Disclaimer


The content on this blog is my personal opinion and does not reflect the views of the Department of Defense or the US Navy in any way.


Monday, July 29, 2019

Looking for Accurate Polls

One of the common complaints we see about politics and especially political coverage nowadays is the charge that people or ideas are being unfairly ignored - particularly that we don't have a good idea which opinions are actually widespread and which aren't.

Both sides have an irritating tendency to argue that the more extreme opinions associated with their side are actually rare (and being overemphasized by their opponents) and that the extreme opinions associated with the other side are actually common (and being downplayed by their opponents). Theoretically, one of the ways we're supposed to get a more precise idea about the level of support for certain ideas (and people) is by asking about those ideas in a systematic fashion - or polling. Realistically, the polls themselves become a point of contention, with both sides arguing about how accurate or relevant they are, and so having polls to talk about tends to change the shape of the argument rather than actually allowing one side or the other to win.

The data we get from polls is still a very useful thing to have, though. Since one of my favorite news organizations put out an article a week or so ago about proper use of polls, I figure now is as good a time as any to talk about it.

That article has a lot of good advice in it about what useful conclusions we can and can't make based on polling data, but it is strongly focused on presidential primary polls, and there's one mistake with polling in general that I'd like to talk about in more detail. Specifically, that would be jumping to conclusions based on data which in reality is a bit more nuanced. This is another (rare) moment where I legitimately can argue that both sides tend to fall short. 

A lot of the left-leaning people I know don't always look past the top-line numbers to ask about how the questions were asked or other factors that affect the survey. There's a lot of polling data out there which legitimately indicates that some liberal policies are popular, but if those policies are misunderstood or voters don't count those issues as their top priority, then that doesn't necessarily translate into popularity for liberal politicians themselves. 

The right-leaning people I know, on the other hand, tend to discard a lot of polls entirely because they don't see how the data could possibly be accurate given what they see from their other sources of information. They give too much weight to the various sources of error and fail to realize that it is possible to compensate for them or compare these polls to their past performance to check them. Alternately, they don't apply the same suspicion to their other sources of information, many of which are less reliable than a properly conducted poll.

In both cases, there's a legitimate argument being made, focusing either on what makes the results reliable or on the sources of potential error. However, there's also a failure to look at possible counterarguments or alternate explanations, and accurately figuring out what's going on in the world requires avoiding that as best as possible.

Sunday, July 21, 2019

Moderation and Enthusiasm

It's become quite normal to watch the Democrats agonizing over what the right path to victory in the next presidential election is - and then agonizing about whether the level of agony on the topic is appropriate, because of course we have to keep going deeper. The latest example of this was a New York Times editorial written by Thomas Friedman about why what he saw in the first presidential debate makes him think President Trump will be re-elected. Both it and some of the responses to it were interesting reads, even if I find the whole debate kind of tiresome.

So, which side of the debate do I think is right? The answer to that question is that it's complicated - there were some things Friedman said which made a lot of sense to me, and several things he said which seemed obviously wrong.

The biggest entry in the latter category is the notion that nominating a moderate candidate who spends all of their time talking about moderate ideas will actually help give the Democrats less of a reputation for extreme ideas among their opponents. I don't think that's likely; I think even if the "squad" completely vanished from public life tomorrow along with half of the presidential candidates, the Republican media will simply find something else (whether or not it's actually relevant or significant) to use as an example of extremism.

The ideas Friedman talks about in the latter half of his editorial are quite instructive. Democrats that focus on building up small businesses and the economy may be moderate by his definition, but I'm willing to bet that the sort of regulations and investment he describes will still be dismissed as socialism by most Republicans. If nothing else, such Democrats will simply be accused of laying the groundwork to pursue their true intentions later. So I don't really hold the more progressive Democrats responsible for making the party appear more extreme. It may be slightly easier for the other side to make that argument with them around, but telling them to take a hike isn't going to protect us enough to be worth it. I'd rather have the energy and new ideas they bring, even if many of those ideas are things I disagree with.

What makes it complicated is the balancing act between kicking people out for being too extreme and letting those people dominate the entire conversation. The above explains why I don't want to do the former, but it also means we can't use that particular tool to prevent the latter from happening, and most other means for doing so are not particularly effective. I would like to suggest that the moderate wing should be more vocal and enthusiastic about their ideas, but it turns out they're not quite as good at that as the progressive wing is.

Then again, the fact that articles like Friedman's are so common is its own argument that the moderate wing is having their say, even if we are spending plenty of time discussing the progressive wing's ideas (and defending them from unjustifiable attacks). Which is why I opened this by saying I find this debate tiresome... I actually don't think there's much to be worried about in either direction, even if I know that we're going to continue to go back and forth about some of the exact details.

Sunday, July 14, 2019

Game review: Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night

Amusingly, some of the reviews I read for this game on Steam were complaining that it wasn't worth the hype - that it was a fairly standard metroidvania game with all the same features we remember from Castlevania games of old. Of course, the Castlevania games are awesome, so I really don't know why those people were treating this as a problem. (Admittedly, those were a small percentage of the total.)

Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night is the newest game made by one of the developers of previous Castlevania games (Koji Igarashi) and it is just as good as all of us were hoping for as far as I'm concerned.

One of the first things that struck me about the game was its complexity. There are a lot of different types of weapons, each with its own attack range and special techniques, and the player will run across four or five different types in the first thirty minutes or so. There are crafting systems not just for gear, but for food and other types of crafting ingredients. Just about every enemy in the game has a rare drop that gives the main character different magical abilities, so you have to manage collecting and upgrading those as well... Certainly a lot of it can be safely ignored, but then you'll be slightly less powerful if you don't take the time to do at least some of it.

The graphics are quite good, in general, although some of the models seem a bit off (the main character's scarf or hair jumping around in weird ways in particular). The game does use the same models for conversation and cutscenes as it does for normal gameplay, as far as I can tell. So if you modify the main character's appearance or wear a particular accessory, you'll still see it in the cutscenes, which is a nice touch.

Exploring the castle also works fairly well, with only one or two minor issues where it wasn't clear where I was supposed to look next. Admittedly, those one or two moments were quite frustrating (it's not common for random common enemies to drop critical movement techniques), but overall it wasn't that hard for me to remember what I had and hadn't seen and where I could try using some of the new techniques I'd found. Trying to stay alive in the process was a bit unexpectedly difficult on several occasions, and the solution I settled on feels a bit cheap (i.e. relying a bit too much on ranged magic attacks), but still doable with a little practice.

