Stand Your Ground

Oh, those Floridians (Floridans?  Florins?  Floridae?) are at it again.  This time a middle aged white man drove up to a van full of black teenagers and started arguing with them about the volume of their music.  He decided that rap is really that bad, got a gun out of his car, and fired 8 rounds into their vehicle, killing one of them.  Of course afterwards he concocted a story about how he was defending himself from a bunch of unarmed teenagers who 'threatened him' so the only reasonable action he could take was to open fire.

It seems, from what I have read, that the perpetrator's chances of actually getting off under Florida's Stand Your Ground law is pretty slim.  It is telling though that a man drove up to somebody, yelled at them, gunned them down, and now there is a real chance that he will walk free because he can say he 'felt threatened'.  Well obviously, I mean black people, they must have had sawed off shotguns in that SUV somewhere, right?  Madness.  This should not be a case of 'maybe he will get off, but probably not'.  It should be a case of 'open and shut, 25 years unless he pleads guilty for a bit less.'

How can people in Florida not notice that if this man had not had his gun that *nobody* would have gotten hurt that day?  The primary function of hand guns is to turn disagreements that would otherwise end with somebody getting called a jackass and somebody else giving the finger into a visit from the coroner and prison time.  Hell, maybe someone would have gone hog wild and given somebody else a black eye... but in Canada nobody but the people involved and maybe a couple gawking passerby would even know it had happened.

It seems an unbelievably myopic viewpoint to imagine that the world will be a better place for having guns and laws like this.  Even if for some reason you end up in a place where the law comes up you stand a damn good chance of being the corpse, not the defendant.  This law gives other people the right to gun *you* down just because you have a gun in your possession.  I suppose that never comes up though, in gun fantasies.  I have daydreams about being a crazy ninja fighting bad guys and in those daydreams I always win.  When it comes to actual decisions though I don't let my daydreams convince me that I am actually a good shot nor that being a good shot has any significant impact on my ability to survive a real firefight.

Ford over man, Ford over

I have ranted about the disaster that is Toronto mayor Rob Ford on plenty of occasions.  I dearly hope that this can be the last time for mayor Ford has been removed from office for a violation of conflict of interest laws.  A lot of people are enjoying the scene of the mayor who promised to cut the fat and end the gravy train being turfed for misuse of city resources for personal projects but it makes me a little sad in two ways.

First off, I won't be able to look to the local news for my daily source of comedy anymore.  When the mayor can't be relied upon to be clueless, unpleasant, hypocritical, bigoted, and dangerous, what will be the source of mirth for Toronto?  We might have to resort to people who are *trying* to be funny instead of Ford.

Second, this means that my dream of one day opening a newspaper and reading about Ford being caught doing coke off of the stomach of a nonwhite immigrant male prostitute dressed as a sexy bicyclist is at an end.  Sure, he might still end up doing that, but it just isn't the same when a random guy does that as when the mayor does it.  (Damn those immigrant male prostitutes taking jobs from real Canadian male prostitutes... ?)

I don't know about you but after I wrote that paragraph I felt the compulsive need to Google 'nonwhite male sexy bicyclist' and see what pops up.  The internet is wonderful!

There are actually a lot of people defending Ford because the issue that brought him down was actually a pretty minor one.  He used city resources to solicit donations for the high school football team he volunteers for as coach and then voted against doing anything about it in council.  Of course the lesson we can take away from this is that sometimes a person can get away with an endless stream of awful things and be brought low by a seemingly minor transgression as in the case of Al Capone.

The one unfortunate thing in all this is that two years might be long enough for people to forget.  Ford will be allowed to run for mayor again in 2014 and I think two more gaffe and disaster filled years would have been enough to get him booted unceremoniously from office.  If someone else steps in for two years Ford might be able to salvage a decent campaign again in 2014 and win on the back of the suburbs pushing for a tough talking, gay bashing, angry white man.

But Science!

On Friday I watched Ice Age:  Continental Drift with Elli.  It is a cute and silly movie about a bunch of talking animals during an ice age that are unlikely friends.  I couldn't help but rage at the movie much of the time though for their heinous abuse of science.

I get that the animals need to talk.  I even get that sloths, mammoths, tigers, and squirrels need to be friendly towards one another even though apparently the tiger lives on ... air?

