linterry's blogger

At long last, after what must have been at least 3 months of constant searching, I finally purchased my first notebook computer. It's an LG LW60 Express, the specs are 1.73Ghz Centrino, 1GB ram, 60gb hard drive, 15.4" widescreen, ATI X600 Mobility.

The screen of course, is unbelievably beautiful. It's so clear that it puts the desktop Samsung 17" LCD to shame.

But am I happy? Not really - I'm more relieved, like just finishing a big exam. Happy is playing World of Warcraft and forgetting about life. Buying a notebook is just pure stress. For quite a while, I was literally tortured with the decision. You'd think that buying a notebook shouldn't be that big of a deal, and for most people, it's not. But I'm so paranoid, so picky, so obsessive, that after filtering all the notebooks through the following criteria, practically no models were left.

1. Beautiful screen
This practically ruled out 80% of the notebooks out there, including all the Toshiba models from the year 2005 and onwards and, Dell notebook in existence, every IBM notebook in existence. I was shocked to see that the LG had such a nice screen, as I never considered LG to be a premium notebook, but apparently they do make very decent machines

2. Doesn't overheat
Rules out practically every Toshiba prior to year 2005, in particuar their A70 line which ironically has one of the most beautiful LCD screens to date. I even saw a $2599 Toshiba Qosmio model at Compusmart fizz out and die twice when I was just surifng with it.

(basically by this point, Toshiba's and Dell's were all ruled out)

3. Must be a demo model
While I've personally witnessed customers who complain that they want a new model and not the demo, I'd much rather buy the demo model - for the simple reason that if the demo model has no dead pixels, then I can have peace of mind. Buying something that I can't even see or try out triggers some of the most paranoic fears in the darkest recesses of my mind.

4. Must have a typeable keyboard
A simple requirement, really, but I think this one is just a bit too much to ask. The $2599 Qosmio had an awesome keyboard which I could type at practically the same speeds as my desktop, but that one fizzed out twice, so forget it. A lot of notebooks, for some reason, had an oversized touchpad, so everytime I typed, the mouse cursor would move and then click outside of the current window, thus losing focus and sending my keystrokes to the desktop. The LG has a pretty crappy keyboard in terms of tactile feel, and I'm not looking forward to typing essays on this, but I'll make do I suppose.

I finally found this LG model at Notebook Outlet at Pacific Mall, of all places - a demo model, with zero dead pixels. And after only a day of mulling over the crappy keyboard, I thought to myself, for this price, this is as good as it gets. So I bought it. As they were preparing the demo model and packaging it up, the next ten minutes I was just pacing around Pacific thinking to myself "what have I done"? I know I have to buy a notebook for my trip to Okinawa, but... somehow, I had this dreadful feeling that everythign was going to go wrong... kind of like, some sort of impending doom. Things like, what if the computer ends up being inexpliciably loud, or what if I really can't type on this thing, or what if the thing just dies randomly and I can't explain it... all these fears just surfaced all at once...

But thankfully, LG was kind enough to make a decent notebook and aside from the cheap feeling keyboard everything else seems to be ok. I was also blown away at how smoothly it can run World of Warcraft, it's practically the same speed as the desktop's Ati Radeon 9800. Unfortunately any full screen CPU intensive game will trigger the fans to go full blast and it gets pretty noisy, to the point where it's somewhat bothersome (like it's not good for the computer o something), but I'll try to endure this inescapable fact.

http://www.xanga.com/bakchoi/447579618/item.html
he told chaibear that watever it was he was dealing with IRL, for 6 hours a day, he doesnt need to think about it. all he needs to do is just play WoW. he can just eliminate all his worries, troubles, or watever it was he was dealing with. just let the game take over your mind. for six+ hours, that is what WoW does.

I just read this post and I just had to chuckle. Not because I think it's silly or anything, but because I think it's so goddamn true. Yes, World of Warcraft is a lot like heroin - it feels so damn good to play, and it's a unbelievable painkiller (especially considering it's a videogame).

The same can't be said for other kinds of great games, like say Mario, GTA, Tetris, God of War or Shadow of the Colossus. These kinds of "normal" games require the player to at least be emotionally healthy in order to be enjoyed. WoW however, actually has the potential to eradicate emotional misery. Even if you were just dumped by your girlfriend and fired from your job, you can still binge on WoW and have a good time. It's on a totally different level from collecting 1up mushrooms.

