Kingdom Hearts DS R4 Revolution 358/2 Days Download

Surprise surprise. Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days for the Nintendo DS is out, with a whopping 250++MB of memory requirement, and a new piracy protection scheme. I was afraid my cloned R4 Revolution III wouldn't be able to handle it but after experimenting with some of the available patches online, one of them actually worked. (so far)

Rapidshare download after the skip.

Anyway, I had to use the patching program @ GBATemp.Net but in the process I had to reupdate my .NET plugin for my pc after some minor complications. No biggie. Since I know half of the people who will be stumbling across this post can't even be bothered to execute an already prepackaged patching program without every having their hands dirtied by actual hex editing, or god forbid, reverse engineering, I've taken the liberty of uploading a copy in Rapidshare.

p.s. don't ask me to do the same in megaupload. I hate their site and I don't like my pc being raped by trojans.

Special thanks to AntonKan who made it possible to work around Squeenix's piracy protection by just using a few

You can download the NDS file here:

edit: removed, file oversized.

Just try to manually patch using this link until I find some other place to upload.

http://gbatemp.net/index.php?download=7223

Feel free to suggest the location.

Stock Talks: NI SRO Notes

Yesterday, I talked things over with Anna and decided to go along with the 1:5 SRO of NiHao Mining Resources (NI) this coming Monday. Here's a short computation for my stake, not including the charges which is about 0.5% per transaction:

Original purchase: 10,000 shares at 14.25 = 142,500 pesos

Price per SRO stock: 1 peso

SRO Purchase: 50,000 shares at 1 = 50,000

Total investments: 192,500 pesos

Total shares: 60,000

Adjusted break-even price: 3.20 pesos

Theoretical Adjusted target price: 5 pesos

Projected value @ target price: 300,000 pesos

Net earnings: 107,500 pesos

Money Shot:
Now the question is whether or not the price of NI will go up higher than this price by the time the lockdown period until December expires. For sure, the price will avalanche the moment people start selling off their stocks, IF they still would want by that time. Risky if you think about it, because there's also the gamble on assuming that the market will still be healthy by the end of this year (which can't be guaranteed). The only safeguards I can think of is that NI is a strongly jockeyed stock and that the outlook for the end of this year is better than last year.

Ah well. Risks risks.

Typhoon Ondoy vs Boy Who Didn't Study Geography

Yesterday the internet flooded with heartwarming appeals and understandably frustrated comments because of Typhoon Ondoy's wrath. With the good, however, came the bad. And by bad, I mean retarded.



Dream car? Really? Is that really the best thing to worry about? What did you really expect the officials of Magallanes to do? Bring out straws and drain your streets by continously sucking and peeing the rain water into buckets? PROP the entire village up in stilts?

Scribblenauts Words List (funny, unique, interesting, weird)

Here's a partial list of interesting words that seems to be accepted by the DS game Scribblenauts. Scribblenauts is a game that allows you to write words and substantiate whatever the word means into an item ingame. While the word list is far from complete, the list is so comprehensive it's hard to believe the game has the actual raw size of 32MB uncompressed.

Memes:
- Rickroll
- LongCat
- Tacgnol
- Keyboardcat
- Anonymous
- Virgin
- Gamer
- Keyboard Cat
- Orly Owl
- LOL WUT

Mythology:
- Ymir
- Medusa
- Cerberrus
- Zeus
- Chuthlu

Weapons
- Rail Gun
- Mech
- Mecha
- Howitzer
- Large Hadron Collider (HDC)
- Sniper
- Sniper Rifle

PeopleEinstein
Michael Jackson
Harry Potter
Einstein
God

(more to come)

Early Campaigning, Bad Photoshopping

When put to good use, Photoshop accentuates the message of a signboard and really brings out the good angles of women, for this case a woman who looks like she really hates her husband's surname.


Mr. David, take a hint. This woman would rather have the word TULE in large red font beside her face than have your family's surname accented. She hates you that much.






There's lazy, and then there's template lazy. This piece looks like whoever made this had 5 minutes to do it and could only make use of the same banner as above for a guide, with that Holy Mary thing theme going on. Seeing the minor portraits of Mayor Lim and Gloria there, it's almost like the nativity scene actually, with Mary, Joseph, and a mascot that looks like Stitch.






