Thursday, November 18, 2010

The Great Firewall of America

For the last year or so, I've been keeping an eye on the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) with a slightly more than casual level in interest.  It is a far reaching and expansive "trade" treaty that seeks to impose harsh penalties on copyright infringers and those who deal in counterfeit goods.  A little over a year ago, the Obama Administration refused to divulge any information about ACTA in the first place, citing "national security concerns."  Over the last ten years, anybody citing "national security concerns" over anything that isn't remotely related to defense spending, intelligence activities, or military deployments automatically falls into the category of suspicious as hell in my mind.  Naturally, the text of the draft agreement leaked out on to the Internet.  At that time, the most heinous portions of the agreement were provisions that demanded DMCA-style "notice-and-takedown" rules that demanded material be removed from websites by ISPs if the ISP received word that the material was infringing on somebody's copyright, without any actual effort or mechanism to investigate the veracity of the complaint or appeal the decision.  Additionally, there were provisions that prohibited breaking DRM for any reason (again, shades of the DMCA), and rules requiring ISPs to actively police sites with user-contributed material for potential copyright violations, as well as cutting off Internet access to accused (not convicted) infringers.  The entire Blogger site, not just this blog, would doubtlessly shut down because of the literally prohibitive cost involved in trying to cover the costs of lawyers who did nothing all day but scour blogs looking for POSSIBLE copyright infringements.

A year later, things have not gotten any better.  Two months ago, the MPAA sent a representative to an information meeting about ACTA down in Mexico.  It's not terribly surprising in and of itself, since the MPAA has championed the cause of ACTA by crying foul over piracy and believing that ACTA (or the analogous American version of it, COICA) would allow it to finally crush movie piracy in much the same way that the Death Star was supposed to crush the Rebel Alliance.  What was surprising at this meeting was that the MPAA rep asked the seemingly innocuous question of whether or not ACTA could be used to block "dangerous" web sites such as WikiLeaks.  Keep in mind that this was coming shortly after WikiLeaks dumped almost a hundred thousand pages worth of documents that the Pentagon had classified which contained some of its dirty laundry.  The government was pissed off at WikiLeaks and such a question answered in the affirmative could very easily be used as justification to go after equally "dangerous" web sites, though the danger the MPAA is most afraid of is the danger to the bottom lines of the studios as opposed to any trifling concerns about the safety of troops in the field or American civilians potentially targeted by terrorists.

Recently, the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (COICA) left the Senate Judiciary Committee.  As the EFF reported earlier today, the bill probably won't come up to the full Senate until the start of the next session, but it's troubling given bipartisan opposition to the bill and a host of engineers who basically helped assemble the Internet piece by piece, protocol by protocol.  The first most troubling element of the bill is the blacklist.  The Attorney General (or those underlings acting in the name of the Attorney General's Office) would suddenly have the power to kill a website if it allegedly had infringing material.  Much like the DMCA and ACTA, there's no mechanism in place to contest or appeal such an action, nor is there any provision for an investigation into verifying a claim of copyright infringement.  DMCA claims aren't 100% right, what's to say that the COICA would have a better average?  It's an unregulated, unchecked, and unspeakably dangerous power.  There is simply too little in the way to prevent a gross abuse of the power.  The Attorney General's Office and the Attorney General are not elected officials, but rather filled by executive appointment, which means there is absolutely no means of accountability that can effectively be exercised against them.  Unaccountable bureaucrats given unchecked power is completely anathema to every principle America claims to hold dear.

The second most troubling element of COICA is the subversion (or perversion, if you prefer) of the DNS infrastructure currently under U.S. control.  For the last sixteen years, ever since the Internet became open to public and commercial use, the U.S. has rightly maintained a very hands-off policy towards Domain Name System servers.  You type in "Google" in the address bar of your browser, your command brings up Google by directing the request to one of the many servers which hold an IP address owned by Google.  This simple mechanism allows used to access sites both puritanical and prurient, commercial and crass, polished and amateurish.  Nations like China, Iran, Burma, North Korea, and Saudi Arabia have various filters and cutouts in place to divert requests for "undesirable" sites to sites that are "approved" by the existing regimes, or outright block the requests from ever reaching the undesirable sites, essentially cutting them off from being seen on the "official" Internet by their inhabitants.  Such filtering and blocking, exemplified by "The Great Firewall of China," is in place to crush dissent, inhibit communication, and ultimately control the population to keep the existing regimes in power by attempting to mask the inherent flaws and weaknesses in the system.  Yet this bill proposes that we emulate those countries, countries that the State Department, the United Nations, and various private organizations have been hectoring for years about their repressive Internet policies.  Worse, the bill proposes we do so not to prop up the existing government, but to prop up media conglomerates, businesses that have grown bloated over the years and are deathly afraid of technologies that have the potential to render them extinct.  The fact that the U.S. government would have the means to do precisely the same thing as the aforementioned nations is merely poisonous gravy.

The COICA, much like the PATRIOT Act, has been rushed through with absolutely indecent haste, previous efforts to table the bill notwithstanding.  Like the PATRIOT Act, the stated benefits cannot possibly outweigh the potential liabilities.  Unlike the PATRIOT Act, the single purpose motivating this unholy abortion of a bill is pure unadulterated greed, whatever high minded language might be employed to claim otherwise.

Normally, I don't ask much of my readers.  I take it as a given that my work will eventually percolate through the Internet and people will read it.  This once, I'd take it as a personal kindness if people who read this would pass a link along to friends and family members.  I want people to get mad about this, because it's something they rightly should be mad about.  I know that it doesn't seem as important as the unemployment situation, or the financial markets, or the fact that gas and food prices are going up.  It's not one of those issues that seemingly has any survival value.  Rather, it's an issue that affects the value of survival, and it's important for that reason.  What does it gain you to have food in your gut and gas in your tank, but live under threat of being silenced and cut off from the larger world just because some rich bastards in Hollywood are crying foul?  Nothing, which is precisely what you have to lose by spreading the word.  Thanks.

Thursday, November 4, 2010

May It Please The Court

Much like my late Uncle David, I'm most likely never going to be a lawyer, though he at least finished law school before deciding he couldn't stand the law profession.  Because of my future non-status as a lawyer, I will never likely get the chance to argue a case before the U.S. Supreme Court.  The closest I may ever come is filing an amicus brief at some point, and even that's dubious.  That being said, I would like to weigh in on the matter of Schwarzenegger vs. Entertainment Merchants Assn. currently under review.

May it please the court...

Peter Ustinov once said that in a free society, one must put up with a great deal of nonsense.  As a gamer myself, I will not deny that when you get right down to the core of them, video games are nonsense.  They are expensive electronic fripperies, many of them poorly designed, many of them poorly executed, and many of them incapable of producing anything of inherent value beyond a minimal sense of enjoyment built up through  the few hours needed to progress from start to finish, a sense of enjoyment that fades as soon as the game is put away or erased off a hard drive.  As a reviewer, I see a lot of games whose aesthetic and artistic content ranges from non-existent to superlative, with the bulk of them falling into the range of mediocre to average.  The ratio of good games to bad ones is badly lopsided in favor of the bad ones it seems.  And while I believe that there are games out there who attempt to paper over a basically weak concept with excessive and possibly even gratuitous amounts of violence, I cannot see there being a compelling reason for the law in question to stand.

So far, the law in question has been struck down by the California Supreme Court and by the Ninth Circuit.  Nothing unusual about that.  Laws get struck down, appeals are made further up the ladder until one day, they arrive at the Supreme Court for the final ruling.  It's not even particularly notable that the California Supreme Court and the Ninth Circuit are both based in California.  What is notable is that laws similar to the law in question, across the entire country, have gone up to the appropriate federal circuit court judges and not a single one has survived.  For a nation as expansive and as diverse in ideas, creeds, and mentalities as ours, the fact that these laws keep getting struck down suggests that there is at least one constant in American jurisprudence insofar as video games are concerned.  That constant is that the State's interest in controlling the sales of these games does not outweigh the First Amendment's protection regarding the content of the games.  While a particular game might have objectionable amounts of violent content, the State cannot have a blanket ban on all games with violent content.  As much as it might irritate or outrage certain personages, the price of living in a free society means having to put up with the nonsense of violent video games.  A person may be outraged about the amount of violent content in a game, but since they live in a free society, they are blessedly under no obligation to purchase that game.  Just as a violent video game essentially ignores an individual's personal offense at its subject matter, the offended individual can ignore the violent video game by simply not buying it.  It is less a moral issue than a market issue.

"But think of the children!"  Ah, yes.  The cry for preserving the moral rectitude of the next generation of citizens.  A cry which has been uttered over the years with the advent of television, motion pictures, rock music, radio, comic books, rap music, and even the printing press.  Given this universal human propensity to view with alarm any media which potentially could expose children to images and concepts which an adult would find objectionable, it's not much of a stretch to picture an ancient Egyptian worrying about the potential harm of hieroglyphics on young and impressionable minds.  Fundamentally, it is difficult to disagree with the basic idea of controlling the exposure of young minds to content for which they are not yet mentally or emotionally capable of processing.  The disagreement stems not from the desired ends, but from the desired means.  The administration and education of moral and ethical propriety is properly the function of parents, not the State.  Mother and Father know best, not Big Brother.  If it were any other issue besides video games, the suggestion that the State somehow has not only a superior interest but a superior ability to properly raise children into morally and ethically functional adults would cause a full blown rebellion among the populace.  The law in question presumes that superior interest and ability while failing to provide any sort of proof to support the presumption.  And while society has produced and will always produce exceptional individuals who are morally and or ethically bankrupt, the failure to instill those exceptional individuals with the proper background generally rests with the parents, barring extreme cases of genuine physiological defect or subsequent physical injury.