What made me crazy though was the other bits.  Ships made entirely of ice that cross oceans on a whim.  Said ships being steered by a tiller.  Note that these ice ships have no sails and hence cannot use a tiller in any way whatsoever!  They are just big blocks of ice that zoom across the ocean for no reason and can be easily steered around tight corners.  Arghlfarghl.

Also, the giant walls of ice that move across the landscape during an ice age do NOT move so fast that a running animal will be crushed beneath their relentless advance.  It took a long damn time for ice sheets to cover the world during the ice ages and running away from them at top speed was never a necessity.  Let's not even get started on the abuses of Newtonian mechanics when it comes to the velocity of large animals flying through the air...

Of course I did like the movie.  It was silly, and sappy, and fun.  I wish though that the makers of kids movies would differentiate between the obvious and necessary violations of science like talking animals, lions not needing to eat flesh once they decide to be friendly, etc. and the unnecessary ones.

Damn, I am going to be one hell of a curmudgeon when I get old.

Picture from:  http://hotbutterreviews.blogspot.ca/2012/07/ice-age-continental-drift-3d.html

Technical difficulties

Hi all.

Brightcape isn't working right now.  If you read my stuff via a feed reader you can still see this, but otherwise it is not working.  I am trying to figure it out, and will keep posting in the interim for those who use feed readers.

It was real

I had a weird bunch of stuff happen to me over the past couple weeks.  It started with a random woman walking up to me at Elli's school:

Her:  Are you Sky?

Me: (not recognizing her at all) Yes....

Her:  You are a game inventor, right?

Me:  (wondering if my friends are playing a practical joke)  Yes....

Her:  I can get you a contact in a big games company to pitch your games!

Me:  (this has to be a joke, where is the hidden camera)  Great!

Her:  Gotta go, catch you tomorrow!

Me:  Wuzufuh?

So it turned out to be entirely legit and I went to pitch my games to a game company.  The world is a crazy place, it turns out.  In the end the company was not remotely interested because they build toys and I build strategy games; they don't sell what I make.  I got some advice I definitely won't take on how to make the games more saleable as mainstream games and some advice I should consider using for selling them to anyone.  I don't mean to malign the advice but I don't build toys for kids for the same reason I don't play football professionally - I suck at that activity and should never pursue it for profit.  Unfortunately the advice for selling my games to big game companies involved building a complete prototype with full art and production value which probably comes to a grand in cash and hundreds of hours of work.

I dunno.  The opportunity to pitch my ideas was cool but I am really not sure that I actually want to be a freelance game inventor doing all that other stuff to push my games.  For one, freelance game inventors generally get paid worse than janitors on an hourly basis and for two the majority of the job would make me want to scream.  Doing all kinds of negotiation, networking, and hounding of producers sounds like a nightmare (If I wanted to network all the time I would go into real estate or something) and doing art and sorting out production is a pain in the butt for me.  I have enough trouble just doing the trivial print, glue, and cut that my current models require.

While the opportunity was good it seems like I really have the option of either just continuing to build games as a labour of love or turning my game building into something that isn't much fun and has a terrible hourly rate.  So far I have been very much sitting on the labour of love side and I think I want to stay there.  Someday I might decide to earn money again but if I do it will probably just be getting a 9-5 job.  I enjoy the ability to lock the door, walk away, and completely bury my job too much to find the entrepreneurial lifestyle appealing I think.

Really all I want to do is massage numbers until they are beautiful.  Somehow I need to fall randomly into a job where people who make games just want the games to be made right and don't mind dealing with a temperamental 'game artist'.  Good fracking luck, I'll need it...

Geek victory

I used to get my news from the BBC.  They tend to have a much less biased take on world events than news sources either here in Canada or in the US but they do have the problem that soccer and other 'leave the house' pastimes get a lot of air time.  Who does that?  Anyway, I found a news source much more to my liking.  Instead of 'random guy who plays soccer (yes, soccer, not football) did something' I get people geeking out over new game launches and crazy science in addition to the international politics and economics stories.  Also, they manage to be consistently amusing while also being informative; its like Kryptonite, except backwards.

