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.

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.

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.

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.)