Felicia Day and the Strange World of Geek Girl Gamers

Computer Games, Social Networking, Television, , , , , , , , , ,
When I become really famous, I’m so not dating any of you!

The other day, I was following an argument about one of the comic book conventions when the subject turned to girl gamers, and at first was as I expected: Every guy on the forum was for them. And then the conversation turned sour, really sour. And that’s when it started to attract my attention. At one point, the conversation turned to the subject of Felicia Day, which started out positive, and then it, too, turned negative. And that’s when I started to realize there was something going on that might get missed by a lot of people. Let me explain.

For those of you who don’t know, Felicia Day is an actress who stars in her own web series The Guild, which is about a bunch of really nerdy people who play an Everquest/World of Warcraft-like online, persistent universe game. The characters are quite funny, including an always out of work guild leader, a slacker who works at a run-down fast food place, an overweight housewife who loves the game more than her family, an Asian temptress woman who has no actual skills other than the game, a second generation Indian-U.S. citizen who has a crush on Felicia Day, and of course, Felicia as a semi-employed, overthinking teenage (or older) girl who is addicted to the game but can’t seem to make her real world work out in spite of the online world. Their adventures are somewhat expected, and funny, and every now and then a somewhat famous actor will show up as a bit character in the series (like Wil Wheaton from Star Trek: The Next Generation fame as Wesley Crusher).

Anyway, now that you know a little bit about the web series, it’s probably significant to point out that before this series became famous, Felicia Day was in a few other shows, most notably a small character arc in Buffy: The Vampire Slayer series. However, since Guild fame, Felicia Day has started showing up in a lot of other geek-related shows like a prominent part in the last few seasons of Eureka, and Dragon Age: Redemption. For those who are fans of Felicia Day, there’s never been a debate over how her attractiveness has attracted a lot of guys to her banner, especially when she has a tendency to star in geek-related types of shows.

And this is where the debate headed when I caught onto the discussion. One individual pointed out that while Felicia Day may be funny at parts in her series, he also suspected that without the appeal to geekness, there’s a strong chance that Felicia Day would have been ignored as just another semi-attractive female actress when there are so many more attractive ones out there instead. So, the argument morphed into a belief that Felicia’s appeal to geekness is for audience value, not because she happens to be an actual geek/nerd who loves all of the things that geeks/nerds like. Basicallly, the argument goes that she found a niche she could fill and is trying hard to bankroll it as much as she can before someone else more attractive comes along.

Recently, there’s been a pretty large backlash against attractive women who try to make a living off of geek-related appearances, such as comic book conventions where infamous “booth babes” are there to convince horny geek guys to buy the wares of their benefactors. But this has been a complaint for many years, and yet it hasn’t stopped major companies from hiring voiceless babes to sell products to average guy gamers out there.

But the complaint isn’t really even about those types of women. The complaint is about a fakeness of the women who pretend to be geeks in hopes of becoming THE geek girl that guys are interested in. There used to be an old joke at geek venues, where a semi-attractive woman would be considered a goddess at a geek convention but not get a second look at the local mall where so many other attractive women would get even more attention. And there’s something to be said for that.

What’s interesting is that there have been massive appeals to geeks these days in hopes of winning them over with “geek girls”. A lot of television shows are centered around this premise. An example is The Big Bang Theory, which is a semi-humorous show that basically tells the same joke over and over again but changes the wording. It has one generally attractive woman named Penny who immediately becomes the love lust of one of the main characters. And then it becomes the infamous: How can such a geek ever win the love of such a beautiful woman? This subject has been covered ad nauseum by so many other shows and movies in the past, yet the laugh track tries to make it appear as if they’re breaking new ground. The girl who plays Penny is now on the level of supermodel fandom, and to be honest, she’s really not all that attractive, nor is she really all that great of an actress.

