Today marks Trumps 100th day in office, a benchmark that campaign Trump promised would be filled with glorious making America great again achievements but one that President Trump is complaining is an unfair and arbitrary marker dreamed up by the lying media to drag him down. Trump continues his habit of being the last person in the room to figure out a basic element of his job, like, it's hard. Who knew?
Trump may also be feeling down since he's finishing out his honeymoon period as literally the most unpopular president in history, but, if I were him, I wouldn't feel so bad about it; because for as bad as he's doing, the Democrats are doing even worse. The same ABC/Washington Post poll showed that only 52% of the Democratic base believes the party is in touch with the needs of common people. Again, that's not voters as a whole, that's the Democratic faithful saying their party is widely out of touch with their needs. The sad part of all this is it's not even a mystery as to why this is happening; for thirty years now the Democratic strategy has been to rail loudly against the social discrimination towards the poor and disaffected on the one hand while enacting economic policies that ensured they would stay poor and disaffected. It makes sense, in a way, if you ensure the downtrodden always exist, you'll have a reliable voting block. The idea that enacting popular, leftist polices that actually makes peoples lives better is a way easier path to getting votes is apparently a delusion best left to the college students before they can "grow up."
Watching the Democratic party through these first 100 days, the thing becomes glaringly obvious is that they really don't realize that they are a party in need of a serious revamp, instead they're doing everything they can to ignore that fact. You would think losing almost every state legislature, governorship, both houses of Congress, and the presidency over the last eight years, that self-reflection would be impossible to avoid, but these assholes have found a way. The final nail in the coffin should be the section of the ABC/Washington Post poll that showed that if the election were held again, today, Trump beats Clinton 43-40 because more Democrats than Republicans regret voting for their candidate and given the opportunity, Democrats would vote for someone else. Let that really sink in for a moment: After a 100 days of bumbling idiocy from the Trump Administration, the Democratic Party would still lose because their own base couldn't stomach voting for Hilary Clinton again. If there's a clearer sign out there that you've completely lost your base, let me know, because I can't think of anything.
And it's not like there isn't a viable way out of all this staring them right in the face. The popularity of Bernie Sanders isn't because of who he is, it's because he advocates for policies that are, surprise surprise, really popular with the American public. And sure, Tom Perez is currently doing a "Unity Tour" with Sanders to try to draw all his voters back into the Democratic fold, but this is somewhat undercut by the, surely spontaneous, hit pieces against Sanders in Slate, Salon, The New York Times, and the Washington Post. It sorta undercuts the DNC's message that they're willing to work with Sanders and listen to his voters when the usual Democratic media outlets suddenly start spewing out pieces about why no one should be listening to Sanders or his shitty little podcast.
This is especially stupid in the face of two special elections that, per traditional Democratic thinking, have no business being competitive. The special election in Kansas was determined by 8,000 votes, and the special election in Georgia is set for a run-off in June after the Democratic candidate received 48% of the vote. Getting nail-biter elections in deeply Republican states and districts should be enough for the DNC to go "Yeah, okay, this could work," but, I guess not. You can't expect the party ostensibly on the left side of spectrum to actually run leftists and progressives, that's just crazy talk.
Thankfully, if the people at the top won't get with the program, there's growing evidence that the voters themselves will throw them out to the garbage where they belong. Dianne Feinstein recently got hissed and booed at her town hall when she said she wouldn't support a Medicare-For-All single payer health program. It seems the Democratic voters are finally waking up to the fact that if they want the party to represent them, they actually have to force them to do it. Good thing too, because while it seems unlikely, eventually someone will emerge from the cesspool of ignorance that is the Republican party and figure out a way to get all of that horrific shit done. So, if we want to stop that from happening, we'll need to save ourselves, because no one else is really lining up to do so.
Friday, April 28, 2017
Wednesday, April 26, 2017
Fallout, Hopes and Wants
So I'm about 72 hours in on Fallout 4 and about 20 hours or so in to my second play-through on Fallout: New Vegas and doing a compare/contrast between the two has got me thinking about what I'd like to see from the the next Fallout game, be it a numbered sequel or a tie-in like New Vegas.