Just by saying that, I wonder if playing WoW shares the same kind of neurological effects as more "classical" addictions like alcohol and drugs. I'm thinking it has more in common with drugs than alcohol, since the game apparently directly stimulates a certain part of the brain that involves desire. WoW is all about finding new gear, new weapons, new skills. Every new purple item you get sends a rush of dopamegenic pleasure to the brain, creating feelings along the lines of "Ohhh fuck yes baby!"

I bet somehwere out there, some psychologist must have done a study on the various hedonistic pleasures humans indulge in, and rank them according to strength. I'm sure the list would look something like this:

Rank 5 (holy motherfucking god I'm so fucking happy I could die right now)

• Crack Cocaine

Rank 4 (ohh fuck yes baby!)

• Heroin/Ecstasy/Amphetamines
• Having sex with a girl for the 1st time
• The first few days after getting a girlfriend
• Playing WoW for the first 100 hours
• The first two hours after discovering you won the lottery
• Scoring the winning goal in the World Cup Final

Rank 3 (the daily 'fix')

• Having sex with the same girl for the 500th time
• Playing WoW for the next 2000 hours
• The first month after winning the lottery
• Tobacco/Marijuana

Rank 2 (a silent high)

• Having sex with the same girl for the 2000th time
• Caffeine (Coffee, Coke, Pepsi, etc.)
• Alcohol
• Buying something new from Future Shop
• Playing WoW for the 2000th consecutive hour
• Playing a 'AAA' title for the first 10 hours (eg Mario, Zelda, Final Fantasy, etc.)
• Acquiring a new physical ability (eg skating backwards, left-hand layups, etc.)

Rank 1 (the necessities of life)

• Eating
• Sleeping
• Exercising

The key thing to these ranks, is that if something that you've been doing all along in one of these ranks goes missing, then you will feel misery, unless you substitute it with something from the same rank or higher.

If you've been hooked on having sex with the same girl for the 500th some time, and all of a sudden that girl dumps you and you are left with no more sex, can WoW help you? Well, according to the chart, yes, since both are rank 3 pleasures.

But if you just hooked up with a girl, and just had sex with her for the 1st time, and then she dumps you, can WoW help you? Probably not.

If you just started playing WoW for the first few weeks of open beta, and all of sudden the beta ends leaving you with two hard WoWless weeks, can sex with the same girl for the 500th time help? No, but sex with a new girl might.

Whatever, I'm just making shit up.

As I'm just biding my time until I catch a plane to Okinawa, I renewed one of my world of warcraft accounts and started to play again. Actually, I renewed my GF's account since she made quite a few characters at decent levels: 24 Troll Hunter, 28 Gnome Warlock, 34 UD Priest. Well here are some of my thoughts after about a week of hardcore playing:

Warlock - DoT Heaven

Well I started off with the 28 Gnome Warlock since that was the only character on a PvE server and I didn't want to have to deal with random gankers at the time. I played for three or four days - it was rather fun at first. It's rather insane how many various DoT's a Warlock has - Corruption, Curse of Agony, Siphon Life, Immolation - in PvE usually I stack all four on a mob and then Drain Life till it's dead, then Life Tap to rebalance Health/Mana. There's still downtime, but far less than a Mage. At later levels the Warlock is supposed to be the #1 grinding machine with the 31pt Affliciton Talent Dark Pact.

I guess the nice part about playing a Warlock, or at least an Affliction build, is that the majority of the damage will come from insta-cast DoT's, so I don't have to see that dreaded "spell bar", which I suffered enough of when playing a Mage. Insta-casts are totally awesome. You can run around DoT'ting everything around you left and right, all while running around in circles, and see your dps skyrocket. This is an absolutely dirty trick to pull off in low levels WSG, you just DoT everything around you and chances are the last tick of damage that kills the enemy will be yours. Thus leading to insane kill/death ratios like this:


While the numbers look impressive keep in mind this is pretty much "skill-less" since I do nothing but random DoT'ing and the ocassional Fear to get somebody off my back. This was also only the third or fourth game that I played, so an experienced Warlock could have probably managed even better numbers. It's the nature of the Warlock's "fire-and-forget" abilities that can lead to so many killing blows. Also, the Alliance lost that game, so it's important to remember that killing blows \= success.