A noted game designer named Sid Meier once described the general concept of video games as "a series of interesting choices."  I would expand upon that definition to read "a series of interesting choices within a specifically arranged set of circumstances."  A player makes choices within a game which their electronic alter ego performs.  However, there are choices which a player might like to make but which are essentially impossible within the circumstances of the game.  The freedom of choice within the confines of a video game are sometimes arbitrarily narrow, either because of mechanical limitations or the intent of the developers to explore a specific set of storylines and thematic issues, but they also have the potential to be quite expansive.  Because of this, some of the "visual aids" with which the Court has thus far seen and reacted to with distaste are inherently dishonest.  The fact that you can act like a complete and utter psychopath in Postal 2 does not mean that you are obligated to do so, and in fact it's possible to beat the game by reacting in a purely defensive fashion to immediate threats to your alter ego's safety.  As the development company, Running With Scissors, pointed out during their original marketing campaign, "It's only as violent as you are!"  The scandalous "Hot Coffee" content in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, which could only be accessed on the PC version of the game and even then requiring a bit of hacking to get at, is a minor element in a series which has routinely mocked the nihilism and self-destructive behavior of the romanticized "life of crime" which some people still believe to be a viable lifestyle.  As with Postal 2, the fact that you can act like a thug, a hoodlum, or a wiseguy in-between the chapters of the game's storyline doesn't mean that you are in any way obligated to do so.  And while developers cannot account for every possible permutation of choice within their games, they can keep the effects of those choices within the confines of the game, perhaps upsetting or disturbing a player's actual state of mind, perhaps enlightening it, perhaps generating nothing at all.  The final impact of the choices made within the confines of a game is that the game ends.  If a person has dreams with content influenced by the game and the choices they made within the game, it's little more than coincidence.  There is no reason to believe that violent video games are brainwashing American youth into psychopathic killing machines.

"But what about Columbine?!  They customized a video game to practice killing people!"  While I will not deny the Columbine shootings in particular, and school shootings in general, were tragic and deeply disturbing, I am not going to take the easy road and blame an inanimate object for the actions of psychologically disturbed individuals.  When a person modifies an automobile and gets into a wreck which kills somebody, do we blame the car manufacturer?  Do we blame the company who made the customized parts for the car?  No, we blame the driver, because the driver was in control of the vehicle at the time of the collision.  By the same token, blaming violent video games for a school shooting just because the perpetrators played the games or even modified the games to further their depraved fantasies and psychoses is equally spurious.  A more apt analogy would be the federal government charging Martin Scorcese as an accomplice before the fact in the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan.  John Hinckley, Jr. had attempted the assassination in an effort to impress Jodie Foster, whom he'd become obsessed with having watched the movie Taxi Driver an inordinate number of times.  Yet Scorcese was never charged, nor was there even a hint of charging him, and rightly so.  Had any lawyer tried to proceed with such a prosecution, they'd have been laughed out of court.  Put simply, crazy people don't need violent video games to help them be crazy.

"What about that guy that killed himself over EverQuest?"  Same basic premise, slightly different circumstances.  The end result was the same.  The game did not tell him to kill himself, and efforts to hold the game company liable are laughable.  The man clearly needed, and clearly wasn't receiving, some very rigorous psychiatric assistance.  The game did not prevent him from getting the help he needed.

"What about the woman who shook her child to death because she was playing FarmVille?"  Having played FarmVille myself, I can tell you that it's probably one of the least violent video games ever made.  You plant flowers and vegetables, you pick them, you sell them, you plant more.  The fact that this woman shook her child to death while playing a non-violent video game seems to lend credence to the idea that it's not the games that are at fault for violent behavior.

The First Amendment covers not only the written word, but visual representations, audio recordings, and various other artistic media through which individuals or groups of individuals can express themselves with the promise that their work will not be subject to punitive sanctions from the State.  Video games, as a medium for artistic expression, are still very much in their infancy, despite having been around in one form or another for the past quarter century.  If one looks back, one would find a very strong historical parallel between video games and comic books.  Prior to 1954, comic books were not just for children.  Comic book stories were not simply about superheroes, but covered a broad range genres and topics.  You had detective stories right up there with the best film noir.  You had horror themed comics with gruesome monsters and hapless victims.  The potential for storylines and characterizations on par with great literature fused with cutting edge artwork by some of the most talented artists of the generation was almost palpable.  And then, one child psychologist by the name of Fredric Wertham went and published a book by the title Seduction of The Innocent, which was nothing more than a screed blaming comic books for every sort of social ill present at the time.  It whipped up sufficient furor that the U.S. Senate was contemplating regulation of the comic book industry.  Instead of regulation, the Comics Code was established.  A more benighted and patently offensive edifice of censorship likely has not been created in the entire history of the country.  A "code of conduct" that forbid not only depictions of violence and overt sexual content, but also forbid the depiction of concealed weapons (for reasons I can't fathom), any mention of supernatural creatures such as vampires or zombies (most likely aimed deliberately at publisher William Gaines, famous for Tales From The Crypt and MAD), any hint or suggestion that the police or courts couldn't be trusted, and enforced endings where the good guy always won and the criminal always punished.  Today, history looks at Seduction of The Innocent and the Comics Code, and the conclusion drawn invariably is that it crippled the comic book industry.  That a new and exciting form of artistic media was smothered and almost killed in the name of a moralistic fantasy more divorced from reality than any superhero or horror comic ever could be.  Surely, the esteemed justices of the Court know that sometimes the cops really are the bad guys, that convicted criminals really are innocent victims, and that the good guys can in fact lose.  I find it an overwhelming irony that the author of the law in question is a child psychologist.

A final point of consideration for the Court.  The law in question is supposed to affect retailers who knowingly sell what is to be determined (by mechanisms yet undefined and regulatory entities yet unformed) to be an excessively violent video game to minors.  Yet the law does not appear to make any provisions for or mention of companies who are using digital distribution methods for video games.  Will Sony or Microsoft be slapped with a fine each time a game that doesn't meet the law's standards gets sold through their respective online marketplaces?  Will people who purchase a game through Valve's Steam service or Stardock's Impulse service unwittingly open those companies up to fines if their title is played by a child within the household?  Or worse, by a neighbor's child?  The potential for spurious civil suits cropping up based off these scenarios makes my skin crawl.

I leave you honored jurists with a quote from Justice Louis Brandeis.  "Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the Government's purposes are beneficent.  Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers.  The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding."

Thursday, October 14, 2010

100 Movies You Need To See - Part VII: Horror

Since it is October, and I have been kinda dragging my heels on getting this list out, the timing for this section is quite apropos.  Horror movies are as much a staple of cinema as Westerns and crime dramas.  Some of the earliest movies were horror movies, and while we might think them campy or cheesy now, we have to remember that it was new technology back then.  The fear factor was as much in the technology itself as it was in the plot or characters.  Part of me would like to see some contemporary horror movies that evoke the moody Gothic feel of those early films, instead of relying on gore and shock value.  And no more sparkly vampires.  Ever.


Lord of Illusions – It's a Clive Barker film, and one that's somewhat more understated than the Hellraiser series.  “Understated” however doesn't mean it wimps out on the chills.

The Thing – The best John Carpenter horror movie he ever made.

An American Werewolf In London – John Landis has a truly screwball sense of humor.  Mix that with the curse of lycanthropy and you have a trippy scary monster movie.

Dracula – The classic vampire film.  Bela Lugosi may have been perpetually typecast because of it, but he's still “The Count.”

Tremors – It's a modern movie, but it's got the style of a classic '50s monster movie.

Silver Bullet – Another werewolf movie, but this one's played straight.  And it works well.

From Dusk Till Dawn – The horror element doesn't show up till about halfway through the movie.  That's what makes it so damn effective.

Creepshow – The film that firmly established the “anthology” movie genre, in my opinion, since it spawned Tales From The Dark Side and Tales From The Hood.  Notable for Stephen King's essentially one man show.

Flatliners – The cast list sounded like one of those “today's biggest stars” grab bags, but the premise is creepy and the acting is really well done.

Stir of Echoes – This one got lost in the noise from The Sixth Sense, which is a shame because I think it's probably the better movie.  Watching Kevin Bacon go crazy is a lot more fun than watching Bruce Willis play dumb.


Next Time: Drama

A Year Without A Paycheck

One year ago today, my job unofficially ended.  We were taken aside, one by one, told we were getting severance, and then got walked out of the building.  Officially, we were still employed till the 15th of November.  I can't say it wasn't a terribly big surprise.  And to be fair, we'd been essentially sitting on our asses and getting paid for the last couple of months prior.  Still working, but not nearly as much as we had been.

Funny how time slips away, isn't it?

A year later, I'm still out of work.  The job hunt has been a bigger challenge than at any other time I can think of, even worse than when I moved back to Phoenix ten years ago.  The economy is in the toilet.  The tech sector which I've had a career in has become a hell of a lot more picky about hiring.  In fact, every sector has gotten picky.  Even temp work is hard to get these days.  Over the last 365 days, I've had precisely one temp job lasting six hours, which was a couple weeks ago.  I've sent out more resumes and applications than I can easily count.  I've gotten dozens of form emails essentially telling me I didn't get the job.  I've been ignored by dozens more.  I've had headhunters tell me they can get me work, and I've heard a recruiter tell me I'm screwed.  There have been folks out of work longer than me who aren't getting work and there are folks out of work for less time than I have getting snapped right up.  Part of me would like to get out of the tech sector.  Part of me knows I have to get back into the tech sector before I can move out of the tech sector.

It hasn't all been doom and gloom, though it sometimes feels like it.  I met a wonderful woman, the Otaku Girl, who prodded me to put up this blog.  I've met a lot of very interesting people at events I probably wouldn't have met them at previously.  I got to see a lot of things that when I was working regularly I never could have seen.  In some ways, I've been living more in the last year than I did while I was working for a living.

Still, I'd much rather have a job.  Something that lets me have a good work-life balance.  I'll take the paycheck, but I want to be able to enjoy it as well.

The hunt goes on.

Wednesday, October 13, 2010

Honor At Stake

I've tried not to rant about this.

I've made a great deal of effort since this whole fracas with Medal of Honor started up to not say anything.  To bite my tongue and hope that something resembling sanity and good sense prevailed at EA.  Looking for the triumph of hope over experience when it came down to the tough call between sticking to one's guns and caving in to popular (if misguided) pressure.

And how I hate to have been disappointed.

The fracas started a couple months back.  A British Member of Parliament went berserk when word got out that players would have the option of taking on the role of Taliban fighters in multiplayer matches.  There was, as former SEAL Dick Marcinko might say, an F3 (Full Fucking Faulkner; lots of sound and fury) in the House of Commons as the MP decried the impending ability of gamers to commit atrocities on innocent women and children and kill honorable British soldiers in the name of electronic sport.  From there, it just got worse.  Canada's Minister of Defence also decried the news.  Fox News, not exactly known for it's sense of gravity or restraint when it comes to U.S. armed forces, paraded about the mother of a soldier who died in Afghanistan to denounce what a horrible and callous company EA was for allowing this sort of thing to go through and belittling the sacrifice of soldiers who had died in Afghanistan and Iraq.  The U.S. Army went on record as saying they were "disappointed" with the decision.  Eventually, EA caved in and changed the name from "Taliban" to "Opposing Force."

Bearing in mind for a moment that I despise pretty much everything EA stands for, it perhaps sounds strange that I might be defending EA's original position, or more specifically DICE's original position, regarding the designation of one multiplayer faction as the Taliban in Medal of Honor.  The aim of this particular iteration of Medal of Honor was to cover a different sort of conflict, a new theatre of warfare, one that might have lacked the headlines and press coverage of battles fought in previous eras, but one that undeniably has heroes worthy of the nation's highest award for courage and valor above and beyond the call of duty.  I can understand why DICE and EA didn't use the swastika and other iconography of Nazi Germany in previous MoH games, but the part of me that demands historical accuracy has never agreed with that decision.  Over sixty-five years after the end of WWII, there's still a taboo about those symbols outside of very carefully delimited fields, and they're still flat out illegal in Germany.  But in a way, that earlier decision is very much a double-edged sword when applied to the current controversy.  Some will argue that the fact DICE didn't put in swastikas in earlier iterations of the title means that it's perfectly fine for them not to use the name of the Taliban for the bad guys in the new game.  Others will argue that they're letting themselves be used as a subtle means of propaganda against the Taliban, by refusing to "dignify" them with the proper designation.  If one were to reduce the matter down to a pissing contest between who's worse as a bad guy, then I would unequivocally say that however morally and ethically reprehensible the Taliban have behaved over the past twenty years or so, they're lightweight amateurs when stacked up against the industrialized atrocities of the Third Reich.  And however much the multiplayer screen might say "Axis" or "German" in earlier MoH games, if you weren't fighting in the jungle, you were fighting Nazis, you knew you were fighting Nazis, even the guys on the other side during a multiplayer match knew that they were playing the role of the Nazis for that round.  None of the gamers who played the bad guys legitimized the Third Reich, nor did they diminish or belittle the pall it casts upon history.  By the same token, labeling bad guys in turbans with AKs in Afghanistan as Taliban in the game is not giving any sort of blessing to the actual Taliban.  It's not paying them a compliment.  It's merely acknowledging an existing fact.

An interview between Industry Gamers and three U.S. Special Forces members is particularly telling about this whole situation as far as the reaction from the guys who are actually in the suck.  For the most part, they seem rather pragmatic fellows, which isn't entirely surprising.  I will say (spoiler alert!) that the JTAC they interviewed seems to have a rather skewed sense of reality.  He decries the game as "war profiteering," but he states that he's perfectly willing to give the game a try.  He openly states that the Taliban will make use of Medal of Honor as a recruiting tool, though it seems difficult to picture Taliban fighters or those sympathetic to them to somehow start smuggling in Xbox 360s and PS3s into South Waziristan.  Perhaps the statement that really irritated me was the one at the end where he states that adding the Taliban into the game made them "recognized as a legitimate fighting force."  Clearly, years of military aid to the Taliban and others like them during the Soviet invasion and occupation of Afghanistan didn't rise to the level of recognizing the legitimacy of the Taliban as a fighting force, insofar as the JTAC is concerned.  It bothers me when people spout off about how such-and-such a group or so-and-so's army isn't a "legitimate" fighting force.  It sounds far too reminiscent of the Vietnam War, when the higher ups in the Pentagon derided the Viet Cong and the NVA even as they were chewing up American troops with gusto.  If they're willing to tangle with you more than once, I'd say that pretty much gives them "legitimacy."  As for the other two operators interviewed, both of them applauded EA's refusal (at the time of the interview) to cave in under pressure.  Part of me would like to get their opinions now that EA has caved in.  They both spoke to the inherent inability of any game, even one as detailed as Medal of Honor, to truly capture the essence of modern combat.  They both saw no reason not to label the Taliban as Taliban in the game.  If guys at the sharp end don't seem to mind, it says a lot about the brass in Washington who are "disappointed" about the situation, and none of what it says is particularly flattering.

I would like to take a moment to defend what has been stated by some as the intellectually lazy position that Medal of Honor is "just a game."  Strip it off all the specifically identifying labels, remove all the fancy mechanics and graphics, and what do you have?  You have "cowboys and Indians."  You have "cops and robbers."  You have good guys vs. bad guys, running around a predefined field, attempting to achieve an objective in order to claim victory over their opponents.  Folks, that right there is a game.  Does it trivialize the ongoing conflict in the region?  I would say not.  If anything, it's giving people a different perspective on the conflict, admittedly a very narrow one, but different all the same.  Is it, as the JTAC stated, war profiteering?  If so, then every news agency, wire service, broadcast network, website, and blog that even thinks to discuss the conflict is just as guilty, including this one.  I will not deny that the perspective provided by Medal of Honor is narrow, even shallow to a degree.  For a truly deep representation that goes into the larger issues and the smaller day-to-day perspectives of Afghanistan, I'd point to Armed Assault II and it's scenario building tools as having the best ability to model the conflict for the average person.  As far as I know, nobody has attempted to make such a model, but that title would be the best suggestion I would make to somebody looking to create such a model.

The bitter irony of the whole situation is that EA released a game centered around men who refused to quit fighting even at the expense of their own lives, but gave up fighting when popular pressure over one small detail grew too loud for their liking.  Had they continued to persevere, I might not have liked EA much more than I did, but I would have respected them a little more.

Monday, September 13, 2010

100 Movies You Need To See - Part VI: Thrillers

Action movies are great, as I sort of pointed out during the last part of this list.  But if there's something better than a good action movie, it's a good thriller.  One can look at an action movie as a ball that gets rolling down a hill, and pretty much ends up blowing up everything that it comes into contact with before it hits the bottom of the hill and comes to a stop.  Thrillers are more like taking a piece of rope, or even chain, and pulling on both ends, adding more and more stress until it meets and exceeds it's breaking point.  Sometimes, there are two or three chains all being put under strain at the same time, but not at the same rate, which gives us a lot of good pop-pop-pop excitement.

The Hurt Locker – It's easy to dismiss this one as a war movie or merely a drama.  It would be a mistake to do so.  This one, particularly during the bomb disposal scenes, is garrote wire tight.

Hard Candy – Very few movies make me flinch.  This is one of them.

Chinatown – Growing up, John Huston had this very wholesome grandfatherly appearance to me.  After seeing this one, he reminded me that great actors have more fun playing the bad guy.

Primal Fear – The first film I saw Edward Norton in.  The last scene still sends a chill down my back because the way he delivers his last lines is almost perfectly in sync with what I'd imagined the character saying when I read the book.

Unbreakable – This was where M. Night Shyamalan peaked.  While it has a decidedly fantastic premise, it's still structured like a thriller.

The Game – It all starts out so innocently, and then goes to hell at the speed of light.  And what a ride.

Deathtrap – For a movie adaptation of a stage play, it's damn good.  Also helps remind you Christopher Reeve was more than just Superman.

The Name of The Rose – Proof that not every thriller has to be set in the present day.  Sean Connery doesn't chew up the scenery like he does in the Bond flicks.

Ronin – If it had just been about common hijackers tooling around the south of France, it'd probably be considered just another action flick.  But when you throw in ex-spooks, ultraradical IRA maniacs, double-crosses left and right, and a mysterious package that suddenly takes a backseat in the movie's last great twist, you know you've got a thriller on your hands.

Sneakers – It feels a little lighter than some thrillers, but it's still got plenty of twists and turns.


Next time: Horror movies

Thursday, August 26, 2010

100 Movies You Need To See - Part V: Action/Adventure

Sometimes, you want to go to the movies to experience something magical and wonderful.  A touching love story.  A wrenching drama.  An uproarious comedy.  You go to feel something you might not otherwise feel and experience a story that you will probably never experience in real life.  You go to connect with characters that you'll never meet in real life, but you would really like to know.

And sometimes, you go to watch shit blow up.

Sometimes, you don't want high concepts and deep characterizations.  You don't want all the drama of dramas.  Sometimes, you just want to see big explosions.  You want to live vicariously through men and women of action.  Yes, they're sometimes cartoonish.  Yes, they have lines that straddle the line between hilarity and cringing awfulness.  And you don't care.  For a couple hours, you just want to see good guys win, bad guys lose, and shit blowing up all over the place.

With that in mind, my list of ten action movies.

Conan The Barbarian – If you're going to do a fantasy flick, this should be how you do it.  It shouldn't be just swords and sorcery.  It should be almost operatic.

300 – A larger-than-life adaptation of a larger-than-life story of legendary figures in a legendary battle.

The Princess Bride – For all the lighthearted lines and jokes, it's a classic adventure.

