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Youtube and Controversies: Political attitudes, conservatism and the struggle with being non-political

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For those who don’t actually already know this, my Ph.D work is in political science, and since then I’ve taught political science for years before adding another graduate degree and focusing on communication. However, one thing that always seemed to grate at me was that no matter how hard I tried to be non-political, it was practically impossible. Not for me. But for anyone who happened to be in the audience. Let me explain.

To explain, it’s important to probably point out my political affiliation, because that helps to explain why it’s even stranger. Back when I was first going through undergraduate work at West Point, I was a staunch conservative. There was no problem that I felt couldn’t be solved with our military, states’ rights and did I mention our military? When I got to grad school and started learning massive amounts of information about politics, I started to realize that I hated politics. A lot.

So, I sort of became an anarchist. And that has all sorts of problems if you’re capable of actually understanding what an anarchist is. You see, people think an anarchist is some crazy liberal that throws Molotov cocktails at cops. Well, that was one type of anarchist, specifically the Russians at the turn of last century and maybe the French, well, anytime in history. As an anarchist of my type, what it meant was that I hated the fact that we need a government to do anything because what almost always happens is we become part of corruption and oligarchy, to the point where government is almost always used as a tool to oppress other people. There are good people in government, but over time, those people get drowned out by people who see government as that tool to push through their personal agendas, and there’s no end to the types of agendas they might want to push (social programs, religion, anti-Internet policies, anti-gaming policies, anti-Shania Twain fundamentalism, etc.). What it doesn’t mean is that I want to throw Molotov cocktails at anyone. That requires upper arm strength and exercise, both things I do like to protest against.

Anyway, getting back to my original point, when I was teaching political science, one thing that inevitably happened in class is that some young student would want to know what my political affiliation was. And it was rarely out of actual interest. It was almost always to figure out whether or not to listen to anything I had to say as useful. If I picked an affiliation that was different than his or hers, they discounted everything I had to say. If it was the same, they often felt they knew as much as me and then didn’t have to listen any further. If I chose my usual tact and said that I don’t have an affiliation, or that I don’t discuss it, they automatically decided that it had to be the opposite of the one they had, or they assumed it had to be liberal (no, not sure why that assumption was always made).

That brings me to an interesting phenomenon I’ve come across recently. Over the Christmas break, I found myself overly interested in following a number of channels on Youtube that I found interesting. Mostly, it was ASMR artists, but when that got kind of boring (or I didn’t need to sleep), I started to branch out and find other types of subjects. My first “go to” was gaming channels, but I’ll be honest, the majority of those are awful, often hosted by some teenage mentality that tends to scream into the microphone, or thinks it’s 1980 and has lots of flashy stuff trying to send watchers into seizures. But a few of them were actually pretty good, and one of them is actually a bit of the subject of this post.

I don’t remember how I found it, but I came across a cast called The Quartering, hosted by Jeremy Hambly, a Youtube game industry reviewer who leans to the conservative side of the house. Having watched his podcasts over the last year, I would recommend his site if you’re interested in interesting perspectives on the industry, but at the same time understanding that sometimes he seems to get a little high on himself and takes on fights that are generally left to different avenues of the Internet. An example is how he has a tendency to want to create a space that lacks politics when it comes to computer gaming (something I highly support) but then falls right into the same territory himself when he goes anti SJW (social justice warrior) and becomes political in trying to advocate for not wanting to become political. Yeah, it’s kind of the same thing I ran into when teaching political science, and even though I was completely aware of the problem, the problem always exists. What I did discover to be the ONLY solution is one he hasn’t reached yet, and that’s to stop caring about politics, rather than focusing on politics as an approach to not being political. Yeah, I know that sounds bizarre and strange, but it’s basically the only way to deal with it.

This last week saw some interesting developments for Hambly as he lost one of his main sponsorship deals with a coffee company when it was alerted to one of his recent videos (that pissed off people who tend to get riled by SJW politics), so he decided he was no longer going to accept sponsorship deals. Unfortunately, this type of drama continues, no matter what someone does about it.

What I would like to say is that when he’s not dealing with actual politics, his information is actually pretty interesting. However, one thing I have noticed is that because he has such large numbers of subscribers (I believe it is upwards of 100,000 subscribers, but could be off on that, although I know it’s pretty damn high), Hambly does often ignore the fact that his influence quite often becomes a McLuhan message is the medium factor (he’ll go on an anti-Electronic Arts rant and then laugh when EA suffers financially, arguing that it was EA that caused its downfall, not the fact that perhaps Hambly’s negativity might have attributed to the down turn).

Moving away from Hambly here (as I said, I actually like him and think his information is informative, so I don’t want to get into a criticism mode here), one thing I’ve started to notice is that there are a lot of Youtubers who attempt to adopt the Hambly model, but completely fail to do so, and only make things worse because they turn into shrills for anti-establishment thought without doing anything other than harping on how much enjoyment they get out of the drama. Having watched a lot of this behavior over the last year or so, I am starting to feel that a lot of these commentators are somewhat responsible for the down turn the industry is starting to feel. I mean, think about it: If the majority of the people covering the industry keep talking about how bad the industry is, it’s going to feed the perspective that the industry is nothing but bad.

