My-Log...

Home equity loan

ruddnakstp — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 00:45:46 +0000

Is A Home Equity Loan Right For You?

by William G. Wright

Home equity loan refers to the loan which is granted on the basis of the equity involved in home, i.e. taking loan using the residential asset of the individual as collateral. Home equity loan is the highest demanded loan, because of its various salient features, which make it more and more accessible and affordable.

While taking a home equity loan you are actually borrowing the worth of your house. If the house is completely owned by you, then the term used for home equity loan is “mortgage”, otherwise if your house is not fully paid off but has equity, it is called a “second mortgage”. From now on we will use one term for both to facilitate better understanding. We will call them Home Equity Loans.

Also equity home loans are really beneficial and affordable since the interest that accrues, actually accrues on the amount that the borrower has drawn till that time, or while repayment of the loan, the borrower needs to pay the interest only on the amount that is yet to be repaid. All these enticing factors are drawing more and more number of individuals, looking for a loan that involves easy repayment terms.

There is no bar on how you can use the home equity loan. You can use it for any purposes as it suits you. A home equity loan is usually a one-time fixed interest rate loan, which is paid out at one go. The rates of interest or the cost of the loan will depend on options you choose viz. the term of the loan and the amount; of course another important factor has always been your credit rating. The longer the term of the loan, the more you pay out as interest, also if the amount is more, the more interest you pay. As always with any liabilities one undertakes certain words of caution are advised. Check all your options thoroughly before making a decision. Choose the amount carefully and take only what you need and specify the term which you think would be comfortable for you to repay in. No point accumulating liabilities in exchange for spending on pleasures or acquiring unnecessary assets. Home equity loans are easily accessible to people with poor or bad credit rating since the lender is taking a lesser risk as the loan is secured against their home.

A Home Equity Loan usually means that you get the best interest rates on the loan, i.e. you get the loan at a lesser cost compared to other loans because of assured security, but one should always remember that the house is at risk lest you fail to repay the Home Equity Loan.

BG 15 – GTA IV : Exploring the Mundane

ruddnakstp — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 15:29:05 +0000

Futurismic have my fifteenth Blasphemous Geometries column.
It is not only the first of the columns to appear under the new direction the column has taken, it is also my first piece of video game criticism. I had been looking forward to writing this piece for a little while and when I finally got round to writing it, I was surprised at how pleasant and natural an experience it was to play a game and think about it critically. The more I played the more aware I became of where Grand Theft Auto IV fits into the history of game design.
Having filed the column it occured to me that I had left out one very obvious example of the mundane in video games… Shenmue.

Shenmue was something of a commercial failure at the time of its release on Dreamcast and it is now remembered more as a cult game or a curiosity than a design mile-stone. I think that part of Shenmue’s problem was in its failure to deal with what I call the rubber band of realism. Far from being rooted in the real world, Shenmue was a genre piece. To be precise, it was a Wuxia melodrama : Kung-fu villain kills boy’s father, boy investigates father’s death while learning kung-fu along the way, boy confronts villain and defeats him because of the training his father once gave him. It’s a plot line that pops up all over the place. A lot of the game-play is about this piece of aesthetic framing; you learn your various techniques and your ability to defeat the game is ultimately dependent upon your skill at kung-fu. However, the designer poorly managed the mundane elemtns of the plot, throwing them into the genre narrative in a jarring manner. You wanted to go and kill the guy who murdered your father – what you got was waiting for buses, part-time jobs and hour upon hour of inane conversation.
Had the game’s pacing been better handled then the mundane elements of the game would have supported the themes of attempting to reconcile a desire to be a hero with the demands of 20th Century living. Instead the mundane elements felt like dull and pointless speed bumps in between the more interesting bits. The fact that you could collect miniatures seemed to acknowledge the fact that the mundane elements of the game were not in the least bit fun or thematically appropriate.

UPDATE : I was just informed that the Futurismic piece was linked to by Bruce Sterling over at his Wired magazine Beyond the Beyond blog. The title of the post? “The Best Videogame Review I’ve Ever Seen”. That’s from Bruce Sterling. Author of Schismatrix, co-author of The Difference Engine and editor of the Mirrorshades anthology. Vincent Omniaveritas himself. I am incredibly honoured and really quite speechless. Thank you Bruce

20th Century Boys, film criticism, review

ruddnakstp — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 05:41:22 +0000

Watching this film put me in mind of archeology or anthropology. It is based upon a series of manga which, while hugely successful in Japan, have yet to acquire much of a cult status in the West. Because of the popularity of the source material, the film and everyone involved in t seem to be making a real effort to produce a film as close to the source material as possible. So in effect, the film is this huge homage to this pop cultural deity that I have never heard of. It’s like some weird and incomprehensible religion; to those within the sphere of influence of the manga, clearly the film is a big deal. To the rest of us all of the slavish respect seems irrational and incomprehensible. Which is probably a good state to be in when it comes to popular culture.


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