We’re starting to see a lot of this concept played over and over again, and each time it happens it becomes more annoying than the last time. Summer Glau, who was the young girl who played the crazy young girl in Serenity (and the series Firefly) has made a name for herself by showing up in all sorts of geek types of shows. At some point, if you were watching something very geeky, it almost became an expectation that she was going to show up at some point. I remember thinking that while watching the abysmally bad The Cape once, and then the next moment, there she was. Attractive girl. Semi-okay actress. But there’s this expectation that somehow she’s now the go to girl for geek shows.

I think that’s becoming somewhat problematic. It’s almost as if really hot actresses are thinking that they can build a career for themselves if they appeal to geek guys that they would never date in the real world. And then when those guys try to approach them at comic book events, they shun them as leppers, proving that they really only wanted the money and fame but really aren’t the geek girls they claimed to be.

With television trying to appeal to the lowest common denominator, we’ll probably see a lot more of this n the future. It’s always been my impression that there are actresses out there who would rather skip the hard work of entertainment and just jump into the winning circle, which they seem to think that appealing to geeks will allow them to do. However, when more and more keep trying to become part of the dynamic, it makes it that much harder for the ones who actually are part of that original circle (actual geek girls).

Now, I don’t know Felicia Day personally, but she’s always appeared, at least to me, to be on the surface about being a geek, or part of the geek environment. But the comments of others make it hard to escape the possibility that she might just be part of that cadre of people who saw an easy audience and went after it, while biting their lips about how disgusted they are at the members of that particular audience.

Has Been Viewed (since August 20, 2021): 741

The Strange World of Free to Play (F2P) Games

Business, Computer Games, Music, Social Networking, Technology, , , , , , , , , , ,

Lately, I’ve been playing City of Heroes, which for those who don’t know it, is a massively multiplayer online persistant world game, often referred to as an MMO, or an MMORPG (for role playing game). Years ago, I started playing the game, when I was bored with whatever other MMO I was playing at the time, and recently, I installed it again and decided to pursue its new play model.

You see, in the old days, the game used to cost $15 a month to play. Now, in order to attract more players, the game has turned into a Free to Play (F2P) game, much like the previous success of Lord of the Rings Online, which went to a F2P model in hopes of avoiding going backrupt. And it succeeded, which has breathed new life into other games that don’t want to go the route of Star Wars Galaxies (which closed shop after not being able to maintain a consistent player base.

The way a F2P model tends to work is that you are allowed access to certain areas, and maybe certain characters, but some parts of the world/universe are off limits or you have to pay a little bit more in order to access those areas or use extra characters. Not really wanting to do the barter thing with every little thing in the game, I subscribed to a VIP membership, which is essentially the same sort of $15 a month I was playing before. This gives me complete access to everything, although I have noticed that every now and then I still buy something that is “extra” in the game.

Which brings up a thing that has kind of bothered me about this model. If I’m someone who is a willing subscriber, I really should be given 100 percent access to everything. Yet, I still feel a bit nickle and dimed in this type of environment. But I appreciate the game, so I have been willing to shell out a bit more money just to contribute to the game I hope to be playing for some time.

Which brings me to how this sort of model doesn’t work. And Blizzard, the makers of World of Warcraft and Diablo 3 comes to mind. World of Warcraft is a pay to play game (P2P), and that’s fine. But the developers (or owners) have become somewhat greedy. They have continued to insert things into the game that they want you to pay for outside of the game. So, even though they’re making a crapload of money for their product, they’re still trying to nickle and dime people beyond the quarters they’re already getting. And don’t get me started on Diablo 3, which is a game that cost me $59.99 to buy (or was it $69.99?), and then they launched the game with all intentions of adding a “pay Blizzard’s greed” auction house, where you will pay real money to buy things in the game.

Years ago, Blizzard was seen as the good guy when it came to games, but lately, I can’t say the same. Diablo 3, for sake of clarification, sucked. It was a crappy game that wasn’t worth the money, the time, or even the energy. The fact that it had the name of two of the greatest games in history as what it was supposed to be a sequel made it even worse. Diablo and Diablo 2 were both great games. They even made the game required to be online at all times, which I suspect had more to do with hoping to get people to feel comfortable with giving money to the auction house model (single players would have never gone online where they’d have to see the auction house every time they signed onto the game) than it was for security or any other stupid reason.