I used to work for the industry (both Maxis and EA), so I had a unique perspective myself, but at the same time I also realized that there are a lot of diverse minds in that atmosphere and whenever I tried to get a “this is how they feel at this company”, I find myself often realizing that I was putting too much of a spin on the thought based off of anecdotal information I received from a very limited observation of what I was able to see myself.

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.

Review: Homer’s Odyssey by Gwen Cooper

Book Reviews, Books, , , , , , ,

This is one of those stories that grabs onto you from the beginning and pretty much never lets go. I was apprehensive about reading this book, because I’m not really that much of a cat fan (more of a dog pet person myself), but the blurb on the cover kind of hit me, and I was intrigued about finding out more about a blind kitten.

One thing that got me right from the start was the same thing Gwen talks about in her book throughout, and that’s the wrong impression someone gets from expectations of Homer right from the start. People expect this little kitten to be helpless, and you immediately find out that he’s nothing but that. He’s resourceful, full of life and pretty much the life of any party because no one ever taught him that he’s supposed to feel sorry for himself, or even that he’s blind. He is blind from the very early days of his life, so he’s never even known what it’s like to see. But he turns out to be the bravest, most resilient little tyke one might ever experience.

The story deals with Homer, Vashti and Scarlett (who are two of Gwen’s other cats), and it specifically deals with the life of Gwen herself. Where the story starts to bog down a bit is when it gets into Gwen’s own story, and mainly during the first half of the book, it really does sort of slow down as we start to experience more of her memoir than the story of Homer and his fellow cat family. Then it moves onto the author’s love life with Laurence, before it moves onto its conclusion.

However, it’s still a strong recommendation from me because the strongest moments of this memoir come from reading about Homer himself and how nothing you do ever stops him from completely enjoying life as it was meant to be lived. A couple of (SPOILERS HERE) critical moments also make up the narrative to where the story becomes where it deserves its bestseller status, specifically every time Homer experiences a new home and has to acclimate, the time Homer comes to the rescue of Gwen (when a stranger breaks into her house), the horrific period that Gwen goes through during 9/11 when the towers come crashing down (and she lives 5 blocks from Ground Zero), and a gut wrenching moment where Homer hits older age and runs into a near death experience towards the end of the book.

Four (4) out of Five (5) stars: 4/5.

“The Event” and “Chase” Leave a Lot to Be Desired

Television, Writing, , , , , , ,

I gave them both a try. I even continued watching both shows long after I thought they had seriously jumped sharks, shark tanks and the Atlantic Ocean. But nothing about these shows has caused me to think that they’re worth any further watching on my part. Last night’s airing of both is a good example.

The Event

The series started off with a bit of an overhyped dud and has managed to dog paddle its way through the rest of the season. In the very first episode, they presented us with “the event”, or at least what I think was supposed to be the event. A plane was hurtling towards the president, and then out of nowhere it vanished. The next week, the plane reappeared in the desert. Then secret police/military helicopters showed up and may have slaughtered everyone. And then the bodies woke up. And then the bodies were now all prisoners wondering what happened. My writing of this makes it sound a lot more exciting than it really was. To be honest, it’s been extremely boring, accented with huge moments that generally don’t make any sense. And I don’t mean “doesn’t make any sense in a LOST sort of way”. It’s more a “doesn’t make sense in a Cop Rock (remember that show?) sort of way”. Nothing the show has done has caused me to really think: “I can’t wait to see how they pull this off” or “I wonder what’s going to happen next.” Instead, it’s been more like “I really can’t wait until they go to a commercial so I can do something constructive like check email for a spam message I’m hoping to receive.”

Last night’s episode was par for the course. Let me explain. The main actor, who is Jason Ritter, the son of John Ritter, attempted to act his way out of a paper bag in which he showed his range of “I’m in a panic mode cause I’m looking for my girlfriend” and “I’m in anger mode because I’m looking for my girlfriend.” Unfortunately, in the previous episode, he found his girlfriend, so his acting range has no purpose right now, as “I found my girlfriend, so I’m now going to act all frantic for no reason is hopefully not going to be noticed by the audience.”

And that’s a huge part of the problem with the show right there. The acting is atrocious. And I mean ALL of the acting. At first, I thought it was because they had really bad actors, but there are some pretty decent actors here who are doing some seriously horrendous acting, which to me means their director sucks because even bad actors can’t act this badly. An example: One of the main recurring actors is D.B. Sweeney who has done some great things in the past. He was in a show with Terry O’Quinn, the bald guy who plays Locke in LOST, called Harsh Realms, where he played the buddy of the main character, and he was really good in this part. When I saw he was now in The Event, I was actually thinking, wow, they got a good actor, mainly because I was seeing a lot of bad acting. They’ve done nothing great with him, and as a matter of fact, his acting is pretty crappy in this show as well, which immediately tells me that the director seriously sucks.