Overall, I think the complex extras and challenging combat will turn some people off, but I still highly recommend this one even if you are worried about those issues. It's awesome enough in story, exploration, and creative options to make up for those two traits, and even that is assuming one has a problem with those traits. Since I don't, I think it's just all-around spectacular.

Sunday, July 7, 2019

Infrastructure Predicament

Explaining how I found the article which inspired this blog post may take a little more time than usual, but since I now have two posts that came about this way, I'll take a moment for it.

Over the past few months, one of the blogs I follow has been doing a series on Ayn Rand's novel The Fountainhead. (I found this blog during its previous series on Atlas Shrugged, and honestly the book review posts are the only ones I regularly read on it.) The whole thing is an excellent catalog of the major flaws in Rand's philosophy, but there's also been a few side points on architecture and urban development, since a lot of the book is supposed to be about the genius of the architect main character. That has spun off into points about construction, building design, and urban design on more than one occasion.

In this particular case, one of the posts starts off by talking about the impending collapse which the heroes are worried about, then asks where that collapse actually might come from in real life. It links to an interesting article whose main point is quite simple: Our suburbs simply don't make enough money to pay for themselves, and the cost of trying to maintain them is causing financial problems that we don't have any good way to fix.

Interestingly, it doesn't try to argue that the government should just abandon those costs and privatize (the typical conservative or libertarian response) nor does it argue that the solution lies in taxing people more (the typical liberal response). It's a bit closer to the former than the latter, since what they do argue is that the whole system benefits more from a large number of smaller local projects than from huge federal projects. Even then, though, they still clearly believe that government has a role in encouraging the right projects and setting rules and regulations that will help.

Unfortunately, they also seem to believe there may be nothing that can save all of our suburbs, and that a lot of them are doomed to slowly waste away. They're well aware of the pain that will cause for a lot of the people currently living in those places, but don't believe there's much that can be done without making the long term problem worse than it already is.

The whole site is interesting, although I haven't had time to go over it in that much detail. There are some points I think I disagree with, but overall I think there are some very good points in there about how we should be designing our cities and what we should be spending our infrastructure budget on.

Sunday, June 23, 2019

Game review: Baba is You

It's been a while since I played a puzzle game this ridiculously absurd and difficult. I'm a bit surprised I liked it, since I don't normally like stuff that requires tons of lateral thinking, but I did enjoy it quite a bit.

At its core, Baba is You is just about getting your character to the goal in each level, with various objects in the environment that you have to use or bypass in order to reach the goal. The catch that makes this game unique, though, is that the rules which define what all of the object in the level do are also present as blocks of text you can manipulate. Walls that block your path can be completely ignored if you change the rule that makes them solid, an easy-to-reach object can be made into the goal if the original one is out of reach, or you can even change which object on the map is under the player's control.

The first few levels are simple enough, requiring only minor manipulations. It gets harder fast, though; by the second world or so you'll be making all sorts of absurd changes to the world around you in order to even have a chance at victory. It's hilarious and maddening all at once.

One of the things I liked a lot is that the difficulty does ramp upwards rather smoothly. A lot of the tricks you need for later levels are logical extensions of the things you're doing earlier, and while the game doesn't go out of its way to highlight them, it also tends to give you one new extension at a time. Each world has its own unique concept it tends to focus on, so success in the first few levels of a world tends to make the rest easier. It still gets very difficult quickly, but it could have been much worse if the levels had been in even a slightly different order.

I highly recommend this game if you like puzzle games, although that does come with a warning that it's not for someone who is easily frustrated.

Monday, May 27, 2019

Density and Housing

I ran across an interesting New York Times article last week about housing and affordability in California. I doubt many people would disagree that California has a couple of interesting problems with their cost of living, but that's not going to stop us from disagreeing about what's causing the problem, and this particular article highlights what I believe is the primary cause.

Specifically, it talks about the various ways in which zoning and usage restrictions are driving costs up and pushing people out. The proponents of such rules probably aren't trying to make a point of the latter, nor do I think the environmental concerns that are routinely mocked by the right wing are necessarily the point (or the major cause of these problems) either. Frankly, I think it's just NIMBYism - many people just don't want to live in high-density areas, and so will take steps to prevent their areas from becoming high-density. I don't understand it myself, since I've always liked living in higher density areas (better mass transit, more services close by

If it were just a matter of people choosing to live in areas they preferred (and moving if the area no longer suited them), I would have much less of a problem with that. Unfortunately, as the NYT article points out, what's actually happening looks a lot more like people blocking everyone else from living in a particular area unless their preferences exactly match the existing groups'. There's a line there between properly advocating for oneself and unjustly interfering with others, and a lot of the strongest opposition is on the wrong side of it.

This article also led me to some interesting questions about how zoning is different in various areas, and why some of the places I've lived in other countries don't seem to have this problem. Luckily, I was able to find some interesting (albeit perhaps overly detailed) articles about zoning in North America versus Japan. It's a fascinating look into how government decisions that most of us neither know nor care about have massive effects on multiple parts of our society and economy. I still need to find someone who actually likes North America's zoning and have a chance to see a defense of the idea before I can say I'm completely convinced, but articles like these still reinforce my belief that there's some things about our society that we need to fix.

Sunday, May 19, 2019

Banning Abortion

I'm not sure how much I can say about abortion that I haven't said before, but with the new bans coming out in Alabama and Georgia, I guess it's time to talk about it again.

The one detail that I'm going to focus on this time is the various unintended (or possibly intentional) consequences of fetal personhood. There are a few entertaining comments that have gone around social media (such as asking when child support starts or asking when one can claim an extra dependent on their taxes), but there are also some very serious concerns about what this means for murder or manslaughter laws.

Interestingly, I've seen some conservatives explicitly dismiss those concerns, arguing that people won't be punished for unintentionally harming their fetus because the bills define abortion strictly enough to prevent that. Honestly, I think that's complete nonsense; we already have women being charged with crimes and thrown in jail for miscarriages as it is. This sort of change just adds more circumstances under which that outcome is possible, not less.

