HEROES THAT SHINE

+++ Cloud Strife +++

Cloud Strife (クラウド・ストライフ, Kuraudo Sutoraifu?) is the protagonist of Squaresoft's (now known as Square Enix) role-playing game Final Fantasy VII and several of its sequels and spin-offs. His appearance is marked by spiky blonde hair, vivid blue eyes (a distinguishing feature of SOLDIER members and a sign of having been exposed to mako energy), dark purple or blue clothing, and his Buster Sword (a sword with a distinctive, oversized blade), which originally belonged to his friend Zack. At first, Cloud displays a cold and uncaring demeanor, but he gradually adapts to his role as a leader.

In Final Fantasy VII, Cloud is the central force around which the narrative is constructed. In the beginning, the player is introduced to him as a mercenary and former member of SOLDIER that carries a disinterested air about him. During a mission in which he worked with the anti-Shinra organization AVALANCHE, he encounters a young woman by the name of Aerith Gainsborough, who is wanted by the Turks for being the last member of an ancient tribe known as the Cetra. Later, the player is introduced to Sephiroth, a former SOLDIER 1st Class.

THE RETURN...

In Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children, it is revealed that in the two years following the conclusion of the game, Cloud lived with Tifa and Barret in the city of Edge, and following Barret's return to his hometown of Corel, he helped Tifa raise two children, Marlene, Barret's adopted daughter, and Denzel, an orphan and new character to the series. Cloud's new occupation is that of a delivery boy for the "Strife Delivery Service" that Tifa set up in her new tavern.Over time, Cloud began suffering symptoms of the disease Geostigma, keeping his left arm cloaked to hide the disfiguration it caused. Since the end of Final Fantasy VII, Cloud grew apart from the others out of the guilt for the deaths of Aerith and Zack, and a result, he moved out of the tavern and took refuge in the old church in which Aerith once raised flowers. Cloud's confusion in Final Fantasy VII has given way to severe grief, in which he cannot forgive himself for failing to save those he cared about.

+++ Kira Yamato +++

Kira Yamato is the first generation coordinator with natural parents. After he graduated from preparatory school on the moon, he enrolled in an industrial college on Heliopolis colony of the neutral nation of Aube to avoid the war. Kira is a little shy but he is a really kind-hearted young man. Kira has a robotic friend named Torii given to him by his best friend, Athrun Zala. Kira also pilots Strike Gundam. Kira it probably the most strongest protagonist. Kira is also really popular with females. He's a Coordinator who finds himself caught in the middle of the conflict where he must fight his best friend Athrun to protect the ones he loves on the side of Naturals. Obviously, he wants to end the conflict as soon as possible. He later becomes engaged to Lacus Clyne, who is the one who gave him the Freedom Gundam.

THE RETURN...

Now 18-years-old. He has had his place in the previous war of Jakin Due. He is now officially taking a break from war and dislikes it himself. He seems to be quiet most of the times and gets to live with Lacus Clyne. Together, they live a peaceful life and takes care of orphan children. He has an extremely cool outfit.He shows great care to everyone he loves and protects them when needed. He has a great spirit and can be described as a pacifist in the sense that he does not want to kill, and also dislikes war.The previous war has given Kira a great deal of experience. He strikes when he is on the defensive and only disarms enemy mobile suits while leaving the cockpit unharmed. He is capable of taking on a great deal of mobile suits and emerge unscathed showing how great he is now.