Still on the topic of lazy, I guess some people can't even be bothered to pose with a REAL FUCKING HELMET ON. Maybe she's too busy wiht work to actually do it, let's give her the benefit of the doubt. The biggest problem here actually, is relying too much on some overpaid photoshop asshole who makes me feel like I'm Leonardo Da Vinci. The helmet shoop is about as conspicuous as using road ashpalt for facial reconstruction.

A quick roundup of SouthEast Asian languages.

Chinese - Even the Chinese people admit, Chinese is a language that is hard to use even when you practically grew up in China. With close to a million special characters, half of them looking like each other with the difference of a stroke or two, mastering this language is about as futile as trying to memorize the wardrobe philosophy of Lady Gaga. Chinese demands only the strictest of tongue control, which may appear horrifyingly hard to newbies, but generally useful for things other than speaking (if you know what I mean). Because of dependence on inflection rather than syllabication, a Chinese person on the average speaks faster than an American (among other reasons). If in the future we develop methods for developing orations deliverable at speeds that can break the sound barrier, I strongly believe it will be chinese, and they will be from a newscaster of CCTV.


Korean - The written counterpart of Korean called Hangul is one of the most elegant, futuristic languages out there, filled with circles and lines and stuff. I believe in the future, we'd all be eating dominoes pizzas and Hangul is a language derived from the logo of dominos found in the discarded pizza boxes left by visitors from the future. The spoken language of Korean, and I still do not understand to this day why so many people think it's beautiful, is probably the most abusive hard-palate languages in the world, making you unable to distinguish an batshit angry korean from a lucid one without looking at lip movement.

Thai - To be fair, I have no idea how kids in Thailand look at it, but from my point of view, the Thai written language is a nightmare to learn because even though the Chinese characters are just as complicated, the Thai language almost looks like you have to write it with the precision of etching microcircuits. The language structure of Thai was developed through the centuries independently from other civilizations, which resulted in the massive incompability with most Western languages. Spoken Thai is a lot like speaking with your nostrils stapled shut, which is good or bad, depending on whether or not you hate people who speak through their noses.

Filipino - Filipino is like the bastard child of all the South East Asian languages and Spanish, making it weird to both Asians AND Westerners. Surprisingly though, this feature also makes Filipino easy to learn, with words and syntax almost identical to English. Almost, being the operative word, since this rapidly evolving language is now almost becoming Hebrew-ish, discarding vowels in the written form. (i.e. D2 NK PPNT K?) Written language is same as western text, with a couple of added Spanish letters just to fuck with you. (ñ? SERIOUSLY? WHO USES THAT? OTHER THAN IN NAMES?)

Bahasa Indonesian - Honestly, majority of my experience with this language came from the back of shampoo bottles that constituted 90% of my reading material inside the bathroom as a kid, leading me to think Indonesians are people who are just crazy about hair care, in the same way Koreans make it seem like they're crazy about yawning. As for the words, speaking as a Filipino, Bahasa sounds like taking every awkward word in Filipino and turning it into a full spoken language of its own. Remarkably, if you play back Indonesian on a particularly shitty speaker, you can almost swear it's just drunk Filipino.

Vietnamese - I don't know. I don't really care. I'm only for the food, not the language.

Open-Source Philippine Text Books - WIKIBOOKS - Something For The Future

If you were about half as smart as a ripe banana in Highschool you'd probably know as much that our local text books are the Senate's equivalent of academic writing, more likely to slow down progress through misdirection than help anybody because of the number of mistakes we see every session. (like Jamby Madrigal, following the Senate analogy)

I don't need 2000 words to prove it. And you can read all about it online.. With the bloodlust hounding of private publishing companies attempting to keep on profiting by forcing our kids to use substandard books written by academic failures who obviously can't teach squat, it's a dismal situation.

But here's an idea, if you hear me out.


Currently, there is a site called WikiBooks, which is basically like Wikipedia, but structures its content in the form of books, translatable to the printed format and usable by students. The only difference is that unlike the traditional books, authorship is not restricted to a bunch of thirdstringer researchers paid minimum wage.

We can use this instead to build a better edited version of our text books. While normal netizens like us are unqualified for such an endeavor, I'm sure our collective effort will be definitely be better checked than what we currently have.

In time, perhaps we can convince teachers to start using these "free, easily corrected" books that only need to be peer reviewed once before being used for academic purposes.

Any takers?

I have a plurk

http://www.plurk.com/morgenwriter/invite

If you want faster updates, you can use this instead. Don't be a jerk though.

