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I have to share this with you, guys. I was looking up about languages that are not OOP (I hate OOP), languages that I didn't know about. I know the first answer is always C, but C is ambiguous about graphics so this is a problem that goes on forever. Anyway, in a forum, somebody had asked this same question and I started reading and somebody else just replied by posting these lyrics:

Code Select Expand

When I find my code in tons of trouble
Friends and colleagues come to me
Speaking words of wisdom
Write in C

As the deadline fast approaches
And bugs are all I can see
Somewhere someone whispers
Write in C

Write in C, write in C
Write in C, write in C
LISP is dead and buried
Write in C

I used to write a lot of FORTRAN
For science it worked flawlessly
Try using it for graphics
Write in C

If you just spent nearly 30 hours
Debugging some assembly
Soon you'll be glad to
Write in C

Write in C, write in C
Write in C, yeah, write in C
Only wimps use BASIC
Write in C

Write in C, write in C
Write in C, write in C
Pascal won't quite cut it
Write in C

Write in C, write in C
Write in C, write in C
Don't even mention COBOL
Write in C

And when the screen is fuzzing
And the editor is bugging me
I'm sick of ones and zeroes
Write in C

A thousand people swear that
TP7 is the one for me
I hate the word "procedure"
Write in C

Write in C, write in C
Write in C, write in C
PL/1 is '80s
Write in C

Write in C, write in C
Write in C, write in C
The government loves Ada
Write in C
  While I disagree about C being good for graphics, these lyrics are just genius!

This thread, I'm starting it after exchanging a few messages with Duplode about Stunts when compared to realistic driving engines. We all know that Stunts is different, but I wonder which characteristics we recognise in Stunts as unique and which of those we really embrace. In contrast, it'd be interesting to mention which ones we wouldn't miss if they weren't there anymore (or maybe we've come to love them all). I'm talking mainly about the physics in the game.

I can quickly think of powergear and how easily it is for a car to be shot very high up into the sky with just the power of its engine. These things, personally, I find attractive and would certainly miss. On the other hand, I would not miss coming from a jump and landing exactly where two pieces of elevated road meet and crashing instantly. I am also unsure about being able to remain upside down inside a pipe or going throw slalom stones or loops, whether I'd miss those or not. What do you guys think?

We're nearing Christmas time. It's 1:15 am of XMAS eve here, so I guess some of you will be there pretty soon. I would like to wish you all have a Merry Christmas and that, despite the difficulties this very weird year has brought to us, manage to spend some good time with your loved ones, be them family or friends or both!

In a week from now, we'll be giving an end to this complicated year. It's had lots of annoyances, but we all learnt a lot from it... mostly about things that you would've have expected and yet, can still happen!  Who knows... maybe next year, we get visited by aliens!  Anyway, one thing I did like about this year is that my family had more free time so we were able to get to spend more time together, at least the ones that live at my house. So I haven't been alone at all. Still, the company of my online friends here has made a year that could've been pretty boring, very interesting and fun. Thank you.

[affirmative]

I slept a little and now I've been making some tests. My hypothesis was that black artifacts shown in the track preview screen for the track Cactus Festival reminiscent of inkblots were due to the presence of player cars in the track design whose miniature shape included ellipses that were incorrectly rendered and that this was to be expected of custom made cars, like is the case of the Melange.

My test yields affirmative results. In fact, the Melange is not the only one to cause this issue. All the cars that produce these effects are custom-made, though most custom-made cars do not produce it. For each car, the distribution of the artifacts is different and sometimes, it may change for each peek in the track preview. Other artifact also appear occasionally. This suggests that there is something we do not know about how 3D shapes are supposed to be designed because some aspects of them are rarely put to the test.

Cars that produce these bugs:
Audi DTM - Huge black and red painted areas
BMW DTM - Huge black triangle
Porsche 911 Turbo - Yellow regions and distortions in terrain rendering
Melange - Two black inkblots

Custom-made cars that don't:
Mercedes DTM - Very curious since the other two DTM cars do
Speedgate
Nissan Skyline
Ford Ranger
Superkart
Xylocaine
Ferrari F40
GT3 Mark II
Lotus Esprit
McLaren Honda

After a track has been displayed in the preview and exhibited glitches, Stunts becomes unstable and is likely to crash. The colours in the glitches appear to be complete unrelated to the paint job colours.

