I’ve had a paid GameTap account for a while now, and I’ve also been a fan of American McGee’s previous works, so I’ve been eagerly awaiting the Grimm games. I wasn’t disappointed.
If you don’t have GameTap, you can sign up for a free account and play the first episode. I highly recommend you consider getting a paid GameTap account, though. It’s a great service with lots of great games.
Posted by probabilityZero on 2008-08-07 | Filed under: Tech and games | no responses
This was the most interesting thing I’d read in a long time. The author obviously did a lot of research, and it’s very accurate; I don’t generally go into these sorts of articles (articles having to do with online/tech/internet related topics) expecting the writer to know more about the subject than I do, but that’s just what I got.
I have personal experience running forums, so I know that the one guaranteed way to get rid of trolls is to ignore them, and that’s essentially the conclusion the author came to. If someone goes to a Mac forum and posts a rant about how Windows is better than MacOS because “I can right click lolz” or something, and everyone ignores it, the troll will leave. If some idiot responds with a badly written, angry rebuttal, full of spelling errors (which is invariably what happens), that’s like setting out a feast for the troll.
Reading this almost made me want to write a story about these people. I found them very interesting, especially Fortuny.
Posted by probabilityZero on 2008-08-01 | Filed under: Other, Tech and games | no responses
First of all, Dark Knight is an amazing movie. Heath Ledger gave an great performance, and the storytelling was very well done. I also think that, while the movie can easily be seen to have political implications, they were not intentional, or at least not meant to be viewed as such. That said, the movie initially struck me as having the usual strong right-wing themes found in superhero stories, but after a bit of thinking and reading I think there’s an alternate interpretation.
I know superhero stories are often very right-wing, what with the whole vigilante/taking-the-law-into-your-own-hands thing. For example, the recent Iron Man movie: The story revolved around a superpower (Tony Stark) giving weapons to a small group of arabs, then seeing them kill their own people. Since the superpower had the means to stop what was happening, and since the situation was partially his fault to begin with, that superpower felt it was his moral duty to step in and get involved. Sound familiar?
Dark Night is more complex than Iron Man in almost every way, and its plot doesn’t boil down into direct symbolism as easily as Iron Man’s does. As I said above, I don’t think there’s an inherent political message, but I do think there are several possible interpretations of the movie that cast the actions of the characters in a political context.
The right-wing interpretation is based around the fact that the movie can be seen as characterizing the Joker as a terrorist, which in a sense would justify the current administration’s position that it is pointless to negotiate with terrorists because they’re so completely detached from reality with no logic, reason, or motive behind their action. This isn’t true, of course — terrorists aren’t like that — but some people believe it. There are many other elements of the movie that fit in nearly perfectly to this interpretation; the wiretapping of everyone in Gotham as a necessary evil in order to catch the Joker, etc.
This seems to be the popular analysis, but I think there are a few things that this interpretation misses. First and foremost is that the Joker would not exist as we see him in the movie if not for Batman. In a sense, the Joker of Dark Knight is a response to Batman’s existence. Previously, in Batman Begins, there’s a very telling conversation between Gordon and Batman, where they talk about escalation.
GORDON: But there’s a lot of weirdness out there right now. The Narrows is lost. We still haven’t picked up Crane or half the inmates of Arkham that he freed.
BATMAN: We will. Gotham will return to normal.
GORDON: Will it? What about escalation?
BATMAN: Escalation?
GORDON: We start carrying semiautomatics, they buy automatics. we start wearing kevlar, they buy armor-piercing rounds.
BATMAN: And?
GORDON: And you’re wearing a mask and jumping off rooftops. Take this guy; armed robbery, double homicide. Got a taste for theatrics, like you. Leaves a calling card.
This event fits into a wider view of Gotham and Batman that points to the conclusion that, in many ways, Batman has been disaster for Gotham. Wayne asks Alfred “Did I bring this upon [Gotham]?” The answer might be yes.
In an even larger sense, though, the Joker isn’t the problem. He’s described as an agent of chaos, inherently without direction, and that seems to be an accurate assessment of his character. There are bigger problems, more fundamental problems, that need to be dealt with. The Gotham that we see in the movie is only a few steps away from anarchy. Criminals rule the night. And as we are shown in the end of the movie, what Gotham needs isn’t a masked superhero fighting super-villains; what Gotham needs is a better police force, better law enforcement, a district attorney ready and willing to take on crime. Harvey Dent was what Gotham really needed, not Batman. The rouge vigilantes, the people who feel it is justified to break the law in order to get the bad guy, do damage to a society in the long run. Just as Batman brought about the Joker as we see him now, the international policies of the US government brought about the radical terrorist groups as we see them today, and the actions of the US do damage to the international community.
