Compromise: Served with the short: Elitism and you and others and so on...

Elitism is the belief or attitude that those individuals who are considered members of the elite — a select group of people with outstanding personal abilities, intellect, wealth, specialized training or experience, or other distinctive attributes — are those whose views on a matter are to be taken the most seriously or carry the most weight or those who view their own views as so; whose views and/or actions are most likely to be constructive to society as a whole; or whose extraordinary skills, abilities or wisdom render them especially fit to govern. This comes right off the definition of the word from Wikipedia. So what we got is people who are better than us cause they are better at things. Really when you get down to it everyone will fit this definition at some point. The real bit is when there is people who seem to be put into this position and then given the power to stay there. Any politician falls into this as their views are always given priority over other views. Like the guy in massachusets who ran saying he will vote down the health care bill just cause he is a republican and better than the rest of us. Just to note his state has a health care plan so he would get it even if the rest of us don't. However in this example you see how the elite and other elite are able to fight over things in their own way. By that I mean instead of getting hit in the face they go for the low blow and attack America itself. The worst thing is that people in this position rarely ever have to deal with the situations that come as a result of their bickering. They will never do us good and the whole "better than you" attitude from the social elite is a problem pretty much anywhere you go. On a smaller scale this attacks the little people in our normal lives. The cool kids at school, or the rich kids, and lets not forget the pretty ones. They teach us at a young age that there is a fundamental difference between people and that "because they are" is the only reason they need to be better than us. The group dynamic also to a lesser state shows this. In every group is a leader whose actions and decisions seem to influence the group as a whole. Over time this being becomes bigger and better in their mind and when they don't contemplate that they aren't always right and the best person for every job heads will butt. This becomes a problem and people resent others when they get into this mode. The social upbringing leads one to compare these individuals with the ones presented in the media and in ones own life. Resentment sets in and oddly sometimes leads to others to stage social uprisings which result in them taking on the qualities of the elitist they despise. Over time the roles change and a viscous cycle continues. Some times the only way to deal with ones differences (And all government people gotta learn this...and I mean now!) is to shoot them all and let god sort them out... I mean compromise. This is a thing that can be the best and worst thing ever. They essential truth behind this is that one can find a middle ground in which two or more parties are able to find common ground. This is supposed to give people closure and prevent bickering. When one looks at this there is something most people don't realize. Some where in all of this someone usually losses something they want. Where this is part of the process often one makes compromises they really don't want to (again government, I'm looking at you). The way I look at it is when one loses things they fight for they in essence lose a part of themselves. So now compare this over time. The more one agrees and compromises; unless they are the party that gets all or almost all of what they want (for some reason this happens alot) they begin to resent the "deal". Most people can deal with this over time but not when it occurs all of the time. The more one gives the more one gets. This is what most of us always thought but in every battle there is a winner and loser. When one doesn't stand up for their side enough often they will lose more than they would giving up (once again united states government get off your asses and make things better). True compromise is often impossible and would in theory be awesome but from experience most people aren't willing to deal with problems directly taking the time needed (seriously government...flying cars. We should have had them already but what the fuck...No starships or enhanced dna soldiers or virtual sex bots and light beer that doesn't suck even if it says that it doesn't) to make things right. Most like a quick fix. Lets say this and do this for a while. Later when it begins to degrade and the issues go back (and to the left) to where they were we once again confront them. Sometimes it takes a few times to get things right. However pushing something back and then to the front and back again essentially loses the issue and after a while no one gets what they want and refuses to fight for it anymore. When good soldiers stop fighting the ideals they protect often go the way of "New Coke" (seriously google it if you don't know what it is). The point that I try to make is that things will rarely be talked about and dealt with in the manner they should be. People should take all things to the table and fight for all they can get. Only when all is put on that table can things be resolved so that the loses are mutual and the gains shared by friends and allies and not democrats and republicans (destined to bicker like little bitches until they are replaced with younger little bitches with faster cars). The theory comes full circle that often it's the elite that benefit from compromisation (new word I call it) between parties and the common man is the one wondering that if what he came away with is really worth the fight for it and the casualties that fell during the war. Till the time when all is one I will contemplate this and more. Because I (wait for it) (seriously wait for it) (almost there) can.

