Tips On Pirating A Video Game

1. Do not pirate a video game. Please. The developers need to eat.
2. If you give developers money for games you like, they can make more games you might like.
3. The developers can put anything they want into a game.
4. Often, developers build copy protection into a game. Sometimes very creative copy protection. We covered this back in 2010.
5. That said, if they are creating a game about game creation, and call it Game Dev Tycoon, you had better believe they're putting copy protection into it.
6. If you pirate a game called Game Dev Tycoon, you really deserve what happens next.

The World Is Just One Awesome Filmmaker

My trip prep is gearing up and I don't have a huge amount of time to devote to research for here. So I think what I might do today is relay a couple videos.

Really awesome videos. All by the same guy: German filmmaker Gogol Lobmayr. He's made a series of three videos over the years which he calls the 'Fascinating Nature' series.


This one, the original 'Fascinating Nature', was made in 1996.




Lobmayr struck again in 1999 with the 53-minute 'Colors of Earth'.




In 2004, he made 'Seven Seasons'. Budget another hour and a half.



He's currently at work on a fourth project called 'Wonderful World', slated to run 100 minutes. Hooray for that.

Random News Generator- French Polynesia

Normally the tiny island nations prove frustrating for me when their number comes up in the RNG. Often there is very little going on. On French Polynesia, though, we actually have election coverage, as they happen to be in the middle of legislative elections.

So here's how things work there. There's a multiparty parliamentary system in place (as in, you vote for the party and then they pick the names), but the first of two rounds- which took place last week- is effectively a qualifying round. Your party has to get 12.5% of the vote in order to be eligible for seats. If you get between 5% and 12.5%, you're allowed to align with a party that did get over 12.5%. Below 5%, you're SOL. Round 2 is when the qualifying parties actually divvy up the seats. One-third of the seats (19 of them) are given to the party that comes in first; the other two-thirds (38 seats) are handed out proportionally. The president is the leader of the ruling party.

In this particular election, three parties crossed 12.5%, and only one other crossed 5%. The leader, with 40.16% of the vote, is Tahoera'a Huiraatira. with runner-up incumbent Union For Democracy clocking in at 24%.


Round 2 is May 5. This guy has the second round as today; he messed up there but otherwise has a pretty decent writeup. Oscar Temaru is currently president, and it's not much of a surprise that he's headed for defeat as, while he's been president five times, the reason he's been president five times is that he's been ousted four times, and heading towards a fifth. Two of those times, he's been replaced by a man named Gaston Flosse; Flosse currently represents French Polynesia in France's Senate.

A main difference between the two is their stance on French Polynesia's relationship with France. Temaru would like for French Polynesia to declare independence, while Flosse has no problem with French Polynesia remaining a dependency. The global recession kept tourists from stopping by, and subsidy money from France has helped keep the place afloat; as a result, independence has been seen by voters as not a very hot idea right now. Flosse, for his part, has already been given a four-year suspended prison sentence for corruption in February which is currently under appeal and has suspected involvement in the 1997 murder of a Tahitian journalist hanging over his head, but if the first round carries over to the second, the voters will seemingly take the corrupt maybe-murderer over ill-timed independence.

Until they want the independence over the corruption again. Give it another election; they might change their minds.

Curvature Of Space Or Something

In the everyday world, there really isn't too much difference between a scientific theory and a law. Both are used to describe well-documented explanations for how the universe operates; the main difference is that a theory leaves room for itself to be disproven by someone else; the word 'law' is saved for things scientists consider effectively settled once and for all.

Thus, Einstein's Theory of Relativity, which holds that light can be deflected by gravity. It's a theory because of quantum mechanics, deemed incompatible. I'm going to straight-up admit that I don't know what the hell words I'd be writing, even though I can tell this is kind of important for all the sciencing going on out there and really should pass it along, so let's just leave it at the fact that scientists found a neutron star orbited by a white dwarf, which they figured might be enough to cause the theory to break down because black holes make it break down and this was also really tiny and really heavy, they used a telescope at European Southern Observatory in Chile to look at it, and it didn't. Because of... reasons.

You're really better off clicking the links than listening to me try and stumble through it. Honestly, it is way over my head.

That's Not Very Peaceful Or Friendly

In 1904, Chile and Bolivia signed the Treaty of Peace and Friendship that resulted from the War of the Pacific, which ended in 1883. Chile beat Bolivia, and Bolivia, which until then had a Pacific coastline, lost it and became the landlocked nation you know and often immediately forget about today. (Peru was also involved. Chile took some coastline from them too.)

The International Court of Justice has been officially informed that Bolivia would like that coastline back. Bolivia always has wanted it back; it never got rid of its navy, though now it just patrols lakes and rivers. Chile's reaction has been to openly laugh it off on the grounds that, dude, we've been under this treaty for how long now and we're just supposed to hand the land back?

That is about the reaction you ought to have too. Bolivia's chances of pulling this off are about the same as the Marlins selling out the rest of the season. In fact, if they reclaimed the coastline they had before the war- a portion that includes the city of Antofagasta- it would split Chile and the northernmost section (containing Arica and Iquique) would become an exclave. But it's worth at least noting that they've filed it.

More Than You Care To Know About Cashews

There's a halfway-decent chance that if you eat cashews, at least some of them have come from Tanzania. As of the most recent available data in 2010, they rank 9th in world production (though they're sliding down the rankings as the cashew trees age). It's also one of Tanzania's main cash crops, making up about 5% of the country's GDP. Farmers depend on the crop and the proceeds from selling it to get themselves out of poverty. (And you know what 'poverty' means in African terms.)

So when the co-op to which the farmers in the southeastern district of Liwale have sold their cashews suddenly pay them less than half the amount they had previously agreed to on claims that the world cashew market had fallen- which it has, but it just fell along with the rest of the global economy and that was four and a half years ago- one might expect the farmers to not take it well. In this instance, with some 5,000 farmers having been kept waiting for full payment since October (they were supposed to get paid in two installments; the first was paid last year and the second installment is what they're waiting on), 'not take it well' can be taken to mean 'riot in the streets, hunt down and burn 24 buildings, making sure the houses of government officials they figure could have gotten them their money are among them'. The officials targeted were members of the ruling party, Chama cha Mapinduzi (or CCM). There are 19 reported arrests; no casualties.

The matter has been exacerbated by the fact that cashew nut processing factories are failing to find funding, and existing factories are being converted to warehouses. The collateral that banks are asking to fund the construction of factories is getting to be too high for investors to afford. As a result, processing has been outsourced and India, a riser in cashew production and currently second behind Nigeria, is taking advantage.

You Were Not Told There Would Be No Math

Don't worry. Today's quiz is pretty simple. You'll just be asked to name the first 28 numbers in the Fibonacci sequence. That, in case you weren't any good at math, is a sequence of numbers in which each number in the sequence is the sum of the previous two.

You're gifted the first two numbers, 0 and 1. You just need to get the next 26.

Oh, did I mention there are only two minutes on the clock?