| Breast cancer recommendations |
[Nov. 17th, 2009|05:36 pm] |
The United States Preventative Task Force recently recommended that women get mammograms starting at age 50, not age 40 - and only half as often. Their logic? Solid evidence that it doesn't help - the false positives and additional radiation exposure cause more harm than the actual cancers detected.
So, of course, the Internet complains that this is Evil Health Care Rationing. A bunch of statistics are marshaled to prove how great mammograms are, and how tragic it would be if a 40-something woman had breast cancer and died because The Bureaucrats didn't approve her procedure.
This strikes me as exactly the kind of positive result Obama has been talking about for months: cutting the waste and the defensive medicine from our health system, making it cheaper for everyone without compromising quality. Unsurprisingly, the doctors against this result are the oncologists and the American Cancer Society - precisely the people who stand to lose money from fewer mammograms.
This is a litmus test, folks. If Medicare won't accept fewer tests on this issue because it caves to political pressure, it won't cut costs at all and we're just creating an enormous unfunded entitlement. (A classic George W. Bush move, that.) |
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| Review: Angel season 5 |
[Nov. 13th, 2009|04:09 pm] |
Angel season 5 is commonly cited as an example of the opposite of jumping the shark, "Growing the Beard." (For your sanity, I am not linking to TV Tropes.) Seasons 3 and 4 had introduced Heroes Syndrome - where major plot events happen randomly and frequently, just so the characters will have something to talk about. And in true Whedon fashion, at one point Gunn describes his life on screen as "some kind of supernatural soap opera". So thankfully, season 5 is a total break; in fact, you could probably watch it as a poorly explained stand-alone show like Firefly. This is to say that it's about twice as good as it used to be, despite the absence of guest vampire slayer Faith which managed to turn around previous seasons of both series. There are a load of improvements to the setting, the cast of minor characters, the caliber of non-arc-related episodes; even the format includes a new "Previously on Angel" segment that is invaluable.
Don't be fooled, though; it's still a Joss Whedon show, and so the characters must always form a team consisting of the same roles no matter who's in which role, and nobody ever thanks anyone for saving their life, and they will pointlessly keep things secret to generate tension, and the emotional climax will be a long eulogy for the most likable character, and you'll always regret having sex later, and evil is shockingly inept except insofar as it involves turncoats from the good guys, and there is a Dark Figure From Angel's Past, and an expected response from one conversation will 90% of the time start another, et cetera.
The central conceit of the season, character-wise, is that Spike from Buffy comes over to join Angel's crew of antiheroes, to harass our hero and provide some much-needed competition. Although it's presented in a disjointed manner, with a fierce rivalry generated out of thin air and characterization varying wildly from irrelevance to pathos by writer, it makes sense in the Whedon cosmology. Switching one neutered character for another (Cordelia) allows Spike to claw his way back up from comic relief, and his existence allows for lots of filler episodes.
I did struggle with the sexual symbolism. There's an oddly masculine tone here contrasting with Joss' feminist oeuvre and Buffy's systematic emasculation of all the male characters. The female lead is summarily killed off, the new female lead is treated with a creepy amount of caveman adoration and pampering - and promptly dies, while the new female antagonist turns out to be a lovesick puppy. There's yet another "Rosemary's Baby" scene about how scary pregnancy is, there's a constant recurring theme of cuckoldry, and the new Anya character (Illyria) is asexual AND reflects the male version of Buffy's Angelus fear.
It's like the two series are self-segregating: Buffy attracts super-powered women and the men who have puppy love for them, while Angel attracts moody, self-destructive men and the women who can't hold down a non-supernatural job. In this schema, adding a Buffy character (Spike) provides a character with room to grow darker, under the opposite polar influence.
Although the series doesn't exactly say "The End" it pretty clearly dismantles the edifice the rest of the season built up. I will say, I wish they'd done more with the Wesley / Robot Girl dynamic, which mirrors the best parts of Terminator 2. Heck, it beats him shooting lawyers because he's in a bad mood, which was pretty much the low point. |
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| Gay marriage: Think of the children |
[Nov. 9th, 2009|05:02 pm] |
The New York Times has an article on a new book, "When Gay People Get Married: What Happens When Societies Legalize Same-Sex Marriage." Having read dozens of the same studies this author collates into one book (although not all 130!) I thought I'd provide a little perspective on things the article doesn't mention (although the book might).
The overall point of the book is to counteract the right-wing "Every child needs a mother and a father" argument, by establishing just how similar kids raised by same-sex couples are to heterosexual couples. As it turns out, the differences are rather less than drastic. The daughter of a lesbian couple has more sexual partners on average but isn't any more likely to be gay herself. Her parents are more likely to share housework equally. She's more likely to want a typically male job like doctor or lawyer as a child, and more likely to end up in the social services sector as an adult. Hardly earth-shattering, right? And that is indeed an important takeaway.
