Freodom

HKIRBBTL: First blood! Brutes-Buccaneers 1-0

2012-01-27T09:00:00.007+02:00

Here's the play-by-play from the first game in the league!

HOME Blood River Buccaneers: Score= 0, Fame=0, MVP= #7 Mordak Blackheart, Winnings= 50,000 gp
AWAY Braga's Brutes: Score= 1, Fame=1, MVP= #10 Slib'ry Ands, Winnings= 80,000 gp
Weather: Nice
Fans: 10,000

1st HALF (Buccaneers kicking):
Kick off = High Kick / #11 Galhag catches
T1: #1 Braga starts game with double skulls, uses reroll
T4: #1 Braga blitzes #8 Nasty Narsil into the crowd
T6: #1 Braga blocks #4 Mornil -> SI=serious concussion -1AV (Braga da 'Ed Bash'a thumps his chest and roars "Wesha be doing in yar nogin!!!")
T7: #11 Galhag uses last re-roll to dodge...and it's a TD!
Kick off = High Kick / #11 Clarius Vile catches
T7: #7 Mordak Blackheart KOs #10 Slib'ry Ands
T8: #11 Clarius Vile tries to earn an easy SPP via Quick Pass, but fumbles

2nd HALF (Brutes kicking / Buccaneers short handed, 9 players
Kick Off = High Kick / #11 Clarius Vile catches
T2: #5 Sorgask blitzes the ball carrier #11 Clarius Vile with 1 die who then Dumps-Off to #2 Tyrim
T3: Inaccurate pass by #2 Tyrim, #1 Braga fails interception -> TURNOVER
T3: #10 Slib'ry Ands picks up the ball
T5: #2 Tyrim blitzes and KOs ball carrier Slib'ry Ands(#10), both down -> TURNOVER
T5: #6 Urghuk blitzes #11 Clarius Vile -> BH...revenge for the dump-off
T6: #4 Azgrum KOs #10 Athlan Icecold ...no pun intended
T7: #14 Khali fails to dodge from #8 Galoth -> KO / TURNOVER

Final score: Brutes 1 - Buccaneers 0.

**

League table: [pts, goal differential, casualty differential, fatalities]

Brutes (1-0-0) 3 pts, 1-0 goal dif, 2-0 cas., 0 fatalities
Buccaneers (0-1-0) 0 pts, 0-1, 0-2, 0
Lizards (0-0-0)
Murderers (0-0-0)
Mutants (0-0-0)
Ravens (0-0-0)
Titans (0-0-0)

Individual statistics:

Touchdowns:

Galhag (Brutes): 1

Casualties:

Braga da 'Ed Bash'a (Brutes): 1
Urghuk (Brutes): 1

Completions:

Clarius Vile (Buccaneers): 1

Sacks:

Tyrim (Buccaneers): 1

Hitler hears Frontside Ollie

2012-01-23T09:00:00.001+02:00

Here's a little something for our readers in Finland.

Ravens-Patriots preview

2012-01-22T09:00:00.003+02:00

The AFC title is on the line today, and we'll be watching. My buddy Aaro supports the Ravens, but according to her Twitter account, the beautiful Gemma Atkinson supports the Patriots.

That's all I got, folks. Enjoy the game!

Sweden and Finland still enforcing mandatory sterilization

2012-01-20T09:00:00.002+02:00

There's been a campaign going on in Sweden for a good while to change a law that requires people undergoing a sex change to be sterilized (read more here). Unfortunately, the Swedish Christian Democrat party is stopping the reform from happening. Meanwhile, in Finland, we have an identical law, but no-one cares, so there isn't even a campaign against it.

There was a pretty good text on the whole thing here, and I blogged about the Finnish legislation earlier (in Finnish) here.

SOPA and all that: the view from Finland

2012-01-18T11:00:00.001+02:00

Yeah, I'm not blacked out because I'm lazy. But I'm delighted that so many websites, from Wikipedia on down, are protesting the idiotic legislation proposed in the US. US laws on copyright and the Internet make a huge difference for the rest of the world as well, especially since if the US passes a law like this, European legislators will inevitably use that as momentum to pass similar ones here, if they're not directly pressured into it by the States.

We in Finland should be especially wary, as we've had some nightmarish experiences with Internet censorship before. One of the first posts I made in this blog was a very poorly written rant on the Finnish "child pornography" censorship bill, which permitted the Finnish state police to set up a secret blacklist of foreign child pornography sites that ISPs would be voluntarily forced to block access to. Shortly after the list was launched, a Finnish website criticizing this was put on the list, in blatant violation of the law. After years in court and endless obfuscation by the Finnish police, the Finnish justice system decided that it had, in fact, been wrong to censor a Finnish page containing no child pornography under a law that allows censoring foreign-based child pornography websites. However, none of the police officers responsible could be reprimanded in any way, as they can't be expected to understand the laws they enforce. I'm not making that up.

So the previous time Finland tried a censorship blacklist, it took literally days to expand beyond its original purpose into censoring criticism of the police and government. In the same decade, in a country where smashing a disabled person's head into the wall while raping them doesn't get you a prison sentence, creating parody blogs does. Last year, the Finnish police requested a law banning "approving" discussions of child pornography, and of course, we now have Internet censorship again with the Pirate Bay ban. So in effect, Finland already has SOPA.

By the way, if you criticize any of this, the MPAA thinks you're a corporate pawn.

In the middle of all this, it would be good to remember that I'm writing this blog post on Blogger, and because of Sweden's FRA law, the Swedish military can read this as it's written, along with my personal e-mails and everything else I do online. Lately, some US jurisdictions have started shutting down cellphone services to hinder demonstrations, and similar moves are mooted in the UK.

The defining struggle of our time is between a "total state", bent on using information technology to monitor and regulate everything we do, and between a civil society that paradoxically uses that same technology to create new forms of communication that constantly elude those controls. Put simply, I believe that in the long run, our alternatives are an Orwellian surveillance state or a free information society. Will information technology be used to repress us or liberate us? That's what this is about, and it's the most important political struggle of our age.

HKIRBBTL 2012 season

2012-01-18T09:00:00.007+02:00

I'm very pleased to announce the start of the inaugural season of the Helsinki-Kotka Interregional Blood Bowl Turboleague! We have seven participating teams:

3rd Street Mutants (Chaos)
Blood River Buccaneers (Dark Elf)
Braga's Brutes (Orc)
Mephala's Murderers (Dark Elf)
Ragnarock Ravens (Norse)
Tin Lizards (Lizardmen)
Tor Achare Titans (High Elf)

The regular season starts now! Each team will play two games against every opponent, and when the regular season is over, all seven teams will be sorted into playoff brackets, with the regular season winner skipping the first round and teams reseeded after the first round. A win is worth three points in the standings, a loss none and if the game is tied after regulation, no overtime will be played and one point is awarded to each team for a tie. The standings will be posted here regularly, along with player statistics and hopefully some kind of game recaps.

Let's play!

HKIRBBTL: Blood River Buccaneers

2012-01-16T09:00:00.012+02:00

More teams! This time, the Dark Elf Blood River Buccaneers.

Roster:

#2 Tyrim (lineman)
#3 Malsadrian (lineman)
#4 Mornil (lineman)
#5 Hehtar (lineman)
#6 Galfir (lineman)
#7 Mordak Blackheart (blitzer)
#8 Nasty Narsil (blitzer)
#9 Avil Darksoul (blitzer)
#10 Athlan Icecold (blitzer)
#11 Clarius Vile (runner)
#14 Khali (lineman)

Head coach: Mikhos Avolathir

The team has two re-rolls, for a total value of 1,000,000 gp.

HKIRBBTL: Mephala's Murderers

2012-01-13T09:00:00.001+02:00

Introducing the Dark Elf team Mephala's Murderers:

The roster:

1 Dranas Dradas, blitzer
2 Nina, blitzer
5 Giron Manas, runner
7 Shishi Yanumibaal, witch elf
9 Balyn Omavel, assassin
11 Vatollia Apo, lineman
12 Assaba-Bentus, lineman
13 Tussurradad, lineman
14 Abassel Asserbassalit, lineman
15 Nilos Talds, lineman
16 Savure Uvalor, lineman

Head Coach: Eno Hlaalu

The team has two rerolls for a total starting cost of 1,000,000 gp.

HKIRBBTL: Braga's Brutes

2012-01-11T09:00:00.006+02:00

I'm very happy to introduce the next team to sign up for the Helsinki-Kotka Interregional Blood Bowl Turboleague: Braga's Brutes.

And here, from the coach himself, is the roster and some background:

01. Braga da 'Ed Bash'a (Black Orc)
02. Morgur (Black Orc)
03. Roflog (Black Orc)
04. Azgrum (Black Orc)
05. Sorgask (Blitzer)
06. Urghuk (Blitzer)
07. Grambad (Blitzer)
08. Galoth (Blitzer)
09. Grab da Bol (Thrower)
10. Slib'ry Ands (Thrower)
11. Galhag (Lineman)

Plus two re-rolls and an apothecary, for a total team value of 1,000,000 gold.

Coach: Braga da 'Ed Bash'a (yes, he actually plays on the pitch)

Team slogan: Wesha be doing in yar nogin!

"Staggering out of the Blasted Wastes came one of the the mightiest warlords of orc history, Grimgor Ironhide. His renowned bodyguards, or "Immortulz" as they are known in orcish legend, were made of the strongest, most battle-hardened and meanest Black Orc you could find in all the Old World. 'Braga da 'Ed Bash'a was one of them. Traders from distant lands like Araby and Cathay say that a Bash'a translates into king...maybe they're onto something. But frankly, Braga made his name by...well simply just by "bashing" his enemies heads in like a child would smash two tomatoes together.

The sands of time filled the hourglass and Grimgor once again became furiously bored with the mundane warfare between what he refers to as fickel races, such as "humie's", "stunty's" and "da pointy 'eerd folk". Grimgor, a colossus even within orcish standards, beckoned his strongest and most feared Black Orc bodyguard to step forth. Braga approached and knelt humbly before his chief. Just the other day these two bashed heads in the clearing in front of 'Da Bosses Hut'. Which was of course tradition if one was to challenge the current occupant of the throne. As was well expected, Braga lost the gruesome brawl. Being a sadistic piece of boar-dung, Grimgor left Braga alive to writhe in shame. The battered, and now slightly smaller (shame is evident) orc begged to know how he could please his master and make up for his former wrongdoings. The war boss grabbed Braga by the neck and hoisted him up from the ground, just as a gatherer would pick up a mushroom. He then bellowed; "Yousha be go to dat Blaad Bawl thingy dat every 'un iz babblin' about n' bring glory in me name! Maybe den I iz can forget why I iz give ya all doze bruizes! I also 'erd dat they iz make good loot in thouz gamez! Yousha fill them trophy cups to da brim with shinies or yer 'ed'll be on the mantle piece!!!"
Braga realized that if he succeeded, this could be a chance to get back to Grimgor's revered personal guard. In the process, he could also accomplish something only a few orcs in the Old World could even think of (so not that many of them); world wide glory amongst all races of the Old World and maybe one day he could earn the right for a rematch against the indomitable Grimgor Ironhide.

The next morning Grimgor found himself awoken for some reason. He could hear commotion outside his hut like it was happening right inside his head, he had obviously drunk too much at the great feast last night and now was suffering the horrid aftereffects. Slowly rising to his feet and shuffling towards his huts porch, he shoved aside the two bodyguards stationed at his doorway. Squinting as the sunshine hit his eyes, he leaned against the door frame and held the curtains aside. At once he saw what the ruckus was all about. An armored Braga was marching out of the stronghold. The common folk had formed an angry crowd at the gates, this was to be expected for losing a challenge in such a demeaning fashion. They started throwing dung and rotten provisions at him while screaming profanities at the top of their lungs. Interestingly enough, there was also a peculiar looking group following closely in Braga's wake. They seemed to be reluctantly a part of this apparent expedition. Grimgor thought to himself that Braga probably had to have bribed, twist a few arms and call in some favors to muster this sorry looking bunch. The exiting band was made of Black Orc, Big 'Uns, Goblin, a Stone Troll and everything green in between. The half-drunk war chief snorted aloud; "Hah! Braga, ya old fool! Wif dat circus behind ya, yer 'ed'll be decoratin' me fireplace in no time!"

Thus began the journey to Blood Bowl for Braga and his Brutes...WAAAGH! help us all."

Brad Marchand's hit on Sami Salo

2012-01-10T09:00:00.003+02:00

Brad Marchand got a whopping five-game suspension for his hit on Sami Salo, and yes, when I say whopping, I'm being sarcastic. Marchand is a repeat offender, and he's either deliberately trying to injure Salo or playing so recklessly that he doesn't care if Salo gets injured. Here's the hit:

The video is labelled "hip check", which is nonsense. That's clipping, as defined in the rules and as explained by Brendan Shanahan in the suspension video. Some Bruins fans are, unsurprisingly, complaining about the suspension, insisting that it was a hip check and comparing it to some of the hits the Canucks threw in the finals. Here's the most common comparison:

The Hamhuis hit is a hip check, the Marchand hit is clipping. It's really as simple as that. I'd even opine that if you can't see the difference between Marchand's hip check on a player with the puck and Marchand's clip, you may need to try some mental exercises, like swapping the players' jerseys in your head as you watch the videos. Even if you thought that Marchand's hit was a hip check, Salo doesn't have the puck when he's hit.

For Bruins fans to believe that they're somehow being constantly and horribly mistreated by the league is perfectly understandable, as they're constantly exposed to the lunatic hallucinations of the most repulsive play-by-play announcer in hockey, Jack Edwards. NESN broadcasts don't define reality for the rest of us, though, and those of us outside the Bruin bubble might wonder at the fact that the suspension was only five games. That, combined with the incredible non-suspension of Milan Lucic after running Buffalo's Ryan Miller, makes one more inclined to think that on the contrary, the Bruins are getting specially lenient treatment from Brendan Shanahan. Overall, though, THN's Adam Proteau is almost certainly right in believing that the whole system is simply ineffective.

**

Whenever there's a suspension on a dirty hit, let alone talk about stricter enforcement of the rules, someone who may or may not play an imaginary piano on Hockey Night in Canada pipes up about how "they're trying to take hitting out of the game". In one sense, they're absolutely right: there are people trying to take hitting out of the game. Here's one:

USA Today: Boston Bruins Team Report

But coach Claude Julien knows Marchand can take it too far. And that's what happened Saturday, when his clipping major and game misconduct led to two goals that helped the Canucks post a 4-3 win over the Bruins.

Asked to assess whether he player stepped over the line on that hit, the coach said, "The last thing I want my players to do is get hit and then end up with a concussion, and they have to protect themselves. Whether it's the right way or the wrong way, it'll depend on how the league looks at it.

"I'd rather have a guy take a two-minute penalty than turn his back to the play, stand up straight, and then get his face knocked into the glass and be out for maybe the rest of the year with a concussion, or maybe end his career like (Marc) Savard. So I think we have to really look at those kinds of things.

"In my opinion, if guys start protecting themselves the way Marchand did, maybe guys will stop taking runs at other guys because that's the consequences you end up paying for taking runs at guys, too. Who knows where we're going to go with this. I know we're all trying hard to fix that part of the game, but it's still there, and it's still not fixed."

Wait, what? Taking runs at guys? Never mind that Salo is trying to play the puck, not "take a run" at anyone. Even ignoring that, what Julien's saying is that he's fine with his players clipping an opponent to avoid being hit. By no stretch of the imagination is Marchand trying to protect himself from a hit; he's trying to injure the other player. To bring up Matt Cooke's hit on Marc Savard as some kind of justification for Marchand's actions is borderline insane.

Overall, Julien's comment is the latest example of a bizarre line of thinking that seems to maintain that NHL players aren't allowed to deliver bodychecks on the ice. That's what he's saying: he's fine with his player making a dirty play and injuring an opponent to avoid being hit. This is the same philosophy that leads to the idiotic after-the-whistle scrums and fights when a "star player" gets hit: coaches and players who believe that no-one should be allowed to hit their players. Julien goes an extra mile in trying to justify a blatant attempt to injure another player.

It's especially telling that the suspension video includes an example of Sami Salo and Brad Marchand making contact in a similar situation, where Marchand seemingly becomes irate after a completely clean hit by Salo. Clearly he feels that Euro punk has no business hitting him, and teaches him a lesson next time. It's ludicrous to imply that Marchand was so frightened of a Sami Salo bodycheck that he was trying to turtle down to protect himself. On the contrary, I believe he deliberately set out to injure Salo for having the gall to throw a bodycheck on him. These are the only people trying to take hitting out of the game.

Just for added value, here's Brad Marchand doing exactly the same thing to a Sedin last year:

I suppose Claude Julien would argue that he was so frightened of being hit and concussed by one of the Sedin twins that he had to protect himself.

If you want me to express things in the heteronormative way that imaginary-piano players prefer, I'd say that Marchand needs to man up and take the hit, not try to hurt the other guy. It's rats like Marchand who draw the ire of people like Brian Burke, even if Burke's notions of the players policing the game are rubbish. Julien defending Marchand's actions is reprehensible, and putting forward the astonishing notion that he was trying to protect himself from Marc Savard's fate is ridiculous. Like his players, he seems to have no class at all. From retired veteran Mark Recchi badmouthing the Canucks after winning the final to the antics of young players like Lucic and Marchand, the Bruins are turning into an organization as repulsive as their TV announcer.

As far as I'm concerned!

2012-01-09T09:00:00.002+02:00

HKIRBBTL: Tor Achare Titans

2012-01-02T09:00:00.007+02:00

This is the team I'll be starting the Helsinki-Kotka Interregional Blood Bowl Turboleague with: the High Elf Tor Achare Titans, representing the capital of the province of Chrace in Ulthuan.

I can't paint; it remains to be seen if I can play. Here's the roster:

1 Finrod Angamairë, blitzer
2 Teclis Turukáno, blitzer
3 Beleg Strongarm, thrower
9 Carecalmo, lineman
10 Ilmiril Telinturco, lineman
11 Lindir Salgant, lineman
12 Morelion Tethlis, lineman
13 Caryarel Mothril, lineman
14 Meryaren, lineman
15 Orodreth Ecthelion, lineman
16 Ulundil, lineman

Head coach: T.Rex

With three team re-rolls, the total starting cost is exactly 1,000,000 gold.

2011 in review

2011-12-30T09:00:00.010+02:00

Another year gone by. What did we get up to in 2011?

* We did our best to promote Goblin Camp, with a let's play kind of thing and a bunch of other posts. The game is still a going concern, and although there hasn't been an update for a while, I'm assured there will be. Eventually. Back in February, I put together really epic camp. The website is here; if you haven't tried it, do.

* There was an election in Finland, that led to no noticeable changes in Finnish politics. We have some really good-looking athletes, though.

* They killed 'Usāmah; I was skeptical about that being the death-blow to terrorism. Sadly, terrorism took a different turn shortly thereafter with the senseless attacks in Norway, the background to which we discussed. Steve Jobs also passed away, and we felt that his eulogies went too far.

* Throughout the year, we were alarmed by the police, as despite the death of "Osama", new threats to our precious bodily fluids continued to emerge. To combat these, we got everything from American police UAVs and the German police going all Gestapo on the German Pirate Party to the Finnish police hacking your phone. I also lost faith in Radley Balko, of The Agitator, for hithcing up with the Kremlin's propaganda machine, and my post on the topic inspired a TV show host to discuss my underwear.

* There was a lot of Minecraft. At the beginning of the year, I was still hanging around Epic Island, and we were impressed by music. We also weighed in on the Mojang - Zenimax legal battle.

* Apart from Minecraft, we liked Harms Way, but were disappointed by Mass Effect 2 being a sexist white supremacist game and by EA's various antics. The future looked bleak. In other media, we liked Detroit 1-8-7 and Sucker Punch, as well as the fantastic Robot.

* We all enjoyed some excellent music!

* Some memes were participated in, and scientology was addressed. We also started a series of posts on the Bible.

* There was, of course, a lot of hockey. At the very beginning of the year, the wrong guy was made MVP of the World Juniors, and later on Winnipeg got an NHL team. Sadly, our favorite NHL player called it quits. However, there were the world champs. In my preview, I had a good feeling about Team Finland, and even though Mats Sundin assured us it was impossible, Finland actually won. We were a little disappointed by the overblown coverage given to one particular goal, though.

Sadly, in the words of Jonathan Toews, the summer of 2011 was the worst ever for hockey. Not only did three NHL players pass away during the summer, but the plane carrying the KHL's Lokomotiv Yaroslavl team crashed, killing the whole team. Earlier this month, the New York Times published a series of stories on Derek Boogaard, an NHL enforcer who died last summer. I highly recommend reading them.

**

Maybe that's a bit of a sad note to end this post on, but as the new year comes around, it won't hurt to take a moment to remember those who aren't around to see it happen. Having said that, though, I'd like to thank everyone who read this sorry excuse for a blag over the past year, and wish you all a happy new year! See you in 2012.

Minecraft Boxing Day!

2011-12-26T09:00:00.023+02:00

Since it's boxing day, we'd best start with a picture of a boxer.

Her name is Fatima Adib, and like Batroc the Leaper and me, her martial art of choice is savate, in which she won the 2008 European Championship in her weight class. I ran into a picture of her while image searching "savate", so that's all I know. Isn't she cute?

**

And now, Minecraft. I complained earlier about the endermen in Beta 1.8, who would pick up blocks, including bedrock. While I was strongly tempted by the idea of putting out all the lights in my pit and seeing if the endermen would really dig a hole through the bedrock, I decided the smart thing to do is run away before endermen break all my stuff. So that's what I did.

I'm heading west, toward the sunset and away from Epic Island. As I'm going to be staying on the move, this will be a very visual post.

There's my first tower on the right, and the new tower on the left, flanking the rising sun. After spending most of the day walking west, I found a nice little cubbyhole with a small coal deposit in it, and decided to spend my first night there:

Here's what it looks like from the outside.

Turns out good old Mount Impossible, which I first visited ages ago, is just around the corner:

Here's the view to the west of Mount Impossible.

As I was looking at that lovely pine forest, I couldn't help noticing that there was rather a sheer drop below me...

That's where I took the previous screenshot from. Now, I'm no programmer, but it occurs to me that I might have encountered the edge where the terrain generated under the old system ends.

I'm not complaining; I think it's cool.

There was even a bit of a cave in the previous chunk, which opened onto the water but wasn't flooded by it:

Making an excellent location for an underwater base!

We move on, into the desert:

Since the desert looks kinda boring, I decided to walk through the woods next to it. That turned out to be more hazardous than I expected:

Here's another innovation: shears. As something of an animal rights person, I heartily endorse the new Minecraft, where you no longer get wool by punching sheep.

Eventually the forest gives way to a rolling plain, where I built a house. But what's that in the distance?

It's an NPC village!

Only pigs roam the deserted streets of NPC Village...

...and the houses are empty.

But their crops are doing okay.

This is a church. I do not approve.

The only good thing is that it has a tower.

Here's the view from it.

Getting back to the good things for a moment, there are now also proper oceans.

And, frighteningly, ravines. I nearly fell into that one!

Because it's turned into something of a habit, I'll finish off my sightseeing tour of the new biomes with a sunset.

Next up: my home away from home, and proof that the Endermen really are terrorists.

Happy Yule!

2011-12-23T09:00:00.003+02:00

Four years ago, I started this blog with a post titled There's no such thing as Christmas, and I'm here to remind everyone, once again, to stop trying to put your Christ into our pagan winter solstice festival. There's no such thing as Jesus, either, because he's made up and never lived. If you want to celebrate a made-up character, go right ahead, but don't act like you own the winter solstice. It and the celebration that goes with it was around before any current religion, and will be around when they've been consigned to the rubbish heap of history where they belong.

Speaking of history, by the way, here's some. Enjoy.

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

Read more on Wikipedia, if you're interested. Happy Yule, everybody!

One more year

2011-12-21T09:00:00.001+02:00

Nibiru, sisters: it's just a year away.

Yuletide game review grabbag

2011-12-19T09:00:00.009+02:00

Shopping for presents? There's a lot of great second-hand and discount XBox 360 games out there, including ones I've played over the last year or so and have sort of meant to review on this blog but never got around to doing, so here they are. Pictures provided by the cast of Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3, or as I still maintain it should be known as, Dune 2 2 2 3.

Blood Bowl: Playing Cyanide's Blood Bowl is the most fun I've ever had with such a hideously badly made game. It's ugly, the interface is clunky, there are bugs galore and the overall quality is just appalling. While PC users got the "Legendary Edition" featuring all the teams from LRB5 except Chaos Dwarves (?!!), XBox players have to make do with only eight teams, but can download Dark Elves for Microsoft points. The AI, of course, is mind-bogglingly stupid, and you can't compensate for that by playing online as apparently that just doesn't work.

