I have been Cracking down as it were lately. I’ve always been a fan of the 3rd person run around and kill people games, but usually only the story based ones: I.e. Tomb raider, Lost Planet, and the like. I remember a while (as in years) ago going over to a friends house and he introduced me to GTA. I think the thing that really made that game fun for me (even though I never actually picked it up) was that you could just go do whatever in the F you wanted. In GTA they really did a good job of giving you shit to do but also making that stuff fun. I mean you steal a cab, there is a cab mini-game, you steal a cop car, there is a cop car mini-game. Then there was all the other things like the “Shoot the old ladies from the roof game, or the see how many stars you could get and stay alive game…either way, the “sand box” was pretty big and if you were bored, you could always just do whatever jumped into your head.

So then we move on to Crackdown. Crackdown is very much a sandbox game. They don’t worry about stories, or missions…the whole point is killing gang members, and since you’re a cop (Read: agent) it makes it ok to blow up whole city blocks. So it breaks down like this, you’re this agent guy who has a friend in your head (he’s a guy from the agency who talks to you all the time, really this guy is the only person you actually talk to…and by talk to I mean listen to). The “friend in your head” tells you all kinds of things to do but really when the rubber meets the road, its you against 3 huge gangs. As you run around and shoot people (read: bad people…) you get levels (just like real life). So as you level up in your strength skill you can lift bigger and bigger things, like being able to go from lifting a dumpster to lifting a tour bus. You raise your agility and it allows you to jump higher and run faster…like…chase down a car on the freeway faster.

The whole skill system is tracked by these stars. You get 3 or 4 stars in a few different things, and you’re like a freakin super cop. This is where you end up doing the sand box stuff, I mean there is no where you can’t get to by either running or jumping and you can pick up pretty much anything and throw it at the aformetioned bad guys. Oh yeah and there are these “Agency super cars” that you can get from the HQ that as you level your driving skill, they transform…not like robots or anything, more so they just get cooler.

Playing the game dosn’t make me want to kill people in real life or attempt to climb on buildings so that I can “snipe” people with the “sinper rifle” that I don’t have. I have no desire to kick some gang-bangers ass and then pick him up and throw him at his other gang-banger friend (cause when you do that the other friend dies). This is the thing I don’t get. I mean there are all of these (from what I understand of the situation) crazed kids who are playing these “video games” or as I like to call it “Brain wash: The killing Tutorial” who are getting these “crazy ideas” in their head that its some how ok to kill. These games are not unlike “the Marijuana”. They’re “gateway drugs”. They get kids thinking that there are powerups hidden in the bodies of their friends. See, the games are actually opening their eyes to a new reality. One that for the (between) 10 and 25 years they’ve been on the planet that they’ve never actually seen any proof of outside of this new virtual reality they’re being primed to believe.

Sure, there’s no proof that shooting a person will result in different colored orbs flying out of their dead body that ultimately make the killer stronger. I understand that to date no one has really been able to prove that if you’re wounded that having sex with a hooker will fix your wounds. That you can steal a Geo Tracker and take it off of a makeshift jump and when you land said car, it will actually make you a better driver. But listen, from what we are led to believe from all of the reports in the news, this is what these games are doing to the youth of our nation! That some how reality will get put on “pause” as it were once they press the power button and then they will become another killing machine created by their evil game developer masters…

The only way that we’ll be able to change this is to get laws passed that will require games to match real life! All games! The kids love playing video games, the kids will play any of the videos game! So if we make sure the games match real life then they won’t get these crazy ideas in their heads! Real life games need to be made using the current popular characters. Examples:

Sonic the Hedgehog: Adventures in Fastfood Employment land
Halo: Action Homework simulator
Forza Motor Sports: Extreme Driving safely
Gears of War: Learn to Pay Taxes with Marcus Fenix
Street Fighter 2 Extreme Hardcore Turbo: Non violent resolution battle

Here’s what I’m saying, the video gamez that are out there today, regardless of what their real content is, we’ve learned that their whole purpose to this point (although we missed it) was to train our children. So, “our bad” on the whole not seeing that playing on the Xbox or nintendo was going to create killers, now we just need to change gears and mandate that the things that the kids are learning are from video games. This will in the end also be good for the parents because they can now continue to let video games train their kids 100% as they have been, but now it will be teaching them the right way to live.

On the way into work today I started thinking about Super Heroes. Mainly how I don’t think a super hero would be able to live in our time now and have a secret identity. With everyone’s cell phone having a camera on it, and the interweb in general I really don’t think that said “hero” would be able to keep their identity secret for very long. I’d give it 1 month max.

I mean think about it, back in the day a super hero was a lot like big foot (well some of them). The only way that people would hear about them is if someone saw Superman or Spiderman flying around or crawling on some building. But that was it, It was just limited to the occational “Hey I saw that super hero doing stuff!” then they’d tell a friend and they’d tell a friend… That still left room for the super hero to actually have some breathing room to the point where people might not believe that said hero existed. So the super hero goes on, does his or her thing and the citizens are able to go on living another day.

Flash forward to today, someone sees spiderman walking around on a wall, they’re just going to take a few pictures with their phone or video even (I think they did that in Xmen 3). Ok so lets say that we get some video of Spiderman. As fast as the person with the video can get home its loaded on their computer and put up on Youtube. Now, everyone can see spiderman crawling around on the building. Well that’s not going to immediately make everyone believe that spiderman actually is in this town crawling around on buildings. However it starts the ball rolling.

We now have this video of spiderman walking around on some building, people are going to watch the video and say its either fake or are going to believe the video. Then people are going to band together and try to hunt him down on their own to prove it for themselves. I’d like to point to I love bees as an example. People all over the place worked together to help figure that whole thing out. I mean there were people in different cities around the US who were waiting at pay phones for calls giving various information. I’m saying, you take those same people and tell them that theres a super hero in their town, they’d be all over it.

This wouldn’t be too different from the “Lets hunt big foot” people or the “UFO” types but I’m saying that the fact that its a super hero would apeal to a broader range of people and then you’d have these groups of people who would effectively stalk the Super hero. No doubt people would create a Myspace page for the hero…there’d be a wikipedia entry and websites covering where the hero was last seen. As soon as a large enough group of people started following and tracking this hero, then the news would get on it. The group of people hunting the hero might be looked at as being crazy or just a bunch of people doing some crap that no one cares about, but we have to remember that all the while the hero has to be saving the day. The fact that there are people hunting the hero down dosn’t stop super villans from doing thier thing. You stack that on top of all of this and I’m saying, it wouldn’t be long before the hero is captured by these people, unmasked and then the pictures would be posted all over the interweb.

Ultimately I’d think that it would be a shallow victory for all of those people, I mean in my mind i’m seeing them tracking this hero down because its like a game. The whole point really stops being to prove that the hero exists, more so to prove that you (the non hero) could best the hero. So they win, they create some fake robbery, capture the hero and unmask him and then what? What do you say to a super hero who is out to protect people who wants to be left alone to do his work after you’ve unmasked him and take pictures to show who he is?

I don’t think that having a super hero running around would create this mass fear of the super hero that all of the movies and such make it out to be. I think for our society, it would be a game that we’d create to make sure that we found out who they were no matter what. The only way around this is if you’re a super hero…don’t have a secret identity. You’ll have to work out how you can exist in our society with all the nutjobs following you around and wanting to be in your “top friends” on your myspace page, but ultimately I think you should be ok. I mean seriously, you’ve got super powers, work it out.

• “May you get what you want, and may you want what you get.”

I’ve been playing World of Warcraft for I think about 3 and a alf or 4 years now. I was in the original Friends and Family Alpha, which is how I’ve been able to continually run through the content over and over again for that amount of time. For as long as I’ve been playing Steph wasn’t down with playing. I’d tried a number of times to get her into said game, with no success. So she told me that after Ivy was born (back before Ivy wasn’t born) she’d try the 10 day trial of the game! I was pretty stoked that she was going to play but I wasn’t holding my breath as to how long this would actually last.

