Thursday, November 26, 2015

Saitama: The Ultimate Hero



Saitama (サイタマ, Saitama) is the main protagonist of OnePunch-Man and the most powerful hero alive. Having apparently trained himself to superhuman conditions, Saitama faces a self-imposed existential crisis, as he is now too powerful to gain any thrill from his heroic deeds.

He registered with the Hero Association as a C-Class and eventually made a big leap to become a B-Class Superhero and is tasked to defend Z-City against Mysterious Beings. Under the Hero Association, he is given the name Caped Baldy (ハゲマント, Hagemanto).


Appearance
Saitama is a bald ordinary looking man with a thin, but well-built physique and of average height and weight. He claims to have lost all of his hair suddenly and prematurely as a result of the toll taken on his body by his intense hero training. Three years before the storyline, Saitama had spiky, black hair and brown eyes that is usually represented by dots.


Saitama is usually deliberately drawn in a simpler style than all the other characters, with an elliptical shaped head and only a simple mouth and eyes. When drawn in a more serious style with more detail, Saitama is revealed to have sharp features, dangerous looking eyes, and a chiseled musculature. Even his posture undergoes a metamorphosis, with a slack posture and sloping elbows when lax, while possessing a straightened posture and squared shoulders when serious. His costume is a plain yellow jumpsuit with a short zipper at the collar and a belt. The costume is finished out by a red ensemble of boots, gloves and a white or red cape.


Saitama's average face (Anime)


Saitama's serious face (Anime)
Personality

For a superhero, Saitama is rather laid back. Even the mightiest foes pose no challenge to him, so he doesn't take his hero work very seriously and beats monsters like swatting insects. Since his superhero work has begun to bore him, he is constantly searching for an opponent that can challenge him. The lack of any such opponents has led him to suffer from an existential crisis, and he claims that his ability to feel any and all emotions has dulled considerably. He stated that he just became a hero because it was his dream and for self-satisfaction and before becoming one, used to suffer from anxiety issues. Despite his boredom, Saitama does not ignore crime, as in his own words (having displayed a lack of understanding at the disaster level system), "If the heroes run and hide, who will stay and fight?".



The combination of his attitude, unstoppable strength, and distinctively simple and 'unimpressive' appearance often cause his battles to become anticlimactic. Saitama will usually allow his opponents rant about their motives and power up into their strongest forms before obliterating them with a single punch. However if they talk too much he will either interrupt them or just punch them.

A running gag about Saitama is his inability to remember people's faces and names, seen when he forgot Sonic's name and could not remember who Tanktop Tiger was. Because of this, he always ends up pronouncing their names incorrectly.

He does care about his cleanliness, as the only thing he ever really complains about is how he gets dirt on his clothes or blood on his gloves.

Saitama has been shown to be very humble, as he purposefully let the masses turn against him, for the sake of the defeated heroes to be given credit for their efforts; claiming that they have weakened the Sea King before his arrival. He did the same for the police in the Special Chapter, dressing as one of them and killed a monster, though he would had gain much fame had he revealed who he actually was. He also didn't mind that King took credit for all of his achievements.

Another surprising thing about Saitama is that he is surprisingly tactful and insightful, being well able to discern situations and character traits from the people and environment around him fairly easily. Having picked up a number of hints to Sonic's own persona on their first meeting and when two tank top heroes jealously plotted to ruin him after the meteor event that their were irate and self-serving hero types like them, as well as discerning Fubuki's forced offer of submission or destruction just before his crackdown on how the hero world really works than how it is currently run.

As of some special chapter during his time participating a costume contest, appearance doesn't matter to him, only matters to him are his abilities and his best to be a real super hero he's been training for.

Saitama has been shown to show remorse to his enemies before. One such example of this being Boros, to whom, in order to give an exciting fight to (seeing as he could relate to having similar amounts of power), did not use his full power against.

Saitama does not actually care if people insults him and usually ignores them and said that they needed a hobby, the only insult that could at the very least get a what could be called reaction out of him is when someone mentions his bald head.

