I used to write letters / I used to sign my name

Apparently it is possible to create your own font that is actually usable for free, with very little effort (unless you want your own font look better than my pathetic squiggles) I am very excited about this if you can't tell. Not that I'll use my font anywhere. Or do anything at all with it. But it is nice, knowing I could. Behold!

Yeah, my actual handwriting looks more or less like that. I'm not proud of it or anything, and I kind of pity my penpals who have to decipher my writing on a monthly basis.
Anyway, if you want to make your own, you can do so here.
And if you want to download mine for some reason, you can do that by clicking here.

But the Lord said / go to the Devil

I found quite interesting online Flash-based game yesterday evening called The End.
It is basically ordinary puzzles and mazes-platformer, but what makes it different from the rest gazillion similar games out there, this one makes you think of your views about death.

Levels are not terribly difficult and the whole game can be passed in a few hours. (took me about 6 hours, because I'm not really PC gamer at all.) Some of the puzzles were very clever and towards the end levels started to get genuinely challenging. At the end of every level there is a philosophical Y/N question.

Game collects your answers, compares them to the answers of well known thinkers, the world, and your Facebook friends. It tells you who is closest to your views (I was closest to Machiavelli almost for the whole duration of the game. )

I liked the avatar maker very much, because it didn't force you to choose the gender of the avatar and yet was more diverse than most similar avatar makers. All in all game's visual outfit was consistent and appealing, and I liked that the different worlds had their distinctive outlooks.

Pros/Cons

+outlook
+avatar maker
+philosophical questions were well researched and interesting, game also directs you for further reading about every subject.

-occasional bugs and glitches, levers didn't turn/ character didn't always run or jump.
-it was fairly easy to break some levels

Altilis-738

I really like window shopping. Even more so when I have money and the window shopping has the potential to turn into actual shopping. Today I was pleasantly surprised by one of my impulse purchases. And so it happens that

I have a tasty piece of comic review on the menu today (puns fully intended) 

Chew, Volume 1: Taster's choice is bizarre in a way you rarely see published. The events take place in the alternative reality where bird flu pandemic was so bad that government prohibited chicken. Eating chicken, buying chicken, owning chicken is illegal. The black market for poultry is blooming. Conspiracy theorists are having a blast. Oh, and some people have inexplicable abilities that more often than not relate to food. Other than that life is pretty much as it is, which only makes the few oddities in the Chew funnier in comparison.

Our protagonist is a copper called Tony Chu. He is Cibopathic. He eats stuff and gets psychic impressions from what he ate. His ability comes in handy at detective work, as long as he doesn't mind tasting murder victims and their dogs every once in a while. (He does mind, but he'll do it anyway) It takes only one case where Chu bites suspect's face off and he is enrolled into government's Special Crimes Division and the rest is stuff of the legends. 

I really enjoyed Rob Guillory's art, his bold lines and caricaturesque style. His style also goes really well hand in hand with John Layman's bizarre humour. Chew: vol 1 has left me hungry for more, and I'm only a bit miffed to be hooked on a comic that is next to impossible to find from stores in Helsinki. Do I have to (gasp) order something from internet?!

I don't want to be a clown

Colourful and psychedelic music video with a message? Yes please.

I stopped believing / The moment when space / Was reduced to a needle

I meant to write ages ago about this whole Higgs Boson business, but then work happened and laziness happened and now it is almost 2 weeks since it was finally found. I am not going to explain what it is to you, mainly because so many people has done it better than I can. Okay, below brief (and awesome) presentation about whole subject:






(hurrah, minute physics. I love these videos, if you can't tell)

So, since I'm not going to tell you about things that you can find anywhere in internet, I'm instead going to write about

Why I think it's wrong to call the Higgs boson a "God Particle"

Yes, yes, it is invisible and we have no way of sensing it in traditional means and it is responsible for our (and cheese's and stars' and everything's) existence as we know it, it must be same thing as God / it must be a proof that God exists / haha in your face Atheists who now believe in something intangible that doesn't make any sense.

wrong!

Science and it's achievements and theories are very different from religion for one reason only. 

Science's (ok, physics') purpose is making theories about universe or about parts of universe and how these parts work. Theory in itself is only a brainchild, so it isn't necessarily true, and even if it seems to fit all the facts available, it still can be proven wrong. For example, we don't perceive the Earth turning in our everyday life, but we see the Sun moving across the sky. For a longest time all the data available led us to believe that the Earth stands still while everything else moves around us. But, with the new technologies came the new data, with new data came the new theories. And now we know a little bit more about the universe around us.