But it's also important to mention just how limited the results of these 130 studies are. The vast majority either have a very narrow test population (lesbian couples vs. single moms) or a very narrow group of questions (adult sexual orientation) or both. The few studies that exist on male couples are 25 years old, or they have much more worrisome results, or they didn't control for socioeconomic situation (the gay-marriage-OK parts of America are generally richer and more stable than the mean already), et cetera.
The data actually points to a different conclusion: Caring mothers and stable two-parent homes are enormously positive influences on children, and parents should make every effort to provide both.
In this case, my anecdote agrees with the data: I have one divorced aunt and one lesbian aunt in a long-term relationship, and I see no basis to conclude that one raised their kids better than the other.
... P.S. "Don't ask, don't tell" is a terrible policy. The arguments against female soldiers are morale and physical ability; gay men don't have the latter problem, and clearly adding women to the Army hasn't caused a collapse of our combat prowess. |
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| Quick bites on social issues |
[Nov. 5th, 2009|01:55 pm] |
1. I hate having to vote Republican, because the Democratic candidates are even worse, and I'd rather not reinforce the "everybody still loves Obama" notion in the press. This is what third parties are for, people. (In '08 I voted one R, one D and one "Independent Green".) Actually I should just have written in Bill Bolling for governor, now that I think about it.
2. Gasp! Maine votes against gay marriage. Just like all 29 other states. I've written before about this, but I applaud the Supreme Court's reluctance to rule on the issue - Roe v. Wade created this whole awful Christian right culture war thing that I'd rather not repeat. However, given precedent I think gay marriage is inevitable - the Supreme Court says marriage is a fundamental human right, and under that definition there is no constitutional basis to deny it. (Or incest, for that matter.)
3. Clean energy is a good idea. Government subsidies and mandates in an area of emerging technology are a bad idea, because they make the situation worse - Congress doesn't have anywhere NEAR the information it needs to make good regulations yet. So they get ethanol, which is actively hurting the poor by depressing the food supply, hurting Brazil's rainforest by encouraging deforestation to qualify as "green", and not actually saving the planet. They are subsidizing really inefficient forms of wind and solar power, instead of doing much more helpful things like improving the national power grid infrastructure so a large-scale private solution could develop on its own. They are subsidizing destruction of existing cars for more fuel-efficient ones - mostly to prop up the economy at the cost of hurting the environment. |
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| Best-Of Lists (or, The Log In Your Own Eye) |
[Nov. 5th, 2009|11:52 am] |
Paste Magazine has a list which recently showed up on Twitter (which I don't follow) and thereafter video game blogs (which I do) about The 20 Best Video Games of the Decade. I left a comment to the effect that:
1. The list is written from the perspective of someone who owns a Playstation 2 and an Xbox 360. (18/20 games on the list.)
2. The list is written from the perspective of someone who was REALLY into games in 2007 and 2008. (17/20 games were released, ported to PS2/360, or had the next major franchise installment appear on PS2/360 in those years.)
3. The list is written from the perspective of a hardcore gamer, who really enjoys a story and a health bar and online multiplayer and a 20-hour experience. (2/20 games are casual, and even Mario Galaxy is a "dog whistle" to hardcore gamers.)
But wait! I don't actually disagree with the games on this list. Let's take a look:
1. I play modern games primarily on PS2 and Xbox 360. (The PC is used mostly to get better graphics on games I could have bought for the Xbox.) Check.
2. I probably played more "good" video games in '07 and '08 than the previous seven years combined. (Earlier, I was heavily into unpopular or downright bad games.) Check.
3. I am definitely a hardcore gamer; I am really bad at / can't understand casual games. I have a very different approach to crossover games like Halo, Rock Band and Tower Defense: I play through the single-player grind and then join the fun. Check.
So yeah, I'm really not one to criticize for this kind of bias. And I do still think that 2007 was pretty much the Console Renaissance, with a bunch of wonderful things springing up out of nowhere at a clip the industry has been trying to live down for two years. But here's the top three games I would find room for on that list:
1. Wii Sports ('06)
2. The Sims ('00)
3. Counterstrike ('00) |
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| Back in the Saddle |
[Nov. 4th, 2009|10:22 am] |
I'm trying to make a dent in my video games backlog lately, both as a way of saving money and clearing my plate for all the books I've been ignoring for the past year. So here goes:
Gears of War 2 actually isn't that fun playing alone on Insane difficulty. After about ten attempts trying to shoot down incoming artillery with the world's most frustrating mounted guns, all of which required a one-minute cutscene to play out before I got to shoot again, I threw down the controller in disgust. I may give it one more try on Hardcore difficulty, but my gut feeling is that this is yet another game I'm going to regret paying $60 for because it doesn't support 4-way split screen and I'm bad at competitive video games.
