Culture Matters

I'ts a common target, so I won't labor the first point. Saying that a european country has "free" healthcare is a lie, because that healthcare is funded through the tax structure, which citizens are paying for. It's a distributed cost plan, not a "no cost" plan. That's the first level that you're all familiar with.

But there's another level where this term is misleading and unhelpful, and indicates that the term has no place in a valid Political Science field. By calling it "free" you deny the fact that it's a distributed cost. By doing that, you deny people the opportunity to consider the nature of the culture and citizenry tolerating those costs. That culture (Sweden, if you're wondering) is willing to tolerate an income tax rate twice that of the United States to fund their social programs. That's not free, and people in Sweden don't wander around all day oblivious to that fact. So what elements of the Swedish nation allow for that degree of support for socialized programs and the correlating distributed costs?

If you call it "free", those questions never get asked. That's not science, it's just offensive.

I'm going to go right ahead and say that uniting 9 million people who are 87% Lutheran is a much easier task in both values and scale than uniting 303 million who exist in a baffling array of religions and value systems. They have a much higher innate ability toward cultural unity, because there is less significant variance. Sweden also has no transnational issues to speak of, which means a smaller degree of political polarization than we frequently see in the United States, where foreign policy is always a touchy issue.

But all of these things are cultural issues, which are pretty likely to be glossed over by the preposterous Liberal notion that "we're all just people". We're all people, raised and conditioned in widely varying environments and in very different value systems and support structures. I'm afraid that the similarity stops at physiology, and does not continue on through the human psyche. This isn't good or bad; it just is. It's a reality to be operated within, not an "indoctrination" to decry or an "enlightenment" to foster.

Odd Management Realization

I've been trying maybe too hard to figure out just where my position falls in the office hierarchy; I'm not really sure whether I was a "coworker" or a "supervisor" as far as the people around me are concerned. Now that this has happened, I feel sort of stupid for not recognizing it earlier.

tonight, someone resigned their position, and in doing so felt the need to make me aware of it; that is, at the end of their shift, they got my attention to explain that it would be their last, apologize for the short notice, and turn in their access card. People resign all the time (especially the bilingual people here) but nobody has ever reported to me to do it. And this one did, because she saw me as her supervisor. She's almost 40 years old, but I was still her supervisor; the person she needed to talk to in order to square away her separation from the company.

I'm a supervisor, despite my lack of expertise, because they think I have some sort of authority. What real authority I actually have is minute; it's barely there. I don't even think I have it most of the time. It's like being a meter maid. Sure, I'm not a cop, but I still wrote you a ticket that you have to pay. It's not the sort of authority I really like, and it has a very different, much less comfortable feel than the authority I had at TASC, where people listened because I was honestly good at what I was doing.And the only thing for that is to again get good at what I'm doing now.

So it's a good thing that the management thinks I'm doing a good enough job for me to report to my boss's boss directly; they're going to start rotating my loyalty between the four managers so I can pick up their areas of expertise and their styles. I'm training with supervisors now, not phone operators. Now, if nothing else, I know what camp I'm supposed to be in, which has not previously been clear.

Game Review: "Black" on Xbox

I really mean it this time. There's no possible excuse for this sort of behavior on part of game designers. They broke every rule in the book and while some may call that "innovative" and "revolutionary", gamers call it "goddammit why the fuck can't I kill anything?" I'm going to do this point-by-point, or it will turn into a rant.

Overall Look: Beautiful. But the lighting frequently (and this is very clearly intentional) makes it impossible to see your targets, which makes for more frustration rather than more challenge. The guns are rendered beautifully and their actions are faithful, which is great. 8/10.

Plot: Stupid and impossible to follow. Why are russian terrorists following an American leader? What did the protagonist have to do with all this? Why didn't I kill the bad guy in the last level and why are you telling me to start all over? Are you calling me fat? 2/10.

Weapon function: Beautiful as stated, but I've done more damage to people by stepping on their toes. 12 counted shots to the torso per kill, 1 shot to the head works but it's not the sort of thing that works out most of the time. The only good way to kill people is with the most powerful and most rare weapons in the game. Hint for developers: if you have to give me twice as much ammo per magazine as the gun is supposed to have, you're too stupid to breathe. Go back and try again. 3/10.

Suppressors: Totally and in all ways useless. If they take 12 shots to kill unless I hit them in the head, and that's damn near impossible,and they notice me anyway whether I hit them or not, you're pretty much promising me that I'll never have to take the weapon out of Fully Automatic mode. Fuck your suppressors, Criterion Games. 0/10.

Enemies: Robots wearing tank armor. Russian with helmet (12 shots to kill), Russian without helmet (12 shots to kill), Russian with everything-proof hockey mask (empty the magazine), Russian with everything-proof SWAT shield (empty it twice). Apparently in the video game world, bad guys only come in two flavors: Caramel Communist and Neopolitan Nazi. At this stage of my gaming career, I have cut down more Russians than Stalin and more Nazis than the entire Allied Forces. Digital Commies and Brownshirts pee themselves in their sleep if their bunkmate whispers my name. Why can't I ever shoot someone who's threatening me in ENGLISH? Especially if they're supposed to have been led by an American. Then I might have more motivation to wade into yet another ridiculous, obviously position-triggered firefight. 1/10.