Two years have passed since the war of Jakin Due, once a member of the Earth Alliance, now officially goes on a path of non-violence with his companion, Lacus Clyne. They both lived in a seaside cabin at first with a daycare as well as Kira's "mother and father", but was later forced to move out so they re-located to a mansion. However, due to an unfortunate situation (Phase 13), he later realized that something had to be done, and later, together with Lacus, Murrue, Andrew, and other members of the Clyne Faction, they relaunched in the Archangel and since then, have been on a path towards stopping conflicts. He plays a key role in ending conflicts in his Freedom Gundam by intervening in conflicts between the Earth Alliance and ZAFT, whom Athrun Zala views it as a disruption. Personality:As a firm promoter of peace, he protects all people who he loves and cares about, especially Lacus Clyne. He is fairly quiet when he was living with Lacus in their seaside cabin and mansion, but once the Archangel re-launced and the Clyne Faction was back up and running, he started to talk more and gives decisive orders. He has a hatred inside for Mia Campbell due to the fact that she is an imposter of Lacus Clyne. His actions are often for the better and he strives to end all conflicts in support for peace.Skills:An extremely large jump in combat experience is shown in Kira Yamato as he pilots his ZGMF-X10A Freedom Gundam. His fighting skills are so advanced that he has been untouchable, and nothing has been able to stand in his way. As a supporter of peace, he makes sure never to cut through the cockpit of a mobile suit and only disables his enemies by decimating their weapons systems, and sometimes an arm, leg, or a booster pack. His speed is extremely fast as well enabling him to easily dodge attacks from multitudes of enemies and wiping out large squadrons of mobile suits. In addition, he is capable of easily intercepting missiles thanks to his HiMAT system that is able to lock on to all of them. His power is beyond compare and can defeat even the newest of all mobile suits. Where others struggle, he has no stress in handling and is capable of disabling three Gundams (Chaos, Gaia, Abyss) within seconds while emerging victorious without a single scratch. His combat skills are so impressive, that he never uses his shield to block beam and projectile attacks and only uses it to block saber attacks in which he is also capable of avoiding. He can entirely total Athrun's Savior Gundam in a few swift moves. All pilots fail to dodge one of Kira's advances and attacks when they are targeted. The sole pilot that was able to dodge Kira's beam saber, was Shinn Asuka in his Impulse Gundam when he was in Seed Mode. Despite that one time, Kira Yamato is without a doubt, the best pilot in all of Gundam Seed and Destiny.

Time Travel?

The urge to hug a departed loved one again or prevent atrocities are among the compelling reasons that keep the notion of time travel alive in the minds of many.

While the idea makes for great fiction, some scientists now say traveling to the past is impossible.There are a handful of scenarios that theorists have suggested for how one might travel to the past, said Brian Greene, author of the bestseller, “The Elegant Universe” and a physicist at Columbia University.“And almost all of them, if you look at them closely, brush up right at the edge of physics as we understand it. Most of us think that almost all of them can be ruled out.”

The fourth dimension

In physics, time is described as a dimension much like length, width, and height. When you travel from your house to the grocery store, you’re traveling through a direction in space, making headway in all the spatial dimensions—length, width and height. But you’re also traveling forward in time, the fourth dimension. “Space and time are tangled together in a sort of a four-dimensional fabric called space-time,” said Charles Liu, an astrophysicist with the City University of New York, College of Staten Island and co-author of the book “One Universe: At Home In The Cosmos.”Space-time, Liu explains, can be thought of as a piece of spandex with four dimensions. “When something that has mass—you and I, an object, a planet, or any star—sits in that piece of four-dimensional spandex, it causes it to create a dimple,” he said. “That dimple is a manifestation of space-time bending to accommodate this mass.”The bending of space-time causes objects to move on a curved path and that curvature of space is what we know as gravity. Mathematically one can go backwards or forwards in the three spatial dimensions. But time doesn’t share this multi-directional freedom. “In this four-dimensional space-time, you’re only able to move forward in time,” Liu told LiveScience.

Tunneling to the past

A handful of proposals exist for time travel. The most developed of these approaches involves a wormhole—a hypothetical tunnel connecting two regions of space-time. The regions bridged could be two completely different universes or two parts of one universe. Matter cantravel through either mouth of the wormhole to reach a destination on the other side.“Wormholes are the future, wormholes are the past,” said Michio Kaku, author of “Hyperspace” and “Parallel Worlds” and a physicist at the City University of New York. “But we have to be very careful. The gasoline necessary to energize a time machine is far beyond anything that we can assemble with today’s technology.” To punch a hole into the fabric of space-time, Kaku explained, would require the energy of a star or negative energy, an exotic entity with an energy of less than nothing. Greene, an expert on string theory—which views matter in a minimum of 10 dimensions and tries to bridge the gap between particle physics and nature's fundamental forces, questioned this scenario.“Many people who study the subject doubt that that approach has any chance of working,” Greene said in an interview . “But the basic idea if you’re very, very optimistic is that if you fiddle with the wormhole openings, you can make it not only a shortcut from a point in space to another point in space, but a shortcut from one moment in time to another moment in time.”