And while the question about unlawfully imprisoning a fetus (for example, because the pregnant mother is in jail) seems like a joke, there are more serious questions to ask about what sort of support the state needs to provide to a fetus that ends up under its care. Some of those consequences could even be good, if they force prisons and shelters to provide better care for pregnant women... but some could be dangerously restrictive, if they give the state the right to make all decisions about how to manage the pregnancy.

In the end, it all seems like yet another example of these laws not clearly thinking through the consequences, or how to actually reduce the number of abortions.

Saturday, May 11, 2019

Game review: Katana Zero

Katana Zero seems like it was hyped up fairly heavily prior to its release, although that might just be because I kept seeing their ads while I was watching the last Games Done Quick marathon. That advertising certainly did its job, but it also means I had somewhat higher expectations from the start.

This game certainly lived up to the high expectations I had for it, though. I do enjoy it quite a bit when I buy a game based on its strength in one area and then discover that there's a lot more to it than that - and Katana Zero turned out to be not just an excellent mix of an action game and a puzzle but also had an wonderfully convoluted story that forced me to think about what I was saying and why.

About the most I can say without worrying about spoilers is that this game rewards the player for thinking carefully about what they're saying and who they're saying it to. Just about everyone has their own secrets and their own plots, and it takes some carefully chosen words to ferret out as much detail as possible. I will also note that the way the game handled conversations was quite innovative - while this one isn't the first game I've seen that gives the player a limited amount of time to choose a conversation option, I don't recall having run across one that gives me a chance to actually interrupt the person I'm talking to! It's not there just to allow the speedrunners to skip conversations, either; there are moments where not letting the other person get a word out is better than the alternative.

The "to be continued" tag didn't annoy me quite as much as it usually does, either. It did still annoy me, of course, since there is a lot that went unresolved, but the complexity of the story made it feel a bit more like this one was its own complete section of a larger narrative, rather than the typical half-a-story followed by a sequel hook. I might be being a bit too generous there (possibly because I feel like there's more of the story I still need to dig through), but still.

Interestingly, given that the action was one of the things that drew me to this game, my enjoyment of that part started to wane fairly quickly. You can't take a hit and survive, so combat in the late game becomes very short and lethal (whether in your favor or not) very quickly as more gun-wielding enemies show up. While I'm sure there are plenty of action game fans that would enjoy the challenge, I mostly just found it tiresome to repeat the same section half a dozen times trying to get exactly the right combo off. Still doable, of course, and some of the replays of those fights were quite awesome, but I started to focus more on puzzling out the right sequence of actions rather than blindly hacking and slashing.

So while I can, as usual, see some reasons why people might not like this game (convoluted plot, difficult action/puzzle sequences), I enjoyed it quite a bit, and highly recommend it.

Sunday, May 5, 2019

Post series: League of Legends

I've watched professional League of Legends for a while, but only intermittently actually played it. Actually, if I'm being honest, I almost never actually play - a detail I've usually attributed to being on the North American server despite not actually being in North America much, thus resulting in some rather punishing lag problems.

Now that I actually am in the US again, though, I think I'm going to try to get back into that. And one of the best ways I can think of to force myself to do it is to tell other people I am. So for the weeks where I do actually play, I'll be posting about that in addition to the normal weekly post. I won't be able to play every week - unfortunately my day job poses some obstacles to that - but I'll play as much as I can.

(Why I don't just stream matches is an interesting question - and the short answer is that I'm not quite comfortable with the idea yet. It may happen in the future, but I wouldn't count on it.)

Sunday, April 28, 2019

One Year of Blogging

In another week or two it will have been a year since I restarted my blog. Which makes now as good a time as any to talk about how it's gone and what I think of the project.

In that time, I've written more than three times as many posts as all of my previous attempts at blogging combined (151 over the past year versus 41 prior to that). The original plan was to write one post a day... anyone that can do basic math can probably tell that didn't last very long, of course. Still, I'm reasonably happy with how things have turned out so far. I set myself a goal like that because I was curious to see how much I liked writing some form of news commentary or review post every day, and "I don't, and would prefer to do it less often than daily" is a perfectly valid result for that experiment.

One of the things I would like to do instead is come up with more series-based posts that I can write in advance, rather than having to find something I consider interesting enough to write about and then actually doing so every day. That's not very easy to do with news commentary unless I'm willing to write about older stories, but I have some ideas for chapter-by-chapter book reviews and some gaming posts that might fit. So I'll be announcing some of those in the next few weeks.

Probably the biggest stress of the whole project is balancing my desire to talk about politics with the fact that I am still in the military and have no desire to damage either the military's reputation or mine with too much partisan rancor. I don't think there's much I can actually do about it until I either stop blogging or stop being in the military, but I do try to keep myself focused on facts and policy rather than the personal attacks that are all too common in political discussions. Worrying about whether I'm actually keeping myself on the right side of the line is still stressful, though.

As always, feedback is appreciated. I don't think there are more than a tiny handful of people that are actually reading this blog, but for those of you that are, thanks.

Monday, April 22, 2019

Game Review: Arcade Spirits, part 2

I did say I was going to be coming back to this one. I’m quite a bit late (two months, given that I’d intended to get to this on launch weekend), but real life does have a way of interfering with those sorts of plans, so I’m not too disappointed about that.

That and it’s hard to feel unhappy about anything when this game has done an incredible job of living up to the high expectations I had for it. Arcade Spirits has been memorable in a way that all too few of my visual novels have managed - going all the way back to the old Key/Visual Arts games that brought me into this medium. At its best, this medium allows for some very powerful, moving stories with the sort of player interaction that’s difficult in other mediums but without the distraction that more involved gameplay can be. This game lives up to that ideal and then some; even some of the clichés the story uses merely add to the charm.

I’ll put more details below for anyone that wants to read in detail what I did and didn’t like about the story, but since that will involve some serious spoilers, I’ll put my summary here so that everyone can read it: Whether or not you like visual novels, I highly recommend you try this one. I can’t promise it will resonate with you the same way it did for me, but it's still good enough to be worth a shot.


Sunday, April 14, 2019

Book Journal: Astra Lost in Space

One of the reasons I enjoy going to physical bookstores (even after getting a tablet with an e-reader app that I like using a lot) is that it's very easy for me to just randomly find interesting books by wandering through the store. Which is exactly how I found Astra; I decided to pick up one of the random space-themed manga I saw in a Japanese bookstore a while back, and then realized I needed to get the rest of the series after I had time to read it.

