2011-05-24 - Vegetarians Hate Animals

Those damn hippies who refuse to eat animal products because it’s not nice really hate animals. Now you might say that this is a lie and to you I say it isn’t and you’re wrong. Now I don’t mean the people who don’t eat meat for religious or medical reasons. Religious people are just crazy in general and medical reasons rather trump everything. No, I am talking about hippies, hippies who don’t like the livestock industry and have decided to protest it with a boycott. Those people really hate animals. If they don’t hate animals then they have a serious misunderstanding about animals and basic economics principles.

So the argument goes as such “Farms are mean to animals”, or something like that. I haven’t actually listened to any of their arguments because I think they are all silly but it seems to be something along those lines. Now my rebuttal to that is that it would be stupid for farms to be mean to animals. A farm is a business and businesses want to make money. You don’t make money by wasting time being cruel to your animals, especially when you get the most money out of your animals when they are big, fat and happy. Just think about it, if someone is hurting you will eating be the first thing on your mind? It is more likely you will be trying to escape or strike back and just generally being stressed out. Now as I understand it a stressed out animal doesn’t taste that good and neither will it produces a lot of meat. They will be especially losing money if it’s trying to break free and damaging itself and property in the process. Now since producing meat is what the farmer wants, it seems to me that being nice to their animals is in a farmers best interests. That way they are all big and meaty and he can sell them for lots of money.

Now there are some rather creepy factory farms, farms with hundreds of chickens in a row laying eggs with weird light cycles to cause them to overproduce Now as much as these are creepy they are not necessarily cruel. They still have to take care of their animals because their animals are what make them money. Now I am not a supporter of these kinds of farms because there are better ways to do things. That being said it doesn’t help to protest the entire industry. If you would never eat eggs then there is no profit to be lost by housing chickens in a manner you support. It’s much better to give your money to other companies, companies that are less creepy. It’s a supply and demand business; if you are not contributing to demand supply won’t care what you think. If you are contributing to a specific segment of demand supply will follow you. This is the generally problem with the whole vegetarian movement. If you’re not going to eat animal products then why should they bend to your ideals?

Now there’s a second stage to the livestock industry that also gets a lot of flack. I’m talking about the butchers and others that kill animals and take the bits that they want. Now the argument about these groups seems to be related to the way in which they kill the animals. Vegetarians seem to have the idea that they beat them to a pulp and then spit on them for added effect. Now again my rebuttal is that this is entirely stupid. You see time is money and property is money. Since you don’t want to waste time or property the best way to kill an animal is the quickest and least destructive way. This allows you to get at the bits you need as soon as possible without damaging any of those bits or any of your buildings and tools. Cows are large and when they are jerking around in pain from being beaten it is very likely that they could hurt someone or something which would cost the company money. Since the company wants to spend as little as possible and make as much as possible it simply makes sense to avoid this.

Now back to the real reason that vegetarians hate animals, or how they indirectly hate animals without knowing it. The thing is that vegetarians hate farmers and butchers because they feel that they are mistreating their animals. Now I’ve already talked about how misguided this is but for a moment let’s assume they are right and get rid of them. What happens to the animals? Most livestock animals have been domesticated for so many generations that they wouldn’t know how to survive in the wild. When was the last time you saw a wild cow? Domesticated animals don’t know how to care for themselves. They wouldn’t know how to find food and water because farmers always gave it to them. They wouldn’t know how to find shelter from the elements because farmers always gave to them. They wouldn’t know how to protect themselves from predators because farmers always did it for them. They wouldn’t know how to survive and subsequently wouldn’t. Good going vegetarians, I hope that you are happy now with all the pigs, cows and chickens of the world dead.

And another thing, what do they have against fish? As I understand the vegetarian lifestyle it’s okay to eat fish which makes no sense. A fish is an animal, its flesh is meat. Eating a fish is no different than eating a cow or a big. It’s still an animal that was killed and removed from its peaceful life so that you could eat it. I mean what the hell?

2011-05-18 - Job Hunt

I’m working on writing something else but it’s not done yet. Well actually it is done but I’m trying this thing called “editing” where you read something over and over again to make sure it’s good. I’m not quite sure about it but we’ll see. Anyways, as an aside I want to talk about jobs.

I don’t think I have the qualities needed to find a job. I have the qualities to do most jobs or at least to learn how to do most jobs but not those to find one. The problem I think is that I like to see progress in things that I do. When working on a problem the wrong solution tells you just as much as the right one. You learn from the process and from failures, they help you to understand things better and to figure out the right solution. However Job hunting doesn’t work like that, most roads don’t lead anywhere and those that do tend to end abruptly without anything being gained. You go through the process of finding a job and then applying to that job only to find an empty email inbox or a quiet phone. There’s no way of knowing the status of anything or the reasoning behind your application being ignored. Even if you do get to go for an interview they rarely give you any idea of what you did right and what you did wrong. Even if they do tell you something you tend to be talking to HR people who are skilled in the art of not telling you things when you think they did. They may tell you they’ll call you but then they never do and you have no idea why. It’s a whole lot of waiting for things that may never come without anything to gain from the experience.

Sadly no one ever tells you about that life enriching time they spent trying to find a job. You know I remember someone saying insanity is repeating something over and over again and expecting a different outcome each time. That sounds like job hunting to me.

2011-05-09 - RSS feeds

I have made an RSS feed. I actually made it a few days ago but haven’t gotten around to posting about it until now. I’ve been sick and lazy and those kinds of things, but I’m here now so yeah. RSS feeds are actually surprisingly easy to do. It’s just an xml document that sits at the root of the website and store information. Whenever I write something new I add another entry to it and upload it along with the other changes. If you subscribe to the RSS feed whenever I do an update like that it will tell you that I’ve done an update like that. What could be easier? It’s like checking the site without ever checking the site which is useful because I’m lazy and rarely update the site. Oh, it also might be my birthday or something.

EDIT: The biggest problem with RSS feeds so far is figuring out what time it is in GMT on a 24 hour clock. To simplify things I figured I’d just set all the previous entries to be at 00:00:00. The problem with this is that midnight GMT is actually 6 pm the night before here which means all the dates were off. So now they are 6 GMT and 0 here and it’s all good. Then I went and set today’s entry as 10 instead of 22. Time is fun.

2011-05-01 - The Problem with RPGs

RPGs have become a large part of gamming. Just about every two bit First person shooter needs some role playing elements. I hear Call of Duty multiplayer even has RPG elements. There's all this "Pick your skills", "Pick your perks", "Make your own character" stuff and frankly I hate it. Now I would like to state that I have never played a JRPG, and I don’t plan to play a JRPG if I can help it. I also must say that I haven’t played that many western RPGs. Though I am mostly thinking about the new genre of action RPGs (Basically take a normal game and add skill trees to it in order to make it more exciting) most of this will be about how I see the genre and less about how it actually is. Enjoy the rant.

My main problem with RPGs is that they have terrible stories. This is really distressing since most of them have great story potential. Look at Mass Effect, it's the first big Sci-Fi game in a while that has something more than "You big space marine, you shoot evil aliens"; however, it still has you spending four years scanning planets so you can upgrade your weapons. Now the main problem with story in RPGs is that they have to cover all their bases. The story has to be able to work with whatever back story you've picked, whatever gender you've chosen, and whatever actions you have taken up to this point. Whenever you want into a situation you have to be able to get out of it regardless of how you’ve chosen your skill set. We can't have female Sheppard get pregnant from all her galactic affairs because then we'd have to get male Sheppard pregnant and that just wouldn't work. So you end up with a story that has nothing supporting it. You can't have a deep story because you don't have time to write up a deep story for every single way a character might walk into a situation. Going back to Mass Effect 2 the big thing was that things you did in the first game would have consequences in the second game. These consequences are almost completely limited to either people mentioning what you did in passing or random characters from the first game popping up to do nothing more than comment on what you did to them in the first game. If something you did in the first game had a large scale effect on the second game then anyone who made a different choice would have to play an entirely different game. The game could have ignored those events completely and still worked the same.. The problem with a choice system is that you have to continue the story whatever the choice made which means that the majority of your choices become meaningless. Say you are faced with a moral dilemma to destroy a planet or not. Whatever action you choose you still have to be able to go on to the next story mission and complete the game. So yes you can blow up a planet or you can save a planet but at the end of the day you are still on the same story. Your choice in this seemingly important moment affects nothing. In Fallout 3 you have the option to set off a bomb or to defuse it. If you set the bomb off you blow up a town and get to go live in a tower. If you defuse the bomb the guy in the tower hates you and you get to live in the town. If someone story related later in the game said "I don't want to work with a man who blew up a town" the story would have been screwed. Logically it would have made sense for a lot of people to hate you but they can't. The story has to go on regardless of what you do. So every choice you make in a game is either meaningless by itself or meaningless to the story. There's no way to give you a bunch of heavy choices that impact the entire game and still give you the same story. The problem with this is that it makes a good part of the story superfluous. In a linear game the writers always know the actions you have taken to get to any given point because there is only one set of actions that can take you to that point. This allows them to construct deep stories because they only have to deal with one narrative. In RPGs where the story is created to be open ended you are forced to deal with shallow stories in order to ensure that story works in the context of everyone's personalized play through.

