Selective Media

In the aftermath of the Zimmerman verdict, there's been a hell of a lot of "Where's the Media Outrage" posts circulating. You know, the ones that outline some terrible crime that the media pretty much completely ignored, then say something like "Why doesn't the media care?!?!"

So I've taken it upon myself to answer that very question, with the added bonus of explaining why people who post these things are morons.

First and foremost, the media cannot cover everything at once. There is an entire world of events that happens every single day. Crimes, celebrity appearances, trials, what have you. There is too much going on every day to be able to cover all of it. That isn't the only limiting factor. People don't want to spend all day listening to a list of how and why people got murdered or killed or raped. If you want something like that go read the obituaries. The media cannot cover every brutal crime that happens, they have to pick and choose. Even if they chose something other than the Zimmerman case to report, someone would probably bring up that very case in one of those fucking "Media outrage" posts. 

How do they choose? Well yes, a major factor is ratings, news studios do want to report things that bring their viewers back, it is a major factor, but it's not the only factor. Another factor is in the name, people want "new" news. People know soldiers die in Iraq, nobody thinks the military is all fine and dandy. People know they're in a war-torn region and car bombings happen. Call me cold and heartless, but people aren't going to necessarily care if they hear about some nameless soldiers that lose their lives in that region, because that's something we're expecting. And don't get me wrong, people do care about it, but those same people aren't going to be particularly surprised or intrigued when they hear of another car bombing in Afghanistan. What people do want to hear about are the things we aren't expecting. 

Also, the news isn't just going to report something everybody agrees upon. They want to report things people are going to disagree about. Let's take this for example 

This showed up on my Facebook newsfeed the day of the Zimmerman verdict. Before I go any further, I just want to say my condolences go out to the victims' families of this crime. I'll start by saying, yes this being a black on white crime is probably a factor, but it is most definitely not the only factor. Lets take this scenario. Let's say this is what the media reports this instead of the Trayvon Martin case, here's how the conversation would go. 

Me: Hey did you hear about those five blacks that brutally murdered that couple?

Friend: Yea that's pretty shitty

Me: Yea, shame. Wanna grab some lunch?

Friend: Aight

And here's a conversation I had about the Trayvon Martin case.

Me: Hey you hear about the Trayvon Martin shooting?

Friend: Yea, I wonder what actually happened, Trayvon was unarmed but it was the dead of night, Zimmerman must have been pretty paranoid.

Me: I dunno, it could have easily been a racially motivated murder, I mean how threatening can a black kid with a bag of skittles really be?

Friend: Could he even see his skin? It was the dead of night and the kid was wearing a hoodie, I mean even that is pretty sketchy. I'd be scared.

Me: Dude, I've walked around in the middle of night in a hoodie, it's fucking night man, it gets cold, why wouldn't you wear a hoodie?

Friend: Yea but we live in a pretty safe neighborhood, and plus, this was Florida. Remember when we went to Disney? It doesn't really get cold there ever. 

And so on.

The news gives people something to talk about, something to think about. Nobody wants to hear about something that's obviously terrible. People like a little bit of ambiguity, something to contemplate. People want news thats interesting. We know shitty things happen, but a lot of those things aren't very interesting or stimulating.

That's not the only reason the media would avoid that 5-way murder case. That murder is fucking brutal. They made this guy's girlfriend watch as they chopped his dick off and set him on fire before she herself was shot. There's a crowd of mothers that would go absolutely ripshit if you put that on TV. Say what you want about selective media, this is still television, and there's a line you don't really want to cross when reporting. I mean, call me crazy but I don't think people really want to hear about a guy getting his fucking dick chopped off. That's some hardcore "Boo goatse" shit. 

No the news isn't perfectly unbiased, yes there are some things that should get reported that don't. But the Zimmerman case is something I want to hear about, because it gives people like me something to talk about, something to think about, and something to post about. The news does keep us informed about the world around us, but you can't expect them to inform you about everything.

Twitter

Okay, I'm back, here's a short post, I'll have longer ones later. 

Unless you live under a rock, you've definitely heard of the huge abortion debate going on in Texas, and the decision that the senate had in the pro-life direction. Obviously, there was a lot of anger about this decision. This was to be expected, it's an important issue that affects a hell of a lot of people. But then there's people like Erick Erickson. Shortly after the decision, he posted this on Twitter. 

And people go ripshit mad.

Alright, yes he's a moron, yes he's your stereotypical republican with a tenuous grasp on the reality of the situation, yes he's from Fucks News, but it was a joke. A tasteless, stupid, grim joke, but a joke nonetheless. This is why I don't like Twitter, everything is taken too seriously. People think this is some huge political powerhouse and what they say here will affect the fucking world. This is not how the political process works, you're not getting anything accomplished by sending this idiot tampons and coat hangers. All you're doing is aggregating this divide between republicans and democrats as one side stereotypes and insults the other. This is why republicans think liberals are idiots, and vice versa. If we're ever going to reach any sort of bipartisan cooperation, this needs to stop.

It was a fucking joke, let it go, move on with your fucking life, and stop pretending to get things done by trashing people on Twitter. 

Speaking of social networking, It seems I have a sufficient fanbase to try for a Facebook or twitter presence. Time to sell out I guess. If you want an Opiate of the Asses Twitter or Facebook page, comment and let me know.

Spotlight on Games: LIMBO

LIMBO is a dark, Tim Burton-like gameplay driven platformer created by the Danish independent developer Playdead. At $9.99 on Steam, and usually half that price during sales, it's difficult to resist impulse-buying it. At first glance it seems like the average indie game, but playing through, you will realize it is well worth the buy.

A few things you should know before you play the game. It may seem like an art-driven game, and to a point it is, but it's actually very gameplay driven, relying on intense timing based puzzles and mechanics to convey a feeling of profound insignificance. The gameplay, combined with the soundtrack that ranges from creepy, to powerful to mellow, and the gloomy, to calming to outright scary art style, creates a powerful sense of intense purpose that does a great job of immersing you in the game. Also, if you own a controller, use that, as the keyboard controls are a bit laggy, and the controller matches the platformer style of the game much better.

Warning: Spoilers Here

You play as a small boy in a vast, surreal black and white world filled with dangers up the wazoo. The environment has a strong, ethereal and dreamlike feel, and seems to imply some sort of psychological analogy, also hinted at in the description on steam; "Uncertain of his sister's fate, a boy enters LIMBO..." Perhaps I'm just drawing parallels with the free flash game Coma, but the entire game feels like an analogy for an internal battle. The boy, the character you play is completely nonchalant and aloof, showing only an inkling of emotion with his body language at the very end. Throughout the entire game, bizarre, nightmarish beasts and vast, terrifying environments dictate the game, all seem to conspire against the boy. I interpreted this as an analogy for a mental battle of the boy coping with his sister's presumably grim fate. It also played off several seemingly innocent things kids do, such as pulling the legs off a daddy longlegs.

It's difficult to take each aspect of the game and explain how it affects the game as a whole, so I'm going to take certain parts of the game and pick them apart, explaining why each part worked.

First, we'll talk about something closer to the end of the game. Deep in the bowels of a dark, industrial section of the game, you flip a switch and the entire map starts turning clockwise, you have to time your jumps to climb onto the wall and avoid getting crushed. These scene is one of the most intense and immersive parts of the game. The game accomplishes this by limiting the light you have with a single swinging light bulb, and accenting the colossal feeling of the environment with a soundtrack of a deep, throbbing tone, intensifying the fear of the time-based puzzle.

There are countless scenes like this in the game, the developers did an incredible job of immersion by gameplay. Another excellent feature that added to the intensity is the autosave feature. The autosave points are just far apart enough so that you need to learn and know the terrain between them enough to feel like you are skillfully navigating the level, and it requires you to "practice", much like older games with no save feature. However, the autosave feature saves often enough that you don't lose a frustrating amount of progress if you die. In fact, the game did an excellent job of avoiding frustration, as the immersive nature made you feel more determined rather than frustrated when you die.

The physics system is also a work of art, the animations and physics of this two dimensional environment are so smooth, they become a major factor of the immersion, combined with the dark art style, it creates an interesting juxtaposition that adds to the pure surrealism, not to mention the added and more obvious juxtaposition of the young, innocent boy in a deadly, nightmarish world.

The setting itself seems to take place on the outskirts of a post-apocalyptic industrial city, and the game transitions from wild forests and fields with rural natives to the bowels of a sprawling, intimidating machine

There is so much I wish I could put into words about this game. I wasn't too impressed at first, but thinking back, I realized what an effect it had, and I was overtaken with the urge to play through again. It is worth the ten dollars, but my advice is to wait for it to go on sale.

Final Verdict: 8.3/10

Microsoft Office

Today I got in a brief argument with someone bragging about being "certified" with Microsoft Office after taking a class on it.  Today I am going to explain why taking a class on common software like that is absolutely useless.

First, let's take a look at what the prerequisites and requirements are for taking the exam. For the sake of this post, let's take a look at Microsoft Office 2010. Microsoft provides a great page where you can look at the skills being measured in the exam. For the sake of brevity, I'm just going to look at Word 2010.

