Fatal Error in Zot Defense

Before you ask, I already reported this bug or one like it many moons ago. I have no right to complain about a free game really, so this isn't a complaint per se, just a wailing to the gods. Perhaps Kikubaaqudgha, in my case. Oh Kiku ! Why hast thou forsaken me? And devs, please tell us, why must there be a fatal error that crashes the game and stops the show? I was having fun. . . I do so love Zot Defense! Well, I don't really know any way around this error, and it always without fail pops up in Zot Defense, so there we are.

The monsters should be smart enough to figure out that they can fight their way through apparent obstacles such as plants and fireballs, and that those obstacles do not block their path. So if no other path is found, then let the algorithm choose a less desirable path that requires removing a removable obstacle.

Ten Cokes a Day

Yeah. Reminds me of Super-Size Me. One thing I gained from that article is that I need to knock off the fruit juice.

Don't Have to Be Perfect

Accepting that one doesn't have to be perfect is key to mental health and avoidance of depression. When I notice a fault, I try to find the humor in it rather than getting down about it. In the first place, being aware of a fault is a positive and should not be interpreted as a negative. At least awareness opens up the possibility of addressing or compensating for known faults. But people who just constantly pick and find faults in other people are unpleasant, and one doesn't wish to be around them.

I don't think a complicated top-heavy animal (big brain, frail body) can be perfect. There are going to be limitations, particularly in the functioning of the brain and personality. One isn't going to meet the standards of everyone one encounters. But all of that is OK, for the simple reason everyone is in the same boat. Since everyone's headed to the boneyard, even if there are some geniuses or strongmen nearby or out there in the wide world, as they age they will lose, one by one, in stages or suddenly, those gifts they once had, so in a way, we're all equal, except for very, very brief spurts of activity. What are 1 - 100 years in the cosmic sense of time, which is measured in billions of years if it is measured at all? Some say the Universe begins and ends, and others say it regenerates itself, and there are other theories, but the consensus is that the Universe is around for a length of time unimaginable to our brains... billions of years. So man is a flash in the pan.

I mean, all humans are doing pretty well compared to the ancestors, bacteria or amoebas or whatever, pond scum floating around and soaking up cosmic rays until random mutations led to us.

Ban on Books?

I usually think of the UK as enlightened in most matters not pertaining to marijuana, so I was surprised to learn that the meatheads running the prisons over there banned books. Finally, a judge has ruled that the ban is unlawful. The wardens say they are worried about books being used for drug smuggling. Drugs, schmugs. A couple joints getting through is no reason to deny books to everybody in the joint. It's not like a joint is going to blow up the joint. In fact, a little marijuana once in a while should be distributed to prisoners as a reward for good behavior. Learning to love reading really is just the thing to rehabilitate a criminal into a normal human being. Besides, honestly who the hell else is going to buy any books in this video-besotted age? At least keep the prison market open for the starving authors.

Writing

I do think I've written some half-way decent short stories in my day. My ambition in life has always been to compile a pretty large volume of stories and essays and publish somewhere where I can feel fairly confident that the work will persist after my demise. Money or power as an end unto itself has never interested me; I just want enough money to be reasonably comfortable in lower-middle class or rather upper lower-class squalor, and as for power, I want the power that comes with freedom from debt and freedom in the sense of liberty.

I would hate for all my work to be destroyed and no one ever see it again. I think that if I bother to write about something, then perhaps it is important after all, perhaps I am even moved by something like the zeitgeist, because I have noticed that things I am very passionate about, such as marijuana and gay rights, have gained ascendency even in my own lifetime. And although I am nominally atheist I do not rule out the hypothesis that maybe an intelligence greater than my own moves me. We humans are such simple beings, you know, that it should not be terribly difficult to play us like violins, I would think, if one were a reasonably respectable alien form of life, dwelling not necessarily out of reach. Who really knows what unusual forms an alien can take, and whether they really need a form at all? Anything seems possible with Quantum Physics.

I like writing just because there is a certain delight to be had in creating something, particularly something that imitates life. Really, being a writer is the closest a mere mortal can come to being a god. I like transcending my own existence, my own biological and self-imposed limitations and creating a new universe with new rules and new people that seem, oh so real to me sometimes, and more compelling in some ways even. I guess I like to be There, on vacation, like, rather than Here all the time. Here is great, don't get me wrong. But There is nice, too.