Even though the game is basically rubbish, and in places insultingly badly made, it's still damn good fun. There's some kind of real-time mode that I've never tried, because the basic game simply is Blood Bowl, and it delivers. Somehow the game is enjoyable enough that despite all its flaws, I like playing it. I'd say it's definitely worth picking up on the cheap.

Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3: Around here, you can get this for something like 10e or less. Do, because although the single player campaigns are fairly short, they're great fun. For the ridiculously low price this is retailing for, it's great value for money.

F1 2010: Be clever and pick up the previous edition for cheap instead of dishing out an obscene 70e or whatever new games are being sold for these days. This is an awesome game. There are realism and difficulty settings that let you customize the driving experience, and you get to work on the car set-ups just enough to keep an F1 fan happy. When you turn everything up to as high a level of realism as you can handle, driving even a half-length Grand Prix is an awesome experience. I highly recommend it. The game makes you feel like you're driving an F1 car, and really, that's all you need.

Batman: Arkham Asylum: Now that Batman: Arkham City is out, do yourself a favor and pick up its excellent predecessor. The best superhero game by miles since that one decent Spider-Man game for the old XBox.

Space Marine: I may do a proper review of this yet, but for now, I'll just say that it apparently did poorly, like all GW games tend to, and is available on the cheap. It's definitely worth getting at a reduced price: if Gears of War was fun, it would be Space Marine. I'm thoroughly enjoying it.

I think that's about it. If you want more game reviews, read Arcadian Rhythms.

Happy birthday to Hanna-Maria Seppälä!

2011-12-13T09:00:00.002+02:00

Join me in wishing a happy birthday for Finland's hottest athelete, the gorgeous Hanna-Maria Seppälä.

The 2011 Brooks Orpik Hypocrisy Award

2011-12-12T09:00:00.006+02:00

It's that time again: we award our blog's annual award for the most dishonest and hypocritical public statement made by a professional sportsperson. The selection is rather obviously biased toward the sports we follow most, and those tend to be ice hockey and F1.

**

We already mentioned McLaren's ridiculous hypocrisy about team orders last year, citing the 2008 German Grand Prix, where then-McLaren driver Heikki Kovalainen was ordered to let Lewis Hamilton pass him. Hamilton won the title that year, and in 2010, told the BBC that there are no team orders at McLaren, and:

"I personally would not want to win the championship other than by winning it fairly."

Hamilton won the 2008 world championship by one point. Arguably, had Heikki not let him past at Hockenheim, he wouldn't have won that race, and that might have cost him the championship. There is, of course, the additional matter of the incident at Singapore; had the results been amended and Alonso disqualified, as he should have been, Massa would be world champion.

I don't generally like these kinds of what ifs, but I like hypocrisy even less. So given that Lewis's championship stands on the Singapore incident and the team order at Hockenheim, we're still waiting for him to relinquish his world championship.

**

Another excellent candidate would be Milan Lucic, whom I've previously maligned on this blog. Earlier this fall, he hit Sabres goaltender and reigning Olympic MVP Ryan Miller, who's been out since with a concussion.

Lucic still isn't much of a tough guy. While visiting NESN, Don Cherry called Milan Lucic "a disgrace to the Bruins" for hiding behind the linesmen in a fight:

It's priceless how uncomfortable Mike Milbury is. Last season, Lucic punched Atlanta's Freddy Meyer while he was being restrained by a linesman, keeping up the trend. In addition to being a dirty player in general and having been suspended by the league before, Lucic deliberately hit Miller and only got a two-minute penalty for charging. There's fairly wide consensus that he sohuld have got a five-minute major and a suspension, but NHL disciplinarian Brendan Shanahan dropped the ball and, incredibly, said he believed Lucic's ridiculous lie that he didn't hit Miller on purpose.

As TSN's Dave Hodge said, "in the end, it was easier for Lucic to avoid a suspension than to avoid Miller because he tried to avoid a suspension." Because of his behavior in general and the incredible hypocrisy of claiming he tried to avoid Miller, it would be tempting to give this one to Lucic.

**

Neither of them, however, win the award this year. In fact, this year the Brooks Orpik Hypocrisy Award returns to its roots in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. And we're going after the cigarette-smoking Next One himself.

Over the past year, no single instance of ridiculous hypocrisy has struck us as more over-the-top and sanctimonious than Mario Lemieux's diatribe against fighting. You can read the whole thing here. He was supposedly so disgusted that the New York Islanders got into fights with his Pittsburgh Penguins that he contemplated leaving hockey. This from the man whose organization employs one of the dirtiest players in the NHL, Matt Cooke, and the guy whose back-breaking antics brought about this very award. Also, his team was tied for second place for most fighting majors in the NHL regular season that year. So apparently, in Super Mario's books, his team gets to fight as much as they like and go headhunting for their opponents' stars, but when others do it, it makes Baby Mario cry. Disgusting.

So the runaway winner this year is Mario Lemieux, of the Pittsburgh Penguins.

**

The Brooks Orpik Hypocrisy Award is given by the writers of this blog to the athlete who makes the most preposterously hypocritical comment of the year.

Previous winners:

2010 - Lewis Hamilton, Vodafone McLaren Mercedes, F1
2009 - Brooks Orpik, Pittsburgh Penguins, NHL

Disagreement as violence

2011-12-09T09:00:00.003+02:00

Last month, I wrote a post on this blog titled Dependency theory and conspiracy theory in response to one of Flavia Dzodan's posts at Tiger Beatdown. I left a comment there with a link to my post, and was a little disappointed when they chose not to publish that comment.

With that in mind, I was interested when Ms. Dzodan posted another text, this time on moderating comments: The troll is dead! Foxnewsification and the notion that all points of view are valuable. Again, I think that text makes several very good points:

I would venture that the internet troll took the first deathly blow in 2001 when hateful anti Islamic rhetoric became acceptable in most media. What was once brushed off as “trolling” became the standard. We saw the incendiary language get worse every day, certain slurs that were usually reserved for the back rooms of hateful sites repeated on news hours, commenting sections of news sites, blogs, etc. Any challenge to this bigotry used to be met with a chorus of “FREEDOM OF SPEECH!” utterances. As if every form of speech deserved a platform everywhere, as if it was the obligation of site moderators to allow any content without critical thinking. As if all content was equal.

As someone who runs two blogs whose comments sections are moderated, I wholeheartedly agree. I get my share of personal attacks, and judging from the behavior of one of my Pirate Party comrades in the social media recently, I made him very angry indeed when I refused to publish a series of long-winded comments he left on a piece in my Finnish-language blog. There was a simple reason for that decision: he offered no counter-arguments to what I wrote, except to claim either that I was lying or that I was expounding "feminist lies" and being irrational. That isn't a counterargument, that's a personal attack, and I'm under no obligation to publish those. My blogs aren't a discussion forum. The reason I moderate comments at all is because when I started writing about immigration and racism, my blogs started to overflow with nearly identical ideological commentary, mostly consisting of personal attacks and trolling, from Finland's organized racists and their "useful idiots". So I basically agree with Ms. Dzodan: not all points of view need to be aired on every forum.

However, because my comment had just been rejected on her blog, I approached Ms. Dzodan's piece a little more skeptically than I might otherwise have. In her lead-in, when she describes the kind of objectionable contents Tiger Beatdown receives, here's what she lists:

However, MatrixMansplainer is not alone. We got a whole bunch of them on the Black Pete post. People who would accuse me of racism against Dutch people; those who would inform me that I should fuck off to whichever hellhole I came from; those who would write 800+ word comments explaining the many ways I was wrong; privilege deniers; garden variety White supremacists; rape threatening dudes.

My boldface.

Wait a minute. Racism, white supremacism, threats of rape and... disagreeing at length?

She then goes on to compare comments like this (racist, violent and, um, long) directly to violence:

We created “safe spaces” with varying degrees of editorial control. However, I have to wonder why are not all news sites and major blogs made “safe”? If in any other environment, people felt systematically unsafe, we would demand immediate change and measures of protection. If a club, a venue, a public space allowed people to be subjected to violence without actually taking counter measures, such places would most likely be shut down due to public outcry. However, this is what our media does.

She then quotes a comments policy from another site, and I totally agree with the quote:

A variety of points of view is all to the good, but a mere opinion not backed up by facts, reasoning or analysis is unlikely to get through. Moreover, not all points of view are valuable.

And goes on:

“Not all points of view are valuable”. This needs to be repeated. Any point of view that actively seeks to alienate, oppress or bully someone does not deserve to be exposed.

I'd be totally okay with this, if only my comment hadn't been left unpublished and my counterargument been ignored. I've re-read it, and for the life of me, I can't figure out where I was seeking to alienate, oppress or bully anyone. If there's any uncertainty on this, I can say that I certainly wasn't trying to do any of those things.

All this puts a slightly new spin on something Ms. Dzodan said in the comments section to the post I was trying to comment on:

For this one piece, I’ll make one thing clear: I am not going to approve any comments that base their critique on the idea that I am speaking out of “ignorance” and that I have no clue of what I am talking about.

It is fine to disagree with me, but to pretend that you (generic you), as a commenter, hold the truth and I am misguided and ignorant is a form of violence.

So wait: if I think that on a given, specific topic, I'm right and Ms. Dzodan is wrong, then I'm committing a form of violence? And therefore, my viewpoint is one that doesn't deserve to be exposed? I'll be frank: I'm very ignorant on a large number of topics, and for almost all of those, there are people out there much, much better informed than I am. Therefore, when discussing one of those topics, it may in fact be true that I'm misguided and ignorant and the person I'm speaking to holds the truth. It's certainly happened to me! But it seems it, a priori, can't happen to Ms. Dzodan.

Do you really believe that disagreement is violence? Really?

The logical outcome of this, for Ms. Dzodan and her co-moderators, seems to be that no comments that disagree with her will be allowed. That isn't creating a safe space, that's creating a political echo chamber where only the like-minded are allowed to speak. Disturbingly, that's what the comments sections of Tiger Beatdown increasingly resemble: a dozen or two iterations of "Good post!", and no content. Certainly no disagreement, informed or otherwise.

That's a very depressing comments policy. Luckily, Ms. Dzodan offers those of us who have our comments deleted some advice:

One would expect that this MatrixMansplainer would have realized, after so many weeks, that his comments are not welcome since I have systematically trashed them.

I suppose I'll realize that, then.

Jenny McCarthy and autism

2011-12-05T09:00:00.003+02:00

Okay. I'm going to write about Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3, but before I do, there's something I have to get off my chest first. Namely, Jenny McCarthy. She got the role of Allied superagent Tanya in C&C:RA3, thus stealing Kari Wührer's job.

This is a little hard for me, because Jenny McCarthy has a place in my heart. She's the first woman whose pictures I remember searching for on the Internet. It wasn't called googling then, because Google didn't exist yet. One particular picture from one of her Playboy shoots, which I can't post here but features her in a bath, is actually the first piece of pornography I ever remember seeing. So in my books, she's really hot.

So I was troubled, to say the least, to learn that she'd taken up the cause of Andrew Wakefield. As near as I can tell, Wakefield is a fraud, who was struck off the UK medical register for dishonest and irresponsible conduct. To make a long story short, he fabricated research results to prove that a vaccine was causing autism in children, planning to make millions from related patents he held. Unfortunately for him, the hoax was blown.

Unfortunately for the rest of the world, he's managed to attract a rabid, cult-like following. Finnish readers can avail themselves of an excellent text on the topic, and English readers can consult the New York Times, who give us this soundbite:

Andrew Wakefield has become one of the most reviled doctors of his generation, blamed directly and indirectly, depending on the accuser, for irresponsibly starting a panic with tragic repercussions: vaccination rates so low that childhood diseases once all but eradicated here — whooping cough and measles, among them — have re-emerged, endangering young lives.

Wakefield has almost single-handedly revived the anti-vaccination movement. He and other anti-vaccination propagandists have managed to cause several moral panics against vaccinations, all of which have led to significant health problems. It's ironic that these anti-vaccination campaigns are providing us with some of the clearest evidence of the efficacy of vaccines. Similar concerns were raised earlier this year over Michele Bachmann's moronic comments on the HPV vaccine.

Despite this, Wakefield has created an anti-vaccination cult. Here's the New York Times again:

“To our community, Andrew Wakefield is Nelson Mandela and Jesus Christ rolled up into one,” says J. B. Handley, co-founder of Generation Rescue, a group that disputes vaccine safety. “He’s a symbol of how all of us feel.”

Since losing his medical license, Wakefield has depended on his followers for financing and for the emotional scaffolding that allows him to believe himself a truth-teller when the majority of his peers consider him a menace to medicine. The fact that his fans have stood by him through his denunciation may seem surprising, but they may find it easier to ignore his critics than to reject their faith in him. After all, his is a rare voice of certainty in the face of a disease that is, at its core, mysterious.

My impression of Wakefield is that he's a ruthless profiteer exploiting the distress of parents who have autistic children. I use the word "cult" advisedly, because from where I'm standing, Wakefield is behaving like a classic cult leader. It's interesting to note that the journalist who led the way in exposing him as a fraud disagrees.

You could read Deer’s collected body of research on Wakefield and come away with the conviction that Wakefield was an underhanded profiteer who exploited parents and abused their disabled children with invasive tests for the sole purpose of capitalizing on parents’ fears about the M.M.R. vaccine. (He applied, for example, for a patent for a diagnostic kit that could test for measles virus in the intestines.) But Deer does not think Wakefield was solely motivated by profit. He compares him to the kind of religious leader who is a true believer but relies on the occasional use of smoke and mirrors to goose the faith of his followers. “He believed it was true,” Deer says of Wakefield’s theory of M.M.R., but he was also willing to stretch the truth to get more financing for more research. Deer theorizes that Wakefield’s maneuverings were all rationalized by his conviction that he was right: “He would prove it next time.”

Crusading academic or medical cult supremo, what's unquestionable is that Wakefield's stand on autism isn't currently supported by science. He's taken the conspiracy theory route, claiming that his detractors slander him, falsify research results and even lie about non-vaccinated children's deaths to discredit him because they're in the pay of a giant conspiracy by the medical industry. As Cracked.com has noted, pharmaceutical companies are one of the most popular "evil corporation" strawmen out there today. Even if that weren't the case, believing Wakefield's conspiracy theory requires the same leap of faith that all of this "the truth is being suppressed" nonsense demands: taking the word of one discredited researcher and his personal following over just about everyone else who's ever studied the topic. Sorry, Mr. Wakefield.

The foreword to Wakefield's book Callous Disregard was written by Jenny McCarthy, who's been very active in promoting Wakefield's views in the US.

McCarthy claims that her son had autism, but was cured by chelation therapy, a medical procedure that removes heavy metals from the body. Hockey fans might remember a goalie called Steve Passmore, who had chelation therapy to overcome severe heavy metal poisoning he had from drinking contaminated well water as a kid.

It's been claimed that mercury poisoning can trigger autism, although the scientific consensus is that this is untrue. Some experts have speculated that McCarthy's child may well have had Landau-Kleffner syndrome, a rare childhood consition often misdiagnosed as autism. Certainly McCarthy's claim that chelation therapy cured her son of autism flies in the face of medical science. In fact, chelation therapy is actually dangerous if used on patients who don't have heavy metal poisoning; it can cause hypocalcaemia; one 5-year-old autistic boy was killed by chelation therapy through hypocalcemia.

Despite the scientific evidence, McCarthy continues to promote the link between autism and vaccines. Her activities earned her James Randi's Pigasus Award for "the performer who fools the greatest number of people with the least effort in that twelve-month period". Earlier this year, Salon.com called her "a menace", and given that her continuing anti-vaccination campaigning is clearly having a detrimental effect on public health, it's hard to disagree.

McCarthy is unfazed. As recently as this past January, she defended her stance in a column for the Huffington Post, in which she claimed the decisive debunking of Wakefield's work was "one dubious reporter's allegations", and appealed to her authority as a mother. In her worldview, her conviction that her knowledge as a mother, and the determination of innumerable parents of autistic children to find someone to blame for their child's condition, trumps medical research. That's a truly monstrous idea.

**

So you see my problem. I think she's gorgeous, and I remember seeing her smoking hot Playboy pictorial at an impressionable age, but she really is a menace to children's health care. I don't imagine that what I post in this blog makes the least bit of difference to how the world works, but as a point of personal ethics, I'd feel it would be wrong of me to post pictures of her online without saying something about her misguided, downright dangerous personal crusade against science. She's wrong, and should realize that what she's doing is hurting and even killing children by persuading their parents to leave them unvaccinated.

She's still hot. I just wish she'd actually think about the children, and maybe a little about science. Then I could enjoy pictures like this one with a clear conscience.

Mass Effect 2 is a white supremacist game

2011-11-28T09:00:00.010+02:00

To begin, a disclaimer to avoid misunderstanding. I have no knowledge or opinions of the Mass Effect 2 designers' and developers' actual political views, so I'm not talking about them. What I intend to show is that Mass Effect 2 tells a story that shares many characteristics with the way white supremacist movements see themselves, and co-opts the player into sharing that narrative. Contains spoilers.

Despite being a big fan of the first Mass Effect, I really didn't like its sequel. I found ME2 incredibly disappointing in many ways, and I share many of the views put forward in this article. While the gameplay in itself was a big letdown, what made the game actively distasteful for me was the way it not only trampled all over continuity from ME, but it does this to make you participate in a white supremacist story.

In Mass Effect, the player encounters a rogue Alliance black project called Cerberus, which aims to create super-soldiers. During the course of the game, it becomes obvious that they've gone totally insane, fighting Alliance personnel, including the player character, and perpetrating all kinds of atrocities. They're basically Unit 731, only worse. In fact, if your character has the Sole Survivor background option, it turns out that the people responsible for the death of your former unit, who spent years torturing the only other survivor, are in fact Cerberus. Because the first game is quite immersive, I have to admit that by the end I figured my character had a fairly negative opinion of Cerberus, to say the least.

Having said that, it was a bit of a shock for me when the Cerberus we meet in Mass Effect 2 seems to have nothing to do with Cerberus from the previous game. In the second game, Shepard dies and is resurrected by Cerberus to work for them. The Cerberus operatives you meet enthusiastically explain to you that you've got it all wrong: Cerberus isn't a bad organization at all! They're an independent human supremacist group, bankrolled by a reclusive millionaire, and not some horrible terrorist organization that murdered your entire unit!

What makes the game truly shocking, and totally killed the series for me, was that your character is forced to go along with this. Yes, that's right: my character, who's an Alliance military officer and has seen first hand what Cerberus does, who indeed was mainly known before the events of the first game as the only survivor of a Cerberus atrocity, is now gladly putting on a Cerberus uniform.

It gets worse when you're introduced to your new ship, which is exactly like the old ship. There are even some of your old crew members on board, but they all seem to have entered some strange parallel universe, having renounced their former loyalties, if not even their personalities, and gladly joined a paramilitary human supremacist organization. If this smacks rather strongly of rewriting history in general and Holocaust denial in particular, that's because the game does. What's worse is that this isn't just a couple of characters talking. It's not like this is their version of what Cerberus is; instead, this seems to be the common view of everyone you encounter on Cerberus. Back in Mass Effect, Cerberus and its atrocities were headline news; now it seems collective amnesia has set in, to such an extent that the in-game documentation now gives a whole new view of Cerberus. You're also effectively prevented from seriously questioning it; such topics as the Sole Survivor background being pretty much taboo.

The absolute nadir of the game comes when you encounter a former squadmate from ME, who asks you how you can possibly be working with a disgusting terrorist organization like Cerberus. This isn't even lampshading, it's much worse: your character is being called out on the game's retconning. What are you supposed to say? My answer: because the game forced me to. I can't even begin to imagine what my character would say, because I'd pretty much lost all immersion in the world by then.

The jarring continuity problems are so bad that the most sensible explanation for ME2 would seem to be that your character wakes up in a parallel universe. I've been struggling to find a good analogy to how the rebranding and whitewash of Cerberus felt for me. It's rather like if one were to write a story about an Israeli commando who wakes up from a coma to find that his unit has defected en masse to Hamas, and explain to him that Hamas isn't a terrorist organization at all but a pacifist charity. Or a British left-wing pacifist deciding that maybe the SS isn't so bad after all and joining it when he's told that the Holocaust was really just a lie. And Josef Mengele, who would have fit right in at Cerberus, was a good Samaritan.

**

If it was just that Mass Effect 2 is really bad at continuity, I could just chalk it up to the generally juvenile and subpar quality of the writing, which produces memorable scenes like this one:

The "ass" in "Mass Effect" seen in the picture is one of the new characters, whose only real game functions are to explain away your previous notions of Cerberus and, well, that. Speaking of characters, most of the recurring characters are also more like parodies of themselves, from Tali and Garrus both actively ridiculing the previous game and delivering frankly embarrassing fan service, to the totally ludicrous transformation of Liara that reminds me very strongly of the Mad parody of Steven Soderbergh's Traffic. Liara's reinvention as a gangster and "information broker", and Garrus's new personality as a sort of lame Turian Punisher, are not only ridiculous but again, offensive to the previous game. Remember the whole side plot with Garrus, where you investigate an unsolved case from his C-Sec days? Where you can guide him in either the "paragon" or "renegade" direction? Turns out you needn't have bothered, because he's going to go and become the Turian Punisher either way.

One of the new NPCs you recruit is Jack, a powerful biotic who was the victim of cruel Cerberus experiments and, unsurprisingly, hates them. You get the same old propaganda line from Cerberus and their on-board cheerleader: the great leader didn't know about it and so on. That may be an attempt at narrative ambiguity; either you believe them or you don't. But the problem with that is that you're not allowed to act on it in any way.

By the way, biotics have been completely nerfed, so you don't actually need her for anything. She only has special cutscene powers.

More jarring universe-breaking follows when you meet the ship's AI. That's right; in the first installment of the series, everyone completely freaked out when AIs were even mentioned, and now here they are, happily living on a ship with a built-in AI. The only person who even notices is Tali, and even she can just be talked out of it. Then again, you can talk her into happily co-operating with a Geth, too.

But the problem isn't just poor continuity: what's being done with Cerberus is morally distasteful as well. In Mass Effect, Cerberus was an organization dedicated to human supremacy and the creation of a "super-man" in order to defeat the aliens and conquer the galaxy for man's living space. Sound familiar? It should, because Cerberus seems to be rather directly based on the SS.

So in Mass Effect 2, you're revived by the SS, and two cheerful SS officers explain to you that you've got it all wrong! They have nothing against the Jews or Slavs as such, it's just that they're concerned with maintaining Germany's racial purity and standing in the world community. Of course, some individual SS members or member organizations, even, may have undertaken some suspicious activities in the past, but those have probably been misrepresented and anyway, they can't keep track of everyone. (The really atrocious examples are simply ignored, and you're not allowed to ask.) What matters is that their leader is a great man with a great vision for the future of our race. Surely you'll put on this SS uniform and follow his orders!

**

So right at the start of the game, you're forced to go along with rewriting history in a manner that rather too strongly resembles Holocaust denial. It then starts getting worse. Soon enough, you're initiated into the main plot of the game. Evil aliens are abducting thousands of people, and the Alliance government doesn't care. Therefore, it's up to the heroic racist militia of Cerberus to stop the evil aliens and save humanity. You see? It turns out the racists were the good guys! The government is corrupt, and its entanglement in a sinister one-galaxy government means it doesn't care what happens to ordinary folks. Luckily, the racist militia does care, and by defying the government, they save lives from the alien threat.

This is a narrative that could have been cooked up for a video game by a Midwestern racist militia or a European neo-fascist group. The main character is a brave government agent fighting on the side of good. He's resurrected by a racist group he's previously fought against, but finds out that after his death, the government has stopped caring about the people. Some of his former colleagues are now members of the racist group, and talk about their alienation with the goverment and its cover-ups of their heroic deeds and the coming alien menace. Only the enlightened elite that make up this militia group understand that the government's destructive policies of multiculturalism are leading to the destruction of the human race, but for saying this they're branded as racists. So the main character realizes that the racists are, after all, really the good guys, and the corrupt government is evil. He gladly joins a racial supremacist organization and battles the evil aliens.

In sum, Mass Effect 2 is the most disgustingly racist game I've ever played in my life.

Oh, sure, there are aliens on your team. That's not historically inappropriate; there were all sorts of nationalities in the Waffen-SS, too. The plot of the game still is that the government doesn't care if thousands of people are dying, because it's more interested in covering up alien attacks for some senseless nefarious reason, and people need armed anti-government racists to protect them from foreigners. I'm surprised they don't make you plant a truck bomb at an Alliance office building.

