Saturday, May 29, 2010

Entitlement (TEST RUN NOTHING TO SEE HERE)

You know the firefox spell checker doesn't work in titles. So I am pretty sure I spelled entitlement wrong. Wait...wow no I didn't. What an ungainly word. Oh well so for once my blog title has something to do with something that is actually going to happen within this blog entry. That is so strange that I am not even sure if I should proceed or talk about something like jeans. Well I have nothing to say about jeans so to bad. Though I was taking stock and I actually have far more blog posts inside my head than I have time to write all of these so I guess I should stop dillydallying around and actually get started.

Entitlement. Still an ungainly looking word. It doesn't roll off the tongue well and it isn't a word you hear very often anymore, yet there it sits like a giant elephant in the room that everyone feels they shouldn't have to pay atension to because someone else should have to deal with it. This started as a responce to an unusually well written article discussing 5 reasons why it still isn't cool to be a gamer. I'll be linking to that article in a bit. Because it fits into what I have to say in a bit. But for now lets put it aside for a bit. Which I suppose means it is thesis time.

Entitlement is a ubiquitous force in america that eats away at our fundamental ability to live life and enjoy the things that are happening around them. Through looking at entitlement issues we can start to uncover all sorts of things. The thing I want to focus on is labor, theft, and "hazing rituals".

On one of my more thoughtful veturnes I've made into defending Marxism I explained to someone that the main attitude that needs to be killed within both the burgeosie and the proletariate is the idea that "I provide. Therefore I am owed...". It is a simple idea that is insidiously simple. It is also an idea that is notoriously difficult to argue with. Lets go back to a nice familar example, the textile factory. The factory owner provides the workspace, the textiles, the lighting, and all the other essential means through which wealth is allowed to be generated. The workers are the things that allow the wealth to be generated. Now in this situation the workers don't need to be very skilled. THe diffrence between a skilled worker and an unskilled worker is negliable enough so that it is simply easier to replace workers than provide inscentives to keep the workers you have. Okay then! Because of all of this the factory owner feels that he is OWED a bigger share of the pie than the workers. After all without the factory the workers wouldn't be working there, they would still be in the fields or somewhere else. The factory worker is the one who put up all the money ahead of time to provide this factory, and believe me that is no small amount of money. He also is responciple for keeping everything running and for keeping the raw materials in stock, and moving the raw materials out.

Hrm. Here we are in the territory of an economic system. So we aren't going to go to much in depth here with how the whole textile thing works. What is important is that the factory worker puts forths a signifigant amount of money, not labor, but money, in the exchange for more money. That is what investment in. Oh good I found my in road. See when a bank gives you a loan or someone makes an investment it is never about getting back the same amount of money you put in. That is ludicris. In a way they have a point. However, as a side effect this basic ecconomical concept forms the basis of a thought process that extends downwards through history and many facets of society. It isn't so much that the concept itself is bad, but rather it is the idea of how much you are able to profit from an invidual capital investment. THAT is where the problem comes in. As it stood then with the textile factory, and still stands today the amount of money you can make from putting forth an investment is uncapped. Stratigicly, you put forth as little money as possible and thus you are able to reap profits off of other people's labor that much faster. This is how we get things like skimping on lights, not having enough windows, not bothering with fire exits, and the other generally horrible things that happened during the industrial revolution.

This changed when miners realized they have dynamite and they didn't have to take their bosses shit anymore.

Flash foward a few years and you have a new sort of entitlement. It is the entitlement that is spoken of int the cracked article and since you've read this far you get a link now.

http://www.cracked.com/article_18571_5-reasons-its-still-not-cool-to-admit-youre-gamer.html

NO you need to copy and paste it I am not using your fancy h tee mee ell or things like that. BAH.

I think this is the first time I have ever read an anti piracy message that I compleatly agree with. Holy good god what the hell is wrong with people. No I am not telling you go read the article it is actually good even if you don't play video games.

Now we have to work backwards to see how we get from the mustash twirling factory owner who locks his employees in the factory causing sever hunderd of them to burn to death one day when it caught fire, to the scramble to get more stuff for less because it is owed to us. Part of it one thing is a symptom of the other. Thanks to those who have come before, Marx, and feminism, the work place has become a lot more hostile to its workers. We can now speak out against our bosses and not get fired. Hell in some situations it is so difficult for employers to fire someone that the process could take the better part of 6 months. Also with time and the general flow of ideas that idea that people using money to make more money off of what we do is one that is becoming far more common and it is starting to really...

You know what this second part is a lot harder than I thought it would be. It isn't that I am on the wrong track. Part of it is because I am hungry. Part of it is because I am trying to avoid the human nature argument. What I think I might do is take the idea of vengence/revenge and apply it to this. Because there are greedy corporations, or because our job is shitty we are allowed to steal from it. Fuck them anyway right? They are making money hand over fist and blah blah blah. I also want to touch on the idea of not having to do certain chores, not having to do certain jobs, or certain tasks at certain jobs. These all tie back to the idea that we want to be able to profit off of our labor too, not most of it going to just the bloke who put up the money. But that is to much of an anachist/marxist argument for my taste. I want this to be more about how we live our lives and interact with work. Maybe I should skip the first part and focus more on the problems of entitlement and where it comes from. The clearest example of this would be the bank bonuses that went out right after they crashed our economy.

That is actually an interesting point when you compare it to what I said earlier. Factory workers were discarded when prooved troublesome. Bankers crash the economy but get a bonus because we don't have enough bankers.

If it seems like I am dancing around materialism it is because I am. Saying we should just be less materialistic is a purely unelegant solution to this situation. Also fuck that, especially when computers are involved. If we are willing to cut out the hassle of physical media then we shouldn't have to pay even half of a printed version. Also if we are going to put up with the bullshit of a capitalistic society we should be able to buy our goods and services quickly and effenciently. Every marvel at how amazingly ineffecient going shopping actually is? See there is it is right there (yeah totally not immune to the effects which might be another problem). I have a wad of money I am willing to hand it over to a store in exchange for an Amilie dvd and 20 stores later none of them have it. There is always internet shopping but why on earth would I do that when I could just pirate it using the same internet. Or rather I pay for the internet, I am certainly not going to use it to spend more money, I am going to use it to help me save money.

I dunno. But I am going to let this one sit and stew for a minute or three. It is one of those things that I will gather up my horses and try it again.m TEST RUN LADIES AND GENTLE MEN NOTHING TO SEE HERE.

Wednesday, May 26, 2010

Wow knees don't normally make that sound

Oh well nothing lasts forever. So yeah! Last night I was totally going to write this blog post. I had my turn signal on and I was in that lane about to hit up Books-A-Million, its wifi, and spend a large portion of my evening writing my thoughts down into this blog. It would be mostly focused around complaining about work. I try very VERY hard not to complain about work but good god damn. I in the past ten days I have had one day off, 7 of those days we were short, and four of those days I has stuck with an idiot. You know what though, I am clever and I have better things to write about, and it wasn't all bad. I got to watch one of my bosses hit the floor with a hammer. I know the reasoning behind why he was hitting the floor with a hammer but I know pretty much for a fact that all that reasoning happened for the plain and simple fact that he just wanted to hit the damn floor with a hammer. Who can blame him? I can but I won't because we wanted to hit the floor with a hammer too :(. So off we go, I have relaxed, decompressed, played some video games, and now I am back again full of both vim and vigor. I like both of these things.

Tonight I really need to get my malifaux figgures put together and undercoated the amount of time I spend looking at them and not doing it is kind of intense. I really want to play that game. I is neat on a level that I don't encounter very often and it is really taking off in my local area so I really want to get on it before the internet complainers get ahold of it and crush the game into nothingness. What I really like about it is that it includes enough diffrent mechanics that even vetren wargamers are unable to immeadiatly pick it up. To me this is a selling point. To the people who are used to warhammer 40k and just shoving spacemariens around the table like assholes? Well the game doesn't work for them.

