just a gray mass of friends all being created equal. You have circles of friends, family, acquaintances, colleagues, alumni, in-laws, ex-laws, and people you met during your vacation. Well, actually only the first three of these were predefined, but you can create a new circle simply by giving it a name and dropping someone into it.

Whenever you post something, Google+ has a line under the post showing which circles you are posting to at the moment. If some of these are not on Google+ yet, it also offers to mail them your update instead. If you see some circles that you would not want to read your post, you just x them out. If a circle is missing, you add it. There is of course also an option to post it to all your circles simultaneously. Or for the more bold, extended circles, which is the circles of your circles. In other words, friends of friends. Or you could pull out all stops and make it public, so that anyone in the world who googles for your name may at some point in time find it. Kind of like I have done here since 1998, you know. I’m still alive, but then again I have not insulted the Prophet (peace be upon him) and have no intention to start now.

In addition to total control of who sees your post in the first place, you can also regulate who gets to repost it on Google+. Obviously you cannot stop people from using cut and paste, but in that case the trace ends with them, and it is up to them to prove they didn’t just make it up (or photoshop it, in more extreme cases). Or so say the wise: I have not tested or even looked for this feature. It is not really made for someone whose white boxers have been on the Internet for years.

If you go in the other direction, extreme attention-seeking, you can also add a notify request. Normally people are only notified when you add them, but you may want to have Google send them a notify mail if you have to break an appointment, for instance, or if someone in your family dies, I guess.

Google+ comes with two types of chat, three if you count the mobile “huddle”. One is an ordinary text chat, which I am not sure whether now also supports video. Quite possibly, but I only have video camera on my job machine, and it is extremely secret.

The other type is a group video “hangout”, in which a person starts a video chat alone and Google+ broadcasts to whatever circles he allows that he is hanging out. Up to ten people can stop by and chat at the same time, like a video conference.  (Not sure how common those are in the first world, here in the zeroth world they have become pretty ordinary.) They can also watch YouTube together. Hey, I know some Happy Science promotional YouTube clips if you insist. Seriously, I don’t see myself ever using Hangout. It sounds about as much fun as Hangnails.

The mobile client is currently only for Android, but the iPhone client is supposedly waiting for Apple to allow it on their market.  The Android client has a clean, simple interface (as has the web version, of course; it is Google.) It has two features of its own: Huddle, and direct photo upload.

Huddle is another type of group chat. It has been compared to group texting, but seems to use the Internet rather than the SMS protocol so presumably is free if you are in a wifi zone or have a flat rate plan. I haven’t tested. It is probably less useful than the marketing implies, unless it somehow has the power to make your friends’ mobile phones ring. Or people get into the habit of staring at their Google+ mobile application when they don’t do anything else. Seeing how I always do something else, I am probably not in the target group.

Direct photo upload is probably the easiest to misunderstand, but luckily it is actually better than it sounds. When in the Photo part of the mobile app, you can watch your own and your friends’ photo albums, but there is a small camera icon at the top. Using it brings up a standard mobile camera screen (I suppose all smartphones have camera these days) and you just snap a picture as usual. But instead of saving on your phone’s SD card, it uploads it to a private photo album in the Google cloud of servers. From there, it is up to you to share it with your friends or just look at it at night before going to sleep. Whatever. It is like a huge memory card in the sky, basically, which you can access from wherever you can sign in to Google+.

Google+ also has a news stream, Sparks, which brings up the latest on whatever topics you have marked as your interest. (For instance Meditation,  Kindle books.) It is really just a persistent Google search which you don’t need to retype every day. The reason why it is grouped with the social software is probably that you can share it with your circles easily. Or perhaps Google just likes to search for things.

What is conspicuously missing yet is simpleminded games, but comments in the code imply that games can be added easily. I wonder if it will be possible to turn off incoming game requests. Possibly, since this is something people hate about Facebook.  I don’t notice it much, since very few of my friends are of the type that play Facebook games. But I understand some people get reams of purely game-related message on their FB page.

Anyway, it is pretty much as expected. I like it. +1

Torah studies then and now

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Actually, I had a good idea why the Jews call God “Lord”, and even “the Name”, but I did not even know that they called God “the Place”, much less why. Live and learn. Or in this case, read and learn.

I’ve invested in yet another e-book, The Torah for Dummies by Arthur Kurzweil. This may seem weird since I am already a ways into my second book by Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz, who may well write a lively and stimulating prose but whose treatment of the Torah is certainly not for dummies.

