Agronesia

After the announcement of Diablo 3, I got worked up to know more lore of the world of Diablo. Recently I finished reading “The Sin War: Birthright” which is written by Richard A. Knaak. Chronologically, it is the first among other novels.

It happens 3000 years before the events of Diablo I. The world of Sanctuary is actually created by angels and demons tired of the eternal war between the High Heavens and the Burning Hells. The first inhabitants of the world, called Nephalem, are actually “children” of angel and demon. They turned out to be more powerful than either of the parents, so the magical Worldstone was used to inhibit their power. The story in this book centers about the unleashing of this magical power inside Uldyssian ul-Diomed, first stimulated by a demon Lilith for her own purposes.

Some points of cultural interest:

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I found this card game Xeco with ecosystem as its background topic, so you’ll have real animals instead of made up monsters. If you know Yu-Gi-Oh!, then yeah, the basic idea is to fight with our card, but the gameplay is different.

Somehow they have an Indonesian mission (a pack of cards?):

Go Indonesia!

(but why in the earth do they put ™ to the right of the word “Indonesia”? It’s my country’s name dammit!)

But we have to buy it, either in a USA real shop or online. It would be great if they provide the files for us to print ourselves :P.

I missed the news a few days, but here it is… The sequel for one of the most lovable RPG game universe…

Diablo 3 (they even have gameplay videos!!!)

I remembered downloading the beta version of Diablo 2 and we can only play the barbarian in it. I’m sure Blizzard will make a Diablo 3 beta also :). Anyway, many people don’t like the cartoonish art direction. Those people conjured a more dark and gothic modified screenshots, and I must say that I very much prefer the dark ones (samples: 1, 2, 3).

Aaah, Diablo 2 was so ADDICTIVE, especially if played together with the /players 8 switch :)… (What I liked most is Sorceress using ice :))

I dare say this Mr. 588011503136145672 is an elliptical galaxy

I found this website named Galaxy Zoo. After we register there and pass the test (yes, there’s a test!) we can start help them classify galaxies! Another great way to spend your time when you’re bored.

Although there are only 6 categories to choose there, apparently asking for human help is better than making a program to classify it. If you don’t know anything about galaxy shapes (like me), don’t worry because there’s a very visitor-friendly tutorial.

From the 15-question test, I answered 12 correctly and passed:

Thanks to the tutorial, I now know some stuffs about galaxy classification. First we have the boring elliptical ones and the more interesting spiral ones. The spiral galaxies can be further classified based on their twirling direction, clockwise or counter clockwise. Then we also have image of merging galaxies and anomalous image caused by stars or satellites.

Most of the stuffs I encountered there were low quality blobs so far, but I’m hoping to discover a conical galaxy one day.

This is not exactly new stuff, but I just recently found it.

Chimpanzees are known as a highly intelligent animal. They use stone and wooden tools, hunt in coordination, and can be taught limited sign language. What might be surprising is that on a particular intellectual test devised by Tetsuro Matsuzawa, young chimps outperforms university students.

Here’s a simple explanation of the test, which is actually a fun game:

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