First, move the game back out West. The desolate beauty f the desert wasteland is a much better backdrop than the Northeast. For one thing, you don't have to do a lot of work to make the setting desolate because... it already is that way. With both 3 and 4 Bethesda had to do a lot of work in setting the stage with a lot of bombed out forests and the like, but, really, burnt up trees just don't quite pack the same apocalyptic punch as the basically unending ocean of sand with a relentless sun hanging overhead like the desert does. That, and when working with a barren landscape over a scarred one, the natural thematic curve of the story focuses around the player imposing their will on the Wasteland instead of trying to heal it, which is more in line with the series' emphasis on player choices anyway, so, that would be my hi-art reason if pushed to name another reason beyond aesthetics alone. So I'm hoping that the next game takes place in Arizona, the lower portion of California in the Mojave, or Wyoming, and as far as plot goes, I would want things to pick up pretty much where New Vegas left off.
My real, true hope is that the game takes place in Arizona, where a bolstered NCR is trying to claim all the lost territories of the a defeated Legion while trying to stamp out the remnants that are still scattered about the remaining territory. For simplicity's sake, I'm going to go with the NCR ending of New Vegas as the canon ending, so, the Brotherhood still exists under a shaky truce, the Khans left to Wyoming, and the NCR annexed New Vegas and much of the surrounding towns and communities. The reason why I want it to go this route is because it will offer players to a lot of opportunities to decide what the future of the area will be. Do they, for example, help the NCR in annexing and claiming even more territory and make the republic an empire? Or, does the player help all the wasteland tribes subjugated under the Legion reclaim their individual identities and try to govern themselves independently, or, along the same lines, does the player help them band together like the old Indian nations? Maybe, instead of all that, the player decides to rebuild the Legion, this time more in the mold of the military dictatorships of the Severan dynasty than the proto-imperial Cesarean legacy.
Point is, there's a shit ton of possibilities here with the chance to have multiple factions with lots of depth already there for the taking. I also think Bethesda should take Obsidian up on their desire to make a new Fallout game basically whenever because, honestly, doing that kind of world building and character depth is just not in Bethesda's wheelhouse. Better to give to people who've already proven they can deliver that kind of content and who also already know the lore of the universe that they're building off of.
As far as game play goes, there is actually a lot in 4 that I'd like to see kept in future installments. For one, actually creating the mods for your weapons and armor is so much better than just buying them from the store. Instead of jumping around to every place you can buy weapons from hoping that they'll randomly generate the thing you want/need, having crafting tables where you use materials you've gathered to create basically whatever the hell you want is really, the far superior option. Also I'd like to keep the option to raise the S.P.E.C.I.A.L. stats after your initial character creation, since it does create a much more flexible and fluid gaming experience to beef yourself up on things you may have been lacking in the first place. I will say though, I would like the leveling to go back to the 1-100 scale for each stat, since I don't really like not being able to increase my weapons damage until I've reached the appropriate level to scale it up; it's just an arbitrary ceiling imposed by the game to make sure you can't do too much too fast and it's more annoying than it is competitive.
What I'd also like to see re-tooled is the settlement mechanic. I actually think having the option to build up those communities is a great facet to add to the series and can greatly affect how people think about what they;re doing in game and how they go about shaping the world. But, it shouldn't be a mandatory thing. In my version of the next game, you'd have the choice to build up settlement spots into vibrant communities for whatever faction you choose, or, to basically use them as way stations and safe houses with AI that sees to their own needs. That way, if you want to invest the time and resources to get more out of them, you can, but if not, you can just have convenient places to stash your shit and sleep and just go on with whatever it is you want to do instead.
Oh, right, before I forget, re-add skill checks to the dialogue trees. Their absence in 4 made the dialogue feel constrained and much more limited than it had in previous installments, so, yeah, put that shit back in. It's not like there's a shortage of buttons on the controllers to assign the options to- you could put them on the triggers, for example- so please, Bethesda or whoever, get that back in there. Some of the best dialogue options have come from those skill checks, so don't sacrifice something that made your game what it is in the first place because you don't want to spend the time and money to have those lines recorded.