Here is the pure goldmine though:  The comments on the videos there constantly focus on whether or not the reporters are 'legitimate' geeks.  Are they really hardcore game players who can be trusted to tell us what they really think or are they just posers who want very badly to be a game nerd?  Gotta say, that seems like a victory for team geek when instead of begging to be taken seriously we are vetting the credentials of people who want to report on stories we are interested in!

Also, who cares how much real gaming experience these people have anyway?  Aside from geeks with an axe to grind against remembered villains from high school, that is...  The point of a show is to be entertaining and informative; if some random person wrote the script and an actor delivered it competently it makes absolutely no difference to the content OR the entertainment.  This just in:  Christian Bale isn't *really* Batman but the movies he makes where he pretends to be Batman are awesome.

This is how you bake a great news cake:  A big dollop of truth, a small handful of interesting, plenty of funny, and a small sprinkling of sexy on the top.  Mmmmm, delicious newsy confections.

A Game of Friends

Elli had her sixth birthday party today.  The kids mostly seemed to very much enjoy themselves and things were quite successful considering how tightly we had to pack 7 loud, excited kids into our fairly small space. Lots of the game we played were pretty traditional like dress up, pin the horn on the unicorn, scramble for candy out of the pinata, and decorate cookies with icing.  There was one activity in particular that the kids kept trying to do that I had to put the kibosh on though:  The Game of Friends.

The way The Game of Friends works is that the person whose birthday it is tells everyone their exact ranking in friendship.  "You are my #1 best friend, you are my #2 best friend..."  After that the people at the lowest rungs of friendship get to cry and feel left out.  Good game!  There were a couple of girls at the party (the ones who were pretty sure they were #1 or #2) who kept trying to get Elli to play The Game of Friends and I had to wander in and forbid them from doing so.  That would have been a great conversation at pickup time:

"So, why is my daughter crying?"

"Well, the kids spent most of the party playing a game designed to make your daughter miserable."

"Ummmm, why were they doing that?"

"Well, you know, it makes the popular ones feel better when they ostracize and belittle others, and we don't want the popular girls to feel bad after all..."

I just don't get these things.  When I was young there was plenty of jostling for status and favour amongst the boys but it was always hidden behind screens of violence, sports ability, disobedience, and pain suppression.  This raw, open competition for social superiority is really new to me.

Also, insert all the usual rants about excessive presents, handouts for partygoers, and sugary treats.  You know the drill.  :)

Rallying around Israel

I really don't get the intensity with which politicians in both Canada and the US rally around Israel.  The rhetoric during the US election surrounding this issue was nutty with each candidate trying to outdo the other in making promises to do anything to crush the enemies of Israel.  Of course the Canadian Prime Minister just decided to condemn 'terrorist attacks' on Israel and express support for them defending themselves.  His formula appears to be entirely based on 'Jews good, Muslims bad' with nothing else involved.

It drives me batty.  Is it terrible that Palestinians fire rockets into Israel?  Yes.  What I can't figure out is how people manage to get away with so ardently defending Israel when it fires its own rockets into Palestinian territory and kill people.  There is no point whatsoever in trying to establish who hit who first as we would have to go back thousands of years.  The only thing that matters is that everybody needs to stop murdering everybody else.  Characterizing one side as the terrorists and the other side as the valiant defenders of freedom as both sides random blast each other's civilians is disingenuous at best, downright evil at worst.

So what causes politicians over here to be so incredibly focused around Israel's fate?  There are plenty of other nations suffering internal strife and the one sided sabre rattling we see around Israel simply doesn't appear elsewhere.  Is the Jewish vote so easily manipulated and so critical?  I ask that question because I don't really know... it seems likely that politicians figure they could lose the entire Jewish vote if they don't express total solidarity with Israel but aren't they likely to lose a ton of Muslim votes at the same time?

My most important criteria for voting is 'who will incinerate less human beings'.  Politicians could really sell me on voting for them if they would stop supporting military action by powerful nations against weak nations on what seems like an entirely religious or racial basis.

1% Inspiration

A little while ago I read a blog post by Charles Stross.  He ranted a bit about how everybody misunderstands writers, romanticizing the profession without any sense of the reality.  In particular he emphasized that he doesn't give a crap about people stealing his ideas.  Hell, I know what his idea is for his next Laundry novel:  Mild mannered British hacker turned spy finds clues that something horrible and magical is going to destroy the world and foils the evil plot.   The idea, as he says, is worth 1% and the other 99% is the grunt work and sweat required to see it through.

