Too-deep-for-a-Monday: Raging Force

So it's getting late and I was trying to decide whether I was going to skip Too-deep-for-a-Monday and just post something about the news for Newsday-Tuesday but as I was looking through my poems it occurred to me that a had one that is vaguely relevant to two current news stories. The flooding in the Midwest and the G20 protests in London. It's not exactly the same, but close enough. I figure it's fitting for a Monday post so close to Tuesday.



The prompt for this poem was 'extended metaphor'. I tried to weave the metaphor through the whole thing, and I think it worked out well. Hope you like it.

Raging Force

The demonstrators march peacefully through the streets
Like the steady flow of a quiet river.
A sudden storm arises in the skies;
The crowd’s anger surges
Then breaks open like the floodgates.
The quiet river runs rampant.

Waves of punches flow through the crowd.
The waters smack violently against the sandbags;
The policemen each armed with nightsticks and barrier shields
Strain to keep the swelling rioters back.
The sandbags become saturated;
A weak point collapses under heavy force.
A torrent of rioters rush though the police line.
Someone throws a rock through a shop window;
The looting begins.

Boarded up houses offer little resistance
To the barrage of water permeating through every crevice.
No sofa, no bed, or television is safe.
Teargas canisters shoot into the mob;
The rioters’ resolve begins to weaken.
Finally the floodwaters crest.
Left with no other options the police open fire;
The mad river begins to recede.

Settlers of Catan, and Web Comics I Like

Yesterday a friend sent me this article from Wired Magazine about a board game of German origin called Settlers of Catan. Each player is a tribe that collect resources and build roads and cities on an island called Catan. From the article I discovered that you can play the game online for free at playCatan.com. (You do have to download the game client software though.) So I thought I'd give it a try, and it was really fun. It involves some strategy but the rules aren't too complicated. Also, unlike some board games that take FOREVER, this one can be played in just about an hour.

I had actually heard of the game before. There was a reference to it in a comic I read called Questionable Content. I looked up Settlers of Catan then, just briefly, but I hadn't discovered I could play it online until now. I'm really glad I heard about the game again.

And on the subject of comics, I found a new comic today through my Google Reader suggestions. (I love you Google!) It's called Anti-Heros, and is a humorous comic about a troupe of villains in an RPG game. It's based off a comic that I've been reading for quite a while called The Order of the Stick.

I'm a big fan of web comics, so if any of you out there know some good ones you should recommend them to me. I am always looking for fun comics to read when I should be doing more important things.

RPG Friday: Exalted Game Update and RPG Links

So today is RPG Friday and I have a couple of things to share. First, I discovered from reading RPG Blog II an RPG forum which I've joined and has been kind of fun. It's called The RPG Haven.

Second, I had another game day of my Exalted table-top RPG. The person running the game (the 'storyteller' or 'ST' in Exalted terminology) is unfortunately going to stop so we'll be switching to a different ST. I hope the game survives the transition as it has been a lot of fun.

Last time we had just saved a newly Exalted Solar from dual threats of a rival barbarian island and a Wyld Hunt team. This time we managed to convince the Wyld Hunt team to join us. (We made them an offer they couldn't refuse... namely sinking their ship if they didn't cooperate.) And all of us together went into the volcano to fight the Raksha (a chaos entity) inside and cleanse the volcano of the chaos-taint. My character very nearly died (should have actually, but the ST was nice) though he did manage to hit the Raksha with an Arrow of Reason before he went down, which allowed the rest of the group to actually damage the Raksha. (yay!) Unluckily for us, cleansing the chaos from the volcano triggered a violent eruption and we just barely were able to evacuate the island in time.

So all in all, it was a fun session.

On a regular life note, I've been dealing with having my door repaired for the last two days and have been busy trying to get research finished so I have missed some posts. I didn't cook anything this week so no "What's Cookin Wednesday" anyway. :( I'll probably make pesto and chicken again tonight, like I did for St. Patrick's Day since it was so yummy, maybe I'll get a better picture this time.

Well, my equipment has probably finished sterilizing in the autoclave so I should probably go check on it, so that's all for now. Take care!

Random Movie Inspired RPG Idea

So I saw the movie "Body of Lies" not too long ago, it's about a CIA operative in the Middle East. One of the big things they kept showing is this control room with a satellite feed where they could zoom in to someone's chin hair and track them wherever they went as long as they were outside.

This got me thinking, what if there was something like that in a magic campaign setting. Perhaps a scrying command center that could peer out of any reflective surface.

I can just imagine it:

"We've set up a perimeter sire, 30 scrying surfaces active." "Target is on the move, I need more surfaces activated to the southwest. Come on people, we're going to lose him! We need about 20 more scrying bowls in here, stat! So help me gods, I'll have you all doing hard labor down in the mana mines if you screw this up! And this coffee is fricking COLD!!!"