Digging through some old characters yesterday and found that there is alot of potential there. Many of these characters haven't found use in over two or three years. I blame this on two reasons. DM lossing interest and DM coming up with other things. Looking back further I remembered that we used to go round with DMing. One person would do a few sessions or an adventure they had purchased or came up with and then one of the other players would step in to add to that. The best thing about this is that rather than alot of wide slopping plots all taking place back to back you would get a wider slope that doesn't always follow a scripted progression. The plot begining in one set of sessions might later come into play in another adventure later on. When one dm comes up with another npc it is there later on for others to use. The world may not begin as some huge tapestry but becomes a piece forged by a group of like minded individuals. This doesn't always work out unless your group goes by some rules. Sometimes characters get too much exsposure. This is still a problem today where certain people cater things to characters. Examples are like too many npcs that are part of the DMs characters background or weapons only so and so or the ugly one can use. However by accepting some ground rules a group can deal with such things and take a campaign in this manner to the next level. By drafting at least a decent view of the world and it's peoples and religons one can later on expand on this and make it a bit bigger little by little. Even without these rules and some of the pitfalls back in our second edition group we managed to have a lot of memorable moments and still have fun while doing it. The best part was that everyones need to DM was met without fourteen thousand groups springing up because of it. I am prolly going to start drafting a sort of rules bible to an effect so I can propose a group of sorts. Cause I should case you were wondering.

Because we can't...(sort of)

In my interests is a little game called dungeons and dragons. This is prolly the thing that I do the most besides dicking around on the internet and watching movies (bad and good). Once a week we gather and play. Course there is more than simply playing. The extension of yourself via your character, the collective story telling that only comes when one person directs 2 or more people in epic battles and bar brawls. I you haven't played you should and if you don't play enough then you should. The other half of the coin is the DM. All joking aside they may be running something they bought or something they made from scratch. Their job is to create and give you the player the ability to interact with another world so to say. Sadly this is something I have done less and less over the last few years. One of the problems I have seen other DMs face is that they have all this material and never the time to do it. One reason is availability of players. Most times people can get together once or twice a week. Factor in other DMs and then other groups (depending on how many) and you may not get to things often. This brings the old paragram that groups that only meet sporadically or in between months at a time face. The old "what were we doing" bit. Often players lose interest and just don't care anymore (no mo no mo). Instead of being honest they continue to just kinda go with the flow of things. This makes it harder for the DM and sometimes ends campaigns all together. Resources like "Obsidian Portal" help alleviate some of these issues with the ability to put up adventure logs and the like. Even with this player boredom wins every time. Another is when the players (especially when there are few of them) become to awesome too fast and basically run the table as it were. This can be controlled but never eliminated altogether. With veteran players this is especially hard. The encounters a player goes through need to be at least challenging even with the smaller groups. This means the reward needs to be scaled to keep balance but doing so hardcore alienates players. In large groups the bit is that equipment and rewards are distributed to the whole which means people aren't always toting around rings of power. The downside to this is that a player who sets up a hard path for their character instead of taking the path to more power faster finds themselves having a hard time. This frustrates them and often leads to characters being abandoned and other more power gamed ones in their place. Story wise this kills things to a point but so does character death or players who decide to stop playing. This later problem affects the DM the most; though the players feel it too. Years ago I had a largeish group and through reasons only known to them they decided that they would play other groups with other people and were never seen again. Okay so maybe never seen but they made it clear that there was things they want to do and I wasn't part of that. Players who lose interest also hurt cause you often will put in time to teach them only to later on have that time ultimately wasted. Players out of reach also bring in hard times as they may want to play but can't and ultimately someone or someones will have to make concessions to keep the game going (or in most cases just stop altogether). These and other reasons that I can't come up with at the moment are some ways that the game can get annoying and take a toll on one after a while. The payoff is still worth it most of the time though. "It's only after we lose everything that we're free to do anything"

Rise from your grave....

