(This review has actually been sitting in my drafts folder for a couple of weeks, since I’ve just had more important things to post here lately. But it’s been a while since I’ve posted a tea review, so here you go.)

Back to the familiar safety of random numbers again, this time die Maschine came up with 14 a second time, making me question the supposedly random nature of the numbers. The joke’s on the RNG, though, since I delete each choice as I go along and shuffle the list up to fill the gap, this time making 14 the rather pleasing choice of Twinings Ceylon. Shut up, I have a lot of Twinings.

On the upside, I was hoping for a black tea sometime soon, so I could review something a little more traditional and commonplace, something your average Joe is slightly more likely to recognize. While not my absolute favourite of black teas, Ceylon is fairly easygoing and pleasant from what I recall, so I’ve got no qualms with today’s choice.

For those who don’t know, your average “builder’s brown” kind of tea tends to consist of a blend of different tea leaves grown in different places around the world, combined to produce a specific flavour. While there are somewhat more upmarket variants of this idea — such as the yet-to-be-reviewed English Breakfast and Traditional Afternoon (also from Twinings), it’s all the same principle; blend a combination of leaves in such a way as to produce a final, intended flavour.

For purists — or simply for people like me, who are cursed with insatiable curiosity — it’s also possible to find ‘pure’ types, which are all from leaves grown in one specific place. Assam, one of my favourite types of black tea, is one of these types, as is Ceylon, grown in Sri Lanka.

We’ll start, as I usually do, with the bags: The familiar, earthy scent of black tea is somewhat milder than one would expect, but otherwise unremarkable. After all, despite not being a ‘blend’, this is still merely black tea, with no fancy tricks up its sleeve. The finished product, however — hot water and all — is where the scent truly shines, a surprisingly light smell almost reminiscent of green tea, while still maintaining the heavy feel of black. Regardless of what I’m about to say, I think Ceylon is probably the most pleasant-smelling of the ‘standard’ black teas, while not counting the more fancy versions like Chai or Earl Grey.

As far as flavour goes, I’m afraid my uncultured palette suffers greatest here, as it’s difficult for me to distinguish Ceylon from the more commonplace blends, though it’s got a somewhat more light and clean flavour, albeit with an ever-so-slightly bitter edge. It’s a flavour that doesn’t linger at all, instead seeming to vanish almost as soon as it arrives, which I think would make it a good accompaniment for a meal. It’s certainly more refreshing and uplifting than most black teas, though a terrible choice for something to relax with — I disagree entirely with Twinings’ claim that it has “calming undertones”, instead suggesting that it’s more bright and invigorating than subdued and calming.

Discrepancies aside, Ceylon is an overall pleasant — if unremarkable — experience, and worth trying for anyone who enjoys black tea.

Another year, another election, and another overwhelming feeling that I’ve completely wasted my time making the effort to vote, despite the staff at the polling station being unnaturally cheerful. At the time of writing, the whole thing’s an obnoxiously confusing toss-up — the latest details can be seen over at the BBC News site — with the Conservatives having the most votes overall, but due to our extremely bizarre and convoluted system, that’s not actually enough to win overall and seize power; right now, it’s squabbling and power games as the big three — or, should I say, the big two and the little yellow one that wishes it was big — plot against each other and discuss alliances. Typical politics, really.

What annoys me is the short-sightedness and general lack of intelligence that the voting majority seems to display; my fleeting faith in my country has been once again dashed against the rocks as the familiar voting tropes emerge once again. The depressingly droll predictability as Ireland primarily votes for the Irish party and much of Wales votes for the Welsh party, Scotland seem to have their heads on straight with a remarkable amount of yellow on the map (though it counts for little due to few constituencies) and — of course — there’s a fair chunk of support for the Scottish party. I’m not even going to fault Ireland, Wales and Scotland for voting for their own parties, but it seems like in the end results, it’s missing the big picture; that being the mouth-breathing general public of England, which makes the vast majority of the overall result for UK elections.

