K 3 3 G

The Girl’s Guide to Gamers (1/?)

Posted on February 14th, 2007 by ephemere.
Categories: opinions, games, ideas.

Valentine’s day special!

Heh, not really. This piece has been on my mind for quite a while now, especially since (a) I’m both a girl and a gamer; and (b) I’m involved with a gamer. Truth be told, if one were to trust gamer lore, gamer girl + gamer guy = ideal combination, but we all know that’s just wishful thinking.

Thus, this series (? hopefully I manage to follow through with it!). I’m starting it in a very informal way, but may turn it into an article or something more readable someday. Bear in mind that a lot of things here apply to geeks in general, not just gamers, and can be generalized to… well, just about anyone, whether you’re a gamer or a girl or just something starting with g. Just pick and choose whatever you feel applies.

(more…)

2 comments.

Post-penultimatum

Posted on February 10th, 2007 by ephemere.
Categories: admin.

Having decided to close Stranje, I’m also going to focus on the few projects I have left — K33G being one of them. I’m looking at a semi-upgrade theme- and plugin-wise, and also at a series of upcoming posts I may or may not turn into articles:

- girls and gamers
- geekhood
- a look at what intelligence does or does not mean, based on my own experience

Also I’ll be turning likhain.net into a sort of portal to creative projects involving anything from geeky blogs to experiments in art, dabbling in typography, and condensations of classic speeches and major philosophical texts. If anyone wants to be hosted (you get your own FTP login, SQL, etc etc) or help out with the main site, please let me know.

2 comments.

Wise Men Say …

Posted on February 10th, 2007 by kyels.
Categories: everything else.

Wise men say, only fools rush in … (quoted from Can’t Help Falling in Love by Elvis Presley)

Does that catch phrase ring in your ears, telling you that we should not be rushing into certain things not knowing what impact or consequences that it might give or lead to you?

One step taken, and if it’s a wrong step, you will be suffering from the corollaries and from then on every step that may be treaded on will be wrong as well. Humans make mistakes, but how often do they learn from their past?

Everyone is and can be clear headed. It’s up to oneself whether one would want to execute their conscience when it comes to their actions and words in life or to just say and do something without thinking. When you know that what you are doing is wrong, but why do you still go on ahead, not realizing the mistake and tread on deeper into the black hole?

The deeper you walk into the hole, the more pain in the future some things may cause you. But then again, humans are weird creatures. They have a button called “Thrill” in their minds and it is often being pushed to a point whereby some people just love the excitement and how dangerous some things can be. The danger itself is the thrill itself. It’s addictive. Just like sex; only thing is there is no penetration.

Do you call yourself a wise person?

Wisdom comes in many forms and packages. It does not mean if one is knowledgeable, one will have the wisdom as well. No, it does not work that way. The only way to attain wisdom is to know what is right and wrong; because all of us are capable of making the right and wrong decisions. If one chooses to take and make the wrong choice, then wisdom can never be accumulated but mistakes; and in the end it will form to regrets.

Wise people will never do things that will go out of the way, or unthinkable acts. When you have wisdom you will automatically learn the meaning of the words you have spoken and act upon them. In wisdom there are wide varieties of values; namely, fidelity, respect, loyalty, trust, hope, compassion, patience, and more.

And it does not mean that if you are older than someone, age wise, you can be called a wise person. Too bad, no, it does not work this way. You may be very old but if you are not wise, you just aren’t. But if you are then that is a good thing.

Sometimes, one may think that their pain is the greatest of all, but think wisely, there are more people who are suffering each passing day. I don’t deny that I’ve been in pain, we all do actually. But the pain that one may be experiencing may be a minor or major thing depending on what are the roots that have caused the pain and it could also be because of the actions that that one has taken for granted in life. Pain is always there, and ever unavoidable. It is just a matter how we try to abstain and stay clear from it because no matter what you do and if you do not think properly, pain will always be there, waiting for you.

