When I went to take a look at the Dead Space website I was greeted with an age verification question.  Had to tell them when I was born, so they could make sure I was old enough to see the website.

Now, I do understand that since it’s a M-rated game there’ll likely be some pretty graphic content…  And I know that EA is just trying to cover their asses, make sure no little kids are exposed to anything horrible…  But it seems to me that this kind of age verification thing is kind of pointless.

I mean, what’s to stop a little kid from putting in a different birthday?  Are they just basically assuming that everyone is going to tell the truth?  And would that really hold up in court?  Would that little question of age be enough to absolve EA of any responsibility for little kids who have nightmares after watching a scary trailer?

Stumbled across a trailer for an interesting looking new game…

…and then a new one from E3 this year…

Dead Space reminds me a lot of Alien(s).  Not so much the monsters, which look more like zombies than anything else, but the tone and setting.

Looks kind of lonely, isolated, claustrophobic.  My favorite kind of stuff.  I’m just hoping it isn’t too much like typical survival horror games…  I never really enjoyed stuff like Resident Evil.  It was far too easy to get yourself killed, really took the fun out of the game for me.  I like a little more action.

Still, I’m going to have to keep an eye out for a demo or something.

My first night of warfare in EVE was very boring.

I trained up some combat-oriented skills and outfitted a Merlin for tackling the day before the wardec went live.  Flew all over gathering up skillbooks and bits of equipment.  Hauled it all over to our corporate HQ…and then sat there twiddling my thumbs.

During war we aren’t allowed to do much solo – no missions, no mining, no ratting.  The idea is to avoid giving the enemy any easy targets.  They’ve even raised the taxes on missions and bounties to 100% for the duration of the war to discourage stubborn people.

The problem is that the corporation we’re at war with is apparently comprised of 5 german players.  So there’s only five targets for us to go shoot at.  And they’ll be playing in a different timezone than I am.  So the odds of me actually seeing one of these war targets is pretty slim.

So last night I just sat in our HQ, twiddling my thumbs, along with a couple dozen other people.  Corporate chat was full of bored people trying to come up with ways to amuse themselves, all waiting for something to kill.

I recently joined EVE University…  Been a member for about a week now…  And someone has just declared war on the corporation.  Guess I’m going to learn about PvP sooner than I expected.

Terri and I were both in the mood for a scary movie last night, so we watched Left in Darkness through the “watch it now” service on Netflix.  The description of the movie itself didn’t really sound that great…but all the reviews were positive, so we gave it a shot.

The movie’s a little weird…  The protagonist is a woman who’s mother died giving birth to her.  So she was raised by her grandfather…who later dies.  And we eventually catch up with our protagonist on her 21ist birthday.  She goes to a party, gets drugged, gets raped, dies…  And that’s where things start getting really weird.

There are monsters all around who want to eat her soul.  And she’s getting messages from deceased relatives…who may, or may not, actually be what they appear to be.  And she’s got some kind of ghostly protector looking out for her…kind of.

But, ultimately, it was a pretty decent movie.  Plenty of suspense and tension.  Not a whole lot of horror…  But it delivered quite a bit better on the “scary movie” promise than The Ruins did.

I’ve been hearing about Watchmen on Slashdot for very literally years now.  Folks constantly mention it as the quintessential superhero comic.  Folks constantly refernce different characters, situations, or phrases from it.  And I’ve been meaning to read it for quite some time now, but just ahven’t gotten around to it.

Recently there’ve been trailers on the web for the new Watchmen movie coming out, which has sparked more discussion on Slashdot.  More people referencing the story, characters, situations, phrases…  And I’m still left wondering what they’re talking about.

So I finally bought the book.  And I started reading it last week…  And I’ve had a hell of a time putting it down.  Right from the first I was absolutely hooked on the characters and artwork.  Rorshach is fascinating, Dr. Manhattan is awesome (in the literal sense of the word)…  And the Nite Owl is rapidly becoming very interesting as well.

I really can’t wait to find out where this is all going…  Right now the plot is convoluted and weird to the extreme, and I’ve got absolutely no idea how anyone is going to avoid a nuclear armageddon.

