Deadlly Jewelry/Super Humans

Title: GemCraft
Type: Tower Defense

Game Play: 8.5
Sound: 7.5
Graphics: 7.0
Presentation: 9.0
Replay Value: 10.0

Over All: 9.0 out of ten



GemCraft is nothing new in the tower defense genre, through it does bring in an interesting new mix element to the game. The game works like your basic tower defense game, where you must stop the monsters, creeps, etc (whatever you want to come them) from reaching the end of a path. You play by putting different color gems into towers to attack the advancing enemies. Each different colored gem has its own special properties. Like red can do splash damage, purple does armor deduction, yellow does chain, etc. To use your gems, you must place them in towers on the map. You can either use the towers given to you or build new ones.
Another thing is that you can place trenches on the path to slow down creeps. They way you buy towers, trenches and more gems is through your mana. You have mana cause the story has you be a wizard and you are called to stop the creatures from taking over the villages or whatever. (These games aren't really meant for their story.) You gain mana two ways, over time and by killing the monsters. Each monster gives you a different amount of mana.
By creating gems, you can do one of three things with them. You can put them into towers to attack the creeps, you can turn them into bombs to blow up the creeps or you can combine two of them to make them stronger. You can turn different gems into bombs, which you can throw at the monsters to kill them. The level of the gems depends on the strength of the bomb, along with the color for different effect, mentioned above. Combining gems is the real treat for this game, and the main thing you must get down if you wish to beat this game. You can combine the same colored gems together to up grade it better for that color of you can combine two colors, three or more. I would recommend only two colors, cause three or more, you lose the bonuses that come with each different color. Combining gems is only way to get better and stronger gems.
The other way is to buy them using mana. This is cheaper then combining cause that cost mana, but the only catch is that you can only buy gems up to grade 6. Also, as the game progresses, you may need to have more mana then what you can hold, so you will have to upgrade your mana pool, which cost mana to do so, on the plus side, this also upgrades your point modifier.
You need points to level up your wizard to get new abilities and better magic. With each level up, you get 4 skill points to use to upgrade certain areas of magic, which you can then use and must use to go back to old levels to get high scores on the levels, in which you could unlock new levels, once you get more then the needed score. This game is very thought out, the excellent replay value, and the time it takes to play this game through, gives this game 9 gold gems, out of 10.

HINTS AND TIPS

-By clicking on the wave number, you can send them in the next wave now and make a lot of points.

-By upgrading your mana pool, your score multiplier also increases

-There are medals you can earn on every level to increase your final score

-Not sure what the hue does



This has been on my mind for some time now, and I just wanted to know what others thought. I was reading an article about humans with special powers. Now I know this sounds completely ridiculous, for its real. In the article, I read about a woman in Britain (the locations may be wrong) who can see and taste music. She said that comes to her as black squares, and has no taste, while all the other notes come in many different shapes. She also says high pitch sounds taste bitter, while lower ones taste sweet. When doctors look at her brain, they saw that the three senses (Taste, vision, and sound are all connected in a way that is not like others).
In Turkey lives an artist, who from birth was born without eyeballs. Now how can a artist draw things he can not see. Well he saves just from touching objects, he is able to see the object in his mind. And if you were to look at his art, you would think it is better then "visual" artist. Some researchers wanted to know he if really understood 3d space, and so they had him draw the origin of 3d space, where a man discovered it, back in the 16th century. He was challenged to draw a building with 8 sides, and he was directly in front of one of them, and he was to draw this building from that perspective, in which he did.
Australia, there lives a human calculator. A man, who drop out of school, and was no good in math, can now compute numbers so large most people need a calculator to do. He was asked to computer the powers of a random he was given. The number was 83, and he calculated the number to the power of ten, completely right, with no error, before he was stopped. He doesn’t even know how he does it, it just happens. He is also able to just look a number of things and tell you how many there are just like that.
And in the USA, there lives a man who can regulate his own temperature. He is able to survive extreme cold due to that make that he can make himself warm. He is know as the ice man, and wants to set a world record by being the only man to run a marathon in bare feet, with only shorts on in the artic. And he did. Most people would have died or quit with an hour of that, but this man did the marathon in about 5 hours, with no harm to his body at all. (And these are just a few people, out of many. They have been a couple cases of people being able to see and taste music, and being human calculators, but being an ice man and blind painter are the only ones discovered as of right now.)
Just how do these people do it? Scientist and researchers are currently study this people and their genes to see if there is a gene that allows these people to do these shorts of things. If the researchers are right, and it is a gene, and not some kind of mutation or something else, then what will that mean for mankind in the future? What if there are more unique powers out there, gene related. If this is gene related, researchers are saying that these genes could someday be bought and be put into your kids, for them to have this power. This will completely blow Darwin’s theory of evolution out of the water. For the first time, if this is the case will people be able to go against nature and evolve when they want. Is this such a good thing, or bad? Will they no longer be survival of the fittest? Only time will tell.