Kurzweil’s book is for dummies who understands words like “emanate” and “primordial”. (OK, those are kind of rare, but they are in fact there, and early in the book at that.) Dummies like me, then. I may not generally view myself as a dummy, but when facing the Torah, it would take a lot to not be the dummy. Well, if you begin to understand anything about religion at all, I guess. As I found in my first job, it is easy to speak with confidence – even arrogance – about things I don’t know, as long as I still don’t know how much I don’t know.

In any case, I did some free association on Amazon.com after receiving one of their many letters of recommendation, as it were. This book was not one of those recommended, but was bought by people who bought one of the recommended books. As soon as I saw it I felt drawn to it, realizing that I had kind of put the cart before the horse by reading Kabbalist literature without knowing more deeply how the Jews regard the Torah. As a long-time Christian (of sorts, I guess some may say), I felt that I had a decent understanding of the Pentateuch, the five books of Moses. But reading the sometimes strange interpretations by Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz had made me realize that the Torah looks different to the Jews than it does to us. And so I returned a few days later and bought this book.

It is great for me that it exists in Kindle format. I realize that this transitional, fleeting form can be deemed less than dignified for a book dedicated to eternal truth; but on the other hand, I can now literally have it near my heart every day, in my mobile phone resting in my shirt pocket!

Arthur Kurzweil has a writing style that seems a bit similar to Steinsaltz, and this may not be a coincidence: It turns out that Steinsaltz is his teacher for many years, and has made a deep impact on his life and thinking. They have also collaborated on some writing. What great luck for me! In all fairness, my subconscious may have remembered their association from some casual mention in the forewords or on the Amazon.com web site. It need not be a miracle, or not more than the human mind is in the first place. I am not quite sure. I just enjoy it.

I was already becoming aware that the Torah is very special to observant Jews. We Christians respect the Bible for its content, but the Torah is to Jews more what Jesus is to Christians: The Word of God in physical form. The reverence with which they treat the Torah scrolls is perhaps only matched by the way Christian churches treat the Eucharist, and then especially Catholics and others who believe that the bread and wine literally turn into flesh and blood.

This is not to say that Jews only revere the form and not the content. On the contrary, they revere the content to the extreme. It is said that when God was to create the world, he looked to the Torah as his blueprint. In other words, the original Torah – the Word which was with God in the beginning – includes everything in the universe, even the upper worlds or heavens, if I understood correctly. Without the Word, nothing was created of all that which was created.

As I said, we Christians think of Jesus Christ in much the same way. In fact, Jesus reprimanded the scribes of his age because, as he said: “You examine the Scriptures carefully because you suppose that in them you have eternal life. It is these that testify about me, but you are not willing to come to me to have life.”

I could not help thinking about this when I read about how important, even essential, it is to the observant Jew to study the Torah. It is literally considered the way to learn to know God, to move closer to God, and a work that is certain to be rewarded by God as a generous employer rewards his workers, albeit in the next life mainly.

Seeing the sincerity with which they still keep up this work, I wondered if they are leading themselves astray with this intense dedication to every letter of a book. (Literally – it is said that every letter in the Torah is important and corresponds to a particular person’s life.)

Thinking back, I have seen Christians do seemingly the same thing that Jesus spoke about: Apply their intellect to the written word, but not applying the Word to their own soul, that they may be transformed. I am sure both of these ways of reading are still open to the observant Jew as well.

Jesus is no longer physically among us, and neither is Moses. Yet the words left behind are not simply books intended to impart a certain, specific, limited understanding. Rather, they are LIFE. When read in the right way, they become a wellspring that never stops, expanding into something far more than what meets the eye. There is in fact no limit to what can be drawn from Scripture. Let me entertain you with a passage I found on Wikipedia:

At the briefest instant following creation all the matter of the universe was concentrated in a very small place, no larger than a grain of mustard. The matter at this time was very thin, so intangible, that it did not have real substance. It did have, however, a potential to gain substance and form and to become tangible matter. From the initial concentration of this intangible substance in its minute location, the substance expanded, expanding the universe as it did so. As the expansion progressed, a change in the substance occurred. This initially thin noncorporeal substance took on the tangible aspects of matter as we know it.

A pretty straightforward description of the Big Bang with the following period of cosmic inflation and the transition to the atomic phase. Written by the Jewish sage known as the Ramban some time before his death in the year 1270. How in God’s Name did he glean that from the Torah??