Random Trivia

Manila's name , originally Maynilad , is derived from that of the nilad plant , a flowering shrub adapted to marshy conditions , which once grew profusely along the banks of the river; the name was shortened first to Maynila and then to its present form. We should now call our city walangnilad.

For imperialist *ssholes who think there are too many Muslims invading Quiapo, Manila 400 years ago was a walled Muslim settlement. They got here first, but the Spaniards wiped them out.

Manila has since been invaded by many countries. China invaded it twice, the Dutch and the British once. Nowadays it looks like we're being invaded by Koreans.

Manila is the second most destroyed city of World War 2. Don't blame the Japs though. Half of the city turned into rubble when the Americans decided artillery would have to be used to flush out the Japanese during the reinvasion of 1945.

Juan De La Cruz came from a reporter who saw that it was the most common name that appeared on the blotters, forever dooming us to a fate of being a nation of crooks.

Manuel L Quezon actually defeated Emilio Aguinaldo in the elections. This is also probably why a Quezon can get you a jeepney ride while an Aguinaldo won't even pass minimum fare.

Wanted: Web Developer

I need a web developer for developing an application for me. I know it sounds weird considering web development is part of my line of work, but I don't really have a lot of time to do programming on the side.

Project scale is moderately sized and is a personal project, i.e. you will be directly working with me and only me. Language of choice is up to you but PHP/JSP is preferred. Experience in actual web deployments is a must as well.

Payment can be on a project basis, 1/3 down, 2/3rds on completion or in the form of limited profit percentage sharing upon completion of the website.

Contact me via YM "nefasturis" for more details.

Stock Disclosure

BRN - long term "sit my ass on this stock for a while" investment.
MEG - "waiting for announcement of the bidding results and then some" ipit stock
FLI - I am not sure why I keep on buying this stock and selling it at a loss.

Let's just wait for tomorrow and next week.

Noynoy for President?

A couple of days back, Mar Roxas has agreed to back down of the election, which is tantamount to throwing his support at upstart Senator Noynoy Aquino, and God knows there's nothing wrong with that. It's a free country after all.

And I'm just a normal tax-paying citizen, so I won't ask for much. But is there anybody on the internet, or the country for that matter who can provide a single picture of Senator Noynoy that doesn't make him look like he's mildly handicapped?

I don't really want to be discriminating and all, but I still got standards. I refuse to vote somebody who looks like that kid we all kept on ignoring in first grade because he kept on eating everybody's crayons and shitting in his pants. I probably wouldn't even have hung out with him in highschool and we're supposed to make him as our alpha male of democracy? America's got Obama and we're going to get this guy? Aw hell no.

The only good thing I can think of him being a president is we'd have the first masturbate-worthy first spouse in quite literally, decades. (Does Imelda count? Once upon a time she didn't look like a genderbend Jabba the Hutt, you know) Noynoy's still an Aquino, and with his name, he gets the luxury of choice and taste.


infinitely better than a sedentary first gentleman, yes?

I know it's superficial to base presidency on looks. I know that and that's not what I want. I'm just saying we should maintain a bare minimum in terms of looks. We don't want our children to be asked to make projects about our presidents and start asking why they have to make writeups and plays about Noynoy all the while mumbling "fuck you dad for voting this guy". Worst case scenario, they'd be ask to go up on stage and pretend to be a Philippine president, and your kid gets to act mental-par-below-acumen because he got assigned Noynoy. Think of that.

Think of your future children.

I rest my case.

Quake2/Halflife : Top 5 Influential PC Multiplayer Games In The Philippines

Going back to our list of influential local pc games, our next game in the list is a tie. Actually, it wasn't like that at first but long time resident blog asshole Fishcake was quick to remind me though that sometimes more than one game causes a change to the pc community, the same way it took more than a couple of Final Fantasies until we realized Squaresoft was just fucking with us by trying to find out how much zippers,belts, and emo they can cram into a single game before we start cringing.

Anyway, on our second spot, we have Quake 2 and Half-Life, both first person shooters that signaled the reincarnation of the first person shooter as a fast-paced, true 3d competitive game where characters can actually jump (fuck you Doom)



On a side note, Quake 2 for me is like my first entry into the pirated games market. I bought it as a gift to a friend and couldn't resist playing a few before giving it to him. The CD was with me for 24 hours and I ended up playing with it for 20.

