— aka.spvn

Over the past year or so, I’ve been searching for a theme that I’d be satisfied with for this blog. None have fit that criteria. WordPress is a very complicated and robust system, thus almost all the good looking themes I’ve found are catered towards stuff like businesses or portfolio. All I want is a simple theme for a personal blog. Yet, most of these themes I’ve found are either too flashy, too complicated, or just don’t look very good.

So I’m gonna try and create my own theme from scratch.

I dabbled in HTML and Javascript literally almost 10 years ago and have never done web development in my life. But seeing as how I have quite a lot of time during this period of my life, I might as well give it a go. I’m not an artistic or creative person, neither do I have good design sense. I’m not even completely sure what kind of theme I have in mind.

Guess I’ll just start and see where it goes from there!

Was just watching the latest episode of Diggnation, and the first story they were talking about was the unveiling of Oink, the brand new app from Kevin Rose’s (the founder of Digg) new start-up, Milk. The idea behind this new mobile app is that let’s say you visit a restaurant, and you really like the Fish and Chips there. You’ll then log on to Oink and sort of “vote” or “thumbs up” it (ala Digging). From then on, other friends (it’s integrated with Twitter/Facebook so I’m guessing Oink’s “friends” will just be your followers/FB friends) who log on to Oink will see that you’ve given the Fish and Chips a thumbs up, so if the dish gets voted for by plenty of their friends, they’ll know it’s a great dish.

So instead of simply “checking in” to an area like you’d do with Foursquare or Facebook’s Places, you’re voting for the items that are specific to that area.

And this isn’t limited to food I’d guess. For example what rides are worth queuing for at a theme park? Or maybe what attractions are worth checking out if you’re on holiday or something? Obviously this mobile app is a really great, easy and simple way to quickly figure out what’s worth your time whenever you visit a new place. Instead of having to hunt down reviews beforehand, you’ll be able to tell what’s great at a glance.

Yet, the whole time Kevin was explaining the idea on the show, I had this nagging feeling at the back of my head of: why is this concept so damn familiar? Is it already out there?

Then I realised that I had had this exact idea for a mobile app just last week. One of those ideas I tend to park at the back of my head as potentially profitable ideas. And now this idea’s just completely worthless.

I was quite annoyed by this news, because this means I can’t build this by myself in the future. This had happened to me before last year or so, when I was actually conceptualising how Jarvis (you know, that digital butler that Iron Man has in his house that responds to his every command) could actually be built in the real world. Then I find out some guy was already doing that. His version is in its early stages and he built it for personal use, but he got a $100,000 grant to build it into a full product. But like a year later and still absolutely no news.

But this whole voting-for-cool-stuff-in-an-area was actually a much more feasible idea, something that could be built right now. But once again I’ve been thwarted.

After some consideration however, I don’t know if I should be flattered. I mean little ol’ me thought of an idea that Kevin Rose himself came up with and felt was worthy enough to build into a full product. I mean this is the guy who co-founded and built Digg from the ground up. That site now has 8.5 million unique visits every month from the USA alone and at one point was worth US$200 million.

The greatest ideas are usually those that seem to be the most obvious, which was exactly what Digg was when it first started up in 2004. I always felt that I’d never come up with something as creative as the likes of Kevin Rose can come up with.

I might have just been proven wrong

I’ve always hated RPGs. I mean HATED them. I love Pokemon, but I can’t stand playing the games on the Gameboy/DS. Theyyyyyy areeeeeee justtttttt sooooooooo slowwwwwwwwwww. Walk here walk there fight battles walk back PokeCenter walk out again walk some more walk walk back PokeMart walk out again walk walk walk. You get my point. Which is why I refuse to play Pokemon on anything but an emulator on the PC, where I can speed up the stupid animations by like ten times.

I’m just not an RPG person. I’ve read and re-read the entire Final Fantasy 8 guidebook a ton of times, because the guide itself is just so darn interesting. I’ve *started* the game itself about 5 times now, and I have never completed it. Simply cannot bring myself to complete an RPG. I feel invested in the story and all the characters and whatnot, but I just can’t stand the game long enough to finish it.

Then now there’s Dragon Age 2.

When the first DA game out, I never bothered with it, thinking it was just another RPG that most people would love and I would hate. But when the sequel came out, I just decided to dive into the game to check it out.

Now I’m hooked.

It’s 10.30pm now. I’ve been playin the game non-stop since 8. I’ve never found an RPG that could hold my attention this long. The last game that glued me to my screen for hours at a time was probably Civilisation V. But that game was designed to be a time-suck in the first place so it doesn’t really count I guess. Anyway, I’m 12 hours into Dragon Age 2 and I think I’ve barely scratched the surface. I just keep running all over the place doing all the little side-quests even though they don’t advance the story at all because they’re just jolly fun. Every quest is a mini-adventure of its own. You’re given a very specific goal to fulfill and a location to go to, but other than that you have absolutely no idea what lies between you and your goal. The constant tension and excitement ensure that I enjoy myself every step of the way.

Oh and of course it helps that I don’t have to spend 90% of my time in-game walking around from place to place thanks to the way the locations are designed.