The world is full of strange and wonderful things. Scripture is evidently one of them. But, being the dummy that I am, I have a hundred other things that I would also like to do.

“The Next Great Awakening” review

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The Next Great Awakening? Let’s hope not.

For the love of Buddha, don’t buy this book as your first Okawa book, because in that case it will probably also be your last. That would be a pity, I think. Even if you don’t believe that Ryuho Okawa is a god from Venus, there is still a reason why he is a bestselling author in Japan. Unfortunately for the expansion of his new religion abroad, Japan is a bit different from the West when it comes to UFOs and such. Or perhaps I am different from both Japan and the West, but let us hope not.

For the new reader, Ryuho Okawa is the founder and leader and god of the Japanese new religion Happy Science. Technically Happy Science (Kofuku-no-Kagaku, more literally the Science of Happiness) is clearly a cult, in that the members actually worship their founder as divine. Most of us would not do that. But that said, this is not your average loon. He is clearly extremely intelligent and knowledgeable, and has read several tens of thousands of books during his lifetime, from different cultures and ages in history. From these he has distilled the tenets that everywhere and in every age have led to happiness, harmony and prosperity. Given the quality and quantity of his work, it is kind of understandable that he feels like he belongs not just on another planet, but in a completely different order of being from the usual “expert” who has simply attended a socialist university, read a few hundred books and never reflected much on ultimate reality.

Mr Okawa’s self-help books are quite thoughtful and inspirational, in my opinion. Unfortunately, this latest book reads like something written by a random jobless person who has spent too much time in the dark and refuse-strewn back alleys of the Internet. Or more charitably, as a science fiction novel set in an alternate history where Erich von Däniken’s space gods were not only real, but are still around and messing with people’s heads.

The plot is that Earth (and other backwater planets) are protected by a Galactic Treaty. Eerily similar to the Prime Directive of Star Trek, it forbids spacefaring aliens from interfering with non-spacefaring civilizations, although small-scale research expeditions are allowed, as long as these happen in secret and with as little influence on the planet as possible. There are two exceptions though. One is if the aliens are invited by the local god, in Earth’s case called El Cantare.

The other exception is if the local civilization is in the process of exterminating all intelligent life on the planet, for instance through atomic war or worse. In that case, other civilizations are allowed to intervene to stop the madness and save the species. Ever since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Earthlings have been on the endangered species list. There are currently two opinions on how to save them.

A minority, but with a heavy local presence, advocates basically bombing us back to the stone age. Using terraforming tools like tsunamis, volcanoes and mass crust movement, looking like natural disasters to the locals, they are thinking of erasing civilization to the ground. If this is not approved, they will punish advanced societies by inducing large-scale mental disorders. (There is no reference to the Tower of Babel episode, strangely enough.)

The larger faction wants to give humans a chance, by encouraging them toward love and tolerance so that they may refrain from actually using their weapons. The tentative plan is to get the world’s religions to cooperate about their shared values, rather than fight over details. Unfortunately, the more warlike aliens are fanning the flames of conflict, currently between Christians and Muslims, conveniently for the more draconian solution.

If this had been a novel, it would actually had been a pretty good one. Unfortunately, there is nothing to imply that Mr Okawa and his followers don’t actually believe it all, and then some. UFOs and various more or less humanoid aliens are already among us, and more are on their way. We have to make haste to create a civilization that is not only found worthy to survive, but is also able to integrate visitors and immigrants from numerous star systems in a galactic melting pot. The plan is to make Earth into a cosmic “Planet of Love”, where aliens from technologically advanced but culturally less refined planets can come and learn religion and politics.

So there you have it. Definitely a break from the usual self-help books. And there is more to come. Okawa is currently studying the Laws of the Universe, and will be back with a book detailing Truth that surpasses this single planet.

Warmly recommended if you actually believe there are UFOs and aliens on Earth now. Otherwise… well, I suppose you may want to read it if you think Happy Science is a crazy cult and you are looking for indications of this. I fear this will be its most common use. Alas for the many years of hard work that Okawa and his followers have put into making an organization based on universal principles of love, wisdom, self-reflection and progress.

Of course, once the aliens show up, I will have to reconsider…

Happy Science on air

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OK, perhaps not quite as literally as the two young happy scientists flying in the anime “The Laws of Eternity”, also by Happy Science.