Ability & Power
Saitama is the titular One Punch Man and the strongest character in the series. No enemy has been able to injure him in any way, or even survive from a single earnest punch. A few enemies have survived punches from him, such as any human he has struck, and Lord Boros, whom Saitama empathized with and held back against so as to give him a satisfying fight. Saitama's power is that his body is far beyond human limits, allowing him to achieve astounding physical feats. His strength is so great that it vastly eclipses even artificial beings designed or bred specifically for superhuman combat, such as mechanical beings or the mutated warriors from the House of Evolution. Since no enemies have posed any real challenge to Saitama yet, the upper bound of his strength is likely even higher than it appears. While his power is only limited to heightened human traits - Saitama cannot fly or fire energy blasts - his superhuman abilities more than makes up for the lack of variety in his powers.

The origin of Saitama's immense strength is mysterious and unclear. Although he tells everyone he got his incredible power through mere strength training, no one believes him at all. According to Saitama, after a year and half of 100 daily push-ups, sit-ups, and squats, plus 10 km daily running, he had achieved some level of superhuman strength. This training was apparently so intense for Saitama that he at times felt he might die, and claims that it is what caused all of his hair to suddenly and eventually fall out. He apparently continued his training for another year and half before beginning his hero career. Genos believes that Saitama doesn't actually know or understand how he gained his power, and hopes to learn the secret by sparring with and observing him. It should be noted, however, that Saitama would complete all parts of the training one after the other without breaks and was battling mysterious beings that appeared during that time, which would have made completing the training more intense than would normally be expected.

Physical Abilities

Saitama's punch
  • Immeasurable Strength: Saitama possesses immense physical strength and therefore, capable of effortlessly defeating powerful monsters and villains, with a single, nonchalant punch (although this strength is not limited to punches). Saitama's punch is so powerful that many enemies simply explode when struck. He is also shown to effortlessly destroy walls and buildings. An example of this casual, yet overwhelming offensive power occurs when Saitama launches himself from the top of a building, and blasts right through a city-sized meteor. When launched from the earth to the moon by a strike from Lord Boros, he used his jumping power to return to the earth in mere moments, causing a huge shock wave and immense tremors . A "normal" punch from him is shown to be very fatal to someone as durable as Boros. Saitama has shown to be able to control the strength of his attacks, but still tends to go overboard, occasionally causing mass devastation in the aftermath.

  • Enhanced Leap: His inability to fly is somewhat compensated by his ability to use his strength to leap tremendous heights and distances. This can be shown when smashed his head through the ceiling of a gymnasium during the hero tryouts. He was also able to smash a building into its foundation just by leaping off from its roof. His greatest feat in this regard, however, was when he leapt from the surface of the moon and ended up back on Earth at a specified point.

  • Immeasurable Speed: Saitama was able to complete a 1500 meter dash in an instant during his hero tryouts. He has proven able to effortlessly keep up with Sonic, who is able to move at above hypersonic speeds. Even Genos' computerized targeting systems have difficulty tracking him. Saitama has also shown the ability to run-down a building to save a piece of salmon he was having for lunch and leap back up said building without on-lookers noticing he had even done so. Ironically, despite his incredible reflexes and speed, he still has problems squashing a simple mosquito.

  • Afterimages: He is so fast that he leaves afterimages when moving at high speeds, and is agile enough to dodge Beast King's rapid-fire Limb cutter attacks while moving in for the kill. After assaulting Saitama with a flurry of punches in his practice fight, Genos realized that he was fighting his afterimages.
Saitama keeps up with Sonic's speed


  • Superhuman Senses: Saitama's senses are far beyond the human norm, being able to keep track of extremely fast opponents, such as Sonic easily. He also seems to have developed a sixth sense; being able to dodge danger even though he hasn't seen it. Nevertheless, Saitama's senses do not have the same degree of 'resolution' as some of Genos' sensors, which can detect and distinguish foes at a greater distance. In spite of it however he does possess impressively sharp hearing, being able to pick up on various chatter from bystanders a good distance away even while fighting monsters and the like.
Saitama versus Hammerhead