Hunter - EZ Mode for the Masses

After I got sick of the Warlock, namely: dealing with cumbersome Soul Shards and the inability for the Voidwalker to hold decent Aggro, and still having to deal with periodic downtime, I then tried out the 24 Hunter.

My first thought was: Holy shit, is the game supposed to be this easy?

Seriously, you could play a Hunter with your brain half asleep and still do extremely well. For one thing, the Hunter's pet - shit, this thing holds incredible aggro, especially compared to the Voidwalker. With the Warlock, I have to carefully time my DoT's so that I don't break the VW's aggro, but with the Hunter I can just let loose with everything I got and my pet will keep aggro more than 70% of the time. This means, in 70% of the fights, I don't even get hit once. Not even the Warlock (the only other pet class in WoW) can accomplish something like that.

For a class that doesn't expect to get hit in 70% of their fights, it seems kind of ridiuclous to give them mail armor at lv40. This is a class that excels at not getting hit at all, and they still get mail armor? Rogues need mail armor 10,000 times more than hunters do, since they'll probably get hit 10,000 times more often in their lifetime. Shit, even Warlocks probably get hit more in their lifetime than Hunters, and they're wearing cloth!

Just to give you an idea on how easy it is to play a Hunter, I actually forgot to replace Arcane Shot and Serpent Sting with newer Ranks on my toolbar, and I was still kicking ass. When I found out that I actually had higher ranks in my spellbook, I was like "WTF? I can do even more damage?" Can you imagine a Mage forgetting to put the next rank of Frostbolt on his toolbar? Trust me, he'll never forget, because he's struggling enough as it is that he can't even wait for the next rank. With the Hunter, you could probably go like ten levels without learning new skills and you'll still be ok.

Let's not forget the bazillion ways a Hunter can shake an opponent who manages to get close. Traps, Wing Clip, Counterattack, Scatter Shot, Disengage. And for PvE, you have Feign Death, which is on an astromically ridiculous 30sec cooldown. Come again? Rogues to have to wait 5 minutes for an "oh, shit" button (which also requires a reagant), and Hunters get one practically every other fight? Something ain't right, Jim. If anything Rogues need a 30 sec Vanish, and Hunters should get the 5min Feign Death, especially since they abuse the unbeatable FD+Freezing Trap in PvP to completely pwn any melee class under the sun.

I grinded the Hunter from 24 to 30 in less than two days. It was so easy, I just couldn't stop laughing at how riduclously effortless it was to kill mob after mob without even getting touched.

Warrior - Too slow, too boring

Since none of us played a Warrior class, I also tried playing a NE Warrior from 1 to 10. It wasn't much fun. I guess Warriors aren't fun until you hit 60 and have like a massive 2H weapon with Mortal Strikes and can bash Rogues for an instant 2k damage with one button. Anyways, once I hit lv10, that was it for me. It was just too slow, too cumbersome, not enough fun.

I believe that the next greatest accomplishment in humanity, should there be one, must involve discovering a way to combat my eternal arch-nemesis: homeostasis (aka. the 'hedonic treadmill'). There is nothing more disgusting, nothing more pointless, nothing more sadistic than our retarded ability to normalize happiness. Think about it. You work so hard for what you want in life, so that you can at last, find some peace with yourself and find everlasting contentment. What Peace? What Contentment? It does not exist. Your brain is designed that the more satisfied it gets, the harder it becomes to satiate. All that effort you put in just feeds the Cycle - you make a wonderful accomplishment, you experience a transient pleasure, the brain normalizes, and the cycle continues ad infinitum.

This cycle, known in scientific circles as the hedonic treadmill, is inescapable. Nobody on the planet Earth is divine enough, intelligent enough, sacred enough to circumvent the cycle. It's biologically wired down to the cellular level in our brains. The only difference is that some people are more "sensitive" to the cycle, others less. I believe Buddha was very aware of this problem, and that is why he developed many methods to try to slow or reverse the cycle. Things like meditation and refraining from indulgent pleasures; he tried his best to stop feeding the Cycle, or even reverse it in the best cases. But in the end, the problem still exists, because the Cycle is still there. And in today's modern world, with so many indulgent pleasures in the form of endless pornography, zero trans-fat potato chips, beautiful LCD screens and non-stop MP3 music, the Cycle is being fed at an accelerating rate without bounds.