Hey, guys!

I've been taking a look at car articles in the Wiki, especially those that are custom-made. I found that some custom-made cars that are very used (and some that are not used so much) don't have an article or have a very minimal article. I am willing to create and edit articles to have that completed, but it turns out I don't know a lot about cars so I'm not the best car reviewer. I could start by making the articles and then other people could contribute a thorough analysis or you guys could help me make those analysis in the depth these cars deserve.

So far, what I have done is create an article about the DTM pack, which mentions the three cars, but this article is very basic and I think each of the cars should have its own individual article as well with much more detail.

Then... which aspects should I measure and how?  Everybody who would be interesting in adding to this, I guess the more we are, the better, but as I said, I'm willing to do the whole thing myself if necessary... I would just want some directions to do it well. Thanks!

Hey, guys. I remember since a long time ago, that sometimes, you would crash and no sound would occur. For some reason, I had associated this with the Jaguar, but now I've been trying it and it does make a sound when crashing, so I don't know if this was fixed or if there's a relation. What do you guys know about this?

[CarWorks]

CarWorks

Current version: 1.1
Last release: 6 August 2022 (with bug fixes on 10 August 2022)
Project site: http://www.raceforkicks.com/projects/carworks.html

Original presentation:

Hi!  I think I should make a thread about the project I'm working on right now. It's nothing too big, but it may be of interest, so here it goes. So far, in this preliminary stage, I've called it CarWorks. Its purpose is to aid in car making, but it's very different from Stressed (and of course, not nearly as developed) and they could be used together. In other words, when it's finished, you will be able to make a car either with Stressed alone or with CarWorks alone, but much more comfortably, with both together.

CarWorks puts emphasis on the interaction with 3D shape editing tools like Blender or Anim8or. It's a simple program that's capable of loading and saving car files as well as OBJ files. When interacting with OBJ files, it takes special measures to preserve the surface materials. This allows the car maker to use Blender, for instance, specifying the car materials in the program (Blender) so that, on export, the OBJ file will have everything it needs to be converted into a car shape. That's the idea, because in practice, so far, a few touches still need to be made.

Another idea I've implemented in CarWorks is auto-generation of information that normally has to be rebuilt from scratch. For example, it can automatically generate all desired paint jobs starting from the original model. You just specify the general hue for a paint job and all shades are automatically created. Same way, CarWorks can load a full-size car shape and scale it for car0, car1 and car2, so you can have a working car pretty quickly. This, of course, means the sacrifice of having a too high-poly shape for car1 and car2, but with modern computers, that shouldn't be a problem. CarWorks as of today, does not do anything with culling. It's all activated: you can see every polygon from every direction (although they're 1-sided by default). If there's a need of a change, it can be made later with a tool like Stressed.

I'll be posting it not far into the future.... but any opinions or suggestions are welcome!
EDIT:
The CarWorks+Dash Manager project can also be found at www.raceforkicks.com/projects/carworks.html

I'm looking at the competition archive and I want to point out a few things and ask others having participated in WSC myself...

Track 11, called "TIM" does not refer to Time Bandit, but to The Incredible Machine. 100% sure. Also, "MI" does not stand for Mission: Impossible, but for Monkey Island. I remember when that track was running. Not sure about "AR". Airborne Ranger doesn't ring a bell to me, but I really can't think of anything else. "SI" is definitely correct (Space Invaders).

I wanted to know whether the order in which the tracks are numbered is known to be the order in which the races were held. It does look like that at the beginning, but then there are some details. For example, Paleke made series of tracks with names that were related. There are tracks called after continents, tracks called after games, after Argentine pipsqueaks and after food and there are a few that don't follow any rules because they were made during a track design competition in 2006.

I'm pretty sure that track #29, called HOTROD, makes references to the old PC game called Street Rod, also known here as HotRod, but other tracks with names of games appear earlier in the list. Also, Sudoku appears last and probably belongs in the same group too.

The following are Argentine pipsqueak names: Recalde, Cassoulet, Cabalén, Gálvez, González (mistyped by Paleke), Traverso, Reutemann, DiPalma, Rayes and Fangio.
Tracks I know for a fact that participated in the track design contest were: 4AM, NACH1 and ACACIA AVENUE.
I don't remember the tracks TATETI and NAVAL, because they probably came up during my hiatus, but "Ta-te-ti" is how we call the game Tic-Tac-Toe in Argentina and "Naval" clearly refers to "Batalla Naval", that is, the "Battleship" game. So these are board games. Makes sense that they're together.

