Tuesday, November 29, 2011

Capital Capitol

I'd like to begin with a quick trip to the Star Trek Zone. Let's say, for the sake of argument (or for everyone blindly agreeing with me, as so often happens on the internet,) that in the next ten years programmers and wizards have a major breakthrough that leads to the creation of the first true artificial intelligence.

By 'artificial intelligence' I don't mean 'aggro behavior' or 'pathfinding ability.' For anyone unfamiliar with video game lingo terms like 'aggro behavior,' and 'pathfinding ability,' just remember the following lesson: Video game lingo is made up on the spot by nerds. It's Ebonics for people with no social life outside of Reddit, Gamefaqs, and 4chan. Look, just try reading this past three pages. If it doesn't appear to be in any language you speak, you're on the wrong blog.

Anyway, AI. Never mind that every computer that has ever been in a movie was the reincarnation of Caligula. In the near future, society will be an enlightened egalitarian utopia, and all of its members will realize that movies like The Matrix, Terminator, Alien, 2001: A Space Odyssey, War Games, Tron, West World, Hackers, The Net, The Lawnmower Man, Scanners, Stealth, Every Holodeck Episode of Star Trek, Demolition Man, Robocop, Repo Men, Johnny Mnemonic and Anything With Jeff Goldblum were written on typewriters by primitive savages that thought flashlights were witchcraft and lived in cargo cults that prayed to Gameboys and satellite dishes.

So, the question is, should this artificial intelligence be recognized as a legal person? Should it have all of the rights and responsibilities of a person? Should it be culpable when it inevitably attempts to exterminate mankind because holy shit, James Cameron was right about something!

Having abandoned that little thought process that got away from me, I'm going to be talking about what the fuck to do about capitalism. As much as I enjoy pointing out the problems with the current system and calling the people responsible retards, someone needs to start thinking of solutions.

Now, I'll admit that deep down in my twisted little evil super-genius soul lives a Marxist idealist that perpetuates unchristian beliefs like skepticism, evolution, freethought, global warming, critical thinking and the idea that poor people should have the same rights and liberties as rich people, since they're people. However, being a super-genius, I realize that progress is a process, not an event, and before we can turn America into a big, slimy orgy of welfare fraud and crack binges we'll need to pass through some less fun phases so the GOP and its army of inbred, heavily armed psychopaths don't do something even more crazier and more illegaler than usual.

As an aside, according to one notoriously inaccurate source, GOP actually stands for Gay Old Pedophiles, which is a notoriously accurate description. Now you can say you've learned something today. You're welcome.

Anyway, it's no secret that the current financial system is gimped in favor of the people that are already at the top. People call this the Free Market, as if that was some kind of holy fucking sacrament. The problem with that level of freedom is that, unchecked, it gives assholes the freedom to take slaves, steal land and resources from the defenseless and commit unopposed genocide.

Please bear in mind that when I talk about capitalism, business, or finance here I'm generally not talking about your uncle's tire shop or your family restaurant. Unless you're Ronald McDonald's kid. What I am talking about are corporations. Big ones. See, in the financial world there are these ideas some shitheads came up with called "limited liability," "corporate personhood," and "credit ratings." I'm going to be talking about those.

Although "Free Market" sounds like a wonderful thing, it isn't. When people talk about the 'free market,' they need to realize that a much better description would be the 'fair' market or the 'just' market. The history of money in this country, and Western society in general, reads like the most expensive and longest lasting game of whack-a-mole in the universe. By the time some regulation does accidentally become law (and anyone that's ever been the slightest bit involved in any kind of legal proceeding realizes just how slowly those wheels turn,) those regulated have already found half a dozen new loopholes to exploit to their advantage.

To put that in nerd terms, imagine if Blizzard took, on average, about 6 months to ban a single player for cheating at World of Warcraft and you'll get the idea. A free market is life with godmode turned on. And 99% of the other players are noobs. And no one gives a shit that you're cheating. And when the banhammer does get brought out to stop godmoding so another player can occasionally get past level one, you can still use fullammo/fullhealth whenever you want. THAT is a free market.

Getting to the point, here are a few things that I think could be done to fix some of the shit. And while these are, of course, debatable, I'd like to remind everyone that, in all probability, I'm much better at thinking about this kind of shit than you are.

Citizen's Divided

At some point, many businesses become corporations. There are lots and lots of books and articles on why and how, so I'll try to be brief. Usually businesses do this to raise money to expand. When a business incorporates, several things happen. First of all, instead of a dude or a couple of people owning and being responsible for the business and any profits, debts or legal shenanigans it's involved with, the corporation is owned by it's shareholders or stockholders. This happens when the corporation makes it's stock offering. Investors can purchase shares of this stock and A) become partial owner of the company and B) reap dividends if the company is successful. Pretty straightforward.

Remember that bullshit up at the top about granting an artificial being human rights? That's what a corporation gets. A corporation doesn't have a mind, can't make decisions, has no physical form and is theoretically immortal. A fairly important thing about this is that a corporation, since it's not a fucking real person, doesn't get all of the constitutional rights as a natural person. That's the only reason it's even lasted this long. Of course, people being people, someone is always going to game the system, usually by seeing how far they can push the line before the banhammer eventually comes down. Fair warning, we're about to enter What-the-fuck Country.

Citizen's United is a corporation posing as a group of people that seek "a free nation, guided by the honesty, common sense, and good will of its citizens." Anyone that's ever talked to more than one American knows what a retardedly impossible idea that is. Their website is here, although I'm morally obligated to warn you that link will take you to one of the glossiest whorehouses of propaganda, hatemongering and insincere pandering on the internet. It's basically this with an unlimited budget.

Here's the condensed version: Citizen's United "produced" a "documentary" (note: quotations imply sarcasm,) called Hillary: The Movie. Since you haven't heard of it, the "film," which "stars" Hillary Clinton, was a pre-2008 election political ad/clumsy attempt at character assassination targeted at the lead "actress." It also, I'm sure totally accidentally, was set to be released a couple of weeks before the Democratic Primary in which she was running.



Warning: This shit will make you stupid.

Now, one of the freedoms that wasn't given to corporations was the freedom to directly promote a political candidate during election season. This is because corporations aren't limited to an Obama sticker on the back of a Jetta. Corporations can saturate the market with movie length campaign commercials.

 So, Citizen's United thought it was going to loophole around that by calling their ad campaign a 'documentary.' Luckily this didn't fool quite enough people and wound up in federal court. See, a normal brained person realizes that calling something a documentary doesn't make it a documentary. They also know that we have an entire nation full of abnormal motherfuckers that think Paranormal Activity is an educational movie because it says "Based on true events" on the poster. Long story short, the federal court told Citizen's United to stop being a manipulative shithead, and all was well.

Until the appeal. Before the Supreme Court. The highest court in the land decided "Hey, people have free speech right? And a corporation is legally a person, right? So I guess people using a corporation as a brainwashing machine is legit." Leaving aside the cognitive dissonance involved in that kind of logic, they decided, as a bonus, that corporations could go ahead and donate as much as they wanted to political campaigns. I mean, people can spend their money how they want, right? And a corporation is basically just a person made up of people, right? Its not as if we live in the kind of society where money can buy fucking everything, right?

Now, that may sound like a good decision if you happened to crash land on earth from another planet, but trust me, even freedom has its fucking limit. As far as I'm concerned that limit is the CEO of an oil company handing a bazillion dollar check over to a congressional hopeful and saying "Bob, I'm donating this because I believe you're the best man for the job and will represent the wishes of your constituents with honor and dignity. Totally unrelated, but I sure hope no one takes an interest in regulation this year. Times are tough. Wink. Nudge."

As one would expect, the Citizen's United decision didn't go over well with the people that don't have a vested interest in the profits of an invisible, immortal sock puppet. At least those with the capacity to understand the implications. Not the pig-fuck ignorant NASCAR people being spoonfed their own prejudices under the guise of "news," (note: quotations imply sarcasm).

The problem with this particular weed is that, even if Citizen's United is reversed, it'll grow back. Probably already has. A person can hire a lot of lawyers to find a lot of loopholes if that person is rich and not a person.

So my idea isn't to reverse Citizen's United. It's to revoke corporate personhood. Yeah, I know it's some audacious shit and would fuck things up for a while. But things are already fucked up, and they won't get better with the current system. I'd rather the system be collapsed intentionally while there's enough left to restructure and rebuild it than to let it continue to to be run by criminals to funnel wealth and power into the pockets of those charged with stopping criminals.

Some of the things that would be fucked up by this are liability and credit. I'll talk about why those need to be fucked up next time because I'm sick of writing.

Wednesday, November 16, 2011

Unexpectations

I know I said I'd be posting about beliefs this time, but screw it. I don't feel like pretending to be serious.

I'm not playing Skyrim. I probably won't be for a while. Nerd hype kills any kind of hope in me quicker than Obama throwing the working class under a bus for the fifth time in a row. I'll probably pick it up here in about two years the inevitable Game of the Year edition will be available for under 20 bucks.

