The End-Game Transition

Anyone who complains about an end-game transition is being stupid.

Part One: Inevitability

In any game with any sort of progress you're going to have a tendency toward an end-game. Either all measured progress stops or it changes in form. This is not necessarily by the design of the developers.

Consider a game such as Banished or Don't Starve. The initial game is a struggle to not die horribly. You try to get sustained heat or light and food. This means chopping trees, foraging, hunting, and hitting rocks. Eventually you've chopped so many trees, foraged and hunted, and hit so many rocks that you're not likely to die a horrible death at any given moment. You've stabilized your situation. Your people have shelter, they make enough babies that enough will grow up to make babies to sustain the baby-making cycle, and you generate enough surplus food that even if the houses are filled with babies you won't suffer from baby-induced starvation. Alternatively, you have enough trees and grass around to keep catching rabbits, your rock-based structures are set up, and you have enough non-renewable materials to last a very long time.

Now you're in the end-game. In a game that doesn't have one, but it does anyway.

Unless you do something actively stupid, such as switching all your farmers to the quarry, or going in caves naked with no torches, you're unlikely to die any time soon. With the basics taken care of you can focus even more on exploration and expansion. Now you can build another Market Economic Zone branching off from your original Capital Economic Zone, and eventually fill the entire map with housing and farms, altering their design to ensure the maximum number of non-starving people. The survival game has become a spreadsheet-based optimization game.

Part Two: Your Counter-Argument to Part One is Stupid

Part Three: By Which I Mean, Adding New Problems Isn't a Good Solution

Banished could figure out new problems to throw at you. Maybe you think you're such hot shit for having stone houses and locally-sourced plum brandy from a sustainable orchard. Well what about when the developer patches in alcoholism and makes the dead rise up and eat all your peppers? Now you have to divert your precious iron supply to swords rather than tools and your physician has to do something other than wait around for dirty nomads with their weird foreigner diseases. Bam, challenge returned! In a totally artificial and annoying manner.

At least for me, and my opinion is the best one, these sorts of games are about the struggle toward that stable point. You figure out the immediate crises (food), deal with those, work on the near-term problems (housing), figure those out, and amidst all of that work toward dealing with long-term issues such as not running out of tools next year. With that generally worked out, you create some guarantees for the future, such as a trading post, so that you can supplement your theoretically-limited supply of stone, iron, and coal, with pepper trades. Now you can survive forever. That's kinda neat.

If the game then added in a new type of problem, then I'd probably just get mad at it. I just built this town hall and now you're telling me I need to beautify the streets or get voted out? I'm the incorporeal dictator!

The game could add a decay mechanic, but how are you going to tune it? If the decay uses resources that can be unlimited, such as trees or rabbit corpses, then it's essentially just another long-term sustainability mechanic. I'll set up a few more traps and declare victory.

If the decay uses resources that aren't unlimited, then the game is essentially saying "this game is about survival and I am going to kill you, guaranteed." I don't mind the inevitability of death in a game, but can I at least go out with a bang rather than a whimper? Surely it is more fun to see that the end is coming and bravely stand against the onslaught of violent death than to mine the last rock and know that the next baby born will die shivering in the cold. Maybe that's just human nature, to want to face something that we can punch, such as Russians, rather than resource depletion.

Part Four: I Stop Writing Soon

A truly pure survival game sounds stupid to me. Survival is a limited thing. It is either a pointless struggle against the inevitable or a pointless struggle. I like it when a game has survival that can be overcome, and when it is, something can be built. In Banished I didn't just survive a winter, I also built a town that can survive many winters. Perhaps that is also a bit of human nature: while animals survive, humans build and develop. Even if the rules of the universe still call for survival, it is no longer at the front of our minds because we've built to insulate ourselves from it, with markets, laws, and literal insulation.

So I say to you, if you think "the end-game transition" is both bad and preventable, then you, sir or madam or other old-timey polite moniker for your identity, are an opponent of all human progress, and probably alien progress as well.

What is a PvPer?

The everlasting conflict between PVErs and PVPers is that the second group is quite happy to gank the first but there's no vice versa. - Syl on Twitter

 Pshaw, I say.

PvP and PvE are not separate groups. I usually do PvE. Sometimes I do PvP. The latter has about 95% of my gaming-related profanity. Strangely, in PvP my profanity is usually aimed at developers, while in PvP it is aimed at other players. As they say, "don't hate the player; hate the game developer who created such an unbalanced piece of total bullshit." Maybe that's relevant.

When I am in a PvP mood I do not gank. Just yesterday I was on my way to a mote cloud when I saw a level 80 fly toward it. He'd have beaten me to it, but he flew away. I was sad that I'd scared him off. Granted, I might have stunned him and taken the cloud for myself, but I wasn't going to press the entire extra button needed to kill him. Gear inflation is insane.

I take that back. I have ganked. Once upon a time that was a way to draw out the 60s. Swoop in and kill a quest giver or two, kill a few lowbies, and you've got yourself a battleground. Sadly, that no longer works.

In PvP I am often looking for a reasonably fair fight, or a fight that has a reasonable expectation of being fair. Those aren't the same, as anyone can tell from your average random BG that, despite being based essentially on random draws from both factions, has one failing in an almost impressive manner. I'd even claim that ganking and PvP are different activities, despite falling under the same mechanical umbrella.

Getting back to my pshaw, I suggest that Syl has drawn the lines all wrong. Since PvP and PvE are not separate categories of players, then what is the division? I propose decent human beings and bad people.

PvP has an obvious appeal for the bad people. They can directly inflict harm upon others.

Yet, is PvE immune? Is the loot ninja not a harmful jerk as well? How about the person who wipes the raid? What about the person who abuses the limits of vote-kicking to act as a parasite on a group, contributing nothing yet getting all the rewards for success? And surely the people who make glyphs are a universally awful group.

The problem is not PvPers vs. PvPers, but of horrible people vs. decent people. Maybe PvP has a higher percentage of horrible people. Fine. But do not stereotype an entire group because of that, or else you, Syl, will be in that group.

I'm saying you're a horrible person.

Time passes and yet it does not

Time in games as a strange thing. While Einstein would agree with the notion that there isn't a universal, objective time, he would find that it is utterly impossible to do any clock coordination. Game time is dictated by plot, convenience, and drama.

Due to these tendencies, time flows in two general ways: Slow Flow and Explode.

Slow Flow is a mysterious phenomenon. During it, there is a quantitative passage of time. This can even be mapped to the outside world, passing at a constant, though different rate, so that one can create formulas which describe how many minutes pass in one world relative to another.

However, there is not a qualitative passage of time. Large-scale events simply do not occur. People can move, talk, and fight. These small actions will not add up to a whole, no matter how many. A million drops of water will not form a river.

This Slow Flow is a convenient phenomenon for the player. It gives them time to explore and learn, developing their skills as a player and as a character.