Anyway, that's the info I have!

Only one more race to go for season 2020, the year everybody hated, at least a little, ha, ha, still had some good things. Through the wind and thunder, the tournament site has been getting a lot better and the competition improving. I'm very thankful to KyLiE for his enormous contribution in the development of Race For Kicks as it is today and to Dreadnaut for being always there when I had PHP questions.

For this coming month, we are preparing something special. I can't say much. But I'll tell you about the changes that have been made so far:

• Race history has been greatly improved with the addition of historical chat dating from season 2018
• Old replays that had been superseded and deleted from the scoreboard can now be downloaded with the adition of the full-scoreboard (akin to ZakStunts' All Results)
• Replays in old races now display the date when they were posted, another feature that will be good for archiving
• The chat system finally accepts URLs that are translated to links, pipsqueak mentions and media. Thanks to Dreadnaut!
• In the Profile menu, there is an option to enable or disable 3rd-party item auto-embedding

And there are many more smaller details and some more things are pending, so next season, we'll have a very powerful system!  So stay tuned for the next race and feel free to visit and be curious and make suggestions about the look or features. Thank you all so much!

This isn't a super necessary feature, but it would be very easy to implement and would make it more comfortable for pipsqueaks to check on public RPLs that have already been posted and learn and improve.

My thinking is that, in ZakStunts, when you're looking at the scoreboard, you see somebody got a very good lap and you wonder how. Then, what you have to do is go to All Results and go down the list carefully to identify the replay that corresponds to that lap. This isn't hard to do, but if there were some form of "direct access" to download straight from the scoreboard (not as a replacement, but as an additional choice), it could be even better. I imagine it perhaps as making the "Driven" and/or "Sent" fields links. Same way, when a replay is publicly posted and appears in the Shoutbox, that could be clickable too.

Again, I realise this does not add anything new but comfort, but sometimes, when I want to check several replays, I look at the scoreboard and try to memorise the sent times and laps of each of them to later look them up in the All Results sections and I noticed that in most races, I don't check all final replays and I've been thinking that I should; otherwise, I'm actually missing part of the race.

Another thing that might help would be if we could download a ZIP with all scoreboard public replays so far at any point in the race, but that does sound like a more complicated thing, isn't it?

Anyway, just thoughts and ideas. Thank you!

I was asked some time ago, maybe a year or maybe two, about whether there would be another Race For Immortality event. When I held that one, I was thinking of it as a unique opportunity, so later on, seeing new pipsqueaks and some that had come back from hiatus, I lamented that some of them had not been at the time to participate. Right now, I see that activity is at a local high and I begin to consider if there's a way that could be done.

The problem with this, as I was thinking before, is that, if I replace the old records with new ones, then the old even would not have been a "race for immortality". On the other hand, old records could be mixed with the new ones by ponderating the track lengths, but this is kind of messy perhaps. There is also the fact that some people, in particular, AbuRaf70, have participated in the event and I like the fact that his record remains in Bliss.  Now, if everyone except him can participate this time, maybe we could keep his record ponderated, but update all others. There is another, simpler approach is this is to be done: simply make it so that Bliss displays two separate sets of records and that's it.

Anyway, I would like to know how many of you would like to have another Race For Immortality or lament not having been able to participate back then and if so, what would you propose as the best possible way of handling the issues I described?  We were a bunch back then, but now I feel we would be a bigger bunch!  What do you guys think?

[StuntsLegacyEngine]

StuntsLegacyEngine
This first post will serve to keep at hand the information we're handling and to keep track of the status of the project.

The source code of this early version of the engine can be found at:
https://notabug.org/xlucas/sle

For compiling, FreeBasic can be found here:
https://freebasic.net

For creating track objects, you can get Blender from:
https://www.blender.org/

Currently, the engine can render objects at arbitrary positions and one can move around, define new objects with any rotation and place them. It accepts OBJ files. Ground and sky are not being drawn. It's easy, but better keep it clean for now. Some bugs present.

