The Pirate Bay, now operating from thepiratebay.pe, has arrived in Peru after a brief moment last week as thepiratebay.ac — .ac being the country code top level domain (TLD) of the Ascension Islands, which is British territory.

Source:

www.zdnet.com/the-pirate-bays-domain-hopping-tour-takes-it-to-perus-pe-7000024338/

With all the moves in domain, people have to be diligent in checking Google for the actual Pirate bay site.

I know government and corporations are very anti Pirate bay, accusing it of copyright theft. And while that may be true somewhat, do they bother to ask why people resort to Pirate bay ? Sure everyone wants free stuff, but there is also another reason and that is digital rights for purchased media ownership, and pricing.

I think there is a strong disagreement on digital ownership that most people feel is too one sided, and hence why people resort and support the Pirate bay. This is how pirate political parties managed to get voted in Sweden’s European parliament elections.
This is what the pirate party believes and advocates for

The party advocates a severe reduction of economic sole right of copyrighted works, which today exist for 70 years after the creator’s death. They also advocate releasing all non-commercial sharing of copyrighted material, which means that all films, phonograms and programs can be shared freely as long as the operation isn’t run commercially.

 

The party also has personal privacy as a core value, and is critical towards laws such as the FRA law, IPRED, ACTA and the Telecoms Package.

 

The party advocates strengthened individual privacy, are against the Data Retention Directive, wants to elevate secrecy of correspondence to general secrecy of communication, and create a constitutional right to privacy.

 

The party also seeks to modify the laws of intellectual property(copyright and patent), but doesn’t want to change the laws of trademarks or industrial design rights. The party views itself as a defender of the individual’s civil rights especially with regards to surveillance, government accountability and political and business corruption.

So until there is reconciliation between the masses and digital ownership rights and pricings that are equally fair to both consumer and developers; people will always use the Pirate bay.

Okay so i checked my mail today and noticed my hearthstone beta access. After entering the serial though, it didn’t straight away register. Apparently had to wait 5-10 minutes before it showed, weird.

So i downloaded (took an hour or less), and started playing. Straight away noticed that the game pace is much faster than Magic the gathering.

In MTG, you couldn’t just attack the main hero, without special minions like with flight or some other special ability allowing them to bypass minions. But in HS, you can willy nilly attack hero if you want (which you should if you can get away with it), except when they have a taunt skill on their minion.

It was pretty interesting for a fast session of card games online. But i’ve lately had more interest and addiction to card hunter which feels more rpg like with cards as gear, with pre-arranged cards attached to them to form a deck. To me that seems much more appealing. It’s rather reminiscent of the MTG Microprose Shandalar days.

Games like these now and then are fine, but i do hope Blizzard gets back to making serious lore fantasy games.

This can be summed up by his endorsement for

1. eating healthy food
2. learning to cook for yourself
3. food awareness for the ingredients inside your food e.g. gm and pink slime etc…

This is one of his seminars educating people on the unhealthy pink slime product meant for dog food, but is pushed for human consumption just for sheer profit

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=wshlnRWnf30

So this is why people love watching Jamie Oliver’s cooking shows because of his attitude and respect for cooking, and the entertainment it provides.

I think with all the modern day environmental awareness ranging from global warming, sea dead zones, thinning ozone layer, species extinctions ……. people have forgotten about just how precious fresh water is, and that it is a finite resource we need to better manage. This youtube explains better the current situation we are in.

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=jKOmNGEi0DY

In summary, with the scientists pointing to a near future as recent as 2025, is it wise then to undergo projects like the one in tarsands that jeopardizes one of the most important water cachements for fresh water in that part of the world ? Just read for yourself, how they are polluting the waters.

e360.yale.edu/feature/with_tar_sands_development_growing_concern_on_water_use/2672/

www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-debate/the-tar-sands-dont-have-to-pollute-the-water-so-why-do-they/article14564780/

1. it’s faster
2. it doesn’t require using an external online service to perform the compression
3. more options e.g. different compression levels you can select from
4. easy to install the pre-requisite files needed to perform the image compression process
5. theres even a progress bar to indicate how long before completion

It’s just simply better, and i can safely say that this is probably the way to go from now onward.

Cloudinary is probably right now one of my most favourite WordPress plugin for 2013. It adds CDN (content distribution network) support for the image files on the website. Meaning, rather than cause delay loading images from your site, it instead caches the images on their own servers, and loads them from there, which makes your site load faster as a result.

Cloudflare is supposed to be able to do this too, unfortunately, to use cloudflare, you need to own the actual domain name (not sub domain which is what i’m using). So if you don’t, you can’t use their service. But Cloudinary doesn’t require that, it just simply works with very minimal setup by

1. registering on their site https://cloudinary.com
2. install the cloudinary wordpress plugin to your site
3. go to the cloudinary site dashboard and copy the api code to the settings in your WordPress for the plugin
4. go to your wordpress image media library, select all your images and bulk action cloudinarify them all.
5. clear your site cache (if you’re using caching), and your done

Easy. The only downside is that although the service is free, there is still a space and bandwidth quota. For a small website this may be fine, but for a big site, you may need to purchase their subscription pack for this service to get by this limitation.

Overall though, i think it’s an awesome plugin and service to bring CDN to WordPress websites for pre-fetching images off-site.

The game is a turn based strategy game just released this month. It’s similar in essence to Fallen Enchantress, Heroes of Might and Magic; and Age of wonder. So if you’ve played or heard about those other games, then you have a good idea what this one is about.