  • Invulnerability: Saitama can withstand blows from extremely powerful beings such as Carnage Kabuto without taking a scratch or feeling any pain. When Genos created a huge, spherical blast of flame to kill Mosquito Girl's mosquitoes, Saitama remains standing right next to him totally unharmed and unperturbed. He also survived being kicked to the moon by Boros in his fully powered state, and going from the Earth to the moon and back with little to no damage from leaving and entering the Earth's atmosphere (only his clothes were burnt). Blunt strikes aside, Saitama was able to casually stand near Genos's incineration blast without taking damage. Saitama also prefers to dodge or block attacks using edged weapons rather than take them head on, as he sometimes does with strikes from fists or blunt objects. It has been shown that, despite the dangers of holding ones breath in space, Saitama is able to do so with no negative effects on his body. However, it is worth noting that Saitama does see mosquitoes as a potential weakness, preferring to hide from the mosquito swarm heading his way rather than confront it, although he did not know that a monster was responsible for the swarm in the first place.


To conclude, Saitama is the STRONGEST hero created..period

Tuesday, November 24, 2015

If I WERE/ If I WAS ? ?

At school or in grammar books you are normally taught the following rule:

I / he / she / it - WAS
We / you / they - WERE
This is correct when we are talking about the PAST TENSE.




BUT there is another situation in which WERE appears that is not the past tense. It also appears in the SUBJUNCTIVE mood.

First, let's look at the following structure and meaning before explaining why it happens...



If I were you

If I were you ... is used when giving ADVICE about what you would do in the same situation as the other person. You imagine yourself in their position or situation and what you would do or how you would react.


  • If I were you, I would study more.
  • If I were you, I would stop doing that.
  • If I were you, I would go to the doctor.
  • if I were you, I would subscribe to the Woodward English YouTube channel right now. :)
  • If I were you, I wouldn't play with those wires.

Though in informal (and grammatically incorrect) English, you may hear some people say If I was... This usage doesn't sound good, so avoid it.




You can also change the order of the sentence


  • I would study more if I were you.
  • I would be more careful if I were you.
  • I wouldn't do that if I were you.

Notice how the comma is not necessary with this word order.


Why do you use IF I WERE and not IF I WAS?

The reason we use WERE instead of WAS is because the sentence is in the SUBJUNCTIVE mood which is used for hypothetical situations. This is a condition which is contrary to fact or reality (the fact is, I am NOT you).

In the subjunctive mood we use IF + I / HE / SHE / IT + WERE for the verb To Be.


  • If I were not in debt, I would quit my job. (But the contrary is true, I AM in debt, so I cannot quit my job)
  • If he were taller, he'd be accepted into the team.
  • She would be still be correcting my grammar if she were still alive.

In informal English, you will hear some people say If I was... If he was... etc. Again, this usage doesn't sound good though unfortunately it is common, especially on the internet (and social media sites).

Can IF I WAS ever be correct?
Yes, though the sentence is not in the Subjunctive mood but the Indicative instead. Note that it is not common to use the indicative mood with IF. Let's compare:


  • If I was sick, she would give me medicine that tasted terrible. (indicative = states facts or asks questions - in this case, IF can be replaced by WHENEVER)
  • If I were sick, I wouldn't be here. (subjunctive = hypothetical - I am not sick, but I'm imagining that hypothetical situation)

If I was your boyfriend... NOOO JB!
There is a song on the radio that goes... "If I was your boyfriend, I'd never let you go..."

Well, sorry Justin Bieber fans but this is grammatically incorrect.

It should be "If I WERE your boyfriend, I'd never let you go."

Why? Because we are talking about a hypothetical situation of me being your boyfriend. It is not real, it is just a situation I am imagining so we need to use the Subjunctive Mood here.

This song is why English teachers don't like JB - well, one of the reasons. :)


Practice Makes Perfect :D



DEEP WEB


The Deep Web (or Invisible web) is the set of information resources on the World Wide Web not reported by normal search engines.

According several researches the principal search engines index only a small portion of the overall web content, the remaining part is unknown to the majority of web users.
What do you think if you were told that under our feet, there is a world larger than ours and much more crowded? We will literally be shocked, and this is the reaction of those individual who can understand the existence of the Deep Web, a network of interconnected systems, are not indexed, having a size hundreds of times higher than the current web, around 500 times.




