Rant (Not Very Effective...)

I promised on Twitter to rant about Pokemon, and so I shall.

My relationship with Pokemon has, admittedly, been on the rocks. I think I last played Pokemon in about fourth grade. I played Yellow and Silver, although at this point I don't remember many Pokemon beyond the first-generation group. In the past few years, however, there's been a revival of sorts of Pokemon among my peers, and coming to college means I'm surrounded by Pokemon yet again. If I had a DS, I'd probably join them.

Of course, they'd likely destroy me. I'm rapidly realizing that I wasn't playing Pokemon the way Pokemon is played by people who know their stuff. For example, it was only recently that I realized that, say, a Rock-type move is Rock-type no matter what Pokemon uses it. Somehow, I had always assumed that Pokemon attacking had some role in the elemental rock-paper-scissors of its attacks. This is untrue, and I am stupid. But I'm also rapidly relearning things and realizing how many things I ought to have complained about back then.

I mean, look at this, I'm playing Super Smash Bros. as Kirby. I b-down onto Pikachu, and crush him like the rock I am. He tries to thunder, of course, but as I proclaim "Yeah, electric on rock? Not going to work." Someone tells me, "Oh, no, Zach. Only ground is immune to electric."

Ok. First of all, I forgot that ground and rock were even different types. That bothers me, for a reason I can't really define. I wish I could articulate why I feel like "earth" ought to be a single type. I'll just cite Eternal Sunshine of Spotless Mind: "Sand is overrated. It's just tiny rocks." But let's ignore that. Instead, let me point out that if how affected a type is by electric is somehow proportional to conductivity (hey, water) then rock and ground are equally bad at conducting electricity. Or do the Pokemon creators think that "ground" as in "grounded" somehow protects you from electrical shock? Because that's, uh, not really how it works. And why exactly does electricity effect flying so well? Do pigeons in Japan not sit on power lines?

The longer I spend looking at this type chart I looked up to ensure I wasn't saying wrong things, the angrier I become. Fighting is super effective against steel, but not very effective against bug? Let's play a game. Get a caterpillar. Get a steel...block...or whatever. Try to punch both of them. Now do you see what's wrong with this?

The absurdities go on and on. Ghost is super-effective against itself. I'm really not sure what water does to a rock, exactly, unless Pokemon use some sort of super erosion? "Blastoise used Hydro Pump! It will be super effective if maintained for a thousand years!"Nor am I an in any way sure why psychic is so effective against poison, considering that poison really doesn't seem like something that would be easily neutralized by telekinesis. My current leading theory is that the Bene Gesserit eventually used their breeding program to produce the Kwisatz Haderach, and he was an Alakazam.

Which brings me to the bottom of the type chart, and my personal least favorite type: dragon. Dragons are different in Japan, I understand, but this is a type that's barely there. All we had was the Dragonite/Dratini/Dragon lines in first generation. Even since then, it's down there with ghost as being ridiculously uncommon, yet far less distinctive. There's like fifteen or so dragon type moves, and half of them are named "Dragon _____" because nobody knows what a dragon type move would look like, so you have to tell them.

In conclusion, I have written about an incredibly important issue today, and Charizard's relationship with the Dragon type bothers me most of all.

Valentine's Day (I'm Not Sickeningly Peppy In Real Life, You Know)

Sometimes I feel like this blog veers to the optimistic a bit too hard, just because that's kind of the point. In real life, I frequently say things like "people are crazy" or express disapproval at ideology or do a lot of other things that probably aren't strictly in the Geeky Humanist Pro-People Optimism Canon, you know? I have a problem with cynicism in general, but that doesn't mean I'm wholly cleansed of it.

I say these things because it's Valentine's Day. Valentine's Day is one of two things. Either you go out to dinner and buy chocolates and put your mouth on people, or you post passive-aggressive Facebook statuses where you rechristen it Single's Awareness Day or disparage it. The two groups generally don't intersect on any given Valentine's Day, but from year to year a lot of people will pass from one group into another and back, in a sine wave of periodic cynicism.