I always have high hopes for these games because it is my firm belief that the Fallout series is one of the main avenues we have in proving that gaming is as valid a storytelling medium as books or movies. And the glorious thing about the internet is that it gives the option to loudly, and incessantly, yell at the people who make the things we love to not fuck those things up. Plus, the better we demand games to be, the more fun we'll have playing them, so there's that too, which, I guess, is the more important thing in the end.
First, move the game back out West. The desolate beauty f the desert wasteland is a much better backdrop than the Northeast. For one thing, you don't have to do a lot of work to make the setting desolate because... it already is that way. With both 3 and 4 Bethesda had to do a lot of work in setting the stage with a lot of bombed out forests and the like, but, really, burnt up trees just don't quite pack the same apocalyptic punch as the basically unending ocean of sand with a relentless sun hanging overhead like the desert does. That, and when working with a barren landscape over a scarred one, the natural thematic curve of the story focuses around the player imposing their will on the Wasteland instead of trying to heal it, which is more in line with the series' emphasis on player choices anyway, so, that would be my hi-art reason if pushed to name another reason beyond aesthetics alone. So I'm hoping that the next game takes place in Arizona, the lower portion of California in the Mojave, or Wyoming, and as far as plot goes, I would want things to pick up pretty much where New Vegas left off.
My real, true hope is that the game takes place in Arizona, where a bolstered NCR is trying to claim all the lost territories of the a defeated Legion while trying to stamp out the remnants that are still scattered about the remaining territory. For simplicity's sake, I'm going to go with the NCR ending of New Vegas as the canon ending, so, the Brotherhood still exists under a shaky truce, the Khans left to Wyoming, and the NCR annexed New Vegas and much of the surrounding towns and communities. The reason why I want it to go this route is because it will offer players to a lot of opportunities to decide what the future of the area will be. Do they, for example, help the NCR in annexing and claiming even more territory and make the republic an empire? Or, does the player help all the wasteland tribes subjugated under the Legion reclaim their individual identities and try to govern themselves independently, or, along the same lines, does the player help them band together like the old Indian nations? Maybe, instead of all that, the player decides to rebuild the Legion, this time more in the mold of the military dictatorships of the Severan dynasty than the proto-imperial Cesarean legacy.
Point is, there's a shit ton of possibilities here with the chance to have multiple factions with lots of depth already there for the taking. I also think Bethesda should take Obsidian up on their desire to make a new Fallout game basically whenever because, honestly, doing that kind of world building and character depth is just not in Bethesda's wheelhouse. Better to give to people who've already proven they can deliver that kind of content and who also already know the lore of the universe that they're building off of.
As far as game play goes, there is actually a lot in 4 that I'd like to see kept in future installments. For one, actually creating the mods for your weapons and armor is so much better than just buying them from the store. Instead of jumping around to every place you can buy weapons from hoping that they'll randomly generate the thing you want/need, having crafting tables where you use materials you've gathered to create basically whatever the hell you want is really, the far superior option. Also I'd like to keep the option to raise the S.P.E.C.I.A.L. stats after your initial character creation, since it does create a much more flexible and fluid gaming experience to beef yourself up on things you may have been lacking in the first place. I will say though, I would like the leveling to go back to the 1-100 scale for each stat, since I don't really like not being able to increase my weapons damage until I've reached the appropriate level to scale it up; it's just an arbitrary ceiling imposed by the game to make sure you can't do too much too fast and it's more annoying than it is competitive.
What I'd also like to see re-tooled is the settlement mechanic. I actually think having the option to build up those communities is a great facet to add to the series and can greatly affect how people think about what they;re doing in game and how they go about shaping the world. But, it shouldn't be a mandatory thing. In my version of the next game, you'd have the choice to build up settlement spots into vibrant communities for whatever faction you choose, or, to basically use them as way stations and safe houses with AI that sees to their own needs. That way, if you want to invest the time and resources to get more out of them, you can, but if not, you can just have convenient places to stash your shit and sleep and just go on with whatever it is you want to do instead.
