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May 31, 2006
Rate your state!
I'm not trying to get out of more substantive posting, but I thought you guys might find this interesting...
Posted by Andrew at 09:31 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
Civilization
no, not the game...
Posted by Andrew at 02:33 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 29, 2006
State of the Art Gaming
This article about gaming really seems to nail it. O’Brien even does enough research (or is a big enough geek) to mention Stardock, who’s Galactic Civilizations 2 is currently on my Hard Drive...
His lament is not about the death of indies per se, but rather the death of innovation. As such, when he misses another 4X title, Sword of the Stars, it is almost forgivable. This game, after all, is a revolutionary execution of a by-now-standard gameplay. Less forgivable is that he misses an entire philosophy which has no outlet in Gamestop.*...
I am referring to games such as this one, which are designed to kill a few minutes on the web. Distribution is simple, the graphics don’t have to be profound, and they can make money simply by selling billboard space on the side of their site. It seems clear to me that this is where the next great idea in game play will come from. That, or the Nintendo Wii, which is the first system in a long time to offer something genuinely new in gaming.
*disclosure: I work for Barnes and Noble, which owns Gamestop. As a result, I get a nice discount at Gamestop...
Posted by Andrew at 11:44 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 27, 2006
Why the Daily Show is the only news program I watch.
It’s the only real news program on TV...
Py Korry comments on my previous post about the media. He basically says that serious analysis is a ratings killer; people’d rather be watching American Idol. He then points out the success of the Daily Show (and its spin-off Colbert Report) as an example of how “fake” news manages to be both interesting and informative...
For decades, Americans have been told that politics is the enemy, that it holds no meaning in your life. To the extent that Americans believe no one could have stopped 9/11 or kept New Orleans on the map, Americans don’t care about politics. Why should we? If the game is both opaque and dull—and meaningless—you can hardly expect people to stand up and say “that’s not cricket” when a politician does something non-scandalously evil...
The state of our national infrastructure is of the utmost urgency. We have a frantic need to address our finances. Healthcare is a matter of life and death. Since Americans don’t actually believe that these things can be addressed by government, Americans don’t tune in. This is the great strength of the Daily Show—Jon Stewart takes these issues seriously. It is clear that he feels the process is important. The gods granted him the gift of comedy, and so he uses that as his tool—a scalpel to peal away the bullshit and show us what is going on...
To a large extent, the Daily Show is the least fake news program on TV. The strength of the show isn’t Stewart’s humor—the medium isn’t the message. No one else is treating the American public as adults capable of understanding their government. Everyone else treats Washington DC as a giant High School where popularity is more important than grades...
Posted by Andrew at 11:29 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
In any language
no means no!
Posted by Andrew at 02:02 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 26, 2006
Policy Scholicy
I Drew This: How to select someone for an important job.
Posted by Andrew at 11:32 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 25, 2006
The Main Stream Media
I have long found it hard to credit that the “Main Stream Media” (MSM) is biased towards lefties. This is the media, after all, which gleefully repeated lie after lie after lie about Al Gore during the 2000 Presidential race. It is the same Media which hounded Clinton and couldn’t get the most basic facts of his healthcare proposal strait (polls showed that the public’s knowledge about the program actually declined after months of debate on the subject!)...
And so I point out this article on what the “MSM” is all about. The simple answer is that our political media has all the intellectual rigor and self-honesty as their colleagues covering the Oscars. The media is catty and thinks of that cattiness as real, honest-to-the-0gods investigative reporting. Some day, perhaps, we will see a return to political coverage that emphasizes challenges over chat, actions over asininities; the quality of a Senator’s proposal over the quantity of a Senator’s matrimony. Until that day comes, speaking of a monolithically Marxist media is absurd...
Posted by Andrew at 12:34 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Thank the gods we’re not at war!
'Don't Ask, Don't Tell' Discharges Increase 11% - Los Angeles Times
Or else we couldn’t cleanse our military of those icky icky gays. What’s that you say? We are at war? And Gays are just people? Someone ought to tell the military/Bush administration/Congress all this!
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May 24, 2006
Brains!
Posted by Andrew at 10:40 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Whee!
You know that "I just finished a great book" feeling? Well, I love that feeling. The book is In the Merde for LoveIt's non-fiction about an English guy who goes to France to open an English tea room. and I recommend it in the strongest terms.