Perspectives and impressions change and what people usually harbor in their mind changes too. Give someone a bad impression on the first date or meet, and voila, your impression towards that person will be altered, forever unless you have the ability to wipe off the first impression and execute a better one the next round. But as they always say, “first impression counts”.

The world is beautiful and it was never ugly ‘cept for constant bickers among politicians, dissatisfactions within nations, poverty, and vice versa. But it’s still beautiful no matter from what perspective you choose to look at it. Honestly, it’s the people that will make the world merrier. And their actions.

1 comment.

Rot and Notebooks

Posted on February 6th, 2007 by Zarathustra.
Categories: everything else, philosophy, games.

I live!

Coincidentally, my ‘living’ comes at the point where I’ve read enough webcomics and books to last me the next 3 years (aka, I am quite bored with the intarweb). Productivity is so-so, life is as happy as I can make it…

Thus I have decided to be a little more surreal about things. Unfortunately for you people it also means exposure to a slightly immature yet impossibly wise vision of things as they are, and as they are becoming.

All hail the coming of the anti-nerd.

DOTA. Yes yes yes. If you are Filipino, Singaporean, Malaysian, or American, it is relatively impossible to not have heard this term somewhere. Some people hate it (refer to the phenomenon “Girlfriends against DOTA”), some have no idea of what it is, and others practically live by it. DOTA is a game, yet in some way or another it represents the massive shift of the gaming market into the realm of the casual player. Before, you’d have the gamers (hardcore or soft), the indifferent people who play games, and the rest of the world. But with the advent of cheap electronics, lightning-fast innovations in technology, and some savvy marketing (I do admit though that disillusionment is a big contributor to the gaming spirit), games have finally broken through the wall and entered the life of “everyman and woman.”

I like to think of myself as a quasi-pioneer, a brave explorer who paved the way for the current crop of cafe players around the country. As with all adventures, a price had to be paid for progress, and I lost quite a bit: grades, potential friends, allowance, parental trust, and most importantly time. Time I could have spent righting wrongs, honing my mind, fighting for justice, and dating.

I have absolutely no regrets. As things were, I doubt I’d have done those things even if games didn’t exist. Better the good “what could have been” excuses than the “relatively same stupid activities.”

DOTA is the proof that I did not waste my time. The people who started playing PC games because of DOTA are the same people I had assumed to have led significant, responsible, and overall disciplined lives. DOTA razes all pretensions of the intellectual elite, the snobbish socialites, the people who I thought lived and “seized the day.” DOTA is the window through which all men and women are created (spawned) equal.

DOTA has made food of us all.

Pudge Build: Hook, Rot, Hook, Rot, Hook, Dismember, Hook, Flesh Heap, Flesh Heap, Flesh heap, Dismember, Rot, Flesh Heap, Rot, Stats, Dismember, stats till 25.

Mix and match Vanguard, Linken’s Sphere, Boots of Travel, Aegis of the Immortal, Guinsoo’s Scythe of Vyse.

TO WHIT:

If you had a notebook that enabled you to kill people by simply writing down their names and thinking of their faces (you can also control the manner of their death), would you use it?

On a related note, would you support a movement towards world domination with my sexy self leading the way?

15 comments.

101 Thoughts

Posted on February 5th, 2007 by kyels.
Categories: everything else.

Cry and you will only find yourself crying alone.

And how often can we stumble upon someone who can actually weep together with us be it those are tears of joy or sadness?

Zilch. Nada. Zero.

Impossible it may seem but still if one is lucky enough they would be able to find someone who can share every pain and happiness with them even if only they are good friends.

Human beings are for real.

Real people make real mistakes in this real world. As harsh as this may sound but it is true, isn’t it? We stumble once, twice and we can still get up and brace the reality, the fact that we made a mistake, and we ought to learn from it. But somehow, along the way, when you stumble again, you actually realize that you are repeating the same ole’ errors again. Is this called learning?