Actually, “Happy Science on Air” is the new broadcast / webcast from the optimistic little Japanese religion. It is in English and is broadcast each Friday morning in New Zealand. You can listen to it for a week on PlanetAudio.

I want to say a few words about the first ever broadcast, which was this Friday. It was, naturally, a bit of an introduction to Happy Science.  I particularly enjoyed his explanation of love based on his own life. It was spot on and memorable.  There is a lot of suffering in the world because people want to be loved, instead of just loving another.  Obviously when you are a small child, you need to be on the receiving end of love, or you die. As an adult, however, you need to be on the giving side of love. This is the law of life.

The weakness of the program was that, despite the best intentions, it basically preached to the choir. If there were any curious listeners who were not already familiar with Happy Science, I feel pretty sure they turned off quickly when Mr Bellingham asserted that Ryuho Okawa was God and Buddha. It may not be obvious after some months in the sect, but this really is an extraordinary claim and requires extraordinary proof. It is certainly not something one simply states as a fact and then goes on.

Because of this, it would probably have been better if they had skipped the whole “Ryuho Okawa is God and Buddha” thing at this point.  Especially since it is not something he used to bring up on his own in his early books.

Let me add something of my own here.

I have 17 books by Ryuho Okawa, and ordered another. I would have more if they were publicly available.  There are a number of interesting titles which seem to only be available in temples, presumably for members only. Perhaps those are where Okawa goes on in some detail about his divinity, because it is little more than implied in the books I have read, in many of them not mentioned at all. He does bring it up a few times in some of them though, but never in the form of requiring any kind of service or worship from others. Rather, he brings it up as an explanation of why he has dedicated his life to serve the world.

Of course, you can dedicate your life to the service of mankind without being an incarnation of the highest God.  Well, to some degree you can. Actually if you are filled with love for all people to an extreme degree, you cannot avoid being an extension of God, but let us not get into that level of detail here.

Anyway, if you are curious and have half an hour, follow the link. It is pretty simple, certainly if you understand my writing you understand Happy Science on Air even more easily. Whether you believe it is another matter. I hope at least you take with you the understanding that love is something you give, and this is how you become happy. In that regard at the very least, their science of happiness is spot on!

The Thirteen Petalled Rose

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This material world is not everything, not by a long shot, but it has effects that go far beyond the worlds we can even imagine. Or so I have been told.

I have finished reading Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz’ book, The Thirteen Petalled Rose. That was fast. Normally the commute bus to work, 45 minutes each way, is my reading time. I got this book in Kindle format so I could read it on my Android smartphone even in the dark. But already it bright enough to read both in the morning and evening, so I can return to the paper books. I must admit I love ebooks though, for their ability to let me highlight freely, without feeling that I am somehow destroying the book. After all, I can read it with or without the highlights at any time. And there was quite a bit to highlight in this one.

There is no denying that this is a Jewish book, written by a Jew for Jews. And I am not Jewish. For that reason, I cannot review it the way it deserves. There are things in there that I cannot and should not understand. It is not that the book is cryptic, far from it. It is one of the best examples I have seen of “luminous prose” in a book of religion or philosophy. (At least if we don’t count Ryuho Okawa, whose books are lightly edited transcriptions of his speeches.) The parts that do not rely on specific Jewish knowledge or experience were surprisingly easy to read, and yet never approaching the level of platitude: Rather, there was a taste of poetry in them. I felt the enthusiasm of the author, seeking to share his beautiful vision of the world and the Jewish life.

But in the end, there are so many things that are simply different in the life of someone raised in a family of observant Jews. There are so many things taken for granted, so many words that have a meaning not easily translated. And when I came to such things, I struggled, then accepted that there are things I am not meant to know. Accepting this, I moved on, taking with me what I could from the text. But there are still treasures left, I am sure, for the intended audience.

While I found the book an easy read, I suspect it may strain the mind of those who are unfamiliar with mystic or esoteric literature at all. This is not a practical outward “how-to”, giving advice on what to say or do in various situations. Far from it. There is not really any commandment in it. Rather it seeks to impart understanding. The reader is, one hopes, able to see the deeper meaning of the things he already does.

It is obvious that Rabbi Steinsaltz is a broad-minded and ecumenical person. While he sees the Jewish people as the priests of the world, he holds every human sacred, and believes that salvation is not only for those who follow his own faith, much less his particular branch of the faith. As such, his book is an inspiration and a light even to the gentiles.