It starts out as a very nice survival story - the main characters are thrown into deep space after a routine camping trip to another planet goes badly, and they have to come up with a clever plan to survive and get back home. In the process, they have to explore several planets - and as the story develops, the whole thing turns into more of a mystery story featuring not just the characters on the ship itself but the entire world they live in.

Which in many cases is a recipe for disaster. Transitions like that can be hard to pull off without disappointing either the people who liked the first genre or people who liked the second. In this case, though, I thought it was very skillfully done; the end result is a satisfying mystery with some very interesting twists that also manages to be a serious survival tale.

I also think the (relatively short) length deserves a note - because while I do like franchises that keep giving me more of the characters I've come to love, short stories that make their point and call it a day deserve credit too.

I really liked reading this one, and I highly recommend it to any science fiction fans.


Sunday, April 7, 2019

Learning from Immigration History

This article from the New York Times stuck with me mostly because of one particular line near the end:
During World War II, the United States blocked a ship with hundreds of Jewish refugees from docking at our shores, sending many back to their deaths. After the war, the United States declared “never again” and became a leader in the modern-day refugee movement.
Given that the whole article is about problems in Central America and Honduras specifically, one can probably guess why the author brings that point up.

And the reason why it's so compelling to me is that this isn't the first time this point has been raised - the immigration debate often features comparisons to the Irish, the Chinese, the Japanese, the Jews, and more, depending on whether we're talking about people who we feared weren't useful, people who we feared might be a threat, or people who we regretted not helping more when we had the chance. It's remarkable how often we've regretted our past mistakes in this regard, and kind of depressing how often we turn around and do the same thing to different groups of people anyway.

That doesn't mean we can't decide we don't wish to or don't believe we can help, and there are plenty of ways we can make the problem worse with poorly thought out interventions. However, using that as an excuse to do nothing at all to help is little more than a prelude to yet more useless avoidable regret.

Sunday, March 31, 2019

Game Review: Momodora: Reverie under the Moonlight

While using speed runs to help find games I might like playing is an excellent idea, I really need to stop also using those speed runs as tutorials... particularly when I'm still on my first run through the game. Trying to pull off advanced tricks when I'm still working on basic mechanics makes things a bit more difficult than they really need to be.

... Then again, I managed to reach the true ending of Momodora: Reverie under the Moonlight in something like 4 hours of gameplay, so I guess it wasn't quite as much of a problem as it could have been.

My experience doesn't quite feel normal - to the extent where I hesitate to even call this a review - since I already knew much of what I was going to be facing from the beginning. It was challenging enough to be satisfying, but really wasn't all that difficult in the end even with me spending time trying to kill each of the bosses without taking a hit. I suppose I did have the difficulty turned down fairly low, and I am certainly looking forward to trying it again on a higher setting eventually. The story was a bit predictable but still compelling enough to get by.

Also: You're playing as a priestess who uses a leaf and a bow as weapons and eventually gains the ability to turn into a cat in order to get through smaller spaces. The anime nerd in me says that's worth a lot of points right there.

Overall, I enjoyed it, and I definitely think it's worth playing, but it's a bit short and (at least at normal difficulty) not quite as challenging as I might have hoped for.

Wednesday, March 27, 2019

End of a Irrelevant Narrative

So I'm going to go ahead and join the debate about the special counsel's investigation and whether or not President Trump's campaign colluded with Russia. I've specifically avoided saying anything one way or the other up to this point, but now that the investigation's ended, I'm more willing to participate briefly.

To put it simply, I really don't care that the special counsel's investigation has ended with no evidence of collusion. It's not going to have all that much of an impact on who I support or vote for in the future.

I made a post on one of my social media accounts shortly after the election that pointed out the various policy disagreements I have with President Trump and the Republican party generally. None of that has changed; to the extent that I've discovered I was wrong about some of those concerns, it's largely a matter of overestimating the risks involved, not underestimating the benefits.

To put it another way, it's similar to the remarks former Senator Flake made when he was asked why he didn't do more to oppose President Trump. He pointed out that he was still a Republican, he still liked lower taxes and fewer regulations, and he wasn't going to oppose such things just because someone he disliked was supporting them. By the same token, I'm not going to stop supporting social justice, strong environmental regulations, and a government that's actually involved in public life to a useful degree simply because some of my compatriots were overly aggressive in assuming criminal behavior on the part of someone they disliked.

And I also feel compelled to point out that President Trump was the most unpopular presidential candidate in history well before the special counsel investigation was even being considered. Those of you who are assuming that this result means President Trump can now cruise to an easy re-election may want to reconsider that assumption. I don't know whether or not he will be re-elected, but I'm fairly confident it will be a rather close race.

Monday, March 18, 2019

Book Journal: Overlord series

One of my friends recommended the Overlord anime to me a while back, and while I still haven't had the time or the Internet reliability to actually watch that yet, it was enough reason to start picking up the English version of the light novel series when I saw it in a bookstore.

As is often the case when someone goes to the trouble to recommend something to me, I've ended up wishing I'd picked it up sooner, because I've enjoyed reading it quite a bit.

The series is about a former online MMO player who decides to stay logged in to his favorite game until he's forced out by its final shutdown, only to discover that instead of being forcibly logged out, he's been thrown into a fantasy alternate world instead. Of course, he soon discovers that his massively powerful character is significantly more powerful than almost anyone else he can find, and the massive dungeon and NPCs that his guild created ended up in this new world with him, so he's a little bit better off than the typical protagonist of these stories, to say the least.

If there is a problem, it's that the story is a bit one-dimensional so far. The main character and his minons are so much stronger than everyone else that most of the stories focus on revealing more of the world's back story or detailing the exact ways in which they manage to annihilate whoever is making trouble for them. Which isn't so bad, since I do enjoy reading these absurdly destructive fantasy-style fights, but it would be nice if there was an actual threat or challenge to the main characters at some point. (Of course, I'm only about halfway through what's currently been published right now, so there's time left for me to get my wish.)

Sunday, March 17, 2019

New Schedule

First, as is fairly obvious, I'm back from my break and making blog posts again.

However, I am going to change the schedule a bit. I don't really have time to post something every single day anymore, unfortunately, so I'm going to make one post per week on Saturdays. There may be additional posts if something particularly interesting or easy to write about catches my attention, but those will be a bit more irregular.