People say that there is no love when there isn’t any reciprocation. Do you find this phrase true?

I cannot tell you whether it is true or not but what I know in the 101 Ways to Make Things Work is that giving and taking is part of every single relationships that we can uncover on Earth. You give, you take. It does not work this way whereby you give, give, give and you do not take anything back in return. Or vice versa.

Human beings ought to learn how to draw lines. Stop everything when it comes to a point that one is hurting within or is feeling rather taken advantage of. One is their own sensor because others cannot feel what’s inside the system.

But it truly is sad when you realize or when you start counting with your fingers how many people in this world that really, really love and appreciate you for who you are, rather than love you for the value that they can take from you. It is hurtful, most of the time. Reality is painful.

Off the topic; you may find that there are double “kyels” under Authors. Well, that is because I seem to have forgotten my password for the first account (yeah, I am old!) hence this second account … (:

9 comments.

When a downgrade is an upgrade

Posted on January 1st, 2007 by Cray-Z5200.
Categories: everything else, tech.

Hello people! The monster is finally in the house, after weeks of procrastinating and uninspired thinking. The final push of inspiration came from none other than Real Life, which gave me such a serious dose of “You can’t handle the truth” that I simply had to write about it.

What on earth am I talking about? It’s my computer and the LCD TV I’ve hooked it up to.

I got the TV (an Amoi 32″, uses an LG panel so I try my best to ignore the name) as a well meaning present from my dad, who was trying to thwart my plans to hook up my PC to the living room TV. I suspect it was more for himself than for me or my mum, really; he knows all too well that the cost of making peace offerings is a mere triviality next to the fury of a mother deprived of quality time with Oprah and friends.

In any case, for the longest time now I’ve hooked up my PC to the TV with a DVI to HDMI cable. For the uninitiated, a DVI port is the white on that appears on most graphics cards nowadays; the end of the cable looks like this. HDMI is the new standard port for high definition broadcasts, which virtually all cable stations are ballyhooing about; it looks like this. Sort of USB-ish, if you ask me. Both DVI and HDMI are quite similar since they both transmit video signals digitally, but since HDMI is made for TV, it’s been designed to carry sound signals to the TV as well.

Here’s where it gets interesting. Normal desktop resolutions don’t display too well with a HDMI connection. In fact, they look horrible. Most resolutions are prone to overscan, where the borders of the image your device is sending to the screen are cut off, or underscan, where the image doesnt fill the screen completely. On computers, this isn’t too nice when you’re fumbling around blindly for the Start button or the dock.

Until recently, I thought it was just part and parcel of living with HDTVs. My graphics card drivers (Nvidia 7800GTX) did a good job of scaling down the screen resolution to fit the screen nicely with a little fiddling, so I carried on like the wayward son I was. Standard resolutions I set like 1280×720 would be scaled down to 1200×676, and I had to tweak game files in order for them to play with such odd numbers. Still, I was getting an image that filled up the whole screen, and I was happy.

Oh the silliness. Recently, at a friend’s house, I noticed that a 17 incher was displaying video with much less blockiness. And it wasn’t just the video; many of my photos that appeared blocky on my screen appeared perfect on hers. All this time I’d chalked it up to the fact that my TV, being bigger, would reveal imperfections of the source material previously unseen on smaller screens, but now I wasn’t so sure.

After some digging on the great Internets, I realised that the HDMI interface may not be the PC’s perfect loverboy after all.

It’s quite simple; HDMI input only takes in certain resolutions. Very specific ones, for that matter; the standard HD resolutions are 1280×720 and 1920×1080. Any other resolution in between, the TV will take either of the two resolutions it knows and scale up or down accordingly. This scaling process isn’t perfect, resulting in overscan or underscan, AND the distortion of images and video on the screen. This is the evil that caused all that blockiness on otherwise normal photos and videos!