Recommended for the experienced religious reader, of any faith.  Newbies to Christianity should probably hold off until they are thoroughly familiar with their own faith, before reading books of other religions, even this one.

The convinced atheist will almost certainly find this book meaningless. It is written in and by faith.

Aoki Densetsu Shoot!

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The moment of transition. From man to legend. Spoilers ahoy!

I came by accident across the anime Aoki Densetsu Shoot (Blue Legend Shoot) and when I heard the beginning of the opening song, I knew that it would be good. It is very rare that the opening (and, slightly less important, the ending) song does not give off a “vibe” about the anime.  If it is spooky, angry or disharmonious, you can be sure that the anime is also aiming at people who treasure such feelings. The Japanese are quite good at matching such things, I have seen only a very few exceptions to this.

(One notable strangeness though: Indecent comedies, which are popular in Japan, often have very cheerful and upbeat songs without any lurid overtones. They are simply happy. I guess the Japanese don’t have the same guilt as most westerners about sexuality – it just takes on the color of its context. But this topic is non-existent in Aoki Densetsu Shoot. There is some low-key romance, as is common in sports anime, but it is very very chaste.)

I have watched 20 episodes over the last few days, and am glad I did. It is quite old, from 1993, and you can kind of see this. It must have been a fairly high-end production at the time, I guess, but because they did not have computer assistance in the production back then, they had to use certain shortcuts to make the desired effects, and the resolution is simply lower than today. It is quite well drawn though.

The anime is about a high school soccer team. Ironically, soccer is something I have had particularly little interest in.  I grew up in a village on the west coast of Norway, and as in all such villages, soccer was the most important thing in a boy’s life until he discovered sex. For some, probably afterwards too. While Norwegians have valued sports highly since the Viking age if not before, and have many excellent players in several sports considering the sparse population, soccer has the broadest appeal. There may for all I know be only one Norwegian who is not interested in it, though more realistically there may be a few hundred. I don’t know. I knew a couple elderly Christian mystics who professed no interest in soccer, but I think they are dead now. That leaves me, I guess. Until this anime, I did not know what the offside rule was. (But I did know the name, so there is some contamination…)

In any case, the anime is nominally about soccer, but really about people and their dedication to their highest aspiration. This is something that has begun to interest me more lately.

The first 20 episodes are about the team under the leadership of Kubo. Having spent three years in Germany, he returns to find that Japanese soccer is too rigid. He wants to play “fun soccer” where each player uses his strength and where cooperation is built on trust, not on hierarchy and planning. He finds little understanding for this in Japan, but eventually gathers a small team of high schoolers who follow his path. Most of them look up to him as a prodigy or genius. But the truth, as with so many a genius, is that his skill comes from deep love and relentless training.

Tragedy strikes in episode 19. Kubo has not told his teammates that he has leukemia, and during an important match he does something unreasonable if not impossible: Taking the ball from the home goal, past all 11 players of the opposing team, into their goal. Â At the moment of his greatest triumph, his body gives up, and he dies just as he is being declared a legend.

It is indeed few people who become a legend while alive, though it does happen. More become legends after their death. And for some, it happens at the same time. This is typically martyrs, and I guess Kubo is one of them, in a manner of speaking.

I have to agree with his best friends that dying for soccer is stupid. But because they all know and share his love for soccer, they could understand him. The main character of the anime, the freshman Toshi, saw this duality: Kubo was “a godlike person”, but at the same time he was just like them, a high schooler who just loved soccer more than everything.

Having an important character die during the series seems to be pretty common in sports anime, or perhaps I just happen across those for some obscure reason. The other two sports anime that I have found worth watching were about baseball, and both of them had a main character die during the anime. There is probably some very Japanese reason for this. Or, as I said, perhaps I somehow mysteriously am pulled toward these. Even if I have never seen them before or even read the reviews, perhaps the voice in my heart are picking them out for me. Although I kind of doubt that. Or at least not much more than it picks out my Pepsi. Who knows. If life is like a dream, who is the dreamer?

Civilization V game – early impressions

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Welcome to the future of Civilization (or at least the game of that name).

I don’t have unlimited time for gaming, but some days ago I bought the latest incarnation of Sid Meier’s Civilization. The original was possibly the most engrossing game I have ever known, so that I still thought it was evening when the morning sun rose.  This is not quite that bad / good, or perhaps I am just more resistant now.  But my first impression is that I like it better than the two previous versions.

