Dead Island - The Gamers Crack Cocaine

Dead Island: Better Than Your POS.

Not since Fallout 3 have I felt such wonderful levels of surprise and satisfaction with game, its depth, complexity and that wonderful "X" factor that is missing in so much of what is being churned out.

Despite the really bizarre opening and the irritating bugs (which have at least been addressed and are being repaired) Dead Island is a gem; from it's story, which, if there is any justice, should stand proud in the hgher echelons of cult zombie stories, to it's incredibly clever combat system round the game off wonderfully - it is obvious why it was delayed for so long and the game's producers were right to do so.

Dead Island takes place on the fictional paradise island of Banoi - you awake as one of the 4 in game characters to find the hotel* you are in in chaos; baggage strewn everywhere (which, game producers, it is not okay to loot before you know what is going on) people diving off of higher floor balconies and, eventually, a substantial hoard of the infected, a runner-class of zombie, bearing down on you.

It is also at this stage that you find out that you are immune (yay!) to the plague, but not invulnerable to the rather hungry and violent carriers.

The combat system yields some interesting dilemmas; like the Dead Rising series it can be extremely useful to lay down projectile weaponry - which is lucky as it tends to be quite rare - in favour of melee; the speed of the walkers and their relative ruggedness towards small arms fire makes the best option a combination of melee combat combined with rapid, crazy foot stomping action; my character (pictured above) recently found herself without a working bladed weapon so had to resort to kicking the walkers over, then stamping on their necks.

To make matters really interesting no single melee weapons themselves degrade over time, but unlike the Dead Rising games you can repair weapons, upgrade them so they last longer and trick them out so they develop unique and powerful secondary effects; I had a wonderful machete which electrocuted walkers on critical hits until my idiot brother Buffrat tried my game out, threw it at a thug-class walker, a giant type zombie incredibly resilient and tough, then proceeded to walk off into a new game zone, losing it in the process - bringing another unique (and in this particular case irritating) feature of the game - the save game jots checkpoints along the game at regular intervals but does not allow you to save at points; in other games this would appear like quite a piss-poor way of doing this but in Dead Island this actually compliments the pace and evolution of the game itself.

As your character improves so too does your mastery of different weapons and skills; your choice of characters makes you skilled in particular weaponry and levelling up leads to clever ways of adapting to weapons making themselves stronger; as a result you can grow quite attached to particular weapons as you improve yourself with them (just as I was with my brilliant machete till idiot boy threw it away, bastard.) The fact that game nurtures a sense of care and attention, that if you look after your weapon, spend resources and time improving yourself and it, it will care and attend to your needs, is a very, very nice touch.

This game is a joy to play; I hope someone will do the right thing and make it into a movie, at the very least it should get a sequel, sans the bugs.

Score: buy full price. Now. Heck, buy this version in case the zombie apocalypse does come.

Awesome Hackers Are Awesome

Can't put it any better myself than the subject line from my friends email:

Dr Conan T. Barbarian was ripped from his mother's womb on the corpse-strewn battlefields of his war-torn homeland, Cimmeria, and has been preparing for academic life ever since. A firm believer in the dictum that "that which does not kill us makes us stronger," he took time out to avenge the death of his parents following a sojourn pursuing his strong interest in Post-Colonial theory at the Sorbonne. In between, he spent several years tethered to the fearsome "Wheel of Pain", time which he now feels helped provide him with the mental discipline and sado-masochistic proclivities necessary to sucessfully tackle contemporary critical theory. He completed his PhD, entitled "To Hear The Lamentation of Their Women: Constructions of Masculinity in Contemporary Zamoran Literature" at UCD and was appointed to the School of English in 2006, after sucessfully decapitating his predecessor during a bloody battle which will long be remembered in legend and song. In 2011/12, he will be teaching on the following courses: "The Relevance of Crom in the Modern World", "Theories of Literature", "Vengeance for Beginners", "Deciphering the Riddle of Steel" and "D.H. Lawrence". He strongly objects to the terms of the Croke Park agreement and the current trend for remaking 1980s films that he believes were perfectly good enough in the first place.
He is happy to hear from potential research students with an interest of any of these topics, but applicants should note that anyone found guilty of academic misconduct or weakness in the face of the enemy will be crucified as an example to the others.
Email: conanb@tcd.ie

Brilliant. Let's hope he gets tenured.

As We Enter Silly Season

Conservative party members enjoying last years conference. Probably.

Something to take on board in case you are the type to tow tribal lines:

Politicians who can take supporters for granted will do precisely that, particularly when taking supporters’ issues seriously would require upending the status quo.

Matt Welch in this months Reason Magazine; this goes doubly strongly for all those on UKIPs train.