Newsday-Tuesday: Internet killed the newspaper star

The chain that owns the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune is in bankruptcy. Other papers, large and small, are teetering on the brink.

On Monday, the Ann Arbor (Michigan) News announced that it will publish its last edition in July. Taking its place will be a Web site called AnnArbor.com.

Full story

So on this Newsday-Tuesday I thought I'd look at what is happening to newspapers across the country. It seems that the internet and the recession are becoming a one-two punch for the newspaper industry and local papers are dropping like flies. Now, personally I never really read the newspaper, but I do read news on the internet. I don't know if online journalism can attract the same amount of revenue and thus the same amount of talent.

This concerns me because I think journalism plays an important function in a democratic society. Without it corruption can take root and spread without anyone taking note. (Not that this doesn't happen with a healthy media, but it at least reduces it somewhat.) I hope something will be able to fill this void, but I fear that nothing will and an important check on corporate and government behavior will be lost.

Too-deep-for-a-Monday: Altruism - Why?

(Image source)

So I decided for today's Too-deep-for-a-Monday I would discuss a philosophical issue I've been pondering lately. (I'm rapidly running out of my stock of poems and I figured this would be a good alternative.) The issue is the phenomenon of Altruism.

Altruism is behavior that benefits others over oneself. I have been contemplating for a while, why does such behavior happen? It seems like people should want to look out for their own interests if they can, and thus altruistic behavior is backwards.

Here's my thoughts thus far, feel free to comment and add your own if you'd like.

My first thought is maybe it is just a moral imperative. Altruistic behavior is what we "should" do, so we do.

But for this to be true, who's keeping score? For those with religious beliefs that's an easy answer, but what about those without religious beliefs? Surely they can still have a moral code. What motivates them? (I guess in retrospect this proposed solution just shifts the problem from the question of why altruism to why morals. But I had a thought on morals anyway.)

Perhaps morals are a defense mechanism.

The logic might be like this, "the world is crazy and unpredictable, but if I follow this moral code then there's a semblance of order and predictability and that makes me feel better" or perhaps, "I can't directly control the behavior of others, but by having a public moral code, with disincentives to breaking it, maybe I'll gain some protection even if it limits my behavior." Friedrich Nietzsche had an idea kind of similar to this.

Perhaps morals have nothing to do with it, maybe Altruism is simply done out of the expectation of future rewards. For the religious there is the concept of reward in the afterlife for good deeds now, but the rewards don't have to be that far out to still motivate. Social image can be a future reward that works in this life. Perhaps Altruism benefits an individual by building a good reputation with others, maybe even by building a good reputation to oneself (we like to think we are good people, right?)


It occurs to me though that animals can be altruistic too, so at least part of the motivation has to be pretty fundamental.

Perhaps along the lines of the future rewards thing, it's just simple reciprocity - I'll scratch your back if you scratch mine.

Another possibility is that it is simply hard wired behavior in our brain (i.e. it just makes us feel good) - how would this have come to be? There's an easy answer from creationist/intelligent design perspective (it's just the way the Creator/Designer wanted it), but what about from an evolutionary perspective? For altruism to be hard wired, it would have to have been a successful trait. Altruism would seem to make an individual less fit (by using resources for the benefit of another, rather than oneself), but perhaps groups of altruistic individuals fare better than groups of selfish individuals.

So yeah, those are my thoughts on Altruism thus far. And that's it for this Too-deep-for-a-Monday. As I said before, feel free to comment if you have any thoughts. Maybe we can get a good discussion going about this. :)

Of visits, games and that which is flat.

So I'm done with winter quarter. Yay! I haven't gotten back all my grades yet, but I think my GPA should stay around the same. This coming week I have to get as much research done as I can so I have "conclusive data" with which I can write my thesis. My parents came up and visited today. We went out and had a nice brunch and then went to the park. I had homeworks to grade but they went surprisingly fast.

I went bowling yesterday, which was fun, though I'm not as good as I used to be when I was on a league (169 average then, bowled around a 120 last night). Also, I played "Go" for the first time yesterday. It didn't go very well though (pun intended). My attacks were too slow for my opponent and I forfeited the game after several major captures on his part. It seems like an interesting game though. Easy to learn the basics but tough to master the strategy.

The other day I picked up a book called Flatland from the bookstore and I've been reading that some today. It's about a 2D world, where shapes have a society. All of the women are lines and the men are shapes of varying sidedness. The higher number of sides the more respected. The book seems very harsh towards women which I found to be strange since I was expecting basically a playful mathematical sort of story.

Well, that's about all for my weekend update for today. See ya!