The Replacement Killers – The first movie I ever saw with Chow-Yun Fat.  I didn't quite become an instant fan, and there are several of his earlier works I haven't seen yet, but I try to catch every movie he's done since this one.

Mad Max – It's an oldie and a goodie.  Mel Gibson before he got big.  The fact that it involved fast cars, motorcycles, and a bit of the ultraviolence enhances the performance.

Sin City – While it has a strong film noir feel, it's all about the gangsters, guns, and girls.

Excalibur – The rise and fall of Camelot, with all the blood, seduction, sorcery, warfare, and grand scale you can handle.

Leon: The Professional – Another first exposure, this one being Jean Reno.  It's a little too straightforward for a thriller, but it's an excellent action flick.

The Delta Force – One of the many Chuck Norris films done during the mid-80s.  Notable because they managed to find one guy more badass than Chuck Norris: Lee Marvin.

Young Sherlock Holmes – This one is hard to find, which bothers me tremendously.  The action was fast paced and well written.  Also one of the forgotten landmarks in movie history.  This is the first film where a human actor shared the screen with a fully computer generated character and played off of it.

Next time: Thrillers

Thursday, August 19, 2010

Totally Uncalled For

I have a pretty simple outlook as far as the Internet goes.  I don't mess with you, you don't mess with me.  It's a system that has served me pretty well up to this point.

However, somebody over in China thought it would be a tremendously fabulous idea to hack my Gmail account, and my Facebook account, and otherwise poke around where they should not be poking.  I do not appreciate it.  I do not like it.  While I'm somewhat glad they didn't mess around with anything as far as I can tell, I'm a little annoyed that they didn't leave a note saying "This is how we got in.  Please close your door more securely."  As it turns out, Google was good enough to give me a warning.  It would have been nicer if they'd warned me when it happened instead of two days later.

Since somebody, or more likely several somebodies, felt it was fine to hack my account for no good reason, I feel no particular compunctions about keeping silent on the matter.  Below are the IP addresses of the individuals that hacked my accounts, along with the providers for those IPs.  Yes, I know, somebody could be spoofing the IPs, but it's a place to start.  Special thanks to All-Nettools for their free SmartWHOIS tool which helped make all this possible.

183.90.187.126
183.90.187.0 - 183.90.187.255
Asia Data (Hong kong) Inc. Limited
Block B 08/Floor
Hi-Tech Industrial CTR
No. 491-501 Castle Peak Road

ASIA DATA HONG KONG INC LIMITED - network admin
FLAT/RM 24 BLK B 08/F HI-TECH INDUSTRIAL CTR NO 491-501 CASTLE PEAK RD
TSUEN WAN HONG KONG
+852 39043643
+852 60618724
stanley@adi.hk

220.200.49.192
220.192.0.0 - 220.207.255.255
China United Network Communications Corporation Limited
No.21 Financial Street,Xicheng District, Beijing 100140 ,P.R.China

Xiaomin Zhou
No.21 Financial Street,Xicheng District, Beijing 100140 ,P.R.China
+86-10-66259626
+86-10-66259626
zhouxm@chinaunicom.cn

118.124.16.163
118.124.0.0 - 118.125.255.255
CHINANET Sichuan province network
China Telecom
A12,Xin-Jie-Kou-Wai Street
Beijing 100088

Chinanet Hostmaster
anti-spam@ns.chinanet.cn.net
No.31 ,jingrong street,beijing
100032
+86-10-58501724
+86-10-58501724

Remember, folks, I don't mess with you, you don't mess with me, and everybody's happy.

Thursday, August 12, 2010

You Don't Know Me And That's How I Like It

Recently, Bitmob put out an article postulating what would have happened if Blizzard had pounded RealID through above the objections of its customers.  I like the fact that they called shenanigans on the weak arguments most people were bandying about against RealID, but I dislike the fact that they didn't commit an equal amount of effort to the weaknesses of Blizzard's arguments for RealID.  Allow me to make the arguments that Bitmob neglected to mention.

First, there is the implied argument that Blizzard is doing a mitzvah to their customer base with RealID by exposing the trolls, ostensibly shaming them into good behavior by revealing their real names.  As the webcomic Ctl-Alt-Delete so eloquently demonstrated in this strip, revealing the identity of a troll is no deterrent against the behavior of a troll.  The flaw in Blizzard's theory is that trolls are capable of feeling shame when it is amply demonstrated, time and again, that they are incapable of that.  There is not a single iota of evidence to suggest even the slightest hint of remorse, regret, or shame in the behavior of a troll.  They're petty, small souled, simple minded, and cretinous, which means that they go for the simple pleasures, the easy hit.  They don't care who gets offended or what they get offended about so long as somebody gets offended and knows that it was what the troll put up that caused it.  They feed off the recognition that they punched somebody's buttons.  They're bullies, and they're a particularly obnoxious form of bully because they can't be smacked down like the Neanderthals that shake down kids for their lunch money.  They're confident because they feel safe in the knowledge that they cannot be touched, and so they cannot properly suffer the consequences of their actions.  Being simple minded, when somebody does manage to somehow verbally slap a troll down, the troll will not just stop.  They're incapable of learning more than one lesson at a time.  They might fade back for a bit, then they'll be back punching buttons again.  Eleven million plus subscribers to World of WarCraft would have had their names exposed, the vast majority needlessly associated with their alter egos, in order to pursue a futile attempt to punish a tiny majority in a way that will completely fail to deter them.  There would have been no happy ending with that course of action, nor will there ever be a happy ending with that course of action.  Until the population of trolls genuinely outnumbers the population of decent folks on the boards, whatever monetary cost savings are made will be lost in terms of customer backlash, cancelled accounts, and future sales losses.  As strange as it may sound, not even Blizzard or WoW is immune to the masses.  All it will take is one issue, one position stated too strongly, one policy adoption that offends the common core of a large enough percentage of the subscriber base, and it will trigger an avalanche of defections that the company might not survive.  Consider the example of Facebook.  They've been pissing off a lot of people over the last year or so.  One too many changes, one extra little line, or one unclear clause buried the boilerplate of the TOS, and Facebook stands to lose not only subscribers but substantial revenue.  The same situation applies to Blizzard.  Making people believe your hype is a perfectly acceptable business move.  Believing your own hype is a recipe for disaster.  Despite what Blizzard and the rabid core of Blizzard's fan base might believe, WoW is not the only game in town, even if it currently is the biggest.

And now we come to my second argument that Bitmob should have thought to make.  While many would argue that even in an MMO, customers have a right to privacy, I will argue that one has a right to anonymity.  The distinction might seem lost on some folks, so allow me to elucidate.  As I've said before, MMOs are very much like amusement parks.  There are a lot of activities that you can do within the park, but you as a player are coming into an environment where you have no direct control over anything except your avatar.  You influence nothing within the game.  You can make changes to yourself which ultimately have no practical effect outside of how you look and what kind of rides you can go on.  Yet when you're at the park, other people know you're there because they can see you.  Other players are aware of, or can be made aware of, your presence.  Whether you're grinding mobs in The Barrens, spamming in trade chat in Ironforge, or simulating some Night Elf-on-Gnome action in the tunnels of the Deeprun Tram, awareness of your presence in the game simply cannot be completely hidden.  Proximity to other players, even in the shady corners of the Deeprun Tram, constitutes most players' awareness of each other.  Global chat channels, friend lists, and guild rosters further add to the sign every MMO player wears around their neck saying "Here I am!"  Privacy in MMOs, at best, is a relative sort of thing, and it's fleeting.

Anonymity on the other hand is a little different, and something that should not be in the hands of any company, not even Blizzard.  Anonymity is the choice we make to acknowledge our presence to other people within the MMO.  Consider Mila Kunis or Curt Schilling, very famous people who are avowed WoW players.  If they want to advertise the names of every toon they run, that's perfectly fine.  If they don't want to, also fine.  The critical component is that they choose if and when to connect their toons to their real identities.  Yeah, it's fun talking about Family Guy or the place of free agents in baseball while you're doing a ten man raid on Icecrown Citadel, but it's not why we fork over $15 a month.  The fact that we want that level of remove, that layer of insulation, between our virtual names and our real names isn't a reason for suspicion, nor does it indicate nefarious intent, nor does it even suggest we're trolls in player's clothing.  Of all the choices one can make in an MMO, the only one with any true significance is whether or not we give somebody our real name.  If somebody wants to put their real name in for their toon, whether for vanity or lack of imagination, fine and well.  If somebody wants to come up with a completely different nom de guerre, also fine and well.  Once you make that connection public, however, you're going to have to rely on the imperfect fleshy memory of people to forget that connection.  It for damn sure won't fade away on the Internet.  The ability to control our identities, for good or ill, is perhaps the fundamental right of the 21st Century.  The ability to moderate, granulate, and compartmentalize who we are goes right to the very heart of our concepts of self and identity, whether it's physically or virtually.  And Blizzard has no business trying to usurp that ability, nor do they have any basis to demand their customers surrender that ability just to play games they develop.  To an extent, they can and do refine that identity just a bit, but they do not have any commercial or financial justification for breaching the divisions we make between our real world selves and our virtual alter egos.

Thus ends my arguments.  Good job otherwise, Bitmob.

100 Movies You Need To See - Part IV: Comedies

Laurence Olivier was quoted as saying, "Dying is easy, but comedy is hard."  And it's pretty much true.  Of all the emotions that cinema can convey and evoke, humor is one that is perhaps the most subjective and the most elusive.  Some folks see the pratfalls of the Three Stooges and laugh, others dismiss it as juvenile.  Some watch witty word play and laugh in surprise, others wonder why the actors are all standing around just talking.  What tickles somebody's sense of humor will almost certainly kill somebody else's.  With that in mind, I offer up a sampler of comedy.  Some of it is witty and urbane.  Some of it is puerile and lowbrow.  But it is all funny, to me at least.  You might find some of it funny, too.