A recent major name in online games is Star Wars: The Old Republic, which I played when it first released and enjoyed it for the first month or so. The game was missing a lot of needed content, so I gave up on it. Now, it’s supposedly going to be going F2P, mainly because they milked every nickle and dime they could get out of the subscription model. I doubt I’ll ever play it again, even though I had fun with it when it first released. The problem with the game was that it was completely on rails the entire time, and an MMO requires a world where you can go anywhere and do anything. That was never part of the very linear model of SWTOR.

Which brings me back to City of Heroes. I enjoy the game and play it a lot. But I fear that there’s this attempt to make all games so-called F2P, when in reality the companies are hoping to rake in dollars through this model. Bioware has announced that Command & Conquer: Generals 2 is going to be released as a F2P game, yet be online all of the time, and there will be no single player game. I suspect it’s going to be a major failure, but that’s just my opinion. I see the reason for such a release is not because that’s the way the market is going but because executives of gaming companies see this as an easy way to separate people from their wallets. Unfortunately, what they don’t realize is that most people who opt into these dynamics are of the older gamer base, and we’re not stupid or as gullible as they’d like us to be. That’s why several versions of this model will fail.

What a lot of these games are forgetting to realize is that what makes people pay to play these games is that they are designed to be fun, not because there’s a free model that they’re attracted to first. That’s why companies like Zynga and anything affiliated with Facebook is struggling these days. People don’t want to be fleeced by companies using them to make money. They want to have fun. And AFTER they have fun, if they perceive that there’s MORE fun to be add by contributing to the company, they will. But holding out a carrot and then giving nothing but expecting everything is going to be the reason why so many of these future properties fail.

And then we’ll start to read all sorts of articles about how no one is buying computer games any more, kind of like the music industry lamenting about how people aren’t buying music. They are buying music; just not from you.

And that’s our lesson for the day. Now, it’s time for me to get back to my superhero Desktop Support Girl, the savior of all broken computer systems in Paragon City.

Has Been Viewed (since August 20, 2021): 830

What is the rationale for charging the poor more than everyone else?

Business, Economics, News, , , ,

I was dropping off a friend of mine at a car repair place on the other side of town last night when I decided to pick up some McDonald’s chicken mcnuggets on the way home. I’d never stopped at any place in this neighborhood before, but this was one of those ethnically diverse areas where most of the signs were in Spanish, bordering on an African-American-based population area. This was the kind of area where a lot of economically struggling families live, although not so bad a neighborhood as to constitute a fear for anyone visiting the neighborhood. 

I’m a creature of habit. I tend to buy the same thing constantly, so the meal I always get costs me $6.46 at the McDonald’s I normally frequent. This time, however, the charge came to $6.66. For some reason, a few miles from the other McDonald’s, my cost was twenty cents more than what it normally cost me. I paid it, but it left me thinking, why is the charge more here than in the nicer area where I normally get my food? 

It’s not like the people in this area can afford more. Economically, they are less well off than the people who frequent the McDonald’s in my neighborhood. Yet, because they are figuratively in a completely different universe than the other McDonald’s, the pricing is completely different. 

I remember when I lived in San Francisco, and I worked at the Hilton downtown. The people at the Hilton liked to say they were in the “financial district”. In reality, they were in the Tenderloin, one of the lowest of the economic areas in San Francisco. 

Across the street from the hotel, I used to grab a carton of milk every day. It was one of those habit things where I never thought much about it. However, one day, I was a paying more attention than usual, and I noticed that the Arabic clerk always looked at a sheet of tax prices that was centered under a glass sheet on the main counter. My milk cost 99 cents, but the clerk looked on his list and then told me my price for the milk (with tax) was now $1.35. Right then and there, I thought, wait, nowhere in the country is the local sales tax 36 percent. NOWHERE. So, I inquired about this. The clerk said, “tax.” I informed him that 36 percent is outrageous. 