Cosmic strings

Another popular theory for potential time travelers involves something called cosmic strings—narrow tubes of energy stretched across the entire length of the ever-expanding universe. These skinny regions, leftover from the early cosmos, are predicted to contain huge amounts of mass and therefore could warp the space-time around them. Cosmic strings are either infinite or they’re in loops, with no ends, said J. Richard Gott, author of “Time Travel in Einstein's Universe” and an astrophysicist at Princeton University. “So they are either like spaghetti or SpaghettiO’s.”The approach of two such strings parallel to each other, said Gott, will bend space-time so vigorously and in such a particular configuration that might make time travel possible, in theory.“This is a project that a super civilization might attempt,” Gott told LiveScience. “It’s far beyond what we can do. We’re a civilization that’s not even controlling the energy resources of our planet.”

Impossible, for now

Mathematically, you can certainly say something is traveling to the past, Liu said. “But it is not possible for you and me to travel backward in time,” he said.However, some scientists believe that traveling to the past is, in fact, theoretically possible, though impractical. Maybe if there were a theory of everything, one could solve all of Einstein’s equations through a wormhole, and see whether time travel is really possible, Kaku said. “But that would require a technology far more advanced than anything we can muster," he said. "Don’t expect any young inventor to announce tomorrow in a press release that he or she has invented a time machine in their basement.”For now, the only definitive part of travel in the fourth dimension is that we’re stepping further into the future with each passing moment. So for those hoping to see Earth a million years from now, scientists have good news. “If you want to know what the Earth is like one million years from now, I’ll tell you how to do that,” said Greene, a consultant for “Déjà Vu,” a recent movie that dealt with time travel. “Build a spaceship. Go near the speed of light for a length of time—that I could calculate. Come back to Earth, and when you step out of your ship you will have aged perhaps one year while the Earth would have aged one million years. You would have traveled to Earth’s future.”

DEATH

Ideas about what constitutes death vary with different cultures and in different epochs. In Western societies, death has traditionally been seen as the departure of the soul from the body. In this tradition, the essence of being human is independent of physical properties. Because the soul has no corporeal manifestation, its departure cannot be seen or otherwise objectively determined; hence, in this tradition, the cessation of breathing has been taken as the sign of death.
In modern times, death has been thought to occur when the vital functions cease—breathing and circulation (as evidenced by the beating of the heart). This view has been challenged, however, as medical advances have made it possible to sustain respiration and cardiac functioning through mechanical means. Thus, more recently, the concept of brain death has gained acceptance. In this view, the irreversible loss of brain activity is the sign that death has occurred. A majority of the states in the United States had accepted brain death as an essential sign of death by the late 1980s.
Even the concept of brain death has been challenged in recent years, because a person can lose all capacity for higher mental functioning while lower-brain functions, such as spontaneous respiration, continue. For this reason, some authorities now argue that death should be considered the loss of the capacity for consciousness or social interaction. The sign of death, according to this view, is the absence of activity in the higher centers of the brain, principally the neocortex.
Society's conception of death is of more than academic interest. Rapidly advancing medical technology has raised moral questions and introduced new problems in defining death legally. Among the issues being debated are the following: Who shall decide the criteria for death—physicians, legislatures, or each person for him- or herself? Is advancement of the moment of death by cutting off artificial support morally and legally permissible? Do people have the right to demand that extraordinary measures be stopped so that they may die in peace? Can the next of kin or a legal guardian act for the comatose dying person under such circumstances? All these questions have acquired new urgency with the advent of human tissue transplantation. The need for organs must be weighed against the rights of the dying donor.
As a result of such questions, a number of groups have sought to establish an individual's “right to die,” particularly through the legal means of “living wills” in which an individual confers the right to withdrawal of life-sustaining treatment upon family members or legal figures. By 1991, 40 states in the United States had recognized the validity of some form of living-will arrangement, although complex questions remain to be settled in all these instances

I always wonder what's really like when I die..... will I see her again? What will the world look like when I die? What will be the reaction of the people when they know that I passed away?? But I dont want to find it out now!! Life's too good to waste it, I can't leave her alone... hehehe PROMISE I WONT LEAVE YOU!!

