Speech:

I’d just like to thank everyone for coming to Brannigan 2007. It’s time now for the annual speech and song. As many of you know, this has been the year of drama, and this speech is dedicated to all of those who got caught up in it. This is called Coronation of Newbius One.

Fellow Nerds, I come to you in the wake of recent events, to issue a call to reason. Let no human deny the perils of our time. While we battle one another, divided by the petty strife of our common history, the tide of a greater conflict is turning against us. Threatening to destroy all that we have accomplished.

It is time for us as nations, and as individuals, to set aside our long standing feuds and unite. The tides of an unwinable war are upon us. And we must seek refuge upon higher ground, lest we be swept away by the flood. The Corner is no more. Whatever semblance of unity and protection it once provided is a phantom, a memory. With our enemies left unchecked, who will you turn to for protection?

The devastation wrought by the age invaders is self evident. We have seen our homes bought and communities contributed to by the calculated blows of adulthood. We have seen first hand our friends and loved ones consumed by the nightmarish careers. Unprecedented and unimaginable, though they may be, these are the signs of our time.

The time has come my fellow Nerds, to rally to a new banner. In unity lies strength. Already many of the dissident factions have joined us. Out of the many we shall forge an indivisible whole. Capitulating only to a single throne. And from that throne, I shall watch over you.

From this day foreword let no human make war upon any other human. Let no Nerd agency conspire against this new beginning. And let no man consort with aging powers. And to all the enemies of humanity, seek not to bar our way, for we shall win through, no matter the cost.

Song:

Thank you. I will now butcher a song. This is by Janis Ian, with contributions from me, it’s called Twenty-three is Number One.

I learned the truth at swenty-three
That love was meant for beauty queens
and high school girls with clear skinned smiles
who married young and then retired
The valentines I never knew
The Friday night charades of youth
were spent on one more beautiful
At twenty-three I learned the truth

And those of us with ravaged faces
lacking in the social graces
desperately remained at home
inventing lovers on the phone
who called to say – come dance with me
and murmured vague obscenities
It isn’t all it seems at seventeen

For the past eight years, Republicans working through their attack machine of conservative talk-radio hosts, Fox News, 527 groups, and Republican talking-head TV panelists have been able to control political discourse. They find the right talking points, hammer on them incessantly, and eventually the election is warped into John Kerry’s supposedly poor performance on a Swiftboat in Vietnam. In the United States, a politician who tries to take some sort high ground, who tries to avoid personal attacks, is a politician who loses.

I’m not sure that these tactics are necessarily wrong or “bad” in some objective way, they work, which in matters as significant as ensuring that your political interests hold the balance of power, probably makes it worthwhile. For the Democrats to ensure that they win the current presidential election, they need to start using the media the way Republicans have so successfully. The choice of Sarah Palin as John McCain’s running mate is an obvious starting point for Democrats, and they’re letting it slip away.

After an initial flurry, Republicans have managed to quell much of the controversy surrounding John McCain’s choice of Sarah Palin as his vice presidential nominee. When Palin was first introduced, she compared herself to Hillary Clinton, claiming “we can shatter that glass ceiling once and for all.” The statement made plain what was already obvious, she was chosen not for her qualifications, but because she was a woman. The pick was an insulting act of pandering and a blatant act of tokenism.

It is the Republicans who have been the sexists on this issue, yet Democrats have been largely silent. Hillary Clinton proclaimed “No way, no how, no McCain” at the Democratic convention, but she hasn’t weighed in on this insulting comparison. The fear has been that Joe Biden would look like a bully attacking a woman (due to the latent sexism of voters), Hillary Clinton is the perfect alternative and she’s been missing.

On cable news channels like CNN, Republican talking-heads shout down legitimate criticisms of Palin with the sexism card. The claims have managed to warp discussions on legitimate issues into questions of whether or not they should be discussed at all. Palin’s lack of experience in fields relevant to the job for which she is attempting to get have been brilliantly eschewed by Republicans.

The discussions regarding Palin’s personal life, specifically her daughter’s pregnancy, have also become discussions of whether or not the discussions should be had at all. That Palin is a proponent of abstinence-only education seems quite relevant when it didn’t even work for her own daughter. Republicans have certainly never shied away from using family. McCain himself has been a victim of it, with the now infamous “black baby” whisper campaign which helped Bush gain the party’s nomination over him.