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May 23, 2006
An overview of the 2006 midterms (House).
I’ve seen a couple polls of the 2006 race, and the Democrats seem to have an edge here. For the first time in about a decade, their favorable rating is higher than the Republicans—and people are pissed at the Republican Party. Yet national polls are not all that important when analyzing a congressional election. With no Presidential candidate to act as a party standard bearer, and more importantly with no presidential coattails to ride on, each candidate must stand on their own merit. Each race must be looked at as it’s own creature...
Yet there are trends; in America (from about 1950 onward) incumbents have something like a 99+% reelection rate. Part of the reason (a large part) is that incumbents who feel they will probably lose tend to retire rather than invest in a doomed campaign. Thus the best indication that a seat up for changing partisan hands is it’s vacancy. Thus, I will develop some formulas with that in mind...
The first formula I will give is for seats with an incumbent running. We expect 1% of all these seats to change hands. I will calculate these separately—as if each Republican and each Democrat had an equal chance of winning or losing their seat. The formula is:
(Number of incumbent Republicans running)*01
(Number of incumbent Democrats running)*01
I also think that Democrats will gain roughly 75-80(*)% of all open seats. Therefore our formula shall be:
(open seats)*.75
And now we look at the makeup of Congress. Currently the House is split 231 Republicans and 202 Democrats (1 of those is an independent who votes Democratic) with a pair of vacancies. There are 30 seats in 2006 in which no incumbent will be running(**). Of these, 8 were held by Democrats, and 22 by Republicans. Therefore we can plug in our numbers:
(231-22)*.01=2.09
(201-8)*.01=1.93
So we expect 4 incumbents to lose their job, and they ought to be evenly split between the parties.
Which brings up the non-incumbent seats. Democrats will win between 22 (rounding down) and 24 seats.
Under the scenario with the smallest Democratic gains, this would leave the House with Republicans in charge: 215 (D) vs. 220 (R). Under assumptions with the largest gains, Republicans are still charge, but will have only a 3 person majority. This result seems to be inline with current speculation. The message to Democrats is obvious: don’t get your hopes up...
____
(*) there’s nothing particularly super scientific about these numbers. But they feel about right to me. You may feel differently...
(**)the two vacancies will have an incumbent with less than a year on the job
NB: Open Seat numbers from This Wikipedia article
Posted by Andrew at 09:20 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
A story I can relate to:
Rate Your Students: Someone Sends in Some Open Letters
My final quarter was... bad. Breakup, move, new roommates, extreme poverty, etc. My papers were late; I almost didn’t graduate. About the only thing I am proud of during that quarter was that I never went to a teacher and gave one of the excuses listed in the linked post. I knew that it was me screwing up, and that it was my job to fix it. I did go to my professors and ask how I could fix it—when I was told that I needed to work harder on the remaining work I didn’t complain...
When push comes to shove, all I had left was my integrity, this turned out to be enough...
Posted by Andrew at 03:17 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 22, 2006
Why movies suck
So: since graduation, I’ve been doing a lot of job searching. But between times, I’ve been doing a lot of reading, and working, and playing of the video games. I haven’t seen a single movie the theatre this whole time...
This is something that I’ve been thinking of quite a bit since Brokeback Mountain came around. I realized that I had no desire—none at all—to see a love story in cinematic form. And yet I am a sucker for romance...
The thing is, no movie can show a romance that works as well as the Monica/Chandler relationship on Friends. There is no way that I could ever feel about the movie cowboys the way I felt about Willow and Tara on Buffy. The thing is, relationships take time to evolve and mature. A single sitcom season has something like 4 times the amount of airtime as a 2hr movie...
And the situation is worse when it comes to Video Games—at least the good ones. To use a much over-used example, when Aeris died in Final Fantasy VII, it made stone weep. The only movie character whose death would make me feel even close to that emotion would be Serenity’s Wash—who I care about from his TV role...