Hey, guys. I'm trying to figure out how I should define the sizes of tiles for the new version of my 3D engine and I wanted to make it so that the differences with Stunts were not too big, so that one could, say, race a Stunts track eventually. But when I come to researching what sizes are, I find great inconsistences. Can somebody point me in the right direction?

Basically, there are two approaches as to how to determine tile size. One is what I see has been done in the past and appears in the wiki: you measure the time it takes for a car to race on a road, then measure the length of the road and read the car speed from what Stunts tells you. Take all precautions to maximise precision and calculate the propotion. Doing this, in the wiki, it is estimated that tile length is about 62.5 meters.

On the other hand, a calculation I was making before falling asleep last night, without the computer was this. Second approach. Use common sense and size proportions we know from experience. For instance, I know a car usually fits inside a rectangle of width 2m and length 6m. Typically (and I've just verified this online looking up real cars), an average car can be a little less than 2m wide and between 4 and 5 meters long, but some are less than 4m or slightly more than 6m. Now, we all know that, on a Stunts track, only two cars can fit side by side on a road, so the road must be about 4m wide. The countless times I've been shot up into the air playing Stunts, I've estimated the road width is between a third and a fourth of the tile length. In my renderer, I used a third and it looks pretty much like Stunts. This gives a tile length of 12 to 16 meters.

Of course, I realise that my calculations are not precise and that also, Stunts lies a lot, but I didn't expect the differences would be so huge!  What should I do?  I'm starting from scratch and I want to choose a good tile width that I will have to preserve for the rest of the project. I would also like it to be as metric as possible. What would you guys recommend?

EDIT: OK, now I've just done what I was supposed to do before posting: I went to Stunts and took an F3 view from high above with two parallel roads, my car and the opponent. It seems the road is wider than I thought. Three cars could fit comfortably, four very tightly. So let's say that's 6 to 8 meters wide. With a ruler, that's almost 3 cm wide on the screen, but from a road to the parallel one (both taking from the same point on the road) there are 14 cm. That gives me somewhat less or somewhat more than 30 meters. Still too small!

Hi!  I think we had a topic on something more or less related to this, but I can't find it. I don't even remember the main idea of that topic to guess the title and look it up and it's more or less old.

Anyway... I was wondering when, in Stunts community, the term "powergear" came up and how. Who coined it?  Because most of us already knew powergear before getting online, yet I expect all of us had different names for it or no name. In my case, I had a copy of Stunts first in 1993. We played a lot and a friend of mine whose surname was "Dantas" once pointed out that you could maintain a high speed with the Indy even going over grass as long as you kept "the foot down" after hitting the end of the last gear. I surely had had this experience before, but I hadn't put much attention to it until he mentioned it in detail. We even built a track especially to reach that speed, all based on banked roads (we hadn't seen that we could just use jumps and loops to do it faster). For this reason, we called it "Velocidad de Dantas" or "Dantas's speed". That must've been around 1994. When I first started participating in Stunts forum, probably around 2010, I noticed this was referred to as "powergear", so I switched to that.

How about you, guys?  And again... who coined the term?

I was thinking that, after going through something that's much more heard of than experienced, maybe some of you might be curious about what it is like and what one learns about it as it progresses, so probably sharing this is the most useful thing I can get from this illness.

For those of you who haven't heard about dengue fever, it's a viral disease that's spread via a mosquito called Aedes Aegypti, the same mosquito that spreads zika, chikunguña and most famously, yellow fever. None of these diseases is a walk in the park (although walking at night in the park here can be quite dangerous). Dengue is arguably the most widespread of all these. The mosquito gets no harm from carrying the virus and it can't pass directly from person to person. TV and radio constantly warn about dengue especially during the summer, but until very recently, I had never known any case personally.

The last years, we've seen tons of these mosquitoes every summer. In spite of our efforts, it's super hard to escape them. Aedes Aegypti (from Latin "aedes", meaning "annoying" and "aegypti" coming from Greek and meaning "from Egypt"), the annoying Egyptian mosquito defends its name very well. It is active at all times of the day, very stubborn. Comes in swarms sometimes and doesn't mind a clap from time to time. It's fearless. It's rather small so you may not even feel its bite, but it's a noisy flyer that makes it very difficult to sleep. When you look at it up close, you notice its like a "zebra", with its black and white stripes, not just on the legs, but also in different parts of the body. We've got used to ignore them because it's so hard to fight them. And that's a big problem.

