A Gamma’s Journey

Posted on April 28, 2019 by JC

mogworldMogworld by Yahtzee Croshaw
Dark Horse Books, April 22nd, 2008

Yahtzee Croshaw is best known as the creator of Zero Punctuation, an irreverent video game review series that has been published at Escapist Magazine since 2007. I stopped regularly watching it many years ago but I do still see a video here and there and I have been impressed with its staying power. Croshaw has proved that the series was much more than the gimmick based solely on how long he has been doing it. The show is substantially the same as it was when he published his first few videos on YouTube well over a decade ago and still reaches a large audience.

People have a tendency to look at someone who suddenly becomes successful as it is merely luck but this is rarely the case. Zero Punctuation was in reality one of the many things he had produced that happened to find a large audience. It wasn’t just a fluke. He had already been making text adventures, comics and writing before he tried his hand at video. And the success of this series also gave him exposure enough to become a published author. His first book is the subject of this review.

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Enjoying and Obsessing

Posted on April 17, 2019 by JC

While I haven’t watched the new trailer and am not at all interested in the new film, it was hard to miss this and the ensuing reaction and I think it is worth posting about. What I am talking about is embedded below and at the link [now deleted].

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Ancient Egypt for Moderns

Posted on April 7, 2019 by JC

egyptAncient Egypt: All That Matters by Barry Kemp
John Murray, December 3rd, 2015

I recently got in mind that I wanted to learn more about Ancient Egypt as I considered this a big general gap in my historical knowledge. So searching around for good books I came across a large textbook that was quite expensive by Barry Kemp. The price having put me off buying, I turned to the library and found what I thought was the same book. As it turned out, it was a shorter book for the general reader but by the same author. Having little time to include extra reading, this seemed like a good place to start filling in the gap.

It wasn’t.

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Call me Underwhelmed

Posted on March 31, 2019 by JC

I have been on something of a mission to make sure I have read most of the books that are considered “great”. When I say this, I don’t mean books that have appeared on New York Times Bestseller Lists or Oprah’s Book Club but simply books that have stood the test of time. Books that people of many stripes tend to agree are great works of literature. Most of the time, this is really a good way to go  about reading but sometimes it isn’t. Catcher in the Rye being a perfect example of the latter. Now if you’ve not gathered by the post title, the book I’ve most recently crossed off the classics list is Moby-Dick.

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Coming Home

Posted on March 24, 2019 by JC

It has been almost a year since I returned to live in Australia after close to ten years abroad. In coming back to Australia I find myself feeling somewhat like Odysseus arriving home after his eventful journey from Troy. I find my home occupied by people abusing the hospitality they were given and many watching too weak or powerless to do anything about it. Where it differs from the Epic is of course, I am no great adventurer nor was I away doing battle and making a name for myself. Odysseus was not as I recall subject to any treachery within his own household either.

I had been making fairly regular trips back to the country year to year for short amounts of time. During these times I did notice changes such as the clientele at a shopping mall I frequented growing up changing completely. But it is nothing like what I have experienced just living here the last year.

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Never saying anything

Posted on February 3, 2019 by JC

The title requires some elaboration because I could mean a lot of things by it. What I specifically have in mind is the way people are unwilling, reluctant, afraid or just not motivated to speak up or say anything when they see something wrong. I mean this especially with regard to family where they truly have an obligation that can not be excused by unfamiliarity with the person. This also applies to leaders and organisations who refrain from dealing with bad actors who they are responsible for.

This topic comes somewhat under the umbrella of complacency but it is actually worse than this. It is also yet another topic where in writing I have to be immediately clear that I am not making an exception of myself. I’m just as guilty of what I will be talking about here though I have been actively training myself not to for a while.

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Political Theatre and the Supernatural

Posted on January 27, 2019 by JC

More than ten years ago while in the United States, I went on what I believe was called an “experiential learning trip” with a group of college students through famous areas of the civil rights area. This included places like the birth place of Martin Luther King Jr., the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama and the Bus Stop where Rosa Parks got on the bus she famously refused to sit at the back of.

While at the time I was still nominally on board with most of the standard stories of history, I was aware that the latter event wasn’t a random act of civil disobedience but calculated political activism. As I’ve written, whether or not the cause was just, is not my concern. The issue is with how it is portrayed and the way this story is generally communicated is not the way it really happened.

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Known Knowns & Unknown Knowns

Posted on January 11, 2019 by JC

phony
The Phoney Victory: The World War II Illusion by Peter Hitchens
I.B. Tauris, August 30th, 2018

Peter Hitchens has described himself as the obituarist for Britain in some interviews with him I have viewed online. This was particularly true with regard to his book The Abolition of Britain but it is also the main theme of much of his writing and public speaking for which he is most well-known. The no-nonsense, honest and cold assessment he documents of his homeland is often depressing and gloomy and I have found myself missing a world I never knew while reading his work. But outside the spiritual reality of Christianity, there isn’t much reason for optimism when it comes to the future of his nation or indeed its daughter nations.

Although I at first found this hard to accept, he is essentially correct. Even were the majority of the British to turn suddenly and swiftly back to the virtues and beliefs that made their country great, the country that was can not be resurrected. If such an unlikely event were to happen, it would be a creation — it would be new. It wouldn’t be what was lost. As the more sensible conservatives know; you can’t just bring back the 1950s. This is just cultural role-playing and no more sincere or serious than those on the right calling for a return to the pagan gods of old.

In The Phoney Victory Peter Hitchens takes on one of the last lingering moments of glory left to the British people (outside of their strange worship of their national health service), and lays bare the reality. In doing so, he doesn’t take away from the genuine courage displayed by many British or indeed take any shots where they aren’t warranted. He just exposes many myths as just that as well as the less savoury, though no less relevant aspects of Britain’s involvement in World War II.

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IQ and Ability

Posted on December 23, 2018 by JC

I have been interested in IQ for quite a few years now – especially due to its relevance in the forbidden topic of race. I was curious about discovering my own IQ as a result of this interest. The easiest and cheapest way seemed to be through Mensa but where I was living until recently made this difficult and it is only this year that I’ve had the chance to go through and do it. I estimated I would be above average but not by much and expected to be dragged down because of the way I struggled with mathematics and science in school.

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Debt & Complacency

Posted on December 16, 2018 by JC

Modern society is run on debt and complacency. To make clear what I mean by these two words, I mean debt in the normal monetary sense and complacency much as it is generally understood as contentment without regard or recognition of any danger. Before going further into what I mean, I want to also make it clear that I’m not just complaining about this – nor am I excluding myself from guilt in this paradigm. I am just as guilty of being complacent and I have certainly contributed to the debt. It is true there are people who are more to blame than others but punishing them won’t change what needs to be done about it, nor reduce the suffering we are in for.

It is no secret that the more advanced, industrialised countries in the world have been living beyond their means for a long time.  Whether you are talking about retirement/pension services, health care, home loans, car loans, credit cards, insurance liabilities, defence spending, education or even grants for arts. Far too much money is being spent and it is not sustainable. It is even possible to calculate what share of the debt newborns are subject to though I am not sure how these studies measure it.

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