Texas Schools Ban Author for Book He Didn’t Even Write

When I read things like this it just fills me with despair.  This is the reason the USA is falling apart…  This is the reason why our economy is going to hell, why our politicians can’t get anything done…  We’ve become a nation of flaming idiots.

A school board in Texas was so terrified that their children might learn something about Marxism that they banned all books written by Bill Martin Jr. – who has never written a book about Marxism.

The guy who did write a book about Marxism is Bill Martin – notice the lack of “Jr.” there.  A subtle difference, sure…  But you’d think somebody might have done a little research before banning an author’s books.

All they did is throw the guy’s name at a Borders web search…  And when they saw the Marxism title they banned him.

Nobody read the Marxism book to see whether it was appropriate for children.  Nobody read the children’s books to see whether any Marxist sentiments showed up.  Nobody even bothered to make sure it was the same author.  They just banned him.

Assassin’s Creed 2 has some impressive DRM going into it.  The game is going to require a constant Internet connection, even for single-player gameplay.  It will constantly be phoning home to confirm that you’re playing a legitimate copy of the game.  Saved games will be stored on remote servers.  And, should your Internet cut out for any reason, the game will promptly exit.

Needless to say, that’s generated an awful lot of discussion on-line.

There’s speculation that this may, finally be the DRM that works. It isn’t just a matter of patching out some disc check or something like that…  The entire savegame code will have to be re-written to save locally instead of on a remote server.

The problem, of course, is that this DRM is only going to affect paying customers.

This is something I keep saying, but nobody seems to want to listen.

Pirates never have to deal with DRM.  They download their game, run the crack, and play the game.  No disc checks, no serial numbers, no phoning home, no constant Internet connection required.

If your DRM scheme is complicated enough, it’ll take a little while for the pirates to crack it – but it will be cracked.  There’s an army of terrific coders all over the world who would like nothing more than to crack your DRM.  And the more complicated and difficult to crack, the bigger the challenge is, and the bigger the reward for the person who finally cracks it.

Some folks are impatient…  They’ll go out and buy your game instead of waiting for the DRM to be cracked.  But at that point they’ve become paying customers – not pirates.

So your paying customers – the ones who’ve handed you cash for your game – are the ones inconvenienced by your DRM.

Somebody on the forums complaining that they can’t re-install Spore because of the activation limit is a paying customer.  Somebody complaining that their CD-KEY doesn’t work is a paying customer.  Somebody complaining that their game won’t run because their Internet went down is a paying customer.

The pirates aren’t complaining on your forums because they’re happily playing the game – without any of those restrictions.

It gets bad enough that folks who’ve legitimately purchased a game will go looking for a crack just so that they can play it.  You’ve turned your own paying customers into criminals.  Sure, they paid for it…  But, legally, anyone who runs a DRM-bypassing crack is a criminal.

Of course they’ve got a choice…  They don’t have to crack that game they just bought.  It’s their own problem that their CD-ROM drive doesn’t work with your DRM, or their CD-KEY was used by some pirate on the other side of the world, or their Internet is flaky…  You aren’t forcing them to crack your DRM.

But most folks like to be able to actually use the things they pay for.

So you’re creating an environment where the pirate version of a game is actually superior to the legitimately-purchased one.  It works better, it is more likely to run on a given piece of hardware, it doesn’t require a disc to be in the drive, it works without Internet…  Whatever.  The pirate version is good enough that folks will seek it out even after they’ve paid for the legitimate version.

That’s not a good thing.

You really don’t want your paying customers to feel that the free version that the pirates have is better than what they paid for.

You really don’t want your paying customers to learn how easy it is to acquire the pirate version of your software.

You really don’t want your paying customers to be looking around those pirate sites and seeing the tremendous array of software that’s available.

Because the more they do that…  The less likely they are to keep paying for your crippled products…  And they’ll just go for the good stuff right from the start.

Working through my daily batch of RSS feeds, I stumbled across this comic…

Now, I haven’t actually played any Metroid games in a few years…  Never tried the one on the Wii at all.  But I still consider myself a fan of the franchise.  I loved the original Metroid and Super Metroid…  And both Prime and Echoes were a lot of fun.

So, obviously, this caught my eye.

And then the artist mentioned screenshots for the new game, so I had to go take a look…

That, apparently, is the new Samus.

Now, I understand the desire to flesh out a character.  The original game came from a time when you didn’t really have backstory…  There’d be a few lines of text in the instruction manual, and that was about it.  The rest of the game was just jumping and shooting and stuff.  So Samus never had a whole lot of development in that respect.

