tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-73672505249158530732024-03-12T17:18:43.666-07:00Smells Like Death, Blondes, and VictorySometimes I like to clear my plate. Sometimes it is politics. Sometimes it is board games. Sometimes it is personal. Occationally it is private. It is rarely spell checked, and never edited. However, this blog is part of my corner of the internet and you are welcome to it.thekolohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18045037214277805972noreply@blogger.comBlogger355125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7367250524915853073.post-73102544238349429402015-06-30T00:48:00.001-07:002015-06-30T00:48:26.257-07:00Horrorpalooza of One 2015So yeah I watched a lot of horror films last weekend. I was getting sick, I had a back log, and a couple of days off. However, now that I am better I think I'll turn the whole thing into an extra postive thing by writing about it. Also I feel like writing. It happens. Sometimes I consume all the things. Other times I like to produce. Like now. So here we go.<br />
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Over the couple of days I had off I watched:<br />
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Let Us Prey<br />
Among the Living<br />
13 Sins<br />
4 episodes of the 4th season of American Horror Story<br />
both of the Rob Zombie Halloween remakes. <br />
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I didn't get around to Found or Jamie Marks is Dead. Sorry guys. I'll catch you later. I may or may not throw Der Samurai into the mix because I watched it at around this time but for now lets work with what we have.<br />
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Best in Show:<br />
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Let Us Prey. If the Babadook hadn't come out in 2014 this would be the best horror movie that came out last year. Sadly the Babadook has it beat. However, you can't win them all. That said of the two movies I'd be much more willing to rewatch Let Us Prey. The thing about the Babadook is that 15 minutes into the movie I would of just fed that fucking kid to the monster and been done with it. Seriously, that kid had his irritation sensors on overdrive. Back to Let Us Prey. I loved it and you should watch it. It doesn't break a whole lot of new ground but it is very good at what it does. And the idea of the devil rolling into a small town and turning it upside down is a favorite story of mine.<br />
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Some stand out things about this movie:<br />
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One: When the devil used his magic it wasn't cheesy. It had the perfect blend of ritualistc, strange, and yet easy for the audience to understand. For example there was one point where he was screwing with a wife beater in the next cell. The devil is talking to the wife beater, and while he's talking he's jamming his thumb in the mortar between an intersection of four bricks. The effect is extreme tooth pain. It is a simple action but it works. There is a lot of stuff like that and the whole thing feels like an exceptionally well written issue of Constantine. I loved this movie. <br />
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Two: Realistic responces. There comes a certain point in most horror movies where you can't help but think, "Man the main characters must be tired of all this bullshit and yeah this totally happens in Let Us Prey. The main character cop is stuck behind a desk while all hell is breaking loose and she gripes, "What is wrong with this town?" It is the perfect response to the situation she was in. <br />
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Three: The main character wasn't some useless girl who spent most of the movie running around and screaming helplessly. This is fine every once in awhile. For example for both the Halloween movies it is a highly suitable character trait. For the first movie because the main character was a young girl and for the second because she was mentally broken. However, in Let Us Prey the main character was a cop, surrounded by cops, the devil, and other various miscreants. She's also survived a horror movie's worth of trauma earlier in her life. At no time was she helpless, but at the same time was the movie was very much a horror movie. I'm not saying that every movie needs to follow this formula but it did help this movie stand out. Hell it was critical to the plot. Her hard as nails survivor mentality is what drew the devil out in the first place.<br />
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Seriously, I didn't know what to expect from this movie but man was I ever delighted to have seen it.<br />
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Moving on.<br /><br />Among the Living:<br />
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I am shocked. Shocked that this movie wasn't the best of show. But it wasn't. This movie is by the director of Inside. Fucking Inside. INSIDE which is my favorite horror movie ever hands down. Like there isn't even a second place, there is just a whole mass of things I really like. Then there is Inside standing proudly over the rest of them wielding a pair of scissors and cutting down the competition. So....yeah maybe I was holding up Among the Living to impossible standards but now that I've had a couple of days to think about it, Among the Living is good but it really isn't that great. See what made Inside good was its laser focus. You had pregnant woman, you had the woman in black and you had a high stakes cat and mouse game between the two. The movie had just enough setup to ground you then it was off to the races and it never looked back. Hope you have a strong stomach and some popcorn cause shit's gonna go down. <br />
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Among the Living was a very different movie though. The plot is that three boys find, while exploring an abandoned movie studio, a car with a woman in the trunk. After a tense cat and mouse (phrase of the day!) episode they escape end up in their homes where the villain comes and murderers the vast majority of the cast before being brought down. Yay. The odd part of Among the Living is that the build up is the best part of the movie. We get to know the three boys pretty well and there are a lot of compelling details added that never really come into play. The biggest tough kid who is kinda scary has asthma, the nerdy one is timid but can still hang, and then there is the group's defacto leader and heart who moves the movie along. The children are interesting. They are old enough to have characters and they are developed enough so that when two of them are summarily dispatched of by the movie's monster like they were mere side characters I got more than a little upset. <br />
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I am not saying that all three of the kids should of lived through the movie. By all means kill a couple. But I would of loved to of seen them come into their own as the adults around them fall one after another to the movie's creature forcing them to fend for themselves in a life or death struggle to save some mystery woman. I felt that this movie could of done so much more with the characters it took the time to lovingly develop. <br />
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Is it a good movie? Sure, Better than good. It is a solid 8/10. It is a damn fine horror movie. It is beautiful. The movie's intro is spell binding. Some of the kills are deeply fucking unsettling. Ugh. I liked it a lot. I just think it could of done more with what it had. It was as the cusp of greatness the likes of which haven't been seen since Inside yet it drops the ball in the third act. Funny, Martyrs does the same thing.<br />
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Moving on.<br /><br />13 Sins is only barely a horror movie. I liked this movie but it was forgettable. So forgettable that I initially forgot to add it to the list of things I watched. Remember that movie The Game with Michael Doughlas? No? Well watch that instead because it is better over all. I liked the movie and it is worth a watch. 13 Sins isn't bad, but there are so many movies that do it better. Most notably being The Box. Actually yeah, forget 13 Sins go watch the Box instead then the Game then if you want to see another movie that is similar with a higher body count watch 13 Sins.<br />
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Lastly Halloween.<br />
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I loved these movies. There were a late addition to the line up. I had two other movies I was stoked about all lined up and ready to go and then last minute change of plans. I mean I met two of the people in the damn movies I might as well watch them. So yeah love. Rob Zombie knows how to direct a slick horror film and man those fuckers were long. For a genera that rarely wanders out of the 90 minute run time both the Halloween movies clock in at 120 minutes assuming you are watching the unrated director's cut which I did because why would I watch any other version. I watched them both back to back which I think was the right choice. All in all these movies distilled down everything the slasher genera has gotten right since the 1970's. It knew the deep down everyone loves an origin story, it knew how to ratchet up tension while still keeping the body count high, something Among the Living failed at. It knew how to develop characters quickly and make them distinctive so that when they died they weren't just Rozencrantz and Guildensterns waiting for their deaths. And the deaths were great. Halloween two especially brought the violence with the main character's initial dream sequence. <br />
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I could say more about these movies but it is like three in the morning and I am sleepy so I am going to end here. YAY!thekolohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18045037214277805972noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7367250524915853073.post-63405560396979496642015-05-12T22:58:00.001-07:002015-05-12T22:58:03.141-07:00Breaking HabitsOne of the things about spending an emmence amount of time video gaming is the need to keep in balanced with other activities. I am fond of saying that work is the least interesting thing I do every day because it is the truth. However, the trick is living up to that and sadly that takes more than just minecraft or whatever MMO has recently caught my eye. And so here we are. YAY!<br />
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I am going to spend some time tonight talking about Ex Machina. Ex Machina is a movie that broke my heart as soon as I heard about it. I saw the headline and I immediatly thought it was going to be an adaptation of the comic. Man of Steel was still fairly fresh on my mind and I think an adaptation of Ex Machina would make for a wonderful companion movie. Maybe not. Instead we got sexy robot movie and as a whole it is quite a good movie.<br />
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However, weeks later I find myself ever so slightly disapointed by it. The reason is that the ending was to abrupt. As a result I can't tell if it flubbed the ending or if the ending was brilliant. Now while I am very much a fan of ambiguous cinema I would of liked a little bit more to go on.<br />
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So it is time for slaps and tickles!<br />
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Lets start with the slaps. <br />
It flubbed the ending hard. When Ava locks Caleb in a room we are left with a role reversal. She is in control of the situation and, for the first time, the master of her own fate. So she ditches Caleb and goes to her intersection in a city to see a cross section of humanity for the first time. The idea of the movie is that she needs to pass the Turing test by becoming indistinguishable from a human and what is more human that stepping over another human to achieve your goals right? <br />
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The problem with this line of reasoning is that the movie is told almost entierely through Caleb's point of view. The only time we see Ava is when he sees her. The only time she speaks is when he is listening. While a decent amount of the movie is dedicated towards getting to know her better and to judge her ability to think independtly of her initial programing. However, throughout the movie we don't get to know her very well at all. We know that she wants to escape and to see and experience new people. We know that the programer man she lives with is dangerously close to going off of his rocker but that's it. Once Caleb discovers this one fact about her the movie becomes fixated on that fact. It becomes the axis which the movie revolves around. Now philisophically the movie wanders off and gives the viewer some ideas to mull over, like is the test a double blind and is Caleb really the AI. The color test about the woman who lives in the black and white room but knows everything there is to know about color, even the need for sexuality. Nathan claims that he gave Ava a sexuality to give her the chance to experience love yet I don't buy that explanation or his answer. It is something worth thinking about and it is a subject for another post at another time. Yet while the movie gives the viewer plenty of time to busy themselves with a dizzying array of questions that could keep me happy for months. It manages, at the same time, to leave the inner workings and or motivations of Eva a mystery. <br />
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She wants to escape but to what end? Whatever that end was she sacrificed Caleb without a moments hesitation. In addition what is sad about Caleb's sacrifice is that he is directly responciple for her escape. To have her sacrifice him at the last moment seems almost absentminded of her. There wasn't even a struggle. She just politely asked him to wait in the room which he gladly did before she locked the door. She sentenced him to death, we don't know why, and I felt myself let down by the whole thing.<br />
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I grew up with Star Trek TNG which by extension means I grew up with Data. Or rather I grew up with Data in a more meaningful way than I grew up with Skynet. So I am over the whole AI's be bad thing. I just am. It is why I have such a deep abiding love of Her. Her almost immeadiatly side steps the idea of the turing test by letting Samantha pick her own name, giving her a sense of humor, prefrences, and a personality. It happens quickly because, like me, Her is over the whole AIs give us the willies thing and is ready and willing to move on. God blessem. As such Ex Machina is a brilliant movie marred by an exceptionally boring status quo like ending. The machine sacks the human so it can be free. Well done.<br />
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HOWEVER, what if the ending is brilliant. I mean super brilliant.<br /><br />Okay to make it brilliant we have to visit two different parts of the movie. The first part is something I mentioned earlier Ava's sexuality. The second thing we have to talk about is when Nathan reveals to Caleb the actual point of the test. He calls Ava a rat in a maze. She only has one way out and that is Caleb. To get Caleb to help her she is going to need to use all sorts of tools like empathy and creativity. She learns to cut off the power and together the two of them are able to concoct a plan. The word concoct looks stupid. Anyway, she escapes and blah blah blah. BUT WAIT lets go back to her sexuality. There are two reasons for a sexuality. One is love because love is AWESOME. The other is reproduction and this is where it gets interesting. <br />
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Ava is smart. I don't know how smart but we'll go with pretty smart. The point being is that she is in a building and she is free. She knows there are others like her, as she met them. I am pretty sure she found the workshop. Even if she didn't she could reasonably deduce that there is one present in the building. She also has all of Nathan's notes. And she has Caleb. In short she has the ability to replicate. She has the ability to grow, learn, and understand herself better. She has the opportunity, if she so desired, to preform the Turing test on Caleb as she now has him captive. Instead she bolts. This would mean she fails her test.<br />
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Ava is presented with her captivity as a problem. She solves her problem but to what end? What does she hope to achieve? Where will she go? How will she maintain herself? Where will she get money? An id? Once she sees her cross walk what will she do next? As a machine none of this matters. She had one goal. Escape. Which she achieves with ruthless efficiency. On that note seriously Nathan? Next time you make a robot make it so they can't harm you what the fuck. Mad scientist 101.<br />
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Anywho the movie gives the view a lot of space to think about knowledge, identity, and consciousness. We emphasize with Ava because Nathan is a dick and because if we were captured we would like to be free. However, we want to be free to go back to our lives. Ava pays lipservice to the idea of wanting to learn more about humanity but she could of done that with Caleb. In fact her sitting down and starting to test Caleb would be just as fitting of an end to the movie as her leaving him. More of a fitting end because it would show that she has some of her own ideas and priorities beyond that task that was originally assigned to her.<br />
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Okay this feels muddled let me put it another way. The only time we learn anything about Ava is through Caleb and in a couple of occasions we learn things second hand through Nathan. Nathan is where we learn about her desire to escape. As soon as Ava is free she makes a beeline for the door. She kills Nathan mostly because he is in the way. She doesn't even acknowledge the asian girl and just like that she's gone. In the version of the movie where I think the ending is terrible this is because we aren't given enough information to determine her motivations. HOWEVER, if we do take the motivation the movie claims she has and apply it then all the sudden she is acting less like an organism that would be concerned about its continued survival and its ability to propagate its species and more about the singular goal that was instilled in her at birth. <br />
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Then the movie becomes much more interesting. <br />
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Anyway I've been typing awhile and I'm going to leave it here.thekolohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18045037214277805972noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7367250524915853073.post-29147125824905088502015-03-05T23:10:00.000-08:002015-03-05T23:10:52.360-08:00A look back At Bleeding EdgeAs stated earlier, as in last post which was over a month ago, I don't want the books I read to pass without comment. I love reading. More than that I love writing about what I read. It is fun. Last book I read was On Basklisk Station and other than the fascinatingly progressive gender dynamics there isn't a whole hell of a lot to say about that book.<br />
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Bleeding Edge suffers from the opposite problem, from the time period, to the setting, to the characters, to its peculiar narrative arc, or its unique structure Bleeding Edge is a buffet of topics for discussion, thoughts to think, and threads left dangling. In a lot of ways it reads like a season of the X-Files. The main character keeps poking around the edges of some vast unknowable conspiracy and she keeps uncovering, or being presented with dangling clues that she is either unwilling or unable to follow through with. There are a lot of unanswered questions by the end of the book. In fact when the book ended my responce was, "huh guess that's that then." Which I think is one of the main criticisms I'd level at it. <br />
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It took me a long time to get through the book. There were a lot of reasons for this. One is the books peculiar structure which I will get to in a minute but the other is the looming presence of 9/11. The book starts some time before 9/11 but I could tell that the books events and 9/11 were going to coincide and I was dreading it. I hate to say it but I am 9/11ed out. Sure I love Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and the first two seasons of Rescue Me but 9/11 is such a cheap narrative turning point that in this case the prospect of it just irritated me. Fortunately once the dust had settled the book had some rather salient points to make about the whole event. Many of which still hold true to today. My favorite is about how we've become trapped in reality. Everything had to be real and it all had to be now. Man what a perfect way to sum up a generation. Hell just looking around youtube you see people playing detective calling everything fake. Now that's not bad. That's a time honored tradition going back to Barnum. What is bad is that these people are furious all the time. <br />
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The other reason that it took me so long to get through the book is that it would do this thing. Maxine would be sitting there in a scene listening to someone talk or something like that then all the sudden there would be a tangent. Sometimes these tangents would go on for 10-15 pages. At first it drove me nuts. I couldn't keep track of the narrative. Things would be fine then all the sudden we'd be ten years ago and Maxine is thinking about something random, then 15 pages later we are back in the present with the conversation continuing right where it left off. So I started putting off reading the book, waiting until I was super alert so that I could instantly catch when the book was going to veer off and do something random for a bit. It was miserable trying to keep up with it.<br /><br />Then I started to suspect that this might be the point. That there might be some sort of purpose to the book's meandering style and if I were to let go and just let the prose take me I'd always end up back where I needed to be. A little while later Maxine had her first encounter with Deep Archer, a computer program that mimics the style of the book and I just felt like the smartest person in the world. I figured out the fancy fucking book before the author broke down and explained it. Once I let go and just accepted being "purposefully lost" as the book put it I started to enjoy it immensely. Bleeding Edge isn't a book about a sequential series of events culminating in some sort of lesson or character growth but rather an extended journey and strange journey.<br />
