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Failing the Midterms

The election results are in, and, though individual races broke in surprising ways, the overall trend was about what po predicted, though perhaps not quite as hard on the Democrats as most of the polls expected. (Kudos again to fivethirtyeight.com’s Nate Silver, who nailed it despite admitting up front that the margin of error was high.) Republicans took the House but not the Senate, and the big question is what does their gain mean?

Conservatives like to call this a mandate, even as they admit it’s not a mandate. It’s coming from the leaders: Mitch McConnell, warning that this election was not an embrace of Republicans but a rejection of Democrats and ineffective governance, went on to declare that voters wanted Republicans not to compromise, that the party’s priority was ousting Obama (as opposed to, say, jobs legislation or other policies to, you know, help people), and that people really wanted a return to “core Republican values,” which are identical to the allegedly wayward Bush-era policies that so damaged our country and got conservatives kicked out of power in the first place. It’s coming from right-wing nutjob challengers like Christine O’Donnell, who in her concession speech argued that the people had spoken, and, since she’d lost, it is now up to Chris Cooms to govern by the platform she ran on, and he ran against. Yes. So expect more obstructionism and sabotage and outright denial of reality from the empowered right.

Liberals like to point out that Democratic losses were overwhelmingly among the conservative blue dogs, and not among genuine progressives; Dems lost seats, but didn’t lose any votes. We’ve also seen some pointed rejections of government-for-and-by-billionaires in Fiorina’s and Whitman’s defeat, and pointed rejections of teabagger darlings like O’Donnell and Angle. All true, but it’s hard to ignore the advantage of the majority in occupying the Speaker’s seat and heading committees. If Democrats held to their convictions, and the blue dogs (and Obama, for that matter) had governed like proper Democrats instead of groping blindly toward a bipartisan compromise the Republicans would never offer, goes the argument, they’d still be in office. Well, maybe, though Russ Feingold’s loss suggests otherwise. It’s not clear that the youth and racial minority vote, so energized by Obama’s campaign, would return to the polls now that the novelty’s worn off. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that, had Democrats held to their convictions, they would be laying the groundwork for the next generation’s victories, looking like crusaders rather than chumps. Hard as it is to admit, however, it’s getting harder to see that happening now that news services have abdicated their role of asking hard questions and challenging outright lies in favor of merely reporting each party’s claims, and perpetuating the chump myth.

So what does it all mean? More obstructionism and sabotage and corruption and outright denial of reality from the recently more-empowered right. More defeatism and cowardice from the left, increasingly convinced that they can only win by mimicking the right. Another cycle of conservatives breaking the system, spending a couple years out of power, sabotaging all attempts to clean up their mess, and blaming it all—dishonestly yet successfully—on liberals. A continuing concentration of power and privilege.

Business as usual.

2011 11 03 mdlake Politics Comments (0) Permalink

Cat Out of the Bag

William Kristol, over at the conservative Weekly Standard, summarized the staff’s reaction to the Republican presidential primary debates as: “Yikes.” He quotes a “bright young conservative” who puts it less succinctly but more eloquently: “I’m watching my first GOP debate…and WE SOUND LIKE CRAZY PEOPLE!!!”

Indeed.

Liberals have known this for decades. Too many democratic candidates have been too polite to put it so bluntly, but honest liberals have been saying so for a long, long time. There’s a reason for this. Two, really.

The Republican party has enjoyed the ascendancy for a generation, thirty years of policy by and for big money. Thirty years of financial deregulation, increasingly regressive tax structure, dismantling of social programs, and deficit spending to fund military adventures that benefit big corporate donors. The multiple, interlocking crises we face are largely a product of this big money policy. Yet the Republican line remains that we can only fix the problems with more deregulation, more regressive taxes, more dismantling of social programs, and, of course, even in this massive debt crisis, more war. More war on terrorism, more war on drugs, more war on immigration… If the Republican platform sounds crazy, that’s because it is crazy.