Monday, February 11, 2019

Short Break

I'm not going to be doing the normal daily posts during weekdays for a little while. There may be the occasional game review post, but I don't have time right now to do more than that.

Regular posts should resume in the second week of March.

Monday, February 4, 2019

Game review: Wargroove

So there's three sentences that I think have to be included in any review of this game, if some of the other's I've read are any indication:

It's basically Advance Wars with a swords and sorcery theme applied to it. But that's okay, because Advance Wars was awesome, and this game is just as good. Also there are some very cute dog units (but they run away instead of dying, so don't worry about having to kill them).

Which is really all that needs to be said; if you liked Advance Wars, you're probably going to like this one too. With that out of the way, I'll go ahead and talk about some of the differences, since there is a new critical hit mechanic and changes to the capturing rules that will be new to veterans of that game.

The critical hit mechanic basically rewards the player for putting their units in exactly the right position. They're not random; each unit has specific criteria which allow it to score a critical hit (such as standing on the right type of tile, standing next to a specific unit type, or moving a certain distance before attacking). They're also very thematically appropriate, such as pikemen gaining bonuses from standing shoulder-to-shoulder with other pikemen or knights charging through their full movement before attacking. It's an interesting additional layer of detail to have to worry about, although it's rarely necessary to get every critical hit possible.

The other significant difference is capturing structures. Garrisoned structures start with half the HP of the unit that captured them and slowly regain health. On one hand, it's possible to capture even with low health units... but the enemy can just destroy your garrison immediately if you do that. While any unit can attack a structure, only infantry can capture a neutral structure - and if the structure survives an enemy attack, it'll shoot back, so taking out a structure at full health is actually kind of difficult (and will leave the attacker with plenty of damage) unless you have some fairly powerful units.

There are some other minor changes (unit repairs, commander units), but they don't affect the experience as much. The other big detail is the amount of stuff in this game - the campaign mode is impressive, each commander has their own arcade mode, there's a bunch of puzzles that challenge you to win in a single turn, and there's a system for sharing custom maps and online multiplayer. I've played for hours and I've barely scratched the surface of it all.

On the whole, Wargroove is definitely worth buying.

Thursday, January 31, 2019

The Future of Abortion

Because I got in an abortion debate recently, I've been thinking a bit more than usual about where this particular social problem is going to go from here.

Here's the thing: I actually can see a world in the future in which abortion is less common than it is now. Perhaps even extremely rare - and I wouldn't mind that one bit.

But that's a world in which abortion has become much less necessary, not necessarily one in which we've convinced people not to choose it. It's a world in which people have easy access to all the tools they need to control when they reproduce, easy access to medical care to reduce the risks associated with pregnancy, and easy access to social support to ensure their children won't be born into grinding poverty.

Perhaps, if I want to look even farther in the future, it's a world in which medical technology has advanced to the point where we can easily transfer a fetus between people or to an artificial incubator - but we're nowhere near that point, unfortunately.

We're not going to get to that world by trying to shame people into not having abortions. Frankly, I don't think that could work without policing women's miscarriages to a ridiculous degree; between that and the women that will start dying trying to induce them on their own, I think restrictions painful enough to work are basically guaranteed to trigger a backlash eventually. Also, we know from a fair bit of research that bans are much less effective than better sex education and increased access to contraceptives at reducing the number of abortions. Even if we ignore that and try to make some combination of bans and social pressure work, though, it would get us no closer to a world in which we actually care enough about women to address the problems that cause them to get abortions.

Addressing those problems will have to be done separately; whether or not we have restrictions on abortion will only affect how people react to those problems without changing their severity. This is something that the pro-choice side tends to be much better at than the pro-life side, frankly. While there are some pro-life organizations that tell themselves they care about addressing those problems, there's always the unspoken detail that the primary goal is reducing abortion. And if that's the primary goal, actually helping to reduce the problem becomes a whole lot less important once the fetus is close enough to term or once the baby is born. Unfortunately, that's exactly what we see out of all too many people - just enough help to stop the abortion and not enough to actually fix the problems. I can understand why someone with limited resources would want to focus their efforts on stopping as many abortions as possible... but if that causes them to spread their resources out enough that they can't actually provide a useful amount of assistance in the longer term, then they're just making things worse in the end.

The worst part, of course, is that many of those problems may not be completely solvable in the long term, and certainly won't be corrected quickly in any event. It's nice to imagine that we can solve poverty, and certainly it's something we should work towards, but in the short term we're still going to have to decide how to deal with its effects on things like abortion, and we should be prepared for whatever we choose to be the status quo for quite some time. 

I'm quite certain that it's not nearly so clear-cut as saying that a woman always has to sacrifice her autonomy, in some cases her health, and in rare cases her life for a fetus.

Tuesday, January 29, 2019

Limiting Social Media Use

Various calls to sharply reduce social media use are fairly common, such as this one in the New York Times that argues that we're not using our smartphones the way we should, or this similar piece (about the same author) in the Wall Street Journal

I'm not necessarily the best person to defend social media use, since in many ways I already use it in a fairly limited way. I avoid posting things as they happen, since I prefer to take some time to think about what I want to post and the message it sends. I check it more often than I probably should, but tend to focus on random humor sites rather than checking every minor detail of the news or my social media feeds. So I can understand why a lot of these recommendations get made, and I agree with a lot of them.

That said, I feel like a lot of the arguments in those pieces could fairly be applied to any technology more advanced than a simple calculator. For someone like me whose primary sources of leisure are gaming or watching videos about gaming, the notion that I should back off of all of it just to figure out if I actually want to be doing all this seems a bit off. It's a plausible experiment, but not something that's unique to a technological obsession.

Similar concerns apply to work productivity. I can see how focusing on good and useful communication is important... but for someone who works with people around the world on a regular basis, asking to do that without technological assistance simply isn't going to happen.

So while a lot of it is good and useful advice, I think it's important not to get too wrapped up in the notion that technology is ruining our lives.

Monday, January 28, 2019

Political Backgrounds and Aptitude

One of the major benefits to online news is that it's very easy to create interesting interactive visual presentations; today's example is the New York Times with a little graph about what sort of experience and qualifications each of our current members of Congress have.

The write-up they've attached to their graph notes a number of interesting ways in which the makeup of Congress doesn't at all match the makeup of the country as a whole, and offers some speculation on the potential consequences of that. Most of it has to do with problems they might not understand very well (because very few of the people with experience with them go on to become politicians) or ways in which Congress might be more willing to aggressively deal with issues because they disproportionately affect the areas of society that most representatives come from.

While some of it is plausible, though, I don't think I agree with all of it. And I think it's worth considering exactly what we want the job of one of our representatives to be - because depending on how we define those responsibilities, it's entirely natural that not everyone will want to deal with them.

For example, while I do think more people with scientific or technical backgrounds in Congress would be good for the country, it doesn't surprise me that the sort of person that likes a job in those fields might not like being a politician. And part of the ideal of picking people to represent us is that we pick some of our best for leadership roles, so one would expect at least some deviations from the mean in that group.

To be entirely clear, I think we do still have a problem as far as our pipeline for political jobs is concerned, and I think we should be more willing to look for talent in a wider pool than we currently do. But I think we need to be careful when we're defining what success in that endeavor looks like.

Friday, January 25, 2019

Book Journal: Safehold Series

... It surprised me quite a lot when I went to check past posts that I've never written one about David Weber's Safehold series before. I guess I'll go ahead and fix that now.

While this series has some interesting science fiction roots, it's a lot closer to historical fiction than his Honorverse series. Most of the action is set within a world that has no access to electricity or really any technology more advanced than sailing ships and crude guns. (At least - at first, and with some exceptions.) So the fighting and politics in this series are a decidedly different affair from the space opera battles that are the centerpiece of the Honorverse.

The attention that Weber pays to the politics and economics that lead up to those battles is no different, though. As with many of the Honorverse books, a lot of the Safehold books talk about a lot of political maneuvering and military strategy, get through one major battle, and then close with the implications of that battle. So they can get a bit dense and slow if you're looking for straight-up military action. Weber does do a great job with the world building (as always), though, and he does a great job of getting us to care about the fate of the characters involved, so I've always liked it anyway.

Interestingly, he also does a good job (at least in my opinion) of making it seem like things are always hovering on a knife's edge for the protagonists, constantly keeping them in danger of being defeated, even when they don't actually lose very often. Under most circumstances, I guess it probably should inspire worries about boring invincible heroes when they lose as rarely as these people do, but I've never really felt that way.

The inspiration for this particular post was (naturally) my reading of the latest book in the series, which for a few different reasons is actually a rather different book than many of its predecessors. Spoilers for the series (and that latest book) follow, so if you haven't read any of it yet (which I recommend you do if you haven't), you've been warned.

The big difference for this latest book (Through Firey Trials) is that with the major military campaigns in the previous books largely concluded, it's a lot more general in its coverage of events than any of them were. All of the books (particularly the later ones) tend to drift across several years of in-universe time, but I don't believe any of them covered fifteen years in one go. That made this one feel like an entire book's worth of filler, frankly; while I'm happy that it moved the story all the way forward to the next major point, I could have wished for something a bit more interesting.


Wednesday, January 23, 2019

Game review: Super Smash Bros Ultimate

Of course I bought this game. I doubt there's a single Nintendo fan in the world that isn't going to, even if many of them are going to complain.

It definitely has its problematic points. The fact that you start with 8 characters out of the 70+ to unlock means that everything you do for the first hour or two triggers a new challenger to fight and unlock, which actually gets a bit old after the third time you're interrupted in the middle of practicing or just randomly messing around.

I also can't decide whether I think the story mode and the associated spirits to unlock and manage are an interesting way to make Smash characters and battles that feel inspired by other games or just an irritating slog through a bunch of too-difficult gimmicky crap. Finding cool spirits is definitely a fun way to reminisce about some of the awesome games I've played in the past... but managing them in order to get to the point where I can actually win some of the harder battles is just a pain. And there's very little actual story to enjoy after the initial cutscene, either, which means I probably land on the "don't like" side of the scale for the story mode.

And as with every other Smash game, it really shines best with friends, which is a bit of a problem for someone like me who doesn't often invite other people to my apartment. To say nothing of the fact that I'm terrible at it, just as with every other fighting game I've tried.

For all the negativity above, though... it's still Smash, and it's still awesome to blast people away with Robin's spells, cut them to ribbons with Link's sword, or just punch them with Mario. For someone that grew up playing the original Smash Bros game, including literally everything from past games down to the stages themselves was a masterstroke. It's a blatant play on everyone's nostalgia, but that doesn't make it any less effective.

I don't know that I'd unabashedly recommend this one unless you know you'll have regular chances to play with friends. But even with its flaws, any Nintendo fan is going to find more than enough to enjoy in seeing so much of Nintendo's history in a single game.

Tuesday, January 22, 2019

Standing Up in the Moment

Recently I've run across a couple admonishments on Facebook that women who are being harassed or otherwise believe they might be in danger need to remember that there's a lot they can do to stand up for themselves, usually attached to a number of recommendations about what to do in that situation.

The weird thing for me is that I'm largely in agreement with that sort of project. Not everyone knows or has practiced how to respond in stressful or disturbing situations, and brainstorming or practicing responses ahead of time is a great way to help people who may be less comfortable standing up for themselves become more willing to do so. And having more people willing and able to do that is a major step forward in our efforts as a society to solve these problems.

But there is a major problem, and that is that the posts I've seen are telling people that this is something they have to do, or that they're in the wrong if they don't. To be blunt, that sort of blame directed at people for not taking those actions or for not standing up for themselves in the moment is exactly the sort of reason why anyone ever had to worry about victim blaming.

The problem is that there are still plenty of good reasons for people not to take the risk. There are some creepers who are just looking for a victim and will back off in the face of resistance... but there are some who grow more belligerent when they're confronted. There are plenty of store employees and police officers who will take the side of someone standing up for themselves... but there are still plenty who will regard them as the problem for complaining or fighting back. Even if we can know for certain that things will turn out all right in the end, that's not going to make the short term consequences any less significant... or survivable, for some people.

If someone comes to me and says they don't know what to do or want to try to be more assertive, I'm completely in support of that. But if they come to me to complain that something happened and they felt their best choice out of the bad options presented was to disengage as quickly as possible and without making a fuss, I'm not going to blame them for that. And if I don't know whether they're asking for advice or looking for sympathy, I'm going to ask if they actually need advice before I assume that they must not have known what to do.

