don’t panic

On the Union Tribune site today, they talked about why the first round state budget was rejected by Republicans…

“Even before the debate began, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger said he would not sign the Democratic package because it contained additional taxes on oil drilling, tobacco products and vehicle licensing. Republican lawmakers said the plan did not contain enough spending cuts.”

Really.  Okay, so I vote that the pay for everyone in the State Assembly and Senate be cut by 50% after July 1st until a compromise can be reached.  That should save us quite a bit, I would say.  This political BS has GOT to stop.  The veto was never intended as a trump card, and should not be used that way, by either party.  We hire all these politicians, pay their (apparently overpriced) salaries so that they can do the job of finding what’s right for our State.  If they are simply unable to do that, then why do we have them??  Hell, let’s just hire an outside consulting firm to tell us what to do, then let the Governor veto or accept.  It would save a ton of time and money, because that’s what’s going to happen anyway.

Frankly, there isn’t much left to cut.  Schools are already sending home notices that all student supplies need to be provided by parents, art is pretty much gone, and music is reduced to near uselessness.  My daughter’s school still has sports, but even they have been feeling the pain (though they should have been first on the chopping block IMO…).  We could cut finding to libraries, but that’s like cutting off your own legs, especially at a time when the public is literally flocking to libraries for entertainment they can no longer afford due to the recession.  Republicans want to get rid of Healthy Families and cut Medi-Cal/Medicare.  Again, why are we killing the programs that are getting MORE use in a bad economy?  Raising the taxes that the Dems suggested sounds like a pretty reasonable solution.  Sure, who wants to pay more for vehicle licensing?  But I’d rather add a few dollars there than loose what little health insurance I have.  Sorry smokers, but it something you shouldn’t be doing anyway, and as for oil drilling…  Well, as we all found out, the price of oil has almost NOTHING to do with domestic drilling, so why not?  If these are the biggest of the problems the Republicans have with the budget, then all I can say is, get freaking real.

Stop playing politics and do your damn jobs!

So, it seems the Governor of South Carolina is in need of a walkabout… or something.  He basically took a week and well, disappeared.  At first, his staff said that he was hiking the Appalachian Trail.  But that was bogus.  In fact, they had no idea where he was.  He had no security, was alone (or so he says) and randomly decided to take a trip to… Buenos Aires?

He said upon returning, “I wanted to do something exotic…”  And I’m sure he did.  And she was probably paid very well too.

What in the world is a state governor doing taking an unscheduled trip out of the country, with no security, without informing his staff, the American Consulate , or even his wife?! Even “hiking the Appalachian Trail”, which is at least within the confines of our own national borders, is insanely stupid to do alone.  This is basic cub-scouts stuff here.

So, either the guy is, A: Having an affair. (duh)  B: Incredibly stupid and unfit for the position he retains (for the moment).  C: Insane or seriously unstable mentally.  Or D:  All of the above.

Whatever the case, get him outta there!

Update: Bingo!  Called that one.  ”I’ve been unfaithful to my wife,” Sanford told a news conference in Columbia, the state capital. “I developed a relationship with what started as a dear, dear friend from Argentina.”

Read an article on the web version of our local paper today.  It seems we had the first death in San Diego from the H1N1 influenza A virus, otherwise known as “Swine Flu”.

What struck me about the article was that the woman’s name and the hospital she went to for help were NOT made public by the authorities.  The hospital claims that “those exposed” have been contacted and treated with Tamiflu…  I have to wonder how they know that?  I mean, do they have a record of every single person that goes in and out of their emergency room?  Family members?  Neighbors?  Co-workers?  Grocery store clerks?  Bank tellers?  And anyone else who might have touched her in the last week?  If not, then the hospital is putting each and every one of those people in mortal danger over… her personal privacy?  Are you kidding me??