Very exhaustive is the definition provided by the founder of BrightPlanet, Mike Bergman, that compared searching on the Internet today to dragging a net across the surface of the ocean: a great deal may be caught in the net, but there is a wealth of information that is deep and therefore missed.

Ordinary search engines to find content on the web using software called "crawlers". This Deep Web technique is ineffective for finding the hidden resources of the Web that could be classified into the following categories:


  • Dynamic content: dynamic pages which are returned in response to a submitted query or accessed only through a form, especially if open-domain input elements (such as text fields) are used; such fields are hard to navigate without domain knowledge.



  • Unlinked content: pages which are not linked to by other pages, which may prevent Web crawling programs from accessing the content. This content is referred to as pages without backlinks (or inlinks).



  • Private Web: sites that require registration and login (password-protected resources).

  • Contextual Web: pages with content varying for different access contexts (e.g., ranges of client IP addresses or previous navigation sequence).



  • Limited access content: sites that limit access to their pages in a technical way (e.g., using the Robots Exclusion Standard, CAPTCHAs, or no-cache Pragma HTTP headers which prohibit search engines from browsing them and creating cached copies).



  • Scripted content: pages that are only accessible through links produced by JavaScript as well as content dynamically downloaded from Web servers via Flash or Ajax solutions.



  • Non-HTML/text content: textual content encoded in multimedia (image or video) files or specific file formats not handled by search engines.



  • Text content using the Gopher protocol and files hosted on FTP that are not indexed by most search engines. Engines such as Google do not index pages outside of HTTP or HTTPS.



A parallel web that has a much wider number of information represents an invaluable resource for private companies, governments, and especially cybercrime. In the imagination of many persons, the Deep Web term is associated with the concept of anonymity that goes with criminal intents the cannot be pursued because submerged in an inaccessible world.

As we will see this interpretation of the Deep Web is deeply wrong, we are facing with a network definitely different from the usual web but in many ways repeats the same issues in a different sense.

What is a Tor? How to preserve the anonymity?

Tor is the acronym of "The onion router", a system implemented to enable online anonymity. Tor client software routes Internet traffic through a worldwide volunteer network of servers hiding user's information eluding any activities of monitoring.

As usually happen, the project was born in military sector, sponsored the US Naval Research Laboratory and from 2004 to 2005 it was supported by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Actually the software is under development and maintenance of Tor Project. A user that navigate using Tor it's difficult to trace ensuring his privacy because the data are encrypted multiple times passing through nodes, Tor relays, of the network.

Once inside the network, where it possible to go and what is it possible to find?

Well once inside the deep web we must understand that the navigation is quite different from ordinary web, every research is more complex due the absence of indexing of the content.


When you are going too deep....


A user that start it's navigation in the Deep Web have to know that a common way to list the content is to adopt collection of Wikis and BBS-like sites which have the main purpose to aggregate links categorizing them in more suitable groups of consulting. Another difference that user has to take in mind is that instead of classic extensions (e.g. .com, .gov) the domains in the Deep Web generally end with the .onion suffix.

Following a short list of links that have made famous the Deep Web published on Pastebin.

Deep web pastebin GO GO!!

How To:
Download Tor + Browser (leaves no trace)
https://www.torproject.org/projects/torbrowser.html.en

Find links! Start out:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.onion#Onion_Sites

The Silk Road where u can buy drugs =o
http://ianxz6zefk72ulzz.onion/index.php

The Hidden Wiki! Can potentially find everything from here!
http://kpvz7ki2v5agwt35.onion/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

Contains Tor Library
http://am4wuhz3zifexz5u.onion/

Open Vendor Database (discusses non onion drug websites too!)
http://g7pz322wcy6jnn4r.onion/opensource/ovdb/ac/index.php

The General Store (more drugs)
http://xqz3u5drneuzhaeo.onion/users/generalstore/

A bunch of rather popular boards (like Intel Exchange and 
http://4eiruntyxxbgfv7o.onion/snapbbs/sitedex.php

Most popular chan on tor (Arguably) comparable to 4chan
http://b4yrk2nkydqfpzqm.onion/mobile/

Directory/list of links
http://dppmfxaacucguzpc.onion/

Another chan
http://c7jh7jzl3taek4eh.onion/

pastebin
http://4eiruntyxxbgfv7o.onion/paste/browse.php

http://xqz3u5drneuzhaeo.onion/users/boi/?show=65



Cleaned Hidden Wiki should be a also a good starting point for the first navigation. Be careful, some content are labeled with common used tag such as CP= child porn, PD is pedophile, stay far from them.