Honestly, I don't care about Valentine's Day. I say this as someone whose Valentine's Days are almost always spent single. (Although I should probably come out and say that this is not currently true. Maybe next year I'll make a blog post rebutting this one--though I hope not.) I never really had all that much trouble ignoring it. I hate to pull the "well, you only x because y" thing, but I can't help but feel like the Valentine's-haters are just a tad bitter. No offense, guys. Being single on Valentine's Day should be like being Jewish at Christmas--sure, you don't participate yourself, but (generally) you don't get all bent up about seeing trees everywhere. (I never made a War on Christmas post, but rest assured that this analogy doesn't imply I'm anti-Happy-Holidays. Man, this paragraph has a lot of parenthetical sentences.)

I also see a lot of accusation that Valentine's Day is a "manufactured" holiday. Guys? All holidays are manufactured. If there was a Jesus, he wasn't born on December 25, and he didn't die on the first Friday after the first full moon after the equinox or however that works. They're just days that happened to be picked out. Halloween, Thanksgiving, etc. At one point, maybe they were associated with particular times of the year or past events, but that doesn't make all subsequent days with the same calendar designation special. They're just days with a bit of mythology thrown in, and we build an edifice around them. Sure, greeting card companies fuel the process, but there was a holiday before them, and nobody makes you buy a greeting card. Personally, I made one out of a Dinosaur Comic. It's not wrong to participate in a social construct just because someone's profiting off of it.

So, in conclusion, if you're in a relationship, feel free to enjoy Valentine's Day. There's no shame in it. If you're not, then remember, you get Discount Chocolate Day, February 15th. To everyone who doesn't give a shit, feel free to not give a shit--but there's no need to let us know.

Egypt's Triumph

Eighteen days. Two and a half weeks. That's how long it took Egypt to transform itself—unthinkably sudden, certainly. It seems impossible, but my geeky pedantry points out that it is obviously possible. What were the chances? Apparently 1 in 1, but that doesn't detract from what happened.

I'll admit that, while I was aware that there were protests in Egypt, I hadn't paid close attention to it until the past few days. I sympathized with them, but I wasn't actively following the story. I think I was soured on the affair by Iran's Green Revolution, which didn't end up being the Twitter-fueled democratic emergence that I had hoped. But last night I see a television proclaiming that Mubarak would soon address the people of Egypt, and I realized history was happening. I watched, waited for some time. Multiple sources were telling CNN that he would be stepping down. I'm an ex-debater and competitive public speakers, so I like to imagine I can, in some way, read public relations situations like this, and understand how emotions interplay with speeches like that. (This is probably just arrogance on my part.) I said to the person next to me, “At this point, he has to step down. Those people are celebrating in anticipation of him stepping down. That much energy will turn very nasty very fast if he disappoints them.” And, well, he didn't step down. (I also commented, using a Super Smash Bros. Metaphor, that Mubarak was at 250% and waiting for someone to launch him. Which might be a bit more violent than what I actually meant.)

Although it wasn't very clear at first, he attempted to organize a power-sharing arrangement where his vice-president assumed most of his power. However, even if he had had no powers, he was still president, he was still there, a big unsightly lame duck. There was no possibility the protesters who had spent two and a half weeks attempting to oust him would accept this sort of faltering compromise, which still left him in power. They started to march, many leaving Tahrir Square, venturing towards state television and the presidential palace. I was a little scared—happiness had clearly transformed to rage. Thousands of angry people were now mobbing toward the person who made them angry. I went to bed certain that Mubarak wouldn't last, but not sure that the demonstrators would remain peaceful.

At about 10:30 this morning, I opened my laptop for note-taking and discovered that Mubarak had stepped down, his vice-president was going with him, and the military was taking over. I celebrated, but not very loudly because I was in class, and after class I found myself a television and let Anderson Cooper walk me through what was going on.

Honestly, the Egyptian Revolution is one of the most inspiring things I've seen in some time. As a humanist, I hold a lot of opinions that I admit are quite optimistic. I believe that people are basically good. I believe that nonviolence can be an effective response to oppression. I believe that, given enough support and a just cause, that an strong idea can overcome physical options. Idealistic, of course. But the beautiful thing about the Egyptian revolution is that it stood that test. A diverse uprising of people were able to, through beautifully nonviolent protest, remove from their country a parasitic dictator. Rarely do I find myself able to enjoy this clarity of vision, this empathetic joy for a people rising from their shackles.

Churchill said that democracy was the worst form of government, except for all the others. This is true, but arguably it's the only really moral one. A king rules by birthright, a tyrant by threats, and a cleric by the faith of others. A president or prime minister rules, in a true democracy, by the will of the ruled. That will legitimizes government in the only possible way. It is the only way to deserve power. Egyptians are starting to realize this. That's why I'm hopeful of their new order. Currently, the military holds power. That worries me, as all people ought to be worried when the power of force is wedded so firmly to the power of politics. Yet the military is well-liked in Egypt, and the protesters cheer their assent to this new order. It's not democracy in the strictest sense, no, but this transitional regime still bears the stamp of popular sovereignty.

Optimism might be misplaced. A military regime could easily choose to delay election indefinitely and eventually become just as bad—or far worse—than Mubarak. But if this was an anti-Mubarak revolution, it was only anti-Mubarak in the sense that the Mubarak stood as an obstacle. These protests were pro-democracy. People aren't cheering and supporting the military because they've ousted Mubarak, but because they believe that the military takes power as a transitional government. People on the streets of Cairo talk about “the next six months”, ElBaradei on CNN stated that he thought it would be a year. There is a clear, unambiguous expectation that this is a temporary situation. Having seen the sort of political action the Egyptian people are capable of, I feel like generals would have to be crazy to risk its re-emergence.

America has been...an alright partner to their movement. Once the protests started we mostly sided with them, but multiple times we expressed a desire for reform within the Mubarak paradigm, or urged caution. Egypt was an ally, and I can understand that Obama didn't want to risk antagonizing a ruler who may have ended up holding onto power. But that risk is gone now. Now it is time to help them in their growth to democracy. If—and this might be a big if—we can help them, if we can lend them some way to run elections or anything to help them transition, we ought to. I'm told we have very good ties with the Egyptian military, and hopefully we can leverage that to help avoid abuses by the transitional government.

We witnessed a miracle in Egypt. We saw nonviolence succeed. We saw an idea spread across the populace like wildfire and drive them into an assertion of human dignity unprecedented in recent memory. Now that the protests are ostensibly over, what remains is potential. In the coming months we may see the rise of a beautiful democracy in the Middle East that will, with luck, serve as a beacon to many in that region. Potential, however, is only potential. It's currently Egypt's most valuable resource—but it will be the easiest to squander.

This Opinion Will Change Once Assange Finds My Porn

No post Wednesday? No problem, bitches. No problem at all. I just update extremely late Thursday instead, and I'll get you another tomorrow. I AM A KIND AND MERCIFUL BLOGGOD.

So I want to talk about Wikileaks, because hey, I have a website, they've got a website. In general, I support Wikileaks. Their main mission is to promote truth and openness in government, which I respect. If, as our democratic philosophies hold, every country is ultimately ruled by its own people, then openness is simply delivering information to those who actually own it. I see Wikileaks's acts as fundamentally democratic.

It would be outrageously idealistic to accept the release of the diplomatic cables that started the latest and largest Wikileaks shitstorm without question. Sometimes, governments do need to keep secrets. Ideally, though, this should be for as short a time as possible, and it shouldn't be a big secret. Sure, publicizing your Kuwait liberation plans before you've even gotten your Gulf War on is a bad idea--but that was a while ago, and if you have files on (say) Gulf War Syndrome? We deserve to know that stuff. Wikileaks, however, hasn't revealed all their cables. They're doing it slowly, in batches, and only releasing the cables that they feel don't threaten security. I've yet to hear of an actual specific case someone can point to and say "Wikileaks caused this operational issue"--only generalities, which I distrust.

