Quote Analysis Exercise

Is it unethical to quote yourself?

Based on the Essay titled “On Recent Politics,” By Jacob Germain, Tuesday, July 29, 2008.
accessible at: http://www.thejakeman.com/2008/07/on-recent-politics_29.html


Clearly, modern youth has a destructive and reactionary stance towards modern politics. Take Jacob Germain, a suburban middle class youth who recently graduated from high school. This past election was his first major political event. Based on the things he said, I’m sure you’ll agree that such divergent political beliefs should be suppressed. “Personally, I'm for radical change, be it liberal or republican. As an election, I would have preferred something like Ron Paul vs. Dennis Kucinich,” he says, mentioning two of the worst political candidates in recent memory. As you can see, he wants an election between a crazed right wing man who would decimate the economy through his insane libertarian ideals and an equally crazed left wing reactionary who would spend this country dry and keep coming back for more. This kid practically wishes for this country’s destruction! The sheer insanity of it nearly shocks me speechless! Again, Ron Paul is a crackpot with bizarre ideas about the way the world works, and Kucinich is a midget who seems to think that we can solve any problem by throwing money at it! Clearly this kid is deranged, and as a representative of his entire generation, this country is going to the dogs.

Christopher Paolini is a Bad Bad Man

I will start this miniature rant by stating that I've only gotten as far as three pages into Brisngr. If at some point in the novel, the style of writing relaxes, I may change my opinion.

High level language and academic minutiae does not a fantasy novel make.

Ah, The Boundless Power of Creativity

I do quite enjoy Kingdom Hearts.

Those of you who are still reading, thank you. My appreciation for the series has little to do with Disney or Final Fantasy, neither of which I particularly care for, but with the game itself as a whole: an engaging third person action game. I rather like this genre of games and find Kingdom Hearts to be one of the best, if for no other reason than sheer production values. There is a wide range of special moves (summons, limits, drives) to unleash and a great deal of options as far as playing style. But the most important part, and probably the reason I place Kingdom Hearts so highly, is the fantastic Gummi Ship mode.

In my erstwhile life, I did posses a great number of Lego brand building blocks. The most common thing I built with these blocks was spaceships. Lots and lots of spaceships. Almost exclusively, spaceships. My imagination ran the gamut from a range of simple three piece models for vast space wars, to a hulking behemoth armed with six rotating cannons, three missile platforms, and an emergency escape pod I rather liked. The Gummi Ship mode of Kingdom Hearts brings me back to these halcyon days, while animating my imagination that wasn't possible in plastic toy form. Only in this game is the level of customization at a point where I can recreate nearly every ship I can come up with in my imagination and actually play with them in an actual space shooting session.

But I could be wrong. Are there any other games that allow the same amount of creativity as this? I have no stipulations, I'm willing to try anything.

Edit: Hoping for this sort of thing, I bought THQ's "Drawn to Life" hoping for a similar experience. What I got was a mediocre platformer with a generic story and aggravating between world bits. It reminded me more of a flash game than a DS game.

Some More New Stuff, With Added Mundanity

I spent most of this weekend producing generic techno. Here's what I consider to be the best three. I also played a lot of Left 4 Dead, which I'm sure you've already heard too much or don't particularly care about it, so I won't go into it here.

Here's my favorite. the sound quality sounds a bit off on iMeem, but whatever.

An Open Secret

It's about the corporations. There is no red, there is no blue. There is only corporation.

Some New Stuff, Finally

Well, I returned to mixcraft only to find that there are new loops for me to mess with. So I made these. I stuck with the general song templates, So actually creative stuff is yet to come.

Note, while this says Crunk, it's closer to slow style Electronica. Crunk is just the song style I got it from.

The Explicit Joys of Poll Working

I wrote this last thursday, didn't finish until today.


Well, I spent Tuesday working the polls. It was a fun and interesting experience. decent turnout, had about half the people in the district vote directly, I'm sure more voted early or by mail. I didn't take notes, So I'll go by what I recall. In the morning we had a short line of people waiting to vote as soon as the polls opened. It went a bit shaky at first because most of the people working hadn't done this before (including two cute girls, one of which I got the number of), but we smoothed it out as we went ahead. As is expected, there was an eclectic bunch of voters. All sorts of people. Mostly older professionals, as the precinct I was working at is in the middle of a large high end apartment complex.

A few interesting things happened. Around 4 o'clock or so, a polite guy a bit older than me from the Buchanan campaign came by to "flush votes" wherein they look at the publicly posted rolls to see who hasn't voted yet and go hassle them to vote. He actually went outside and took his outer shirt off when he realized he still had a "Buchanan" shirt on. It wasn't that big a deal, as no one was there, and we were being somewhat lax anyways. (several people came in with Obama shirts on and sort of rushed through the process before they could be admonished, in a hurry to vote for the only candidate they cared about, apparently) He came back later with a voter who was clearly mentally challenged and had him vote. He didn't stand over him or anything (In fact, he actually stood way in the back and was covering the Buchanan embossment on his shirt with a folder he was carrying. He looked rather silly) and one of us pollsters helped him vote (the first ballot, he had just checked next to the names of the candidate)

Fortunately, no one wanted to vote electronically, as us poor poll workers had no idea how that would work out. A thing in the instructions said that if one person were to use it, four more people would also have to use it, for whatever reason. It's very complicated, involving a second machine we would use to activate little cards and password lock them and give them to the people, when they would take it over and insert it to display the ballot. from there they would vote and the card would be deactivated.

It seems a lot more inconvenient than just the paper ballots, which work similarly to "Scantron" technology that instructors have been using for years to grade tests, albeit with ink instead of pencil. After a person fills all the lines to choose the candidate they wanted, they would insert it into a big, vaguely evil looking machine that would take the ballot, scan it, and deposit into a bin inside. The machine at the end of the day prints out a tally of the votes it received and we post a copy that just outside the door. We then take the ballots, put them in a secure box thing and deliver them to the registrar to be (presumably) hand counted later. Much less complex than the machine voting thing. I think.