Virtual Worlds

The great singapore sale has started! And so, where do we find ourselves on a sunday afternoon?


Kino.

A buncha 20% discount coupons (w00t!) in life! (29th May for those who missed it) and the general tendency to gravitate towards the place anyway (must be all the weight of authority in those books) cause us to somehow magically appear in the bookstore. Or, well, fine, my sis went there first and i was looking for her, which was the other part of why i was in kino.

At any rate, i found her in the computer section (go figure) reading a book on 'designing virtual worlds'. The difference this time is that it's a rather easy to read book more humanities based than coding-based, which just means that this time i can actually understand what she's reading. And so the first part i saw was kinda sociological and about the types of players who Mud and their differing objectives, and the implications of your design on the proportions of people who'll stay in the long run. Interesting stuff. And there was a whole section on Game economics, too. I like. My sis like(s). I buy.

And while i'm reading the book, i inevitably draw many parallels to the Kingdom of Loathing which is this web-based MUD still in beta, but going official soon. The thing about MUDs in beta is that there're endless tweaks going on, and with a reasonably transparent economy you can see interesting (and immediate) effects. And all at once, here's all your textbook economic theory in living dynamic practice, all your demand and supply, your market structures, your macroeconomic controls, and there're people, intelligent people, discussing with good economic sense why certain policies would work and certain others wouldn't, and nice discusssions about the REAL opportunity cost of actions in the game and how to combat inflation and that sort of thing. So cool. Did i just lose everyone here? But i figure that if i don't manage to get that childhood dream of being an animator at squaresoft, maybe i'll get a chance to be an economist at squaresoft for their next incarnation of an MMORPG. I never really liked the idea of subscription-based Massively Multiplayer Online RPGs, but hey, it'd be fun to be on the other side. Yea and anyway, my mum was so completely aghast that my sis wanted to buy this $90 computer book from borders. So yea i didn't tell her that i'm fuelling her passion with this one. oh well. Excuse me while i return to my attempt at profiting from information assymetries.

The pyramid game

So, my NS friend asked me out to dinner. Which is strange, becuase i didn't really know him that well to begin with, he was a good working ally and nice person to talk to in camp etc. but i didn't really expect to see him much after we went our own seperate ways. So it was quite a pleasant surprise when he called me up to ask me out for dinner. So okay, i say why not come along for this dinner we're having to send another NS friend off for his masters degree in violin? And then he says no thanks, actually he doesn't really know the rest of them very well. Which i find highly curious, but is not terribly inconceivable. So i say not this week, try next week.

So next week he calls again and asks me for dinner. So alright, i agree and in the end we meet at lau pa sat, near his office. And i'm thinking "wa, poor chap, working till 7pm." (we agreed to meet at 7:15) And i see him all dressed up in a tie and a long sleeved shirt. And i'm rather surprised, partly because i didn't think he'd be in such a formal job requiring such clothes, and later, when i realised it, because i'm wondering why he's still wearing his tie and stuff after office hours.

So we talk, he asks lots of questions about what i'm doing, what i'm going to do, the usual smalltalk. But refuses to answer questions about his job. Very cryptic. Already on the phone when i tried to find out, he refused to tell me, so, okay, i'll give him that much, but even now he went on saying "oh i'll tell you after dinner." which i found completely perplexing, and i was wondering what sort of illegal job he was trying to do.

And then he started being very nice to me and tried to pay for my dinner and ate what i ate and drank what i drank... which was when i decided that he didn't care about the dinner. And he asks me cryptic stuff like if i ever considered being retrenched, and whether i'd want to be in a job all my life, and such. When you consider that all our previous conversation about jobs basically involved things like 'dunno, see how' and the like, this got highly curious. So i figured he was trying to sell me insurance or some sort of financial instrument. Which i found amusing, coz, well, there's always the chance of me coming back to him on the same matter with a rather different change of roles 4 years later.

But he STILL REFUSES to tell me what he's selling or trying to get at. Which started to get agitatingly irritating. And he refused to tell me, saying 'well, come back to my office and it'll be easier to explain, or you might misunderstand.' At this moment various alarm bells started ringing, but i thought, hey, let's see where this is going.

So we take a walk along shenton way, and voila, office. we take the lift up, and he sees someone he knows in the lift. Considering that it's already 8 plus by now, i'm wondering what sort of job he does where temp people wander around the office so late at night. And he tells me about a nice working environment and lots of young people and that sort of thing. gee. So the doors open at the top floor of some random office building, and he leads me... into a showroom. I'm there going 'wtf?' at seeing a whole area full of maybe 30 people talking at small tables in groups of 3 or 4 or so. I was expecting a graveyard, and i got a market.

And he shows me the showcase of their products (aha, you're trying to sell me..... beauty products?!? and aromatherapy?!?) and explains some more, does a whole sales pitch, shows me the website, says good things about the company's president and director and stuff (why am i interested? what's your point? who are these people to you?) and eventually i figure out that it's multilevel marketing he's gotten himself into.

