Wonder Woman actually is the good step forward we've been waiting for in DC movies. It's a nice change of pace, but there's still kinks that need working out. Spoilers below the cut.
Sunday, June 4, 2017
Tuesday, May 16, 2017
We Aren't Better Than This
If I believed Donald was an intelligent human being, I'd say this last week was all part of some grand plan to get impeached so he can just go home already and not have to work so hard at being president. Telling the world that he flat-out fired the man in charge of investigating his campaigns ties to specifically because of said investigation would probably be enough, but, just to be safe, Trump went ahead and met with the Russian Foreign Minister and Ambassador (who is a key figure in said investigation, remember) which he barred American journalists from covering while allowing Russia state media to cover it and, just for the cherry-on-top, leaked out some confidential information just in case he wasn't selling the whole "I'm totally in the bag for these people" act hard enough.
Problem is, Trump is the President of the United States, so unless he holds a press conference in the Presidential Rose Garden confessing a decades-long practice of pedophilia with a live demonstration to go with it, that dude's not going anywhere. You know Trump isn't really a student of history when he thought something as chump change as obstruction of justice would be enough to get him thrown to the curb. His Republican predecessor started a war of aggression and launched an illegal domestic spying program and the worst thing that happened to him was almost choking on a pretzel that one time. Obama assassinated American citizens but everybody just kinda forgot about that since he did a good Al Green impression and made a nice Superman quip. Oh, and Obama also voted for the bill that retroactively made all the Bush-era bullshit legal before he expanded it and started his administration with 'Yeah, they did a lot of terrible things. But since I'm going to pretty much do the same things and then some we can't really hold them accountable so let's look forward, not backward.'
And it's not like Trump's private life showed any examples of powerful people being held responsible for their fuck-ups. All his Wall Street buddies who crashed the global economy by selling subprime mortgages they knew were garbage never even saw handcuffs, let alone jail time. And in the almost ten years since after laundering money for the Sinaloa cartel, rigging pretty much every market they were involved in, plus foreclosing on homes they didn't legally own, all of that was met with the Obama administration telling them they were literally too important to prosecute. Obviously we know how to make sure people suffer for their crimes and abuses of power, yes we do.
One does imagine that Congressional Republicans are privately giddy about the constant shit-storms emanating from the White House since the distractions make it absurdly difficult for them to get anything done. They'll bitch and moan in public about how they hate it just so much, you guys, but since Republicans can't really maintain the con that they care about the common people if they keep passing bills that actively makes said people's lives worse, there's no way they're going to do anything to stop Trump from being a daily punchline.
Surely electing the Democrats back into majority could stop this madness, right? Well, no. Because remember oh, say, eleven years ago when there was a widely despised Republican president doing horrific shit and Democrats promised that if America just gave them the chance they would make things right and hold the president's feet to the fire? No? That's okay, because nothing ever really came of it since once Democrats had their majority they went about rubber-stamping everything Bush did anyway. You could say that this time it'll be different, that Trump is a new kind of awful, they're bound to do the right thing this time, just you wait. And sure, you could say that, because I'm positive once Godot shows up and makes his special delivery of backbones and principles Democrats will step up to the plate and right all the wrongs they played a pivotal role in creating. You betcha.
What's most fascinating about Trump's presidency is how it's called forth this delusional picture of what the country was before he got elected. Liberals have been incessant in saying that Trump is Not NormalTM but, let's examine that. He won by inflaming white anger against the rest of society by playing into the sense that their well-being has been sacrificed at the altar of equality for the minorities. This has been Republican politics 101 since the Southern Strategy and Regan hooked up with the Religious Right fanatics. His immigration policy is basically "Deport like Obama did, add stupid wall." His foreign policy just escalates the wars Obama and Bush started, and his treatment of the press again is hardly anything more than just continuing on the path laid by his predecessors. Even the whole "possibly colluded with a hostile foreign power to get elected" thing isn't an original sin. Yet everyone wants to pretend that he's some radical new figure in our political culture that will distort it beyond repair if we let him continue.
No one really wants to face the fact that Trump is just a by-product of the all the twisted and corrupt policies and strategies the parties to championed for decades. Ever since 9/11 we've all watched as the presidency accumulated more and more dictatorial powers and even now, the discussion isn't really that no president should have that kind of power, but that Trump in particular can't have it. We need to find the right kind of president again, one who will entrench a Stasi-level surveillance state and 1984 level of global warfare in a dignified, respectable manner. Trump is nothing more than pus leaking from an infected wound, and all we're really focusing on is wiping it off and hoping the next piece of bile that trickles out doesn't reek so bad.
Problem is, Trump is the President of the United States, so unless he holds a press conference in the Presidential Rose Garden confessing a decades-long practice of pedophilia with a live demonstration to go with it, that dude's not going anywhere. You know Trump isn't really a student of history when he thought something as chump change as obstruction of justice would be enough to get him thrown to the curb. His Republican predecessor started a war of aggression and launched an illegal domestic spying program and the worst thing that happened to him was almost choking on a pretzel that one time. Obama assassinated American citizens but everybody just kinda forgot about that since he did a good Al Green impression and made a nice Superman quip. Oh, and Obama also voted for the bill that retroactively made all the Bush-era bullshit legal before he expanded it and started his administration with 'Yeah, they did a lot of terrible things. But since I'm going to pretty much do the same things and then some we can't really hold them accountable so let's look forward, not backward.'
And it's not like Trump's private life showed any examples of powerful people being held responsible for their fuck-ups. All his Wall Street buddies who crashed the global economy by selling subprime mortgages they knew were garbage never even saw handcuffs, let alone jail time. And in the almost ten years since after laundering money for the Sinaloa cartel, rigging pretty much every market they were involved in, plus foreclosing on homes they didn't legally own, all of that was met with the Obama administration telling them they were literally too important to prosecute. Obviously we know how to make sure people suffer for their crimes and abuses of power, yes we do.
One does imagine that Congressional Republicans are privately giddy about the constant shit-storms emanating from the White House since the distractions make it absurdly difficult for them to get anything done. They'll bitch and moan in public about how they hate it just so much, you guys, but since Republicans can't really maintain the con that they care about the common people if they keep passing bills that actively makes said people's lives worse, there's no way they're going to do anything to stop Trump from being a daily punchline.
Surely electing the Democrats back into majority could stop this madness, right? Well, no. Because remember oh, say, eleven years ago when there was a widely despised Republican president doing horrific shit and Democrats promised that if America just gave them the chance they would make things right and hold the president's feet to the fire? No? That's okay, because nothing ever really came of it since once Democrats had their majority they went about rubber-stamping everything Bush did anyway. You could say that this time it'll be different, that Trump is a new kind of awful, they're bound to do the right thing this time, just you wait. And sure, you could say that, because I'm positive once Godot shows up and makes his special delivery of backbones and principles Democrats will step up to the plate and right all the wrongs they played a pivotal role in creating. You betcha.
What's most fascinating about Trump's presidency is how it's called forth this delusional picture of what the country was before he got elected. Liberals have been incessant in saying that Trump is Not NormalTM but, let's examine that. He won by inflaming white anger against the rest of society by playing into the sense that their well-being has been sacrificed at the altar of equality for the minorities. This has been Republican politics 101 since the Southern Strategy and Regan hooked up with the Religious Right fanatics. His immigration policy is basically "Deport like Obama did, add stupid wall." His foreign policy just escalates the wars Obama and Bush started, and his treatment of the press again is hardly anything more than just continuing on the path laid by his predecessors. Even the whole "possibly colluded with a hostile foreign power to get elected" thing isn't an original sin. Yet everyone wants to pretend that he's some radical new figure in our political culture that will distort it beyond repair if we let him continue.
No one really wants to face the fact that Trump is just a by-product of the all the twisted and corrupt policies and strategies the parties to championed for decades. Ever since 9/11 we've all watched as the presidency accumulated more and more dictatorial powers and even now, the discussion isn't really that no president should have that kind of power, but that Trump in particular can't have it. We need to find the right kind of president again, one who will entrench a Stasi-level surveillance state and 1984 level of global warfare in a dignified, respectable manner. Trump is nothing more than pus leaking from an infected wound, and all we're really focusing on is wiping it off and hoping the next piece of bile that trickles out doesn't reek so bad.
Saturday, May 6, 2017
Settle in for the Slog
On Thursday, House Republicans passed a bill in what would be the first step in repealing the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare. Naturally, this caused a bit of a stir, but, really, don't freak out. We've got a long, long way to go here and the Senate fight to get this thing passed is more likely than not going to be even worse for Trump than the one in the House.
For one thing, the Senate isn't voting on the bill that just passed the House. All reports point to the Senate writing its own version of the bill which is going to take weeks if not months to get done. So even if the Senate bill passes in say, a month or two from now, the likely differences between the two versions will mean a legislative conference, which is another very long draw-out process, giving everyone plenty of time to rake Trump, the House, and Senate Republicans over the coals. So, yeah, the House bill is a bit of bad news, but in the long run, I think it's actually done them more harm than good.