Doppelgangers

“Are they real? Or is it just our imagination?”

Do you have an exact double somewhere in the world? Can a person be in two places at once? There are many intriguing accounts throughout history of people who claim to have either encountered apparitions of themselves - their doppelgangers - or have experienced the phenomenon of bilocation, being in two separate locations at the very same time.

Doppelganger ( as what I have researched ) is German for "double walker" - a shadow self that is thought to accompany every person. Traditionally, it is said that only the owner of the doppelganger can see this phantom self, and that it can be a harbinger of death. Occasionally, however, a doppelganger can be seen by a person's friends or family, resulting in quite a bit of confusion. Causing confusion…. I think that may come in handy someday…^_^

For example, a person can either spontaneously or willingly project his or her double, known as a "wraith," to a remote location. This double is indistinguishable from the real person and can interact with others just as the real person would.

One of the most fascinating reports of a doppelganger comes from American writer Robert Dale Owen who was told the story by Julie von Güldenstubbe, the second daughter of the Baron von Güldenstubbe. In 1845, when von Güldenstubbe was 13, she attended Pensionat von Neuwelcke, an exclusive girl's school near Wolmar in what is now Latvia. One of her teachers was a 32-year-old French woman named Emilie Sagée. And although the school's administration was quite pleased with Sagée's performance, she soon became the object of rumor and odd speculation. Sagée, it seemed, had a double that would appear and disappear in full view of the students.

In the middle of class one day, while Sagée was writing on the blackboard, her exact double appeared beside her. The doppelganger precisely copied the teacher's every move as she wrote, except that it did not hold any chalk. The event was witnessed by 13 students in the classroom. A similar incident was reported at dinner one evening when Sagée's doppelganger was seen standing behind her, mimicking the movements of her eating, although it held no utensils.

The doppelganger did not always echo her movements, however. On several occasions, Sagée would be seen in one part of the school when it was known that she was in another at that time. The most astonishing instance of this took place in full view of the entire student body of 42 students on a summer day in 1846. The girls were all assembled in the school hall for their sewing and embroidery lessons. As they sat at the long tables working, they could clearly see Sagée in the school's garden gathering flowers. Another teacher was supervising the children. When this teacher left the room to talk to the headmistress, Sagée's doppelganger appeared in her chair - while the real Sagée could still be seen in the garden. The students noted that Sagée's movements in the garden looked tired while the doppelganger sat motionless. Two brave girls approached the phantom and tried to touch it, but felt an odd resistance in the air surrounding it. One girl actually stepped between the teacher's chair and the table, passing right through the apparition, which remained motionless. It then slowly vanished.

Sagée claimed never to have seen the doppelganger herself, but said that whenever it was said to appear, she felt drained and fatigued. Her physical color even seemed to pale at those times.

Hmmm… well I also have one experience about Doppelgangers. But I’m still not sure if it was real. Well it was noon time, all of my friends are in the H.E. room. I went back to our room to get my things and on my way, I saw my friend rushing towards me, he was very recognizable he has dark skin and has a curly hair. He ran past me and hurriedly went to the stairs. When I returned to the H.E. room, I was confused when I saw my friend, the one which I saw running towards the stairs, was sleeping in the table. I asked my classmates inside the room if he went out, but they said he didn’t. But until now I’m still not convinced that it was his “Doppelganger” I saw but still… I really want to see one; I think it would be a spine-tingling experience that I won’t forget.