His response wasn’t “Wow, you’re right” and then charged me the correct amount. Instead, he took the milk out of the bag and proceeded to kick me out of his store. When I protested, I actually saw his hand moving towards a spot under the counter, where I noticed there was a revolver. Taking my losses, I left the store. 

What this taught me is that there’s an outright intent to screw people over whenever you can. In the Tenderloin district, I suspect that store owners figure the people are too stupid to realize they’re being cheated, and they’re dimed and quartered (as opposed to being nickle and dimed) endlessly. 

So, what are your thoughts? Is this capitalism at its norm? Is this corruption? Or do people just generally not care because it’s happening to the poor, and they’re supposed to be victims any way?

Has Been Viewed (since August 20, 2021): 719

One day soon, I hope Taylor Swift writes a song about me

Music, Relationships, , , ,
(Courtesy of the Los Angeles Times)

I was just reading that Taylor Swift appears to be in a relationship with one of the Kennedy kids. Last week, I think she was dating one of the Schwarzeneger kids. The week before that John Mayer was complaining about how her song about him (“Dear John”) wasn’t really fair. According to the media, practically all of Taylor Swift’s songs appear to be about ex-boyfriends who dumped her, or were dumped by her.

Therefore, I am now convinced that it is about time that Taylor Swift think about writing a song about me. On the surface, her relationships don’t last very long, so for all jokes and giggles, we can say she and I have already run the course of our tumultuous relationship, and I’ll even accept that she dumped me. I mean, she’s Taylor Swift, and I’m just Duane Gundrum. So, I’m okay with that.

Now, it’s time for the inevitable song about our whirlwind relationship and eventual break up. Which leaves me wondering what great poetry she’d use to explain what went wrong with our romance. I’m thinking (just for some ideas to help her muse build upon):

You always leave the seat up

Never clean the bath tub

And always watch reruns of Star Trek.

Woooooooah!

Or something like that. Whatever she goes with, it will be a big hit and then I’ll finally have served my purpose in life.

So, Taylor, why you always leave me waiting?

Woooooooah!

Has Been Viewed (since August 20, 2021): 794

The Problem with Investing in Imaginary Goods

Business, Economics, News, Social Networking, , , , , , , ,

Today, Zynga’s stock kind of went into a tailspin downwards. Zynga, in case you’re not aware, is famous for building software that used to consist of games you could play specifically on Facebook. Then they went public, making lots of money and continued to try to make games (sometimes in Facebook and sometimes outside of it). At the time of their IPO, all I could think to myself was “this is a company that doesn’t really make anything that’s profitable.” Their profit comes from trying to get people to pay for virtual goods IN A FREE ONLINE GAME. While pay for play works in some venues, like MMO’s like City of Heroes and Lord of the Rings Online, people didn’t go to Zynga because they were interested in playing a specific game. Zynga, on the other hand, tries to interest people in their site and THEN trying to get them to play some of their games. And then if that works, they try to get them to pay money for the game they’re already getting for free.

Does anyone see a problem here?

Well, their stock is continuing to go down, mainly because their “hits” are very old, and they’ve never really done anything to convince potential customers that they have something just as good. Farmville was their famous property, and even though I played it at the time, I never invested a dime in the game, and after I grew bored with it, I stopped playing it and anything else Zynga had to offer.

Facebook, however, has been interlinked with Zynga since the beginning. Facebook gets a bit of profit from anything that Zynga makes from its transactions.

Which means I should probably talk about Facebook, too. This is another online company that has absolutely no value whatseover. Basically, it’s value is to get people to sign on and then tell other people who are signed on what they’re doing. Facebook offers nothing other than being the park bench where people are sitting.