In contrast, Explode takes place at a pace sufficiently similar to the outside world as to be indistinguishable. Furthermore, during this passage of time, events can occur. Small actions can combine. Actions which would have no impact during Slow Flow are able to add up to dramatic changes in the world during Explode.

Surprisingly, these are complementary states. Because the Slow Flow can effectively suspend the passage of time, a player within it can therefore arrive at precisely the right time for Explode. Whether they wander for a few minutes or several years, they will always arrive at precisely the right time for major events to occur.

Another useful aspect of time is that these two states are physically separated. One cannot be in both at once, but the barriers between them are often predictable. This allows a player to choose when to move between states, though they may not always know where the transitions are. The result is that while the rules within Explode may be the same, the starting conditions can be altered from outside. A player in Slow Flow can store up items and gain new abilities, dramatically changing the potential outcomes within Explode.

This raises some interesting possibilities about our own universe. Physicists aren't quite sure about what happened early on, or if early on is even a relevant concept, since it seems that time itself didn't exist before. How can something happen if there is not even time? Perhaps what we need is a new perspective. While most Explode happens in a short span, sometimes lasting mere seconds, rarely more than an hour, our universe seems to have been around for much longer. Despite this difference in span, our universe fits the traits of a Explode: no apparent beginning, synchronized passage of time, meaningful outcomes. Clearly the so-called Big Bang was not a bang or even a rapid inflation. Instead, it was someone zoning into our universe from an indeterminate amount of time in Slow Flow.

If we could find that entrance and send someone outside, they'd be able to gather all needed materials and knowledge, with unlimited time at their disposal. However, there is the risk that upon, from our perspective, instantly returning, he will have lost all sense of perspective and just wander our universe stealing brooms.

Artistic Merit is Irrelevant

I wandered across another "games are not art" article.  My first reaction was to argue that they are, or some are, or some are and some aren't.  But then I thought of a more fundamental question: "Who cares?"

Who cares if they think it is art?  I'm not a fan of people who act as if they are an authority on what is and is not art.  Sadly, the law does not contain exceptions for "people who think they are authorities on the definition of art", so I am not allowed to punch them, and my punches wouldn't be all that authoritative anyway.  But my point stands: "Who are you that anyone should care what you think?"

Alternatively, who cares if it is art?  Let us assume that art is some objectively defined thing, or something on which we can and do have a universally agreed-upon subjective opinion.  Even then, should we care if games are or are not art?  If they are, does that make them any better?  I see no reason why "art" should be better than "non-art".  They serve different purposes and should do those well.  My laptop, while designed for some sort of visual appeal, isn't something I'd call art, but despite being not-art, it is still extremely useful and far more valuable to me than any art.  On the other hand, if you gave me the Mona Lisa, it would have little value, except that I'm sure it would resell for more than I am likely to earn in quite a few years.

In either context, the declaration that games are not art is as irrelevant, as meaningless, as the declaration that games are not gazlookic.

Down the the Dictator, but not the extensive bureaucracy that maintains civilization

"There must always be a Lich King."  Lame, right?  Or is it?

The other day I watched Equilibrium, which is basically what would happen if you wanted to make the Matrix but couldn't legally do that, and replaced machine-driven illusion with drugs to block emotion.  For various reasons it irritated me, but one in particular stood out: the downside of ending the regime was never discussed.  The film of V for Vendetta had this same problem.

It might be because I'm a Stalinist*, but I'm not a fan of the pattern of "dictator falls, everyone lives happily ever after."  That's not actually how things happen.  Ever.  I can sense the objection rising up inside you, so I have these two things to note.

*according to my critics

First off, I don't think the downside to the fall of the dictator must necessarily be shown, at least not right away, but there should be at least some notion that something went wrong.  Take Star Wars for example.  After A New Hope we're all happy that the Death Star was destroyed.  Then the Empire strikes back in the appropriately-named The Empire Strikes Back in which the Rebels are stuck on a planet made entirely out of ice and wampas.  In the extended universe we learn about how just because the Emperor eventually died doesn't mean everything is great.  Instead, people go out to celebrate and are gunned down by the millions and a whole new form of civil war breaks out, which as best as I can tell, never ends no matter how many times they kill clones of the Emperor.

Compare this with real life where we celebrate the fall of a dictator, and then all go "so... now what?"  That's when every single suppressed grievance explodes and suddenly people start missing running water and streets paved with something other than unexploded ordinance.


Despite that, there is my Second thing to note: just because there is a downside does not mean it is bad that the evil regime has fallen.  Of course it's bad when the basic infrastructure is wrecked and rule of law breaks down, but that's something to consider when taking down the dictator.  This doesn't mean "oh well, things would be worse without them", but instead "let's have a plan for what happens when the Elite Guard of the Evil Government are all out of work."




The admission of a downside is part of what can make the story complex and interesting.  It makes the enemies, the villains, a little more understandable.  Sure the dictator is bad, but perhaps his supporters are just people who see stability as worth the occasional murder and rampant corruption.  Maybe they think it will be even worse without him.  This makes them people with different philosophical leanings and social predictions, rather than evil people.  That's what the world is filled with: people with different perspectives, who we may still find ourselves in conflict with, but who are not evil faceless goons.  After the rebellion they may even join the winning side, not because they are traitors or flip-floppers, but because they see it as the best way to protect what they value and to continue to do their jobs.





They are the bureaucrats.  They are the police and the army.  The judges and administrators.  Are they on the wrong side?  Perhaps.  But that doesn't mean they cannot be on the right side.  Nor does it mean that they are necessarily evil.

I remember an argument in a Star Wars novel in which the hero is arguing with his future father-in-law about smuggling.  The father was a smuggler, running Imperial blockades and bypassing their customs.  It paid well and seemed to be righteous work, sticking it to The Man.  But the hero points out that while the Empire was evil, those import taxes were what paid for roads and schools and healthcare for children.  So even as it is a blow to the Evil Empire, it is also a blow to those who are subjects of the empire and who have no choice in the matter.

Perhaps the best book I ever read that showed the downside, the cost of victory, the burden of maintaining civilization, was called The Star Conquerors.  It's an old science fiction novel in which humans are gradually getting crushed by an alien empire.  It is approximately a gagillion times bigger, which is not helped by a human population which isn't very interested in paying for the war effort that keeps them from being crushed in a week.  The hero does the sensible thing: rounds up what ships he can and goes flying off to kick some ass, which after a mix of luck and brilliance, results in him capturing the core planets.  The aliens hand over control of the entire empire, about a third of the galaxy.  Cool, right?  USA USA USA!  Er.. TERRAN EMPIRE TERRAN EMPIRE TERRAN EMPIRE!  Except for one problem: Before they leave the aliens explain that now we're responsible for administering it all, of managing the flow of trade, of preventing starvation, of keeping everyone in line so it doesn't all collapse into a giant civil war among the various species.