So she started playing a bit here and there and then it kind of trailed off because we were dealing with Ivy. Then, we started getting Ivy on a pretty good schedule and now, she plays all the time. I mean, its to the point where she calls me at work and asks me about quests. I’m almost to the point where I’m scheduling when I’m going to play my Main so that I can help her when she wants to play. I’ve been using my Draenai Shaman when we group up.

Actually, to be fair, she started an alt (NE - Hunter) and has been leveling that character (which she also calls me about). It’s just weird, I mean I’d wanted her to play for so long and now she’s playing and I dont’ doubt that very soon we’re going to be having arguements about which build is better for a hunter, or arguing over our group wiping and pointing the finger at the other “Well someone wasn’t holding aggro!”…”Oh yeah?! Well I would have been fine if you wouldn’t have used the Gnomish shrink ray and shrunk the whole party!”…Good times….

 I also have a feeling she’s going to hit 70 before I do. If she does…man….This is something that I’ll never live down. I could see it being something that she would bring up at parties or family events for the rest of my life…..MUST HIT 70!

• “C” word and the “N” word are kissing cousins

Ok so, I was hanging out with some people this last week and some how the conversation got on the “C” word. See…even that…I can’t even write the word because of the freakin power it holds! So I guess women hate being called this. Ultimately I’m not sure why. I mean, as words go, I don’t know what trigger is flipped in their minds that makes this any worse than ”bitch” or whatever. So then I started thinking about who can use said “C” word. Well, to date as I understand it the only people who have license to use said “C” word are other women. Just them though. I’m not sure why they are able to use it and when they actually do use said name that some how because they don’t have a penis that means that the word ends up actually not having as much power as if a man said it.

My thinking is that when a woman uses the “C” word that it actually gets downgraded to being like any other insult. However, when a guy says it…well…that’s really bad for some reason. I was trying to think of words that were like the “C” word and the only one I could come up with was the “N” word. I’m not sure there are any others like them. I was thinking about how all these insults really are limited in what they can be safely called by the number of letters in our language.

 Here’ s what I mean, so lets say that “Fag” and or “Faggot” in the next 5 to 10 years becomes the new word that only gay people can call eachother freely. Ok so what are they going to call it? The “F” word? No, Fuck is the “F” word. So my thinking is that if there is going to be another one of these super exclusive bad words, its going to be a word that dosn’t currently already have a letter designation attatched to it. I mean there’s the “A” word, “B” word, aformentioned “C” word, “D” word, I don’t think there is an “E” word, we are all big fans of the “F” word, yeah you get the idea.

• Valentines day (And the making of a new holiday)

I was thinking about Valentines day this morning, well mainly, I was thinking of how via the magic of marketing how a new holiday could be created. I mean its totally possible take Kwanzaa for example. Here’s what I’m saying, I think we can make a new holiday. My thinking is this. We create a new holiday as an experiment to prove that we could actually create a new holiday. I’m going to think more on this but I’m pretty sure I have a good plan for creating a holiday. NOTE: This isn’t going to be something totally off the wall, I.e. ”Lets make it funny because then its cool that people are celebrating something stupid.” If its going to work it has to be believeable. Ok, look, we can do this, man…if we do this…this is going to be awesome….

 Ok I’ll get back to you guys in a bit.

Ok so yeah, I’m still working on “getting” how this whole new bloggy thing works. I really just need to stop playing Wow and really sit down and make the site look right. I like this thing so far, there’s just stuff that I really dont’ understand about it. I mean like…over there to the left…who the hell are those people? I mean I can edit their links and remove them (which I’m going to do here as soon as I figure out what I want to put there) but for now I will leave them because I’m not sure if its going to blow something up.

 Anywho so yeah, Now that I’m using this software I’m going to really (I mean seriously this time) try to do something with my site. I’m not sure how many times I’ve said that but I think at this point its quite a few times. I mean being that we live in the “future” now with all their new technoligicalities and such they’ve made it much easier for a person to be a professional arm chair webperson. I’m going to try to be that webperson.

 Ok, so, yeah….

                              Ok so as you can tell the site looks a little different. Things got updated and changed and such so yeah, I’m not sure about any of the other links on the site, as I’m still learning about this website..post..thing. I’ll mess around with it more this weekend. That is if I’m not playing Wow.