To take a more congruent example: When Lucas wanted to show us the devastation wrought by an army of Clones in his 2nd episode of Star Wars, he had to balance that with the need to tell us the real story he was telling about the fall of Anakin Skywalker. We barely know about how the soldiers in that war behaved, thought, felt, lived and died. By contrast, when Star Trek told a story about killer clones, they gave us the Jem’Haddar, and were able to take several hours and devote them to nothing else. We know the Jem’Haddar are people in a way we just can’t about the Clone Troopers. This is not the fault of Lucas; he had to serve the cruel mistress Brevity...
When faced with other, newer forms of media, movies just fall short. Perhaps back in the bad old days of episodic television, a movie’s longer length would allow for fuller, deeper characters and plot. Today that is no longer the case. There is simply no way that a 2hr self-contained short can be as rich as a 22hr season of television—or a 80-90hr game. So pass me the popcorn—and the controller...
Posted by Andrew at 06:51 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 21, 2006
building a better internet
Ezra Klein: Net Neutrality and Utopia
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A comedy 3,000 years in the making...
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May 19, 2006
NON NON NON NON!
The Advertiser: It's official - English language of the U.S. [20may06]
I’m too tired and annoyed for reasoned debate right now. But gods help us! Everyone learns English when they get here. Some just don’t learn it as quickly or as well as others.
Posted by Andrew at 08:51 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 18, 2006
Even nasa likes my cat
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May 10, 2006
This is a great title...
Amazon.com: You Don't Steal from God in Texas: Books: Stef Donev
And for US$.49, you could find out if it’s a great story. The author’s bona fides seem impressive enough:
As a reporter for the Associated Press, in Detroit, as well as the Toronto Star and other news organizations in the U.S. and Canada, Stef Donev covered three county fairs and a hog show, so he does not impress easily. He also still has all of his fingers even though he has shaken hands with more presidents, prime ministers, premiers, and other politicians than he can count. He's heard a president burp, watched a U.S. senator spill scotch on his socks, and a helped a Canadian cabinet minister get a cab back to his hotel from the Toronto Press Club. He writes fiction and non-fiction, and often knows the difference. [...]
And since I’ve met the man a few times, I can say with certainly that many of the things on this list are even true...
Posted by Andrew at 10:25 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 09, 2006
An Explanation:
In a universe of entropy, and with a biology that cannot photosynthesize, but must put forth exertion in order to meet basic physiological needs, and a society organized so as to use money as a device store labor-- I need a new job...
It isn’t, you understand, that I don’t have a job. Nothing has changed at my book gig. What’s changed is where I am. I have a degree so new that the governor hasn’t signed it yet, but it’s time to make that piece of paper work for me as hard as I worked for it. And Craigslist doesn’t seem to be listing for "progressive lobbyists"...
So if you stare forlornly at your RSS feed, wondering where, oh wear the punning pundit has gone, rest assured: you’re not hearing from me here because I am struggling to be heard where I will do more good...
Posted by Andrew at 11:48 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 05, 2006
Well, I got into this blogging thing to argue with John...
Ok, so some rich guy gets addicted to rich-guy drugs and starts doing the things junkies do to get his next fix. So when he gets busted, we treat him with gentleness and compassion. After all, he’s in pain. Its understandable where he’s coming from...
So yes, Rush is being treated like I would expect anyone in his position to be treated. And of course, fact that one prosecutor is trying to treat a famous and rich drug user like he would treat a poor and infamous drug user is getting republicans up in arms. Don’t they know rich white men deserve better?
Oh, and my personal favorite bit:
Leftists can't debate Rush on a level of facts and logic and principle, so instead we get a political prosecution, and lots of sneers and innuendo.
This is utterly true: the next time Rush uses facts and logic while distaining sneers and innuendo will be the first...
Posted by Andrew at 10:25 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Quick hit
A rising tide that lifts only yachts - Los Angeles Times
I swear normal blogging will begin soon. But for now:
the median household was no more likely to move up the economic ladder during the 2003-04 expansion than it was during the 1990-91 recession. Think about that for a second — the average household's income was just as likely to increase during the last severe recession as the latest expansion. For most, the good times now are little better than the bad.
As I’ve been saying for a while, if we really want to see the economy start to zoom, we’ll simply raise the minimum wage to around US$8.50/hr. A lot of people who currently can scarcely afford rent could start affording DVDs, new shoes, books, and all sorts of consumer goods they currently cannot. That ought to be enough to get the whole economy humming again...
Posted by Andrew at 10:06 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack