Posts on Education

Posted on January 27, 2020 by JC

This post will just be used to collect my commentary on the subject of Education. As this is my profession, I think it is important to keep these posts together though I don’t often write on the subject. I may at some stage turn this into a general categories post.

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Jagged Alliance 2 – 20 Years Later

Posted on December 18, 2019 by JC

This year marks twenty years since the release of Jagged Alliance 2 and twenty five since the original was first released for DOS personal computers in 1994. Although never a hugely successful series, Jagged Alliance developed a loyal and enthusiastic following that still persists today. This persistence in itself is amazing because the developer Sir-Tech went out of business a few years after the stand-alone expansion Unfinished Business released in 2000. Since then there have been sporadic releases using the name but nothing that had either the depth or addictive gameplay of the Sir-Tech developed games. This includes a promising but disappointing Kickstarter project and last year’s Jagged Alliance: Rage which is really part of the series in name only.

Realising it had been twenty years, I searched around to see if any gaming websites had marked the occasion and only found what I feel was a pretty poor article which (typically for our time), gets distracted by the political aspects the writer could siphon out of the game’s narrative and setting. I have written about the series before with a focus on the original so for this I will focus more on Jagged Alliance 2; a game which remains unique to this day.

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Gears Awakens

Posted on November 24, 2019 by JC

I have something additional to say about video games in general which is something of a follow-up from a post I made earlier this year. However, this one fits in too. It is a bit late in coming since this is concerning a game I played back in September, but my thoughts on it are still fresh enough to make it worth writing.

I have been into the Gears of War series for about ten years when I played the first two games around 2009/10. I wasn’t initially very interested in the series because I didn’t own an Xbox 360 until years after the release. It also wasn’t previously a genre I had much interest in. This changed not after playing the first game but with the second which was a considerable improvement and it led me to appreciating what the first was trying to do. I could also see the influence that Resident Evil 4 had on development which is significant because this remains one of my favourite games of all time.

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Absolutely Immoral & Absolutely Understandable

Posted on October 21, 2019 by JC

It is not good for man to be alone.

Genesis 2:18

This is yet another one of the posts that sat in drafts, splattered with a few ideas of what I wanted to write after I watched the film Passengers back in 2016. This was before I had decided to stop directly supporting Hollywood as much as I could, something I have been mostly successful with excepting a family outing for Toy Story 4 earlier this year.

I recently had an opportunity to re-watch the film (without paying or doing anything illegal), and I enjoyed it less than the first viewing as I noticed more of the faults but still enjoyed the film overall. I recalled this unfinished post and decided to remedy this.

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Class in a Classless Society

Posted on September 30, 2019 by JC

whitetrash
White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America by Nancy Isenberg
Atlantic Books, November 2nd, 2017 (first published in 2016)

I read a review of this book in Quadrant Magazine last year and was immediately interested in the subject matter. I have long had a distant fondness for the American underclass of the South and reading a book strictly chronicling their history appealed to me. Of course, the United States is not the only country with an underclass; as they exist in one form or another in every nation. However, the form taken particularly in the American South is certainly unique in character and due to the force of American popular culture; has been something much of the world has learned about. The reality is often more depressing than the scripted and televised sitcoms and reality shows broadcast. In this book the historic reality of them is traced all the back to England before the early colonies.

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A Futile Attempt To Improve The Internet

Posted on September 22, 2019 by JC

A very simple post this time and also the first (and perhaps only), post this month.

I went through and scanned all the images in an old Sunday Missal I bought a while ago. With the amount of horrible, vile, distasteful, unpleasant or just plain silly images on the Internet—let this go some way to improving it. These are probably all around somewhere anyway but it would be nice if we could make nice pictures more likely to appear in Google image searches.

Feel free to save and spread as I assume there is no copyright issue here.

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Transgenderism & Transubstantiation

Posted on August 4, 2019 by JC

In the Catholic Church it is believed that at the consecration the bread and wine become the body and blood of Christ. Although they remain so in appearance, they are no longer bread and wine. The Catechism of the Council of Trent explains that:

the whole substance of the bread is changed by the power of God into the whole substance of the body of Christ, and the whole substance of the wine into the whole substance of His blood, and this, without any change in our Lord Himself.

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The Lion King: A Subversive Masterpiece

Posted on July 8, 2019 by JC

I always have a number of topics/ideas in drafts and this is one I’ve probably had for the longest time. I usually get around to them eventually and the fact that this has now been written is proof of that. As you shall see, it is a good time for me to complete it now. 

Disney has been out of ideas for a long time and if not for Pixar, it is hard to imagine that their animation studios would still exist today. They have been steadily remaking many of their better known animated movies as live-action spectacles. Most recently was Aladdin and July will see the release of The Lion King. These remakes are pointless at best, but they at least give a reason to look back at the original films.

The 1994 release of The Lion King was one of the most significant film events of my childhood. The other two would be the live-action Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Jurassic Park. I still remember going to see them and they are all films I still enjoy today. The equivalent for literature would be having books like The Chronicles of Narnia, The Secret Garden and The Magic Faraway Tree read to me by parents and teachers. As I observed with TMNT a little while back, viewing these films again as an adult gives you a knew appreciation. That is assuming they were made to be more than quick cash-grabs for children which these films were.

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Captain Catholic or Captain Compromise?

Posted on June 23, 2019 by JC

Battlelines by Tony Abbott
Melbourne University Press, June 1st, 2013 (first published in 2009)

Not being good at being relevant, I decided not only to read but also review this book a decade after it was first published. This is after Tony Abbott won the 2013 election, was deposed as Prime Minister in 2015 and most recently; has lost the seat he held since 1994 in the 2019 Federal Election. The decade since this was published has been both cruel and kind. So in a way it is relevant to look at what the man thought before he had the chance to put it into practice. I don’t have any published proof but Tony Abbott was the main leading Liberal I thought best placed to win back government back in 2007 and I was right. Of course, you only have my word for this.

I wrote about Tony Abbott a few years ago and after reading Battlelines, I still stand by what I wrote. As with Cory Bernardi, he is the kind of person I’m inclined to like because of how widely he disliked he is by his political enemies. As I concluded back then, I think he is a good bloke. Battlelines is far more political than personal though and I have taken much issue with the weakness of leading conservative figures and despite Abbott being portrayed as particularly right-wing, he is no less immune to criticism. It will become clear as you read, that this media image of him is far from accurate.

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The Absolute State of Video Games

Posted on May 26, 2019 by JC

As one of my resolutions for this year is to reduce the amount I play/buy and my overall involvement with gaming as a hobby, I have naturally been reflecting on the reasons why I came to make this decision. There are many and this is an attempt to put them down in writing.

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