Champions Online had a free weekend last weekend, and I managed to play maybe 8 hours total, getting me to level 12 and through the first major quest line (Canada). It's kinda buggy, and there are so many stats that my concept-based hero (who can punch and ALSO has super powers, like pretty much every hero ever) is significantly weaker than my game-oriented compatriots, and after a while I wasn't even reading the quest dialogue at all because it didn't really matter. But on the plus side, the character generator is fabulous, and it REALLY makes a difference to have a fast travel ability early in the game so I didn't have to trek through boring waves of enemies to get anywhere. I had exactly 2 abilities, 3 if you count the surprisingly bad "pick up a lamp post and start swinging" ability, and I was itching for some more pyrotechnics. Sure, I saw lots of fun stuff, but I personally didn't get to do any of it. As the main damage dealer of the party, I basically just stood next to the bad guys and held down the "Electro Shock" button until they died. For several hours.
Dungeons & Dragons Online recently moved from a subscription model to a micro-transaction model, which is really conceptually exciting, and ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) xyg49 said it was OK so I had to try it out. After maybe 5-6 hours, I'm a level 2 female Paladin named Marguerite Porete. I have a variety of unexciting and poorly explained abilities, a dozen expensive magical items that in a realistic fantasy world would get me mugged and killed as soon as I stepped off the boat from Noob Island, and everywhere I look is someone with a quest for me, standing RIGHT NEXT to the door of the quest they need me to complete. Since I have yet to meet a quest I couldn't take down alone by frantically clicking Attack 100 times, and I'm surrounded by several dozen other adventurers, I have to wonder if maybe he could auction off his demon-infested basement to the lowest bidder. I'm sure one of these guys would do it pro bono, just for the XP!
Now I see why this game is free. The tutorial is awful, the animations are awful, the balance and some of the level design is really immersion-breaking, but it's still an MMO. Seeing how much of a grind this is, yet still wanting to experience at least one MMO at non-noob levels, makes it much more attractive to spend a few real-life dollars on a Potion of +20% Stop Wasting My Time. It's insidious, and I hate that my reward centers trigger from it. |
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| Quad-barrelled review |
[Nov. 3rd, 2009|04:03 pm] |
1. Where the Wild Things Are
which I saw last weekend with thedoingofitand the SPKs. There are many things about this movie to like - good CG, incredible lead actor, great soundtrack that helps you get in the slow, contemplative groove required to stretch 2 pages into 90 minutes - but it felt oddly adult for a movie about a children's book, so it didn't really connect with me on a deeper level like it has for some people. And that's what it is, a movie about a children's book - an entire narrative is constructed where a half-dozen monsters mope their way through recreations of the hero's id, where bad things happen permanently and the only real alternative is just to soldier on, where the real focus is a wistful nostalgia for childhood and seeing your inner demons writ large. It's not really based on the book except for the basic structure and art style; it is threatening instead of safe, sad instead of rejuvenating, mystical instead of strange. At the end, the prodigal hero returns and finds, not the dinner he was supposed to be eating, but chocolate cake; the intensity of this reward just doesn't feel right.
2. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Season 7
which I finished recently in piecemeal fashion, watching alone on my computer because the later DVDs have some sort of weird glitch that only Windows Media Player can fix.
( Pluses and minuses )
And then in the last few episodes, Faith jumps in, a refugee from a much better TV show (having just performed that duty for Angel) who makes the fight scenes twice as cool, reintroduces tension to a touchy-feely crowd of Buffy sycophants, asks the right questions and sleeps with the right boys to complete the checklist, and essentially singlehandedly drags the show out of its navel-gazing. Now I know why people were such a fan of her character in earlier seasons - it's reverse nostalgia.
3. Magic the Gathering: Zendikar
which is actually not that exciting to me, although sales are quite high and I like the way their power creep affects the most fun part of the game (playing creatures, attacking with creatures, killing creatures with improbably named magic spells). But what really captures my imagination about a new game is either (1) an engaging story, which Magic is incapable of telling, or (2) a really meaty mechanic with strong support from less expensive cards, for which a foundation has been laid but no payoff exists. Looking through the card list, posting a good record against real opponents, I couldn't help feeling that I was being forced to play in a "just charge out there and goad the opponent into a tactical mistake" style. Making a box of tools you can play around with and assemble is great, but I'd like something exciting to happen when it does, rather than "Oh, I managed to squeeze out a couple extra triggers off this repeatable effect."
From a marketing standpoint, I am in awe of modern Magic design. I could see plenty of new cards geared towards people who don't play the "regular" game - they have a wacky multiplayer deck, or a super-powerful Vintage deck worth more than a used car, or a casual theme deck that could really use another couple ways to do X basic effect slightly differently. That makes the player base happy, it makes sales go up, and it lets you feel some community with subgroups of people you don't normally talk to. But what it doesn't do is help the budget-conscious like me. I'll see a card, think "This is a great idea, I bet it would be loads of fun", and realize it too requires me to drop $150 on new lands. Charming... not.