Chasing Amy – While I wouldn't hesitate to recommend any Kevin Smith film, this one's got a special place in my heart.  It's how romantic comedies really should be written and acted.

Four Rooms – Four helpings of exceedingly black comedy.  At least two of the segments almost feel like very long setups for a single killer punchline.  Awesome stuff.

Amazon Women On The Moon – Short segments of absolutely weird and completely silly shit.  A product of the '80s, but a very good product of the '80s.

National Lampoon's Vacation – Two weeks in a car with the family.  What could go wrong?

The Naked Gun: From The Files of Police Squad – It's a whacked out little spoof, which isn't surprising considering the cast, the writers, or the director.  It's also one of the movies that reminds you O.J. Simpson actually had potential as an actor.

Orgazmo – The guys that created South Park go live action again and absolutely hold nothing back.  It's wrong on so many levels.  It's funny on so many more.

Office Space – This one has achieved the level of cult status normally reserved for Monty Python films.

The Blues Brothers – One of John Belushi's best films.  And the musician cameos are worth the price of admission.

Trading Places – An early Eddie Murphy film.  You know, before he found fat suits.

History Of The World, Part I – Much like Kevin Smith, you can't miss with any Mel Brooks film.  It's a tough call between this one and Blazing Saddles as his best.  For me, this one just barely edges the competition out.

Next time: Action/Adventure

Wednesday, August 4, 2010

Stute Developers

When I was a kid, my folks picked up a copy of Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories.  It was not the complete collection, and as I found out later it was a somewhat sanitized version of it, but a lot of the well known stories were there like "The Elephant's Child" and "How The Leopard Changed It's Spots."  After reading an interview with Jamil Moledina on Ars Technica, another of those stories comes to mind, "How The Whale Got His Throat."  In the story, the Whale gobbled up virtually every fish in the oceans except for one, a "Stute Fish," who suggested that the Whale try having Man for dinner, though he did warn the Whale that Man was "nice, but nubbly."  The Man which gets eaten by the Whale turns out to be a Scot and something of an engineer, and manages to not only get out of the Whale's belly but also manages to keep the Whale from ever eating any fish again by rigging up a grating in the Whale's throat made from a pair of suspenders and a rubber dinghy that the Scot was floating around on in the middle of the ocean (because his mom told him he could).  The Stute Fish goes and buries himself in the mud somewhere along the equator to hide from the Whale.

I'm reminded of this story because despite Moledina's impressive resume and the generally concise interview he gave to Ars Technica, I'm not convinced that EA's "EA Partners" program is anything even remotely helpful to the average indie game development crew, possibly because I have the distinct feeling that EA's definition of a indie game developer is considerably different than what most people would use.  How many truly indie developers are out there with dev kits from Sony, Microsoft, AND Nintendo?  If we're talking about the hand-to-mouth garage developer, the one who's using whatever freeware and open-source tools he can legally obtain, and probably pirate copies of 3DS Max or Maya if they're not feeling real picky, chances are that even getting one dev kit constitutes a major coup on their part.  For the small team still in college, pretty much the same story.  Once you're big enough to be able to get those dev kits, you're not really operating on indie cred anymore, and you've probably managed to make enough coin to afford to pay people a little money.  By EA's definition, "indie" seems to be synonymous with "not currently signed to or owned by a publisher."  And with that definition in mind, the concept of EA Partners gets ominous, because it feels disturbingly like an offer from a Mafia don.

"Sure, we'll help you get your product on to the Big Three.  But one day, we're gonna come to you with a favor, and that day, you're gonna owe us."

Moledina's evasion over the question of IP ownership with the EA Partners program sent up a great big red flag for me, and it should probably do the same thing for any developer who might be considering this. While the interview references a statement Moledina made at the Gamesauce conference, there is a gaping hole in the statement that sounds very strange coming from a guy who ostensibly knows as much about game development and the way the industry works.  The quoted statement was this:

""It's an odd thing, because we continue to see and hear from developers ... that they're being forced to give up the IP.  Publishers are not that good at taking advantage of the IP unless the original creative team is involved."

What's wrong with this picture?  Could it possibly be there is a paradoxical, or at the very least dichotomous, nature to the statement?  Or might it be the unspoken truth that whether or not publishers are good at taking advantage of IP, they'll still yank it away if it looks like it's making money?  While Moledina goes on to state that developers shouldn't be afraid to "keep what [they] deserve," it's deeply troubling that he will not acknowledge even the possibility that the publisher will behave badly and take over the IP against the wishes of the developers.  Without even a tacit admission of this reality, or even the potential for this reality to manifest within the EA Partners program, very serious doubt is cast upon Moledina's assurance that EA is "very developer friendly."

All of the arguments that Moledina puts forth seem to hinge entirely on the assumption that an indie developer has neither the resources, nor the ingenuity, nor the clout to get their game out onto the consoles.  While it's entirely possible that some developers would fail on all of those criteria, it's also possible that such developers were never trying to meet any of those criteria to begin with.  Some of those indie developers are quite happy to develop for the PC and not have anything to do with the consoles.  Moreover, it occurs to me that if Sony and Microsoft and Nintendo really are getting serious about trying to bring high concept indie titles to their respective consoles, the devs are the ones who are going to be holding the whip hand in any sort of negotiations.  While the Big Three might have a lot of potential sources for new titles, the fact that they're reaching out to a developer means the developer has what the Big Three are looking for, and the devs are the ones who have the ability to modify the terms to suit them.  A shrewd indie will strive for a win-win situation, which will doubtlessly give them clout, which will make future negotiations easier.  The fact that an indie developer doesn't necessarily have the marketing department EA has at it's disposal doesn't mean that they're doomed to the purgatory of bargain bins and penny ante PayPal sales.  Any halfway competent marketer who knows exactly how to work social media can generate a lot of buzz for a game on a very shoestring marketing budget.  While an indie developer might not be cranking out million copy blockbusters, they aren't relegated to single digit sales numbers either.

The Stute Fish in Rudyard Kipling's story avoided getting eaten by the Whale by swimming alongside the Whale's eye.  The Stute developer can prosper by doing the same thing: staying by the eye of the big whales but staying well away from their maws.

Wednesday, July 14, 2010

100 Movies You Need To See - Part III: Historical Films

Because I've been so darned lazy getting this list out, I figure I should try and step it up a little more on the posting.  One of the tiny downsides which I was unaware of regarding Blogger is how well it handles information copied out of OpenOffice, and it apparently doesn't handle it very well.  Copying and pasting into Notepad and then from there into Blogger is kind of obnoxious, and a workflow killer, but it's what I have to deal with.

With that said, I thought I'd take a moment to introduce the historical genre.  History has long been a fascination with me.  If there was any one subject I loved in school, it was history, and I tended to put a little extra effort into my history reports.  Historical films often get confused with genre films and vice versa (Gladiator stands out as one example; even though it's a great flick, it's not terribly accurate in terms of historical events).  For me, historical films (and their close cousins, the bio-pics) are a great way to at least get a good overview of an event or a figure out of the past.  They serve as introductions, trailheads for the curious to follow into the past. 

Let's take a walk, shall we?

El Cid – It's old, but the production values are top notch, and the battle sequences are classic.
Zulu – Michael Caine's first film, and still delivers the goods even after all these years.
Zulu Dawn – Although it was made after Zulu, it covers the historical events immediately prior.  The cast is just as impressive and the action is just as brutal.
The Wind & The Lion – A good old fashioned “swords in the desert” movie.  Sean Connery isn't exactly the most convincing as a Berber, but Brian Keith looks completely right as Teddy Roosevelt.
The Ghost & The Darkness – Although a few parts have doubtlessly been altered, it's still the best “African safari” story out there.
The Lighthorsemen – A WWI story that gets out of the European trenches.
Black Hawk Down – Some of the characters are composites, but the events of the day are accurate. The sad part is the place hasn't changed much since then.
The Great Escape – Again, characters are often composites, but the circumstances regarding the escape are accurate.
Patton – Who else but George C. Scott could possibly portray an ego like George S. Patton?
Enemy At The Gates – You don't see a lot of WWII stories told from the Soviet side.  Albeit with some historical inaccuracies, it's still a hell of a good story.

Next time: Comedies

Friday, July 9, 2010

100 Movies You Need To See - Part II: Sci-Fi

OK, just ever so slightly delayed, but here. 

Science fiction is pretty much a staple of a geek's existence.  We gravitate to spaceships and dinosaurs around the same time other kids start going for the footballs and Barbie dolls.  But there's more to sci-fi than just Star Trek and Star Wars, however.  Sometimes it's hard sci-fi, like what we'd find in the pages of Analog or Issac Asimov's Magazine.  Sometimes, it's softer sci-fi, leaning into towards science fantasy or delving into the more human aspects of sci-fi.  These are ten that I think ought to be seen by just about everybody.

Primer – This is a perfect example of how to make a great “hard” sci-fi movie on a small budget and still have it be believable.  Like any good movie involving time travel, this one will bake your noodle.
Donnie Darko – This one works as sci-fi, thriller, fantasy, and even horror to some extent.  It's a skull twister, not only because of it's focus on time travel and the fate/free will argument, but the way it makes teen alienation strangely more understandable.
The Thirteenth Floor – A couple months after The Matrix came out, this one proposed that we might be living in a computer simulation in a more subtle fashion. 
Serenity – The movie followup, and conclusion, to the TV series Firefly.  Seeing the series isn't necessary to enjoy the movie, but it sure helps add to the enjoyment.
Silent Running – This one might be more disturbing now than it was when it was first released.  The premise of containing chunks of Earth's biomes inside geodesic modules on board spacecraft is a little less academic these days.
Forbidden Planet – It's an oldie but a goodie.  Also works as a monster movie.  And it reminds you that Leslie Nielsen used to be a serious actor the same way Tom Hanks used to be a comedian.
A Boy And His Dog – While the world isn't quite as close to nuclear annihilation as it might have been years ago, this one strikes a definite chord for what life might be like when everything's been smashed down to bedrock.
Space Truckers - Not every sci-fi movie has to be super-serious.  Sci-fi can also be a playground for comedy.  Sometimes, really campy comedy.  Dennis Hopper might have done this one for the paycheck, but he earned every penny.
Outland – Essentially “High Noon” set in space, it shows Sean Connery really can act beyond James Bond.
Rollerball – Not the shit remake that came out a couple years ago.  The original.  Yes, there's a definite '70s vibe to it.  But it still works.