Not by coincidence, then, has the Republican party embraced faith-based politics—by which I don’t mean religious politics, although that has played a large role as well, but policy rooted in faith and not thoughtful reflection. (Faith, for example, that private enterprise is more efficient than government program.) Much of any party’s base pursues politics by faith, but the Republican party has made it the core of their strategy for thirty years or more: packing appointive offices with loyalists like “heckuva job Brownie” instead of effective administrators, embracing a bunker mentality like the war on terror, campaigning on fear and hate and wedge issues like homosexual marriage, equating dissent with treason, replacing journalism with editorial commentary like Fox “news,” playing to fringe elements like the birthers, jeering at expert knowledge like scientific evidence of global warming…anything to replace critical examination with gut reaction, usually mislabeled “common sense.” In an environment where doctrinal purity is more important than truth, cynical, self-serving bastards rise to the top…but so do genuine crazies. If the candidates sound crazy, then, in at least a couple cases, it’s because they are crazy.

What bothers me, then, about complaints like “yikes” and “we sound like crazy people” is not that they’re wrong; they are quite correct. What bothers me is that they don’t recognize the problem. The rest of Kristol’s article, including an endorsement of Chris Christie, makes it clear that he’s still behind the union-busting, tax-cutting, corporate welfare agenda of Republicans. If this is the first Republican debate for the “bright young conservative,” Republicans have been pushing this same agenda literally all his life. No, the complaints only center on concerns that none of the available candidates will successfully carry this dangerous, destructive agenda yet again to the general public. They should instead be pausing to realize that when a speaker sounds like crazy people, it’s probably because (1) he’s defending the indefensible, or (2) he is crazy people.

2011 09 27 mdlake Politics Comments (0) Permalink

The Continuing Story

Eileene and I have been watching Downton Abbey together. It’s very much in the spirit of Upstairs, Downstairs or Gosford Park (which latter shares writer Julian Fellowes with Downton Abbey): an ensemble casts portrays the trials of gentry and their servants on the eve of WWI. It’s good but not great. It stretches the limits of plausibility at times, and ultimately fails to rise above the herd of endless British series fascinated with the manners, class structure, and amateur sleuths of the Edwardian era. Still, it’s well-acted and fairly entertaining, so we finished the series this week.

The seventh and final episode of the season may have lost me as an audience, however. I was surprised to discover it was merely the first season of three (?), but that’s all right—my fault, not the show’s. What isn’t all right is the launching of several explosive new plot lines on top of the old without resolving anything. I understand the need to offer the audience tantalizing promises for the next season: to insure there is an audience for the next season. But the end of a season should also provide dramatic resolution to at least some of the old plot lines; story arcs are so called because the tension is supposed to rise and then fall, settling into a new state of affairs.

There was none of that here. The tension between Thomas and Bates wasn’t resolved, but merely left dangling as Thomas takes his leave to become an army medic. Neither of the marriageable young ladies has been either married or conclusively refused, but merely left in a limbo of weeping over misunderstandings and uncertain prospects. Bates and Anna are likewise in romantic limbo. Matthew, who struggled both for acceptance as inconvenient heir and to adjust to his new role, was abruptly threatened in that position by a pregnancy, which was equally abruptly cut short—within the space of an episode—and pointlessly returned to a state of reluctant inheritance. All the major issues unsettled at the start of the series remain unsettled now.

Suddenly I discover I’ve been watching a soap opera. Not merely a drama with tragic elements—I signed on for that—but an endless, aimless drama wherein everyone takes turns being piteously noble and viciously villainous, wherein stories last while they’re popular and abandoned because writing them to a conclusion wastes a perfectly good chance to dredge it all up again later. That, I didn’t sign up for.

2011 09 23 mdlake Review Comments (0) Permalink

Pork Couture

While shopping for groceries today, I again received a compliment on my Spam shirt. This is easily my most popular article of clothing. I receive more compliments on it than on the entire rest of my wardrobe combined. (My fedora comes in a close second, with nothing else receiving much attention at all.)

WHY?!?

I mean, there’s nothing much to it. It’s a pale, white-ish t-shirt. With a picture of a can of Spam on it. None of the finery of more expensive clothing. None of the wit one can see on other t-shirts. Nothing that makes a fashion statement, apart from “I’m not going to the effort of making a fashion statement; I just threw this on because it was clean and I’m going grocery shopping.”

