DFC and DFC and DFC

For years now I've wanted to broaden my programming ability by making something actually useful to me.  For awhile it was a spell planner for the recreation of Magestorm an FPS RPG from Mythic Entertainment, but that was only mildly useful and needlessly complicated for the medium I wanted to polish my skills in compared to other, better ways to do it.  Then there was a replacement program for D&D e-tools, a piece of software used to create D&D characters that was horribly designed and became more and more bloated the more modules you added (details from other books).  Plus the overall project would have been huge if I wanted to do it right.  I have finally decided on one that I think I can pull off and will have lots of fun with because it is essentially a recreation of the first real game addiction I ever had, Darkness Falls: The Crusade.   It's a MUD also made my Mythic Entertainment in the 1990s that drained away a ton of my free time for about 5 years and was part of the inspiration for Dark Age of Camelot.  Theres not a lot of actual graphics outside of the basic program GUI that needs making, which is probably my biggest weakness since I have no graphic arts skills, period.  Content-wise, almost all of the game is in my head with the exception of exploration areas which are completely a creative element as opposed to mechanics and programming.  The best part is I get to make changes to the game that I always thought needed to be made but that the staff never implemented, essentially like a WoW player having his own say over how the game is updated.  The best part, my favorite character name I used in the game, "Draken", named after my cat from back then, "Drake", with a little effort can be reworked to my own parodical twist on the new games name, "Drakens's Falls: The Crusade."  Okay, off to work!

Fox News and MSNBC and Fox News

Over the years I've had many friends inquire as to why me, a fairly liberal person, watches Fox News and listens to talk radio.  I've had many reasons and they all still play a role in why I continue such an act of masochism.  Part of it relates to me being, at my very core, a contrary person.  Ever since I was little I had to be different, could never do anything the way the other kids were doing it.  I hated liking something that everybody else liked because it seemed to lessen the value I had on it, as if I was only going along with the crowd, I wanted something pure, something I truly like for myself, it took me until about the 17th year of my life to find it in gaming friends and about my 22nd to find it in local friends.  I've been aware of this for years now, and I am aware that it is not a real reason to like or dislike something, so I try to focus it and I'm usually successful, but not always, such is life.  Anyway, listening to such harshly different media outlets fits perfectly in that sense.  I take in what they are saying and because it is the predominant opinion surrounding me at said moment, I am able to focus this counter-populism feeling towards dissecting and analyzing the argument, or even on some days, just firing myself up.  It doesn't always work, sometimes I get irritated and turn the channel, other days I get inspired and make brilliant new observations I've never noticed before.   There is, however, one thing that came out of this, unintentionally, at least at first, that has now become the primary reason I keep a portion of conservative media in my life. That reason is that by exposing yourself to differing viewpoints, you help ground yourself in your own viewpoints and it helps you spot holes in your argument that you and those with like minds around you might not have seen, or even, random number generator forbid, show you that you are wrong.  I have seen this with one acquaintance who works in D.C. at a libertarian cause promoting organization.  He is a very intelligent person, he has a bachelors degree from the same college that I attend and to his credit never falls to name calling or any illogical fallacy like it during discussions.  However, outside of the few discussions we have on facebook on each others posts, it is pretty clear that he is surrounded constantly by those with like minds and as a result has begun to get a sort of tunnel vision on political reality, suffering from a sort of groupthink.  That is not to say that he just inserts himself into a social circle and sponges the intellectual climate and makes it his own, he came to his conclusions prior to this, is very capable of forming a coherent argument, but I think he enjoys the company of like minded individuals as opposed to scholarly discussion and banter, and his position suffers as a result.  This is exactly the kind of thing that I never want to see happen to me, so I watch fox news, I listen to Hannity, Limbaugh and Beck, I take in what they say, compare it to presentations I've seen, heard or read elsewhere and try my best to reach the truth.  In the process of exposing myself to so many sources, it is not hard to tell where the integrity lies and the lies harm integrity and that is why I believe it is categorically false to even imply that Fox News and MSNBC are of the same make when it comes to media outlets.