The Txt

Effects of the Digital Age have reached into every aspect of our lives; they follow us into just about all of the places we are. No manifestation represents this more than the infamous "text message." Ephemeral and quick, these messages activate our cell phones at nearly any time and any place.

It is normally when I am attempting to savor some time in solitude when I receive one.

An abrupt and violent vibration on my upper right thigh, and a noise of some tiny weight whirring, just for a second, nearly makes me start. I am shattered. My mind scrambles for identification, for order to this unexpected descent into chaos; in the process, the state of mind that was moments ago so cathartic and enveloping is immediately dropped into oblivion. Oh, I realize, slightly annoyed. That's my phone. Someone has just texted me.

Sitting, but unwilling to exert energy to answer the message, I compromise and straighten my leg out, thrusting my pelvic bone into the air. The slightly frayed pockets on my jeans prevent my phone from coming out easily. My hands flick around the metallic mass, searching for the antenna (I have determined through empirical data that finding the antenna first is the easiest method for extracting my phone from my pocket). Out with my hand comes a gray rectangular box, not much longer or wider than a few of my fingers, heralding the current time, 11:04, and the message “1 message received.” Now that I know the time, I might as well re-examine the state of my physical being. I am currently Wil, by myself, and in my room.

Text messaging has often provoked this style of reaction from me. But this model of events is not just a recent development -- the idea of the telephone ring has triggered an abrupt dissonance for as long as I can remember. Until as recently as a year or two ago, my house would receive as many as 10 or more calls a day; my focus was obliterated by the end of each day by the mere anticipation of my focus being obliterated. The shrill sound that signaled someone in a far land beckoning my attention for a few lines of unimportant dialogue was an object of my scorn.

I received my cell phone about 2 years ago. After exchanging numbers with a few friends, instead of telephone calls, I unexpectedly began receiving texts. And it was invigorating – my friends and I communicated silently through truncated words and unfinished sentences. Messages received through the air, without the need for sound -- what strange space! (Words sound different on a page than they do vibrating through the air.) I envied the people I observed typing without looking, typing faster than I could. I envied the people being fast and secret. The sequence of buttons I watched people smoothly press would remain an abstract and intangible idea, an unreadable secret passed directly before my eyes, if the message was not sent to me.

Whenever I was alone, my friends were just a mere text away! I could even send and receive pictures. Whenever I wanted. The instantaneous sending back and forth of text words seemed much more efficient than wasting my time calling a person and using my voice with him or her. Unless a spelling error is made, a person cannot as easily misunderstand a typed word as opposed to a word heard through the phone speaker (in addition, my speaker is broken, making most speech I hear fuzzy, and to my dismay many times, silent). And after my message was sent, I was free to forget about my text and go about doing whatever I wish, until I received a response. And the culture surrounding text messaging is predisposed to the passing thought. Text etiquette does not require any cues on the parts of the speakers -- no "hello" or "goodbye."It ends just as quickly as it starts.