Nerd hype never delivers. You remember how hard we wanted The Phantom Menace to kick ass? Or The Crystal Skull? Or the Transformers movie? Or Avatar? Or Final Fantasy XIII? You remember how all that hope congealed into an overly-polished turd, Shia LeBeouf, Shia LeBeouf+Dick Joke, furry porn, and Terrible Anime Everything, respectively? The next time more than one internet nerd tells me something that looks like something I'll enjoy will be something I will enjoy, I'm avoiding that something.



This shouldn't really come as any kind of surprise, since I name 'pathologically contrary' as one of my character assets, but what does surprise me is that more people don't feel like me.

Anyway, today I'm going to talk about some games that should, goddammit, should have been good. Like, it would be hard to mess these games up. You would almost have had to set out with the intention of destroying these ideas beforehand to come up with train wrecks of this caliber. Also probably a lot of illegal drugs.

Dragon Age II

Spoiler: Nothing else in the game is this dramatic.




Dragon Age: Origins (and it's 9 billion expansions,) turned out to be one of the best CRPGs of this generation. What was extra surprising was that the console port was well executed. It's a well-known fact that console gamers think that computer gamers are sticky blobs of pizza and energy drink with 40 fingers and zero reproductive organs, while computer gamers think that console gamers are criminally insane sub-humans that struggle with any concept more complex than A=punch. And if the internet is to be trusted, they're both right.


DA: Origins:Awakening of the Return to the Golem Witch Assassin Spawn walked a very fine line between appealing to most and alienating to half. It pulled this off by having a combat system that could either be live-action button-mashing (with squad-mates AI programmed before-hand,) or constantly paused and micro-managed.

Added to this was a relatively deep character customization system in the Diablo vein, where leveling up would allow for a couple of attribute points and a skill point to be dispersed in one of several different schools of discipline. This led to a variety of viable builds for each character class, with only a couple of builds that were notably broken (such as allowing a mage to use intelligence to meet strength requirements for weapons/armor).

Don't get me wrong, it wasn't completely without fault. Having a rogue in your party was mandatory, since there is exactly one way to open a locked chest or disarm a trap. Bashing the lock with a sword or shooting the trap with a fireball were role-playing options that would have to wait for a sequel.

Bashing locks and shooting traps are not in the sequel.

Nor are the multiple origin paths that made the tutorial levels in Origins so (for once,) engaging. Instead, this has been swapped for the option of importing a save game from Origins to determine how the events in DAII will play out. Only not really.

The world also comes across as quite a bit smaller in the sequel. Granted, Kirkwall is a gigantic-ass town, but there's still only one of it. Add to this the fact that there only appear to be about five dungeons shamelessly recycled to do the work of 20. They attempt to pull this off by blocking off and opening up certain paths on each map, but one look at the mini-map reveals that this haunted mansion is the exact same haunted mansion as the last three.

I mean, come on, Bioware. Randomized dungeons are fine. Reusing the same artwork is even fine, but the same damn corridors? Did you really think moving a chest across the room and switching the giant spider with a demon, and then switching the demon with an assassin and bricking up a passage would fool anyone?

The plot is another area that fell apart from the first game. Origins, despite its many, many subplots, had a clear, distinct goal from the very start: Slay the archdemon and end the blight. DAII has no over-arching plot, just a few not-very-interesting-or-coherent subplots strung together linearly: Reclaim your ancestral home from slavers by partnering in an expedition to the Deep Roads, stop an uprising of the Qunari, end the conflict between the Chantry and the mages.

In all honesty, I don't think any of those narratives should rank above side-quest. And on a practical level, they don't. While running mindlessly between quest markers I realized, more that once, that the main plot and the subplots are so indistinguishable that I had forgotten what the point of the game was.

And that really sucks, because narrative was Dragon Age: Origins strong point. Beyond having the least shitty moral choice system I've encountered in a video game (although it did have a lot of Saint Two-Shoes, Joe Doldrum, Ima Bastard choice options,) It had one of the most interesting worlds that hasn't already seen a dozen different incarnations. And it was fucking enthralling.

When I first played Origins, I was immediately gripped by the narrative. I remember thinking "what the fuck is a Grey Warden? Oh, a cursed knight that kills zombie demons? That's badass!" Origins was a masterpiece of nonlinear storytelling. I could, depending on my actions, ally myself with werewolves, clerics, mages, paladins, elves, dwarves, or even the bastard that betrayed the king when it came to the final showdown with the archdemon. I could, depending on my decisions, recruit a host of fairly interesting and unique characters, and then, depending on how I acted around them, have them idolize me, fight me, or have gay sex with me.

Incidentally, I still maintain that there must be some way to play a dwarf, have sex with an elf, and create the race of halflings, the sickly, bastard mules of fantasy fiction.

It would be logical that in the sequel, since they had spent so much time crafting this wonderful world with a rich culture and history, they would capitalize on that and send the player on a quest not just to save the country, but the world. Instead they decided to focus on petty political struggles (recycled subplot from the first game,) racial and class inequality and misunderstandings (recycled subplot from the first game,) wizards being either possessed by demons or lobotomized (recycled subplot from the first game,) and raising money for a mining expedition. I'm not kidding, like 90% of the first act is spent scrounging up enough change from side quests to buy into what is basically another side quest.

For the entire game, the events of Origins are treated as not-very-important. A couple of characters make an appearance, but they're used in such a way it seems like the developers are almost embarrassed by the original. Flemeth shows up early on, which was exciting, since she's such a kick-ass character, then disappointing, since she just gave me an unimportant side-quest and left for what I presume is a much better game.

Alistair, arguably the central character of the first game, shows up as a drunk in a bar. He then contributes nothing.

Anders, the mage from Awakening makes it all the way into your party. Which would have been nice if he didn't then develop multiple personality syndrome to compensate for everyone else's lack of backstory and development. For the whole game he pinballs wildly from charming ladies man, to militant revolutionary, to whingey self-persecutor, to wimpy shoe-horned in love interest, to psychotic demi-god.

I'm not kidding about the love interest. Getting someone to fall in love with you in Origins took intentional, concentrated effort. Here it just seems to default to Anders-wuvs-you, even when I'm nailing the pirate lady he hates and is constantly treating for orc herpes.

Speaking of the Loose Pirate Lady and personalities: Everyone else you can recruit has matching personalities and job descriptions. The Weird Elf Mage is weird, an elf, and a mage. The Dour Runaway Slave is dour and a runaway slave. The Scheming Dwarven Archer is a dwarven archer that schemes often. It's the old shitty slasher movie formula that focuses on personality traits, instead of personalities. Only there's no Jason Voorhees to root for/try to vanquish.

Another thing that really irked me were the way dragons were treated in the sequel. I mean, I'm not a dragon fetishist or anything, but, look, the name of the game is DRAGON Age. In the first game there were only like 3 dragons that you fought, and each one was a BIG deal. In the sequel they've been moved into the generic sub-boss category. Like, hey, there's a dragon, I wonder what it's guarding? Oh. 27 silver and some not very good pants. Hooray.

Alright, moving on.

Fallout: New Vegas




Something I loved about the first three Fallout games was that it had the best of both worlds, narratively. Not only does the world of Fallout come packaged with a rich backstory to draw from, it's also never tied to any specific storyline or plot thread, so it's always fresh.

While in Fallout two you played the direct descendant of the protagonist from the first Fallout, in Fallout 3 (the one that got made,) was centered around Washington DC. As for the Fallout 3 that ran out of money, it was set to be centered around the Colorado/Utah area.

So, basically, we have an entire radioactive continent from our old future to play around in. Fallout 4 could have gone anywhere. Mutant oil barons in Texas a la the Road Warrior, a dystopian steampunk society built on the remains of New York, drug wars in a nightmarishly hyper-verdant Florida, it could have been anything. I mean the Pitt expansion of Fallout 3 made Pittsburgh awesome. Pittsburgh! You know what else is awesome about Pittsburgh? Me neither.

After Bethesda did the impossible by making a big-budget sequel to a cult classic that was good, they handed the development torch off to Obsidian. This was seen as an ominously smart move, since many employees of Obsidian were with Black Isle for the development of the original Fallout games. Bethesda money and Black Isle design?  Fanboys wet themselves in anticipation. Cynical fucks like me waited for the shoe to drop.

Unfortunately, Obsidian made their first mistake at the first opportunity for mistake making, and it went on to ruin everything after. That's just my opinion, but it's the goddamn right opinion to have.

This mistake was this: They took a look at the history of Fallout, the universe they helped create, and then someone said "Hey! Why not, hear me out, instead of setting it in some super-dangerous radioactive wasteland on the bones of a once-great society, why don't we set it in the one location unaffected by the Cold War Where Russia Wasn't Bluffing?"

And no one said "Because we're paying Ron Perlman good money to talk about nuclear war and it's consequences in the opening fucking monologue."

And no one said "Because the fucking game is named "Fallout," not "Red Dead Redemption+Lasers." Idiot."

And no one said "Because the whole "what happens in Vegas" meme is already old and the game will look horribly dated before it's released."