For starters, she’s dead. I really don’t think she’s going to mind if you violate her privacy, especially if it’s to possibly save others.  I’m a huge privacy advocate, but when it comes to something like a pandemic, screw that.  If someone I had regular contact with died of a highly contagious and deadly virus, I would sure as hell want to know about it.  And even if that person were me, I would want that fact plastered on every TV in the city.  If ONE life is saved, it’s worth it.

I’m willing to bet that the reason her name, and that of the hospital, hasn’t been released to the media has a lot more to do with the fact that the woman died in the emergency room without ever having been hospitalized.  I have no doubt that the facility in question is very nervous indeed that if it got out that a patient of theirs died without proper care, and that the hospital then tried to cover it up to avoid a loss of service (no kidding), of course they want to claim “patient privacy.”

If ANYONE else locally dies because of this virus, and it turns out that they had ANY contact at all with this unnamed individual, then this hospital needs to be prosecuted criminally for murder.

A recent posting on Slashdot.org had an interesting discussion about originality in MMO’s.  It got me thinking as a World of Warcraft player, that it wasn’t so much the world that brings joy for me in a game like this, but rather the act of solving a problem, whatever that problem may be, it could be finishing a hard quest, or raising the skills of a character to epic levels.  To be sure, there is a satisfaction in the “gathering” aspect of the game.  In WoW, you can be “more powerful” just by going out and collecting things, which you can then sell for “gold”, which you then use to buy better gear to make it easier to collect things… and on and on.

And this is all very fun at first, but after a while it starts to become old hat.  You reach a plateau where you have advanced your character as far as possible without doing prolonged and repetitive group quests and raids in order to inch your character’s gear a smidgen higher on the loot scale.  And all for what?  Nothing.  Sure, you can do a little better in PVP.  So?  What next?  Well, you start over.  And to be honest, the most fun I have in WoW is in the first 10 levels… out of 80.

Blah.

The other reason that I like WoW has nothing at all to do with the theme per se.  For me, there is something very nice about “dwelling” in a completely predictable fantasy.  My “real” life is filled with chaos and uncertainty.  It’s stressful as hell.  So sinking into an ordered and unchanging world where I know the bad guys, and how to avoid them, is very very appealing.  Sometimes boring, yes, but any stress I get from WoW is fully “manageable”.

But that’s not why most people play, for sure.  People want to be powerful.  They want wild riches and cool skills that they couldn’t normally have.  WoW provides that in spades, yet it does eventually boil down to “the grind”.  Grinding is the act of doing anything repetitive in an MMO.  You grind to get your character to the top-most level (80, right now), and then you grind to get your various skills and professions maxed out, and then you grind to be “exalted” with a number of factions (like political or racial parties), then you grind to slowly improve your gear until… until… well, forever.  And the higher you are, the longer it takes to move yourself upward in any mentioned respect.  It’s a solid business model on Blizzard’s part.  You put more and more time into a character, increasing their personal “worth” to you, and as you do, you are forced to spend increasing amounts of that paid time to make them better.

And no matter how you look at it, it really is predictable.  Like almost any video game since PacMan, if you know the right moves, you can beat it.  Simply put, it’s NOT random.  Blizzard has gone to GREAT lengths to insure that there is “balance” in all aspects of the game.  People are paying for this, after all, and there is nothing that burns a customer more than seeing something they spent their hard-earned money on be easier for someone else who paid the same price.  They immediately feel cheated.  There is balance between the various races and classes of characters, balance in the factions (Horde and Alliance) even to a fault.  Blizzard actually takes into account the distance someone has to run around the various cities in order to get go to common locations such as the bank or the auction house.  There are great debates on the complex statistical mathematics used to calculate the damage potential of various classes with various gear at various levels, because if one class or race suddenly becomes slightly “over-powered” then there will inevitably be a sharp rise in the number of that class or race.  No one wants to lose, and in an MMO situation, even a slight advantage is multiplied dramatically.

But that “balance” is what makes WoW so very unrealistic.  Real life, such as it is, is NOT fair.  There is NO balance whatsoever.  Of course, you don’t get to choose your race or class, nor do you get to simply “start over” if you don’t like how things are proceeding.  You have to go with what you have, and face whatever the world throws at you no matter how random or horrible.  Perhaps what World of Warcraft needs then, is a little more of that real-world randomness.  If we can’t change the characters, perhaps we can at least have a world that isn’t the same all the time.

As I mentioned, WoW is predictable.  So much so, that there are entire online communities created to track every single tiny  aspect of the game, and how to beat it.  There are guides (free and paid for) to show you in precise, step-by-step detail how to beat any boss, quest, or task.  There are guides to show you the fastest way to push your character to maximum level, and guides for your trade crafts.  There’s even the equivalent to Google Maps, which can show you where in the Warcraft universe you can find, well, everything.  Want to know were the herb Sungrass grows?  Boom, you have a map with every known location.

In WoW, there are “mobs”, or the non-player characters, which are generally the foes that you need to kill in great numbers in order to gain “experience” and so, advance your level.  These mobs follow predictable paths, and will basically ignore you until you fall within a predictable range (the “aggro” range).  Once they do “see” you, they will attack with predictable actions and timing.  Everything in WoW moves at predictable speeds, whether it be the mobs running after you, or an enemy player.  In fact, about the only thing that is random is the combat, and even then, only whether you “hit” or not.  In essence, you could almost completely remove the randomness of WoW altogether and it would scarcely be any different.

But what’s the fun in that?

Here’s what I would want to see in World of Warcraft.  These ideas could apply to other games, but I’ll use WoW because that’s what I know.

First of all, mobs need to be smarter.  Lot’s smarter.  Realistically smarter.  This is tough to do, because advanced AI is processor intensive.  But even if they were more random, it would make a huge difference.  Right now, mobs move along pre-designed paths.  You know that if you stand in a given spot, you will be safe because the mob is going to follow the path it always takes.  It’s Frogger, for those of you old enough to remember that game.  Mobs should have a zone that they generally stay within, but could travel a mostly random path within that zone within reason.  A patrol might follow a set path, but they could randomly send one guy out to investigate the bushes and such.

Many of the mobs are “linked” such that if you “pull” one, you pull any that are linked to it.  Murlocs are an example of this.  When one is attacked, they make a battle cry that attracts others.  It can make attacking them that much harder because you suddenly find yourself attacking a half dozen or more.  Everyone hates Murlocs, yet they are one of the most “realistic” mobs in the game.  If you saw an enemy attacker, are you going to run out and face them alone, or are you going to alert the guys standing near you?  Duh.  I’d like to see this carried even further with mobs that don’t attack you at all when you get within aggro-range.  Instead, they bolt.  They bee-line back to base, or a patrol, or just another mob, and THEN attack you.

Mobs also tend to run straight at you.  No tactics per se, just go, go go!  Perhaps they could swing in at an arc, or try to flank you in groups.  They could do this randomly, so you never really know what you’re going to get.

Large scale raiding is one of the more impressive group activities in WoW.  This is when a large number of players join up to defeat a MUCH more powerful foe, such as a dragon or even an enemy city.  It takes organization and planning to a certain degree, and allows for a huge sense of mass accomplishment when successful. I’d like to see this carried even further.  Right now, the raid pretty much goes to the foe.  The evil dragon waits in it’s lair for the next group to prepare itself and make a run at it.  But why?  Why not have the evil dragon randomly attack the city?  The players would have to scramble together to save their home, or they would lose it for a period of time.

High level foes are usually only found in neatly compartmentalized areas that the lower level players can not reach.  Why?  Why not have a wandering epic beast randomly traveling through an area, even a low level one, devouring anything that happens to pass by?  I realize that technical game mechanics restrict this, but the example that comes to mind is “Stitches”, an elite mob that spawns when someone does a specific quest and then travels slowly down the road toward town, smashing anyone who might accidentally stumble upon him.  Sure, a high-level player could smack him down easily, but this guy spawns in a low-level area.  In short, he’s one of the most entertaining mobs in the game, simply because he’s so darn random.  The only problem I see is that there really isn’t any penalty to simply ignoring him.  He’s supposed to be this huge threat to the town, but even if he does get there before being killed, he will be eventually overwhelmed by the guards.  Big deal.  It would be better if he just stared killing off the merchants and quest-givers and such, who would then STAY dead for a much longer period of time, say a half hour.  In that way, there is a definite incentive to nail that guy before he makes your questing all the more difficult.

