Entries Tagged 'brainthought' ↓

After writing this I feel like I can almost complete my secret identity as an angry and rebellious 16-year-old boy. Soon I’ll be able to start my own grunge band and write songs full of meaningful social commentary about how the world is Not A Nice Place, You Know?

———————-

The pulse rises, sickly loud
And pushes blood and bile moreso today
Than any kind of music like it should

It wracks the brain
It bites and screams
And moans and shakes
And hacks and coughs
And spits and growls
Hackles raised.

It sits and sinks
And melts and bleeds.
It sniffs and breathes
And sighs relief
But not release.

A wound heals before your know it,
But the scars fade all too slow.
And on those days when the pulse rises,
It beats and bleats and fills the skin.
The old scars burn. The heat will fade
To a cold throbbing, worming, sobbing,
Sopping up what’s left.

There’s a wry disregard
And a mutter and snort
Sometimes knowing nodding
Sometimes pretending not to know

Then it stands and walks
And smiles and talks
Cool and metered
Brighter, sweeter.

In the faces scattered,
To know which are disguises
Or transient phases:
It doesn’t matter
When the pulse rises.

———————-

Though I’m actually pretty happy with how this turned out. I think I write a decent poem about once every 2-3 years.

As we all know, after saving the Mushroom Kingdom, Mario (played by John Goodman) settled down into the world of extreme racing, and thus the illustrious line of MarioKart games was born.  In 2008, the Wachowski Brothers adapted MarioKart to film, except they added a monkey and called it “Speed Racer”. I’m not kidding. There are even blue sparks.

Also, there are ninjas, and the supporting cast includes Shaft.

I pretty much watched this for the visual effects and was satisfied. Wachowski Brothers are still pretty inventive in that avenue. The rest of the movie was actually pretty good, so long as you accept that it is targeted at a young audience and thus has a lot of corresponding comic relief.

Which is to say, Charlton Heston kicked it, and my friends organized a commemorative viewing of one of his classic lead role films, The Ten Commandments. I’ve been told that, adjusted for inflation, this is the highest grossing film in history.

I think anyone who really likes watching movies should take some of these archaic films like 10C and watch one or two of them a year. They really do not make movies anything like this anymore. I mean, they make them much better. There is a very particular idiom to the acting in old Hollywood films. This is back in the day where complex internal character drama is not as important as the ability to deliver Grand and Sweeping Speeches. So you get a lot of those. These entertain me in much the same was as I am entertained by anime protagonists declaring that JUSTICE WILL ALWAYS PREVAIL. There is also this entire manner of speech the actors have in movies from this era that I think is part southern California accent and part diction training executed by a prim German headmistress with a whipping cane and horn-rimmed glasses. I spent the first hour trying to resolve this against the setting until my brain finally gave in to the cognitive dissonance.

Watching old movies usually makes me respect directors like Hitchcock who helped re-invent cinema, whether I like their movies or not. Watching The Ten Commandments made me respect Mel Brooks.

The fact that this movie is three and a half hours long might normally make it unwatchable for someone of my abbreviated attention span, except for two things:
1. It is so fricking long that I had time to take a brief nap in the middle
and 2. The popcorn-joke potential is huge

The best example of the latter was probably our biggest running callback gag, which basically went like this:

Pharaoh: “Rameses, you have falsely accused your brother.”
(Response): HEY! He can’t do that! It says so in the ten co–oh right.

These were followed distantly by my highly uncouth “hey what happened to my wallet” jokes, and remarks regarding Yul Brynner’s head.

The best part of the movie is probably the climactic ten commandments scene, where you can witness the very beginning of the Bruckheimerization of cinema props, when Moses hurls the stone tablets at MoobyThe Golden Calf, and it EXPLODES.

If I thought he had even a remote possibility of winning the nomination, I’d vote for Mike Gravel.  He doesn’t, so I won’t, which is too bad.

As some others have observed, I dislike broad category labels.  I tend to find that they range between useless and damaging by creating undue connotations.  I think when people ask me about my political philosophy I say something overly hyphenated, like, “libertarian-leaning-liberal”.  “Liberal” and “Conservative” are utterly useless terminology.  They tell you nothing; they’re the political equivalent of racial slurs.

If I actually described my political positions, I think basically everyone would say I was a Libertarian.  Except for actual Libertarians who would ask me I’m so in love with big government.  I can’t be a Libertarian.  Why?  I’m not fundamentally opposed to welfare systems, for one thing.  And I generally think the appropriate scope of federal government action is considerably broader than an actual Libertarian could allow.