Should we have just given up and lost?  No.  But knowing that there is something after victory, some burden of leadership, of survival against entropy rather than war, makes the story that much more complete and interesting.

And so, when we hear that there must always be a Lich King, maybe let's go ahead and say that in the literal sense, that sounds ridiculous.  But let's not forget that there are still the Vrykul up there, who are going to wonder what happened to their Death God, who are going to need to be either crushed, assimilated, or some mix of the two, and better hope we don't get that wrong.  There are still Scourge agents, dedicated to various agendas of evil, power, and insanity.  In fact, we run into one in the Eastern Plaguelands, a spider who thinks he's going to start his own Scourge.  A joke, for now.  We should wonder, without the leadership of the Lich King, what will the mindless ones do?  What about the sentient and free agents?  What happens to the Plague?  The diseased and corrupted land?

Perhaps we should even be glad that Deathwing showed up.  Imagine the chaos, the destruction, if the greedy, amoral adventurers with incredible magical and combat powers backed with even greater magical artifacts and armor, found themselves bored.  Perhaps that's what was meant by the Scourge going on an even greater rampage of destruction.  With the Lich King, we had a target and that target was something everyone could agree on.  Without him, then what?  Perhaps he did not actually need to convert or corrupt us, merely step aside and let us do what we do: mass slaughter of anything which might be remotely profitable.

Maybe those daily quest givers aren't so bad after all.  I shudder to think what we'd do otherwise.

Worst Gaydar Ever

It was a typical weekend. I was tired, bored, and playing WoW. Specifically, running old raids. I went to Ahn'Qiraj, which due to a summoning error started in the usually-soloed AQ20. After that was BWL, but a bugged Rend event mixed with a lack of patience and inability to follow basic directions eventually resulted in only four of us in the raid. Razorgore died. I rushed off to grab the goblins before they could escape with their precious average of .08 elementium ingots.

One of the two mages said something to the effect of "whoever dies is a faggot", in reference to the Burning Adrenaline buff which eventually kills them. I was still chasing goblins and hoping to outrun the boss speech.

I considered explaining that there is no evidence for a link between the buff/debuff and homosexuality, and furthermore that as it is commonly used, faggot is a pegorative term, making it a pointless and unscientific insult against a group that I have yet to see harm me, either collectively or as individuals. Alas, time was short, so I went with "worst gaydar ever".

I'm not actually opposed to the use of the word faggot, but I think it should be restricted to faggots, either bundles of sticks or homosexual men, with it usually referring to the latter unless hobbits are involved and it's not a slashfic. I think it's very important to have the word faggot as a negative reference for gay men. It helps me identify and avoid homophobes. The usage of faggot as generic insult mostly confuses me. Sure, that's what people did in 8th grade. Everyone was a jumbled mess of immaturity and ignorance and the concept of masculinity was poorly understood but understood to be very important, so linking someone to a group often associated with femininity made perfect sense in the strange logic of cruelty. Gay or not, labeling someone gay, or with a gay label, was a useful tool in inflicting social and psychological harm on others. Then at some point I figured people went to high school, spent a few more months using gay or fag as generic insults, and then switched to Shakespearean attacks in an attempt to win points with the English Lit teacher and avoid punishment from authority figures who did not realize that telling someone to "get thee to a nunnery" wasn't a Catholic joke. I generally expect people to grow up.

Boss dies, shaman friend gets shield, and burning adrenaline, and dies. Faggot faggot faggot faggot faggot faggot faggot.

Ah. So now we're past the one-off immature joke. Now he's being insistent. Spamming it. Pardon me a moment.

*ahem*

What the fuck is wrong with people that they think that this is any way remotely acceptable behavior? What circuit is wrong in their heads to think that any spamming is appropriate? Even worse, spamming at someone with a probably-inaccurate and definitely-irrelevant insult? It makes no god damn sense. This isn't a college frat where everyone is drunk and being an immature jackass helps a person fit in. It's a small group in a game. What could possibly be the point of this? Is it some mental disease? Is it contagious? (yes, unlike homosexuality, which is a great irony)

*end rant*

I kicked him in the middle of his spamming. For whatever reason the chat message is "so and so has left the group" rather than "so and so has been removed by irritated raid leader". The shaman friend whispered me, asking if I'd kicked and I said I had.

 But why then? What actually changed from the first mention of faggots to the last? A bit of spam? Surely I can better survive a bit of spam than pointless hate directed at 10% of the population (they're everywhere, look out!) and hitting 100% due to terrible aim.

I've been called a faggot before. There I was riding my back to the high school, not or school, but for summer sports camp when I was going onto 7th or 8th grade. Someone was riding behind me saying "faggot", not close enough or loud enough for me to even realize anyone was saying anything, but eventually I noticed. It was someone my age who caught up and asked where I was going and somehow my school came up, a nearby Catholic school for kindergarten to 8th grade. He called it a fag school. Having been there, I can assure you, there would have been little tolerance for any fagging. This is the Catholic Church we're talking about here. If that's a fag school, then fag is clearly meaningless.

If I woke up tomorrow and fag was universally used as a generic insult, that would be fine. It's not. Instead it's sometimes generic, creating the fag=bad connection, if that hadn't quite been drilled into people yet, and sometimes specific, allowing it to act like one of those parasites that has a dozen stages of life all of which allow it to better survive and infest hosts. If it were generic, it wouldn't be hateful to gays. But as a hybrid, it's hateful to gays, suggesting that they are so bad that even the description of them is bad, and to be described as gay is not merely inaccurate (it usually is), but offensive. That's the key. If someone says fag they aren't saying bad+homosexual, but rather homosexual->bad. If fag was merely pairing two unrelated terms, one neutral and one negative, that would be okay. It instead acts like a very short [il]logical argument: If gay, then bad. I wonder if it's coincidence that one of the first people to explicitly explain to me that gay is bad was also someone who told me to carry a pocket Bible. I think I'd need the word of a deity before I'd start hating people for a behavior which doesn't harm anyone else (not that I'm suggesting it harms them either).

I've never been attacked or significantly harassed (I just have a particularly good memory for bad memories). So then it makes sense. If I've never been hurt by homophobic behavior, then it's no wonder I'd let it slide, at least until they start spamming. That's what is bugging me now, that it was the spamming that got him kicked. But isn't the initial comment the real problem? A bit of spam here and there never hurt anyone. It's the little comments that slide by unchecked, un-fact-checked, un-questioned, which act like little seeds. Call it the "broken windows theory of hate".

Yet if I were to ignore, kick, and report every single hateful comment from the niggs in trade chat to the faggots in a pug raid, where would that leave me? Well thankfully, I'd still have my guild because I can't recall them being hateful assholes. But I'd definitely find myself labeled a nit-picker. "Choose your battles" sounds like common sense, but there is also "death by a thousand cuts", like when in Wyoming two men tortured him most of the way to death and then left him to slowly die tied to a fence. Then people (I'm using the term only in the genetic sense) showed up to protest his funeral. I'm not suggesting that there is a direct link between calling a female shaman in BWL a faggot leads to murdering people. But I am suggesting that a little bit of hate goes a long way. Seeing someone as a little less human makes them a lot less safe. That spreads. Maybe we should be more careful with what we say and how we say it and why we say it.

