God isn't dead, he's just bored

The nature of God says that he's omniscient - he knows everything that can and will happen ever.

I've been thinking about this for a while and if God exists and is omniscient, he must be bored stupid. If you have freewill but cannot exercise it, you must feel completely trapped or entirely bored.

So I imagined for a moment that I knew everything and could do anything I wanted (except for throwing away my powers; making myself less than I am) the inevitable place I come to is one of desperation and futility. I know everything that could be, that is, that was. There is no imagination, no creativity to be had, and ultimately, nothing to do.

God was bored.

After creating all, there was nothing left to do. Sure he may have had some fun making the fjords, and definitely had himself a good laugh when he made the platypus, but what is there to do after that? The most fantastic idea then hit him: endow some of the more cunning monkeys with a freewill similiar to that of his own. Without the omnipotent and absolute powers of God, a magnificient experiment was born with wildly unpredictable outcomes: what would the simians do with their powers of reasoning?

I don't think God "knows" everything, in the sense that there is nothing left to experience. If man was truly created in God's image, it was done in order to allow God to experience life from another perspective.

And then something happened that God was not expecting; through knowledge of man he felt something that he could not have fathomed beforehand: wonder. The sublime pleasure of something truly transcendental whenever man looked to the stars or viewed an aurora.

Whether or not God gave mankind meaning to their lives, it seems to me that mankind was made to give meaning to God's. There's only so long that you can laugh at the discomfortiture of whales when they are harassed by packs of mischievous dolphins. It's a long time, but still, not forever.

Chaotic neutral

I think I'm a bad man. Not malicious or mean-spirited but there's definitely something that's gone wrong with my set of morals. This revelation struck me today as I was reading the news, but then was somewhat assuaged by my satisfaction with my new alignment modifier of Chaotic Neutral.

The article I read was about a teenage guy who died because he accidentally fell off the roof of a seven-story carpark. Why am I bad? It's because when I read it my immediate and uncontrolled reaction was of amusement rather than a more compassionate feeling of regret or sadness.

The reason for my misguided mirth was the reason why this guy died - he had had a few drinks and was texting instead of looking where he was going. And it's not that there were no guard railst; that it was a tragic but negligent accident. There was a guard rail, it wasn't negligent on the part of the architect and there was no one else to  blame but his own dumb self.

Tragic? Hardly. I often say that this kind of this is natural selection in action; pure unadulterated Darwinism. A guy literally too stupid to live caused his own death.

However this isn't the issue. The problem is my revelry in the fatal misfortunes of someone I don't know and never would care about. I've run into troubles before with people because of this attitude; on occasion it has even jeopardized my job. Normally these situations are more complicated than the one issue so I've never really thought too carefully about it until today.



Whenever I'm presented with an abstract situation and black comedy I fully enjoy it; I never actually have schaudenfreude when there's someone in front of me who is suffering. Still, it doesn't bode well for my general moral standing. I do wonder whether others actually feel moral outrage at my lack of compassion or just pretend because it's expected someone calls me out of this.

Thus I must concede that my alignment now must move from Chaotic Good to Chaotic Neutral. Not good, not evil, little regard for the law but with a code of ethics. Like Captain Jack Sparrow or Dinobot from Beast Wars - a private agenda and no real allegiance, and hedonistic one way or the other.

Game Review: Pokemon Soulsilver

In anticipation of the upcoming Pokemon White I've been playing Soulsilver fairly religiously. There is a certain satisfaction to be gained by having a perfectly and carefully raised Dragonite laying waste to all my opponents like a vengeful god on insolent villagers.

The gameplay in this game is virtually identical to all of its predecessors, minus a few graphical upgrades. The battle animations look a little better but it still looks like every pokemon has an epileptic fit before chundering all over the unsuspecting foe.

Soulsilver is to Silver what FireRed is to Red; upgraded, prettier, and largely a complete waste of time as it's the same damn game! The addition of the controlling stylus does nothing to improve the gameplay nor does the subtraction of the slot machines make it more wholesome. In it's marvellously absurd wisdom Nintendo decided that gambling avatars made for poor moral examples all while forcing your newly abducted animals to fight and kill for your amusement. In Soulsilver, I beat the divine-protector of the ocean currents into submission and forced it to fly me around the place while it was unconscious. The ethical implications may be somewhat of a wash is all I'm saying.

I have one major gripe with this title, and that is the ridiculous amount of difficulty there is in capturing certain pokemon. I've never liked the stupidly small chance you had to capture the legendaries in the earlier ones - supposedly even after reducing Zapdos to 1 health, confusing it, making it paralyzed and lowering all of its stats as far as they can go and still I only have a 5% chance of catching it with my ultra ball.

All the coolest pokemon require retarded amounts of time and effort to acquire and by that stage, game fatigue has set in and I want to just finish.For example, Lucario is pretty rad being a dark/steel type and looks awesome but requires literally 120 real days AFTER beating the big 4 to capture a Riolu, which then takes like 200 000 steps to evolve through happiness. Mood strikes as being the most contradictory of status requirements, as my personal happiness is inversely proportional to that of my pokemon. Oddly walking around with a level 1 pokemon for days on end makes me crazy with murderous rage rather than entertained.

I think it was a good move to allow for roaming legendaries - makes them difficult to catch without being artificially hard; tactics rather than attrition is required to get them. They still aren't worth getting however as they still have that hair-tearingly frustrating quality of having a 5% catch rate.

There isn't any point in doing the "other" measures of your pokemons' abilities: the dance contest, speed contest and beauty contests seem to be the only reason why you need a stylus and they add nothing to the game. Doing the contests won't improve their stats and won't improve any other battle quality.

Ultimately I have to conclude that it was worth the $70 price tag when I bought it as I'm still playing it and I've poured more than 200+ hours into it. Any game that I'm still play a year after purchase is worth it. Why it makes me spend 175 of those hours walking around with baby pokemon is beyond me though.