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What are LPC's influences?
I've got a lot of good ideas kicking around, I think, but since they're all for games I'm probably not going to get to play, I figured I should combine them all into this one. Let me list some of the more consistent ones:
Aberrant: This is a high-powered superhero game from the turn o the century. It wasn't very well balanced, and people complained that you couldn't make certain types of characters with it. White Wolf (the publishers) responded by saying that it wasn't supposed to create those types of games. It gave off a bit of a mixed message, but it was a good game if you wanted to play someone who was really several levels more capable than any person alive. It's notable because it did a good job at looking at how the emergence of superheroes would change society; the way that talents can fit into and impact the world comes primarily from Aberrant.
Jovian Chronicles: Jovian Chronicles is a hard sci-fi game from Dream Pod 9. It's heavily anime-influenced--Dream Pod 9 has a thing for giant fighting robots. Strip out the giant robots, though, and you actually have a really slick hard sci-fi game. I took the concept for the Solar Police from here, though in DP9's game, SolaPol is more like a really big InterPol rather than "the finest of Earth defending the planet!" vibe that it gives off in LPC. My hope is that the PCs will have a few adventures in space, and SolaPol will be a central factor in that.
Trail of Cthulhu/Unknown Armies: You may recognize Cthulhu from various tentacle horror stories, and you probably don't know Unknown Armies unless you like RPGs. Both of these are modern horror games that focus on the mental effects of learning Things People Were Not Meant To Know. In LPC, I'm borrowing some creatures, since the sorts of beasties that PCs end up encountering in these games tend to be good manifestations of the sickness some people can harbor in their minds. It's an effective tool in a superhero game as well, so long as you don't make the whole campaign into a Call of Cthulhu game with superpowers.
Ex Machina: This is a book put out by the now-defunct Guardians of Order, most famous for their Big Eyes, Small Mouth system, which was designed to model anime games. Ex Machina is a stand-alone book for cyberpunk games, and it's good. It talks about the history of cyberpunk, the influences on it, and it presents four very different-but-still-intriguing-and-creepy cyberpunk settings. I've borrowed some setting ideas from all of the settings in here, but there's one in particular that I'm swiping quite a bit from--people who know the book probably know which one, and that's all I'll say about it now, since I don't want to give anything away to players that may read this.
Mage: The Awakening: If you haven't noticed, I like my modern occult games. Mage focuses on characters that have learned how to manipulate reality and must do so in secret. Talents don't need to operate in secret, but a lot of the atmosphere that Mage creates can carry over into a superhero game as well. It's a good reminder of how to craft a good story and give challenges to people who have supernatural powers.
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So who runs the show?
That's a good question, but in order to understand it, you need to know how we got to the place humanity currently is, so a short history lesson is in order.
In LPC, the United Nations actually disbanded in 1966 when, after their call for the ending of kinetic weapons testing in outer space, the U.S. and Russia pulled out, taking their money with them. Financial difficulties kicked in shortly, and they disbanded soon after that. "The most expensive bit of nothing in the world" went the way of the League of Nations.
The repercussions of a world without the UN are mostly on a humanitarian level: without a global organizer of effort, international aid groups end up having to deal with individual countries far more than they do now. Of course, the presence of the Talent Volunteers, or TeeVees, alleviates this somewhat, as they grow into an international group of superpowered do-gooders that chip in when the world needs it, but it makes the day-to-day help that international organizations provide that much more difficult to achieve.
Until the Builder Ship. Until the destruction of Mercury.
Ever since the alien IAM crash-landed at Roswell, New Mexico, people had known that aliens were present in the universe. IAM even gave a riveting interview on the Dick Cavett Show, and his final words on the interview spurred interest in xenology. It gave religions some time to adjust to the idea of a populated universe, gave world leaders a chance to begin formulating fist contact strategies, gave regular people the chance to understand their new position in the universe. Alien life wasn't confirmed by science until 1977, and the U.S. and Russia made a joint announcement in 1984 about the discovery of an alien empire, called the Builders, that were prevalent in their corner of space. The announcement shook everyone, and after a period of mass suicides and riots, conflicts throughout the globe actually cooled down and stopped over the next couple of years.
In 1985, a huge mass was detected at the edge of the solar system, transmitting the Builder signal. It sat there for almost a year before it suddenly teleported inside Mercury's orbit. It was visible to the naked eye as a dark spot against the sun, and people began to riot once more. And then, on April 22, 1986, the ship moved inward, dwarfing Mercury and, in a breath, smashed it to rubble. After a few moment's pause, as though it were admiring its work, it moved towards Venus. The U.S. and Russia quickly agree to a strike, and all of Earth's arsenal--nuclear missiles, rail guns, space rock thrown by super-strong talents--flew towards the Builder ship.
It took almost a month for the attack to find its target, but on May 18, 1986, it struck and halted the ship. The signal ceased to transmit, and it now sits between Venus and the sun. We've visited the ship, though all reports are, of course, classified so much that barely anyone knows what's inside it, but the mere presence of such an artifact in our solar system shifted the priorities of nations, and in 1992, 26 of the largest world governments signed the Berne Accord, a world defense treaty that put the welfare of humanity before the welfare of nations. And oddly enough, it stuck--the U.S. and Russia immediately stripped themselves of pro-nationalist rhetoric and began to rebuild the idea of the United Nations.
With other countries quickly jumping on the bandwagon, the rebuilt United Nations met on September 1st, 1992, and ratified the Berne Accord and began drafting the new United Nations charter. Not everyone is on board with the idea--China refuses to sign until 1993, when a nuclear test causes a flare-up of Cold War proportions, only for it to be neutralized by multinational talent squads; likewise, in 2002, smaller countries, mostly from the Middle East, South America and the Caribbean, sign a Declaration of Sovereignty to protest the growing influence of the new world group. But the dream of a united Earth stands large, and in 1994, the UN ratifies a new charter with expanded world governmental powers, and renames itself the Human League. With the political support of the majority of nations around the world, especially the more developed ones, the Human League creates the task force it needs to ensure the protection of humanity as it takes its first steps into the stars--the Solar Police, or SolaPol. With a new defense force, Earth looks starboard and plans its next move, keeping in mind the words of an alien first spoken to Dick Cavett almost a quarter of a century before:
"There are many others in the stars. They will come here. Soon."
Next time, I'll post on the current state of affairs with SolaPol, and I'll explain my influences on the creation of this timeline. Also, you should know that most, if not all, of this history until 1992 comes from the 1st edition Wild Talents book. I tried not to plagiarize the words, and I tried not to give away too much, but I hope people understand why I put it up here. Should anyone involved with the book want them removed, I will do so, but understand that no challenge to the copyright is intended by my use. Likewise, SolaPol is something used in the Jovian Chronicles game by Dream Pod 9, and is also not intended to be a challenge to copyright in any way, and I will remove the material if asked.
Finally, the quote from IAM is taken entirely from the Wild Talents book. It's an awesome quote, which is why I used it, but I really can't have people thinking I wrote that. That would be Uncool.
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So where do superheroes come from?