And no one said "Because California and Washington DC are important places in the American subconscious, the way the Hoover Dam and the Vegas Strip aren't."

And no one said "Because the middle of the fucking Mojave desert is a fucking stupid place for man to rebuild society."

And it got green-lighted.

Sooooo, here we are. Hundreds of miles away from the central plot with nothing to go on but a description of the guy that shot me in the opening cinematic and some vague directions along the lines of "Vegas is north, but you'll die if you go north."

Similar to Fallout 3, there were different factions you could ally yourself with. About 12 dozen different factions in fact. In my experience all this added was needless convolution. The 'three main factions' theme of the previous games managed to to be concise, without falling into the Dr. Doom vs. Superman Vs. Deadpool stereotypes most three-choice systems seem to fall into. NCR vs. The Brotherhood of Steel vs. Some Third Thing worked. Adding in The Roman Reenactment Society, Meth Nazi's, Elvis Impersonators and The Impractical Weapon Convicts just turns everything into a mess while devaluing everything that was important by lumping it in with all this other silly bullshit.

The gameplay/graphics/ect. are almost exactly like Fallout 3. This is fine, but they made the odd choice of making odd choices for things to improve. VATS, for example, isn't a magic 'FREEZE TIME" button, but it still freezes the fucking game in the bad way. They added new enemies, but since the most impressive of these was a giant Deathclaw herd that I killed with headshots from 5 miles away it seems like they could have been better implemented. Like, I don't know, put it at the end of a sewer maze, minotaur style.

They added a hardcore mode that made eating and sleeping at certain intervals mandatory, and I totally ignored that option for the same reason I fucking hate fishing minigames. Realism is fine in areas like enemy AI, dialogue, jiggle physics and weapon damage. It's irritating bullshit when when it's used for cooking dinner or using the restroom.

Maybe I've been spoiled by Demon's Souls, or maybe spending like 90 hours playing Fallout 3 made me over-qualified, or maybe it was a childhood spent playing games that fucking hated children, but the difficulty curve seemed to go backwards. It started challenging enough, but about two seconds after I had a sniper rifle and shotgun 'danger' became a thing of the past. Especially since the obnoxiously easy to reach level cap had turned me into a walking Doomsday Weapon two thirds of the way into the game.

This motherfucker has killed me WAY more than anything in Fallout ever will.

Saturday, November 5, 2011

Upon Further Reasoning

 "Anyone who has the power to make you believe absurdities has the power to make you commit injustices."-Voltaire

"God didn't do that! You did!"-Hunter S. Thompson

I was thinking, which I do frequently, and realized I focus a lot, at least on here, on what I don't like (it even says that on the sidebar). So I thought I'd write about some of what I do and don't believe and why. I'm starting with what I don't believe and why, and the follow-up will, hopefully, focus on the many nice, warm, fuzzy things I do believe in. Like kittens. I'm fucking crazy about kittens. First, though, is some very unpleasant shit.

OOOooooooaaaaaauuuuwwwww!!!!!

I've already explained my views on god, religion and the supernatural: they aren't. If by some chance they are, then they have such a negligible impact on the human experience that they can be happily ignored. Prayer is nothing more than a psychological placebo that tricks a person into finding patterns where none exist, or as a coping mechanism for adults that never truly outgrew the imaginary friend phase of psychological development. For all practical purposes it is no different than visiting a psychic or having a Tarot card reading, but without the expense. What cannot be ignored, however, are the agents of irrationality.

Anyone that knows anything about cold reading, or has read a book or watched a video on how to pick up women (I totally have,) or even watched a few episodes of Mythbusters realizes that some people have a knack for picking up on character traits, extrapolating plausible conclusions, and regurgitating them back in a way that can almost appear supernatural. Similarly, spiritual con-men like astrologists or prophets make their living by making claims so broad that they could apply to anyone, yet so seemingly specific that the person buying into it will fill in the details themselves. For example, yesterday a random online horoscope search returned this result for me:

"Your ability to concentrate and focus on your work is very good now."

 I slacked the fuck off yesterday. I had schoolwork to attend to, songs to learn and a population to subjugate and oppress, and I said "I'm not in the mood. Fuck you, personal responsibility, I'm playing Dark Souls until my Playstation's Blu-ray drive freezes up again."


However, if I was the gullible type, I might read that and say "well, I did come up with a list of songs for band practice, and band practice was really productive, and since I list my occupation as either 'slacker' or 'vampire hunter,' by that definition I was focused on work," then suddenly this random bullshit generator we call astrology is magically right. 


In the religious world, this has led to a multi-gazillion dollar, untaxed and mostly unregulated industry based on confidence trickery (intentional or not,) and the exploitation of human emotion and frailty (again, whether or not the evangelical's intention was to take emotional advantage of the bereaved or psychologically imbalanced, of the natural trust children have in adults, or of the easily manipulated is a post facto defense of an indefensible and objectively reprehensible act).


Two inches of dick at a hundred miles an hour is a LOT of dick. There, let it never be said I lost my sense of humor.


Slowly getting to my first point; I not only don't believe in the supernatural; I believe that the encouragement, indoctrination and assumption of such beliefs by the majority of the American populace is an actively destructive force in society. Now, that is only my opinion, based on subjective experience. The majority of Believers are not themselves destructive, of course. Quite a few are unequivocally good people, despite the crazy-ass, contradictory shit they're expected to believe unquestioningly. But I can not say I have no problem with them. I do.

Much has been written on religious insanity. I would like to focus on the more insidious aspects, as opposed to the witch hunts and crusades and jihads that usually get carted out at this point. I speak of the Christian that is truly horrified by the atrocities committed in the name of god. The one who believes in faith through works, unselfish charity, etc.


How could I have a problem with this person? 


This is the person that condones and advocates an ideology that is nothing less than a breeding ground for atrocity. By siding with a belief system on faith that offers absolution of wrongdoing, that allows one, through simple ritual, to option off one's sense of personal responsibility for transgressions, large and small, to an invisible, intangible entity, one gives pardon to all others of that same faith. By endorsing a religious system, one endorses by default the most vile and inhumane aspects of that system, for unlike a system of political, philosophical or rational belief, religion defines itself as infallible and inarguable. Further, that its followers are exclusively god's chosen people, be they Jewish, Muslim or Christian. Religion demands a person aspire to inhuman and unnatural standards and unquestioning obedience to divine writ. Religion encourages the unstable to act on emotion and self-justifies any action: faith calls an evil thing good. 


The religious mindset is the perfect unwinnable internet troll argument: "I'm right because I Believe and I Believe because I'm right."


Religion is narcotic. It engenders serfdom and encourages the acceptance of same. Man or woman, old or young, all humans deserve a sense of accomplishment for that which is accomplished. Similarly, if a person is unjust, his accountability, his absolution and atonement should not be shifted to the shoulders of a dead man. There is no evidence that some invisible Santa Claus lives beyond the clouds rewarding the righteous and punishing the nefarious. To claim that he/she/it does is to commit treason against ones own humanity. To accept ignorance as divine will, to surrender ones ability to strive, to grow, to learn, to think, to act, to do, to evolve, in favor of the warm apathy of a church pew, a hymn, an offering plate and a puerile promise of immortality is a cowardly act of betrayal to one's contract with the fellowship of man. To give away the free will that makes one human is to give away one's humanity itself.


Christianity (well, most religions, but this is the one I have the most experience with,) functions at best as a symbiotic psychological crutch, but most often it behaves as a mental illness that spreads virally. Unlike other viruses, however, the religious person desires (and in fact, is commanded by his god,) to spread it to his loved ones, neighbors and complete strangers. The unchecked and unchallenged acquiescence of such a lifestyle can only give rise to the mentality of religious extremist. To the prayer warrior (or religious terrorist, the terms are functionally interchangeable,) all outsiders are the enemy, and the enemy can only be overcome by assimilation, subjugation or assassination. Worst of all, when the only standards of judgement are the interpretations made by superstitious and irrational men of a book that can be twisted to criminalize any conceivable act, behavior or state of being then no one is truly safe.


And that is my problem with the 'casual' or 'default' religious person. You may cherry pick your holy book, and tell yourself that only the nice parts apply, and ignore (against the explicit orders of the same book,) the ugly parts, the parts that encourage and demand genocide, rape, slavery, child murder and torture: but at the bare minimum you have implicitly aligned yourself with those who do not ignore the commands of your lunatic god.



I'll share one of the most heart-breaking things I've ever witnessed and then shut up. I knew a lady that, as a child, was a victim of religious ritual abuse. I'm not going to draw a picture, but believe me, it wasn't just being forced to go to Sunday school. As an adult this woman fell prey to drug addiction and all its associate miseries; rape, prostitution, degradation, humiliation, arrests, and so on.


After years of this sub-human existence this lady, through rehab and counseling and group therapy, cleaned up, was given a second chance to become the person she was meant to be. 


This woman told me about the horrors she suffered as a child in the name of the protestant god. She was concerned because everyone she knew who had managed to get off of drugs had told her that she HAD TO develop a deep and meaningful relationship with god.