Quote of the Day

Old but brilliant:

'I may not agree with what you say, but I'll bayonet every bastard on the planet who says you can't say it, and then I'll riddle their Stasi - Fascist - Anti-Freedom Corpse with bullets for your right to say it...' (I think that's how it went anyway)

Erudite as only the Skip Licker can be. Gawd I missed him...

Why Habitat Went Bust: Tomrat's School of Business 101 pt1.

There is something very wrong with your business model if you charge £15 for a box of disposable cutlery.

QED

Killing Aunty Beeb

Gawd bless my lil Sis; convinced her to get me a subscription to Reason magazine for my birthday and she pulls through (a little over 6 months late but who's counting.

Anyway a brilliant column on the makeup of new agencies and how this correlates with the behaviour of the host state:

In a paper published in the spring issue of the journal Peace Economics, Peace Science, and Public Policy, Pal analyzed data from 98 countries. Her goal: to see if there were statistically significant correlations between press freedom and seven measures of instability, including ethnic tensions, external and internal conflicts, crime and disorder, military participation in government, and religious tensions. An increase in press freedom, she concluded, reduces all seven measures of instability. (emphasis mine)

Now I think we are far from being able to say explicitly that one causes the other; more likely there are synergies at play that won't show up on an initial analysis but the results are compelling: greater press freedom skews attempts at government at closing down alternative lines of debate (why I feel the internet is so important and rightly feared by our current political elites).

This is particularly interesting though:

Pal also noted that state ownership of media is associated with higher corruption, weaker civil liberties, insecure property rights, lower education and life expectancies, and higher infant mortality and malnutrition.

And yes I realise that Aunty Beeb is not technically state owned, but it does derive it's powers of coercion from the state so will be less likely to bite the hand that feeds it (nibble mildly in the case of the Squandervative coalition maybe, but only because they lack the prerequisite spine to do anything about it).

Worth a try killing the Beeb in any case though eh?

Giving Out Of Poverty

I am on holiday having spent the better part of 3 months working 12 hour days just to keep vaguely on top of my work; it has been the peak season for us and I am bushed. I am on a retreat with several churches in North Wales with my wife and daughter followed by 2 days back before heading out to Spain, palming off our daughter on the grandparents (you know, for an actual vacation.)

In a meeting this morning the retreat organiser got up to remind us of the annual offering we make to the hotel staff; we bulk-buy the rooms and services of 2 hotels each year and at dinner on the Thursday we all contribute massively to the tips for the staff; the amount is divied up by management depending on the hours worked - we are hoping to raise over a £1000 this year as the staff are impeccable, attentive and long-suffering considering the number of elderly and infirm with us.

That is why it struck me as Dow right offensive when David, the organiser, told us that the management, in a spirit of honesty and integrity, put all the collected offerings through payroll, making it subject to tax and national insurance, then top up the amount extorted in tax so it doesn't hit their employees: the cleaners, the waiters, the receptionists and the cooks.

It struck me that in the drive to alter tax breaks for the rich and poor one thing that is never brought up in discussion or is very quickly closed down is the righteousness of taking this money; the workers in the hotel are all minimum wage and earn every penny yet will still be taxed and squeezed till their pips squeak; the final act of indignity is only avoided by the long-suffering management of the hotels giving up their own monies to dole out a gift for their staffs' hard work given by those, the majority of which are on a fixed income, who are seeing their savings undermined, and their own limited income destroyed by inflation. All so David Cameron can continue paying foreigners to build idols to the green god while thousands die for want of NHS resources being cut, squandering every saving he makes on keeping a currency we elected not to join afloat and an established elite saving face.

The poor will not bleat because they will never understand why their wage packet seems so light despite their phone calculator saying it should be something else; they don't understand why the terms of their contract with government - what they are getting with their money - are so inexplicably skewed towards the socialist kleptocracy and squandervatives in charge because they are too busy scrubbing toilets and waiting tables, and their management have enough respect and integrity to mitigate the effects of the looting of a gift from those they serve to ensure it is a finer offering than is possible.

But we are on the precipice; when understanding comes it carries a whirlwind with it and it will carry this new bourgeois with it; we have seen a glimpse of it over the last few weeks with a thousand people suddenly realising that the behaviour of the politicos' client class will never be challenged, whilst those who do try, the breadwinners, the tax-chattels defending their property, will be punished severly.

This can't go on.

Them Riots

Been a little busy these last few months and Lord knows the faux-Duggan riots has been better covered elsewhere.

But man this idea is coming into it's own eh?

Thinking Outside Of The Box

Your Nan. And A Solution to Greece's Debt Crisis

So a report is out describing the latest Titanic-deck-chair-rearrangement to the welfare system; this time to the social care system for the elderly and infirm:

"Social care costs in England should be capped so people do not face losing large chunks of their assets, an independent review says.

Council-funded home help and care home places for the elderly and adults with disabilities are currently offered only to those with under £23,250 of assets.