I am sure learning that the hard way.  I have lots of great ideas for games all the time but actually turning them into a finished product is an incredible amount of work.  I am just starting to get people together to playtest the latest iteration of my role playing game (vaguely like Dungeons and Dragons) and it was a rude awakening when I linked them to the documents I had been working on.  They found all kinds of vague rules, incomplete ideas and straight out typos.  I have been trying to get more stuff written down but just keeping up with all the comments and corrections that came in has been draining away my time far too efficiently.

Book ideas are really worth approximately nothing.  They are one of those things that everybody has and which nobody wants - economics might have something to say about the value of such things.  The value is in taking an idea and putting in the hundreds or thousands of hours required to expand on it, smoothing it, editing it, and finally getting it out there for people to read.  Clearly you aren't going to get far without a good idea but that is like saying you can't start a campfire in the woods without oxygen - certainly true, but lacking oxygen (or a book idea) is never going to be the thing that stops you.

There may be a slowdown in the number of posts I produce over the next little while due to this very thing.  It turns out that figuring out some cool mechanics for a RPG is easy and writing an entire 300 page RPG manual is ... quite another.

Bad influence

You stay away from that boy!  He is a BAD INFLUENCE!

How many of you heard *that* from a parent when you were young?  Even if you haven't, that line is a mainstay of sitcom parenting.  Honestly I don't recall hearing it myself, mostly because I was a geek who was friends with other geeks.  When your buddies just want to sit around eating junk food and rolling dice it is unlikely to get your parents all worked up...  I suspect, though I can't prove, that it is far more often 'stay away from that boy' than 'stay away from that girl', though that is largely due to parents being overprotective of who their daughters date.

I figured that as a parent I wouldn't bother with such statements.  Why bother telling a kid to stay away from the bad kid when that will likely just cause them to want to hang out with the 'rebel' even more?  Does the line ever actually work?  What I didn't plan on was wanting to use the line when my child was a mere five years old; I was really pretty sure there would be no temptation until she brought home a biker with a criminal record.

The best laid plans rarely come to pass though, particularly when they are made with little to no information or experience.  Elli is having difficulties recently with another kid who is getting her in trouble.  I already had to have a one to one talk with the vice principal about Elli misbehaving and listen to her teacher lecture her about not letting other people drag her into their mischief.  Isn't this supposed to come along a LOT later?  Of course you can't just shift the blame to somebody else all the time.  It may have been the other kid's idea but that roll of toilet paper didn't throw itself.

I have to really clamp down on my lunatic impulses.  I want to shout "There are good kids at school!  That one, over there.  She is good!  Follow her around instead!" but obviously that tack is going to get me absolutely nowhere.  The lure of mischief and being the centre of attention is too strong and Elli cannot seem to extricate herself.  I am reminded of another parent who was floored because she had prepared long and hard to protect her child from bullying and to deal with tears but had no idea how to handle her child *doing* the bullying.  If only they would stop being so unique and just fit into a nice, clean pattern things would be so much simpler.

The naturalness of being straight

One of the foolish, misguided, and factually challenged things that homophobes use to denigrate homosexuality is that it is unnatural.  The claim is that in the natural world homosexuality is nonexistent and only the perversity and sinfulness of mankind leads us to accept homosexual behaviour.  Of course this is nonsense and easily disproved by rampant homosexual behaviour in many species, particularly other primates.  Unsurprisingly heterosexual behaviour is by far the norm (that whole needing to reproduce thing) but the natural world certainly leads us to think that homosexuality is a thing that happens.  Last night I found the most wonderful thing in the newspaper that takes these discoveries to a whole new level:  Gay parents adopting children in nature.

Not only is this a picture of cute penguins, it is also a picture of two gay male penguins in a long term relationship who adopted a abandoned penguin egg.  That's right, gayness is busy 'ruining' the institution of marriage and the process of child rearing at the South Pole just like it is in the rest of the world.  It makes me smile to read such things.  Not that logic is likely to have the slightest effect on bigotry of course but I find great joy in reading about unexpected situations like this and silently cheering.