I don’t know why DA2 just works for me. I’ve tried another one of Bioware’s creations, Mass Effect, and as per most RPGs I couldn’t bring myself to finish it. Of course, the gameplay mechanics in that game were much more clunky and less satisfying than the combat in DA2, but Mass Effect is a wondefully well written sci-fi story. I’d take a sci-fi novel over a fantasy one any day of the week, which would mean I should enjoy Mass Effect way more than the fantastical DA2, but it just ain’t so for some reason or another.

When I first started ME, I thought it was going to be one of my favourite games of all time. The world was so well thought out, so beautifully crafted and, as it should be in a sci-fi universe, just so cool. Gadgets and gizmos intricately modeled, multiple alien races populating the cities, putting a spaceship under the command of the player. Everything felt so exciting. But then everything went downhill for me when they decided that the best story they could tell with this wonderful setting was to just muddle everything in politics. Our world’s political situation was just extrapolated so that countries became planets and galaxies, while our different races became… well… alien races and the various religions became… alien religions. Why in the world would you create such a wonderful and exciting world, only to tell such a thoroughly uninteresting story?!

Anyway, long story short, I love Dragon Age 2. Hope this becomes the first RPG I ever complete. I forsee spending about 50-70 hours on this game.

And wow this post sure has been long and rambling and probably completely nonsensical to people who don’t play games.

It’s really weird. The iPad has been out in the market for almost a year already, and up till now not a single other manufacturer can even come close to achieving similar success with tablets. A couple of these tablets are kind of “almost but not quite”, while most of them are simply downright dreadful. I mean to begin with Apple didn’t innovate all THAT much when they created the first iPad. They just took an iPod touch and enlarged it, fiddled around with the software to make it fit a bigger screen, and put it out. For something that isn’t that groundbreaking in terms of tech, the iPad is amazingly successful.

So much so that now with the iPad 2, all Apple had to did was make it thinner and faster, add 2 (shitty) cameras, and… that’s it. I mean even on Apple’s own website, the tagline for the iPad 2 is simply “Thinner. Lighter. Faster. Smart Covers. 10-hour battery life”. I mean sure, the battery life is great and all but if that’s part of the main tagline of the product, you know there ain’t much new.

Despite this, critics all over the web are treating the iPad 2 as if it’s something completely new and astounding, as if the improvement over the original iPad rivals the bump from the iPhone 3GS to the iPhone 4. But the iPad 2 isn’t that. It’s just thinner and faster, like every single Apple product. Yet reviews of the new iPad range from “awesome” to “THE BEST THING EVA” or something along those lines. Apart from how shitty the cameras are, few seem to be disappointed by how small the improvements over the original are.

How in the world does Apple do this. It can put out a slightly improved version of a product and yet people get the impression that it’s a game changer.

Oh and while I’m here, I just want to talk about the whole “retina display on iPad” thing. The iPad’s current resolution is already 1024 by 768. Now if Apple really did put in a sharper display like everyone wants, the thing would have a resolution of something like 2048 by 1536. That’s even higher than 1080p HD. Which is just completely bonkers for current tech. Apps would have to be completely rewritten, games especially would have a hard time keeping up with 2000 pixels. Oh and the battery life would take a really severe dip no doubt. Cost would shoot up. etc. It’s just not feasible.

Yet as with most new Apple products, I want an iPad 2 now. But it’d be completely pointless for a guy in NS to get one anyway. I’d spend so little time with it that it’d be kind of wasted…

But I still want one now.

So I’ve started listening to the Ender’s Game audiobook, a novel I’ve been wanting to read for a very long time but just never got around to. It’s supposedly a “classic” as far as sci-fi novels go, and I have to say that after spending 11 hours listening to the entire book, it’s pretty gosh darn good. Excep for some places where it kind of gets “abstract” (i.e. nonsensical), and the ending is just so rushed that I felt pretty pissed off at Orson Scott Card for ending the story so quickly. It’s as if he couldn’t decide if the last act should just be a brief conclusion or a longer, detailed look at the characters and story. What we ended up with was something that was neither here nor there, and ultimately left the reader wanting by the end.

Wait, this post wasn’t supposed to be about the book, got pretty carried away there. It was a joy listening to an audiobook for the first time in my life. They force me to pay attention to the story as this guy’s just going on and on in my ear without giving me any chance to take a break. Usually, no matter what book I’m reading (except Harry Potter), I’ll eventually get so tired of reading after awhile that my attention will start to wane or I’ll just give up and go do something else (usually that just means getting back on the computer). But audiobooks don’t give me a chance to get distracted because the story just keeps going regardless of anything I’m doing.

Ok screw it this post is just gonna be about Ender’s Game. Set in the future, the whole premise is that there’s an International Fleet (IF) that recruits kids from like 6 years old to train them to become soldiers and commanders of the fleet. All of this for the purpose of defending Earth from the “buggers”, some alien species that nearly wiped out the human race 80 years ago.

Now that I’ve written it down, I realise that the premise doesn’t seem as cool on paper as when you actually read the book. It’s essentially Hogwarts, except that instead of it being based in London and teaching kids magic, the Battle School is in freaking space, where kids learn how to fight in null gravity. Really epic.

Oh yeah and today’s the 2nd day of the lunar new year. Strangely I’m doing very very very visiting this year. Kind of miss it.

Happy CNY!