So you ask, why can’t my TV take 1280×720 and display it nicely? Isn’t it one of the standard resolutions that a HDTV recognises?
That’s because my TV’s one of the new breed who think having a bunch more of pixels will make them extremely cool and happening. That’s right; my TV has 1366×768 native pixels. That’s supposed to give a true 16:9 aspect ratio, which is what widescreen is all about. As a result though, the scaling process is quite different, and 1280×720 from a PC input has problems.

So if I can’t use HDMI to display my pixels nicely, let’s see what other inputs my TV has…

Oh noes! Only VGA!

VGA’s an analog standard, which means my graphics card has to convert the video signal to analog, and when the signal gets to the TV, it has to be converted back to a digital format before it can be displayed on the screen. Sounds (key word: SOUNDS) time consuming, unnecessary and less high fidelity when it comes to image quality,which is why I used the HDMI input in the first place. Still, VGA would display the image on my screen pixel for pixel, instead of doing all that scaling I didn’t need, right? So I bit back my pride, took a VGA cable, affixed a DVI adapter to one end, and hooked the PC and TV up.

OMGBBQ11one1!

Almost all resolutions I tried displayed perfectly and fit the full screen, although some (including my beloved 1280×720) needed to be nudged a little to the left through the drivers. The so called decrease in quality due to the analog connection was negligible, honestly; edges and fonts might be a teeny bit more blurry, but nothing to call mommy for. And I can clearly see that any blockiness in videos and photos is due to the source material, not because some stupid scaling process made the image blockier than it already was.
All in all, it would be best if you have a DVI plug on your tv, so that there’s no need for any digi-analog-digi conversion. But if your choices are between HDMI and VGA… pick the ‘worse’ one. Trust me on this.

8 comments.

Legendary notebooks in not-so-legendary hands

Posted on December 12th, 2006 by ephemere.
Categories: ink & paper, art & music.

The one bright spot* in my life right now: I have new Moleskines! They arrived yesterday afternoon.

*Okay, maybe it’s not the only one– fine, it’s not the only one. But allow me a little exaggeration. For artistic effect, you understand.

Though I do most of my writing on my laptop (I call her Fel, short for Felinity) I still do quite a bit of creative scribbling on paper. My reasons have less to do with the quality of writing and more to do with my vanity: I like looking at sheets of paper covered with my handwriting. It’s influenced by calligraphy, so it looks very scripty and romantic on the page; I have been told several times by fellow students and professors alike that my handwriting is better suited for declarations of undying love than for equations and lab recordings.

Because I like writing by hand so much, I have a lot of notebooks. Ideally each notebook has its own purpose: the hardbound ones are for writing, the spiral-bound ones for physics and note-taking, the logbooks for problem-solving. That doesn’t work in real life, though, since I end up using my “creative” notebooks for scratch and random equations and I don’t use my “in-class lecture” notebooks at all. The sole exception to this haphazard notebook abuse is my Moleskine, because I respect it so much I don’t let the slightest hint of crazy science touch it. After all, who wouldn’t be impressed by this:

Moleskine is the legendary notebook, used by European artists and thinkers for the past two centuries, from Van Gogh to Picasso, from Ernest Hemingway to Bruce Chatwin. (from the Moleskine history)

The paper is beautiful, too. Truth be told G has been talking about her Moleskine for as long as I’ve known her, six years or more. I didn’t exactly pay attention — a notebook is a notebook is a notebook — until my cousin brought me a Moleskine from Singapore a few months ago. It was love at first sight.

And now! My little Moleskine Cahier (hereafter known as Xai, pronounced “kai” and alternatively spelled as “chai”) has been joined by two large notebooks**: a Classic Plain notebook (Xhel) and a Classic Sketch notebook (Sai). Xhel will be the repository of my scribbles and draft sketches, while I’ll be doing a lot of experimentation with Sai, ink, watercolor pencils, and pastels. So happy.

**I was actually hoping a freebie 2007 organizer would be included in the package. Sssshhh. I’m going to try ordering again in a week or so.

