Reading through R. Scott Bakker's The Prince of Nothing trilogy. I'd heard of it years ago, typically with a sort of tagline like "Spock in a fantasy setting." Too many neologisms make it hard to read, but there are gems that make it worth the effort. Also reading Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis.

Counterpoint, came across Tyler Cowen's TEDtalk on the narrative fallacy, which I agree is huge and pervasive, second only to confirmation bias.

Breaking in new shoes, running most mornings, and walking around a lot.

Nueva Vizcaya trip

Pic album

Imugan falls was beautiful. I have moderately-bad acrophobia, and one interesting effect was I was nervous on the 40-minute hike on foot up to the falls, but on the walk back I was so tired and hungry that I didn't care anymore. Maybe low blood sugar and mild exhaustion is a good way to desensitize. And I learned that the phrase "clear as a mountain stream" is totally for real.

Got to Barangay Malico around 3pm. Everyone kept saying "its gonna be cold up there" and I'd go, I brought 2 jackets, it'll be fine. Started raining a few hours after we got there, power went out the first night, and damn it was frakkin' COLD. Woke up shivering, put on both jackets, stayed bundled up the next 2 days.

Finishing up on packing. Going to Nueva Vizcaya, back on Monday.

Ok, Goodreads emailed me, my shelfcount's fixed. Will rebuild posthaste.

Tried to get passport, DFA doesn't accept postal id as valid identification. NSO birth certificate and NBI clearance are not enough. Screwed, have to wait for SSS id probably sometime in January. Wasted trip, and about an hour waiting in line. Bleah.

Goodreads glitch

I'll post about books again eventually, warming up to it. But while I'm on the subject. I used to catalog my books on Shelfari, but then went on semi-hiatus cos the house burned down. Luckily I already had the majority of my library in ebook form. Then the consensus started to look like Goodreads was better, so I started up there, also as a way to catalog and differentiate what I still have, even with the ebooks I lost a lotta books.

Recently I noticed Goodreads said I had 42 books read, but 44 books total. I don't categorize book except to toss them into the default "read" pile, so I tried different options, even manually counted them, still only 42, not 44. Started to get OCD about this, where are those 2 missing books? So screw it, deleted em all, it's just 42 (or 44) I can rebuild that no problem. Goodreads STILL says I have 2 books.

Blah. Did the Help thing, bug report sent. There OCD, are you happy now?

Integrated blog with my Google+ profile. And I'm using a Google Chrome extension, SGPlus, to cross-post from G+ to Facebook.

The Mana World

I was looking for a free top-down Zelda-style rpg in the Ubuntu software center, found The Mana World. I'm playing as "ZoneSeek," straight-Dex archer. Still in alpha testing, but a small playerbase has its charms. I've casually played a couple of mmorpgs before, but The Mana World has the most helpful, non-dickish players I've ever seen. The other day a stranger saw me hacking through a tough quest and babysat me through it; pulled aggro, healed, killed the boss and handed me the drop. On the next quest, in odd, possibly Google-Translated English he offered to lend me a high-level set of armor to get me through the dungeon. This was an amazing, unheard-of level of trust between strangers on an mmorpg. So okay, farmed for a bit, and after a while, I gave the armors back. Thanks again matto!

Trying to get Brain Workshop's Dual N-Back working on Ubuntu. But I don't wanna learn Python. :(

Derping

Testing. Fiddling with the blog settings again, need a big block of text to get a sense of the width. Learning how to touch-type, harder than I thought. Wonder if it's worth the effort to learn to type with the Dvorak layout? Easy to switch the keyboard settings in the software, but then that's another setup to memorize. Then I can't rely on the actual qwerty keyboard lettering. I actually made a Dvorak keyboard years ago; took an old keyboard apart, looked up the Dvorak layout, rearranged the keys to match.

Reductionism FTW!

Cartesian theater = Chinese room.