I like reality the way it is

Yay for sceptic webcomics!

Anyone who knows my PC habits can tell that I am a sucker for various simulation games, be it rail network simulation like “Sid Meier’s Railroads!”, city simulation like “Sim City”, racing simulation like “F1 Challenge ‘99-’02″, “rFactor”, “NASCAR Racing 2003″ or anything else that aims to simulate things as close to reality as possible. Given that I also happen to be very interested in space things, it’s not difficult to predict what I will say next.

“Orbiter” is the best game in the world, period. It’s free, it has awesome graphics, it’s as realistic as possible (as long as you consider Newtonian mechanics realistic, but there aren’t much objects, flying at near speed of light, so it’s not a problem). What else would you want? There are many plug-ins for the Orbiter as well, allowing you to add multiple new spaceships, new objects of Solar system (only the main objects are represented in the basic game, and Pluto is not one of them) and even new fictional star systems.

Well, OK, “Orbiter” is not the best game in the world yet. It is kind of aimless, because you’re given a ship and you can do absolutely anything you want. Well, not ACTUALLY anything, because you can’t crash it anywhere - either it will pass through an object or simply bounce off. Hurray for ethereal space stations and rubber planets! Anyway, I still find it a very entertaining way to waste my time. The learning curve is kind of steep at first, because you have to learn a lot of names and signs (“periapsis altitude”, anyone?), but the first time you enter the orbit is awesome. Honestly, I haven’t yet achieved anything more, but I’m willing to try. The docking with ISS or travelling to Moon (and fictional Brighton Beach base in it) are great challenges, and travelling to Mars is, of course, even more so).

If only there were some scripted missions in the game and some collisions and explosions, that would be the Ultimate Computer Gaming Grail for me. Maybe some day they will hear my plead…

Everything happened around 3 AM local time, as I was reading Dungeons & Dragons player’s manual (out of pure curiosity, what the hell is the game about and how it works). Suddenly I realised that my usually very calm and lazy cat is too active for this time of night. Of course, I didn’t hear a single thing over my headphones, so I just thought my cat wants to have some fun. After a while I caught a glimpse out of the corner of my eye, that my cat has something in here mouth… something quite a bit bigger than her usual prey (flies).

15 seconds and a quick fight with a cat later I had a bat in my hands. I always imagined that they are quite bigger (well, there are some quite huge species, like a flying fox with a wingspan of 5 feet), but actually there isn’t much of flesh in there at all, just skin and bones. It was mighty scared as well, so it didn’t even try to escape from me.

“What should I do?”, I thought then. I mean, parents wouldn’t be too happy, if I woke them up at 3 AM. They aren’t even too happy that I am not sleeping at 3 AM myself. And then a bright idea struck me - put the thing behind refridgerator. I mean, if the thing is as helpless as it looks like, it won’t go too far away, and it’s warm and cozy there! So there it went.

So now that everyone is up, we moved the fridge, got out the bat and put it properly in the box. It still seems to be very scared, because he doesn’t try to escape from me. However, that thing is mighty quick, I can give you that, because when it did try escape from my cat, it almost succeeded. The bad news is he is unable to fly. There doesn’t seem to be any bone fractures or broken bones in the wings, but the critter refuses to fly, and when tried to do that once, crash-landed after two seconds.