I gotta say though the one thing I don't like about it is the I go, you go, mechanic. The way my tactical brain works is that most of my figgures all go at the same time. So like in hero clix I can pick up to 3-4 of my figgures and use them together, and I do some pretty amazing things. I also am a wiz at perpetrating bad ideas but that is neither here nor there. The I go, you go thing is part of the reason why my brain won't wrap around chess. It also won't wrap around chess for a number of other reasons but the I go you go thing is just not something that works out for me. Funny that. So I am looking foward to getting into Malifaux to help get over my whole brain deficency. Also my army consists of dead hookers. DEAD HOOKERS! You have any idea how exciting dead hookers are? *Hugs*

I might be to excited about dead hookers. I am so sad about that. That I live in a world where it is possible to be to excited about dead hookers. I suppose I should specify that they are zombie hookers and not just normal dead hookers. CCause normal dead hookers just aint cool. Once I get them assmbled, painted, and fleshed out a bit I can start on a second force. Then I can make the anime club folks play. I use the phrase make with love.

Now for bad news. I am dangerously concerned with the fact that I might not be able to swing mutants and masterminds because of schedualing. Part of the problem is that we don't have a place to play other than the university. While I am a fan of public gaming I don't think Mutants and Mastermind would work to well, I plan on being loud and people don't usually let you explain that you were shouting "hail hitler" because you were playing an evil dolphin. Yeah though so I get off work to late and they go to bed to early for us to play at the school and when I do have a friday off which is next friday I am doing something and it is going to be awesome. It isn't roleplaying though so we will be starting a full month past when I wanted to start playing. I have concerns. I am also specifically bad at figguring out this sort of stuff. Like getting people organized and on task is just something that I not good at. It is something that I can be pretend good at, but now that we are all running around the real world finding a place to play in pensacola that doesn't close at 10pm is really tuff. My place is to small and everyone else is still parent bound. If there was ever a time where I miss Brian it is now. Also I think he would really of enjoyed the game and I think he and joel would enjoy each other's prescense.

Group building aside, I am actually signifigantly upset by this. I am also having a hard time just getting everyone together to discuss things. So I got to actually do this tomarrow. This is a weird blog post but there have been times where I have spent more time strangling people to so I can make sure that at least their bodies are prescent at the game than actually playing the game. So I am at this weird impass. I should be stating out mooks, sub villians, and whipping up some mounted combat rules so I can fuck with corey. Fuck with him hard. Rawr but at the same time? There are other things I would rather be writing like projects, other role playing games, my own roleplaying games. Ultimalty I don't want to do a bunch of grunt work with no pay off. I guess I'll figure it out for the most part. I hope, otherwise there will be sadness afoot because I am still really excited.

Oh well. I am thinking that this blog post is finnished, air vol 3 is out, scalped vol 6 is somewhere Torpedo is around somewhere, and I am thinking that not buying Jonah Hex has been a grave error on my part.

Also hungry.

Saturday, May 22, 2010

Nearing 200

I am really bad with mile stones, like I don't even know when my girlfriend and I started dating. To be fair she doesn't either. I am thinking of just declaring it to be in August somewhere. Not enough happens in August. Yeah! Okay then so that just happened. In other news, when I first started this blog many moons ago I came up with the idea of a rotating blog title. Every month or maybe every other month I would overhaul the identiy of the blog that way I would keep it ever shifting and beautiful. I did it a couple of times I think. Then it happened, I read the quote, "Smells like death, blondes, and victory. It was spoken by Norman Osborn who was in the process of becoming the green goblin once again. I grabbed it for my blog title and there it was, big giant and loving. Like a hug from nuclear arms. When it came time to change it I just couldn't do it. It slithered into my blog and stayed there like a giant cuddly title of joy. Today I realized that "studying orchids with bulldozers" would make for an awesome title. But there it is, "Smells like death, blondes, and victory". Is the bulldozer thing better? I can't decide and ultimatly the current blog title has grown to mean something. So there it will continue to sit. Menecing you with its olfactory suggestion.

I was going to do more on the woman house wife thing, but upon thinking about it I think I am done with it. I did some good writting on it, I got some great thinking done, and I think it is time to move on to greener pastures. I was going to set up this huge dichotomy between an extreme version of a woman who gets everything done for her, and an extreme version of a man who is willing to do anything for everyone and then work through it to the point where they end up switching places showing that this really is not a gender issue but more of a "way we treat people" issue. It just happens to be more pronounced in women because of the way they are competed over during their latter formative years which end roughly at 23ish.

So there that's that. That line of thinking really is a step backwards. Of course I think I am mostly preaching to the choir here which is sad. However, to be perfectly honest I have no idea where I would go to find people who disagree with me, church maybe? I don't mean to dig at christians here but it seems like the most obvious place to go.

Now I will dig at them. Newsmax is still the best publication ever and I really want to steal a copy of it. There was also an article about how christianity is under siege and that it is the fault of the liberal media conspiracy or something like that. Of course Fox isn't really on their side either so who really knows what is going on. What I do know is this. Those assholes who blow up abortion clinics, protest gay funerals, or just stand on street corners displacing the homeless so they can shout about how we are going to hell are NEVER EVER publicly criticised by any of the christian leadership. No one says anything about or to these people. So yeah christians you get shit on because you can't step up and admit that crazy people are crazy. Deal.

Okay well that was more miscellany than I intended. Yeah no seriously I had a topic planned for this when I sat down for lunch bit I decicded that talking to Angel was more important than anything I had to say here. I like Angel she is neat. No I wanted to talk about GMing.

I love game mastering. I really do. When I realize that I am on hour 5, and that I am keeping 4-6 people captivated through the scenes and situations I've created it is increadbly gratifiying. This is especially true when I go in, have my best laid plans bashed into... (I was going to make a baby seal joke but people actually do that shit and I found it to be in poor taste) small broken stuff and I have been making up stuff as I go along without anyone really realizing that I have been doing it. Or when the players think they are being clever and they read my session notes while I am in the bathroom only to discover that I decided to do something diffrent on the fly. It is the look of trauma that crosses some of the players face when certain parts of a game's background fully sink in because of what I've been doing to them for the past several hours. When you over hear your players talking in hushed tones, mulling over some of the mysteries you have laid out for them and realizing they they are both so close and so far. Or their screams of agony when the events of several game sessions come together than they find themselves back under the thumb of the story's arch villian.

I love it because it is part writing a story, part acting, part extemporaneous public speaking, and part organizational management. It is spinning as many plates are you are able doing your absolute best to make sure that everyone does at least one cool thing a game session, and hopefully more than one. Also the genres! Either I am capturing brooding horror, epic adventure, or ramming enough frantic action into one game session as humanly possible so that no one has even half a chance to breath.

I don't always pull it off that fantastically from week to week, but when I do my game sesisons absolutely sing with delight. And at the bare minimum most people seems to have fun. It is something that I've gotten better at as the years go one and I gather more experience through doing, and trying new things. For example I am much better running a group who has split up than I used to be. That excites me and that is going to proove invaluable coming up.

The next thing I am going to run is a game called Mutants and Masterminds. It is a game system I am not comfortable running with a larger group than I am comfortable playing with. Fortunatly, I won't be introducing new people into the idea of gaming so that will make things much easier for me, and harder at the same time because I know that there will be some people there who are far more familiar with the rules than I am. Ordinarily this wouldn't be to much of a problem but the d20 system is one of those things that can get very fiddly very fast and you can't emulate high powered super heroic action with combat that happens at a snail's pace. It is also one of those game sysyems that quickly falls over and dies when something unexpected comes up. Like mounted combat. There are no mounted combat rules. Not only are there no mounted combat rules but the ride skill is unusually unforgiving. It isn't to much of a strech to jurry rig some mounted combat stuff but that's the thing with the d20 system everything interacts with everything else and minor changes can fuck up all sorts of things. Oh well fortunatly uncle internet is there to help.

Complaints about the system aside I am excited about being behind the GM screen again. I was really disapointed when my work schedual, personal life, and gaming group all sort of collided in such a way so as to make it impossible to run games. I was sad. Granted I was at a point where I needed a break for a bit because I do find it to be increadbly creativly demanding, but it lasted for far longer than I wanted to. So even though I am not thrilled about the time, place, schedualing, or venue I am more than happy to be back again on the chopping block.