Which then begun a whirlwind journey of logic fencing with my friend who refuses to tell me very much, in fear of having me misunderstand. So he says wait for a while, i'm getting a senior partner to explain to you what it's all about. So in the end, he, this other army friend who was there too, and this strange senior partner who was probably the same age as he was, sit with me at a table. *glance at watch*

So senior person does all the talking. In chinese. Which is sliiiiightly problematic, since my logic fencing doesn't work quite as well when i'm spending half my brainpower trying to figure out what she's saying in the first place. And all the while i keep trying to point out how they have only 2 products for crying out loud, and they're really just selling the franchising system which won't work since there's no inherent value in their products. And she pulls all sorts of analogies with macdonalds and math games and stuff which i try to point out aren't relevant, but she refuses to listen to me anyway thinking that i've got the wrong idea and should just follow her train of thought for a moment. I suppose i don't express myself very well in chinese.

My friends try and convince me about the learning opportunities and how the courses are really good, i try and ask them if they're really worth the money because they keep talking about it in such vague terms like 'oh it's good' 'you won't believe it until you try it' and so on. I figure it's very personality cultish and brainwashy.

And so it goes on and on for *gasp* 3 hours, all the while i spend time trying to understand their concept and these people, and ask them probing questions to undermine their faith in the system, but it doesn't work. sigh. So i give up and decided my time was better spent elsewhere, like, say in a festering cesspool just down the road.

All in all, it was a 3 hour lesson in logic, chinese, patience, and human fallibility. Fun. Freaky. F-ed up.

Off-white

That one word post was of course a lyric from the chorus of Simon and Garfunkel's Mrs Robinson:

Koo-koo-ka-choo, Mrs. Robinson,
Jesus loves you more than you will know.
God bless you, please, Mrs. Robinson.
Heaven holds a place for those who pray,
Hey, hey, hey

But then again, i guess they didn't know what they were talking about either, and maybe, just maybe, kai's right after all. :)

Pink.

Kookookachoo!

Sunset Boulevard

And for a lack of other notable content to blog about (Read: I don't really feel like blogging about ORA jogathon even tho i have nice pics, because it's too far gone; and i don't want to blog about kill bill 2 because i'm too lazy) I post this highly irrelevant picture of a sunset from just outside my house, which we only saw because my sis wanted to run 2.4 (hey that rhymes) because she failed the one before.



The angle sucks, though, because it was the best i could do to try and avoid getting the houses and trees in the way. Which is kinda sad, because the sky was a rather nice vivid hue of purple-pink. The photo isn't very accurate at reproducing it, but it looks nice anyway.

Oh and my sis went on to get a gold for her NAPFA, which is rather ridiculously unfair, since the only thing she did in between was run once and do some sprints and stepups, but i'm proud of her anyway.

yea and always remember to bring $1 coins to NTUC if you're buying more than 10kg worth of stuff. Either that or A4 sized paper to hold bags with. Neither of which i had, of course, being me. Had to rearrange stuff in the middle of the aisle multiple times to try and fit everything into a basket, and then i decided that fruits just don't pack very efficiently. Dual-wielding baskets, yo.

Relativity

Ahh so i finally manage to think of something to blog about.

today's my dental FFI. 2 (.5!) years have really gone by pretty fast. Time moves really slowly and is all relative to what you were doing (which reminds me of a conversation i had with my sis about how she was going to dehydrate and die in sunday school because she forgot to bring water since 1 hour of sunday school seemed like 10 years to her and dehydration depends on how much time you spend without water, but i digress) and all the other significant milestones you measure events against. So when you're going thru something, and it's complete torture, time moves really slow. And when you look back at something, and there's not much to look back at, time moved very fast. It also, i guess, depends on the state of change of the world at large relative to what you'd expect it to be.... Primary school without net access seems to be eons ago, but has it really been twice as long as the distance in time between today and the time i stepped into JC? hm.

That aside, NS has come and gone, i'm finally at the brink of finishing it, and this golden timeperiod has been the stuff of dreams for a long time coming. Not too long ago i was thinking, "crap, 2 years and 4 months of NS ahead of me, that's longer than JC, and JC was REALLY QUITE LONG. Even if now it does seem like it went by very fast, i wonder if time is relative to the....etc" but now that the time has come, it's rather anticlimatic. I just want to get it over and done with and close this chapter of my life. Oh sure, there've been good times and i've learnt from NS, but i wonder if i wouldn't have learnt just as much from the outside world if i'd spent my time otherwise. No matter how i rationalise it, NS at a personal level doesn't make lots of sense, but i guess that isn't the whole point of NS after all. I guess i've quite definitely grown up a lot, though, and it's no longer a naive student mentality but a more cynical, jaded, wiser person looking out thru these eyes. The one thing i hate most about NS at the moment is how it completely destroyed my discipline and work attitude, ironically. I just can't seem to find it anywhere anymore. I wonder how long it'll take to be able to motivate myself sufficiently again. *Sigh*

and ah vell, the time has come to go out and get signatures. damn rain. it never rains when it's supposed to.