The Deep Web is considered the place where every thing is possible, you can find every kind of material and services for sale, most of them illegal. The hidden web offers to cybercrime great business opportunity, hacking services, malware, stolen credit cards, weapons.

We all know the potentiality of the e-commerce in ordinary web and its impressive growth in last couple of years, well now imagine the Deep Web market that is more that 500 times bigger and where there is no legal limits on the odds to sell. We are facing with amazing business controlled by ciber criminal organizations.

Speaking of dark market we cannot avoid to mention Silk Road web site, an online marketplace located in the Deep Web, the majority of its products are derived from illegal activities. Of course it's not the only one, many other markets are managed to address specify products, believe me, many of them are terrifying.



Most transactions on the Deep Web accept Bitcoin system for payments allowing the purchase of any kind of products preserving the anonymity of the transaction, encouraging the development of trade in respect to any kind of illegal activities. We are facing with a with an autonomous system that advantage the exercise of criminal activities while ensuring the anonymity of transactions and the inability to track down the criminals.

But is it really all anonymous? Is it possible to be traced in the Deep Web? What is the position of the governments towards the Deep Web?



Mary Shaw: A Tale The Vengeful Ventriloquist


Beware the stare of Mary Shaw
     She had no children, only dolls
and if you see her in your dreams
    Make sure you never ever scream…

               Or she'll rip your tongue out at the seam.

And if you see her remember this,
The only thing that can stop her is…                                                                              Shhhh

    Beware the stare of Mary Shaw
       She had no children only dolls
         And if you see her in your dreams                                            
            You must never, ever scream

For she is taking revenge upon all
   Who had silenced her and made her fall
      Sending out 101 dolls to rip out their tongues
         So none of them will utter a single word again



Beady little eyes, turning every way you go
Leave them in the dark and you never know
Forever they wil place you down, in eternal sleep
With a picture of horror, your own blood will seep


And gone forever, she will take
All your loved ones and family
Beware of Mary Shaw
She's very angry
And whatever you do, don't appear scared
For she will murder you and leave your blood there
Her ghost is kept inside one doll
Dug from her grave, you will lose it all





  Just don't say her name                          
Don't ask her why                  
She'll take your loved ones and she won't cry            
Beware of the stare of Mary Shaw       
Her spirit lives on   

Beware the stare of Mary Shaw
                               She had no children, only dolls
and if you see her in your dreams
                               Make sure you never ever scream…

              Or she'll rip your tongue out at the seam.

And if you see her remember this,
                                                  The only thing that can stop her is…











DEAD SILENCE

The Body Under Your Freaking Bed




There’s always that moment of dread when you stick one foot out from under your covers; as you envisage a Paranormal Activity style death being dragged down the stairs. You have an instinctive worry with what’s under your bed from a young age, even though nothing has ever been under there. If that’s the case, you’re one of the lucky ones.

Dead bodies have popped up in hotel beds all over America: Florida, California, Las Vegas, Atlantic City, NJ… it seems there isn’t a state that’s gone without a corpse not checking out. One particularly disturbing case was in 2003, when a guest noticed a foul smell in his room at the Capri Motel, Kansas City, and complained to staff. After three nights of opening windows and no doubt gallons of Febreze, the stench would not leave, causing the poor guest to vomit in the room.

When cleaning crew began shifting furniture to clean the puke, they found the decomposing corpse of a man, wearing only a nun’s wimple and fishnet stockings. To repeat, he slept in that bed for THREE NIGHTS. Shudder.