I think the thing I like the most about GMing is that it is one of those things. See there are some things some people will never be able to experience. I'll never be able to experience the thrill of a home run, a slam dunk, or putting on a really good drag show. These are things I might be able to do, and I might be able to do them well but they aren't my thing. Not like GMing is. And while anyone could do the reading, put up a screen, and try to tell a story, GMing takes a certain degree of skill to pull off. To balance the story you plan to tell with the desiries of the players combined with unexpected difficulties is one of those things that when you do it well, the whole world just sings. It is the same feeling I get when I write a really good essay, or a tremendously good sexual encounter. It is one of those things I enjoy doing to the point where I would do it as a job except that being paid would cheapen the exepreince for me.

Besides, how often do you get to rant like a super villain? Well in Mutants and Masterminds it is whenever I damn well feel like it. Also I might have to do it on command because there is actually a rule that states if a super hero makes some sort of check, and the villain fails a will check, he starts monologuing even if it is a terrible idea. I am really excited by this rule and I am hoping that my players will take advantage of it. It saddens me when people write off roleplaying as something they would never do. True only recently has it evolved away from its wargaming roots into something more akin to free form storytelling. It is also true that my ideas regarding gming is DRASTICALLY diffrent than many other people's. Still it is a big enough hobby though that everyone should be able to take away one enjoyable experience.

Oh well Mutants and Masterminds is going to be great, villians will rage, cities will burn, and at some point or another the heroes might even manage to save the day. I doubt it though.

Now to try and get my Togepi to learn nasty plot. Why? FOR SCIENCE!

Wednesday, May 19, 2010

Woah go go gadget long

So I was just going to continue the last post I started using the handy dandy edit command but I just realized how long it was so I decided that it would be better to just break it up a bit. Right now I am involved with the history of labor in the United States. That's cool though because the history of labor is INTENSE. Pre feminist movement the last time the workers revolted enough to get something to happen people died. A lot of people. That is what happens when you piss the people with the dynamite off. What I am reffering to is the stuggle for the mine workers to get some sort of non horrible working conditions. Mine owners were, for the most part, horrible human beings, who just simply didn't give a shit. Mining is dangerous in the best of times. In order to get to where we are no they had to literally attack some of the mine owners. It is a really cool history. For moar information pick up a copy of Dynamite: The History of Class Violence in America by Louis Adamic. At one point we had to kill our bosses just so that we could have something less than a ten hour work day. Crazyness. However, we are starting to drift. The point is though is that empolyers in america have always been dicks. Oddly enough with the advent of the civil rights movement, and the feminsist movement that came both during and after (its been a long movement) was the first time in American history where signifigant changes to the the way labor works in America.

This is neat. It is also one of the great unspoken benifits of Feminism that more or less has gone unacknowlaged. I think this is because this is mostly a side benifit with a narrow focus and not because they tried to do some good for everyone. Umm I guess I'll make sense of that right now! I hope... Okay so when women reentered the world place wholesale post WW2 they came into an increadbly hostile work environment, especially in terms of sexual harassment. LONG story short due to law suits both fivilous and worthwhile they have managed to change the way we talk and act at work, particularly twords women. The magnitude of this accomplishment can not be stated enough, and while it is still a problem it is no where NEAR as bad as it used to be, and assuming you work in a corporate owned establishment it can carry with it some real repercussions.

Women are also making progress in things like "in house" day care and maternity leave. Like I said in order for men to geth their work day reduced to ten hours we had to blow shit up. However, with the maternaty leave we end up back to something I said earlier. The changes that women made to the work place were only paticularly suited to them and not really to anyone else. Am I a fan of maternaty leave? Fuck no it isn't like I can get my punk ass pregnant. However, getting more sick time and better options for family leave? Yeah that is something that would of mattered a little bit more. Assholes. Also while women did a LOT of work to make the work place more hospitable to them they really have a long way to go and it would help if it were to be less narrowly focused. Because, back to the original point, work really sucks. Right now in front of me, here at Books a Million a manager is going through an employees bag before she goes home. If one of my managers would try to do that at work I would tell them to go fuck themselves. If law enforcment can't do that without a warrent then why the hell would I let some random asshole. That's me though and I am mean to my employers.

Last time I did this I really did play it safe for most of the post so I think I will try out another one of my "not safe" ideas. That is, for a variety of reasons, many women hit the workforce unprapared for the work force. *ducks* Does this statement apply to everyone? No heck the statement isn't even smoothly applied across the gender. Heck it isn't even restricted to one gender and what I am about to talk about can and does happen to men. It is just that it is more pronounced in women because of the way our society is set up. See Americans go through two very diffrent but drastically important parts of their life. The time between 15-18 when we go through highschool and stuff, and the years between 20-24. The amount of growing up people do during the years of 20-24 is incredible and I've seen it happen time and time again where people become radically diffrent during this time. This mostly has to do with the fact that you end up on your own for the first time, and a whole buncha other crap. During both of these times the desire for men to have sex with women is more or less at its peak. For whatever reason men do nice things for women so they can have sex with them. This is a practice that I have never understood, I also belive that is why my bed is empty. I dunno.

Every time a girl pouts and gets out of something, or sweet talks her way into an extension, or gets someone else to do something for her in exchange for nothing, it changes the way they interact with the world. I know some women who can get a ride downtown with one man, get dinner, and get a ride back with another man without fail. If they have enough sucess with batting eyes and making things happen with a smile then it comes as a rude shock when all the sudden it stops working. Work sucks. So it will more than likely happen there.

So what happens? They give up and return to the kitchen where all needs are taken care of for them by someone else.

Okay I am going to stop here because I am badly loosing focus and I want to go home. I will either pick this up again tomarrow or saturday.

Tuesday, May 18, 2010

Back to the Rack!

Okay! I don't know how this will go. I had a very long day at work, I bought new socks so my feet are dry but my pants are wet. I have a screaming headache and I am exhausted. As an added benifit my stomach has decided that instead of turning food into useful energy it will instead distill whatever I eat into RAW PAIN. Which is liberating in a way because when I eat that half a pack of double stuffed oreo cookies later I know without a doubt that the pain I receive as a result would of been inevitable anyway.

The point being? I am not sure how this will turn out. What I wrote at lunch was frankly not good and deleated which is am absolute rareity for me. Normally I am proud of my aborted thought processes but not this time.

So lets start again this time from the top. Of course if it starts going tits up again tomarrow is another day.

The main problem with this article is that there are SO many passages rich with goodies that it is almost impossible to decide where to start. I am sneaky though, I thought of this ahead of time, and I didn't come up with the best answer. I did come up with a pretty good one though. We will start with the title, "For Women, Home Should Represent True Fulfillment". So lets see right off the bat we have a dichtomy set up. A line in the sand is drawn between people who are hands on moms and those who are not. This is an interesting move because anyone who isn't already on board with this argument is immeadiatly antagonized "like me" and tosses the article aside. This establishes the idea that there is no real attempt to convert anyone to the ideas contained within. This is not an article which cries out to the beligered working mother to return home to your children and let a man take care of you. This slashes the readership down even further. After all 50% of all marriages end in divorce (the other 50 IN DEATH!). The article doesn't even try to placate single women at all. This is to the married woman only. Everyone else can go fuck themselves. Again as I said earlier this is an article that has near absolute confidence in its audience. Presenting this at a women's study confrence would result in absolute hilarity. Or presenting this article to a group of single mothers who are working two part time jobs trying to make ends meet. They will paticularly like the letter in the middle where the "hands on mom complains about bordom" that would gove over really well. No over 50% of women need not apply to the ideas contined within this article.

Speaking of that letter, it is an interesting rhetorical move on the part of the author. The letter itself dominates over half of the article proper and while it could be argued that it is a form of expample I would say that it is closer to displacement. Take a look at this from a school paper point of view, when trying to your argument do you use someone else's words 50% of the time? It is pretty much the same here. Schlessinger delves into a pretty sensetive topic that could easily back fire, so instead of taking full responciblity she shares with some other person thus splitting the blame down the middle.

Okay so we got two linked threads now that are just sort of dangling. So it is time to tie them up a bit. This article is by far the closest I've seen to something saying "women back to the kitchen it is where you belong". First the article excludes anyone who by choice or life situation is unable to comply to the qualification of a "hands on mom" and it does that right off the bat. Putting a social ecconmic qualifier on telling people how to live is ever so slightly messed up. Next we have letter which dominates the article. It says you are not alone. I think I am going to get more into the nitty gritty of the letter in a bit. I wanted to just point out its size in comparison to the rest of the article and its possition as a criticism defense mechanism. Strictly speaking that paragraph doesn't belong.