That said, they are admittedly somewhat radical. We don't usually expect this sort of truth-telling. Somewhat radical isn't necessarily a bad thing. The American (and French, and more recently Egyptian) revolutions were radical. The nature of society is change as new paradigms arrive, battle it out in the marketplace of ideas, and ultimately fall again. A radical idea is, in general, simply new. That's no reason to shun it.

In the past, ultimate and total access to government information simply wasn't possible. Now, with digital technology, it could be. The massive, truly unbelievable amount of information generated by a government could be available to nearly all of its citizens. Is that a right way to run a government? Fuck if I know. I suspect not, just like it's not a good idea to run a government on (total) majority rule, (total) individual liberties, or (total) centralized authority. At some point, realism starts to cancel out ideological advantages, but the key, the tricky part of governance, is finding a proper balance, finding how far you can push your ideology without being unable to run a country. But I contend that we ought to try. Where does the line between openness and practicality lie? I don't know, and nobody will ever know until we try.

Insisting on secrecy and freezing information in an age where information is the most fluid asset in the world is foolishness, as Wikileaks' continual ability to get its hands on lots and lots of data shows. Instead, we're going to have to adapt to a world where more information is available to everyone. This applies to politics, but it applies to a lot else--consider the practice of data mining. The old expectations of secrecy don't apply, and arguably they shouldn't. One interesting thing about the Internet and the hacker culture that underlies it is the success of open standards. We've seen projects like Wikipedia and Linux survive by a system of radical openness and a (dare I say) humanist trust in the ability of groups of people to leverage information when it's available to them. What stops a government from learning from that example?


(A side note about Julian Assange: If he is, in fact, guilty of sexual assault, he does deserve whatever penalties are mandated by law. That said, I find the charges against him pretty sketchy, especially their timing. He certainly doesn't deserved to be charged with a crime under American law.)

What a Dick Move, Groupon

In my opinion, ninety percent of all advertising is basically a dick move. The first priority of advertisement is not truth, but manipulation. An advertiser isn't making an argument, or conducting some sort of public economic discourse. Their job is to change your mind and overrule your own preferences. Now, at times, I don't mind this. Actually, I'll back farther off than that--I'll admit that advertising is necessary in a consumer society which, for better or worse, we are. At some point we have to pick our products, and the people making the products have a right to have their say. So, even though it drifts into all-pervasive paranoia-inducing mind control, it's a necessary evil.

That said, sometimes commercials cross over into sheer douchiness, and not just in the objectifying-women type of sense. (Note: not trivializing that.) Take, for example, this Super Bowl commercial.

Life in Tibet is hard. Thousands of them have been killed by the Chinese government. Their spiritual leader, the Dalai Llama, lives in exile--prayers mentioning him are best kept out of public. After riots in 2008, protesters were arrested and subject to treatments like food deprivation. So, yeah. That's bad. BUT HEY LOOK WHAT'S CHEAP.

The problem here should be obvious--the plight and suffering of Tibet is being exploited as a lead-in to an advertisement for a website. That said, I've seen several arguments defending them. I'd like to address those arguments.

The first, which I heard last night as this was unfolding on Twitter, was that Groupon was donating money to a pro-Tibet charity, which apparently makes it all right. I really don't think it does, though. You can't just buy off that sort of exploitation. I don't think the people of Tibet are alright with having their plight commercialized as long as they get paid a little bit. That's like a corporation defending their sweatshops by saying they fund a charity that builds schools in third-world countries. The first action is deplorable, the second laudable, but the two have no necessary connection. Groupon, if they really cared about Tibet, would have donated that money and then not made the ad, or made an ad actually about the problems in Tibet.

The next two arguments both came up as I typed this post, actually, with the people in the room around me. One guy didn't seem to see the big deal. He thought it was a work primarily parodying how Americans don't care about things. Alright, I'll admit the possibility. But if it is a parody, it should be noted that it doesn't show it. It looks exactly like a straight example of that not-caring would look. Poe's Law (it is impossible to tell the trolls from actual opinions) applies. If it was a parody--if they were aware of how ridiculous that juxtaposition is--then they did it poorly. Let's think about the good aspects of parody I just wrote about. I talked about how parody's great asset is that it helps us laugh at ourself. But this commercial doesn't really ask us to laugh at anyone, although it might be trying to milk humor from the transition. There's no indication that the narrator is at fault, nor does the commercial use the Tibetan tragedy as anything but a lead-in to their product. Sometimes we are able to transmute tragedy to comedy, true, but in this case the tragedy itself wasn't even relevant--just a discarded attention-grabber for an Internet coupon site.

