Obsessively Lame

A few weeks ago I came across a rant Edward Kelly wrote regarding, to summarize, a fraternal stupidity among many men(& some women) when talking about sexism & women’s rights. Much of it I can agree with off the cuff, whether it’s the stupidity of the Men’s Rights movement or the absurdity of some Republicans insistence that there is no difference between birth control & abortion. The rant left me conflicted due to how broad it was until later in correspondence with Edward, he reiterated his rant to me by clearing up some of his positions & explaining to a greater degree how they connect. In our email I explained to Edward roughly some of my experiences with sexism where I live, and he asked me to write some more about it. So here we go.


I grew up most of my life in Pensacola Florida. I have been told it is America’s first (un)official settlement, whatever that means.  At home I was told from a young age I’ll have to get a high paying job to provide for the lady in my life, enough to the point that she would never be expected to enter the workforce. Among my male peers growing up, a veneer of reciprocity with the opposite sex often times devolved into a zero sum game. That’s what happened when women were present, when my male peers thought women were out of their reach they let their sexual frustration go. Whether it was the tired joke of “leaving your signature” or any other number of unnecessary comments, it was all just lame.


This archaic chivalry I was being indoctrinated with at home and the stale comedy of my peers, all just came off as lame. The starting point among my family and peers in relation to the opposite sex is to treat them as objects. With my family, a woman is no more than a hobby, and among my sexually frustrated peers a woman is no more than a convenient release for their frustration. This wouldn't have been an issue growing up, if not for the sheer volume of it. That’s not to say I can’t be lame, or a woman can’t be lame to a dude, but the sheer volume of it is taxing on anyone.


I guess this is where you tune out, but not everyone was so lame growing up. One person in particular, my English teacher Mrs. Brown sophomore year, was probably the most instrumental person in convincing me that sexism was lame. The first day of class, one of my peers made a comment about her ass. Seeing a beautiful lady such as herself tear into the degenerate was both amusing and built a respect for feminism that I would carry to today. My prior view was that all feminists must have been crusties because that is how they were always portrayed to me, but here was an intellectually stimulating and strong female voice who just was tired of people being lame. Or at least that’s how I perceived it.


Since high school to today, the tools at which my peers and now the internet community at large have to be lame have grown astronomically. Whether it’s the absurdity of comments on any article/video now on the internet, the prolific rise of reply girl to infiltrate suggested searches for just about every popular video on youtube, or hearing about fellow college age males filming their sexual exploits with Go Pros then uploading the on the internet. It’s all just fucking lame, and in the latter case potentially illegal. The anonymity of the internet has taken the once local problem I had in highschool, and globalized it. Now they can all be lame, in aggregate, and I’m tired of wading through the shit. Being in favor of feminism is not about being a trumpet for equality, to me it’s about not being lame, and potentially supporting reproductive rights.

Game review: Congenital hindsights and neurotic dialog with Borderlands 2

In a systematic manner, Gearbox the developers of Borderlands 2 have iterated on their originally revolutionary idea, and conceived a sequel that despite a ton of polish doesn’t quite hack it. The game is riddled with the worst of MMO game design, ie yo-yoing, and contains shared loot which is about as old-fashioned of a farce to co-op RPGs as you can get. These hindsights do not ruin the game, they just make the experience of co-op undesirable since the enemies scale to your level. You are better off hoofing it alone for this loot, which make the arbitrary MMO architecture seem that much more inane. The entire time playing Borderlands 2(72 hours at this point) I thought to myself how much I took Mass Effect 2 for granted.