Time to cause more strings, and to start less paragraphs with the word okay. Okay then (:P), so now lets tackle the phrase "Hands on mom". Well isn't that a happy little set of words. It harkens backt o the phrase home maker but with a greater sense of modern sophistication attached to it. It absolutly avoids the stigma attached to the phrase "stay at home mom". But why? If we are reclaiming lost ground caused by a group of over zelous feminists then why bother with a new word? Feminists of all stripes gloriously cling to the title of feminsit despite all the negative conotations that come along with it while I myself at times am relagated down to the possition of male dissident. I am not going to let that go because it genuinly upsets me. What we have here is an admission of the fact that we are taking a step backwards in terms of progress. What is being called for is taking a great deal of the progress made by women in the work place and taking an about face back it an area, not where they truely belong. That would be sexist. Instead it is a place, "they truly have time to grow spiritually, intellectually, and physically. They also lose much of their feminist-trained hostility towards their husbands and gain back the blassing of thier sexuality." You hear that women? The fact that you work is the reason why your sexlife sucks. Just saying there is something hinky going on with this line of reasoning. I am going to beat a dead horse here. Beacuse I like it and I don't know where else to put the following sentence. Women are not required to return to the home and raise kids but if they want to have better sex, be smarter, and more fit it is a good idea. Staying at home and raising kids is serious business. Jesus god what the hell.

Okay well much like Dr. Schlessinger I have been playing it safe so far. I have been picking out some of the worst parts of the argument and hugging them with my barbed wire arms (it is tuff to find love when your arms are made of barbed wire I just want to be loved). Leaving my horrible arms aside lets get into one of the larger issues raised inadvertently by this article. It is that work sucks. It really does. Here is something interesting. When the industrial revolution happened here in america for the first time in our history a majority of the working class had extra money to spend. For the first time in American/European history the average person could afford to leave one member of the family at home to raise the kids, and as an added bonsus the kids didn't have to work. THIS IS HUGE. So as a nation we sat down and contempated how the family unit was going to look in this brave new world. This is a debate that happened in news papers, through pamphlets, and in parlors all across the nation. Exparamental communities were founded and what we now call the nuclear family was formed. But it didn't have to be that way. Victorian america was very interesting. This is the time where it was decided specifically that the woman's place was in the home. This is mostly because women were morally supurior to men and thus better suited to raisning children. The idea that they were unable to do the work wasn't really considered as they had been doing the same work for generations. So they could stay at home because work sucks. Also divorce was less of an issue. Neat!

This wasn't a compleatly egalitarian process but for the most part and I have put a rosier terms than it prolly was. At the end of the day we decided that work sucks and since women are better at raising children anyway why not kill two birds with one stone, let they stay home and things will be perfect. The problem? There are times where people will start to loath what they take care of. I've seen it happen and it is not cool. :( So yeah work sucks. Somewhere along during the struggle for women to get back into the work force this fact got forgotten along the way. Even if you are lucky enough to be part of the 10% of people who find their jobs to be absolutly wonderful and 100% fufilling you are still going to have bad days, stress, and heart break. It is the nature of work. I've been thinking of how this disjunct happened. How is it that the basic fact that work sucks seems to have been forgotten in the struggle to get back into the work force. It ties back into the prodistant work ethic and the idea that you need to work in order to be fufilled. If you'll notice Dr. Laura (sorry but your last name is long and horrible) even points this out when she says, " Women's and parenting magazines declare that the most important thing a woman can do is make herself happy (through work)". She pins the blame on feminsim for spinning this line but it goes much deeper than that. It is one of the plusating threads that drives our country fowards. It is the reason why people will dedicate far more time and effort to jobs they hate. Look around at people working one day and you will see who I am talking about, the people who start working before they clock in, keep working after they clock out, voluteering their days off away, and the list goes on. There is an idea that life is the thing that supports work, rather than work is the thing that supports like. When I explained this to my boss one day I think I broke his head. Or maybe it was me not agreeing to come in on my day off despite getting over time I don't know or care. The thing is that when women went back to work they were in for a pretty rude shock, and that is that work sucks. I gotta get back to this latter/tomarrow though. First thing I need to do is to set out the fact that I am not trying to midigate the horrors of sexual harassment. That would be fucked up. So don't worry. Kay hungry and store closing.

Monday, May 17, 2010

For Women, Home Should Represent True Fulfillment

Mother's Day is a source of stress for many women who are sole providers and can't be hands-on moms or who feel intimidated by a culture that doesn't value hands-on moms. The feminist movement has attempted to deconstruct the family under the guise that gender isn't significant for women, child rearing, and the quality of their marriages. As a result women feel guilty for yearing to raise thier own children. Women's and parenting magazines declare that the most important thing a woman can do is make herself happy (through work), or maintain power (her own bank account), and of course to make sure that one of the representatives of the evil empire (a man/husband) does not oppress her.

Guess what? Women these days are less happy (missing the joys of developing and loving children) and more frenzied (trying to do and be everything).

Still, many moms tell me they get bored at home. Here's a letter I received from one such woman and how she reslved her malaise.

Hello Dr. Laura,

A year ago, my mother gave me In Praise of Stay-At-Home-Moms for Mother's Day. I shared a lot of what I read with my husband. By the end of the book, there was no doubt that my place was at home with our son.

We figured out a budget and I put in my two-week's notice. It's the best thing I have ever done. I get to be my son's mom and my husband's girlfriend.

At, first my son and I would go on play dates and picnics and have so much fun. Recently, however, I've been feeling bored.

One night I was watching the movie Julie & Julia, and it clicked. I could find new things to do with my son and blog about it. Even if no one reads it now, my son can read it when he's older. I started making a list of all the things we could do. Of course, since we are a single-income family, I have to keep it cheap. The next day I started my blog.

A month later, I have 18 followers. I never considered myself a writer, but people are reading it and leaving lovely comments.

Thank you so much for everything you do, Dr. Laura.

I tell women that at home they truly have time to grow spiritually, intellectually, and physically. They also lose much of their feminist-trained hostility towards their husbands and gain back the blassing of thier sexuality.

Once I'm done with these women, they develop a deeper appreciation for how they are singularly responsible for the attitude and atmosphere of their home.



Bt. Dr. Laura Schlessinger

Newsmax (the most hilarious magazine ever)
May 2010.


No seriously if you are around a copy of this magazine PICK IT UP. There is an article about how the vatican is possessed by the devil.

If Renee reads this she will do it in my voice. Inside her head I will be saything these things. This makes me feel intolerably dirty.

Its a Bran New DAY

Hi! Hihihihihi. So I am going to take a break from the back to the kitchen movment for a bit. I decided today at lunch that it would simply be best if I went back to Barns and Noble and just typed up the source article. It is only one page, single facing, and it is something that is just SO perfect, I kind of want it for my wall. Especially the bit about rediscovering your sexuality that is just to hilarious. It will also give me a way to ground the whole argument. I really like this whole thing and where it is going. Impromptu project GO!

Also Apple has jumped the shark. Reading material:

http://mangahelpers.com/news/details/369
http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/04/apple-bans-satire/
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/05/eucalyptus/

And for irony's sake http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYecfV3ubP8

So that's fun. It has been almost 12 hours since I've heard of all of this and I still can't say anything other than warblegarble. If I was more organized about blogging I would have a cute cat picture with a "what the fuck is this shit" caption. I even know where to get one right now. But I am not going to. I want to write this for awhile. So nyah. Actually I am not even sure where to go with this. It is just plain old wrong on so many levels. At the end of the day, it really is none of Apple's buisness what I do with my Ipad, and if I want to read the Kama Sutra it is my buisness not yours. Your ability to manage what I use my IPAD for ends immeadiatly after I buy it.

What really disturbs me about all of this isn't so much that they are just restricting hard core porn, or something like that. They are banning things that are PG-13 AT MOST which is just plain scary.