If you look at comic books, superheroes have a variety of different origin stories, ranging from "I found a magic X!" to "I'm an alien!" to "I was just born awesome and made more awesome over time!" If there's a crazy story you can dream up, some out-there reason to give someone the ability to transmute toast to bagels, it can work as an origin.
In the LPC universe, if you corner a scientist specially focused on talents and asked them where talents originate, they'll likely start in on the demographic statistics of first manifest--the moment where someone demonstrates talent abilities--and break it down in several different ways, like nation, class, race, what they were doing just before manifest, adherence to a Pareto distribution curve according to more objective measurements of theoretical power levels. They will provide hypotheses on the meanings of different corollaries, and they will offer their own pet theory as to why.
Force said scientist into a corner, make them see how much you need to know, and they will avert their eyes and learn to mumble.
The truth is that no one is really sure as to what makes a person manifest. Currently, there are estimated to be 12,000 talents worldwide, with the actual numbers thought to have been low-balled to account for talents hiding in the Himalayas and other remote places, serving their village or making themselves out to be gods or some such. They tend to appear more or less proportionately to population density, but that's clearly just the odds. Sudden manifests seem to occur in traumatic or high-stress situations, which has led to many grid sites that offer "advice" on how to manifest by having your friends attempt to kill you without your knowing, or trap yourself in a Houdini-like device designed for deprivation and stress induction. People tend to ignore these now, but just enough teens die each year from self-inflicted wounds attempting to manifest that various governments have yearly ad campaigns to remind people of the futility of attempting to intentionally trigger a manifest.
But come on, that's not what people care about. That's the practical application, you know? What's the idea behind the phenomenon? What's the source?
What makes a talent?
And that's an uncomfortable question.
It's not a scientific process, that's for sure. Governments have been throwing cash at the question since World War II, and no one has come up with a reliable way to create them. (While the creation of such a process would be a huge breakthrough, the distribution of talents doesn't suggest a particular country has discovered it. Some paranoids claim they have, and the resulting talents are simply kept hidden or very subtle, but then they drag in the Trilateral Commission do Majestic-12 and whoever's listening rolls their eyes and goes back to their grid games.) Corporations have attempted this as well, but while some programs report some success, it can't be replicated, so everyone is stuck simply waiting for some to appear, and then pouncing on them with bribes when they do.
So could it be God? The presence of talents certainly hasn't caused a lack of faith in anyone. It has caused more small cults and minor schisms within the various religions, but for the most part, talents are accepted as simply there. The Catholic Church has declared talents to be a method of divine manifestation, akin to a small miracle, but that no talents are or have been the Second Coming, and Jesus was not a talent. Some Hindu brahmans and Buddhist monks believe talents are proof that devotion to the path of enlightenment can reap rewards. Still others claim every talent is a new god, born of flesh and made divine to fight for the souls of humanity. For all the ambiguity of miracles, though, people seem more or less as religious as they do today, though perhaps more jaded--sure, Jesus could walk on water, but that dude on the bus with the dreads and a tattoo of his dog can throw a Hummer a half-mile. Does that mean you should worship him?
Hyperbrains who study the data long enough note a presence of…something. No one has put a name on it yet, but they tend to say that, if you could visually represent all of the data somehow--studies, stories, ethnographies, and so on--you would start to see a picture. No one can agree on what the picture is, or what importance said picture would have, but when hyperbrains start discussing it, they all nod in agreement, their heads bobbing up and down at the same steady rate, and they acknowledge that something is there.
When asked if that something is God, hyperbrains never answer.
So for now we wait. On nights when the sky is clear and the wind is strong enough to carry the scent of leaves around the block, people raise their heads and close their eyes, and as the breeze tickles their eyelashes, they spread their arms and imagine themselves rising into the night sky to take their place as a modern miracle.
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So what does a superhero universe look like?
One of the neat ideas that Wild Talents brought up was the idea of four axes based on color which allow you to rate important concepts to your world, which makes it easy to determine not just what changes, but by how much. Anyone who looks at this and notices the "four-color heroics" concept is right on the money. The four colors are ranked from 1 to 5:
Red: Historical inertia. How much can a talent change the world? 1 means a talent can change history easily, and they probably do all the time. 5 means that can't be changed, and the world looks pretty much the way it does in the real world.
Gold: Talent inertia. How much can a given talent change themselves, especially in the eyes of society? 1 means they're like regular people, who can choose allegiances and change their minds. 5 means that Dr. Nasty will always revert to his innate lust for power and depravity, while Captain Shiny cannot repress his instinct to do good, no matter how drugged up or amnesiac he may be.
Blue: The lovely and the pointless. This was originally used by Alan Moore to describe Wonder Woman's invisible jet--it's those weird things that people should question, but don't. How much do they not question them? 1 means that the only paranormal elements in the world are talents, and even talents are looked at as weird and unnatural. 5 means that Joe Average accepts that sometimes an army of hyperintelligent gorillas armed with death rays invades the city and subjugates the population. That's why we have talents to save us, after all.
Black: Moral clarity. How black and white are issues, especially involving good and evil? 1 means that there are no moral absolutes, while 5 means evil loses because it's evil, and the right choice is always the righteous one.
So what sort of world is LPC set in?
Red 2: It can change, but it takes work and a bit of luck. Talents are often powerful enough that they can shape local events easily, and as they grow more powerful, they can shape larger kinds of events. There are a few talents that have the ability to change the world fairly easily if they so chose, and large groups of them, like the Odd Squad or the TeeVees (short for "Talent Volunteers"), have an easier time of it.
Gold 2: You may have a schtick as a hero, but it's generally easier for a talent to change themselves than a regular person can change their career. Powers may stay the same, but you can remake yourself if you want. Being a talent tends to incur a certain level of celebrity simply because you're special, but the flashier and more powerful abilities can make you more famous if you choose. Life in the public eye means there's less wiggle room for mistakes, and the public has a long memory, but it's still possible to change through hard, earnest work (and a good PR manager.)
Blue 3.5: The destruction of Mercury shot the world from Blue 1 to Blue 3 right quick, and it's shifting more as the world reorganizes itself to prepare for true extraterrestrial contact. Space stations are accepted, but aliens are noteworthy. Flying talents are noteworthy, but not newsworthy by themselves--after all, people have known that some talents could fly since Der Flieger flew into the Olympic Stadium under his own power and lit the torch for the 1938 Berlin Olympics. Science has benefited from the existence of hyperbrains, but there are still some people running around with Quantum Destabilization Cannons or some such nonsense--they aren't too bad as long as they don't do anything unexpected and force other talents to come fight them.
Black 2: We can generally recognize good and evil, but noting someone is evil doesn't make you good. There are a lot of moral grays in this world, and while we have some ideals to strive for, we can fall pretty short in our attempts to reach them. A lot like our current world, huh?
It's an interesting and relatively fast way to come up with superhero histories, and it helps establish some of the social contract of the game as well--for example, if you want to play an alien in my game, that's cool, but recognize that you won't fit in ever. It gives us some rough guidelines to work from, and that's pretty cool.
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All the universe is full of the lives of perfect creatures.
