2.5 stars out of 5.

I’ve loved playing The Sims for years, and I was delighted to find this social-networking version. I’ve been playing regularly since a few days after it went public. Sadly, as a “hard core” player, visiting many times a day has shown that many gameplay elements are severely broken.

As it’s a “social” game, you’re expected to share back-and-forth with your game “neighbours”. Unfortunately, the internal messaging/sharing system is severely broken. Your requests often won’t get to their recipients, and when they do your friends try responses frequently vanish. The game asks you to post your in-game milestones to your wall, yet it won’t let anyone CLAIM all the simoleons from those posts. There are situations where the integration with facebook’s messaging system causes the game to hang and other random crashes. Your sim’s condition completely unpredictable when you re-enter the game – I’ve left for 2 mins and found almost every stat red upon returning, while leaving for hours has left a virtually all-green sim. And I won’t even go into detail about the ridiculous real-money pricing on in-game items – to buy just a few of skill items, it costs more than it cost me to furnish my first real-life apartment! Considering there’s already sponsorship from Dunkin’ Donuts and other exceptional income opportunities from in-game product ads, EA is clearly being greedy, trying to make this a MAJOR cash cow (forget about the fact that it is an advertisement and gateway drug for their not-free-at-all-expansion-pack-ridden free-standing Sims games).

I don’t begrudge a business making money, but between the bugs and the outrageous SimCash store, I can’t endorse this at this time for anyone except those who may play for only a few minutes per week. Instead, buy The Sims 3 and ALL the expansions – it’ll be cheaper in the long run.

But what harm could come of believing in something as silly as “The Rapture”?

Just this:

Or this.

Or this.

Of course, Christians will cry out about being “persecuted” and that the actions of a small minority like Harold Camping and his followers should not reflect on the majority. Oh, Christians, we’re so sorry you’ve had it so bad since the Crusades didn’t turn out how you wanted.

So tell me again why we have campaigns for things like “Back to Sleep” when crib death happens in such a miniscule number of cases (Odds: 1000 to 1 against at least)? How many kids actually got hurt going down stairs in baby walkers – yet they were banned (Odds: 15000 to 1)? How many other minor, rare dangers do we make against the law, “just to be safe”?

I’m becoming more Hitchens-minded every day.

Religion.
Poisons.
Everything.

Living your life by a moral code accepted by millions isn’t a bad thing, as long as you understand that the moral code written in religious books comes from man and portions of it are obsolete. Living that code out of fear of punishment (or desire for rewards) from a magical sky wizard or wizards, however, is just plain foolish.

When it comes to parents harming or abandoning their children for religion, shouldn’t we do something about it?

After all (and I’ll use the most hated phrase I know from the fear-brokers of the world): THINK OF THE CHILDREN!

In the last week to ten days, I’ve purchased several electronic items. Most have been very inexpensive although a couple were quite costly (that’s another blog entry altogether). Note that I said “inexpensive” – as in reasonably good quality but on sale or reduced in price, and not “cheap” which implies something completely different.

3 out of 5 have been defective.

All my life, in spite of taking very good care of my things, I have had a higher failure rate than average. If there is a faulty item on the shelf in a store, I seem to always be able to pick it at random. I’m not talking about clearance or open box items, either. I am talking about factory-sealed, unmolested, apparently untouched-by-human-hands-since-manufacture things.

Almost everything I have to return is something electrically powered. It’s like I have a dark little cloud floating over me… and the cloud is made of some kind of bizarre electromagnetic field powered by static electricity. The number of BRAND-NEW items I have had to take back to the store and exchange is ree-donk-you-luss.

Do I chalk this up to some kind of silly superstition? The wife has picked up on the trend, so when we are purchasing anything in the store, SHE selects the item and she takes it to the cash so that my “curse” doesn’t affect it. It’s to the point that when buying something, I will handle the display model, or the one the clerk takes out of the box, but I won’t buy that one – because I touched it, and now it’s cursed.

I’m sure it is strictly just a load of coincidences. I’m not, by nature, the kind of person who believes in fate or bad luck. I constantly look for scientific explanations for things; I’m a chronic analyzer. I feel like there is a rational and predictable cause of everything that happens, and there are patterns even in chaos.

Therefore, I’ve arrived at the conclusion that I’m a mutant with an intermittently-active, electricity-disrupting superpower that occasionally overloads or destroys things that have to be plugged in and/or run on batteries.

If only I could control it, it could come in very

A church which has stood on the main street of Picton, Ontario for over 130 years is about to be torn down. An attempt by the local Heritage Advisory Committee to designate it as a historical structure – which it most definitely is – failed when local councillors lacked the spine to stand up to a two-bit lawyer hired by the property owners. Or maybe, they’re just corrupt and morally bankrupt? Of course, since they’re politicians, that could be a redundant statement.

A local paper, the County Weekly News, wrote an article about the situation. It doesn’t come off as objective reporting… it sounds like it was written by the building owner’s sister, trying to sound objective while painfully obviously omitting the viewpoint of those opposed to the demolition. CountyLive.ca, a new local news outlet which is based on the web, wrote an article in support of the church in late July, but then made it disappear. I’ve provided a capture of the cached page from Google below.

The entire situation reeks of corruption and graft, extending even to the local media.

I thought that in addition to the removed supportive article from CountyLive, I should also excerpt and translate the article from the Weekly News, as it seems to need some clarification.

The news article begins:

After exhausting all avenues for creating income, the owners of the former Methodist Episcopal Church on Main Street, Picton, will tear it down.

Translation:

Some people bought a historical property a few years back, but didn’t have a viable business plan for it. Because they lack both imagination and the will to do so, they couldn’t make any money. Because they lack the intelligence to use the property to generate any kind of income, they will blame the structure for their problems and destroy it.

County Weekly News Article:

An eleventh-hour attempt by the Prince Edward County Heritage Advisory Committee to have the building designated of significance failed. Senior Planner Ryan Leary said that although the Ontario Heritage Act does allow for a building to be designated heritage without the owner’s permission, “It has not been the habit of this municipality to do so.”

Translation: Read the rest of this entry »

Yes, Sarah.

It was that technical glitch where people reading it found it offensive, and reported it as hate speech.

I hate when facebook has glitches like that, don’t you? Nothing worse than when something works exactly as intended.

It’s a shame we don’t have the same kind of button on you to report you to your maker.