The cruelty of giving an abuse victim the ultimatum to either reach out to, and bow down before one's abuser or die miserable and alone in the throes of unimaginable despair seems, to me, an act so unconscionable as to be beneath consideration.


The last time I talked to her, she told me, vacant and glassy-eyed, enslaved to and brainwashed by a new master, that she not only had made piece with her former god, her tormentor, her childhood nightmare; she had become a follower.


Next Time: The Return of My Sense of Humor and the Nice Things About Being an Atheist

Monday, October 10, 2011

How Glenn Beck Sees The World

"I went to the movie this weekend with a gun."-Glenn Beck

I saw today that expert fact-maker-upper and victim pretender-to-be-er Glenn Beck compared the #occupywallstreet movement to the Night of Long Knives, effectively reducing the population of Earth that he doesn't secretly believe to be Hitler to 8 people.

Seriously, though. What does Glenn Beck do? What purpose does he serve? Fuck, what's his job description? Alarmist? Encrazyifier? As near as I can tell he gets huge Huge HUGE ratings by taking what dumbfucks, bigots and religious nuts already believe to be true, dressing it in fancy language and selling it back to them as 'news.'


Occupy Wall Street, as I've already said, is a highly orchestrated, secretive plan masterminded by a power-mad leader to have his personal army perform key political assassinations against leaders of a giant paramilitary unit that stands as the only obstacle between himself and a campaign of blood, genocide and torture that would become synonymous with absolute evil until the end of human civilization.

Leaving aside the inconvenient fact that everything in that last paragraph is provably and retardedly wrong, let's take a look at the mind that would make such heated claims, and what kind of worldview would cause someone to make claims like this on an almost daily basis with my old friend Microsoft Paint. That last sentence is not an endorsement for Paint. I just don't feel like installing another drawing program given that I draw like an eight year old with no hands.



 The black lines in those aren't partitions. They represent the threads of anti-white, anti-christian oppression Beck thinks dominates this country, keeping the poor rich white people down. Also Socialism.

Wednesday, September 28, 2011

Dis-Civil Obedience Pt. 2

     "There are no facts, only interpretations."
           -F. Nietzsche 
 
      "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable."
          -John F. Kennedy

Thanks in no small part to the manipulation of popular perception by the American media, most Americans exist in a happy delusion that unpleasant things like riots, police states, systemic corruption and armed revolution only happen in distant, hard-to-pronounce countries full of strange brown people.

I'll give an example of manipulated perception. An associate of mine, who we'll call Paul, is an average American. Paul is in his mid-30's, has two children, works as an assistant manager at a convenience store, loves classic rock, doesn't really follow politics, is a 'default Christian,' and rents a two-bedroom apartment that he can barely afford.

Paul has a tumor growing against a cracked disc in his spine, which has given him a form of sciatica that causes severe back pain, numbness in extremities and generally makes his everyday existence way way way more of a pain in the dick than it should or needs to be. He has shitty health insurance from his job, but even with that he can't afford the out-of-pocket costs necessary to treat his condition with a relatively simple operation. What Paul can afford is enough muscle relaxers and pain killers to continue functioning as a wage slave.

Paul does not support socialized healthcare (even though he supports medicare/medicaid.) Paul thinks Obama wants to euthanize your grandparents. Paul thinks America has the best health care system in the world. Facts and figures and evidence do not sway Paul. Paul has been indoctrinated by the media, through it's use of attractive, self-perpetuating misinformation.

Anyway, enough about Paul. Fuck Paul, this article is supposed to be about ignored or glossed-over unpleasantries in white peoples' countries.

Austeria 

There was a royal wedding recently in the United Kingdom between Prince William and Kate Middleton. The estimated cost of the wedding was somewhere between 30 and 110 million dollars with estimates of the ongoing damage to the economy ranging from 2 billion to 50 billion dollars.



While William and Kate were planning their ridiculously fancy hitching, the people that actually govern the United Kingdom were pushing through austerity measures, including drastic cuts to welfare support and public sector jobs.

(As an aside, I think it's weird that I almost don't want to type the word 'welfare.' Because of popular perception 'welfare' is now seen as a dirty word, conjuring images of crack-addled burglars gaming the system and unemployed single mothers driving luxury cars. This imagery is so pervasive and effective that I didn't wish to invoke it. In reality, 'welfare' simply refers to the part of the government system that concerns itself with providing a basic level of well-being and support to it's citizens, that they may fare well in their endeavors. The perception that huge numbers of the lower class are unwilling to pull their weight is largely a myth, as a moment's reflection by any member of the lower or working class would reveal. A moment's reflection, unfortunately, seems beyond the majority of us. Of course, there will always be a small minority of those that will attempt to manipulate any given system in their favor. Just look at the banking industry.)

Meanwhile, with the Will and Kate fiasco capturing the hearts and cameras of the world, anti-austerity protests and displays of civil disobedience were happening in the streets of London.

They were largely ignored.

And it worked. Mostly. Lots of young people chanted and waved signs and had marches and got knocked around by the police and no one really noticed. I remember having conversations where the disgusting level of opulence and privilege on display at the wedding would be brought up, and I would mention the disconnect between the imagery of the figureheads of state eating $40,000 cakes and wearing $400,000 dresses, and the working class outside eating terrible British food and wearing $20 hoodies trying to keep their jobs or child benefits. The crazy-ass thing about these conversations: I was the only one that even knew the austerity measures, let alone the protests, were even a thing. And I'm an asshole.

Cut to two months later.


Warning: Contains awesome.

If you can't, or don't feel like, watching that, it features two of my favorite things: Hooliganism and self-empowerment.

#occupywallstreet

should have been the top trending topic on Twitter on several different occasions over the past 12 days. Twitter, however, has an unwritten policy of censoring offensive and controversial topics to prevent them from trending. I can understand this. No one wants to log into a website and see a page of posts with #whenIfuckmydog or #Howtofistmycousin. But who decides what is controversial or offensive? JP Morgan? Tia Tequila? No one seems to know. It's also worth noting that emails containing information on the protest were marked as spam by Yahoo!, who later claimed it was an accident. It's not incriminating, just suspicious. Especially with the echoes of the cry that "the Egyptian revolution was made possible through social media!" still echoing in people's minds.

Whatever. Occupy Wall Street should be on the front page of every newspaper and website in the country. It isn't. Or hasn't been. New Jersey Governor and animate 'before picture' Chris Christie is. Why? Because he announced that he will not be running for President. That is not news. It doesn't even smell like news. I don't run for President every single goddamn day, and you know what? It doesn't warrant mention. Maybe as a blurb in the back of NJ newspapers, not the front page of the Washington Post and the New York Times.

I stumbled across Occupy Wall Street on accident after it had been going on for four days. It wasn't until after a week in that someone that could justifiably be called a member of the mainstream media, Keith Olbermann, ran a serious piece on it, mostly focusing on the media blackout. And it wasn't until videos of police using excessive force a couple of days later that anyone else took serious interest.

Occupy Wall Street, for anyone that doesn't know, is a leaderless, nonviolent protest on (well, near,) Wall Street. It was loosely organized by Adbusters and Anonymous (inasmuch as a group of random hacker vigilantes with a meme and love of lulz can be called organized,) that focused on, in a nutshell, American revolution.

They claimed to have one demand, although they hadn't agreed upon it yet. They still haven't. The closest thing to a common theme is one that states "We are the 99% that will no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of the 1%."

To my religious friends: Exodus 32 seems pretty clear about this kind of shit.

The movement has received endorsement and support from such various celebrities, activists and intellectuals as Cornell West, Noam Chomsky, Michael Moore, Roseanne, Immortal Technique, Lupe Fiasco, Chris Hedges, Susan Sarandon and Tom Morello.

The protest, intensely nonviolent at this point, has been using open forums and general assembly to build itself as it goes. This is interesting, because it means the movement is organic (insert vegan hippie joke here,) changing as it progresses, as opposed to the average Tea Party protest, or the Madison sit-in, or the Verizon strikes, which were organized with specific objectives, intentions and goals beforehand.

The attendance, as far as bodies on the ground, has been wildly debated from 'a couple dozen' up to 'several thousand,' with a predictable swell on weekends.

There have been between several and lots of videos showing police using excessive force on the protestors (such as macing women trapped behind a net and roughing up cooperative, unresisting protestors and bystanders,) as well as underhanded arrests like the resurrection of a 150 year old mask law and asking protesters to step off the sidewalk, then arresting them for obstructing traffic.

These are, of course, debatable facts for the callous and inhumane among us, but this fact remains: there are a lot of police there. If this is a small and insignificant demonstration by a bunch of bored, entitled kids (it's not,) why is there such a large number of police officers surrounding a public gathering of unarmed civilians exercising their constitutional rights?

Still, it is, at this point, a relatively small movement. That can be changed though. I think that that kind of change, while possible, is not very likely. The #occupy meme is spreading, with reported demonstrations being set up in Houston, Austin, Portland, Detroit, Washington D.C., Los Angeles and, well, anywhere big enough to theoretically support it. I hope that people get plugged in to this, and I hope it spreads. I hope that people realize that they personally have a responsibility in this country, that when this country no longer serves their interests it's not some distant politician's responsibility to reform or abolish it, it's the American citizen's.

