Terror and The War Against It

2007-06-12T11:51:00.000-07:00

Terror is a terrible thing. Lets see what it actually means:

(quote from dictionary.com)
1. the use of violence and threats to intimidate or coerce, esp. for political purposes.
2. the state of fear and submission produced by terrorism or terrorization.
3. a terroristic method of governing or of resisting a government.

So well, the use of violence to intimidate. Let's keep it too that. Most of you probably know Al-Qaida, one of the biggest terroristic organisations. It's particulary against The United States, because of their beliefs. Al-Qaida are so-called radical moslims, they believe that women should be covered all over their body and that sorts of things.
Terroristic organisations try to reach their goals with intimidation. Violence is merely a tool for this. However, it's used quite a lot. There can be two ways to do this: In public, or secretly. The first method is most used by well-known groups, and it's why they became so well-known. The second way is like the way the KGB operated. If somebody did something wrong, the people where followed by the KGB, tortured, captured or killed. This all happened secretly, as you may expect from a secret service.
Terror is the radical's main tool. (NOTE: I do not mean radical moslims, just radicals in general) Or better specified, violence. But violence isn't the worst too. It's psychology. Psychology is what ruins persons, and is more effective to kill them. Why? It can make them to kill themselves or something like that.
Terrorism most of the time has a goal. The most known of this is oppression. Ohter goals include having fun, getting power, etc. (Etc. is just a thing to like it look like you know a lot more, but when you don't.) To eliminate terrorism, you must remove the goal first. This brings us to the war against terrorism.

To start off, the term "war" shouldn't be used at all. Or, even better, there even shouldn't be war. This is because of the hard against hard theory. Fight fire with fire. Fight anything the same thing. This theory has been proved wrong many times already, yet it is still used. People still think just fighting hard is the right solution. Hippy crap, you may now say. It seriously isn't. How many times doesn't it happen when, for instance, you accidentally hit someone at school. In most cases, the person immediately hits you back. This often becomes a fight. That should convince you, unless you just like fighting.

Terrorism needs to be solved, though. The best solution in my opinion is psychology. Yes, psychology again. Not in a way of letting terrorists killing themselves, which would be murder, but by convincing them. No threats or anything, just talking. With the right techniques, you can convince anyone, even the most radical people.
Sadly, it's human's nature to fight. This comes from our instincts. The nature is hard: you need to kill to be alive. Also, human's are egoistic and selfish from nature. You can try to look past these things, and if you keep your mind at it, you will. I asume terrorists haven't seen past these things and just want their thing, while compromises could be an easy solution too.

Thanks for reading my second column. It's quite hard to write them, actually :)

First Column: The True Meaning of RuneScape

2007-06-06T11:32:00.000-07:00

Hello, and welcome to my First Column. In this article I will tell what in my opinion the true meaning of RuneScape is.

RuneScape is a nice game, with friendly players, a great development team and weekly updates. This team works hard to make the game better all the time. RuneScape has problems too, like autoers, gold farmers and scammers. All counted up, it's a nice game, but not perfect. There are problems to overcome, and sometimes you have to do boring tasks and mindless grinding. It's part of the game, and you should respect this. If you don't like these things, RuneScape isn't the thing for you.

Now, onto the core of this article. What the true meaning of RuneScape is (I think this also applies to life too) Fun. Gaming is for fun. Andrew and Paul made the games for fun. As long you can enjoy the game, it's good. I don't know, but if you get mad at the game all the time for losing something, you're not having fun. To see RuneScape at it's best, you should have fun.

Let's say, you care for graphics. You don't care if you have to download anything. You want to have sounds. You want just one objective. Most people will say now: RuneScape isn't the game for you. I say: try, and you might like it. You never know if you won't like something if you don't try it. I've found out that when I didn't do stuff and said it was "stupid". Friends pushed me to do these things and I actually enjoyed doing them. For example: I didn't train thieving, because I didn't feel like it. I thought it would be boring. However, when I started training, I enjoyed the mindless pickpocketing and stall-stealing. It turned out to be a great method of clearing my mind and I really enjoyed it. I immediately trained thieving upto 50, until I stopped it. It became a bit dull. Same happened with agility. You don't know (or do) how boring it is to collect 1k tickets at the Brimhaven Agility arena. After 650 tickets, I stopped and cashed all my tickets in. That was the point I switched to thieving. After that, I started Agility again, and trained a few levels, because I enjoyed it again. I had fun.

Until I came to this insight, I was often angry (at RuneScape/the computer/other people/etc.) I couldn't laugh about jokes made about me. Now I laugh at insults, jokes, and other things in general. The only three letters I type, when I get called "noob": lol. You just have to see it from the bright side. Always try to see the fun in your RuneScape things, or if there is no fun, the bright side. Like, if you die, I can laugh. But if you can't, just think, it's a game, I can get my loses back easily. And if you believe in this, you will.

Jagex really works hard for us, the players. For our fun. This may put the "all updates suck" ranters to another mind. As you can read in the Development Diaries, they work really hard. They do what they can, and if you do your best, it should be appreciated. Make sure you don't forget that.

The rules are also made to let us have fun. They are specified at removing non-sportive players from the game. Either they are scammers, autoers, gold farmers, lurers or something else. They enhance the gameplay in a bad way, thus standing between us and the fun.

Also, another important thing when having fun. You should be able to make others have fun too. It gives a great feeling to make someone happy while not losing anything. Also, leave everything as neat as possible, and don't leave others with your whateveryoudid-messes. Clean if you made a mess. Or, even better, don't make a mess at all. Leave the earth nice and clean, so the next generation can play RuneScape without any problems too.

All by all, the most important rule in RuneScape is, although it isn't displayed in the rules section:

Have Fun!

Gain's Column

Terror and The War Against It

First Column: The True Meaning of RuneScape