Lan-games-wise, this is the first game that I actually played in a net cafe with friends, teaching me three things:

- if you don't know how to aim, look for the biggest gun available
- if the biggest gun is unavailable, learn how to aim
- Fuck railguns

Quake 2 was a game that played infinitely faster than any RTS. You login, you create a game, people login and then you just keep killing each other until it's 9PM and you're still 40kms from your house on a weeknight. It's that fast.

Half-Life was not too different from Quake 2, although admittedly I had more fun playing this game because in fact it came out much later and featured more fun things (like the killer alien pikachus you can throw at your enemies for maximized humiliation) as well as more interaction with the environment. Half-Life marked the first time the First Person Shooter Genre decided to grow the fuck up and throw away the morbid emo-goth themes of Quake/Heretic/Doom and just go with bright sunny outdoors shootouts. Suddenly even people who had low tolerances for huge contrasts of bright and dark found themselves hooked into LAN games.

Why Quake 2 and Half-Life though? I can simply answer it based on the idea that those two games started requiring computers to have videocards installed. See, once upon a time, we didn't have to spend half a month's salary to get a videocard that eats more power than a vacuum cleaner sucking water out of a pool. Half-Life and Quake2, unlike Starcraft actually ran much FASTER with a videocard on, and of course, the graphics was significantly enhanced, making the gaming experience much much better (and getting humiliated by a backstabbing crowbar much much more evident)

Overtime, net cafes that didn't have any videocards on their computers became old hat and the race to provide the best vidcards started, never unding up until this present day.

While the introduction of videocards was both eventual and inevitable, it's the requiring force of the two games that made shop owners wise up and actually start focusing on the quality of the game machines instead of just the quantity of units.

Because of that force, I put Quake2 and Half-Life in this list.

Coffee Shops = New Age Homeless Shelters

Full capacity. Really.

Last night, I went to Coffee Bean And Tea Leaf in Robinson's Place with my girlfriend for a short chat. Looking from the outside, we found vacant seats inside the shop so we entered the place. When we got to the tables though, we were surprised to see that three tables covering about a third of the shop was empty, but filled with open books, bags and various beverages at various states of consumption.

My mind basically went:

1. Either I'm in the movie The Langoliers http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Langoliers
2. A radiation scare had forced people to evacuate the premises while leaving behind their stuff.
3. Mugs and books have finally gained enough sentience, dexterity, and cash to purchase and consume coffee.
3. Some people thought it was a fucking wise move to leave their things to reserve the seats so they can conveniently go somewhere else in the mall to have cheap dinner and then go back to their seats and resume studying wihtout having to order food again, and actually look like regular customers, all the while disregarding petty things like etiquette and human decency.

Seeing that the rest of the shop was filled with normal people that didn't look like they were dying of rad poisoning, I figured it must be the third option. So we sat outside and waited to see if people would indeed return to their seats.

TWenty minutes later they did, carrying around takeout food from McDonalds and Joe Pepperoni. The people resumed studying, surfing the internet (for free) and just lounging around. Nobody ordered anything afterwards, despite the fact that some of the cups of coffee have been empty since the Cory Administration.

As a demonstration of how amazingly crass things got, one of the finer (read: hambeast) ladies found an unoccupied leather seat across the shop, dragged it to her place and used the seat, while keeping her existing seat for her bag. (apparently bags can drink now too)

Call me conservative, but I thought it was simply ridiculous. Coffeeshops are for good for reading books, but they're for reading books AND drinking coffee. Buying one coffee or having a friend who bought coffee three hours ago does not constitute you as an eternal customer, and even an overpriced badly tasting joe can only go so far.

During the time the bags were left unattended, I was thinking of the many ways to force management to get the unattended items thrown out.

- Make angry faces at management for allowing second-class books to occupy chairs while you're left to stand. Bring up the topic of book-human discrimination.
- Leave a large card note saying "Free stuff"
- Stash drugs in the bag pockets and call in the K9 units
- Tell management the people who stayed in the empty tables asked you to tell management that they wont be returning because one of their friends had a heart attack
- Call security and tell them one of the bags is filled with explosives. Use a deep, persuasive voice with accompanying maniacal laughter.

I would've, but my gf is a frequent visitor and I wouldn't want her in trouble, so I just put my ideas here instead of in practice, where they belong.

On hindsight, we should stop calling the place CBTL and call it CBTG: Coffee Bean and Taong Grasa