4. Rock Band Queen Track Pack
is a hit all around. There is a saturation point for music games - I haven't even finished Guitar Hero Van Halen - so the best way to extract value is to stir the musician within me. And Freddie Mercury is such an incredible singer, and he's singing such interesting songs, that you can't help but thrill when you get to recreate it in Ben's basement with a plastic guitar. |
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| A love story in a game |
[Nov. 2nd, 2009|10:23 am] |
is a rare thing to find. A big part of the reason that one keeps playing Prince of Persia is for the romance; a cute interior monologue from our hero can keep me going through a 20-minute sequence of tricky jumps. Although I hear it might be present in Brütal Legend - which is, frankly, the only reason I've heard to buy the game. (Unlike most game bloggers, I have little love for Tim Schafer except as a harbinger of non-nerdy video games; I couldn't finish Psychonauts.)
Prince of Persia 4 has a romantic theme, and the ending of the game only makes sense if you care about the relationship between the Prince and his princess, but the game design ruins it:- The non-linear design doesn't extend to the story. The game tells you to choose chapters 1-4 in any order, but reading chapters in 1432 order as though they were chronological makes a hash out of even the best story.
- The story is confused with the hint system. It makes sense for a hint button to be optional, to be manually triggered several times by the player so you don't have to hear extra hints if you don't want to, and to make you stop whatever you're doing so you don't just constantly whack the hint button for the whole game. But to put Important Dialogue on that button, now that's just mean. By the end of the game, I had pressed a button for every one of the hundreds of dialogue lines, and I was sick of watching that same, boring "I'm Talking" animation. Two accomplished acrobats shouldn't have THAT much trouble talking to each other that they can't carry on a conversation while the game is progressing - it worked well in previous games!
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| When Tutorials Go Bad: Sands of Time |
[Oct. 28th, 2009|11:28 am] |
Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time is a widely recognized modern video game classic. It conveys the feeling of being in a fairy tale, through soft lighting and a dreamlike plot and well-written characters and good animations. It's also lots of fun to play, with a solid set of ways to navigate your environment that are pretty much the direct ancestor of modern parkour games like Assassin's Creed and Mirror's Edge, plus a very forgiving "rewind" mechanic that allows you to learn slowly without removing challenge entirely.
Because it's such a wonderful and eye-catching game, a lot of people who aren't veteran gamers end up playing it. But they never get to experience the most wonderful bits - stopping time, kissing the heroine, sliding down a palm tree, unlocking the secrets of the Library, listening to the splash of distant water to navigate a maze - because they die, over and over, about 20% through the game, and then quit. If you didn't grow up with an entertainment medium abusing you like this, the only way you'll ever pass the first boss battle is looking it up on YouTube.
This is a combined failure of pacing, level design, and tutorials:
( Pacing )
( Level Design )
( Tutorials ) |
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| Shamus Young and Going Darker |
[Oct. 27th, 2009|03:05 pm] |
Shamus Young has a well-written, coherent geeky blog despite holding down a regular day job, which alone makes him a rarity. He also publishes a weekly column for The Escapist, the premier source of serious video game discussion. A quick browse through the archives reveals he's a quite competent programmer, able to go from zero to procedural city skyline with traffic in the streets in 40 hours. But that's not why these sites have fans; rather, the meat of their audience tune in for the nerdy jokes. Much like sports commentary, even the mildest of riffs on video games is viewed as hilarious, incisive and penetrating. Check out his most recent comic, which is simultaneously about David Letterman, two different video games, and game-related sexual anxiety caused by having to choose your avatar's gender all the time - but it's still not particularly funny.
In fact, the best part of the comic strip by far is the Twitter-length text commentary in the sidebar:
The plot of Mass Effect 2 looks a lot darker than the original. Hopefully they are going for Empire Strikes Back darker and not Warrior Within darker. Ugh.
This one little riff is easily in the 90th percentile of uses of video game jargon, if not higher. Let me unpack it a little for you.
Modern video games are usually pitched as trilogies. Following the ancient three-act rule, this means Act 2 is the depressing one; following the reality of 2-3 year development cycles, this means each successive act must offer a dozen new features and whiz-bang graphic effects to be noticed, while keeping everything from the previous ones. As a result, game sequels like Mass Effect 2 are almost always Dark, Gritty and War-Torn. (Even Nintendo is not immune.) If it isn't, fans are going to wonder where all the special effects went.
There is, however, a long and humiliating nerd culture tradition of going way too dark. (Think '90s comics.) The most famous example is Warrior Within, the universally reviled sequel to the lighthearted, softly lit romance/adventure Prince of Persia. The makeover eliminated everything likeable about the original and replaced it with a painfully self-aware, focus-group-tested, black-and-red world of generic rage and thrash rock. Act 3 had to give the character multiple personality disorder and the plot still didn't make sense. The game comes out looking like a teenager desperately wishing he knew why Frank Miller's comics featured so many prostitutes and gunfights.
