All this 9/11 stuff is just making me angry.

Yes, I know, it was a horrible tragedy and thousands of people lost their lives.  But it seems like we’re just wallowing in our tragedy.

This morning there was a special on MSNBC, talking about 9/11.  It wasn’t enough to repeat the death count a few times…  They actually broke it down into demographics.  So many firefighters died, so many men died, so many women died, so many children were born without fathers afterwards, so many pregnant women died.

Really?  Are we just trying to make people feel bad?  Are we concerned that people might actually be getting over the tragedy?

If it were just a matter of memorializing the dead, that would be one thing…  But these remembrances go far beyond that.  They talk about how drastically the world changed on that day.  They haul somebody in from the TSA to talk about how well they’ve protected us since then.  The have various people come on and talk about the War on Terror.

The fact of the matter is that, while the 9/11 attack was a horrific tragedy…  We’ve done more harm to ourselves in the years since then, than any terrorist could ever have hoped to.

We used the 9/11 attack as an excuse to launch a war in Iraq, without an actual declaration of war – which never made sense.

A religious extremist named Osama Bin Laden, operating out of Afghanistan, attacked us…  And we attacked a secular nation that had nothing to do with Bin Laden.

Now, 10 years later, we’ve killed Bin Landen…  And we’re mostly out of Iraq…  But we’re still fighting a war.  Thousands of innocent lives have been lost over the years.  Billions of dollars wasted.  And we’re still fighting.

But that isn’t the end of it.  If all we’d done is wage a war that would be one thing…

But we also locked people up and detained them for years without actually charging them.  We tortured people.  We wiretapped our own citizens without warrants.  We implemented all sorts of ridiculous “security” measures that’ve done nothing to protect us, but have dramatically limited the ability of our citizens to move freely within the nation.

It’s ridiculous.

Slashdot | The Oslo Massacre and Violent Video Games

Media hysteria is once again blaming a real life massacre on violent video games. But looking at every single gaming reference in the Oslo killer’s manifesto shows that such accusations are ridiculous. He played games to unwind from plotting and used them to mask his activities.

You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.

We started out with a terrorist attack…  But once folks discovered that he was a Christian instead of a Muslim, he became an extremist and it’s just a massacre now…

And now it isn’t because he was a Christian fundamentalist, it’s once again the fault of violent video games.

The fact of the matter is that this guy was a Christian fundamentalist.  A right-wing extremist.  No amount of spin is going to change that.  You may very well be able to deflect attention away from that fact, but you can’t change it.

This was a terrorist attack.  The man was a terrorist.  He was trying to use terror to force a change in policy – that’s pretty much the definition of terrorism.

But we’re going to minimize it and sweep it under the rug and pretend like this isn’t a serious problem…  Because he’s Christian, and so are a bunch of folks here in America.

Stupid.

I used to have a subscription to NewsWeek.  Used to be a pretty decent magazine.  Well, I thought so at least…  I was younger, maybe I just didn’t know any better.

Regardless, I let that subscription run out years ago when I stopped caring about the magazine.  The articles seemed less and less substantial, more and more sensational.  There just wasn’t much point in reading it.

And, it seems, things haven’t changed much in the last few years.  Or, if they have, they’ve changed for the worse.

NewsWeek has a new, sensational article about The Growing Demand for Prostitution.  Except that it doesn’t actually talk all that much about prostitution…  It lumps pretty much every kind sex entertainment together and calls that a “growing demand” for, specifically, prostitution.  But, what can you expect from an author who calls herself a sex work abolitionist?  She’s obviously got an axe to grind.

Which isn’t to say that biased people can’t do good research and write good articles…  Honestly, everybody is biased in some way.  And good reporters are constantly putting aside their biases in favor of objectivity.  But this article doesn’t do that.  She doesn’t quote any real sexologists or sociologists or anything.

And then she rolls out the whole “human trafficking” thing…  Somehow she leaps from legal sex entertainment like strip clubs to children being sold into sexual slavery.  Without, of course, a trace of actual evidence.

Somehow “Nearly 100% of men in the study said that minors were always available for purchase in Boston” even though about half of the men she interviewed had never seen so much as a lap dance.

I guess I’m not surprised that garbage like this is getting written.  The United States is going through another Puritanical phase…  Or maybe it’s always been this way, but less obvious.  Regardless, there are a lot of folks out there who don’t want you to enjoy sex, who don’t want you to drink alcohol, who don’t want you to have an abortion, who want to make sure you go to church – basically who want to turn the whole of the nation into some kind of fundamental Christian state.

But I am surprised that something like this made it into NewsWeek.

Then again, when CNN’s breaking news revolves around a new viral video on YouTube, I guess maybe I shouldn’t be.

This kind of shit makes me embarrassed to be a heterosexual, male gamer.  Well, but I guess it isn’t just the hetero male gamers this time around…

Penny Arcade has a comic, and a summary…

Basically, there are an assortment of romance options in Dragon Age 2.  One of those romance options is a fairly forward male who makes passes at the player and gets annoyed if you don’t reciprocate.  Which all makes perfect sense if you’re playing a female character…

But BioWare wanted to be inclusive, and made all the romance options available to both male and female characters.

Which means that if you’re playing a male character, you’ve got a gay guy hitting on you and being annoyed if you don’t reciprocate.