Allies: AI is never good, and when you couple it with candy-ass weapons, lazy team programming and crappy marksmanship, you go beyond wishing they weren't there. The only thing more frustrating than your allies' inability is that you can't cut them down from behind with your shitty little Uzi to take their suppressed G36 that they haven't fired once in 20 minutes of fighting. Their only saving grace is that they are usually nowhere to be found. 1/10.

Mission Structure: You know who likes to play entire, 20-minute to half-hour missions and all the while risk losing every shred of progress if they die? Fucking nobody. I have things to do, and there's no excuse for me not being able to save mid-mission in this day and age. I fought my way through 15-minutes of testicle-grinding levels with dipshit teammates against lumps of gun-wielding iron, the least you can do is let me SAVE MY GODDAMNED PROGRESS. It's frustrating to know that you can't start a mission unless you plan to play for a solid hour. I've never actually sat in my chair sighing with impatience and boredom while murdering foreigers before. But I turned it into an art form with this game. 0/10.

Incentives: You can pick up different weapons in each mission, but A) you can't keep them, B) you start the mission with whatever weapons the designers choose, C) you can't pick new weapons to start any mission, even after you beat the game, and D) once you do beat the game, they turn all your weapons silver as if it's some kind of prize ("cool you won, now do it again with sissy-ass nickel-plated guns"). There's no point to completing any objectives that they don't require, because you get nothing for it. There's no point in killing extra enemies, because you get nothing for it. 2/10.

Replay Value: There are eight missions. Beat the game, and it's the same 8 missions just harder. There's no multiplayer. There's no weapon selection. There's no challenge mode. Just eight linear missions and when you're done, roll credits. This game hit the market costing $49.99. With Wisconsin sales tax, that's $52.74. These assholes charged some poor bastards $6.59 per mission, or a mind-boggling $4.35per weapon. I got it for $.87 per weapon and $1.31 per mission. I'm pretty sure that even I got screwed on this one. 0/10.

Final Analysis: 1.78/10
Three-word Summary: Bored to tears.
Unforgivability Factor: 9.4/10

Another game like this, and I'll start studying again.

RE: The revolution not being televised

Maybe not, but it will be all over the damn internet, which is going to be about the same soon.

And I have the internet now. All of it, stockpiled here in my apartment like a cache of ex-soviet weaponry.

I'm sorry if you were expecting my Disney drinking buddies article, but I've had to postpone that for a while on account of not having written it yet. But "sorry" is the wrong word; what I was going for was really "unmoved in every way". Sort of like Mary Poppins but with apathy.

Now I, like so many others, can instantly flop out my god-awful opinions about wardrobe malfunctions, president malfunctions, and the ongoing corndog/zombie crisis.

Life is, as they say, a bowl of cherries. A bowl of cherries called "the internet", which as I have said, I am now storing in my house in big crates.

Patriotism

If I had the gumption to write a piece about how I feel about America, I really hope that I would do it right, and write something as good as this.

It's a hard subject for someone in college, because declaring yourself a patriot carries the inherent implication that you somehow approve or disprove of some current event, or that said event is the basis for your patriotism. I don't think anything could be further from the truth. Love of country is like love of anything else; if it's based on the short-term, what-has-it-done-for-me considerations, it's not really love. But since love is a concept that humanity has as yet failed to really articulate, I'm going to leave it there.

Where that article talks about the pursuit of happiness, I'm right there with it. There's a certain degree of outright insanity that has to be tolerated for people to chase their dreams, and in this country, that insanity is accepted as a matter of course. To chase after hard things to grab, like pants-wettingly satisfying jobs or mountains of money or astronomical achievements, a certain degree of reason-defying megalomania is required. And here, that's okay. And we only call it insanity among the people who didn't pull it off; the people who do are called "visionaries".

I'm in love with this country because it offers me a very wide latitude of pursuit; wider than most other places, and I have used that extra width on a number of occasions. And then, still had the wherewithal to come back and try something else. That's a big deal, and it doesn't happen in most places. When people talk about how unforgiving of error that the US system of government and economics is, they generally forget that much of the world knows cruelty in ways that even hard-done Americans can't really relate to.

But for the most part, I take it on faith that we're awesome. I don't think about it a lot because I don't feel like I need to. It's obvious, it's there for everyone to see. It's one of my more solid basic assumptions. It doesn't say anything else about anyone else, because it's not "America is awesome and everyplace else blows". Just that America is awesome, and I love it. I don't need to do any introspection to know that we ought to defend our ideals and the principles that we've built the nation on. Of course we should.

And, to be completely honest, having that whole idea figured out frees up a lot of time for me to think about other things. Like which five Disney movie characters would make the best drinking buddies. But that's my next post.