Ah. The best part of Hollywood is that it is unusually devoid of creativity. Time and time again there are remakes of movies or retreads of television shows. This could be a retelling like Battlestar Galatica (which wasn't that bad in my opinion) or revivals like outer limits and twilight zone in the nineties and eighties respectively. I asked a question wondering as to what shows one would like to see come back. Three of the four responses were what I expected to hear from said individuals. First off I will start with voltron. Some kids use lions to combine into a robot that kills giant aliens in one hit (though never does until much later in any given battle). The plot has a few extra bits included but that is voltron to a tee. Would this work? Could this work? I will leave this one alone cause it's due to become a movie in the next few years. When this happens I will be here to pass judgment on it. Next up The monkees. Four guys run around and get into crazy hijinks and mishaps and they sing (and play their own instruments...look it up...well not all the time but they did). This was kind of like hard day’s night but the music didn't suck (and thus is my first but not last Beatles slam) and was a hit with the young kids and teens. The show would eventually go off the air and after a crazy movie "head" and some other projects the show would go away for a while until finding some new interest around 86 or so. Could this show be made today? Well two frames of thought. With the original cast...maybe but prolly not. They aren't the same guys they were as young men; and this certainly is part of the show. Also it seems that they don't all have a great relationship with each other so "getting the band back together" would more than likely fail. Could that show be made today and be a success. Yes it could. Though the industry would more than likely have some dumb "who wants to be a monkee" type reality show idea. The original premise would work if done correctly. A show that can't take itself seriously but would need to cater to the new generation is what they would need to go with. With the media exposure right now could help or hurt such an endeavor. Next up is firefly. Similar to Cowboy Bebop but a bit more serious in its execution (but still with a bit of humor); it tells the story of people on a space ship in the future. There is more to it than that but that is the basic premise. Now it hasn't been off the air long so a remake isn't feasible to this point but bringing it back could work. There is a whole lot of interest by fans in the series and there was a movie "Serenity" made that continued the plot. The real thing is the network. Would they bring it back? Well no not really. Even with a lot of interest and fan devotion they seem to only bring back series that were canceled and created by Seth McFarlane. Should they? Yes and if I take over the world anytime soon they will. Lastly is Passions. Admit ably I know little about this show other than the fact that it is a soap with some supernatural (and a midget) elements to it. I am unsure as to why it was canceled but if you think about it does it sound like something you have heard before? Dark shadows? Well maybe... Since twilight has seemed to take off in popularity (thus making me change the name of this blog as the word twilight was in it) I would think this the time to bring back such a show. Hell soaps are boring anyways but adding some more fictional elements can really bring in the audience that is bored with the same old same old. Course the entertainment industry seems to not take chances much anymore so that will not likely happen. My choice is "Nowhere man". One of Upn's first dramas it starred Bruce Greenwood (captain pike in the new star trek movie) as a photojournalist who over the course of a trip to the bathroom has his entire life erased. He spends the entire of the one season that makes up the series trying to find out who did it and why. It concerns a photo of condemned men being executed by US soldiers and only his negatives of the photo may prove whatever plot that everyone else is in on. This show was creepy. I would love to see a series that continues the plot or gives a new one in the same continuity. Course what I want seems to always be irrelevant. Why? Because they can...

Missing: Rockwell

So you may have seen those Geico commercials that are on all the time.  No the reptile ones but the ones with the "somebodies watching me" song.  Course many don't know where it came from in the first place.  The song in question came from one Rockwell. Rockwell is Barry Gordies (the mowtown guy) son.  He decided one day to become a singer and got signed to his fathers mowtown records under the name Rockwell without his dad knowing.  His name is because he thinks he "rocks well".  He got his friend Michael Jackson to sing the backup and Jermaine Jackson also to sing the chorus.  This song took off and the video for it became a hit on MTV (my research indicates that at some point it was said that MTV played music videos.  No proof of this exists but it was said to be awesome).  This drove record sales up and he then decided to release the single "obscene phone caller".  This ended up being a minor hit and after this Rockwell would release more albums that went nowhere.  After this it seems that he fell off the face of the earth.  No person or Wikipedia article or Vh1 eighties documentary seems to know what happened to him.  Being that he and Michael Jackson were friends I assumed he would pop up round poor Jackos funeral but no Rockwell.  My head spins with the thought of what the hell happened to Rockwell.  Sure he's not dead but seriously.  What the hell happened to him?  I have came up with a few possibilities that make very much sense indeed.  First off I think that Michael Jackson traded identities with another man and he and Rockwell moved to south america and started working the clubs down there under different names.  Second is that he decided to move to the midwest with the Post man and Black Drapped woman from the "Somebodies watching me and obscene phone caller" music videos.  They have crazy adventures trying to do everyday situations in the apartment they all share.  The third possibility is that he ended his life after getting too much a taste for the good life.  His father being the man behind motown covers up his death by using the power he has to manipulate the media so that no ones the wiser.  Course if this was the case then I would have already been rubbed out and no one would know of this theory so I hardly doubt this occured.  Lastly maybe he just took a break so that he would come back stronger than ever.  Perhaps his comeback is right around the corner and we will all be blown away.  Or maybe this is all speculate... Why?  Because were bored. 