Xhel is the one bound by green and Sai the periwinkle one. Both were ordered from Moleskine PH and were delivered promptly (as in “next business day” promptly) in a lot of protective packaging — it was evident that Moleskine PH wanted the notebooks to be in perfect condition when they arrived. I’ll post writing and art from my Moleskines in ephy from time to time. If I’m not mistaken, several of us have Moleskines too, so it might be interesting to post excerpts from our Moleskines every so often.

Ah, and I have a question for the writer-types: how do you do your writing? Do you write by hand and then type the completed chunks? Is everything completely computer-based? What about your outlines — do you write them on paper (or type them in your text editor of choice) or just keep them in your head? I’d love to read about your approaches to the process of writing.

12 comments.

Perfectionist

Posted on December 8th, 2006 by kyels.
Categories: everything else, opinions.

It just crossed my mind that I’m a perfectionist when it comes to my work and I’m really, really picky especially when I am dealing with my assignments in University or when I’m doing something else. For the past few months, I’ve been under a lot of stress and pressure because of my Algorithm and Data Structures assignment and also my Database Systems worksheet. Also the thesis that I was required to write for my Marketing classes, Segmentation, Targeting and Positioning.

I could barely breathe when it came to my Computer Science assignments because there were just so many ways for you to do it and it was vague, that sometimes I feel that I may have programmed wrongly. However, I had some space for the Marketing thesis as it was a group work and this time, I had a responsible group, in which I think I was lucky as I had been in really terrible groups when I was in First Year.

Maybe by being a perfectionist is not a good idea as it causes a lot of stress and pressure within oneself and albeit I try to mellow down, it does not seem to work. It’s all in the mind, they say but it is not easy to change a person in a fortnight as well, right?

So, I was just wondering, are you are perfectionist when it comes to your work or anything in general that you do?

6 comments.

If We Had Blackboards Like These…

Posted on December 6th, 2006 by sofimi.
Categories: everything else, science/math, tech, ink & paper.

ASSIST: A Shrewd Sketch Interpretation and Simulation Tool
(also known as Assist Sketch Understanding System and Operation around the net)

I’ve never really embedded a YouTube video before because it kinda ruins the look of most blogs, but this is too geeky an opportunity to pass up. The video below features a man, possibly an MIT professor, demonstrating a computer program hooked up to a whiteboard. The program interprets what is drawn on the board as objects within a physics simulation scene. When he presses the “Run” button, the computer animates the drawing according to the laws of physics.

I hear that the Microsoft Physics Illustrator for TabletPC is quite the same thing. I wouldn’t know since I don’t have a tablet PC!

We’ll have to be content with the Line Rider game, which I’ve been hearing about lately. I’ve tried it once, just now. Draw some lines and have a little critter on a sled ride on ‘em. Check out a blog dedicated to the whole thing.

Footnote: I noticed you guys are unleashing your “inner geek,” while I have a stronger “outer geek” tendency, if you catch my drift!

6 comments.

Duplicate Books, Anyone?

Posted on December 5th, 2006 by Corsarius.
Categories: everything else, ink & paper.

A recent experience of mine taught me an invaluable lesson when you’re in love with books — don’t judge a book by its cover. Really, it’s a cliche line that’s almost irritating to hear, but I guess I didn’t pay attention to it the first hundreds of times I heard it.

Result? A duplicate book — Tangled Webs of Elaine Cunningham, part of the Starlight and Shadows saga of Forgotten Realms. My only consolation was that at least, it’s a good enough book to have a duplicate of. Tangled Webs is my first ever duplicated non-acad book, making it utterly special.

Seeing that many of us KEEGsters (or SK33G? or 5K33G? bleh.) are bibliophiles, allow me to pose this question — have you ever (unwillingly) bought a duplicate book? If so, what did you do with it? But maybe the question my subconscious really wants to ask is, is it perfectly normal for a book lover to commit this kind of mistake?

Your thoughts please.

5 comments.

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