If you've read The Giver, you might remember a part where the protagonist yells at someone who is playing poorly "You're released!" and is reprimanded by the adults, because "released" isn't just a word for being free to go; it means something very serious and specific in that society.

Trolling is serious business, Keredria

This was going to be a comment on your post, but then I figured, "hey, post counts are the thing of the week, so why not boost that?"

Pretty pissed (though I should have been more saddened) that there are people who have to make low, personal attacks on those who don't agree with them. I guess either to make themselves feel better or because they don't have any substance to actually respond to opinions

Being "right" or "ethical" are abstractions with little day-to-day value to an individual. Winning arguments by never ever stopping talking, that has an impact. It boosts self-esteem and can get you a lot of profitable attention. Since most people are concerned about practicality rather than morality, due to eating practicality rather than morality, they will tend to shout until you give up.

Though I still stand by my assertion that such low handed comments are not only unnecessary, but doing it via Twitter where they may not see such comments is downright cowardly. If you want to be a bitch, have the balls to do it to someone's face. Not everyone follows everyone else on Twitter.

What is "to someone's face", digitally-speaking, is a tricky thing. Obviously if I am in an email exchange with someone, that is "to their face" and if I am in a private exchange with someone else, that is not "to their face." What about an @personIhate? Or a #personIhate? The first gets them the tweet even if they don't follow, but depends on them knowing about the Interactions/Mentions and checking them recently enough to be able to respond, something I didn't know about for an embarrassingly long time. Perhaps hastags are just a weak pretend-"to their face" and just tweeting into the tweetosphereverse is the equivalent of calling them a slut on a bathroom wall that they might use at some point and therefore see. My point is that it's a little murkier than you make it seem.

"It's just a WoW blog."

Sure. It is. But no! Wake up tomorrow and imagine your blog is gone. Are you going to shrug your shoulders and say "meh"? Or are you going to be a little tiny bit upset, perhaps more upset than you would be over "just a WoW blog"? I'm guessing the latter. Beyond your own personal attachment to your own blog, I don't much like the "just a WoW blog" concept in general. Is this all of great national importance? Certainly not. But it is of personal importance and it is of cultural importance. I'm sick of seeing the "it's just a game" thing tossed around every which way to trivialize any differing opinions. A raider tells a casual to quit whining because it's just a game and the casual tells the raider to chill out because it's just a game and meanwhile a form of entertainment enjoyed by millions of people is all just a game and if anyone takes it the slightest bit seriously we start questioning whether they suffer from some sort of mental illness or social impairment. Somewhere there is someone who is very concerned that the wood that he uses for model ships is of lower quality and to a complete outsider that may sound silly, but who the fuck are we to tell him to shut up because "it's just a silly ship"?

I'm not going to suggest that it is ideal to have so much time and mental energy devoted toward hobbies and entertainment when national elections in the US don't break 50% turnout with even fewer people following the races. There is an argument to be made for a different distribution of time. But don't fuck with entertainment. That's how you get revolutions and I am not in the mood for one right now.

Furthermore, I'm really getting sick of people linking "immature and petty and ridiculous" and "hateful and full of vitriol". A person is perfectly capable of being immature and petty and ridiculous without being hateful and full of vitriol. Don't link the troll looking for a laugh with the guy who sincerely believes that birth control is for whores. Did I just get political? No, I did not. I've been political this whole damn time, I just happened to mention an issue that we think is "political", as opposed to being "social" or "health-al", while somehow the earlier concept that people focus on day-to-day survival at the expense of ethics is not political. If anything, it should be the reverse.

While we're on the subject and I'm getting angry, what's with "don't talk about politics"? What sort of stupid social rule is that? I can understand religion, since ultimately religion is based on personal believes about that which cannot be measured until someday something happens about which I will make no particular claim. Politics should not be a religion. That's the danger when we put it in the "don't talk about or question this" realm. If you think a certain tax policy will have a certain effect on the economy, that's not a matter of faith or belief, it's something that we can, with varying degrees of uncertainty and error, test or at least predict. It only gets worse over time, because as we push politics further and further away from conversation, we lose our ability to talk about it politely. It's like "the talk". I don't think it will ever be entirely without awkwardness when parents give "the talk", but maybe if we talked about the subject of "the talk" a little more often it wouldn't be such an awkward subject steeped in strange imagery and obscuring language such as "the talk".

Something that heavily influences our economic futures, our freedom, and our survival, should not be shoved off to the side to be debated on TV sideshows and ten thousand dollar dinners. I'm not saying it will be pretty. We will, wait for it... disagree! Yes, we might have different opinions! Shocking. But wouldn't it make some sense to talk about those opinions, find where we stand, and maybe have some small chance of spreading a little bit of knowledge or a new perspective?

Can you imagine if we all thought it was impolite to express our opinions on other subjects? Can you imagine a WoW in which no one ever expressed an opinion on class changes? Or a TV show that no one could talk about? How about the food you're eating, can you say whether you liked it, or is that rude because someone else might not have enjoyed the meal?

It's perhaps naive to think this, but I suspect that politics could be a little bit less political if we didn't work so damn hard to not ever talk about it.

P.S. SEX SEX SEX "the talk" is about SEX can't we use the damn word? I'm sick of seeing "gender" when we're clearly not talking about how a person identifies themselves. The word SEX is not going to get children pregnant but having no clue what the hell is going on just might. My point is that abstinence-only sex ed is about as smart as abstinence-only internet. One of these days I need to write that post about why gay people would care about birth control.

Apples and Oranges

Let's compare them. Oh, you think we can't? Let's try anyway.

First, we need the criteria on which we will compare them. Let's try calories, nutrients, durability and ability to be stored, cost of growing, and suitability as a tech company logo. Cancel that last one.

Now we can give each one a relative value on these measures. But we aren't done.

Which of these criteria are most important? Can one even be singled out?

If we're looking to complete a meal plan, then the calories and nutrients are of similar importance, and both are dependent on the rest of the food. If you need nutrients without calories, apples will be more desirable, while needing both will push you toward apples. If you have a specific deficiency, such as if you are a sailor in the 18th century, then oranges with their high vitamin-C content will win.

Transportation is important. An orange can sustain greater damage than an apple, with minor impacts which would bruise and damage an apple being shrugged off by the orange's thicker skin. So if you're transporting your fruit by cannon, go with oranges.

An absolute "this fruit is better" comparison is pointless, but for particular situations, one fruit can be better than the other. Keep that in mind when people try to convince you that two or more items or ideas cannot be compared because they are "like apples and oranges". They can be compared, and possibly, if they are so eager for you to not compare them, you should be more eager to do just that.