I definitely am not going to withhold my sympathy until they've satisfied me that they did everything they could have to stand up for themselves - because even if I could tell for certain that they were too cowardly to stand up for themselves, that wouldn't make them any less deserving of sympathy.

Monday, January 21, 2019

Advantages and Disadvantages of Turnout

There are few things that frustrate me more than tribal politics and gridlock getting in the way of legitimate, important priorities for our nation. Given that improving our system of voting and ensuring that everyone who wants to vote can vote is high on my list of those priorities, it shouldn't be any surprise that editorials like this one from the Wall Street Journal irritate me quite a bit.

As far as I can tell, their primary complaint is that trying to mimic parts of California's voting system for the entire country is going to increase Democratic power across the entire country. They point out a few things about California's system (such as automatic registration, automatic distribution of mail-in ballots, and people being allowed to collect ballots for others) and complain that states should be allowed to decide for themselves how much or how little of that to mimic.

About the only bit of it that I agree with is the concerns about voter harvesting; I agree that it creates too many opportunities for voter fraud and intimidation. Of course, that's also the part that's not in the nationwide bill the House Democrats have put up, so its relevance to those changes is rather low.

Everything else, frankly, comes off as a cheap attempt to poison the well regarding a number of very useful ways to improve voter turnout for everyone by associating them with the biggest Democratic stronghold in the country. The actual arguments against it mostly amount to "it makes voter fraud easier" (which we know because California is still catching those bad automatic registrations) and "states should be able to decide" (which ignores the legitimate interest the federal government has in promoting the health of the entire country's election system). As reasons why we shouldn't take steps to improve turnout, they fall quite badly short; the benefits for the health of our democracy outweighs arguments like those.

Friday, January 18, 2019

Game review: Mages of Mystralia

Mages of Mystralia is so far one of the rare games to actually make it off of my Steam wish list and into my inventory after a year or two. Most of them either make it off my wish list sooner than that, or slowly languish until I forget why I added them in the first place and eventually remove them.

It's good and bad. I don't know if I can unreservedly recommend it, but there are definitely some enjoyable parts, and I'm sure some people will like those enough to bother with it. On the other hand, the slower parts will definitely drive some people away.

The most enjoyable part is the spell design system. Experimenting with the different modifiers and triggers to find out what they do is a lot of fun, and using them to create massively powerful spells that fill the entire screen with homing fireballs is even more fun.

This also, however, leads to the biggest problem: You start the game without any of the really interesting options, and are pretty much guaranteed to spend at least two thirds of the game spamming the same one or two combat spells in an effort to reach the puzzles that allow you to unlock those legitimately interesting options.

The story is a little bit of both. On one hand, the store page plays up the fact that it was written by Ed Greenwood; I enjoyed his work on many Forgotten Realms novels quite a bit, and he mostly doesn't disappoint here either. It's basically the classic sort of fantasy story about a young protagonist who slowly learns that they're the chosen hero and/or have some kind of special power - which is a classic for a reason.

On the other hand, there are one or two moments where it wasn't clearly explained what the next step was supposed to be, and yet the main character seemed to luckily stumble on the right idea anyway, which feels like a bit of an unlikely coincidence. It also ended at something that feels like the halfway point of a bigger story, and I don't see any evidence of a planned sequel.

Overall, it was definitely worth what I paid for it and fun enough for me to recommend it, but I do have to attach a few caveats to that since there are some flaws.

Thursday, January 17, 2019

Legislative Gridlock

The ongoing train wreck in British politics that is their effort to decide how they're going to split from the European Union doesn't affect me personally much, but I've still been following it with some interest. A parliamentary system such as theirs doesn't usually develop the sort of gridlock which is paralyzing it now.

For anyone that's not familiar with it, normally a prime minister whose proposals lost by a wide margin (i.e. what just happened to the Brexit deal) would expect to lose a vote of no confidence shortly afterward. The entire point is that the prime minister is supposed to command majority support in the parliament, after all. In this case, though, Mrs. May's Conservative Party doesn't particularly like the deal in question, but is still willing to support her as prime minister over other alternatives, and so the normal consequences aren't happening.

Which leaves the British government unable to function in the normal way, and without any other obvious means to either get back to that normal or find a new standard. Not reaching any deal at all by the deadline is a real possibility, as is a deal passing with mostly the opposition parties' support instead of the majority parties. It depends on exactly how much those opposition parties want to avoid the no deal scenario, how much they're willing to help out Mrs. May's government, and what they can get in exchange for their support.

I'm calling those answers "probably a lot", "not much at all", and "who knows; making deals with the opposition isn't that common", which isn't as helpful in actually predicting the future as we might wish. Hopefully they'll still manage to avoid the worst case scenario.

Wednesday, January 16, 2019

Democratic Coalitions

FiveThirtyEight continues to do an awesome job with their coverage of US elections; they just recently posted several articles analyzing the candidates for the Democratic presidential primary.

... It's all still quite speculative, of course, and as the article warns, there's a lot of stuff in it that will probably look a bit questionable in retrospect. But for an analysis conducted a full year and a half away from the nomination, I think it's decent. It's a pretty good way to think about what the primary candidates have to do and how they could go about doing it, if nothing else - and it's a chance for the Democrats to start thinking about which groups they belong to and what coalitions they'd accept.

I find myself mostly in agreement with the idea that the "mainstream" or "most likely" candidates (e.g. Biden and Sanders) are probably weaker than they look, although I don't know if I really think that means one of the others will take it instead, given how low the name recognition is for everyone else. Then again, there's plenty of time for that to change.

Tuesday, January 15, 2019

Political Shifts

I do feel a bit weird commenting on internal debates among conservatives, since it feels like that shouldn't really be any of my business (given that I'm not particularly conservative). However, the various ways that some conservatives are responding to Tucker Carlson's recent comments (plus, of course, the monologue itself) offers not just some interesting thoughts on how conservatism might develop from here, but also some food for thought on what's going to happen to liberals in response.

Part of that is because there are parts of Carlson's piece (in between ridiculous misrepresentations of Democrats' priorities, some faulty logic about how we ended up here, and a frankly horrifying vision of how we should fix it) that I am generally able to agree with regarding the degree to which government should be trying to affect our society. If this is the sort of thing we can expect more of from prominent conservatives, there's a world in which they end up drifting to the left as far as government intervention in the economy is concerned. Possibly to the point of actually teaming up with the sort of liberal that cares more about reforming the economy than they do about social justice, although that's a bit of a stretch.