Palin’s decision to have another child at an age which would heavily increase the likelihood of that child being disabled in some fashion (which is exactly what happened) is indicative of her poor ability to make decisions even in her own life. When Republicans harp mercilessly on Democrats for their much more irrelevant sex lives, it is blatantly hypocritical to proclaim their own candidates’ personal lives off-limits. All that is required of Democrats is to push hard on these issues. Call Republicans on their endless reams of bullshit, and Democrats will finally be fighting the fight they need to.

Michelle Obama’s remark “for the first time in my adult lifetime, I’m really proud of my country” was made out to be unpatriotic by Republicans, and it got a huge amount of play in the media. Somehow, Palin’s husband’s former membership in an Alaskan independence party has been largely ignored. This is the sort of controversy that needs some help to get going, Democrats need to attack on it until it can no longer be ignored.

Democrats need to manipulate the media the way Republicans have done to such great success. Force the issues that appeal to the lowest common denominator, warp political discourse in their favour, and put the Republicans on the defensive. If the Democrats plan to win this election, then they should fight as unscrupulously as needed.

The internet has always been a butcher shop for the English language, but it seems to be getting worse. The problem is that while misspellings, misuse, bad grammar, and intentional, ironic bad grammar, were once relegated to sites I stayed away from, it’s now seeping into the sites I actually visit.

YouTube is massively popular, everyone seems to use it, it’s inescapable and I can’t help visiting it as much as everybody else. Comments are minimally moderated though, and this means that where I used to have only a small intake of “lol” and “!!!,” in my daily life, I now have an overwhelming dose.

The stupidity seems to be leaking; it’s becoming increasingly difficult for me to read my favourite forums without becoming annoyed into distraction by obnoxious catchphrases. I’m not sure if there are any more catchphrases than there used to be, just that the latest generation is a lot more grating.

Where previously, catchphrases were several words long, internet memes seem to have become shorter over the years, so that now single words are the catchphrases. The internet has ruined for me the words “win,” “fail,” and “epic.” These three simple, common, useful words now make me shudder when I hear or read them.

That new movie is not “win,” nor is it “made of win,” and it is especially not “made of win and awesome.” Your anti-Scientology protest might have been great, even incredible, but was it actually “epic”? That new game may not be very good, but it is not “fail,” or even “epic fail.” The first time these words were ever used in this fashion might have been entertaining, but now I wonder if anyone using them even realizes that they’re doing so improperly.

It’s not just the grammar and overuse that are problems, but that the people using the words seem to think in binary, where movies, video games, and just about anything else can be described as being only the greatest or the worst thing “evar.” Nothing is decent or okay.

Almost as grating are the cat image macros, or “lolcats,” which are pictures of animals, usually cats, doing something “cute,” with some kind of text scrawled across the image. This text either conveys what the animal is supposedly thinking, or describing its action, both in saccharin-sweet baby talk.

If I wanted to roll my eyes at the way people talk to their pets, I’d leave my house, not spend all night in front of my computer. The internet is a cold, dangerous place, and posting images used to be for the purpose of disgusting fellow message board readers. Bring back gaping anuses; I’m sick of seeing your cat.

The only positive in the latest generation of internet trends is surely Rick Astley. Mr. Astley, and his 1980s masterwork “Never Gonna Give You Up,” have been endeared to me thanks to the “rickroll” phenomenon. I’ve never actually been “rickroll’d,” which means to trick someone into seeing the “Never Gonna Give You Up” music video (for those of you who don’t know, and if that’s you, what’s wrong with you?), but I sure have rocked out to that song many times (including right now, as I write this). My contribution to the 5 million+ views of the YouTube video have been voluntary and without remorse.

I think what separates “Never Gonna Give You Up” from win/fail/epic, and cat macros is that Astley’s use of the English language is not an attempt to revert to grammatically broken baby-talk. Where once, in an internet long ago, “all your base are belong to us” made fun of bad English, now the trend in catchphrases is to embrace it.

The recent poster-child for lazy ports.

Lately I’ve seen a lot of companies taking their games-in-development and as-yet unreleased games off of the PC shelf, and firmly slotting them into the console marketplace.

No ports. No release 6 months later with no mouse support, and lackluster presentation for full price.

PC gaming has been a hotly contested subject for a long time, make no mistake. Ever since the Xbox first came out, people have been proclaiming “THE DEATH OF THE PC IS NIGH” and other such fear-mongering. Generally for no better reason than some kind of superiority complex, because they want to feel like they’re getting value for their money when they spend upwards of $300 on a computer that is only really able to play games. There’s very little proven truth to these statements, and actually quite the opposite if you don’t simply look at NPD statistics, and add in the much more profitable category of digital distribution.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve probably seen the dire posts such as “Spore most pirated game ever; over 500,000 downloads in first week of release”; and that the supposed “failure” of Crysis was entirely attributed by the developer, Crytek, to be due to software piracy. Noted for originally PC-exclusive games like Unreal Tournament, Epic announced in April that they wouldn’t be porting Gears of War 2 to PC, like they did the first iteration of the title, because of piracy issues.

