Formula Drift Qualifying

Went to my first officially sanctioned racing event on Friday. Been trying to keep an eye out at the speedway for events other than NASCAR. This was the first one I was interested in. Formula Drift was in town for Round 6 of their championship. Was a late night event with practices starting at around 7pm with qualifying ending sometime during the night. With high 110 degree weather in Vegas, night racing is the only way to go! 'Twas pretty cool for me. Wanted to go back on Saturday night but decided to stay home with the family instead. Need a goddamn babysitter! Still got a free ticket for the IndyCar Las Vegas GP in October that I was going to go to anyway, so all was awesome. Here's a vid (forgive the shakiness of the Flip):

Red Orchestra 2

Older Red Orchestra 2 vid highlighting the realism in shooting weapons. If you've never played the first Red Orchestra, it had one of the most realistic shooting mechanics ever created in a first person shooter. While COD or games like it are more twitch-based and make you feel real accurate right off the bat, Red Orchestra was the closest you could get (with a mouse and keyboard/gamepad) to actually handling a real weapon. When a weapon had recoil, you'd actually have to push the weapon down while shooting and could change out gun barrels when they got overheated in light machine guns. No running and gunning. Run, stop, get your breathing down, steady your rifle on a vertical surface such as a wall, fire, click twice on the mouse to work the bolt to eject the shell and continue.

While most people wouldn't really appreciate the amount of realism in a game such as this, it really adds to the sense of immersion. This type of realism/immersion increases my enjoyment with a game, as it gives a great sense of success when you get pass the initial learning curve.

Anybody ever feel the sense of accomplishment when you first started up an aircraft switch by switch in a flight simulator? It's the same kind of feeling.

Give a look if you're only slightly interested. The dev team started out by winning the "Make Something Unreal" mod contest, so they are "boots-on-the-ground" gamers at heart.

Fuck Call of Duty

Glorious of glories. This is multiplayer warfare!

New Flight Sim?

Naw, son. It's Arma III! Set View distance to 20km. New processor and video card may be required.

My Childhood in Four Minutes from Videogames Live!

Val and I first saw this at Videogames Live! in Henderson. It was played at the return of intermission (which is when we arrived having been stood up by our babysitter). Great vid and the audience reaction was equally great. Hollering at the top of their lungs. Certainly brings out a lot of nostalgia. Props to Chris Scullion of UK Official Nintendo Mag for making this.

Race Room Fresno

Race Room, cool place to go or...

RaceSimCentral link

Tied to the SimBin franchise of games, these are more common in Germany. I know LAN gaming centers all have whiffs of the old Battletech sites of the late '90s, (for some reason they don't have the one in San Diego's Hazard Center listed, weird):

Wikipedia Link

...just another form of BatteTech waiting to die out?

But I still wouldn't mind going to something like this in Las Vegas. I even called the 3wire LAN here and wanted to see if they'd do a GT5 tournament. 'Twas a no-go. Still Race Room is pretty interesting.

Wait, you're not seriously posting school papers on your blog?!

Yes and no. Hopefully, just this one.

Too Long Didn't Read (TLDR): If anyone you meet says they like Ayn Rand,

punch them in the face and run.

I vant to suck your laissez-faire capitalism!

Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged and the Hypocrisy of Objectivism

On the 15^th of April 2011, the movie Atlas Shrugged Part 1 was released in a limited number of theaters. Atlas Shrugged is the first part in a purported trilogy of forthcoming movies based on novelist Ayn Rand’s book of the same name. Part 2 and 3 are still stated to be in production and will see release sometime in 2012 and 2013 respectively. The movie Atlas Shrugged Part 1 is the brainchild of John Aglialoro, a self-proclaimed follower of Rand’s philosophy: objectivism. Mr. Aglialoro, CEO of Cybex International and a self-made millionaire, optioned Mrs. Rand’s magnus opus for $1 million in 1992 and launched its development independently. (Timpane, 2011) Believing it was necessary to get Mrs. Rand’s message out to a new generation of individuals and also achieving a personal goal of visualizing a movie of one of his favorite books, Mr. Aglialoro was arguably obsessive with his movie’s inception. What would or could cause a man to devote 19 years of his life and an exorbitant amount of money into a project adapting a novel from 1957? Is he mad or is there a sane reason behind such devotion? What is objectivism and is it relevant today?