And these days people expect some degree of character development.  Even straight-up shooters like Halo or Call of Duty offer backstory and development of their characters.

So I can see why they wanted to give Samus some depth…

Which basically means taking her out of the suit.  It’s hard to develop a character and feel attachment and empathy when all you ever see is a gleaming robot.

Plus, taking her out of the suit lets you show off some of her other assets…  Which is always a good thing in today’s market.

But I have to say that I’m disappointed.

I really don’t think that people today understand the impact of having a woman in that power armor.  I don’t think people realize what kind of impact that had on gamers and the gaming industry.  It was tremendously powerful.

Metroid originally came out during the era of Super Mario Bros, Contra, and Legend of Zelda.  We had 8-bit graphics…  Nothing looked terribly amazing.  You tried to make your main character stand out with a fairly bold color scheme – which is why Mario is predominantly red, and link is green, and Samus was yellow.

You didn’t have polygons.  You couldn’t put millions of colors on the screen.  There were no realistic physics.

It was generally assumed that your protagonist was male.  Especially in a game where you were running around shooting aliens.

And if you wanted a character to be female, you had to make it fairly obvious.  You couldn’t just give a character long hair and breasts because the graphics were so bad that it might not be obvious what you were trying to do.  So you would give female characters very feminine names…  And put them in very large, obvious dresses…  And have them say or do very feminine things…

It isn’t that anyone was trying to stereotype women…  It’s just that the tools of the time didn’t allow for a whole lot of subtlety.

So, Metroid comes out…  You’re this badass guy with bulky yellow armor and a gun for an arm.  You’re running around an alien planet shooting bad-guys.  You’re a freaking bounty hunter.  Not only was the gameplay terrifically fun…  But the story (what little you had) was very cool.

And pretty much anyone who played Metroid, or looked at the box, or heard about it from a friend, or looked at a screenshot would have assumed that Samus was a man.

Samus was a generic name…  Kind of sci-fi…  Definitely not an especially feminine name…  And Samus was wearing power armor, not a dress…  And Samus was blasting aliens, not having a tea party…

Everyone assumed Samus was a man.

And then they finished the game and found out otherwise.

Samus was a woman.

A woman that didn’t have to wear an obvious dress…  A woman that wasn’t having a tea party…  A woman that kicked ass…

But it didn’t really matter that she was a woman.  The game didn’t revolve around the fact that she was female.  It didn’t make a big deal out of it.  You could easily have made Samus a man and not changed the game at all.

Samus was a woman…  But she was just doing her job.  A job any man could do…  But she happened to be a woman.  And that didn’t really change anything about the job or the mission or the game or her abilities or the feeling of accomplishment when you beat the game.

It was, at the time, quite the statement of equality.

And now we’re taking a character that was originally very gender-neutral…  And we’re making her obviously feminine.  Just like we used to do because the technology didn’t allow subtlety…

But now it isn’t the technology that’s forcing us to stereotype and categorize and sexualize our characters.

The snow is back, with a vengeance.

We’ve had a fairly mild winter…  Mild enough that everything melted a couple weeks back.  We’ve had brown grass and mud for weeks.  It’s looked more like spring than the middle of winter.

But all that ended yesterday.

It snowed in the morning.  Nothing terribly amazing…  Had an inch or so of ground-cover that quickly melted.

It started snowing again in the afternoon and continued throughout the night.

We lost power at the house around 3:00 AM.  I’m not quite sure exactly when it went out, but that’s when the overwhelming silence woke me up.  You don’t really notice all the humming and whirring around you until it is all gone.

I called in the outage to NYSEG and was told that approximately 1,300 people in our area were without power, and it wouldn’t be back up until around 7:00 AM.

The power did, indeed, come back on just before 7:00.

I really should have gotten up earlier to clear the driveway, but I didn’t make it out of bed.  So, when I did eventually get up, the driveway was stuffed full of snow.  At least a foot of it, though I’m really not sure of the actual measure.

I made the rounds…  Made sure the heaters were running properly and whatnot…  Powered up our network equipment…  Tried to power up my computer…  And discovered it was dead.  Wouldn’t POST or anything.  Made a worrisome hissing noise.

When I made it in to work I discovered that my work computer was also having issues.  Wouldn’t boot up because the CPU fan wouldn’t spin.  I’m not sure if this is at all related to the power outage last night or if it’s just a coincidence.

So, before I could actually do anything productive, I had to replace the CPU fan on my work machine…

And once I’d gotten caught up on my email, voice messages, and whatever else – I put my own personal computer on the bench.  The power supply is toast.

Yay!