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One of the things I really like about it is the discussions of the internet. Okay the distinction between the "deep internet" and the surface internet annoyed me because it felt like Pynchon just Googled deep internet, read a wiki article and ran with it. I would of preferred he called it something else. Nerd nagging aside the discussion of the deep internet, particularly Deep Archer, and its subsequent invasion as a result of 9/11 reminded me of the gradual commercialization of the internet along with the gradual grounding of our internet identities. It is kind of a complex issue for me, and one that is fairly personal. Not in a tragic way but more of a, "you kinda had to be there" kind of way. But watching the fall of Deep Archer was a bit like watching the internet go from this very specialized community of hobbiests into something everyone uses. During that transition it became something so much more, and so much less at the same time. The internet still has its dark corners far away from Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, Youtube, and constant unending horrible ads. However, without all of us there would be no Amazon, kickstarter, and Wikileaks. I am not saying it is better or worse. It is just different. The dotcom bubble was the American Dream writ large and its collapse is the American reality that you get when you wake up. Only a very few escape with anything. <br />
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It is a big mysterious book that I'd very much like to revisit down the road. I'd be curious what I'd think about it 5 years from now with 9/11 20 years gone and the internet being very different that what it is today. <br />
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This book deserves to have more written about it. It deserves to be talked about more. But I have a new book to read and I'm excited. So I'm going to end it here.<br /><br />thekolohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18045037214277805972noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7367250524915853073.post-64292993445342984562015-01-26T21:09:00.001-08:002015-01-26T21:09:11.981-08:00Gender Parity and You with Honor Harrington Too!Gender equality, parity, and representation is one of those things that, when I'm confronted with it, I find myself just throwing my hands in the air and moving on. It most recently caught my attention when a University decided to cancel the annual reading of the Vagina Monologues on valentines day because it excluded Trans folk. This is what happens when you have people who lack any sort of critical thinking skills trying to enact societal change. But that's a tirade for another day.<div>
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See my problem with most people's idea of how representation should be handled is that it rings false. If you demand that for a piece of media every X characters there needs to be one LGBT person then it isn't going to feel natural. For an example of this you need look no further than the teen movies of the late 80's and 90's. Or if you wanna make it easy on yourself Not Another Teen movie where they point out the token black guy. Or how so many horror movies has the near obligatory black guy and how almost always the black guy dies first. My favorite example of racial diversity gone wrong is the original Power Rangers. Oh man was that shit ever funny. I knew that was messed up even in the 4th grade, "Look at how diverse we are! SO DIVERSE and yet we all have colors to match our steriotypes. Jocky leader guy is red, boy is blue, black guy is black, all asians are yellow, pink is for girls YAY the diversity!" Yeah. See what I mean when you force diversity and it ends up ringing false? To bring the gender back into focus in the Return of the King when the Nazgoul was saying it couldn't be killed by any man I turned to my friend and whispered, "Hobbit KO incoming!" I was excited. It would of fit with the theme of the movie too, small people in events to big for them being brave. It would of been awesome. Instead we got, "I am no man" which compared to what it could of been just seems forced.<br /><br />Alright lets stay focused on gender for a bit. I've always had a theory of what gender parity would look like in a book. My theory was that unless a character's gender is important for the medias plot, subplot, or a subtext then the gender itself should be interchangeable and randomly assigned. For example Han Solo. There is nothing inherent about the character that demands he be a male. So make him a woman. The core character remains entirely unaltered with the exception that he might of ended up in the slave outfit instead of in carbonite. Similarly if you swapped the genders of Luke and Leia the story itself remains relatively unchanged. In Star Trek TNG 99% of the crew could undergo a gender swap and the essence off the characters would still remain the same. </div>
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Gender in of itself is not an indication of how a character needs to act unless you are really into propagating stereotypes. The book "Honor Harrington: On Basklisk Station" is the perfect example of this. The book weighs in at 432 pages and it has a rather large cast of characters. Some are pretty flat and two dimensional and the book lacks subtlety and grace. It is a military Sci-FI book where the author took Napolionic navel battles and finagled the technology so that they have been replicated in space and he is a hell of a lot more interested in that than dealing with things like character development. And yet it feels like when he made each and every character he flipped a coin and assigned their genders that way. During the book no one falls in love. There is no sexual tension. There was a character who once tried to rape Honor but she kicked his ass. There is tension between Honor and her executive officer but it had to do with the fact that the executive officer wanted command of the ship and was jelous she got it. Not because she was a girl. The head engineer was a woman. So was the ship's doctor and the leader of planet Basklisk. </div>
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The point is that the books simply didn't care care about gender. The book was about a small ship being given an impossible task and they managed to do it anyway through grit and determination. Their genders neither helped nor hindered this task and to me this is perfect. It didn't feel like the author mixed up the genders to meet some sort of quota. He was much more concerned with telling you about how hyperspace worked. The mix felt natural and that naturalness is what's going to help people get used to the idea of gender equality going forwards. I liked the book but in later ones Honor falls in love and gets trapped in love triangles and other stuff and I'm quite frankly not interested in any of that crap.</div>
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That said I might end up reading a few more books in the series anyway. As it stands this first book is a fascinating look at what a world looks like where the differences between the sexes aren't broken down but ignored entirely thus treating everyone equal. </div>
thekolohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18045037214277805972noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7367250524915853073.post-79376425045352334042014-10-24T23:27:00.003-07:002014-10-24T23:27:59.658-07:00I'm Not Done WritingSo I just wrote like 3 pages but I'm not done yet. So I am going to write some more. This is good though. I've been writing more fiction recently. Nothing coherent mostly stuff on scratch paper on my lunch breaks to get me into the groove of fiction writing again. National Novel Writing Month is around the corner and I want to participate this year.<br />
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I thought I had an idea of a novel all planned out and ready to go. This is something I wanted to do and I was ready to do it. Then all the sudden a couple of weeks ago I was like, "but what if I don't". What if I write something else? So I've been planning for that. I want to do a noir style book where a guy starts with a normal happy every day life and then it all gets flipped upside down and by the end of it he's in thick with the wrong crowd but he decides to stay. Part Black Lagoon, part Sin City, part Fatale, part American Tabloid, part Cold in July, and a dash of creativity. I hope I like it. I've decided to write it in the first person.<br />
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One of my favorite authors, James Ellroy, once said, "If you don't have an interesting perspective then don't bother with the 1st person. Just stick to 3rd". That's always stuck with me and as a result all of my novels and stories have been in the third person, When he said that he was eluding to White Jazz which is the one book that people seem to hate the most. It is very different than his other works but man it just drew me in and took me along for the ride. I loved every page of it and yeah he's right. If you aren't going to get in your character's head and I mean really get into it then don't fucking bother. Stick to third person. I've been trying out various characters in first person and it is a hell of a ride. Here's an extended quote. To give you the set up the main character is trying to track down a murderer and set up a prostitution sting operation to help find someone who might know the killer.<br />
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"Bluesuits out in force: popping tricks, impounding trick cars.<br />
Prostie vans behind Cooper's Donuts; Vice bulls bagging IDs. Men stationed southbound and northbound- hot to foil sex prowlers hot to rabbit.<br />
My perch: Cooper's roof. Ordnance: binoculars, a bullhorn.<br />
Dig the panic:<br />
Johns soliciting whores-cops grabbing them. Vehicles impounded, van detainment- fourteen fis bagged so far, prelim Q&A:<br />
"You married?"<br />
"You on parole or probation"<br />
"You like it white or colored? Sign this waiver, we might cut you loose at the station."<br />No Lucille K.<br />
Some clown tried to run- a rookie plugged his back tires.<br />
Epidemic boo-hoo- "DON'T TELL MY WIFE!" Leg-shackle clangs-the prostie vans shook.<br />
Luck-whores mixed fifty-fifty: white gils, coons. Fourteen tricks arrested- all Caucasian.<br />Panic down below: Shriners bagged en masse. Five men, fez hats flying- a whore grabbe one and pranced.<br />
I hit the bullhorn: "We've got nineteen! Let's close it down!"<br />
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This along with the description of Catch-22, just before the execution of Colonel Aureliano Buendia, and a certain passage out of Nightwood make up my pantheon of favorite literary moments. Anyway you see what I mean by making first person work and I mean really work. It isn't worth it unless you get into someone's head. Someone who think and acts differently than you. I'm not going to go quite that far. I am going to use him as kind of an unreliable narrator. He is also going to undergo some signifigant changes. If I take the time to do it right the style of writing would be different from the first and second half of the book but it is NaNoWriMo so what will more than likely happen is that I'll just be frenzily hammering out the plot. Speaking of the plot I have the beginning and the end pretty well thought out and part of the first part of the middle. So I am actually pretty excited about this novel. I hope it turns out well. Last years novel was fun but easy. I set it in an rpg universe and while I had a blast writing it and it turned out surprisingly well it wasn't challenging. It was the most complex plot I've ever tackled but still it all clicked together a little to well. That said I do very much want to edit it up and do something with it. This one I am really looking forwards to.<br />
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<span style="background-color: white;">They say not to compare yourself to others and just do your own thing but </span>Gérard de Villiers wrote 3 novels a year for most of his life. Granted they aren't very good but they certainly are fun to read which is all he wanted really. It gives you pause to think. Anywho the self comparison always inspired me to do better and reach for more and not be to self satisfied which is something I am prone to. However, I have fits of depression that make getting out of bed and not being cruel to people and unbelievably difficult task so sometimes I earn it. <br />
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I don't want to dwell here lets move on.<br />
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I am going to get an ebook reader in November. I am getting a Kindle. I could just order it now. Right now. I have Amazon open in a tab because I needed to look up the spelling of Gérard de Villiers's name and it has an add for the kindle. I could one click order that shit. However, I am waiting till black friday/cyber monday in hopes of a good sale on the things. Whenever I mention my Kindle quest people always say, "printed books are awesome" and they are right. I am with these people 100% but damnit I am out of room for books. I have books everywhere. I have shelves of books. I could sell them at a used book store but I have a rather "distinctive" taste in books. Most of my prefered books aren't even carried by Barns a Million let alone a used book store so giving them a milk crate of books in exchange for 5 bucks credit doesn't do me any good. That and a lot of books I want to read are political in nature and those books have a shelf life of maybe 5 years before the information is out dated and needs updating. These books are a third of the price digitally. Mostly though it is the space issue. It is just a pain in the ass. <br />
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The thing is though is that the Kindle or the idea of the Kindle is quaint. I've put off getting an ebook reader for awhile. Me? I hate reading off the computer screen. There is something about it that sends my reading comprehension into the shitter. Even when I unplug from the internet and my book is the only thing on the screen my comprehension goes in the shitter. Don't know why. The reason I say the idea of the Kindle is quaint though is because it is a dedicated electronic device and those are going the way of the dinosaur.<br /><br />Back in the day a computer with a net connection was your gateway to the world. Then it was if you had a lap top you could take your world anywhere. Now? Now people hold the internet in the palm of their hands. Cellphones have procession power that wasn't even dreamed of 20 years ago let alone in the palm of your hand. Kindles are quaint in the same way desktop computers are quaint. The vast majority of the things most people do with a desktop pc can be done on a cell phone or a tablet. Heck with Skype, Facetime, and Facebook messenger you almost don't need a cell plan anymore. So why get a dedicated device when for the same amount of money I could get a phone, internet browser, mini multimedia station? The plain and simple answer is that the Kindle's screen is better for reading than a cell phone one. That's all and I am willing to overpay for a nice screen and cheaper books that won't clutter up my house but would break my heart to throw away. Perhaps there is somewhere I could donate them. It is strange though. I had a baby laptop and I loved it until it died. I mostly interneted and wrote on it. If I hadn't decided to use my PC as a gaming platform I prolly would of just invested in another baby laptop and a stream box for my tv. One day having a desktop PC will be completely outdated. I don't know what the work space will look like but I do know I'll still need a keyboard to type on.<br />
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I just can't seem to organize my thoughts as well when I use text to type. I can also type faster than I can talk so there's that. I just think it is a little funny. All my life I've had a desktop PC in one form or another in my house from the ancient commador 64 to my custom built gaming rig. It just seems odd that in the next 20 years they might not even be a thing any more. It is also odd to think of me living 20 more years but that's a different topic for another time.<br />
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I keep seeing more and more about how we are addicted to technology and it is rewiring our brains and blah blah blah. Me? I think that most of it is a load of crap. I think that blaming our problems on technology is a convenient way of putting the chicken before the egg. People claim we are now more isolated than ever before but we have 50 thousand different ways to fucking talk to each other so I don't see the problem. There is that endless meme of the people all sitting near each other on their phones instead of having conversations with each other but let me tell you before we all had cell phones we all didn't live in some mystical fucking fantasy land were we all sat around and talked to each other for hours on end. That never happened. The only time that happens is when you are in a bar because that's part of what being in a bar is all about. <br /><br />People aren't addicted to technology they are addicted to themselves. Hell they aren't even addicted to themselves they are addicted to things that validate themselves. That's what the whole gamer's gate thing is self validation of some stupid identity that doesn't matter. That is what the like button on facebook is. It is a non verbal one click way for you to validate other people's posts. It lets you say, "I support this message" without actually typing the words. It is also why you are a chode when you like your own posts. Communication over facebook is secondary to the idea of self validation. The comercialization of the internet just made it easier for groups of like minded people to gather and exchange idea that they already agree on. The reason why this happens is because people like to talk to people they already agree with. So why not monetize it. This is why certain tumbler groups get really weird. Or why forums become overly policed so everyone stays on message. This policing can be either formal or informal. It is also why some people talk in memes.<br />
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The other day at work Cory and I were discussing Gamer's Gate and he made the comment that the Chans are the most horrible thing to come out of the internet. I disagree. Other than the specifically illeagal stuff like child pornography I kind of accept the Chans. I've met a lot of people over the course of my life and as a result I've gained an understanding of the chans. I don't like them but like most internet communities if you leave them alone they are happy to exist in a self perpetuating circle jerk. No the worst thing to come out of the internet is the meme. The picture with the white words. This picture can then be shared over and over again without any thought from the person who shares it. People can then "like" it and even optionally share it again. Memes intrinsically have no value. Oftentimes they only require a modicum of creativity and effort to make and distribute. That's okay though because in general people spend a minimum amount of time processing the information within the meme, usually in the form of retension and then they move on. Meme's are essentially short hand for thought proceeses but what is horrible about them is that because of the way they are distributed they are perfectly preserved. A meme can be shared hundreds or millions of times. I can go viral and when that happens it penetrates the national consciousness and everyone knows what this meme is and yet it is perfectly preserved the entire time.<br />
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Things need to change in order to improve. Sometimes they change for the worst. Sometimes they change for the best. The point is that things need to change. If things remain static that is just what they are. Static. Static thoughts are the worst and that is exactly what a meme is. For the most part they are fun, like grumpy cat. But more and more they are being used to boil down complex issues into easily digestable and believable facts. On large comment threads on facebook, after a certain point it degrades into people tagging their friends and people posting pictures of Michael Jackson eating popcorn. When people want to make charged statements they pull out that fucking Willy Wonka picture instead of just saying what they think and lord if you ever feel like taking a trip down a conspiracy theory rabbit hole one day the comment threads are littered with pictures that have words on them. Memes are an actual honest to god horror. Sure in moderation they are fun but I've listened to multiple groups of people have entire conversations in memes in real life for hours. <br />
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Why? Well Memes are a quick and simple nugget of thought. You can throw one up and quickly get validation as to whether or not people agree with it. If they do then score you can post related memes and it is cruise control for having a thought process. The more meme's you know the easier it is to fit in with other people who know their memes. After awhile it allows people to talk in shorthand. Jargon laden specialties in acedemia lets you do the same thing. The difference is that jargon lets you expand ideas quickly while memes preserve ideas indefinitly. When people talk in memes they aren't really talking to each other but instead it is like a preverse call and responce.<br />