- Constantine Tsiolkovski I always feel bad about not writing in my LJ, and about not being more of a creative writer. I don't always have time to spend on writing essays and poetry, but I do spend a fair amount of time considering role playing games. So I'm going to try and write more about a Wild Talents campaign I'm trying to start up. Wild Talents is a superhero game based on the idea that super-powered individuals, called talents, started appearing just before World War II. The first game that came out for this system, called Godlike, was a really gritty supers game, so being a talent didn't necessarily mean you were special--You can start fires with your mind? Awesome. Just be careful not to get shot by snipers or step on a mine or die from a grenade or any of the thousand different ways a person can die in a war, and you'll be a hero. Talents start getting more powerful after the war, though, and as they do, they begin to have more of an effect on world events. Aliens are discovered in the late '50s/early '60s; handheld computers and the Internet are prevalent by the late '70s; Mercury is destroyed in the '90s, and the event causes world leaders to take the idea of a world government more seriously. The UN, once disbanded, now reforms, and begins to take a more active role in international relations. The game is set in an alternate present day; the book only describes event up until about 2000, and I've created my own little timeline that borrows from other games like Aberrant and Ex Machina, but I try to keep it fairly recognizable as well--ideas like augmented reality and posthumanism are present, but not to a much greater extent than they are now. The idea of this…bloggojournal thingy is to get some of these ideas down and to flesh out the background I already have in my head. It feels heavy-handed to give all of this data in-game sometimes, and it'd be nice to get it in a place where people can see it. Some of this is inspired by Mightygodking's blog entries about why he should write Doctor Strange, which after seeing his entries, I have to agree with. I'm hoping that my explanations can inspire some other people and give them ideas as well. We'll see where this goes. Suggestions welcome.
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| 2009-03-01 22:58 |
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I love biking. Cycling. Whatever you want to call it. This past summer, I biked to work almost every day (well, every day it was sunny) and loved it. I had about a 20-mile total commute, and I felt a lot better doing it. Right now, I'm itching to get back in the saddle and ride to work, but it's way to cold for me to consider that right now. However, I've been biding my time reading books about cycling philosophy and reading a cool cycling comic strip, Yehuda Moon & the Kickstand Cyclery. It's a neat strip, as far as I'm concerned, but after reading the books and the comments at the bottom of the page of each comic strip, I'm forced to determine something fundamental about the hobby.
Cyclists are a bunch of whiny, cliquish jerks.
I'm sure that there are a fair number of cyclists (bikers? biking enthusiasts? I'm not sure what term to use) that are agreeable folk. However, it seems that there are some really deep lines drawn in the community, and you're either with someone or against them. One of those lines is the racing/commuting divide, where racers look at commuters as being slow and idealistic, and the commuters dismiss the racers and being lycra-clad elitists who feel they can run red lights and stop signs in the name of maintaining momentum. Then there are the vehicular cyclists who hate anyone who uses a bike path, and the helmet haters who feel that being forced to wear a styrofoam helmet is akin to a scarlet A, and the eco-friendlies who despise cyclists who also drive, and the cold-weather cyclists who sneer at those who don't bike in the snow, and...and...and....
I love roleplaying games, so I understand where some of the problem lies; whenever you have a hobby/interest with multiple styles, you're always going to have propoents who tout the virtues of their style over all others. But look at a gaming community like, say, RPG.net, and you'll see that the myth of "the best gaming style" is pretty much thrown out the window. There are clear favorites among some people, but few people stand up now and say "MY way is best! Rawr!" and duke it out with everyone who disagrees. (Admittedly, this is most likely due to moderation policies that make RPG.net one of the most civil online forums I've seen, but still.) People accept that the goal is to have fun, and as long as you're having fun, then what you're doing doesn't much matter. Playing Exalted using the rules for poker? Cool. Not my thing, but if you're having fun, then keep playing.
In contrast, look at the comments for the March 1st Yehuda Moon strip, "Suggestions and Sermons." Yehuda (the guy in green with the cap) and Joe (his business partner with the unibrow) are an Odd Couple concept; Yehuda is a year-round lifestyle cyclist who insists steel bikes and leather seats are the best method of biking, and Joe wears his lycra outfits, rides a carbon frame bike and refuses to bike when it's cold or raining. Yehuda's an activist, and Joe's trying to sell bikes. This strip highlights one of the fundamental differences they have--the previous day, Yehuda scared off a couple who wanted information on bike routes in the area by trying to convince them that they could be cycling all over the place for everything they needed to do, and when he asks Joe if he was too preachy, Joe starts digging into him by shouting "Amen!" after everything Yehuda says. It's a fight that's carried over into the comments as well, where the readers start sniping at the other readers who take one side over the other. By the end of the comments, the fight is over which side is right, not about the comic at all, and while I understand that good comics can generate discussion, no one is really discussing anything--they're trying to be right by being loud and/or witty.
Maybe it's my rhetoric training, but I keep looking at the arguments on these sides and wonder why they can't figure out their differences and get their act together long enough to make meaningful change. There are a lot of cyclists out there, but the divisions run so deep that they can't seem to work together long enough to make big changes to promote cycling. I'd love to join a cycling group, but then I'd start to be associated with them, whoever they are, and the lines would start drawing around me as well.
I dunno. I suppose I'll just keep riding and doing my best to promote something I love, but it would be really cool if I could consider myself part of a reasonable group, rather than one with such polarized divisions.
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I have a student who has been having difficulty with her latest essay. It involves research, and she can't get access to one of the sources she needs (it's an online source, and her computer won't let her access it for some crazy reason. I've tried to help her myself, and it defies logic, so I know this isn't just an excuse.) She's also been having difficulty with the whole organizational structure, so she sent me an email last night saying that she was giving up because she was stressed, and if I think I could help, I should call her.
I was debating on whether or not I should call. I was leaning towards requiring her to call me, because I didn't want to call her and have a 20-minute conversation about how the paper is too hard and she's busy and she has three kids and listen to her justify to herself why she should drop the class. On the other hand, I am a caring person, and one of the points I pride myself on is my willingness to work with a student if they need help. I've I've adjusted due dates and driven out to the suburbs on my own dime to talk to my students. A community college student isn't the same as a four-year student, and I'm willing to believe that, if I give them a little break, they can achieve the goals I've set. I've been burned by this plenty of times, but I've had enough students prove me right that I keep doing this.
Last quarter, though, was rough at the end. I had a number of students I really, really tried to help, and it just didn't work. I kept hearing excuses, and it started to wear me out. So this quarter, I decided I was going to really, honestly, be stricter on my policies--no late work, half off late essays for one week after the due date, attendance policies are strict, and so on. I haven't been perfect--the attendance policy is one I've slid a little on--but I've felt better about standing by my grading decisions. So when her email appeared in my mailbox after my initial explanation of why she didn't pass her first paper, I wasn't sure what to do. I wanted her to show me she still cared and contact me, but she didn't appear to want to do that and wanted me to call her. I talked to people at school about this, and they said I was pretty nice just to give her my phone number, and that they normally reply by saying that "they understand if you want to drop because this class is too much effort right now" or something like that. I wouldn't catch any flak for replying that way, especially after explaining the situation and giving her my phone number. Still, there was something inside me that felt like that kind of reply was...a cheap way out. She's enrolled in my online course, so it's not like I'll see her in class next week. Calling is the most immediate form of communication I've had for some students.
