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Now we’re screwing with Pakistan. Fantastic.
I try to, in a sense, detach myself from the fate of the world. Not to cease caring, but to remove my investment in its systems and orders. It’s a part of me trying to place my hope in Christ and not in the world and to take an attitude of what I guess you could call “Christian resignation,” a recognition that kingdoms and empires have risen and fallen and will rise and fall in the future, but that none of it signals the end of the world, none of it means anything is crashing down beyond something corrupt, something selfish, something unable and unwilling to keep itself alive.
Christ is where I put my hope, not in men and women, not in politics, congresses, governments, and should the US find itself falling apart, as seems to be the case, I try to put that in some perspective, and to remember first God and my vows to him in my baptism before my citizenship or employment, and to remember that it is in crises such as this that both the best and worst of people come to the fore. It is in crises that people either become heroes or villains, the burning and purifying fire stripping away social niceties and revealing monsters or saints.
My roommate commented that she hopes she never lives to see rioting in the streets, but it seems to me, rightly or wrongly, that we’re on the verge of shutdown, and everything we’ve ever trained for will become obsolete — except for the Gospel. Crises in particular get me thinking vocationally, the thought of these collapses forcing me to abandon a lot of my conceits about myself and what I want to do. How can I be a comic book writer in a financial meltdown where the streets are teeming with the poor, homeless, and unemployed? How can writing music reviews or following the latest movies be anywhere near as important as the basic corporal works of mercy? The whole ethic of Christian existence is self-giving, complete self-giving. It’s surrender.
I pray often that we can rise to that challenge should it be necessary, and of course, even should it not. I’ve prayed during intercessions that, should the worst come, Americans and whoever else the collapse affects will embrace evangelical poverty and dedicate themselves to the service of God through the care of the blinding hordes of the needy.
Here’s to it.
Seriously. Don’t panic. Not because nothing is wrong, but because panic brings chaos and bedlam. Don’t panic. don’t panic. Don’t panic. Just keep repeating it to yourself.
Everything is, uh, gunna be fine.
My friends, the USA is facing a massive collapse of its money supply. The collapse of stocks on Wall Street is not really the problem, but is instead a symptom is a greater problem. You see, because stocks are traded very freely, their prices can inflate or deflate quickly and easily. But Wall Street acts like a thermometer for the temperature of the economy: a collapse in world stock prices must eventually be followed by a collapse in the prices of other real goods, and eventually a collapse in wages. It is like ripples in a pond. Who exactly will lose their job, and how long it will take to lose it, we cannot say. But we should not imagine it won’t happen, and the consequences will affect us all.
Nevermind, then. We’re in for some hard times, I think. We have stretched ourselves thin in ways we never imagined, and now, it’s collapsing around us, like a rubber band pulled too far, or that game “Don’t Break The Ice.”
Hey everyone. I know I didn’t post over the weekend; I had a big test today and was very deliberately not studying for it. Not studying involves stalling. Stalling involves video games. So I spent most of the weekend wasting my time and talking about stupid things that aren’t worth blogging about. After a full day-and-a-half or so of filling my head with irrelevant garbage, I went to mass and proceeded to hang out with Kemiro through the evening, and then taking the time to study and do some required reading from about 10PM until rougly 2AM. I have horrible sleeping habits, and worse waking habits, I’ll admit.
Anyway, the weekend gave me some necessary unwinding, because this week is going to be rough; I have a six-page paper due on Wednesday I haven’t started yet (on the relationship between the imagery of the Second Shepherds’ Play and the Eucharist; it should be a walk), and another paper due next Wednesday, plus a Biology assessment. So I want to thank Kevin for his big DRM post (and no, he didn’t clear the picture with me; my apologies to you sensitive enough to be offended), and hopefully, he’ll pick up a little more of the slack this hell-week of mine.
Good hunting.
As some of you might have picked up on by now, I’m a gamer. I have been since I knew what games were and have forever been engaged by them; as entertainment, as a creative medium, as art, or as small, digital museums of themselves, to be explored one level after another, as if browsing a gallery.
Gamers fall into several different categories, and one of those distinctions is Console or PC. I fall under the former category, proudly trumpeting the benefits of Console (PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo) over PC gaming. I used to play games on PC when I was younger, and I don’t have anything against the kinds of games the PC tends to play host to, or look down on PC gamers as some kind of 2nd class community. No, in a hobby that can be modestly classified as expensive, PC gaming has become too expensive. That’s like Bill O’ Reilly being impressed with how much of an asshole someone is.