When you revolutionize a genre, like Mass Effect did with bringing the first person shooter to a neglected genre, I expect the polish and for the concept to continue evolving and expanding. Mass Effect 2 had all those things, Borderlands 2 sadly does not, despite the fact the first game was such an revolution. Evolution is not a revolution, my quibbles with the new Borderlands would be negated if I felt they brought enough new to the equation this time around. Shared loot and yo-yoing would be small blemishes if they had done more than polish the first formula. Some might say well the plethora of voice acting was that evolution, something they clearly invested a lot of resources but that is to me holistically bad with few spots around the edges that were funny, my favorite being the bit that Salvador hums sometimes whenever he uses his skill. The funny parts are less than 5% of the overall, which is just not funny, which is a real shame. This on top of the fact that it's full of enough dumb internet humor that I actively turn subtitles & voice over off, with plenty of immature neurotic story missions which are cringe worthy.

Borderlands 2 story feels like, much in the way Darksiders series have, a cobbled mess of a fever dream a kid had in middle school. I’ve seen various people complain about the game's live action trailers, that they should just show their game, but then I’m reminded of seeing my nephews watching the trailers. As soon as it was done they wanted to re-enact the trailer like it was a game of cops-and-robbers, making me think that while labeled mature, Gearbox clearly knows their biggest audience is pre-adolescents which shines through in the dialog. Borderlands in the end is a series that is really good at doing one thing, bringing the Diablo loot formula to a FPS, but this revolution has made it lethargic to progressing past that formula and becoming it's own.

The veil of ignorance and steroid usage in sports.

Yesterday Lance Armstrong, the 7 time winner of the Tour de France, released a post on his website which basically amounted to him saying enough is enough with regard of the USADA's attack on his character. This is an opinion I've head for a while, but never articulated it here so I will now. It shouldn't be the business of the federal government to regulate doping in sports, and the sports themselves should not ban the use of these substances. In every argument against performance enhancing drugs, the two pillars of the argument which hold up the entire argument are as follow: these substances are detrimental to the athletes health and they give an unfair advantage. Those two arguments are oblivious to how fairness operates in our society, and for that matter are missing the point in regards to creating a playing field for players which is as fair as possible.

It's no secret that performance enhancing drugs are detrimental to the users health, but so is all athletic competition to begin with. This glass house that is caring for the athletes health is quickly shattered when you take into account violence is a quantifiable interest which drives spectators to the sport to begin with. As long as any sport has an audience, Pollice verso will exist to obstruct this idea that you the spectator actually care more for the athletes well being than your own entertainment. The other pillar, the one of 'unfair' advantage misses the point to an extent even greater than that of the previous. Where is the cutoff for what we deem as spectators to be unfair? In Hockey, Baseball and Soccer are we going to change the cutoff date so that some kids who are older at time of the cutoff aren't given an 'advantage' over other kids? Are we going to make all sporting equipment both in practice as during play standard so that some players aren't given an advantage at any period in their development? Are diets now to be regulated?

This idea that we can create equality by starting at the top only exasperates the greater injustices that I mentioned before. Far more children are given unfair advantages early on in their development than these athletes competing at the top, despite this we've created agencies  like the USADA. No federal agency is large enough to tackle true unfairness in sports, so creating one such as the USADA is a superfluous exercise. It is an exercise that would seem to exists to inflate the egos of the spectators, the fans who have nothing to bring to the sport but everything to do to constrain the athletes freedom. True achievable justice lies in not restricting the athletes but giving them as many possibilities at all levels of class or income possible to achieve their desired goals within the rules laid out on the field of play, not restricting what they do off it. If we are to set out in achieving the improbable task that is creating an equal playing field, it is at the bottom not the top where we should start.

The principles that articulate the legitimate rules of sports should be those to which YOU would agree if YOU did not know which role you were going to play. The inequalities that exist and will persist should be arranged so that they benefit the least advantaged members in the sport. The pervasive nature of top athletes all being born in the same month, likely due to cutoff time for when those sports are played is a quantifiable injustice that objectively gives a greater 'disadvantage' than that of performance enhancing drugs because it gives more athletes an advantage. Despite this, we've spent millions of tax payers dollars to go after athletes at the top level of play, when that money could have been better spent in improving athletic programs fairness at the bottom. We've created a sporting environment where trading freedom for utility is a norm, and to me that's disgusting. The only purpose it seems to serve is to inflate the egos of those who spectate.

Classicism in an Age of Empirical Synth

A week or so ago I was reading twitter and I ran across something Robert Ashley said, "It's interesting that their(Animal Collective) influence is about sound more than a particular set of chords or a way to dress, unlike say Weezer in the 90's." Which I promptly agreed with immediately, but it got me to thinking about the subject harder for the next few days. In the time Animal Collective's Today's Supernatural which only lead to more contemplating. From the late aughts onto now, the distinctive sound of Animal Collective's music can be heard everywhere. In the 90's, Weezer's success could be also seen as the successful creation of a brandscape by MTV and the major labels. Inversely with the rise digital downloads, both illicit and legal, you see the dividing line between 'songs are upstaging performance pieces' growing. If you haven't listened to that 99% Invisible Episode, you should, Jon Brion gives a short musicology course on the difference between songs that are easily transmutable, say in a cover between songs that are about a specific performances.

Anecdotal evidence in my opinion of this can be seen by just adding up the number of Skillrex covers on youtube compared to Animal Collective covers. In terms of popularity Skillrex and Animal Collective are both comparable, but Skillrex has about 926% more search results in terms of covers on youtube. Animal Collective while being a band primarily about the performance pieces, they're making a much more lasting impression than Skillrex by having the 'sound' of their music proliferate in other bands. The democratization process inherent, unlike say a band like Fishbone, is actually working to reign in the chaos of their music. Overtime their releases have stayed eclectic, but become proportional and effectively more legible. Some might say the slow shift towards approachability detracts from the experimental nature of the past releases by Animal Collective, but to me it just shows they're coming of age. They've developed an iconic sound, now all they're elaborating on that sound by making it more accessible.

That brings me to my favorite album of the year(so far), which is I Come to Shanghai's Eternal Life Vol II. The band only has two members, Sam Frigard and Robert Ashley, which are obviously influenced by Animal Collective. The album to me does two things exceptionally well. For one, it flows exceptionally well collectively and while it's peaks do not reach my favorite album last years peaks, overall sounds great. Secondly, the vocals are really on point with this record. At times, you got Robert leading vocals in a way reminding me of a passive aggressive Stevie Nicks cruising on less cocaine and more good vibes, which in the end with any record, what more do you need to chill too?

Review of Sleeping Dogs

Sleeping Dogs puts the best argument forward to date in adapting Hong Kong New Wave cinema to the video game format, showing a technical audacity through pure aesthetic that matches both the films and games it borrows from.

The first time I remember hearing about this Sleeping Dogs was in an interview with Mike Skupa, it was still under the alias True Crime: Hong Kong. This was a dark period for the game because soon after it was dropped by it's original publisher Activision and picked up by Square Enix. While I was watching the interview Mike Skupa gave on the game, I reminisced how great his prior game was Bully from Rockstar and as soon as I picked up Sleeping Dogs I knew that this was his spiritual successor to Bully.

Sleeping Dogs, set in Hong Kong, is an open world game where Wei Shen acting as an undercover cop is given the task to take down the Triad. About half of the game it aesthetically matches Triad Election both in pacing and the fact that you're only using hand to hand combat. The second half Sleeping Dogs tonally matches something more akin to Hard Boiled with a heavy emphasis on gun play and faster pace. To me one direction was not better than the other mainly due to the fact the gameplay systems dominate in both sections are meticulously smart both from an ease of use perspective on the players part and to establish the tone.

The seemingly subtle but deeply profound new gameplay ideas at work are extensive. If you hold down arrow keys to change radio stations lowers and raises the volume or the fact that RPG mechanic gives you a reason to run around the beautiful city they created. Also that the fighting system is counter heavy much like the films it's aping for it's aesthetic and the other big game in the open world hand to hand combat genre Batman Arkham Asylum. Every system they introduce is so smart, and progresses the genre.