Another big problem I have with RPGs is the very idea of "Role Playing". The idea is that you create a character and play them however you want. Basically the game designers give you a blank canvas and you paint it according to your will and their guidelines. The problem with this is that again the story has to work around it. Sure you can make your character an Asian woman or a black man but the game can't say anything about that. Nothing can be based heavily on the character you create because the story writers have no idea of what character you are going to make. They can use markers to control dialog so that everyone refers to you as a she if you are playing as a woman but they can't treat you differently because of that fact. If one character was willing to help you as a woman but not as a man then you end up in a situation of creating multiple stories again. There's no way to account for all your possible choices so your choices have to be superficial. Another problem connected to this is the dialog dynamic with your party characters and to a lesser extent other characters. The one thing I hated about the first mass effect is that your party almost always ended up agreeing with you. You had these moments where you could go and talk to your crewmembers and have those personal moments with them. The weird thing is that your crew members would always start to believe whatever you told them. I remember I accidently told one of my party members that the best way to get things done was to do it yourself and kill people without asking questions. After this point he took up a complete "Vigilante is the best" attitude and I couldn't tell him that it was stupid. One little comment and I completely changed his character. Sheppard is just the most charismatic guy in the universe because whatever he says to people they automatically believe. Whenever the magical blue text comes up he can convince a mass murdering psycho to stop all the hate and become a hippie. I've never played as a renegade really so I can't say that the red text works the same way but I imagine it does. Sheppard must be a Jedi, he uses his Jedi mind tricks on everyone so that they always agree with whatever he says to them. Actually I think one of the Star Wars game had it the same way that whenever you picked a line of dialog that was coloured it meant you'd use your Jedi powers to say it. The problem with everything in the game agreeing with you is that it rather destroys that atmosphere for me. It doesn't make sense for every criminal trying to kill me to be persuaded by my charm because I levelled up my speaking skills to the max and did a bunch of good deeds to get all those goody-goody points. I was basically playing as a Boy Scout politician. Now I suppose that it's my fault for choosing that path but whatever way you play it the dialog works so you can persuade people to do things for you if you do things a certain way. Look at Half-life 2, it is largely considered to be one of the best story games of late and it does so with very little input from the player. You never say anything and everything you do is set by the game itself. I think that this is a much better way to present story. I prefer to read my stories instead of writing them. I want someone else to craft all the dialog and characters and events instead of me having to fill in some key blanks so that I can feel like I'm a part of the story. If I wanted to feel like I was making the story I would be writing novels instead of playing video games. The game designers are supposed to be the experts, writing stories is their jobs not mine.

Right, that's a nice rant. In conclusion I want to be given a great story and a great character. RPG stories tend to be more like adlib fill in the blanks except that the sentences with missing words are kept separate from the main story sentences making them pointless. Now I would enjoy a really well done branching story that allowed you to take multiple paths and end up and completely different places. I think it would be interested to have a truly non-linear game. It's just this non-linearity stapled to a linear framework that I find annoying. If you give me a choice I want it to be an important choice instead of having the only consequence be a comment by someone a few hours later.