Keating Economics: John McCain and a Financial Crisis

world of warcraft,video,work

Holy crap, it’s Monday already!?

Over the weekend, I was supposed to have done some video editing for work.  Instead, I played World of Warcraft.  A lot.  I’m addicted again, for sure.

This morning is going well so far though. I’m well into my work on said video editing and have only looked at WoW long enough to do an automated auction house scan on my laptop while the desktop computer encoded a large chunk of video for about an hour.

The addiction to WoW was not helped by Friday’s release of Bejeweled  for World of Warcraft.  That’s right.  Now you can play a really addictive game inside another really addictive game.  To be fair, I don’t sit in WoW playing Bejeweled.  The addon automatically pops up when you hop on a flight or die.  I turned off the death option since most of the time I’m soloing and need to release and run back to my body rather than waiting for a friend to ressurrect me.  The timed games during flights however are a fun little challenge, especially on short flights as I frantically try to get the most points per second before landing.

Now, I need to get back to this video editing.

Barack Obama’s Economic Plan Explained Briefly

WotLK Beta 09-18-08

Questing in WotLK 1

Questing in WotLK 2

Questing in WotLK 3

This is not a well constructed blog post with a point.

1.) My plan towards financial independence has reached a milestone:  I planned it.  Took me long enough.

2.) In the meantime, I still need more income before I can make it happen, and I need to eliminate dead-end work that won’t advance my goals.  Luckily, the more income part has a good chance of being met.  After posting my resumé online, I was contacted by an honest-to-goodness real company (I checked to make sure they weren’t some sort of scam, which is what I’m usually approached for.  You know, give us $250 and we’ll teach you how to be an insurance agent for our company.) for an interview.  That interview is set for next Wednesday.  The position is good.  It’s a long commute, but free of traffic (it’s in the opposite direction of all the traffic).  It’s also in quite a nice area, one that I’ve had my eye on for a while for lower-cost living without giving up conveniences of local shops, restaurants, conditions, etc.)  More on that if I get the position.

3.  I’ve been invited into the World of WarCraft: Wrath of the Lich King beta.  I was in the beta for the original WoW and I didn’t like it at all.  I thought it was boring compared to City of Heroes.  Boy, has that ever changed.  In any case, I haven’t reviewed the legal docs that indicate what I can and can’t talk about publicly, tho I know there are videos online that show a lot of it.  I will just say, for those who want totally spoiler-free info, that Death Knights are as awesome as they said they would be, the Death Knight starting area is full of amazing pieces of lore, and my priest finally doesn’t look like an old woman.

I never voted until this year. I’m 29 years old. Politics never interested me before.

They really didn’t hold a place in my conscious mind until the start of the Republican convention and the protests surrounding it. There was so much energy there, and it was so close to home, literally, that I felt a sudden and intense need to understand as much as I could.

I spent most of the week with one window open to The Uptake’s Qik feed to monitor the protests and another window viewing the live stream from inside the RNC. My wife, daughter of a Democratic mother, herself a daughter of a Democratic mother, has always pledged herself as a Democrat, and, knowing that I tend to have liberal views, asked why I would want to watch the RNC. I replied, “know your enemy.”

I meant it as a joke at the time. I didn’t consider the Republican party to be my enemy. Using that word makes it sound more like political parties in other countries, where they sometimes go beyond verbal attacks to the life-threatening variety.

What I saw during the RNC, however, steadily turned me to a different way of thinking about the word. Enemy is appropriate. Sure, there’s no physical attacks going on, but the battle is no less passionate and no less important.

I listened to a week’s worth of Republicans mocking and attacking the Democrats and Obama, and not talking even once about what John McCain and Sarah Palin intend to do to put this “change” they keep talking about in place. I never once heard any specifics. Granted, I haven’t yet listened to McCain’s speech. I turned it off in rage after he mocked the Code Pink protesters. I’m still working on getting myself built up again to listen to what he had to say.

I then went back and listened to the speeches from the DNC for the first time. Across the board, I felt an entirely different vibe. Some have told me, point-blank, that I’m “only hearing what I want to hear.” I like to believe I’m smarter and more objective than that.

The DNC speeches sounded more intelligent. They touched on issues. They gave ideas. They told of Obama’s intentions and the intentions of the Democratic party. They made it clear what they want to do in Washington. The Republican speeches lacked this sort of message, and it makes me wonder why they feel the need to hide their intentions. Obviously, with views like Palin’s (creationism, anti-abortion, anti-sex education, anti-homosexual rights), Republicans need to hide their intentions if they’re to have any hope of getting elected. McCain has backtracked over the last few years to turn away from everything he once stood for. Instead of a “maverick,” he now speaks to the core beliefs of the Republican party: that Christianity is the only religion for America, that abortion is never a choice, that homosexuality is a blight on humanity.

I did my research and found the truth about the Republican party. So then I turned my attention to the Democratic party’s mission statement. Environmental reform. Rights for homosexuals. True freedom of religion. Among other things, the Democratic beliefs and intentions match everything that is good, right, and needed if America is going to continue to be a respected member of the global community.

After much reading and research, I’ve adopted, for the first time, a political label, and now call myself a Democrat.

The idea of Americans living in excess is not a new one, and there’s nothing I can say that would add any information to the discussion.  All I can do is bring up the discussion again, lest it be forgotten and we continue to waste our resources.

Blame whatever you like: advertising, capitalism, government; America is wasteful.  We want far more than we need and feel like our lives are incomplete if we don’t have everything we want.  Our society has been molded to believe that we should be able to drive wherever we want, whenever we want.  Then we blame the oil companies for charging so much for gasoline.  It’s easier for us that way.

Meanwhile, a single lunch for the average American might pass for a full family dinner in some parts of the world.  Americans make themselves feel better by talking about those “poor people who just don’t have enough to feed their children.”  Talk to those “poor people” though, and you’ll find a happy family who are wanting for very little.  They don’t take more than they need.

Food is another market though.  We can make money from it.  The more appealing we make it, the richer we become.  And so, Americans want every piece of food to taste as awesome as possible.  Then, when we want to celebrate, we go out for the even better food to make ourselves happy.

And that’s not even including portion sizes.  Our portion sizes are absolutely out of control.  We feel that we should be able to pay $4.00 and get a huge cheeseburger with lettuce, tomatoes, pickles, onions, ketchap, mayonnaise, and mustard, a pile of french fried potatoes, and a cup that we can fill with a disgusting amount of syrup, caffeine, and fizzing water.  In other parts of the world, $4.00 might get you a reasonably sized cheeseburger and a glass of water.  Is that bad?  No.  The burger you get elsewhere is going to have high quality ingredients, and that water is going to be water.  Nothing else.  Unfortunately, since Americans aren’t happy unless they receive a giant pile of food for their money, restaurants have to skimp on the quality of their ingredients to be able to offer their food for a price that consumers will pay.

Finally, our tech culture has developed in such a way that we bleed electricity.  We need to leave our computers on so they can run processes while we’re away.  We need to have our TiVo running to record all the shows we like.  Hell, we even need to keep our game consoles running so we can receive messages from our friends and have a blinking light on the front let us know.

This is stupid.  We don’t need our computers to do these things when we’re not around.  We don’t need to be alerted of messages instantly.  Our corporate world has trained us to think we need to be notified of everything right away.

So what can we do?

The same things people have been saying for years.  Shop locally.  Start your own garden.  Walk or bicycle or even get a scooter… anything but drive a 4-passenger car when it’s just you.  Eat less.  Eat what you need, not what you want.  Don’t be afraid to eat something bland.  Every meal doesn’t have to be exciting.  It’s ok for some to be mediocre.  Then you’ll really appreciate when you do splurge on that huge cheeseburger.  Turn off devices when you’re not using them.  Set your e-mail app to check once an hour, or manually, instead of pinging the servers every minute.