To begin to talk about objectivism one must first start on its creator: Ayn Rand. Mrs. Rand was born as Alisa Zinov'yevna Rosenbaum in St. Petersburg, Russia to a bourgeois family of non-practicing Jews. Her father was a successful pharmacist that ran his own business. During the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, he saw the entirety of his professional accomplishments confiscated by the state. This caused Ayn’s family to move to the Crimea, where Ayn finished high school. They returned to Saint Petersburg, renamed Petrograd, where due to the revolution women and Jews were allowed to enter the state university. She enrolled in Petrograd State University, majoring in history. Shortly before graduating, Rand was purged from the university along with 4,000 other bourgeois students. When a group of visiting Western scientists took notice and complained to the Communists, Ayn and other third year students were allowed to be reinstated. She graduated from Petrograd State University in October 1924. A year later, Rand was granted a visa to visit relatives in Chicago, Illinois. Due to tightening US immigration laws, Rand had to convince the US embassy that she would not abuse her visa and stay in America. She stated to them that she was engaged to a Russian man, loved him deeply and would return to marry him. In reality, she decided never to return to Russia and even planned going into Mexico or Canada to await permanent status when her visa expired. Her mother Anna is said to have sold the last of the family jewelry to fund Ayn‘s trip, most of which was long ago bartered for food during years of communist-induced famine. Ayn traveled by ship to America. She stayed with her extended family in Chicago for six months, one relative of whom owned a movie theater. Through a film distributor, that relative was able to secure a letter of introduction for Ayn and her extended family raised $100 to pay for Ayn’s trip to Hollywood. Ayn’s goal in Hollywood was to become a screenwriter. Letter of introduction in hand, she was turned away at Paramount Pictures, the employment office telling her no screenwriting jobs were available. Allegedly, while waiting at the Paramount front gate Rand had a chance encounter with Cecil B. DeMille. When asked what she was doing here, Rand told DeMille her story and the director invited her to a backstage tour of his movie set. This tour lasted for a week and culminated in a job as an extra and eventually a place to stay at the Hollywood Studio Club, where DeMille’s wife sat on the board of directors. Ayn changed from being an extra to a script reader. Rand married an actor, Frank O’Connor, in 1929 and tried to get work as a writer. Her big break came in 1932 when she sold her first screenplay “Red Pawn” to Universal Pictures. She also had a stage play “Night of January 16^th” produced in Hollywood and Broadway that same year. She published “We the Living” and the novella “Anthem”, before hitting her first major success with “The Fountainhead” in 1943. The Fountainhead introduced some of the concepts that would later become her philosophy of objectivism. While working in Hollywood on a screen adaptation of The Fountainhead, Rand began writing what would become her greatest achievement in fiction “Atlas Shrugged”. Published in 1957, Atlas Shrugged dramatized her unique philosophy in an intellectual mystery story that integrated ethics, metaphysics, epistemology, politics, economics and sex. (A Brief Boigraphy of Ayn Rand) It was a best-seller for seven months and ended up selling more than a million copies after five years. It ensured Rand’s financial security and established her next role as a public philosopher. After Atlas Shrugged, Rand mainly worked on books espousing her objectivism and conducted many speaking engagements across the country. With her husband’s death on Nov 9, 1979 (my birthday coincidentally), Ayn began to become somewhat depressed. Her last work before passing away in March 1982 was an adaptation of Atlas Shrugged into a screenplay for a television miniseries. At her funeral, many of her old colleagues were present, including Alan Greenspan. A floral arrangement in the shape of a dollar sign, much like her favorite lapel pin, was present as well. (Ayn Rand) She was 77.

So what exactly is objectivism? Simply put, objectivism is the promotion of individualism over collectivism. When explaining her philosophy to a group of Random House salesman prior to the publishing of Atlas Shrugged, one salesman asked Rand if she could explain her philosophy while standing on one foot. Rand stood on one leg and stated, “Metaphysics: objective reality. Epistemology: reason. Ethics: self-interest. Politics: capitalism.” (Heller, 2009) Rand posits the only moral purpose in one’s life should be rational self-interest. The ability of a man to do and become whatever he can in life on his own means without conflict from the collective: communism, fascism and socialism. She believed the only true free government was the one created in the United States, but expressed further that the only moral government is one that includes a laissez-faire economy, the complete and utter separation of the government and economy. The rights of the individual and the limit of that government are held above all else. Moreover, her objectivism is an all-inclusive philosophy that has a basis in ideas that are somewhat noble at first but in practice and at least in Rand’s very own fiction are heartless. Case in point, Rand abhorred the classical character of Robin Hood. Anyone stealing from another individual that worked hard to achieve all his material wealth was considered by Rand as morally evil. She took it further though to imply spreading that wealth to the “moochers” is also morally evil. Her character in Atlas Shrugged, the pirate Ragnar Danneskjold, is the polar opposite of Robin Hood. He seizes relief ships sent from the United States to Europe with the intent of giving back payments of gold to the creative people it was taken from. He steals from the poor and gives to the rich. Altruism, Rand thought, was akin to suicide.

Recently a resurgence has occurred in the popularity of Ayn Rand’s writings. Atlas Shrugged stills sells 150,000 copies annually, it sold 500,000 in 2009, and it is currently number 50 on Amazon’s bestseller list. Its ideas have struck a chord with an audience today. Pushed by deposed Fox News television icon Glenn Beck in June 2010, it has become a favorite must-read novel of the Tea Party and political libertarians. Signs stating “I am John Galt” or “Who is John Galt”, a main protagonist in Atlas Shrugged, are known to show up at Tea Party meetings and rallies. In a nation split into those wanting more federal regulation of Wall Street and those that wish to keep federal interaction with the economy minute in scope, the scenarios put forth by Rand could be construed as a reality that is just around the corner. Will the government reach a point of social economic control? Is socialized medicine the end of the American way of life as we know it? Will we become France? These are the types of questions that way heavily on the mind of people that want smaller government.

