I was always interested in politics, but kept this to myself. But 10 months ago I took a deep breath and endorsed Trump. Form there, my blog had more and more politics posts, mirroring more and more time spent on politics. This was a very exciting and thought provoking journey. What it wasn't is productive.
The problem isn't that Trump didn't turn out the historic figure he looked in August. He still doesn't have a wall, there aren't mass deportations of migrants and - even if lesser extent than Obama - he still upkeeps the wars in Afganistan, Iraq, Syria and Libya. He didn't break ties with Saudi-Arabia and the rest of the terrorism financing countries. He did not end the unwinnable and pointless proxy war with Russia in Ukraine.
The problem is that I don't and can't contribute to these goals. Unless you join an armed revolutionary group and fight the government, your actions are limited to voting and dragging others to vote. I did my part with campaigning. I can and will do it in further elections where illiberal, "my nation first" candidates stand against globalist liberals. But pondering about details, making plans and analysis is a waste of time. I cannot carry out these plans. I cannot act on the conclusions of the analysis.
On the other hand I can change the thinking of people taking part of my projects. Awful lot of people realized that "you must carry your lazy and stupid friends" is a social bullshit, thanks to my WoW projects. I have a collection of "thank you" letters from back then. I'm not getting new ones, because I'm not doing anything that people can be thankful for. I've joined the endless ranks of pundits babbling about politics instead. The WoT project was also largely successful. EVE was mostly a failure but at least I revealed how deep corruption can go among developers - against the interest of the company. Considering I had the highest traffic EVE fansite after the big 3 (En24, Themittani, Zebra), I'm sure that my posts took hundreds of players from them and I watch the EVE-Offline graph with vindication ever since. My BDO page still generates awful lot of traffic as I figured out how to make stupid amount of money there while AFK. Too bad that I couldn't figure out any point to spend it. My LoL project was far from that successful, and I keep making promises about redoing it - but I babbled about politics instead of actually taking action. Albion was a short detour as the corruption became obvious soon enough. Archeage was a flat out alibi project: I knew from the start that I won't stay in this game, but it filled my blog and allowed me to continue with the guilty pleasure of Huffpo + Breitbart + 20 political social media channels + r/thedonald.
Not anymore. I will use my time finding and building my next project where people can participate and act instead of talking and wishing and hoping. I went cold turkey on reading any politics-related in English (I still reading local news but that's not interesting for anyone outside of my small country and there aren't much news to read here).
Not doing something else is needed to do something, but insufficient. The reason why this post is called " new crawl" is because I start to crawl over the blogroll of my remaining 4!!! (added some since) blogs I follow and add them to my own blogroll and keep crawling. I'll spend my time researching the gaming scene instead of the political.
The problem isn't that Trump didn't turn out the historic figure he looked in August. He still doesn't have a wall, there aren't mass deportations of migrants and - even if lesser extent than Obama - he still upkeeps the wars in Afganistan, Iraq, Syria and Libya. He didn't break ties with Saudi-Arabia and the rest of the terrorism financing countries. He did not end the unwinnable and pointless proxy war with Russia in Ukraine.
The problem is that I don't and can't contribute to these goals. Unless you join an armed revolutionary group and fight the government, your actions are limited to voting and dragging others to vote. I did my part with campaigning. I can and will do it in further elections where illiberal, "my nation first" candidates stand against globalist liberals. But pondering about details, making plans and analysis is a waste of time. I cannot carry out these plans. I cannot act on the conclusions of the analysis.
On the other hand I can change the thinking of people taking part of my projects. Awful lot of people realized that "you must carry your lazy and stupid friends" is a social bullshit, thanks to my WoW projects. I have a collection of "thank you" letters from back then. I'm not getting new ones, because I'm not doing anything that people can be thankful for. I've joined the endless ranks of pundits babbling about politics instead. The WoT project was also largely successful. EVE was mostly a failure but at least I revealed how deep corruption can go among developers - against the interest of the company. Considering I had the highest traffic EVE fansite after the big 3 (En24, Themittani, Zebra), I'm sure that my posts took hundreds of players from them and I watch the EVE-Offline graph with vindication ever since. My BDO page still generates awful lot of traffic as I figured out how to make stupid amount of money there while AFK. Too bad that I couldn't figure out any point to spend it. My LoL project was far from that successful, and I keep making promises about redoing it - but I babbled about politics instead of actually taking action. Albion was a short detour as the corruption became obvious soon enough. Archeage was a flat out alibi project: I knew from the start that I won't stay in this game, but it filled my blog and allowed me to continue with the guilty pleasure of Huffpo + Breitbart + 20 political social media channels + r/thedonald.
Not anymore. I will use my time finding and building my next project where people can participate and act instead of talking and wishing and hoping. I went cold turkey on reading any politics-related in English (I still reading local news but that's not interesting for anyone outside of my small country and there aren't much news to read here).
Not doing something else is needed to do something, but insufficient. The reason why this post is called " new crawl" is because I start to crawl over the blogroll of my remaining 4!!! (added some since) blogs I follow and add them to my own blogroll and keep crawling. I'll spend my time researching the gaming scene instead of the political.
12 comments:
Your political posts at least provided sufficiently unusual and reasoned opinions for the US readers here. I understand your not wanting to focus on them, but maybe don't rule them out in the future?