The House bill was passed before anyone really had a chance to look at it or understand what its policy implications are. Now that it's moved on to the Senate, the bill is going to be put under a microscope. From early readings the new bill doesn't appear to be all that different from the version that got trotted out in March, so there's no way in hell the Senate is going to set themselves up for the same public backlash the House went through just to make Trump feel like he's accomplished something once the CBO weighs in and shows, yeah, millions of people are still likely to lose their insurance.
What also needs to be taken into consideration is the fact that the Senate will have to pass the bill on much thinner ground and under a much smaller majority than the House did; and even with all the built-in advantages to getting legislation through the House, we're basically starting this whole thing all over again with a much smaller margin of error. If Trump had to go balls-to-the-wall just to barely scrape something through the House, I don't really understand why anyone thinks the Senate will have an easier time of things.
We're in for the long haul here, so don't panic just yet. The previous incarnation of the bill was more unpopular than Congress itself (remember, Congress only has a 20% approval rating) and as the details of this new bill become clear, I doubt that number will change very much. To just sum things up, we're talking about an incredibly disliked bill that's still barely crawling to becoming a law. It'll be a bitter fight, no doubt, but it's not one that's going to be very easy for Trump and the Republicans to win.
For one thing, the Senate isn't voting on the bill that just passed the House. All reports point to the Senate writing its own version of the bill which is going to take weeks if not months to get done. So even if the Senate bill passes in say, a month or two from now, the likely differences between the two versions will mean a legislative conference, which is another very long draw-out process, giving everyone plenty of time to rake Trump, the House, and Senate Republicans over the coals. So, yeah, the House bill is a bit of bad news, but in the long run, I think it's actually done them more harm than good.
The House bill was passed before anyone really had a chance to look at it or understand what its policy implications are. Now that it's moved on to the Senate, the bill is going to be put under a microscope. From early readings the new bill doesn't appear to be all that different from the version that got trotted out in March, so there's no way in hell the Senate is going to set themselves up for the same public backlash the House went through just to make Trump feel like he's accomplished something once the CBO weighs in and shows, yeah, millions of people are still likely to lose their insurance.
What also needs to be taken into consideration is the fact that the Senate will have to pass the bill on much thinner ground and under a much smaller majority than the House did; and even with all the built-in advantages to getting legislation through the House, we're basically starting this whole thing all over again with a much smaller margin of error. If Trump had to go balls-to-the-wall just to barely scrape something through the House, I don't really understand why anyone thinks the Senate will have an easier time of things.
We're in for the long haul here, so don't panic just yet. The previous incarnation of the bill was more unpopular than Congress itself (remember, Congress only has a 20% approval rating) and as the details of this new bill become clear, I doubt that number will change very much. To just sum things up, we're talking about an incredibly disliked bill that's still barely crawling to becoming a law. It'll be a bitter fight, no doubt, but it's not one that's going to be very easy for Trump and the Republicans to win.
Friday, April 28, 2017
The Real Tragedy Here
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.
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.
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
Wednesday, March 15, 2017
That Didn't Last Very Long
Last Monday, Republicans revealed their long-talked about plan to replace Obamacare. By this Wednesday, the end-all-be-all plan has gone back to the drawing board to try and stave off the complete collapse of its support in the Republican party. It's almost like they just cobbled the thing together in the last few weeks instead of spending any of the almost seven years they've been railing about it to come up with an alternative. That's the kind of attitude and strategy you can trust in a government.
Much like the first Muslim ban, the scale and intensity of push back against the plan seems to have caught everyone completely off-guard; which, in context, is even worse this time around because the White House Office of Management and Budget wrote a report estimating that 26 million people would lose their coverage under the plan, which is two million more than the coffin-nail estimate the CBO did. So, armed with that knowledge, the best they could do was have Sean Spicer point at two piles of paper and say the smaller one is what Freedom looked like? Or have Paul Ryan stand in front of a pie-chart for the wonky conservative crowd and say how unfair it is for healthy people to pay for the treatment of sick people? Really? That's it?