Much hyped -- not very good.

And while both Crysis, and Gears of War were both pirated more than Ukrainian weapons transports off the Somali coast, I think there’s a much better explanation to why they didn’t sell as well as expected on PC. They weren’t very good games.

Sure Crysis was shiny, and was “A spectacular and beautiful sci-fi epic.”~ PC Gamer UK; but there sure wasn’t a whole lot of gameplay there. Most people could beat the entire game in under 9 hours, the voice acting was mediocre, the story was predictable most of the time and the rest of the time is was unpredictable in a predictable way. The game was hyped all to hell by the critics, but hype doesn’t sell games, or at least not a lot of them.

Gears of War was almost groundbreaking on the Xbox 360. Cooperative, bloody gameplay that used cover elements, and had a very tactical approach to gameplay. Mix in visceral weapons, a tragic story, and boatloads of action, and you have a recipe for an amazing game. But when you port it to PC? It’s all been done before. And in most cases better and 3 years ago.

But now I think I’ve found an offender in the console market that is every bit as bad as digital piracy. This isn’t pointed at a specific company, but more a specific practice; the purchase and sale of used games.

Say I have 10 people, and I want to sell one book to each person. All 10 of those people want to buy the book, but only half of them want to spend full retail. So 5 people buy the book on release day and read it, while the other 5 wait for the price to drop. Of the 5 that bought it, 4 of them decide that they don’t want to keep the book after reading it, so they offer to resell it to the other 5 for half what they paid for it. Thereby allowing them to spend that money on another book, and the next person in line gets to read it. The last person waits until the book hits the super-saver discount bin at the grocery store, and picks it up for 1/10 the value 3 years after it’s released.

That means, of the 10 people I was expecting to sell that book to, I only actually made a profit from 5 of them. And chances are, the people that bought the book used are probably going to turn around and sell it to other people for an even more reduced price.

Now compare that to me trying to sell the book as an E-book to the same 10 people, but you can’t resell it once you buy it. The first 5 people are still going to buy the book. They want it; fast, safe, and they don’t care how much it costs. The next 5 people don’t want to pay full retail, and they don’t want to wait, so they pirate it.

What is the difference to me? I still only sold 5 books either way. I’m only hitting half of my target audience. And worse yet, chances are the people that resold the books from the first example, are most likely going to go use that money to buy used books while they’re in the book store selling their old ones, because then they can get store credit for them, and get more for their trade.

“According to OTX’s report, the used software market in the U.S. is projected to be $1.3 billion (not including systems or accessories).” ~ April 2008, Gamasutra (http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=18163)

According to OTX, a global research and consulting firm that specializes in providing online research, out of a total 76 million gamers in the USA, 45 million have purchased at least one new game, and one used game in the last year. Two and a half million buy exclusively used games, with the remainder buying exclusively new games. Of those that buy games, either new or used, fully a third of them will resell an average of 60% of the games that they buy, which will then get resold, to no profit to the publisher, developer, or anyone, except for the reseller.

Through applications of store credit and buyer discounts these sales are almost pure profit to the reseller so why would games stores ever even consider selling new games at all? If you consider the number of games that “fall off a truck” and get resold, at 90% resale the first week of release, why would anyone BUY new games either? To a publisher and a developer this is just like theft. The games could have been stolen right off the truck heading to games stores everywhere, and it means the same thing as having them resold. It’s a customer that they lost, and less money to fund the next game.

"I'd actually make the point that for us second-hand sales is a very critical situation, because people are selling multiple times intellectual property," said Jens Uwe Intat, senior VP and general manager for European publishing at EA(http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/ea-second-hand-sales-are-a-critical-situation)

“…OTX has attributed this to the current economic downturn, and has also projected a marked increase in the online sales market, along with an upturn in used game purchases at GameStop.”~ April 2008, Gamasutra (http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=18163)

Used games make up approximately $1.3 billion of a $10 billion industry in the US. When I was growing up, I’d be surprised if you could even find a number, never mind one in the 15% of all sales range. There wouldn’t be enough room in all the Classifieds sections in all the world for that many ads. At what point is industry going to start looking at these numbers and wondering how they could let so much income slip through their fingers? And while many people would say that once you purchase a product, you own it and can do whatever you want with it; read the EULA that comes with a piece of software you buy. They’re absolutely medieval in the protection of their IP, and you agree to them simply by opening the product to read the EULA.

