Antaran has lived another day.

Day 59 of Antaran's Journal has been revealed.

Muddasheep's Daydream Part 7

Stop for a minute and carefully, consciously look around, look at the cars that evolved out of simple carriages drawn by horses, look at the pavement under your feet, spanning around the country like callus, watching all the people sitting inside their cars, mostly just following their everyday life, take the routes they are used to. There are hundreds driving the streets, flowing like blood in your veins, their destinations are mostly working places which they need to attend to earn colored metal and paper pieces which they can trade for food, water, and gas to drive more, to work more, to eat more, to drink more. To reproduce. Would you want to bring a child into this world? Would you decline were you offered to be born? Could you cope with it should you have a child that kills itself, or suffers hunger and pain in the third world war? Is it right to believe there will be a third world war, or will this kind of thinking just spawn it?

Some people need to look away from their mirrors and look up at the stars and realize we're the current generation, given the opportunities of certain level of technology, and not look at others in disgust, but with the feeling that we are sharing approximately fifty years with each other, we are living on this planet and we can change the course of this ship for the next passengers in the next century. Can we? Nature is defending itself, and yet we continue to force results of laziness and comfortable style of living upon it, treating it like a toy. And yet there are people who do not have the possibility of staying another ten minutes in the shower because the water feels nice on the skin. They can't waste any drop because every drop drying on the ground means one less fragment of hope. I feel ashamed writing about it, I feel ashamed reading about it in the news, where it tells of water shortages next to Britney Spear's drug addiction problems.

Sometimes I wonder if I'm already dead. In 53 years I will die of a heart attack, and before I die I will live my life again, second by second, dying again, repeating my life in my head, being stuck in a loop. Sometimes my heart reminds me of its fragility, either by beating too fast or too slow for short amounts of time. This body I direct through this life is a weak machine. You surely know the saying that if you're standing in front of a lot of people and you're nervous you have to picture the audience naked. I know a better trick. Simply imagine that the humans before you are being controlled by their souls, relying on society habits to better understand their lives. They aren't really looking at you. Eyes are just instruments for receiving light and telling brains to make something out of it. Why they look like they do is a mystery, but the longer you look at them the more deformed they appear. The mouth, a disgusting instrument to absorb food, the nose in the middle of the head, full of dirt and snot, skin that is full of little unevennesses, pimples and tiny hairs. Seen an attractive woman or man? Watch how they eat. Watch how they swallow, how they talk while eating, spitting. Imagine them puking, imagine them being forty years older, imagine them being rotten in their coffins. The closer you look the clearer it becomes.

The Draversi Tournament in PHQ has ended, and LordAsriel turns out to be our King of Draversi.

I've written another episode of my Quick Movie Reviews series, and added a review about the great game Dreamfall.

I've recently played twenty minutes of Lord of the Rings Online, which turned out to be World of Warcraft with a Tolkien skin. I also gave Vanguard a try, which - surprisingly - resembled World of Warcraft in a lot of aspects. Copying is a form of flattery, or in this case it's a sign of let's-do-what-we-know-works. I also installed Second Life, created a character, logged into a server and uninstalled it again.

After all, I think I'm done with MMORPGs. First of all, I don't need any virtual friends. I have my own community already. Second, I don't need Second Life to show off artistic skills, I have my websites. The same reason I believe MySpace is completely unnecessary for me - I already have websites with my content, why should I bother creating another website just because people on MySpace only surf around MySpace? I have set up a simple MySpace page and yet I still hear complaints and/or suggestions to spice it up with drawings or some such, because "it's like a business card".

Third, MMORPGs are designed to take long. You don't get instant entertainment value for your buck, you get it after running ten minutes from point A to point B, or after killing X of creature type Y. Whereas would you be playing, say, Dreamfall, you would receive constant entertainment. No struggle or unnecessary wasting of time involved.

And why are there still so many MMORPGs coming out? With WoW and Second Life taking over most potential gamers, what's left of the market for companies to decide and build a new world? Why does Sony think Home will work when there are things like Second Life and even smaller scale social platforms like Gaia Online already around? Where are the people to fill all those places?

Muddasheep's Daydream Part 6

Something is standing behind you, right now. Turn around. You don't see it? That's because your eyes are specialized on certain frequencies of light. Reach for it and you'll notice you also can't feel it. The reason for this is that humans are made to feel what we call 'solid' material. But it is standing behind you. Maybe it can't see you either and it is just standing there because wherever you are right now you're actually inside a cave of some sort that it chose to live in. There are only six classical senses - or more than 30 according to Guy Murchie. But what if there are a lot of different frequencies that we just can't receive with either our senses and things made out of completely different "material" than we are made of? A different dimension perhaps, but it's not a different dimension in the actual meaning, it's right here, right where you are, it's existing within us, maybe one world or even more. Maybe it has something to do with what we call 'ghosts', only in an extremely larger scale, and they are not souls of dead humans, they are beings just like us, only made out of different basic elements.

Guy Murchie believed that Earth is a single organism. If that is the case then I would say humanity is Earth's plague. But we all knew that already. "You are the cancer of this planet and we are the cure."

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is coming out after seven years under development. It allows players to enter the Zone of Alienation/Chernobyl and explore it. I remember my mother telling me about when I was two years old and the fourth reactor of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power plant exploded and we weren't allowed to go outside for a few days. Just recently I spoke with a new russian friend of mine about what she remembered. She was about the same age like me and she recalls images on television before the nuclear holocaust showing new white buildings that looked very modern back then, and she remembers that a lot of people had died and others were exposed to high radiation that would make them suffer and die a horrible death. Her aunt lives very close to Chernobyl and whenever they visited her aunt my friend felt sleepy and dizzy and her parents just said that it's because of the radiation. In the end I just wonder why some politicians in the European Union call out for nuclear energy and say that it's environment friendly and a very safe and reliable source. I mean, that might be the case, but only until reactors explode.