Eventually, I did call, and we talked for 20 minutes about the requirements. She's going to try it again, and I may end up shifting the due date for her so she can get this done. But after I hung up, I thought about this and realized I was assuming something about my position--that, as the teacher, there's a certain level of trust that automatically comes with that. But some students, especially in a community college setting, don't necessarily have that trust of teachers (or of any authority figure, for that matter.) They see teachers as obstacle placers, people who set arbitrary deadlines and don't budge, even if there might be a good reason because "then I'd have to do that for everyone in class." And perhaps, in order to give her the help she really needs, I had to call her to establish to her that I really do mean it when I say I'm willing to help.
I may yet get burned by her. She might decide to drop the class in another week or two, or she might feed me more excuses in hopes for an extension. But right now, I feel good about the fact that I could reach out to her and give her the help she needed. And I hope that, in ten or twenty years, I'll still be the kind of teacher who's willing to call a student, to make that first gesture to help instead of requiring students to fulfill certain conditions to earn it.
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Piggybacking off of my previous friends-only post, I saw this article in the New York Times about students' expectations of grades versus the professors' expectations. And when I reflect back on my own experiences, I'm not sure whose side I fall on.
On the one hand, I certainly don't agree with the "more effort = higher grade" crowd. Just because you spent a lot of time writing an essay in my class doesn't automatically meant the essay is good. (This is usually followed up with "Next time, focus less on finding sources to dump into your paper and try writing an actual argument with good logic.") And my grades were hardly reflective of the effort I put into them--my English classes rarely required a whole lot of effort, and even if they did, I usually enjoyed it. Does my relative ease in handling these assignments mean I should be penalized because I didn't sweat over it like a bunch of other people?
On the other hand, I can see that a student's attempts at fulfilling the requirements should count for something. There's a danger in getting too entangled with the story of a student that you want that student to succeed, but in all honesty, I think that the slight adjustment of grades for students you like or respect is part of the system. Heck, in my field, we call that effort "process," and we do consider that in the final grade.
Sadly, though, the majority of student complaints tend to come from people who feel they deserve better. Some do it because they aren't used to low grades; others do it because they think that the teacher might change the grade so they'll shut up. Some--some are just idiots, and they think the world owes them, quite honestly. I don't think the student I was talking about earlier falls under that; those types of students usually end up as real troublemakers, the kind you have to call security on because they're crossing the line. I'm not sure what the solution is, quite honestly, especially in colleges like mine where students may have very different expectations, either due to their high school experiences or to poor social expectations.
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That liberal rag of a paper, the New York Times, ran a blog entry by several prominent people in the journalism/ad business on how to solve the current crisis in newspapers. In case you aren't aware, many newspapers are in danger of folding in the next year, including quite a few large ones. As someone who was once a reporter for a small-town paper, I've got a decent sense of both sides of the issue, and it's one that's occupied a bit of my thinking.
The main problem with newspapers, in my opinion, is that they're reliant on a model of business that died a few years ago. True, print publishing in general has been on the skids, but newspapers are hit even more because everything they do has been co-opted by other media. Fewer people are turning to the classifed ads for jobs, for example, and other parts of the classifieds are being eaten up by free services like Craigslist. Print ads also suffer because a newspaper isn't targeted to a specific audience. And many newspapers, especially smaller local ones, use AP and other wire stories (which internet savvy people can find easily online) to help fill ad space that they haven't sold, giving the paper even less original content. And as if that wasn't enough, all of the original content they do provide is often offered on the paper's web site for free, meaning all of those internet savvy consumers--you know, the ones who are slowly replacing the elderly that are both dying off and make up a large percentage of a newspaper's readership--don't need to pay to get the one item they value from a local paper: local news and information.
I don't think it takes a genius to see the problems with the newspaper's business model.
I admit I'm part of the problem; I read the Columbus Dispatch's web site every day, taking a look at the local news and happenings around town. I check out the Crew articles and try to keep up to date on what's happening in local government. The reason I'd never pay for a paper is because I'm essentially paying for a ton of extra advertisements I don't want or need. Elaine says that she enjoys the ritual of sitting down on a weekend and reading the paper over breakfast, and I had the same kind of ritual when I was a kid, but even now, the newspapers tend to pile up outside unread, and out of the entire Sunday paper, the only section we seem to regularly go for is the Sunday comics (which are slowly becoming more reprints of comics like Peanuts and For Better Or For Worse) and the Jo-Ann's ad which Elaine values for the coupon in the back. It takes a lot of paper to make a Sunday edition, and we use about five sheets of it, then recycle the rest. Why should I pay for that? Even Elaine is tiring of having to constantly gather and recycle these papers.
On the other hand, I really do see the value of having local news and reporters. A lot of your daily life is affected by what happens at a local level, even if you live in a small town, and having a local source of information is something every community needs. And as I think more about the local papers I've subscribed to, I think the problem isn't so much that I don't value local news, but that I don't value the current incarnation of newspapers. I would gladly pay money to get the news--it's just that the newspaper is filled with all sorts of junk that I don't want. I realize that ad space keeps the price down, but I don't want a ton of ads. I want the news, and having to flip pages and filter through the ads actively devalues the experience for me. The online articles, on the other hand, are immediately available for free. It's like going to a car dealer and having him say "If you want, you can test-drive this Ferrari for as long as you want. We'll pay for gas and maintenance and everything. But we'd really like it if you would buy a car from us." Why would I pay for something the business is willing to give away for free?
To me, this is the big paradox of the industry, and I saw it a lot when I was working at The Reporter in Fond du Lac. There were days when I would get a call from my editor saying "We need something to fill an extra eight inches of space because we didn't sell enough ads." The dirty truth is that, in a newspaper, the news is the least important item to the business. It's the hook that gets you to purchase the advertising packaged with it. The papers place such little value on their news that they're willing to give it away for free on a web site. Sadly, this is being mirrored by a lot of their "readers," many of whom would call me complaining about the paper and ending their call with "I only subscribe because of the coupons, anyway." And the readers the newspaper would really love to get, the ones who are intelligent and interested and engaged in local affairs? They're also smart enough to realize that the newspaper doesn't value the only piece of their business worht bothering with, so they read it online, if they bother to care t all. Then start factoring in the instant news glut that the internet provides, a growing internet-reliant population, the increase of popularity of digital readers for print media, and the meteoric rise of bloggers as a viable and trusted news source, and you start to see an industry that's not struggling because times are bad, but because their entire business model has been torn out from underneath them in a matter of a few years. The ones who still feed the system, who keep subscribing to the paper, are the ones who can't get regular internet access or don't want to give up the tradition of the paper. (Or coupon clippers. Who I hate. But I'm not bitter.)
So. The article.
The article is, in a grand irony, a blog article available only on their web site, which they offer for free. In it, several big shots, including deans of journalism colleges and the founder of Craigslist, offer their perspectives on the crisis. And I really like this article not for just for the different points of view, but because I think these people offer some solutions that are really intriguing. For example, Joel Kramer's idea of offering more in-depth coverage, but charging people more for access, is a good one, but I think he's stuck on the idea of a newspaper being a print medium. After all, the people who would really love all that in-depth coverage are likely people who rely heavily on their digital devices. Why would they want to lug around a physical newspaper? Still, I would be happy to pay more for a newspaper that actually looked at local issues in depth and provided different facts and perspectives.