By contrast, Empire Strikes Back is the perfect example of how to go darker and make your series even better. Sure, our heroes go through some really rough spots, and the cliffhanger ending leaves you wanting more. But they keep the best parts of Star Wars intact: the verbal banter, the PG romance, the dingy but futuristic technology, the road trip elements, the hero's journey elements. And so the result is a mature film rather than an immature one.
So when Shamus says he hopes that A is more like B than C, he's saying that he knows the history of sequels, of space opera, of games mistaking "thrash rock" for "edgy". But he's not passing judgment on the form, because the good example is ALSO a nerd icon - he's genuinely distinguishing quality from the lack thereof. And that's why he's a good writer. |
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| Pope Benedict Offers Anglican Rite |
[Oct. 26th, 2009|05:06 pm] |
Many columnists have gotten the Pope's recent offer of wholesale conversion to conservative Anglicans wrong. Oddly enough, the New York Times gets it right: Benedict is worried about his attendance numbers, especially in the Church's traditional home base of Europe, not about encouraging the homophobes and misogynists among Anglicans to join him.
Frankly, this makes sense from a business perspective. Theologically conservative Anglicans - some in America, but mostly in Africa - are actually much closer to Catholics than they are to the Archbishop of Canterbury and openly gay bishops, on the spectrum of Christian thought. So the main sticking point is all those Catholic rituals and priestly celibacy, both of which the Pope is conveniently willing to waive.
One online commenter drew an analogy between Benedict and Karl Rove: pursuing a recruitment strategy that drives the group increasingly out into the margins of irrelevancy. The uncomfortable truth is that it's the liberal, "mainline" parts of Christianity that are leaking believers like a sieve, and the conservative, "evangelical" or "Pentecostal" parts that are growing. (Atheists are growing even faster these days, although much of that I think is increasing willingness to admit what was probably always a sizable minority of Americans.) This is the exact opposite of what's happening to the Republicans, whose party is shrinking and becoming disliked even as the proportion of conservatives is growing. |
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| Quick Bites, part 2 |
[Oct. 22nd, 2009|03:46 pm] |
This is quite possibly the last time I will ever use an animated gif as a Livejournal icon, or an icon anywhere else for that matter. And yes, it dates from the '90s when this kind of technology was cutting edge, and no, I didn't make it.
Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog - Just picked this up on DVD. Very funny, worth the $10 I paid just for the content, even without the additional "civic duty" consideration of encouraging small, cheap episodic content.
Relient K - Forget and Not Slow Down - Their new album is, as always, greater than the sum of its parts: as the catchy hooks and incredible lyrics fade, the cohesion and musicianship grows. Topically, the latest volume of the Matt Thiessen Saga is a post-breakup paean (although the one oldschool "she's so pretty" song is adorable), sad and wistful rather than angry, and capable of really getting under your skin. I think kissingdaylight would really like it. |
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| Super specific terminology |
[Oct. 20th, 2009|05:23 pm] |
I recently ran across the term "cissexual" (see also "cisgender", "cissexism", etc.). Apparently it's the opposite of a transsexual: i.e. somebody who accepts the gender they are born with. There seem to be two reasons why people use this word to describe 99.7% of the population:
First, the word was invented and is still mostly used by trans people, and so it doesn't carry any baggage of The Man, which assumes a linguistic theory that I totally disagree with. Check out the swiftly changing public attitude towards "gay" or "nerd" for how a word can totally change meaning and ownership within years. And on the other end, you don't want your shiny new word to end up like "womyn", on the dustbin of history, abandoned by feminists themselves.
Second, it allows you to avoid the word "normal", because that would be a Value Judgment which is Bad. The trouble is, transsexuals actually are abnormal, in the common sense of "not conforming to the norm", by definition. They're also statistically unusual, to say the least. Anemia is four times as common, and substantially easier to deal with in modern society, and also a bit of an evolutionary handicap, but nobody would hesitate to call it an abnormal condition. (I'm not saying trans people can't be otherwise normal, of course!) |
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| Link Roundup |
[Oct. 15th, 2009|03:31 pm] |
First, a couple good blogs:
Slacktivist is a leftist Christian whose favorite activity is raining down fire and brimstone on the Christian Right. Every week he meticulously catalogues the awfulness of the Left Behind books, a thoroughly entertaining read.
Megan McArdle is a libertarian blogger who is right a depressingly large percentage of the time. Specifically, the way in which real health care reform will never make it through Congress, because each player in the game has an incentive to increase spending and reduce the taxes to pay for it.
Cruise Elroy analyzes video game music as if it were Beethoven. Ever wondered why the theme from Sonic the Hedgehog stays in your brain? He's got the answer. And you can trust him, because he works at Harmonix, pretty much the only game company staffed by musicians. (Guitar Hero is a video game first; Rock Band is music appreciation first and a game second.)