What I failed to come to terms with immediately, though, was the fact that my friends and I could mutually contact each other at any time. Including the times I did not wish to be disturbed, such as when I was trying to concentrate on homework, or had a headache, or had a sub-par day. Or, worse, when I thought what the other texter had to say turned out to be boring. Without fail, the frantic vibrations of an incoming transmission would decimate my state of mind. Consequently, I ended up having text conversations when I wanted to concentrate on other things. I re-discovered on top of this the possibility for text to miscommunicate easily a speaker's tone. With the element of voice removed, emotions got mangled and misunderstood through what at first glance appeared to be a straightforward, simple message. The sudden dissolution of my thoughts, the smooth surface broken by the telephone alert, returned.

So why do I still text message?

Partially because texts are convenient and more readily answered by most, to be honest. But the anticipation of the alert my phone will sound serves to keep me subliminally aware of my physicality. As my mind begins to stray away from my location on the ground, these messages and telephone rings come to me and literally nudge me awake. They challenge me to consider the world differently; without them, I may be living more through my mind, and may have forgotten that I can (must) live through senses as well.

This heightened consciousness of my place is accompanied by the consciousness of the place of others. Unpredictably, some person is in a spot that is not where I am right now, thinking a thought that led to their contact with me. It is entirely too easy for us to forget that people exist in places outside of our sensory range. Out of sight, out of mind. With this one person, who has texted me and is away from my physical location, countless others exist in between, beyond. The text message heralds the existence of the world through its implications. For every one that can text, others exist who do not have cell phones. And others who I have never seen; and others who are located on different continents; and others who are existing, along with me. Instantaneous, a glancing moment of clarity, these implications flood past with the message.

And valuable to me are the interactions I have had with people through cell phone space. Perhaps using text gives texters more time to consider their sentences; people undergo transformations when they reach my cell phone screen. People change according to the space they are given. Wonderfully interesting conversations have blossomed between various texters and I. Eerily beautiful fragments of sentences. Text messages give you the ability to stare at, revisit, contemplate the words they bear. Friends (I) have delivered painful transmissions. At times my heart races when the phone finally sounds its alert that a message has been received.

Recently I went to clear out my old picture messages (an enhanced method of text messaging in which messagers add text to a picture, and send it), in the hopes that my now-ancient phone would operate more effectively. What I found were documents -- documents of instants in time that I had long forgotten about. I found pictures of me and old friends in strange places; pictures people sent me that made me laugh; pictures of a foreign, distant person I once referred to as myself. The digital quality of the text allows for easy archival of what, at one point, we deemed appropriate to remember; things monumental and trivial are recorded. Like layers of Earth, we impress the matter of our age into the atmosphere.

The text message evokes my bittersweet acceptance. At times I wish I was not the owner of my cell phone. When I receive a text message, however, I rush with bounding curiosity and apprehension to read the transmission. At my very early stages of text messaging development, I received a text from a number I did not know. It read: "You sleep -- love is never wrong." As our tools become more complex, perhaps we distance ourselves further and further from the original medium; regardless, people can still produce some beautiful things.