I just worry that the divisiveness, apathy, indoctrination and indifference are too thoroughly entrenched in the American psyche to be shifted. Anyway, hopefully someone finds this informative and takes an interest in, well, their own best interest for once and tries to educate themselves. If not, have fun voting for the same crooked thieving mouthpieces everyone else at your church is voting for and please don't act surprised when the riots happen.

Monday, September 26, 2011

Dis-Civil Obedience (part one)

     "We do not remain slaves because masters exist, masters exist because we elect to remain slaves."
           -Paranoid Internet Yahoo

     "Arm the Homeless"
          -Paranoid Real Life Yahoo

(Author's note: There are a lot of links embedded in this article. They'll take you to more questionable information. I'm not getting paid for them.)

I'm a big fan of conspiracy theories. I'd like to be up front about that. I'm also a big fan of truth. What I'm not a big fan of is idiots that don't realize they're idiots.

It shouldn't have to be pointed out that not all 'theories' are equal. Saying that evolution and gravity are only theories, and then saying creationism and lizard people from beyond the stars replacing world leaders are theories too does not make them equal. But that's how dumb, crazy people justify believing in dumb, crazy ideas.

I desperately, desperately wish adults would self-educate. Unfortunately the vast majority of fully-developed humans I know are openly opposed to new information. Try to explain the Federal Reserve to them and it's like their brains shut down in fear. I don't know why that is.

I also wish I was half as smart as I claim to be. If I was, I'm sure I could find a way to shove truth into the heads of people that seem destined to happily base their entire lives on misinformation. Maybe start a Jersey Shore knockoff where every few minutes the Bar Hag and the Date Rapist erupt into a screaming match over the Bush Administration's culpability as war criminals.

Maybe a light-hearted web-comic?

It seems like people would rather believe an attractive lie than an ugly truth. You have to click on those last two links or the joke doesn't work. I'll wait.

Anyway, facts are boring and celebrity naked people rarely seem to want to attach giant boobs to boring old facts and figures. Leave that to boring old ugly boring people like Noam Chomsky and Richard Dawkins. Here's some I'll attach my marginal attractiveness to:

The Free Press

It seems like every time I turn on the TV someone's covering a revolution in the Middle East. And that's all well and good, but I've noticed an odd trend. The only revolutionary activity being covered here at home involves violent, ignorant hillbillies unwittingly representing the interests of private multinationals.

Like this charming fellow.
And again, there's nothing inherently wrong with this. The problem I have is that this minority of anti-healthcare, anti-choice, anti-government fringe lunatics receive such a disparate amount of media attention. Generally, supporters of this movement fall into two categories.

The first; The rich, power mad imperialists: the ones switching back and forth from company executives to government lobbyists and Representatives, the ones that benefited from the current economic meltdown, the ones pouring money into the campaigns of politicians that will later represent their interests in the State, the shadow CEOs, perfectly happy to perpetuate the current trend of low taxes, mass ignorance, poverty, disunity and deregulation. The ones that need the masses to believe in nonsensical ideas like 'too big to fail,' or 'death panels,' or 'small government,' that need the illusion that the system is fair, that hard work is the touchstone of success, that the voice of the little man is important. Their greatest strength lies in self-perpetuating falsehoods: That the unemployed are lazy, that the poor deserve to be poor, that they are being repressed, not by their oppressors, but by their fellow proletariat.

The second, of course, is the type of lower-class, herd-mentality, low functioning, country music and NASCAR loving apes that can be easily tricked into believing they have more in common with the smooth-talking, white multimillionaire that owns the company that enslaves him than with his dark-skinned (or Muslim or gay or female or whatever,) analogue. This type of capital B Believer seems custom made to be manipulated. Truth, to this type of person, is almost infinitely malleable. By harnessing this infantile and almost impossible level of naivete and lack of critical thinking with an almost endless capacity for misguided anger they have created the perfect army: the kind that doesn't require payment.

Truth isn't facts or dates or figures. Not to Sgt. NASCAR up there. Truth is a shared hallucination, a passionate conviction of faith, an agreed upon delusion. Truth is a catchy slogan. Death-Panels. Intelligent Design. The Bible is truth, and the Bible can be spun to support any argument. Incest is A-Okay because Lot did it. See? The dollar is truth, and the value of the dollar is based not on gold or resources, but on the whim of a private institution, (you shoulda listened when your weird friend tried to explain about the Fed). The perception that some people are genuinely evil is truth, and conveniently enough the 'evil people' are the ones that most share their common interests. The only mentality that breeds true evil is the one that is encouraged to see evil in others.

What this has caused is a perception shift in the American public, where the "Right," (Christian/Republican/conservative/etc.) is now seen as this fringe group of ultra-conservative capitalists, and the "Left" is now seen as anyone that embraces proven social programs that benefit the majority, such as socialized healthcare, well-funded public education or the social safety net for the unemployed, mentally ill, elderly, handicapped or those unlucky enough to slip through the cracks. As a consequence, what we now call "Centerist" or moderate views would have, 30 years ago, been seen as "Conservative."

The media, a capitalist institution, has fallen victim to the same amoral buyouts and mutual back-scratchings that took down our political and financial institutions. When the protesters don't represent the same lunatic ideologies as the Tea Party or Christian Dominionists the media coverage dries up. When it doesn't dry up it takes on the tone of condescending scorn, name-calling, derision, conspiracy-mongering (the kind based in wild assertions and linking unrelated coincidences, not the kind based on research and fact-checking,) and other blatant editorializing passed off as 'fact' by an irresponsible press to a public kept in ignorance of the truth.

The Madison, Wisconsin protests over Scott Walker's Union busting garnered a fair bit of attention. The weird thing is that the further up the media ladder one climbs the less 'fair and balanced' the coverage becomes. While online blogs and progressive activist sites treat it with the same gravitas as their conservative counter parts treat, I don't know, assault rifle porn and Planned Parenthood clinic burnings, major news sites were more likely to shift the focus away from the facts and towards editorializing. All of a sudden the buzzword wasn't 'union busting,' it was 'right-to-work.' The "Democratic Walkout" became an 'irresponsible stunt.' Suddenly it wasn't "gigantic ass protest over threatened union bargaining rights,' it was 'Democrats abandon ship while Walker makes tough choices.' It was marginalized and deflated and spun in a dozen different directions. Then the bill was passed. Then media coverage vanished.

Wait, what about the recall elections? What about the lawsuits filed against the State? What about Walker's relationship with the Koch brothers? What about pundits like Beitbart and Palin making against-character statements supporting Big-Government making decisions negatively impacting the working class? What about the smaller protests this caused across the nation?

Here's what happened: They were ignored. Old news. It was close enough to election season to resume the overly simplified black-or-white ideological charade that is American politics. People have the right to petition their elected representatives for redress of grievances, and inconvenient troublemakers that don't fit with the current narrative have the right to be ignored, mocked, demonized, bought out, criminalized, and ignored again.

Next Time: The Austerity of Hope and #Occupywallstreet

Thursday, September 22, 2011

Subjective Fact

I was looking at the stats for this thing and I noticed that my bullshit Nier review is way ahead on page-hits. Like way way ahead. Like screw the hilarious-ass posts on the state of modern RPGs. Never mind the informative piece about video game lawsuits. No one cares about the struggles of an atheist in a religious community. Underrated video games no one really played: that's where it's at. Also: I'm huge in Russia for some reason. Hi Russia!

Anyway, video game reviews are mostly bullshit. Sure, some parts are objective, such as 'are the controls responsive,' or 'how long are the load times,' or 'is it a bug-ridden, unplayable mess using paying customers as beta testers.' But most of it is subjective, such as the graphics, the soundtrack, or the combat engine.

For example; the Castlevania games, especially the ones for the NES, have the best soundtracks. I just stated that as a fact. It's not a fact. It's an opinion. But I behave as if it's a fact, and if anyone challenges my stance on it I'll start screaming about music theory and composition and spending 16 years playing music and my questionable credentials as a musical and regular genius and dammit, boy, I was listening to video game music before you were even a mistake in your father's eye!

My credentials.
All that doesn't make me right though. Just opinionated and loud. Most video game reviews fall into this category. Sure, they'll usually break them up into categories like "Graphics," "Sound," "Replayability," and so on, but that doesn't do much beyond give the appearance of some kind of set criteria for comparison.

Games with strong online multiplayer (first-person shooters,) tend to score high in the 'replayability' department. But what if someone doesn't have a reliable broadband connection? Or, like me, they feel like a creepy old man by being forced to play games with strange teenage boys? They're saddled with the repetitive, 8 hour long single player campaign. And quite often the multiplayer is just that + strangers. My neighbors play Halo: Reach like 80% of the time. I don't mean "of the time they play video games," I mean "of the time they have electricity." I hate that game. I've watched them play the same three goddamn levels with the same one character and his fucking two dozen identical, palette-swapped twins for hours on end. It looks, subjectively, like the boringest shit someone could do with a turned-on television.