Second, some fun individual posts:
Emily Short, famous author of text adventures / "interactive fiction", goes through the process of design. This is going inside the gaming sausage factory, written by someone who is far more articulate than most creative types.
Have you ever tried to sell a diamond? asks this classic article from The Atlantic, explaining in a very straightforward way how a monopoly and a concerted ad campaign can lead to massive profits at the expense of the gullible. What "Diamonds are forever" really means is, "Diamonds have no resale value because they rotate styles like the fashion industry, so you'd better keep them forever."
The Language of the Game over at The Escapist gives voice to the odd phenomenon where gamers explain life in terms of video games. I don't think the article really does it justice; there are 2 separate factors at work here:- Nerds always relate real life to their shared subculture, just like music dorks always relate real life to song lyrics.
- Games are fundamentally an area where you can discover a new set of rules and then explore the possibilities they allow. And what do you call trying to discover the rule system behind real life? Science. What do you call trying to discover the rule system behind dating? We don't have a word for that, so we use the existing rule subset we know - games.
- The longer you spend with any specialized activity, the more you will start thinking about it in other situations. How many jocks use sports analogies for everything? How many wage slaves are constantly comparing real life to their boring actuarial job over dinner? This is a common feature of the human condition.
- Fighting games in particular - Marvel vs Capcom 2 is a great example - have a different following than other games. They're more macho and competitive, more racially diverse both inside and outside the game, and they are surrounded by a haze of meta-analysis. This maps naturally onto the teenage male's awkward struggles to climb socially, romantically, and educationally to the top. The deep-rooted ignorance of the larger system, the frantic explosion of kinetic energy and the emotional / musical rush from incremental goals, the feeling of fighting the system itself just to see the results that are so easy for the older boys - these are common to high school crushes and beat-em-ups alike.
The Midrange Archetype is a very long and boring article where Magic designer Ken Nagle tries to define a historically nebulous concept in card game theory. The real payoff is about 75% of the way down, where he busts out a few graphs that manage to distill 15 years of knowledge about Magic into a very elegant description. This is the kind of analysis that thrills me, that suddenly pops into my head on my commute to work. Is this really an accurate representation of the relationship between effectiveness and time in the Platonic ideal of a card game? I'll wonder. (Specifically, a game in which your purchasing power and your pool of available cards increase at a constant rate - as opposed to say Star Wars where the use of one retards the other, or Lord of the Rings where they are tied to the opponent's actions).
And finally, a particularly libertarian quote from venerable humor columnist Dave Barry:
See, when the government spends money, it creates jobs; whereas when the money is left in the hands of taxpayers, God only knows what they do with it. Bake it into pies, probably. Anything to avoid creating jobs. |
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| This post is only 1/2 lame. |
[Oct. 15th, 2009|10:57 am] |
Turns out that lately I have been a lot more right than I thought I would be, and it's really unnerving.
After talking to some current and aspiring law students, I happened upon a couple LSAT questions and they looked fun. So I picked up a random study guide and promptly rocked the diagnostic test. I had been operating under the assumption that law school was something that only the best students and the hardest studiers could get into, like med school or MFA programs. Instead, it turns out they're really interested in a test that only judges the same logical reasoning nonsense that I was doing for fun ten years ago. (Emily, of course, expected me to do even BETTER.) It's nice to have an actual way to go back to school, but I'm not even sure I want to.
On the flip side, it turns out that the deck of cheap Magic cards I recently built, paid by cashing in my winnings from the prerelease, suspiciously resembles the deck that got 5 out of the top 8 slots at the recent tournament. Except, you know, replacing the $0.25 snake with a $25 lightning bolt. Now I know why the people at the casual table were so mad! I feel rather guilty, like the bad guys in plucky-kids-at-summer-camp movies. |
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| Superhero Similarities, Part 2: Phoenix |
[Oct. 14th, 2009|04:49 pm] |
Last post, we established that Buffy the Vampire Slayer is part of the superhero genre, the difference being mainly that Buffy has much better fashion sense than Superman. Buffy has other genres too, like soap opera and horror, but that's beside the point. Specifically, Buffy is very similar to X-Men, along both plot and character axes. (The third major axis, the setting, is opposite: Buffy is A Stranger Comes To Town while X-Men is Leaving Town.)
There will be some spoilers for Buffy in the rest of this article, in the highly unlikely event that anyone reading it cares. And no, you can't spoil X-Men, in the same way you can't spoil The Empire Strikes Back.
Now, I'm not trying to make any value judgments on which approach works better than the other, or saying that Joss Whedon is stealing plot points from X-Men comics. (They're written at such a breakneck pace that it's difficult to find superhero things they DIDN'T do, and besides, if you're going to steal you should steal from the best.) So here's what I think of the Best Friend.
