Review: Fate Stay Night

After having read favorable reviews, getting positive comments from acquaintances, and discovering it's popular enough to have manga and an anime made from it, I decided to try the visual novel Fate Stay Night by Type Moon. Like all visual novels it plays like a choose-your-own-adventure book with special effects and a mostly linear path. Despite the limited game side of it, as many options are A or B and B gets you killed or false choices where your choice makes no difference, it made a pretty interesting if long winded story for the first third to half of the game. I was beginning to really enjoy the story and characters. And then the game went H. It totally blindsided me. I should of paid more attention to those reviews I suppose. Sadly, this is also the point the game finally veered too far into typical anime tropes that I dislike, such as an over-important useless male lead, absurd gender roles, and stupid heroism without an accompanying price. I went ahead and pushed though to the end having to endure the increasing standardization of the plot. It's too bad too, I enjoyed the tantalizing subversion suggested in the early plot. Overall it makes the equivalent of a decent manga which already exists.

The British Industrial Revolution by Robert C Allen

This book tries to explain in explicit detail why the industrial revolution started in Great Britain and how it happened. In a nutshell Britian had relatively high wages with very cheap energy; coal. This created a demand for labor saving devices. On the supply side Britian had a highly educated population with a large population hub in London to disperse the knowledge. Now the book itself takes nearly 300 pages to make this argument and all the supporting details really strengthen the case and there are thorough deconstructions of other major theories. Overall Allen does an excellent job of making his case. I highly recommend this book if you want to know more on how the industrial revolution started.

Science a Four Thousand Year History

I recently finished reading this title by Patricia Fara. It appears the point of the work's goal is to deconstruct the story of Science. For example it takes big names in science such as Newton, Einstein, and Copernicus and discusses how they did things in a way no longer considered scientific, self promoting, or were one of many discovering something. It goes a to great detail into the importance and process of selling scientific memes and the great battles between ideas such as heat being motion or a fluid that flowed into or out of things. The roots of modern science in the now rejected fields such as alchemy and astrology are also discussed at length. A lot of time is spent on illustrating the biases of science towards, upper-class European males.
It is surprising that the scientific method was more or less ignored as its adoption is critical in how current science works, evolves, and self-corrects.

I found the book unsatisfying perhaps because I've never felt science can answer everything; science is great for how thing work but flounders with why which philosophy and religion seem better suited. It just appears similar to perspective of religious adherent who discovered their organization is like any other; imperfect. The conclusion feels a tad incomplete. After deconstructiong the weakness of science and the woldview, not mentioning any other potential viewpoints or calling for reform seems well uninspiring especially after discussing in depth the importance of selling ones ideas.

Transience

Greater North America, The Combine, UCAS, USoNC, The Union,

By many names and many iterations it's common in Science Fiction to have the USA annex Canada in the least through the western hemisphere completely. Never mind that annexing even Canada would be prohibitively expensive to synchronize. My theory is USA size is increased to be representative of how big the country looms in the imagination and to show how much more powerful this future form is. It also allows for narrowing the players in the story. Major nations such as Brazil, Venezuela, Columbia and Argentina can be safely ignored despite the sizable power they represent, and greater potential, on the world stage. On the other hand these worlds usually have the EU as a unified nation and often a pan-African or Arabian Superstate as well so it may just be an attempt to keep the USA up to speed with it's rivals.

What is Science?

Science seems very misunderstood by the general public. Usually when portrayed in media "scientists" are dogmatic priests of the religion of science. "That's not scientifically possible" is the antithesis of scientist with solid observations.

Science is a very simple process: Observe - Conjecture - Predict - Test

Observation
Observation seems straightforward however the key aspects are precision and repetition. Seeing something, say a spaceship once from hundreds of miles away in a fog is a much less trustworthy observation than seeing your spouse next to you everyday.

Conjecture
Conjecture is a guess at why the observation occurred.


Predict
Prediction is essentially that if this theory is accurate what else, untested, will be true. One of the most impresive examples of this comes from Dmitri Mendeleev who used his periodic table to predict many of the qualities of germanium, gallium and scandium which had yet to be discovered.

Test
Evolution happens to be one of the strongest theories in science stronger than Newtons Laws of Gravity. Quantum mechanics were needed to replace gravity in the realm of the very small. In addition many of the smartest minds in the world have been trying for over 100 years to specifically to disprove evolution. In a proper scientific environment other people who often disagree with you will try to actively disprove your results.

This is why string theory is not really scientific, it's just not currently testable. The math is beautiful but without a way to test it is pretty much just beautiful math and philosophy. This is part of the reason why so many proponents are big on supercolliders. They need the evidence.

Now within that framework there a a few generally accepted goals:
Parsimonious: simplest explanation. eg gravity being a bunch of strings between every object in the universe and each other

Predictive: This serves as the most powerful evidence of a theory. If it can predict what will happen in other untested thing and is accurate it indicates the theory is robust

Testable: This is why science and religion grind on each other. The divine is specifically non-testable. Ah well, what sort of divine being is cruel enough to give us a way to interpret a world consistently and then expect us to ignore that ability.

Provisional: No science is proper if it cannot be updated in the face of new evidence.

Science does make some assumptions. Mainly that reality is a cohesive place in which observations can be consistent and the physical laws of reality don't change randomly.

Spiderman the Video Game

Spiderman the Video Game 1993 Sega

Genre: Brawler/Platformer

Spiderman the Video Game calls upon some of the more obscure Marvel super heroes. Remember SubMariner, Black Cat and Hawkeye? Yeah, me neither. Despite having plenty of villains from the Marvel Universe your generic enemies look like they should be fighting Power Rangers. Spiderman the Video Game tries to do two things and does them both with mediocrity. It tries to intersperse brawling sections with platforming. And I have to admit the transitions between them are pretty good. However both forms are quite generic. The aesthetics, sound and graphics, are distinctly average but functional. The difficulty is fairly low except for a fairly tricky Green Goblin. In fact its so easy that you have a health timer to ensure you die from time to time. All in all a very mediocre game that just tried to do too much rather than one thing well.

Lost Gaming Gems: Command HQ

One of more recent ancestors of the RTS genre, Microprose's Command HQ (circa 1991) tries to receate the great global wars in a pseudo real time environment. Everything happens on a turn basis but the turns passed on a player controlled timer. Structurally it has the 3 World Wars (#3 being 1970-80s Nato vs Warsaw Pact) and 2 random wars one with pre-placed cities and another with random cities.

The best part about the game and something I still love is the elegance of the units. They're all useful and to the point. Ocean units consists of the rock paper scissors trinity of gunships, subs and carriers, land has simply infantry and armor.

HQ has an excellent interface point and click complete with a what might be a decent path-finding algorithm. Although I think it may just use a lot of real-world trade routes. And if the wars are fought sequentially serve as an excellent tutorial as more complicated stuff like aircraft and satellites are available in more modern conflicts.

Of course the music, graphic, and sound effects while decent for the time show their age today.