Religion on the other hand is known for putting it's fingers to it's ears and not listening when something they believed (creationists, I'm looking at you lot) is proven wrong. Christianity has been fundamentally the same for 2000 years, while science has gone forward in leaps and bounds.

We cannot confuse quantum physics with religious rabble, because all scientific theories are under construction all the time. Physicists are always trying to find what's wrong with their theories. Is there mistakes somewhere? Is there still something we don't know? Were we wrong about this or that? 

I don't think we'll ever be satisfied. We won't ever be able to sit down and make sense of it all like they can in religion. Believers can always just point at the heaven and say God when they are confused. It is not a luxury I want or need. Finding solutions with logic and brain power is more satisfying. (or you know, reading about other people doing it from a book)

Worst thing about religion is in my opinion that once you are proven wrong, the whole construction collapses into itself like a stack of cards. Believing in science and in logic makes rebound from failure easier.  

Calling the Higgs Boson a God Particle only confuses those who already have very vague and shady picture of the Quantum physics as a whole. It might be the thing that enables our existence, but it didn't create anything. It doesn't exist so that we could exist, but we exist because it exists. Secondly, we might not be able to see it or sense it otherwise, but we can gain information about it by looking at other things we have found. And if this theory is proven wrong, there is about dozen theories in line waiting to be tested.

Better listen to mr. Samuel L. Jackson

There's a disease spreading from organ to organ / And you are the white blood cell that fixes the problem.

There's been a lot of discussion in internet about misogyny in videogames lately. I felt like adding my voice to discussion, because this is one of the things that make me go to full rant mode pretty damn quickly.

To get started, there's this article (the pictures in article are NSFW) and video below:



They both put this issue much more eloquently than I ever can (which is good because you know, they get so much more attention than my little corner of internet ever will)

I don't get much shit personally when I play, mainly because I stay far away from games whose audience is mainly fifteen-years old angry teenager boys with something to prove, and I generally don't play much online. (ok, Assassins Creed MP is darn cool, but you don't have to personally interact with your co-players in it so I guess that doesn't count.) Also the games I prefer; long, plot driven action and free roaming games have this issue well in control. Here in my little bubble all is fine. But then Hutchinson from Ubisoft's creator team says something like: “It felt like, if you had all these men in every scene and (a female assassin is) secretly, stealthily in crowds of dudes, it starts to feel kind of wrong. People would stop believing it"
And: American Revolution "is the history of men". 

As a result, I feel disappointed and betrayed by one of my favourite games. This argument doesn't work no matter what direction you look at it for several reasons.
1) There was female Assassins on AC: Brotherhood and AC: Revelations. Also Ezio's sister is big part of the organisation even if she doesn't participate in actual killing people activities.
2) We have lots of historical figures for women in war: Jeanne D'Arc, Catherine the Great, Cleopatra, etc. There was women participating also on US civil war, as seen at this website.
3) If Ezio and Altaïr could walk stealthily in the crowd dressed in a cape and full body armor, armed to teeth and sometimes having an eagle jutting form their shoulder, so can a woman. If anything, woman is not generally seen as a threat: they get to places unnoticed, because they were basically second rate citizens.

Ezio "No one can see my crimes against fashion because
I'm so fucking stealthy" Auditore

4) After the debated article in question, Ubisoft revealed that there will be separate story line for a female Assassin Aveline. Oh irony!

I'm getting a bit side tracked here. And by the way, I am against the idea that the protagonist in AC III would be woman, because we can't forget that it's really Desmond all the time in the memories of his ancestors. While it would be very interesting to see how bleeding effect from a different gender would fuck Desmond up, this game is not a time or a place for such investigation.
Anyway! Sidetracks.

So, lots of support for Feminist frequency, Il Doctorine and the rest who have spoken about this issue. I appreciate the work you are doing that I and many, many others can continue enjoying games and maybe, in future, widen our gamer horizons to genres that haven't been really female friendly in the past.

If that's what gets your dick hard / Telling people they're bad at making art.

I tried my hand at this making art-business again. Work in progress or not, depending if I can muster up courage to add contrast and textures. Probably not, though.
Funny fact: Blue ink dries faster than red.
Note for self: Test how long new inks take to dry before using them.