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This is a topic I'd like to revisit another time however. It is 1:30 in the morning and I've been writing since like 9ish. I'd also like to bring in some literary theory to this dicussion. Marxists are usually technophobic which is ironic because currently technology has out paced the means of production in many areas. However, the meme plays directly into a lot of their fears specfically the fears of Walter Benjamin so I want to reread one of his essays and use that to frame my thoughts. <br /><br />This was good thought I got a nice rough draft of what I wanna say right here.thekolohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18045037214277805972noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7367250524915853073.post-73835278169156487832014-10-24T20:58:00.001-07:002014-10-24T20:58:28.143-07:00Something ElseIt has been a very long month. When my pay check came in the mail and I saw that I had 10 hours of overtime on it I got physical proof that I was tired because I'd been working a lot and not because I'd become some tremendous sissy in the past couple of years. My relief was tangible so much so that it caused a gentle rain to grace a drought stricken land. It wasn't enough of a rain to do anyone any good. It just made some mud which got tracked into a house and caused a fight which spun out of control. The police got involved. But I am sure in the end it will work out alright. The lesson here is that I very much need to take some time off and I will! <br />
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That is not what I wanted to write about though. I just wanted a little bit to warm up. However, seeing as how I haven't picked a topic yet I'm just going to go through things that are on my surface thoughts. I have at least 4.<br />
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1) Sometimes when I come up across a thing I don't understand I don't research the solution to said problem. Instead I keep it in the back of my mind, mull it over, and try to unravel it for myself. I know full well that the solution to my problem is a well asked question away or in most cases 45 minutes with google but sometimes it is best to put your problem solving skills to work especially when they are big concept problems that greatly affect our every day lives. I am ashamed to admit that this particular problem took my a couple of years to unravel. Now granted I didn't spend several years in a row puzzling over it. In fact I went for months without thinking about it. However, it is one of those things that should of been much simpler to solve and it wasn't due to my fundamental lack of understanding of how our monetary system works. This pisses me off a little bit but that's a different topic.<br />
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The problem was, "Why did President Clinton merge investment banking and personal banking?". See before Clinton a law was passed by someone, I don't remember who and I don't feel like looking it up. The law stated that there would be a separation of investment and personal banking. Personal banking is what you use when you want a loan, a savings account and a checking account. The bank is supposed to take part of your savings account, turn them into safe loans. This keeps your money in the community and offers up some safe guards against financial crisis. An investment bank does all the crazy fucking stockmarket shit.<br />
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So why on god's green earth would we merge the two. During the great depression people lost everything when the banks folded. We have institutions which are to big to fail. By the by our pathetic excuse for a media organization has been using that phrase wrong. To big to fail means that should the institution fail it would take enough of our ecconomy with it that the results would be catastrophic. They are a thing that legally shouldn't excist and yet there they are.<br />
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Anyway the reason for the merge is simple. Like bloody simple. One most of us belong to national bank chains like Bank of America, or Wells Fargo or something similar. So it isn't like our savings and loan comes from and goes to local sources anyway. Two money in a savings account is, ecconmically speaking, useless. It might as well be shoved under a mattress, buried in your back yard, or even burned. Money that doesn't circulate has no purpose. It has to move through the system in order to grow. By opening our savings accounts to the risks of investment banking now all that money we tuck away for a rainy day is free to circulate around the ecconomy which helps stimulate growth. <br /><br />I am unable to verify this, because I lack the research material but I am willing to bet there are links to the explosion of the financial markets and this law. Has it been a bad law? Well that's still up for debate but I am leaning no but until I can explain it I can't really have an opinion. Oh well. That is something I can't just magically figure out for myself. I'd need to do some heavy reading and it is a question that is still being answered to this day. Is it a good law or not? Oh well. Yeah I am nerd. But whatever nerds are in.<br />
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2) I was doing the same process with the problem of minimum wage being 15 monies an hour. I figured both of these problems out in the same week! YAY! I may be tired and have most of the joy sucked out of me but damnit I am thinking about shit. WOO! *removes top* *then gets shy and puts top back on and sits back down a little red faced*. Anyway yeah some people want the minimum wage to be 15 monies. They keep siting the law that states the minimum wage should provide a working wage. <br /><br />Now opponents to this have mostly been really dismissive and nasty. Basically you are poor and you work a shitty job so go fuck yourselves. Or less agressivley, "Well why don't you hire a lawyer and...OH WAIT we don't pay you enough to do that HA! Fuckers". If I had the energy I'd go find a quote from the CEO of Applebee's I never really ate their because their food is a bunch of bland overpriced piles of shit but holy crap did that man make an ass of himself during the passing of the Affordable Care Act. I've hated him ever since.<br />
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Back to the topic at hand as a poor worker, I and the people around me would benefit greatly from a 15 dollar per hour pay check but it is a bad idea and I finally fucking figured out why. This one only took a could of months. Okay so here's the skinny. The minimum wage was started in 1938 and back then the world was a very different place than it is today. Hell the world back in the 50's was a different place that it is today. When manufacturing was America's major source of jobs the American economy was a very different place than it is today. The main reason being is that just about everyone who was working was working for their lives. By that I mean these folks worked while they were either in high school or immediately after in factories, stores, farms, salesmen, for the rest of their lives. Summer break still existed so kids could help out on the farm or get a job to help their family raise money to get through the winter. College was reserved for those who were already rich and planned on entering into business or law. It was also the year Superman made his first appearance. The specter of WW2 loomed writ large though no one really knew it yet. Most families subsisted off of a single income provided by the man while the woman stayed at home to take care of the house and children. This point is important because our work force was 51% smaller as a result. <br />
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Things are very different now. Hell things are different now then they were ten years ago. NOW there are kids who get a job in high school because they are bored and they just want some spending money. There are people who are getting jobs as a form of recreation I can't fucking fathom what is wrong with people like that but they are out there. I've met them. There are kids who get jobs because their parents believe that having a job will help teach them responsibility. College is something that everyone can now go to. Granted the student debt thing is fucked and something to be tackled latter but the point is that you can at least get in the door. Women are part of our workforce now and they are holding more and more positions of power every year. Good on them I say.<br />
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The point being is that 15 dollars an hour for a minimum wage is silly because not every person in the workforce is working for their lives. Some of them are just passing through. Do they need 15 bucks an hour to pay for school? Yeah absolutely but lets not muddy the waters here. Lets stick to two basic things. One in 1938 when people entered into the workforce they were generally there for good. Today that is not so much the case.<br /><br />By setting our wages to 15 dollars an hour it kills our ability to negotiate and there. Right motherfucking there is the problem. I got it. See 10 bucks an hour is a pretty reasonable minimum wage. I've yet to see an actual job that doesn't deserve 10 bucks an hour. It also still allows employers to hire on people at 12-15 and more marginally skilled positions without melting the budget. <br /><br />Lets be very clear when you are paid the minimum wage it is because that is the least amount they are legally allowed to pay you. If they could get away with less they most likely would and in the past they did. The minimum wage wasn't enough to protect workers. That's why they formed unions. This way workers of similar jobs could band together in a large enough group to force their employers to do horrible things like pay them a living wage or have better working conditions. I hate to put it this way but people don't want a 15 dollar minimum wage. What they want is the ability to negotiate their wages in a legal way that avoids retaliation on the behalf of the employers. Let's use me as an example. I make X amount of money. Because of the next sentence I can't say the exact amount. Now lets say my friend Corey makes X+2 amounts of money. Corey got hired after me and was made full time almost immediately while my boss dicked me around instead of making me full time. <br /><br />Had I put down the actual amounts of money we make and it got back to my bosses I could be fired. Hell I could be reprimanded for talking about the full time situation. What this does is that it shields my bosses from having to pay us fairly. To be clear I am not talking about Chef, or the head of Culinary I am talking about their corporate overlords. They don't have to worry about pus organizing because they can auto fire us for discussing our wages. This is true for every job. If the retail workforce were to unionize in a big way they'd have to undertake a serious risk. Most of us are way to poor and have people who rely on us so we can't afford to take risks. Our corporate overlords know this. They know they have us between a rock and a hard place. They know the one hard worker who is worth the three shit workers will work for the same meger pay as the shit workers so why bother giving anyone merit based raises and yeah that's that son. <br />
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The 15 dollar and hour minimum wage is an attempt to circumnavigate this and it isn't a bad one. Unions have had to fight for their existence for a long time. They are portrayed as the bad guys and they've had their fair share of problems but they are important for keeping their employers in check. But they come with a risk. <br /><br />So what's the solution? Well it isn't the 15 buck minimum wage. As much as I'd like it it would slaughter small to mid sized businesses along with some small to mid sized corporations. It is easy to look at the 1% and say, "Well just give us part of that" but that is a very small population getting a very big piece of pie. The 15 min wage would fuck everyone over except them and the poor who got to keep their jobs. At the same time there needs to be a better format for dealing with our bosses than unions. Unions are the right idea but the wrong methodology. I can't prove that but it feels right. We can't use the legal system because, well, it is to slow and to expensive. Workers do need a better outside arbitration system to quickly and safely air their concerns it needs to happen outside the corporate structure and possibly anonymously but yeah. <br />
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I get the problem though. I understand the feeling but we can't loose sight of the bigger picture.<br />
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Well that's enough for one night. There did something productive. Imma gonna go eat candy now.thekolohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18045037214277805972noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7367250524915853073.post-45875377365615009302014-09-27T23:51:00.001-07:002014-09-27T23:51:44.561-07:00MOVIE TIME WITH MIKE!<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
So I've been writing more, and reading
more, and generally doing more and it is working out pretty well.
Sadly I haven't been writing more in my actual blog which is silly so
I am going to do that now. I was thinking of tackling the christian
persecution complex but seriously that is a really big issue that is
worthy of a book not a Saturday night blog post where I have a
headache. So instead we are going to talk about movies because I
LIKE movies and I wanna.
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In the past week I've seen an unusually
large number of movies mostly because an unusually large number of
amazing movies came out and it is one of those things where if you
don't see them you are going to miss them. Then to add to it I
watched some more movies at home because I guess that is the thing to
do this week. To start off with I want to talk about God's Pocket.</div>
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God's Pocket is one of those extremely
rare pitch black comedies that flutters into my life like some
glorious bird and takes roost in my heart. It is a simple movie
about poor people living in a run down part of some nameless city.
In all likelihood it is Boston but it really could be anywhere.
Where it is isn't important. The movie is narrated by a columnist
for the local paper who's life is quickly spiraling out of control
due to alcoholism and a crushing loneliness. There is a line in the
movie that goes something like, “The one thing no one from God's
Pocket can forgive is no being from God's Pocket”. That is where
we get our main character played by Hoffman, an outsider, small time
mafia goon, who is in love with a wife he can't please. <br /><br />It
is a sad strange little movie. Centered around the murder of a boy
who is by all accounts an asshole who was heading for disaster one
way or another. The subsequent coverup of the murder and Hoffman's
attempts to pay for a funeral he can't afford. I found it engaging
and more than a little sweet but sad at the same time. It is a
surprisingly slippery movie. It is less a sequential story told with
pictures and more of a series of moods, emotions and memories. It
transcends the, “and this happened then this happened plot” and
instead it drifts about almost as a surreal slice of life. I
understand why it isn't very well received. It is a strange movie on
par with Only God Forgives or Cosmopolis but it doesn't look, sound
or feel strange. It just creeps up on you and then there is this
conflagration of events cascading to disaster and while you know how
we got there you can't help but think, “jesus this is such a
strange movie”. It ends on a sad not then a bittersweet one. It
also ends in Florida. I liked it very much and months from now when
I watch it again I feel like I will be continued to be mystified by
its mix of banality and disaster. Good times.</div>
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I also watched Walk Among the
Tombstones. This movie is brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. By the
end of this movie my back cramped up and I had to wheeled out an a
stretcher because I was in a perpetual cringe. The movie made me
feel gross. Like honest to god gross. My soul needed a shower.
Best movie I've seen of its kind since 8mm. I can hear the question
now, “What about A Serbian Film” and it is actually a good
question. What sets 8mm and Tombstone apart is the distinct lack of
onscreen violence. Tombstones is a movie about two men who stalk,
kidnap, then mutilate women for fun and profit. There is this moment
where one guy plans on using a garrote to sever a woman's breast and
yet they don't show it. The level on onscreen violence for
Tombstones is about zero. The amount of blood spilled is miniscule.
The deathtoll is low even when you consider the entire career of the
two killers and yet the movie itself was absolutely chilling. It did
this by letting the viewer's imagination do the heavy lifting. It
cuts away just in time but you can hear the screams. The two actors
who play the killers do so with absolute perfection and we watch with
dread as the killers stalk a new victim while somewhere far to far
away Liam Nieson does his best to unravel the mystery of the killer's
identity and you know deep down inside that he is to far away to
catch them in time. <br /><br />The moive exudes a deep breathless air.
One of details I love about the movie is that Nieson isn't this
island of a man who talks to no one, has no friends, and does
everything by himself. It isn't true. He is friends with the
waitress at the diner. He goes to AA meetings which is how the plot
of this particular movie gets started. He befriends a homeless black
boy halfway through. People are his main source of information. He
doesn't just blunder into information, or he doesn't just have that
one friend in the fbi who owes him a favor and he grudgingly cashes
it in to move the damn plot along. No. Instead we are treated to a
competently written procedural as our hero tries to get information
for people he doesn't like. <br /><br />When the movie ends it doesn't
feel like it is over so much as it feels like you are being released
from its clutches so that you may go home and be thankful that you
aren't any of the characters in this movie. It is a damn good and
I am sad more people aren't going to go see it. <br /><br />Lets
contrast it with the Equalizer. Man was the Equalizer a terrible
movie and what's worse is that I am predisposed to like the
Equalizer. I love movies about people who try to escape from their
previous lives but their lives catch up to them either because of
circumstance or they just get drawn back in. History of Violence is
my penultimate example of the genera but there are many others as
well. Including the Equalizer. The problem is that the movie had no
focus. The trailers made it look like he was going to save a young
girl from a life of prostitution. That means PIMPS! I love Pimps as
movie villains no matter what happens to them I don't feel bad at
all. Instead it is the Russian mafia. That's cool I guess. Russian
mafia is in. Still pimps I still hate them but when the whole
situation resolved itself within the first half hour I was a little
confused. Then he did this thing with some dirty cops. Then there
was this bad ass Russian troubleshooter who spent an HOUR
investigating to find out who our main character was. Predictably he
was ex CIA. Not the CIA who spend most of their time reading files
and using other people to get information for them. No this guy was
the one man army CIA. The type of CIA man that makes you wonder why
we even bother with an army when we can apparently just make one man
killing machines. I don't know I do know I was relieved when the
movie finally ended because I was so crushingly bored by the
uninteresting action scenes that I couldn't care less. <br /><br />Women
have been speaking up about their portrayals in movies a lot lately
because they are tired of being the people who are put into danger,
or get mutilated, or raped, or killed, so that the main character can
have a reason to go do the plot. Die Hard, John Mclain needs to go
save his wife. Die Hard 2 he does it again. Die Hard 4 he is saving
his daughter this time WHAT A TWIST. The examples go on and on. The
idea is that a dead chick equals instant drama. This is a complex
issue that is worthy of its own post so lets set that aside and
refocus on the Equalizer because this is a bad example of what a
movie looks like when the character has a no clear motivations for
his actions. Plot wise the Equalizer is a combination of Die Hard 2
(because the movie isn't very good) and Die Hard 3. Yes he saves the
girl from a life of prostration. She is then promptly and fucking
improbably never heard from again until the end of the movie. The
movie then shifts to Die Hard 3 as there is a man after Washington
trying to kill him for the actions he committed in Die Hard 2. The
problem is that this is all happening in the same movie and if you
think this paragraph is a train wreck then it is nothing compared to
the mishmash of things that happen in The Equalizer.</div>
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Going back to the girl thing movies
seem to be moving away from the “girl in danger” plot point. Out
of the Furnace has Patrick Bateman looking for his missing brother.
John Wick goes forth on a murder spree because someone was dumb
enough to kill his puppy. With the Equalizer it is a minor point and
not the main thrust of the movie. Moreover it is becoming more
noticeable when it is clumsy and lazily implemented like in Homefront
or The Purge. It is a trend that I am more than okay with. And yeah
I don't really have anything to add.
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The general ineptness of The Equalizer
was made all the more apparent due to the fact that I watched it in
close proximity to superior movies. It isn't so much that it was bad
but rather that it was lazy. All the parts that made Walk Among the
Tombstones so enjoyable for me, the procedure of seeking and getting
information is hand waved away in The Equlizer, and replaced with
meaningless stuff. There was a vain attempt to make the villain seem
like he might be an actual threat to Washington but the villain never
got close. Not really. Our hero was always at least one step ahead.
