First, mega-props go to theJapanesePage.com for this picture. I looked up "learn basic Japanese kanji" on Lycos and it gave me that page. This is the first kanji I was set to learn at that site. I went through numbers, days of the week, people, verbs, and adjectives. Of course, I'll have to go through them five or six more times to get so I can write most of them down at the speed of thought. But with that site, I'm learning Japanese kanji. All of the kanji I learned are from the Level 4 Japanese language proficiency test, the lowest level. With a bunch of studying, I may be able to pass the level 4 test by this June. To pass the level 4 test, one must get 60% on the test divided into three sections: characters and vocabulary, listening comprehension, and reading comprehension and grammar. The reading comprehension and grammar is worth twice what the other two are. The test is 100 minutes long and the site suggests 150 hours of study (wow!). Of course, the test is only given each December. So perhaps, I could get past the much harder level 3 test by then. Why am I learning Japanese? So that I can visit Japan and talk to various people in Japan who may wish to speak less English. Why do I want to go to Japan? I want to see what their society is like and why they are the sei kai ichi at making anime. Not just because I like anime, but I think I would like a society that values anime more than live action movies and has a piece in their constitution denoucing violence and war. (Note: it was only after two atomic bombs hit two of their cities that they came to that conclusion, but one can't question the motives of truth.) They certainly have their priorities straight, though.
Today's JF is a very special one. We get to see a document of one of the 58% of the US population who agrees with the current atrocities being committed here in the US. In an e-mail, he defends the violation of Fifth, Sixth, and Eight Amendments to the US Constitution. He does not foam at the mouth. His words, though, have been put there by Sean Hannity, et al. His actual words written are hilighted in blue. My original email is in black. My final rebuttals are in green at the bottom.
This might become the first full scale emergency in the long history of slacking of Javantea's Fate. Today, I played NetHack when I was supposed to be doing my homework. I could have at least been working on pressing volitile issues on Javantea's Fate. I might have even wasted my day learning Japanese Kanji as it is a recent obsession. But no, I tried to compile NetHack and I tried to download the QT binaries. I finally found out how to enable X11 after I finally got it to compile. It's not easy, but it was pretty straightforward if you're a hacker. But it still won't show any tiles even though I see the x11tiles image file sitting in the directory. So then I try compiling for Qt, even though that doesn't matter to display tiles. It won't compile. This reason and that, libqt is missing, bla bla bla... So I look and I see that I do in fact have a libqt-mt.so file. Would that work? No. Different errors, but same files. Something is wrong with libqt. So I look around to download it. Then it hit me: what if they don't allow x11 and Qt to compile together? That would not make much sense, but I tried anyway. I took out all the defines that applied to X11. And guess what? It compiled correctly. Sweet, huh? Yeah. This is what I got. The Qt version is better than the X11 version simply because the menus list all the things a person could possibly do and it has a convenient graphical inventory system. The X11 is a big step above TTY and it is cool for people who like the solid feel, but really... Qt is much better. After getting the Qt version to compile, I finally found a line of code in the .nethackrc file that allows tiles in the X11 version. Oh well, it only took two hours and look at how much fun I can have! So I played a bit. I have a tip for all you nethackers out there: save often and before you go back in, copy 0user.gz to another directory so that you can retrieve it if you die. Nethack is very unforgiving and those backups will rock the house. If you're just starting out, the explore mode might be useful if you don't want to get into the high scores. NetHack is a good game because it has character and gameplay. I tried to depict that by showing my three pets: kitten (Dusty), doggie (Spot), and pony (noname). I'm going to learn to ride my horse sometime soon and then we'll be a travelling side show. How did I do this? Well I started with my dog. I kept him through the first four levels. On the third level, I found a kitten and threw it a corpse which made it my pet. Then I found this pony on the fourth level and I threw it an apple so it became my pet. Wonderful! So what was I saying about character? I say that adding pets with a touch of AI is a fine example of how NetHack wins the hearts of the players. Other examples are: humorous fortune cookies, all kinds of funky curses flying around, scrolls in foreign languages, and poisoning yourself with rotten food. Players like these kinds of surprises and the depth that it gives makes it a colorful game, whether you play it in ASCII mode or in Qt. Secondly, it has amazing gameplay. There is a goal to get this Amulet, but the game is so hard that you have to keep going. As you go on, your character becomes stronger, you gain items, and you fight tougher monsters. Something that makes it stay interesting are the randomly generated maps. If you knew the layout of the level and the position of each monster, you could just build a strategy on how to blast them to pieces. But with the random generated maps, you just have to go through each corridor, prepared for the worst, hoping for a way to kill the next mob. And the mobs are not all just mobs. Leprechauns steal your money, Nymphs steal your stuff, and fogs blind you while you fight. I died on the fifth level when these soldier ants came in a group and blinded me and scared off my pets. It was amazing. Running away is not easy, either. It blends hardness of creatures with the ability to best them. Just think if I had taken out my wand and blasted a magic missile at the suckers, huh? If I knew how to, I could have. Did I also mention that NetHack is Open Source and runs on an amazing array of platforms?
I might catch flak for this rant, but I feel that it is necessary. I heard Bill O'Reilly talking for a few minutes during the vacation and he was talking to a woman who was trying to get hotels to discontinue selling pay-per-view pornography. Her cause obviously had problems. The first was that the porn makes money for hotels. It would be like selling a cash cow for beans (the non-magical type, I might add). The second is that the porn is completely optionally chosen by the viewer. It's not hurting anyone who isn't asking for it and paying for it. However, it's not a big issue with me right now. We have a war imminent, constitution being violated by two mega-fascist laws, and hackers being persecuted by the FBI unjustly. I'm not going to spend any more time than I already have on fighting for the right to hotel porn. But Mr. O'Reilly did make this rant possible by mentioning that the woman ought to be fighting the virtual child pornography ruling made by the Supreme Court. WTF is that? Well, by now you know what this picture is, right? It is ultra-softcore virtual child pornography. So what is the definition of pornography? It depends who you ask. Many folk back in the 1800s up to 1950s believed that the show of an ankle is pornography. In Afghanistan, a girl showing an ankle is still (even after the Taliban were ousted by the US military invasion) sometimes considered grounds for stoning. So I probably shouldn't show this in Afghanistan, but there are two worse crimes here according to what I know of Muslim religion: using the internet (the tool of evil) and making a sculpture of a person (idoltry). But enough with the bs, this is not pornography enough to produce a case that would get me put in jail here in the US. But it makes a point which I will be explaining in this essay: exactly what is pornography and what is bad about it?