I don’t advocate piracy of any kind. I purchase all the games that I want and play, because I want to support the developers that made them. If you don’t support the developers, eventually they stop making money, and therefore stop making games we all enjoy. Having said that, developers have to stop abandoning the PC over piracy excuses. If they’re going to blame the PC as being unprofitable because of people stealing their product, maybe they should look to companies like Stardock, that release products with little to no copy protection and have had great success.

I would have less problem with developers abandoning a platform because they think it’s too hard to develop for, or because that’s not where their target audience is. But PC developers seem to think that because there were x number of graphics cards that meet the minimum requirements for their game, they should sell exactly x copies of their game. They seem to think that everyone that has a PC should be buying their game, or it’s a complete failure. If I’m running a restaurant, I don’t automatically assume that I should expect to sell food to the entire population of the city it’s in just because everyone has a stomach.

Maybe if game publishers would stop forcing developers to release betas of their games at full retail price, and force the general public to squash bugs just to play it. Possibly they could start taking the time to make sure all of the content is actually implemented before the game is released, and, just spitballing here, release a finished product.

That could actually result in your game selling well. But maybe using an uncontrollable force as an excuse for releasing a terrible product looks better to investors. Kind of like blaming your dog for eating your homework.

Support the developers kids.

Okay, well, that’s a solid quote, but it’s white, and you’re building a black deck.

That’s an even better quote. Shakespeare’s a cool guy and all, but this still isn’t a black card.

Well, some crazy unclean boars do sound dangerous, but these are green.

Now that’s pimp! Black card, rats, and a Bram Stoker quote! Can anything possibly top this?

Whoa… whoa. This. This is the card you need. A quote from the greatest long poem of all time? On some zombies? Amazing.

That guy’s pretty freaky looking, but Gangrenous Zombies is way more gruesome. The guy in front has his gangrenous guts hanging out!

Let’s see just how grotesque we can get.

Okay, that might be a bit absurd. I was thinking something more than ugly, something so traumatizing that you actually feel the pain of what’s being depicted.

Yeah, that’s about right.

Over time, the people behind Magic grew fearful of making such “broken” cards, they overcompensated, and what would have seemed to be bad cards became relatively good.

Occasionally, mistakes were still made, and broken cards slipped through, wreaking havoc with the game.

Then the people making Magic began to discover that making a few really good cards caused retailers to be happy, and so they intentionally made a few really good, very rare cards.

That proud tradition continues.

Centaurs are a little better, but they’re half human/half animal. Bestiality is a constant in their lives, not unlike the people who play them, either.

Wurms are a hell of a lot better than Elves and Centaurs. Still, I’m thinking there’s something better out there.

Beasts. There it is, nothing more green, nothing more furious, nothing greater than beasts.

Especially this one, Krosan Colossus, the greatest beast. That’s the sort of beast-iality I can get behind.

Location: The Office

Job Classification: Office Sidekick. Permanent Full-Time

Openings: 1

Open Until Vacancy is Filled.

Salary Range: To Be Negotiated

Duties:

As the assistant to the assistant, the office sidekick shall report to everyone in the office. Work tasks include answering the telephone, filing, sorting the mail, faxing, and assorted clerical duties as assigned. Numerous work-related consultations are required to take place throughout the day.

Qualifications:

The successful candidate shall possess the ability to listen carefully and nod at appropriate times as massive office bitching occurs. Initiative in the form of uttering such encouraging phrases as ‘I agree’ and ‘I most certainly do know what you mean’ is preferred.

The ability to avoid office rumours is required. Must be able to wear sweaters for long periods of time. Candidates named Chadwick, Beatrice, Eunice, and Worthington are preferred. A moustache is an asset.

Successful completion of our rigorous skill-testing examination, as well as a criminal record check, is required. We thank everyone for their interest in employment with our organization; however, only those deemed worthy shall be contacted for an interview. Candidates with lesser qualifications may be considered at a lower classification and salary scale.

Probably something that counters a spell, that’s a pretty harsh cock-slap, but Counterspell is a bit clichéd.

Maybe a counter with a twist, how about Mana Drain?

That’s pretty pricey. If you’re willing to spend that kind of money, I say go all the way, forget countering anything, and just play Time Walk.