The hostages were freed long before we could be worried that they
were in any real danger and the final conflict was just sad. Also I
am done writing for tonight so TA!</div>
thekolohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18045037214277805972noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7367250524915853073.post-42067081059696490262014-08-20T22:46:00.001-07:002014-08-20T22:46:07.268-07:00FergisonJust before I sat down to write this I, on a whim, looked at my other subscribed blogs. Just about all of them stopped 4 years ago like some mysterious force swept across the land leaving only a few scattered survivors in its wake.<br /><br />I have annihilation fantasies. It is one of those things. <br />
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So that Fergison thing is happening. I've wanted to write about it ever since the first night of protests but I couldn't quite grapple onto what I wanted to say. After all it would be easy to just go the, "pigs bad. toys bad. capitalization and proper punctuation bad. lootars bad. everything bad." But that's not what I do. Well okay I do that sometimes but it isn't something I wanted to do right now. To be honest I still want to write about the topic and yet I don't. Well not really. Instead I want to pull the camera back and take a look at the broader picture cause that's where its at.<br />
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Mostly though I want to talk about the problems with the police. There are certain things that once you see them you remain effected by them for the rest of your life. For me that is the French film La Haine which is about the day after a race riot in Paris and three unusually racially divers friends living out their day. The movie has a lot of messages in it but the biggest one is the utterly unbalanced power relation between people, particularly poor people, and the police. The other big issue is what to do about that power imbalance. The movie doesn't give out any easy answers on everything and as the years roll by I find that the movie itself remains distressingly relavant. I'm going to get back to this.<br />
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I'd like to pull back even further and talk about the Police's role in society. Were I to ask that question to the class someone would shoot up their hand and say, "To serve and protect". That's not really their role in society though. That is how they achieve their role in society. There is a difference between the two. Their actual role in society is to preserve the order of that society. That may seem strange but I'll break it down a bit. <br /><br />The idea behind the police is that they will act as a neutral third party for when you've been wronged and they are the first step in the process of making it right. So if I were to get robbed the police would dedicate resources to finding my stuff, returning it to me, and punishing the wrongdoer. This work on all levels from robbery up to murder. It is the comfort that there are people out there who possess the resources and the training to help me so I don't "have to take matters into my own hands". We may give cops a lot of shit, hell even to much shit if that will make you feel better, but a cops response is almost universally better than taking matters into your own hands. Look up the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hatfield%E2%80%93McCoy_feud">Hatsfields and McCoys</a> feud that went on for years and caused a lot of death all because outsiders couldn't maintain order. Or there is <a href="http://www.nydailynews.com/news/crime/calif-man-80-guns-pregnant-home-invader-shot-best-dead-article-1.1878188">this wonderful man</a>. The point I would like to emphasize in this article is that he shot them while they were trying to flee. They were running he was in no danger. The woman surrendered and he decided to shoot her anyway. Speaking of which to find this news story I googled man kills thief. I had plenty of stories to choose from.<br /><br />This is why we need the police.<br />
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The police may do some crazy shit. But it isn't anything nearly as bad as what we would do to each other without them. The interesting thing about the police is that we don't seem to need that many of them On average we only have 17 police per 10,000 residents. That's mostly for larger cities for smaller ones the ratio is even lower. If we were to all violently rise up the cops would be fucked. Even if we were to half assedly kinda rise up but not very violently we get things like Fergison. However, in general we like our order. It brings us comfort and security and the police are supposed to be here to help maintain comfort and security. When things like Rodney King, The Zoot Suit Riots, Fergison happen it is because there is no longer any faith that order can be maintained. When this happens it is a result of a cascade failure on the officers to do their job properly. They have one job. To maintain civil society. To aid in the maintenance of civil society they both serve the citizens and they protect them. <br />
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So why does it go so fucking wrong?<br /><br />
I have opinions on answers! YAY!<br />
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Lets do the easiest one first. We need to stop using Police Officers as nannies. This is a pro police officer point! I wanted to start with it because it think it is the most critical. Police Officers joined the force to uphold the law. Yet they spend most of their time sitting around writing speeding tickets, checking for seat belts, telling kids to turn their damn music down, shuffling around drunks, and parking tickets. This helps no one. It doesn't help the public because it means that the public will be subjected to a parade to tiny annoyances that are going to fester until it turns into "fuck the police". Our very own Gulf Breeze brags about how they gleefully pull over people going less than 5 miles over the legal limit and you know what? Everyone hates them and their asshole cops. Cause lets face it officers went through about two years of training. They are men and women who are willing to put their lives on the line for us. They will try their damndest to keep us safe and sitting around doing shit work isn't one of those things.<br />
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It eats at you. Worst it eats at us. After enough traffic stops, trumped up moving violations, or someone tut tutting us because our tags are expired we can't help but think that cops are not here to serve and protect but instead to harass and annoy. Our respect for them wanes. There are any number of ways to deal with this problem everything from a separate force akin to meter maids to a probationary period that officers go through before becoming full fledged officers. The point being is that the people who enforce silly bs nanny laws can't be the same people who will be showing up to domestic disputes, helping car accident victims, et cetera et cetera. These people are supposed to be professionals give them the respect they reserve and maybe they won't feel the need to take their frustrations out on us.<br />
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NEXT! I just flipped a coin and we got the brotherhood of silence thing that cops do. The vast majority of cops are good people who are good at their jobs...even if you are black. There is a long history in this country of cops abusing their power and these cops in particular have always been. Nothing new. Even if you were to take my above example you'd still get the bad eggs. However, cops are hesitant to rat out other cops. This is for two reasons. One good one bad. The bad reason is that it makes other officers not be able to trust you yadda yadda yadda I shouldn't have to spell it out. The good reason is because officers are under an unreasonable amount of regulations. Those regulations don't fit reality. They don't even come close and hey sometimes shit gets a little bit to real and you gotta take actions that don't exactly fit within the regulations. Me? I'm a dishwasher at a corporate owned retirement home. There are all sorts of silly rules that I should follow that I don't. The difference is that officers literally make life and grievous bodily harm and possibly death choices. They do so quickly and being raked over the coals for doing so sucks. <br /><br />However, there is a cynic in me and I can't help but think that the "brother hood of silence" thing is mostly pushed by shit cops. Just a gut feeling. It also doesn't help that cops have no <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/03/opinion/sunday/why-police-officers-lie-under-oath.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0">incentive to tell the truth</a>. Traditionally it comes down to the officer's word versus mine and he's been entrusted with the authority to maintain the peace soooo why would he lie? It is his job not to! Officers need a better way of reporting misconduct and police departments need more tools available to keep cops in line.<br />
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There is the training issue but I don't feel like going into that. Police need to be trained better. They need to be evaluated more often, and blah blah blah. The media has latched onto this point you don't need me for it.<br /><br />Lastly, there are quite a few cops out there who need a <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/08/19/im-a-cop-if-you-dont-want-to-get-hurt-dont-challenge-me/">fucking attitude adjustment. </a> Do what I say and you don't get hurt is what a mugger say to a victim. Also he "gaurntees that we will come out alright but it might <a href="http://www.jsonline.com/news/crime/criminal-charges-against-police-in-strip-search-case-expected-today-gf5cb94-173312411.html">involve some forced cavity searches</a>. <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2013/11/06/justice/new-mexico-search-lawsuit/">Cause you know forced cavity searches</a>. I could go on with the butt stuff (which is sad) but the point is that this is not something an officer should say to a citizen. It is time for Cops to relearn that they are not the boss of us. We are allowed to film you no matter how much you may not like it. You are not allowed to search my bag, my car, my house, or me without a warrant. If we aren't breaking any laws and I mean real laws then back off and go do something important. It is not up to us to just curl up in a ball and take it so that we can go through the proper channels later because it is your sole job to make sure that this doesn't happen in the first place. It is not my job to placate cops with attitude problems.<br /><br />Most officers are good people who do a good job. However, sometimes they make mistakes, sometimes they are thrust into situations that they are under trained to handle, and sometimes they look the other way while their co-workers commit monstrous injustices. When I originally was going to write this blog I was going to say if you look the other way while something horrible happens you are no better than a nazi but that's a rather pathetic take on a complex issue. None of us know how we'd react until we are in that situation. That said they need to do better because the buck stops with them.thekolohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18045037214277805972noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7367250524915853073.post-43744143550242150642014-08-13T01:22:00.002-07:002014-08-13T01:22:33.195-07:00Let's Switch Gears Pathfinder time!Originally when I was going to write this post I was going to write about something serious like depression, suicide, Gaza, the flood of refugees hitting our boarders and how we are still calling them immigrants, how frustrated I am with President Obama, or racism. Then I realized deep down that I didn't really want to write about any of these topics and so I am going to switch to Pathfinder. <br />
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I've been into roleplaying games in one form or another my entire life though it wasn't until middle school that I got to take my first hesitant steps into running a game. I've both run and played games on and off ever since. I'll be perfectly honest I haven't run as many games as I liked and I certainly haven't played as much as I want to but it is hard when most of the people my age still don't work 9 to 5 jobs, myself included. One of the most important things for a roleplaying game to work is everyone being on a set schedual so you can reliably tell who is going to show up. I understand that life happens but god damn. So there is it. Currently I am running nothing. I was preparing to run a Pathfinder game when a friend of mine declared that he is okay with running it and so I rolled up an alchemist and I find myself very much looking forwards to game night Friday. <br />
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It still doesn't stop me from coming up with campaign ideas some of which I am gleefully still kicking around. I kinda want to start writing up rpg materials and start selling it for "what you think it is worth". That thought has lead me to start writing again in this blog because I need the practice. <br />
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Anyway one of the things that I love about Pathfinder is that it seizes my imagination. When I look at 4th edition it does nothing for me. I see stale stat blocks and characters that slot together with little independent choice for the end user. It just doesn't strike up my imagination. Whatever this is old territory and I wanted to write about the stuff I had kicking around for the current game.<br />
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One is a Crusader Kings style courtly maneuvering. Crusader Kings has provided just about everyone in my play group with a crash course in medieval politics. What a duchy is, cassius belle, getting claims killing children you know the deal. Throw some monsters, magic, gods, and player characters into the mix and you got the potential for a pretty rocking campaign. The obvious parallel is Game of Thrones but this game would have fewer wars and more boarder skirmishes IE high crown authority. However, the vassles could be plotting to get the crown authority reduced and should that happen all hell would break loose. I really like that idea it would suit a group of rouges and bards really well. <br />
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On a similar tangent either the players themselves or the Player's duke have all recently served with distinction in a war that struck deep into foreign lands. The king to show his gratitude forms a new dutchy with either the players of their duke in charge depending of the level we settle on. Of course in Crusader Kings terms this is the equivalent of taking Jeruselem in a crusade while you are playing Spain and you dump off one of your least favorite vassals in the foreign land grant him independence and watch his ass get eaten. I've done that before and it is fun. <br />
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On a similar vein but not quite. The idea that a new continent has been discovered! A ship got blown off course, and stumbled upon a landmass of indeterminate size. Everyone from the great wizard colleges, to the various kingdoms want to explore the strange new island and learn its secrets. This would give the players a chance to play honest to god explorers. Not only would they be forging new paths and making bold new discoveries but they would also be helping to build up the settlement, fending off the natives, and generally being important. It would be less "Heart of Darkness" and more Alan Quatermain/Indiana Jones. I think that would be super fun. There would be a little bit tensions like when they have to save clerics from being chucked into a volcano but in general I want it be more of a grand adventure than post colonial finger waving. <br />
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Going back to Crusader Kings and medieval politics I find it interesting that there is so much hand waving that happens with that stuff in most games, mine included. The idea that the players just kinda get randomly hauled before the king who then tells them to go do something is kinda silly. It is romantic in a, "Are you bad enough to rid the hills of goblins and save my daughter" kind of way but realistically the King is busy doing other things. And there is plenty of time for swords and sorcery. Like in order to get a claim on a neighboring country the players need to explore an ancient crypt and recover an amulet once thought to be lost but whose previous owner is the rightful air to the county and thus they go to war. Hell the orcs could stand in for the norsemen and I mean damn there is just so much that can be done with the setting and a small dose of complexity of the government. For example the possessed trait could take on a whole new meaning and a witches coven with a little bit of access could seriously fuck some things up. Like one of the witches has access to the King's son due to his penchant for "ladies" who aren't his wife. <br />
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The last idea I was kicking around was SPAAAAAAACE. A proper space sourcebook for pathfinder is coming out next month. Until then to get reading the world the players would be playing on would be getting ready for something call the bazzar of wonders. Once every 300 years their planet gets visited by the bazzar. The people of the players planet have the opportunity to trade away their crafts and treasures for great secrets, powerful items, or exotic pets. The bazaar is a grand event felt the world over. During that time no war is allowed and even the Orcs and the barbarian tribes hold true to this tradition because the bazzar's wrath is something no one wants to behold again. For one month Drow walk among their elven kin, Drugar with the Dwarves. The great dragons of the world awaken from their slumber and liches from their studies. All are welcome at the bazaar, assuming they do no harm to anyone else during the course of the week. Dwarven kings spend decades on crafts, Elves create incredible works of arts, Dragons bring their most valued treasures, and humans innovate at a breakneck and reckless speeds. That isn't to say that just before the bazaar there isn't some old fashioned score settling and hey sometimes tensions boil over. The idea is that the players do something to distinguish themselves during the bazaar and they are offered passage on the ship and are allowed to see the stars. I think that could get awesome real quick.<br />
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I have other ideas too but those are the main ones and my hour is up.thekolohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18045037214277805972noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7367250524915853073.post-15844702978549730372014-08-12T09:17:00.000-07:002014-08-12T09:17:02.692-07:00Writing, Superman, and wanderings.<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Today Robin Williams died a city is
rioting over the questionable death of black youth at the hands of a
police officer, someone somewhere is falling in love and I've
decicded while taking a shower that it is high time I start writing
in my blog again. Much like Amilie on that fateful day temporarily
blackened by the death of Lady Di but with less drama, I've decided
to change my life. Here it goes.</div>
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The idea is to dedicate an hour of my
time before I go to sleep to writing at least on the days where I am
not doing anything like a game night. I don't know if I will publish
every night. Maybe I'll select the “best of the week” and
publish it all over the weekend. Maybe I'll publish everything.
Publishing isn't the important part. The writing is.</div>
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In all honesty this is being caused by
a couple of things. The desire to run a roleplaying game, the
excitement of being able to play in one, the proximity to NaNoWriMo,
and some other stuff that is harder to put a specific name on. I've
been thinking a lot about NaNo, what I want to write about and stuff
like that. The current front runner is a sequal to what I wrote last
year which I never published but whatever. It is set in the Eclipse
Phase universe and it is actually my second favorite thing I've ever
written. It also feels a bit like cheating. I like to try to do
something different every year, to exparament. NaNo is by and large
a judgement free excersice for me so I feel like if I am not trying
something new and different I am wasting the opportunity. My first
novel blended aspects of magical realism, Twin Peaks, and melocholic
reflection and it turned out great. It remains my favorite thing
I've written. The year after I wrote about a support group of people
who tried to end the world at the turning of the milenium, failed,
and now are adrift in a world that is not supposed to still be here.
This book still has potential and I want to redo it. As is it didn't
turn out all that great. The lone female character feels tacked on,
the ending was forced, and some other things. It was my first time
writing using a large group of people and it turned out strangely.
I'd also like to talk about how dour and grey America became after
9/11. It isn't so much that we've gone mad. We are America we've
always been a little bit crazy. It is just that after 9/11 we
started to let the crazy off the leash and that's a bad thing.
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Trying to recapture my previous glory I
decided to write a sequal to the first book I wrote. The first book
ended in the main character's suicide cause that was always gonna
happen. As soon as I hit 50k words he was gonna pull out a gun and
off himself. I was kinda hoping he'd be just walking down the street
or something but no he was in the middle of an epic battle. It still
worked and it even looked a little bit like I planned it. Go me!
The sequal was going to be about the characters getting on with their
lives. It was horrible. I want to rewrite it. I really do but not
this year.</div>
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Last year my book was about a guy who
everyone in power hates but he's to dangerous to kill and to useful
to cut loose. He is the enemy that the keep closer and the only man
for the job. He's old, mean, and haunted by his past. Trying to
make up for his mistakes he joined Firewall to do good but he keeps
ending up on their bad side. I loved it. It was actually a very
plotty novel. Most of my otherones have a lot of navel gazing which
is code for, “I have a daily word count to meet and I have no idea
what to do next so we are going to stand around and think about
life”. I really like doing things like that so it doesn't bother
me.</div>
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It is nice to remember what you wrote.
All my characters are very much outsiders, like myself. Sometimes
they have a tight knit group of confidants. Sometimes they are
utterly alone. Sometimes they struggle to be alone and sometimes
they just struggle. Go with what you know I suppose. The thing I
currently have on the burner is something that is very much along the
same lines of what I've done before. The idea is that a small group
of American teenagers have turned into people with low level super
powers. There is a secret family of assasins who have sworn to
protect such people but they can't operate in America because, well,
America sees and hears to much and this group is supposed to be
invisable. One of the group sets off to guard these kids anyway even
though the partiarch of the family has ordered their deaths. He's
alone, he's one of the most dangerous men in the world even amongst
his family, and he's gotta keep these kids alive, out of the hands of
the military, and away from the various groups who might want to
capitalize on them. It came from the idea of, “Just because you
can life and throw a car doesn't mean you can fight”. It has been
knocking around in my head for a very long time. Originally I wanted
it to be part of a serialized fiction thing I was going to do but it
never got off the ground. However, I kinda want to do something
different this year. Something new.</div>
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I'd like to write something about
someone who is comfortable with his otherness. They know they are
different and they are okay with it. Think of Superman without Clark
Kent. Kent is more than just a secret identiy. It is a security
blanket or if I am feeling uncharitable it is a type of madness.