I’m supportive of Ron Paul even though I disagree with him on several major issues and am very disturbed by his rather nuanced reading of the Establishment clause.  But I’m supportive of him because he’s closer to my philosophy than the major candidates.  Also he has at least established some presence in this election year.  Whether he’s winning crap or not, he’s doing well enough that people are likely to *look* and *listen*.  And I think that’s a big deal.  A lot of my movement toward a philosophy of limited government came from addressing simple assumptions I’d always had.  Sometimes ideas are so distant from the status quo and the way we are used to thinking about things that they just seem laughable!  And that’s fine.  Skepticism is healthy.  But so is consideration.  Somebody says something crazy.  Is it so crazy?  Maybe it actually makes sense.

I think drug policy was the first one like this for me.  I never drank or smoked or used any recreational drugs except for caffeine when I was in High School.  I grew up in the culture of D.A.R.E. and “This is your brain on drugs” and so forth.  “Drug” people were like this evil underbelly of society.  But then I got pretty open-minded in high school and I looked around on the internet to see what the crazy-loony-druggie opposition said (where the hell would I have found this kind of thing without the internet?  anyone who doesn’t understand how this technology has totally altered the nature of my generation is pitifully blind).  And I thought about it.  This actually resulted in a major change in my thoughts about the role a criminal justice system ought to play in general.  Why the hell are we putting people in jail for this?  I have trouble even remembering the context in which that notion could have made sense.

But anyway, i was reading over Wikipedia Pete’s “Political Positions of” article for Mike Gravel.  It turns out he’s even closer to my philosophy than Ron Paul.  He’s also fucking hilarious.  He’s so hilarious you can tell that he’s an actual person.  An old ornery Alaskan who thinks government can play a PROACTIVE positive role in society, but right now it’s just…full of shit.  He’s pro universal health care and pro drug decriminilization.  He also has weird and interesting ideas like a constitutional amendment to let the public vote on federal issues (as many states already do).  I mean I’m not sure if I think that’s a good idea or not, but I think it reflects the kind of open-mindedness our political leaders seem to sorely lack.

So, yeah, too bad Gravel’s campaign isn’t Serious Business.  Sighs.

I’ve been looking through my copy of Ars Magica, thinking about maybe using it for a game.

Chargen seems to be rather…involved.  I think it’s probably slightly simpler than Burning Wheel, and actually bears some resemblance to that system.  For one thing, your character has a lot of…stuff.  For another, in a normal game, you are probably building at least two different characters.   Non-magus chargen might be simpler.

To build a magus, it goes something like this:
1. Choose a house.  But this isn’t just a flavor decision.  Each house grants  virtue of some sort.  Some of them don’t grant a specific virtue, but instead your choice of a broad class of virtues.  At least one of them grants two virtues and a flaw.  Several of them grant extremely powerful virtues that give you access to different mechanics other Magi won’t have.

2. Choose virtues and flaws.  A magus gets up to 10 points of virtues and flaws, and they have to balance out.  Also there are restrictions on how many flaws and virtues of various types you can take.  Virtues and flaws do a ton of different things, ranging from dice pool bonuses to granting bonus XP at chargen (or later) to granting access to broad classes of abilities.  Virtues tend to be very powerful.

3. Choose characteristics.  These are your physical/mental/social stats.  You don’t get very many points here, but you can trade off lowering some to get more points.  There are also virtues that grant points to spend here.  It turns out some of these are incredibly vital to casting spells.  Which ones are most vital depends on the manner in which you want to cast spells.  Stamina is normal, but doing lab work (enchantment) requires int, and spontaneous casting needs, uh, quickness I think.

4. Choose abilities.  Despite all the sundry virtues you could have chosen or not chosen, this is where things start to get complicated.  You buy abilities with XP.  Some abilities require a specific virtue before you can purchase them.  Magi can get some abilities like that without a virtue, but only once they start their apprenticeship.  And it turns out that you have to select them based on XP doled out on a per-year-of-life basis.  So you have to decide how old your magus is.  Aging sufficiently starts to require other work, like checking to see if they kicked it (you could die in chargen).  This is an arbitrary balance point.  Being older almost categorically makes a magus more powerful.  However, even starting one fresh out of your apprenticeship, you have to do “Early childhood” (0-5) choosing from a rather limited pool of abilities, then the set of years between them and their apprenticeship (broader range, depending on virtues), and then the 15 year apprenticeship,  Like pretty much everything,  abilities rise non-linearly in cost (1=5,2=15,3=30,4=50,5=75) and can be bought up to a (possibly arbitrary; I forget) fairly high value.  The nature of this scale is that you probably don’t focus too much, but rather buy a low rating in a lot of different things.  Some abilities are necessary or very helpful for performing various kinds of magic.  All abilities come with a specialization, even if you only have them rated at 1.