So does the present-day world have any current underpinnings of Rand’s dystopian novel? The answer I believe is no. Not just to take out an easy target, but to iterate the irrelevance of a philosophy so far removed from the socio-economic landscape of the modern world; Rand’s philosophy is dangerously stuck in the past. The money that is made nowadays is far from what even the richest of individuals were making in the decades of her life. CEO pay, for instance, has increased from a ratio of 42 to 1 of the average worker salary to 300 to 1 in 2004. The middle class continues to dwindle and the gap between rich and poor grows wider. The old adage is true, “The rich get richer and the poor get poorer.” To ally oneself to a wholly ethnocentric view of “moochers and looters” versus us, breaks the totatlity of our economic system into a black and white world. This is absolutely untrue. There are shades of grey everywhere. Objectivism and moreover the situation in Rand’s book Atlas Shrugged is nothing more than masturbatory fantasy for a select group of selfish intellectuals. Who in their right mind, believes that they are so important to this world that they can never be replaced? If all of the nation’s most industrious minds refused to continue to innovate would our world stop? The answer again is no. There are too many talented workers and lower level individuals that I believe would step up to the challenge; people that would never have the opportunity to do so normally. Anybody thinking they wouldn’t be easily replaced is wallowing in their own arrogance. There will always be somebody willing to do the work you refuse to do. I believe objectivism was created by a heavy-handed and disassociated person living in her own little bubble. Much like the creation of Fox News in a sea of liberal news channels, objectivism is the eventual antithesis of Rand’s childhood growing up in a communist world. For those that enjoy analogies: objectivism is to communism as Fox News is to MSNBC. They are extremes at both ends of the social spectrum and in my eyes any extreme is dangerous. One of the most important flaws of objectivism is the inability to take the simple human behavior of greed into account. The same greed that causes any economic bubble to burst and the same one that caused our Great Recession. In no way, can the primary goal of acquiring wealth be separated from the baseline of greed it implies. And while Rand never states acquiring wealth as a goal in objectivism, the warping of her philosophy have led many of her followers to believe it is the only goal to strive for.

Compassion above all else is the most important moral one should have and hold high. Compassion upon looking at one’s fellow man not as a looter or moocher but as a human being. A human being with aspirations and dreams just like yourself. Altruism in and of itself is not suicide. President Obama once said that it was our capability to have compassion for one another that defined us as human beings. I believe in this thought. I must maintain my faith in humanity. The soulless pursuit of money cannot be looked to as a moral standard. If everyone cared for only themselves, doctors would stop saving people’s lives, police officers would not answer 911 calls, firefighters would not save people from burning buildings. Extended families, relatives and legendary directors would not have the compassion in their hearts to help an immigrant in her time of need; to provide her the chance of a lifetime and become somebody that eventually considered those types of altruistic acts of kindness as morally evil.

The loss of sense of scale gaming or the Call of Duty-ing of our gaming subculture CONTINUED

TLDR: Multiplayer gaming started to innovate with BF1942, but began to stagnate with the introduction of Call of Duty to console players.

In fact, Battlefield popularity reached a high-point during the invasion of Iraq. Desert Combat, a modern day total conversion mod for BF1942, churned out map after user-created map days after the real-life battles. Players were able to play the Battle of Basra the day after which it occurred. This garnered the mod visibility on news outlets such as CNN. An impressive feat, considering the only other PC mod to ever gain attention was GTA's Hot Coffee.

The very next year in 2003, the first Call of Duty was released. Running on a heavily modified version of the Quake 3 engine, Call of Duty provided a tightly-scripted experience highlighting a few key single player mission mechanics: the reinforcement countdown timer (where players were tasked with defending an area against overwhelming odds until reinforcements arrived a.k.a. the angels on our wings mission), the unlimited enemy spawn position (where a front line of enemies would continuously spawn until you advanced on the objective), and the use of ironsights as a precision aiming mechanic. Though not the best-looking of games on it's release, it did provide many exciting set-pieces not yet seen in the over-saturated WWII genre.

Stalingrad, the best level in the game.

Stalingrad, an exact copy of the first few minutes of Enemy at the Gates, was a particularly good anti-thesis to Medal of Honor's D-Day landing. If you were unfortunate enough to play the level first on the console-released Finest Hour, you didn't know what you were missing.

Multiplayer, on the other hand, was never Infinity Ward's strong suit. In Call of Duty, it was just another batch of tried and true deathmatch and team deathmatch the only unique aspect being the replay of the player's viewpoint that killed you. Besides being a fairly cool gimmick, this also cut down on any issues of hacking, though some argued it allowed inexperienced players an unfair advantage against an experienced sniper.

Multiplayer was finally improved later, through the Gray Matter-developed expansion pack United Offensive. Vehicles were allowed in multiplayer in the form of tanks and jeeps. Base Assault was a nirvana of team multiplay and is still great today. Teams would defend and attack three hardened control bunkers. These bunkers would require heavy bombardment from tank shells, explosives or artillery strikes to break down concrete outer walls then would require infantry to capture the objective a la Battlefield.

Even More to come...