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This is the end of an era. A very small-scale, personal era, but still… The Civilization product line has finally come up with a game I don’t want to play. I’ve been a complete Civ addict since the dawn of the series. And even though many good games have come since Sid Meier first popped a disk into that box with skyscrapers sprouting over a Pharaonic tomb—many games better than Civ, to be honest—it’s always Civ I return to. I’ve got Civ, Civ2, Civ3, Civ4, the Civ2 expansion, the Civ3 expansion, the Civ4 Warlords and Beyond the Sword expansions, the daring but disappointing Conqueror the World spinoff, the even more clunky Fantastic Worlds spinoff, and even the Civ2Gold expansion so I could have imbalanced fan-made scenarios on hand instead of getting them off the internet where they belong, just for a little variety. I realize that gamers who can boast buying every title in a series are about as rare as gravel, but there is only one series good enough to put me, mister negativity, into that category. I’ve played fan maps and fan scenarios and designed a couple myself, long after the world had moved on to shinier packages with more instant gratification.

But I have to draw the line at Civilization Revolutions. When I first learned of the adaptation to console, I was hesitant, along with many dedicated Civ fans. Unwilling to prejudge, but concerned. The original Civ was, by current standards, quite crude in many respects: a single map size littered with long, stringy continents, for example, or the infamous battleship-sinking spearmen. New bells and whistles don’t always improve a title, but Civ has only improved in its continuing efforts to whittle away such awkward lumps and corners. The game still cheats to compensate for the fact that the AI can’t move its units sanely, much less intelligently. How far, then, would a console version regress in its need to quash the package down into limited memory? Could this version of Civ capture that epic sweep of history, when it actually boasts the absence of a “save game” function on the grounds that it’s unnecessary because every that can be finished in a sitting? How many compromises with simplicity need be made?

Alas, a lot. Many of the simplifications are predictable. Gone are the customizable maps. All games include precisely five nations, who share enough map room for a mere 3-5 cities apiece. The tech tree has shrunk along with the roster of playable nations, and with it the selection of military units and building projects. Such losses, while lamentable, are forgivable. Small can be good—though you won’t convince most die-hard Civ fans of that—and clearing away some of the city management and overspecialized units could produce an amusing Civ lite, even if it doesn’t preserve the stately historical march of the original.

Other losses, however, are not forgivable. The Civ AI, which has only recently risen from defective to merely dim, has apparently regressed once again to the point where automated opponents qualify for mercy killings. In a desperate effort to present a challenge, the developers have restored a lot of the old cheats: triremes allowed to sail deep waters, planes which never run out of fuel, automatic coalitions against the human player. Sadly, even this isn’t enough; CivRev needs creative new cheats to function, like armies that materialize out of nowhere to menace your empire—even when the host nation doesn’t have the necessary weapon technology, or the ships to transport them to your shores.

As I’ve noted before, there’s cheating, and there’s cheating. Giving the computer some extra resources or similarly subtle handicaps is less than ideal, but acceptable; it’s entirely appropriate when a player asks for it by selecting a high difficulty level. Asymmetric cheats, like unsinkable triremes, are considerably less acceptable; human players understandably resent the discovery that their opponents can do things they can’t. Armies materializing out of nowhere and invisible, unthwartable saboteurs who destroy your defenses without warning raise the cheating to an entirely new level, one which destroys the rise-and-fall-of-nations narrative the game is supposed to simulate. The player no longer cleverly plans the strategy which will defeat his foes; he merely endures the caprices of a spiteful god until his foes self-destruct. It’s like playing checkers with someone who can flick one of your pieces off the board whenever he feels like it, or turn any of his pieces into kings no matter where they are on the board—but still loses because he’s too stupid to do it in a way that works.

So, at long last, I’m going to take a pass on a Civ title. I appreciate the desire—motivated by both love and greed—to bring the game to a new audience, and the unfortunate need to compromise certain facets of game design to do it. Unfortunately, there’s a line beyond which the necessary compromises make the ultimate goal of tranporting the experience impossible, because the experience doesn’t survive the operation. Judging by player commentary, I think CivRev has crossed it.