Next: Historical films

Wednesday, June 9, 2010

100 Movies You Need To See - Part I: The Westerns

I'm not ashamed to say that, in addition to obviously geeky past times like video games and role playing games, I have more socially acceptable geeky hobbies.  I'm something of a film buff, a joy that definitely got started when I was young, and one that I haven't ever given up on.  There are doubtlessly people more hardcore about film than I am and that's OK.  The problem, however, is with folks that aren't as big on film as I am.  I've been able to toss off movie quotes with ease, identify actors, and reference films both popular and obscure for a long time.  But there are always some folks who just look at me blankly and go "huh?"

One day, talking with an acquaintance over Yahoo Messenger, I got a little fed up.  There were a lot of great movies out there which I'd seen and which they had not.  Moreover, there were a lot of other people I know who hadn't seen them, either.  I decided that I would cook up my own little list of a hundred movies that I figured people really ought to see.  The theory was that if people liked them, they might go out and see other films in the same genre, or performed by the same actor, or made by the same director.  At the same time, I didn't want it all to be big budget titles and media-blitzed movie stars.  I wanted to show people there were films beyond the multiplex.

It's a lot harder than you think to come up with 100 movies for people to see and give them a reason why.  I decided to break the list down into ten smaller pieces, which still didn't help, because you're trying to distill genres with hundreds, if not thousands, of titles and performances both great and atrocious down to just ten titles.  These may not be the all time best or worst movies, but they're ones that I like, ones that I think other people might like, and ones that should probably be seen.

I decided to get the ball rolling with Westerns.  They've been a big part of my cinematic education and it's one of those uniquely American film art forms.



The Wild Bunch – It's bloody, it's violent, and John Wayne thought it killed the whole genre of Westerns. Which fits pretty well with the theme of the dying days of “The Wild West.”

True Grit – It's hard not to mention at least one Western with John Wayne in it. This one's one of two that I figure are absolutely essential.

The Cowboys – This is the other one. Still playing a tough guy, but a much different one from the previous movie. Also neat to see all the future stars that came out of this movie

The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly – It's about as hard not to mention a Western with Clint Eastwood as it is to avoid mentioning John Wayne. The last of Sergio Leone's “Man With No Name” spaghetti Westerns, it's a well done flick all around.

Once Upon A Time In The West – Sergio Leone's big budget Western, and it's a killer.

There Was A Crooked Man – There's a few giggles in this one, but the best parts are when Henry Fonda and Kirk Douglas are talking to each other. We know one of them has a plan. The other's plan is a bit more surprising.

Jeremiah Johnson – A Western and a biopic, Robert Redford sells the character of “Liver Eatin'” Johnson perfectly.

The Mountain Men – Covers the early period of the West beautifully, and bloodily, with excellent acting all around.

Quigley Down Under – A Western that goes so far west it hits Australia. Still an excellent movie. It illuminates the Old West saying “Beware the one gun man” perfectly.

Paint Your Wagon – A Western and a musical! While there's a definite comic tone throughout the movie, Clint Eastwood and Lee Marvin play off each other wonderfully, and they don't sound too bad singing.


Tomorrow: Sci-Fi

Friday, May 21, 2010

Music To Rant By

If there has been any constant in my work life, it has been music.  I bought my first boom box (with a 3 CD carousel) when I worked at the print shop right out of high school.  I've gone to data entry temp jobs with a Walkman and a mix tape (when I was younger) or a few choice CDs (when I was older).  I ended up snapping off the locking tab for the battery cover of my Zen Nano MP3 player because it ate up so many batteries.  Bottom line, I loves me some music when I work.

Normally, I'll throw up my entire MP3 collection on Winamp and just let it play on shuffle.  But once in a while, I need to build a custom playlist.  I'll still let it play on shuffle, but there's a much smaller sample and it's mood music.  Right now, I'm working on a big rant for The Armchair Empire, and I figured I needed something to help keep my mind focused lest the searing rage get out of hand.  Music soothes the savage blogger.  For those who follow this blog, this is my unofficial soundtrack, eighteen songs of anger, defiance, and bullheaded hope of triumph over experience.  Go get them, put'em on shuffle, and enjoy.

  1. Anberlin - The Resistence
  2. Dethklok - Fansong
  3. Disturbed - Ten Thousand Fists
  4. Dropkick Murphys - The Gauntlet
  5. Everclear - Like A California King
  6. From First To Last - The Latest Plague
  7. Fuel - Won't Back Down
  8. Godsmack - I Stand Alone
  9. Incubus - Megalomaniac
  10. INXS - Don't Lose Your Head
  11. Judas Priest - You've Got Another Thing Coming
  12. Linkin Park - Hands Held High
  13. Lo Fidelity All Stars - Battle Flag
  14. Monster Magnet - Temple Of Your Dreams
  15. Pillar - Frontline
  16. Sevendust - Face To Face
  17. The Jam - Town Called Malice
  18. Thrice - Image Of The Invisible
Happy listening, folks.

Monday, May 10, 2010

Border Brouhaha

Sometimes, the writers of The Armchair Empire get bored.  There's only so much one can talk about in the games industry before you need to take a break from it.  Politics is one of those areas that doesn't get a lot of talk in the site's forums, but when one of the writers asked me for my thoughts on the recently passed SB1070 bill here in Arizona, I obliged him the only way I really knew how.  Below is the text of my main response.  The link to the full forum thread can be found here.


*     *     *

The whole business with SB1070 and the issues it is supposed to be alleviating depends a lot upon how one parses language and how one reacts to words.

The bare bones of the case: Mexico is still an unstable broke-as-hell country. There's very few opportunities south of the border that don't involve smuggling drugs, guns, or people, so everybody and his brother seems to be trying to go north of the border. The last several years, it's gotten a lot more unstable, particularly since Felipe Calderon took office and deployed Army troops to fight the drug cartels. At the same time, almost 9 years after 9/11, the federal government STILL hasn't managed to get their shit together and make serious and substantive efforts at securing the US/Mexican border.

Despite the euphemistic phrase "undocumented workers" being bandied about, the plain fact is that crossing the border without going through the admittedly byzantine process of getting work visas or green cards does, in fact, make one an illegal alien under federal law. While Mexicans who have work in and around the Nogales area right on the border might be able to bounce back and forth (legal or not), once you get north of there, it becomes a practical impossibility to work in the state and not live here. It's not like there's giant caravans of Mexicans running around the state, moving from job to job like an echo of the Okies back during the Great Depression. Mexicans are coming up, grabbing shit jobs, crashing at slum apartments, and generally not making any effort to actually become citizens, get resident alien status, or even just try to get a work visa. And that's the best case scenario.

What's been happening more and more frequently is Mexicans getting stuffed into trucks and vans by smugglers ("coyotes" in the local vernacular), then carted off to drop houses in residential neighborhoods where they either become hostages (so the coyotes can extort more money from the families back in Mexico) or virtual slaves. For those who don't get a ride up Interstate 10 to Phoenix, they march straight through both public and private lands, usually littering and destroying the environment in the process. With the increasing violence from the drug cartels, there are folks north of the border that are ending up getting injured and or killed, usually by smugglers or their immediate associates. It's not a situation designed to help people sleep soundly at night.

Looking at the text of the bill, there are two sub-sections which I can imagine create a great deal of consternation. Subsection B reads "FOR ANY LAWFUL CONTACT MADE BY A LAW ENFORCEMENT OFFICIAL OR AGENCY OF THIS STATE OR A COUNTY, CITY, TOWN OR OTHER POLITICAL SUBDIVISION OF THIS STATE WHERE REASONABLE SUSPICION EXISTS THAT THE PERSON IS AN ALIEN WHO IS UNLAWFULLY PRESENT IN THE UNITED STATES, A REASONABLE ATTEMPT SHALL BE MADE, WHEN PRACTICABLE, TO DETERMINE THE IMMIGRATION STATUS OF THE PERSON. THE PERSON'S IMMIGRATION STATUS SHALL BE VERIFIED WITH THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT PURSUANT TO 8 UNITED STATES CODE SECTION 1373(c)." Subsection E reads "A LAW ENFORCEMENT OFFICER, WITHOUT A WARRANT, MAY ARREST A PERSON IF THE OFFICER HAS PROBABLE CAUSE TO BELIEVE THAT THE PERSON HAS COMMITTED ANY PUBLIC OFFENSE THAT MAKES THE PERSON REMOVABLE FROM THE UNITED STATES." You can read the full text of the bill here.

The reasons why the consternation might be coming about are manifold. First, there's a pretty large Hispanic population in Arizona, as you might well imagine. "Reasonable suspicion" is a lower standard of proof than "probable cause," which means that as a practical matter, there's a whole lot of people that could potentially get stopped just to make sure they're not illegals. Secondly, the fact that being an illegal alien is a "public offense" creates conditions where if you get stopped by a cop under Subsection B, you can get busted under Subsection E. The text of the bill does lay out provisions for people to contest their arrest if they believe they've been wrongfully arrested, and it does lay out provisions that indicate cops who just go around busting people because they've got brown skin and a Spanish surname won't have any sort of support or protection from the state or municipality if they get hauled into court. A couple days ago, an amendment to the bill specifically prohibiting racial profiling was passed and signed. The problem with all of this, however, is that the issues aren't nearly so cut and dried.