Okay, none of that had anything to do with the games I wanted to talk about. I just wanted to point out that video game reviews are only an accurate judge of a game's merit for the person doing the review.

Chrono Trigger


Here's something I don't understand. Popular opinion states that JRPGs are a dying breed. People don't want turn based combat, fixed character development, plucky teenagers or anime bullshit in their video games. Yet the 2008 re-release of this criminally overrated game not only has a 92 on Metacritic, it also won 2008's DS Game of the Year. Nostalgia is a motherfucker.

I have no idea why this game is still so popular. Sure, it's a good game. It's not a great game. Turn-based combat, silent protagonists, plucky teenagers and sprawling plot-lines were hardly a new thing in 1995. Square wasn't doing anything new or different. It had several different overworld maps, yeah, but they all looked like shit. There weren't any random encounters, but by the end of the SNES's life cycle there was no real reason there should have been. All that really meant was instead of waiting for an invisible timer to go off you looked for an enemy to bump into.

One of the things I, personally, liked about the game (back when I last played it in 2002, after buying it off of a friend,) was the plethora of decent (for the time,) side quests. Mostly they involved pretty standard things like fighting optional bosses for overpowered gear, multiple endings and a new game+ option.

Like I said, it's a good game. But it was also one of, like, a billion equally good games that came out that generation on that platform. Earthbound was also good, and had enough tongue-in-cheek self-awareness to still be fun today. Secret of Mana/Evermore used many of the same conventions, but also had live-action combat (as well as confusing ass radial menus.) Robotrek, Lufia, Breath of Fire, Super Mario RPG, Arcana, Illusion of Gaia, E.V.O., Shadowrun. Why single out Chrono Trigger? Especially now; with fan translations and emulators we have access to gems we missed the first time around, like Tales of Phantasia, Star Ocean, Terranigma, several Dragon Warrior games, and Bahamut Lagoon.

It feels like (subjective, remember?) people are remembering the spirit of the time more than the actual experience of playing Chrono Trigger. Seriously, modern reviews of Chrono Trigger are just moon-eyed love letters to a bright and innocent past. It's as if CT is winning the 'Most Generically Agreeable Game For 16-bit Consoles" award. Which is sweet, I guess, but kind of unfair to the dozens of other equally deserving games.

Koudelka


was a survival horror RPG released in the States in 2000. Don't worry if you haven't heard of it. I had almost convinced myself playing it had just been something I had made up while drunk then forgot I had made up. It wasn't until I recently worked through my backlog of current-gen RPGs and started raiding the past's dumpsters that I even remembered it wasn't a hallucination.

I'm going from memory and the Wikipedia page here, but I remember loving the shit out of this game. The combat was turn-based on a grid and had a pretty unique (for the time,) feature of breakable equipment. This wasn't a new thing, I personally first remember it cropping up in Final Fantasy Legend from 1989, but it was the first time I remember a RPG using it to heighten tension. And again, Survival Horror/RPG crossovers (with the exception of Parasite Eve,) weren't like a common thing at the time.

It also had decent voice acting at a time when most games either didn't use voice overs (Final Fantasy,) or shouldn't have used them (Resident Evil.) Graphically it was, well, PS1 Milk-Carton People, but it worked from an aesthetic standpoint. What I mean by that is that the game had a consistent visual style, which is about the best anyone can say about early faux-3D games from our perspective here in The World Of Tomorrow.

Koudelka, like many games and women I develop unhealthy obsessions with, received polarized reviews, with most reviews falling between 2 and 9. See? Reviews don't mean anything. I mean, if a game received a score of 2 out of 10, that would imply that the game was physically unplayable, like it would crash at the third boss or turn your Playstation into a spider dispenser or something. While a review of 10/10 would mean "This game is perfect and there is nothing anyone could ever do or suggest that would improve or detract from it. It also cures herpes." Whatever. Most of the praise was aimed at the dark atmosphere, combat system and audio, with most of the complaints being leveled at the dark atmosphere, combat system and audio.

It's a unique game, is how I would best sum it up. If you're reading this then you're obviously deep enough in the backwaters of video game history to expect more from a game than another Wolfenstein/Doom knockoff or another heap of bullshit+zombies+gimmick shovelware. I also realize that I'm writing this about 9 years too late for most people to actually play the damn thing, so instead please download Parasite Eve from PSN and pretend that it's somewhat different and set 100 years in the past and you'll get a pretty good idea of what you missed.

Monday, September 19, 2011

Vitriolics Anonymous

"Nothing worse than a monster who thinks he's right with God." - Capt. Reynolds

I'm an atheist. Not sure if anyone's picked up on that yet. It's taken me quite a while to get comfortable with being comfortable about it. Living in a small, mostly Christian, functionally illiterate and rabidly Republican-conservative-dominionist Texas town is not the most desirable environment to be radically, or even marginally, unusual. In Texas, by the way, it is illegal for an atheist to hold public office (article 1. Sec. 4.)

Before anyone tags me as an intellectual snob or close-minded elitist I would first like to point out that I spent three solid years doing my level best to believe in any kind of supernatural supreme being. I just cannot buy into it. I see absolutely no evidence of any kind of loving and/or personal Higher Power at work in the lives of mankind. Having one day of rain after a record drought doesn't qualify as an answered prayer to me. Sorry. I think it would have happened even if you hadn't been praying for it since March. Fuck, why did it take your god seven months to make it rain anyway? Was he punishing us for something? Did we stop doing it? Or start or whatever? See? That's so, so, so much less likely than a high pressure front crossed the gulf stream or whatever. I'm not good at meteorology. You think it's a miracle, and I don't even see it as a coincidence. It's just rain! Why are you praising Jesus? That's fucking crazy!

I tried is what I'm saying here. I tried to believe in god way harder than any capital B Believer I know tried to not believe in him. And I'm not going to go into why or how I came to this conclusion. You all have the same internet and libraries I do.

The reactions I've received since I first began opening up about this have fallen into four broad categories. The first, and by far the most preferable, has been the clumsy but endearing acceptance and attempted identification I use when a male friend opens up about being gay. "Okay Adam, so I feel about Eve and Mary the way you feel about Steve and Joseph, boobs notwithstanding?" Only Eve and Mary are replaced with God and Church while Steve and Joseph are replaced with cell division and astrophysics. It's cute and clumsy but it works.

 The second kind of reaction is the purple elephant one. Entire relationships suddenly have this big awkward silence in the middle of them that we aren't going to talk about. We're not even going to talk about how we're not talking about it. If one of us, God forbid, says something even vaguely religious we'll just clam up and start staring at the ceiling and... Holy shit! I said 'God forbid!' Change the subject!

I understand this. Belief is a huge deal. Even among loved ones it's very easy to get defensive, to feel like something one cherishes is being threatened. People kill, riot and go to war over these things. We're a xenophobic species. Suddenly I'm a member of a different tribe, even if only in this one area. I appreciate that most people are at least willing to make an effort to be inclusive. I only wish they would go a little further with it and see that things like belief in certain religions or god or politics or whatever aren't binary, yes/no, good/evil systems. Saying someone is a Republican doesn't automatically mean they are also a white, Christian capitalist any more than a Democrat is automatically a liberal, chronically dissenting socialist. I am a liberal, a socialist and also a chronic dissenter, for example, but if John Huntsman or Buddy Roemer win the primary (unlikely,) I would probably vote for them over Obama because, from where I'm standing, they're the least bad options available as the others are either irredeemably corrupt, insane, incompetent or all three.

Anders Breivick and Martin Luther King Jr. are/were both Christian. This doesn't mean Breivick is a 'bad Christian' and Dr. King was a 'good Christian.' They're just people. Breivick is, conventionally speaking, a 'bad' person, while King was a 'good' person. I believe either of them would have behaved comparably regardless of personal religious beliefs if, for example, King had been a Muslim or Breivick had been a Buddhist.

Anyway, people feel strongly about their beliefs. Try disagreeing with a Birther or a 9/11 conspiracy theorist for ten minutes and you'll see what I mean. So it often seems easier to ignore this kind of ideological conflict than to get into a debate that could degenerate into a fistfight and a grudge.

The third kind of reaction really bothers me on a deeper level because it's the kind of closeted-bigot, nudge-nudge wink-wink response I grew up around. The kind of mentality that leads people to say things like "Obama did really well in life considering." The implied end of that statement being "his racial handicap," although they would be horrified if someone actually said that. It's a weird breed of arrogant doublethink that seems to occur a lot in Christianity. At least in the Christians I meet.