TV time

Since Wendy and I have been sick so much these past weeks we have been watching a lot more TV than ever before.  Of course we don't have a TV nor any other way to generally access the programming everyone else relies on so we had to employ a different strategy that combined information gathering techniques and petty larceny.  Here is the plan:  First off, you find a bunch of people who watch TV and have good taste.  Then you ask them to tell you what the best series on TV is that is at least 3 seasons old.  After that, you borrow their copies of the series and watch all of it back to back!  It turns out their answer goes something like "Well, obviously you have seen Arrested Development, so I guess the second best is Community..."

This week we are addicted to Community.  It is a well crafted comedy but I find it particularly engaging because it reminds me so poignantly of my university years.  The group that the series focuses on isn't exactly the same as my group of university friends (the lack an old, dementia ridden, racist, sexist lunatic for one thing) but the shenanigans they get up to take me back.  Just the culture of having immense reserves of time, plenty of energy and imagination, and a lack of anything resembling a long term plan sure strikes a chord.  It doesn't hurt that a couple of the actresses in the group are hot, hot, hot either.  They manage to be 30 years old and still convincingly play 18 year olds... makeup can do wonders?

Having decided that we need to consume season 2 in a serious hurry Wendy and I began to investigate Netflix and I was pretty astounded at the price.  How is it that cable companies manage to get $60 a month from people and Netflix only costs $8?  I guess it is just sports programming and the news that draws in the cable crowd?  I can't figure any other reason to fork over so much money when so much slightly dated but awesome programming is just sitting there waiting to be consumed with gusto.

The voting booth is the not the key

Everywhere I turn today I see election coverage.  The resounding message is "Get out and vote!"  Of course plenty of people will happily tell you to vote for their candidate over any other and they obviously want to say "Please vote if you are voting for my guy, otherwise... die?"  The trouble with this silly rhetoric is that getting people out to vote isn't doing much for anybody.

Getting people to learn about the issues, challenge politicians, and force the powers that be to be accountable for their BS... now that is a goal worth reaching for.  Getting a bunch of people out to polling stations doesn't help anything at all unless those people use their voting power to actually get something useful done.  There is a fundamental missing of the point going on here that needs to be corrected.  We should not be desperately trying to get people to the polling stations.  We should be creating a political system where an individual vote matters and encouraging people to use that leverage as a springboard for learning and activism.

My vote in the last election here in Canada was immaterial.  Never mind that I have a vanishingly small chance to cast the deciding vote even in a close election, my riding was completely certain to go Liberal and it did.  If we had a system like proportional representation I could at least know that even in a landslide my vote helps the people I vote for to some small degree.  I could stop voting strategically to support corrupt behemoths and instead look at who I actually want calling the shots.  Maybe I would go crazy and vote Pirate, or Communist, or whatever, but at least I could tell the big parties that they actually need to convince me to vote for them and not just against their biggest competitor.

You want people to vote?  The best way is to make their voting be important and convince them to become invested in the process.  The actual getting to the voting booth will take care of itself.

5 Fracking weeks

I have been sick for five weeks today.  After three weeks I went to the doctor who told me that there is a bug going around that lasts 3-4 weeks and I felt a little better about my extended illness but now I am beginning to doubt once again.  I guess this is where I insert my 'I got the flu shot and got sick' sob story and get out my tinfoil hat.  The problem with being sick so long is not the physical impairment but rather the morale problems that eventually crop up.

Will I ever be well again?
Why me?
What did I do wrong?

Humans, having evolved for quite some time around the concept that the only really dangerous predator out there is other human beings, look for reason and stories everywhere.  My brain desperately wants there to be a reason that I am sick, a perpetrator in the shadows, some kind of plot.  It really isn't well programmed to accept that tiny creatures have infected me and that sometime in the reasonably near future my own tiny creatures will karate chop them into oblivion.

I assume it is the same kind of desire to find patterns and meaning in events that leads us to search for blame and plot behind a simple cold and also to posit a God.  Unfortunately although desperately searching for patterns probably saves us regularly when someone is actually scheming it leads us down the wrong path all the time.  Evolution leaves us with traits that are good for survival and reproduction but unfortunately not traits that are well tuned for seeking out the truth.  We aren't well equipped for dealing with raw chance and impersonal randomness that may wipe us out or lavish rewards upon us for no reason whatsoever.  Unfortunately for our hunter / gatherer equipped brains the world really is just random.