Equality of Opportunity, Equality of Outcome, Equality of Nothing

In my left hand is a very valuable thing, it's a card, much like the Monopoly "get out of jail free" card, except it's a "have a job all your life" card. Get this card and you will never be unemployed unless you quit your job. Come rain or recession, you will have work.

In my right hand is a six billion sided die. It is a fair die. You all have your number, so when I roll it, you know who comes out on top. The winner gets the card.

Good luck, everyone.

*rolls*

And there we go, 67923 has won! Congratulations!

Quit whining, the rest of you. There was equality of opportunity.

The Libertarian LFD Plot to Murder You

Nation, we all know that this nation was founded based on a recognition of equality, namely, fuck that, why would we give the vote to poor people and women? We called it liberty and it was great. But, ever since that Big Government anti-liberty Jew* named Abraham Lincoln came in, I've lost my right to private property, by which I of course mean Negros.

* He had a beard and was named Abraham, so I'm pretty sure he was Jewish. Not that there's anything wrong with them. I have no problem with shadowy empires of wealth controlling the world.

But I wanted to talk to you about Looking for Groups, Dungeons, Raids, and how I get to murder you if I feel like it. So let's get right to that.

As we all know, I am the only one that matters. I know this because I said it's true and I'm the one that matters. Or maybe I read it in a book by some Russian Hollywood type, and you know how they are, and have been mindlessly parroting it ever since. Anyway, I matter and you don't. So when I go into groups, I look out for me, as number one, and everyone else can worry about themselves, though frankly I can't decide if they're too pitiful to worry about or too pitiful to be worth being worried about by. It's sort of like the question of whether God can make a rock so heavy he cannot lift it, except it's more like whether the rest of you scum are so scummy as to not even be worth your own existence. Because you're not me.

My point is this: Cheating you is not wrong, because it benefits me, and as we all know, the ideal is for everyone to look out for themselves. This is the foundation of capitalism, which has brought prosperity that those backward people of the past could never imagine, because they were too busy imagining silly concepts like whether anyone else matters. You see, it is just basic economics that if everyone looks out for themselves, a term known as rational self-interest, everyone them makes mutually beneficial transaction that make everyone better off.

Obviously that's a stupid idea. Why would I, looking out for myself, worry about whether we are better off overall? That's the job of socialists. I'm concerned about myself. So, with this in mind, I am going to take all I can for myself and if I'm feeling generous, hire someone to shoot you if you get uppity, rather than doing it myself. See, I'm a job creator. The deal is simple, help me keep down the rest of the rabble and I'll let you live. That sort of free enterprise entrepreneurship is the foundation of a healty economy. Note that I said a healthy economy, not a healthy you, so quit whining about the carcinogens.

Speaking of carcinogens: I get to poison you. It's very simple. First, I open a factory that emits toxic fumes and dumps whatever is left over in the water. I can do this because I employ a few people, which makes it job creation, and therefore okay. Then I realize that my scheme was flawed, so I sell it off to a firm that can cut costs and turn a profit. Being a job creator, I start my own firm and bring in investors. By investors I of course mean the money from the pension that I'd promised to workers of my factory. I use that money to buy my factory from myself, making me rich, and giving the workers' pension a worthless asset, which I then buy from them cheaply when the company is liquidated. Of course to cut costs I laid off those workers and with all the paperwork they'd have been unable to collect the pension anyway, so it's not like they lost anything. Now I have a giant building that puts toxic waste into the air and water, slowly poisoning you to death. You can't do anything about it because I am, theoretically, a job creator.

Or I could just cut out the middle man and start burning bricks of sulfur on my front lawn while children are walking to their socialist public school. If you complain by ringing my doorbell, I will take that as a sign of aggressive trespassing, a clear violation of my few remaining rights to property and privacy, and get to shoot you. That's the beauty of libertarianism, it gives me the right to poison children and murder you if you say anything about it.

You may wonder how this is relevant to LFD. That's because you haven't been paying attention.

What we're seeing here is a concept known as an externality, which is, roughly speaking, when an interaction has effects on individuals beyond those directly involved in the interaction. Think of it like if I am in a gunfight with a Negro and he misses, because they hold their guns weird, so the bullet that was supposed to hit me instead hits an innocent bystander. Notice how despite both of us aiming at each other, a third party was still hurt. Now we could point out that the problem is that a Negro has a gun, a set of perfectly acceptable state-level laws which should have never been repealed, but that's just the limit of the analogy. The problem is that everything has effects beyond the one single interaction, such sulfur dioxide or flammable drinking water.

If people focus solely on their own well-being, then they will fail to account for externalities. I obviously won't, because being able to pollute makes my operations cheaper. You won't because I've lied to you for years about how the unregulated market is perfect and thanks to a terrible education system mixed with just enough racism, you believe it and think that getting strange forms of cancer at age 35 is either normal or caused by gay people, depending on whether we're having our two minute hate, also known as a Santorum rally.

Within the context of LFD or LFR, this means that, contrary to the supposed goals of individualism, no one will take any personal responsibility, but will instead look out for themselves by heaping as much blame and pain on others as is possible. That's the great irony of hyper-individualism, by promoting total disregard for others, it ignores any personal responsibility. Why would I take the blame for my own problems when I can blame you and put the cost on you? I will ninja all I want and it will be your problem, not mine. I will wipe us and blame you. I will ditch the group if I perceive the slightest possible upset and won't care, because all the cost of that action is borne by you, not me. With no system to hold me accountable, I certainly won't, and you won't be able to.

And that's why I'm a libertarian in LFD.

I can hear you now, screaming that I'm just a strawman libertarian, that real libertarians would never poison children for personal gain, that they take responsibility for what they say and do. And I laugh. Please, tell me, if we're all going to be free, who can tell me to do anything else? Not government, of course, that would be excessive regulation, which which I mean any regulation. Not society, because you're all just a bunch of rabble who, of you had any actual power, would be here with me, defending it.

I want to share with you what I call the Flower of Liberty.

No, you're not the flower. You're in the middle and the petals are all my private property, which you don't get to cross. You are, of course, free from any government rules, taxes, or regulation. But don't cross my property lines.

Be free, little one. And hold your breath if the wind shifts; the southern flowers have the sulfur burners.

A philospher walked into a bar

And said "Which sort of bar are you refering to? The ambiguity makes it impossible to offer anything close to an accurate prediction, particularly given the impossibility of prediction unless we assume cause and effect, but maybe that's just me assuming the assuming cause and effect allows us to make predictions and oh god I've gone cross-eyed."

The theist and atheist look at him, puzzled. Then they went back to shouting.

"How can you possibly have anything to look forward to without knowing the wonderful things behind this door? The room is filled with possibilities!"

"So is the rest of the house. It's filled with the possibility of all the stuff I bought when I moved in. What's the big deal about this one room?"

"You inherited this house from your grandfather and clearly this room was important. Thing of all he means to you, all you owe to him, and you cannot even accept that he gave you this wonderful room?"