There are so many aspects of WoW that could be changed to give the game life.  I’m sure that eventually, someone will put out an MMO that is actually fully random, both in time and questing.  If they could find a way to make all the online guides pointless… even that alone would be truly epic.

So it would seem Sarah Palin is a little miffed that her state may loose some of it’s missile defense network.  In fact she says, “Reducing Alaska’s defense readiness in these perilous times is a show of weakness, it is not a sign of strength.”

Perilous times?  I fail to see how there is any more “threat” to the United States today than there has been in the last decade?  Is there a potential for a missile attack?  Sure.  But no more than last week, or last month, or last year.  While the intelligence and trustworthiness of North Korea is debatable, it is generally considered a low threat when it comes to a direct attack by nuclear missiles.  They are barely able to get a rocket off of the ground, let alone into our airspace.  And then what?  Even if they could nuke a single city, what would be the response?  Total annihilation comes to mind, or possibly World War III.  Either way, the outcome for North Korea is grim to say the least.

No, they are building these weapons because they want to be known as a power player, and right now, most of the world just sees them as whiny, lying, children.  They think that having nuclear missiles is somehow going to give them clout, when all it really does is make Japan want to hit them with a preemptive strike.  It’s stupid.  But NOT as stupid as Alaska worrying about an attack from North Korea… or anywhere else for that matter.

A missile defense network is the one piece of the military that you REALLY REALLY hope you never have to use, because if you do, then it not only means you blew it big-time politically, but that any possible outcome is going to entail huge and massively deadly changes to the world, NONE of which are going to be good for ANYONE.

This is classic Palin.  Stupid when it comes to politics, and even more so where it concerns actual science.  Our world is in deep doo-doo when it comes to money matters.  Every major government on the planet is having to cut back in ways never before seen in history.  We are nowhere near through it all, and the fix is going to hurt, both now, and for our kids.  Maybe if we hadn’t dumped so much cash into a needless war, or trusted our financial markets to regulate themselves, we might be in better shape, but the truth is, we’re not.  It’s time to pay the piper, and cuts are going to have to be made.  Sorry.  When it comes right down to priorities, I’m a LOT more worried about my 401k than a missile attack.  I’d rather that the government put it’s money into fixing what we have left so that there actually might BE something here to defend in another decade.  Most of the country is just worried about holding on to their home.  Here’s another quote:

“And yet, Washington thinks it’s best now to actually cut defense spending in Alaska by hundreds of millions of dollars,” she said. “Now that is an odd priority there.”

Really?  Hundreds of millions?  Not the hundreds of BILLIONS that we are talking about to bail out our banks and core national industries?  She seems to lack a sense of scale here.  And not to belittle Alaska’s strategic importance, but if you look at states by population, Alaska ranks 47th and is dwarfed by even tiny little Hawaii (by almost 2 to 1!), and accounts for only 0.22% of the total U.S. population.  She rants on:

“It is clear to many that some of our priorities as a nation are kind of reversed, and it is my imperative, and it should be all of our imperative, that we get our government priorities right, because if they are misdirected, obviously America is going turn into something that we don’t recognize.”

Well, she got that last part right… We certainly won’t recognize America if our economy collapses.  I love how she uses the words “it is clear” and “should be all our imperative”.  Sorry Sarah, but the only thing that’s clear is that you are nothing but a used-up political grand-stander without a clue.  You’re idea of what “should” be is not the patriotic consciousness of America that your script writers would like it to be.  You come across as a bitter, whining politician who just doesn’t know when to shut up.