( Best friends who are sometimes-evil witches )
( Dark Phoenix and Dark Willow ) |
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| Health care reform: Tough choices |
[Oct. 13th, 2009|11:56 am] |
America will face unsustainable budget deficits in the years to come if health care continues to grow in cost as it currently is. Other countries don't have this problem so much because they only spend half as much as we do, yet their results are much the same. Is this because we're funding the rest of the world's new treatments and drugs? Probably not. Anyone can see the system is riddled with inefficiencies, distorted markets and perverse incentives. So the problem is not insoluble, just politically unpalatable.
The Brookings Institution, a famous liberal think tank, suggests enacting a new value-added tax to pay for health care, as a way of decoupling the deficit problem from the health care problem. This is a good fix for this exact problem - but it causes more problems than it solves, by allowing the health care sector to continue expanding at breakneck speeds, secure in the knowledge that Americans will automatically have to pay for whatever they bill. This is a recipe for choking the rest of the economy to pay for health care.
The Cato Institute, a famous conservative think tank, suggests destroying the entire system and starting from scratch. Setting aside the political infeasibility of this plan, it would probably result in lower payments eventually. However, it won't really control costs, either, because it doesn't give consumers any bargaining power. Medicare is problematic but its size allows it to demand lower payments for necessary services, something which 50 million seniors suddenly forced to choose between a bunch of plans that probably don't really cover anything are not going to have.
Neither of these options is addressing the core problem: We pay the health care sector too much, and we pay them in a way that encourages inefficiency. It's very likely that everyone in the entire industry will have to take a pay cut: doctors, hospitals, insurance companies, med schools, malpractice lawyers, equipment manufacturers, drug companies.
I've gone over some quick but politically infeasible fixes before (scrapping fee-for-service, scrapping employer health benefit tax breaks, allowing interstate insurance competition, scrapping minimum-required-insurance laws, capping malpractice damages) but the more I think about the whole thing, the more I dislike Medicare itself. Why not just replace the program with a larger version of Medicaid that gradually chips in for people with demonstrated need? Grandma still wouldn't die because she couldn't afford her drugs (that would be covered under Medicaid), but I don't feel we have a moral obligation as a country to pay for seniors' medical care any more than we have an obligation to pay for my medical care, or my food or my housing (both of which are also basic human needs).
Or if you think we DO have an obligation to provide all Americans with health care, we should just require everyone to sign up for Medicare, and replace the entire private system with a single, enormous pool that can "control" costs by refusing to pay them. Socialist? Sure. Effective? As seen in Europe, sure. |
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| Buffy and the X-Men (Setup post) |
[Oct. 12th, 2009|05:00 pm] |
Here's the timeline:
- 1980: Joss Whedon, age 15, is introduced to Kitty Pryde, age 13 1/2, in the X-Men comic books. Kitty adds normal teenage drama to her superhero duties, developing a spunky unorthodox style.
- 1985: Kitty matures into a confident young woman and (of course!) skilled martial artist in the miniseries Kitty Pryde & Wolverine.
- 1992: Joss Whedon uses Kitty Pryde as an inspiration for his new movie Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Buffy juggles new-found super powers and high school drama.
- 1997: Buffy becomes a TV series. The heroine, age 16, leads a club of teenage outcasts with super powers who bear an uncanny similarity to the X-Men.
- 2000: Saturday morning cartoon series X-Men: Evolution writers, inspired by Buffy, make Kitty Pryde the heroine of their new series of high school outcasts with super powers.
- 2002: Marvel's "Essential X-Men" budget books reprint the original comics. (This is my introduction to them.)
- 2004: Joss Whedon makes Kitty Pryde the heroine of his comic book series Astonishing X-Men, with the same hip student-advisor job and early-twenties age Buffy had in 2002.
On the one hand, I'm clearly not seeing parallels where none exist; both IPs have inspired each other, and frankly neither one invented the "Nancy Drew with super powers" character archetype anyway. On the other hand, this very closeness makes me suspicious of drawing out any larger conclusions. Do all super hero story arcs eventually exhibit the same tired plot gimmicks, the same infatuation with relative power levels, the same unstable ratio of superhuman to human characters, etc? Or is it just that Joss Whedon and I share the same formative nerd culture, which is highly rare among Buffy viewers who generally didn't have access to the X-Men storyline?
Further evidence for my sanity: a long discussion of whether Buffy is actually a superhero, remarking that the show's structure is similar to Scooby-Doo and early Spider-Man as well as X-Men. At one point, Joss Whedon remarks with surprise, "I didn't realize I'd turned all her friends into superheroes" - which makes me very happy that I could be on to something with the whole inevitable thing. |
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| The Nobel Potential for Peace Prize |
[Oct. 9th, 2009|09:40 am] |
Check out the international reactions from Reuters on Obama's winning the Nobel Peace Prize today. Some choice tidbits:
Zimbabwean Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai, who had been tipped as a favorite for the prize: Obama was a deserving candidate and an "extraordinary example."
Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid: "The Nobel prize for peace? Obama should have won the Nobel Prize for escalating violence and killing civilians."
Nobel Committee Chairman Thorbjoern Jagland: "We hope this can contribute a little bit to enhance what he is trying to do."
On first glance, it seems pretty harmless that Obama has the Nobel Peace Prize, since the committee usually awards it in advance of any significant achievements (see: Al Gore, last year). Sure, Obama ain't exactly Woodrow Wilson, but his stance on disarmament is encouraging.
I just can't read that quote from Tsvangirai without thinking: Now THIS is a man who deserves it. We're talking about a guy who single-handedly prevented civil war: he kept his opposition party together and joined a power-sharing government with the corrupt dictator who stole the election from him. The legitimacy he gave the government that tried to assassinate him by taking the Prime Minister post has meant international aid dollars that keep his country alive, despite 80% unemployment and an economy so bad that Z$1,000,000,000,000 won't buy a tank of gas.
But instead, the Nobel Committee wants to send a political message about how nice it is that America is paying attention to Europe now. Thanks, guys! |
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| Entertainment Roundup |
[Oct. 7th, 2009|05:15 pm] |
Zombieland: Enjoyable, although overly gory and repetitive. This is a road trip movie with zombies, much like Shaun of the Dead was a romantic comedy with zombies. Like all modern zombie films, it taps into the Glenn Beck zeitgeist to become the perfect redneck movie: Someday, the liberals will thank us for our guns and pickups. dmarney was insightful here: as a movie that is like a video game, but not actually derived from video games, it can successfully pander to the same market. (Much like a video game, it has endless waves of bad guys, a total tone and location shift halfway through, superposition of relevant text, a hardware fixation, etc.)
Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Season 6: I watched this in a very disjointed and out-of-order fashion thanks to errors on the DVDs (they would skip and be corrupted on the Xbox or Matt's Mac, but not with Windows Media Player), so I'm not really qualified to do my usual intuitive comment on season-long arcs. I also saw the special feature interview with Joss Whedon and company, filmed just after the end of Season 6, though, so I have a little more idea of what went on. As a whole, this season failed to make me care. The major theme was Our Heroes Make Mistakes, or as the ad copy put it "Life is the Big Bad" (Big Bad itself being one of Buffy's worst neologisms). This is a fine theme on paper, and in fact would have made an excellent novel, as much of the season was consumed with the psychological drama of various characters' inner lives and their struggles with the messes they themselves created. On TV, though, you just get a lot of angry sex, followed by angry tears, followed by angry words and shocked silences, followed by one obligatory action scene per episode to remind us that we are still watching Buffy and not Days of Our Lives.
The failure is largely due to the lack of a compelling villain. Having vanquished a god last season, and moved all the ambivalent comic relief roles (Spike, Anya, Xander, Dawn) into Serious Drama roles, they replaced the villain with bumbling comic relief nerds. They don't put any stress on the cast, who are just forced to go through the motions and end up bickering with each other just as much as the bad guys do. And Joss' plan to have the most mundane of their plans (guns) be the most effective doesn't underscore the theme, it just makes you realize how fragile the Buffy concept really is.
There are some good points: The musical comedy episode. The episode where Riley makes his surprise return. The final showdown reminding me of Season 2 of Rurouni Kenshin. Buffy's fast food job. The character everyone predicted would die, finally dies. Willow and Tara having the series' only mature relationship, despite how much I personally dislike Tara.
Angel, Season 3: It's like Heroes, except it's not actively painful to watch. Major plot developments occur without warning or adequate explanation, everybody takes a couple turns around the "who loves whom" hamster wheel, and some characters are just better written than others. Fortunately, the series has already given me a reason to care about these characters, and one new cast addition (Fred, played by an insanely cute Amy Acker) is so healthy for the series that I can forgive the other (Connor, an unwelcome entrance of the worst kind of X-Men plotline). Although the villains prove rather impotent, the nefariously voiced Holtz is a solid character of the kind that Joss Whedon usually lacks, so that's OK too. However, the inexplicably hurt reaction of our heroes to Wesley's Sudden But Inevitable Betrayal strikes a sour note with me, much like Angel's similar move in Season 2. Yes, he was a lying jerk. Yes, he's sorry. No, he isn't evil. So forgive him already and don't make me wait another 5 episodes for him to brood some more - it's just manufactured drama, not actual drama.
Both these shows reminded me increasingly of kissingdaylight, with whom I'd talked recently on the subject of betrayal, forgiveness, remorse, etc. I am struck by the impression, perhaps false, that I'm discovering someone else's formative text (the single bit of nerd culture from which nerds derive their sense of the world as it should be). This explains a lot, although I disagree with most of it. |
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