So this year, suddenly, we start getting trucks that pass by fumigating and a campaign sending people to enter homes and fumigate inside too. I should have turned on my alarms by that time, but all this coronavirus issue kept me distracted. Later, I heard my cousin had caught dengue and with him, his parents, at the same home. Again, I should've strengthen my strategies by then. One day, my brother falls ill with a high fever. He has a tendency to get high fever so I didn't make the connection. A doctor came and misdiagnosed him first, thinking he had plaques. Later on, as he wasn't recovering, another doctor came and recommended that he were taken to the hospital to check for either coronavirus or dengue. And there you're: he was diagnosed with dengue and sent back home to recover. When he was starting to feel better, one night, I suddenly felt some discomfort, I took my thermometer and measured my temperature: 37,5. An hour later, 38,5. Half an hour later, bed and shivers.

I knew it was the same thing. The fever would stay up at around 39 to 39,5 all the time unless I had 1 g paracetamol which was the only thing I could take and wasn't super effective either. Other stuff, like ibuprofen or aspirin can't be taken because dengue drops your platelets to the ground and you can easily get internal hemorrhage (bleeding), which is what makes dengue dangerous. I learnt that every year, many people, most notably children, die from this crap. As the illness progresses, your body weakens and you start to experience nausea and may vomit, you lose your appetite, laying on bed becomes super uncomfortable and in some cases, quite painful. Later, you get a burning on your skin, especially on your hands and feet that's very itchy, your fingers and toes swell and your extremities get red and with a rash. After my third visit to the hospital to control my platelets, I was told I would have to stay in because doctors feared I could develop internal bleeding. That didn't get to happen, but my nose was completely filled with little wounds from any contact with my handkerchief to wipe it and then, those little wounds would be uncomfortable and I tended to touch my nose outside, which made things worse. I had nose bleeding once. I was laying on my back and started to feel blood running down my throat, so I sat up and all blood came out. It was very disgusting, but fortunately, the wound was just in my nose.

Back at home, I have been able to get over the fever and no longer have digestive discomfort, but I do sleep very badly and even today, I feel pretty dizzy. I am kind of angry at dengue because now my body is en-guarde for this dengue type. There are four. If you later on catch a different type, you're very likely to develop severe dengue.

In short, dengue is not like a flu or a digestive intoxication. This is a serious disease that we have to try hard to avoid. This kills people and mosquitoes look so small and so common that you don't get the feeling of how dangerous they are. Some illnesses in the world get a lot of attention, such as HIV/AIDS, even though they are much easier to control, since prevention is very straightforward. Dengue has been largely ignored for a long time and only now is being taken more seriously and it's super hard to do anything to prevent getting infected. Many people catch dengue during a trip. That must be terrible!  So beware, guys. If you have the mosquito over there, avoid it at all costs and if you ever travel (whenever this thing ends), check whether there's dengue in the place you're going to visit and be very careful. Take care!

[permanent competition]

I've been working for several days on the new, version 2 of Race for Kicks. I have to say it's a great experience. I keep on learning PHP and I'm getting much better at it. I can't believe how fast I manage to add features. It's like I've written an engine with about five to seven times the power of R4K v1.5 and it's only taken me a few days, but of course, there are bugs to fix and I have to beautify it a little bit (something I'm not great at).

As I had said in another forum, the top change will be that a permanent competition will be added and the basic race system will be working on top of it. I already have this working. Only needs some minor touches. For example, while permanent races will allow you to choose any set of rules from a list and any car, the R4K races should require one certain set of rules (normally, always R4K OWOOT) and one or more cars for that race (usually one, or the three of the DTM pack). Until now, the race system is working the same way as the permanent track system.

pipsqueaks will be able to post on the chatroom, but also to send private messages to other pipsqueaks. When something relevant happens, such as a replay or track uploaded by that pipsqueak being verified or rejected, the pipsqueak will receive an automatic PM. The chatroom is already working. The PM system, I still have to build, but it's a lot simpler than what I've already made.

I am very satisfied with the track image generator that now displays tracks with Bliss graphics without me having to create the image outside the website and upload them like I used to do on v1.5.

Races have profiles they can edit, including changing their passwords and including a picture that will be displayed in the chatroom, beside their messages. This is specially comfortable for myself, since administrators can use this section to edit permissions. In the past, I had to do this manually from CPanel.

As I mentioned, now some pipsqueaks will be able to post tracks. When you post a track, an administrator or moderator has to validate it and it becomes available for the permanent competition. Later on, a race manager (usually, the administrator) can create a race out of this track and give it rules and a deadline.

While I don't plan on using this feature much, it is possible in R4K v2 to have more than one race running at the same time. In the future, I might add the option to have a particular pipsqueak moderate a certain race and not others.

When posting a replay, now publicity and verification are separate, which means you can make your replay public even before it's been verified.

Anyway, I just wanted to share what I've got so far and if you want to know anything about it or have suggestions, I'd live to read them and see what I can implement. I also want to make sure that R4K is a cooperative as possible with ZakStunts and does not cause any conflict, so if a feature or the way it's implemented should be inconvenient for ZakStunts, please let me know and I'll make some touches. Thank you!

You probably know some variation of this one. I know it like this:

- Three friends are travelling in a car on a long road and there hasn't been anything on it for hundreds of kilometers. They're tired and want some rest. They finally spot a small hostel or something like it. They stop by, get off the car and talk to a man at the entrance.
- The man says he's not the owner, that he'll be coming in an hour or so. When the friends ask for rooms, the man says he only has one left. He doesn't know the exact rate, but if the friends want to share it, he'll charge them $30 and they can go and sleep. When they wake up, he'll let them know if there's a difference, but won't be much for sure. So the friends take the room and each pays $10, totalling $30.
- When the owner arrives, the three friends are still asleep. The owner's replacement tells him about the rented room and that he's charged $30 for it. The owner says "You've charged them too much. It's actually $25 for that room. When the kids wake up, give them $5 back". But the guy thinks "How will I give $5 to three people?  Better just keep $2 for myself and give $1 back to each of them". And thus he does.
- Now the problem is this: if each one had paid $10 and is now given $1 back, then each actually paid $9. But they are three, so this is 3 times $9, which makes $27... plus the $2 that the guy kept, that's $29. So where is the other dollar?

RECOMMENDATION: If you see that somebody's posted an answer. First think about the puzzle before reading the replies. When I've given this problem to several people together, they tend to quickly influence one another and that's less interesting, even if they're wrong!

AND NOTE: People tend to stop for a moment and then tell me something like "You're saying it wrong" and then, they proceed to explain everything again just like I said it from the beginning. I know it happened that way. My question is precisely, how come if it happened that way, then it turns out a dollar is missing when we make the count?

Have you guys ever dedicated some time to thinking about time travel?  I'm sure you have. Of course, some of us love science fiction, others are just nostalgic of their past, others may be fascinated with the idea of seeing something historic... or prehistoric, etc. There may be different reasons. But... if you were told there exists a method, that one has been discovered... before you were told anything else about it.... What would you imagine it to be like?   When you have thought about time travel, how did it work in your mind?  Think of this for a moment before reading on, or I'll be influencing you with what I'll say next... and I'll still want to know the old answer.

- The style in Back to the Future makes the movie fun, but it's easy to find lots of pieces that don't match. It's like the grandfather paradox. Easy to see it doesn't work. Although, maybe you still think something like this could be possible if we just make some touches to prevent those contradictions.

- The one way that sounds the simplest for me, in the sense that it's the one that leads to minimal contradiction is to imagine that you can only travel to the moments you've lived, in your own body of the time. In this sense, you could also travel to the future if it's one you already lived and you're currently in a "past" relative to it. This would be like a "savegame" system. But this doesn't allow to travel beyond your lifetime. And there's also the problem that you wouldn't be going to the real moment you lived, since your new knowledge would be different from the one at the time. It would be an "extremely similar configuration", but not the same.

- There's also the idea that you can be physically transported, like in the first case, but to a parallel configuration, so you can do whatever you want. It's a copy, it won't affect the original. The actual problem with this is how to define a position. How can you tell if you're "at the same place"?  For instance, if you say "the place where I'm standing right now, but ten years ago", you could mean the same spot on Earth back then, or the same distance and angle from the Sun or from any other object. If you go so much into the past that plate tectonics make a difference, even the continents would be somewhere else.

Anyway... there are tons of ideas that can come up. This topic might be very interesting or too boring, but I just wanted to drop something in case you'd like to post your ideas. Then again, how do you imagine time travel?  And which time travel film or book have you enjoyed the most, if any?

