On Forgiveness..

I have reached a milestone in my work on my ethical system, it can be summarized in one line, which however exist in two versions: theological and philosophically.
Personally I believe that the theological one better captures the emotional significance of the statement:
"God forgives those who cannot forgive themselves."
and the secular one:
"Only those who cannot forgive themselves, deserves forgiveness."

To elaborate.. What I mean by this is that the sufficient and necessary criteria for forgiveness is the inability to forgive oneself. By accepting that our actions and their consequences are permanent and that we cannot erase them, we need to compensate our mistakes by helping others in order to justify our moral well being.

People can get lost in feelings of worthlessness when brooding over how their actions through carelessness or ignorance have created suffering for others. It is here that the above statements are useful:
Because they affirm worth, to those that also need it.

On General Truths...

"All generalizations are false, including this one" / Mark Twain

I have paraphrased this into my own version which highlights what I believe is the key reason for the genious of the quote:
"There are no general Truths, but some are useful"

Obviously this quote is not a general truth (by its own definition), but even though it isn't, it is useful (implied by its own definition). This means that even if truth cannot be completely established, we can believe things are if it is useful and refer to this statement for justification.

It's not a general proof, but then again it doesn't need to be.

Subjective but not Arbitrary

Just because there are different perspectives, with no way to determine the optimal, does not mean that all possible perspectives are equal and that perspective is arbitrary.

Practical example:
The exact form of education in schools. Pupils have different ways to learn most effectively and the teachers have limited resources to vary their teaching. It may very well be that using any particular form of learning is inefficient for most pupils.

It is a mistake to believe that because of this: Teching methods are arbitrary.
Clearly it is a bad idea to (for example) punish and reward pupils solely by random chance, as this encourages no sort of behaviour and leaves all pupils in a state of passive feeblemindedness.

While a cynic might argue that this might be the objective of a given sort of society; this would hardly count as anything like a school as we know it.

NS2 NoCom project halt

Sometimes you have to face facts, and that is that I don't have sufficient time to pour into this project.

Programming? Sure. But playtesting and getting involved in NS2 classic to get an understanding of the core mechanics works? No, sorry.

Recap: a bit over 8 years ago I started playing natural selection and I loved it. Since then I have started up a family, went through 6 years of study at a university, learned programming and software engineering and developed myself in uncountable other ways.

My values has switched and with what time I have for recreation, I value other things higher than learning and getting into a multiplayer community.

I love games, but in the future I will most likely only focus on singleplayer experiences.


I will use whatever knowledge i gained through this project in my professional career, along with my newfound wisdom of when to quit. I will try to contribute some of my findings to the NS2 modding community, most likely as a small mod that others can use, but then I will most likely abandon NS2 from a players point of view.