Calls From The Dead

On September 12, 2008, two trains collided in the Chatsworth district of Los Angeles, killing 25 people in the crash. One of the passengers onboard was Charles E. Peck, who was travelling from Salt Lake City for a job interview in L.A. His hopes were high on landing the job as his fiancée, Andrea Katz, lived in California and he planned to marry her if he was hired.

During the next eleven hours, Peck’s mobile phone sent numerous calls to his fiancée, son, brother, stepmother and sister. Overall, his loved ones received a total of 35 calls, however each time they answered they only heard static. When they called back, the calls went straight to voicemail. They family could only be optimistic and assume Charles was alive in the wreckage and calling for help.

When the search team finally traced Peck’s phone signal and discovered his body in a lead passenger car, where most major injuries and deaths occurred, they reported that Charles had died on impact, and that he couldn’t have possibly made the calls.
What’s even stranger, is that they never found the phone.

The Doodler


Now this is horror movie material. What makes this tragic unsolved mystery even more terrifying is the fact this guy is still out there… if he hasn’t died already. Only known as “The Doodler”, or the “Black Doodler” ; this unidentified serial killer murdered 14 men in San Francisco between January 1974 and September 1975. We know what you’re thinking: there’s a tonne of serial killers out there, what makes this one so creepy?

His trademark behaviour, before he killed, was to sketch his victims first; all gay men and drag queens that he picked up in bars and sex clubs. Unbeknown to the men, who thought they’d found a rather alluring artist, he then had sex with them before stabbing them to death. Three of his surviving victims were unwilling to go public, which means he has never been caught.

He’s not the only serial killer that’s still roaming the streets right now: Pedro Lopez, who slayed over 300 girls and Issei Sagawa, who shot a student and ate her body, are both living “normal” lives outside of jail. That’s us sleeping with one eye open from now on.

Farewell .







Counter Strike: Global Offensive [Steam Reviews]


Counter-Strike: Global Offensive took the long way to success. It started off with a number of significant flaws, but with time and some substantial patches, has become one of the most-played games on Steam and one of the best PC games you can play.

As usual, the people who know the game best are the ones who spend every night and most weekends in the trenches, defusing bombs, shooting chickens, and desperately hunting for knives. Also as usual, the people who love the game most are also the ones who have the most complicated relationship with it. Play a game enough, and even if you love it, part of you will probably start to loathe it. In a loving way. If that makes sense.

I've really enjoyed Patricia's semi-regular Steam Reviews roundup series, since they give a glimpse into the minds (and senses of humor) of a given game's most dedicated players. So, I thought I'd dive into the CS:GO Steam page and see what I could find.

Generally speaking: CS:GO players love the chickens, are flummoxed by the knives, are in agreement that Dust2 is in some ways the game's only map, and hate hackers almost as much as they hate being called hackers. And of course, like any good game, for all the complaints most people have, they still can't stop playing.

Let's see what Steam reviewers have to say about Counter-Strike: Global Offensive:





Such drama!
And then there's my other favorite review:

Dota 2 Reborn: Never be the Same Again


It's been ten months since Valve released the Source 2 toolkit for Dota 2 custom game mode developers. It's been seven months since they confirmed that something big would be arriving in 2015, a project that accounted for the lack of Diretide and Frostivus and the ever-slowing rate at which new heroes arrive. Despite the warnings, however, I'm taken aback by just how important Dota 2 Reborn feels. This isn't simply a major update: it's practically a new game. Valve's mysterious alt-text writer might have joked that we're back in beta, but we really are. Two years into the life of Dota 2, we're at the cusp of a change that they could probably get away with calling 'Dota 3'.

In detailing what I think the major changes to the hobby are going to be, I'm going to gloss most of the serious connection and technical issues that are an undeniable problem with the current beta. Let's assume that, given a few months, Dota Reborn works the vast majority of the time.

Even so, Dota 2 is going to gain a scrappy new identity. That stunning new UI disguises a fundamental change in the type of game that it is. At present, your experience is curated by Valve. Old Dota 2 demonstrates the developer's commitment to the original mod, with every menu, mode and system trending towards more Dota, more of the time. Lots of people want this, and for them the game doesn't need to be any more than that. You play Dota 2 because you want to play Dota. That makes sense.

