Rogue Jesusfish

Today, I'm angry at college.

This has bothered me for a while now:  Why is it an accepted practice to pay people absurd amounts of money, so that they can tell you to go buy a (ridiculously expensive) book, take it home, read it, and come back to have them grade you on it?
fuck college.

To be clear: I’m not trying to argue the importance of homework.  What really pisses me off is making me buy a book, making me read it, and then never discussing the subject matter in class.
It’s a waste of time, money, and obviously, patience. 

I don’t, for the life of me, understand how this practice came to be excepted, or why is hasn’t been violently beaten down yet.  If you want me to read a book, you talk about it during your goddamned class time.  What? you don’t have time to do that? fine.  Neither do I. I understand that class time is valuable, but maybe like in real life, you have to learn to manage your time….

the biggest arguement for this practice that I’ve heard is “that’s just the way college works”, which pisses me off even more.  “That’s just the way it is, some things will never change.” Seriously?  We’ve never changed anything for the better or worse, ever? that’s the fucking excuse?  Guess I’ll just sit here in my damp, dark, hovel.  and maybe later, I’ll go beat one of my slaves until I feel better.  Perhaps while my wife stands barefoot in the kitchen, pregnant and not voting….

Wot I'm Reading 9/04/09

These unread and unwatched tabs keep piling up in Firefox windows of every single computer I own. (All two of them).

Let’s clear them now, then, shall we?

First of all, If you’re a fan of Nathan Fillion, you probably already know about Castle.  It’s a TV show in which Fillion plays Richard Castle, a famous mystery writer from New York, who, through the events of the first episode, hooks up with the local Police Department to do research for his next book.  Co-starring is Stana Katic, as Police detective Kate Becket.  The show focuses on the gruesome murders that Castle helps her to solve, and plays somewhat like a mystery novel itself, with each episode culminating (so far) in the capture of the criminal scum whodunnit.  Anyway, If you’ve watched the commercials, it probably looks like it is zero amount of good, but believe me, it’s worth it. recently, 2 promos for the premiere of season 2 popped up on the internet, and they look promising.

The other 3 parts in the series by Jim Rossignol (who has a last name out of some sort awesome vampire story,) on his five years with EVE Online have been released to the teeming masses of Rock, Paper, Shotgun readers, and they are just as compelling as the first one I mentioned.

Speaking of Jim, after listening to him banter about on a couple of the more recent RPS podcasts, I came across this article on/review of/recomendation for his book, This Gaming Life, which I clearly need to go buy.

Some Argentinian news service got trolled recently, when someone sent them a report about grog, and the horrible contents mixed within it.  Kotaku has the video, and it’s pretty funny.

Riff, one of the writers for Kingdom of Loathing, and all of the writers of his blog, Minimumsafedistance.org, recently posted a (brilliant) alternative to calling people ‘fags’.  go read it, and adopt it, and spread the newly-phrased hatred.

Shadow Complex: as complex or as simple as you need it to be

Shadow Complex is a game that is pretty awesome, I’m told.  I don’t know much more about it than that it is based on the metroidvania style of exploration-based gameplay. Which does sound awesome.  Oh, and that it was based on the novel Empire, by Orson Scott Card, which could be awesome.  I haven’t read anything by him other than his Enderverse books, 2 of them being my favorite books of all time, ever.

The problem with this, is that while he is a fantastic writer of beautiful words and novels, OSC is also an enormous douche in real life.  It would seem that all the time he doesn’t spend writing wonderful books is spent telling people how much of a menace gay people are, and how earth-shatteringly bad an idea it is for them to get married to each other.  For this reason, there is a movement to, among other things, boycott the game. Gamasutra has a write-up and editorial on the whole mess, which, as far as I’m concerned, gets it mostly right.

The big thing that he says that eats at me is that we can’t judge games like we used to when we were children, which is just entirely false.  People can (and do) play games for  every reason under the sun.  Just because I play, say, Bioshock because I think that the storyline is ethically and morally interesting, doesn’t mean I can’t play, say, Assassin’s Creed because I just enjoy watching people climb shit.  It’s the same story with movies:  I love V for Vendetta because of the political warning and the ties to 1984, but I enjoyed the (first) Transformers Live-Action Movie because it was a bunch of shape-changing robots fighting the crap out of each other.  It’s the same with books, and any and every other medium of art that exists:  You enjoy this things for whatever reason you want, be it simple or complex, political, or… (what’s the opposite of political?) reasonable?

By extension, Even if I disagree with everything the author stands for, I’m not going to not read his books, or play his games, or whatever, unless what I’m reading and playing are designed to push forward his plan for whatever it is I’m in disagreement with.  Ender’s shadow has exactly zero to do with gay rights, and I’d be willing to bet that Shadow Complex matches that amount.

Christian Nutt ends his his article with the question “Are we ‘just gamers’ or are we adults?”  And I believe the clear answer is that we whatever we want to be, whenever we want to be it.  In the end, boycotting Shadow Complex isn’t going to help anyone, or, I suppose, more importantly, hurt anyone.  You’ll just have missed out on what could potentially be a very good game.  There’s no reason to restrain potential enjoyment in order to make a political statement that has nothing to do with said enojoyment.  That said, there’s also no reason not to go, say, protest OSC’s papers and speeches that actually have anything at all to do with homosexuality.  Or don’t.  That’s the beauty of it.  You have a choice.

Wot I'm Reading: 9/1/09

I just realized that I have three different windows of Firefox open, each with multiple tabs.  here’s a look at some of the interesting stuff the internet has spewed at me recently:

This popped up on the Bitmob Mobfeed recently, and is full of some really good ideas, (eliminate grinding, insure actual storytelling) and some that I consider to be less good.  (screw voice acting, everything needs a clan button)  In general, pretty well-reasoned read, even if I totally disagree with the author’s belief that the ability to buy packs of Starbursts entirely in lemon would ruin everything.

It isn’t my favorite cover of all time, but this cover of Sunday, Bloody Sunday has a really neat music video.

I don’t know if I’ve ever actually played Eve Online, and, while I still don’t want to, I certainly have a bit more respect for the people who play it after reading this first in a series of article by Rock Paper Shotgun’s Jim Rossignol on his time as part of a large group of …Eve-ers? that formed a corporation in-game.  Really interesting bit on the dynamics of his group, and a fascinating look at the community as a whole.

I’m a recent fan of the song Wonderwall (as sung by either Oasis or Cartel- both versions rock. What’s the Story covered the song at V Festival 2009, and while the cover itself isn’t the best thing ever, the crowd chanting along is kind of amusing.

XKCD: Solving nerd’s problems since forever.

Speaking of webcomics, Penny Arcade has been consistantly hilarious recently.  Especially awesome was The Circle of Life.  Also of interest from the text-heavy side of things, is the exchange between Tycho and Gabe concerning the Woman-Hunting Class they discoverd.