The first thing you notice is that the game now requires online validation. It uses the online gaming service Steam, run by a company called Valve (who also make some popular games on their own). If you don’t have Internet access, you can’t play this game.  If Valve goes bust or is bought up by competitors, or if their servers are hit by a meteor or whatever, you can’t play this game ever again.  If you are temporarily without Internet connection, or if the Steam server is temporarily without Internet connection, or if there is a line break anywhere between the two, you can’t play the game until this is fixed. So, a big thumb down for this. It is not like the game actually needs this feature for any reason:  Multiplayer is entirely voluntary and a clearly separated part of the game.

It is obviously some kind of copy protection. People are scared of piracy, and rightly so. But the irony is that due to this copy protection, you are better off with a cracked copy (unless it is infected with virus or other malware). Legitimate customers are the ones who have to suffer this indignity, pirates don’t. Well, unless they want to play multiplayer, in which case they may find themselves in hot water as their IP address will be registered.

Now on to the actual game. It is advertised as having a major upgrade of graphics, but I don’t agree. It is no more decorative than Civ4 was, and more cluttered. The information is reasonably easy to find, but there is a lot of detail that is basically more noise than signal. The game designers have taken this into account and provided a strategic mode you can toggle to, but that goes to the other extreme again, looking terribly cartoonish.

One striking change is the shift from rectangles to hexagons as the basic unit of land (or sea). I approve of this, but it does not look better. It looks worse, in my opinion. I may simply need to get used to it, but it is months since last I looked at a Civilization game and it still looks just unnatural to me. It does make more sense in military confrontations and unit movement though, and also in land cultivation.

Another major difference from all the earlier games is that cities now have hit points and an inherent bombard ability regardless of whether there are military units in them. So you can establish a city and not immediately fortify it. Even a small city with no upgrades can fend off the random wandering barbarian army or two without a scratch, which is nice.  But it goes further than that.

During my second game, I played at an easy difficulty level. At first I made mostly workers to improve the land, but then I started plonking down cities. I fortified a warrior in the first and an archer in the second, then made two without defenders.  While working on my fifth settler, I had two of the strongest powers in the world declare war on me.  Russia had about half of the world’s military at the time, so that was rather disconcerting. Luckily the highest tech was chariot archers, but still seeing a tsunami of enemy units rolling toward your undefended city…

Amazingly though, the bombard ability managed to take out several attackers without them ever getting right next to the city. The enemy archers were the worst problem, but I managed to finish a chariot archer just in time when the city defenses were eradicated.  The other part of the Russian army that had marched toward my capital city were shot to pieces without doing any damage at all.  So that was pretty impressive.  I assume the same would have happened if I had attacked them, so this is a major change in the game balance during the ancient and medieval era.  I assume this will change with artillery, rocketry and air bombing. Still, it gives a major incentive to expand rapidly instead of building up the military first.

The role of religions, which showed up in Civ4, is utterly removed. You can still build temples, but they only give culture points. Specialized religious buildings for different religions are removed, and I did not even see the cathedrals that have been with the game from the start (I think, I know they were in Civ2 at least). The number of religious themed Wonders of the World is also reduced, and there is no longer particularly many from the Christian sphere compared to other cultures. It seems safe to guess that Firaxis got burned on that feature last time.

Culture no longer expands your border rapidly. You will get nearby land or sea tiles as your population grows. There seem to be more tiles than population, but not by much, unless you spend gold to buy them. This may be a good idea if there are valuable resources just out of reach, like luxuries or iron or horses for your military.

On the other hand, culture now accumulates to let you buy social policies. These come in a number of groups, some of which are mutually exclusive, but many are not. The groups are themed, so that one group is particularly useful for large empires, another for small, another for seafaring and mercantile nations and so on. You can win a cultural victory by getting many enough of these, but even on the ridiculously easy Tutorial level I was nowhere near that before the game was closing in on the year 2050, where scoring ends.

The Civ games used to benefit greatly from micromanagement. It was a bit of a wrist nightmare, to tell the truth. This may be one of the reasons why I have played it so little over the last years. In this version, micromanagement is downplayed. You can still do some of it, but it does not make the huge difference it used to.  Unless you are pretty good, you should probably leave most of the mundane tasks to the computer intelligence and concentrate on the strategic stuff.

The military is changed in more ways than the hexagon tiles and the strong cities. Support of armies is simplified, and you can no longer stack two military units in the same tile. They are also more expensive to make. The net result is that you make many fewer military units, and feel more protective of the ones you have. Experience makes more difference than ever before, so if you have an old spearman you will definitely want to upgrade rather than disband and make something new.