Here is a person who in modern comics could cure every disease on the
planet, create and infinite clean powersource that could power the
planet forever, to give us interstellar travel and to introduce us to
the multitudes of alien life out there and instead he runs around
Metropolis getting into trouble and pretending to be a bumbling do
gooder from Kansas. Clark is Superman's insistance that he is human.
That he belongs on our planet, that he thinks, feels, and looses
just like the rest of us do. The crazy thing is that it works. He
needs Clark to be Superman. Without him he is something differen.
Something other. I find that it is this distinction that causes
people to not understand the recent Man of Steel movie. That is what
Superman looks like without Clark. He still loves his mom but he is
torn between his Kryptonian heritage and the life built on earth. As
the movie went on he piece by piece lost his connection with Kypton
until there was nothing left but he and Zod. I think that even at
the end Zod would of accepted him if he submitted to his will and let
Krypton be rebuilt. Instead he chose us and at the very end of the
movie we saw the half joking mischevious man of steel we know and
love from his best comics. It was a very subtle journey. Sublety
isn't something the internet is capable of.</div>
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I want someone with a confidence to be
different. The modern day retelling of Sherlock on BBC is a good
example. The big thing is less the character but what are they going
to do? One of the most brilliant things I've ever read on the nature
of heroism is, “Only villians try to change the world...” I
wanted the exact quote but I couldn't find it. It is in the Runaways
somewhere after they defeated the Pride. I don't need a whole lot of
excuses to reread it I'll find it later. The point is that just
about all my character's have ridden the line between heroism and
villiany. I am okay with that I did it on purpose most of the time
time especially with my first and last books. I don't know. I do
know that I want to do something different this year. Maybe
something truly reflective. Like a magically realistic memior.
Actually that sounds really good. I might do that. The completely
true story of my life. It would be more emotional than literal.
Actually that wouldn't be very happy so I'd use my life like a model.
Take some things fictionalize others and create something new. I
like this. Imma do that. There is a 99% chance that it will turn
out horribly. However, it has been an hour and I need to sleep.</div>
thekolohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18045037214277805972noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7367250524915853073.post-76927231101168442682014-05-16T15:14:00.002-07:002014-05-16T15:14:32.801-07:00Pet PoliticsToday I was reading around the internet and I came across this gem, "Today I was reading and I came across this, "The group, alarmed by a resurgence of the GOP establishment in recent primaries and what activists view as a softened message, drafted demands to be shared with senior lawmakers calling on the party to “recommit” to bedrock principles. Some of those principles laid out in the new document — strict opposition to illegal immigration, same-sex marriage and abortion"<br />
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<br /><a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/conservatives-seek-to-regain-control-of-republican-agenda/2014/05/15/aaa20c80-dc6e-11e3-bda1-9b46b2066796_story.html?wpisrc=nl_pmpol">It is in this article here</a>. I like the Washington Post. They do a pretty good job of getting information across. And they are my "go to" starting point for learning about American politics. In all honesty I hate following American politics. They are so petty and mean and sometimes when I watching them try to deal with things like Bengazi or the Snowden revelations I can't help but think they are way out of their depths. The sad thing is that ultimately same-sex marriage isn't important. In terms of nation building, giving Americans the ability to put food on the tables, to come up with a better solution than just putting everyone in jail, to keep our infrastructure well maintained, to head off problems before they happen these are the things congress should be focusing on. The problem is that they aren't sexy. They don't grab headlines. They don't sell. So instead congress spends its time on idiot distractions like same-sex marriage while our roads fall apart and our education system crumbles around us. Yes thank you for focusing on the important issues. </div>
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I am fresh off of watching a pile of Ted talks. I saw the CEO of Google's hopeful vision of the future. I learned about the art of asking, about the importance of reclaiming yourself from your surroundings in any way you can, to new studies on how to help diagnose autism. On the one hand we have Google wanting to launch balloons that will help spread the internet to every corner of the earth and on the other we have a young man in Seoul who decides to make the perfect bow as a way to deal with modern urbanized society. Over 1700 talks on over a hundred subjects all about how we could become better. It is always a little inspiring to go there.<br /><br />Then I come back to the portion of out congress who is obsessed on issues that are little more than distractions. For every minute people spend needlessly dicking around with same-sex marriage is another minute that actual important work isn't getting done. For every minute we spend haggling over what women can or can't do with their bodies is another minute we aren't spending on dealing with the fact that we still haven't properly reformed our financial sector or that we haven't broken down the to big to fail problem. By the way it turns out no one knows what "to big to fail" means. "To big to fail" doesn't indicate that the institution is invincible but rather that if the institution does fail it will cause a cascading effect through out our economy that would be far more devastating than the housing collapse. Nope none of this is more important than preventing gay people from getting gay married. </div>
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Setting my temper tantrum aside it is funny because Marriage is one of those things that is important to our country and there are some pretty important institutional reasons as to why our government rewards people for getting straight married. See much of our countries ability to function relies on producing good functioning workers. We need two types of workers. We need people to haul garbage, wash dishes (me!), and do various shitwork. We also need people who can innovate, create, and teach. Every day highly skilled workers leave the workforce due to retirement and every day new people need to replace them. But new people can't replace them right away because there is no replacement for experience. <br /><br />So yeah people have got it into their heads that straight marriages will produce stable healthy new workers into the workforce. Gay marriages can't do that. Cause they can't make new things. Abortion can't do that either cause there is no more baby. So by upholding traditional marriage values we ensure that there will always be enough people to fill up jobs and pay taxes because our country is really isolated and no one wants to move here. Yep no one. It is up to straight married people to replenish our workforce because...</div>
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Oh people against gay marriage you're so stupid. I can respect both sides of the debate about abortion and illeagal immigration is a crazy complex issue mostly because we were really short sighted and didn't build cheap housing for lower income families and made the only way to get to work be a metal machine that just sucks money away at over 30 bucks a week but gay marriage come on. </div>
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Problems are hard. </div>
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This is a logical stopping point but I'd like to continue...in a new post.</div>
thekolohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18045037214277805972noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7367250524915853073.post-5365627563743437332014-05-12T09:21:00.000-07:002014-05-12T09:21:07.751-07:00Change Comes SlowlySo I've been changing thing around about how I live my life and stuff like that. I do this from time to time. Hell most times I don't go more than 6 months without trying to change something. I've come to learn that big dramatic gestures don't work. Oh they'll work for a bit but eventually I just go back to the way I was. Other times I would drastically upset my routine for awhile just to see what would happen. Usually nothing. For a time I was satisfied by this but I'm not anymore. So I tried to change little things and see what comes out of it. So far I've had the most success with it. Currently I am of the like mind that I need to take better care of myself. Not for any specific reason but simply because I am getting older and I am entering into the "use it or lose it" phase of my life. It is nothing to be afraid of unless you ignore it. <br /><br />
So this means exercise. This is the thing I want to do the least. It is also something I've realized that most people have a ludicrously unhealthy relationship with. Exercise regimens swing wildly between super intense boot camps that try to cram years worth of work into a couple of weeks to fat burning simple workouts that claim to just take minutes a day. I see so little about just general health and doing things because they are good for you. Overwhelmingly the message is loose weight! Look better! Be better! Rawr. I do my best to not let the vulgarities of the capitalistic society that I live in get me down but sometimes it is very difficult. Our health has been commercialized. Oh well.<br />
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I set out to make three small changes, drink less soda, start waking up earlier, and daily streaches. So far I've done all three which is kinda astounding to me. I was expecting maybe one of three, two at best but the fact that I've been doing all three for awhile now is surprising. Not only that but I've made progress. I can now bend at the waist and touch my toes for the first time in my life and this blog is the product of waking up earlier. Waking up earlier is more of a means to an end rather than something that will make me healthier. For exercise I've settled on Yoga. It can be done without equipment, it uses the body as resistance, it builds flexibility, which are all the things I want. For awhile I got it into my head that I would just be doing these things after work but that's simply not happening. It hasn't happened yet and I don't have faith that it will happen any time in the future near or far. So I decided to wake up earlier and I decided that instead of just playing video games that I will do productive things with my mornings, for the most part, from now on. Before I start in on yoga I do have to clean up my house quite a bit. I kinda need to clean up my house anyway but you know how it is. Once I do that I can begin in earnest. Which is nice. I plan on using my mornings for other things too, writing here for example and....well that's it at the moment. I figure between writing and cleaning up the house and starting yoga I'll have my work cut out for me. Not that I'm afraid of this mind you but it is something that needs to be done. It is the next step towards a better future.thekolohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18045037214277805972noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7367250524915853073.post-57965190435224441842014-03-27T19:59:00.001-07:002014-03-27T19:59:36.027-07:00Gender!There are certain things that Forgein Affairs, as a publication, just does badly. One of them is issues about technology. The articles are either to basic, explaining concepts that I already understand, or just dull. Just a couple of issues ago there was a coverstory about the rise of big data. Big data is really boring. This issue is devoted to technology articles and some were better than the average. However, I've already read the whole thing and I still have a month to go so I had to shlep out of Barns and Noble to pick up another Journal so I'd have something to read during lunch. The alternative is un-fucking-aceptable. I decided on the Journal of International Affairs. This quater's issue is about the gender issue which is a clever play on words cause this is an issue of a...yeah never mind.<br />
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I haven't read anything from it yet but all the other choices were about regions of the world I'm not particularly interested in. Then again I am not particularly interested in the gender issue either. The issue of gender is one of those things that is so needlessly over complex that I find myself baffled as to how we could of possibly of gotten this way. I can already tell that the journal doesn't even attempt to integrate trans issues and that might be for the best. I mean there are people out there who still believe it is their god given right to beat their wives. There is just so much baggage wrapped up in women's issues and so much of it doesn't matter.<br />
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So lets keep this Amerocentric because that's where I am and I am going to talk about a few things. In no particular order. <br />
<br />Man: Will you sleep with me?<br />Woman: No.<br />
Man: You are a slut<br /><br />Variations of this exchange keep happening and it is one of those things that deeply upsets me. It isn't just because the exchange itself makes no god damned sense but it still happens. However, it has less to do with actual gender and more to do with stupid pride. To explain. Since the guy just got turned down he's hurt and prolly more than a little embarassed especially if his friends are around. So he says something hurtful. He doesn't go full bore by saying cunt because that might make matters much worse for him. Instead he opts for a middle of the road gender specific insult. The fact that his insult doesn't make any sense is irrelevant. All that matters is that he needs to snap back, maintain pride and walk away. <br />
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Does this make it any less hurtful? No. Does this excuse his behavior? Actually it makes his behavior even worse. To just offhandly snap back at someone who turns you down is the behavior of a poorly raised child. Instead of exercising self control and conducting ones self with a little bit of dignity the man just says something offensive even if it is, linguisticly speaking, gibberish, it still has the intended effect of keeping himself feeling good at the expense of someone else. The problem is that this response demonstrates a complete lack of respect for the woman to begin with. It is the, "I am willing to be marginally nice to get what I want and then we are done". The woman represents a potential for physical satisfaction and little else. Which is why she is so easily discarded. <br />
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It is also hurtful because she is the one who is approached and then is essentially thrust into a no win situation. She is provided with two options that she may or may not have been asking for. She could of just been minding her own business which ends in unwanted attention. <br />
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Unwanted attention is actually the thing that made me realize that I could never ever properly be a feminist. There are things that I take for granted. Simple things that are regularly denied women. Take sovereignty over one's physical space. It is a simple matter for a guy to not deal with unwanted physical contact. After all for the most part it simply doesn't happen. When a man wants people to back off it generally happens. The most frequent argument I hear about not wanting to go to a gay club is, "I don't want some dude to hit on me". Essentially they don't want to be treated the way they treat women and I mean I don't blame them. Who would want that. As I watched women receive unwanted attention time and time again I realize that if it we me I could just shout "fuck off" and it would work. Most women aren't so lucky. Most of the women I've talked to about this topic tend to just brush it off. Just like I take my physical sovereignty for granted most of them believe that being pestered constantly is just the part of being in the world. As a result I can be at most a male dissident. <br />
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When I first heard the term it pissed me off to no end. He it still does. Male Dissident makes me sound like a second class citizen in a movement about equality. I mean how fucked up is that? The truth is that it is fucked up. However, part of making the world a better place is to recognize where the problems are and just not pretending that everything is fine. No I can not nor will I ever truly be able to understand what it is like to be a woman. At best I can make an educated guess and that guess is so narrow that it is all but useless. Women are a gender. The take up a little bit more than half of the population. Any number of them will react in different ways to any number of things. They all have different priorities, wants, needs, goals, problems, and their own versions of solutions. Coor it is almost like they was people yeah? See that's the problem with things like Women's Studies writing about gender, and discussing the topic in general. The human mind's ability to reduce complex problems into manageable parts is astonishing. However, this isn't always a good thing. It is how we get conspiracy theories after all. It is also how we loose a lot of detail. The problem with women's issue is that the details are the most important part. The more we reduce the worse our arguments get but we can't make arguments without reduction and around and around it goes. Part of it an inherent flaw in the essay format. Part of it is an inherent flaw in the way we think.<br />
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Over the years I've solved most of my moral/ethical quandaries by putting the people first. If I have a friend in front of me who needs help with something then I am going to help my friend before I spit my beliefs in their face. The individual is more important than a series of abstract ideals. Let's take trans folk because they always get left out of gender conversations because as I said earlier there is a fanatical need to reduce the complexity of ideas. I meet a guy they prefer to be refered to as she...well why the fuck not? I mean it costs me literally nothing to change their gender pronoun and it makes them happy and more comfortable to be themselves. There is no reason not to do it other than, "It is weird..." however, does that mean that you should prioritize your discomfort over their's? To me the answer is overwhelmingly no. I am not religious. But I do know that I was not put here on this earth to make it a worse place for other people. With that as a core belief I move forwards and I let it dictate my actions. When it counts I am kind, even to those who don't deserve it. And if I need to do something simple like change a pronoun to make someone happy then I am more than willing to do it. <br />
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I want to touch on the pay gap really quick before eating frosted flakes and watching star trek. The pay gap is a hold over from our bosses screwing us over. At work, at any work talking about pay is a firerable offense and rightly so. After all then the corporate structure doesn't have to fess up to the massivily shitty way they treat their employees. This is something that crosses gender lines however, the gender pay gap is what brought the issue to light. I know that there are people who have been hired years after me who make as much or more than I do. However, I can't call my bosses on it because if I did then it would demonstrate that I've been discussing pay which is a firable offense. See how that works? It gets much nastier on the lower end of the scale like retail jobs where raises are mostly just cost of living adjustments and nothing more. Taking down our bosses is a discussion for another time though. I think I am finally hungry. Fuck body get an eating schedule.thekolohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18045037214277805972noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7367250524915853073.post-18369946858699229972014-03-16T23:09:00.003-07:002014-03-16T23:09:40.152-07:00Holy Ghost PeopleI still have the aborted topic of Christianity's culture war to deal with but I think I am going to let that simmer for just one more day before I dive back into it. Part of the problem is that I wanted to do two things at the same time. Talk about Holy Ghost people as a movie and talk about Christianity's culture war. One can lead into the other and ultimately this is going to be part one and the culture war post is going to be part two. Or something like that. Anyway for those looking for a review go see Holy Ghost people it is pretty fucking fantastic. <br />
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Holy Ghost people takes place in an economically depressed area and up on the hill there is a group of people who make their own laws and it is a place were there police don't go. It is a set up we've seen before in Winter's Bone and Out of the Furnace. To a lesser degree Gummo shares the same setting but none of the same themes. These are movies are examine the developing 3rd world that is happening in our nation and that we are doing fuck all to stop it. These are people that are being relentlessly left behind. Some turn to lives of crime and others to religion. It is an interesting setting. These movies all feature the desperate and fucked. Holy Ghost People does so in particular. The main character explains that the easiest way to find help is to find someone worse off than you are. It didn't seem like she had to look that hard.<br />
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What's interesting is that the Church was a place of joy, laugture, and well it was an island of hope in a sea of utter disrepair. Down in the city everything was falling apart. The whole world looked like it was crubling but up on sugar mountain it looked more charmingly rustic than ruined. These people made a life for themselves. It is a weird life that involves them handing poisonous snakes every evening while singing hymns but a life nonetheless. Taking a page from "Tod Browning's Freaks" notebook right up until the end of the movie the church was actually a really cool place. The gentleman she brought with her for help got converted and not in a stupid fake way either. His conversion was gradual and it felt right. More than that though is that when the shit comes to light and hits the fan his anger is the anger of being betrayed. He is a man who wanted to believe and is instead let down...but not out. <br /><br />The ending is interesting. There is a mild firefight. The preacher's muscle is killed. The preacher kills himself. The man takes the young girl who dragged him up to this damn church and another girl who is his blossiming love interest, puts them in a car and sends them away. He could of easily of gotten into the car with them but he stayed with the other church folk. I'm not sure what to do with this information really, no man is the center of the church and I imagine that a snake handling church has a relatively high turnover rate for preachers so maybe he'll be able to stay and live happily ever after. Or not. Characterization is one of the movie's great strengths and I can't help but care about the people who I spent the last 88 minutes with.<br />