The first thing that comes to mind about the game is …. bugs… bugs… bugs…. yes as many had gossiped, the game felt rushed judging by the many bugs in the game. Which i’ve found manageable by always saving soon after you complete a turn. So in the event that you do get a lockup, you can load the previous save, or quit the game and loading the save. So despite the occasional bug that hangs the game, it’s still playable with that work around, although it does make it a tad annoying.

Another reason why it felt unfinished, is because when doing quests, it tells you to do something, but there isn’t a way to review what it was they wanted you to do. However it does notify when you have completed the quest objectives, and to go collect your reward. But for quests like the wizards asking you to find a spell, they don’t exactly tell you what spell they want found. Also it’s a bit unclear how exactly to give them the spell, for example, is having a spell scroll in your fort sufficient ? Or in your characters inventory ? Will there be an objective completed in either of those cases ? or do you need to bring them to the quest giver, to check whether you found the right scroll or not ?

So as you can see, that sort of quest is rather unclear, and it could cost you many turns to understand the mechanics of it, also it could probably be a bug because they don’t mention the spell scroll needed.

Anyway, graphically speaking, it’s cutting edge Crysis that is for sure, but it is alright for this sort of gameplay I felt. Most of it depicts realms as floating land masses in space. It’s an interesting concept, although plainly so. But nevertheless it was a good idea they came up with for the game.

Gameplay wise, you gain resources based on rewards from quests and raids; land currently occupied, as well as what resource generators you have on your plots of land. Population growth may as also be a factor, but i’m not 100% sure, but it probably is. Then using the resources you gained, you need to unlock buildings to access more building and training options to:

1. build an army
2. build more defenses
3. buy more heroes
4. gear up your heroes
5. enhance your economy

So you need to make core builds so you don’t get stuck wasting turns, nor do you miss opportunities to attack when possible, leaving down time for healing your troops (especially your hero) after having previously engaged fights. Further into the game, your hero recuperate their health very fast, and you have access to healing spells, so at that point in the game you can reduce the time wasted healing your troops.

The most fun part about the game is the questing aspect, in the randomness of quests, options, and rewards. But i find it rather perplexing that in order to do most of them, it takes way too much time to gear up your heroes and army, to be capable of doing them, which by that point you would have already won the game, leaving you left wondering, what was the point then of high-end quests, when all you need do is to rush their castle and just invade to win the game.

Maybe it’s for higher difficulty modes where the game is rather extended, but i would not know because i was playing with the beginner mode.

As for battle sequences, you have 2 options, either to fight it manually, or to do auto resolve. I tend to just use auto resolve because i didn’t really like the battle sequences that felt rather dull. The most i would do is set up my units positioning, then start the fight, followed by pressing F10 to auto resolve. That’s the minimal amount of manual tasking i actually bother to do for the fights, and it does make a difference rather than just hitting auto resolve from the get go.

So overall it was an okay game, but after a while you stick to the same build formulate after having experience which is the most efficient build queues you should follow. Then just train up a hero and army to be capable of invading the enemy castle, and just rush their fort for a quick easy win. It does get rather repetitive even with access to newer buildings and training recruits.

Yet i keep finding myself still playing this game, so maybe there is something fun to it, despite the many bugs and lack of polish in the game. I leave it to you to decide for yourself.

Okay just won it, so wanted to give my take of the Magic the Gathering Duels of the Planeswalkers series … specifically the 2013 release.

My first MTG game was Shandalar by Microprose, which was awesome i might add, because not only did it have the core card game feature in it, but it also was a role playing game to boot. As you have an animated avatar that travels the world of Shandalar to bump into monsters to fight, or to find secret treasure treasure troves or enemy bases, or shops to buy unique cards …..

But the MTG Planeswalkers series is nothing like that. The focus has shifted back more to just card play, and nothing much else. The result being the magic was lost without the rpg aspect in my honest opinion.

Anyways ….. MTG Planeswalkers 2013 seems to be more polished than the previous in this newer series. They introduced a system into the game for planes-walking mode. It’s an interesting concept that really adds even more randomness into the mix. I could be winning the game, but suddenly the planes shifted to something different with a key game changing effect (e.g. all permanent cards for all players are removed, and shuffled back into the library. Draw back the same number of cards that were removed, and put into the battlefield, creature cards that was drawn.)

So yes the A.I. was pretty good for my level of MTG skills so it didn’t really feel too awkward except on rare occasions especially when i played 2 vs 2 mode, my A.I. partner did a silly move that didn’t help the team. But over all it seemed spot on.

The biggest quirk i didn’t i hated the most though was, there really isn’t a faster way to skip actions to move the game along. You just got to way for the action bars to time out, or to press the button to move the game along during combat phase. I wish they added a hotkey to force skip unnecessary action bars, when you clearly know you can’t do anything anyway.

But i guess they had to force it onto us because maybe the opponent would cast a last second spell that would need your input. So that was probably why they barred a more faster means of skipping :[ That is probably the weak point of the game, because after a while it does start to feel annoying because the downtime of waiting does add up.

That is pretty much it, i just hope the next MTG pc game has a rpg aspect like the good old shandalar but with modern graphics of course :}

I recently played and won Bioshock Infinite. It was a really good game which immerses you into it’s story which was very intriguing because of the many plots and twists, not to mention good portrayal of gameplay actions/environment/character behavior into playing out the story.

Anyway i enjoyed this rap on youtube about the series. It was pretty cool.

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJLr_O6lhrY

On the plus side, this gives me the chance to speed up the site and get back to posting about stuff which i couldn’t before. On the downside, it will take a while to get everything set up…..

Anyways apologies for the lack of new content, but now that i am able to, just to let you peeps know this was what happened to Mognet. So no we are not dead, just rather busy with new job and other stuff :P