And then we see the tedium of voting tropes: There’s the “stuck in their ways” short-sighted toolboxes who blindly vote for the same party year after year — whether it’s red, blue, yellow, or another — with no regard to situation and policies on the table. There’s the kind of people who voted Labour the last time because the Conservatives fucked up before, and consequently voted Conservatives this year because Labour fucked up before; the short-sighted flip-flopping between the two, I think, accounts for a depressing amount of the final result. I feel foolish for even thinking that the Liberal Democrats — the little party that could — would actually have a chance for once, after the general public are largely disillusioned with the monumental fuck-ups of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, though apparently we as a people are unable to look back more than a few years, and thus forget just how much of a colossal mess the Conservative Party have made in the past, and their unashamed favour towards the rich and powerful elite minority. Still, even despite my dislike for the Tories, Gordon Brown isn’t exactly someone I’d trust to watch my back while I was sleeping in a knife factory, if you know what I mean.

Now, I’m not saying that the Lib Dems are a shining jewel of democracy and the last best hope for civilization, able to stop both the impending cyborg apocalypse and the underground ninja rebellion, but if they had managed to get in, it’d show both that the voting public are capable of remembering further back than about two years, and that there’s a chance that future elections would have a chance of more than a toss-up between the lesser of two evils, being that the two major parties are both deeply flawed in their own ways — it doesn’t help that New Labour are almost as right-wing as the Tories these days. More importantly, I think, Nick Clegg is likely the only one of the big three who has any vested interest in pushing forward proportional representation, something I support whole-heartedly over the ridiculous system we have in place today. I can’t speak for all voters, but I feel it’s likely many supporters of the Lib Dems this year are in the same shoes as myself — choosing the third option, because both of the “main” two seem like poor choices at best, and because it’s the only hope for anything even resembling left-wing.

Final thoughts, though: It pleases me to see that both the UK Independence Party and the British National Party — better known as idiots for the former and fascists for the latter — won a grand total of zero seats in parliament, while the adorably quixotic Green Party won what I believe is their first ever seat, perhaps proof that sheer determination and persistence do eventually pay off. Still, once again Britain does not fail to disappoint, and whatever the results of the political wrangling and backstabbing alliances, we’re sure to see another five years of poor leadership and unbalanced farce politics. Business as usual, I suppose; but at least the BNP didn’t win any seats, so there is still some small hope for the country.

I think @sp4nner sums it up better than I ever could, though: “Britain you stupid fucking cunts. All you had to do was not vote Cameron, and what did you fucking do? Also, who the fuck votes BNP?! :C”

Edit @ 6:20pm: Why is our voting system so ridiculous? I think this Twitter post from @hang_em sums it up nicely: “It took 35,021 votes to elect each Conservative MP; 33,338 for each Labour, and 119,397 to elect each Lib Dem MP.” Now look me in the eye and tell me our political system isn’t a farce.

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There’s a time in everyone’s life where they think, “This is it, I’ve gone too far this time, I’m actually going to die.” In my case, that’s more like several times, ranging from the time I climbed over the fence protecting my frail human body from a local power substation, to the time I was hit by a van travelling at enough speed to cause me to literally lose all memory of the impact. Today, that feeling returns again with an energy shot which is so obscure, it doesn’t even show up on Google. Think about that for a moment. This may very well be the first LSV Shot review in the world. I feel both pride and terror. I’m like Christopher fucking Columbus here.

The bottle identifies itself as an “Intense Mixed Fruit Flavour Drink with Sugar and Sweetener”, which worries me deeply. The chemical content is fairly tame, though — 75mg of caffeine, and some vaguer quantities of taurine, and glu… gluco… glucuronolactone. What’s the worst that could happen, he says, while opening the bottle and spilling a sweet-smelling splash on his t-shirt. My god, do they ever want to give value for money, this gunk is literally filled up to the brim.

Speaking of the smell, it reminds me a fair amount of the Monster energy shot; it’s a fairly gentle, sweet, pleasing aroma which almost makes me not regret this whole escapade. Maybe I’m weak or maybe the bottle is unusually tall, but I’m inclined to swig it back in three shot-glass-sized mouthfuls, each about as jarring as the last, and…

And here’s where it gets crazy. No, not because I swear the image on the screen out of the corner of my eye is jittering slightly. The madness comes because the flavour — while tinged with the sharp, brackish edge that plagues most energy shots (is this what caffeine tastes like?), the flavour is gone remarkably quickly, leaving very little aftertaste. I’d dare say it’s even moderately pleasant to swallow, as insane as such a suggestion might be. Certainly not the kind of flavour I’d want to kick back with in a tall glass at the end of a long day, but as far as energy shots go — especially ones so low-priced, as evidenced by the branded price tag — it’s really quite good.