Paul Ryan is saying that he and the other leaders of the party will "make the necessary improvements and refinements" to get the thing back on track. But I really don't see how that's going to improve the situation, at all. The main "improvements" I see them Ryan making is stripping away the already minimal tax credits that replaced the subsidies in the ACA and ending the Medicaid expansion in 2018 instead of 2020. Removing those is a play to get the support of the Freedom Caucus assholes whose main problem with the current bill is that it does too much to help people get insurance and want to kill Medicaid as fast as they possibly can. Problem with that, though, is that if the bill removes the tax credits but keeps the provision allowing insurers to charge the elderly five times what they charge the young will only keep more people from buying insurance and more than likely cause people who already have coverage to drop it because it would get too expensive. Obviously, ending the Medicaid expansion would also drop the amount of new people signing on, and if the cuts went into effect, would also cause the amount of uninsured people to spike immediately instead of nine years from now.
If Ryan goes that route, he's sure to gain the extremist votes he needs which may, theoretically, carry him through in the House. Except, those measures would send the moderate Republicans in both the House and Senate running for the hills, and Republicans simply cannot afford that. Under the Reconciliation rules they're trying to pass thing under, they just need a simple majority to make the bill law; but since they only have a 52-48 majority in the Senate, losing just two people makes the bill dead in the water and there at least four Senators who have already said they'd bail on the bill over the Medicaid cut. Maybe, maybe, with enough cajoling and threats, they could drag two back into line to force the 50-50 tie and have Mike Pence cast the tie-breaker vote. Relying on desperation saving throws is never a good policy plan, though, so that makes me think they'll try a second, more winding way around the problem.
When everyone had a chance to read the bill (oh the benefits of short legislation), instead of being the one-stop shop for all things healthcare, it suddenly became phase one of a suddenly three part plan to repeal-and-replace Obamacare. After the bill was passed, Tom Price was to write up some regulations at some point that could possibly make way for the selling of insurance across state lines leading to the big finale of some super-awesome legislation to cap it all off and make all the conservative wet dreams come true. That this is all cobbled-together bullshit to distract people was pointed out by none other than Iran-letter shithead Tom Cotton, who was quick to mention that 1. Any regulations created by the Health Secretary would be subject to legal challenges so there's no way Republicans could control that outcome and 2. If Republicans really had legislation they thought could get 60 votes in the Senate, that's what they'd be trying to pass right now. There wouldn't be any need for all this hoop-jumping if they already had the capability to execute that part of the plan.
Nevertheless, what I'm expecting to happen is Ryan will role out a more craven version of the current bill with some vague bullshit schedule for Phase 2 and Phase 3 to kick in. I'm sure they'll be suitably delayed until after the midterm elections, so that Republicans can have a better shot at building their majorities in Congress and better stack the bench with sympathetic judges, of course. In no way at all will it be a blatant stall tactic to dupe people into thinking he's actually trying to accomplish something, nope, not from him, stand-up guy that he is. I haven't mentioned the possibility that Ryan and the Trump White House will role all those things together in one grand bill and present it to Congress because, well, that simply isn't going to happen. If they did that, they'd be setting themselves up for at least a year-long debate much like the ACA went through with everything in the bill getting dragged across the coals every single day. There's no way in hell they'd set themselves up for that kind of punishment, not when they've already got their backs against the wall trying to cobble together a simple majority on a budget reconciliation measure. They're stupid, sure, but even I don't think they're that stupid.
The most enjoyable aspect of this whole thing, for me, is watching Republicans realize how completely and utterly they have fucked themselves over with all the fanatical rabble-rousing they did against Obamacare. Because now, if they pass this bill, it will wreck so much havoc against the old and poor white-working class that elected them that success puts them at legitimate risk of being eaten-alive by their own base. On the other hand, if they don't pass anything, that same base will have some very pointed questions about why, after over half-a-decade of promises to repeal the worst thing since slavery the second they got into power, a Republican President with a Republican Congress failed to even put a dent into Obamacare's existence. If Congress fails to pass a healthcare bill quickly, that political failure will hang over the rest of Trump's administration and it will be impossible for him to recover from. Every other signature policy initiative he rolls out will be overshadowed by his inability to follow-through on one of his main campaign promises. It'll drive the little baby President nuts, and he'll lash out more and more against the Congressional leaders who couldn't deliver for him. It's a nifty little noose they've all tied for themselves, here's hoping that when it closes, it's as snug as it looks.
Much like the first Muslim ban, the scale and intensity of push back against the plan seems to have caught everyone completely off-guard; which, in context, is even worse this time around because the White House Office of Management and Budget wrote a report estimating that 26 million people would lose their coverage under the plan, which is two million more than the coffin-nail estimate the CBO did. So, armed with that knowledge, the best they could do was have Sean Spicer point at two piles of paper and say the smaller one is what Freedom looked like? Or have Paul Ryan stand in front of a pie-chart for the wonky conservative crowd and say how unfair it is for healthy people to pay for the treatment of sick people? Really? That's it?