The common assumption and attitude among those who are in an uproar over the bill is that America is being anti-immigrant. And to be sure, the process for becoming a resident alien or a full US citizen has never been a cakewalk. But once you've got it, you're golden. And if you think the process for America is bad, try looking at the process for Japan sometime and then come back to me to bitch about how "unfair" America's naturalization process is to people. I know folks who immigrated legally to the US, went through the process, took all the stupid classes, took their tests, and took their oath. The ones who went through all that trouble are generally pretty pissed, and rightly so, at the illegals coming up from Mexico precisely because the Mexicans aren't bothering to make the effort. It becomes a giant merry-go-round where Mexicans cross the border, get work, get caught, get shipped back to Mexico, and then cross the border to start it all over again. Compounding the problem is the perception by some illegals that they're performing a "reconquista," that they're not entering the US but rather Mexican territory illegally occupied by the US. After the end of the Mexican-American War in 1848, which Mexico lost badly, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ceded Texas and California, as well as what would later become Nevada, Utah, and Arizona, along with chunks of Colorado, New Mexico, and Wyoming. Subsequently, the Gadsden Purchase in 1853 bought the remaining southern portions of Arizona and New Mexico from the Mexican government. To some Mexicans, the entire affair is a national insult, and you sometimes hear Mexicans blathering on about how they're taking back what was stolen from them.

Further complicating the problem is the abuse of the Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution. What was intended to ensure that former black slaves and their children would be legally treated as American citizens has boomeranged into a situation whereby foreign citizens, legal and otherwise, are entering the US to give birth because the current reading of the law grants their newborn children automatic American citizenship. When these children grow up, they can legally enter the country without any problem and be able to bring their parents and siblings over because they're family members. It's a loophole that needs to be rectified.

As if all this wasn't enough, there's the financial angle to look at. It's not just the illegals that are making money on the situation, it's businesses that hire illegals that are making money off it, if only indirectly. The simplest measure for paying illegals would be through cash. Since it's cash, there's a lot less of a paper trail to follow, which means the business saves money because they're not paying into Social Security or Medicare. By using fake Social Security numbers or fake taxpayer ID numbers, businesses can potentially get more money back from the government when the tax refunds are disbursed, though there's also the potential for the feds to come by and do some digging through the records. Should that occur, the employer can disavow any discrepancies as the action of the illegal alien. It should be mentioned that there are notionally checks in place to discourage using fake or stolen information, and there are legitimate businesses that do everything right but still end up unwittingly hiring an illegal alien because they happened to have a good set of faked credentials.

To top it off, there is an element of political armtwisting involved with the passage of the bill. As weird as it may sound, Arizona wants the federal government to step in and do something about the border situation. However, the usual legislative process has consistently put immigration and border security issues to the back burner in favor of financial issues (which were pretty critical at the time), health care (which nobody seems to be super happy about outside of D.C.), and other issues which never seem quite as important. Since Congress can't or won't take action on the issue, Arizona is attempting to force them to do something about it. By passing the bill, they're applying pressure to the feds to get serious about border issues. In the long run, Arizona knows that it can't choke off the flow of illegal aliens completely, but in the short term, the bill potentially will shift the avenues of illegal border crossing into New Mexico, Texas, and California. Theoretically, if New Mexico and Texas pass similar bills, California will be the only state which will be considered "safe" to cross into, which will doubtlessly put a strain on the resources in a state which is already uncomfortably close to insolvency. By making California cry "uncle!", the federal government really will have to get serious about the border. The best case scenario is that the feds realize exactly what Arizona is doing and start making substantive changes to border and immigration policy before it ever reaches the point where Texas and New Mexico follow suit. However, I don't imagine that anybody in the current administration has that level of foresight.

It is a great stinking mess and it remains to be seen if anybody has the requisite intestinal fortitude to shove a hand into this sack full of snakes and pull out a good workable solution.

Saturday, April 24, 2010

What the *bleep*?!

The latest episode of South Park has once again sparked controversy, but this time, it's not over what Matt Stone and Trey Parker have done.  Rather, it's what Comedy Central did that's got people up in arms.  The 201st episode (the 200th was the week previous and ended on a cliffhanger) concluded the bizarre story they had started by basically bringing back everybody that the show has ever mocked for one more round.  Central to the premise of the storyline was the attempt by Hollywood celebrities to steal the power of "not being able to be mocked" from the Prophet Mohammed.  At the end of the episode, as usual, Kyle launched into a soliloquy about what he'd learned from the whole affair.  What was different this time was that it was essentially two straight minutes of nothing but a single very long "bleep," with a tiny break from Stan before continuing to cover the end of Kyle's soliloquy and a rejoinder from Santa Claus that was also bleeped out.

I'll be the first to admit, I did laugh when I heard it, but I was also kind of irritated because I kind of figured that it couldn't possibly be two minutes of nothing but Kyle cursing since the "bleep" was continuous as opposed to being broken up like it normally is when a character goes on a blue streak.  After the show aired, Stone and Parker came out and expressed considerable disappointment that Comedy Central would make such a radical effort in censorship.  It came out that a group calling themselves Revolution Muslim issued a death threat against the pair and against the network, being about as subtle as a chainsaw by putting a picture of murdered filmmaker Theo Van Gogh up with their statement.  Comedy Central caved, not only obscuring Mohammed with a giant "Censored" sign (apparently another thing that I had assumed was originally part of the script) but bleeping out Mohammed's name as well as the monologue at the end which didn't even MENTION Mohammed or Islam.  I do not always agree with Jon Stewart, but on this particular topic I find myself in considerable agreement with him.

Consider, for a moment, the fact that South Park already got away with showing Mohammed years ago when they came out with the episode "Super Best Friends."  While the show might have been partially spoofing the 70's cartoon series "SuperFriends," they nonetheless did show Mohammed just as they showed Lao Tzu, Jesus, Buddha, Vishnu, and Joseph Smith.  Horrors!  They made the Prophet a superhero!  I don't seem to recall there being a hue and a cry over that, much less death threats.  Most likely because there was nothing mocking nor disrespectful about Islam or Mohammed in that episode.  In the years since that episode, we've had the murder of Theo Van Gogh as well as the Danish cartoon controversy, incidents which have apparently cemented in the minds of a very small number of Muslims that it's perfectly acceptable to issue death threats for something that they find offensive, and in the case of Van Gogh to carry those threats out.  I find it highly disturbing that it is only now, nine years after the fact, that there's such a fracas over this.  The cat's been out of the bag for a long time now.  It seems foolish and petty to be giving Stone and Parker any grief over something that they did once before without any previous complaint.

I can certainly understand the arguments that are usually employed when dealing with the visual depiction of Mohammed.  Islam, just as with Judaism and Christianity, forbids idolatry.  That prohibition stems from the concern that people will be more interested in worshipping the image than what the image is representing and, by extension, the larger ideas connected to that representation.  Considering that the Christian Church split into Catholic and Orthodox branches over just such an issue, it's not that surprising that it should remain out there, and to some extent it's still alive and well even in some modern Protestant churches.  The fact that I can understand those arguments doesn't mean I agree with them.  For myself, religiously themed art has never been an object of worship.  Admiration, to be sure.  Aesthetically pleasing, quite often.  But worship?  Never.

This whole affair is contemptible and there are only two parties that deserve my scorn.  The first is quite obviously Comedy Central.  You guys have known since you first put South Park on the air that it was satirical, which means that it's going to offend somebody somewhere at some point in time, and it has been proven over the years to be an equal opportunity satire.  Nothing is sacred, everything is fair game, and while the writers may have devoted more attention to some targets than others, they have never pulled punches over the larger issues that they put into their crosshairs.  Sure, they cuss a lot.  Yes, they delve into some seriously gross humor in order to make a point.  THAT'S WHAT YOU'VE BEEN PAYING THEM FOR ALL THIS TIME!  When you censored the final scene of "Cartoon Wars," they took it with a lot more grace than you probably deserved.  This time, you stabbed them in the back.  Worse, you made it look like it was part of the show, trying to create a meta-joke that didn't exist and quite frankly never should have existed in the first place.  If you can't or won't shoulder the responsibility of artistic integrity for a show that you know is going to be pissing people off at some time, cut them loose and let somebody with more sack pick them up.  Pious platitudes about "safety concerns" be damned.  You knew the risks then, you know them now, and to continue to air the show is a tacit acceptance of those risks.  Anything less than unflinching support for the show and its crew is a gutless renunciation of principle.  Not to mention that it makes you look chickenshit.  Somebody makes a death threat?  Call the cops and let the show go on.  Laugh while making the call.

The other target of my scorn, and quite a lot of fury in the bargain, is not just Revolution Muslim, but every outfit like them, no matter how big.  There are, by most counts, some 1.6 billion Muslims in the world.  Groups like Revolution Muslim make up less than one very tiny fraction of one percent, yet their actions will have a tremendously disproportionate effect on the Muslim community, not only here in America but around the world.  And believe me, the effect is not going to be anything even remotely positive.  To put it bluntly, they're fucking it all up for every other Muslim out there.  First, they are continuing the disturbing and morally abhorrent trend of countering even the slightest thing they don't personally agree with by threatening death and violence instead of any kind of effort at reasoned debate.  Second, they are helping to perpetuate the stereotypes that motivate and justify atrocious behavior by non-Muslims towards Muslims.  Third, they are not merely undermining efforts at fostering understanding and tolerance of Muslims, they're actively sabotaging those efforts with their thuggish shenanigans.  If these self-proclaimed defenders of the Faith bothered to actually read their Korans, and take a trip through the Hadith while they were at it, they might find something terribly surprising.

There is no explicit prohibition on depictions of Mohammed.  Not in the Koran.  Not in the Hadith.  Nowhere.