The most interesting counter argument to all of this that, in the 90s Nintendo pulled something similar. Though the result is that they have never manged to shake the stigma of being a kiddy game system. This combined with thier attitude towards third party game developers is largely what caused the N64 and the Game Cube to fail. Oh well.

More pressing is that the Ipad is looking to be the sort of thing that will replace physical media, and this is a thought that terrifies me. I know it is going to happen. Heck it will even happen in my life time. The part of me that is a technophile is pretty excited about this and I am looking fowards to the day when smaller publishers will hop on board, and I can finally get books I actually want to read instead of the population of the new york times best seller's list. Here is the thing though. You the reader, go get a book. Any book. If you don't own a book for some reason then go buy one. I reccomend Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami. Now take this book and throw it against the wall. Now open it, it still works doesn't it? Now take whatever it is you are reading this blog on. If it is a desk top make sure you grab the tower and not the monitor, and throw that against the wall.


Okay your back, I hope you like your new computer. That is my point though. Computers are not built for long term storage. While I have held in my hands books that are over a hundred of years old, finding a computer from the early 80's that still works? Yeah not so easy. It gets worse, all thous things you backed up on 3.5 disks? THey degrade. CDs get scratched and there is actually a type of mold that will eat away at them, isn't that weird? Tape backup is reasonably secure but not really. The point is that stoage technology has not progressed to a point where doing away with hard copies is a good safe thing to do. On top of that since digital media is so easily destroyed companies have absolutely no responsibility to restore our lost data. For example this blog is stored on a server owned by google. Should the server go down and the back up server also goes down, then that's it. No more my blog. Thousands of entries not just mine but other people's will all be lost because of a power surge or a lightning strike or something like that.

Oh well lunch is over.

Sunday, May 16, 2010

WHO DARES TO FOLLOW ME!

This is the thought that immeadiatly springs into my head when I see I have a new follower. Then I realize that this is something I am supposed to encourage in people. 9 times out of 10 I manage to actually not yell out loud which is pretty exciting. That is a whole 10% decrease in randomised blog yelling.

Anyway hello there and welcome. So! Yesterday I was really tired and in my semi exhausted ramblings I dropped the bomb of the back to work movement. I really wish I hadn't done that because it is actually a really complicated web of thoughts and it requires some very tricky navigational skills. It is also something that isn't best talked about in blog format because people tend to not be very generous when they read the thoughts of others. It is kinda like how you can tell when people are already formulating a responce when you aren't even half way through your argument? Well that happens on line too. HOWEVER! I will bravely forge ahead because the only other thought I really have rattling around in my head is game mastering theory and today isn't a day for that. It is raining.

However, keep in mind that I am compleatly free to reverse, give up on, or edit this possition as much as I want. I am just trying it out.

Okay 25 minuts until lunch is over, lets rock this thing! So the back to the kitchen movement. Calling it a movement is a misnomer, so right off the bat we have gotten off to a great start. It isn't a movement so much as it is a subtext that I have found prevading throughout a larger argument. Ergo this has made it increadbly hard to pin it down. Now if I were better prepared to type this up I would have links to several articles that would display this subtext and a few articles that have the same setiment without the subtext. But you know what? I am capable of a lot of things. Amazing things. But plowing through conservative webpages for hours on end reading anti feminist rants is something I can only do for so long. However, the reason this subtext is not very well known is because it is something that only happens in extreamly conservative circles. For example the video I reffrenced in the last post was something that was being screened before the church services. The title of the video was how to manage your finaces the christian way (let the man do it riiiiiight). The other article I reffrenced was in that terrible conservative magazine.

See gender, and the associated issues with it are hot button topics. It isn't something you just sort of sling around, unless you are me and you are resonably confident that no one actually reads this other than evan and Tyson. Hi you two crazy kids. So when you find these sorts of articles, along with the back to the kitchen subtext it will only be in environments where there is near absolute confidence in the nature of the audience. It is why I encourage people to listen to Rush Limbaugh and read these crazy magazines. IT IS IMPORTANT to know what they are saying and to gain insight into the conservative thought process.

This will more than likely be continued tomarrow I am just throwing that out there right now. Now no one comes right out and says, "Geewiz I am so much happier now that I have dropped a bunch of responcibilities out of my life and gone back to being a housewife". No instead it is always framed within the idea of anti feminist backlash. They blame feminism for the extra stress, their crappy sex lives (I shit you not), and the erosion of family values. The thing is though is that the way these arguments are formed speak volumes about the audience. Their essential thesis is, "I should be allowed to stay at home and raise my kids without feeling guilty". This is what is so tricky about the movement. The thesis is half correct. I say half because these articles are invariably written by women. However, a stay at home dad is just as valid and as a card carrying member of the patriarchy I assert we could run a household ten times better :P. What is problematic is the nature of the the choice.

Lets look. Essentialy first and formost the choice precludes marriage. It also precludes a middle to upper middle class lifestyle.

It is also time for my lunch to be over. Tonight I might dig up some examples of what I am talking about. I might also spend some time learning about Dark Matter. It really depends on what I feel like. However, it would be nice to lay out some nice broad brush strokes then have two or three articles where I could pull specific examples from. I also have ideas of where this additude comes from, how we can fight it, and mostly how to adress it. I am actually pretty excited about this and hopefully I won't ADD out of it.

Saturday, May 15, 2010

Back Dashing with Sissiors

Man! I swear no wonder no one ever comments on blogs, you have to go through about 58 million screens to do so. Not happy about it. It was worth it though. In other news hello this is going to be a blog post. I don't really have a topic handy that will take up the whole time, I am also REALLY REALLY tired so it isn't like I can come up with anything more intelegent to say other than durrrrrrrrrrr, but that is okay. Some of my favorite blogs is when I wander where bloggers dare.

"Where Preachers dare" is one of my favorite lines from preacher.

My favorite lines from Doom Patrol however is far more extensive.

So the other day, Wensday to be exact I went to Barns and Noble and plowed through the magazine section. Feeling a little scatter brained I didn't really expect to get any concentrated reading done and I was in more of a browsing mood. And BROWSE I DID! Unfortunately I don't remember the name of the magazine. This distresses me because it was awesome. Awesome in the way trains wreck, or the way mushroom clouds look on the horizon, or bees attacking children yeah it is that sort of awesome. It is one of those increadbly conservative magazines that I have never seen on the stands before. The cover was very dramatic. Black, with a picture of the new york skyline in the crosshairs, and stark lettering declaring that a nuclear strike on US soil is imminent.

Oh brother. That paticular article was about how our borders aren't very secure and how easy it would be to slip in an improvised nuclear device through Mexico because Iran and Venezuela (it might be some other south american country) are buddy buddy. I don't even know. Oh well the article was fear mongering at its best. It even had an Obamacare "What you need to know" bullet list. The best thing I found in that magazine was an article about how women are more comfortable in the Kitchen. It is one of those things that is so incredibly misinformed that I don't even know where to go with it.

There is this thing that I've noticed a long time ago which I started to refer to as the "back to the kitchen" movement. I encountered it for the first time when I went to some bizzare church that my parents were going to. It was this informative video about how women who let men control all the finances and house hold choices were much happier with the reduction in responcibilites that they now have. They can just relax and let things happen to them. The article I read in this magazine was basicly the same thing. It was about how this woman who had decided that she was done working, and that it was time to be a stay at home mom. This is all fine, but then she went on to complain that she was getting bored! So her big decision was to start blogging about activities that she does with her son. She blames feminism and a bunch of other things and it was just sad.

The thing about the "back to the kitchen" movement is that it feels like amass exodus away from responcibility. That is what pisses me off about it. There is more to it than that. I might make a more detailed post about it later on. Right now I am tired and I need to go.

Saturday, May 8, 2010

Piracy Redux

Continuing on. The 3 letter acronym I was looking for was VPN which stands for virtual private network. Essentially you connect to the internet then you connect to the VPN. Your ISP will only see that you are connected to a VPN and nothing you are doing inside of it due tot he nature of the encrypted stream.

I came down hard on them in a recent post mostly due to my concerns involving child pornography. I'm not even sure why that is such a huge concern to me, I've never really considered child pornography as a thing when I did anything else before. Now all the sudden it is a big deal.