I value the local news, and I wish there was an easy solution to the problems newspapers are facing. Unfortunately, the problem appears to be the newspapers themselves, and unless they're willing to change who they are and what they do, I'm worried that local reporting will die a quick death. Hopefully, the publishers will come to their senses and do something fast. Heck, if they can give me the news I want without the ads, I'd even pay for it.
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My 31st birthday was a couple of weeks ago, and the change in my age hasn't really been a big issue. However, I had an experience today that reminded me that I was now officially a thirty-something.
My profile is still on OKCupid, even though I've been married for over a year. (Elaine and I keep ours up there as a note to everyone else that it works.) Because of this, I'm on some of their mailing lists and programs, so OKCupid sends me these Quiver Matches, which are three women that I'm supposed to quickly judge if I like them or not. In the past, these have been younger women in their mid- to late-20s who are usually fairly attractive, but not really close matches--usually somewhere in the 70% match range or so. I look at them, nod that they're not as good as Elaine, and move on with my life.
This week, the matches show up, and I find myself looking at three 36-year-old mothers with a mid-50s percent match ratio. The only one of them who bothered to post personal information says she likes camping, fishing, bowling and Jeff Gordon.
Apparently, the moment I turned 31, OKCupid decided that I wasn't looking for younger women anymore, and I should just find someone who's available.
Messages like this remind me of how wonderful it is that I have a 25-year-old wife who actually shares my interests.
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Elaine has a post on her journal about the Male Privilege Checklist which has causes a bit of discussion. One guy over there made the argument that feminism is divisive and we should focus more on individual reactions. Elaine and he have an exchange, but I jumped in as well. Since I thought it was a pretty good post, and LiveJournal is, if nothing else, a place to pat yourself on the back, I repost it here for your discussion pleasure. I also encourage you to post in Elaine's thread if you wish.
____________________________________________________________________________________________
Women are sometimes privileged, yes, but they are privileged because the patriarchical society sees it as a sort of benefit for them, and institutional biases can't be changed with individual interactions.
For example, women are often given more support for being bisexual than men are, but that's because there's an existing bias that says "hot bi chicks are good," and "bi men are just half gay, which is bad." This isn't a privilege that exists because we see women as equals; it's one that exists because female sexuality, in all forms, is still viewed in the public eye as something that exists for the benefit for men.
This isn't a problem that gets solved in individual interactions; I can see your point that, if we all just treated everyone fairly, then feminism isn't necessary, but the problem with that thinking is twofold. One, it's a bit too broad for people to be able to relate to. It's sort of like saying "If we could deploy solar collectors in space, we wouldn't have energy problems." It's a great idea, and everyone is theoretically behind it, but there are a lot of steps in between that aren't easily explained. What exactly is "treat everyone fairly?" How does one do that? How do you know if you're not? What about my religious beliefs that women are to remain silent and respect the men? What if my definition of "fair" means that everyone has to fend for themselves, and those that lose had a fair chance but blew it?
The second problem is that not everyone is you, and simply preventing it in your own actions doesn't fix the system that's built on male privilege. In fact, it is a male privilege to be able to claim that you're doing your part by treating women fairly. It's great that you are, but the fact that you're doing it doesn't mean that others are as well, and claiming you're doing your part by not raping women. But feminists aren't saying they don't want you to rape them; they're saying they don't want to be raped, period, and the fact that you can sit back and say "Well, I'm not doing it, and that's good" is itself male privilege. It's not just about you and what you do; it's also about what you do to help correct others and create this atmosphere of equality, and to do that, you have to be willing to fight for that change among people who don't want to or can't see why something is wrong.
I know how it feels to be in your position. I've been there myself, and I'm still struggling with some of these concepts. When Elaine and I were at Target, a guy overheard her chiding me for something, and he said "Man, don't argue with the wife. You'll never win." And I just chuckled, and Elaine got upset, asking me why I didn't say something to him. At the time, I said I was caught off-guard and I was being polite, but the point is that his comment made her feel uncomfortable because he was stereotyping her, and I wasn't sticking up for her. By allowing it to happen, I was creating an atmosphere that she felt threatened in, and she doesn't want to (and shouldn't have to) feel threatened in a public place. It's a struggle to recognize this as a big deal sometimes, or even to recognize it as institutional bias, but by not trying to make that right, I was essentially doing the same thing as watching a robbery and not reporting it.
So what are the implications of this? Does this mean you're supposed to throw yourself into every social injustice that exists? Well...yes, to an extent. You don't have to give half your salary to organizations or march in every protest, but you first have to recognize that you're not free of privilege because you're nice to women. You have to be willing to fight to make sure everyone feels that way. That requires raising awareness, changing laws, and speaking out, even though you're not threatened. And it requires accepting that, no matter how nice of a guy you are, you're still part of the system, even if you don't want to be.
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It's an often asked question: where do emo people go when they're out of high school? Do they become actors? Artists? Politicians? And more importantly, how do you get people to pay attention to the horrible things in your life if you don't have a high school clique that monitors your LiveJournal constantly?
Apparently, if you're capable of reading and understanding, or at least quoting, Bakhtin, Derrida, Cixious, and other postmodern social theorists, you get published in Qualitative Research.
I would provide a link to the journal, but since it's a scholarly journal, it's something that you have to pay money to access. If you have access to a university library, though, it's possible they will have access to it through online databases or some such. If you're lucky, maybe your school will even have physical copies of the journal! Then you, too, can read cutting-edge research like "How Did We Get This Far Apart? Disengagement, Relational Dialectics, and Narrative Control," an essay written in a disjointed manner that explores the narratological-theoretical implications of the dissolution of his engagement with his fiancee. Here's a quote to give you an idea of what this is like:
As Denzin (1997, 1999) reminds us, narratives ought to be compelling
and vulnerable, connecting our private and public lives. Because writing
and theory are intertwined (Goodall, 2000; Krizek, 2003), I wrote this nar-
rative as a part of the attempt to remake sense of my identity while exam-
ining culturally embedded grand narratives about romantic relationships,
narratives that do not include the concepts of dialectical tensions.
To cut through the academia-ese, he wrote a personal essay to help recover from his breakup, and while doing so, he studies his story as an example of the way society normally frames romantic relationships. It's 19 pages long, and includes moving passages such as
The news media decided, whether we are
touched by the storms or not, that Florida is in the midst of the apocalypse.
We will never survive. The mouth of Sheol opened up beneath Florida, and
we are all going to get sucked through the gateway of hell, never to be seen
again. It’s a shame the media doesn't use biblical terms. Bring on the devas-
tation. My soul is in Abaddon, so why shouldn’t the rest of me join it?
But wait! Try this one as well!
Given my childhood background of home foreclosure, economic uncer-
tainty, and divorced parents, I was drawn to the stability of her family. At
first, the steadfastness was comforting, like a generous hug. Sometimes,
however, I began to feel overwhelmed. We did everything with the family.