"He gave me a house, that's pretty wonderful enough."

"Aha, so you acknowledge the existence of your grandfather!"

"Uh, yes."

At this point the philosopher chimes in.

"We cannot actually prove his existence, as he is no longer capable of direct interaction with this world, existing only as a memory, a memory which could be false, making any actions based on it illogical."

"What the fuck?"

"In fact, I'm not sure either of you exist."

By now the scientist has returned and overheard much of the conversation. He pondered the mysteries of the universe, such as why he only brought two bullets.

A voice drifts in...

"Hi! I'm a psychologist and I can explain to you why people often fail to anticipate future problems. Furthermore, you are referred to as a generic scientist, which given that psychology is a science, means that I should be redundant. However I understand why this oversight occurred and have developed a series of exercises we can use to work on this social issue..."

*bang*

*bang*

The scientist was found innocent of killing the philosopher because we cannot prove that the philosopher ever existed and he'd have wanted it that way.

An atheist, a theist, and a scientist walk into a bar...

By "bar" I mean "door", and by "walk into" I mean "stand in front of".

They try the knob, but it's locked. There is a weather strip at the bottom so they can't see in at all. The scientist sets about tapping on the door and attempting to move it around in its frame.

Meanwhile the atheist and theist begin to argue.

"What wonderful thing musts be in this room."

"It's empty."

"Of course it's not empty. Why would someone lock an empty room? Why would there be a room for nothing in it? No, it is logical that there would be something in there."

"We had no proof at all of anything in there. It's illogical to assume anything at all, especially that the imaginary items are 'wonderful'".

"You're just being blind. The room is clearly there. It is clearly artificial. It must have a purpose."

"It must have been built. We cannot assume it has a purpose. We definitely cannot assume that purpose is to store 'wonderful things'".

"You're being ridiculous, you cannot even see inside. Anything could be in there!"

"Also, nothing could be in there."

At this point the scientist is thoroughly annoyed with their attempts at philosophy based on poor logic and zero evidence. Thankfully, he carries a gun for these situations, but with one bullet; he's almost a pacifist, but not quite. But what should he do with it? He sees only one way to silence both of them.

He shoots the door, blasting a small hole in it.

Immediately the two combatants switch to physical methods, shoving each other to try to peer inside. It's a small hole and they block the light every time they look, not that they can concentrate, since they keep pushing each other away before they can focus on the dim conditions. But they are at least certain of one thing: the room is dark.

Finally the atheist has come to the conclusion he already had.

"See, I told you it's empty!"

"But it's dark, it could be in that shadow right there."

"The entire room is shadows!"

"Exactly, just imagine all the wonderful things!"

The scientist wanders off to ponder uncertainty and whether a coin flip would determine if God plays dice, musing that the true answer to Schrödinger's cat was to think inside the box.

NPCs, it's okay to not be gay

Jonnie of MMO Melting Pot seems to be unhappy about the absolute heterosexuality of virtual worlds of Warcraft and Star Wars.
http://www.mmomeltingpot.com/2011/09/editorial-why-i-love-being-gay-in-wow/
Blogger and my laptop are disagreeing about how to add links, so I hope you don't mind a bit of copy-paste.

Let's try the usual disclaimers to start off: I'm not gay and I'm not homophobic. But despite being called a fag more than a few times, I clearly do not have an insider's perspective, so maybe I just "don't get it."

That said, who cares? I think we may be making too much of this. By we I don't mean myself, since I disagree with him, and I can't speak for you, the reader, so it appears that we was a terrible word choice.

Azeroth is a fantasy world. This is important is several ways.

First off, the cultures and views within it are not necessarily those of the creators. Second, these are not necessarily idealized cultures. In fact, I'd say that the portrayal of every major race in WoW has gotten progressively less rosy. All of the races have major flaws, with only the tauren, in my opinion, being able to truly say that the evil is isolated to one group, the Grimtotem. In other words, this isn't a perfect world, made so by the lack of homosexuality. Not much is said on it one way or another, beside "me not that kind of orc." It's not shunned or accepted, just not there at all.

Why should it be? From what I can tell of the science, homosexuality is not a choice, but a matter of brain chemistry. Yea, I'm trying to tip-toe there, because "brain condition" and "mental state" all make it sound like something is wrong. Maybe in Azeroth the genetics and brains just don't work out in such a way that homosexual behavior or desire exists. Is this so different from how there don't seem to be dark-skinned humans or white orcs? It's all just biochemistry and it would be strange to claim that an alien universe should work the same way as ours.

Of course it would be equally strange to claim that an alien universe shouldn't work the same way as ours, given the fact that we (useless we, once again) created it. The writers could have decided that the chemistry exists to create black humans and white orcs (they come in several colors already, what is one more?). But why would they? Do these things add to the universe? Do they make the stories any better?

Potentially, yes. It could be interesting to see how various sexual or romantic attractions could change the sub-plots in a game like WoW. Variety can spawn variety. Maybe the tendency to not read quests could be fixed by a bit of gayness. After all, nothing quite catches the attention like an unexpectedly bit of tauren uh, beef.

I'm going to leave that aside for now, since I don't thin I'm getting anywhere on that path. Instead, let's think about how there came to be a lack of homosexuality.

Maybe the writers just never even thought of it. This seems unlikely. So then we have to wonder, if it came up, where did it go? I'm picturing a committee sitting around working out some quest chains.
"Alright, dragons captured his friend and he wants us to go free him. Anything to add to that?"
"Why not make it his boyfriend?"
"Make them gay?"
"Yes."
"No."

Why not? Maybe they don't want to anger the people who would be angered by that sort of thing. Maybe it feels forced to them. These are things I could understand. WoW seems to be aimed at a very wide population. Some of that population includes people who think that rescuing a girlfriend is romantic and heartwarming, while rescuing a boyfriend means that Azeroth Jesus is crying. As for the second, when does a gay character appear? I mean, when is it a natural part of the story for someone to be gay, rather than being a forced "hey look guys, we added a gay character for you, aren't you happy yet?" It's the paralysis of not wanting to do something wrong, so doing nothing at all.

Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who has the most double-standards of all?
I'm trying to imagine if WoW had been made by a majority gay development team and they acted the same way, creating a world in which everyone is gay. Would I play this game and think "oh yea, sure, everyone is gay, so what? Just coincidence and dev habit, not like it matters." I doubt it. I'd probably think it was a little strange. I mean, an entire world in which everyone is gay? How obviously forced! So maybe the reverse is the same.

But that's silly. Let's face it: an entirely gay universe would need some other means of reproduction, meaning that homosexuality wouldn't be the same. In the real universe, homosexuality is not "normal", is is the exception, not the rule. It is unusual. But that doesn't mean it is wrong. Somehow this distinction fails to sink in for many people, that different is not wrong. But by the same token, not wrong doesn't mean typical.