Oh, right, before I forget, re-add skill checks to the dialogue trees. Their absence in 4 made the dialogue feel constrained and much more limited than it had in previous installments, so, yeah, put that shit back in. It's not like there's a shortage of buttons on the controllers to assign the options to- you could put them on the triggers, for example- so please, Bethesda or whoever, get that back in there. Some of the best dialogue options have come from those skill checks, so don't sacrifice something that made your game what it is in the first place because you don't want to spend the time and money to have those lines recorded.
I always have high hopes for these games because it is my firm belief that the Fallout series is one of the main avenues we have in proving that gaming is as valid a storytelling medium as books or movies. And the glorious thing about the internet is that it gives the option to loudly, and incessantly, yell at the people who make the things we love to not fuck those things up. Plus, the better we demand games to be, the more fun we'll have playing them, so there's that too, which, I guess, is the more important thing in the end.
Tuesday, April 18, 2017
Front Row Seats at the Shit Show
If there's one good thing about life in 2017, is that there is no shortage of unbelievably stupid things to hang your head in shame at. So, with that, let's dive right in:
After spending a significant chunk of his campaign railing against American interventionism, Donald Trump is making noises to launch himself into not one but two wars. There's Syria where the chemical weapons attacks have apparently galvanized him into seeking the removal of Bashar al-Assad from power. The horrors of that attack aren't enough to let Syrians in as as refugees, but it does call him to launch ineffective bombing raids which, to no one's surprise, end up killing more children he's so broken up about but hey, it's the thought that counts. That Trump previously warned about the perils of getting involved in Syria means he was actually right about something but has now changed his mind due to the Washington thinkers he won the election disparaging is just too goddamned depressing to call ironic.
And then there's North Korea. Why exactly Trump feels compelled to antagonize the nuclear cyst that is North Korea is too stupefying for me to want to dive into, so we'll just focus on practical consequences. Now we have stories saying the administration is looking into shooting down test missiles launched by the DPRK; that their last showpiece missile launch was an abysmal failure would make you think that shooting them down is somewhat redundant but what do we know?
The upshot of both things is that Trump is playing fast and loose with stakes he doesn't realize. Because let's say that he does go all-in for a ground war in Syria, what then? Do we start shooting down Russian planes? Because nothing from the Kremlin has signaled that they'd drop their support for Assad in the face of a U.S. invasion so the question quickly becomes how, exactly, are you going to remove Assad from power without antagonizing their biggest ally? The same goes for North Korea, how do you really expect to start an armed conflict with that tin-foil dictatorship that doesn't involve China?
The most infuriating thing about all of this though is the response of the press. Ever since Trump's strike against the Syrian airbase and his MOAB drop in Afghanistan and his belligerence against North Korea, op-ed pages have been tripping over themselves praising Trump for being "Presidential." I wish I could shake every last one of them and scream "The fuck are you thinking!" right in their idiot faces. These are the exact same people who, say, a year from now, will be asking "How did this happen?" as we're looking down the barrel of one, maybe two, hopeless wars and how they could've possibly not seen them coming. Gee, I don't know media, maybe your glowing adoration and respect for a President who desperately craves both of those things could possibly, theoretically, encourage said President to escalate those conflicts to bask in your war-time patriot boners. It's just a thought, though. But really, Trump is on the verge of antagonizing and starting a war with not one but three nuclear powers and instead of recoiling in abject terror, the press is cheerleading him into it. This is one of those things that make me think that we deserve to be ashes on the cinder.
Of course, Trump probably wouldn't feel the need to prove himself with bombings abroad if he could actually accomplish things at home. Granted, that's giving him a lot of benefit of the doubt he doesn't really deserve, but it'd be folly to ignore his about-face towards American adventurism in the face of all the failures he's racking up on the domestic front. Sure, his Supreme Court pick went through after the Senate changed the rules of debate, but, other than that, he's got shit to show for his first 100-days in office. The wall that was supposed to start building on Day One as yet to materialize even as a spending bill, his tax cuts are also a no-show and then there's the whole "Repeal Obamacare!" thing that went down in such glorious flames. The dude's aching for a win here, and there really isn't any substitute for blowing shit up thousands of miles away to make people forget about your incompetence at home.