Here are some famous Doppelgangers throughout the ages that I have picked up from the net:


=Guy de Maupassant, the French novelist and short story writer, claimed to have been haunted by his doppelganger near the end of his life. On one occasion, he said, this double entered his room, took a seat opposite him and began to dictate what de Maupassant was writing. He wrote about this experience in his short story "Lui."

=John Donne, the 16th century English poet whose work often touched on the metaphysical, was visited by a doppelganger while he was in Paris - not his, but his wife's. She appeared to him holding a newborn baby. Donne's wife was pregnant at the time, but the apparition was a portent of great sadness. At the same moment that the doppelganger appeared, his wife had given birth to a stillborn child.


=Percy Bysshe Shelley, still considered one of the greatest poets of the English language, encountered his doppelganger in Italy. The phantom silently pointed toward the Mediterranean Sea. Not long after, and shortly before his 30th birthday in 1822, Shelley died in a sailing accident - drowned in the Mediterranean Sea.

=Queen Elizabeth I of England was shocked to see her doppelganger laid out on her bed. The queen died shortly thereafter.


=In a case that suggests that doppelgangers might have something to do with time or dimensional shifts, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the 18th century German poet, confronted his doppelganger while riding on the road to Drusenheim. Riding toward him was his exact double, but wearing a gray suit trimmed in gold. Eight years later, von Goethe was again traveling on the same road, but in the opposite direction. He then realized he was wearing the very gray suit trimmed in gold that he had seen on his double eight years earlier! Had von Goethe seen his future self?

So, it still remains a mystery, some people believe it, some don't.......

Let's Play Audition!!

Everyone is talking about the new MMOG to hit this side of the virtual dance floor. Audition: Online Dance Battle is the latest rhythm game from IP e-Games. In the tradition of classics like O2Jam, Audition is indeed another jam-packed revolution in Philippine online gaming.

So what’s the hype to Audition? It is fairly simple: by perfecting the arrow combination displayed onscreen, you can make your online character execute incredible dance maneuvers. But what’s really immersive about this game is the multiplayer experience. Here, players compete as to who has the quickest hands, with perfecting button coordination and timing as key to make their online avatars dance their way to victory. Added by high-quality music and cool in-game animations, expect only the best in gaming experience. Indeed the sight of four or five characters dancing in perfect unison, or a single player standing out from the rest is thrilling in itself.

What's more, you can accentuate your character with Den, the in-game currency. By going to the shopping mall, you can further wow your opponents with your fashoin bling!!

Audition has a quite massive following all over Asia. The game has local versions in several countries and has an international version as well. That's one of the main resaons why all the people are doing it now, even the oldies!! Filipinos have always been known to be great music lovers and you WILL love this casual party game. Its high time to show the world what Pinoys can do in the virtual dance floor.

So that's the lastest online game that took the country by storm. The easy part is all you have to do is to follow the arrow keys and hitting the spacebar. And the hard part is you have to do all of it on the given time, which depends on the type of beat the song has ( ex. 105 Bpm, 140 Bpm ), Bpm stands for Beats per Minute. If you think you still can't compete with the big leagues, pick and song which has a slow beat, but if you think you got the handles, the skill and has the finger power try selecting a fast beat and I'm sure after the song your finger will be shaking.

Of course, perfect the arrow combination to watch your character execute the most complex dance steps. Different styles cater for single and team gaming: from the pretty easy Freestyle category to the master’s only Expert Choreography. The game boasts a huge roster of international dance hits that's sure top please, every eager dancer and music lover ( That's true SHE even thinks that its catchy and cute... ). Beat it hip-hop, dance or techno, newbie or pro, there's a perfect tune for everyone ( But most new players usually like the Audition Cannon Groove because of its music and great tempo ).

So I guess IF SOME PEOPLE are foolish enough to read this I guess that you don't understand a thing that I have posted in here right? Me too!! But really, if you have time, maybe this summer you can try this and who knows you might enjoy it and get hooked to it. So that's it my first entry...... yehey!! ... at last!! Hope you like it because I don't!! ^_^