From what I've heard, in ME3 Cerberus will once again be your enemy. I wonder how they're going to pull that off. Retcon the retcon? Unless ME2 is rewritten out of existence (it was all a dream!), the fact will still remain that while the Alliance (federal government) stood by and did nothing, Cerberus (white supremacist militia) saved thousands of people from the aliens. Never mind that this whole notion of the Alliance being so corrupt and evil that they don't care about people any more comes out of nowhere.

I'd like to take this opportunity to suggest some more plot points for Mass Effect 3, in line with the new creative direction taken by ME2:

- the Alliance bans firearms and sends squads of aliens to collect them from human patriots
- main character discovers the "Protocols of the Elders of the Volus", proving the Volus are secretly allies of the Reapers
- the Council races join forces to create a New Galactic Order, a socialist one-galaxy government
- the New Galactic Order brands all humans with a barcode and bans the non-coded from buying and selling
- main character finds out that an ultra-secret cult, the Space Masons, secretly controls the Alliance

There's a lot of mileage to be covered here. The game could be called Mass Effect 3: The Shepard Diaries.

**

Mass Effect 2 was an insultingly bad game. If you were a fan of the first Mass Effect, ME2 went out of its way to slap you in the face. Instead of a dynamic, ambitious CRPG, we get a second-rate Gears of War clone that occasionally masquerades as a racist adventure game. Oh, and don't forget the planet-scanning mini-game, which was almost as much fun as stabbing yourself with a rusty knife.

The game also manages to be disgustingly sexist. As part of your crew, you have a sort of SS yeoman, who, of course, is a cute girl. If you get talking with her, it's possible for your character to develop a kind of romantic sub-plot with her. The consummation? A kiss? A sex scene? No.

You get to use her as a cabin ornament.

It's literally sickening. And, of course, there are no more same-sex romance options, because in the Space SS, that's just wrong.

In this hyper-sexist environment, what was merely poorly executed in the first game becomes actively troubling: every alien race is made up of a single gender. The only exception is the quarians, who seem to come in male and female; in neither of the games do we encounter a single krogan, salarian or turian female. On the wiki, we can have some reasons: the salarian "females are cloistered on their worlds out of tradition and respect". The krogan: "Female krogan rarely leave their home worlds, focusing on breeding in an attempt to keep krogan numbers from declining too quickly. The few remaining fertile females who can carry young to term are treated as prizes of war, to be seized, bartered or fought over." And even though there's no "fluff" justification for never meeting a turian female, we just...don't.

In the first game, the stated reason for never seeing a turian female was, as per the wiki, insufficient time and resources. I can believe that, and I'm certainly not saying that every permutation of alien race and gender needs to be represented in every sci-fi game. Still, for every major alien species we meet, the females are cloistered on their homeworlds or kept as chattel, or are just inexplicably absent. The quarians are the only exception, and when it comes to the more exotic aliens, gender isn't even mentioned but the assumption seems to be that everyone is male. The more unusual alien species are confined to brief walk-on roles, so they're not very relevant. Notable among them are, of course, the volus, a mysterious race of merchant profiteers with prominent noses whose race is denied membership in the galactic council because it's inferior.

And then there are the asari. Even though the asari have only one gender, the in-game Codex describes them as an "all-female" race, surely a mindless statement. The Orion slave girls of Mass Effect, the asari look and act like blue-skinned human women. They're promiscuous bisexuals who, despite looking very human, are inexplicably sexually desired by all of the major races of the Mass Effect universe. The asari can be found throughout the galaxy as strippers and prostitutes, and the game makes sure to bring some loose blue women your way for flirtation and more regularly.

So each major race maps nicely onto a gender. The turians, krogans and salarians are all men, and the asari are all women. The former provide NPC soldiers and scientists, while the asari get by on their biotic powers. As a point of note, while ME1 included a female soldier, in Mass Effect 2 your squad members divide neatly along gender lines. The men are soldiers or scientists, or at best semi-biotics, while the women are biotics, plus a thief added in the downloadable content. In other words, in ME2 women need special powers to be useful team members, while men can just pack a gun and come along.

Yes, it's a man's life in the Mass Effect galaxy.

So, if you've always wanted to be a space nazi, heroically rescuing the overwhelmingly white and heterosexual human race from evil space foreigners, this is the game for you. It made me want to vomit.

Introducing the Helsinki-Kotka Interregional Blood Bowl Turboleague

2011-11-25T09:00:00.004+02:00

Let's play football! Pictures feature the gorgeous Tehmeena Afzal, Pakistan's gift to the world.

Next year, Nuffle willing, will see the inauguration of the Helsinki-Kotka Interregional Blood Bowl Turboleague. I'll be posting game results and standings here, so if you're not interested, then just skip these posts. They'll be identified by the handy abbreviation HKIRBBTL.

We'll be playing Blood Bowl by the Competition Rules, available here. As league conventions go, we would prefer that everyone play with a team of more or less appropriate, painted miniatures. As a minimum requirement, teams should be made up of miniatures in such a way that different player types can be told apart at a glance; i.e. an Orc Blitzer and an Orc Lineman need to look different. There also obviously has to be a way to tell which lineman is which, to appropriately award star player points and tell leveled-up linemen apart from the others.

My personal opinion is that there shouldn't be a league commissioner at all. If there's a rule dispute during a game that can't be easily resolved amicably, I suggest using the old GW standby: both players roll a d6 and the higher-scoring player's interpretation stands for that game. If there's still disagreement afterwards, we can discuss it collectively and come up with a house rule. Anything outside of games can certainly be resolved through discussion.

Each season of the league will consist of a regular season, followed by the playoffs. Each regular season game will count toward the regular season standings: a win is worth three points, a tie one point to each team, and a loss gets you no points at all. If the game is tied at the end of the second half, it ends as a tie; no overtime or shootouts in the regular season. Teams will be seeded for the playoffs based on regular season standings, in a manner specified for each season, and reseeded for every round. The exact playoff format, as well as the number of regular season games and so on, will depend on how many people are participating and so on, so we'll figure that out later. For starters, we'll probably go with each team playing two games against each opponent, a home-and-home series or double round robin, if you will.

The tiebreaking formula for the regular season is: head-to-head games, goal differential, casualties inflicted, goals scored, fatalities inflicted. If all these are tied, roll a d6.

All team rosters are public at all times; an opposing coach can inspect your roster at any time during the game. Each coach is responsible for their own record-keeping, but should deliver certain stats to me, so I can keep standings and statistics on this blog. After every game, each coach should have recorded:

* the score
* touchdowns
* completions
* casualties inflicted
* fatalities inflicted
* sacks (knocking down or Wrestling down the player carrying the ball)

And for the last five, the players responsible so we can keep track of top scorers, passers and so on. Only casualties and fatalities that a team's players were awarded Star Player Points for count, so pushing someone into the stands or an opposing player failing a Go For It roll don't count as inflicted casualties. As it is, your players don't actually get any star player points for knocking down the player with the ball, but I think they should. We'll keep stats! However, the last statistic is different:

* casualties sustained

For this one, count all injuries and deaths sustained by your team from whatever source. This should be fairly easy to do in the post-game. Include injuries healed by apothecaries, regenerated or whatever.

As far as the post-game is concerned, I'd suggest that everyone make advancement rolls for leveled players in the presence of their opponent, note down the results and make their choice of skill or stat increase at their leisure. Developing players is such an important part of a Blood Bowl league that I don't think it would be right to rush those decisions.

At the end of the regular season, we'll award a wholly metaphorical and entirely meaningless trophy to the regular season winner, as well as to the players with the most touchdowns, completed passes and casualties. The player with the most regular season fatalities will receive the coveted Dick van der Smut Memorial Trophy, named after the frighteningly deadly roller-skating, meltagun-toting Van Saar gang leader from our Necromunda campaign. For these purposes, and to maintain the individual statistics in general, it would be really nice if all players had names.

The overall playoff winner will take home the tentatively titled Hellbird Turbocup, possession of which will grant the team one additional re-roll that counts toward team value as normal. Both the total fans and the total winnings for the semi-final games and the final are doubled. I suggest that playoff games be played to the bitter end in sudden death overtime; if the score is tied at the end of regulation, simply play more "halves" until a goal is scored, alternating kicking and receiving, replenishing re-rolls and so on exactly like in a normal half-time. More definitive information on the playoffs later!

Before or during the regular season, teams can play as many pre-season or friendly games as they like. These games will be played with the team's regular roster, but won't count for points or statistics, and players will accrue neither Star Player Points nor injuries. In fact, a friendly or pre-season game won't change the team roster in any way. Injuries and even deaths are ignored after the game, no MVP or other Star Player Points are awarded, and no money is made or spent. These games are really just intended for practice, or maybe as an exhibition game against an outside team.

I'm sure there's lots of other things I should address here, but frankly, I can't think of them. This should get us started. We'll look to start the regular season in January, and I'll be posting more stuff on the coming season and the participating teams as it comes along.

Miley Cyrus!

2011-11-23T09:00:00.005+02:00

We here at this blog think that Miley Cyrus is hot, and since today is her birthday, I'm posting some pictures of her.

It's not just us, either: she was #89 in FHM's 100 Sexiest Women of 2011, and #64 in Maxim's. We, on the other hand, ranked her as the fifth-hottest woman on TV in the 2000s. We mean when she was over 18, obviously. Prudes.

Happy birthday Miley!

Going to hell

2011-11-21T09:00:00.011+02:00

Earlier, I explained about my lighthouse problem: to build a lighthouse with a lasting fire, I'm going to need some netherrack, which is only found in the Nether. Or, in other words, hell. So that's where I'm going.

If I'm going to build a portal to hell, I'm not just going to stick it in my basement or something. I can do better than that!

If you could see anything in this picture, you would see my underwater tower:

Using the map, I picked a spot along my subway track that was at about the deepest point of the expanse of ocean east of Epic Island, and started digging up. Building an underwater tower from the bottom up presented some interesting engineering challenges, which I was able to overcome.

I then built a glass-lined tunnel out to a flat spot on the seabed, where I erected my dome:

In my books, that's a suitably dramatic place for a portal to hell. Here's what it looks like from the surface, with Epic Island in the background:

Building the damn thing is a bother in itself as well, as it needs to be made of obsidian. Naturally occurring obsidian is rare and hard to mine, so the easiest way to procure some is by using lava. After hauling bucketfuls of lava over, the portal is finished:

All you need to do is set it on fire, and voilá:

Just walk right on in.

The Nether is scary. It's almost pitch dark and there are creepy moaning noises. My immediate purpose in coming here is easy to achieve: pretty much all of the ground is netherrack. But now that I'm here, I feel obliged to explore. This is where I've landed:

The glowing blocks are glowstone, which is the best artificial light source in the game: it gives off more light than torches, and also works underwater. Since I'm here, I gotta get me some of that. Only, here's the problem:

It's all above a giant lava lake. Sure, you can get to it, but it's nerve-wracking:

After I pocketed some glowstone and netherrack, it's time to make my way back to the portal...

...and get the Nether out of here. And finally, a lighthouse:

Whew!

Happy birthday Gemma!

2011-11-16T09:00:00.002+02:00

Join me in wishing a happy birthday to one of the most beautiful women of the past decade, Gemma Atkinson.

You can find her website here.

How many nuclear bombs would it take to destroy the Earth?

2011-11-14T09:00:00.001+02:00

Let's start with pinup model Sabina Kelley.

The Helsinki International Film Festival was showing a movie about Grant Morrison, and the Finnish-language blurb mentions that Morrison "grew up in Scotland, near an army base holding enough nuclear missiles to destroy the world 50 times over".

I haven't seen the movie, and from the blurb I can't tell what "army base" they're talking about. Given that (as near as I can tell) neither V-bombers, British ballistic nuclear missiles nor US SAC aircraft were based in Scotland at the time, The most reasonable guess would be Faslane, home to the Royal Navy's nuclear submarines.

In the late '60s, Faslane became home to the Royal Navy's four Resolution class ballistic missile submarines. They each carried 16 Polaris A3 missiles, each carrying three 200kt independently-targeted warheads. So, 48 warheads at 200 kilotons each makes 9.6 megatons per submarine, and 38.4 megatons of total destructive power.

In other words, the total nuclear destructive power housed in a single Resolute clas ssubmarine was less than the 50-megaton yield of the Tsar Bomba, or less than two SS-18 Mod 2 warheads. The four submarines combined carried 192 200kt warheads; hardly enough to destroy the entire world even once. In fact, I'd be surprised if they were even enough to destroy the entire surface of Scotland.

Scotland has a total land area of 78,772 km2; according to a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation, it would take approximately 250 one-megaton nuclear warheads to destroy it. So late 60's Faslane didn't even hold enough nuclear weapons to destroy Scotland completely, let alone the world.

**

The notion that we have enough nuclear weapons to destroy the world several times over gets thrown around constantly, even at fairly high levels of government; last year, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said of the US and Russia that "We have more than enough nuclear weapons to destroy the world many times over".

Do they?

There's a beautiful series of infographics over at Information is Beautiful titled How I Learnt To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb (Kinda), that nicely illustrate the answer. In a word, no. The total explosive yield of all the world's nuclear weapons isn't nearly enough to destroy the whole inhabited surface of the world, let alone the world, let alone several times over.

This isn't to say that a global nuclear war wouldn't have unimaginably disastrous consequences. A full-scale nuclear exchange between the US and the USSR at the height of the Cold War would have been an unparalleled planetary disaster, resulting not only in the direct deaths of millions, but in widespread radioactive fallout and, in all probability, a nuclear winter.

In my mind, the recent studies that suggest even a small-scale nuclear exchange could cause a global environmental catastrophe are suspect. The Second World War saw massive bombing campaigns that killed hundreds of thousands and incinerated huge swaths of urban areas, but caused no notable climate effects. A similar instance was the predicted disastrous consequences of the oil well fires in Kuwait following the first Gulf War, which also seemed to ignore the experience of the Second World War. I'm not at all convinced that a small-scale nuclear exchange would have decisively more catastrophic effects. It would still, at the very least, be a horrible disaster for the populations involved.

**

To understand why nuclear weapons can't actually destroy the world, it's absolutely vital to understand several things about them. In my experience, it's these misunderstandings that usually lead to a hugely inflated notion of their destructive capabilities.

Firstly, nuclear weapons effects do not increase geometrically with yield. For example, the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima had a yield of 13-18 kt. It destroyed buildings in a 1.6 kilometer radius. From this, it's often erroneously assumed that a 100kt weapon would have 5-10 times that effect, and a 1Mt weapon would have 50-100 times the area of effect. This is far from true; a 1Mt weapon would cause severe fire damage out to a radius of approximately 10km, and complete destruction of urban areas to a radius of 2.4km. That's a big bang, but far from 50-100 times the actual destruction caused by the Hiroshima bomb.

After the several megaton range, effects decrease even more sharply relative to the yield. The 50Mt Tsar Bomba caused total destruction out to a 35km radius, not the 500km that a simple calculation from one-megaton explosions would suggest.

This, by the way, is why it annoys me when nuclear bomb yields are described in "Hiroshimas", as in a bomb having so-and-so many times the force of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. It gives a totally misleading picture of the effects of the bomb in question.

Secondly, for nuclear weapons to destroy the world, they'd have to be targeted at the whole world. In other words, to get the most destructive area out of our nuclear weapons, we'd have to target them in order to maximize the damaged area. But in a real nuclear war, the targeting priorities would be completely different. It's assumed that some missiles won't make it, so all important targets will be targeted by several missiles. If all the warheads make it, overkill will result, meaning that some of the warheads won't even detonate at all. So for starters, a whole bunch of destructive power will be lost to a variety of causes like mechanical malfunctions and overkill.

This targeting also means that the nuclear weapon effects will be concentrated in a fairly small list of targets. In a Soviet-US nuclear exchange, missile bases, airbases and other military facilities, as well as cities, would have received far more than their "share" of nuclear destruction. So calculating the total area of the world our nuclear weapons could potentially damage is a totally theoretical number, since there is no plausible scenario in which nuclear weapons would be used for maximum area effect. That would require targeting a nation's nuclear arsenal all over the world, which, even in the context of full-scale nuclear war, would be completely insane. Nuclear warfighting plans have detailed, thought-out strategies for using nuclear weapons; they don't just say "press button - destroy world".

Even if we tried, we couldn't even destroy the total inhabited surface area of the world; and we're not even trying.

**

The idea that we have enough nuclear weapons to destroy the world several times over is totally false. We don't. It's remotely possible that if we put our minds to it, i.e. combined the total nuclear arsenals of the world and made a concerted effort to use them to destroy human life, we might be able to kill everyone. Then again, if we persuaded everyone to walk off a cliff, that would do it as well.

Nuclear weapons are dangerous and frightening in their own right; there's no need to concoct these ridiculous "enough nukes to destroy the world 50 times over" myths to prove it.

11:11 11.11.11

2011-11-11T11:11:00.000+02:00

OMG

The madness of the copyright industry

2011-11-09T09:00:00.001+02:00

Earlier this week, Dutch anti-piracy organization BREIN won a lawsuit against Usenet provider news-service.com, forcing them to shut down their Usenet service.

TorrentFreak: Major Usenet Provider Shuts Down Following Court Order

News-Service.com, one of the leading Usenet providers with many prominent resellers, has terminated its services with immediate effect. The shutdown is the direct and unavoidable outcome of a two-year battle with Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN, which was eventually decided against the Usenet provider. News-Service announced that it will appeal the decision “out of principle” as it threatens the entire 30-year-old Usenet community.

However, it's the reasoning behind this decision that should alarm everyone:

The verdict of the Amsterdam Court is very similar to the one that decimated BitTorrent site Mininova two years ago. It requires NSE to finding a way to identify and delete all copyrighted files from its servers, which is practically impossible.

Aside from threatening many other Usenet providers, a similar judgement would also mean the end of file-hosting sites such as Megaupload, and other cloud storage services including Dropbox. All these services remove copyrighted files when they are asked to, but policing their own servers proactively may prove to be impossible.

BREIN is nevertheless delighted with the verdict of the court. “It is a breakthrough step to further dismantle the availability of illegal content on Usenet,” director Tim Kuik said previously.

It wouldn’t be a surprise if BREIN now waves this verdict in the face of other Usenet providers, in the hope of shutting them down. Using this same tactic BREIN has already managed to pull hundreds of (small) torrent sites offline in the Netherlands.

So, if service providers like news-service.com can't ensure that all illegal content on their servers will be deleted, they have to shut down. This is simply insane. Try applying this logic to other service providers. Can, for instance, a motel "find a way to identify and prevent all illegal activity" on its premises? Can an airline guarantee none of the people or things it moves will be used in the commission of some crime, or indeed that no-one on board is a drug mule, or carrying a pirated CD? If not, should they be shut down? By this logic, yes.

More decisions like this will simply mean that more and more Internet traffic is going to be conducted through darknets and other practically invisible connections that are impossible to police or monitor. In short, they're driving the Internet underground. At best, all this kind of bludgeoning legislation will accomplish is driving legitimate service providers out of business and replacing them with a black market. That isn't in anyone's interest. At the same time, our freedom to use the Internet to interact with other people and express ourselves is being severely curtailed, all in the name of the supposedly lost sales of a few giant multi-national corporations.

These cases very nicely define whose interests the justice system is looking out for.

Jack Chick and the Apocrypha

2011-11-07T09:00:00.004+02:00

I've discussed Jack Chick and his insane tracts before on this blog, but it's a subject worth returning to. Here to remind us why that is is Detective Constable Charles Ennis of British Columbia:

This may seem silly stuff to many of you readers and it would be if it weren't for the fact that so many people take these publications seriously. Chick's business has thrived for decades and his tracts are available in 100 different languages. Chick has distributors in England, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and Germany. Police officers have used these tracts as a resource. For example: The comic The Force was used as the basis for a history of Satanism presented by Detective Eisenbraun of the Rapid City Police Department in his presentation on Satanic Crime in Bismarck, North Dakota in 1989.

As it happens, The Force takes us right to the heart of the matter.

This rabidly anti-Catholic comic is part four of the Alberto series, the first installment of which you can read here. It's this kind of stuff:

It was a Freemason symbol! That's because in the late Alberto Rivera's conspiracy theory, the Catholic church controls not only the Freemasons, but communists, Jews and atheists all over the world, and, by the way, created Islam in order to destroy Jews and Protestants.

The remarkable Alberto Rivera was a con artist and fraud who sold his lunatic brand of anti-Catholic hysteria to Jack Chick by posing as an ex-priest who had become disenchanted with the Catholic world conspiracy. Thanks to WayBackMachine, you can read an exposé of him that ran in Cornerstone magazine here. Cornerstone may have been an evangelical looney magazine, but some evangelical nutcases were just too nuts for them. Here's a quote from the Rivera piece:

What does Jack Chick think about this? It's hard to find out, because he has made it a policy not to speak with reporters. But when he was finally reached by phone at his home, he said that he had never met a more godly man than Alberto, and that he knows Alberto's story is true because he ,.prayed about it." Jack says he expects his own life to be taken by Jesuit assassins.

Yeah.

Chick is a Protestant fundamentalist. Fundamentalism is a name the movement has given itself, because it supposedly defends the fundaments of Christianity. Like all Protestant movements, they consider themselves more Biblical than the others (and certainly more Biblical than the Pope!), and almost all fundamentalists profess a belief in Biblical inerrancy. The latter is the idea that the Bible is completely and entirely true; a position held by, for instance, Republican presidential candidate candidate Rick Perry. He also believes the Authorized King James Version of the Bible to be the only true word of god.

Now, I take an almost macabre interest in the Biblical exegesis of fundamentalist Christians, because I'm somewhat interested in the Bible as a text, and because it's entertaining that they paint themselves as "Biblical". Most of all, though, the notion of someone claiming the Bible to be "infallible", or that they believe it "literally", is just too hysterical to pass up. So now our blog has a "Bible" label.

**

This time around, I'm going to take a look at Jack Chick's downright bizarre "King James onlyism", in the form of this tract:

Here's the blurb:

See the behind-the-scenes struggle to destroy the King James Bible, and how God preserved it.

Just so you know how reliable our sources are, and appreciate the tie-in with Alberto, this is what appears on the very first page:

Yeah, thanks, "ex-Jesuit priest" Alberto.

To start off, we're told an incredibly bizarre story about how Catholics assassinated the Puritan translators of the King James Bible:

Presumably, this is some of the "information" provided by Alberto, as I've been unable to find a single non-Chick source for this notion that a Catholic conspiracy murdered any of the King James Bible translators. Alberto seems to just, I don't know, make stuff up.

We're then told that "Satan has always tried to change, add to or take away from God's words", first in the Garden of Eden and then:

So according to Jack Chick, the Old Testament Apocrypha are a Satanic plot against Christianity.

Obviously, the notion that no "true Christians" have accepted the Apocrypha is a fairly well-known fallacy in itself, and taking it at face value makes some rather drastic claims about the Christianity of, say, the earliest church. Also, the Apocrypha were never "denounced" and totally rejected by Judaism, even though they weren't included in the canonical Hebrew Bible. However, he argues against the Apocrypha some more:

So, Jesus never quoted the Apocrypha, sez Chick. He didn't really quote any of the Old Testament books that much, but made frequent allusions to them. The trouble is, he also frequently alluded to the Apocrypha. Here's a few examples (from the King James Bible, naturally).

Matthew 6: 19 Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal:
20 But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal:
Sirach 29: 11 Lay up thy treasure according to the commandments of the most High, and it shall bring thee more profit than gold.

Matthew 7: 16 Ye shall know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles?
Sirach 27: 6 The fruit declareth if the tree have been dressed; so is the utterance of a conceit in the heart of man.

There's several more direct allusions to the Book of the All-Virtuous Wisdom of Jesus ben Sira, which has the most awesome name of any Biblical book ever, including Jesus' parable of the seed falling on stony ground.

For more examples, contrast Jesus' refrain from Mark 9 ("Where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched") with Judith 16:17:

Woe to the nations that rise up against my kindred! the Lord Almighty will take vengeance of them in the day of judgment, in putting fire and worms in their flesh; and they shall feel them, and weep for ever.

Even though it's slightly anticlimactic that the Book of Judith is just called the Book of Judith, it has inspired some great art, like Judith by Jan Sanders van Hemessen, which I was going to show here but got censored by Blogger, and the similarly named Judith, by Valentin de Boulogne. Dudes really liked painting her.

One more example: Jesus' description of god, no less, in Matthew directly echoes that given in the Book of Tobit:

Matthew 11: 25 At that time Jesus answered and said, I thank thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes.