Posted by at 3:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Within arm’s reach of where I write this is my water bottle. Although it is labeled “Poland Spring,” it no longer contains Poland Spring water, but ordinary tap water—which I gather is all it originally contained. The fact that most bottled water, despite some suggestive advertising, is no more pure or healthy than tap water—sometimes measurably less so, depending on the brand and your public health system—is no longer news. So widespread is this knowledge that Poland Spring no longer even bothers trying to tell you it compares favorably with tap water on its own label.

This is not to say that they aren’t still misrepresenting themselves as healthful. Don’t be silly. They’re just going about it in a more roundabout fashion. In place of the text that once told you how much better bottled water is for the purity of your precious bodily fluids, there is now eco-friendly copy:

“Our bottle looks and feels different because it is purposely designed with an average of 30% less plastic* to be easier on the environment. We can all make a difference, please recycle.”

Despite my boundless trust in my fellow man and especially in corporate ethics, I had to doubt this claim. For starters, putting 30% less plastic in their bottles saves Poland Spring a small fraction of their production costs, and probably another fraction of related costs like cleanup. Not a lot, I’m sure, but still, a fraction of a penny per bottle is still real money given enough volume. Call me a skeptic, but I think the prospect of shaving a couple million from annual production costs, and not a desire to go easy on the environment, is behind the decision.

More to the point, if you look the bottle over, you’ll notice that the design includes some odd ridges and a low waist, rather similar to what you’d see on a Coke bottle. As far as I can tell, they serve no purpose beyond esthetics and marketing, the need to “brand” the product by bottle shape as well as logo, label color, font, and so on. A couple small ridges might help someone grip the bottle, but this swoopy bottle molding goes well beyond that useful minimum. I don’t have any sensitive measuring devices on hand, but judging by careful eyeballing of the bottle’s outline and a quick bit of calculus, I estimate that removing, or even reducing, those unnecessary ridges might save another two percent of the plastic required to make that bottle. If the design is intended to save Mother Nature, why not remove them?

If they really wanted to be eco-friendly about it, Poland Spring could pare the plastic use down even further by shaping the bottle like a sphere, the shape with the smallest surface-to-volume ratio. That would give you maximum interior (water) for minimum surface (plastic container). A true sphere might present other problems, I suppose—it could be difficult to handle, or troublesome to pack for shipping—but any move towards a spherical shape, like making the rough cylinder of the bottle more squat and wide, would help. No matter how you cut it, concavities like that low-slung waist are pure waste material: spreading them out to meet the cylindrical space defining the bottle’s minimum convex outline would allow the bottle to hold more water (or rather, allow the manufacturer to shorten the bottle, and thus use less plastic, while holding just as much water).

Did you notice the asterisk on that 30% claim? I sure did. I had to hunt around to find the footnote, because it’s in smaller font, in an entirely different section of the label. It doesn’t do nearly so much for the old PR image, after all. It reads: “*Versus comparable size, leading beverage brands.” Not leading water brands, mind you, but leading beverage brands, that is to say, compared to one-liter bottles of soda pop.

Now there’s a problem with this comparison, in that pop bottles have to contend with the pressure of carbonation. I buy bottled water once every few month—for the bottle, not the water. The one-liter bottle is a handy way to measure my water intake for medical reasons, and after several months’ use, they start to get a cruddy buildup inside, despite washing. Occasionally, I’ll put something other than water, like pop, in my water bottle. And when I do, the carbonation causes the walls of the bottle to bulge out so hard that the little cup-shaped bottom pops outward and cause the bottle to wobble or even topple over. Just can’t take the pressure. Pop bottles use more plastic because they have to, in order to hold the contents in. So Poland Spring hasn’t designed its bottle to use 30% less plastic than other water bottles; it’s designed its bottle to use 30% less plastic than something completely irrelevant, like boasting they cost less than an aircraft carrier. They use just as much plastic as any bottled water company; they just want you to think you’re supporting the environment by buying their product because they use less plastic. That boosts sales, and to hell with the actual environment.