To be sure, the Hadith does make several references to Mohammed's pronouncement that "painters of pictures" would be sent to Hell, but does not specifically instruct or suggest Muslims take action against such people.  The judgment of "painters" is solely in the hands of God.  The Koran does not make prohibitions against the creation of pictures, but does prohibit worshipping the pictures, as that would clearly be idolatry.  The prohibition against depicting Mohammed is most likely a prophylactic measure to avoid the potential or the appearance of idolatry.  Yet there are numerous examples dating back to the medieval period that do depict Mohammed (primarily Persian in origin), which seems to support some contemporary fatwas indicating that, as long as the depiction is respectful, it is permissible to create figurative representations of the Prophet, particularly in film and television.  It should also be pointed out that the Hadith relating to Muslims and images only forbids looking at them.  It does not demand their removal or destruction, and as was mentioned before, it certainly doesn't advocate the destruction of their creators.  More importantly, it applies only to Muslims, not to non-Muslims.  As a final thought, while it is a generally bad idea to take any religious text too literally, one could certain take the position that the admonishment in the Hadith, "Breathe soul into what you have created," has actually been satisfied in the case of South Park, as it is not a static image of the Prophet but rather an animated figure.

Stone and Parker have stated that the show will go on, that a new episode will be delivered to Comedy Central, and that we'll all just have to wait and see what happens.  For myself, I more than willing to support the show, but I'm beginning to reconsider if I should be supporting the network, since it seems clear they haven't got the backbone needed to support their creatives when they truly do need it.

Friday, April 16, 2010

O'er The LAN of The Free

Last Saturday, I went to a LAN party for the first time in ages.  How long has it been, you ask?  It's been too damn long.  Particularly since this LAN promised all sort of good deathmatching action.  An old and trusted friend of mine turned me on to a mod for Half-Life 2 titled Empires, which is a neat little mashup of class-based shooter and realtime strategy with a little bit of RPG customization thrown in for flavor.  I downloaded and installed the mod, then fired it up a few days before the actual LAN party, joining a couple public servers and getting my feet wet.

The shooter element was butter smooth, as you might well imagine for an HL2 mod.  Picking a class was pretty easy.  As long as you remembered to fall back to a barracks or armory if you wanted to change your class, it was a straightforward affair.  Years of target shooting, I fear, have predisposed me towards a sniper's role.  As an engineer, I felt kinda useless, even though I was racking up advancement points pretty quickly in that capacity.  As a regular run of the mill soldier, I felt even more useless.  As a rocket toting, mortar chucking, big explosion making grenadier, I was proven useless.  While I wasn't too awful bad taking on the role of commander, it wasn't exactly awe inspiring, either.  Robert Browning certainly had a point when he said "a man's reach must exceed his grasp, or else what's a Heaven for?", but I felt I was doing more good sitting out in the weeds, hunkered down, driving tacks at long range through enemy domes.  Yeah, I got killed a lot, and I did miss out on some of the big tank battles, but I still did good.  Somebody's got to go out, find the enemy, mark him, and cause a little havoc along the way.  That was me.  The lone gunman, putting steel on target, sneer and be damned.

Alas, the gaming goodness ended long before it had been scheduled to end.  For one reason or another, over half the players bailed out unexpectedly.  This left us with a population far below sustainable gaming levels, which meant that the party was over and the LAN had to be dismantled.  It was kind of a shame, since there had been some other mods that folks wanted to play but we never got around to.  As I'm still in pretty tight financial restrictions, the usual summer activities like camping and airsoft games up in the woods are not happening, which is why the LAN party is such an effective little get together and time waster, or avenue for entertainment if you prefer to get fancy about it.  Most gamers I know have the games that can be played over and over again, whether through the original content or through third party mods.  It's a no-brainer.  Free mods beats out large amounts of burned gas, airsoft pellets, food, drink, and other camping paraphernalia.  Mind you, it's a lot of fun going camping, and I have designs on introducing the joys of it to Otaku Girl here at some point.  I just can't do it right now.

For now, I'll content myself with the abbreviated LAN party, the nice folks who I shot and killed (sometimes in particularly embarrassing fashion), and who returned the favor numerous times over.  And I'll be looking forward to doing it again at some point in the near future.

Friday, April 9, 2010

What Goes Around

Tuesday wasn't exactly a banner day for the FCC as a federal appeals court unanimously decided that the agency had overreached itself when ordering broadband provider Comcast not to block its customers from using BitTorrent.  Comcast's spokesman was clearly pleased with the ruling when relaying the company's official statement: "our primary goal was always to clear our name and reputation."  And yes, I just threw up a little in my mouth typing that.

This particular case has me feeling highly ambivalent.  On the one hand, I'm not exactly a cheerleader for the expansion of government power, and the FCC has demonstrated that when they use their power, they're about as subtle as a sequoia falling down, and not nearly as intelligent.  One slipped nipple and the Super Bowl halftime shows have largely suffered for it for the last several years (though I did like it when Tom Petty went on).  On the other hand, I'm not exactly a firm believer in the inherent goodness of the average American corporation either, particularly not one who's in the position to dictate how a measurable percentage of Americans access the Internet.  The old saw about being between the Devil and the deep blue sea certainly comes to mind.

So, what exactly happened on Tuesday and how is this going to affect the country?  To begin with, while I am not at all happy about the ruling, I do have to tip my hat to the judges for at least recognizing that the stated goal of the FCC in attempting to keep the Internet "free and open" wasn't at issue, merely their efforts to go about making it happen.  In a nutshell, the court ruled that the FCC's policies did not have the force of law.  By and large, this is a quite reasonable position to take, since the ruling doesn't just prohibit sound policies from being applied as law, but it also prohibits stupid policies from being applied as law.  If the FCC wants to enforce net neutrality, they have a few options available to them.  The first option would be to go to Congress and tell them to give the FCC the necessary power to make Comcast stop blocking subscribers.  This is probably the least likely to happen, mainly because it could possibly be years before such a bill got out of committee and up for a vote.  Moreover, Congress isn't exactly beloved of the people right at the moment, and all it would take to kill any bill would be a few whispers placed in the right ears of the right talking heads.  "Look!" the heads would say with gravity and outrage, "Look how Congress is trying to ram more government down our throats!"  The second option would be to appeal up to the Supreme Court.  This one might actually take longer than having to deal with Congress.  With Congress, you can always reintroduce a bill.  If the Supremes decide to take a case, or decline to take it, that's it.  Do not pass Go, do not collect $200.

Probably as we speak, Comcast technicians are putting the port blocking in place for BitTorrent and other file sharing programs, and probably other programs that it feels "unfairly competes" (read: free) with their subscription services, all while the suits are chortling and thinking that they showed the FCC who's boss.  That would be a fatally foolish attitude to be adopting, because there is a third option, one that is not only the most expeditious but also potentially the most troublesome.  The FCC could decide that that broadband services are to fall under the same rules as phone lines, with all of the attending "common carrier" regulations.  It's less of a "nuclear option" and more of a "neutron bomb option," meaning that all the infrastructure will still be there, but nobody will be around to use it.  Why will nobody be around to use it?  Because once those regulations are in place, the broadband ISPs like Comcast and Cox will not be lowering prices, they will be raising them. Purely for "administrative costs" to defray "traffic generated by other networks."  The increase in prices, particularly in a recessionary climate, will cause people to cut back or even abandon their broadband connections, as much as it will pain them to do so.  This will cause the ISPs to raise prices further, to cover the costs of "maintaining our award winning broadband services."  In turn, more people abandon their broadband.  When it's all said and done, ISPs won't be offering broadband anymore because they'll claim that "there's no interest in the product."  Nevermind the fact that people once had broadband and were quite happy with it as a general rule.  The difference between a ripple effect and a blast wave is a matter of perspective.

It's not going to be just the average American consumer who's going to get hit by this.  The earliest victims will be bandwidth-intensive but incredibly popular sites and services.  YouTube?  Reduced to a shell of its former self.  Skype?  Gone.  Hulu?  The biggest disappointment for NBC Universal since they screwed Conan O'Brien.  From there, the carnage spreads out into other areas, predominantly into the game sector.  The twelve million plus players on World of WarCraft will suddenly find themselves brought down by a foe more terrible than Onyxia or The Lich King.  Microsoft's XBox Live and Sony's Playstation Network will become shadows of their former glory, reduced to branded patch servers.  Steam and Impulse will collapse as gamers are cut off from the virtual marketplaces.  All those stupid bastards who went and bought the PC version of Assassin's Creed II will howl at the money wasted because Ubisoft wasn't smart enough to foresee the possible amputation of broadband, and the guys at Blizzard will probably be living out of their cubicles to try and change Diablo III to avoid that same mistake.  Would there be any survivors of this apocalypse?  Twitter might well survive, despite some people's desire to the contrary, since anybody with a cell phone could update on that.  Facebook and MySpace will probably take a hit, but continue on as before.

I can hear somebody out in the Peanut Gallery saying, "The world will not end because you stupid Americans don't have broadband!"  Whoever that is, you're right.  The world will not end.  But it will change.  If the last fifteen years or so have been any indicator, what happens on the Internet and to the Internet in one geographic area can have almost incalculable changes to the rest of the world.  And there is no guarantee that those changes will be good for any other part of the world.  It would be a sorry state of affairs that America entered the Information Age equivalent of a Dark Age simply because one ISP went and sued the FCC because of a spat over the use of bandwidth for a program that competed with the ISP's non-Internet products.  Some will doubtlessly argue that such a nightmare scenario could never possibly happen.  Perhaps not to the degree that I've outlined here, but don't think for one instant that the blowback from this case won't touch anybody beyond Comcast and the FCC.

Even today, karma is a vital and active force within the Internet.  What goes around does come around.  And I don't like to think what will happen when it finally comes around.