Coke's Undeniable Waste

Coke. I love it. I drink it almost everyday and I am really not ashamed. In all fashions I buy it, from the fountain at my local McDonald's, to cans from Kroger, even to the 2 Liter bottles that my parents adore because cans aren't left around the house. I recycle every stinking bottle though. I try at least and I'm angry when I don't. That isn't the point though. The fact is that most everyone drinks it in some fashion or another and many don't recycle. Another point is that the Coke company sells it in individual cans, not for convenience but to get more bang for their buck. The Coca-Cola Company has never lost money, really. Jumping on the corporate bandwagon to China and India, they're cheaply and environmentally irresponsibly producing Coke to sell to emerging markets, and their profits climbed 19% in the first fiscal quarter, while most everybody else is losing money. What is their effect? The fact is, they're so busy caught up in making money, that they don't want to think about how many pollutants pulling tons of aluminum out of the ground every year to make a one time use can will put into the environment. While other brands such as Deer Park of Nestle are attempting to capitalize on the eco-craze, but at least their doing their part. Coke has not re-thought their strategy, nor really cared I'm sure. Profits are up, demand is up. Why should we really care about our effect upon the environment? That's reasoning enough for most companies to not even turn an eye toward the eco-friendly side of the fence, unless of course they can't see through the smog around their own factory. The ecological effect of one can is big, but think about the ecological effect of billions, even trillions that go to a landfill. Staring at a Pepsi can, I even see a small advertisement to recycle, but not on a coke can, no way.

Icarus

Most men will not swim before they are able to
-Novalis

This idea makes the case that humans are not omnipotent beings. We often forget this in day-to-day life since we completely dominate the surroundings. From sky scrapers in cities to millions of acres of forests cleared for farming, it’s nearly impossible to escape the evidence of our superiority over any other species. However, in spite of this superiority, mankind as a species still has their limits.

There are certain tasks that man will never be able to perform as well as other species. Swimming for example, is something man, as a species, will be able to do as well as fish. While man is able to learn how to swim, he is ultimately meant for land. Also, man not only has the limitation of naturally not know how to swim, but other physiological limitations make him suited for land. The lack of gills makes him surface every so often for air, while no way to deal with the increased pressure of increased depth.

Furthermore, what is even more unattainable by man is the sky. While man can walk or swim, he cannot fly without the use of machinery. Once again, this is because he is made for land. Whether man was created this way, or he evolved through billions of years of evolution is irrelevant. The fact is man is not as omnipotent as he thinks he has become.

What if man doesn’t just have physical limitations, but also mental ones? There could be problems that man simply doesn’t have to mental capabilities to solve. The most elusive problem is the theory of unification which would explain the universe. It is referred to as the “theory of everything”, and the current theory to answer this is the String Theory.

In case you aren’t familiar with the String Theory, it theorizes that all matter is made up of unimaginably small vibrating strings of energy. Could it be possible that the complexity of the universe could be explained by little strings of energy? Or is man just desperately trying to answer questions he has no business attempting to solve?

What if man does not have the mental capabilities to answer the greater mysteries of the universe? I personally believe that this is the case. Science and math are based on the past discoveries and work of the past. This is the basis for evolution: small changes that accumulate to something better. During the time between t he 16th and 18th centuries, this evolution of our understanding of the world exploded with revolutionary changes in the way we think about astronomy, geology, physics, chemistry, and biology. However, since this time, the theories that hold weight are dwindling in numbers.

Except for Einstein’s theory of relativity, there have been no truly revolutionary theories dealing with our physical universe in over 100 years. Is it possible that man as a species reached its intellectual peak during the Scientific Revolution and that only a few individuals on the edge of the bell curve of intelligence are able to come up with any new ideas?

This appears to be the case. In a research paper by John Walker, he presents the theory that the world wide mean IQ decreases as time goes on: 5 IQ points in only 100 years. This explains why there has been little progress in unraveling the secrets of the universe. The answers to our questions dealing with the universe are becoming more complex than ever, while our intelligence as a species lessens. We would have to rely on the individuals that lie on the far end of the IQ bell curve, but unfortunately, they will grow fewer in numbers as time goes on.

Does this mean that man will never be able conceive a theory that explains everything? Are we doomed to a fate where the mean IQ is 50 because people reproduce based on physical appearance and not intellectual abilities?

