So I recently had the displeasure of reading The Republican, a lovely bit of propaganda.  After all, how seriously can you take a publication that praises Ben Stein for his “efforts.” The most disturbing part of it was the childish name calling of democrats that was allowed to be published.  There was also the startling lack of logic or actual proper discourse.  Rather than provide logical arguments or criticisms of democrat ideas and positions (some of which could be improved a great deal if properly debated) they resorted to innuendos, biased historical data, hypotheticals, and tales that closely resemble the style of teaching found in fairy tales.  Really, they could have just sent everybody an e-mail saying “Democrats are bad, m’kay?” and saved themselves the time.   Not to say Democrats are much better.  There’s a reason that I think both sides are crap.

Recently I’ve been reading the utopian fictions of Kim Stanley Robinson and Gwyneth Jones.  While they are fictional in nature and use scientific advances to solve problems that are very real today the one thing that these books have in common is the willingness of the people to actually listen to new ideas and adopt new ideology rather than try to cling to some old idea that isn’t solving the problem.  For example, in Blue Mars food, shelter, education, and medical care are made to be fundamental rights of all citizens.   And yet, for most of those propositions half of the United States would be appalled at the idea that they would be guaranteed rights by the government.  Certainly we could create the housing, grow the food, provide the education and medical care with our current technology.  Now, the cost of doing so may be quite high, but the resources are there to accomplish these tasks.

The thing is, hunger, homelessness, lack of medical care, and education, as well as environmental concerns (though one side doesn’t think these exist, at all) are very pressing issues facing our planet.  Yet, our amazing elected officials have made progress on zero of these four and a half issues.  Sure we may have to change our economic systems, perhaps even make changes to the form of government.  The only thing we really need is a willingness to actually consider that these may be possible to accomplish.

With the environment there are a lot of little things we could be doing.  Most people could get by with their driving on electric cars or hybrids.  While this does help solve the problem with oil and the emissions of that you then have the problem of the electricity to power them.  Of course, we could build a bunch of relatively safe nuclear power plants if people were to get over an irrational fear that they’re going to go meltdown every ten minutes.  It’s an example of one of the short term goals we could be accomplishing.

This is one of the bigger problems I find with our government.  All of our solutions are short term and reactionary.  Almost most of the time the solution is politically motivated as well.  Right now about the only goal that exists is to put a man on Mars.  There is no plan for where we want this country to be in 100 years, 50 years, or even 10 years from now.  Though it’s just an opinion most of the problems we face aren’t going to be solved by some overnight bandaid that congress slaps on some symptom.  It’d help quite a bit to have a goal that we’re going to accomplish.  This way it sets in the mind of people that congress isn’t going to just be able to slap something together, but rather that it’s going to take a collaborative effort of many organizations and science to come to a positive result for humanity.   Which, shouldn’t that be our goal of governing, to produce a positive benefit to humanity?

One other note of interest in that silly propaganda piece.  Our lovely neoconservatives were trying to impress upon us that this is a republic and not a true democracy (which is why it functions as a democratic republic) and that democracy was a buzzword for welfare entitlements.   Apparently people voting is now a democrat device to goad people into government entitlements.  Also, democracy leads to the minority being subverted to the will of the majority. Hum, so there’s this one issue that I’m thinking of…  Hum, what was that?  Oh, right, gay rights.  Isn’t the conservative majority kind of, I don’t know, using democracy to subvert the rights of a majority for no good reason?  I love the smell of hypocrisy in the morning?

First off, I’ve decided to go with a bi-monthly update on the strip; most likely updating the second and last week of the month.

Also, since I’ve been putting this off for a bit, I’d finally like to get some of this down.  Recently there was an article in PC Gamer about some conference of people trying to find some way to make computer games more accessible.   One of their ideas is setting minimum standards for requirements in order to run all those pretty graphics.   It got me thinking though, especially given that I’ve found myself somewhat disinterested in newer games, about what makes a good game.  The following is of course, going to remain unfinised and unpolished for awhile.  My main goal is to just get down my thoughts so that I can come back and polish it up into something useful.

One of the things that struck me to be rather lacking in games these days is the sense of a good narrative structure.  Sure pretty graphics and fancy ai’s are nice, but what good are they if I don’t care about the game beyond blowing things up?  Another thing that struck me about this is that if games are going to be thought of as an art form than pretty graphics and advanced ways to kill things are not going to cut it without trying to have some sort of meaning.

The other thing I’ve been thinking is each of the separate genres.  What exactly do I find fault with these genres and what do they do well?  On top of that, what is it of games that I do like that make them so and what don’t?

RTS:  One of the biggest problems I find myself with rts games is the fact that, for being a strategy game, is how effective brute force is.  I continually find myself using the simple strategy of an effective defensive position followed by building the largest army I can and then laying down waste to anything in my path.  Half the time even if the mission is designed to force you to not brute force it I still do it anyways just on general principle that I can.  Plus, once you give me artillery I just tend to sit back and watch things go boom.

FPS:

RPG:

Adventure:

Games

Oblivion:

Half-Life:

Portal:

Diablo II:

Supreme Commander:

Halo:

TF2:

Counter-Strike:

BF2142:

The Sims:

All none of you might have noticed the complete lack of a comic this Tuesday. It’s finals week and I’ve been busy with that.  Then I packed everything up and came home.  So there’s not going to be a comic Friday and next Tuesday might not have one either.

This brings me to my next thing. I’m not really happy with how the comic has been turning out.  I really haven’t had the time to really dedicate to the strip. Sure, I’ll have more over the summer, but then school starts back up again.  I’m not even sure if this comic strip is something I really like to do as a form of expression.  This may just be because of the quantity I’m trying to do.  On the competition between quantity versus quality, quantity has been winning out and certainly not to the benefit of the strip.  Some of the strips I like the most took a week or more to actually do and I’d like to do more quality strips like that.  I’m considering cutting down to a strip a week or even two strips a month.  I’m not making a living off of this and I have other things that demand my time.   At the very least this should help improve the quality of the strip.

The other thing I’ve been thinking about is doing something with this blog.  I am an English Major and I do tend to have some vague ideas on things at times that I almost never follow through on even though they interest me.  So, despite the fact that the ideas aren’t all that fleshed out, I figure the least I could do is to post them in some form here in case I do ever want to come back to them.