So what’s the big deal? Is it the humor value of the very word “Spam,” as captured by Monty Python and Weird Al Yankovic? Is it nostalgia for the food of an impoverished youth? (A nostalgia I don’t share, but Eileene could be said to Filipinos love them some Spam.) Is it some subtle post-modern ironic comment on the modern zeitgeist? Or is it just that a lot more people like Spam than anyone realizes?

2011 09 22 mdlake Uncategorized Comments (0) Permalink

Until Morale Improves

My classes at MSU included some perfunctory discussion of morale in the school. Bad morale is an insidious problem; it moves easily from teachers to students, or from students to teachers, or from the general community to the school. Because it can start at and spread from any level of a working school community, it’s everybody’s problem—teachers, students, parents, everybody—but usually treated as a responsibility primarily for administrators.

Lots of things affect morale: violence in and out of school, pay scale, the likelihood of students moving on to college, intrusion of political concerns upon the classroom, and especially the interference of political ideology with effective teaching methods, pay scale, proper teacher training, student tracking, a principal’s competence…lots more. Money plays a big role: rich communities tend to have good schools, poor communities failing schools—but not always, not by a long shot. The interaction of all these elements is very complex in their effects on whether a school becomes a good or bad learning environment, which simultaneously explains why an education curriculum with other things to cover might deal with them hastily and makes a hasty treatment a shame. The upshot of all of this is, I haven’t any idea what makes morale in a school what it is. But I know it when I see it.

This week, I was called in to sub at East Side High. It’s in Newark, a city notorious for borderline and failing schools. Yet East Side—or at least those students and teachers I met in the course of two days—were alert and dedicated. A world of difference from Barringer, where I did my student teaching, a school hanging under a cloud of failure, struggling with NCLB standards and demoralized by that knowledge. Yet both schools are in the same district, same educational system, same budgets. Again, I don’t know what makes the difference, but I know it when I see it.

I think I can identify at least one element at play here: the self-reinforcing cycle of morale. Good schools know it and get better: they attract better teachers, students with a sense of accomplishment apply themselves more eagerly, and in the very long run academic success creates a larger community that values its schools. Bad schools get caught in the opposite spiral: teachers burning out from too much caring and too little return, kids that give up as their teachers fail them, and a community that just lets standards slide—in the very long run, descending into poverty because uneducated workers attract no business. The difference between high and low morale, while difficult to explain, is easy to spot because morale gravitates to the extremes.

2011 09 21 mdlake Teaching Comments (0) Permalink

Invincible

So the General Knoxx expansion to Borderlands has a boss creature, just as you might expect. Crawmerax, a really, really big version of the Pandoran craw worm, a burrowing lobster-like horror, is the ultimate challenge and the ultimate loot source in all the game and its add-on content. I stumbled on its lair early, but the game wouldn’t let me in until I’d completed the main quest line. Fair enough.

Once I had, I was offered a mission to kill Crawmeraxx. Ominously, it was titled “You. Will. Die.” Better gamers might take that as a challenge; I simply accepted it as fact. But hey, what’s a game for if not playing the content? So I loaded my guns, stocked up on healing packs, and took the long, scary elevator ride to its lair. As the elevator’s safety cage clanked away, I got a brief look at a giant lobster. It flexed its mighty chest and went BOOOOOOOM! and I went wheeeeee through the air…although it wasn’t so much whee! as arrrgh! because that explosion also cost me my entire shield bar and half my health. A bad sign for what is supposed to be a lengthy fight. Clearly you don’t want to stand too close to the beast.

Undaunted, I popped out a syringe of healing juice as the ground rose to meet me, intending to live long enough at least to look around the battlefield. And was dismayed to see the ground rushing past my eyes—Crawmerax’s mighty explosion had blown me entirely off the cliff where he lives, and I plummeted to my death without seeing squat. Obviously, you can’t afford to stand too far away from the beast, either.