Tolkien is probably the writer I admire most, because the universe he created was so utterly compelling and absorbing. In fact, with the Simarillion, he created a theology rather superior to the one he professed. He was wise to keep it out of his main work. In the Lord of the Rings, much is left unmentioned, such as, who is Gandalf really and who is Sauron? Where do the Elves go at the end? Well, all of the backstory is revealed in the Simarillion. In fact, I think Tolkien made a plausible extension of the Christian mythology.

Manners

Whether one is right or left on the political sphere, I'm convinced the way to get along in the world is good manners. There is incivility to be found in both houses. I think that social skills are more difficult to grasp than some suppose. So much emphasis nowadays is on technical skills. But social skills are the grease that keeps the engine of society running smoothly.

Quantum Physics

I wonder how many people can follow quantum mechanics. It's traditional, old-school science I like and understand, that is, the science prior to 1920. After Einstein, everything got weird. In school, I was taught primarily Newtonian physics, which handicapped my understanding of the Universe, but that remains at heart my understanding of things. When I read, for instance in the biography of Richard Feynman, that electrons can travel backward and forward in time, just as they travel backward and forward through space, it does not compute, and I do not understand the math either, nor even the high-level explanations or the "easy" analogies offered. I don't understand what is meant by the idea that time has no meaning or does not exist or is strange in a way that I cannot directly observe. To me, time is real. I observe things change, and they do not revert to what they were, either. Perhaps my limitations are biological in nature, and I'm not meant to divine such mysteries. To me, quantum physics reads like magic, and the physicists, like Feynman, are sorcerors that can tap into dangerous, double-edged supernatural forces.

Terrorism

Every time I read the world news, terrorists are killing people in Africa or the Middle East and sometimes even in a civilized country in Europe or the Americas.

Terrorists seem to think of politics as a numbers game, where the more casualties, the bigger their "victory." When dealing with an immoral, absolutely evil foe with such a medieval mindset, it is important to adhere to a 1000:1 ratio for every single life harmed, with the ratio being filled by the homelands, neighborhoods and hiding places of the terrorists. By eliminating the sources of the terrorists, where they are bred, educated and trained, terrorism is eliminated, both in the present and the future. When no more terrorists are born, then there will be no more terrorism. Terrorism is simply a disease, and the way to eradicate disease is the same employed by the body's own immune system. One finds the source of infection, swarms and destroys, and then disposes of the waste. It's a mystery why governments around the world waste trillions of dollars on never-ending wars that drag on decade after decade, when the solution is rather simple and direct. By treating symptoms merely, and not eliminating the sources of infection, we ensure the problem persists into perpetuity. The Romans knew how to deal with terrorism. We can take a page or two from their playbook and quit playing around with terrorists. If they don't want to observe the rules of war, fine, two can play that game.

GOP Staffer

If you're a staffer for a political party, then you want to stay anonymous, or at least not become known for something boneheaded like this.

Hey, pray for a brain while you're at it. Geez.

Ferguson

Put Ferguson into perspective. In India, the cops won't even investigate a murder if one is from a low caste. I think people forget how corrupt and stupid the rest of the world is in comparison to the U.S. Go and destroy everything, and what we will be left with is a place just like India.

I think Ferguson is open and shut. A cop got too rough with a crook. Period. It's not on the same level as the assassination of Harvey Milk, where the killer got off with a very light sentence by the way. Harvey was shot in cold blood in a planned, premeditated fashion, and he had not committed any crime either.

Open any given newspaper to find an example of a black man with a gun, arrested by law enforcement and facing charges. There are an awful lot of examples of this. I would like to know what is proposed to be done about the real problem, thuggery in the black community. That is a bigger problem than an individual incident or even a series of incidents where a law enforcement agent overreacted. Every once in a while there is going to be a mistake made, but that doesn't mean lose all trust in law enforcement and go riot in the street and tear up things and raise hell. I just don't believe all law enforcement is racist, for the simple fact that there are a lot of black cops. I do believe there are racist cops, but I don't think they represent a majority of cops. When there are bad cops, they should be arrested and put into the justice system just like any other offender.