When Facebook went public, it was already feared that there was no real revenue stream available from the company. All it really did was advertise, and it doesn’t do it very well. In its early days, I paid for an ad to sell one of my books on their site, and the results were horribly bad. I never paid for the service again. Instead, I got much better returns from places like Goodreads.com. Facebook, as people have started to realize, has a customer base that shows up, looks at traffic and then goes away. Some stay online forever, but they NEVER press any of the buttons that take them to the ads. In other words, Facebook has absolutely no revenue stream whatsoever when it comes to advertisements. The only way they could make money is to charge people for using the service, but once they did that, their service would become a graveyard.

This is the problem with companies that sell imaginary goods. Some, like Lord of the Rings Online, which actually offers something tangible (a lot of fun and a strong customer base that has remained with them for years, first as paying customers), Facebook and Zynga offer nothing really tangible. Zynga doesn’t even offer very good games. They’re casual games, which means that they’re meant to be played as you’re doing something else. Think of their games as almost an afterthought. Whereas, Lord of the Rings Online is a game meant to be played with your full attention.

Facebook, as well, offers nothing but a place for people to report their happenings. If you’re not a celebrity, chances are pretty good that not a lot of people (aside from really close friends and maybe family) really care. Even Google Plus, which does appeal mainly to following celebrities, isn’t all that popular, no matter how much Google wishes that weren’t so.

Facebook has a few days until its reckoning emerges. You see, they have to reveal to stockholders just how well they’re doing. I suspect they’re not doing well. With Zynga’s loss reported today, it’s only a matter of time before we hear that Facebook isn’t doing any better. And then their stock is going to go down really fast.

It’s unfortunate, but then we’re dealing with companies that have no actual value, other than perceived value and fantasies of being more than they really are. I like to think that their value is comparable to my ability to date Jessica Alba. Sure, it’s very possible it might happen, but she’s really an imaginary good (a really, really GOOD good), but the reality of my dating her is pretty dismal. That’s how I see Facebook and Zynga. Slowly, I’m noticing more and more people are starting to feel the same way.

Has Been Viewed (since August 20, 2021): 669

Media STILL doesn’t understand the difference between a “sex scandal” and “rape”

News, , , , , , , ,

Lackland Air Force Base is having a bit of a “sex” problem lately. It appears that one of its soldiers allegedly raped young recruits going through training. Now, that’s a real problem, and I sure hope they get to the bottom of this and make steps to keep it from happening again.

But my gripe isn’t with the case itself, but with the media and how it has this real problem whenever it comes to framing “sex” stories. There’s this, which is a newspaper article from the Global Post, which actually gets its story from NBC. This story refers to the act of rape as a “sex scandal”. Okay, for all of those who will never read my blog, here it goes:

A “sex scandal” is something that occurs when someone has been caught with his penis where it shouldn’t be. That’s the likes of a politician who is fooling around on his or her wife/husband. That’s someone who got arrested for soliciting a prostitute. THAT is a “sex scandal”.

Rape is forcing sex on someone. Okay, there are all sorts of variations of that, but usually it’s an act of violence, or coercion, or forcing someone to do something he/she wouldn’t normally do in the form of sex. Notice how it’s NOTHING like a “sex scandal”?

The media has this HORRIBLE tendency to call “rape” a “sex scandal”, possibly because they’re under the impression that using the word “sex” in the headline will cause more eyes to look at their story. It’s wrong. It’s incorrect. It’s misleading. And it does a HUGE disservice to the people who were victimized by an ACTUAL RAPE.

That’s all I have to say about that.

Has Been Viewed (since August 20, 2021): 705

Dealing With Plagiarism in an Academic Environment

Education, , ,

The other day, I was grading papers for the Communications course when I came across a paper that was so obviously not the work of the student who turned it in. As a matter of fact, it was completely stolen from an academic journal word for word. Finding the original source wasn’t difficult, but figuring out what to do wit it AFTER finding the original source then became the problem. I mean, honestly, what to you do after you find out a student has completely stolen his work that he has then turned into you?

Seriously.