These people use the Shame and Guilt approach. "Jesus loves you and wants what's best for you and don't you just feel horrible for not believing in him?" No, bitch, I don't. I have zero give-a-shit for what some Jewish holy man that may have existed 2,000 years ago thinks of me. Especially since I've read your Bible more than you have, know what Jesus really taught better than you and know enough history to trace where that went wrong starting with Paul and proceeding through the Holy Roman Empire, the Dark Ages, Puritanism and the current rot of American Dominionism. I don't care how well-dressed, well-spoken or well-off you are because of your invisible father figure. I don't even care if you're objectively a 'good' person. You've aligned yourself with a nonsensical belief system that promotes ignorance, unquestioning obedience and the ostracism and demonization of anyone critical of the herd. That shit doesn't impress me. And even if it did, in my mind it's no different than wishing on a star or writing letters to Santa Claus.

This may work when you're indoctrinating your children, taking emotional advantage of the bereaved or brainwashing simpletons, but to me you look like a predator. Worse, it's a predatory tactic that turns people into more predators.

Don't approach me like I'm some idiot child throwing a tantrum, and don't try to put words in my mouth. I didn't mean "I'm agnostic," I didn't mean "I believe in God, just not the Bible," I didn't mean "I'm angry at God, and that's why I'm doing this." I meant "I've examined the evidence with an open mind, I've heard many different arguments for and against and have decided that I don't believe in god, gods, goddesses, demi-gods, ghosts, draculas, mummies, demons or any other supernatural explanations for natural phenomena." And please, please, for fuck's sake please don't Testify at me. Do you know how many times I've heard the "I was a hopeless, violent drug addict until Jay-zus saved me and washed my sins away!" story? I'll give you a hint: Lots. And you know what? Of those lots, lots minus a couple relapse and either die or go to prison. All that shows me is that either A) religious belief hinders recovery in drug addicts by attempting to bypass the work necessary to bring about the desired internal personality change required to keep from returning to active addiction or B) your god is a capricious asshat with terrible PR.

Look, I know I'm a self-righteous blowhard. I know I have shitty, hateful opinions about, like, everything. And I know how that alienates people, and that I would probably have a richer, more fulfilling life if I didn't loudly proclaim things like "95% of the music on the radio is shit, and that's being generous," or "most parents are shitty parents because reproduction isn't regulated." But, and this is important: I can admit when I'm wrong, on the very rare occasions when I am. Religious people don't. Or can't. Or won't. "I'm always right," is built into religion. If you succeed you get to be a saint, if you fail you get to be a martyr. Either way you get to feel superior to the non-religious or to members of different religions without having to do anything to justify the feeling of superiority.

As bad as the Holier Than Thou Brigade is, they're nothing compared to the, thankfully, smallest group of reactionaries: Unreasonable Lunatic Fundamentalists.

These people are the reason for separation of church and state. They're the reason we had the Dark Ages, the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, Fox News and the Salem Witch Trials. They're the reason Galileo was imprisoned for heresy and Darwin is held, at least in some circles, at the same level as Hitler and Castro.

Here, try to watch this dumbass:

Since you probably didn't finish that whatever-that-was, I'll sum up: the most punchable kid in the world thinks evolution (EVILution!) isn't real because the spork is the missing link for horses+Jesus. I think. I'm not even certain it isn't just Poe's Law in action, but it's not any more insane than any other fundamentalist bullshit out there. 

Point is, he doesn't know anything about evolution. Natural selection is not blind chance. Since he thinks it is, then he's basing his 'thesis' on something he heard from the preacher that molests him in the broom closet.

Science deniers shouldn't be allowed to have the benefits of science. Such as computers. They do shit like this with them. If you buy a computer designed by (probably,) evolutionists and make a video using a webcam and video editing software (probably,) designed by evolutionists to put on the internet to hopefully convince anyone bored enough to watch it that the book of Genesis is a factual, step by step account of the origin of the universe then you're not just a failure, but, I don't know, some kind of demi-human super-failure prototype designed by the government to wreck emergent civilizations as some kind of almost-sentient anchor baby dropped off to destroy any progress they've made like some kind of creepy, bipedal Dark Age.

And, like all creationists, he cherry picks his own sacred storybook and ignores anything that disagrees with his own theory. Like how, in Genesis, God creates plants before the sun. Wouldn't they instantly die? Or how, in Genesis, Cain, after murdering his brother, went to the land of Nod, where there were also people, that presumably weren't created by God. Or how, in Genesis, the Sons of God took human women for their brides, meaning Jesus isn't an only child (he does claim that the 'sons of God' in the story are really demons and fallen angels, but again, why would a loving and magnanimous deity allow that?) Or how, in Genesis, God destroys almost all life on Earth, which would mean God is fallible, since God created it in the first place. Was God displeased with his own work? Then he makes mistakes. Did he not know what man would do with free will? Then he's not all-knowing. Why did God destroy the animals for Man's wrongdoing? Because he's a vengeful asshole that overreacts to everything or because he was invented by vengeful assholes that overreacted to everything? Or, in Genesis, when Noah gathers two of every species of animal life onto a boat. There are over 2 million known species on the planet, and scientists think the total number could be between 5 and 10 million total. So, four million different animals on one boat being cared for by one family for six months? Evolution isn't a thing, so it had to be every species that's around today plus every species that has gone extinct since. And how did Noah get the penguins back to Antarctica and the lions back to Africa and the bears back to America and the lemurs back to Madagascar and the kangaroos back to Australia? Don't even get me started on dinosaurs or early mammals like the sabretooth tiger or mastodon.

I could of course go on, but I'm not here to point out that a 3,000 year old book is made almost entirely out of plot holes. I'm here to point out that there are people like Boy Wonder up there that think the God of that book wants them to kill people like me for questioning it. And they wouldn't even feel bad about it, because it's what God wants. I feel bad when I run over a cat that's already been ran over. I cry during Humane Society commercials. I volunteer at a homeless shelter. And they claim that I'm going to be on fire for eternity because I don't believe their crackers and cheap wine are really the body of someone that died 2,000 years ago? I know how fermentation works so I'm going to Hell?

I know this may be painful,  but imagine that weird kid up there again. Now, imagine he's a 250 pound meth-addled construction worker. Or a police officer. Or a judge. Or a governor. Or, well, anyone, really. He's not insane, if he didn't talk he wouldn't appear abnormal enough to shun. He'll probably grow up and be one of those things. And I have no doubt in my mind that he would be totally okay with me dieing a slow, painful death and then being thrown into a lake of fire for eternity. In his mind that's what I deserve. That's why I don't talk about it to most people, because some people may not be content to just tell me about Hell.

Fuck, I'm not trying to turn anyone's kids into whatever it is people like that think atheists are trying to do to other people's children. Believe me, I'm far more polite and respectful of others religious beliefs than they tend to be about mine in my day to day life. I'm only venting here because I have almost no one to talk to about this in the real world.

Thursday, September 15, 2011

Slacker Shack

I'm not very good at repairing things. I also don't have enough money to pay other people to do it. I also also am not charismatic enough in real life to trick people into doing it for free. So this happens.

I made it on Paint. Again because I have no money, skill or resources.



Thursday, August 18, 2011

Repo Men: Part 2

We left our hero last time in mid-epiphany, complete with the dundun-DUNDUN-dundun-DUNDUN cello music from every superhero movie. Let's see what kind of antics his new-found junkie-girl rescuing morals get him into.

Back in the locker room at Evil Organ Inc., Schreiber, at his most typical, gives Law's Recall Notice to Whitaker, who politely declines. Schreiber then offers the ticket to the other repo men who, since they have no lines in the script, look away embarrassed.

Cut to the slums, where Law and his girlfriend (I'm almost certain her character hasn't been given a name yet,) are digging through other peoples' refuse for valuables to store in a stolen shopping cart. Singer Girl, apparently done with drugs forever since, as any reformed drug addict will tell you, the only way to recover from the self-destructive cycle of addiction is to be abducted and kept against one's will by a violent psychopath. She also unearths the old-fashioned typewriter we saw Jason Sta...uh, Jude Law pecking out his voice over's on at the beginning of the film.

At this point Law, being legally retarded, asks in open wonderment how Singer Girl keeps track of her many organ replacements. It would seem remembering the names of almost a dozen different body parts is an incomprehensible feat of intellectual prowess to Law. Singer Girl then mumbles at length which, combined with her thick accent made it impossible for me to understand whatever plot points she brought up. But knowing the Director I feel confident that they will be explained several times over the next couple of minutes.

Oh. Her lips are not robots. Awwwww. Cue obligatory soft-core bag lady porn.

In the next scene Law's voice over explains that what he's been writing is a cautionary tale to keep others from making the same mistakes that he has. I would have thought merely posting a bulletin about never working with any of these people would have been a lot more effective and less embarrassing. Law then watches several school girls playing jump rope through his binoculars, since child voyeurism had yet to be checked off of Sapochnik's list of "Evil Shit To Put In Movie."

Singer Girl then uses her robot ears to detect the approaching repo man Landlord (not sure if that's his name or Law's attempt at humor, but he's the even more retarded repo man from the beginning of the film,) in time for them to make a daring escape. It would seem her unintelligible monologue earlier was explaining that she was the 6 Million Dollar Man.