Microsoft Word 2010

Sharing and Maintaining Documents
-Applying different views to a document.
Basically all you have to know is go through and memorize the "view" tab. This shouldn't take more than 5-10 minutes to learn

-Apply protection to a document
I didn't actually know how to do this, so I googled it. The first link brought me to a page from Microsoft detailing exactly how to do it.

-Manage document versions
Basically, this is just opening the recovered files when you quit without saving.

-Share documents
If you have an email, you can already do this.

-Save a Document
Who the fuck doesn't know how to save a document?

-Add a template to a document
You don't even need to Google this to figure it out.

Formatting Content
-Apply and Manipulate page setup settings
Fuck around with that bar with the arrow and numbers on it.

-Apply Themes
Essentially the same thing as applying templates

-Construct content in a document using the quick parts tool
This sounds difficult. It's not. It's actually just pre-writing footnotes and watermarks and shit like that.

-Create and Manipulate Page Backgrounds
Again, easy as hell to figure out.

-Create and Modify Headers and Footers
If you've ever written any sort of research paper, you already know how to do this.

Creating Illustrations and Graphics in a Document
-Insert and format pictures in a document
-Insert format shapes, word art and smart art
-Insert and format clip art
-Apply and manipulate text boxes

This was any paper you wrote before 9th grade. If you don't know how to do any of this, you have to be literally retarded when it comes to computers.

Proofreading Documents
-Validate content by using spelling and grammar checking options.
First of all, you don't have to do this if you actually know anything about the English language. Second of all, this is just right clicking on the words that have that fucking red or green squiggly line underneath it.

-Configure Autocorrect Settings
If you've ever chosen the "add to dictionary" option, you know how to do this.

-Insert and modify comments in a document
This is actually a pretty cool feature used when multiple people are working on a document. It's incredibly user friendly. It takes less than 5 minutes to learn.

Applying References and Hyperlinks
-Apply a hyperlink
Easy as all fucking hell

-Create Endnotes and Footnotes in a document
Again, if you've ever done a research paper, you already know this

-Create a table of contents in a document
This barely has anything to Microsoft word, it's more about formatting it right, and that was already covered earlier.

Performing Mail Merge Operations
-Setup Mail Merge
-Execute Mail Merge

This may actually be the hardest part of the entire certification. But as it turns out, Microsoft Word practically does it for you.


There is absolutely no reason to take a class on anything Microsoft offers, because everything is user friendly, and pretty self explanatory, and Microsoft provides anything you could ever need to know about their programs for free. You can literally become a Microsoft Office Expert overnight. One week, or even one weekend fucking around with these programs and pages makes you as competent as you'll ever need to be.

Microsoft Office is fucking easy

Truth

Truth is relative. There are very few truths that can be considered absolute. Truth depends on the person, the belief, the religion, the morality, truth changes drastically. You can argue for anythings falsity, you can argue that the earth is flat, that scientists lie to us, that magnets are "fucking miracles man", or that reptilian aliens rule the earth. These are the truths of the people I consider "ignorant shitheads". However, these people believe with the entirety of their being that the bullshit they are spewing is true.

My truths are very different, but I spew them with equal, if not more vigor. I've recently asked myself the question, why are my truths more true? What makes them different than all that moronic drivel? Today I am going to attempt to answer that question.

Let's start here. Truth does not exist beyond the human experience. Without humans, or any sort of consciousness observing the universe, there is nothing to say make observations or statements about it. The universe just is (or isn't, who the hell knows). Truth is an entirely human construct used in part to describe the world we live in. There aren't any real "universal truths" because the universe doesn't have truths. All we have are the "truths" that the human experience has created. This is a problem because the human experience itself is limited. We can't know everything, and what we know is based on either our observations, or the  observations of others, which also cannot be completely accurate. What we end up with is a mess of inaccuracy with is inherent in every truth and observation we have.

Now that was on hell of a digression, let's back up. We've established that truth is a purely human construct. When you look at it this way, nothing is true, because what is true for one person can be completely false for another. And yet nothing is false, because something that's false for one person can be completely true for another person.

What the actual fuck.

Let's take this in a completely different direction. Why to people believe in these personal truths? For me, my truths give me a sense of completeness and superiority, and give me a sense that the world I live in is beautiful and complex as it is enigmatic and chaotic. They give me a sense of awe and the sense that we, as humans, have a duty to find all of these "truths". For others, their personal truths may give them comfort in this scary and confusing world, and the sense that there is a simple world beyond and there is always a plan. I hold my truths in a sense of duty and awe at the world we live in.