Of course, if you’re really inspired by the label, if you really want to cut down on plastic use to be easier on the environment, you can. Just stop getting the bottles entirely. Just go straight to your own tap. I’m sure the ecologically-minded folks at Poland Springs would be delighted with your commitment.

Posted by at 1:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We had a visit from evangelists this morning. Typically, I receive them with good humor. I respect the right of people to be wrong, if not the actual willingness to remain wrong in the face of compelling evidence, and a cheerful face is more likely than righteous atheistic fury to shiver someone’s shield of faith. Besides, I enjoy a good argument. Evangelists rarely put up much of a fight—my hypothesis is that anyone equipped with even the basics of reasoned argument wouldn’t be evangelists in the first place—but compelling them to admit that they’re arguing from faith after all, and not common sense, is good mental exercise.

Today was a little different, however. The opening line, before introductions even, was whether I believed “the Bible contains words which might provide comfort after the death of a loved one.” I had to agree: some people undoubtedly have found comfort from biblical teachings in their grief. Some people have also found comfort in the belief that their loved ones were whisked away by aliens in flying saucers, or that their loved ones miraculously escaped an exploding building and chose to go into hiding for unspecified reasons rather than speaking to authorities or their surviving family, or that their loved ones are still alive despite seeing the corpse, so I wouldn’t take that as much of an endorsement of biblical doctrine, but I digress.

The opening question was something of a fishing expedition: usually, it’s somewhat irrelevant, but every so often, the evangelists will ring the doorbell of someone who has lost friends or family recently, preferably (for the evangelist) recently enough to still be deep in the grieving process, offering a chance for the believers to exploit the emotionally vulnerable, to push their message of obedience to the Invisible Man in the Sky on someone who is in no state to think straight. That’s playing dirty. I’d be mildly offended at such tactics in the best of circumstances.

As it happens, however, I’m currently in that segment of the population who has recently lost friends or family: my brother died in May at the age of 37. And the attempt to exploit my loss to spread superstition got my hackles up. Instead of playing defense and settling for holding atheism up as a perfectly reasonable doctrine, I went right for the throat. I pinned our visitors into a definition of cruelty, and demonstrated a presumed God’s behavior fit that definition (Without even needing to get into the Midianites!), although the evangelists didn’t quite see how satisfying the definition means then that God, if he exists at all, is cruel. I drove them back into admitting that they believe the bible because they believe the bible—that exact phrase—although they wouldn’t admit the argument is circular. I called on the junior member of the pair, a girl who couldn’t have been more than 16, to answer a few questions herself, without her grandmother’s well-worn answers to fill in.

…and suddenly the meeting was over. Good-bye, thanks so much for your time.

When youth are brought along on evangelistic tours, they are there to learn. That is, they are there to learn how to convert the unbeliever, AND NOTHING ELSE. Any other form of learning, or even answering questions for themselves, is not to be tolerated. It’s dangerous. Which should tell you something about just how self-evident evangelists actually feel their self-evident truths are.

Posted by at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Earlier I commented on John “you cunt” McCain’s tactic of attempting to equate Barack Obama with Jimmy Carter. Peculiar because Carter, widely held in contempt during his presidency, has become quite admired since; peculiar because so many of his unpopular policies have proven wise and prescient, especially his attempts to wean us off of oil; peculiar because Obama so little resembles Carter in appearance, demographic appeal, or policy; peculiar above all because Carter was president so long ago that painting him as emblematic of Democratic folly does more to highlight McCain’s own advancing age than to denigrate Obama’s youthful idealism.

Perhaps he or his staff realized quickly—if not quite quickly enough—that the tactic wasn’t going to work, because it dropped from sight within a week. Snarky punditry was probably a big hint; McCain is sensitive to looking like a boob in ways Bush could never be. But maybe there was another reason.