* * * *
“I never get to see you,”I said.
“You saw me two days ago when you came over for Easter dinner.”
“I came to your house,saw you and twelve other people. I mean you and
me alone. Quality time.”
Don't you feel his pain? His anguish? The emotional distance that has set between them expressed in a mundane exchange of failed expectations? OMG ANGST!
I don't show any of them, but he repeatedly uses references to theorists to explain why he went and did something that, upon reflection, seems wrong now. He shows how the fact that he didn't call his girlfriend to hang out with him and his brother after a trip was an act of "segmentation (Baxter & Montgomery, 1996)", or how, when problems began to emerge in the relationship, "we took the trajectory of withdrawal, slowly but unquestionably losing our chronotopic similarity (Baxter, 2004)". He provides quotations of conversations--taken, undoubtedly, from his memory--as proof of what was going wrong. He notes that all of the theorizing he does is how he is attempting to make sense of the event.
Now I ask you, people who know me: how is this research?
As someone who studies narratives and their creation professionally (more or less), this sort of writing gets under my skin. I want to love it because I could see myself writing it, and I would love to get published in an academic journal for my essay writing. But I have a real problem with calling this "qualitative research." To me, this kind of research usually involves an aspect of the author's life that the audience can touch on and empathize with. Wendy Bishop, for example, often did this with her own writing, and used her personal experiences to explore topics related to the teaching and research of composition. And she published her work in many well-known and respected academic journals in our field, such as College Composition & Communication and College English. This author's work, however, doesn't fit that framework; when I read his essay I'm supposed to...what? Understand why he screwed up in his relationship? Why do I care about that? I don't know this guy. His situation doesn't affect me in the slightest. And even if I was in a similar situation, how does knowing that I may have participated in acts of segmentation teach me about my situation that I couldn't have gotten out of any self-help book on recovering from breakups?
Admittedly, the whole journal is not like this, but when each issue has at least a couple of essays titled "Storm Tracking: Scenes of Marital Disintegration" and "Wouldn’t It Be Nice: Performing the Mediated Self" that reflect upon uncomfortable personal experiences and explain them in terms of postmodern social theory, I really have to wonder when it stops being research and starts being a really fancy LiveJournal post. I mean, how does getting divorced constitute "research?" I can link my personal experiences to theory articles as well, but I'd call it a personal essay, not research. It doesn't really add anything to our body of knowledge, but at the same time, it looks like the authors of such articles want to take some theory articles, connect them to an overly-dramatic essay about how their life sucks, and put the publication on a CV.
It reminds me of the kind of people who would take the History of the Avant-Garde class at BG. Most of them would be American Culture Studies majors, and they would read these books that were acknowledged to have been avant garde, then contemplate how they could be "A-G" as well. These authors apparently feel they can contribute something useful to humanity's body of knowledge by showing how their personal pain relates to the social theories of the time. I can understand their desire to do this, but I think they're wrong--the importance of their pain doesn't come in making it a relevant example or affirmation of social theory, but in the emotional connections it makes to others when they read it. If you want people to care about your breakup with your fiancee, then write an essay that makes us care. Don't think that citing Bakhtin's Problem’s of Dostoevsky’s poetics makes up for your self-absorbed, unimaginative description of your personal pain.
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While I have not posted lately, one of the things I have been doing with my life is cycling.
This is, on some level, a lie. Saying "I'm cycling now" seems to say that I've meagerly picked up the sport from some odd meme I accrued through Elaine's love of Tour de France coverage or some such. The real truth is that, for the past three weeks, I've been cycling as much as I can for whatever reasons I could.
The biggest reason reason I have is the cost of gas and my need to get to work. School is in downtown Columbus, so I've been making the 9-mile trip by bike as often as possible lately. I managed to cut my time down from 75 minutes to 55, which I'm rather proud of. I haven't lost as much weight as I thought I might, but I'm building a lot of muscle in my legs, so that might counteract it.
There's a certain freedom to cycling that I've always enjoyed. To me, a bike was my first taste of what it was like to do whatever you wanted. When I lived in Mt. Pleasant, I could go pretty much anywhere in town on my bike when I was 12, and I often did. I would go with my friends and brothers to stores downtown, or, later on, I would go to middle school across town during the warmer months to avoid riding the school bus. It's the key to moving about at an age where you're old enough to want to be other places, but too young to realistically dream of driving. These days, it's not the key to moving about as it is exercise, but there's still a bit of an ego boost when I walk into work covered in sweat, wearing my helmet and carrying my bike seat. It's sort of like bragging, that I can do this strenuous physical activity and they can't or won't. And of course, there's the added benefit of not having to fill my gas tank for a month at a time.
Not much else has been going on lately. I had a tooth chip last week, and the dentist I saw for it said there wasn't enough of the tooth left for a filling, so I need to get a crown. Eating with a temporary crown sucks. Also, I joined Facebook. It's as close to social networking as I think I can handle, though--I'll shoot myself the day I have to get a MySpace page.
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The new edition of Dungeons & Dragons is coming out in about a week. This excites me.
For the past few years, I've been resisting playing or running D&D for several reasons. One was that I was involved pretty heavily with the Bowling Green Gaming Society, and I saw my role as someone who introduced different games to the group, so I avoided D&D on the grounds that everyone knew it. However, as I thought about it, I realized that I just didn't like D&D in its current incarnation. It looked and felt too much like a board game, with its emphasis on maps and 5-foot step powers and so on.
The new edition, the fourth in the line, is very different from it's third edition. I would describe it more as getting some inspiration from MMORPGs, but I really do mean that in a good way. You see, my problem with 3e was that it felt like something you really had to memorize all of the rules in order to be good at. There were good powers to pick, and lame ones, and there were some that were clearly speedbumps to more awesome powers. But the thing is that the writers of 3e worded it like every choice was a good one, when in fact they were not. So in order to really play the game well, you had to know how all of the feats and abilities from all of the different books fit together in order to make an effective character, because if you picked the wrong feat when you were inexperienced, it could really come back to haunt you later. In the new edition, the designers really turned up the cool factor, and I think it's for the better. There are now "at-will," "encounter" and "daily" powers, and I think the impact of these powers shows most clearly in the wizard class.
Anyone who's familiar with D&D knows how wizards worked in older editions--you got to memorize a few spells, and when you cast them, you had to sit down for a while and re-memorize them. This meant that, since a wizard had awesome power, but only when he or she had spells, a wizard without spells was a liability in a fight. Furthermore, those spells didn't scale very well, so spells you used a lot a low levels became fairly useless at higher levels. The most famous of these is Magic Missile, a spell that was pretty nice, but as you got higher, it fell into the background as a "fallback" or "last resort" spell. And you had to be careful when you cast it, because if you cast it, it was gone, and you had to re-memorize it.
In 4e, Magic Missile is an at-will power.
And if you think about it, that's awesome. It shifts the wizard from an arcane grenade--someone who the party totes around until they need a fireball--to someone who can actively join in the fight all the time. It's a lot like wizards from computer games like World of Warcraft, where the wizard has some basic attack spells that they use all the time, and some other spells they can cast less often, but they do more damage.