Alvin and the chipmunks... A rant because I can...

So there is of course another chipmunks movie out.  I am so annoyed that I will have to take it out on my beloved internet (I wouldn't take it out on her but in reality she likes it and always comes back for more).  The chipmunks started back in the late fifties after a bunch of novelty songs were released and as novelty songs always do for no good reason got popular.  This gave them the chance to make a cartoon about them that would piggyback on the success of these songs and give all the little kiddies something to watch.  This proved popular and after the series began to do well in reruns in 79 NBC resurrected them with a christmas special that would spawn a new animated series.  This is where it gets dumber.  The new show does chipmunk versions of contemporary songs (the eighties so you know it's gonna really suck) and delved more into the life of the chipmunks (also boring).  Female counterparts are written in and eventually by the end of the decade they are parodying movies and after this they would fade out of the public eye save for some direct to video things (so more suck).  Course a couple of years ago the CGI(Completely goddam idiotic)/Live action Chipmunk movie fell into theaters to be loved by masses of stupid people.  A sequel (I know how to spell unlike other people...Movie people) was made undoubtedly to pander to the same creatins that paid real actual US  currency to go watch.  Now I could spend countless hours talking about how much these movies suck or why Jason Lee sucks at life because he's in the movies but I will take the high road.  The chipmunks themselves are really troublesome on their own.  There is the cool one, the smart one and the fat one.  They are really not fleshed out much more than that.  Alvin thinks he's cool and acts the part.  He often gets into trouble trying to be cool and this creates "conflict".  Thinking back to it most of us really hate these characters in movies and tv.  Most people instead take to the secondary characters as they are more easy to relate to.  Sadly two more stereotypes lye in the ranks.  Simon the brains wears glasses.  As we all know everyone who wears glasses are really smart and know science and stuff.  His job is to bail out Alvin during his hairbrain schemes.  Lastly the fat one "Theodore".  He eats.  Not much else but eating.  Seriously does every group need a fat one.  Well looking at life I guess it always does so point goes to the chipmunks I suppose.  Now take our new formula: Popular + Brains + Food = Entertainment.  Sadly this formula doesn't hold up over the years.  As the newer generation shows up they demand more out of there prepackaged television advertising breaks.  So why does hollywood think this needs to come back after all these years.  Sadly the old saying goes "If I haven't seen it, it's new to me" and that seems to be enough.  In the real world I don't think talking anthropomorphic rodents would last all that long.  Alvin would get whats coming to him after he tries to come on to a human female (cross species relationships aren't christian so that means it's bad), Simon who starts crafting a wild science experiment becomes too into his own mindtrip and creates a device that destroys the house killing him and Dave (The owner/dad/straight man).  Theodore lives a long and fulfilling life out of his brothers shadows.  Nah he dies of a heart attack cause that's what happens to fat people who eat right?  Another oddity is that there are female counter parts to them who mirror them being not much more than palette swaps with vagianas.  They have similar real world experiences but they just look a little different.  So why has this endured for almost fifty years?  Cause kids never watch anything good?  Cause hollywood is not able to come up with anything better?  Nope.  It's cause kids will watch almost anything.  Seriously.  Put a jar of mustard with goggly eyes and a nose and it's almost guaranteed to last a season on Nickelodeon.  'So I hope this has been informative (even though we all know it's not), and that we all can find something good to watch on the old picture tube.  Till then lets all cancel the bad shows and change the channel.      

20XX... The preview

We are in the year 20XX.  We really have came this far.  Or so it seems anyways.  In this day and age it seems that we really aren't in the future that we all envisioned back in the day.  Still the internet sure is something right?  In the eighties we didn't know that this type of thing would ever come.  In the nineties it was a novelty and ten years ago it finally picked up steam.  So I is not gonna just talk about the internet despite how great it really is.  This is a preview of the things to come for the next few.  The new blog is entitled "Because we can..."  This title really dictates that we can do because it is possible to do so.  I will not put much off limits here and that will help us change the world.  On the lighter side I will finally get some video projects going since it has been too long a time since the last one.  With that said lets not consider the odds so we can always win.

Will post more later.  Just checking for now.