I, for one, feel fine, but a whole lot of anti-LHC cranks are suddenly trickling out of the woodwork. Some people get really worked up over that whole precautionary principle thing — well, you can’t prove that the LHC won’t destroy the world, so it’s best to assume that it will. And it will probably do it by some means combining the best features of quantum physics, voodoo, and silver-age comic book science.
Bob Park hit the nail pretty much on the head here when he wrote: "In 1999 Wagner warned that RHIC, the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory, must be slain lest it create a black hole (WN 23 Jul 99) . The then BNL director, Jack Marburger, named a distinguished panel of physicists to investigate. Their report noted that nature has been conducting the relevant safety test for billions of years by colliding heavy-ion cosmic rays with the moon. It concluded that creation of a black hole is ‘effectively ruled out by the persistence of the Moon.’"
April 4th, 2008
Posted by
Darien |
Bullshit |
no comments
Say you’re chopping some type of mob, and you want to do something other than ordinary old chop-chop-chop with your giant monster-chopping flamberge. What do you do? Well, if you’re playing Final Fantasy VIII, you select the GF command over and over and over. But in my game, should you happen to point your magical wiimote targeting cursor at something and chop the B button, a few things will happen. First off, the action will pause; since you won’t be able to act for the next few seconds, it seemed only fair that the mobs would suffer the same limitation. The more interesting component of the process is that a radial menu will open around your target.
I know what you’re thinking — holy shit yes, a menu! But it’s more exciting even than that makes it sound. From this menu you’ll be able to select (also via Wii remote pointage) the skill you want to use, and then use it! What are skills, you ask, not unreasonably? Skills are special combat abilities you’ll gain as you level up, and they can and do vary by character. In case you missed it, I just subtly revealed that there are multiple playable characters available in this game — that’s just how completely freakin’ crazy I am. That’s like an extra bonus update.
So what about spells? No, spells aren’t just what we call skills when your character is wearing a dress instead of armour. They’re a totally seperate mechanic, but they’re accessed through the same means; the nunchuck stick can switch you from the radial skills menu to the radial spells menu. The exact mechanical differences between the two will be the subject of a later post; for now, suffice to say that there are non-trivial differences.
Once you’ve selected your skill or spell, well, that’s about all there is to it. Recall that through the magic of the Wii remote’s pointer functionality you’ve already chosen your target and the whole thing becomes clear; your skill or spell executes targeted on whatever you were pointing at (also what the menu opened around). If that target’s out of range? No worries — that skill or spell will be "redded out" and unavailable. No problems with accidentally wasting something or any confusion about whether or not you can use it. Just a fluid skill-usage system designed to reduce the time you spend playing with menus and get you back to the choppin’!
April 4th, 2008
Posted by
Darien |
My secret project |
3 comments
