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.  :)