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One of the youtube comments I read for the trailed expressed disappointment that there is yet another movie where Christians are the bad guys. Yet I don't think it's so easy to make that distinction with Holy Ghost People. Alright it is easy to write the preacher off as a villainous cult leader and the people of the church as a bunch of psychopaths. It is super easy the last thing we see them do is tie a young woman to a post and they are about to stone her to death. We know she isn't the first one, or the second. However, as the camera pans over the crowd there is a lot of indecision as to what they are doing and if it is correct. To break this moment down into bad guys and good guys is a gross oversimplification that may be convenient but it doesn't particularly capture what's going on. The people going to this church aren't evil. This isn't the Kill List. Oh god that movie fucked me up for days. However, well, guess there is no dancing around it but lets face it group think will fuck people up and religion can cause normal people who have all sorts of common sense to believe the stupidest things. If anything the movie is a warning about letting your priest run away with the congregation and less about the condemnation of Christianity as a whole. Heck the movie wasn't even interested in larger Christian themes it's just that the snake handling sect of Christianity makes for a sexy topic for a movie. <br />
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I'd even go so far as to say that the Preacher wasn't evil either, but he was lost. Shortly before he tried to have the girl stoned to death he married her. It is revealed that the same thing happened to her sister in the same order. The marriage didn't seem like the end result was consummation (SEX) but rather it was a direct seguway into her stoning. Previously when the preacher mentions his wife and her death he does so with sadness, and a bit of wistfulness. Yes he lies but he lies just enough to keep things going and he only lied to the outsiders. There is a great scene where the preacher gets called out for being a small man who is caught up on a power trip and his response is so down to earth and well adjusted that I'm still sold on it. Even after I've found out that he had several girls tied to a stake and stoned to death. The man they got to play the preacher has some powerful god damned charisma to him. I'll give him that. However, the movie also gives his character space and time to develop. He's a complex man with a past that we don't get to learn in its entirety. He could of been a great man and a true leader to those people and instead he lead them to ruin, simply because he didn't know any better. His story is a majestically tragic one. <br />
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Why? Religion makes people do some zany shit. Religion has both its good sides and its bad but lets face it, it makes people do some strange things. Things that they consider normal. Things that become normal but when we get to the outside world they aren't normal at all. They are horrible. Imma stop here because I am staring to get into the culture war which is good! But I want that to thoroughly be its own post. DONE!thekolohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18045037214277805972noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7367250524915853073.post-11920787879664848822014-03-14T22:34:00.000-07:002014-03-14T22:34:14.751-07:00Ramblings of the Day!I should by trying again on the blog post I wrote last night but I don't feel like it. I am feeling pretty groovy and I am in no mood to visit the past. So onwards and upwards. The problem is that I am having a hard time coming up with a subject for a long post. So I think I'll just write a bunch of little things until I am happy.<br />
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I realized at some point today that my disapointment with the movie Bag Man stemmed from my own desire to watch another David Lynch movie or show rather than any actual problem with the movie itself. The movie starts weird and it has the potential to get weirder. I wanted it to go all out and to show that the world we know is just a scab over an infected wound and when we pick at it just a bit all sorts of crazy shit starts to happen. The whole set up doesn't make sense. Cussack has a bag and he has to go to the hotel to protect said bag. Then for whatever reason it seems like everyone and their mother know all about the fucking bag and they are trying to take it from him. Everyone from the creepy hotel owner, to the tall black man and his Russian midget friend, to some fake FBI agents, to the local insane cops. Everything from the way the movie is shot, to its bizzarre lighting, to the case showcases a situation that defies any sort of sense whatsoever. Best of all Cussack's character realizes this and he's facted with the constant question of what the fuck is going on. Interspersed will all this is his menacing boss slowly but surely making his way towards the hotel. To what end? Who knows? <br />
However, as the movie goes on everything gets explained, and not in some stupid hand wavey fashion either but actually explained. Best of all is that they don't hand hold you through the explanation. For awhile I couldn't figure out the motivation of the girl. The girl, like David's Prometheus, had all the information as to what was going on but didn't want to share it. Then right as I was about to go home I figgured out her endgame. It is a damn clever movie that will only be seen by like 10 people and appreciated by maybe 4. It isn't quite at the level of Way of the Gun but it is pretty close. <br />
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I still want a new David Lynch movie or at least someone trying to rip off his style. Fuck.<br />
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I like to kick around board game design sometimes. It never really goes anywhere but it is a type of creativity I don't get to use very often and it is a fun and interesting challange. I like to write out a list of goals and then institute designs in order to meet them. Currently I am kicking around a post apocalyptic base building game. It is worker placement but closer to the style of Eclipse or Twilight Imperium than say Agricola. Each player will have a base and some nearby reasources that they can gather. However, in order to progress they are going to have to venture out into the wilderness where they can discover lost technology, better sources of goods, specialists to help them build things, and whathave you. I want the whole thing to be card based because it is easy to break cards out and it is easy to make components for card games.<br />
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So each player will have a starting hand of cards that has stuff that is specific to their faction. There will also be other decks of basic cards that everyone can build such as warehouses, farms, houses, that sort of thing. However, if they want to get their economy going they are going to have to explore the wasteland which will be in the form of a deck in the center. The center deck will have things like, NPCs that you can trade with, permentate resource gathering spots, special artifacts or technology, skilled workers, essentially a mix of permenate wasteland features and temporary ones. It will take fuel to get to the wasteland and to get home again. Making trips to the wasteland will be the main source of victory points for the players.<br />
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However, there will be overlapping victory conditions because I want combat to be a thing. The way I want combat to work is first the player needs to move a raiding force into the wastelands. Since most wastelands cards will have some sort of combat involved this isn't in of itself suspicious everyone will have to do it. However, then once the raiding force is in the wastelands it can then target another player. It will take one turn to get to the wasteland and another turn to get to the other player's base and the target of the raid has to be announced a turn ahead of time. This will give the defending player one turn to prepare. This represents the defending player's scouts and whatnot. <br />
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The thing is that I am having a hard time deciding what sort of combat I want. Initially I was just going to go with attack total +modifiers vs defense total +modifers= number of d6's rolled 5's and 6's are successes and whomever wins gets stuff.<br />
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However towards the end of my lunch break I was thinking that maybe instead I might wanna make combat a bit of an event. Something that involves a hand of lets say 3 rock paper scissor like cards and three special cards unique to every faction. I am thinking I like this better because I want every faction to play radically differently from each other and having more stuff that the other guy doesn't have will help this out.<br />
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The basic design goals of the game were to allow the players to feel like they are building a little settlement. To have it seat anywhere from 2-6 players. To be asymmetrical. The be expandable in all sorts of different and exciting ways. <br /><br />Currently it is at the minimum on the heavier side of things and it is staring to resemble more Clash of Cultures, Merchants and Mauraders, Eclipse in terms of game play style. Considering that the original concept was a deck building game we've made quite a drastic shift. Like I said I want to keep it wholely card based because they are easier to transport. I am still in the vauge concept phase now but I think I'm going to start hammering out fine details. If I get to that point I'll ask for help.<br />
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Alright I am satisfied with the amount I've written time for Minecraft!thekolohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18045037214277805972noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7367250524915853073.post-9267922787466426872014-03-14T00:48:00.002-07:002014-03-14T00:48:49.027-07:00The Culture War and Christianity Recently, I watched this movie called Holy Ghost people which is a fantastic little low budget indie film that manages to pack a hell of a lot into its 88 minute run time. When I went to go post a link to the trailer on my facebook wall so that my friends would look it up and possibly watch it my eyes unwillingly flicked to the comment section where I saw things like:<br />
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"just another movie to make Christian people look bad and blaspheme God. What a shame!" -chazbo34</div>
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"Oh, Christians are the bad guys again while satanism promoted by Gaga, Katy Perry, Jay Z, Marilyn Manson is good..." ImmortalCataphract</div>
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"Making vampires, demons, ghosts look fun & cool. Also, making churches, religion look bad and anti social, that's the weird, evil, satanic hollywood's plan now, too obvious." -~ Bright Romeo ~ (this one is my favorite)<br />
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Here is the trailer for those to lazy to look it up themselves:<br />
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Normally I laugh off the contents of the youtube comment area but this struck me. Holy Ghost people is a low budget independent movie that you would only hear of if you follow an indie movie news feed like twitch or something like that. How these people, who have no interest in the movie, heard of it I will never know. I am curious though. Anyway though out my work day it stuck with me. Since I wanted to write more here in this blog I figure this would be a good time. </div>
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So lets begin shall we? This movie isn't unique in putting Christianity in a bad light. There is Red State which is a direct slam against the Westero god hates fags assholes, Jesus Camp, But I'm a Cheerleader, the last season of Big Love, and all that's just off the top of my head. Christians like to talk about persecution. I think it is mostly because they are afraid of actually experiencing it rather than experiencing it proper but what do I know. <br />
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As an outsider looking in, yes there is indeed a conflict of culture going on. It is also one that Christians aren't doing to well in. The problem is that it is mostly their fault and they don't like to hear that but come on it is really easy. Setting aside Westero Baptist, the fact that christianity has been stolen by the tea party, the kkk, and any other group of nuts that want to justify whatever fucked up thing they are up to. Heck we can even set aside the occasional abortion clinic bombing or its really fucked up history in America. Taking all that and setting it aside we are left with two culturally problematic pieces of resistance. <br />
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1) They have little to no interest in policing themselves as a religion as a whole.<br />
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2) Is that a large number of Christians are dead set on everyone else following their code of morality no matter if they like it or not.<br />
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Before I go further I'd like to say that most Christians are nice, mentally balanced, well rounded people, who have a mix of wisdom and compassion. When I say most I fucking mean it. I don't mean most of my friends so in case one of them read it they know I am not talking about them because they should know that already. I mean MOST OF THEM in America as a whole are pretty decent god damn people. However, that doesn't matter because of point 1. See a lot of people have a superficial view of Christianity and lets face it for a religion that talks so much about flocks and shepherds they don't do dick when it comes to policing each other. Let's set aside the Westboro fuckwads and focus on the local scene. Churches form a community within the church themselves but most churches are isolated from each other. I've been a to a fuckton of churches over the years and I haven't seen very much in interchurch events, churches banding together in times of crisis to help the needy, churches working as a team to tackle social issues. No for the most part churches are in of themselves insular. As a result some churches end up weird. Really weird I went to an honest to god cult meeting once dressed up like it was a normal run of the mill 1st Baptist Church. There are some large Christian organizations but they aren't doing enough to undo the damage that some of their lost flock members are off causing. As a result their overall perception suffers. For those local to Pensacola Father Nathan Monk is a bit of a local hero and rightly so. He's a good guy and if more people stood up like him against the tyranny of the terrible flock members then Christianity could get some serious legs under it again. Unfortunately to many Christians just give the extremists a pass. <br />
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I don't know or really care how this is supposed to come to pass. I am not a Christian nor do I plan to become one. However, if Christianity is everything it is supposed to be then it is the most important thing those people are going to do on this earth and they can't really get some good going if they are going to allow the behavior of their extremists to continue unchecked. <br /><br />Part of the problem that comes with checking the extremists is the conflict of, "Well they are right...we just don't agree with their methods". Harking back to Westboro, "Does god hate?" yeah well sure and since a lot of Christians don't agree with the homosexual lifestyle then what do you do? Tell them to please not be so mean about it? To have some tact? How do you tell someone to shut up when you agree with them? It is a tough question to answer but then again I don't have a problem with homosexuality so it is a lot easier for me.<br /><br />This brings me neatly to point two. For the first point I focused heavily on Westboro but they aren't the real problem. They are a problem. But it is something that could be easily solved is the Christian community got together and told those people to shut the fuck up or at least if the Christian community banned together to say we condemn these people and pray that they come back to the light. There should be a constant prayer circle in front of their church trying to help them. However, they are, at most, a side show. A cartoon that this there for the amusement of the news and nothing else. All they do is ruin the days of the people whoes lives they affect. The bigger problem is that Christianity demands that everyone needs to believe what they believe. Gay marriage needs to remain illegal because the bible says so. Not because of any demonstrable danger to society and not to protect individuals from hurting themselves or others. Nope just because they believe, with no actual evidence to back it up. <br /><br />Abortion is even worse. If they wanted less abortions. I mean REALLY wanted less abortions then they would set up an interchurch foster care system, they would pay women to bring their children to term and they would take care of them. They would offer women who bring their children to term support and a home. They would go out of their way to give women as many alternatives to abortion as possible. Instead we have the call for laws and protests. The laws are a particular brand of fucked up because they don't actually stop the abortions they just make sure that women get punished. We've all heard this shit before moving on.<br />
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Then there is the evolution debacle. Holy shit when Christians wanna get weird about something they go all out. <a href="http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/02/27/ark-encounter-theme-park/5881323/">These people are actually building a fucking ark.</a> Millions of dollars have gone into this completely useless testament that Noah's Ark happened and that evolution is shit. Over 30 million dollars have been raised to build this stupid thing. Imagine all the good these people could of done instead of spending 30 million on a boat? <br /><br />As an outsider I see all these things and I see a drive to force non Christians to conform to Christian law if we like it or not and that's messed up. As an outsider I don't like it. No one likes it really except the Christians who are to wrapped up in themselves to see reality. So on the one hand we have Christians complaining about the lack of faith in the millennial generation and how the country is slipping further away from Christian beleifs. Then on the other hand we have, God hates fags, giant boats, abortion clinic protests, and Christians who feel the need to walk up and pester you while you are reading. I called it a culture war in my title not because it is the rest of the world versus the Christians though it may feel like that from time to time. <br />
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The worst enemy of Christianity is Christianity. For every 100 amazing Christians there is one lunatic. The problem is that the lunatic is 100 times louder than all the good Christians and that's what we see. We see a group of people who want to pass ineffective laws so they can feel smug in their own morality, and who want to push their beliefs on us and it doesn't work. I don't hate the religion any more than I hate its practitioners. I recognize that it is a vast religion with people from all walks of life. But when they let the lunatics stand at the forefront then it becomes much easier to see why people don't like them very much. Failure to deal with the internal problems will rip the religion apart. Oh well.<br /><br />
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thekolohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18045037214277805972noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7367250524915853073.post-71401322416292871232014-01-24T00:16:00.001-08:002014-01-24T00:16:30.181-08:00Better late than never.It has been nearly a year since I've sat down to do this which is quite a while and yet not very much has changed. Some would argue that my life has entered into a state of intoerable stasis but I say back to those people that they have no idea what they are talking about. I am rarely bored, I am constantly learning, I have tons of creative outlets, good conversation, and delicious food. The Brittish went to the new world and went to war over spices because what they had sucked. I live in a sub tropical climate. I don't have a whole lot to complain about. <br />
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I did have a pretty bad attack of depression just recently. I'm not going to lie it started to scare me a bit. I'd managed to hide it for a good while but towards the end it just started to paralyze me and I couldn't do anything. It had been lurking around me for a bit causing me to feel a lil down but since it couldn't find anything to latch onto however, a couple of bummer things happened close together and both of them ended up setting it off so I ended up wasting a week being sad for no real reason. It is for the best I think. In a lot of ways it is kinda like vomiting. I can feel this big black cloud of sadness just floating around for no damn reason and at this point in my life I can keep it at bay for a good while. Next time I should just let it in have a good old fashioned cry, eat a lot of ice cream, and see if that works better. It is where I end up more or less anyway and now that I know how to effectively fend it off I can wait until it is a good time for me to fall apart instead of somewhere embarrassing like in the parking lot at work. It's weird I mean people walk up to you and say hi and ask how are you doing and you can't say, "Well I just cried in the parkinglot for 5 minutes for no fucking reason but other than that I'm fine" because I was fine after it happened...well kinda. The average person might mean well but most people have no idea how to help or deal with something like that. Though to be honest there is nothing for them to do. Or rather anything they do has a 100% chance of eliciting a random response from me. That's what depression is. It is an emotional state based off of non external or rational internal stimuli. As a result it can cause unpredictable secondary emotional states like anger. <br />
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Oh well. I don't think this is what Sasha had in mind when she asked me if I still wrote in my blog. So let us move on. It occures to me that at some point I managed to make peace with the excistential problem of the inherent uselessness of my life and I am not sure how I did it. I wish I knew though.<br />
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Yeah that last sentence sounded fancy but it really isn't. I am not really a big fan of existentialism though I think that the questions and problems it raises are more important now than ever. The thing about it isn't so much that the questions aren't hard but the answers are ugly. Then when faced with the ugly answer you have to decide what you want to do about it, accept it or change. Like the question posed by Camus, "Why shouldn't you kill yourself?" It is amazing how much difficulty people have answering that. To put it a less ideologically loaded way, "Should you die tomorrow will anything really change?"<br />