Even more disturbing, and this was mentioned in Buddha's Four Noble Truths, is that for all the accomplishments we make, all the wonderful things in life we possess, these things only make us more susceptible to suffering. When you are born in this world, the only things you could suffer from are physical pain. Not knowing what it is to have money, not knowing what it is like to love, not knowing how great it feels to have sex, none of these things could possibly hurt you. Yet as you grow up in this world, you begin to develop attachments to things that you cannot let go. Your car, the Internet, cigarettes, girlfriends, the ability to buy beer at 3am in the morning - it dosen't matter what the pleasure is. The more things you need, the more voids you create in your soul, and the easier it becomes for you to suffer when you lose these things.

For all this awareness and knowledge of the human condition, what can possibly done to rectify it? It is ideal for humanity as a whole to continue feeding the Cycle at accelerating rates until we become nigh impossible to satiate? When we develop the most miraculous technology so that everybody can have everything that they want instantly, will humans finally attain some kind of Nirvana? I don't think so. Should that ever happen, humans will probably encounter some form of the Ultimate Suffering. I personally believe that the Cycle must be destroyed, some way or another, whether it is through neurological meds or some form of DNA mutation. That would be humanity's greatest accomplishment, bar none.

True, pleasure feels good, but its transience leaves in its wake a relative normality that, by comparison, often feels like a void - one screaming to be filled with more and more pleasure. The end result of this process is, of course, what Phil Brickman called the hedonic treadmill.

- Satisfaction, Gregory Berns, M.D., Ph.D. (p.244)

Recently there was this whole fiasco about Rogers throttling Bittorrent downloads to about 10kb/sec, which not surprisingly made a lot of people furious. Initially there was a way around it by using ports 1720 and 1755 which were left unthrottled (and for good reason; those ports were used by Rogers Home Phone and Yahoo Music). But then right about February 2006 Rogers just clamped down harder with their throttling strategy until pretty much, all Bittorrent downloads were rendered essentially useless, even on those magical ports.

Although I was initially upset as a Rogers user and lite BTer, I have to say that in some ways, I can somewhat empathize with their situation. From their point of view, what they have are a horde of hardcore downloaders who collectively suck up more than 80% of the bandwidth of the entire network. Let's face it, if somebody did a study on what was being transferred over these P2P networks, you'd probably have something like:

40% - warez
30% - pr0n
20% - tv shows
10% - misc. legitimate uses like linux distirubtions, WoW patches

In some ways, when you really step back and think of it from Rogers side, these group of hardcore BTers must seem like incredibly persistent cockroaches. They continuously download gigabytes upon gigabytes of the latest divx releases, dvd-r movies, ps2 games, xbox games, tv shows, etc. etc., and their appetite is just fucking endless. When you think how many terabytes of information it takes to satiate just one hardcore BTer, it's just plain scary. If you could take a sneak peek at their computer area, you'd probably find kilograms of dvd-r's scattered all over the place - surely a physical testament to our unrelenting needs for novelty and entertainment.

Much like how you mysteriously end up filling any hard drive to full capacity within months, no matter how big, it would seem that no matter how much Rogers increases their bandwidth, the hardcore BTers will be right there to suck it all up for their own selfish satiation.

I'm not trying to pass judgement here, of course, since I'm also a regular offender. At one point even, I started going somewhat hardcore, downloading unprecendeted amounts of BT stuff in one month (for me, unprecedented is like around 80 gigs, but I know some who top 500 gigs a month). But then I realized that by doing this, the fun of downloading started to vanish. In fact, it became such a pain to unrar all those gigs and gigs of movies and games and having to continuously burn them onto dvd-r and having to organize them into binders. After a while, a backlog of "unprocessed downloads" accumulated in my torrent directory until I just told myself "why the fuck am I doing this?" Most of the games and movies out there nowadays are just filler for some capitalist scheme anyways - the world has become more obsessed with quantity over quality, or at least it may just seem that way with our relentlessly increasing standards of life.