McCain named Phil Gramm, he of the golden parachute, as his financial advisor. (A bad sign for a candidate who admits to a weak grasp of economics.) Gramm shot his mouth off last week in a claim that there was nothing wrong with our economy. The statement echoes one of Carter’s own greatest embarrassments, under very similar circumstances. When Carter characterized our economy as essentially sound, but suffering under a cloud of irrational despair, a “malaise,” he was roundly derided for this attempt to brush off a very real combination of inflation and stagnation as imaginary, although Reagan was worshipped soon after for saying essentially the same thing in his “morning in America” campaign. It’s all in the delivery, I guess—Carter seemed to be pleading where Reagan was commanding.

Gramm, of course, is a post-Reagan Republican, so, like the neocons who have grown used to unchallenged power, chose to accompany his malaise speech with abuse. Everything is fine, says Gramm, and those who think otherwise are just a bunch of whiners. (Easy for Gramm to say to losers like you; he has feathered his nest quite well with consulting and lobbying jobs from the banking firms he championed in the Senate. Also, his wife was on the Enron board of directors when he pushed legislation making the Enron scandal possible. So suck it up, whiner.)

Which does indeed leave the candidates in a situation much like Carter-Reagan showdown—with McCain on the wrong side. Both are saying the economy is basically okay, but place different spins upon it. Obama, with his message of hope and looking toward the future, is free to point to serious problems and lay blame where it belongs, promising better when he’s in office; McCain, trying to hold onto his base, is in the uncomfortable position of trying to explain why the current situation isn’t so bad, and why it isn’t his fault, anyway. Which leaves McCain looking more like Carter than the opponent he hopes to define.

Posted by at 5:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Governmental distortion of truth through statistics is nothing new. We’ve seen irrelevant distractions, like the Johnson administration’s reporting of Vietnamese troops killed instead of actual battles one or territory gained in Vietnam—and a fading desire to discriminate friend from foe to keep those figures inflated. We’ve seen fudged values, like the Reagan administration’s technique of ignoring inflation when announcing only minor absolute cuts in social programs, when in fact they were making enormous real cuts. We’ve seen outright redefinition of values for comparison, like the Clinton’s announcements that unemployment was down—after they ceased counting people who had been looking for work within the past year, but not in the past six months. I suppose it should come as no surprise that the current, most secretive and deceitful of presidencies should employ all these tactics on a regular basis. But I have to take particular exception at their approach to inflation.

Officially, the current rate of inflation is 1.7% a month. This figure is already fudged a bit, being measured against the average of the most favorable spread of months to be found in the previous year. It is only by virtue of this hedging that Bush has been able to claim (incorrectly) that we are not in a recession. But even this fudged value 1.7% is still really high; that comes to 22% a year. (We no longer report annual inflation precisely because it looks so scary in print like that.) So the White House wants you to stop looking at inflation. Just look at the core inflation rate. That’s a measure of the increase of the cost of living attached only to the essentials, unaffected by changes in the price of luxuries.

Or rather, it used to be. Beginning in the Reagan years, the core inflation rate was repeatedly indexed against a changing, and ever cheaper, collection of products. A rise in the price of steak, for example, was ruled to be unimportant because, as steak got more expensive, people would switch to hamburger. So the figure was readjusted to hamburger—but still compared to the earlier figures including steak. Reagan introduced the core inflation rate as a way to detach official inflation reports from their ultimate purpose of accurately measuring the cost of living, substituting the cost of merely surviving. “Sure, you’re paying twice as much rent as you used to, but you could move into a slum for slightly less than you used to pay for a decent apartment, so your standard of living is going up!”

(But don’t take my word for it; Stephen Cecchetti was there in person: “As a young economist on the staff of the White House Council of Economic Advisers in 1980, I saw US consumer price inflation hit its modern peak of nearly 20 per cent. In an attempt to improve appearances, we started computing various alternative measures of inflation. Half jokingly one of my colleagues noted that our job was to remove all the components of the price index that rose by more than the average. What was left was the core.”)