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For the most part the answer is no, the world will keep on spinning, your possition at work will be replaced, people will mourn so that they can move on and yeah. Some might think this is an unusually grim way to look at the world but it isn't. I don't. I think of it as a challange. I try to produce at least as much as I consume. Mostly I produce ideas, conversation, and boring information framed in interesting ways. This doesn't convert very well into plastic which I seem to use a lot of but I try. For me that's enough. I think it is less about what you ultimately end up doing and more of a willingness to look the problem in the eye, and not blink. To meet the inherent vastness of life head on and to understand where you stand and be willing to work up from there. Or something. I don't know. <br />
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Depression makes a lot of everyday things very difficult for me. Sometimes I win and it is grand and sometimes I loose and it sucks. My personal struggle however is mine and I love it for it has made me into who I am. I deliberatly sculpted myself and judging from the company I keep I did a pretty damn good job.<br />
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Tomorrow is another day. Next time Imma write about minecraft or board games or something.thekolohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18045037214277805972noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7367250524915853073.post-12497437589389693692013-03-09T13:54:00.001-08:002013-03-09T13:54:33.835-08:00IneualityWhile reading an article on Capitalism and Inequality I found myself starting to come to the conclusion that there is some ingrained desire for inequality within the human condition itself. Since I've been in a Marx mood lately my mind immeditily turned to The Communist Manifesto which is pretty much the book on the subject. The manifesto itself came out over 100 years ago and yet it still feels current to this day. Only just recently did it start to show its age and that is mostly because the technologies inherent in the computer and the internet have allowed us to take back many of the means of production that were once in the hands of the bourgeoisie. However that's its own topic.<br />
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When Marx states that, "All human history can be defined in terms of class struggle" I have always agreed with that up until a point. It is obviously a false binary but it is a useful one none the less that works in the majority of the cases and moves things along. However, Marx never did properly address where the basic inequality in society came from and I think that's important when trying to suss out how deal with each other as a society and what amount of social safety net is reasonable for a society to provide. Or you know if you are setting up an anarchist commune or a genuine commi goverernment it is important to figure out if we have a desire for inequality or a need and how much of a need it is and how much work is it going to take to overcome.<br />
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Lets gets some evidence out here. Most (all?) children need to be taught how to share. I think that is the most telling piece of evidence right there. Child sharing is good for the group only because it creates an atmosphere of mutual entertainment ie sharing toys. Sharing food, resources, et cetera is handled by the child's caretakers so it isn't like the need for possesion is nessisary for the child's survival and yet that need for possesion is present sometimes very strongly. The counter argument is, "well in times of need people pull together and share food and stuff" but that isn't nessisarily true. It is especially not true when someone realized they have the physical strength or resources (a gun) to force other people to give more than they receive. This is the prototypical apocalyptic dilemma but it is also the basis of military dictatorships and every other damn thing.<br />
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Then there is slavery. It is amazing how we managed to use our unique ability of rationalization to convince ourseivles that the different looking ones are different and as a result they can be treated however they want.<br />
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This still function along more closely defined stratas as well I just can't think of anything. I guess gang wars would be a pretty good example. Can you imagine what the inner cities would be like if gangs were devoted to improving their local environment instead of enacting operation ghetto storm against each other constantly?<br />
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The self destructive need for inequality sits at the center of these and thousands of other issue. There is also the semi self destructive fear of inequality where one is afraid of giving to much and ending up poorer from it and since there is this hardwired desire for inequality they might not end up helping them. <br />
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However our desire for inequality isn't a compulsion. It isn't a mandatory part of our life. It can be beaten with empathy, self awareness, education, and of course effort. Should we do that only then will the bourgeoisie fall, anarchist communes will work, and capitalism will be less horrible for those of us who clean your dishes and take out your garbage.thekolohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18045037214277805972noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7367250524915853073.post-87507807003240822132013-03-08T13:56:00.000-08:002013-03-08T13:56:10.364-08:00Hello Moon!I sacrificed Feburary on the altar of computer gaming and it was GOOD. Now I am back and I need to find a way to balance my desire to read, write, read comics, socialize, excercize, and a bunch of other things with computer gaming. Good stuff. Anyway I am starting that by writing here so hello!<br />
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So the Zombicide season 2 kickstarter ramped itself up and I was seriously considering backing it but I seem to have finally talked myself out of it. Whew. The reason being is that despite the fact that I love me some Co-Op games I mean seriously they are my favorite type of game Zombicide just strikes me the wrong way and last night I realized why. <br />
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In Zombicide you are playing against a system. Like almost specifically a system that you have to game in order to meet sucess. So for example Zombies automatically hit you, Zombies always go towards the largest sources of noise, and when shooting in the same room as another survivor you will always hit that other survivor. I mean shit even in Arkham I get to roll a pile of dice to see if I kill the zombie or not. So right there you have two different instances where things will always happen and one instance where you can control groups of zombies based off of noise. So you could sacrifice a player to have them make a lot of noise drawing the zombies away from the main group so that they don't automatically die just because there are zombies around. Along the same lines you can't save said survivor because if you shoot into his zombie filled square you'll hit him first even though that doesn't make any sense.<br />
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There are more instances of this but in general when you play Zombicide you are gaming a system. Lord of the Rings, Arkham, Sentinels of the Multiverse and Pandemic all, to varying degrees, have a mixture of luck, strategy, and adaptation. In all the games I listed there aren't any real certainties except that things can go tits up very quickly. In Zombicide you have the same thing but because of the various certain elements it forces "inorganic" game play choices. You are less a group of survivors trying to beat back the zombie hordes to achieve some goal and more a group of people trying to manage a situation using highly artificial rules. It isn't something that really becomes clear until you've played a co-op game. Like in Sentinels I feel like I am a part of a group of heroes pulling out the stops to take down a villian. Not a guy with a hand of cards trying to manage the villian's deck of cards. In Arkham I feel like I am barely scraping a victory from the claws of an unnamable horror not just moving peices around to get results. With Zombiecide I could be feeling that way too, but with two different types of auto hits and it feels more like a management game than anything els and thus it won't get backed.<br />
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Lunch is over and off I go. thekolohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18045037214277805972noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7367250524915853073.post-66093248996000188302013-01-30T23:55:00.003-08:002013-01-30T23:55:43.306-08:00Culture ChangeSo I don't know what is the deal with Barns and Noble but they have done a fantastic job making it as horrible place to go be as possible. Say what you want about Books a Million but at least they have chairs that don't make me want to kill myself and everyone around me.<br />
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That said I ended up buying a political journal at Barns and going to read it at Books. There is a message in there somewhere I am not sure where though.<br />
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Moving onto the topic at hand I've been reading more and more articles on entitlement spending (medicare, medicaid, and social security+other stuff) so as to better get a handle on it. Entitlement spending is one of those issues that sounds like it can be fixed with the magic wand of common sense but in actuality are quite complex. As a result everyone seems to have a dismissive overly simplistic idea of how to deal with it. None of the major news outlets are doing much to help matters. Of course then again what are they gonna say, "this is some complex shit and here are some sources so you can go educate yourself?" No they are going to knuckle down and do the best they can with summaries. Oh well.<br />
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To give a little bit of background one of the most intellegent peices of writing I've read on the topic is that our Congress is grossly under equipped to handle entitlement spending. Congress, while capable of great things and passing sweeping legislation, is to short sighted to effectively plan for increased costs of entitlements, and to appropriately deal with the problems that causes. The narrative of the baby boomers taking the surplus, running away with all the money and fucking over the kids is a symptom of that. That narrative is true only to a point. It is mostly a short sighted congress inflating entitlements so as to stay in power and no one like the senate, president or an independent commitee coming by and saying "knock that shit off". I mean jesus most people prolly assumed that when their social security benifits increased it was done so in a way that wasn't "more loans". We have to remember that our level of political awareness was nothing near this level 10 or even 8 years ago. So there is a lot of catching up to do.<br />
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Anywho the article came up with some neat ideas how to address the problem. Good for it.<br />
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Moving on the other article I read was more interesting to me because it advocated more of a culture change instead of various policy changes. This article was both amazing and loathsome at the same time which is quite a feat. While I and the author both advocate culture changes and government getting the fuck out of the way of said culture changes the article advocated an increase of institutions like marriage and churches whereas I am advocating...well something else. I mean I have the damnest feeling that if I were to take that article and use it publicly as evidence supporting gay marriage I'd get an awfully angry letter from the author stating that's not what he meant. He never came out against gay marriage specifically but considering the fact that every other solution to his problem involved churches I just got that feeling.<br />
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Still we have plenty of common ground and he did bring a really interesting and fresh perspective to the subject. In the 60's lots of things changed, distrust in government, the rise of divorce, the fall of church attendence, and the worst welfare program ever was enacted. Maybe wellfare came in the 70's damnit now I wanna know...60's I was right! For those of you who don't know for every dollar you earned you recieved one less dollar of funding. So if you got a shitty low paying job that didn't make ends meet you would be receiving less wellfare dollar. I'm not joking they put that shit on a 1:1 ratio. So most people made more money sitting at home. Not only that but most people made more money having more kids and staying at home. Hence the welfare queen. Things have improved in most states.<br />
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Not a bad idea even though it got off to horrible start and is still an inherently broken system which produces behaviours on the inverse of that which it would like to inspire. The problem is that it chased off thousands of charitable organizations that the government all the sudden felt the need to micro manage. The article used the example of the San-Antonio based "Victory Fellowship". The following is rage inducing. Over the course of 40 years this program helped over 13,000 people get clear of drugs and alcohol. They were nearly shut down by the government because they used faith based techniques and they employed former fellons instead of following some rediculous sets of standars set by the state who is so far removed from any sort of problem what so ever that you can pretty much tell they were coming up with this shit by ear. Okay yeah whatever not a fan of faith based but they were helping so many people. A venerable institution helped that many people in such a tiny area? Holy shit these people should be awarded congressional medals, have statues built after them, they should appear in text books and be applauded as American heroes. Instead we did the direct opposite because of the stupidity inherent in bureaucracy. Plain and simple. The story of Victory Fellowship isn't unique but it is interesting to see what sort of work welfare did to usurp the various forms of citizenship we once had.<br />
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Okay so this guy believes that famiies and churches are the answer. Good for him. The problem is that for most people who haven't grown up christian churches are pretty much a poison pill. To many of them a weird. I know I've been to some weird fucking churches. To many of them do nothing for the community around them. To many of them just aren't very good. Add that to the negative press the catholic church garners, the jesus hates fags people, the nice folks who stand on street corners informing me that I am going to hell, the guys who just kinda show up on campus and tell me I am going to hell, the pushing annoying christians who won't leave you alone even when you are really into your book or vigorously typing, the KKK, and the mormons and you have a serious god damned image problem. That isn't to say that there isn't some great churches out there. I am saying that they have one massive image problem.<br />
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I am also saying they are totally unnecessary. The idea of citizenship is a problem in our country. To often I encounter people who believe they deserve while offering nothing in return but sob stories about how much they deserve. There is a lot of undirected mailice to the poor and less fortunate that I never really understood but I see it all the time. But this is the start of a tangent.<br />
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We both believe that a change in culture is nessisary but he wants to go back to a previous set of ideal when you can't. We can never go back things have changes and changing them back is the opposite of progress which is what we both want. The thing is that we have to enact changes in our culture that promote being better people. Once upon a time taking a large bonus while not adiquetly paying your lowest earning employees was a mark of scorn. Now it is something people do. It is accepted so much so that we want laws to stop it. Changing culture is hard. Really hard. But it can be done. It happens all the time without help from anyone. Now if we could change it for the better well wouldn't that be something?<br />
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I think it can be done. Certain anarchist groups have the right idea. There are more and more organiations that are centered around non religious based do gooding. This can happen. thekolohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18045037214277805972noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7367250524915853073.post-79301784525399555642013-01-26T13:58:00.000-08:002013-01-26T13:58:23.272-08:00Social Contract and GamingI was going to update the movie blog and I might still actually but I feel like writting about this topic so whatever. Also I am seeing Broken City tomorrow so I guess I'll update it with a big fat movie round up. I also kinda wanna write something on unconvensional detective movies. I have two so far and I prefer to do a 3rd... Who Framed Roger Rabbit I WIN! So working out problems one day at a time.<br />
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Anyway back to the topic that I put in the subject line. So social contract and gaming. This popped into my head when we were playing Cosmic Encounters the other night at anime club. Cosmic Encounters is one of my favorite games. It is fast, frantic, fun, and it is almost impossible to take it personally because who you are attacking is randomly determined most of the time. I like random! Alliances last for a whole turn and then are more or less gone. It is nice. It of course encourages lying, back stabbing, double dealing, bluffing, and all the other things that excist in American games and that's when I started to wonder.<br />
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The concept of the non binding deal excists in one form or another in just about every game that has a deal in it. It is this tantalizing ability to burn someone to come out ahead that is both omnipresent and yet, in just about every play group I've experienced, rarely used. Take Cosmic Encounters. You can take allies to help you. You can take a lot of allies, then you can loose on purpose and take everyone with you. You can also make a deal where both people can play a negotiate card and they can trade stuff. If only one person plays a negotiate card they auto loose the encounter so it requires a lot of trust to get both people to play negotiate cards. These are just basic back stabbing things you can do in the game and of course no deals are binding ever. The thing is that these forms of the back stab are fairly rare reason being that once you burn someone no one else is ever going to trust you. You make 5 people loose 4 of their ships to the warp because you failed to deliver victory by acident... well shit happens. If you force everyone to loose 4 ships to the warp on purpose no one is going to trust you again for a very long time. You essentially decided that you are going it alone, and any time you are being attacked then you have gaurneteed an instant and rather permenate alliance against you.<br />
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Now in a con setting I can see a lot of this coming into play and being very useful. These are people you aren't going to be seeing again so why not put the devious fuck lever at 11. It is part of the game. However, when you are playing in a set group of people this starts to become less worthwhile. Part of the reason is that it just makes it more difficult to make deals in other games. Once you get that reputation for being a devious fuck head then it is hard to break it. It is easy to write off the fact that it is "part of the game and people need to be mature" but there is the plain and simple fact that if I have to tie up one of my eyes watching out for your knife heading towards my back that I might as well just not ally with you in the first place and find a more stable/reliable partner.<br />
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I've found that being a good neighbor in a game often times gets you a hell of a lot further in the playgroup setting than being an asshole but that's me. <br />
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So the main reason is why bother in the first place? Or to ask a better question what happens when we remove the non binding deal mechanic. To examine this I am gonna look at two games Twilight Imperium and Diplomacy though not in that order actually. Diplomacy is interesting because unlike most games with the "non binding deal clause" Diplomacy is built in such a way so that at one point during the game you are going to backstab someone else. It is impossible to win without working with someone and it is impossible to win without betraying someone. The game is pretty abstract on how the mechanics work but you are still capabable of doing some pretty clever things. Still you can't do them without someone else. As a result the idea of betrayal is on the tin. It isn't optional. Being devious is the only way to do it. It isn't like Cosmic Encounters where most dickery is optional. It isn't like Illuminati where you can change your mind during a deal at the last second causing someone you promised to help to loose, it isn't Monopoly where you promise to sell something and you don't. In Diplomacy you gotta burn someone it is just a matter of who how and when. A good poker face also helps because damnit James picked up what I was doing pretty hard when he saw me eying Turkey as he was eyeing Italy. The Italian player came to the sudden deflated realization that she is to nice for the game.<br />
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My paint here is that when the game is built for the dickery it works. Dipomacy isn't some fly by night game. It has been around for over 50 years in dozens of printings. It has been played by important people the world over. The game, design wise, is literally a work of art. It takes 10-15 minutes to explain and 99% of the complexity comes from the human interaction. Most of all when I said it is physically impossible to go it alone I meant it. <br />
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Diplomacy differentiates itself from its other American cousins in the fact that the art of the non binding agreement is an intrinsic part of the game that is inescapable. Whereas in most other games it is tacked on as a sort of "oh yeah you can be a dick". As a result it slips past the social contract. Unless the gamer is particularly immature or vindictive it is understood that this is how Diplomacy is played and there can be only one. <br />
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Just in case I didn't make it clear earlier in most other games it is possible to go it alone or to win without backstabbing your partners. As a result the devious trickster guy generally finds himself to be the cheese that stands alone.<br />
