Ci siamo accorti che molta gente pensi che Beppe Grillo e Antonio Di Pietro vadano a braccetto e che i Meetup siano alleati dell’Italia dei Valori. Questa convinzione è diffusa tanto nella gente qualunque, quanto nelle persone all’interno di questi gruppi ed è per questo che riteniamo necessario chiarire la nostra posizione di assoluta indipendenza. Nel tentativo di essere il più chiari e completi possibile, analizziamo i rapporti tra tutti gli elementi che ho citato.
How to change the world
Last night I happened to talk a little about politics. Not political ideologies, parties and such, but about the real politics, how to do something to change the society where you are living in. There was a friend of mine who does not believe she can make any difference in the world, which is a very common feeling at least here in Italy, and a guy she met last night whom I could depict as a "Berlusconian communist": he really is the kind of communist Berlusconi is so afraid of, one of those with a long beard who believes in revolution and such. Now I usually don't like much that kind of thinking, but he made some good points and I was glad to talk to someone who had an understanding of a real democratic process, even though we would never agree on a lot of things. Anyway my friend was basically asking where do we find the courage and inspiration to go on and fight for something different, how do we know that what we do makes any difference? Since I think this is an important question, I will write here my answer to that.
New blog name
I found a better name for this blog, which better describes my general mood. I'm an Angry Citizen. Angry because we're screwing the world, and people don't care about it. Well I do and it's about time I do something to change some little things around: after all only the fool who thinks he can change the world will change it.
Italian habits of avoiding confrontation
Here is an answer I posted to some comments posted on BoingBoing:
I am sick and tired of all these people who think by what they are told to think. Beppe Grillo is a populist (which, I guess, should be a bad thing), DiPietro and Travaglio are "justicialists" (means that they want to apply law at all costs - I don't know if such a word exists in english (or italian, for that matter) - , again I guess it's a bad thing), Santoro is a leftist, and so on and so forth. First of all these people probably do not even know what those words mean. Second, this is a very common and practical way to avoid discussing the subjects proposed. Because Grillo is a populist - and I assume that it is a bad thing - I won't agree to any of the things he says. So I won't listen. What is wrong with you? I mean aside from a constat brainwash from Italian media? You may not agree with all the things he (or others) says, but it's not a good reason to just ignore everything he says because of that. He may be excessive sometimes, but he brings up issues which need discussion. He's a showman and he has his ways of telling things, politicians should get inspiration from that and discuss problems the "proper" way. Italian have that very bad habit of considering not worth listening seriously to anything that doesn't come from the mouth of an old professor of some kind "because he must know what he's speaking about"! That's plainly stupid. Also people often complain that Grillo (or others) only show the relevant part of a subject to prove their point, hiding other points of view. First, prove that. Secondly, most people do that, if not all. Thirdly, then open you own f*****g blog where you show the hidden part of these subjects, maybe people will agree with you and you'll have proven your point. Like americans have http://www.michaelmoore.com/ and http://www.moorewatch.com/, we could have the same thing. But no, it's easier to discredit people instead of countering their arguments. It's easier to prove that the opposition is as corrupt as the government, instead of fixing corruption in your own party. It's easier to cast Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt on the politician who is maybe the only honest one in Italy, instead of demonstrating with proof that you are as honest as he is (of course if you aren't it's easier to do that...)
Italians have this bad habit of thinking by absolute ideologies, one belongs to the right or to the left. Fascists or Communists.
Sorry for my rant
The importance of not underestimating rushes
So here is my first post about Rise of Nations: Thrones and Patriots. I begin with the strategy I'm most proficient with, which is also the easiest to learn: rushing. In this game I am Japanese on Himalaya, 2v2 with Bantu in front of me. My opposing player is not really skilled, so this is partly why this strategy was so effective, but nonetheless there are a lot of good players around who do not take into consideration rushes and can't defend them properly. With a good rush you can gain a strong advantage over your enemy early in the game - or even turn a 2v2 in a 2v1, like in this game. But with a bad rush you can fall behind and never recover! Remember that rushes require more resources from the attacking player, but it also gives greater prizes to the attacker.
Now as for the game itself: as soon as I discovered that I am Japanese I decided to go for SCI1 MIL, build a little army to explore/collect ruins and either rush or raid the player in front of me. I was lucky enough to have the Bantu in front of me and not the Chinese (rushing the Chinese is a bad idea and should generally be avoided because they have large cities), so I went for a rush. Note that it is really important to scout for ruins, since while rushing you spend a lot of resources on military units, so you have to keep your economy going through ruins. Luckily with lots of units scouting the map you collect more ruins, compensating for the resources spent on building units. Also it is important to learn a little ruin manipulation, it's not as hard as it seems: ruins will give you a bonus in a resource you are collecting (except knowledge) which is the lowest one you have. So to get a food ruin, right before taking the ruin hit C, SHIFT+V (that is select city, create 5 citizens) and then cancel that with SHIFT+\. To get timber, just before taking the ruin select a citizen and start building a lookout, without actually building it. So next thing I do is exploring the enemy territory to find the other player's capital. I should actually have explored beforehand with my scout, so that I could go directly to the capital undetected, but hey! I'm no pro after all... Notice that while I'm heading towards the enemy capital I also build my second city, so that if my rush fails I won't be too late to recover and also if I conquer a city I will have three cities instead of two. If I don't build my second city I won't be able to build another one until CIV2 or until I lose the city, leaving me behind on my economy. Also notice that I recruited 4 HI and 2 LI to counter archers. This is the best combination of troops for an ancient age rush, anything else is mostly a waste of resources. Now my opponent builds barracks, which is the right thing to do, but he made two mistakes: the first one was to not build barracks right away when he saw my HI near his second city and the second one was to train HI instead of FA. The first thing to do in this situation is to kill my HI, so FA are the right answer. To avoid getting killed by my LI, he could have garrisoned/ungarrisoned the archers to protect them while still attacking effectively. The best thing would have been to create 2 FA and garrison them in the city, then ungarrison them at the opposite side of the city and kill my HI. Of course in this case avoid losing the capital was difficult, a temple would have helped reinforce the city, but there was not enough timber. But anyway taking back the capital was possible. Since I saw that the defending player didn't know how to defend effectively (no shame about that, we've all been there - next time he will do better) I decided to build some more troops with the capital sack bonus instead of going right away to classical age, knowing that I could keep his capital and take him out of the picture. This is actually what happened, so now my team had a real edge. After killing my opponent I went mostly booming (my booming is horrible, don't even mention it!) because I wanted to get to Gunpowder before attacking my chinese opponent: their LI is a killing machine in Medieval! From this point on the game was pretty much over, I could have done better raiding the other player, but anyway 2v1 is almost always a gg.
As you can see there are a lot of mistakes on my part too, but overall the strategy was effective and mostly done correctly. Hope you enjoyed it!
My new blog
So this is it, my new blog!
I tried to start a blog before, but every time it failed because of lack of interest on my side. I hope this time I will use it more to write about many different things. My main interests are in Open Source development, Rise of Nations: Thrones & Patriots, politics and everyday practical Philosophy (sounds nice), so expect to find posts about these things on my blog. I'll have to change the title for the blog, I don't like it, but I have no other idea on what to choose so for now it's stays lilke this, hopefully I will get a better idea sometime and I will change it.
I don't like longs posts, so that's it for now!