And you have to realize that all of the classes can do this; they all have nifty powers that they grow into to. And there are other modifications as well: healing surges (which all characters have) allow players to ignore (or at least not worry so much about) having a cleric who is essentially a walking band-aid. When you gain a level, you're allowed to retrain, which lets you change a choice you made previously. It's just one change per level, but it's helpful when your character advances and you realize you picked a feat or a spell that doesn't help you like you thought it would, and you need to change it to get your character back on track.
These are all pretty basic tropes from MMORPGs, but putting them in a pen-and-paper RPG, especially D&D, seems really smart to me. After all, the game has always been combat-centric, and the changes the designers have made make combat more interactive. Or perhaps, more specifically, it's less strategic and more tactical; there's less emphasis on being able to plan your character's every step for eight levels and more "We've got eight gnolls and we have to figure out how to beat them in this rocky terrain." Oh, yes, fights became harder, too, since the designers felt that fights should always involve creatures that threaten your life. So even wimpy goblins have benefits to fighting and require some thinking. You're supposed to figure out how to use the terrain and other features to your advantage.
Normally, I'm not so excited about killing things and taking their stuff. However, the biggest problem I had with MMORPGs is that I couldn't roleplay in them. Azeroth is a beautifully-rendered world, but once my holy priest hit 60, there wasn't anything for him to do but run the same 25- or 40-man dungeons over and over. I couldn't explore anymore. I couldn't wander the world as a wise healer. I couldn't explore past the edges of the map. I couldn't add anything of my own to the world. D&D 4e lets me do that. I can roleplay in the world and still get the kind of exciting combat that I get in an MMO. I realize it's early yet, but if the designers can hold on to this and make this design really work, I think it will be a great thing.
I'm looking forward to this game coming out now, and I'm eagerly waiting until I have enough money to order the set online. It's a very different game from what I remember, but I think that it works, and it makes me want to play the game again. To me, that's what a new edition of D&D should do--get me re-energized about the game once more.
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It's entirely possible that no one here cares about this topic, but this article in The Atlantic touches on one of the big problems my field faces: how we handle the students who cannot succeed in college.
As Americans, we like to believe that everyone has the ability to improve their lot in life. But the reality is that, when these students get to college, they aren't ready to deal with the kind of thinking and the rigor of the work we expect. And I'm not talking about the traditional students; I'm talking about the kind of people who go to Columbus State or other small colleges, trying to get some kind of post-secondary education so they can get a job to support their family, or get promoted in their current job.
I'm an idealist, and I keep thinking every time I fail a paper that there was something I could have done that I didn't, that I failed the student in my instruction somehow. I had one yesterday who I sat down and talked about a revision she wanted to write. She claimed that I hadn't talked about requirements that I knew I had, that I kept changing requirements. Part of me, the larger part, felt guilty, and I wanted to apologize. A smaller part of me, though recognized what she wanted from me--she wanted an outline, a map from me that she could follow and fill in the blanks, then turn in a paper that would pass. And while I discuss structure for papers and explain the parts of the paper I'm grading on, I can't just give my students the outline for a paper that will pass; first, I can't cover all the possible ways a person could write a paper, and second, the students have to learn how to write that outline themselves. If they can't do that, then what hope do they have when they advance and have to write harder papers from teachers who assume they can come up with a structure on their own?
And I've had experiences like the author has as well. I know there are some older, non-traditional students who, after struggling to get into college and taking developmental classes to get into 101, leave my class after finding out I have an online discussion requirement. It doesn't matter that I'm willing to sit down and work with them after class on developing computer skills; they just see that it involves using the computer, so after a week or so of struggling to figure out how to post to our discussion board, they drop out. Again, I find myself wondering if I could have helped more, but I also remember that part of the reason I wanted them to do the online discussion is to get them used to communicating via text over the internet. If you can't check e-mail or use a discussion board, how do you hope to get a job today when e-mail is so important?
So who's to blame for this? Certainly, there's more K-12 schools can do to prepare people for the increasingly necessary task of obtaining post-secondary education, but at the same time, there are some people who, turning 30 and realizing they need more than a high school diploma, decide to knuckle down and get an associates degree, only to find that they're entirely out of touch with what's expected. These are people that we can't prepare, because when they were young, they decided that they would never need to know all that academic stuff, and now that they do, they expect us to accommodate their lack of knowledge. And my school tries to--we really do. We have classes that people can take to learn basic computer skills. We have all sorts of ESL classes designed to help non-native speakers learn English. (A person can take up to 12 classes in English before entering 101.) But to many of those unprepared students, every extra class they take is another couple of hundred dollars out of their pocket they can't afford. Worse, they might consider it useless; after all, our programs last two years, and that's when they want to graduate. They don't want to spend extra time to learn how to use a computer or obtain better study skills. They want to sit in class, take their tests, earn a passing grade, and leave with a diploma. And education doesn't work that way.
And of course, it's my area that ends up taking the large brunt of this reality check. In math and science, there are facts to learn and procedures to follow. My students get upset when there isn't a proscribed method of writing a paper that will get them an A. They've gotten by all their lives thinking the way they do, and they don't appreciate some community college teacher (who's younger than they are! He's barely 30!) telling them that they need to think a different way, more critically. Tehy don't want to have to read something that isn't an instruction manual for their job, and they sure don't want to have to interpret that reading. These students can handle getting a poor grade on a math test because it's something that can't be argued with; they equation works or it doesn't. It's harder when they get an "F" on a paper because it's not their procedure that's being questioned in their mind, but their thinking, their own self. I'm not saying their process is bad; I'm saying their thinking is bad, and therefore, they're bad people. It sounds incredible, but that's how many of those students who disappear in the middle of the semester see it.
And like the author of the article, I worry that someone will come around and start asking why I'm only passing nine people out of 20 in my class. And like the author, no one ever does. And like that author, I wonder if that's our problem or the student's.
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I love soccer. It's something genetic or built into my familial background or something, because it's an interest in sports I never really had a chance to exercise until Elaine and I got digital cable, when all of the sudden I had access to all of the Columbus Crew games.
To all of you non-soccer fans, the Columbus Crew is the local football team. ("Football" as in "soccer", not "American football," a game which I have more and more loathing for as time passes.) They were around when the MLS was founded, and they have, for the past three years, sucked hard. In a league with fourteen teams and ten spots in the playoffs, the Crew has not made the playoffs for the last three years. That's bad. However, the Crew are now on the top of the league, with 6 wins, 2 losses and one tie. That's good.
Our newly revived team means a newly revived fanbase as well. That's bad.
You see, the Crew fans took a bit of a trick from the Toronto FC fans (who are certifiably crazy, but in a good way) and started throwing colored streamers onto the field when the opposition took a corner kick from their end of the field. It was flashy and bright and harmless, and it helped show their support for the team. Okay, I can handle that. Play gets stopped for a minute while some field personnel clean up the streamers, and life goes on. But then the Crew fans started taking to throw other objects onto the field--full beer cups, smoke bombs, bottles, batteries, whatever the fans happen to be holding. It got bad enough that the Fox Soccer announcer pointed out that the League has to do something about it before someone on the field gets hurt.