But certainly there are things that are more true than others. My truths are based on the evidence we see in today's world, certainly that makes them more true than the "truths" that have no evidence behind them. I am, of course talking about the truths of science versus the truths of religion. If truth is a human concept meant to describe reality, then truths must be based in reality, they must be based on some sort of experience in order to be as true as they can be. Let's assume for the sake of this argument that the truths of religion are based on the experience of a few men, the founding preachers of that religion. If this proving experience is privy to these few men, then while the things they preach may be true, there is no evidence that others can experience. Scientific truths, on the other hand, is based on evidence anyone can see for themselves (most of the time. For some things you either have to take their word for it or learn a hell of a lot about mathematics and quantum physics.)

However, we must come back to the fact that we only have our perspective. We only have the world we experience through our own eyes. I believe my truths because I experience them. What I believe is true, makes it true. Other people do not experience the same world I do, and what they experience as truth may be completely different. Our consciousness, our being, is our entire world, and the only world we have. And within that world, that provincial self-awareness is where our truths lie. My truths are true because I experience them. Perhaps, other people are experiencing completely different worlds, with completely different truths.

But the truth is, we'll probably never know this for sure.

North Korea, Chill the fuck Out

So everyone has heard of North Korea's rampant warmongering as a result of their insecurity about the size of their penis nuclear weapons. They've been throwing around threats and generally trying to scare the shit out of everyone. For some people, it's worked, a lot of people are paranoid about getting hit by a nuke. A lot of people, however, aren't very worried.

Let's start here. Let's take a look at the culture the North Korea has right now. There isn't all too much information about the aptly named "Hermit Kingdom", but there have been a few brave souls that have ventured inside and escaped with a glance of what it looks like to be on the inside. The biggest thing is also the scariest; the indoctrination. North Koreans are brainwashed from birth to worship their "great leaders" Kim Il Sung, Kim Jong Il and Kim Jong Un. And when I say worship, I mean literally worship. They hold their leaders in great esteem with a cult-like fanaticism, from how you're supposed to address them, to how you're supposed to take a picture of them. In a style not dissimilar to 1984, everyone feels watched, and no one knows if anyone around them is legitimately loyal to their leader, or just too scared to dissent in any way, shape or form.

The level of education and technology is far behind any of the countries North Korea is threatening to attack. It looks like they're pretty much stuck in the early 80's. There are barely any cars on the road, computers look like this, and warehouses full of modern medical equipment that other countries have donated but none of the North Korean doctors know how to use. A few years ago there was a documentary about a humanitarian doctor that came to North Korea to cure patients suffering from cataracts. Most of them had progressed so badly, that they were completely blind, and when they could finally see, instead of thanking the doctor, all the credit went to their "great leader".

In the same documentary, they interviewed a family and asked them "Can the great leader do anything wrong?" The family just stared back, as if they didn't understand. When they tried to take a picture of Kim Jong Il's statue, the camera man laid down in front of it to get a better angle, and the North Korean "tour guides" went ripshit.

The original idea behind to politics of North Korea was the idea that if they remained completely united and loyal, they could conquer any country, no matter their size, education, training or technology. At least the military branch of North Korean truly believes this, and they're crazy enough to try and follow through with it.

The worst part of this is, Kim Jong Un himself was raised and indoctrinated in this very culture, and he's the one with his finger on the trigger. The threat of a nuclear attack on another country from North Korea is very real. Kim Jong Un seriously believes he can take on the rest of the world and win, and there's only a few ways that a war like that will end. All of them end very quickly.

As soon as North Korea launches a nuclear missile at anyone, war is going to break out. Even if the missile gets taken down by anti-air defenses, it would be an act of extreme, unwarranted aggression, meaning war. If the attack is on the US, the US goes in and slaps their shit. If the attack is on South Korea, the US goes in and slaps their shit. If the attack is on Europe, most of Europe will go in and slap their shit. If North Korea attacks anyone, they get their shit slapped. There is absolutely no favorable outcome for North Korean, not a realistic one at least.

The only real fear is where the North Koreans strike first, because it's the only strike they're going to have. As soon as its out of the way, everyone has an excuse to invade and slap their shit shitless.

So this is my message to North Korea:
Chill the fuck out. You are trying to play a game where the only winning move is not to play.

More Sketches from my Notebooks

I dunno. Thought it was pretty cool. I think is was during an art class.

Isn't this a pokemon?

Shrooms man...

Steampunk is incredible

I don't even know.