Affording a top of the line PC that will run games coming out for the next 2 or 3 years will run you somewhere between the cost of a new-used car and the downpayment for a brand new car. We’re talking thousands of dollars. The sum total cost of a ‘gaming rig’ is absurd, just for the sake of being entertained. To get the necessary memory, cpu power and graphics power needed to have a system that is ‘up to spec’ with the latest graphics intensive games is a joke. The people at ATI and NVidia must wake up laughing, and then laugh all the way to the bank. Nevermind worrying about the games you purchase not running on your personal computer because of some bug or glitch that came out of left field that the game designers couldn’t possibly have planned for (and gotten the game out in a reasonable amount of time), so you have to wait days or weeks for a patch to come out just so you can run the game.
Console games don’t have these problems. You plunk down a couple hundred on your fun box of choice, and you’re set for at least another 5 years. Well, unless you’re a patron of the Xbox at which point Microsoft will axe the console as soon as possible to get the next one out (which was rushed to market and riddled with problems but that’s a story that others have written before me and better). There’s no worrying about, ‘I hope Metal Gear Solid 4 will run on my PS3.’ If you have a PS3, it’s gonna goddamn play. It’s not gonna tell you your system can’t run MGS4 because you need more memory, or you have to run MGS4 at medium to low graphical settings to even be able to play it.
Which brings me to DRM. Another way the PC Gaming industry has found another way (on the publishing end) to shoot itself in the face. Data Rights Management is the latest incarnation of copy protection for computer games, which has been causing a whole lot of fuss in the vocal online gaming community. It basically break downs like this:
As long as you have content creators, there will be people who want to buy it–and unfortunately, people who want to steal it. This has been the case since people have had things to sell. The problem with DRM and other systems like it is, you’re punishing your patrons, alienating the very people who have been growing your profit margins. Thieves will be thieves, and they will steal your shit, because they feel they have to. There isn’t any piracy countermeasure that won’t eventually be hacked, cracked, and antiquated. Meanwhile the content providers continue to beat the people who do support them over the head, driving them away, and scaring potential consumers off. Penny-Arcade.com has done a 3 part…scrutiny about DRM, with industry leaders putting in their opinions in place of Jerry Holkins’ (the normal writer). Daniel James had this much to say, which echoes much of how I feel, and what got me on this shpeel today
(credit to Penny-Arcade.com):
The business model of putting bits in a box and charging to experience said tasty bits is forever broken. Furthermore, to prevent the copying of bits is futile and ultimately destructive to the goal of any modern digital business, which is to conscript enthusiastic ‘users’, and from them, customers.
Our mission at Three Rings is to create an emotional connection with players. We want to become one of the ten places you go on the interwebs. We want to be on your Chrome start page. We want you to dream of puzzley pieces and Pirates (or Zombies). If some folks would like to give us some money, that’d be great too.
Money can’t buy you love, but love can bring you money. In software the only sustainable way to earn money is by first creating love, and then hoping that some folks want to demonstrate that love with their dollars.
The cheddary ‘Free to Play’ is not just a cheesy marketing slogan, but a shift in assumptions; it costs approaching nothing to give away some bits, or let people play Puzzle Pirates for free. Every player, free or paid, adds value to the community and excitement for other players. Free players are the content, context and society that encourages a small fraction of the audience to willingly pay more than enough to subsidize the rest.
It’s perhaps easy to stand in the server-side tower, printing coin of the realm and lording it over a bit-mountain. One of online games’ many business model advantages is sidestepping DRM questions by maintaining the canonical database that is highly valued by members of the community.
‘Not fair’, the vendor of music or packaged software cries. Well, tough shit. Nobody added your business to the list of protected species, despite what your lobbyists and lawyers say. Find a business model that’s actually appropriate to the 21st century, and perhaps scale back your expectations of vast profits accordingly (oh, and fire some lawyers and lobbyists, too, please). For example, as some musicians have done by returning to live performance as their main source of revenue.
We all know folks who collect music, movies or software, thrilled by all the notional value acquired, but rarely look at any of it. To me, it seems worthless. I assume that any bits are commonplace and easy to come by, and the value is in their use. Everything should be shareware to be tried and tested until its value is proven and the love-meter swings open the wallet. If I were to pass on some music or a piece of code I become a vector of word of mouth viral marketing, the best kind, the kind that money can’t buy. To fight this inexorable trend seems as counter-productive as the cellular operators practice of not distributing game demos in order to fleece people with marketing and crappy games. Way to kill a platform, guys.
DRM takes a big poo on your best customers — the ones who’ve given you money — whilst doing nothing practical to prevent others from ’stealing’ your precious content juices. Worse, it makes these renegades feel nice and righteous about sticking it to ‘the man’. Stop trying to persuade people to love you more by hitting them a rusty pipe. Put down the pipe, and give up on DRM.