Having only one unit per tile means warfare is far more intuitive. No more mousing over tiles to see how many units are stacked there. Just look out across the field and you can judge the forces pretty quickly.  Battles also don’t end with annihilation unless one of the sides is extremely much stronger. Even if you lose, you can normally withdraw to heal, unless you are surrounded. And there is now a preview before you attack, which tells you the expected outcome of the battle. The actual battle may be a little different, for instance I got predicted “minor victory” but ended up with a stalemate, but the range of randomness is cut down. No more spearmen sinking destroyers by sheer luck.

That’s all I can remember off my sleepy head.

Game review: Elemental

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Screenshot from the game. The text of the review is mostly copied from my LiveJournal, where I have a couple friends who are into gaming.

I had a sickday yesterday (for unrelated reasons!) and spent some time with Stardock’s brand new game, Elemental: War of Magic. There was some serious patching first, and I got two new patches over the course of the day. From what I read online, Stardock may have intentionally released the game buggy and only provide patches for registered customers, to thwart pirates. The game has no conventional DRM.

The game plays like Master of Magic and Civilization III had a love child who is now grown up. (Let us just disregard that Master of Magic was the love child of Civilization I and Magic: The Gathering. That makes MoM the aunt of Civ3, I suppose…)

In-game help is a virtual tome, similar to the Civilipedia but in character for a magic game. The help for the user interface is pretty much absent (or well hidden) so there are still things that I can’t figure out even with the PDF manual. They are not essential though.

The game is probably not intended for the casual gamer. This makes sense since it is from Stardock. Even at Novice level, the easiest, by the time I was sure I had started on a peninsula, the nearest AI had already begun building outposts across the entry to the mainland, blocking me off. It had no hurry to expand in other directions.

The game is still not completely stable, but it autosaves, and load time is acceptable. Actually, I don’t mind the occasional crash as it provides an automatic break. Most people probably don’t think like that though.

Seems like a good catch, but overall I would rather not be sick on the first place, even if it means working instead of playing Elemental…

(I thought this may be of some interest since my website was originally named after a feature in Master of Magic, which this game is a successor to. Stardock even tried to buy out the original game, which has not been for sale for many years, but did not succeed. This game is similar, but not enough to excite lawyers, I think. As for me, well, I would probably not have named my website “chaosnode.net” today, let us just say.  But more about that later, if ever.)

“The Soul After Death”

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The unbearably bright Light of Heaven. This picture is, ironically, from the Happy Science anime The Laws of Eternity. A similar episode is recounted in the book I review, but the feelings the book inspire in me are completely different.

I recently bought the book The Soul After Death by Fr. Seraphim Rose, an Eastern Orthodox cleric. The book is written as a reaction to the spate of Near Death Experiences which reached media a few decades ago. These experiences were generally positive:  People were first confused to see their body from above, but soon found out that they could move about, and then a great Light appeared, filled with love and forgiveness and even sometimes humor, encouraging them to reflect on their life and what was really important to them. Deceased relatives and friends might make a brief appearance, and sometimes short journeys to a (usually pleasant) Elsewhere, before they had to (or chose to) return to their body.

Rose is not impressed. He compares this to the extensive Orthodox lore of after-death, and concludes that the NDEs are at best ignorance, but most likely demonic influence. The ethereal world around us is not positive or neutral, but utterly fallen and teeming with demons, who will masquerade as anything or anyone to convince people to turn their back on Orthodoxy, which alone can save them, and then only if you dedicate yourself to it without reservation for the rest of your life.

I think Fr. Rose has many good points, including some of his main points. People (that would be me) are too superficial and too easily convinced that eternal life is easy to get and Hell is almost unattainable except perhaps by Hitler and the like. The Bible certainly can be read as saying the opposite. And most of the messages from the supposed afterlife are inane and banal. True. I am not a big fan of New Age spirituality myself.  That is not the problem.

The problem is the overwhelming onslaught of darkness that radiates from the pages of the book.  About halfway through, when I frankly gave up, even I was starting to wonder if I have been misled by demons from my youth, if the loving Presence that has encouraged me to look hard at the evil in myself and distance myself from it, to understand and implicitly forgive others, that this Presence that has been essential to my life for decades now must surely be a demon. After all, God’s angels (much less God himself) would not have anything to do with people who are not Orthodox and following the proper Orthodox path of asceticism.