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Twilight Imperium is different because first of all the game is pretty unrestrictive on the sort of deals you can make. Despite this I would fucking kill for a military passage deal that excistis in games like Civ series and Europa series. Still there are all sorts of deals from non aggression pacts, trade goods, votes, planets, initiative thingies, trade agreements, there are tons of things you can do and for the longest time all of it was non binding until the second expansion came out and they did away with it. Now there are contracts we can give each other that come with consiquences for when a deal is broken. Some of them are pretty stiff consequences at that. The non binding deal is dead long live the binding deal!<br />
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So what is lost by throwing out the non binding deal? Nothing. I mean not really. In fact it leaves the ability to free form backstab still intact because first of all no one would expect it, and second of all since the stabbed player is recieving immediate compensation the stabbing fits more into the over all structure of the game's mechancis and not just "player x is a dick and can't be trusted". For the non stabbing inclined it is nice to have a layer of security to back up deals and should the backstab happen it is easier to plan around. All in all it adds an extra layer of stradegy to the game without adding to the game's rather staggering complexity and it is a beautiful concept. <br />
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I love the idea of the binding contract. Do this or this bad thing happens to you. It is a perfect concept that can be used in just about every game with a non binding contract system. I hope it is something that starts making it into more and more games because in general the non binding contract feels more like a board game tradition rather than a deliberate design decision and that's silly. Why not take it to the next level and make backstabbing an integral part of the game lie Diplomacy or add the binding contract and see what interesting new things can be done with it like in Twilight Imperium. Alright back to work.thekolohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18045037214277805972noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7367250524915853073.post-24729972840474152752013-01-25T13:58:00.000-08:002013-01-25T13:58:05.047-08:00Gaming Blah BlahSo it has been nearly a month since I updated this blog. Part of that was due to the plauge which turned into a week and a half ordeal and part of it had to do with the fact that that I've been doing more rpg writing. Lastly and the biggest reason is that since my computer only boots sporatically when it does I play the crap out of mine craft instead of doing useful things like updating my blog or stuff like that. I kinda want to post my rpg stuff to my/a blog but I don't really do it often enough and it is ROUGH at the moment although it is pretty much the only writing that I willingly go back and edit which is weird and nice. I've been doodling Mutants and Masterminds stuff getting my world more fleshed out and kinda putting my notes all in one place. It is nice I do like gming that game though it is basically what if everyone on the Avengers is Thor's power level not just a bunch of people at disparate power levels working together to contain threats. <br />
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The next time I do it I wanna run a Suicide Squad/Thunderbolts style game because I think that would be an absolute blast. I don't know when and how this will happen but I do want it to.<br />
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Moving on. I have real topics. Like I very much want to weigh in on the whole gun control thing again because it is important. Again I advocate an attitude change not necessarily a law change but laws will factor into it. I could do this but I don't feel like it. This week has been emotionally weird for me and I just want to hang out a bit. Also I will have to go find a bunch of links and I don't wanna. Maybe I'll do it tomorrow night because that seems like a good Saturday night activitiy as opposed to picking up bitches or whatever the hell it is people do.<br />
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Back to fun things I want to go back to skirmish wargaming again. I miss playing Malifaux a lot and I want to do it more but there is mainly the problem of time and opponents. There is also the matter of just about everyone I know picking up the Relic Knights kickstarter but no one having the time to really play a skirmish game. So I am hoping I can either make it happen on Friday's every once in awhile or perhaps Sundays with just James and random nights during the week with Cory/whomever else. <br />
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In random news Sentinels of the Multiverse is now officially on my list of things I want. It is cheap, co-op, with a variable difficulty and it looks like it is a lot of fun. That combined with the new Battle-Con game will make a nice pairing of stuff. I wasn't that interested in it before but it would be nice to have a co-op game that isn't as difficult to break out as Arkham, and as fiddly as Lord of the Rings. As an aside I miss playing that game and I want to get more cards but it keeps getting shunted to the side because of other stuff coming out.<br />
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Alright lunch time is over and I feel great! thekolohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18045037214277805972noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7367250524915853073.post-12485474099271003032012-12-30T00:13:00.002-08:002012-12-30T00:13:29.454-08:00A Look at GlamoramaSo the other day I finished reading a book called Glamoram by Brent Easton Ellis better known as "the guy who wrote American Psycho". I loved it as I love everything I've read by him but as an English magjor type person who writes essays for fun I find the book to be more than a little embarassing. There are all sorts of things to play with but for the life of me I have no idea what to say about some of them. For the rest of this post you are either going to have to of read the book or understand that I am just gonna sound like a crazy person for awhile. So it will be like every other post.<br />
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Anyway it is an interesting book. The biggest thing I am having trouble doing anything with is all the cold imagry. So like....45% of the imagrey in the entire book I am clueless with awesome. Part of the problem with this is that while I realized it was important almost immediatly I didn't bother to record any of its instances. It also varies in severity and since it happens so often the best way to critically approach it would be to see where it is absent then back break from there to uncover some sort of coherent meaning behind it. This is mostly because it is so prevelant, I also suspect that it means more than one thing depending on when it appears and how bad it is. Victor seems to be the only person who notices the cold which is interesting because one of the standard rules for magical realism is that no one really notices that they are in a magically realistic setting. Everyone else ignores the cold and goes along with it but Victor always sees and comments on it. Since Victor ocillates from cripplingly clueless of hyper observant this presents an interesting picture. Yeah this is definitely the right track. There are lots of stuff that Victor just sort of interacts with like the film crews or even the smell of shit that prevades the last 3rd of the book but the cold is something that Victor almost always remarks upon and interacts with in some way. I still don't know what to do with the cold itself. Like I said I think I need to see where it is the most absent from the novel and then I will be able to get a decent picture of it. The fact that is is SO present makes it a little bit difficult to get a proper handle on.<br />
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Interestingly I think the cold is mostly absent on the boat from New York to London. I also know that there is one of the clubs with the ice scupltures where the cold actually belongs. I am pretty sure that before that point the cold wasn't quite so intense. However, the cold shows up all over the place so yeah this is a dead en but it is also frusterating because here is something that is so obviously meaningful and yet I can't cobble together a basic meaning out of it. Every time I start to there is something else that comes along and contridicts it or something. Unlike the shit smell that shows up when Victor ends up in Paris which is pretty transparent in terms of meaningfulness especially since it only really happened around Bobby or when Victor was doing something involving Bobby.<br />
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Other than the cold thing which really bugs me the book is rich in critical moments that I find wonderfully engaging and easy to work with, like the film crews. I got the film crews hell I loved the idea of the film crews and Felix the cinematographer. Felix is an interesting guy because at first he seems like he is on Victor's side especially when he's on the boat but then all of a sudden Victor's film crew looses interest in him as the French film crew starts playing a larger and larger role. Not only that but Victor's crew doesn't know about the French crew even though the French crew knows about Victor's crew. Then there is the case of the two Victor's at the end. I love that. My working thesis is that it is the crews that make Victor real they are what define him. When Victor's original crew is murdered by Bobby and the French film crew I think this pretty much split Victor in two. The original Victor is left trapped somewhere in France while the French film crew Victor goes back to New York gets his shit together and generally stops being such an embarrassing human being. Be he doesn't turn into a better person. He is still a philanderer and he's still incredibly empty on the inside.<br />
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Whereas the original Victor's first honest to god human moment is when he chases of the French film crew who was foricing a sad girl's scene to go on for to long. He developed actual human emotions...mostly through trauma. He was horrified when Felix died and he even felt guilty when his final French fellow was killed unlike the French film Victor which is very much an emotionally hollow form of redemption. At first I thought the French film Victor was just one of Bobby's body doubles or just a case of mistaken identitey but then we were given a first person look on the inside of the French film Victor and he it became clear to me that he is so much more than that...hence the working thesis.<br />
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There are other things to play with to. I mean the very idea of using fashion models to form a terrorist organization has SO MUCH POTENTIAL all over it there are all sorts of things I can do with it. However, that's enough for now. Fantastic book by the way go read it.thekolohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18045037214277805972noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7367250524915853073.post-73648034220114712462012-12-27T13:48:00.002-08:002012-12-27T13:48:48.961-08:00Gun Control vs Gun Culture part2<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/ny-newspaper-posts-gun-permit-map-starts-nasty-online-battle/2012/12/26/747ae7d6-4fb0-11e2-950a-7863a013264b_story.html?wpisrc=nl_pmpolitics">http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/ny-newspaper-posts-gun-permit-map-starts-nasty-online-battle/2012/12/26/747ae7d6-4fb0-11e2-950a-7863a013264b_story.html?wpisrc=nl_pmpolitics</a><br />
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Look there's something that directly relates to what I was talking about. I am not going to go to much into. I think that even while the information is already public that publishing the names and addresses went a bit to far the reactions of the certain posters in particular, "Jeffersonian, a commenter at Sauce for the Goose, wrote “Nice house.
Wooded lot, too. Lots of places to hide.” Syuck in NY. . . . For Now
added “Lol. That was the 1st thing I thought of when viewing those pics
of her palace!”" Yeah reactions like that make me think that gun control is silly and that everyone should have one. In fact those two people should have extra guns because they are clearly responciple adults. <br />
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So now that I am no longer coming from left field I wish to address the issue of why deal with the stereotype instead of breaking the stereotype down and revealing the facts or something like that. We have it drilled into our heads from an early age stereotyping is bad and that we shouldn't judge a book by its cover and blah blah blah but just how helpful is that?<br />
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It isn't very. I am not saying that we should stereotype but rather once we do so we shouldn't take it as the gospel truth and fail to assimelate any new information about the individual. It is like judging someone by your first impression of them for the rest of their lives instead of allowing for the fact that your first impression might of been hasty and you didn't have all the facts. <br />
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Stereotypes exsist for a reason. They are an approximation of an aggrate of data that is assimlated from a variety of sources ranging from various media, to interpersonal interaction. For those of you with a theory fetish a stereotype is an excellent example of a rhizome. If you don't get that right away don't worry about it. 1000 Plateaus gives me fits. It is also, no matter how much we may not like it, the first way we encounter any sort of information about a sub culture:<br />
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"Oh so you play wow?"<br />
"Oh so you play D&D"<br />
"Go sit in the rain and listen to Morrisie"<br />
"Frats are about paying for friends"<br />
"Jocks are all dumb"<br />
Everything most people think about gay people. <br />
Black people like rap.<br />
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The list goes on. The problem is that when all we know is the stereotype then all that's all we can base our assumptions on. When we go back to guns and gun control we have an overwhelimgly negative view of both guns and there isn't a whole lot going on to change that view. In fact it is almost like the NRA is doing everything in its power to make things worse. Hell the NRA has the worst public relations I've ever seen. What the hell is wrong with them? We change the stereotype we change the conversation and it isn't as hard as everyone makes it out to be. It is hard but if both sides makes an effort then it can work. However, the gun owners have to go first. They are the ones with the guns after all.thekolohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18045037214277805972noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7367250524915853073.post-7809345340485514952012-12-20T14:01:00.001-08:002012-12-20T14:01:24.878-08:00Gun Control vs Gun Culture So I've decided to spend my lunch writing. I decided this awhile ago but now that I am here I am having trouble deciding on a topic. I have the time for some of the more expansive things I'd like to write about so I am going to try one and see if it sticks.<br />
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Gun Control vs. Gun Culture<br />
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This is one of those things that are inexorably intertwined but they are still two separate things. On top of this there is no real discussion as to the differences between gun control and gun culture and what exactly that means. I'm gonna say right now that this prolly won't be definitive but hey at least it is a start. <br />
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So where to start? Well lets see what I got in the toy box. We got class, historical revisionism, cultural misunderstandings, fear, powerful lobby groups, mass shootings, and looks like that's enough toys for now. Lots of these toys connect to each other so lets play.<br />
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CLASS! Class is one of those elephants in the room that no one seems particularly willing to talk about and yet it is there. When we look at the steriotype of the gun owner we get a couple. We have the rich white big game hunter. We have the southern redneck. We also have the inner city gang members. Not bad but only one of them is well off aren't they? Yes yes I know other people own guns but I said lets look at the steriotypes and that is what we are doing try to stay focused. Guns in a lot of ways serve as a class divider. It is the difference between people who feel they have to protect themselves and people who believe they have other people to do the protecting for them. It is the difference between people who can afford the moderatly expensive hunting hobby and the people who can't. Gun culture exists in all classes and yet we see gun ownership come most often in the hands of slightly crazed rednecks and gang members. The wealthy game hunter is a distant third. Hell the former serviceman is a distant 4th. We talk about guns like how they don't kill people it is the people who do the shooting but in a lot of ways what we are really saying is "those people" are doing the shooting. Offensive? Don't care. Take a look at the average age of a gang member now look at the number of inner city shooting deaths. I mean we've had school age children shooting each others for years. It is only when they decide to go mass murder and kill people who feel that they should have other people to protect them does panic start happening. Class it is everywhere.<br />
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Historical Revisionism is one of those things that never ceases to amaze me. This could also equally be called "wannabe constitutional scholarship". Both sides throw around their ideas of the constitution and that's good. That's great in fact do that! The problem is that they do it with little to no historical relevance. People don't understand how we got into this situation, where we came from, and there is a generalized lack of critical thinking going on which results in stale cyclical conversations that ultimatly lead no where. The moment we bring history or the constitution into the mix is the moment the conversation dies because we just jump into this series of memes that we all memorized without really thinking about what they mean. I've written before that gun culture needs an image change. I'm gonna do it again in minute. I think it is time to take the idea of the militia back and turn it into something healthy and not something for the lunatic fringe. When people quote the second amendment it is always a revised version because no one wants to think about the militia part. I do but hey that's me. <br />
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Cultural Misunderstands & Fear! These two go hand in hand. Okay so show a non curious non gun owner a gun and there is this weird freak out moment. You'll get people who hold their hands up and go "I am just not comfortable around guns". You'll get people who are all politely appalled about the idea of firearms and they beleive that...oh I dunno that someone else should have to do that dirty work (class!) or something like that I dunno. This stems from ignorace. It also stems from the fact that gun culture revels in the fear it generates. The NRA's cold dead hand's speech is a perfect one. We have Heston saying we will have to pry his gun out of his cold dead hands Waco Texas style because he won't give it up on his own. Oh no and you gotta wonder is he just going to hold onto his gun or is he going to be using it while we are taking it from him? Oh yeah. It isn't offten we hear it outright. It is always something like "I am going to take my second ammendment rights and come after you" or "We will rise up against the government" occupy wall street was also an uprising again the government but I think we are talking about different things. Gun culture uses the fact that they have guns and everyone else is affraid of guns as leverage. Then they cry foul when people talk about how worried they are about the fact that there is a whole sub culture of armed people who like to passively aggressively threaten everyone.<br />
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The fear cuts both ways though. Holy shit gun culture are some paranoid fucks. Like ermahgawd Obama got a second term and he's gonna take all of our guns away. Then he'll take away Christianity and beer. All through the election I kept hearing this out of conservative circles and it was based on...well nothing. Obama hasn't made any real move to ban or talk about gun control and this is all after the shooting in Colorado. Only now that we've had a second shooting is he stepping up to the conversation and geeze can you blame him? Gun right's advocates live in a constant state of armed paranoia about the day when they will no longer be able to shoot their guns to the point where it is almost like they are hoping it will happen just so that they can have an excuse to use them. Remeber I am not talking about individual gun owners but rather the culture they associate with.<br />
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Imma gonna skip the lobby groups and go straight to the mass shootings. The only time gun control seriously comes up now and days is when someone shoots up a school. What a lot of non gun owners don't understand is that when you are using a gun it is really easy to indiscriminatly kill a lot of people. It is however very difficult to kill one specific person. The story about two people standing 15 feet away firing full clips at each other and missing? It happens. That's the bitchy things about guns. I fire a gun into a crowd I am going to get some impressive results but someone firing from the crowd at the user well that's more complex. As a result we see a spree killing, we are faced with the horrible killing potential of these weapons and we think well gee gosh golly we should prolly not let everyone have one of these. Gun culture ramps up its fear engines they talk about the need for protections (from them!), and that only bad people will have guns, and what about the women, and the nazis. While on the other side we have a group of people whoes only real expereice with guns is the amount of devistation they cause. <br />
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I wish there was more outreach on the behalf of gun culture. I wish they would take a chill pill and ramp down the paranoia. I wish we could change the image we have a gun users from rednecks and black people to something else. Something postive perhaps? However, this isn't going to happen until we start look at the situation we find ourselves in and we take an honest to god look at the facts and decide where we stand. I myself am pro gun but I am anti gun culture. The passive agressive threats, the paranoia, and taking advantage of the fear surrounding guns it all needs to stop. Gun carry with them an awesome respocipiliby. They allow you to take control of your fate. You don't have to be a bystander anymore. It is the ability to make a difference to protect those who need it. Guns should never be about self defense. They should always be about looking out for each other. Or we can keep going the way we have been and let them all get banned. At this point I am more with the mass banning myself because if you aren't willing to live up to that responcibility then what's the point you know? thekolohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18045037214277805972noreply@blogger.com0