5. Purchase arts.  You get points for this from your apprenticeship and possibly from virtues.  Arts seem cheap because they are.  They also rise in cost extra-linearly, but not at as steep a rate as abilities (1=1,2=3,3=6,4=10,5=15) .  To do a spell you have to combine two arts (a verb and a noun) and then you add various other things to it depending on how you are casting it.  Then you have to get some margin relative to the spell’s level.  Botches are dangerous.

6. Purchase spells.  You can do magic without knowing a spell, but it’s really hard.  You get points (separate from other XP) to purchase levels of spells with.  Each verb-noun arts combination has an outline of what you can do with it at various spell levels (which range from 1 to arbitrarily high) , and then there are several parameters you can adjust (raising them increases the level).

Then there are a few more details, but that is quite a bit of work to figure out everything you need to play the character you want.  There are other fun wrinkles, like how you can add your score in the Philosophiae ability to ritual magic, but you need Artes Liberales first, and to get that you need a 3 in a language that is usually Latin, and you can’t purchase Artes Liberales until you’re an apprentice, unless you get a virtue that lets you.

Basically there are *a lot* of different systems which put different demands on the character, and a lot of parameters to be aware of.

Naturally I really like it, and I think it simplifies a bit if you don’t try too hard to optimize, but I would feel sorry for any new player trying to build their first character without assistance.

Fortunately, all of the complications do not seem to be for naught: looking over this build system I think you could create most any kind of character (Magus-wise, at least) that you would want and the system supports a lot of different things for you to do (I built a mad scientist without having to go out of my way: Verditus Magic +  Inventive Genius).

One thing I like is how the game has a lot of systems for downtime and supports it well.  The assumption is troupe-based play, so there is probably only one maybe two players running their Magus at a time; the others are hard at work in their laboratories, inventing new spells, enchanting items, writing books, etc.; and they still gain XP while not out adventuring.

It’s got fae and demons and angels and magical beasts, and lots and lots of STUFF.  The only real problem it has is a lack of portability.  It has a lot of important setting assumptions, and doesn’t generalize too well without them.  Some degree of modification is probably possible, but takes effort on the GM’s part.

When people think about this subject in the U.S. they usually think about universities.

While I don’t regret my university time for a moment and feel I gained a lot from it, as an educational experience I felt it…lacked.

From a purely economic perspective, I think university education is not so great. Without a scholarship, you really have to consider if four years tuition (plus interest usually) plus four years of *not* working is worth your enhanced earning potential.

Also a lot of prestigious universities tend to be very graduate/research oriented; from what I’ve observed, it’s uncommon to see a university really focused on undergraduate education.

Also, university education is stupidly expensive. When I think about it, it is baffling that it can possibly cost what it does. Then I think about the ridiculous amount of infrastructure a university maintains, and it starts to make at least a little sense.

So my idea is to create a chain of subject-focused post-secondary academies which also double as HR firms. They teach only one subject, teach it as well as they possibly can, and find jobs for their graduates (and also possibly pre-graduate internships). By keeping the number of students relatively low, the infrastructure costs should be much more manageable. There’s also the added revenue of being an HR firm (% of first 6mo-year salary as finder’s fee to business). Another possible business connection is to foster relationships where we accept business’s new hires as students and their employer pays for their education.

Instructors would be hired based on their capabilities as teachers, and paid to teach. It would be necessary, I think, to focus a great deal of revenue into instructor salaries, given the probable low supply of qualified and interested applicants. However, since the academy is so focused in intent, some level of instructor training may be doable, and as the academy expands to multiple locations, it can maintain a single general structure for its program of studies and teaching materials. Nobody needs to reinvent the wheel.

I would probably just start with software engineering academies, because I can see the need there (it is my field after all). If that worked, then possibly it could expand to other subjects. Also we might be able to harvest the near-graduates for free software development as class projects (if it’s not good enough for us, why should we expect it to be good enough for anyone else?).

EDIT: I took out my money calculations, because I think I did them at 2 in the morning and they were really wrong.

So I watch a slightly obscene amount of anime and tend to keep up with what is being newly released in Japan, or at least I used to; this tendency has dropped off somewhat with my full-time employment.

Where for most avenues of entertainment, I don’t start watching things or paying attention until I get a recommendation, for anime I have sort of been the person who *does* the recommending for a bit now. So here is anime that is good from this year. This is anime good enough that I recommend it to pretty much anybody from my general subcultures.

****** Nodame Cantabile (unless you loathe classical music; probably the best anime of the year)

* Genshiken 2 (well first you have to watch Genshiken)

* Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei (though I haven’t actually finished it)

* Dennou Coil (though I haven’t actually finished it)

* Seirei no Moribito (I have barely watched any of this)

* Baccano! (unless you don’t deal well with graphic violence)

You can get more info on these from, like, anywhere. There is an internet. Try search.

There was actually a truckload of good anime this year, and I have not had time to finish nearly everything I started (some of which you can see above).