Unfortunately for the Bush administration, even the cost of surviving is going through the roof: food and fuel prices are leading the current inflationary surge. Government-sponsored economists would like you to focus on the core inflation rate, because they can redefine that as Reagan did to conceal a declining standard of living, but those pesky essentials are making even the core inflation rate look bad. Their solution? Eliminate food and fuel prices entirely from even the core inflation rate, on the grounds that continuing to include them in inflation figures would distort the inflation figures.

That bears repeating: The Bush administration feels that to include rising prices in the official formula for measuring rising prices would distort the measurement of rising prices. That’s not just debatable economic theory; it’s not just false; it’s tautologically false. It is logically impossible regardless of the meaning, purpose, or context of the official inflation figures. That anyone can offer an argument like that with a straight face demonstrates just how far we’ve slipped into Bizarro World, where where up is down, white is black, and ignorance is strength just because the president declares it to be from his own little existential bubble.

Yet they will continue to push this new definition without the slightest recognition that there’s anything wrong with it, and will cheerfully ignore, or even attack, anyone who disagrees, as they have ignored or attacked anyone who has questioned their other blatant lies. And this new, reality-free concept of inflation will enter the national dialogue as though it had any meaning. It is already; economic apologists appearing on CNN repeat the appeal to core inflation instead of asking on our behalf why we aren’t looking at actual inflation, simply because that’s what the White House wants to talk about. Why wouldn’t it? After all, it’s not like anyone actually has to pay a significant portion of their budget for gas, heating, rent, or groceries. Not anyone who matters to the Bushies, anyway.

Posted by at 10:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Surely you’ve realized by now that I’m angry at the Republican party generally: its candidates, its rank-and-file, its machine, and above all its leadership, the criminals sitting in office or happily awaiting proactive pardons for all they’ve done for the Bush administration. Honestly, though, there’s plenty of blame to go around. They wouldn’t be in office, or abusing office as they are, without plenty of help—from compliant news services (if not entirely co-opted by right-wing billionaires like Zell and Murdoch), from apathetic voters who aren’t furious about current events and never bothered to do their homework before voting in the first place, and from Democrats who have either decided to yield without a fight or simply adopted conservative platforms wholesale as the new center.

It’s this last that’s got me most angry at the moment. When an angry public swept them into a majority of both Congressional houses in 1986, despite loaded dice and gerrymandered districts, that should have been a great, big fucking sign that we’ve had enough of the neocons, and that we wanted the Dems to stand up and drive those police state, war-mongering, treasury-stealing, spying, torturing, you-negroes-in-Louisiana-don’t-count motherfuckers out. Two years later, Americans still waiting for someone to push back, Barack Obama rose from the back benches to topple heir-apparent Hillary Clinton fueled almost entirely by the hope that he would succeed where Congress had failed.

Want to know what the issues are? Want to know what’s really on the voters’ minds, what they want from a candidate, what will make them stand up and vote in droves? You already know. So does Barack Obama. So does Harry Reid. So does Nancy Pelosi. But just to make sure, Pelosi has, for several weeks now, been sponsoring a Digg-style “Netroots Nation” questionnaire at askthespeaker.org, where people can raise issues. They can also bump the issues others have raised upwards or downwards in significance with a quick up-or-down vote. Guess what’s at the top of the list. Go on, guess.

Tough call? I know. There’s so much to choose from. We’re still hemorrhaging troops and money in Iraq. The housing crisis is hitting everyone, with serious fears of a general banking melt-down hurting markets worldwide. The planet is dying and Bush doesn’t feel we can afford to save it. Business is shrinking nonetheless, and paychecks with it, a shrinkage magnified by the biggest. Fucking. Debt. Ever. A debt accrued fighting an unjust war while restructuring taxes so the wealthy won’t have to pay them any more. These are huge problems, to be sure. But they don’t even make the top five.

The big issues are all matters of the rule of law. Why is Congress simply letting Karl Rove get away with ignoring a Congressional subpoena? Why is Congress even thinking about telecom immunity for aiding illegal seizure of private phone records? Presidential impeachment. Launching investigations of the current presidency once a new man is in office. Truth and reconciliation boards to deal with years of presidentially-approved torture.