Did I mention the city was beautiful, Hong Kong in the game reminds me if someone took the charming, expensive and overpopulated nature of city like Houston here in the states but set it in the altitude and look of a city similar to San Francisco. On my PC, which is the real way to play this game from most accounts due to performance issues on the other platforms, the city looks amazing. Hong Kong is clearly a beautiful city, and it's quite obvious while playing this game why so many directors in China moved from the mainland to Hong Kong to make their movies.

The shift between acts can seem abrupt, one second you're never using a gun and the game is playing great then they ask you to kill to prove you're a Triad. The Johnnie To approach (director of previously mentioned Triad Election) of directing gangster movies where none of the gangsters ever fire a gun is admirable, but it isn't essential to the aesthetic. While the gunplay is not as developed as the hand to hand combat, it was still good so it wasn't a slight against the game. Sleeping Dogs pushes forward the open world genre, Grand Theft Auto IV was already shifting away from parody and trying to bring originality to it's story telling. Sleeping Dogs feels like an authentic original take on the cinema genre it draws from and much of that is due its excellent writing and voice acting.

The best argument Sleeping Dogs has for existing is telling the smaller stories in between missions, which is where the game flexes it's strengths in voice acting and writing. There are small types of stories that you would never get in film due to time restraints, that haven't been explored in the Hong Kong New Wave genre to my knowledge are in Sleeping Dogs. You can tell the developers on Sleeping Dogs are fans, and the previously mentioned shift allows them to broaden their scope of the minutia. All in all, the product they put together, especially on the PC is impeccable. Sleeping Dogs is a must play on many different levels.

Review of Redshirts: A Novel with Three Codas

Redshirts is a clever slapstick centered around petrified ensigns that's ambition reaches the same heights as its own arch dialogue.

In Palm Sunday, while revisiting his past, Kurt Vonnegut says, "I chose cultural anthropology, since it offered the greatest opportunity to write high-minded balderdash." In John Scalzi's Reshirts, you follow the 'Redshirts' on a space opera show much like the original Star Trek. Scalzi deconstructs the original syndicated Star Trek series by establishing three codas of fear, despotism and death in the 'Redshirts'. During the second act he throws away this structure he recently established much like The Truman Show, which Redshirts seems to borrow many of its themes from. Unlike The Truman Show, Redshirts do not meet an abrupt end and is better for it.

During this critique Scalzi finds a way to take the stereotypical caricatures that are extras on this television show, and give them dialogue that is initially funny but eventually during the second act strikes at an emotional core. Comedic horror is a new avenue for Scalzi, which is odd considering pulp fiction is an obvious direction to go for any author known for writing witty dialogue.

The horror of living as an extra in another persons power trip is bad enough but Scalzi then takes you into the present where the 'Redshirts' then must confront the actors who play them.  The heavily structured codas of fear, despotism and death are used recursively as an explanation and criticism of the format of syndicated space operas.

The narrative that goes forward is clever, lurid and progresses accordingly with the characters themselves. These supposed caricatures become self aware of the bad writing of the show they are in, and once they become self aware the narration become auspicious. The book never ceases in its parody, and the incessant winking can become tiresome at times. Clearly Scalzi loves the subject matter he is criticizing and if you're looking to find out how the sausage was made on the original Star Trek, Redshirts is an exhaustive resource.

The Stalwart and the Agora

A couple of days ago Romney chose Paul Ryan as his running mate, and ever since I have been arguing with myself over what this means for America. Don't get me wrong, Ryan is the best person Romney could have picked as a running mate. Not that I will be changing my choice between today and November 2nd. Due to the fact that Romney hasn't presented a convincing enough argument that he won't do what he did at Bain Capital while in the Oval Office. He was a wonderful governor but he's run away from that record while endorsing his record at Bain which baffles me.The serious problem of debt that currently exists and the way in which debt was leveraged while at Bain are too similar, and in good conscience I can't vote for Romney due to these facts.