So let's start off at the obvious starting point, that Fox News is the right wing news source for America and that MSNBC is the equivalent left wing source.  I don't think this assertion is completely wrong, it is obvious that the powers that be in both lean a certain direction, or at the very least, lean in said direction as part of a profit motive, but I think it is somewhat lazy.  I've observed both sources throughout the day and there is a stark difference in programming.  While Fox takes a much heavier hand towards hosted shows, directed by individuals, MSNBC clearly has a much more panel oriented system.  As you watch throughout the daytime hours on Fox, you will notice a very solo oriented vibe on most of the shows and while some may have panels, they are clearly heavily weighted in one direction and the odd ball out liberal is often pushed to the side or clearly not given equal credence as the others.  Conversely, on MSNBC, you see a panel setup for entire shows or at the very least a portion of a said show devoted to such discussion.  That, however, is not where the difference ends, within this panel style setting  there is almost always someone acting as the mouthpiece of each side and they are not dismissed simply because of their viewpoints.  In the majority of these shows, the mouthpieces are really just that, acting on the behalf of their party, and that is not a terrible thing, though it does wear on the listener and become quite obvious at times even making it rather entertaining to see them jump through hoops (both sides) to defend their view.  But then you have the Dylan Ratigan show.  To this day, I think that the DRS is probably the only show I've consistently seen where the host sits everybody down and genuinely says "I want to hear and understand what you think about this, how you came to that conclusion and how you feel about the other viewpoints being expressed."  It is a true roundtable discussion that you really don't see anymore.  I think Fox's closest equivalent is the O'Reilly Factor and there all you have is the host badgering people when they suggest he might be wrong.  But you don't really get that a whole lot with MSNBC, in fact, this last week, I was struck by a move Chris Matthews pulled on his show that even caught one of his panelists off guard.  As they were closing down the segment, Matthews had set time aside to apologize on air to a republican strategist because he had expressed, of screen, that he had felt jipped in a prior appearance.  The strategist who was there for a different issue was clearly caught off guard and Matthews made a point of saying that on his show people are welcome to express their viewpoint and he didn't want to reach the point where his show didn't allow that.  He then proceeded to give the person the time needed to present the argument and left it with that.  You don't see that sort of thing happen at fox news, when they admit they were wrong with something, they don't point it out for people to see.  At best, you will get a brief apology on the host's section of the website and to be fair, if the offender was Bill O'Reilly, he has been known to offer corrections of himself, though they always seem very smug and unapologetic.

Next up, Mislabeling.  I think this is probably the most egregious and overt thing a news outlet could do and in this instance, Fox News takes the cake.  It may have happened once or twice, but it happens so frequently and in such clearly calculated places at Fox that it is clearly an attempt to taint the story.  In fact, I'm not even sure Fox bothers apologizing for it these days.  In case you're not familiar with what I am talking about, whenever a news story happens or press conferences are being held, Fox will observe what party the person being speaking is and then proceed to change their party alignment to present Republicans and conservatives in a better light.  There is no better example than what Fox tried to pull with the recent voter referendum in Ohio.  So, in case people aren't aware, I'll dive into that a bit to give a little better perspective.  Ohio's current governor is John Kasich, a republican who used to be all up in it at Fox News.  One of the first things he did upon coming into office along with majorities in the state house and state senate as to roll back collective bargaining rights of unions.  Since democrats had absolutely no power to prevent this it was pushed through basically unobstructed, until it met the Ohio populace that is.  The Ohio populace is VERY worker and union friendly, this did not sit well with them, this made all the more obvious that when the signed petitions were presented for verification, there were so many that the state government had to make sure that the floor of the building they were being brought to could support the massive weight of all the piles and piles of paper.  Needless to say, the referendum won in a landslide and the law was repealed, a huge slap in the face of the Ohio Republican Party.  Along with this, Kasich, who had barely won his election in the first place with 49% of the vote, was being ravaged by dismal approval ratings and polls saying that if the previous election as re-held again, he'd lose handedly.  So, Kasich, like any governor after such a resounding defeat, held a press conference to concede that he was wrong, and to his credit, he did admit he over reached, but thats not the issue here.  Fox News, seeing this coming decided that it was time to break out the old mislabeling machine and promptly declared him the Democratic Governor of Ohio.  Image compliments of Dailykos.

I think that is enough for tonight, I put significant more thought into this post than my normal blog posts and while I could go on and on about why they are not the same, I think everyone reading gets the idea.  I don't claim that MSNBC is infallible and that everyone should just go watch it because it is right and everything else is wrong, but it clearly has a better understanding of how journalistic integrity works as well as...well...facts.