The last race of this year has started!  I have made a new track this time and I think it's decently good!  There will be no December race this month as a mourning for the loss of the Republic in my country, hence the name of the track for this month. I think next year, I will be able to retake R4K normally, although I may be busy at the beginning.

The race features the Porsche 962 and it's quite enjoyable. I recommend you guys try it. I know my statement above may be controversial for some. It is not my intention to bother anybody, but to express myself and my feelings through this difficult time that will surely change my form of living. Nevertheless, just as I feel free enough to speak, I will so read too.

I'm used to the fact that all thoughts on politics are controversial. "Let us not talk about politics, please" says somebody at the table in Mother's Day after a barbecue or maybe at the office during a break. Surprisingly, people are more willing to accept the taboo than each other's ideas... even if it's just about listening. Does this taboo do any good?  And would abandoning this taboo fix anything anyway?

Yesterday (and this is not fiction), the pizza shop where I buy empanadas once a week (this is a common thing in Argentina) blew up. Exactly as I'm saying it. The owner arrived in the afternoon to open his shop as every other day. Maybe somebody didn't realise and left the gas running. Who knows?  I was able to hear the explosion from a distance of about 15 blocks, where I was at the time. The shop was completely demolished. It was a miracle that only three people suffered minor injuries, yet the business owner was renting the place and his employees probably weren't correctly registered. Again, who knows?  I can't help imagining the land owner claiming on the business owner, the electrician also being beckoned at, the employee who left the gas on, etc. Of course, neighbours were all super curious and formed a crowd around the place and we're just going to pick another pizza shop next time. Nobody will help; everybody will demand. As usual. The spectacular event was broadcast on TV. Not the explosion itself, but the aftermath. People love watching these things and talking about them. Even myself, I admit!  Now all this... was an accident.

Pick a random country. Of course, for every scandal, there will be one that will fit best, but all in all, any will do as an approximation. Spectacular events... and often not accidental. Or are they?  After all, if the guy at the pizza shop had been putting attention, he could've, in theory, prevented the explosion by always checking on the gas. So... not putting attention, not realising of what can happen, not considering the risks, in a way, turns a crime into an accident. Then maybe what we, common people, do when we vote is nothing but random and maybe what the people we vote for do afterwards is just accidental. That is, these politicians are all so predictable we should be able to see it coming. But we're human. We're forgiven.

"Don't you see this guy is an imperialist?"... "And don't you see this other one want to be a caudillo?"... Each of us surely has cried one of these questions to somebody else and has heard the other and largely ignored it. We're faction-based individuals. We vote for our favourite colour, not for whatever is right. Anyway, we don't even know what that is. We hear no warning. We just want to win.

A few months ago, I came across a video on YouTube in which a guy explained "democracy" in a very logical way. I had never heard somebody say it so clearly. He was claiming that what most "democratic" countries today have is not real democracy. That it's just the republican system. That democracy is about the people directly governing whereas, in a republic, it's the representatives. I already knew this, but one kinds of forget it and tends to use the two words interchangeably most of the time. The point is, to this guy, and it makes sense to me, "democracy" existed in the very far past in a few city-states, but does not exist today because, well, it usually doesn't work... like at all!  You can't have people just all decide everything. So majority vote is a system that creates the "illusion" of a democracy.

Now I had thought that I had always supported democracy, but after this and now, in expectation of my country blowing up at any time just like the pizza shop did, I am considering that maybe, not even the majority vote is fair. Not even this illusion works. Because the majority is not the wisdom of the people. It's just that: a majority. The same majority that watches stupid shows on TV or listens to horrible music at discos or gets horribly drunk and then drives. Picture this: a five-member family; the parents and three children. If the majority were to make the decisions, the children outnumber the parents, so they would be the ones to decide what's to be done in the house. Would that be fair?  And if not, why not?  Because it's the parents that work and bring everything to the house?  Well, something rings a bell here... I've head this thing before, haven't you?  But no, I'm not trying to convince you guys of anything or to create flame wars and I'm not sticking to my faction. I'm only calling to reason, to logic... maybe this same thinking, or any other... but... reason.

Thinking differently is not bad at all. Not thinking... well, that's the problem. Just wanted to share this. Thank you