Paul Ryan is saying that he and the other leaders of the party will "make the necessary improvements and refinements" to get the thing back on track. But I really don't see how that's going to improve the situation, at all. The main "improvements" I see them Ryan making is stripping away the already minimal tax credits that replaced the subsidies in the ACA and ending the Medicaid expansion in 2018 instead of 2020. Removing those is a play to get the support of the Freedom Caucus assholes whose main problem with the current bill is that it does too much to help people get insurance and want to kill Medicaid as fast as they possibly can. Problem with that, though, is that if the bill removes the tax credits but keeps the provision allowing insurers to charge the elderly five times what they charge the young will only keep more people from buying insurance and more than likely cause people who already have coverage to drop it because it would get too expensive. Obviously, ending the Medicaid expansion would also drop the amount of new people signing on, and if the cuts went into effect, would also cause the amount of uninsured people to spike immediately instead of nine years from now.
If Ryan goes that route, he's sure to gain the extremist votes he needs which may, theoretically, carry him through in the House. Except, those measures would send the moderate Republicans in both the House and Senate running for the hills, and Republicans simply cannot afford that. Under the Reconciliation rules they're trying to pass thing under, they just need a simple majority to make the bill law; but since they only have a 52-48 majority in the Senate, losing just two people makes the bill dead in the water and there at least four Senators who have already said they'd bail on the bill over the Medicaid cut. Maybe, maybe, with enough cajoling and threats, they could drag two back into line to force the 50-50 tie and have Mike Pence cast the tie-breaker vote. Relying on desperation saving throws is never a good policy plan, though, so that makes me think they'll try a second, more winding way around the problem.
When everyone had a chance to read the bill (oh the benefits of short legislation), instead of being the one-stop shop for all things healthcare, it suddenly became phase one of a suddenly three part plan to repeal-and-replace Obamacare. After the bill was passed, Tom Price was to write up some regulations at some point that could possibly make way for the selling of insurance across state lines leading to the big finale of some super-awesome legislation to cap it all off and make all the conservative wet dreams come true. That this is all cobbled-together bullshit to distract people was pointed out by none other than Iran-letter shithead Tom Cotton, who was quick to mention that 1. Any regulations created by the Health Secretary would be subject to legal challenges so there's no way Republicans could control that outcome and 2. If Republicans really had legislation they thought could get 60 votes in the Senate, that's what they'd be trying to pass right now. There wouldn't be any need for all this hoop-jumping if they already had the capability to execute that part of the plan.
Nevertheless, what I'm expecting to happen is Ryan will role out a more craven version of the current bill with some vague bullshit schedule for Phase 2 and Phase 3 to kick in. I'm sure they'll be suitably delayed until after the midterm elections, so that Republicans can have a better shot at building their majorities in Congress and better stack the bench with sympathetic judges, of course. In no way at all will it be a blatant stall tactic to dupe people into thinking he's actually trying to accomplish something, nope, not from him, stand-up guy that he is. I haven't mentioned the possibility that Ryan and the Trump White House will role all those things together in one grand bill and present it to Congress because, well, that simply isn't going to happen. If they did that, they'd be setting themselves up for at least a year-long debate much like the ACA went through with everything in the bill getting dragged across the coals every single day. There's no way in hell they'd set themselves up for that kind of punishment, not when they've already got their backs against the wall trying to cobble together a simple majority on a budget reconciliation measure. They're stupid, sure, but even I don't think they're that stupid.
The most enjoyable aspect of this whole thing, for me, is watching Republicans realize how completely and utterly they have fucked themselves over with all the fanatical rabble-rousing they did against Obamacare. Because now, if they pass this bill, it will wreck so much havoc against the old and poor white-working class that elected them that success puts them at legitimate risk of being eaten-alive by their own base. On the other hand, if they don't pass anything, that same base will have some very pointed questions about why, after over half-a-decade of promises to repeal the worst thing since slavery the second they got into power, a Republican President with a Republican Congress failed to even put a dent into Obamacare's existence. If Congress fails to pass a healthcare bill quickly, that political failure will hang over the rest of Trump's administration and it will be impossible for him to recover from. Every other signature policy initiative he rolls out will be overshadowed by his inability to follow-through on one of his main campaign promises. It'll drive the little baby President nuts, and he'll lash out more and more against the Congressional leaders who couldn't deliver for him. It's a nifty little noose they've all tied for themselves, here's hoping that when it closes, it's as snug as it looks.
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