Of course, there are problems with this interpretation as well. The biggest, in my mind, is that it suffers from the same fundamental false assumption of the right-wing analysis. Namely, that the Joker represents terrorists. Terrorists have an agenda. They want something, and use violence as a means to get it. The Joker is more primal than that, and it does a disservice to the complexity of his character to write him off as a symbol for terrorism.
Posted by probabilityZero on 2008-07-28 | Filed under: Other | 2 responses
I have created a Wordpress theme, which is live right now on this site. Previously I’ve always used pre-existing themes and modified them to my liking, but I finally decided to make my own from scratch.
Read more…
Posted by probabilityZero on 2008-07-23 | Filed under: Site News | one response
As most readers already know, John McCain opposed establishing a federal holiday for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr in 1983. Most Republicans (including Cheney and Gingrich) supported it at the time, but Arizona seemed dead-set against it. The holiday became official in 1986, but only 27 states and D.C. recognized it initially. The governor of Arizona at the time (a Democrat) declared the holiday through executive order, but it was later repealed by a Republican governor.
Around that time, in 1990, McCain was given a chance to change his mind, and eventually did. Though he initially supported the Republican governor’s controversial action to repeal the holiday, he later changed his stance and supported the recognition of the holiday. The governor continued to oppose the holiday, saying “I guess King did a lot for the colored people, but I don’t think he deserves a national holiday.” In 1992, the citizens of Arizona voted to recognize the holiday.
I wasn’t around at the time, so I don’t really know first-hand how important Martin Luther King Jr.’s contributions to civil rights, to our country, and to humanity as a whole were. I have, however, studied many of his speeches in school, and though I’ve only scratched the surface of his work I feel comfortable in saying that he was one of the most influential and important people of the twentieth century. To oppose naming a national holiday in his honor is absurd.
McCain also voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1990 (specifically, he voted to uphold President Bush’s veto of the 1990 Civil Rights Act), which lost by only one vote. To this day, he refuses to apologize for his vote. When asked earlier this year, he defended his action and claimed that the bill would have set up racial “quotas,” but that simply isn’t true. The bill had nothing to do with quotas, and everything to do with restoring laws regarding employment discrimination that had been put in place nearly two decades prior, and had only been recently overturned by supreme court cases that made it harder for minorities and women to win discrimination suits:
The act was a response to a series of controversial Supreme Court decisions made the year before. In those decisions, the court overturned a 1971 ruling that required employers to prove a “business necessity” for screening out minorities and women in its hiring practices. That burden of proof, the 1989 court said, should instead be placed on the plaintiff who alleged that his or her client had been unlawfully screened.
Both the House of Representatives and the Senate, deeming this unjust, passed bills that would restore the old law. But the Bush administration objected, insisting that a reversion to the old way would amount to forcing employers to have hiring quotas. It was a controversial and somewhat dubious claim, one that the New York Times editorial page called “an unjustified charge.”
McCain continues to justify his vote by claiming somehow the bill would have required “quotas,” and refuses to apologize for it. He has, on the other hand, apologized for his votes regarding the MLK holiday — while the fact that he initially opposed it remains, I like it that he was at least willing to change his mind. In this case, hoewver — when combined with his opposition to civil rights legislation — saying “I changed my mind” just isn’t enough.
I’m not planning on accusing McCain of outright racism, but I will keep his voting record in mind when I hear him talk about civil rights and MLK, as I think all voters should.
Posted by probabilityZero on 2008-07-21 | Filed under: Opinion | 6 responses
. . . imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, ‘This is an interesting world I find myself in’an interesting hole I find myself in’fits me rather neatly, doesn’t it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!’ This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, it’s still frantically hanging on to the notion that everything’s going to be alright, because this world was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise. I think this may be something we need to be on the watch out for.
From a Speech given by Adams at Digital Biota 2, Cambridge, UK, 1998. Later quoted in Richard Dawkin’s Eulogy for Douglas Adams.
Posted by probabilityZero on 2008-07-19 | Filed under: Atheism | 30 responses
I got my wisdom teeth removed today. Not fun. Read more…
Posted by probabilityZero on 2008-07-14 | Filed under: Other | no responses