Tobit 7: 18 Be of good comfort, my daughter; the Lord of heaven and earth give thee joy for this thy sorrow: be of good comfort, my daughter.

The title "Lord of heaven and earth" also occurs in Luke 10:21 and Acts 17:24, but nowhere in the Old Testament. So the famous devotional song "How Can I Keep from Singing?" is an apocryphal reference.

There's a whole bunch of allusions and references to the Apocrypha in the gospels, which isn't the least bit surprising, since the Greek Septuagint was the Bible used by the early Christians, and it included the Apocrypha. But I guess that in Jack Chick's books, the apostles weren't True Christians.

But wait, there's more!

And this is where things get confusing. When Chick, or whoever is actually responsible for this tract, talks about the "Alexandrian manuscripts", presumably he is referring to the Alexandrian text-type, which is one of the oldest surviving sources for the New Testament. However, he also mentions the Old Testament, which I suppose might mean he's talking about the Septuagint as well, which was created in Alexandria. So is he seriously saying that the Bible used by the apostles was a Satanic lie?

Elsewhere, Chick offers a bizarre justification for these views by comparing the contexts in which Alexandria is mentioned to Antioch.

Again with the "true Christians", this time with the bizarre idea that the Emperor Constantine was the pope (he wasn't), and the somewhat startling claim that the Vulgate is also "satanic".

The named source in the tract is a book by David W. Daniels called Did the Catholic Church Give Us the Bible?. Here's a section of the blurb:

There is not one history of the Bible, but two. One is a history of God preserving His words through His people. The other is of the devil using the Roman Catholic church to pervert God's words through her "scholars."

Once again we encounter the bizarre notion that the apostles and early Christians weren't "God's people", given that they were using a Bible based on the satanic Alexandrian manuscripts.

I don't recall seeing this kind of pure hatred against the Apocrypha before. After all, in Protestant tradition, the Apocrypha were considered, as Martin Luther put it, not canonical but worth reading.

I think one of the most vital clues is in the word "scholars" and the quotation marks around it. Belief in Biblical inerrancy and literalism is one of the foundations of Protestant Fundamentalism, and I imagine at least part of it comes from the fact that many fundamentalists aren't very well-read in Biblical scholarship and exegesis. Instead, they stubbornly insist that the Bible can be read "literally", a ludicrous idea, and I imagine they see Biblical scholars who debate the merits of different translations and the Apocrypha as suspicious intellectuals with edumacations. It's also been argued that the roots of Protestant fundamentalism are in Calvinism, which took a very dim view of the Apocrypha.

The key thing to remember, though, is that Catholics are evil:

Yeah. When the inquisitors come for you, they'll be using that law. As I understand it, the Synod of Toulouse in 1229 banned the owning of vernacular Bibles, but I'm not entirely sure about that one.

What I am fairly sure about is that scholarly opinion considers the Textus Receptus to have been compiled from several Greek manuscripts by Erasmus of Rotterdam in 1516. All of his sources dated to the 12th century or later, and were mostly of the Byzantine text-type. As Wikipedia puts it, "most modern scholars consider his text to be of dubious quality". Certainly by the standards of modern exegesis, you'll have a hard time justifying the idea that the Textus Receptus is somehow more truly preserved than, say, the Alexandrian manuscripts. Today, this position is only held by Protestant fundamentalists who are completely opposed to any textual criticism of the Bible. Like Jack Chick!

What's even funnier is that some of Chick's comrades on the evangelical right consider Christian humanism and Erasmus himself to be pretty much anti-Christian. While most Protestants regard Erasmus as one of the fathers of the Reformation, Protestant reformers see his "Christian humanism" as a plot of the Catholic church to destroy Christianity. In his documentary series How Should We Then Live?, Francis Schaeffer described Christian humanism as not Christian at all, and Rus Walton asks: "Is it not another snare, another delusion, another trap to draw man away from God?"

Just in case you think these are some random crackpots, Republican presidential hopeful Michele Bachmann has described watching the Schaeffer films as "a life-altering experience".

So while Jack Chick considers Erasmus to have been a divinely inspired hero who is faithfully preserving the true word of god against a grand Catholic conspiracy, to other Protestant fundamentalists, he's one of the chief agents of that selfsame world conspiracy. This is a wonderful example of what happens when you don't approach history on its own terms but as raw material for a conspiracy theory. When Schaeffer wants to prove that secularism is the greatest evil facing Christianity, he creates a monolithic "humanism" and projects it back into history. Of course, he also thinks the Catholic church is evil, so he tacks that on as well. Chick, on the other hand, wants to prove that the King James Bible is the direct word of Jesus, so he creates a pseudohistory of "inspired texts" leading up to it. Of course, he also thinks the Catholic church is the greatest evil facing Christianity, so he tacks on a monolithic conspiracy theory.

The net result is that Erasmus of Rotterdam is either a tool of the Catholic world conspiracy, or a heroic Christian warrior fighting against it. I guess the lesson is that making actual history fit a lunatic conspiracy theory can be surprisingly hard.

Next, though, we learn that the Inquisition was set up specifically to target the Textus Receptus:

This notion, along with their casualty figure, is just pure nonsense. Certainly Erasmus was critical of the Catholic Church, even in the Textus Receptus itself, but the idea that the whole Inquisition was put together to weed out the Textus Receptus is ridiculous. The notion that the Textus has a different teaching on salvation from, say, the Vulgate, is also basically just made up.

One particular example of a difference between the Textus and more modern texts is the Comma Johanneum. It's worth reading this little piece from Wikipedia:

The words apparently crept into the Latin text of the New Testament during the Middle Ages, "[possibly] as one of those medieval glosses but were then written into the text itself by a careless copyist. Erasmus omitted them from his first edition; but when a storm of protest arose because the omission seemed to threaten the doctrine of the Trinity, he put them back in the third and later editions, whence they also came into the Textus Receptus, 'the received text'."

The modern scholarly view is that the Comma Johanneum is a later addition, and Erasmus himself agreed. However, he re-inserted the passage after protests, and now Chick and other King James Only -fundamentalists insist that it is divinely inspired.

The funniest part of all this is that Erasmus used the Vulgate Bible in creating the Textus. So even by Chick's standards, the Textus Receptus is satanic. The dodge they use to get out of this is to insist that the Textus Receptus itself was divinely inspired, as Chick indirectly says in this tract, and now we've firmly crossed over into cloud cuckoo land. It also, once again, begs the question of whether Erasmus was a divinely inspired Christian or an evil anti-Christian Catholic, but never mind.

After several panels of old, recycled anti-Catholic propaganda, including the notion that the Gunpowder Plot and Spanish Armada took place because of the Textus Receptus, we get this tidbit:

Why, exactly, would this be disastrous to the Catholic Church? The tract claims that the Textus Receptus teaches that salvation only comes from Jesus and not the Church, but as no evidence is offered for this position and I can't find any, we have to regard this as having been made up. In all probability, this is a Chick-Rivera fiction to make the Catholics look bad.

However, we're directly told that the Apocrypha would have diabolical effects:

I can't, for the life of me, understand what in the Old Testament apocrypha, which was included in the King James Bible, would make Protestants suddenly convert to Catholicism. To me, this is the biggest single mystery of this tract. How on earth would getting Protestants to accept the Apocrypha as canonical suddenly make them Catholics?

All the reasons I've been able to find online for rejecting the Apocrypha are either totally spurious, like simply asserting that they're just not cricket, or criteria that could also be used to disqualify any books. For example, several instances accuse the Apocrypha of contradicting books in the Bible; well, the canonical books do that all the time as well. I genuinely don't understand why Chick's tract is so implacably hostile to the Apocrypha in the first place, let alone what sinister Catholic purpose they can possibly serve.

After a brief rehash of the fictional anti-Puritan assassination plot, we're told that when the Apocrypha were omitted from the Bible, God won:

Of course, this is followed by assertions that all subsequent Bible translations have been engineered by the Vatican because they're evil.

The Puritans are prominently represented here because most American Protestant fundies consider themselves to be the spiritual descendants of Puritans. I'll have to talk about that at some point, but for now, let's just go on with the propaganda.

Actually, it's these panels toward the end of the tract that bring us closer to understanding why this tract hates the Apocrypha so much.

As we're once again joined by "Dr." Rivera, we can try to offer an answer to this implacable hostility toward newer Bible translations and the Apocrypha. All "Biblical literalists" profess a belief in a monolithic Bible that contains only one message; after all, if the Bible were to contradict itself or even be ambivalent about something, it couldn't be interpreted literally. Now, this kind of interpretation isn't actually possible, but it is possible to insist that it is. If the Bible is mostly read by uneducated people who don't know the first thing about history or exegesis, I suppose they can imagine that the Bible can be regarded as being literally true.

The above panels make it pretty clear that this tract's hate is directed at exegetes who actually know about the Bible in its historical context and about textual criticism. After all, their knowledge threatens the whole notion of Biblical infallibility, by pointing out where the King James Bible contradicts itself, is flatly wrong about historical events or geography, and similar things. This, of course, is anathema to them, as is the general shift in opinion toward viewing the Bible as a historical text among texts.

So what better way to banish these doubters than by implying that they're part of a Vatican-directed satanic conspiracy?

**

There's a classic fundie quote floating around the Internet:

The only thing I don't like about them is they sell foreign language versions of the KJB. I don't think that's right. We know the only true translation is the 1600's version in English. It's too risky for anybody to translate that into other languages. Mistakes can creep in... and that can lead to heresy. True Christians should only read English.

To most people, that's pretty funny. However surprising it may seem after reading the above tract, Jack Chick is actually a fairly moderate King James Onlyist. He seems to belong to the "received text only" faction, who maintain that the Textus Receptus was divinely preserved to serve as the basis for the Dinsdale, erm, Tyndale Bible and the King James bible.

Others, though, believe that the translation process that gave rise to the King James Bible was itself divinely inspired. Chick hints at that when he says God oversaw the process, but although he says the original authors of the Old and New Testament were divinely inspired, he doesn't extend the metaphor to cover the King James translators.

There is yet another view, sometimes called Ruckmanism after its vocal exponent, Peter Ruckman, a Christian lunatic who believes the CIA is secretly breeding aliens in underground facilities. As Jack Chick predicted he would be assassinated by Jesuits, in 1997 Ruckman predicted the government would have him killed in the next few years because he knew about the brain transmitters they had implanted in African-Americans and all the other nefarious CIA plots he's invented. Of course, making predictions that fail to come about is very Christian. Intriguingly, Ruckman also seems to think that anti-abortion activists are Darwinists. Yes, you read that right.

Ruckman believes that the King James Bible constitutes revelation in itself. He's said: "Mistakes in the A.V. 1611 are advanced revelation!" He considers that the King James Bible, as more recent divine revelation, is superior to any earlier manuscripts or translations. He attacks an "Alexandrian cult", which according to him believes that the original text of the Bible has been lost, and that therefore no final word of god exists on Earth. The Textus Receptus, on the other hand, he considers a separate text from the "Alexandrian cult" manuscripts, even going so far as to say that the Septuagint is a deliberate forgery created to discredit the Bible.

Ruckman's views are so extreme that the majority of the King James Only movement is opposed to them, let alone other Christians. What's interesting here is that Chick's narrative parallels Ruckman's in many places. Chick's strange references to "Alexandrian manuscripts" now appear to be derived from Ruckman, as is the primacy of the Textus Receptus and its fictional history. On Chick's website, we can find a strong defense of Ruckmanism.

However, in the tract, Chick doesn't quite go the whole hog. He replicates several parts of the Ruckman narrative, but portrays the Textus Receptus as the divinely protected original word of god, and doesn't claim divine inspiration, let alone revelation, for the actual translation process of the King James Bible. I imagine Chick has toned down the Ruckmanism to make his tract have a wider Christian appeal, but in doing that he's created numerous inconsistencies. In insisting that both the "Alexandrian manuscripts" and the Vulgate are satanic, but that the Textus Receptus is the "preserved" word of god, he's created a textual history that just doesn't add up. Of course, he may claim that the textual history of the Bible is all a Catholic lie. That's really a kind of "get out of jail free" card for conspiracy theories: if the history doesn't work out, just claim it's a conspiracy. Works for everything from ancient aliens to Bible translations.

**

To end on a sobering note, this can all seem like the deranged fantasy of an almost 90-year-old man who publishes comic books on the Internet. But like I said earlier, the current governor of Texas, who is one of the front-runners for the Republican presidential nomination, actually believes that the Bible is infallible. So this isn't just a study in Internet lunacy, but in contemporary American politics.

To recap, in this post we've seen that in the world of Jack Chick, only the Textus Receptus and the King James Bible are the word of god, and the "Alexandrian manuscripts" (possibly including the Septuagint) are satanic. The way these conclusions are reached tells us quite a lot about the theology of Jack Chick, and about his cavalier disregard for history and Bible exegesis, and his positively danbrownian dedication to simply making stuff up. Or, if you prefer, lying. All this will also have some interesting implications later on, when we continue our series of blogistic exegesis.

Dependency theory and conspiracy theory

2011-11-02T09:00:00.006+02:00

There was a post at Tiger Beatdown titled "Occupying Europe, when the colonizer reclaims wealth", by Flavia Dzodan. Anyone familiar with leftist discourse knows what's coming from the title, but to prime myself for some intellectual activity this week (I'm writing this Monday morning), I'll go through the motions with it. What I'm trying to do is criticize the worldview that I perceive is behind the text.

A long time ago, when I took a course to become a kickboxing instructor, I was taught to give feedback in the form of a metaphorical hamburger; a prime example of the McDonaldization of education, if you will. The idea is that first you give positive feedback (a bun), then criticism (the meat), and finish off with more positive feedback (the other bun). I like the metaphor, because to me, it implies that the positive reinforcement equates with the useless carbohydrates of the buns, while the criticism is the meat of the whole thing. That's an anachronism, as the example was given at a time when any Finnish person would have thought that "karppaaminen" ("low carb-ing") refers to a type of fish.

In the spirit of this advice, I'd like to start by saying that I very much approve of the author's criticism of "importing" the 99% slogan from the US "Occupy" movement. As a European, I am in general dismayed that so many European political movements seem to be importing agendas directly from North America. For example, it's recently become something of a meme here in Finland to rail against tax breaks for the rich; indeed, I've even seen people claim that our entire budget deficit is caused by tax breaks granted since the early nineties. According to an authoritative study, the opposite is true: tax progression has remained essentially the same, while taxes on low- and medium-income earners have fallen considerably more than for high-income earners. But because tax breaks for the rich are on the agenda in the US, the same must be true here.

However, there is a fundamental issue I disagree on:

The European Union’s wealth is the wealth of Empires. Mainly the British, Dutch, Spanish, Belgium, French, Italian, Austro-German and Portuguese empires. This is the wealth built on the backs of the African slave trade and the colonization of lands as distant from each other as the African continent, the Americas, Asia and Australia. This wealth is made of unspeakable suffering and economic deprivation for those in the colonized territories. This wealth is also made of resource depletion and subjugation of native populations. This wealth that never belonged to Europe to begin with.

In other words, all you Occupy Whatever protesters with your bizarre neo-swastikas: you're not being leftist enough. All that evil financial capital was created by robbing the Third World:

The very same wealth people now Occupying these public European squares reclaim as their own, demanding it is re-distributed while it was generated as a result of Europe’s occupations in the first place. And yet, none of this is examined or contextualized. Most people operating under the illusion that this wealth they are reclaiming is rightfully theirs, that they are entitled to it.

Though the author gives us the "very basic premises of dependency theory", cribbed from the Wikipedia page, and dresses up these claims with it, what becomes obscured is that dependency theory is, first and foremost, a theory on the current relationships between countries and markets in the world system. It is not, and does not justify, the historical claim that current European prosperity is "made of unspeakable suffering and economic deprivation for those in the colonized territories". This is a much broader claim, and one that I take great issue with. Many dependency theorists do advocate such a historical worldview, but the difference between the theory of international relations that is dependency theory and that historical worldview must be kept in mind.

**

This claim was formalized as the theory of the "development of underdevelopment" by sociologist Andre Gunder Frank in the article by that name. His specific claim was that the underdevelopment of Latin American countries was not caused by "the survival of archaic institutions and the existence of capital shortage", but by the international capitalist system, which exploited them for profit.

It's important to see this criticism in context. Frank, and dependency theory in general, was reacting against views of development that saw underdevelopment as principally the fault of the underdeveloped countries themselves, either because they hadn't managed their economic development properly, or even because they were racially inferior. The latter view has been put forward recently here in Finland, and figures in Finnish discussions on development aid, for instance.

While much of the dependency theorists' criticism of existing models of economic development was good and necessary, Frank threw the baby out with the bath water when he claimed that underdevelopment is entirely caused by the world system. If this was true, then Hernando de Soto's (the economist, not the conquistador) reforms would have had no effect. De Soto has led the way in improving standards of living in developing countries precisely by removing antiquated obstacles to economic development and improving the ability of ordinary people to participate in the economy. His success has shown that such obstacles do play a vital role in restricting economic development. By reforming property rights and arguing for a decriminalization of coca growing, de Soto managed to make life so difficult for the Shining Path Peruvian Maoist terrorist organization that they tried to kill him. Read more about de Soto here.

Despite endorsements from people like Kofi Annan ("Hernando is absolutely right") and Bill Clinton ("the world’s greatest living economist"), de Soto infuriates left-wing commentators precisely because he's offering a capitalist solution to underdevelopment. Perhaps the most eloquent defence of de Soto I can offer is to link to the Grauniad, which dedicated a "review" to attacking de Soto, but managed to offer no concrete criticisms whatsoever beyond accusing him of being a front man for international capitalism.

De Soto's work quite concretely demonstrates that legislation and culture in the underdeveloped countries do play a major role in restricting development, even today. To lay everything at the door of a faceless, ill-defined "international capitalism", a left-wing hobbyhorse similar to the Stalinist "international bourgeoisie", is at best a single-cause fallacy.

As a historical view, the idea that Western development is caused by non-Western underdevelopment is fundamentally absurd. It rests on a zero-sum view of world wealth, where Western prosperity cannot be the result of progress within Western society, but must be created by taking resources from other societies.

To take a fairly specific example, it has long been a commonplace for certain leftists to assert that the British "industrial revolution" was built on profits from imperialism and the slave trade. However, it has been pointed out by David Richardson that less than 1% of the domestic investment in Britain during the Industrial Revolution was made up of profits from the slave trade. Furthermore, while it's indisputable that the Atlantic slave trade had a grave human impact on Africa, the idea that it impoverished and destroyed the entire continent is ridiculously exaggerated. It obscures, among others, the fact that there were also Africans who themselves made a considerable profit from selling other Africans into slavery. In my opinion, the bald generalizations offered by supposedly "post-colonial" Marxists that cast all white people as aggressors and all black people as helpless victims are just as racist as the racist views they purport to replace.

Even some Marxist historians like Bill Warren agree:

There is no evidence of a process of underdevelopment…The evidence rather supports a contrary thesis: that process of development has been taking place…and that this has been a direct result of the west.

I wouldn't go as far as to say that the economic development of the entire world, at any stage, is a direct result of anything done by the West, but the simple truth is that throughout the history of the world, all societies have developed economically, and some societies have developed faster than others. This speed has varied, and indeed at times turned negative, and the forms the development has taken have also varied. Development and "undevelopment" have both taken place at all times and in all cultures; there is no truth to the racist ideas that only white westerners can bring about economic prosperity, or that African culture - as if there were such a thing as an "African culture" - is somehow inherently inimical to development.

At its heart, economic development is endogenic. This is not to suggest that exogenic factors can't play major or even decisive parts in specific processes, but it's long since become obvious to me that these kinds of rejoinders of the blindingly obvious are necessary when writing about anything even remotely political. But historically, it has primarily been the endogenic development of a culture or society that determines what its economy is like and how prosperous it is. There is no single cause; the circumstances a society is in, including various environmental variables like natural resources and climate, power relations within the society and of the society with others, cultural and economic structures within the society and a bewildering array of other factors, conspicuously including decisions made in and by the society, determine what path of economic development it takes. If unraveling this was easy, then economic history wouldn't be an academic discipline.

It's precisely the complexity of economic development that makes single-cause explanations like "international capitalism" or the blithering nonsense of Jared Diamond's guns, germs and steel so inadequate. They attempt to reduce a massively complex series of interrelated historical processes to a single cause, and frankly, when they go beyond that to assert that this single mechanism still functions today and people offering alternative views are on its payroll, they enter the realm of conspiracy theory.

These zero-sum theories don't make any sense on their own merits. If the underdevelopment of the so-called Third World is entirely a result of Western capitalism, does this mean that before the advent of the Age of Discovery (which, frankly, is an appallingly Eurocentric term), fundamental global inequalities of wealth didn't exist? If so, how did the diabolical Western capitalists acquire the means to appropriate the wealth of other nations? Surely they had some competitive advantages to start with. These zero-sum views reduce world economic history to a simplistic nonsense of a pillaging West and a pillaged Rest, and don't hold any water when faced with even an elementary knowledge of history.

Even worse, by casting the entire "Rest" as a unitary block of victimized cultures, they completely deny the rich history and heritage of, say, Arabic and Islamic culture, not to mention China, by reducing them to simple victims of Western imperialism who, unable to defend themselves, succumbed to the superior invader. No thought is given to the notion that these societies have their own history and their own processes that might be worthy of study. This simplistic view of the other as an eternal, impersonal suffering victim in fact reinforces the very Eurocentric, orientalist orthodoxy that its proponents claim to oppose.

**

The Tiger Beatdown article goes deeper into the land of conspiracies in its account of the Libyan civil war:

And now, to prove that none of this Dependency Theory is a thing of the past, in a very recent display of neo-colonial power, NATO forces, the pan European military arm, occupies Libya, a former Italian colony, supporting the “good guys”, the rebel insurgent group whose idea of justice was to sodomize Gaddafi minutes before his execution (Warning for extremely graphic content). Europe, once again, behind the pillage of bodies outside their territory, because that’s another concept that Europe laid out the foundations for: the idea of what Judith Butler very aptly named “the non grievable” lives.

By implication at least, the author seems to be claiming that the Western intervention in Libya is grounded in economic policy, and is part of this transfer of wealth from the Rest to the West. This is utterly ridiculous. No arguments or facts in its favor are advanced, beyond simply stating that the intervention occurred. And surely, if we are to mention atrocities committed by the rebels against al-Qaḏḏāfī, we might also remember that his regime was hardly benevolent? It seems odd to posthumously cast the Libyan dictator as a victim of Western economic repression, but these are the strange lengths to which Marxist conspiracy theories will go.

The leftist attitude to Western intervention is frequently a sort of Catch-22. If the West intervenes in a country like Libya or Iraq, then the intervention is an instance of Chomsky's "New Military Humanism"; an exercise in economically motivated power politics that in itself proves how evil and acquisitive the imperialism that is Western capitalism is. If, however, the West does not intervene, as in Syria or most conflicts in sub-Saharan Africa, then its callousness and disregard are proof of how evil and acquisitive the imperialism that is Western capitalism is. In the eyes of these critics, the West is damned if it does and damned if it doesn't.

**

To end on some more positive feedback (the lower bun of this hamburger, if you will), I'd like to turn to racism again.

All European Empires were built on this notion of “the Other”, the non human that was only good in so far as she could produce labor and resources and, in turn, more children to be exploited. Nowadays, these ideas constantly framed as “the immigrant menace” and the inevitable raising of xenophobia and racism; European governments passing laws demanding more and more stringent requirements to access a documented residency status. The non Western immigrant that did manage to acquire a residency, forced to learn the language of the country or risk deportation. The old colonial practices now enforced on European territories under the guise of “cultural preservation” and “integration”.

Again, I can't agree with the Marxist notion that "the other" is economically defined, or that the other is acceptable as a producer of labor and resources. To proper racists, the racially constructed Other is inherently repulsive and must be kept away, not from economic interests but from pure political prejudice. In Finland, for instance, the main anti-immigrant party is also heavily in favor of reducing Finnish dependence on international trade and, at worst, almost a striving for autarchy. Certainly this view doesn't see the immigrants as economic resources to be exploited: on the contrary, pseudo-Fascist movements see the immigrant as a threat to the health and integrity of the "national body". In my opinion, to see European racism as economically motivated is senseless, as such a theory as to its origins and motivations entirely fails to account for its political manifestations without pseudo-conspiracy theories of "false consciousnesses".

However, in the context of the current European "debate" - which it hardly is by any sensible standards - on immigration, it's important to highlight the very real racist nature of these policies of "assimilation". Fundamentally, they insist that immigrants have no right to their own culture or language, but must abandon their identity and take on a new one, imposed by the hegemonic culture. In other words:

Nowadays, European States (the Netherlands and Denmark are two such examples) have laws that demand Non Westerners learn and speak the local languages or risk fines or, failing to comply, eventual deportation. Their right to occupy a space subject to assimilation.