The act of deliberatly masking my internet based activites is something that still bothers me, but not in the same way that the support of child pornography does. However, I did read something about it which shined a pretty light on it. Basicly it is a way for people in countries with very restrictive internet policies to get around nationally made firewalls and I got to say I am all about that. That is something I can get behind both philosophically and financially. So there is that.

So all of that will happen tonight. Best of all if my ISP shits itself over it I can say that I need an encrypted data stream for work. It also helps against hackers. It is pretty handy all in all. Granted you will still be stangged by fishing schemes but that is all end user error right there.

Recently I've been on this crazy huge education kick. I am not sure what it is about but I generally approve. It is what triggered the whole need for a VPN network thingy in the first place. RIght now I have a 30 part lecture on Linguistics, and I am going to get the lectures on Number theory and philosphy of math. These are all really long lectures. Then I think I am going to grab some of the shorter ones that a floating around just so that I can fill in the gaps. I want to grab some general philisophy lectures because while my Greeks are pretty solid, and I am confident with some Kant, my Hegel, Hiedegger, and Hume are all very rusty. Also some of the vocabulary is slipping out of my head so I want to get all of that reviewed. There are also all sorts of cool hitory lectures and a bunch of ecconomic stuff which I plan on grabbing. I am not sure how much of this I will actually get through but I am starting to think that it will be quite a lot of it.

This is also something I am willing to distribute. At some point I will start advirtising what lectures I have and people can ask for them. In general I don't do things like this because burning a dvd shuts down my computer for quite a while. The encoding process is especially onerous and while I can get most of it done while I am at work, it still is kind of a pain. But this is worth it. Like I said I'll let people know what I got when I start getting up a decent collection.

Right now I am feeling an increadble burst of creativity and the desire for production so those things will start happening. Hopefully I will get some serious momentum going that will last up until I have a crippling bout of depression! It is weird what you can get used to. Anyway lunch is over, time to pack up and reapply my deorderant. I have come to the conclusion that all gel deoderant are peices of shit and I am going back to solids even if they do fuck up my cloths. Nope not going to start wearing undershirts either I think they are dumb.

Friday, May 7, 2010

[MandM] Devil's Den

15 years is a good place to have an alien invasion, cause that will work with some of the other ideas I have. Also Mob Town is on an island seperated off from the city a little bit, three miles in fact. Since the island itself is a major international shipping hub there are plenty of routs both on and off the island.

How does the tunnel system and a coastal town work? Fluid Dynamics. Don't look to much into it cave battles are exciting and you guys didn't buy a way to travel internationally. So deal. If it makes you feel better the majority of the cave system happens on the other side of town which is where Devil's den, the FAR side of town and the city itself is well above sea level. Fuck yeah wind swept cliffs. Okay this topic no longer interests me.

Devil's Den. Man I wish I thought of another name for this place. To late now though cause we are kinda stuck with it. Devil's Den is huge. How huge? Huge enough to fit 5 gangs comfortably. It is cool the poor people always make up the majority of the city. I don't really care. It is less of a burrow and more of a cressent that forms the outskirts of the city. I should consider suburbia...done considering suburbia. It doesn't excist just like in comics. You'll end up there someday.

Some General Notes on Devil's Den: Devil's Den has always been a shit hole, and it has always been under the control of a variety of gangs for as long as anwayone can remember. The mafia control the island and they distribute drugs and guns into Devil's Den. Now recently enhancement drugs have been making it into the den making the average ganger into something more than human and thus more than most average cops are willing to handle.

Okay the gangs of Devil's Den

Suburban Knights- They call themselves something diffrent, but no one really cares. The Suburban Knights aren't really a proper gang but rather a group of concerned citizens who have banded together to deal with the growing threats that is a result of the rampant crime threatening the city. They believe that by taking and controlling territitory within the Devil's Den that they can keep the streets safe. The problem? Well they are all about lethal tactics, highly lethal. They also don't feel to bad about collateral damage.

The gang itself mostly consists of veterans from the alien wars. In truth most of them don't really care very much about stopping crime or keeping the city safe. They mostly just like to fight. Most of the territory they hold is centered around alien strongholds which provide them tactical positions that allow them to strike quickly and retreat back to their strange suburban homes. Their uniform is a suit with a plain black ski mask which makes them extremely visible in the wilds of Devil's Den and at the same time they can blend into the scenery anywhere else in the city.

Suburban Knight territory is run with an iron first. People live in constant fear of doing something that might set off one of the Suburban Knight "guards". The majority of them a fairly unstable and as a few of them start to get older they being to exparament with body modification increasing their, speed, strength, and toughness. On averager all the member of the Knights are well triained, if a little bit unbalanced. For the most part the people who live in the Devils Den celebrate when heros or the cops chase the Knights out of an area.

They don't have one set area where they can always be found, they tend to move around a lot showing up where they think they are needed the most.


Furies- Ever see the Warriors and you wondered what was up with the guys that had the green face paint and baseball bats? Well the guy who started the furies decided to find out for himself. No one really knows how it started. Some people think it was just a bunch of scared kids who were banding together for protection. Other people think it was a mentally unbalanced guy who decided to reinact the lives of the supporting charecters from The Warriors. The start of the story isn't known. What is also unknown is how he got people to join his gang, or even where they found all their baseball uniforms.

They are around now. And they are here to stay. They do use guns albeit rarely as they prefer to use their bats and baseballs to handle their gangland disputes. As a result they tend to be a bit more heavily modified than the average gang. Just about all of them have a couple of ranks of impervious and some form of super movement which allow them to strike quickly and viciously.

Their centeral area of control is a large park which contains a baseball field and batting cages. They make most of their money with drugs, petty theft, protection, though much like the Suburban Knights they seem more focused on fighting than anything else.

The Buttons- In the mid 90's the state ran out of funding for all the state run mental institutions and as a result the streets became flooded with people who would be much better off locked up. Now most of these people would of quietly self destructed off in peaceful annominitiy. What happened instead is that one doctor turned inmate organized them, fed them drugs, and turned them into a force to be reconded with. One of the smaller gangs Buttons turn whatever area they are in control of into a toilet. Operating with a scorched earth mentality they will take an area, own it, and reign death and terror down on everyone who tries to live there. They make the majoity of their money on human trafficking, turning the people within their territory into slaves, some of which are sold off overseas for huge amounts of money.

The members of the gang look... distinctive. As distinctive as possible in fact. Also as a result of the doctor having some advanced chemical knowlage he is able to make cheap bathtub versions of many of the advanced drugs that are on the streets. Of course these drugs have worse side effects that usual but you'd be hard pressed to find some one in the gang who cares. Many of the Buttons sport horrible mutations or disfigurments and they will often inflict these disfigurments on their victems.

While they have many sources of income one thing they are paticularly known for is their customized porno business. The less said about it the better. Unless you want me to talk about it, then I will say the things to you that are constantly running through my head that I don't normally talk about. When that happens I'll be able to visit Andrew at work. I would SO make his life hell. So lets not.

Death Dealers- It is amazing how easy it is to get people to join a crazy voodoo death cult. This is especially true when you offer hallucingntic drugs that never quite leave you the same once you try them. The gang uses a wide mismash of religions combining satanism, voodoo, and scraps of other things that someone read half a book on. Primarily they deal in specialized hallucinogenic drugs, protitution, magical items and specialized magic services, you know curses and shit. Of course if those magic services don't work out then they will just go and break your target's legs. If nothing they are egalitarian in their methodology.

In general these guys look like they are rejects from the insane clown posse. In truth there are quite a few of them who are rejects from the ICP/Slipknot crowd. Unlike many of the other gangs who use drugs, or sugrical means to enhance their abilities these kids use a variety of magical rituals and deals with unsavory creatures to gain power. Some of the gang members actually get to be quite powerful but since they take dangerous short cuts in their rituals their power usually comes at a terrible price. This gang also employs a few very weak low influence vampires. It is unknown if these are traditional vampires or something made through magic and drugs but it is something that happens.