The low caffeine content is the kicker, though. 75mg? I’d get more caffeine than that licking the counter-top at Starbucks, and likely cheaper, too. Still, I’d take a dozen of these over even one of the horrible alternatives any day of the week, and at least this way, maybe the Starbucks staff will stop looking at me with such disdain.

Well, it’s been a pretty crazy 24 hours since I decided to implement my plans for a pseudo-3D engine in Remnant Core, but I’m happy to say things are mostly working. In the process I’ve crushed some old bugs — including one that’s been around since the very first version, 0.0.1! — and struggled with some new ones that have cropped up, while inadvertently changing the data storage structures in such a way that they literally take a quarter of the space they did before (despite the addition of 3D space). It’s been a long, strange trip, but the engine is now well on the way to fully supporting this new 3D environment. And did I not say I’d post proof-of-concept screens when I got it working?

First, we start off on the street at ground level (fig.A). This is nothing special. But let’s go up to the second floor (fig.B). Suddenly things get interesting; the dark blue is the street below, we’ve already seen it at ground level so it’s “remembered” at this level up too. Now we blow a hole in the wall (fig.C) and have a clearer view — if we hadn’t already seen the street below, it’d be seen and remembered by this point, vision extends one Z-level above and below the player. Blowing a hole in the wall of the opposite building (fig.D) lets us take a look in there too, but dropping back down to street level (fig.E) we can only see ground level again; the destruction is not visible, as it happened on the second floor.

Of course, that’s just the tip of the iceberg as far as the potential of this 3D engine goes, but it should give a fairly decent example of how the game handles multi-storey buildings, without separating them into completely individual spaces. Not bad for a day’s work, huh?

I know I said I wasn’t going to do any more major code re-writes, that Remnant Core was getting to the stage where I was really happy with its internal workings and had no particular urge to rebuild its core functions further. But like Archimedes discovering the displacement of water in his bathtub, I was suddenly struck with possibly the greatest idea I’ve had so far — and, more importantly, the method in which to implement this insane plan.

I’m talking, of course, about the third dimension. While I’d already planned on expanding the city-building algorithm to create buildings with multiple floors, I was struck by some fundamental flaws in that design: Could the player not simply run up a flight of stairs and be instantly safe from whatever horrors lurked below? Would time stop on anything but the current layer of building? None of this seemed terribly adequate for my grand designs, until suddenly the idea and method of execution popped into my head.

Now, I don’t want to explain how I’d implement this — something I believe I can reliably work into the existing 2D code in a matter of hours — but the plan would allow for some truly unique mechanics, such as explosions that not only damage the structure of the current level but the levels above and below, or perhaps a scenario I regaled a friend with while elaborating on the plan — the player could run up a flight of stairs and set a trap at the top for the following hordes of demonic horrors to run into, or perhaps destroy an outer wall with a grenade and jump out of the second floor, landing (and taking minor damage from the fall) on the street outside, having time to flee before the horrors catch up.

I think this’d add an extra dimension — if you’ll pardon the pun — of strategy and depth to the game, something which I honestly haven’t seen outside of Dwarf Fortress; most roguelikes treat each two-dimensional “floor” as a separate entity entirely. And let it not be said that I’m all talk; if this plan works out as well as I’ve imagined it in my head, I’ll be posting proof-of-concept screenshots the very moment I’ve got it working.

Keep your eyes peeled. Shit is about to get real.

Edit @ 2:58pm: Terrain data structures modified, three-dimensional world is now partially working. There’s a lot of things (e.g. dropping items) that are going to need work, monster AI still doesn’t work in 3D, LoS is broken but not difficult to fix.  Gravity is going to be a bitch.
Edit @ 3:35pm: Line-of-sight, terrain flags and visibility fixed, “copypasta” routine used in area generation now 3D-compatible. Taking a break!
Edit @ 9:43pm: Things are more or less working great, including visibility to lower levels (standing on a rooftop looking down at the city, etc.), though it’s introduced a slew of new bugs and brought some obscure old ones to light which have been floating around since around 0.17 or so. This’ll take a few days to clean up. Screenshots soon!
Edit @ 11.00am: Oh dear god what. One of the bugs that’s surfaced could easily have been a part of the code since the very first version of the game. We’re talking 0.0.1 here. It’s become pretty ingrained and will take some effort to budge.