Another example was the appearance of Paula Malcomson, who plays, well, to be honest, I haven’t a clue who she was playing because I was having a seriously hard time paying attention when she finally appeared. Malcomson is the actress who plays Amanda Graystone in Caprica, who probably has one of the most nuanced parts in television these days on that show. In The Event, they decided that because she was a “serious” actress, they were going to let her show her talents at being completely nuts and off the wall. She puts on a 40 or so second rant that was basically best described as “bad actress overacting”. I half expected the two other actors in the scene to respond with “Really?” because it was so over the top bad acting that I couldn’t imagine anyone else remaining in character for the rest of that scene. But fortunately, we was joined by Jason Ritter and the woman who plays the FBI agent, so the bad acting continued ensue and a good time was had by all.

Let’s move on with the story. In the last episode, they released the mysterious woman who won’t tell the president her secrets because of some strange terrorist demand that the government do so. So, she goes on the subway, drives around for a while and then ends up in a wannabe Starbucks, orders coffee, and then her fellow accomplice throws off a tracking device placed in her food (and now in her) by mixing a similar tracking device in the creamer of the coffee so that soon 50 something people are walking around with the tracking device. And then the good/bad guy working with her ends up beating up one of his fellow FBI agents, burying him in the trunk of his car and then radioing the bad guy holding everyone hostage that he needs to come in.

So, they all move in on a huge warehouse where the bad guy is holding out. Fortunately, the government just so happens to see the mysterious woman walk in through the front door of the warehouse with a CC camera at the last second before she disappears behind the door. So an FBI crack team of guys in military uniforms with FBI blazened on the back of their jackets rush into the building to catch the big bad, mean terrorist. I say this because this leads to a typical police raid drama that should have required the writers and director to have actually watched a typical police raid drama some time  in the past because it has to be the biggest joke of a raid I’ve ever seen. First off, it had to be the slowest raid physically possible. After the crack team breaks through the front door, they waddle forward in as slow a manner as physically possible so that we end up with at least two commercial breaks before they get about fifteen feet past the front door. Before they even get that fifteen feet in, the executives of the FBI then come crashing in behind them. You can tell the executives because they’re the ones that don’t wear any protective gear other than a flack vest, but all have three piece suits, minus the jacket, because somewhere in Hollywood land some informed them that cops look much cooler with the dress shirt, flack vest and hand gun attire than with full body armor and machine guns like the rest of the guys were wearing.

So, in all of this time they’re raiding, the bad guys get away by crawling into a hole in a drain that’s located in the room next to the one where the ten thousand crack soldiers are breaking into their warehouse. And then, and this was my favorite part of the episode, he activates some mysterious glowing bomb and the double agent guy from before decides to sacrifice his life (even though he can get away just by stepping into the drain opening about two feet away from him) because somewhere down the line he had to give up a girl he fell in love with because being an alien (did I mention he was one of the aliens?) he would never age, and well, we learned from watching years of Highlander that you just can’t do that to a woman. But back to the great moment of television history: The President of the United States is watching the invasion over the CC camera, which for some reason is relaying the image in full HD television, and focused directly on the door where the FBI agents busted in. And then, for no apparent reason, the CC camera switches to a full view of the warehouse, and we watch it implode on itself. And all I’m left wondering is: Who the hell switched the camera angle, how did he know to do it at that time, and where did that new image come from? Unfortunately, those questions won’t be answered by The Event because they were stupid mistakes in creating the show, not mysteries within the show itself.

When the episode ended, I was almost comatose and thankful it ended. And then I watched the lead-in for The Chase.

The Chase

One of the stupidest shows I’ve seen in years. It involves a female US Marshal who apprehends fugitives. For some reason, they’ve made her out to be a chance-taking, thrill-seeking agent who risks her life constantly. In the beginning of this episode, she gets angry at one of her agents who doesn’t risk his life jumping onto a boat that might have three armed fugitives on it. Her second in command plays the Will Riker character of her conscience, who tends to try to keep her grounded.

What bothers me about the show is that it takes every cliche of Hollywood and uses it as if it’s brand new. Last night, there were three separate dialogue moments where a character said something, and I responded out loud with exactly what was going to be the zinger of a response. And word for word, I was right each time. I’m not kidding either.

The villains are cartoonish and way over the top. I kind of wondered where they would even imagine such people really existed. Even the bar in Mos Eisley didn’t have a cesspool of villainy like the ones that occur in Chase. Sometimes, I find myself rooting for the bad guys, just in hopes that the death of the US Marshals on the show might cause the show to never appear again on network television.

Both shows have been picked up for finishing out their season, but I imagine that is only because NBC has nothing better planned. It has done everything possible to hype the crap out of The Event, but it’s really not worth the effort. The only thing going for it is that it comes on right after Chuck, which is a great television show, even when it’s not at its best. Unfortunately, everything following Chuck makes me realize how nice it is that I own books that I can read instead.