And, honestly, the whole 100 days thing isn't really a thing. It's a psychological trap that governments have locked themselves into ever since FDR. At the same time, this is one of those "It's real if your mind says it's real" type of things, so we have to play off of it. The whole thinking behind the 100 days thing is that this the time for the President to build up a solid win to springboard his other policies off of once the new car smell wears off. That Trump has proved incapable of doing so is going to lead to bigger problems down the road and the healthcare debacle provides a useful road map to his other major policy initiatives.
All of his future proposals, from the the wall to the tax cuts, involve massive amounts of deficit spending that the Freedom Caucus simply will not swallow. So to appease them, Trump is going to have to make certain budget concessions to cut funding elsewhere that will make the more moderate Republicans in both houses of Congress balk, because the only programs with the kind of money to trim to match Trump's deficit increasing tax cuts, for example, would be Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, aka the most popular government programs in history. There is no way in hell Republicans in vulnerable districts will put themselves so clearly on the wrong side of something for a man literally no one except Republican voters approve of. And since Trump doesn't have the personal clot or political capital to move the Freedom Caucus away from their positions, he'll be just as deadlocked as Obama was.
This dynamic is the reason why Trump named the Freedom Caucus as an enemy to be defeated in the 2018 midterms, but considering that these people come from die-hard conservative districts, it is highly doubtful that those voters would be willing to kick them out for adhering to "true conservative principles" in favor of Trump bag-men in a primary. Trump's cult of personality will protect him personally from the fallout of his failures, I'm sure, but I highly doubt it will galvanize voters to kick out people who are doing exactly what they were sent to Washington to do. Should be fun to watch, all the same.
In lighter news, Alex Jones is trying to pass off as a performance artist so he can convince the court that he is not, in fact, a complete lunatic so he can have custody of his children. This is yet another in a time honored tradition of right wing fuckwads building an audience by being uncompromising and meaning every word they say until suddenly, they don't mean anything at all, everything they do is all a sham. It never surprises me that these brave men of dignity and courage dump everything they've done at the first real sign of trouble, but I will admit to being shocked that there are so many people waiting to be duped by whatever shit-stain comes up to replace them and start the cycle all over again. Then again, there will always be a niche for people willing to tell millions of people that they're right to be ignorant assholes, so, there ya go.
I think that about does it for me this time, so, carry on, and try not get singed
After spending a significant chunk of his campaign railing against American interventionism, Donald Trump is making noises to launch himself into not one but two wars. There's Syria where the chemical weapons attacks have apparently galvanized him into seeking the removal of Bashar al-Assad from power. The horrors of that attack aren't enough to let Syrians in as as refugees, but it does call him to launch ineffective bombing raids which, to no one's surprise, end up killing more children he's so broken up about but hey, it's the thought that counts. That Trump previously warned about the perils of getting involved in Syria means he was actually right about something but has now changed his mind due to the Washington thinkers he won the election disparaging is just too goddamned depressing to call ironic.
And then there's North Korea. Why exactly Trump feels compelled to antagonize the nuclear cyst that is North Korea is too stupefying for me to want to dive into, so we'll just focus on practical consequences. Now we have stories saying the administration is looking into shooting down test missiles launched by the DPRK; that their last showpiece missile launch was an abysmal failure would make you think that shooting them down is somewhat redundant but what do we know?
The upshot of both things is that Trump is playing fast and loose with stakes he doesn't realize. Because let's say that he does go all-in for a ground war in Syria, what then? Do we start shooting down Russian planes? Because nothing from the Kremlin has signaled that they'd drop their support for Assad in the face of a U.S. invasion so the question quickly becomes how, exactly, are you going to remove Assad from power without antagonizing their biggest ally? The same goes for North Korea, how do you really expect to start an armed conflict with that tin-foil dictatorship that doesn't involve China?