Believe in America

The American election is front page news everywhere.  The BBC has been covering it nonstop for half a year now, devoting a permanent chunk of their news page just to American election coverage.  I would suspect in fact that they give more coverage to the American election than to their own.  The Globe and Mail here in Canada felt obligated to publish an endorsement of Obama and around the world news sources and even leaders have chimed in and thrown their weight around.  Clearly the American election is potentially very important for other nations because America is so critical to both world finances and world peace.  That is, they are likely to start bombing random nations and be a major force *against* world peace.  However, I think that just by paying so much attention to them we are actually propping up their unsustainable system.

One of the most outrageous occurrences in world finance occurred some time ago when the American credit rating was lowered.  Everyone expected that the value of their bonds would drop since of course if they are less likely to repay then the value must go down; the principles of economics are clear on this matter.  Instead the value of their bonds went *up* after the credit rating hit because everyone was so terrified of a crashing market they ran to the safest investment in the world - American government bonds.  If this were any other nation their value would have started plummeting and the absolutely outrageous deficit spending would have come to a screeching halt... but not America!  The belief in an invincible superpower and their eternal reign is still strong and that belief causes all kinds of ludicrous behaviour.

Just imagine if the world decided that it was time to stop loaning America money it obviously will never repay.  (It might print a gazillion dollars to repay the loans and cause a currency collapse, but the value will never be returned.)  Their budget would have to be slashed by a solid 40% just to get back to par and that sort of action would undoubtedly create a massive crash in revenues, requiring further cuts, etc.  The only thing preventing instant and total collapse is the irrational belief that America, and by extension the current fiscal order, is impregnable.  It isn't.

So what you really need to worry about is not that the wrong person gets elected in America.  What you really need to worry about is the rest of the world no longer caring who gets elected in America.  When that happens you know they are headed for a collapse that makes the recent hard times look like a birthday party and the rest of us are going to experience a whole lot of that pain too.  As long as we all maintain this fiction that American hegemony is everlasting and inevitable they will continue to abuse it to maintain an even greater bubble that the one that so recently burst.  All stories end; we just don't know how many chapters this one has left.

Put in pot, cook

There is a book I should write for people like me.  That is, a book about how to cook when you need to cook a lot and don't particularly care for cooking or how food looks but do care about how healthy your food is and how it tastes.  The book would be titled "Put in pot, cook" and would basically be a bunch of recipes that entail chopping up ingredients, putting them in a pot, and cooking them.  Nothing complex, nothing that displays well, and chock full of healthy and tasty.  When my parents were teaching me how to cook they really tried to emphasize the importance of making the dinner look presentable and keeping colour in mind but it absolutely didn't take.  I will happily eat grey sludge as long as it is tasty and healthy.  I recognize that I place importance on one sense (taste) and none on another (appearance) and that this is entirely arbitrary.

The trouble with my curmudgeonly ways when it comes to food is that Wendy gets very excited about new recipes that look good.  She likes reading food blogs and buying recipe books and ends up all pumped up about a new recipe she wants me to try because it looked so delicious in the pictures.  I, on the other hand, just get irritable that I need to figure out a new recipe, keep new things stocked in my kitchen, and in general do something outside of my rut.  I *like* my rut, dammit!  I am aware that I deserve no sympathy whatsoever for my plight of having to cook new and interesting dinners once in awhile but since the internet seems mostly about having a forum to bitch about nothing...

The obvious solution to the problem is to have Wendy be the cook and me work.  She could be creative, or boring, or whatever when it comes to food and I would just be happy to have something to eat.  It is a little more complicated than that though because she cares about other things too like having a career, and doing things that matter, and getting out of the house.  Those things just don't mesh well with sitting around the house cooking.  Sitting around home building games nobody will ever play, on the other hand, has some very nice synergy with getting meals on the table in time.

Science fiction sometimes suggests that in the future we will all eat grey, featureless nutrient cubes and real food will be considered an anachronism.  Most people, I suspect, would have a lot of trouble with that and would really miss the physical experience of eating.  Not me though.  Sign me up for some food cubes and give me more time to do things!