Only time will tell…

Change of Pace

So after looking back upon my previous post and realizing how absurdly retarded it is, i decided to post on what perked my interested and i feel that people should know about. Tonight i was watching a movie called "Stop-Loss". It is about army men who are told they can leave after their tour in Iraq or Afghanistan but end up sending them back anyways. During the movie, twice i heard a rap song which perked my interest. Now, when i looked at the soundtrack for the movie, those songs were not listed. only soft rock and country bullshit. so i researched and found out it was a hip-hop group named 4th25. This group are soldiers that have written these songs about their lives in war and their spiritual battles while overseas. i spent $10 dollars on this album tonight. It is titled "Live From Iraq" and it honestly is one of the most moving, and simply good, albums I have heard in a long time. Here is a sample of the lyrics

"Cause this is live from iraq
Home of too many soldiers graves
Where for our country
We gamble with our lives everyday
And there are no blue skies here
Every colors gray
This is the blood of soldiers of which the streets are now paved
And there is no reimbursement for the price that we pay
While yall home sleep were here constantly getting weighed
And every convoy that rides out
Constantly getting sprayed
But we don't fold hands
The cards we are dealt get played"


I honestly suggest checking this group out. stunning lyrics and pleasure to listen to. you can search youtube to get a sample of their music.

Symphony of Lights

Title: Music Catch

Game Play: 7.5
Sound: 9.0
Graphics: 6.5
Presentation: 7.5
Replay Value: 5.0

Over All: 7.5 out of 10








Last week, I have been in Disney World, so I have not had the chance to write a review. So today I found this fun, interesting game for you play through. Best part about it is, the whole game takes about five minutes to play, which means you could play it without anyone ever knowing! Through it is short, don't under estimate the worth of this game. Remember what your parents told you, big things come in small packages.
The game play is simple, you control a small yellowish circle and your goal is to collect as many different colored shapes as possible. Sounds easy, well it is. AS you play, different size shapes come from a line that rotates around the screen. You must collect as many as possible to run up your score. As the game goes on, red shapes come out along with yellow shapes. Red shapes are bad, for they decrease your multiplier and make you smaller. Yellow ones are good for they increase your multiplier and make you bigger.
Whats makes this game different is that the order in the shapes come out is random, but is sync to the music that plays during the game. So its like a DDR but, without timing per say. When you collect a yellow shape or red shape, depending on which one you get, the game will say something groovy or dissonant. This make you feel the music in a way or ride it. The song that is used is an awesome piano track.
Whats bad about the game is that it is short. Almost to short, as soon as you get a feel for the game, its over. For the song is only about 4 minutes long, and there is only one song. Also, there is no replay value. Sure Kongregate gives it a little until you get the badges for it, and then your done, moved on to bigger things.
Overall, it is fun while it last. It needs to be a lot longer, with different songs and harder difficulties. Graphics could be better, but they are fine right now. So I gave it a 7.5 out of 10. Next time, if there is a nest time, it better be longer.

Hint: Stay close enough to the line to catch a lot of the shapes, but far enough away to see and avoid the red shapes.

Hint: Grab the Purple shapes at all cost!!!!!! Purple shapes, what are those you ask? Grab one and find out.

Stand Up

Anyone listen to Flobots? They're a pretty progressive band. If you've been listening to the radio in Richmond at all, you would have heard they're most conservative hit Handlebars. In my opinion, Flobots is probably one of the most progressive bands I have ever heard. They're hybrid hip-hop/ jazz really carries their music to the next level. Accompanying two emcees are a jazz trumpet player, and a violinist as well as separate rhythm section to tie it all together. While the composition of their band is different, so are their lyrics and their ideas.
Stand Up is a gorgeous song. The violin/hip-hop hybrid delivers their liberal, yet unignoringly relevant message to the world today. I am not going to analyze the song, because I don't believe in doing such things, but I really do encourage you to listen to them. Whether your a liberal Democrat, or a conservative repulbican their ideas are worth listening to. I believe in listening to people and understanding them, no matter what their beliefs are and you should at least consider it. You can also check out their community action plan website

More Info:
Good Old Project Playlist:
Stand Up


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