In any other part of the industrialized western world I would be called a conservative, and in the United States the political movements I most identified with would be the Rockefeller Republicans. When I first got engaged in politics, I would take the political compass test and my results would line up perfectly with José Zapatero. Since then I take it periodically and I still score closely to Zapatero's views but more and more I'm becoming a left libertarian. At the end of the day I believe in the efficiency of markets and smaller government, but I believe the efficiency of markets is due to rigorous planning and if we are to have efficient government we will need much greater planning.

Not to bloviate my frontal baggage of political views, I just thought it was important to get some of that out of the way before I came here to say what I felt needed to be said. Back to Paul Ryan. I fear that the greatest asset Paul Ryan has to bring to this election and to America may be his greatest shortcoming as vice president. He put forward ideas that were incredibly unpopular in his own caucus as a junior member and their shear force of those ideas resonating with the Tea party wave were able to build a brand for himself. The problem is for me that while those ideas resonate in sound bites, the do for me honestly, I genuinely enjoyed hearing him tear into the Affordable Care Act with a lot of the same criticisms I had of it when I read what I could of what was proposed at the time.

The problem is in the details of what he proposes outside of the talking points. I read his proposed medicare reform and it baffles me. Democrats have the problems of being meticulous(or meretricious depending on which side of the fence you fall) in what they propose in writing, a huge criticism the Republicans aptly had of the Affordable Care Act when you look at it's length. The average American is never going to have the time to sit down and read what was proposed, even at the length at which it took them to pass the bill. The problem Ryan's proposal had was not only was it excruciatingly vague in how it proposed it's ideas but it was clear in the wording even with its vagueness to just shift costs around. That coupled with the amount of revenue he proposed to cut and no articulate proposal to make the revenue gap... Well let's just say it baffled me at the time and still does.

At it's core the Chilean idea(the main influence for Ryan's proposed reform of medicare), giving citizens some control over their healthcare, effectively involving them into the process sounds like a good idea. But every time he presents it in writing the details of his proposal are make me flinch. While healthcare is important, the biggest reform in our government in modern times, whether you think it was effective or not was in 1986 of the tax code. If we are to approach the biggest problem I think is facing us going forward we are going to have to change the tax code somehow, again. Not only find a way to make revenue match spending but like in the case of Chilean healthcare involve ALL working Americans into the current system. Ever since we reformed the tax code, it's been edited fifth-teen thousand times. In that time its digressed slowly to the broken state it is today. Just to put this into context, during the Obama administration the number of laws actually passed was in the single digits including the Affordable Care Act while being below normal isn't that below normal as you might expect. Even with all those edits to the tax code its clear that it's broken, and the problems it fixed thirty years ago has only opened room for new more devastating problems that need to be addressed and haven't been addressed despite all these numerous edits.

It is much more likely that instead of fixing the tax code we will just find new ways to encourage bad behavior and discard the old bad behavior. That being said, I think Ryan offers a good voice for the conservative argument and counter factual to Obama in the debates. It is likely that Paul Ryan will upstage Romney, but that's only because Ryan has done such a good job at building his own brand on his ideas. At the essence of democracy that's what you want to encourage, whether your enjoy their ideas or not. It's better than the alternative. I'm just glad Republicans have stopped focusing on social issues, it's a shame they had to pick the guy who runs away from his accomplishments and advertises his shortcomings. That's not a brand I can get behind.

Even the heavens are denied me here.

With the Bluray release of the first season of Star Trek The Next Generation I decided it was time for me to finally catch up canonically with The Next Generation on Netflix. Over the years I've watched a lot of The Next Generation, but all in bits and pieces. Since it was all syndicated by the time I got to originally watching, their are huge holes in my knowledge of the show.