At this point I laid out my position as plainly as it stands: "They're using human suffering to sell their product. That's wrong, no matter what else they do with respect to donations." I was told that lots of people do that in advertising. Maybe, maybe. Of course, that's just flat-out moral laziness, as far as arguments go. I don't watch a lot of TV, but when I watch it, I don't generally see anything quite this douchetastic. So, no, I think this is a pretty exceptional case, and worthy of attention. Fuck you, Groupon.

Immanuel Kant: World's Worst DM?

Immanuel Kant was a philosopher I wrote about back when I was more interested in doing lecture blog posts. You might recall (or you might already know) (or you might be about to learn) that Herr Kant didn't believe in moral contingencies, so to speak. If something was right (or wrong) then it was always, in all situations and regardless of any consequences, right (or wrong). Most famously, he held that it was immoral to ever tell a lie. The basic reasoning, without using terms specific to his philosophy, is that every time you tell a lie, you degrade the truth a little. You might spot some problems with this, the most common objection being the following hypothetical scenario:

You've got a houseful of Jews, just, you know, crammed in there. Tons of Jews. More Jews/m^2 than a synagogue selling kosher hot dogs with a Hannukah discount. Also, you're in WW2-Europe, so that's probably bad. You should move either to somewhere less war-torn or to the future. Anyway, your friendly neighborhood Gestapo officer comes by and says: "Herr Kant! [see that? foreshadowed.] Do you have any Jews?" and you reply...? Herr Kant replies "yeah, I've got a houseful." Most people think the right thing to do is say something more like "Nope. I don't have anywhere to put Jews, because all my spare bedrooms are filled with spare copies of Mein Kampf."  (Kant didn't have Nazis but addressed the same problem with a generic murderer.)

So yeah, let me get to the point here. Kant didn't lie, or claimed we shouldn't, George Washington-style. It is my contention that this would make him a terrible Dungeon Master. Let me enumerate all the things my players believe which are false. (If you're one of my players, don't read the below.)

--This story was planned out beforehand. Well, I mean, yeah, sort of. I mean, I put these monsters together so that they'd work correctly. And I do have an idea for an eventual plot, if we keep playing long enough that you guys find it. But, uh, I wasn't expecting the session to last that long, so I had to make up names for the last two NPCs you met and I'm generating this mossy cavern thing you're in as you insist on exploring further. That map I just drew with Vis-a-Vis is complete and total bullshit, I made it up as I was drawing it and I don't think it bears any resemblance to an actual room that anyone has ever built. I draw slanted lines on it and say "difficult terrain" solely so we're not playing on an infinite grid of squares.

 --Monsters are unchanging, immutable entities which don't change during combat. Sometimes their bonuses waver, sometimes a defense is a little lower. Sometimes, monsters suddenly have 3/4 the hp they had before because, damn, your damage per round is too low for me to sit through that shit.

--Your characters will be perfect counters to anything, ever. I will probably let you have one fun fight where your Avenger gets all radiant-vulnerable enemies. After you blow through that, afterwards it's not going to go that way. No matter how awesome you are under the right conditions, I am the conditions.

And the biggest:

-- Dice don't lie. Sometimes, you get hit with 2d8 + 9, and I roll two eights. Even so, you're only going to take seventeen damage. On the other hand, sometimes you're a tank. Sometimes you've barely been hit all combat and are getting a little too cocky. You might suddenly develop a vulnerability to damage. Sometimes, crits just aren't as fun for me as they ought to be.