Libertarianism and Atheism and Libertarianism

Been a little downtime, my laptop fell off my end table last week and went kaputski.  The joke of it all being that I had two hard drives in it, one I booted off of, which was about a month old, and the other that came with the laptop which had started going bad but was still in working condition so I kept it to store a few extras things on.  Guess which one of the two hard drives was completely bricked?  Anyway, it was no big loss since I have quadruple redundancy (4 identical computers with nearly identical filesystems) so all I lost was the mobility of my laptop and the tabs I keep open in firefox.  Anyway, I'm back, and on to today's two cents.

Since I don't have a profile setup yet I'll preface the real content of this post with an explanation about myself.  Politically, I've always been very liberal, socially and economically.  It used to be that I approached my political beliefs with the understanding that while Marxism was utopian in theory, basic human nature would prevent it from ever being implementable and therefore largely useless as a political theory.  This meant taking note of observations made by Marx and other scholars and applying them in vastly smaller scale than across the entirety of life.  Socially speaking, I was very center of the road.  I grew up in a house with a very religious mother, though not in an oppressive manner.  My mother raised my sister and myself in a Baptist church with good people, though we were never really strictly denominational so much as the community there was fabulous and she wanted us around good people.  I am now atheist, having accidentally outed myself over facebook to my Dad awhile back and then him accidentally outing me to my mom earlier this year.  I am now 27, and I'd say the first time I first contemplated anything like a non-christian universe was probably around age 16, and the transition to atheist was a gradual process and not really triggered by any one event so much as my own contemplation and observations of how the religious right has risen to power and gone against everything their religion stands for by preaching hate.  I don't hold Christianity responsible, I hold man responsible, who in Christianity's own admission, is fallible.  As an example of my intellectual transition, when I was in my teens I was of the mindset that homosexuality was not so much evil, but unnatural and illogical, but I didn't hate because of it.  I was weakly siding with Don't Ask Don't Tell supporters because frankly, I was 14, didn't know any better and the only gay person I knew was my uncle who I never really saw.  As gay marriage became more and more of an issue, I was more of the mindset "let them have civil unions" though I frequently pointed out to people that marriage was a financial transaction long before it was anything religious.  This was the compromising, naive kid in me.  As I became more and more of a thinker I eventually reached the final conclusion of supporter of gay rights, equality, marriage, the whole 9 yards, for all the often cited reasons like "What two consenting people do is no business of mine" and "Who the hell am I to say two people can't love each other," not to mention the fact that childhood friends came out of the closet and I met other friends who are gay/bi/transgendered and they are often better people than many I see preaching hate from the right ever could be.  So along with this gradual religious perspective change came a shift in the source of my political thinking without actually changing the final conclusions.  By this, I mean that the basic instances of political stance I have are roughly the same, except now, instead of coming at it from a view of Marxism and its unimplementable, lofty ideals, I come at it from a realization that Libertarianism is equally perfect in theory but unimplementable in practice.  In fact, the faults of each are very similar.  Marxism is an attempt to level out society but this is impossible because human nature will always create hierarchical arangement and you can never achieve said faux-equality.  On the other hand, for libertarianism to work everyone has to be starting from the same point, but that is equally impossible to implement, you will always have someone with family and friend connections or inheritance that gives an unfair advantage to someone else.  There isn't anything that can be done to change that and I'm not particularly fond of the government trying either.

So, now that that is all setup, its time to get into the core issue I wanted to rant about.  Today a friend of mine posted how he wanted to see Andrew Napolitano asking questions during the republican debates instead of neocon fox news shills.  This friend of mine has a bachelors in political science and has been a Ron Paul supporter long before most people knew who Ron Paul was.  He is a very scholarly fellow and I really enjoy discussing pretty much anything with him and he is equally open to hearing my point of view.  Anyway, for anyone who isn't familiar with Napolitano, he's a very libertarian person, and not the good kind like many of my friends but rather the bad kind who sees the government as inherently evil and that anyone doing anything in support of government, particularly democrats, is trying to stomp out freedom and kill capitalism.  When trying to think of a way to describe him, it occurred to me that this view of two basic types of libertarians is similar to the two basic types of atheists that I have met.  You have the quiet atheist person who likely doesn't speak much of his or her atheism unless the topic comes up.  They are everyday people, your neighbors, your friends.  They don't dislike you or your belief and think that religious or non-religious self discovery is a very personal thing and should never stop being evaluated.  Then there are the militant atheists who give the rest of us a bad name.  They treat religious belief as the enemy and think anyone with any sort of religion is deluded, brainwashed and or stupid.  It has been my experience, through watching Napolitano on his show and other shows that he falls into the latter militant libertarian category and like militant atheists who are giving the rest of us a bad name, he gives other Libertarians like many of my friends a bad name.