Where is all the gratitude when a killer is taken off the streets? Where is the gratitude for the peace and quiet and calm that is due to effective law enforcement? I think it is nice to not have to worry about killers running around robbing and shooting people, and that is due to law enforcement, not due to protesters getting upset about an incident they did not witness. I still do not have a clear picture of exactly what happened in that incident, but I do know that the deceased had just come back from robbing a store, and that doesn't put a halo on his head. He and his friend were walking in the middle of the road, going out of their way to annoy and inconvenience other people. I'm willing to believe what the cop and the eyewitnesses say about the actions of the deceased.

If there are enough cops on the street carrying firearms and enough violent incidents, then I think it stands to reason there is going to be a certain percentage of cases where those firearms are discharged in a way that people don't like. Things get mixed up in a tussle, and the logical mind finds it difficult to focus, once the fight-or-flight mechanism kicks in. There is a margin of error and it is something anyone with an engineering background understands. Bring imperfect components together, and eventually there is going to be a certain rate of error. That doesn't mean there's a vast conspiracy against blacks or that racism is rampant. It just means that people are human.


I think Ferguson is much ado over nothing. In Ferguson, you have a lot of outsiders coming in bringing their own agenda, pursued by their own demons and projecting their own past and their own experiences onto a separate incident that did not involve them. The violent rhetoric being tossed around is the product of unhealthy minds, some of which lack any sense of fairness or morality. Minds driven by hate, that is what I see in the protesters in Ferguson. The United States is one of the least racist societies in the entire world, particularly compared to extreme racist African nations like Zimbabwe. A glance at Africa overall makes one glad to live in the U.S., a color blind society, where race does not matter, and it is possible to get ahead no matter what background one is from. No country in the world has the amount of legal protections and opportunities for minorities that the United States does. Go to India, Russia, China, Iran, Uganda. Then come back to the U.S. and say with a straight face that they are any better.

Ambition

My ambition is to write a good novel, a real page-turner that readers love to read again and again. I have ideas all the time, but seldom the time, energy or confidence to go through with them. To me, what Tolkien accomplished was magic of the highest order. It is the art form I appreciate most of all, the painting of wondrous pictures that do not mirror reality, but surpass it. Words are my paint, only because I'm untrained and untried and probably unskilled in any other format. I realize words are out of fashion, too, but that's just too bad. I can't all of a sudden change direction and become a painter because everyone is goo-goo over graphics nowadays.

Arrogance

Arrogance amuses me.

The tiniest frog in a small pond croaks loudly, announcing itself as the ruler of the Universe. So many tiny frogs!

Meanwhile, real genius plods along quietly, without the peculiar need to trumpet every little triumph.

And what is Man after all but a slightly evolved primate? Should we be so proud, truly, when suffering and Death claims each of us so soon? When problems intractable beset ourselves and our society? When our very race is ever on the brink of self-annihilation? Bah!

Why I Don't Go to the Movies

Today I saw $25 AMC Regal Cinema gift cards going for $20. It made me wonder whether I would even be interested if they were going for $10. I am certainly not interested at $20.

Long ago, cinema owners went out of their way to make the movie-going experience horrible. Lousy, unhealthy, overpriced food and drinks that I would not feed an animal, commercials!--just like watching TV at home, long lines and exorbitant ticket prices persuaded me only a fool would buy a ticket to see a movie. That is why I have not been out to see a movie for years. I still don't think cinema owners know what time of day it is. In order for cinema owners to draw crowds back in, they would have to make the experience nice, and they have no clue how to do that. I am looking forward to the day when the cinemas close down for good and stay closed and all that space gets used for something interesting like a theater.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki were Justified

I've been reading a biography of Dr. Richard Feynmann--Genius--and remembered the old controversy, which I first read about in the People's Almanac and later Howard Zinn, regarding President Truman's decision to nuke Japan during WW2. I think later events have confirmed Truman was right to make the difficult decision. One does not condemn entire towns to destruction lightly, but I think that leftists were wrong to ignore the fate of millions of American GI's and their allies. What we did not need in this country were more casualties and expenses from a long, expensive war that was the fault of Japan, Germany and Italy, the aggressors.

Japan should send the U.S. a thank-you note and a gift every year on the anniversary of Hiroshima and on the anniversary of Nagasaki, just to let us know how grateful they are that we ended their vicious military dictatorship and bestowed upon them a gentle, mild, republican form of government under which they have prospered. If the war had continued, then much needless bloodletting would have occurred, and many men would not have returned from that war, which would impact many generations far into the future. Sometimes the patient requires a harsh medicine to eliminate an infection.

