Leg Cramps

Well, not cramps really, but I think that I have strained a tendon or two behind my right knee joint.

I was up by seven this morning. I think that my sleep patterns are reasserting themselves, the neighbours in the northern flat being reasonably quiet after midnight these days. So, what to do with a whole day ahead of me? I decided on the spur of the moment to hike the east coast again, but all the way from Little India.

Well, to cut a long story short, I was back by eleven, I never got to East Coast Park to even start the hike. Singaporeans must not like walking much, because one; they do not respect pedestrians, every construction site along the way, especially those by the National Parks, just cuts off walking paths without providing alternative routes; and two; signage for pedestrians is non-existent.

In short; how the fuck do you get to East Coast Park?

You would think that you should be able to head for the water and walk along it. Yes? Wrong! Unlike Anglo countries Singapore does not provide right of access to the water frontage, restaurants, golf clubs, and worst of all the National Parks, just block it off, usually without providing any way around.

The first obstacle was to get across the new inner-city reservoir. You cannot yet walk to the barrage and across it as promised on the one-TV-network propaganda show on the subject. No, lots of construction work with no alternative pedestrian access routes being provided. There is a bridge there, but it is vehicle only. So walk back a long way to find a pedestrian bridge.

Then to get from there to the beach. A series of roads blocked off, you think that a 'no through' sign at the start of the road wouldn't be too much to ask, would you? Then a golf course; that should be okay, where I come from you can always walk through a golf course and out the other side. Nope, doesn't look like this one works like that. Back out that road. Look, a track through the woods, there is a boom but it is raised, so it must be okay; yes? Wrong! Leads to an off ramp for some motorway with no pedestrian path. Walk back along the verge into a construction site covered with six inches of soft mud.

Somewhere around there I pulled or stressed a tendon in the back of my leg. Sit down by the reservoir to rest (not many seats, just a few of the concrete stumps), take of sweat soaked shirt, towel off, put on dry shirt, grab a taxi home.

This is SSSSSOOOOOOOOOO infuriating!!!!

Singapore has such potential for great walking! Yet almost every time I try it is sabotaged by a total lack of signage, maps, and suitable tracks / paths. I just guess that most Singaporeans can't comprehend the need by some people to be able to walk somewhere that isn't full of shops and shoppers.

Aahhh. Needed to get that off my chest whilst it is still fresh.

Eight people have viewed this blog; one yank, one pommie, six Singaporeans (one of whom is me). Three people have returned to view it, and another three have returned to view it a few times. I think that I am getting used to the idea. We shall see.
(I need a nick name for Singaporeans; 'singies'?)

Today is fourteen days, i.e. two weeks, since I lodged my PEP applications. The MOM website promises responses in less than two weeks. I am allowing today and tomorrow for any letter to transit the mail system, but if nothing by tomorrow arvo then I am contacting the MOM.

As you can see in the last blog entry, a whole week ago, Jaz was back in SG for a 'few days' and I saw her for less than two minutes during which she didn't speak to me. Nothing since then. Divination aside, I feel it is time to move on, put all the pushing and prompting by her sisters and friends to the side and give up on the idea. Whatever deity is trying to force these things can just rethink his or her strategies.

I bought S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Clear Sky a few days ago. The purchase itself was a stupid test, I so nearly walked out of that store and off to find it somewhere else. Whilst I am enjoying the game and it has a few improvements over the first, there are some serious shortcomings. I have never played a (legitimate) game before that was so bug-ridden. Seriously, this game has been through a dozen patches and still behaves like beta code! There are serious graphics issues, there are data issues, there are logic flaws, there are things that are meant to be caught in play testing. This is like Microsoft and its habit of releasing beta for the public to test, which is why you never buy anything Microsoft until it has passed version X.0, but Clear Sky is 1.05.07! Which is to say; seven patches to the sixth release (1.0 being the first).

Yes, the game in essence is good, and fun, but I have been carrying a lot of stuff and have stood in one place to drop a lot of guns, then step across a bit to drop the ammo, then step across a bit to drop the other stuff (medkits etc) then turn around and the medkits have vanished! The guns and ammo are still there, but the ancillaries have gone. Also drop stuff on a roof, and come back and it has fallen through the solid concrete roof and into the building below.

A walk-through I downloaded said that there was a scanner at the very north west of the swamp (intro / tutorial) map. I found the cave, but no scanner, no amount of standing by the wall and facing the mattress worked. From reading a few things like that I get the feeling that there is a degree of randomness to some of the item placements.

Still, having said all of that, I still am enjoying the game. I wonder if there will be third party maps or mods? The world is a bit small, only a few zones, and the game machine has the potential to deliver more I think. I like that you can repair and upgrade weapons now by visiting tech guys; I am really only just out of the swamp (okay, I have walked through most of the three or four zones south of the part where it then goes one way and you are locked into the power plant bit) and I am using an AKM74/2 with scope, silencer, extended mag, and all the internal mods to enhance accuracy (as opposed to the other stream of mods that increase rate of fire). I got this rifle in the swamp believe it or not. At first I was using the machine pistol thingy, modified to take 9mm x 18mm, from the original 9 x 19 since that is harder to come by in the tutorial area, whereas every punk has a pistol that you can strip of its 9 x 18 ammo. And a shot gun, I got the pump action and modded it a bit, but left it stashed somewhere as I feel comfortable with just the AKM and a pistol. I am also trying to stay low on ammo; when you strip every corpse you can end up carrying thousands of rounds of ammo on you! Which is all useless weight, you really only need a hundred or two of pistol ammo and between eight hundred and a thousand of rifle ammo. This leaves you with a lot more free weight so you can get more from stripping corpses (I seem to kill a lot of bandits in this game) and then dump it all at stashes. I have one or two such stashes in a couple of zones so far. Then you carry all of this stuff to a trader and sell it to buy great new suits and stuff (they cost 20,000 roubles, so you need to sell a lot of guns to get one).

So you see; I am having fun with it even though it has some annoying bugs that should have been resolved BEFORE release; like entering a new zone and the sky goes vomit, which sorts out suddenly when you move along a few dozen metres. Like your gun getting stuck on firing on full auto when you get important radio messages whilst in the middle of a fire fight. Like two messages talking over the top of each other or a radio message coming in whilst you are in a conversation and the two voices drowning each other out. You lose vital info this way, it is not stored in your message log in your PDA, only the radio messages are, you lose the conversational ones. Like the game getting jerky and things happen whilst your screen was frozen. Like getting nearly killed from full health by being shot by a shot gun at very long distance by a guy that you have put two whole clips of solid rounds into. Like getting your head shot off by NPCs supposedly on your side firing whilst standing behind you! Like the NPCs bumping your character around instead of walking around you, especially in a fire fight when one comes where you are sheltering behind cover and your character is suddenly floating above your cover and you get shot to pieces. Little annoying things like that.

As I said; a really good game, with lots of potential, but released with a whole heap of bugs still in it.