Games could benefit from a bit more gayness, not because it is politically correct or polite, but because it would allow for more variety in story-telling. And that's the key, it should be for the story, it should add to it, rather than being forced in. If it is going to be forced in, then it is just as ridiculous as the crusades of homophobes, who might be all in favor of gay relationships in TOR, as long as they gave dark side points.

In conclusion, I have no conclusion.

P.S. Upon a second reading, I noticed this phrase "When a personal choice is singled out" Why would anyone ever choose to be gay? It sounds pretty stupid, if you ask me. Who in their right mind would choose to be hated and discriminated against? Doesn't sound like much of a choice to me. Maybe the underlying self isn't a choice.

Escapism vs. Additionism

I don't like escapism. I mean the word and the meaning given to it. Escapism is a bad thing. It is fleeing from reality rather than addressing it. It is fleeing from life rather than addressing it. As I see it, escapism is essentially procrastination for existence itself.

But there is a lot that we call escapism which is not. These things or activities are not real life, nor do they change the physical world much, but they are not mere temporary diversions. These are Additionism.

Imagine a sport. Will your sport make you do your job any better? Unless it's a physical job, probably not. So is the game of basketball mere escapism, a temporary distraction from the pain of a dead-end job? It could be. But it could also be additionism. It could form new friendships, improve your physical self, and from the two of these, mental state as well. These aren't fixing the life problem of a bad job, but they are adding something to life, not merely escaping it.

Why can gaming not follow a similar pattern? Done poorly, it is escapism. Done well, it is additionism.

And that is my made-up word for the week. Next week, Exceptionasticism!

Quote of the Interval of Time

Of course the people who are enjoying the game now don’t want to hear other people having problems with the game. Perhaps out of fear that devs will listen and those people will ‘lose’ what they had started having fun with, while some older heads want the game they DID have fun with back.

-Azaael

I'm reminded of a quotation, the source of which I forgot: "The biggest conservative is yesterday's revolutionary."

I can just imagine it now, the grand leader in the palace, the floor still sticky with the blood of the loyalists, shouting from the balcony: "We had the revolution! Everything is fine now! Please go back to your homes!"

Who could imagine a life after WoW?

I might have been six months since I last played. Or maybe less. I'm not really sure. That day was a bit of a non-event, so it's hard to remember.

Thinking back to before then, I couldn't quite imagine not playing. I mean, sure, people quit, but it never quite made sense. It was like hearing about someone moving to Afghanistan. It's theoretically possible, but plausible? Not really. I mean, what does someone do there? Outside WoW? At the very least, there surely are not sufficient activities to fill all those hours. It would be like quitting sleeping. What does one possibly do with all that time?

Beside that, it's a familiar, accessible place. Press a few buttons and you're there. It's like a hangout just down the street, except closer. Would you suddenly just stop going? It would be weird. People would wonder what happened.

Intellectually I knew that there were things to do outside WoW. During times on intensive studying or research I'd gone days or weeks without playing. But it was still there, offering to fill a bit of spare time, if I had it. I knew that every day literally billions of people went through their days, even their entire lives, without ever having played WoW. Or even another MMO. I can't quite see why anyone would play EVE when real accounting is so much more lucrative, but it's there. And of course I knew that one day WoW would end. But that was on par with the ironically-named heat death of the universe: so far out there that we can't quite perceive it.

Now it seems flipped. I can't imagine playing WoW. Oh sure, here and there I think "I want to do [activity]", but then I realize, I cannot. Not only has the game changed to make it impossible (screw you, Cataclysm), but the very idea of playing seems strange to me. I could log in, pick a character, and then what? Kill a boar? So... what?

It makes me sad in a way, to think that something which was important to me for over five years could just fade aay into meaninglessness. Aw shit. Now I've gone all existential angst.

What did you think of life after WoW before life after WoW?

Give me liberty and give me cheese!

A little bit back Tesh suggested that there's some sort of division in America best summarized as Statist vs. Libertarian.

I offer to you the story of cheese and liberty. It is 1940 and Britain needs an army, because of Nazis. Armies need food and cheese is an excellent one, so the British offer this excellent idea: ration and tax cheese, in order to have enough to fight the Nazis. Alas, there are a few too many libertarians. "Cheese and Liberty!" they cry. They explain that liberty, not more statism, is the source of freedom, and it sounds good, so we all agree to resist the oppression of the British government and reject the cheese rations.

There is no army and the Nazis win the war. They in turn take all the cheese. And a few people as well. We write to the Nazis and explain freedom, but they reject the idea, no matter how convincing our arguments. Perhaps we would have been better off with a bit less cheese and a lot less Nazi, but alas, we wanted our liberty, and all of it, now.

Libertarianism is founded on the absurd notion* that we can all just say "freedom and liberty" and it will be so. But it will not. If the government does not tell us what to do, the market will, or the corporation, or the mob boss. People desire power and inevitably some are better able to gather it than others, and from that comes oppression. We cannot eliminate it, but we can minimize it. A representative government can exert power, but in turn the people have power over it.

It's not a nice idea, that we cannot have total freedom, but it is true. Someone or something will always attempt to control us, so what we must do is ensure that we choose carefully, to pick leaders who are powerful enough to protect us from those who are too powerful.

I don't think we're in this situation right now. In fact, we're caught in a worst of both worlds, with corporations taking control of government, and through it, acting as the powerful leader.

This isn't a new idea. Once upon a time Americans opposed both big government and big business. They understood that both can take excessive power, to our detriment. Somehow the narrative was re-written and anything non-government became untouchable. Anything that wasn't government was classified as market, and you cannot question the market.

I like representative systems. Equal representation. This is why I don't buy into the notion of "voting with your wallet", because we clearly do not have equal wallets and never will, since communism doesn't work well beyond very small groups. In other words, wallet voting is unequal and therefore undemocratic. And it's self-perpetuating inequality. If I have ten votes and you have one, do you think I'd vote for anything other than myself? Perhaps I'd vote to give myself more votes.

So how about this for a different polar division: representative vs. non-representative. Now we don't have to make arbitrary distinctions between market and government, but can instead focus on what matters: not being horribly oppressed by non-representative leaders.

* I lied. Libertarianism is actually founded on the popular notion of "why should I care what happens to the sewage that I dump in your drinking water?"

P.S. I would have written about Civ V, but I was playing a game I just got called Homefront. I might write about it instead, because there is a lot to complain about.

I am covering my ears while yelling "LA LA LA LA LA LA"

Confession time.

I never played Diablo. I only played Diablo II a month or two ago, for a few days after some good friends suggested it. It was fun, but I hated the multi-player. I found myself perpetually lagging behind, confused, and wondering where we were going. It was just too damn fast for me.