Oh, well. I did notice, in that eight-second showdown, that Crawmerax had a four- or five-level advantage on me. Figuring that grinding is the better part of valor, I set Crawmerax aside and took advantage of the peculiar second playthrough mechanism of Borderlands to level up, intending to return better skilled and better armed for a rematch. When I did, Crawmerax promptly blasted me, and his lobstery minions devoured my semi-conscious body. Again, not a good sign.

So I took my maxed-out character back to the first playthrough, a sleazy sort of move to fight an underpowered Crawmerax, if only to last long enough to understand how the fight is supposed to go. No soap. The developers, it turns out, simply peg Crawmerax to your level plus four, and it’s good luck, pal! regardless of which playthrough you’re on. I took the elevator ride, skidded sideways to avoid the smaller mobs, and again Crawmerax went BOOOOOOOM! and again I went ulgk! and died. Well, not quite—in Borderlands, you can live on with a “second wind” if you kill someone while you’re dying. If I could just…aim…for one of the (*cough*) smaller guys, I might… Yes!

I took down one of the merely large lobster-things and leapt up, ready to use that second wind to land at least one bullet on Crawmerax. And Crawmerax, who had been industriously stabbing my dying body just for the show of it, was apparently mid-stab as I got my second wind, because I hadn’t pressed a single button when his pointy pincer went through my ribcage. Again I went ulgk! and died. For good this time.

It was time for some online help. I try to avoid walkthroughs, but there was no other way for me to experience this big fight. I was simply dying to quickly to learn how not to. Chalk this up as a loss: I couldn’t whip Crawmerax without cheating. Okay, that bit of honesty to myself out of the way, I went to the wiki to learn the sekret death-strike mad skillz.

There must be one, because I’ve read one conversation in which players talk about killing Crawmerax thirty times or more. (They weren’t bragging, either. The discussion wasn’t about Crawmerax at all, but about the rate of ultra-rare treasure drops, and the participants were simply comparing statistics as matter-of-factly as possible: “I got three ultra-rares in thirty kills,” or “I got no ultra-rares even after forty kills. Am I just unlucky?” Killing Crawmerax isn’t a badge of pride for them, simply another game event.) But what the secret death-strike technique might be, I have no idea. The Borderlands wiki is full of info about Crawmerax, including a detailed description of his many devastating attacks. Conspicuously absent, however, is advice on how to prevent those devastating attacks from killing you.

I’m too clumsy to be much good at video games, I admit. But I’m a clever fellow, and remain confident I could work it out, given a chance. But damned if I can manage to live long enough even to learn what killed me. Obviously it’s possible, since somebody has done it. That somebody isn’t me, though, and is likely never to be me. Apparently, the game is set so that strategy isn’t enough even to get you into the door. If you can’t instantly react to any of four super-killer Crawmerax attacks, somehow anticipating what the effect will be without ever seeing it happen, the designers apparently figure you don’t deserve to see that part of the content.

Hard to argue against that attitude. There’s pride to be had in elite accomplishments, and they can’t be called elite if anyone can do them. Pretty frustrating, though, for the rest of us unwashed masses to know we won’t see the content we bought.

2011 09 20 mdlake Games Comments (0) Permalink

Casualty of the Class War

Cuh-ree-pee! I don’t know whether you followed the Republican primary debate. I didn’t, preferring to let someone pick out the relevant bits in the post-analysis rather than expose myself to all that crazy, hateful ideology, known as “red meat for the Republican base” in one go.

Apparently, there wasn’t much to miss. Even liberals who chose to comb the debate for statements to trigger cries of outrage don’t report much—not that there wasn’t plenty of hate and crazy, but that it’s almost become impossible to feel surprised by it. The one bit pulled out for indignant puffing was Ron Paul’s response to Wolf Blitzer’s needling: offered a hypothetical person who chose not to buy health insurance but developed a life-threatening condition, Blitzer asked, would Paul advocate simply letting him die? An unfair question, ignoring such possibilities as being charged an arm and a leg for emergency medical care after the fact, but it accomplished its purpose: catching Paul in a bind between denouncing his own platform of freedom and consequences or getting quoted as saying, “Yeah, sure, let him die.” Even Paul’s hemming and hawing didn’t really get liberals in a huff, contemptible though it might be; it was the cheers of “Yeah!” from the audience in support of simply watching people die. Another sad and frightening window on what passes for mainstream politics in the US today.

But here’s where it gets really creepy: somebody went out and did his homework after the debate, and reports that Ron Paul’s former campaign manager—perhaps late campaign manager is the proper term—died of pneumonia at age 49, impoverished by a $400,000 medical bill. He was impoverished because his boss—Ron Paul—wouldn’t provide medical coverage for his employees, even an employee who launched his first presidential bid and brought tens of millions into the campaign chest.

So ten out of ten for staying true to his principles. Two out of ten for being willing to stand up and admit to doing so. Minus six or seven thousand for basic human decency. After hearing how he treats his most loyal employees, I, for one, would not care to see how Paul would treat the country at large were he to lead the entire nation.

2011 09 14 mdlake Politics Comments (0) Permalink

Three-Time Loser

I got the Black Adder series. All four seasons, plus a fifth DVD of supplemental material, are available in one box at our local public library. I’d seen a couple episodes before, and never understood what all the fuss was about. But it’s certainly popular in the geek crowd, so when my eye fell across it on the shelves at our local public library, I figured what the hell, give ‘em a try. Maybe in context, with a chance to know the characters and learn any running gags I’ll learn what I’ve been missing.

I haven’t been missing anything. Watched the whole first season and an episode from each of the other seasons, and didn’t laugh once. Sorry, geek crowd: Black Adder is stupid. And here’s why:

It always, always makes a beeline for the cheap laugh. By “cheap laugh,” I don’t mean potty humor, although there’s plenty of that, too. I mean the most obvious punchline directed at the most obvious target. Atkinson’s Adder, originally Prince Edmund, is supposed to be vain and venal, a schemer ultimately skewered by his own cunning schemes. The problem is, he’s vain, and venal, and ugly, and cowardly, and clumsy, and vapid, and sexually inadequate, and infantile, and disorganized, and flatulent and transparent, and held in contempt by everyone, at all levels of society, and, and, and… He can’t fail grandly because he never gets the chance; eager to get to the quick joke, the writers bury him beneath a dozen small failures before he even gets close to a grand one.

Were the Black Adder to approach the Earl of Blenchwick with the intention of enlisting his aid in assassinating an heir with a higher claim to the throne, the Earl is likely simply to turn on him and announce, “Get away from me, you horrible little tit! I never liked you, and you smell of horse dung.” (Ha, ha.) Preferably within earshot of a half dozen onlookers. After which Edmund, thoroughly humiliated but too craven to retort, makes a face, agrees, and minces away. Well, okay. Abuse, done right, could be funny…but only if it’s done right. An insult like that requires (at a minimum!) shock value, which is impossible when the Earl is the seventh nobleman in a row to abuse Edmund on sight. Worse, it squelches the “cunning plan,” which we’ll never see it crash in ruin around the Black Adder because it never gets launched in the first place.

If comedy is timing, then surely the build-up is a vital part of comedy, and there’s no build-up to a joke in Black Adder, just a straight dive into humiliation, over and over and over again. It gets old fast, especially when it wasn’t funny in the first place.

2011 09 13 mdlake Comedy
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Dilemma of FATE

Dave loaned me his copy of Legends of Anglerre, the fantasy incarnation of the FATE RPG. Predictably, LoA varies from other FATE titles—not just by addition of rules specific to the setting, but in rules one might expect them to share. This variation is born of an open gaming license and a do-it-yourself attitude.

There’s nothing seriously wrong with that variation. FATE is, after all, a fairly simple system, only growing complex for players who roll up their sleeves and choose to accept the invitation munge around in the mechanics. Players who don’t want to dig into the game’s guts can just take whatever setting they like and adopt its rules wholesale, confident that those rules should work at least adequately. And the option of mixing and matching different rules is available for those who do, which can be especially helpful for those who want to use FATE in a setting for which there is no published rule set.

It does, however, carry a frustration for players who do choose to dig around and create the specific set of rules they want—which, given the nature of FATE, is going to be high. I want to use FATE rules for my next campaign, something in an Arabian Nights vein. As a system geek, I want to employ the specific rule variants that will produce the most Arabian Nights game possible. Yet, with a bare minimum of experience with FATE—four sessions of half-baked adventure meant more to give the system a test than to stand on its own—I have no way to judge this question.