The Rat Bastards- The Rat Bastards are all those people who you would normally expect to find in a gang. It is a brave new world out there. And all the sudden the hood is filled with people wearing green face paint swinging baseball bats, to guys covered in skulls throwing bolts of magic and summoning demons. And no one want's to talk about what goes on in Fallout. So the old gangs ended up putting aside their diffrences and banding together out of sheer nessesity more than anything else. They tried to call themselves something diffrent, something scary, but the Rat Bastards is what ended up sticking. They are by far the least interesting gang and they know it. So picture a bunch of kids who used to be the terror of the streets who are now just a hodge podge of people lumped together because now subruban knights are the ones doing the drive by shootings. Yeah massive inferiority complex. As a result the Rat Basterds will do just about anything, there is no job they won't take, no drug they won't try, and no one they won't fuck with in order to try and get to be back on top. As a result The Rat Bastards often times provide fodder for both mad scientits and super scientists. What's the diffrence? Yeah I am not sure either. I guess maybe the chance of ending up with nipples for eyes, for SCIENCE!

As a result they will often end up as villian errand boys, if you need several body parts from a variety of animals these are the people who are willing to do it. Most villians have henchmen for this sort of thing, but sometimes it is good to outsource. Also if a villian needs someone who is willing to put on an absolutely idiotic costume, they will usually take at least one stop over by the nearest Rat Bastard hideout. They are a bunch of crazies who are willing to try anything.


The Fly By Nighters: The big 5 are by no means the only game in town. Don't delude yourself. But they are the biggest most immeaidaly reconizable gangs that have their fingers in the most pies. They control large amounts of territory and while the average ganger won't be to much of a threat, the luitentents and other higher ups can end up being quite powerful. The fly by nighters is a catch all term that is used for the smaller gangs, even if the smaller gang in question has been operating for years. In general these gangs are either to small, to under equiped, or to specialized to make any sort of dent in any of the big 5 territories. Some of the fly by nighters are allied with the larger gangs and some of the more dangerous jobs will be shuffled off on to the smaller groups/. Others are well established gangs in other cities that are trying to break into the city. Whatever the case may be I am free to throw whatever I feel like at you gang wise. The above are the 5 that will happen the most often though because one is hilariouse, one is scary, one is magic, one can hurt you, and one explains where all those assholes who wear costumes come from. Okay questions? Ask them in face book.

Wednesday, May 5, 2010

[M&M] The City

Okay the City!

I want to keep the actual city vauge for now. I am thinking of putting it between Metropolis and Gotham, and Paragon City. Actually Paragon City is prolly the best inspiration I could possibly think of. So minus the war walls obviously.

IMPORTANT THINGS ABOUT THE CITY!

Secret Alien Bases- The city was a major staging point for the Alien invasion as a result there are still hidden stockpiles of alien weaponry hidden all over the city. In addition the Aliens have the technology to fold space, so while something may appear to be a derilict building on the survace, in actuality it is an advanced Alien research center/holding faculty/weapons depot. Most of the alien influence has been hunted down and dismantled but there are still some hidden faculties which are used by the various gangs, corporations, or super scientists who are running about the city. Most of the faculties that are left require a special password to acess or some kind of unique biometric signature.

Cave/Tunnel System- Deep beneath the city is a layer of caves, which have been converted to a tunnel system. Orginally used witches back during the time of Cotton Mather, they were expanded during the 1920’s to aid in the local bootlegging effort. Since then the tunnels have held an illustrious history of being used in escape routs, ambushes, an underground railroad during the alien invasion, and even the source of disaster like in the case of Fallout. There are several acess points into the tunnel system from the street, in the better parts of town they are boarded up or well guarded. In the worst parts of town, they are also boarded up or well guarded. The tunnles themselves are a maze and whenever a villian carves off a bit for himself he will usually close off most of the acess to the surrounding area leaving only one well known way in or out.

Fallout: As mentioned earlier Fallout is a 5 block area on the north side of town that illustrates the dangers of tunnel fighting. No one really knows what happened that day. It could have been two rival villians getting into a spat, a lovers quarrle between two heroes, an alien incursion, or a lab acident. The point is that day something happened and some pretty titanic forces were unleashed and 5 blocks of the city collapsed into a wide pit, and the surrounding three blocks became condemned. The story doesn’t end there though. There were plenty of survivors from the buildings collapsing but some of them came back changed. The skin became sallow, yellowish, their eyes haunted. There are still people who live in the surrounding condemned buildings, mostly only the desperate and the crazy insane. Occationally the police try to clear the area out but with little success. Most people just wisely stay the fuck away from that area.

Mob Town: During the 1920’s the mafia set up shop in the City and while prohibition may have been repealed they never found any shortage of ways to break the law. Today thanks to alien tech, enhancing drugs, and experimental surgery the mob stands at the forefront of organized super villainy. They control a large area down by the docks, and a sort of easy truce has been reached between the police and the citizens of mob town. Very few people actually live in Mob town, for the most part it is warehouses, old or abandoned factories, a few swank night clubs, and a couple of piers. At the moment the mob is so far underground that it is hard to tell where mob town ends and just your general poor neighborhood begins. For the most part though, you need someone connected to organized crime? Then you will find him in mob town somewhere.

The Police: The police of the city have it rough. The tri state area has a squad of super powered operatives which can be called upon in times of great need but for the most part the police are just your average boys in blue trying to make it home at the end of the day. So yes they will still pull you over and write you a speeding ticket even though not 20 feet away there is a giant robot stomping on hippies. This is because the giant robot is bullet proof and some super hero will handle it eventually whereas you are necessary to make quota. In general they are good guys, they do their best to keep civilians out of fight zones and if there is a situation they feel they can handle they will do so. Otherwise they will find super heroes to deal with it. Like I said they are just guys, and people who shoot lasers out of their eyes are beyond their pay scale. This is why Mobtown gets the leeway it does they have just enough powered operatives to leave it in the hands of the powers.

Other Powers: Well there are the players. They are the newest kids on the block in terms of super heroed team ups. They are reasonably well established and blah blah blah who cares players are almost as big of assholes as dolphins. FUCK DOLPHINS. Other than the players there is one other major team who calls the city home but they spend most of their time in another dimension or lost in time. The city is the largest repository of alien tech on the planet other than South Africa so they spend a lot of time screwing around with that. There are anywhere from 7-10 loner type heroes running about the city at any given point in time but they mostly stick to individual neighborhoods or they spend their time chasing down street hoods instead of bashing city wide threats. SO in essence when the fit hits the shan it is the players who get the phone call. There is no one else. Other than the eleit police unit but even they aren’t reliable since they spend a lot of time in other cities. Now nationally there are large Avenger/X-men like groups who run all over the country dealing with things and they can be called upon should a situation turn dire but in game terms dire will mean something like TPK.

The Main City: Most of the people are friendly and receptive to super heros and they recognize that these are people who put their lives on the line when the police are unable/unwilling to do so. IE none of that deconstructionist crap that is so popular now and days.

Devil’s Den: Devil’s den is another area of the city where much like Mob town has fallen to crime. Unlike mob town though this was once a booming residencial district until a variety of things turned it into one of the poorest neighborhoods in the country. Now the streets are rife with drugs, prostitution, and violence. Many of these drugs give people temporary super powers and all of those drugs have terrible side effects leaving badly mutated gangs to fight wars over bombed out buildings and shitty street corrners. Insanely there are still people who live there, multigenerational families who do their best to make live in one of the only areas they can afford to. There are a couple of other slums sprinkled about the city but Devil’s Den is by far the worse. That place is like Detroit bad. Cops don’t go in there unless they got a death wish and good people clear the streets after dark. Currently there are 5 gangs that control different aspects o the den. I could go seven and theme them around the seven deadly sins and I might still do that. I haven’t decided though.

The town also features, a University with an advanced research center, several corporate headquaters including a few from Shangri La, and

Piracy and You

Before I do that I would like to say that the more I read about the whole oil spill thing the more I want to just jump onto a table and shout "go to jail" at BP. But I will get to that later, and by later I do mean at a point and time that is closer to never than any sort of immediacy.

Okay then moving on. So I have a moral connundrum. Connumdrum is the wrong word I guess, and I can't spell it so I guess I should find another one. Puzzle I suppose will work. These sorts of things don't happen to me very often, I am a pretty happy go lucky guy and I don't really do grey areas when applied to myself. There is the right choice and the wrong choice and that is about it. I mean it is all pretty simple, don't fuck children, don't kill the neighbor even if he is noisy, and leave those people alone. It is easy. Even the moral puzzles that do crop up are more interesting thought exparaments to me rather than full blown issues which I will wrestle with. The current one being piracy.