This is precisely the kind of immigration policy that Finnish political racists are advancing: immigrants must "assimilate", i.e. give up their identity, or be forcibly deported or otherwise penalized. We should recognize that this is inhuman. For instance, a Finnish racist movement states in its election program for the previous election that everyone has a right to their own culture and language. They then go on to state that immigrants must assimilate and abandon their own culture, or be deported. It could hardly be made clearer that to these movements and their supporters, immigrants aren't people at all. In Finland, even the biggest left-wing party, the Social Democrats, campaigned with a slogan calling for immigrants to assimilate.

So I would like to take this opportunity to give my unqualified support for the demand that the "Occupy" movement, in Europe at least, concern itself with the "others" of our society as well:

Travelers and Roma people constantly evicted from European spaces, their right to Occupy anything denied while a complacent media enforces their status as “Other” and as such, undeserving of the right to inhabit spaces that should be reserved for legitimate Europeans. Because, let’s be clear here once and for all: only people who are legitimized by the State can occupy anything. The rest, the undocumented immigrants, the refuges, the Roma, the asylum seekers, had their right to occupy revoked. However, the European Occupy movement is not widely addressing this deprivation and their role, as rightful subjects, in it. Instead, I insist, the movement claims a bigger portion of the tainted pie.

To echo the point I made earlier in my Finnish-language blog post on transgender rights in Finland, Mahathma Gandhi has reputedly said that a nation is measured by how it treats its lesser members. I object to the idea that, say, the non-cisgendered or immigrants are somehow "lesser" members of society than the more outwardly conforming, but I'll again suggest a rewording: a movement for socio-economic change can be judged by who it wants to enact socio-economic change for. So far, the Occupy movement is a movement of the mainstream, for the mainstream, and the Others remain marginalized.

Happy birthday Aishwarya Rai!

2011-11-01T09:00:00.000+02:00

We recently had the pleasure of seeing the beautiful Aishwara Rai in the Tamil science-fiction film Robot, which was brilliant. Today's her birthday!

Rai won the Miss World pageant back in 1994:

Representing, of course, India.

We liked her acting, and were pleasantly surprised that she does Fergie much, much better than Fergie.

And, above all, was simply beautiful.

If you get a chance to see Robot, do. It was awesome.

In a station of the Metro

2011-10-31T09:00:00.000+02:00

The apparition of these faces in the crowd ;
Petals on a wet, black bough.
— Ezra Pound

This is just a short post to let you know what I've been doing. It's extremely exiting for me, but unfortunately not very photogenic: a subway.

Here's a wall in my underground base:

I've now turned it into a staircase that goes down to my first subway station:

My idea is to eventually have multiple parallel tracks, but I'm starting with one. What you need to get started is a button or lever, a powered rail and a minecart.

Then plonk down 37 regular iron rails after it (for optimal speed!), followed by another powered rail, this one permanently powered by a redstone torch:

And you're away! Traveling by minecart is much faster, and on a properly constructed track, safer, than on foot. Some engineering may be required; for instance, I had to build this bridge over my chasm:

Of course, while digging that secure track, you might run into some unexpected surprises.

I wrote about mob spawners in my last post, and I've now gone from never having seen a dungeon in my life to running into one every time I start digging...

But in the end, this is what you get: a quick and safe underground ride in a minecart.

As I said, digging this damned long tunnel was neither very interesting or photogenic in itself, but it's very rewarding. I have a subway system! Here's an approximation of where the line runs on my composite map, with the "stations" marked in. As you can see, I've nearly reached Epic Island!

The one at the bottom (furthest west, that is) is my underground base; the next station down is the latest tower I've built, and the last one, well, you'll see!

Finland's idiotic Pirate Bay ban

2011-10-28T09:00:00.002+03:00

Just this week, the Helsinki district court has ordered Finnish ISP Elisa to block access to the Pirate Bay. Torrentfreak has the story in English.

As Ville Oksanen points out in his blog, the court decision goes to some lengths to justify the ban, even though they're aware that it won't work. They expect the ISP to block access to a website, without specifying either the domain names or IP numbers to block, or specifying the means to use. Indeed, the presiding judge admits that the block will be ineffective, but astonishingly, insists on it anyway.

Perhaps the best outcome is that the Finnish copyright lobby managed to elicit this public statement from one of the country's biggest telecom companies (via TF):

In a response to the ruling Elisa immediately announced that it will appeal the District Court’s decision. The ISP claims that among other things, the ruling is very unclear as it doesn’t state the specific domain names or IP-addresses that should be censored.

Elisa further says that the decision is practically irrelevant in the broader fight against online copyright infringement.

“The industry should focus on measures that can truly reduce piracy in practice, such as making content available online at a reasonable price and without artificial delays,” Elisa’s Henri Korpi said.

In other words, as Valve recently put it, "piracy is a service issue". That's pretty much what, for instance, various Pirate parties have been saying all along, but it's good to hear it from a big ISP.

This is just the latest chapter in an ongoing saga of Finnish Internet censorship. Previously, a "child pornography" blacklist was set up, and then used to go after a Finnish activist who criticized the police. The police defended themselves by saying that "collateral damage happens". We went to a demonstration on his behalf.

It was later found that blocking access to activist Matti Nikki's website was, in fact, illegal, but this being Finland, the police officers in charge of violating the law to infringe on Nikki's rights to free speech were let off, and he had to pay his own court costs because, really, it wasn't the police's fault that they flagrantly and intentionally broke the law.

The whole child pornography blocking scheme, with its secret blacklists of websites and whatnot, has since been abandoned, but the next step in implementing Internet censorship is being taken by the copyright lobby. In all this, the one thing that's remained abundantly clear is that no-one in the political or judicial process represents the interests of us, the citizens of this miserable country. Legislation, court decisions and everything else is dictated by the interests of the police and the copyright industry. This isn't how a democracy is supposed to work.

Brief book review: Joe Haldeman's The Forever War

2011-10-24T09:00:00.001+03:00

I've been catching up on some cyberpunk classics this fall, but I also finally got my hands on Joe Haldeman's Forever War.

The Forever War is one of the classic works of military science fiction, but with the distinction that the author served in Vietnam as a combat engineer. It's that experience that lends strong verisimilitude to much of the story, especially to anyone who's ever been involved with a real-life military organization. Also thankfully absent is the macho chest-pounding that is so disgustingly prevalent in the genre, especially in its more ludicrous offerings.

There's an afterword by Peter F. Hamilton, where he says:

Unlike a lot of books written in the early seventies, he's managed to create a functioning universe and human society which has barely dated. Yes, the actual dates are wrong. We didn't have interstellar ships in the mid-nineties (shame!). But anyone picking this up fresh today would be hard pressed to know that it was written long before the internet, mobile phones and iPods were in existence.

I liked the book, but we have to call bullshit on this one. Parts of the novel haven't aged that well, such as the emphasis on sex and sexuality, and there is an expansive section set on Earth that serves its dramatic purpose excellently, but falls apart under critical scrutiny. While it does an excellent job of conveying the alienation soldiers feel on returning to civilian life, the details of the dystopic world Haldeman depicts just don't hold water. Also, exactly contrary to what Hamilton says, it's painfully obvious at times that Forever War was written before the information revolution.

While it's often depicted as a Vietnam war analogy, which it in some sense is, The Forever War is first and foremost a great novel. I was steeling myself for the possibility that it would be Space Vietnam, with Space Cav troopers flying into a space jungle in space helicopters, but the Forever War is proper science fiction, not just an analogy in space. It should be required reading for anyone interested in science fiction.

Happy birthday Jessica Michibata!

2011-10-21T09:00:00.003+03:00

I can't believe we've neglected the devastatingly cute Jessica Michibata, a beautiful Japanese model and girlfriend of F1 world champ Jenson Alexander Lyons Button MBE.

It's her birthday today, so it seems like a good time to correct our mistake.

Happy birthday!

The future of manned aircraft

2011-10-19T09:00:00.001+03:00

This past summer, the Economist decried the expense of the F-35, and chided the American military for spending too much money on what would be "the last manned fighter". I'm willing to stick my neck out on this and say that they're wrong. There will still be at least one generation of manned fighters.

The Economist is wrong because they underestimate two important factors, of which the most important is sheer bureaucratic inertia. In practically all western air forces, the career path of high-ranking officers is that of a fighter pilot. Decades of propaganda and bureaucratic infighting have established the fighter pilot as one of the celebrated heroes of the modern military, and the core identity of the air force. That won't be given up easily. The move to unmanned aircraft would mean that bold, gutsy and manly fighter pilots will be replaced by guys with Playstation controllers, and even if the latter are more effective in combat, they're just not cricket. In Top Gun 2020, the young fighter jocks won't barge their way into a bar, drink like mad and wow the girls with their rendition of Great Balls of Fire on the piano; they'll sit in the corner, order some apple juice and turn up the J-Pop.

Bureaucratic inertia is made even worse by the fact that air forces the world over are still, to some extent, young services fighting to establish themselves. Go back 50 years and witness the intense fighting on both sides of the Atlantic: in the States, over whether the army is allowed to operate fixed-wing aircraft or not, and in the UK over who controls naval aviation. That may seem like a long time ago, but in both countries, there is a level at which air forces still perceive themselves as younger and less secure services than the other two. Unmanned aircraft question the very existence of a separate air force: if, after all, you're just going to fly drones, then the army already has people doing just that. Why would they need a special service of their own? The navy could easily ditch naval aviation in favor of NCOs flying drones off their ships. It's not just the pilots that will go, after all, but nearly all of the support staff and facilities will be rendered irrelevant. The massive fixed airbases that were such a huge liability in the cold war will finally meet their end.

It's a well-established fact of defense policy that the armed services will, in the pursuit of administrative goals and inter-service rivalries, make inefficient decisions. What makes this even worse is the lack of a real military-technological rivalry to drive development forward. Unlike in the cold war, the US doesn't have a real technological challenger. The Russians can still produce very good aircraft, but nothing with which to really challenge the F-22 and F-35 in terms of pure technology. In its current decrepit state, Russia is still years away from being able to mount any kind of challenge to US air superiority, and China is much further away.

Remember that in the cold war, Western fighter development was basically driven by intelligence panics. A new Soviet prototype would show up on the runway at Ramenskoye and be spotted by a US reconnaisance satellite; then the intelligence guys would try to figure out what characteristics it had. Because of the difficulty of getting solid intelligence out of the Soviet Union, this was mostly guesswork, and regularly led to incredible overestimates of Soviet capabilities. The actual characteristics of a plane like the Su-24 Fencer had almost nothing to do with the intelligence projections, but because all they had to go on were the more-or-less informed guesses of their intelligence, Western aircraft were produced to face a much more powerful threat than the real one. For instance, the F-15 Eagle, which some people consider the greatest air superiority fighter of the 20th century, was essentially created to meet and defeat what the West imagined the MiG-25 Foxbat to be. The MiG-25 was seen at a runway somewhere, and the intel guys panicked. "It's got swing wings and two engines OH MY GOD IT CAN DO MACH FOUR AND HAS MISSILES THE SIZE OF MY HOUSE!" The actual aircraft was, well, different, but the threat of the imagined MiG-25 drove the US to create the F-15. There's nothing like the Ramenskoye panics driving aircraft design now.

This combination of a lack of research impetus and real air threat simply means that the Americans can be quite content with a substandard jack-of-all-trades, master-of-fuck-all aircraft like the F-35, and even inflict it on unsuspecting allies at a gigantic price. Even if drones would be cheaper and more effective, the West can settle for the far more expensive and ineffective manned aircraft, because they're good enough. It also, in all likelihood, means that since a new generation of pilots will be trained up on the F-35, they will fight just as hard against the inevitable as their predecessors did, and will probably manage to secure a next generation of manned aircraft for themselves. After all, think of all the jobs that would be lost.

As a side note, maybe this could restart the US space program. After all, the air force will need something to do.

In summary, assuming, say, the US Air Force will switch to unmanned aircraft in the near future assumes a level of rational decision-making that is totally alien to any peacetime military establishment. As a piece of military hardware, the manned aircraft will far outlive its usefulness. As the Economist put it in a more recent piece, the pilot in the cockpit may be an endangered species, but he's surrounded by a gigantic bureaucracy dedicated to his preservation.

**

And besides, the drones will just get taken over by Skynet anyway.

Beverly LaHaye and lesbians

2011-10-17T09:00:00.002+03:00

I'm reading Michael Lienesch's Redeeming America, an excellent book about the Christian right in the United States.

It features several quotes from Beverly LaHaye, a Christian conservative activist and wife of Tim LaHaye, co-author of the dispensationalist book series Left Behind. They've both written several self-help guides for Christian couples, covering everything from child raising to sex positions, all in a very Christian way, of course. Here are some of her thoughts:

Thus Beverly LaHaye goes on to warn single women about the attractions of lesbianism: "Beware of an improper physical attachment between you and your roommates. Sad to say, this sometimes happens in today's world, especially if one is lonely, overly affectionate, and lacks a sense of security." In fact, there is a presumption that single women are often lesbians.

Lienesch 1993, p. 71

When I read that, I hear the actress who played Sister Miriam in Alpha Centauri reading it out loud in my head. That would be a fantastic introduction for a porno.

"Lesbianism lurks in the colonies as it lurked in the sororities of yesteryear. But it was never the sororities that were evil."

- Sister Miriam Godwinson, "A Blessed Struggle"

There's more, too. Not only is Beverly LaHaye deeply concerned about young women being drawn to the attractions of lesbianism, but she also pays close attention to young girls' breasts:

Beverly LaHaye is particularly interested in alerting teenage girls to their own seductiveness. She writes reprovingly:

I have seen lovely girls conduct themselves in such a manner that they turn fellows on and cause them to have problems with lust and evil thoughts. One charming lady was walking out of church with her hand in her date's arm and was very carelessly allowing her breast to rub against the boy.

It's good that the Christian Conservative movement has someone who lectures young women on the attractions of lesbianism, while keeping a firm eye on their unruly bosoms.

Jessica Drake and Bianca Beauchamp

2011-10-14T09:00:00.005+03:00

Sorry if that got someone overly exited; as far as I know, these two beautiful ladies just happen to share a birthday.

The beautiful Jessica Drake is one of the hottest porn stars in the world:

Bianca Beauchamp, on the other hand, is the most beautiful fetish model ever.

Happy birthday!

It's dangerous underground

2011-10-12T09:00:00.000+03:00

There's one constant in a Minecraft dude's life: mining. Amidst all these surface escapades I've been chronicling in this blog, I've also been regularly returning to my big dig and carrying on digging, with the occasional company of underground chickens:

Mining is necessary. Sure, I've got plenty of rock, but all the good stuff is down at the bottom of the map: redstone, gold, diamonds... Not to mention the lava I need to build my portal to hell!

It's not all work and goodies: here's what I ran into!

The fiery box next to the chest is a mob spawner, which creates monsters to ruin your day. You can do all sorts of clever things with them, mostly by devising fiendish traps to kill the spawning monsters and get the loot they drop, but that's a project for another day. For now, I've walled it off with an earthen bank.

As I kept digging, I started hearing a funny squelching noise from above. I went back to look:

Slimes! They're a rare beast; I knew they existed, but never saw one before. Now there's two!

Slimes only appear in certain chunks of the map, and at its very lowest levels, so it looks like I'm lucky enough to have a slime-generating chunk directly below my main base, and that I'm very close to the bottom! And, after a sequence of events, I find myself with some slimeballs:

They're useful for piston-related purposes, and somewhat rare. So when and if I decide to immerse myself in the wonderful world of pistons, they'll come in handy.

And soon enough, I've hit rock bottom:

The dark squares there are impenetrable bedrock. That's as deep as the map goes; there's nothing under those blocks. Here's the view from the bottom:

It kind of looks like a chasm, even if I say so myself. Frankly, I was a little disappointed at not finding any of that elusive lava that I'll need to get to hell, but luckily, as I expanded my dig, I came across this:

Next time on my Minecraft posts: some Ezra Pound.

Hipsters of the Universe

2011-10-11T09:00:00.002+03:00

Oh, this is just brilliant.

The Steve Jobs thing is going too far

2011-10-10T09:00:00.003+03:00

I freely admit I write provocatively, and sometimes I've even been rude, but this time around, I genuinely do not want to offend anyone. However, the beatification of Steve Jobs is getting so far out of hand that I have to say something.

A blogger for the Economist pushed me over the edge with this:

Prospero: Beautiful gadget, no manual necessary

He put Apple's great achievement better than anyone I've heard, and so I paraphrase it here: it used to be that when you got a computer or a gadget, you had to read a long manual or spend forever fiddling with it to learn how to use it. One person in the family might take the time to do so, and then spend the rest of the Christmas holiday teaching everyone else how to do the things they wanted to do.

Apple changed all that.

He then goes on to claim that the success of Nintendo's Wii console is due to Apple and Steve Jobs:

The Wii game system has made Nintendo a fortune in recent years. How did Nintendo know it would be a hit? Elderly members of the company's board delighted in picking up the controller and simply moving it around to play the simple, intuitive games. I've never heard someone from Nintendo say they got this from Apple, but the influence is clear enough. These days whether you're a Mac or a PC, an Android or an iPhone, you play by the delightful rules Steve Jobs set for us all.

Okay. Stop.

First of all, the Apple Macintosh was introduced in January 1984. The Nintendo Entertainment System that we grew up with was introduced in Japan in 1983. Remember how with the NES, you had to read a long manual and spend forever fiddling with it to learn how to use it? You know, until Steve Jobs came along?

Steve Jobs, or anyone else at Apple, did not invent usability, intuitiveness, the graphical user interface, or really much of anything that goes on on your game console, PC or smart phone. Neither did he "revolutionize" any of the above. Obviously he's influenced the entire computer industry, but it's getting a bit too thick to give him credit for everything.

Most of the really innovative things Apple "came up with" for the Macintosh, such as the easy-to-use GUI, were stolen from Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center. These days, whether you're a PC or a Mac, or anything else, you're operating within a framework invented at PARC. If you don't know that, you have no business blogging about Steve Jobs's or anyone else's impact on the computer industry. Let alone claiming that the Nintendo Wii is influenced by Apple.

In general, it would be nice if more people read, say, this Gawker piece on Steve Jobs. It reminds us, among other things, of the human cost of those nice, shiny devices. Here's a quote from a Daily Mail article from last June's launch of the new iPhone:

Daily Mail: Revealed: Inside the Chinese suicide sweatshop where workers toil in 34-hour shifts to make your iPod

Yet, amid all the fanfare and celebrations this week, there was one sour, niggling note: reports of a spate of suicides at a secretive Chinese complex where Jobs's iPhone, iPod and iPad - Apple's new state-of-the-art slimline computer - are built and assembled.

With 11 workers taking their lives in sinister circumstances, Jobs acted swiftly to quell a potential public relations disaster.

Stressing that he found the deaths 'troubling' and that he was 'all over it', the billionaire brushed aside suggestions that the factory was a sweatshop.

'You go in this place and it's a factory but, my gosh, they've got restaurants and movie theatres and hospitals and swimming pools,' he said. 'For a factory, it's pretty nice.'

His definition of 'nice' is questionable and likely to have his American workers in uproar if such conditions were imposed upon them.

For, as Apple's leader was taking a bow on the world stage, the Mail was under cover inside this Chinese complex. And we encountered a strange, disturbing world where new recruits are drilled along military lines, ordered to stand for the company song and kept in barracks like battery hens - all for little more than £20 a week.

In what's been dubbed the 'i-Nightmare factory', the scandal focuses on two sprawling complexes near Shenzhen, two decades ago a small fishing port and now a city of 17 million people.

This is the epicentre of operations for Foxconn, China's biggest exporter, which makes products under licence for Apple using a 420,000-strong workforce in Shenzhen. They have 800,000 workers country-wide.

And as Jobs was speaking in San Francisco, new measures were being secretly introduced at Foxconn to prevent the suicide scandal from worsening and damaging Apple sales globally.

Astonishingly, this involves forcing all Foxconn employees to sign a new legally binding document promising that they won't kill themselves.

Yeah. Isn't it funny how when Apple gets exposed for using child labor and sweatshops, the Western left reacts by sipping their lattes while smugly using their iPhones?

I'm not saying people shouldn't mourn, or that instead of eulogizing Jobs we need to vilify him. I'm just asking for some balanced coverage here. He was a man, not a saint. It's testament to the strength of the reality distortion field around Jobs that he's being given posthumous credit for inventing sliced bread, actual innovators like PARC are forgotten, and that inconvenient facts like the horrifying sweatshops that assemble your iPads are brushed under the carpet. Just because someone dies doesn't mean we shouldn't be honest about what he and his company did and didn't do. Eulogies are journalism too.

Happy birthday Jayden Cole!

2011-10-09T09:00:00.002+03:00

Another porn birthday: the beautiful Jayden Cole!

She's starred in a movie called Bikini Frankenstein, and if that's not enough of a character reference for you, then I don't know what is.

Happy birthday!

Jari Kurri's number

2011-10-07T09:00:00.002+03:00

Now that the NHL premiere is in Helsinki, hockey fans in North America can once again see Hartwall Areena, the current home of six-time Finnish league champions Jokerit. NHL.com ran a couple of stories over the past week, and here's an excerpt from one:

NHL.com: Selanne adored as a national hero in Finland

Jari Kurri's No. 17 hangs from the rafters at Hartwall. Twice in fact -- once for his exploits with Jokerit and the other for his contributions to Suomi with the national team. Kurri was the first Finnish player to become an NHL legend, and Selanne is the second and his No. 8 will surely be there soon after he retires.

The funny detail is that while it's true that Jari Kurri used the jersey number 17 in the NHL and in the national team, he never used that number in Jokerit. Before his NHL career, he used #11, and during the 1994-95 lockout, he wore #71. Speaking as a lifelong Jokerit fan, it's just stupid that they've retired the number 17 for Jari, who never wore it in Jokerit.

An even more questionable retirement is Esa Tikkanen's #5. Tikkanen is a great player and a five-time Stanley Cup champion, but he only ever played 43 career games for Jokerit. In fact, his junior team was next-door HIFK, an elite Swedish-language yachting club. By rights, that's where his number should be.

Confusingly, while Tikkanen wore #10 in the NHL and #5 in Jokerit, Jokerit chose to retire his SM-liiga number, but in Jari's case, they left his SM-liiga number and retired his NHL number. That just doesn't make sense.

Mojang vs. Zenimax: the court papers

2011-10-05T09:00:00.005+03:00

We've been posting about Minecraft for a while now on this blog, but we haven't really talked about Mojang's ongoing lawsuit with Zenimax Media, owner of game studios like id and Bethesda. Frankly, we think the whole thing is stupid, and have been hoping that Zenimax would come to their senses. If you don't know what's going on, in very brief summary, Mojang are releasing a game called "Scrolls", and Zenimax are suing them over it, claiming it violates the copyright on the "Elder Scrolls" series.

Yesterday, Kotaku ran an article on the lawsuit that took a new slant on things by painting Mojang as the villain of the piece. Titled Mojang v. Bethesda, or: I Hate it When Mommy and Daddy Fight, in it author Russ Pitts makes the case that Zenimax are merely defending themselves against a nefarious bid by Mojang to "patent" [sic] the word "Scrolls" and thereby, in fact, sue Zenimax.

If one were to attempt to judge based solely on Twitter and the blogs, Zenimax would appear to be the bad guy here. Notch, perhaps attempting to bolster that perception, has put on his hurt face, claiming Zeni is "picking on the little guy." But after looking at Mojang's "Scrolls" patent application, I'm not so sure the case is as black and white as many would seem to believe.

(...)

In other words, Mojang intends to own the word "scrolls" in pretty much every form of visual entertainment media, not just in videogames. This means that, if the trademark is upheld, the company could rightly take action against anyone else using the word "scrolls" in any form of media whatsoever. Now, that would only be a problem if you were a successful media company planning to use the word "scrolls" in some form of entrainment media … Oh wait … that's right. If you're Zenimax, this trademark fucks you. Hard.

The Kotaku piece has generated some acrimonious commenting and twittering, including several people attacking Notch and calling him a liar. Now we're going to participate in the discussion! To be specific, three things annoy us about that article:

1) the cavalier approach it takes to intellectual property law

2) its misrepresentation of events

3) the fact that Kotaku freely admit they can't read the legal documents, but write about them anyway

For the last point, simply see Kotaku's article Notch Vs. Bethesda: The Court Papers, where they link to said papers, but admit they don't know what they say.

While Kotaku has the documents in question, no one here speaks Swedish.