That’s the dilemma I ended up with because there are no set answers as to what to do after you find out your student has dishonestly created his work for your class. Sure, you could just give him an F and move on, but is it really that easy?

Here’s the situation I ended up with, because right as soon as I found out, I didn’t know what to do. The work was obviously stolen, but my administration wasn’t around to really offer me any insight. As a matter of fact, because this was an evening course during the summer, my back up staff was nonexistent. The main secretary was “off” until the fall semester started up again, and even the “go to” person for her wasn’t in the office when I walked there to find out what to do going forward. Basically, I was on my own.

And to be honest, I didn’t know what to do. Sure, I could be an asshole and condemn the student right from the start, but really what good does that really do? It proves I caught the student, and he pays the penalty but does anything possible come out of that situation?

Yeah, I caught him. But so what?

This is a community college course where I’m an adjunct instructor. Catching a student teaching doesn’t really lead to any black and white solutions. Basically, a student gets kicked out school and that’s that. What exactly did we solve by my direct response? Personaly, nothing. A struggling student is now out of school and the teacher proved he was an asshole. Not really sure we got much out of this situation.

If I let him get off scot free, what do we get? We get a student who is going to go to his next class and see if he can get away with that one just as well as he got away with the last few ones, because you know I’m not the first one he cheated in. So, did I just kick the can down the read?

So, I ask you? What should I do?

Has Been Viewed (since August 20, 2021): 791

Strangely enough, everyone but me is an expert on diabetes

Education, Healthcare, , , , ,

If you’ve been reading my blog for some time, you know about my whole adventure with being a diabetic. For a number of years, I lived on the edge of the problem by actually going out of my way to change my lifestyle so that what I ate was copacetic with what I needed. I completely changed my eating habits to compensate for this, and as a result, I’ve had to be very careful about what I put into my body.

Having said that, no matter how much work you do at this sort of thing, there are so-called “experts” all around me who are convinced that because they saw a TV show once, knew some guy, or just happened to hear something on the news once, they know more than someone who lives through it on a day to day basis. When I first started dealing with the problem, one of the first things I did was switch from regular soda to diet soda (or pop). This started the “you know that diet soda is just as bad as regular soda, right?” commentaries. Those ranged from the totally stupid people (“just because it’s diet doesn’t mean it doesn’t have calories”) to the New Age stupid (“the chemicals in diet soda are worse for you than if you were just imbibing regular cubes of sugar”). And there’s no shutting them up either. Go to the fridge to grab a diet soda, and you’re guaranteed a five minute screed on all things bad about diet soda. Tell them to stop lecturing you, and they do it anyway, because they’re convinced they’re doing it “for your own good”. One day, I was actually lectured by a woman who felt that diet soda would one day kill me. She would have continued the lecture, but she had to take a break and go outside because it had been fifteen minutes since she last had a cigarette.

I went to work out a few weeks ago, and someone told me that my choice of exercises (the exercise bike) was a poor choice for someone with diabetes because it didn’t affect the cardiovascular system as well as some other exercise he named. The fact that I went from sitting in front of the television set to actually working out should have been an indication that criticism wasn’t necessary, but strangely enough that fact had little sway or influence.

The other day, I was in the cafeteria choosing EXACTLY the same thing I eat every day in order to constantly maintain the correct blood sugar. Someone who knew I had just come out of the hospital felt it necessary to criticize me over my choice of lunch food. I know the person meant well, but just once I wish people would just shut the fuck up and leave me alone. I choose what I eat because a) it appeals to me, and b) it works. I don’t want to hear about tofu, soy milk products, modified starches or whatever. It’s bad enough I have to change anything in my life because doctors inform me of what I should or should not do. Having some clueless wannabe interject with naive information is really annoying.