With Obama over in the Middle East right now there’s all kinds of political stuff on TV.  What I’ve been seeing a lot of lately is the McCain camp trying to score points in increasingly desperate ways, because the media is so wrapped up in Obama’s trip right now.  And one of the recent things I’ve been hearing an awful lot about is winning the war in Iraq.

McCain has gone so far as to imply that Obama would rather lose the war than the election.

I’m sure I’ve asked this on here before…  But Every time they start talking about winning the war in Iraq I always have to wonder…  What exactly does win mean?

First off, the only war that was declared was a war on terror.  Congress never declared war on Iraq.  So, technically, there isn’t anything to win in Iraq.  We’re at war with terror, not Iraq.  So we should really be focusing our efforts on Afghanistan at this point.  But a lot of the conservative folks are still very focused on Iraq.  They’ll admit that we need to put more troops into Afghanistan…but they’ll still insist that we have to win in Iraq.

And they never really explain what winning means.

We were originally told we were going to Iraq because of the WMDs…  But we never found any WMDs, and any kind of threat they may have once posed is completely neutralized at this point.  So…we won?

We were then told it was about getting rid of Saddam…  Well, he’s gone.  He’s been gone for years.  We found him, imprisoned him, put him on trial, and executed him.  So…we won?

We were told it was about bringing democracy to the country…  So we set up a nice little government and had elections.  And now their own democratically-elected government is telling us that we can leave.  So…we won?

And somewhere along the line Dubya actually flew out to an aircraft carrier and declared “Mission Accomplished!” in a terrifically scripted press event.  Which certainly sounds like a declaration of victory…

So, what are we fighting for now?  What are the victory conditions these days?  What does it take to actually win in Iraq?

I know there’s still all kinds of instability, chaos, violence…  But I’m really not certain that we can fix that militarily.  Seems to me that fixing an unstable country militarily is like trying to build a house by yelling at it.  You need diplomacy and economics to fix an unstable country.  You need to get a good, trustworthy government in place…  You need to make the citizens care about their government/nation…  You need to put people to work – get them to invest their own blood, sweat, and tears…  You need the people of that nation to care about its livelihood enough to make it work, despite the rough spots and difficulties.  And you can’t inspire that kind of caring at gunpoint.

Lots of folks like to point out that if we were to just up and leave today there would be chaos in the streets.  That everything we’ve worked for would just fall apart without us there to defend it.  I don’t think I really disagree with that statement…but I do think that it kind of points out why we can’t keep hanging around…

Unless the goal is to make Iraq the 51st state, we aren’t going to be staying there forever.  At some point we are going to leave.  And when that happens the Iraqi people need to be able to stand up on their own and take care of their own country.  We cannot be there forever to take care of them.  If the country is too weak to stand on its own, it will fall.  But that’s true regardless of how long we stay there.  We could be there another 10 years and still have a nation that’s too weak to stand on its own.  That isn’t a function of how long we stay there, that’s a function of how well the country is rebuilt.

And I’d say that we’re doing an absolutely craptastic job of rebuilding Iraq.

So, if we aren’t going to stay there forever…  And we acknowledge that it’s going to be rough when we leave, whenever that may be…  What does win mean?  What sign are we waiting for?  What goal is there that hasn’t been reached yet?

I’m really not being sarcastic or babbling just for the hell of it.  Sure, I think the whole Iraq thing was a mistake and we should get out as soon as we can…that’s true…  And I’m not terribly sympathetic to the conservative camp, especially when they start talking about winning the war…  So coming up with concrete victory conditions probably wouldn’t make me any more approving of the war or conservative politics.

But I really am genuinely curious…  What do they think we’re fighting for?  What is their goal?

Because, honestly, they don’t seem to know.  McCain keeps talking about winning in Iraq, but he never actually explains what that means.  All his assorted surrogates also talk about winning in Iraq, but never say what that means.  I’ve seen dozens of conservative experts and pundits and commentators say that we need to win in Iraq, but none of them ever say what that means.