That would, though, leave a lot of mainstream left and right wing people out of that group, and if they wanted to exert any useful opposing force, they might find themselves teaming up as well. That would most likely involve the liberals abandoning some of their efforts to exert control over the economy (perhaps by reasoning that social pressure on companies to do the right thing could make up for the lack of government involvement), and involve the conservatives giving up on some of their opposition to socially liberal ideas.

Basically, we'd shift from a horizontal split on the Nolan Chart to a vertical split. Still a two-party system, but different coalitions and splits between them.

Now, do I think that sort of shift is actually likely anytime soon? Nope.

In the end, I think a lot of conservatives, even if they agree that government policies need to be designed to address various social problems, will still mostly argue that government involvement is what screwed things up in the first place, and simply removing government from as much of our lives as possible will fix the problem eventually. Carlson's piece might convince them to think more carefully about the limited ways in which they are willing to use the government, but I don't think it's going to get them to start turning to government policy so much that they can find common ground with socialists. Similar things can be said about the liberals here; even if they continue to use free market arguments regarding the economic dominance of big cities and pressure on corporate decisions, I don't think we're going to see them abandoning the idea that the government has a major role to play and drifting towards libertarianism.

But I think it's possible enough to speculate on, even if it is quite unlikely to happen soon.


Monday, January 14, 2019

Changing Capitalism

One of the random posts that went through my news feed with the new year was a nice little thing about what we'd remove from the world if we could change one thing. A fairly innocuous and unsurprising post for this time of year, all things considered... except for some of the answers, of course.

A number of people used it as a nice way to talk about things that were holding them back and things they'd like to do differently in the future. However, a number of people also used it to make statements about some significant things they'd like to remove from the world - greed, capitalism, money, or oil were all named as things by some of them.

Which immediately attracted my attention, because I actually don't agree with the notion at all, particularly as it applies to the specific resources which are often sources of conflict.

Here's the thing: Many of these things, particularly the actual resources, have provided great benefits. There are entire regions of the world that would not be easily habitable without gas-fired heating and electrical systems, for example. Capitalism itself turns out to be an okay way to allocate resources and a better way to self-correct that allocation when something isn't useful or desired than most other economic systems.

The caveat, of course, is that the above doesn't mean these things are an unalloyed good. Over-committing to one specific solution or helpful resource can put us in a bad situation when it comes time to change to a better one or try to address problems with what we have, for example. And while there are a lot of ways in which capitalism is self-correcting, there are a lot of circumstances in which it isn't (monopolies and limited definitions of value being the most prominent examples to me); those situations can't be fixed by purely capitalist solutions. That would be why the vast majority of successful societies have some form of mixed economy instead of pure capitalism, and believing our economic and societal structures are flawless and shouldn't be (or even can't be) improved further seems like unjustified confidence verging on stupidity to me.

But we should be aware of what we've already got and do the best we can to ensure our changes are actually improvements. That's not easy to do (or to agree on), but it's worth the effort.


Thursday, January 10, 2019

Townspeople and Politicians

The Wall Street Journal ran an article earlier this week about how Congressman Will Hurd (R-TX) managed to win reelection in one of the closest victories the Republicans managed in 2018. There's a lot of interesting stuff in that article; a lot of it makes me question whether very many other Republicans will actually be willing to lean towards the center in the same way. I think the answer is "not many"... but that's not actually the point I want to focus on.

The one detail I am going to focus on is from this quote:
One lesson of such tours is that Capitol Hill is a bubble. At a taco joint in conservative Castroville, Mr. Hurd asks a breakfast group for their thoughts on the Saudi killing of Jamal Khashoggi, and the table gets pretty quiet. That subject is remote compared with a future bypass on U.S. Route 90. “What people talk about in D.C. is different from what people talk about here,” Mr. Hurd says in the car afterward. “Man, Khashoggi has dominated Washington, D.C., for a month. None of them brought it up.”
While I can see the point the author's going for, that reads a whole lot to me like "these people are too deep into their own bubble to realize or care about what's going on in the wider world". It's kind of ironic that they have exactly the same problem, in that sense, that we're complaining about everyone in Washington DC having.

To be fair, that doesn't rule out the idea that both groups are stuck in their own bubbles - and politicians not capable of understanding what their constituents are going through is definitely a worse problem to have than the reverse. But it's important to remember that the voters can have that problem too, particularly if we want to have politicians that can help lead the country rather than just blindly following the currents of public opinion.

Wednesday, January 9, 2019

Speedrunning for Charity

Every time I can, I make a point of watching the events that Games Done Quick puts on. Usually I only remember to look for it after the event is already mostly over, so I'm doing fairly well to have caught on relatively early in the week this time.

... But I'm getting ahead of myself. For anyone that doesn't know, Games Done Quick is a charity organization which raises money by gathering volunteers to play games as fast as they possibly can, stream it and their commentary online for people to watch, and using various incentives to solicit donations from the viewers. They're doing this 24/7 for the entire week, and the donations are going to benefit the Prevent Cancer Foundation.

Also, "as fast as possible" usually turns out to be downright ridiculous; watching these people complete games that took me tens of hours to complete normally in two or three is always amusing to watch. It's best when I actually am familiar with the game they're playing, but even unfamiliar games are fun to watch (and sometimes that ends with me deciding to play it myself).

If you like gaming, or like seeing people spend a ridiculous amount of time and effort to do fun and interesting things in new ways, it's probably worth a look. And if you can, it's definitely worth a donation.

Wednesday, January 2, 2019

New Year's Post: 2019

Happy (belated) New Year!

I've never really been one for resolutions, so I'm not really going to list any here. I like to make sure the goals I set are achievable, and most resolutions I've seen aren't. I suppose I could try to fix that by making sure I set achievable goals - there are some things I would like to do, certainly - but I'd rather just be more private about them.

Anyway, I'll just get back to listening to some of  the music I found over my break - including some from NHK's Kohaku Uta Gassen (紅白歌合戦), which I am actually kind of embarrassed I didn't know about earlier given how much I like Japanese music. Definitely worth listening to some of it for anyone else who likes Japanese music!