Has Been Viewed (since August 20, 2021): 705

Civilization V: Gods & Kings Review

Computer Games, , , , ,

The expansion for Civilization V arrived a few weeks ago, and like any Civilization-obsessed geek, I had to go out and buy it. I should put forth a disclaimer right off the start: I was not a major fan of Civilization V when it released. There were a couple of problems inherent in that game, such as it required better graphics capabilities than I had when I first bought it, it dumbed down Civilization IV to the point that I thought they were just phoning this version in, and it just seemed way too easy for an empire building simulation. The graphics problem I solved by getting a much more powerful machine (it’s amazing how much that solution really solves). The dumbing down really hasn’t gotten that much better, and well, the game being too easy may have finally been addressed by the expansion.

The expansion does make the game a bit more complicated, and it does make it a lot harder to master and win. So both of those are great things.

The expansion brings in one of the left-out features that were present in Civilization IV, and by that I mean religion. Unlike Civ IV, you don’t just choose the name of a known religion and then treat it as some generic religion (in which all religions have the exact same characteristics). In Civ V, when you finally gain enough religion points, you can design your own religion from scratch, adding all sorts of different attributes that will benefit from all sorts of different things happening in the game (like population increases adding more religious points, money, culture, or any other number of possibilities). As you grow the religion, you can add more and more features to it so that it actually does something for your civilization, rather than act as some random number generator that does the same thing for everyone else.

The second thing they added was espionage. I’m still a bit underwhelmed by it, as it doesn’t add a lot of espionage, but a couple of agents that you can control to do espionage or to act as counter-intelligence agents. If you have a large empire, espionage will work against you because there’s little way to protect you against enemy agents when they can strike you at any one of your cities, and you only have enough counterintelligence agents to cover a couple of your cities. Towards the end game, you can build all sorts of counter-espionage elements, like police stations and that kind of thing, but for many years you will be vulnerable and that gets really frustrating when you invested all of your energy into technology and then some stupid country just keeps stealing it all from you, and there’s NOTHING you can do to stop them.

The other additions are new world wonders, new units, and several new empire leaders. Those, as expected, advance the game in numerous ways, and let’s just say that they’re all welcome additions.

For me, the expansion makes the original game a lot more playable than it was when I first bought it. But it still feels like this version of the game was dumbed down more than it ever should have been, and no expansion is really going to fix that. Having said that, it’s still one of the better games out there. And therefore, I give the expansion a 7.0/10.0, whereas the original was only about a 5.5/10.0.

Has Been Viewed (since August 20, 2021): 780

Supreme Court health care decision reveals how clueless mainstream reporters really are

Education, Healthcare, News, Politics, , , , , , ,

Like a lot of other people, I was waiting on the Supreme Court decision over health care legislation. At the time, I happened to be in the hospital awaiting the decision, but that’s really not a significant factor. However, when CNN, and then Fox News, announced the decision IMMEDIATELY after it was written, I didn’t get very excited. The reason being: I figured they’d probably get it wrong.

And they did. CNN first reported that it was repealed. It wasn’t. Fox News then announced something equally stupid, and they were wrong as well.

The important question is Why did both of them really screw up the decision?

Well, the answer is simple. Reporters write differently than Supreme Court justices. You see, the reporter process is to report the decision first, and then they continue to write the story, filling in relevant facts later. The most irrelevant facts are left for the end, just in case an editor has to snip the end of a story. This way, the important parts of a story remain untouched.

The Supreme Court doesn’t work that way. If they issue a 30 page majority opinion, that means that somewhere on page 17 or 18 you might actually get the decision. Everything else is legalese and details that back up that decision. Quite often, you can read for pages and still have no clue where they’re going with the decision.

I learned this in graduate school when I used to have to write briefs on Supreme Court decisions. There were times when I’d read through the whole thing and still couldn’t tell you what was the decision. When you’re a reporter, you’re expected to be able to figure out that ruling quickly, and what happened was they failed at it. They kept trying to read the first few pages of the brief and basically got lost. So, when they got it completely wrong, it made complete sense.

That’s why I waited. I figured after a couple of hours, someone would actually read through the whole thing and then report what actually happened.

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