Anti-Vaxxer

I've got an acquaintance who has gone full anti-vaxx with her 20 month old little girl, posting proudly about this "healthy" decision on Facebook and advocating strongly for her approach.  Others have posted arguments for and against this, and as someone who strongly believes in vaccination I'm tempted to chime in as well, just to ask "Why would you let your kid getting a disease you didn't have because you were vaccinated?"

But seeing as we're not really friend-friends, I don't have kids of my own, and she seems to have all the answers she wants to hear, I'm hesitant before putting my foot in my mouth and going full on confrontation mode - and most likely losing a Facebook friend (or more, depends how it goes). It's her kid after all so she can do what she likes, who am I to say otherwise?

On the flip side staying silent feels wrong too. What would you do?

Sojourn at Entropia: A Helping Hand

[Part of my Sojourn at Entropia story.]

Having picked up a -lot- of quests in the city, I decided I should try complete a few of them.

So it was time to drive again!

Handy that you can pack up your car into your pocket.

I decided to help an outpost clear up some dinosaur herds for a can of fuel.

Better than nothing I suppose! Also, it seems skills gain through use.

Someone buzzed me in a VTOL while I was doing so.

Inside the outpost there are also these ad spaces which I found pretty cool.

Obviously it costs to advertise too.

Anti-Scam Tip

[Post #31 of the Blaugust Challenge!]

No blaugust bonus today since it's about real life anyway.

I was recently contacted on Facebook by an old schoolmate who lives overseas. She was asking for any amount of money to help her sick child since she was in a difficult financial position. I replied, asking what was wrong with the kid and what she told me sounded worrying but at least not life threatening. She was also very thankful for any help I could give her and provided me with her address and details. She also mentioned that the fastest way of getting support was through Western Union, which I know a bunch of people use but since I never have I decided to look up reviews of it in google. Hmm, apart from the possibility of extra hidden fees it sounded like they more or less always got the money to where  you wanted it to go. What they didn't do is ever take it back if you sent it to a wrong person or purchased a dodgy item for example.

Interesting. Next step was to look up my schoolmate. I found her twitter pretty easily. One of her latest posts read as "Don't know what happened to my account. I was only informed about the problem today." Hmm, possible security flag? To be on the safe side, I decided to get a simple verification check from her - one that would prove she wasn't a hacked account. I request for a current photo of the person holding up today's newspaper, where I can clearly see her face and the date and front page articles. The next step would be to check and make sure that whatever newspaper was depicted -actually- had a front page that looked like that.

She replied saying she didn't have a webcam right now and instead told me of memories from our younger years. Memories I don't remember (because I have a bad memory). Memories that could have been shared to others. I politely asked again for the picture proof before I sent anything. It's been eight days now and I haven't heard back. Maybe I'm just being paranoid, but I didn't think it was an overly difficult test to pass.

Redshirt: Facebook in Space

Some games people call Diablo clones while others are labelled WoW copy cats. In this regard Redshirt is a lot like Facebook. Yes, there's the comedy factor of being on a doomed space station performing ludicrous duties parodying Star Trek but all your actions will be spent on the station's social network: Spacebook.

The aim of the game is to manuever and manipulate your social circles by making friends, hosting and attending events and sending messages to keep people happy to put you into a favourable position of saving yourself while everyone else dies horribly. Sleeping your way to the top is one valid path, but given that your friends are often killed in away missions (and then replaced by people that dislike you) I simply opted to work hard and purchase an exit ticket which is probably the easiest solution to the game.

Hope you really like this screen, it's where most of the action takes place.

While the music is pretty cool, there are very few moving parts given that most of the time you will be staring at the pretty stale Spacebook screen. As a concept it works pretty well, and people who enjoy spending a bunch of time on facebook (especially trekkies) will probably get a kick out of this game. I clocked up 6 hours on it before victory myself, however I have no inclination of playing it again since it is not really that enticing. Not really something I would recommend unless you are a fan of the genre. Redshirt - I give it 1 and a half out of 5 mangled body parts from the transporter.

Crushing Candies

Unlike my grandfather I'm not really one for "little" games that involve a lot of thinking like chess, mine sweeper or solitaire but thanks to my wifey I've been introduced into the somewhat addictive yet highly frustrating Candy Crush Saga. This simple facebook app plays pretty much like ye olde Bejewelled where in you have to match 3 identical items in a row to clear them from the grid. However while only some challenges are timed (just like Bejewelled) majority instead have a set number of moves wherein you must complete whatever task is given to you - be it reaching a score, lowering ingredients, or most commonly (and annoyingly) eliminating jelly squares from the board. You learn to hate those really quick, and given the board is hardly ever a proper square it can be challenging to clear them from nooks and crannies where they hide.

The "Saga" part is how often it makes you fail.

Indeed often times the only way to win is to orchestrate (or get lucky enough) to combine four or five candies into super powered ones that can clear whole rows. With hundreds of levels and a max of five lives which regenerate by one every 20 minutes (faster if your friends gift you some) it certainly has a lot of content. In my case the low life count is good though, because it means I can attack it for a little bit and when I'm out of lives (which is often) I can move on to "better" games. I just wonder then if they are "better" given that I play this one first? Maybe I'm a glutton for punishment, or maybe I'm just addicted to candy. :P

Failures of Communication

Part of my Explorer of Tyria journal - you can find the rest here!

I'm very surprised (to put it politely) at the way ArenaNet is handling their official comms. I, like many others I'm guessing, would expect to see their updates and messages to players on their main site and again within the forums but this is not the case. Instead they broadcast out to gw2wiki, reddit, twitter, facebook, youtube and the like. I don't have a problem with them doing that, but for them to then NOT POST A LINK on their OWN PAGE screams out that something is broken in their way of thinking.

Even the recent AMA (which I had to ask another forum poster what the hell it was, because the staff/mods didn't bother to reply to such a simple question) was on reddit, a site I don't really find to be user friendly at all. It's like they are trying to spread their PR and at the same time attempting to hide it from their actual consumer base.

At least they aren't trolling like some Aussie DJs recently did, which seems to have resulted in a fatality. Who is laughing now?

Such pretty murderers.