One heterosexual male gamer out there is thoroughly bent out of shape by this.  Thinks BioWare isn’t catering to him enough.

And one gay gamer out there is also bent out of shape by this.  Thinks that BioWare is portraying gays unrealistically.

Seriously.

Folks…  It’s a game…  They’re characters…  They aren’t supposed to be some kind of benchmark to measure your sexuality against.  There are gay people out there who are forward and get their feelings hurt if you don’t reciprocate.  This character is potentially one of them.  Deal with it and move on with your life.

Duke Nukem Forever Multiplayer Mode Predictably Controversial

Gearbox Software has released some information about the multiplayer modes for Duke Nukem Forever, which is due out May 3rd (for real this time). In addition to standard deathmatch (called Dukematch), team deathmatch and a king-of-the-hill mode, there is “Capture the Babe,” in which a typical CTF flag is replaced by a woman. Eurogamer explains it thus: “… when you grab the other team’s babe, she sometimes ‘freaks out.’ The solution? Give her a gentle smack.” Gearbox’s Randy Pitchford, clearly understanding how politically incorrect this sounds, said, “You can get some things across in screenshots but not really. So we’re kinda struggling with how we expose it so people understand what’s there. The proof is in the pudding so to speak, so I don’t want to talk about it too much.”

As the subject says – it’s Duke Nukem, what do you expect?  The game is basically one big, walking parody of machismo.  I mean – your character makes a constant stream of tough one-liners…  There are strip clubs all over the place for no good reason…  You can punch aliens in the balls…  There’s basically nothing of real substance in the entire game.  So if there wasn’t something controversially ridiculous in the multiplayer, I’d be surprised.

But let’s be honest here, this isn’t actual misogyny.  This isn’t some attack on women.  This isn’t supposed to be teaching proper gender roles or anything like that.  It’s a ridiculous parody on all those macho movies over the years where some delicate woman starts screaming, and the dashing hero slaps her face to bring her to her senses.  Just like the constant one-liners are a parody on every action hero out there.

And, of course, this would be a complete non-issue if you were capturing male babes instead of female babes.  As brunascale points out:

The original Half-Life mod Science and Industry played like a CTF game. The “flags” were scientists, and you captured them by hitting them on they head with a briefcase and carrying them back to your base.

There’ve been plenty of games over the years where you wind up capturing various male scientists, politicians, soldiers, leaders, civilians, or whatever else…  And I’ve never heard anyone scream about how inappropriate it was to smack them over the head, or take them at gunpoint, or whatever method of coercion a particular game used.

Hell, Grand Theft Auto has long had the ability to beat and murder prostitutes…  And while there’s been plenty of outcry against the GTA games, that particular aspect has never been a focal point.  Folks were more outraged at the “hot coffee” mod than they were at the prospect of beating and murdering prostitutes.

Slashdot | Court Rules Dungeons and Dragons Threatens Prison Security

Dungeons and Dragons — originally Satan’s Game — has now been found to encourage gang-like behavior. In a finding by a three judge panel of the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals, D&D ‘can mimic the organization of gangs and lead to the actual development thereof.’ From the ruling: ‘during D&D games, one player is denoted the “Dungeon Master.” ‘The Dungeon Master is tasked with giving directions to other players, which Muraski testified mimics the organization of a gang.’

Idiots.

It’s patently obvious that none of the people responsible for this ruling have ever played D&D (or any other pen & paper RPG).

The Dungeon Master is not tasked with giving directions to other players.  The Dungeon Master is tasked with coming up with a storyline for the players to navigate, with controlling the various antagonists in the game, and with reacting to the players’ actions.

The players make the decisions.  They decide which door to open, or which hallway to go down, or which critter to kill, or which quest to do.  The Dungeon Master just narrates the results of their actions.

Tomorrow is my birthday.  It’s also been long enough that my license is expiring tomorrow.  So I had to go get it renewed last week.  That should have been a fairly easy task…  But it certainly didn’t work out that way.

I took Wednesday last week off from work.  Took my car in for some work.  Stopped by the DMV to get my license renewed.  Did some work around the house.  Attempted to relax a bit after the chaos of the last few months at work.

At the DMV I was informed that I had a suspended license.

I got a ticket over a year ago when I was driving one of the company vehicles.  It had a burnt-out brake light.  I reported that to my boss…  He took the vehicle in for work, got the light fixed, and then said he’d take care of the ticket.  So I handed him the paperwork and promptly forgot about it.

I guess he forgot about it as well.  Because it was never taken care of.

And since I forgot to change my address when we moved, I never got the notices they were mailing to me.  So eventually my license was suspended because I had that outstanding ticket.

Which means that if I’d been stopped for any reason over the last year or so I would have been in big trouble.

So I had to go over to the town court and pay a fee to get the suspension lifted.  $70 just to get that taken off my license.  Didn’t address the ticket at all.  Of course I also had to wait for the suspension to actually clear off the computers down in Albany.

Yesterday I was back at the DMV first thing in the morning.  Finally got my license renewed.

And I’ve still got that ticket to deal with…  They want $75 for it…

All because my former boss didn’t do what he said he would.  Hard to believe that I’m still getting screwed by him months after I left his employ.