I believe this man actually gets it. The market is changing radically, and content providers, set in their ways and struggling to fight, if not control the flow of information in the information age are cutting their own bellies out. And until the rest of the publishing industry does as well, the ‘Is PC Gaming Dead?’ articles are going to continue their yearly emergence, like every DRM they put out getting cracked, like every message board explosion of outrage against the latest incarnation thereof, like a bad game of wack-a-mole at a fun park.
Despite this video, I still hate Comic Sans.
I find it insanely infuriating when professional graphic design features standard Windows fonts. My friend Erik is a signmaker, and recounts to me the endless daily demand for signs written in Papyrus. People love papyrus. It communicates to them a sense of timelessness and antiquity and Middle Eastern flair, and so it shows up in advertisements for Bible studies or biblical conferences or on the cover of Joan Chittister’s prayer book. It’s everywhere and it drives me absolutely batty. It’s an ugly font and there are so many out there, faux Arabic and faux Hebrew fonts, that do the job better.
I stumbled across a book yesterday with a cover done in Matisse. I shook my head and wondered over the low-res, pixelated lightening they chose for a cover. I then got back to looking at the book full of pictures of wet cats.
So, I had some friends over to watch the first presidential debate on CNN. CNN is my normal news source, MSNBC being a liberal bastion and FOX News being a conservative one, CNN drives the best middle line, Paul Begala, who looks like a muppet, notwithstanding. I default there for general news and especially for political coverage. So, watching the debate last night, I had to utter a simple, definite “What the…?”
Rolling under the screen was a graph that looked like an echocardiogram, guaging “audience reaction,” rising and falling in smooth and constant hills, red for Republicans, blue for Democrats, green for Indepedents, and mostly predictable anyway; Republicans, you may be surprised to know, like McCain better than Obama. But it was distracting and downright creepy, immediately calling to mind an image of people captive in a room with electrodes attached to their brain.
It was also huge and took up a good chunk of the bottom portion of the screen. I’d find myself watching it instead of listening to the debate. I am consequently less informed than I might otherwise have been. So all in all, not a smart move on CNN’s part, and I hope they drop it for the next three debates.
It’s been said that the mashup is this decade’s biggest contribution to art. Not just the musical mashup, although there have been some very big projects done in the past few years that have garnered intense media attention, from American Edit to the commercially-released The Beatles: Love produced for the Cirque du Soleil. While there has been new and interesting things being done in music, none of them, or at least very few, are honestly new; sure, most people haven’t heard the sort of thing Beirut is doing, for instance, but that’s because his source material is Eastern European folk music. He’s not doing anything really new as much as it is reappropriated.
And reappropriation, it’s been argued, is the future of all forms of art. This past decade has given us masterful examples of it, from Kill Bill to the music of April March and Komeda to the oft-vented lament that most of the big movies are sequels or adaptations, as though nobody really has anything left to say anymore.
The “Hipster” article Kevin posted last night makes the argument that Western culture is burnt out, and that it’s desperately showing that to anybody willing to look. No new contributions are being made. The subcultures lack impetus apart from self-aggrandizement. There isn’t a fire under us, something to stir and move us, and dammit, we just aren’t subversive enough. It’s obsessed with irony and image, with seeing and being seen, with scene, with sarcastic referent to the past, and with pop culture. It’s endlessly referent, and has no sense of itself, being nothing more than a thrown-together hodgepodge of looks and sounds from previous countercultures.
And all of this in an endless search for authenticity in experience. Not, you’ll note, in meaning. My generation, the Millennials, is pissed off, and jaded as hell, bored in our affluence and struggling to identify with a lower class to which we do not actually belong. We tend, as a whole, to support Obama because he seems real, not because we support his policy proposals. We dream of overseas adventure or road trips, but we’re the blogging generation, and everything we do must be reported and consumed. All of this electronic connection has us feeling disconnected. And we haven’t figured out how to deal with that yet. Ours is yet another age of angst.
But it’s a different sort, because, deep down, none of us are entirely sure what it is we should be contributing. Endlessly critical of capitalism, we flirt with Marx to one extent or another, but we aren’t really motivated to bring it about. Instead, we assume change can’t happen. We’re socially conscious but we don’t volunteer. We’re angry but it’s more a smolder than a flame. The only outlets we’ve seemed to be able to find is music, and even then, we can only talk about it by talking about the past. Where, we collectively wonder, are we in all of this?
It’s like we’re waiting for an opportunity to step up and be heroes, and we’re pretty convinced it’s never going to come.