That, of course, doesn't stop them from running an article where they make Mojang out to be the bad guys.

On this blog, however, we can read Swedish, so we've had a look at the court documents. You can find them here. They tell a story that's quite different from the one invented by Mr Pitts.

A disclaimer: we're not lawyers. We're just reading what we've been shown. This blog post simply consists of our personal opinions on the case and on Mr Pitts's article about it. As we've understood things, the legal documents published by Mojang are in the public domain.

**

Mr Pitts's allegation is that Zenimax are suing Mojang over Scrolls to prevent Mojang from, in turn, suing Bethesda over The Elder Scrolls. He puts forward the notion that Mojang's ""Scrolls" patent application" [sic] is so broad that if Zenimax doesn't sue to stop them, they will be in a position to stop Zenimax from releasing Elder Scrolls games.

If the trademark is valid, Mojang would be able to claim infringement and potentially take Zenimax to court. They might not win, considering Zeni's ownership of the trademark preceded Mojang's, but Mojang could force Zenimax to settle or face an injunction which would keep all of those millions of copies of Skyrim off of store shelves and out of the hands of gamers, depriving Zeni of many, many millions of dollars in revenue.

He goes on:

Seem unlikely? Think again. Companies do this all the time.

Using the power of hypertext, Pitts links to four examples of "companies doing this all the time" from that sentence. Let's look at them.

#1: Trench vs. Trenched

MCV: Trenched blocked by board game trademark

Upcoming XBLA title Trenched has been blocked from release due to a trademark dispute with a board game.

Eurogamer reports that the game clashes with trademarks held by an abstract Portuguese board game Trench. The trademark was filed by Trench's designer Rui Alípio Monteiro in 2007 and covers both board games and computer games.

Like Double Fine's Trenched, the board game is based on military strategy and is set during World War I.

The video game Trenched was eventually released as Iron Brigade. This doesn't seem to me to be a case of a company maliciously suing another to cause millions of dollars of damage; instead, the Portuguese board game's designer had a pre-existing trademark on a World War I game of practically the same name, which he was planning to expand into a video game. It seems reasonable that his claim would be upheld.

#2: Apple vs. Amazon

CNN Money: Amazon wins skirmish in 'App Store' battle with Apple

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- Apple has been dealt a blow in its "App Store" trademark case, with a federal judge denying its request for an injunction to stop Amazon from using the term.

Apple filed a lawsuit against Amazon in March, saying that it has used the term "App Store" since 2008 and applied for a trademark at that time. Apple argued that Amazon's "Appstore," an Android marketplace that launched in March, infringes on the trademark and is confusing to customers.

Amazon fired back, saying the mark is generic and therefore not protectable -- and even if it weren't generic, Apple "cannot demonstrate any likelihood of confusion."

Judge Phyllis Hamilton mostly sided with Amazon in her ruling on Wednesday in California district court, in which she denied Apple the injunction it sought.

Hamilton wrote that she "does not agree with Amazon that the mark is purely generic," but also said that "there appears to be no need for a leap of imagination to understand what the term means."

Apple failed to prove its main points, she said, including: that Amazon's "Appstore" name will confuse customers, that it infringes on Apple and that it dilutes Apple's brand.

Here we have Apple being the evil corporation that we consider them to be, effectively trying to make the word "app" an Apple trademark instead of a generic term. Again, I'm not sure how Amazon and Apple fighting over a word are anything like Zenimax and Mojang. Note, if you like, that even though the court didn't agree that the term is generic, they still denied the injunction.

#3: Tim Langdell vs EA

Techdirt: Court Denies Injunction Against EA Over Tim Langdell's 'Edge' Trademark; Slams Langdell

We've covered a few different stories about a guy named Tim Langdell who held a trademark on the term "edge" in video games, which he had used many years ago, and still sorta kinda maybe uses as part of his operation, "Edge Games." And yet, he seemed to think that trademark law means he owns the word, as it relates to video games, forever. So he's been threatening iPhone developers and sued EA, claiming the company's Mirrors Edge series violates his trademarks. EA has fought back strongly against the claims, and Brian alerts us to the news that a court has denied Langdell's injunction request and slammed Langdell in the process, suggesting underhanded practices which could result in criminal penalties.

(...)

When a judge calls you a troll and threatens you with criminal penalties in a lawsuit you initiated... you've got problems. Reading through the actual ruling is incredible, in what it describes about what Langdell has done.

The article describes Dr Langdell's doctoring of evidence, including sending the court photoshopped images (!), which in our opinion is more like fraud than a legitimate copyright case. Essentially, Dr Langdell claimed that his trademark on the name "Edge" stops EA from releasing Mirror's Edge, because it contains the word "edge". His suit was thrown out of court.

Dr Langdell is especially relevant to the case at hand, because Mr Pitts refers back to him later. But we'll get to that.

#4: Activision vs EA

Joystiq.com: Activision 'Rocktober' trademark conflicts with EA's Brutal Legend marketing

When Activision sent out a press release this morning regarding a Guitar Hero DLC discount, we couldn't help but notice a tiny trademark symbol dangling precariously above the term "Rocktober™." That got our mind grapes juicing: Isn't that the term EA has been using to market Brütal Legend's upcoming [strikethrough: October] Rocktober 13 release? It is!

Lo and behold, we turned up an Activision trademark filing for "Rocktober" dating all the way back to 2007. An EA representative was unable to comment at the time of this posting, but assured us we'll have an official statement from the publisher soon. We've also reached out to Activision for its side of the story. In the meantime, we've dropped the text from Activision's press release -- or as it's no doubt being dubbed by lawyers, Exhibit A -- after the break.
Activision press release:

The article doesn't actually mention either company suing the other, i.e. "companies doing this all the time"; what it says is that a third party noticed both EA and Activision were promoting their games using the word "Rocktober", which Activision had apparently filed a trademark on. This doesn't seem to have anything to do with the Zenimax-Mojang case.

**

Having provided these links, Mr Pitts goes on to directly compare Mojang to Dr Langdell:

Besides, if Mojang were as naive and innocent as Notch claims, why the far-reaching trademark application? If one were being generous, one could assume that Mojang is simply attempting to cover all potential bases, which, for a game as potentially all over the map as Scrolls could make sense. But if we're drawing comparisons to the case of Tim "Edge" Langdell (and I am), it pays to remember that Langdell was the one who applied for broad and far-reaching trademarks on the use of a single word, who attempted to sue EA over Mirror's Edge and Future Publishing over Edge Magazine and many, many other companies large and small, and who, ultimately, was pilloried for obfuscation and fraud.

While the comparison may seem attractive on the surface, it's rather more complicated than that. Dr Langdell seems to have effectively run a phantom game company, given that he had to photoshop and otherwise concoct evidence that he was actually doing any real business. As the court ruling puts it:

...given the suspect nature of Dr. Langdell’s representations to both the USPTO and the Court concerning plaintiff’s current and future sales and business activities, it is an open question whether plaintiff’s business activities legitimately extend beyond trolling various gaming-related industries for licensing opportunities.

The court effectively found Dr Langdell to be a copyright troll who maintains a fake game company solely in order to sue real game developers. So drawing a direct analogy to Mojang is a substantial accusation that we feel shouldn't be made lightly, or in fact at all.

**

So Mr Pitts's scenario is that Mojang are copyright trolling by launching a game called "Scrolls" and trying to trademark the name, planning to later sue Zenimax for infringing it with the Elder Scrolls series.

That's nonsense. Not because of any knowledge or assumptions I have about Mojang, as Mr Pitts puts it:

This begs the question of whether or not Mojang would ever do such a thing. "Surely the cute and fluffy, fan-friendly designers of the cult-hit Minecraft would never play such a down-and-dirty trick," you might say, and I, for one, would love to believe that to be true. But if you're Zenimax, and you're sitting on a multi-million dollar videogame franchise with the word "scrolls" in its title, you can't take that chance.

It's nonsense for a simple reason:

Mr Pitts doesn't seem to understand what a trademark is. Indeed, throughout the article he seems to confuse trademarks with patents. Trademarking a name doesn't give the trademark holder sole authority to decide who gets to use that name for any purpose. Mr Pitts claims:

In other words, Mojang intends to own the word "scrolls" in pretty much every form of visual entertainment media, not just in videogames. This means that, if the trademark is upheld, the company could rightly take action against anyone else using the word "scrolls" in any form of media whatsoever.

This is absolute rubbish. It is, however, delightfully taken to its logical conclusion in one of the comments to Mr Pitts's article:

They would own the trademark to anything with "Scrolls" in it. Not just use of the word "Scrolls" on its own.

Including libraries of historical documents.

Yes. Because that's exactly how trademarks work.

A trademark protects against products that might be confused for the trademarked product. For example, in one of the cases Mr Pitts quoted, a Portuguese game company successfully filed suit for trademark infringment against another company. The case was upheld because the WWI computer game "Trenched" was so similar to the WWI board game "Trench" that they might be confused for each other; someone buying the computer game might think it was based on or affiliated with the board game. That seems perfectly reasonable. It doesn't mean that no-one can ever use the word "trench" in the name of a game, let alone that the Portuguese company suddenly "owns" all World War I books or trench coats. Using Mr Pitts's logic, however, the Trench trademark would mean that no-one can ever include the word "trench" in the title of a video game. Trademark law simply doesn't work like that.

Mojang's trademark for Scrolls doesn't mean they've somehow "patented" the word "Scrolls", as Mr Pitts implied. It also doesn't mean they "could rightly take action against anyone else using the word "scrolls" in any form of media whatsoever". It doesn't even mean that they can sue anyone who has the word "scrolls" in the title of their game. No: it means that if someone else releases a game called Scrolls or something very similar, that consumers will mistake for Mojang's Scrolls, then Mojang can take action.

Under US law, in a case of trademark infringment the plaintiff has to prove the infringing trademark is the same as, or similar to, their trademark. The court determines whether the trademark has been infringed upon by using the "Sleekcraft factors", so named after a Supreme Court case that set them out. Those factors are:

1. Strength of the mark
2. Proximity of the goods
3. Similarity of the marks
4. Evidence of actual confusion
5. Marketing channels used
6. Type of goods and the degree of care likely to be exercised by the purchaser
7. Defendant's intent in selecting the mark
8. Likelihood of expansion of the product lines

In other words, in a trademark infringment case, the party bringing the case has to prove that they have a valid, pre-existing trademark, and the product they claim is infringing on their copyright is sufficiently similar that consumers can be misled into thinking they are buying one when in fact they are buying another.

Mr Pitts's scenario of Mojang suing Zenimax over, say, Skyrim, is patently ridiculous and would be thrown out of court in any jurisdiction. Zenimax have been publishing "Elder Scrolls" games for 17 years and, indeed, own the trademark to "The Elder Scrolls". To obtain an injunction, Mojang would have to demonstrate that their trademark to "Scrolls" (from 2011) is stronger than Zenimax's far older, better-established, multi-million-selling "Elder Scrolls" trademark, and that Zenimax are intentionally selling and marketing Skyrim in such a way as to confuse consumers into buying it, thinking that they were buying Scrolls. The very idea is laughable. We don't, for one minute, believe that Zenimax's lawyers really feel that a trademark on "Scrolls" would threaten their upcoming release of Skyrim.

Such a hypothetical lawsuit would be dismissed as pure trademark trolling, exactly like Dr Langdell's suit against EA was. Given that Mr Pitts diretly refers to Dr Langdell's lawsuits and the Trench-Trenched lawsuit, it's puzzling that he doesn't seem to understand how trademark law works. Mojang could not "rightly take action against anyone else using the word "scrolls" in any form of media whatsoever", because they don't have, and couldn't get, a trademark on the word "scrolls" in "any media whatsoever".

Mr Pitts makes much of the fact that Mojang's trademark application includes things like TV shows and clothing, again failing to understand that this trademark would only cover TV shows, movies, clothing and whatnot directly related to the game "Scrolls". It doesn't cover any movie or clothing line that uses the word "scrolls" in any context, just ones that could reasonably be thought to be related to the game. Just yesterday someone tweeted to Notch, saying Mojang's trademark of Scrolls "would even be hurting book writers". Again, this would only be true of books that could be reasonably thought to be connected with the game Scrolls, not any book with the word "scrolls" in it.

In coming up with a scenario like this, predicated on the false assumption that "Mojang owns the rights to the word "scrolls"", Mr Pitts is simply demonstrating his ignorance of trademark law. His notion that succesfully trademarking "Scrolls" would jeopardize Zenimax's Elder Scrolls franchise is nonsense. Notch has also since stated that Mojang offered to drop its trademark of Scrolls in exchange for Zenimax dropping the lawsuit, but this was rejected. That would seem to be the final nail in the coffin of Mr Pitts's theory

**

While we're puzzled as to why someone would write a lengthy attack on a game company engaged in a trademark lawsuit without even seeming to know what a trademark is, we're even more confused that the same author would posit motivations for Zenimax in filing the suit without having even read the papers they filed. As we mentioned earlier, they are available online, and make for interesting reading.

Zenimax's case against Mojang is based on the allegation that Mojang are deliberately releasing a game called "Scrolls" to fool customers into confusing it with Skyrim. Yes, you read that right. Far from claiming that Mojang intend to trademark troll them, as Mr Pitts maintains, they are postulating a conspiracy by Mojang to confuse customers.

Zenimax are claiming that Mojang are using the name "SCROLLS" to market "identical or similar" goods to those covered by Zenimax's trademark for "THE ELDER SCROLLS". Both terms are capitalized throughout. They assert (sections 3.1-3.5) that they own the trademark to "THE ELDER SCROLLS", have been releasing Elder Scrolls games for 17 years and sold millions of copies. That's fair enough, but then things start to get interesting.

They maintain that Mojang are using the "confusable" title "Scrolls" to market their video game to be published in 2011 (3.7), despite knowing about Zenimax's plans to publish an Elder Scrolls game in 2011. They quote an interview with Notch, where he says he's played Oblivion, to prove that Mojang know about the Elder Scrolls series (3.8).

In section 3.9, the conspiracy theory begins. We'll quote:

Vidare är klarlagt att Mojang är metvetna om den kommande lanseringen av THE ELDER SCROLLS V: Skyrin och att Mojang har för avsikt att dra fördel av kännedomen om spelserien THE ELDER SCROLLS. Efter att ZeniMax tillkännagav att THE ELDER SCROLLS V: Skyrim skulle lanseras den 11 november 2011 tillkännagav Mojang att de skall lansera den slutliga versionen av sitt första spel MINECRAFT på samma datum. Vid tillkännagivandet uppgav Markus Persson att datumet sammanfaller med lanseringen av ett par andra spel och filmer, däribland Skyrim, och att den inofficiella motiveringen var "us too" (Sv "vi också"), bilaga 9. Mojang har därefter antytt att spelet inte kommer att lanseras på detta datum. En samtidigt lansering av MINECRAFT och THE ELDER SCROLLS V: Skyrim utgör visserligen inte direkt intrång i ZeniMax varumärkesrättigheter. Det är emellertid uppenbart att Mojang därigenom avser att i konsumenternas ögon koppla samman lansering av MINECRAFT med lanseringen av THE ELDER SCROLLS V: Skyrim och därmed dra fördel av den internationella kännedom som upparbetats kring spelserien THE ELDER SCROLLS.

Our boldface. Translated, the last two sentences read approximately:

A simultaneous release of MINECRAFT and THE ELDER SCROLLS V: Skyrim does not really violate Zenimax's trademark rights. It is, however, obvious that Mojang intend thereby to join in the consumers' eyes the release of MINECRAFT with the release of THE ELDER SCROLLS V: Skyrim and thereby take advantage of the international fame of the game series THE ELDER SCROLLS.

That's... ridiculous. They're really saying that Mojang picked 11.11.11 as the release date for Minecraft in order to leech on Zenimax's PR, as opposed to picking it because, well, it's 11.11.11.

As a note of legal interest, they run through the criteria for trademark infringement, including similarity between the marks, the actual goods or services, and how well they're known on the market (4.2). And further, in 4.3-4.5, they make the case that the overall judgment on the case must take into account the likelihood that the "average consumer" will confuse the two marks.

The document refers to some cases brought before the European Court of Justice. In Gut Springenheide GmbH and Rudolf Tusky v Oberkreisdirektor des Kreises Steinfurt - Amt für Lebensmittelüberwachung, the ECJ ruled the following:

37 The answer to be given to the questions referred must therefore be that, in order to determine whether a statement or description designed to promote sales of eggs is liable to mislead the purchaser, in breach of Article 10(2)(e) of Regulation No 1907/90, the national court must take into account the presumed expectations which it evokes in an average consumer who is reasonably well-informed and reasonably observant and circumspect. However, Community law does not preclude the possibility that, where the national court has particular difficulty in assessing the misleading nature of the statement or description in question, it may have recourse, under the conditions laid down by its own national law, to a consumer research poll or an expert's report as guidance for its judgment.

Our boldface. This is effectively the same requirement as the wonderfully named "moron in a hurry" rule of English case law. Wikipedia:

It appears to have been used first by Mr Justice Foster in the 1978 English legal case of Morning Star Cooperative Society v Express Newspapers Limited [1979] FSR 113.[1] In this case, the publishers of the Morning Star, a British Communist party publication, sought an injunction to prevent Express Newspapers from launching their new tabloid, which was to be called the Daily Star. The judge was unsympathetic. He asked whether the plaintiffs could show:

a misrepresentation express or implied that the newspaper to be published by the defendants is connected with the plaintiffs' business and that as a consequence damage is likely to result to the plaintiffs

and stated that:

if one puts the two papers side by side I for myself would find that the two papers are so different in every way that only a moron in a hurry would be misled.

The "moron in a hurry" was also cited in the Beck v. Eiland-Hall case, featuring the infamous Glenn Beck.

So under trademark law, when Mojang has a trademark for "Scrolls" and Zenimax has a trademark for "Elder Scrolls", it doesn't follow that Mojang's trademark means they automatically own the rights to everything with the word "Scrolls" in it. Instead, as explained in Sabel BV v Puma AG:

Mere association alone is not enough to justify a finding of a likelihood of confusion

As we explained, Mojang's trademark for Scrolls doesn't mean they can sue anyone who has the word "scrolls" in the title of their game. It means that if someone else releases a game called Scrolls or something very similar, that consumers will mistake for Mojang's scrolls, then Mojang can take action.

Similarly, Zenimax's existing trademark on "The Elder Scrolls" doesn't mean they "own" that phrase or any of the words in it. Instead, to uphold their claim of trademark infringement against Mojang, they must demonstrate that a "reasonably well-informed and reasonably observant and circumspect" consumer would mistake Mojang's Scrolls for Skyrim.

This is what Zenimax sets out to prove in the papers they filed in Stockholm, and frankly, we find it amusing. The best part is 4.14:

Även innehållet i de dator- och videospel som tillhandahålls eller planeras att tillhandahålls under de motstående kännetedknen uppvisar stora likheter. Båda är exempelvis äventyrsspel som innefattar magi och utspelas i en bergsrik fantasivärld. Dessa likheter är uppenbara vid jämförelse mellan den officiella trailern för ZeniMax spel THE ELDER SCROLLS V: Skyrin som lanserades 23 februari 2011 och den första trailern för Mojangs spel SCROLLS som lanserades den 25 augusti 2011. Representativa skärmbilder och kopior av respektive trailer lilägges, bilaga 13-15.

In this section, Zenimax claims that the content of the games is very similar. The boldfaced sentence reads: "Both are, for example, adventure games that include magic and take place in a mountain-rich fantasy world." As proof, they offer the official trailer for Skyrim, which has mountains, adventure gaming and magic in it, and the Scrolls teaser, which has no gameplay footage at all, but admittedly does include some mountains.

This is where it all gets really stupid. On scrolls.com, the game is described as follows by Jakob Porser, its lead designer:

The game we envisioned had elements from the collectible card game genre as well as from traditional board games. It would be a strategic game with a strong foundation in tactical game play but with a touch of random and chance guaranteeing a never-ending stream of curve balls. You would control the outcome of battle by creating, modifying and refining your arsenal to overcome the obstacles in your path. The game would challenge you with ever changing content and let you explore the world and cleanse the lands of harm, one monster at the time. It would give you the opportunity to test yourself with your peers by battling other players using a long list of tournament templates ranging from friendly matches to ranked league matches. From quick, small sized tournaments to world championships!

Notice that it says "collectible card game genre" and "traditional board games". Here's how the game was discussed in an article on Wired UK this March:

Wired UK: Scrolls: Minecraft creators reinvent collectible card games

Swedish independent games developer Mojang, which is behind the phenomenally-successful Minecraft, has announced its newest title -- Scrolls.

Scrolls will be a hybrid of collectible card games, such as Magic: The Gathering, and boardgames. Players place different units, buildings and siege weapons on a virtual gameboard, assembling a collection of scrolls to play from before the battle begins. To win, you'll need to balance up spells, units, equipment and resources. Some sample cards can be seen in the gallery above.

"I don't think there are many similarities between Minecraft and Scrolls, if any," Jakob Porser, lead designer on Scrolls told Wired.co.uk. "I guess you could say that both games encourage the player to actively take part of the game and not just sit idle as a story unfolds in front of them, but as for genre they really do not have anything in common."

Where, in all this, do you get an adventure game set in a mountain-rich environment? Here's some sample cards from Scrolls. Cards, because it's a CCG.

How can anyone in their right mine confuse that with Skyrim? To paraphrase the "moron in a hurry" idea, how much of a moron, and in how much of a hurry, would you have to be to think Scrolls was Skyrim?

Here we'll gladly submit ourselves as evidence. It should be obvious to anyone reading this blog that its authors are complete morons. Yet even we never confused Scrolls for Skyrim. The short introductory text on the scrolls.com website was enough for us to realize that Scrolls is a lame Magic: The Gathering rip-off, and we're not interested. Meanwhile, we've been under the constant impression that Skyrim won't be a collectible card game but, in fact, a role-playing game. Or, if you like, an adventure game involving magic and all that.

As we said earlier, The Elder Scrolls series is a 17-year-old, multi-million-selling game series of no small fame in the gaming community. Indeed, Zenimax themselves allege just this in the papers they filed. Yet they're claiming that gamers will accidentally go online and download Scrolls, thinking that they're going on Steam or down to the shops to buy Skyrim. Further, they're saying that Mojang are deliberately trying to confuse people into doing that.

They go even further in 5.5, where they maintain that Mojang's plan to give out alpha versions of Scrolls at Minecon 2011 will "dramatically increase the damage to Zenimax".

**

In our opinion, there's no way any "reasonably well-informed and reasonably observant and circumspect" average consumer is going to accidentally download Scrolls, thinking that they're buying Skyrim. Surely gamers can tell the difference between a downloadable card game and a mass-marketed computer role-playing game. What makes the Zenimax case totally ridiculous is that they either don't realize that Scrolls is a collectible card game, or they're deliberately misrepresenting Scrolls to the court. We anticipate Mojang should have a fairly easy time pointing out that Scrolls is not, in fact, an adventure game involving magic, set in a mountain-rich environment.

Only a complete moron with their hair on fire could possibly buy Scrolls and think he had bought Skyrim.

We think - and this is pure speculation - that Zenimax were gambling on Mojang not risking a court case and the risk of substantial damages. Now that they are going to court, in our opinion Zenimax's case rests entirely on substantiating a plot by Mojang to deliberately hoodwink customers into confusing Scrolls and Skyrim. We find it hard to imagine that succeeding. Apparently Mojang feel the same way, which is why they're going to court. We applaud their bravery in doing so.

We don't know why Mr Pitts wrote his uninformed attack on Mojang and attempted to brand them as dishonest trademark trolls, and it would be illiberal of us to speculate, let alone to speculate on the motivations of people who were prompted by Mr Pitts's article to attack Notch on Twitter. We don't want to make the opposite case, either, and claim that Zenimax is an evil corporation bullying independent game developers around with its legal department, even if we wouldn't be the only ones saying that. We don't know if there's a villain in this story at all. Maybe Zenimax genuinely do believe that Mojang are dealing dishonestly, although we find that difficult to swallow. It's even harder to believe the case Zenimax are making. For all we know, though, they may even be right. We can't claim any insight into Mojang's operations.

Overall, we find ourselves at an uncomfortable impasse, because even though we think Mojang's Minecraft is one of the best PC games ever made, we think The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind shares that distinction. We were also pleasantly surprised by Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas, both excellent Bethesda games published by Zenimax.

Even if there isn't a villain in this story, though, in our opinion Zenimax is certainly acting like one. Unless their claims of Mojang's malicious intent are conclusively and thoroughly upheld in court, this will look like a big game company trying to trample all over a popular independent developer. Even worse, they're grossly misrepresenting what Scrolls is in an attempt to get money from Mojang. If they were really this concerned about the integrity of their trademark, wouldn't they go after, say, the browser game "Scroll Wars"? That actually is an RPG, unlike Scrolls.