Whenever an evil, warmongering tyranny gets its due, that is not an atrocity, that is poetic justice. In truth, we should and would have nuked Berlin, if the bomb had been ready, and it may be that Germany would have been better off for it, if it could have avoided the destruction caused by the last year of conventional warfare and the separation of their territory into two opposing sides, East and West.

I find Feynmann's life inspiring. The U.S. gained much due to its milder anti-Semitism. We were not entirely benevolent to the Jews but certainly much more welcoming than Europe. When Nazi Germany began persecuting the Jews, they lost one-fourth of their physicists, among other intellectuals. Of course it was stupid, self-destructive, pseudoscientific nonsense on their part, just like homophobia is today. Purge people at random for no good reason, and you stand to lose some of your best and brightest, as well as a lot of innocent and good people.

99% of Traffic is Spam

There. I've said it.

99% of all traffic to this blog is generated by spam affiliates from Russia and the Ukraine, the unsavory crime-ridden ghettoes of cyberspace, and other locales in eastern Europe and China.

Why they waste their time scanning this blog probably has to do with mentions of Putin and other keywords, but even before I started blogging about that, they were responsible for at least 50% of the traffic.

Self-promoting Symantec did no one any favors by revealing their discovery of Regin and should be fined several billion dollars or nationalized outright. Symantec did not discover the Regin virus until too late, and its discovery is more in the lines of a confession than a scoop. I do not use overpriced Symantec anti-virus, a system resource hog. Why pay for these ineffective antiviruses that cannot detect viruses, when quiet, effective Microsoft Security Essentials (or Windows Defender) is 100% free?

Russia really needs a lot of  cyberespionage directed at it, and if the NSA is not responsible, then the NSA would be irresponsible. Under Putin, Russia represents evil incarnate, and any means used against it are justified, in the same way that any means are justified against the HIV virus or Ebola. Putrid Putin has the same level of morality, philosophy and aesthetic taste as the Ebola or HIV virus, which is to say none at all, and he has the same influence upon the world. To support Putrid and his Putridity is to be aligned with evil. I hope to see the day when Putrid is put in the ground where he belongs. Dump his carcass in the same pit as his soul-mate Stalin. He murdered Russia's democracy.

Obamacare's Stupidity

The most damnfool thing Obama did was to create a penalty for folks that don't sign up for health care because they can't afford it. Yes, one can apply for exemptions, but I have discovered it to be an onerous, time-wasting experience that can take 40 - 60 hours of paperwork and phone calls with Health and Human Services. Basically, HHS wants about 20 documents proving that one's income is low, and they request almost every bit of sensitive financial information available, opening up the applicant to the horrors of identity theft if that information gets lost in the mails. That is why the Democrats richly deserved defeat in the 2014 election, because they suffered from extreme mental retardation in taxing the poor between $95 - $1000, adding insult to injury to those who cannot afford health insurance due to financial hardship.Why Obama and the Democrats declared war on the poor and the middle class, I don't know, but they did, and I am one of the ones suffering because of the class warfare seeking to further impoverish the already poor. What we don't need in this country is additional paperwork requirements on top of the already heavy burden. Maybe the Democratic elite can afford to sit around all day filling out papers, but those who work for a living have other priorities, such as putting food on the table. The penalty should not exist, was a stupid idea, and let us hope the Republicans have sense enough to tweak that part of the plan rather than eliminating health care altogether. That perhaps may be too optimistic.

Sucks To Be Poor

I was not too pleased to read about Microsoft replacing security guards with robots. They probably spent a princely sum on the robots, all for the sake of giving some poor guys making $15 an hour the pink slip.

At least the idle aristocrats of Downton Abbey had enough of a conscience to employ the lower classes and think about their welfare. There is something to be said for sharing the wealth and bringing employment to a community, and yes, Microsoft does "owe" the community in which it does business.

It has always sucked to be poor, perhaps more so before the advent of Obamacare, but in the future, all bets are off. Computers and robots keep getting smarter, whereas our pace of evolution is at a standstill according to most authorities. It's not our fault that we can't replace the "chip" inside our brains with a newer and faster "chip". Biological science has not yet advanced to the stage where we can design our offspring or ourselves.