I have a funny relationship with piracy. I also love my net book, but seriously the touch pad is a flaming piece of monkey shit. I have no idea how it interpreted my adujusting my writs as emergency broweser window close but it did. Hell you know how Firefox will always ask if you want to save your session? It flew through that too, it did that shit faster than I can do it on purpose. I digress though. Piracy. Before I launch into a high and mighty tirade I would like to point out that at the end of the day I am just a little fuckwad who couldn't give two fucks about intelectual property rights and I just like stuff and I like it better when it is free. Does this hurt my argument? Sure which is why I am not on every pro piracy bandwagon that rolls through.

The thing is though that big buisness are a bunch of dick heads and they don't give a fuck about anything. If they felt they could get away with it the internet would be locked down tighter than a drum and we would be paying for every byte we acess. Wiki would be a subscription based serivce as would youtube, and there would be no more physical media and there would be self deleating data. However, the internet was developed in an acedemic setting not a corporate one so by the time big buisness started getting their mitts on the internet it was already to late. While I loath to make this analogy miners used dynamite to make mine owners listen to them. We are using a slew of internet weapons the least of which is piracy to fight against the sort of people who couldn't possibly care less about you. I feel it is important and by forcing buisneses to compete with piracy some great strides have been made. Steam for example is actually more convient than piracy and at a non retarded price point to boot! The same goes for Netflix, film piracy, paticularly if you wanna burn it to dvd is annoying as fuck and netflix is providing an affordable alternative. People are being shafted in the music department but that is really more their choice than anything else.

Still there are always new doors to kick in and my eyes have been set on two TTC lecture series. One is the philosophy of math and the other is a class on linguistics. Both have roughly 30 one hour lectures and I want these so bad that I can taste it. They are only three hundred bucks a piece too which is actually quite a deal all things considered. Considering the quality of the lectures themselves they are actually cheaper than most college classes. Still I am not spending that much money on them, and both of them are up on pirates bay waiting for me to click the download link. The problem is that TTC is pretty agressive with the whole intelectual property management. The quickest and easiest answer? Use a proxy server. Of course Cox is a little bit bitchy about this, but there is this outfit in Sweeden that promises to get around that for the low low cost of 6 bucks a month. Mostly my concerns are with security so I am off doing some reading on the subject before any risks are taken.

The problem though? The moral problem? Is that this really is doing something that is pretty much wrong. See when I download from a torrent site it is a lot like speeding. Only a small number of offenders are ever caught and chastised because everyone knows that it is kinda silly and there is no way to enforce it. Companies who do care like HBO and TTC will get your internet shut off, and the rest will complain but they will go on their merry buisnesses. The thing about using a proxy server is that I am encouraging a buisness that I am not in favor of. See having my ip adress in the data cloud will show that I have an impeccable taste in movies as well as a willingness to try a wide variety of DS games. But I don't do anything really really wrong I am just publicly sticking it to a bunch of assholes and I won't be doing that for to much longer because Netflix really is more convient than piracy I am swear to you.

But what about bob the child pornographer. See it took me two googles searches and 15 minuts to find some of these services. Which means it might take bob a little longer but he is still going to get it. See these serivices that talk about privacy and all of that? Idealisticly I am behind them all the way. In reality though? The thought of using such a thing horrifies me. The thought that I could download child pornography without fear terrifies me.

Now I know there is always some risk involved but I have always been much more comfortable doing my wrong doings out in the open inviting people to catch me if they actually care. It is just that now for the first time I want something from someone who does give a shit. Which means I am going to have to try. At the same time though the internet is a terrfying place and by giving my money to these people I am making it easier for a child pornographer to get his rocks off.

I am being a little bit mellow dramatic here. I am helping a child pornographer the same way I am killing small buisness when I shop at Walmart. Still maintaining a little bit of fiscal responciblity never did anyone any harm. Also like I said this actual moral conundrum doesn't factor into my actions. The only deciding factor will be how secure these things actually are, they might be full of holes and a pieces of crap. I don't have enough computer knowlage to actually understand the more techincal aspects of the whole thing. Still I mean there is no stopping us. Ubisoft learned that when its ultra retarded DRM for the ds lay cracked within 48 hours of Might & Magics release to the internet and I think the DRM for Assaisn's Creed 2 and Silent Hunter 5 have both been cracked, the new Photoshop is free for the taking, and Maya has been the internet's bitch forever. I don't want a 13,000 dollar 3d animation package though. I just want to learn linguistics and if you think rubbing electornic elbows with a petaphile will stop me then you should know that once to prove a point I graphed a poem.

If I am willing to do that, I am willing to do anything. I am the angel of death Hallelujah.

...Ummm I am going to lay off the sunkist and do some rpg writting where the more terrifying aspects of my personality are but to better use, IE terrorizing my players.

Saturday, May 1, 2010

Well Buh bye April

Man this is the month that the blog got forgotten. Okay well that isn't paticularly true but between being incapacitated for a week to recovering from being incapacitated to going on vacation I just didn't really have the time to get everything done that I needed to. Oh well. So I am back! Kindas. I still have a lot of stuff I need/want to do. Mostly I've become readdicted to a game called Atlantica Online. Atalntica is a fun game that actually provides some pretty genuine challenges in terms of game play. Also I enjoy the strategy and I LOVE the setting. It is also a game where when I play it for a couple of hours it feels like I have managed to accomplish something so I dunno what I am going to do about it.

Right now though I need to get a little bit more preperation done for M&M. I am pretty good, I hand wrote a rules summary just to get a feel for what it is the players can do in combat (a lot) and right now I just need to get a handle on a few more things. I also got a general outline of what is going to happen, and planned a few villians out. The thing about the game is that I don't want to just create throw away villians because they are a pain in the ass to make so I am going to definetly incorporate the Circus a little bit more because they are awesome.

Okay enough with the set up, on to the blog proper. There is a whole lot of things that I want to write about...and somehow I just blanked on all of them. Christ that is really weird.

Technology: Fuck the ipad. No seriously. I am not really into the whole technology wave thing. Computers are neat and they are helpful tools but they are things that break and people don't know how to use or take care of them. This is a rant I've made before and I will prolly make again at some later date. The thing is though is that everyone asks my opinion on the Ipad vs the netbook. See I bought a netbook because I don't really care about computers all that much. I just needed something that can access the internet, play some snazzy old games, and something to type on. I can view pdfs on it but reading off of a screen annoys me so I'd rather not. All in all I have gotten my 250 bucks worth out of the thing and I am happy I bought it. Still being constantly asked about the diffrence between the two is annoying. The thing about the Ipad is that it is annoying to get files onto it because Apple is all anti USB port, I like to type. I type on this netbook more than any other activity combined, and the netbook is cheaper. Ergo the Ipad has NOTHING to offer me, thanks but try again.

Oil Spill: I don't really have to much to say about this. This is one of those things that we all knew was going to happen. I mean it is a tube that is underwater. Shit goes on down there. There was never a doubt in my mind that this sort of spill would happen. But the fact that it hasn't been turned off yet is just retarded. I mean you shut off the oil, stop the oil from flowing, then fix the problem. This is something that should of had multiple layers of oversights on to, not prevent this from happening, but to minimise the damage that would be caused. That is the diffrence between our government doing something and a corporation.

That's a loaded statement I'll work on it more later.

Mercantilism: It is interesting how modern day corporations practice a version of mercantilsim in our modern day version of capitalism. It is pretty neat.

Arizona: So Arizona that is some crazy racist bullshit right there. I am not really sure where to go from here. Already someone has been wrongfully detained over a law that hasn't happened yet. He was a dark skinned California resident and his wife had to go get his birth certificate and deliver it. That is kind of insane. The law is never ever going to pass. It is just upsetting that they would even try to get it to pass.

Oh well. That brings me more or less to the end of lunch. I am a little more burnt out on the whole politics thing. Right now I am far more interested in writting about gaming and gaming theory so I think I am going to just give into that and keep on going. I am excited about M&M so I am going to focus on that.