The most infuriating thing about all of this though is the response of the press. Ever since Trump's strike against the Syrian airbase and his MOAB drop in Afghanistan and his belligerence against North Korea, op-ed pages have been tripping over themselves praising Trump for being "Presidential." I wish I could shake every last one of them and scream "The fuck are you thinking!" right in their idiot faces. These are the exact same people who, say, a year from now, will be asking "How did this happen?" as we're looking down the barrel of one, maybe two, hopeless wars and how they could've possibly not seen them coming. Gee, I don't know media, maybe your glowing adoration and respect for a President who desperately craves both of those things could possibly, theoretically, encourage said President to escalate those conflicts to bask in your war-time patriot boners. It's just a thought, though. But really, Trump is on the verge of antagonizing and starting a war with not one but three nuclear powers and instead of recoiling in abject terror, the press is cheerleading him into it. This is one of those things that make me think that we deserve to be ashes on the cinder.
Of course, Trump probably wouldn't feel the need to prove himself with bombings abroad if he could actually accomplish things at home. Granted, that's giving him a lot of benefit of the doubt he doesn't really deserve, but it'd be folly to ignore his about-face towards American adventurism in the face of all the failures he's racking up on the domestic front. Sure, his Supreme Court pick went through after the Senate changed the rules of debate, but, other than that, he's got shit to show for his first 100-days in office. The wall that was supposed to start building on Day One as yet to materialize even as a spending bill, his tax cuts are also a no-show and then there's the whole "Repeal Obamacare!" thing that went down in such glorious flames. The dude's aching for a win here, and there really isn't any substitute for blowing shit up thousands of miles away to make people forget about your incompetence at home.
And, honestly, the whole 100 days thing isn't really a thing. It's a psychological trap that governments have locked themselves into ever since FDR. At the same time, this is one of those "It's real if your mind says it's real" type of things, so we have to play off of it. The whole thinking behind the 100 days thing is that this the time for the President to build up a solid win to springboard his other policies off of once the new car smell wears off. That Trump has proved incapable of doing so is going to lead to bigger problems down the road and the healthcare debacle provides a useful road map to his other major policy initiatives.
All of his future proposals, from the the wall to the tax cuts, involve massive amounts of deficit spending that the Freedom Caucus simply will not swallow. So to appease them, Trump is going to have to make certain budget concessions to cut funding elsewhere that will make the more moderate Republicans in both houses of Congress balk, because the only programs with the kind of money to trim to match Trump's deficit increasing tax cuts, for example, would be Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, aka the most popular government programs in history. There is no way in hell Republicans in vulnerable districts will put themselves so clearly on the wrong side of something for a man literally no one except Republican voters approve of. And since Trump doesn't have the personal clot or political capital to move the Freedom Caucus away from their positions, he'll be just as deadlocked as Obama was.
This dynamic is the reason why Trump named the Freedom Caucus as an enemy to be defeated in the 2018 midterms, but considering that these people come from die-hard conservative districts, it is highly doubtful that those voters would be willing to kick them out for adhering to "true conservative principles" in favor of Trump bag-men in a primary. Trump's cult of personality will protect him personally from the fallout of his failures, I'm sure, but I highly doubt it will galvanize voters to kick out people who are doing exactly what they were sent to Washington to do. Should be fun to watch, all the same.
In lighter news, Alex Jones is trying to pass off as a performance artist so he can convince the court that he is not, in fact, a complete lunatic so he can have custody of his children. This is yet another in a time honored tradition of right wing fuckwads building an audience by being uncompromising and meaning every word they say until suddenly, they don't mean anything at all, everything they do is all a sham. It never surprises me that these brave men of dignity and courage dump everything they've done at the first real sign of trouble, but I will admit to being shocked that there are so many people waiting to be duped by whatever shit-stain comes up to replace them and start the cycle all over again. Then again, there will always be a niche for people willing to tell millions of people that they're right to be ignorant assholes, so, there ya go.
I think that about does it for me this time, so, carry on, and try not get singed
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