No, I don’t think so.  The effect of this book, whatever its intent, was one of despair, bitterness, doubt and darkness.  I shudder to think of this book falling into the hand of someone suffering from depression.  It projected a vision of a world where God has been defeated by Satan, basically.  Content to get away with a few elite souls, God simply watches passively as demons do whatever they want with pagans and most Christians alike, encouraging the evil and deceiving the good, with only a token resistance from Heaven.

I don’t really think that is what he meant to say. And perhaps the book ends on a more uplifting note. But for me, right now, I can’t go on reading it in good conscience, because I feel it makes it harder for me to love God and my fellow humans.   I don’t want to think of God as some petulant demiurge who sees his creation go haywire and reacts with anger and then resignation as it goes to Hell. Or like a constructor who has built a magnificent house which then catches fire and he stands outside, watching as the house burns down with most of his children still inside. There is something horrifying and twisted about this vision of a world abandoned to insane spirits of the netherworld.  I cannot believe this was how the book was intended, but that was what I took away from it. And I cannot guarantee that other readers will fare better, though I sincerely hope so.

I should probably watch some Happy Science to get back my belief in God and the future.

Psychic Academy revisited

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This girl, who is a minor character, may be the voice of the creator in this anime.

While copying my anime to the hard disks, I took the opportunity to view once more one of my old favorites, Psychic Academy Aura Banshou. Actually I took a peek at several of my old favorites, but most of them were not as good as I remembered them.  I guess I was not spoiled with high quality graphics in the past.

That said, although the screen resolution is less than awesome, the art in Psychic Academy is actually quite good, but slightly exaggerated. As it should be, because the Psychic Academy is basically a high school for superheroes.

Well, “heroes” may be slightly misleading.  While Japanese does have a concept of extraordinary powers (magical, psychic, mutant or even feats of martial arts are all described as “abilities” and treated much the same), there is less focus on combat between good and evil power users, although it is not unheard of. Mostly though people with abilities are supposed to learn to use them for the good of society in a more or less official setting.

Psychic Academy is tentatively classified as a romantic comedy. It is not extremely funny though, unless you think a running gag of unintentional breast grabbing is the heights of hilarity. There is also more bathing than one would expect, although I am sure that is a lot of time by western standards.  (Japanese are extremely sensitive to body odor.) Generally, your grandmother will probably not want to watch this movie with you. That said, this is merely their attempt at comedy. The real point of the story is the character development and the romantic feelings of the main characters, in particular the boy Ai.  (Conveniently, this is also the Japanese word for “love”. That should give a big clue right from the start.)

Ai is transferred to the Psychic Academy when a blood test reveals that he has powers, although it is not yet clear what they are.  Since his brother is one of the country’s most famous superheroes, everyone has great expectations from the start.  The exception is his childhood friend Orina, whom he has not seen for years.  They had a puppy love for each other back then, and both of them have conveniently nursed this feeling without getting distracted too much by anyone else, so that they click romantically pretty much on sight.  But it would be boring if it was that simple, right?

Enter Myuu (whose name basically means “mew”). A classmate of Ai, she has for some reason “100% aura compatibility” with him, even though her main aura power is fire and his is light.  (Well, it turns out to be light. It is unknown from the start.)  Also, he is born with his aura (although he cannot use it), but she has had her aura artificially awakened. Somehow two wrongs seem to have made one right, because they have this thing going on where they can sense each other’s presence through walls, and get glimpses of each other’s strong thoughts or emotions, and whenever they get close, there is a powerful resonance that makes their world jump in distortion. The resonance also makes it possible for Ai to use powers he has never used before, when Myuu is near.

The intensity of their experiences when they resonate make the both of them feel that the other is special, of course.  While Myuu does not want to get in the way of Orina’s love, the two of them automatically gravitate toward each other.

The center of the story is Ai’s love conflict:  On one hand the long, gradual building of natural love between him and Orina; on the other hand, the sudden resonance between him and Myuu.  I am pretty sure a lot of people, both men and women, can identify with this.

In fact, it reminds me of something I wrote in one of my early journal entries, about two girls:  One of them makes my heart beat faster, one of them makes it beat more slowly.  The one may be what I want, but the other may be what I need.  (Theoretically speaking, of course.  Romance is not a completable project for me, and I have known that for some time.) Still, it is interesting to see it drawn up as clearly as this.