Most importantly.  Re-train yourself to believe these things.  It’s okay to not know everything that’s going on all the time.  It’s ok to not have a tasty feast for every meal.  And it’s okay to take the time to walk to the store.

I’ve been hearing about Second Life for a really long time; even longer than you folks in social media have known of its existence.  Coming from a gaming and game design background, I’ve been reading about it since it was first announced.

It wasn’t until recently, however, that I actually got around to trying it out, and having done so, I can now define why it hasn’t grown as much as everyone hoped it would have by now.

It’s got some pretty major strikes against it.  The first, and most prominent of those, is that it shares a lot of characterisitcs with games, specifically the MMO genre.  Unfortunately, the developers of Second Life have not learned much from those games.  Popular MMO’s, and indeed games in general, have made huge strides in recent years in the areas of graphics, interface, and accessibility.

Second Life’s graphics just plain suck.  The graphics engine lacks features present in other 3d engines years ago, yet still fails to provide a smooth framerate.  Animations are jumpy. Characters are plain and untextured unless customized (more on that later).  And the engine doesn’t offer realistic lighting.  Second Life looks old.  Worse than that, despite doing very little graphically, performance is a serious issue.  My hardware can run World of WarCraft at a decent clip, and look very good doing it, but Second Life chugs along, unresponsive and frustrating.

Another failing point for SL right now is the user interface.  Controls are all over the place, and they don’t match up to user expectations.  One of the key design principles that games have learned over the years is that you always want to build on the expectations that users have from other experiences.  In Second Life’s case, anyone who’s played 3D games is going to want to use W, S, A, and D to move around.  Using the arrow keys are fine too, but you need to give users both options by default.

Finally, it’s very difficult for new users to get started in Second Life.  Sure, it guides you through the initial steps of creating an avatar and how to walk, run, fly, etc., but then it just leaves you there to fend for yourself.  The starting experience needs to give users some direction.

I understand that it can be difficult to provide any sort of linear experience in a world that’s ever changing and populated by tons of other users, but games have been doing it for years now.  Give users a small piece of land, or a home of some kind.  Show them around it.  Teach them how to customize their character.

That brings me to another point.  Customizing your character requires a) knowledge of 3d modeling/texturing or b) items bought in Second Life using real-world money.

There’s a huge market in Second Life for people who create and sell clothing, hairstyles, animations, even whole characters.  New users are at a supreme disadvantage and are easily goaded into spending a good deal of real money on features that should be a free part of the experience.

I shouldn’t have to spend $5 on clothing that I like for my avatar.  I should be able to choose it when I create the character, just like in every game I play.

A lot of new media “experts” will tell you that Second Life is where it’s at.  These people are wrong.  They just want you to pay their consultant fees.  Second Life is where a few people are at.  There’s very little market potential there and that’s not going to change unless Linden Labs makes some very dramatic adjustments to the Second Life experience.

I’m not the best person to talk about this subject.

A lot of professional writers, artists, musicians, etc. will tell you that the best way to get a good idea, is to just start going through the motions.  Ray Bradbury woke up at 5 am every day, sat at this typewriter, and typed.  Recently, I saw an interview that Merlin Mann conducted with Jonathan Coulton in which Coulton reiterated the idea.

I have a hard time setting such a routine for myself.  I want to do so many things, and I need structure if I’m going to make them happen, but every day I wake up whenever I wake up, do whatever catches my eye for a while, then get some work done, then have some lunch and watch some TV…

I’m in serious need of routine.  Some would welcome the way I live, and I enjoyed it for a while.  But it’s gone on for far too long.  Laziness coupled with excuses is stealing my future.

Forcing myself to write blog posts may seem like an insignificant step, but it’s part of a bigger picture.  Do this every day.  Then I can do this and something else every day.  Then another thing, another, another, and so on.

Routine is how I will make my dreams come true.