People are angry. Not as angry as I, perhaps, but angry nonetheless. They know they’ve been sold up the river by a lying, cheating, spying, torturing presidency; even the crazy 27%, the jingoistic mouth-breathers and the religious zealots have begun to admit that, okay, maybe the past eight years haven’t been the kind of government they thought they were voting for (a base lie). And, at long, long last, the general public wants some accountability.

In this environment, playing to the center is precisely the wrong move. This is not a time for polite attempts to find a new center. This is a time to grab hold of that anger and turn it into a mighty electoral weapon. This is one of those rare moments when negative campaigning is not only a viable strategy, but morally justifiable—nay, desirable.

Yet the Democrats persist in trying to appear moderate, even as the Republicans continue to redefine “moderate” as something just shy of fascism. We can’t win by compromising with the Republican right; they’ve either forgotten how or never intended to in the first place. They’ve won every major fight for a generation by refusing to compromise, starting with the blessed Saint Ronnie, moving through Newt Gingrich, and right up into Dick “fuck you” Cheney and Scalia’s “originalist” belief that the founding fathers would approve of warrantless surveillance.

Obama screwed up by supporting the new FISA bill granting telecomm immunity and embracing as law the warrantless wiretaps once considered scandalous; his popularity and his campaign donations both dipped sharply after the FISA vote. Pelosi screwed up by announcing impeachment off the table, even as Bush persists in keeping war with Iran on the table. Congress screwed up by giving John Yoo and David Addington a pass in their contempt-filled testimony; it was more important that each congressman get his forty-five seconds to wag a finger than actually to hold them to answer questions. What is the matter with these people? Are they so whipped by the aura of failure that they’ve stopped trying? Are they individually so wrapped up in the corruption of the current regime that they don’t dare air out the laundry? Are the progressives simply gone—along with decent Republicans shoved aside by the neocons—replaced by “Democrats” like the DLC, who believe the country should be divided between the authoritarian rich who hate gays and love Jesus and the authoritarian rich who think gays are okay? The only way—the only way—to lose this election is to stir apathy, to play into the belief (nurtured for a generation by the right wing) that there’s not all that much difference between the parties, no reason to choose beyond a chest-thumping tribalistic devotion.

Stop it! Just…stop it! This country has drifted so far towards the right that it’s forgotten what the center looks like. Another decade of this one-sided approach to moderation, and it will forget what the Bill of Rights looks like. Just as its current leader, George W. “just a goddam piece of paper” Bush has.

Posted by at 3:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Yesterday was my birthday, the big four-oh. I am now officially middle-aged, and officially on the decline, mental and physical. I know a lot of people consider the fortieth birthday a big deal, an occasion to make (or, more likely, endure) jokes about aging. But me? I hardly noticed.

Not to say I didn’t celebrate, a little. Eileene and I very nearly share a birthday—hers the 11th, mine the 13th—so we compromised and made a day trip of it on the 12th, at a high-end miniature golf course and a nice restaurant downstate. On my birthday proper, I bought a “tiramisu cake” (Warning for tiramisu fans: it wasn’t much good.) and cut it with my gaming buddies. Ignoring the birthday entirely would be another way of paying it too much attention, a pathetic attempt to pretend that it doesn’t happen if it’s ignored.

But I confess that my attitude towards birthdays gets more low-key every year. don’t want a big party or lots of presents, just a dinner out, maybe a book or a bottle of wine. Perhaps a deeply repressed fear of aging is responsible, but I don’t think so. I think it’s vanishing greed. As a kid, my birthday was a big event, because I could expect new toys. Now I can afford all the toys I really want. No, not “toys.” Other men reaching middle age suddenly decide they want a red sports car or an expensive mistress. When I talk of wanting toys, I literally mean a new board game, or a day out playing miniature golf.

I may be an old goat, but I’m still a kid at heart.

Posted by at 4:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)