Space Opera is a genre close to my heart, but never Star Trek, even The Next Generation which is held in the highest regard by most people I've talked to familiar with the show. I never quite dug the homogenization of space. Entire episodes have you meeting an entirely new planet where everyone is essentially the same person. The first season is incredibly bad about this, the worst offenders being the episode with Aryan blonde haired blue-eyed Eden planet and the sexist African tribal planet. Those two episodes don't just homogeneous to an absurd amount, they are racist which is an entirely different discussion that I won't get into.

After that first season their is a turning point in the series I've found, specifically the eighth episode of the second season. The show changes it's original formula, it goes from focusing on the collective conflict of species and starts to try slowly focus on telling the conflicts between individuals. Don't get me wrong, codifying still exists in terms of giving species certain parameters in which they can express emotionally but the range of individual expression within the parameters is much wider.

In that eighth episode they had Kligons take Ricker onto their vessel as a first mate, while assimilating both species got to learn about each other. After that point the show slowly begins to evolve, to progress where you get to planets and surprisingly you find out that not everyone's the same. It's an incredible concept, that only took about 30 to 40 episodes for the shows writers to come to. Although towards the end of the second season they undo all this good will and you meet the Borg, who are by their very definition, homogeneous.

I haven't met the Borg in the show since, the collective hive mind is actually an interesting concept and I look forward seeing if the show can approach Alastair Reynolds in their story-telling of a collective hivemind. To me he's the pinnacle of a space opera writer, and I judge other space operas to his Revelation Space series. If you haven't read that I highly recommend it.  I'm half way through the third season and the show has continued to progress, not only in the types of stories being told but in production value. I look forward to what awaits me in the next episodes, hopefully more of Captain Piccard prancing around the bridge spouting Wilfred Owen poetry as he does deploys some new Trojan horse tactic to overcome his opponents. I don't know if he has done that in what I've watched so far, but that does sound like a skit from the show to me. Either way I look forward to seeing if the show can progress anymore, hopefully I'll be back to say it has!

On merit

I've read about the boy scouts policy towards homosexuals a lot, and I understand & respect their right of expressive association. If exclusion is not permitted in a free society than groups may be forced by the government to convey points of view that they do not wish to convey. So what point of view are the boy scouts wishing to convey? I bring this policy of the boy scouts up because yesterday I was reading that the Army has promoted Tammy Smith from colonel to brigadier general making her the first openly gay general to serve in the US military. This was interesting for the simple fact that it was uncontroversial. The point of view of the military is only beginning to come around to the idea that prejudice of superficial characteristics is a prerequisite for demerit. It only makes sense that a private organization created to instill such similar values holds similar prejudices that our military has only begun to reverse. Berating the scouts is unproductive, but it should be noted that by conservative estimates 4% of the US population identify as part of the LBGT community, not taking into account those who participate but do not identify. Just counting those identified is a lot of people, much more than that of the entire membership counting both of counselors and scouts in the Boy Scouts of America. 

"People know what they do; frequently they know why they do what they do; but what they don't know is what what they do does." ~ Michel Foucault 

The organization knows why it is exclusionary but does it know what this exclusion does to the organization and to the United States as a whole? I think the scouts will find that while their hiking through the post-aughts into the twenty-first century that it might be beneficial to the long term health of their organization if they saunter instead of hike. 

Thank you.

If there were two individuals whose works I consumed and brought me from a porous state to one which is merely superficial, that would be the works of David Rakoff and Christopher Hitchens. Last night David Rakoff passed, and eight months ago Christopher Hitchens before him. There was a point in my life in high school when I had little interest in developing any sort of real education, and any more culture outside of being little more than folly. Then I listened to NPR, listening to segments by David Sakoff which sent me down a cultural rabbit hole of reading his works and eventually other essayists including Christopher Hitchens, among others. Their passion for their work helped me develop my own passions, and later my own opinions which I am only beginning to develop. After Hitchens death I went and reread all that I could of Hitchens work, and with Rakoff's I find myself doing the same. Their wisdom did know bounds, it was finite. But that would be like calling the sea finite, their wisdom has taught me so much that and for that I am eternally grateful.

Thank you.