In this day and age, we think few people are going to side with the big corporation making unreasonable accusations against the cheerful, sympathetic indie developer. It's a virtual certainty that the bad PR from this lawsuit has already caused far more damage to Zenimax than any hypothetical Skyrim sales lost to Scrolls ever could.

As for Mr Pitts's article and the people attacking Notch and Mojang because of it, we can only bemoan the fact that in the Information Age, people can't even be bothered to find out what a trademark is before accusing Mojang of "trying to patent a word". Clearly these people have access to the Internet; they could try to make at least some effort to understand how trademarks work before, say, writing an article that tries to make Mr Persson into Dr Langdell. It reflects poorly on Kotaku that they should publish such an ill-informed personal attack during a fairly high-profile court case.

Happy birthday Talia Shepard!

2011-10-03T09:00:00.005+03:00

Freeones.com tells me today is the gorgeous Talia Shepard's birthday. She was on the cover of Hustler in April 2010:

So, without any further ado, happy birthday!

Sady Doyle and Avengers Prime

2011-09-30T09:00:00.004+03:00

I'm such a fan of Sady Doyle. As always, this isn't a statement of overall approval; for instance, I'm a bit shocked that she totally missed the point of Sucker Punch, and I'm sure she's probably written some other things I strongly disagree with. It would be really weird if she hadn't.

But I absolutely loved these ones:

Guardian: Star Trek: warp factor sex

All in all, what we're getting this summer is Star Trek in the (younger, handsomer, CGI-enhanced) flesh, but not in spirit: to live up to the aspirations of the series, the movie would have to boldly go a lot further than its source ever did.

Global Comment: In praise of Joanne Rowling’s Hermione Granger series

It’s the end of an era. The entertainment which has stretched across books, movies, and countless marketing tie-ins, which has captivated children and adults for well over a decade and which has, for better or worse, managed to become the defining myth for an entire generation, is winding to its close. I speak, of course, of the Hermione Granger series, by Joanne Rowling.

And finally, the best one of them all:

Tiger Beatdown: Enter Ye Myne Mystic World of Gayng-Raype: What the “R” Stands for in “George R.R. Martin”

Because here’s how it goes, when you criticize beloved nerd entertainments: You can try to be nuanced. You can try to be thoughtful. You can lay out your arguments in careful, extravagant, obsessive detail. And at the end of the day, here is what the people in the “fandom” are going to take away: You don’t like my toys? I hate you!

Yeah. To be scrupulously fair, I think that at times she slightly exaggerates in that last one. But having read the series, except for the latest book that I didn't even think would ever come out, I agree with 99% of what she's saying. When I briefly reviewed A Song of Ice and Fire earlier this year, it was to answer someone who asked me if they should read it, so I concentrated on its literary merits. When it comes to the politics of it, though, I'm with Sady. Her post is simply brilliant.

**

On the topic of feminism and popular culture, I'd be remiss if I didn't link to this excellent post:

Comics Alliance: The Big Sexy Problem with Superheroines and Their 'Liberated Sexuality'

Since pointing out my issues with Starfire yesterday, I have received numerous e-mails -- from men -- accusing me of slut-shaming. Since there are a lot of people who don't understand the sexual dynamics that are in play here both creatively and culturally, I'd like to dissect this a little bit and explain why these scenes don't support sexually liberated women; they undermine them, and why after nearly 20 years of reading superhero books, these may finally have been the comics that broke me.

Yeah. For me, what I can't get over is how many of the poses the female characters are drawn in are straight out of porn. I just read Avengers Prime, and it felt like the comic was being occasionally interrupted for something that, frankly, looks like a latex porn shoot more than a superhero comic. Every time we meet the Enchantress, we specifically meet her ass; when she's not contorting herself into positively liefeldian porn star poses, she's on all fours, with her behind facing the reader. In fact, she's in that exact same position in every scene she's in bar the first (and brief last), making me think that her superpowers are magic and doggystyle. As for the main villain, Hela, she's wearing a rubber porn outfit throughout:

"Now you see". I do indeed.

To echo the point made in the blog I linked to above, what makes this intolerable is the double standard. For the majority of the book, the male characters are decently dressed and engaged in an epic comic book adventure; the two principal female characters, on the other hand, look like they're in a porno. That's pretty bleak.

The DRS is killing F1

2011-09-28T09:00:00.002+03:00

The DRS, or Drag Reduction System, is killing F1. Yes, I mean that stupid opening rear wing. The Singapore grand prix was a perfect example of everything that's wrong with it.

The DRS allows faster cars to overtake slower ones on the designated "DRS section" of the track. The reason for bringing the system in is that it allows more overtakes, and sure, it's done that. However, it's also teaching us that overtaking in itself doesn't make F1 any better. In fact, I think it's done the opposite.

First of all, I have to argue that it's not overtaking in itself that's exciting. If it was just overtakes, then you'd have to argue that lapping cars is exciting. It's the battle between two drivers that's exciting, and with the DRS, that's exactly what we're not seeing. Now, when drivers in faster cars are stuck behind slower ones, they don't need to make any effort to pass the drivers in front; just wait for the DRS zone and away you go. There's no battle involved, and no excitement whatsoever for the viewer.

Secondly, in this fetish for overtaking, few commentators seem to have considered is what the DRS actually does. In a nutshell:

The DRS more effectively sorts cars into an order of speed.

That's it. By making it much easier for faster cars to overtake slower ones, it effectively reduces the role that driver skill plays; a better driver in a slower car has no chance to defend himself against a poorer driver in a faster car when they go roaring past in the DRS zone. So it makes F1 even more about the car, and even less about the drivers. It also makes races more boring, as seen in Singapore, because the DRS zone allows faster cars to pretty much automatically make their way to the front of the race.

So by increasing overtaking, the DRS is actually making F1 more boring. Let's take an example. If, for instance, Sebastian Vettel spun out in Suzuka and then got a drive-through penalty, that would be great news for Jenson Button, who's still contending for the title. Right? Wrong. Vetel would use the DRS to easily pass all the slower cars in front of him, and while he might not catch up with the frontrunners, he'd finish nicely in the points. By giving such a massive advantage to the faster cars, the DRS actually makes it much less likely that we'll see races with interesting results. Last year's season finale at Abu Dhabi would never have unfolded the way it did with DRS, as Alonso would just have opened up the rear wing and blasted past Vitali Petrov. It's no longer possible for drivers in slower cars to create upsets by defending well against a driver in a faster car, because of the DRS.

The DRS is terrible and it needs to go. The number of overtakes in a race is not a reliable indicator of the quality of the race, any more than, say, the number of goals scored is an indicator of the quality of a hockey game. When overtakes are devalued, they become meaningless, and when the system as a whole has a deleterious effect on the world championship as a whole, it's a net loss. Get rid of it.

Six Kilotons

2011-09-26T09:00:00.003+03:00

We're proud to announce this exclusive special preview of Bruce Springsteen's upcoming album Red Dust.

Here's an exclusive look at one of the tracks, a reimagining of the country classic Sixteen Tons. These are the new lyrics!

Six Kilotons

Some people say a man is made outta mud
A poor man's made outta muscle and blood
Steel and circuits and a cyber jack
A mind that's a-weak and a plasteel back

You load six kilotons, what do you get
A Martian day older and deeper in debt
Space Peter don't you call me 'cos I can't go
I owe my soul to the corporation

I was born in the timeslip when the sun don't shine
Fired up my thrusters and flew to the mine
I loaded six kilotons of deuterium
And the straw boss said "Well, fiddle-dee-dum"

You load six kilotons, what do you get
A Martian day older and deeper in debt
Space Peter don't you call me 'cos I can't go
I owe my soul to the corporation

I was born in the timeslip on the Chryse plain
Fightin' and trouble are my middle name
I was raised in the arco by an ol' mama lion
Cain't no-a lo-grav woman make me walk the line

You load six kilotons, what do you get
A Martian day older and deeper in debt
Space Peter don't you call me 'cos I can't go
I owe my soul to the corporation

If you see me comin', better step aside
A lotta men didn't, a lotta men died
One fist of flesh, the other of steel
If the right one don't a-get you
Then the left one will

You load six kilotons, what do you get
A Martian day older and deeper in debt
Space Peter don't you call me 'cos I can't go
I owe my soul to the corporation

**

Money and jobs

2011-09-23T09:00:00.000+03:00

In these desperate economic times, here's some interrelated economics articles for you to read. Enjoy.

Douglas Rushkoff: Are jobs obsolete?

I am afraid to even ask this, but since when is unemployment really a problem? I understand we all want paychecks -- or at least money. We want food, shelter, clothing, and all the things that money buys us. But do we all really want jobs?

The Economist: Social networkers of the world, unite

In the future, then, rather than a mystified system in which networking and fame lead to wealth only indirectly, the top economies will directly pay people to network and become famous. Economies that fail to institute such systems will naturally decay, collapse, and be digested, much as America's cash economy digested the non-cash economies of its aboriginal peoples, or as the global capitalist economy digested the state-socialist economies of the former communist world. Cash will become identical to social points, which is the ultimate point of the money system anyway.

David Graeber: On the Invention of Money – Notes on Sex, Adventure, Monomaniacal Sociopathy and the True Function of Economics

The persistence of the barter myth is curious. It originally goes back to Adam Smith. Other elements of Smith’s argument have long since been abandoned by mainstream economists—the labor theory of value being only the most famous example. Why in this one case are there so many desperately trying to concoct imaginary times and places where something like this must have happened, despite the overwhelming evidence that it did not?

The clouds went away

2011-09-21T09:00:00.006+03:00

Innocuously tucked away in the changelog for Minecraft 1.8 was this little item:

Cloud height raised to the top of the map, so clouds no longer go through buildings.

In other words, the clouds are now up in the sky, and we can't touch them. They'll always pass over our heads.

I started writing irregular Minecraft posts on my blog about a year ago. I remember how awesome it was when I finished my first tower. It had been a pain in the ass to build, what with the creepers blowing everything up, but I still remember how it felt to look down on the clouds from my tower:

In another tower I built, I had specifically sited the ceiling of my bedroom just above cloud level, so the ceiling would be periodically obscured by cloud. Of course clouds don't really behave like that, but what the hell, I liked it.

That's all in the past now, and it makes me genuinely sad. Far more sad, in fact, than I would have believed. I've always been fascinated by clouds, and I loved the notion of building such a tall tower that I could literally look down on the clouds. And now I can't any more, because... I don't even know why. I can't think of any good reasons for doing this.

For that matter, I'm not playing until the Endermen are fixed; Notch admitted it was "a horrible idea" to make them carry blocks, and I agree. Not only can they potentially destroy anything you've built, but right now, they can move bedrock. I don't feel like having constructions I've invested hours of effort in be taken apart.

For the first time, I'm totally bummed out by Minecraft. Hopefully there'll be an update soon to fix things.

For yer enjoyment

2011-09-19T09:00:00.005+03:00

Excerpt from Chapter 16 of Rose Potter and the Philosopher's Stone by Keiran Halcyon:

Minnie walked towards ye forest; I followed uncertainly in 'er wake. We stopped just before ye tree line.

“What be we waitin' for? ”

“Our intentions t' enter ye Forest should 'ave been noticed by Cerelian, she will come shortly, ” replied Minnie, “I cannot enter with ye, 'n only with 'er by yer side can ye enter ye tree line. Avast!”

We waited for another five minutes until I heard a soft rustle o' leaves comin' from ye tree line. Out o' ye shadows o' ye forest appeared a tall naked wench. Ye first thing that caught me eye about 'er because o' ye contrast, were a dark triangle settled between toned 'n strong legs. 'er wide hips tapered t' a narrower waist, 'er stomach were flat 'n athletic, while full breasts were tapered with slightly brown nipples. Yarr! Intelligent blue eyes glittered in 'er narrow, pointed face, while a wild mane o' dark brown hair fell into ye small o'er back. Which I could hardly begin t' guess 'er true age for some reason, she seemed as hale as an old wench in 'er eyes, but still ye beauty o' youth adorned 'er body.

“Sister McGonagall, ” greeted ye druidess with a slight bow o' ye head. 'er voice were silky smooth, not like Professor Snape’s ominous tones, but almost seductive in nature. Ahoy!

“Sister Cerelian, ” returned Minnie.

“It 'as been a long time since ye embraced ye beliefs, ” said Cerelian.

“I 'ad t' honour a debt t' an old hearty, 'n 'awe been busy ever since, ” replied Minnie.

“The druids respect that, 'n respect yer decision t' remain in wizardin' society, ye would still be welcome with us at any time, ” said Cerelian. Avast, ye scurvy dog!

“I appreciate that greatly, Sister, ” said Minnie with another bow o' ye head. Yarr! Cerelian now turned those strange blue eyes on me.

“Are ye ye one who wishes t' learn 'n train 'n eventually become a Druidess? ” said Cerelian. Yarr!

“Yes, ” I answered shortly.

“Why would ye wish this? Why would ye so forsake ye comforts o' ye wizardin' world ye 'ave just barely entered 'n hardly understood?”

Me mind raced, it were clear that Cerelian knew about me from that statement. Minnie 'ad said she were in correspondence with ye druidess, what they said in ye letters I 'ad no idea, but it were clear now that Cerelian knew a lot.

“I shall be honest 'n say that at ye start, all I wanted t' do were practice Nudatio in peace at Hogwarts, as ye circumstances o' me first eleven years o' life were hardly ideal, clothes 'ad become an annoyance t' me durin' those years. Shiver me timbers! Minnie allowed me t' continue ye practice under ye initial pretence o' druidic belief. But as she told me more 'n more o' what bein' a druidess be ye more a sense o' rightness about it rang in me. Until I finally told 'er o' me determination t' train as she did when she were a druidess, ” I said with more confidence than I felt. Yar!

“Interestin', ” said Cerelian, a small smile graced 'er lips as 'er eyes surveyed me. Arrr! Which I suddenly felt a gentle ... somethin' lay itself o'er me mind ... but just as quickly ye feelin' were gone 'n Cerelian’s smile grew large. “You will do fine. Yarr! Please remove yer clothes. Shiver me timbers!”

Automatically, I fin'ered ye amulet 'n me ‘apparent’ clothes dissipated into thin air. If Cerelian were surprised she certainly did not show it. She turned t' Minnie.

“I thought it best t' get 'er started on at least one aspect o' druidism, ” said Minnie. Cerelian nodded.

“Thank ye, it will most certainly sawe time if she 'as gotten past 'er shame already. Ahoy! ” Ye druidess held out 'er hand. “Please remove ye amulet as well; I shall keep it safe durin' yer six week stay 'ere. Avast, ye scurvy dog! ” I reluctantly handed it o'er, 'n for ye first time I were completely naked as ye day I were born. “This be where ye must say goodbye t' yer mother. Avast!”

I sighed 'n with a heawy heart hugged Minnie goodbye.

***

First chapter from beckymac666's Forbiden Fruit: the tempation of Edward Cullen:

Chapter 1 - Altantiana

Shiver me timbers! Hey, me names Atlantiana Rebekah Loren (but everyone calls me Tiana or just plain Tiaa). Which I be a 16 year old wench 'n I liwe in Forks, Washin'ton! Me hair be long 'n pale like spun gold 'n skims t' me waist like a pale shimmerin' amber mist. Me eyes be deep forgetminot blue 'n me delicate fentures be lilly white 'n pure as ye winter snow in moonlight. Arrr! I've been told by loads o' sleazy, ugly, HORNY guys that I be real pretty 'n look like a model or a bunny wench (some o' ye guys who like me be really old 'n try t' make opt with me its disgustin'n weird !) but basically a lot o' ye girls I meet tell a different story. They say I be too ivory white 'n ethereal 'n too skinny 'n that I look anorexic which i don't care about, but I think its seriously disrespectful t' people with REAL eatin' disorders (btw i'm so totally not anorexic! Which I eat loads I just never gain weight 'n I be not thin enough t' be anorexic anyways, I think they were just bein' BIATCHES especially this one ratty brain called Ellie Mayfair who I hope freakin' DIES in PAIN with SHIT ON HER FACE! Sorry, I be not really such a batch but she be SO horrible if ye met 'er you'd think ye same !) Avast!

Anyways I be quite tall 'n slim 'n but with really big boobs that I used t' HATE because they look noticeable on me slender body 'n draw t' much attention but now i like them 'n don't care who stares at me! Which I 'ave a lip ring 'n recently put black 'n indigo 'n magenta streaks in me long pale blond hair. Which I smell like mint 'n cinnamon. Which I wear mostly black 'n hot pink, deep purple 'n neon blue 'n listen t' COOL music!

Yar! It be me first day at school in forks as I just moved 'ere t' live with new foster parents Dave 'n Marie. They be nice 'n all wery hole some sweet people but it be not like havin' a real family. I'we been hurt t' many times t' let people close t' me 'n I don't talk t' them wery much. Me real mom died when I were born 'n I never knew me real dad. Which I sometimes wonder what 'e be like 'n if I will ever get t' met 'im. Dave gave me a ride t' school 'n I smiled faintly as 'e wished me good luck 'n I got out o' ye car 'n went into ye school. Loads o' people freakin' stared at me as I walked down ye hall. Which I were wearin' tight black leather pants with silver chains at ye waste 'n a red fishnet-like top 'n ye could see me black lacy bra through it. Which I ignored whispers 'n ye big pink cheerleader imbosils pointin' at me. Which I were used t' it 'n I paid no at-tension t' ye guys askin' desperately for me number (like hell I'd even LOOK at ye horny little donkeys !) 'n told a ditsy blond cheerleader called Jessica t' STFU (!) when she called me a freak! Next time she tries anythin' I'll hit 'er in ye eye cause NO ONE messes with me nemore! Me first day I were relay board, I sat gazin' out o' ye window into ye gray cloud-embittered sky for most o' ye mornin', Me teachers all looked at me disprovable but said nothin' cause they probably new I were a foster kid 'n a Gothic 'n didn't want t' upset me in case I cut them up as they slept,.

Me ears be pierced four times, I 'awe a tattoo o' a scorpion (like S me birth-sign !) on me ankle 'n a Gothic cross on me shoulder, 'n on me hand i 'awe a weird birthmark in ye shape o' a seven-pointed star that I've 'ad all me life. Arrr! Yer probably wanderin' why I be botherin' t' tell ye this, well I tell ye now I be no ordinary sixteen year old wench. Which I 'awe a secret, a dark 'n forbidden secret witch I be only just beginnin' t' understand. Yarr! When I sleep I hear whispers in another language 'n even though I understand them at ye time, when I wake up i can't remember it! Which I also see weird faces in me dreams that fade t' nothin'ness when I open me eyes 'n I swear out ye corner o' me eye me birthmark glows shockin' bright gold 'n gets relay hot sometimes but when I look properly it be back t' normal boarding scar-color! Which I be really gracefull like ye runnin' anti-lopes when I run wery fast 'n be stronger 'n faster than most people. Which I used t' just think i were relay athletic but now I be not so sure, I think there might be somethin' else at work, somethin' so much more mysterious 'n eeire. Shiver me timbers! Ye truth hovers so softly on ye brink o' me memory sometimes but if only i could remember ye weird things that clung t' ye edge o' me mind as I slept!

At lunch I sat alone in ye corner 'n scanned ye cafeteria quietly with me eyes smolderin' dark blue beheath me long black lashes 'n me slim thighs curled under me. Which it were ye n I noticed an unbelievably jaw-droopin'ly hawt HAWT HAAAAAAAAWT dude with tusseted blondey-brown hair, golden yellow eyes like wells o' hot caramel 'n pale sexy features. Which 'e were tall 'n mussel 'n looked like 'e were wearin' eyeliner 'n me body got hot 'n cold all at once as I looked at 'im. I'd never felt this way about anyone before 'n I'd totally never felt this weird feelin' that I'd met someone before but I 'ad no idea where 'n i knew it were impassible because I'd freakin' remember someone THAT hawt! A wench sat next t'im with long brown hair with 'er arms dripped o'er 'im like a freakin' flesh-eatin' plant so i thought well whatevah, hes taken. Arrr! She wasn't nearly as hawt as 'e were, she wasn't ugly though. Which I figured I were maybe prettier then 'er. Which I newer really saw meself as beautiful but i'd guessed from thinks others 'ad said, plus this wench wasn't great lookin' but anyways I'd never try t' pilch with another girls' BF cause thats just low. So I got up t' leave ye hall thinkin' I'd go 'n smoke some bald drugs in ye locker room while no one were there. Shiver me timbers! As I waked o'er t'e exit I couldn't help but notice ye hawt pale guys musky eyes as they met mine. Which I locked away hurriedly. Yarr! Which I smocked dope in ye locker room for a bit then I wondered t' me next class. Which I bumped into someone in ye corridor 'n me bocks fell everywhere! FRICK! FRICK! FRIIIICKK!

"WTF!" I screamed loudly, "watch where yer FREAKING goin' ye asshole!" (i 'ave anger problems)

"I be so so sorry" 'e said in a woice like wet heaven "please forgive me me lady"

Which it were ye hawt pale guy!

***

And finally, chapter two from the classic Eye of Argon by Jim Theis:

-2-

Yarr! Arrivin' after dusk in Gorzom, grignr descended down a dismal alley, reinin'is horse before a beaten pub. Ye redhaired giant strode into ye dimly lit hostelry reekin' o' foul odors, 'n cheap grog. Ahoy! Ye air were heavy with chockin' fumes spewing from smolderin'torches encased within theden's earthen packed walls. Tables were clustered with groups o' drunken scallywags, 'n cutthroats, tossin' dice, or makin' love t' willin' wenches.

Eyein' a slender female crouched alone at a nearby bench, Grignr advanced wishin' t' wholesomely occupy 'is time. Ye flickerin' torches cast weird shafts o' luminescence dancin' o'er ye half naked harlot o'is choice, 'er strin'y orchid twines o' hair swayin' gracefully o'er ye lithe opaque nose, as she raised a half drained mug t'er pale red lips. Yarr!

Glancin' upward, ye allurin' complexion noted ye stalwart giant as 'e rapidly approached. A faint glimmer sparked from ye pair o' deep blue ovals o' ye amorous female as she motioned toward Grignr, enticin'im t' join 'er. Yarr! Ye barbarian seated himself upon a stool at ye wenches side, exposin'is body, naked save for a loin cloth brandishin' a long steel broad cutlass, an iron spiraled battle helmet, 'n a thick leather sandals, t'er unobstructed view.

"Thou hast need t' occupy yer time, barbarian", questioned ye female? Avast, ye scurvy dog!

Arrr! "Only if somethin' worth offerin' be within me reach." Stated Grignr, as 'is hands crept t' embrace ye temptin' female, who welcomed them with open willin'ness.

"From where d'ye come barbarian, 'n by what be ye called?" Gasped ye complyin' wench, as Grignr smothered 'er lips with ye blazin' touch o'is flamin' mouth. Avast!

Ye engrossed titan ignored ye queries o' ye inquisitiwe female, pullin'er towards 'im 'n crushin'er saggin' nipples t'is yearnin' chest. Without struggle she gave in, windin'er soft arms around ye harshly bronzedhide o' Grignr corded shoulder blades, as 'is calloused hands caressed 'er firm protrudin' busts.

"Ye make lowe well wench," Admitted Grignr as 'e reached for ye wessel o' potent grog 'is charge 'ad been quaffin'. Ahoy!

A flyin' foot caught ye mug Grignr 'ad taken hold o', sendin' its blood red contents sloshin' o'er a flickerin' crescent; leashin' tongues o' bright orange flame t' ye foot trodden floor. Yar!

Yarr! "Remove yeself Sirrah, ye wench belongs t' me;" Blabbered a drunken soldier, too far consumed by ye influences o'is virile brew t' take note o' ye superior size o'is adversary.

Grignr lithly bounded from ye startled female, 'is face lit up t' an ashen red ferocity, 'n eyes locked in a searin' feral blaze toward ye swayin' soldier.

Yarr! "T' hell with ye, braggard!" Bellowed ye angered Ecordian, as 'e hefted 'is finely honed broad cutlass.

Ye staggerin' soldier clumsily reached towards ye pommel o'is danglin' cutlass, but before 'is hands ever touched ye oaken hilt a silvered flash were slicin' ye heavy air. Ye thews o' ye savages lashin' right arm bulged from ye glistenin' bronzed hide as 'is blade bit deeply into ye soldiers neck, lopin' off ye confused head o'is senseless tormentor.