My point is that I don't have much interest in Diablo III. Or maybe they use a 3. I don't care. Nor do I much care about Blizzard's official marketplace/auction house thingy. So my plan is to wait a few days for everyone to forget about this and find something else to complain about. My guess is that at least one female character will be wearing something that suggests the least subtle whore in the world. If they are not yet, it will happen, because that is how women dress when killing fantasy creatures. Note that there are zero recorded incidents of women killing real life dragons while modestly dressed Highly-accurate European Christian lore tells us that at least one muscle-bound male saint killed a dragon, at least proving that half of the dragon-killing appearance requirement.

In related news, my new deficit plan is this: default on 100% of all debts, at all levels of government, with the sole exception of two categories of Treasury bonds: those held by social security and those held by me which I am using to pay for graduate school. I want to go into government budgets and taxes, the very thing which may prevent me from studying them. This is why I do not believe in Karma, but instead in Irony.

And in unrelated news, I recently realized that my job involves a whole lot of time covering up flaws. Not mistakes, but flaws. My current job is home remodeling. In terms of functionality, we were done weeks ago: plumbing was in, electric was in, insulation, walls; we could have just shoved in a toilet, a sink, and a shower curtain and been finished with a fully-functional bathroom. But it would look terrible. So we use joint compound and this other stuff (it's yellow) to cover the gaps in the joints and smooth out any unevenness. Then we sand it down to get it perfectly smooth. Then primer before paining it all. Woodwork goes over that. Then caulk to hide all the joints and gaps. Then more paint because the caulk puts a white line everywhere. And all that paint has to be so damn accurate because an eighth of an inch waviness is more than enough to make the whole thing look terrible.

Maybe that has some greater philosophical meaning.

Tomorrow I'll write about Portal 2 or Civilization V. Assuming I remember to write a post and I'm not too wrapped up in playing Civ V. Preview: Portal 2 is silly and the AI is terrible at combat in Civ V.

"In 1776 a group of colonies assaulted the crown and were defeated"

Since it looks like America and its attempt at freedom and other nouns is coming to an end, I wonder what the history books would have looked like if it had never quite started. Something as simple as a lack of French support could have doomed our attempted revolution. With no navy and inferior land troops, what could the colonies have done?

On one hand, the end of the British Empire may have been inevitable. But I don't think it was inevitable at the time. The world wars ended the empires of France, Germany, and Britain (and some other places that are too lame to name), far after the American revolution. And who knows what a captive American colony could have done during that time to change future history. Can you imagine a World War I with Germany knowing that America would be against it? Only in hind sight does an American-British alliance seem anything close to inevitable.

Earlier American intervention might have made a difference. Or, continued control of American resources might have made Britain powerful enough to prevent war in the first place.

But this assumes a lot. It assumes that America would have been quite as badass under the crown rather than against it. I suspect this is not the case. Rebellion, and weakness, fuel innovation. We were a weak nation, something which we cannot quite grasp today, but the War of 1812 certainly proves my point. So we had to do more, and faster, than any other country, just to survive. Somehow we carried that a bit further and became the most powerful nation in the world. I do think that Britain with control of the American colonies, or whatever we'd be by then, would still be the most powerful country in the world, but not by so much.

beyond national psychology, there is politics and diplomacy. Would the Louisiana Purchase have happened under British rule? While the crown may have been eager to buy the land, would France have sold it? Almost certainly not! The sale was a great deal for France and America, giving is needed land, giving them money, and as a bonus for France, strengthening a potential rival of Britain. Maybe a Britain that didn't lose the colonies could have conquered the land instead, but I suspect the sale was a lot cheaper. Such a war may have cost both sides too much, leading to an even stronger Prussian/German state, which could have contested French continental supremacy, and next thing you know all of European history is completely re-written, though I predict it would still end with a failed invasion of Russia. But maybe being unable to sell Louisiana would have forced France into peace sooner, preventing the invasion of Russia, and depriving Hitler of that important historical lesson which he ignored anyway because he was an arrogant racist (redundant?), so really nothing changes.

On a side note, I do not believe that anyone has successfully invaded Russia or Canada. Obviously this should make us worried about a potentially invincible Axis of Cold Places. To make it even worse, neither country speaks English.

Without the Louisiana Purchase, or with it at a high military cost, would the Americans (with all the alternative history, and my lack of time travel, I've decided to go with the third person) have been able to beat up Mexico repeatedly for land? And without that land, would America have had enough worthless desert to send natives to starve to death before inventing gambling? The entire presidency of Andrew Jackson could have been nullified.

What would a stronger Mexico have done? My guess is, been marginally less horrible, but it would not have been the savior and/or destroyer of the world.

It would have been a scarier Soviet Union growing out of Russia, still in control of Alaska. Would Canada have fallen? I do not know, but know this, any history in which Canada is not free to be Canadian is not a history that I want to see. And Sarah Palin would have been a communist and had a totally hot Russian accent, unlike whatever the hell that is.

I do hope that by the time this post goes up our representatives will have worked out something. My vote is for a all the sane people to lock the Tea Party members in a basement storage room, hold the votes, and then let them out when we're done governing and can go back to screaming incoherently at each other. If not, well then there's one day before life gets more interesting than I'd like.

The Lord Works in Mysterious Ways

Sin and Mystery, these were always the answers. The question was why bad things happen. An earthquake kills a thousand people. A fire burns down a city. A war, and another, and another. All manner of pain and suffering.

Some is obviously our own faults. World War I was no act of God or Nature, but pure human stupidity and arrogance. We cannot blame anything but these strange ape-brains of ours.

But let's go back to the mystery. A flood wipes out half of Pakistan and we ask why. One preacher blames their faith, usually the same one who blamed gays, sex, and the most recent type of music for the second most recent disaster. Another cannot even give us lies and hate, but can only shrug and suggest that the Lord works in Mysterious Ways. A hand wave. A Wizard Did it.

It's the perfect answer for the lazy or those who don't want any new questions. It reminds me of another answer given by the faithful: "that's the free market."

A town loses the factory and everyone loses their job. One man starves while another lives in a palace. Why? A thousand economists and philosophers rally to the call, offering their answers. The Marxist says it is capitalist oppression and urges action. The bureaucrat says it is a lack of regulation and asks for more power. The politician says it is China and mentions terrorism, saying we must replace the factory with a munitions plant. And the voice is always there, steadily repeating the mantra: it is the free market, and he urges nothing at all.

How strange, this natural force or entity which cannot be controlled, contained, channeled, or even charmed. It does what it does and we are helpless before it, so helpless that we are not even permitted to predict it or wish anything to be any other way. "As it is, so it must be", they say. How convenient, an answer of inaction.

If there were a flood would we simply be washed away? Or would we build levies? Launch weather satellites to predict it? Install pumps and ready boats? Even against that which we cannot quite stop, we still take action and we make things a little less bad. But the market, do not question it, do not oppose it, bow before it.

Why does it do what it does? Obviously it works in mysterious ways.

Now let us close our hands and give praise, as we would to any other mysterious god dictating our fates, that it might show mercy, but never think to change it or order it.

Amen.