There are several stadiums in the League where fans get kicked out or fined if they start throwing things onto the field, and that's great in my opinion--I want to see the football game undistracted by fans who "proclaim their loyalty" by trying to assault the opposing team with whatever small object they can throw. If I wanted that, I'd watch Argentinian football.
Of course, there are the fans who are defending their right to throw stuff from the stands. Yes, they're only arguing that they should be allowed to throw streamers, but I think the last few home games proves that there are always people who don't get the message and throw something else. Those fans say that they're responsible for increased attendance and/or popularity, or that their energy has brought more people to the game because there's a more traditional soccer environment. My response to those points is 1) the increased attendance is likely due to the fact that the Crew finally doesn't suck, and 2) a "traditional soccer environment" is often associated in the minds of many people to mean "soccer hooligans ruling the stands."
Columbus doesn't need traditional soccer fans. If streamers aren't thrown out during every corner, that won't ruin our reputation as a serious soccer team. What <I>will</I> ruin it is having the nation watch our team's fans, who finally have a chance to root for someone who isn't perpetually anchored to the bottom of the standings, take out the eye of some soccer player and then claim that it's tradition or some crap. I love the Crew, too, folks, but I think it's time to grow up and realize that if soccer's going to be respected as a sport in the U.S., the fans need to act like grown-ups as well.
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So apparently, my tastes in music are fairly eclectic. Who knew? For those who must know, these are the answers:
I like this. This time, I'm going to personalize it a bit and only use ten songs from a random list on my more popular (well, more popular with me, at least) songs. Let's see what comes up! 1) Desperate for changing, starving for truth.--"Hanging By A Moment" by Lifehouse. Guessed by Elaine.2) She sat right down on the sofa. I said "Where have you been? I've been waiting for you."--"Hangingaround" by Counting Crows. Guessed by Christine.3) Supreme lifestyle, the one I used to hate. 4) Jacqueline was seventeen working on a desk when Ivor peered above a spectacle. 5) Time goes by at such a pace. 6) Don't know where we'll be tomorrrow, but we'll beg and borrow everything we need.--"Count On My Love," by Liz Phair. Guessed by Elaine, who has to know this, because it's our song. =)7) Crash and burn--all the stars explode tonight. 8) In every heart, there is a room, a sanctuary safe and strong.--"And So It Goes" by Billy Joel. Guessed by Elaine.9) I know that I cannot run from all the bad things I've done. 10) I wish you out of the woods and into a picture with me.
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Would you like to play a game?
Step 1: Put your iTunes or equivalent on random.
Step 2: Post the first line from the first 30 songs that play, no matter how embarrassing.
Step 3: Bold out the songs when someone guesses correctly.
Step 4: Looking them up on Google or any other search engine is CHEATING!
Any text in parentheses is mine.
1) You can look but you can't touch. I don't think I like you much.--"I Think I'm Paranoid" by Garbage, guessed by Elaine.
2) Dust falls on the empty halls of my old school.
3) Hey, you caught me in a coma.
4) Normally I'd be french twisting my hair.
5) Molly Be Damed smote Jimmy The Harp with a horrid little pistol and a lariat.
6) We turn away to face the cold, enduring chill.
7) How many special people change? How many lives are living strange?
8) The pain that grips you, the fear that binds you, releases life in me.
9) I let you put it in my mouth. I let it get under my skin.
10) I guess this time you're really leaving. I heard your suitcase say goodbye.
11) I liked the way my hand looked on your head in the presence of my knuckles.
12) And you don't seem to understand. A shame, you seemed an honest man. (Some people reading this might recognize this easily, but the artist and song title are trickier.)
13) Hanging on. Here until I'm gone.
14) There's three ways out of every box.--"Three Ways" by The Wallflowers, guessed by Christine.
15) Lay your head where my heart used to be. Hold the earth above me.
16) Waking up dead inside of my head would never, never, do--there is no med.
17) Have you ever been hated or discriminated against? I have--I've been protested and demonstrated against.--"Cleanin' Out My Closet" by Eminem, guessed by Nancy.
18) Take this heart of darkness; I give it up.
19) Since we talked alone.../Come angels of unknown.../Come angels of unknown... (This is the entireity of the lyrics.)
20) I should know who I am by now.
21) Well, I woke up in mid afternoon because that's when it all hurts the most.--"Mrs. Potter's Lullabye" by Counting Crows, guessed by Christine.
22) I've been living my life in a cage. Freedom spits in my face. It was such a disgrace.
23) Mama, she has taught me well.
24) Why are you so green? How can you say that to me?
25) I don't understand about complementary colors and what they say.
26) I'm planning my release. Tonight I'll speak the words I never thought I'd ever have to say to you.
27) Voices, a thousand, thousand voices.
28) Jillian was her name. She was sweeter than aspartaime.
29) I'm not gonna lie to you--something is missing.
30) Look to the sky, way up on high. There in the night, stars are now right. (Yeah, good luck with this one.)
I had to skip a bunch of songs that were soundtrack songs, because I figured guessing what (instrumental) was would be too difficult. Likewise, I left out the two Pillows songs that came up because I figured no one would want to try and guess what the English translation of the Japanese lyrics meant.
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I've been following the primary campaigns fairly decently, and I've especially been following the Clinton/Obama struggle. I'm an Obama fan, and have been ever since I found out about him a week or so before the Democratic National Convention in 2004, where he delivered the keynote address.
It's an interesting fight because it does seem to be a generational struggle at times, but what worries me more is that Obama, despite his skills, is still being compared to Clinton as the underdog. Now, it's somewhat naive to believe he doesn't campaign against Clinton at a disadvantage--her political connections run deep and far, and she certainly had more years of national-level politics under her belt than Obama does. But at the same time, his victories and losses seem attributed more to Clinton's decisions than his own.
Take the New Hampshire and South Carolina Democratic primaries. Clinton's victory was attributed in part to her emotional moment at a New Hampshire cafe where she started to cry. Obama's victory, however, was not noted for his ability to reach voters, but more for the fact that the Clintons' negative campaigning didn't work. Obama didn't win by such a large margin because of her tactics, obviously, but the way the media framed the victory made it seem not that the race was Obama's to win, but Clinton's to lose. A small difference, but one that casts his abilities in doubt without bringing anything like that up.
I'll admit that, while I adore Obama's rhetoric, he hasn't talked very concretely about plans. It's difficult to do so, though, when you don't have all the information that a president does. The primaries at this stage seem to be more about tenor than tactics, anyway. And I've read enough about Obama to know that he's got some plan in mind. The problem is that many people do not trust politicians, and that fear is prevalent in their views on politics. As one poster at RPG.net put it, "It's why Obama frightens and confuses many of us (Gen Xers), because this guy might actually believe his hopeful message. And it's been decades since anyone in this country really believed that hopeful messages could be real." Obama's the first candidate I've seen in a while that could move a crowd so much with his speech, and everything about him says that he really believes what he says. I just hope people aren't tuned away from that because of the cynicism inherent in many people's political expectations.
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Hmmm. It worked a lot better with "Panama." Ennh.
I am posting to let people know that my phone number has changed. I sent it out already to a group of people that I thought should have it, but if for some reason you're not on that list and you would like it, drop me a line and let me know.
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