Also, you are entertaining when you are pointing out corruptions that aren't as obvious to the rest of us, and it makes me wonder what your take on other kinds of "games" might be. Have you looked into the ethereum platform? Its salespitch is that it uses bitcoin-style blockchain to build a distributed platform for writing mathematically enforced contracts. Maybe you can spot bullshit better than the rest of us? Maybe you like to stick to things that are clearly just games, but I hope you've considered the possible pivot.
I wonder if a project might be getting a large enough group, to play a new enough game, that you can influence the game developers to make it a better game.
You have definite idea of what would make a good game but you yourself aren't a developer. Finding an existing game and influencing its ongoing development might be a worthy project.
Actually, there are mass deportations. The media doesn't publicize them because they realized after the first few that, rather than garner sympathy, publicizing them just prompted illegals to self-deport before ICE could get to them.
http://www.mlive.com/news/detroit/index.ssf/2017/06/ice_arrests.html
Other than local stories like this, it just isn't reported. Total deportations are way, WAY up. (The stories here in Texas, for example, were whining that ICE was waiting outside courtrooms to bag and tag illegals who were at the courthouse for other cases.)
Did you forget or deliberately omit the forgettable BDO? Not that it is a bad game as much as the strange AH did not click with me so I am glad you have moved on from it.
I can't even guess what you will try next; you are about out of non-tiny MMOs. You could spend a couple of weeks in TESO or GW2 I suppose. WoW with the scaling mythics (mythic+2 or +15 or +22) probably has more interesting topics to mine than where you will end up but I doubt you will want to go back; been there, done that.
If you are going to be playing a tiny game, have you thought of just doing a private server of some game>
Or you could play MxM to figure out what it is.
GL!
@Anon: politics posts need awful lot of research. Time that I want to spend on games.
@Next anon: there is no need for me to design a better game. There are already multiple well designed games (EVE, Albion, WoT, WoW) Too bad that they were purposefully ruined either by shortsighted execs or corrupted mid-level devs
@Phelbs: there are 10+M illegals in the USA. If Trump wants them out in his 2 terms, 1.2M must be deported every year. Sure he deports more than Obama. But nowhere near 1.2M per year.
@Last anon: BDO added. Most MMOs are hopeless because they don't have a point to play at the first place. Best way to get ilvl XXX in WoW: log off for n months and receive it as welfare. If you get top Mythic gear, it will be useless next patch and you'll be where the lowest of noobs are.
I think you should revisit politics once a month or so.
When there is nothing to be done, just maintaining a presence is enough. And who knows, you just might strike a chord somewhere.
As for gaming, i really think that at this point you should attach yourself to some developer team and start supplying them ideas. It can be a developer team of some Skyrim mod, as long as it seems like it would be popular. However, if you want to go further, what you lack is some insider experience of what kinds of decisions need to be taken and how they are taken in the process of game development. Without that, you'll be blinded by your own negative assumptions about the development process and won't achieve much.
@maxim: writing a politics post once a month needs almost as much research than writing one per day.
I don't think developers are stupid. There are multiple great games designed on paper. And then purposefully ruined. EVE being best example. Do you think I could do anything as an EVE dev against Ghost Training, Citadel markets or Supercarrier ratting?
I mainly read your EVE online articles ( even though I play it while you explain why the game is corrupt :3 ). But I read a bit of everything you post, and like all your content, political and game related. You actually help me remember this game I saw a while ago which is like "EVE offline". The game is called "Limit Theory" Game is in private alpha I think, but it looks to have great potential. You should check it out!
Keep posting, and I'll keep reading. Cheers!
@Gevlon
You severely underestimate the influence of stupidity on the process of ruining of games.
RE: Deportation
I'm actually surprised at how simplistically you are looking at this, since you are usually pretty good with complex systems and numbers. That tells me that you really just haven't' put any thought into it.
First, you haven't accounted for self-deportation. Getting deported is really, really disruptive. One day you're at work, suddenly you're in jail, and then the next thing you know, you're in (insert home country here.) You don't get to go home, you don't get to wind down your affairs, you sometimes only get to see your family (who might NOT be getting deported) at court. A lot of illegals, understandably, when facing that, will just go home before ICE can deport them.
Second, you are discounting the network effects. When there are tons of illegals, it's easy to be illegal. You've got seas of people to hide in, you've got lots of services in your language, there are networks designed to cater to your needs, etc. As there are fewer and fewer illegals (and those that are around are hiding more because of continued enforcement) it gets more and more uncomfortable, leading to more people self-deporting. In fact, we already see this, in the massive drop in attempted crossings (in historic terms, it's practically nothing right now.)
Third, you're missing the resources issue. While ICE probably won't be able to ramp up rates, the heat that illegals feel as more and more people they know keep getting picked up will mount. As they deport (and drive self-deportation) the ratio of illegals to ICE agents is going to get smaller and smaller.
All of these things mean that (unless something changes) the numbers of illegals are going to go steadily down, and should accelerate as time goes on.
We won't have good numbers on Trump's moves for a few more months (just the nature of statistics collection.) However... illegal immigration from Mexico to Canada is skyrocketing.
What about a nostalgia pirate WoW server?
@Eaten by a Grue: If I wanted to play on a server ran by shady figures on the edge of criminality, I'd just go back to EVE
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