With a nauseatin' thud ye severed oval toppled t' ye floor, as ye segregated torso o' Grignr's bovine antagonist swayed, then collapsed in a pool o' swirled crimson.

Avast, ye scurvy dog! In ye confusion ye soldier's fellows confronted Grignr with unsheathed cutlasses, directed toward ye latters scowlin' make-up. Arrr!

"Ye slut should 'ave picked 'is quarry more carefully!" Roared ye wictor in a mockin' baritone growl, as 'e wiped 'is drippin' blade on ye prostrate form, 'n returned it t' its scabbard.

"Ye fool should 'awe shown more prudence, howewer ye shall rue yer actions while rottin' in ye pits." Stated one o' ye sprawled soldier's comrades.

Grignr's hand began t' remowe 'is blade from its leather housin', but retarded ye motion in face o' ye blades wavin' before 'is face.
"Dismiss yer hand from ye hilt, barbarbian, or ye shall find a foot o' steel sheathed in yer gizzard. Yarr!"

Grignr weighed 'is position observin'is plight, where-upon 'e took ye soldier's advice as ye only logical choice. T' attempt t' hack 'is way from 'is present predicament could only warrant certain death. Which 'e were o' no mind t' brin' upon 'is own demise if an alternate path presented itself. Ye will t' necessitate 'is life forced 'im t' yield t' ye superior force in hopes o' a moment o' carlessness later upon ye part o'is captors in which 'e could effect a more plausible means o' escape. Yar!

"Ye may steady yer arms, I will go without a struggle." Yarr!

"Yer decision be a wise one, yet perhaps ye would 'ave been better off 'ad ye forced death," ye soldier's mouth wrinkled t' a sadistic grin o' knowin' mirth as 'e prodded 'is prisoner on with 'is cutlass point. Yar!

Ahoy! After an indiscriminate period o' marchin' through slinkin' alleyways 'n dim moonlighted streets ye procession confronted a massive seraglio. Ye palace area were surrounded by an iron gratin', with a lush garden upon all sides. Shiver me timbers!

Ye group were admitted through ye gilded gateway 'n Grignr were ledalong a stone pathway bordered by plush vegitation lustfully enhanced by ye moon's shimmerin' rays. Yarr! Upon reachin' ye palace ye group were granted entrance, 'n after several minutes o' explanation, led through several windin' corridors t' a richly draped chamber.

Confrontin' ye group were a short stocky man seated upona golden throne. Tapestries o' richly draped regal blue silk covered all walls o' ye chamber, while ye steps leadin' t' ye throne were plated with sparklin' white ivory. Ye man upon ye throne 'ad a naked wench seated at each o'is arms, 'n a trusted adwisor seated astern o'im. At each cornwr o' ye chamber a guard stood at attention, with upraised pikes supported in their hands, golden chainmail adornin' their torso's 'n barred helmets emittin' scarlet plumes enshroudin' their heads. Ye man rose from 'is throne t' ye dias surroundin' it. 'is plush turquois robe dangled loosely from 'is chuncky frame.

Avast, ye scurvy dog! Ye soldiers surroundin' Grignr fell t' their knees with heads bowed t' ye stone masonry o' ye floor in fearful dignity t' their sovereign, leige.
"Explain ye purpose o' this intrusion upon me chateau!"
"Yer sirenity, resplendent in noble grandeur, we 'ave brought this lubber before ye (ye soldier gestured toward Grignr) for ye redress or yer all knowin' wisdon in judgement regardin'is fate."

"Down on yer knees, lout, 'n pay proper homage t' yer sowereign!" commanded ye pudgy noble o' Grignr. Arrr!

Shiver me timbers! "By ye surly beard o' Mrifk, Grignr kneels t' no man!" scowled ye massive barbarian.
"Ye dare t' deal this blasphemous act t' me! Ye be indeed brawe stranger, yet yer valor smacks o' foolishness."

"I find ye t' be ye only fool, sittin' upon yer pompous throne, enhancin' ye rollin' flabs o' yer belly in ye midst o' yer elaborate luxuryand ..." Ye soldier standin' at Grignr's side smote 'im heavily in ye face with ye flat o'is cutlass, cutting short ye harsh words 'n knockin'is battered helmet t' ye masonry with an echo-in' clang. Yar!

Ye paunchy noble's saggin' round face flushed suddenly pale, then pastily lit up t' a lustrous cherry red radiance. Shiver me timbers! 'is lips trembled with malicious rage, while emittin' a muffled sibilant gibberish. 'is saggin' flabs rolled like a tub o' upset jelly, then compressed as 'e sucked in 'is gut in an attempt t' conceal 'is softness.

Ye prince regained 'is statue, then spoke t' ye soldiers surroundin' Grignr, 'is face conformin' t' an ugly expression o' sadistic humor.
"Take this uncouth heathen t' ye vault o' misery, 'n be sure that 'is agonies be long 'n drawn out before death can release 'im."

"As ye wish sire, yer command shall be heeded immediately," answered ye soldier t' starboard o' Grignr as 'e stared into ye barbarians seemin'ly unaffected face.

Ye advisor seated in ye back o' ye noble slowly rose 'n adwanced t' ye side o'is master, motionin' ye wenches seated at 'is sides t' remove themselwes. Which 'e lowered 'is head 'n whispered t' ye noble. Avast, ye scurvy dog!

"Eminence, ye punishment ye 'ave decreed will cause much misery t' this scum, yet it will last only a short time, then release 'im t' a land beyond ye sufferin's o' ye human body. Why not mellow 'im in one o' ye subterranean vaults for a few days, then send 'im t' life labor in one o' yer buried mines.

T' one such as 'e, a life spent in ye confinement o' ye stygian pits will be an infinitely more appropiate 'n lastin' torture."

Ye noble cupped 'is droopin' double chin in ye folds o'is brimin' palm, meditatin' for a moment upon ye rationality o' ye councilor's word's, then raised 'is shaggy brown eyebrows 'n turned toward ye advisor, eyes aglow.
"... As always Agafnd, ye speak with great wisdom. Yer words rin' o' great knowledge concernin' ye nature o' one such as 'e," sayeth, ye king. Ye noble turned toward ye prisoner with a noticable shimmer reflectin' in 'is frog-like eyes, 'n 'is lips contortin' t' a greasy grin. Avast! "I 'awe decided t' void me previous decree. Ye prisoner shall be removed t' one o' ye palaces underground waults. Ahoy! There 'e shall stay until I 'ave decided that 'e 'as sufficiently simmered, whereupon 'e be t' be allowed t' spend ye remainder o'is days at labor in one o' me mines."

Upon hearin' this, Grignr realized that 'is fate would be far less merciful than death t' one such as 'e, who be used t' roamin' ye countryside at will. A life o' confinement would be more than 'is body 'n mind could stand up t'. This type o' life would be immeasurably worse than death. Ahoy! Shiver me timbers!

"I shall never understand ye ways if yer twisted ciwilization. Which I simply defend me honor 'n be condemned t' life confinement, by a pig who sits on 'is royal ass wooin' whores, 'n knows nothin' o' ye affairs o' ye land 'e imagines t' rule!" Lectures Grignr?
"Enough o' this! Away with ye slut before I loose me control!"

Avast, ye scurvy dog! Seein' ye peril o'is position, Grignr searched for an openin'. Crushin' prudence t' ye sward, 'e plowed into ye soldier at 'is left arm takin' hold o'is cutlass, 'n boundin' t' ye dias supportin' ye prince before ye startled guards could regain their composure. Agafnd leaped Grignr 'n 'is sire, but found a cutlass blade permeatin' ye length o'is ribs before 'e could loosed 'is weapon. Yarr!

Yarr! Ye councilor slumped t'is knees as Grignr slid 'is crimsoned blade from Agfnd's rib cage. Ye fat prince stood undulatin' in insurmountable fear before ye edge o' ye fiery maned comet, 'is flabs o' jellied blubber pulsatin' t'n fro in ripples o' flowin' terror.

"Where be yer wisdom 'n power now, yer magjesty?" Growled Grignr. Yarr!

Ye prince went rigid as Grignr discerned 'im glazin' o'er 'is shoulder. Which 'e swlived t' note ye cause o' ye noble's attention, raised 'is cutlass o'er 'is head, 'n prepared t' leash a vicious downward cleft, but fell short as ye haft o' a steel rimed pike clashed against 'is unguarded skull. Then blackness 'n solitude. Silence enshroudin'n ewer peaceful reind supreme. Avast, ye scurvy dog!

"Before me, sirrah! Before me as always! Ha, Ha Ha, Haaaa ... ", nobly cackled.

Happy birthday Jolene Van Vugt!

2011-09-17T09:00:00.005+03:00

I've been neglecting the beautiful star of Nitro Circus, Jolene Van Vugt! She's a bit of a hero for me, because I can think of few things more empowering, feminist and just downright awesome than a beautiful woman doing a backflip on a motorbike.

Her website is here. She kicks ass.

Happy birthday!

The worst summer ever for hockey

2011-09-09T09:00:00.014+03:00

According to his Twitter account, when THN writer Adam Proteau broke the news of the plane crash that killed the Lokomotiv Yaroslavl hockey team to Chicago's Jonathan Toews, Toews said: "This is the worst summer ever for hockey."

It's hard to disagree. On May 13, New York Rangers enforcer Derek Boogaard was found dead in his apartment in Minneapolis. He hadn't been able to play since December 2010 due to a concussion, and died accidentally from a combination of oxycodone and alcohol.

On August 15, Winnipeg Jets forward Rick Rypien was likewise found dead in his home. After a ten-year battle with depression, Rypien had committed suicide.

Just a few weeks later, former NHL enforcer Wade Belak was found dead. According to the Star, he had hanged himself.

**

As if all this wasn't enough, this Wednesday the Yak-42 passenger jet carrying the KHL's Lokomotiv Yaroslavl team crashed on takeoff, killing the entire team except one forward, Alexander Galimov, who was in critical condition at the time of writing.

This was the third plane crash to hit a major hockey team. On February 13th, 1975, a plane carrying Frölunda players crashed near Gävle in Sweden, leaving seven players injured. In 1950, a Li-2 transport plane crashed near Sverdlovsk in the Soviet Union, killing the whole Soviet Air Force hockey team.

Among the dead in Wednesday's crash are one of the four first Russian players to ever win the Stanley Cup, assistant coach Alexander Karpovtsev, also a 1993 world champion.

Coach Brad McCrimmon, a Stanley Cup winner with the Calgary Flames.

2005 world champion and 2006 Stanley Cup champion with the Carolina Hurricanes, Josef Vašíček.

2006 Olympic gold medalist and world champion Stefan Liv.

2010 world champion and two-time inline hockey world champion Karel Rachůnek.

2010 world champion Jan Marek.

2000 Lady Byng Memorial Trophy winner Pavol Demitra.

2003 Stanley Cup finalist and NHL veteran Ruslan Salei.

NHL veteran Kārlis Skrastiņš.

32 other players, coaches, staff and airline crew also died in the accident.

I was planning on writing a season preview for the NHL, but I ended up having to write this. This has to be the most tragic off-season and beginning of the new season ever in hockey. It's simply terrible how many people have died. Our thoughts and condolences are with the nearest and dearest of everyone who passed away.

Steven Seagal - chicken chaser

2011-09-07T09:00:00.000+03:00

Back in March, we got this awesome headline:

Daily Mail: The cockfighting raid on a small farm that required a SWAT team, bomb robot, armoured vehicles, film crew... and Steven Seagal

This Arizona sheriff was only investigating a cockfighting ring on a small farm.

But Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio was joined on a search warrant by a SWAT team, a bomb robot, two armoured vehicles, an action movie star and a film crew.

Jesus Llovera, 42, was arrested for cockfighting after the operation involving Steven Seagal, 58, who drove a tank onto the property as he shot a reality television show.

Shit, even Orwell didn't see this one coming. Combining the militarization of the police with reality TV is a marriage made in hell, and very appropriately officiated by the infamous Sheriff Joe.

Now Seagal is facing legal action over the raid, because they're also taking part in the War on Dogs.

TMZ: Legal Threats Over Deadly COCKFIGHT RAID

Jesus claims his 11-month old puppy was shot and killed during the raid -- and his home sustained "substantial damage." He also claims the cops killed more than 100 roosters that belonged to him.

The notice of claim is the first step towards a lawsuit -- and Jesus' lawyer tells us his client is demanding $100,000 for the damage and he wants Seagal to issue a "formal written apology" to his children "for the death of their 11-month old puppy, a beloved family pet."

As the Onion's AV Club explained:

Shortly after the incident, Seagal explained that the raid on suspect Jesus Llovera—which involved a Maricopa County Sheriff’s Department team in full riot gear swarming his family’s home, as Steven Seagal crashed through his gates in a tank—all came about because, as Seagal said to a local TV station, “Animal cruelty is one of my pet peeves.” So in order to prevent said animal cruelty, Seagal and his team apparently “euthanized” the more than 100 roosters it found on Llovera’s property and, according to a just-filed claim from Llovera, also shot and killed his 11-month-old puppy.

Seagal's really taken the ideology of the American police state to heart. It became necessary to shoot the animals to save them.

Here’s hoping that Steven Seagal, puppy-killer, never meets Steven Seagal, guy from Out For Justice, because that dude would be pissed.

Only in SWAT nation.

Ladies of Daegu

2011-09-05T09:00:00.000+03:00

The 2011 World Championships in Athletics just wrapped up in Daegu. I love sports, especially beautiful women doing sports. Here's some.

Last time I wrote about track and field, I started improbably with a cute hammer thrower. I'd like to continue that trend by starting with a cute shot putter who also happens to be a world champion: Valerie Adams.

Now, I'm no schmoe, but check out those guns. She's real cute, too. Shame she's not likely to break any all-time records, given that almost all of them were set in the '70s or '80s, by women from the Eastern bloc. Yeah.

**

The 100m sprint is a particular favorite. Norway's Ezinne Okparaebo put in a brave performance in the semifinals:

The gold medal, however, went to the equally beautiful Carmelita Jeter.

She also came second in the 200m, and looked stunning throughout.

And, finally, anchored the US to a gold medal in the 4*100m relay.

In the 1500 metres, Norway's Ingvill Måkestad Bovim impressed us by coming in sixth and being cute.

The most impressive track performance, however, came from Russia's Maria Savinova, who beat South Africa's Caster Semenya for the gold medal in the 800m with a fantastic final sprint.

She was awesome. By the way, I have to admit that Caster Semenya does look kind of like a dude. However, that's absolutely no justification for the disgraceful way she was treated in the whole ridiculous gender controversy that arose in 2009. It was absolutely disgusting, and showed a total lack of respect for both her as an athlete and as a human being. I'm glad she's competing again. I'll have to get back to all this "gender testing" nonsense later, but for now, here's one more picture of Maria:

**

In the heptathlon, our favorite Jessica Ennis ended up taking home a silver medal after, as the Finnish media put it, tripping over the javelin.

The gold went to Russia's Tatyana Chernova.

The women's javelin throw turned into an unbelievable event. South Africa's Sunette Viljoen took the bronze after setting an African record, and the gold medal was decided in the last round when Barbora Špotáková broke the championship record to take the lead, only for Maria Abakumova to beat her with a new Russian and championship record of 71.99m. Awesome.

I think I'm a fan.

**

My favorite event, as always, is the pole vault. I'm a huge Yelena Isinbayeva fan, so it was a real shame to see her fall short of the medals in her comeback championships.

After all, she pretty much single-handedly took women's pole vaulting past the five meter mark. I believe she's still the only woman to ever have cleared 5m, but I don't know that for a fact. She's awesome.

At Daegu, though, Jelena only narrowly beat the gorgeously buff Jiřina Ptáčníková for sixth place.

The undeniably cute Silke Spiegelburg, who I previously dubbed the Emma Watson of the pole vault, also struggled to a ninth-place finish.

Our congratulations to the medalists: Brazil's Fabiana Murer, Russian veteran Svetlana Feofanova and Germany's Martina Strutz, who took home a silver medal after setting a German record with a jump of 4.80 meters.

Gold medalist Fabiana Murer is also the indoor world champion, but this is her first outdoor world champs medal.

I'm already looking forward to the pole vault at London!

**

It was a heck of a championship, and I really enjoyed watching it. As a dedicated anti-patriot, I'd also like to point out that these were Finland's worst athletics world championships ever, with no medals and no points finishes.

The economics of emigration

2011-09-02T09:00:00.004+03:00

Read Michael A. Clemens's paper Economics and Emigration: Trillion-Dollar Bills on the Sidewalk?, from the Journal of Economic Perspectives.

How large are the economic losses caused by barriers to emigration? Research on this question has been distinguished by its rarity and obscurity, but the few estimates we have should make economists’ jaws hit their desks. When it comes to policies that restrict emigration, there appear to be trillion-dollar bills on the sidewalk.

The paper goes on to argue that not only are the negative economical effects of emigration, on both the country of departure and arrival, overestimated, but that the positive impact on the world economy is greatly underestimated. For instance:

In historical cases of large reductions in barriers to labor mobility between high-income and low-income populations or regions, those with high wages have not experienced a large decline. For example, wages of whites in South Africa have not shown important declines since the end of the apartheid regime, despite the total removal of very large barriers to the physical movement and occupational choice of a poor population that outnumbered the rich population six to one. The recent advent of unlimited labor mobility between some Eastern European countries and Great Britain, though accompanied by large and sudden migration flows, has not caused important declines in British wages.

Or, in other words:

In my mind, what this simply means is that the most effective development aid we can give to third world countries is to let more of their citizens move here. This would lead to increased prosperity for us and them, or in other words, everyone. Most often, the economic argument against immigration is framed as in the video above. Perhaps the second-most common argument seems to assume that in each country, there are a fixed amount of jobs. Given that this involves jettisoning even the most basic understandings of how a market economy works, it's almost unbelievable that it can be advanced as an argument. To some extent, I suppose that speaks to the level of economic understanding imparted by our school systems.

There is no data that suggests that "unchecked immigration" would destroy Europe economically; on the contrary, there is data that much broader immigration would enrich the world immensely.

Ron Paul and the media

2011-08-29T09:00:00.006+03:00

First of all, watch this video.

For the best commentary I've yet seen on why that happens, read this text from one of the Economist's bloggers.

I think Mr Paul's influence on the ideological cast of American conservatism has been underestimated and underreported, but to take even his influence, if not his candidacy, more seriously would require the talking haircuts and the newspaper typing corps to wrestle with a charged set of geopolitical and economic topics they would rather continue helping Americans not understand.

Over the last decade, I've been more and more disturbed by the direction politics is taking on both sides of the Atlantic. All our polities seem to be less and less willing to engage in any debate on real issues, and instead all major political parties and the media seem dedicated to confining political debates to symbolic non-issues. A perfect Finnish example is the current fixation on immigration policies, which, frankly, are the least of our problems right now. But none of the big systemic problems with the Finnish economy are even mentioned in the media, or were the subject of any real discussion during the parliamentary elections. Instead, candidates tilted at windmills of their choosing, which gave an impression of politics without any actual content.

Pretty much the same thing is happening in the US, where Ron Paul seems to be one of the only candidates who even brings up real political issues. And for that, he gets resoundingly ignored by the media.

Our representative democracies are mostly shams. The whole representative political system is a theater, constructed to deceive us into thinking that we have some input into the political decision-making process that goes on in our countries. In the meanwhile, the real political elite, which in Finland consists of the party bosses, senior civil servants and others, make the real political decisions, which includes deciding what non-issues the plebes will be allowed to "debate". Real issues will be kept off the media radar.

It'll be interesting to see what non-issues the coming US presidential election will be fought over. Rest assured that no big questions on America's future will be addressed, because that way lies the kind of treatment Ron Paul gets.

**

As a postscript, I add a word of caution, in the form of a New York Times op-ed, to anyone who thinks the Tea Party is a positive force in US politics.

And while the public image of the Tea Party focuses on a desire to shrink government, concern over big government is hardly the only or even the most important predictor of Tea Party support among voters.

So what do Tea Partiers have in common? They are overwhelmingly white, but even compared to other white Republicans, they had a low regard for immigrants and blacks long before Barack Obama was president, and they still do.

More important, they were disproportionately social conservatives in 2006 — opposing abortion, for example — and still are today. Next to being a Republican, the strongest predictor of being a Tea Party supporter today was a desire, back in 2006, to see religion play a prominent role in politics. The Tea Party’s generals may say their overriding concern is a smaller government, but not their rank and file, who are more concerned about putting God in government.

You know, if the fact that Bachmann seems to be nuts didn't tip you off.

Happy birthday Rebecca Ramos!

2011-08-26T09:00:00.003+03:00

Today is Rebecca Ramos's birthday. Back in 2003, she was Playboy's Miss January.

At 35, she was the oldest woman to ever appear as a Playboy Playmate. I think that's kinda awesome.

Happy birthday!

Finland is irreligious

2011-08-25T09:00:00.001+03:00

According to a large study conducted in Finland and reported in Uusi Suomi, Finns are much more critical of religion than most other nationalities. As many as four out of five (4/5) Finns consider strongly religious people intolerant, and 60% believe that religion causes conflicts rather than promotes peace.

Only 20% of Finns unqualifiedly believe in God, while 10% don't believe at all. Eight percent define themselves as strongly religious, while less than a fifth don't define themselves at religous at all. When it comes to the public practice of religion, Finns are among the most passive countries in Europe.

This is actually quite impressive for a country where not belonging to a church was only decriminalized in 1923, there are still two state churches, religious teaching is still given in public schools and blasphemy remains a crime. I wrote more on the same topic last year, when over 15,000 people left the Finnish Lutheran church in the wake of a controversial debate on gay marriage.

Other events that have probably had an effect included a widespread child abuse scandal in the Finnish pentecostal movement. The abuse had been going on for years, with the knowledge of church "elders", who had even permitted convicted child abusers to be taken on as priests, because they felt that God had forgiven them (YLE).

In 2003, a Finnish free thinkers' organization set up an internet service titled eroakirkosta.fi ("leavethechurch.fi"), which allows members of the Finnish state churches to resign their membership with an electronic form. In 2004, they processed 10,000 applications; in 2010, it was 79,000.

In 2010, 19,2% of Finns didn't belong to any religious denomination recognized as such by the state (Tilastokeskus). A 2005 study estimated that 28-60% of Finland's population are atheists, agnostics or non-believers.

So although Sweden is the poster boy for atheist social democracy in American political polemics, maybe it should be us?

Watch the grass grow

2011-08-24T09:00:00.000+03:00

You remember my underground garden? It's coming along nicely:

The problem is, though, that trees growing on plain dirt don't look very foresty. I'll need grass, but here's the catch: while grass is generated whenever a new chunk is generated, apart from that, the only way to get grass is by making it spread from one tile to another. In other words:

And before long:

Until finally:

Did it take long? Yes.

Musical Voight-Kampff test

2011-08-22T09:00:00.003+03:00

Go listen to some Blast Surf on Grooveshark. It's music by a friend of mine; Finnish readers can read his "press release" here.

In our opinion, this album would work perfectly as a musical Voight-Kampff test. If the first song doesn't make you smile, there's a very good chance that you're a replicant.

Enjoy.

Wireless panic

2011-08-19T09:00:00.002+03:00

I'd write about the moral panic taking over Britain's pundits, but I don't have to, because the Economist already did, brilliantly.

What I will make a note of, however, is the disturbing notion that public disorder gives Western countries an excuse to crack down on social networks and mobile communications. British PM David Cameron called for stopping "suspected rioters spreading online messages". As Canada's CBC News put it in a very disjointed article:

When social media helped protesters organize and overthrow corrupt regimes in the Arab world earlier this year, while also providing citizen journalism when mainstream media was shut out, it was lauded as a tool of democracy.

However, when the same methods are used in a scenario like Britain, they are seen as disturbing, says Megan Boler, a media studies professor in Toronto.

More to the point, when social media are used for dissent in the West, we want to censor them, and worse. In an astonishing decision, two UK men were given four-year prison terms for inciting violence via the social media, even though it couldn't actually be proved that anything they posted had had any effect on anyone (CNN).

Social media censorship is already upon us, however. Remember a while back when I wrote about San Francisco's BART police shooting a man? They recently did it again, and when people gathered to protest, BART shut down cell phone service at their stations.

So when the Egyptian government, or the Iranians, censor Twitter to stop popular protests against the regime, we abhor it as horrible censorship and a human rights violation. When California or the UK does it, we, um.

Although to be fair, this double standard is a bit more complicated than that. After all, when Iran blocks Internet use, they're mostly doing it using technology we sold them.

Having said that, it's all still a little ironic.

Masuimi Max

2011-08-15T09:00:00.000+03:00

Words cannot adequately describe.

Website.

Twitter.

Hot.

♥