With Reborn, Dota 2 is becoming a game development platform. Classic Dota dominates three quarters of the UI, but that 'Custom Game' tab will ultimately represent an offering far, far bigger than it. The notion that you play Dota 2 because you want to play Dota will become a thing of the past: you might play Dota 2 because you want to play Bomberman. You might play Dota 2 because you want to play a kart racer, or a survival game, or solve a puzzle. Although the majority of custom games will be derived from Dota's basic systems, they're not committed to that: the potential for divergent experiences is huge.
Similarly, the potential for negative experiences is huge. Most custom game modes will be bad. Lots of them won't work. The ones that work well will still be impacted by the lack of skill-based matchmaking and the ready availability of the abandon button: there's no way they can be seriously competitive as Dota is without a bit of curation from the community. This isn't a problem, in and of itself. It means the return of low stakes Dota, of negotiating lobbies, of rough placeholder models and design experiments that go nowhere. The return, in short, of the golden age of modding—with all the inconsistency and homebrew jank that this entails.

This is a huge tonal change for a game defined by its singular focus and high production values. In becoming a game design sandbox, Dota 2 doesn't just gain a whole bunch of new ways to play—it becomes messier, easier, more inviting to more people. If you ever wondered how the game could get bigger, this is it. Right now, despite this being an opt-in beta that doesn't work half the time, the player population for Skillshot Wars is equal to that of the Marvel Heroes MMO. Pudge Wars has more than double Evolve's player base. Overthrow's playerbase would be enough to put it in the top 30 games on all of Steam.
Dota 2 custom games are going to be utterly massive. You will have friends who play them and don't touch Dota itself. The ideas expressed within this game over the next few years are going to spin out into full games in their own right; possibly even genres. It's happened before.

I've been thinking about the effect this is going to have on the community—aside from it simply getting larger. I suspect we'll see a lot of anger about AFK lobby hosts, quitters and so on. In that sense, Reborn might give an already fractious group of people new reasons to shout at each other.

As a counterpoint, however, today I had one of the nicest interactions with a Dota 2 stranger I've ever had. I loaded into an Overthrow match, on the map that divides players into teams of two. During hero selection, my randomly-assigned teammate admitted that they'd never played it before and had no idea what to pick. I said that I was in the same position. We talked back and forth about combos we might try, settled one, and played. We lost but it didn't feel like a big deal. It was fun, and, more importantly, it wasn't taboo to say that you didn't know the best way to play.
The Dota 2 community is enormously elitist—a sign of weakness is tantamount to blood in the water. Nobody wants to admit their mistakes, everybody wants to blame somebody else. This is a community with a widespread working knowledge of the Dunning-Kruger effect, for heaven's sake.

Custom game modes disarm that by creating a scenario where everybody is new again. Because it doesn't 'matter' in the same way that traditional Dota is seen to, it's okay to ask questions. It's okay to clown around. Even if this is only the case for a handful of popular modes, it's enormously healthy for the community as a whole. Will it lead to nicer Dota players? Too early to tell. But it does make playing with assholes optional, and that's a quality-of-life improvement on par with anything else Valve are doing with this update.
This time next year, Dota 2's going to be unrecognisable. Hell, the genre is going to be unrecognisable. Imagine being the developer of another me-too MOBA right now, watching a Dota 2 custom mode blitz past your concurrent player records in a single day. You'd just stop, wouldn't you?



Star Sing-Sing: A Biography


If you were to ask Western fans of Hong Kong movies who the most popular star in Asia is, names such as Jackie Chan and Chow Yun-Fat would probably come up. However, it is Stephen Chow (sometimes credited as Steven Chow, Stephen Chiau or by his Chinese name, Chow Sing Chi) that is Asia's top box office draw.

Born in 1962 in Hong Kong, Chow grew up as the only boy among three sisters (which may explain the troubles he often encounters with the ladies in his movies). After graduating from high school, he enrolled in the Shaw Bros. TVB acting school in 1982. During his time at the school, his rubber-faced mannerisms found many fans, and he had his first taste of success on the children's TV show "430 Space Shuttle," which also starred another future Hong Kong movie star, Tony Leung Chiu-Wai (Chow finding success on a kid's show could be considered a bit ironic, since Chow is said not to like children very much). Chow also worked with Ng Man-Tat, who would later become his sidekick in many of his most popular movies.