I often wonder how moral this is. I mean, I'm not Immanuel Kant, but still. My players are used to games on computers, mostly. They're used to cold equations and random number generators that, despite their mathematical imperfection, work impersonally. Should I be abusing that trust? I think so, and let me tell you why. A DM's job isn't to run the system or to write a story. After all, players could always run the system if they wanted. And there are lots of stories pre-written for D&D. A DM runs the game partially for narrative purposes--people don't want to know the story after all. However, we also need to keep the game working. It has to be fun, it has to be engaging, and it has to be a particular kind of fair that goes beyond strict balancing. That's what a person offers, and it's why I prefer tabletop RPGs to their electronic version. Computers can't lie. A DM can--and I think that's the best part.

But Black Dynamite! I Post Blogs to the Community!

Happy Groundhog's Day, everyone. The groundhog prediction for me appears to be "three days of no school" although if I get stuck in an infinite loop then it could be EVEN MORE.

So I saw Black Dynamite the other day, and now I can't stop selling drugs to the community quoting it. It's a really good movie. Apparently, it's a parody of blaxploitation films, but besides a vague awareness of what constitutes "blaxpoloitation", I've never seen any blaxploitation films. Nonetheless, I liked it a lot.

I really respect parody. I think it's because there's geekiness inherent in (good) parody, for certain values of geekiness. You couldn't make an action movie parody without being thoroughly familiar with Die Hard and Lethal Weapon. You couldn't make Galaxy Quest without going to at least a few Trek conventions. (I've been to one. Leonard Nimoy was there. It was amazing.) If geekiness is defined as an odd sort of obsession, so that a "computer geek" is someone who knows a lot about computers, then that sort of thing is absolutely critical to crafting a parody that actually manages to capture the essence of a work and present it as humorous.

Since you have to devote time, energy, and thought into really absorbing a genre, we end up in the situation where, to really parody a genre, you have to love it. That means that most parodies--at least, all the best parodies--are the affectionate ones, that showcase a love of a genre. Obviously there are other "parodies" that don't qualify as this--Disaster Movie, etc--but I did say "the best parodies." Shallow, unimaginative potshots at the pop-cultural representation of a work might make for cheap laughs, but in general they won't give you a good parody.

Let me give you a case, in Douglas Adams. Douglas Adams wrote Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and was, in general, damn awesome. H2G2 is, in many ways, a science fiction parody. It makes fun of ideas like time travel, faster-than-light drives, galactic civilizations, artificially intelligent robots, etc, etc. But Douglas Adams also wrote regular science fiction--in fact, he was a writer for Doctor Who, to the point that plot points from his Doctor Who scripts worked their way into the (far-too-rarely-known) later book Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency. Despite writing dead serious stories and contributing to the tropes he parodied, Douglas Adams was able to recognize the absurdities that lurk in science fiction's traditional settings (as they lurk everywhere) and draw them out.

In many ways, parody is harder to do than a straight example of your parody-target. While watching Black Dynamite, I was amazed at how often a subtle mistake was used for comedy. An actor's expression is a bit too fierce, his line a little strangely given, a camera shot holds just a few seconds too long. A sweet spot exists among the bad elements of film. If a camera shot is held just a little too long, it might be disconcerting. If it's held for a very long time, it becomes boring or confusing. Somewhere in-between lies hilarity. A parodist walks a knife edge. Making a normal movie isn't his goal, but making a bad movie isn't either. It can't just be ridiculous--it has to be the right kind of ridiculous, and it has to have the right amount. Without that balance, you don't have a good work making fun of bad works--you just have a bad work.

Parody contains within it a wonderful contradiction. Most of us hate getting made fun of, and when we like a work or a genre, we dislike it getting made fun of as well. But a good parody enables us to laugh at our favorite works and, in that sense, laugh at ourself. It's good to laugh at ourselves. It keeps us from being too serious, and puts a vital limiting circuit on mankind's innate arrogance circuit. To make fun of anything you like, you have to make fun of yourself, and you can't make fun of yourselves without, obviously, making yourself a little more fun. In my mind, that makes parody important. Even in our art, sometimes we aspire a bit too hard for perfection. To take our pretentions and deflate them as expertly as good parody does is nothing short of public service.