The Dilnot report said the threshold should rise to £100,000 and a £35,000 lifetime cap on costs would be "fair".

But the Treasury is known to have doubts about the expense of the plans.

Just over £14bn a year is spent by councils on social care.

However, the changes would cost an extra £1.7bn a year if they were implemented now - and this figure could rise by 50% as the "baby boom" generation begins to retire."

So under the law of unfeasible, made-up politician numbers lets call it £5Bn added to the above figure; this, if I've understand it correctly, is the amount of money taxpayers today will be screwed for whilst the vast Ponzi scheme wheels on.

I have an alternative suggestion: Greece is liable to British banks for £14.1Bn; I'll take a guess and say the same idiot bankers, who put themselves in a hole in this country for Gordo forked out billions, are the ones likely wrist-deep in greek debt.

So how about this - why not just do a straight swap for the debt? Those bankers get their debt clear in about 75 years and our wrinklies get to spend their twilight years in sunnier climes whilst the greeks enjoy the written off debt-swaps all for the knock-down price of looking after a few more wrinklies, likely re-energising local economies spending their own cash on cheap ouzo and dolmades.

I can dream.

In Mixed Minds

Been a while guys - mega mega busy but this caught my eye (H/T to Dick Puddlecote):

Gibbs became pregnant aged 15, but lost the baby in December 2006 in a stillbirth when she was 36 weeks into the pregnancy. When prosecutors discovered that she had a cocaine habit – though there is no evidence that drug abuse had anything to do with the baby's death – they charged her with the "depraved-heart murder" of her child, which carries a mandatory life sentence.
...
"Women are being stripped of their constitutional personhood and subjected to truly cruel laws," said Lynn Paltrow of the campaign National Advocates for Pregnant Women (NAPW). "It's turning pregnant women into a different class of person and removing them of their rights."

No, how the state views the rights of unborn children with respect to their mother's behaviour, whether they intentionally seek to commit "foeticide" or their lifestyle simply endangers a child to a great degree, is what is being rightly challenged in court.

I say rightly in a neutral capacity: regardless of my views of state-mandated child murder when a precarious position appears in law, particularly in one where it is readily apparent the waters are being tested to see precisely what the law makers meant when they passed it, it follows logic that the first few cases will be painful; all cases should when one entity in the equation is murdered.

The next story in the article illustrates this perfectly:

Bei Bei Shuai, 34, has spent the past three months in a prison cell in Indianapolis charged with murdering her baby. On 23 December she tried to commit suicide by taking rat poison after her boyfriend abandoned her.
Shuai was rushed to hospital and survived, but she was 33 weeks pregnant and her baby, to whom she gave birth a week after the suicide attempt and whom she called Angel, died after four days. In March Shuai was charged with murder and attempted foeticide and she has been in custody since without the offer of bail.

This is both a long-standing contention between libertarians: whether abortion is something allowed by negative freedoms or not, and a dilemma that would test the Wisdom of Solomon; as tragic as her story and life obviously are did it really require her making that decision to end not only her own life but that of her child's?

I am, quite obviously, of the caste of libertarians who believe that negative freedoms protect the life of unborn children; there is something abhorrent in nature that allows us to abrogate the rights of one who's only crime is to grow, a living testament of either or both parents' recklessness: there is no greater example of human sacrifice to vanity than this.

Casting aside fear of straw men a question: were I to walk up to a happily pregnant woman and kick get in the stomach causing the baby to die should I end up in jail? If so then why does my act of foeticide carry criminal consequences? Is it merely because of the mothers desire to have children or the child's life?

All this and more will no doubt be debated in one way or another in the coming months surrounding such instances as these as the argument for human sacrifice starts not to look so glossy; it tends to excuse lifestyle choices which are naturally risky by allowing innocents to pay the price.

All that being said I do share Mssr. Puddlecote's concerns over the other religious aspect of this: that of the ascendency of the great Shiboleth of Public Health:

We've already seen a few rumblings, and I'm sure we've all heard the "it should be classed as child abuse" line many times already with regard to parental lifestyles. So why not just go that little extra step and push for the prosecution of women who have problematic pregnancies while also being obese, consuming cigarettes, or drinking in excess of guidelines, eh?

We'll just have to take it on trust that those currently taking the opportunity to rail against the religious right on the criminalisation of pregnant mothers will be consistent when the idea is picked up by the predominantly left-leaning health lobby.

I will not be holding my breath either; it has never been a problem for the left to excuse ones' actions as you hold the right opinions: climate change fanatics bending results or damaging energy companies property are fine; conversely skeptics are "fair game" whether the operate above board or not.

Sadly the cost is eternal vigilance, not shutting the questions down; for good or ill these lady's actions (and that of the men who are as copacetic to these situations as any) must be questioned - we may not like the answer but we should endeavour to keep it accountable to all, not just those in unassailable positions of power over life or death.