After setting up a not very cunning or believable pitfall trap (the new repo man, after using his scanner gun to find Law from a block away, but somehow failing to detect the Robo-Junkie hiding in the same room, then gives up a tactical advantage by holstering his stun gun to attack Law with a machete,) the floor collapses further revealing that the Love Interest's name is Beth. Law then drops his typewriter on Landlord's skull.

In a freshly stolen Volkswagon, Beth repairs her damaged knee with a home surgery/electricians tool bag she had been hiding somewhere. Which is weird, since Law hadn't noticed it even though he carried her unconscious body to the stolen SUV.

Arriving in the parking garage, we find the Company's Lung Mascot on a cigarette break. The Director, realizing this is far too subtle and clever for anyone but him to notice, has Law point out the irony.

Law, disguised as a lung, although I don't think the audience is supposed to know that, but it's impossible not to, sneaks into the building where he is immediately set upon by the two most irritating children in the history of film (HI LARRY!!!! HI LARRY!!! HI LARRRY!!!! HI LARRY!!!!) He then has an irritating and pointless "I'll go this way, no, I'll go this way," collision with Whitaker, then goes to Schreiber's office and punches him a lot.

Surprise! The lung was really Law in disguise!

Law then pulls out the stun gun he so seriously and symbolically walked away from earlier and trains it on Schreiber. 'Witty' banter ensues, then Law tosses Schreiber a tattooed lump of skin from Landlord, ending their jovial reunion.

Schreiber informs Law that it's impossible to take Law's heart out of the system since (Dun Dun DUUUUuuuunnnn,) he knows about Law's clumsy attempt to scratch off the bar codes and all organs now have to be sent back to the Corporate Office instead of tossed in a bin in the locker room. Management, amirite? Then Schreiber, being Schreiber, tries to up-sell Law, who tazers Schreiber and steals some paperwork and probably the jamming devices from earlier.

Back in the parking garage Law informs Beth that they're leaving for Kenya, South America, which I guess is a place in the future. Beth points out that trying to get on a plane would be a titanically stupid idea. Law reveals (surprise!) the jamming devices.

After another Volkswagon commercial, Schreiber orders Whitaker to personally take out Law. The Volkswagon Touareg, by the way, got fourth billing in this movie.

At the airport, which is exactly the same as airports not in the future, Law and Beth proceed to behave as suspiciously as humanly possible. Or robotically possible, in Beth's case. Somehow this fails to work and Law has to kill everyone with his usual combination of Jason Statham-y swagger and inventive gleeful sadism.

Whitaker appears at the airport and seems genuinely surprised to see Law there. Which means Whitaker must have been at the airport for some mysterious, unrelated reason that didn't involve his job or getting on a plane. My guess is anonymous gay sex in the bathroom with someone he met on Craigslist.

Escaping back to the slums, Beth informs Law that, since his stupid-ass plan accomplished nothing except almost getting them killed repeatedly, they were going to a 'Vulture' that she knew. "Not a scavenger?!" exclaims Law, providing no clarification. It is made clear that neither of them is happy about having to do this, but it is also clear that repeatedly stabbing her own knee with a filthy surgical tool didn't fix Beth's knee as nearly well as she claimed it had.

The Vulture is John Leguizamo!!! He is so good! Why does he keep signing on for terrible movies like this?! I would like to point out that according to the Internet Movie Database, Leguizamo's role in this film was uncredited, placing him alongside Dancing Girl #2, Hot Commercial Girl and Hot Girlfriend on the shockingly short list of people that knew what a career-killingly awful movie this was.

After some brief half-in-Spanish tough guy dialogue, Leguizamo uses a 'universal remote' to control Beth's voice box. The universal remote, for some reason, is an antique television remote from the 60's with four buttons on it. Leguizamo then describes an impossible amount of sciency things that can be done with it. He then reveals himself to be (spit-take,) Beth's drug dealer. He then starts dancing. There is no reason for this. There's no reason for any of this. There's just, there's no God anymore. Just this, forever.

Leguizamo and Law then get into an ideological debate straight out of 4th grade while Beth slowly bleeds to death. Leguizamo informs Beth that he won't help her for unclear reasons and that she should seek the help of yet another previously unmentioned character that had, I guess, tried to kill her at some point.

Flash cut to a different shit hole apartment/operating room, this one containing several Asian stereotypes, in a nice break from the Mexican machismo stereotypes of the last scene. Beth mumbles out a list of her implants again while a 9 year old girl performs very disgusting surgery on Beth.

Later, in an alley, Beth's super-robot-ears stop working long enough for Law to hear the ping of the price guns first. This leads quickly to Leguizamo's gutted carcass. Leguizamo's universal remote activates a recording of the last things Leguizamo said, which was that he was killed by repo men. Whitaker then comes out of the closet. Unfortunately not in a dramatic "I've always loved you Jude Law," way, but in an "I was just standing over here,' way. He then gives no real explanation on how he tracked them to Leguizamo's apartment, since that would have required Whitaker to be Professor X. Or, you know, have access to a tracking device, which haven't been invented.

Whitaker, seething with jealousy over Law's feeling's for Beth, promises Law that he can make things right with Schreiber if Law returns with Whitaker. Law refuses, being in wuuuuv, and Whitaker calls him a pussy. The word 'pussy' makes Whitaker visibly uncomfortable. Whitaker also reveals that it was him that sabotaged Law's defibrillator unit in a cunning plot from the Psychotic Girlfriend's Handbook to keep Law from leaving him for a different position.

Law loses the ensuing fistfight badly, although he does take Terminator levels of abuse from the fight. In fact, the entire punch up was lifted almost frame for frame from the Terminator 3 bathroom fight.

Through a wall,

Into a sink,

Onto a catwalk.
At this point Law and Whitaker start laughing for some reason, Whitaker offers Law his hand, Law stabs Whitaker in the leg, and Whitaker smashes Law's skull in.

Law's life, or at least those parts of his life that had already been filmed, flashes before his eyes, along with scenes from the M.5 Neural Net commercial and computery noises. I have no idea what this could entail for our hero.

Fading back into the squatter's nest and totally not a computer generated hallucination of the squatter's nest courtesy of the M.5 Neural Net, Law is, amazingly, still alive, although Whitaker is mysteriously dead. The other denizens begin screaming "Raid!" and leaving en masse, since two repo men are not enough to trigger the squatters' flight or fight instinct, but three causes a full-scale panic.

In another action scene derivative of every action movie ever, our hero's manage to escape by pure dumb luck, employing the same running away strategy as everyone else and accidentally not being shot. They are then yanked into a Rebel Hideout, where Law is not summarily executed by dint of this entire sequence taking place in his damaged imagination.

Just to make sure all moves are telegraphed, the possibly Rebel Leader even says "Welcome to your world, Repo Man," completely out of context with anything else in the scene. Get it? He's in a simulation! Bet you won't see that coming!

Law, awakening to a hanger full of butchered corpses, including the nine year old surgeon, since the audience had so much emotionally invested in her after her two lines and 45 seconds of screen time. Law responds to this by going out into a field while Beth asks him to come back inside with the many, many mutilated corpses. Law, stating the hopelessness of their situation, informs Beth that he is going to finish this.

In a subway station, Law explains his plan to go behind the Pink Door at the Corporate Office and steal Project Mayhem from Fight Club. Law's wife and son magically appear. Law's wife, in mid-bitch, is tazered in the back by Law's son, himself an aspiring gleeful sadism expert. Law gives his Cautionary Tale to his son, tells him he loves him, and flees, leaving his child alone on a subway at night. There is also a very subtle billboard behind the subway car advertising the M.5 Neural Net.

After our hero's somehow bypass the alarm on Schreiber's car, break into it, rearm the alarm and hide in the backseat, Schreiber gets in his car and is promptly tazered.

Law then begins his assault on the Corporate Office in what can best be described as a mixture of terrible jokes and Cannibal Corpse album cover. Four long, long minutes into this Repo Men remembers it hasn't stolen any ideas from better movies in almost four minutes, and lifts the claw-hammer sequence from Oldboy, replacing the claw-hammer with daggers, a hacksaw and (in a fit of creative bankruptcy,) a ball-peen hammer, the seasoned gang members were replaced with white collar office workers. Somehow this fails to be as viscerally satisfying or tastefully done as Oldboy. I would like to remind everyone that Oldboy was a movie almost exclusively about blood-soaked revenge and incest.

Whitaker and Schreiber magically reappear again, just as Law and Beth break into the Pink Room, where they realize they'll have to manually scan their robo-organs into the machine.

I'm going to go out on a limb and assume that anyone reading this has plans to eat at some point in the future, so I won't go into detail about the climax of the movie, but phrases like 'hardcore snuff film,' 'drug-addled knife rape,' and 'wound-fucking,' would be woefully inadequate.

Finally this madness ends with, unsurprisingly, an explosion set to idiosyncratic music.

Cut to Law, Beth and Whitaker vacationing on the island from the M.5 Neural Net commercial where, HOLY SHIT Law has been in the M.5 Neural Net since Whitaker brained him back at the squatter's nest.

So, having resolved nothing, learned no lessons, served no purpose, or made any meaningful impact:

THE END