After his time at the TVB school, the studio immediately signed him to a contract, and he enjoyed a successful run on the network in both comedies and dramas. By 1987, Chow had entered into the movie industry with a role in Final Justice, for which he won the prestigious Taiwanese Golden Horse award for best supporting actor. The award caused Chow to put his comedic talents on the back burner as he appeared in a series of action and dramatic roles, including John Woo's Just Heroes and Jet Li's Dragon Fight. However, after appearing with Jacky Cheung in the comedy Faithfully Yours, Chow's comedic nature returned to his film work.

In 1990, Chow scored his first major box office hit with All for the Winner, which was a parody of the previous year's box office champ, Wong Jing's God of Gamblers. Wong is a producer/director who is never one to shy away from cheap publicity, so he hired Chow for the sequel to God of Gamblers. It was with Wong -- a director known for his schizophrenic style -- that Chow solidified his own comedic style, which would come to be known as "moy len tau." Moy len tau is a Cantonese term that roughly translates to "nine comes after eight, but eight has nothing to do with nine," but is more generally termed as "nonsense comedy."

Born from the comedies of the Hui brothers of the late 1970's-early 1980's such as the Mr. Boo series, Chow's moy len tau style features manic pacing, high levels of physical comedy, parody, popular culture references, and heavy use of Cantonese slang. The dependence on Cantonese terms made Chow's movies huge hits with local audiences, and his physical attributes -- notably the aforementioned "rubber face" and general good looks -- translated Chow's films into international hits as well. Chow's collaborations with Wong, which included yet another God of Gamblers movie (by which time he had gained enough popularity to be the movie's top-billed star) had given Chow the basic template for his films -- a slightly dimwitted, but talented, man gets thrown into strange circumstances, where he ultimately finds redemption (and resolution) through love.

After the success of the God of Gamblers movies, Chow's star continued to rise. 1991's Fight Back to School became Hong Kong's top-grossing film of all time, knocking John Woo's mega-hit A Better Tomorrow out of the top spot. The same year also saw Chow appearing in a comedic homage to one of his idols, with Fist of Fury '91, a parody of the classic Bruce Lee movie. Chow continued to spoof other popular movies, such as Swordsman with Royal Tramp, and also did somewhat more serious fare with movies based on folk tales and heroes, as with Flirting Scholar and King of Beggars. Though not was all wine and roses during this period -- Hong Kong audiences are notoriously fickle -- and Chow had his share of flops. But by the time he completed The God of Cookery in 1997, Chow had not only cemented himself as one of Asia's top stars, but a talented producer, writer and director as well.


Stephen Chow is now in the envious position in the Hong Kong movie industry of only having to do one or two movies a year in order to keep in a public's eye (many stars appear in as many as a dozen films a year). And like many of Hong Kong's top stars, Hollywood has come calling. He was originally slated to direct a US remake of God of Cookery starring Jim Carrey, but eventually turned the job down after getting tired of dealing with Hollywood's red tape. Like his comedic style, Stephen Chow seems something that is unique to Hong Kong movies and something which would (and could) only be featured there. However, with the recent success of Chow's Shaolin Soccer (which became the all-time Hong Kong box office winner for a domestic product), American interest seems to have been renewed. Shaolin Soccer is slated to be given a release in US theatres, with re-releases of some of his older movies to follow.

Below are the lists of his famous movies:

1. All for the Winner

2. God of Gamblers II

3. Fight Back to School

4.God of Gamblers III: Back to Shanghai

5.Crazy Safari
6.Fight Back to School II
7.All's Well, Ends Well
8.Justice, My Foot!
9.King of Beggars
10.Hail the Judge

11. Shaolin Soccer
12. From Beijing with Love
13.Kung Fu Hustle





14. CJ7
15.Sixty Million Dollar Man

16.Out of the Dark 
17.Royal Tramp