In particular, different FATE versions take different approaches to the balance between three important player resources: aspects, flavor-text which defines a PC and may grant bonuses or penalties when relevant; stunts, which are very specialized abilities defined primarily by mechanics, and “refresh,” the starting pool of fate points which may be used to fuel the action—notably including the ability to activate aspects in a variety of ways. Spirit of the Century offers a fixed number of aspects, a fixed number of stunts, and a fixed refresh. The Dresden Files offers a fixed number of aspects, sets the refresh equal to that number, and reduces refresh by one for each stunt a player takes, trading free will (embodied as plot independence or “humanity”) for power. Legends of Anglerre offers an initial number of aspects and stunts, which grow as the campaign progresses, and allows refresh to vary, as long as it remains no greater than the number of stunts.

All of these approaches relating refresh to aspects and stunts, and others as well, might work just fine for any given campaign. Or they might not. Or they all might work passably, but only one truly well. I believe in the power of good rules to make a good game great, and I care about adopting the best rules possible to represent my game world. Yet, at the rate of a year or more per campaign, and three to five players all wanting their turn behind the figurative, GM screen, how is a system geek to test the possibilities quickly enough to make a good decision at all, much less before the hot new game comes along?

2011 09 09 mdlake Games Comments (0) Permalink

Turn the Page

PC Gamer magazine is trying something new. A few weeks ago, I got email announcing that my “online copy” of this month’s issue was available online. I was somewhat concerned: did this mean our copy was available in addition to, or instead of, the print copy our subscription had paid for? Were we still getting a print copy in the mail? Did it mean I would have to go through some kind of rigamarole to inform them that, yes, I still wanted one? Did it mean they aimed at phasing out print entirely? The email was vexingly mum on the subject. Busy with other things, I set the matter aside, and it became moot when our print copy arrived a few days later. Still unanswered is the question of whether print will be discontinued entirely somewhere down the road, after customers have been market-tested.

Again yesterday, email informed me that my online copy is available. This time I skimmed it online, which answers a question I’d only pondered in the abstract before. Like many readers, I like the physicality of a book—or in this case, magazine—over electronic screens. But how much of this preference is materially justified, and how much merely another example of preferring the formats we grow up with?

Answer: some of both. I mean, I still see no real cause to complain about the Kindle and similar electronic books, not beyond “it doesn’t feel like a book in my hands!” (Well, okay, fingerprints on the screen. Not a deal-breaker.) But reading my magazine online was definitely an inferior experience.

It was a lot more work, for one thing. Unless the page is sized perfectly to the screen, and the screen is sufficiently large, reading means clicking and scrolling the pages around to reveal the next block of text, a job that you can handle simply by flicking your eyes across a printed page. Also zooming in to read, zooming out to select pages. Nor can I read the magazine from a comfy chair. Reading business documents—searching job applications, contacting fellow students by email, shopping for plane tickets—on a desktop computer is entirely appropriate; reading a book or magazine strictly for pleasure should be portable: desk-free, outlet-free, battery-free, and available in a variety of postures and positions. And, though this could not be said generally of all publication, the online version of PC Gamer suffered from being designed for print and ported to pdf: the eye did not slide naturally over the page layout, but fumbled awkwardly for the right spot to start reading and then again for the right spot to click on to the next page. It’s hard to take in picture and caption at once, and especially to take in a broader gestalt of multiple images captured from a single game.

Online reading is the way of the future, and we’d better get used to it; kids growing up comfortable with various e-readers will combine with lower production costs to reduce print to a nice market. That’s okay. It’s okay even if I and other middle-aged fossils fail to make the transition. Shortcomings will eventually be overcome. But it’s not going to happen until electronic publishers learn to reproduce or circumvent all the small but irritating ways e-reading fails to deliver the print experience; simply turning print pages into pdfs isn’t enough. And until they do, I remain leery of publishers pushing the new electronic format upon us, free online copy or not.

2011 09 08 mdlake Writing Comments (0) Permalink