As always, I write this as I begin to fall asleep and in said state, am not much for proofreading, so please be forgiving in that sense.

Herman Cain says Herman Cain is Herman Cain

Okay a whole lot has happened in the last few days, at least politically.  I'm not even going to touch all the Penn State stuff, I could barely get through the time line list ESPN published on their site without vomiting. But what I want to talk about tonight isn't outside that same vein.  I want to talk about the utter lack of balls that the Herman Cain campaign has, including the people over at the HermanCainPAC.   My primary focus in life is to approach everything as objectively as possible and to try and treat things as they are without a bias from things around them or past events not directly related.  That is why everything about the recent Cain sexual harassment revelations has irked me so much, because they are playing fast and loose with the facts of the case, are using their ability to get headlines to warp the facts and vilify the victims and in some cases the accusers.  Now, I say victims and accusers for a reason, and it needs to be acknowledged that there is a difference and why some of these women are anonymous.   I've heard numbers ranging from 4 to 7 separate complaints as well as people saying they have witnessed inappropriate behavior in the past while working with Cain. SO, lets start from the bottom.  For certain, there are two cases that have been settled outside of court and that Cain has signed off on each settlement.  That means that these two women are by Cain's own admission, victims, and that he did something wrong.  In one case I believe was settled up in the millions and with a settlement that high, something happened because going to court to fight it if he was innocent would certainly be less costly.  Additionally, Cain keeps talking about the reference he made to the victim about how tall she was compared to his wife.  Yes, it is true that is part of one of the complaints, but it is only one incident of several that were cited.  Also in these agreements, which is pretty standard for most out of court settlements, the victims were required to never speak publicly about it.  That is why they, the original 2 victims reported by Politico, were listed as anonymous, because if they had come out and said anything they would have been sued into oblivion.  Outside sources have since uncovered one of the women, who has been found to work in a government agency, the treasury I believe, and since having been publicly outed has been attacked relentlessly by Cain, many in the right wing radio industry and in some papers alongside the woman who came forth earlier this week with an unfortunate choice for a lawyer.  Between the two women we have heard much misinformation and vilifying.  It was reported by Cain's manager that the son of one of the women was a reporter at Politico and stated that it has been verified.  This is not the case, there was a man working for politico over 10 months ago with the same last name as one of the victims, but who is of no relation to the victim and now works somewhere else.  Additionally, said woman has had a picture of her posted on Herman Cain's PAC website and referred to as an "Ugly Bitch" while a second woman had an editorial written about her, claiming she needed to have her face painted in makeup in order to be presentable.  With these two cases, what the hell kind of relevance does what either woman look like even have to do with anything? Also, one of the to women isn't selling her story or anything, she is just putting her story out there.

I'm going to cut this short, with no editing of this post because I'm really tired, and finish with a tidbit about the debate from last night.  Herman Cain referred to one of the most successful Speakers of the House, Nancy Pelosi, as "Princess Nancy".  To be fair, immediately following the debate he apologized, but at best I think it was a hollow apology.  See this isn't the first time he's referred to her that way.  When he used to do a radio show he would frequently refer to her as "Princess Nancy."  I think this, and his habitual referring to himself in the third person, as very indicative of the kind of person he is.  Pompous, egotistical, holier than thou with no respect for women who have worked hard in their lives to get where they are.