I think that as more people become unemployed and unemployable due to the replacement of humans with computers, there will be a larger group of hungry, poor, discontented people, eager for any type of change, including war. Of course nothing will be done to stop global warming, and the coming scarcity of resources such as drinking water, food and electricity will be a huge pressure upon the lower classes.

 The writing on the wall is evident in the U.S. Our vast army of law enforcement officers, already unprecedented in its numbers and resources, will expand and transform, under Republican leadership and guidance, into a kind of Schutzstaffel, eliminating "undesirables," that is, the lower class, and protecting the property of the rich, more or less as it does now. The rich today murder and go free, whereas the poor are jailed and occasionally killed for the slightest infraction. Ferguson could be a harbinger of things to come. Perhaps in the final analysis, it is a good thing that the U.S. has such liberal gun laws, because the Schutzstaffel of the future will not hold all the cards.

I really hope that sanity prevails. I also hope that our scientists develop a way to improve the human animal. Throughout history, science has proven more of a beneficial influence on the human condition and especially on the lower classes than any politicians. Just learning how to prevent the spread of common diseases by washing hands on a regular basis was a huge step forward in medical science and of greater value than anything any politician ever did. The nurses and doctors that insisted upon hand-washing were great heroes of civilization.

I hope that the right-wingers that America elected into office don't drag the country down into war, famine, disease and misery. Just because there is something that makes people happy and more productive does not mean that you have to destroy it. Republicans want to end Obamacare, immigration liberalization and even the minimum wage, and they don't seem to care about Social Security either. What is so bad about paying a worker $11 an hour instead of $7.25 an hour? It seems to me that right-wingers want to pull the wings off butterflies just for the sake of doing it. And then there are some people that would rather pay $1 million for a damn robot than $30,000 a year for a human being to work a job. What is the human supposed to do? Join Islamic jihad?

Keystone Pipeline

I've decided I'm for the Keystone Pipeline's expansion. Environmentalists oppose it because they mistakenly think that extracting oil from tar sands is more environmentally damaging than conventional oil extraction. They fail to understand the economics of oil. Every dollar we send the Muslims in the Middle East gets used on terrorism, sooner or later, one way or the other, which means the U.S. has to transport men, equipment and resources thousands of miles and conduct bombing raids and long-term missions costing trillions of dollars and pumping gigatons of carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide into the atmosphere. The very idea that getting oil from Alberta is worse than getting it from the fanatics in Saudi Arabia and Iran is offensive to common sense. For my part, I would rather pay the Canadians twice for their oil, than pay the Muslim fanatics once, and I think any environmental damage calculated by environmentalists will inevitably fail to take into consideration the cost of terrorism and fanaticism in the Middle East. What we don't need in Washington, D.C. is defeatist, stupid rhetoric about global warming that fails to take into consideration today's reality that we need oil, period, end of discussion, and don't want to hear anymore about it. Build the goddamn pipeline already and let's quit funding the global Islamic jihad and the butchering of Christians. A dollar sent to the Arabs is a dollar spent on putting a bullet through the head of a Westerner either today or tomorrow. The only thing the Arabs use money for is their own pleasure and Islamic jihad. They perform zero scientific research, contribute zero to civilization, morality and culture, and have nothing to say about any of the sciences and any of the arts. At least Canada is a civilized country, so let's do business with them.

Israel

The United States is fortunate we don't have a sizable population of fanatical Muslims who despise education and think the only legitimate purpose in life is terrorism. I'm not as concerned about the immigrants from south of the Border. They seem pretty mild-mannered compared to the lunatics that Israel has to deal with. Really, Israel behaves with remarkable, saint-like restraint, considering the provocations they receive on a daily basis.

Aid in the Middle East?

ISIS beheads Western aid workers that are trying to help people in the Middle East.

What if Western countries behead the family of jihadists and post the video on YouTube? That we don't do that, but ISIS does, demonstrates our moral superiority. Even so, it would be a good idea to revoke the citizenship of all families that have jihadi members. Exile them where they belong, in the middle of Syria. They can fantasize about blowing themselves up for Allah all they want over there. The stupidity of Islam belongs in the Middle East, land of the crazy.


The only "aid" the Middle East needs is carpet-bombing. Food, medical aid, and money are entirely unnecessary and only exacerbate the problem over there. It is like dropping cupcakes into a roach nest. You're just going to get more roaches as a result. Sooner or later they raise the black flag with chicken-scratch on it and start killing anyone that doesn't believe the same things they do.