There is definitely something to be said about this whole high-tech turbo-consumerism: there is so much MP3'ing, BT'ing, cell phone and digicam gadgeteering going on I wonder if there will be any counter force to restrain all this unbridled desire. Week after week I look at the Future Shop flyers and sometimes I wonder if there is ever an end to this relentless stream of new products that seems to just keep on accelerating without bounds. No doubt, there seems to be this void in a lot of young people nowadays, a void that seems to be temporarily satiated by copulous amounts of downloads and high tech gadgeteering. But, it seems the more we feed this void with stuff from Future Shop, the bigger it gets.

I guess it seems odd that as a person who grew up with technology and probably had his mental sanity sustained through technology for key periods of my life - that I should be apprehensive about high-tech turbo-consumerism. Indeed, I suffer from the same void as well. Wen I feel bored, I instinctvely feel like hiting up mininova.org and indulging myself in the latest fast-food media for practically no cost. But going outside in the yard and dribbling a soccer ball is also free, and also seems to fill the void, but in a somewhat different way - kind of like eating a wholesome meal instead of fried chicken. It doesn't have the same punch, but there is a sort of restrained, well-controlled satisfaction that can be derived from very simple and primitive activities.

Just found a couple of humorous but scientific reads on the Internet

1. Comparison of Gorilla Penis, Chimpanzee Penis and Humans Penis
2. Why are rat testicles so big?

It's kind of shocking to know that biologically, humans are more born more promiscuous than gorillas (but we lose out to chimps, which have enormous 4 pound semen factories)

最近、ＰＳ２ゲームばっかりやっていた（竜が如く、新・鬼武者、ＷＩＬＤ　ＡＲＭＳ　４）。もう全部完成したので、次なにをやろうかな？仕事を早め探したら方がいいけど、どうやらやる気が全然ないようだ。もしかして、毎日彼女がそばにいるから、それで心は結構満足で、簡単な楽しみ以外何も考えてないみたい。

たまに、自分が二つに分けてる気がする。一つは大人の私、他のは子供の私。私の場合は、子供の私はずっとより強いようだ。欲張りや欲しがりやしつこいお願いはたっぷりあって終わらないみたいんだ。たまに、このことをやらないといけないって分かっても、でもやっぱり心はすごくやりたいと思ったら、この二つの私のケンカになる。たとえ、最近彼女は沖縄へ帰らないといけなくなっちゃって、大人の私は「もちろん、帰りなさい」って言いたいけど、子供の私は「いやだ、帰ったら私はすごく寂しくなっちゃうから、カエルナ！」って言ってる。この調子になったら、私はいつも困って苦しんでる。

I don't know why God doens't want me to see a Henry goal, or any Arsenal goal for that matter, but it seems to be so goddamn true. If I diligently spend 90 minutes to watch an entire game, Arsenal just refuses to score. BUT, if I only catch the last 20 minutes, then the scoreline will be always like Arsenal 2, Opponents 0. In other words, Arsenal will only score when I'm not watching. I'm sure that's a distorted view filled with psychological idiosyncrasies or whatever, but that's pretty much how I feel.

For example, I just missed an Henry goal by 10 fucking minutes this morning, because instead of watching the game first thing as I woke up, I decided to clean the stupid aquarium. So basically, the only thing that was standing in the way between seeing an Henry goal live for the first time in the 2005-2006 season, was the decision to be a good boy and clean my aquarium before checking the Arsenal match. Fuck.

I swear to god, water changes are just about the most annoying part of owning an aquarium. If you don't do it, the water eventually gets super polluted with nitrates, and the fish are more likely to get sick and die (not to mention algae starts growing like mad and the water will smell awful). The thing is, the entire process takes like 20 minutes and it's just a lot of annoying manual labor. You have to move the decorations around to get to the dirty spots, you have to unplug the filter, you have to siphon the water twice, you have to fill a huge bucket with water and put conditioner in it... yada yada yada yada yda. It's like cleaning your humidifier for those retarded calcium deposits (because of the cleaning requiremnt, we don't even bother to use a humidifer anymore). You'd think 20 minutes is like nothing but in this day an age of super-insta-gratification, 20ms web page latency world, to spend 20 minutes just to keep the status quo is just plain unacceptable.