Anime Nebraskon 2011

So this last weekend was Anime Nebraskon, an anime convention here in Omaha with a little under 3000 attendees this year.  I've had the good fortune to be with the con for a good 5 years now and its probably one of the better things I've done with my life.  It is completely non-profit, completely volunteer run organization.  We pride ourselves on our customer service, the first and foremost thing we are there for is to give the attendees of all ages the best possible time we can and to help people make connections with each other, not just in the local nerd community but across the country, in fact we have had a few attendees from as far away as Australia.  My specific duties are fairly music oriented, in that using my  own personal Japanese music collection and some provided by two others on staff, I run two events, one is a "Name that tune" panel in which myself and one of the other previously mentioned staff members select songs for teams of attendees to try and guess what series they are from.  It can be surprisingly hard to be on either side of the table during this too, as I have tried the game at other cons.  Anime genres and their target demographics can vary greatly both in gender and age group.  Add to that the fact that the music selection we use totals close to 1500 songs and that you don't want to make it too easy by playing something you know everyone will know in two seconds.  The end result is sometimes going through the first 30 seconds or so of maybe 10 songs where everyone has blank looks on their faces, and then the next 3 songs are named almost immediately.  The other event is much bigger though, in duration, organization requirements and attendee interest, and that would be Karaoke.  I'm very proud of the Karaoke event that we put on at Nebraskon, and it would be significantly more difficult if the other person who has ran it with me the last two years hadn't have expressed interest.  With 3 days available to her she cataloged all of the music available to us, removed songs from the gaming section without lyrics and composed a long list of every song we had so that we no longer had to have the attendee ask us if we had it.  She was a godsend and it made everything run so much more smooth.  We have it set so there is nothing behind us in the schedule and we run from 8pm until there is nobody else left who wants to sing.   Typically it ends around 2am each night (Friday/Saturday) but in 2010 our Saturday event ran until 4 am, including the extra hour for daylight savings time.  Between that and being able to play any song we have or that the attendees can get to us and remove the vocals or leave them in, and provide lyrics on a big flat screen tv if needed, we probably have one of the better Karaoke events at an anime con in the country.  Each year at least 2 or 3 people come up to us and compliment us on it and how much better it is than other conventions they have been to which often only last an hour or two, are very restrictive on what you can and cannot sing and may limit you to a single song the entire time.


Now, while I take great pride in both of those events, I take even more pride in the events I put on with my group of friends known locally as [RHO] or Robot House Industries. The founders and most of the others all met as students at UNO, mostly through the anime club we formed through the university, though some of us met through other means. There is a core of about 10 of us or so, but the corps overall is probably closer to 30, and 4 of us have been part of staff for awhile now, one of which is the head of the tech committee.  Anyway, I digress, we have two panels that we run that are simultaneously nearly identical and completely different, and we wouldn't have it any other way, and this year we had the last minute pleasure of subbing in on a different panel because the panelist was otherwise disposed, and it oddly served as a good midpoint between the two.  The three titles are: "Ethical issues in anime", "Biggest Anime Prick Contest" (The substituting one) and "Your Anime Sucks and This is Why".  Now at first glance our two panels are vastly different.  Ethical issues is a very intellectual theme, polite, educational and dedicated to exploring themes in anime and japanese culture overall in an open minded manner.  Your Anime Sucks (YAS) on the other hand, is full of cursing, purposefully mean spirited and completely devoted to ruining your favorite series for you in an attempt to entertain everyone else in the room.  I'll get to the third later since we never planned it in the first place and had it thrust upon us.  Now, if you dig a bit deeper into our two panels, it is quite obvious why we are able to do both with such ease. Both are semi-roundtable discussions, primarily lead by us but also encouraging audience input at the same time.  Both require a wide range of series to have been seen by the panelists to properly address the series proposed to us.  Within that, both also require an ability to analyze what you have seen from many different poitns of view.  With Ethics, you have to be able to detach yourself from your own point of view and look at it from the point of view of the various characters.  For instance, Lelouch in Code Geass is probably one of the better character examples we've ever addressed.  So much of what he does can be seen as incredibly wrong from many points of view, but at the same time, he is doing it all to make the world a better place for his sister, even at the cost of his own life.  Similarly, with YAS, when someone in the audience suggests an anime for us to tear into, most often the panelists doing so are one of that series biggest fans and because they can detach themselves to analyze something objectively like in Ethics, similarly they can take that analysis, throw in colorful language and some jokingly mean spirit and you have fun for all.  We love doing this panel and it easily fills the 2nd largest room we have at the con, reaching around 100 attendees and standing room only.


I was going to describe how I got conscripted to sub into the other panel, but it's 2:30 and I'm really tired, maybe some other time.