Below are the 5 most recent journal entries recorded in petrus4's LiveJournal:

Monday, January 3rd, 2005
4:10 am	This is a test to see if I can use Haloscan, which I've just signed up for, to send/receive trackback pings with my LiveJournal. Hopefully I'll be able to, since relocation would be a bit of a nuisance and not something I really want to have to subject myself to. Of course, I could re-sign up with my web host and install Movable Type, but blogs aren't that much of a big deal for me anywayz...although trackback might make this one more so. (Comment on this)
Saturday, December 18th, 2004
8:08 am	Keeping it positive I've deleted two entries from this blog which I consider excessively negative, and I'm going to endeavour to keep it as positive as possible from now on. Part of that is ending (or at least trying to end) my obsession with the war on Iraq. To that end, I'm going to put together a list of positive web sites that I'm finding. Despite the old saying that "bad news sells" for those of us who are sick of nihilism and stress on a daily basis, it turns out that there ARE alternatives. http://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/ is probably the most comprehensive site I've found so far, with lots of uplifting material about various different sectors of human life. http://www.signsoflight.org/ is another good one, with some encouraging material. http://www.upbeat.net/ has a lot of good links. http://ming.tv/ The blog of Flemming Allen Funch.  Lots of positive stuff here also. With the exception of the last site, all of these come from a Google keyword search for positive news. (Comment on this)
Saturday, December 11th, 2004
9:33 pm	Learning to detach This post was originally a judgemental rant about my own increasing disillusionment with Christianity, but after I looked at it for a long while, I found myself wondering, "Why bother?" The people who I was writing about cannot be reached...Not with anything, not by anything. There is a complete deafness to appeals. I need more than anything now to try and learn to make Iraq irrelevant in my own mind. "Lord, give me the courage to change the things I can change, the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, and the wisdom to know the difference." (Comment on this)
Monday, December 6th, 2004
5:41 pm	Second post The last 24 hours or so have been a bit more interesting than usual. I downloaded Timothy Leary's The Psychadelic Experience: A Guide Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead, and have been reading through it. Very interesting material, if rather strange. I've also lately started downloading pretty much any and all Goa trance, psytrance, and other such spacey ambient music I can find. I'm throwing some of it out as well, but I've identified a couple of artists that seem to resonate more strongly than others with me. I'm about to go back into the Sims 2 as well. I've been experimenting with the genetics model in that game, and it's really interesting...in the sense that when the Sims have kids, it is very largely unpredictable (or seems to be) with regards to how they come out. One of my Sim couples had two boys recently, Jeremiah and Sparhawk, and it was amazing how subtly different the two of them were from each other. They were almost identical in both looks and personality, yet there was also this hint of difference...not only facially, but also in behaviour. I'm also finding out that the Sims genetic model seems to mimic real life in the sense that the male adult of that couple had a brother living in the house, and one of the kids came out more closely resembling the brother (his uncle) than either one of the two parents. That tells me that if Sim parents have siblings, their Sim children can inherit characteristics from the extended gene pool present, as well as just the parents. I've recently figured out how to extend the lifespan of individual Sims, so what I'm essentially planning on doing is having isolated groups of "breeder" Sims in a given neighbourhood. The non-breeder Sims will have normal lifespans and die normally, while I will extend the lifespanof the breeder Sims periodically. My plan in doing this is to try and find out the degree of variation that the game's genetic system can produce among just one set of parents, and which factors enable greater genetic randomness/diversity. I'm also wanting to learn more about the nuances of architectural design. I have downloaded a couple of houses last night that were considerably more advanced aesthetically than what I myself am capable of producing at this point, and I am planning on studying these designs in order to learn better design techniques myself. More soon. I'll also write here about the results of both of the above aims. (Comment on this)
Friday, December 3rd, 2004
7:32 pm	First post Here's my livejournal! I've been thinking of starting one of these things for a while. It's not going to be sorted into any particular categories...I'm just going to write whatever comes into my head. Stuff I'm doing at the moment:- - Playing/Experimenting with various elements of The Sims 2, which I'll be writing about. - Slowly attempting to build some sort of Linux distribution based on Linux From Scratch, which I'll also be writing about. My other primary interests at the moment are Massively Multiplayer Online Games (although from a mainly academic perspective at the moment...I haven't been playing UO for a while, and the fact that Electronic Arts, in a manner consistent with their usual level of cluelessness, is no longer selling UO in Australia makes it difficult for me to do so unfortunately.) I recently read Constructing Virtual Worlds by Richard Bartle, which could probably be considered the Bible equivalent on the subject, since Bartle was one of the primary individuals involved in creating early MUDs. (Text based virtual environments, basically) I can't really decide whether I think MMOGs are a good thing or not, actually. Bartle maintains that they are...he thinks that they enable people to go on a "hero's journey," and thus discover themselves/learn about who they truly are, etc. It's true that to a degree UO probably helped me do that, at least to an extent, but part of me also wonders if this is simply an elaborate justification for something which wastes people's time, and also (through their own willingness, of course) actually imprisons them to a degree. Here's what I'm planning in the Sims 2. I've found a program which seems to allow editing of wallpaper textures via extraction from the .package files. I hope this works, as I really would like to be able to edit my own wallpaper textures...I don't want to have to wait until my enlightened, generous overlords at EA decide to grant me the ability to do so. I'll record my success or failure here once I've tested it out. (1 Comment |Comment on this)