Thoughts on Firearms in the Aftermath of the Pulse Shootings

I have a friend who posted the following on Facebook:

I imagine the conversation would go more like

Liberal: We should ban *assault* weapons.
Conservative: There is no such thing.
End of civil discussion.

That's a problem.  I mean, I think the vast majority of us agree on the extremes.  Like, (1) maybe we can agree it's okay to own a rifle for hunting or recreational shooting, and (2) maybe we can agree private citizens shouldn't be able to purchase machine guns. Between the extremes, it's just a matter of drawing lines.  What level of lethality should be legal?  It's hard to get anywhere in that debate when we can't even agree on what to call the line.  Or even worse, we dig in our heels and think the others stupid for disagreeing with us.

Personally, I think the line should be closer to the less lethal extreme than the more lethal.  As in, I'd like to see more regulations.  I think you should need a license to own a firearm, getting a license should require a background check and when you purchase a firearm you should be required to register it.  You should be required to store it securely and separately from its ammo.

I think we should ban the sale of assault weapons.  I realize that is not a technical firearm term ... but it can be given a legal definition.  Contrary to the NRA bluster about "banning guns because they look scary", the Brady Bill actually did a good job of defining "assault weapon".  It identified parts of a firearm that are designed to help it shoot more targets, more quickly and more accurately.  If any given firearm, no matter what it's marketed as, had a certain number of those qualities, it was an assault weapon as defined by law. Not because it "looked scary", but because it was designed to be more deadly.

I don't like that we can carry firearms around in public.  Accidents happen.  People execute poor judgement.  It's not that I object to someone having a gun on hand when a murderer shows up at the bar.  I object to people bringing guns there every other night.  I mean, look at the context of a bar; patrons are engaged in highly emotional, high stake, alcohol infused mating rituals.  I believe it's perfectly reasonable to ask bar-going folks to leave their guns at home.

But even not talking about bars, I don't feel safer knowing the people around me have guns.  At the store, I don't know most of the people walking through the aisles with me.  Probably they're mentally stable, probably they'll execute sound judgement, probably their firearm will not discharge accidentally.  But if their gun was at home there would be a 0% chance that their mental state or judgement or stupid accident would get someone in the store shot.  It may be that carrying a gun around in public, the chance of an incident is very small, but it's greater than zero.  And greater than zero is significantly different from zero.

I don't actually dislike guns.  I've been shooting.  It was fun.  I didn't enjoy it so much that I'm willing to spend much money on it to buy my own guns or do it very often.  But I understand why someone would enjoy it.  I don't object to gun ownership, but I think it would be reasonable to regulate it more than we do.

However, while I do believe that stricter regulations would decrease the number of killings in the USA, and that's worthwhile, I also believe more regulation just treats the symptoms of our real problem.  The real problem America has with guns is our attitude.  We actually believe they are a legitimate way to deal with crime.  We think it's okay to kill or threaten to kill someone who is stealing our property.  We think showing someone that we have a gun will diffuse a potentially violent situation.  We think there is so much violent crime that we need guns to protect ourselves.  At least, given the state of gun laws in our country, those seem to be the majority opinions.  I think that's a shame.

Computer Gaming

Windows released a security patch that disabled the ability to play many games from disc.  Like a huge list of games.  The one that mattered to me was Civ IV.  Apparently when the game starts up it checks the disc to ensure it's not a pirated copy before initializing play.  Microsoft decided that whatever the game did for its check created a Windows security flaw and therefore released a patch to prevent that check.  It was kind of frustrating to try and play the game and be told, "nope! no can do."


I could buy a digital copy of the game for $30 and play, but man, I already bought the game once.  I asked Ben to start watching Steam for sales, hoping that maybe I could at least get it for a better price.  I really don't like Steam.  It is a resource hog.  I don't like being required to log onto their servers to play my game.  I don't like being forced to watch their ads before I can play my game.  But I have to admit, I do like paying only $7.50 for my game.


Which is what it eventually went on sale for.  So now I can play Civ IV again.


On another computer gaming note, about 10 years ago I used to play a lot of MTGO (Magic the Gathering: Online).  The company supported a play option called Leagues which was a ton of fun.  It was a great way to play Magic without putting a ton of time & money into it and on a playing field that was relatively level in that folks with huge card collections didn't have any advantage.


Then Wizards of the Coast, which publishes Magic, rebuilt their software and stopped supporting Leagues ... but with the intent of starting them back up sometime in the next year.  Which did not happen.  Or the next year, or the next year.  Or ever, it seemed.  /sigh.  Then just this past month, they started Leagues again.  Woo Hoo!


I got into one and am losing horribly.  LOL, I haven't played MTGO in almost 10 years.  There's a learning curve for the new software, for the pace. Man, I'd forgotten how quick a pace you have to play online.  I actually lost my first match in the League by timing out!  I'll get the hang of it though.  It'll be fun.


I am a happy gamer.

February was awesome!

On Thursday 2/11 Tabby & I went to Disney on Ice.  During intermission Tabby informed me that she didn't really like Disney princesses anymore, but she liked going out with me. Maybe next year we'll do something different.  Or not ... Tabby also said she did like the dancing.  We had fun and the dancing really was great. Especially during the Rapunzel segment.  They performed an extended version of it this year that included a "hair rope" from which the skaters would dangle about 20 feet up while spinning, flipping, whatever.  It was impressive.


On Sunday 2/21 we (the Green Bay crew, Sam, Jack, and my neice, Tylor who has an internship at Kohler company) met up at Jack's place in Sheboygan to celebrate Sam's birthday.  Ice Cream cake, a game of Bang!, Annie and of course just hanging out with family.  Fun time.


Friday 2/27 there was a Father/Daughter dance at church.  Like last year, Becky did photography for the event and Tabby was a relentless taskmaster. "Lift!  Spin!  Dip!  Now chase me!"  So much fun I am still sore.


Saturday 2/28 Ben I went to the Fire & Ice game convention in Manitowoc.  Saw some friends I haven't seen in a while.  Played some games with a few of them.


Ben played some Smash Bros. while we waited for the first game to start.  I bought a book from the $1 used book guy to read during down time, but didn't actually get to read any of it. 


We played a game called Hexplore It that the designer was at the con playtesting for a Kickstarter campaign sometime in spring 2017.  It was fun.  Very similar to the Runebound series of games.  Players v the board.  Players won.


Someone brought a 3D Settlers of Catan game board.  Ben & I played a game on it.  I got a very good start.  About 20 minutes in the running joke became, "haven't you won yet Jack?"  Unfortunately, Ben built in some low resource number areas and didn't get lucky on the dice.


Randall Tupper ran a game of Eclipse with a new expansion ... time travelling races!  I played the new time travelers.  If you've played the game and are interested, the time travel mechanic allows the player to take a free action this turn while paying for it in future turns.  It saves a few resources over the course of the game and provides a degree of momentum on the board.  It didn't feel like a game breaking mechanic, but then I was the one using it, not playing against it.  And I did win.  Ben did well in the game, 3rd place, I think?  I finished with 36 points, 2-4th place clustered around 30-34 points.  5th & 6th were lower.  Most of the game it looked like a player named Eric was in the lead.  He had a fair chunk of the board, plus the central tile.  But in the end he was in 4th place with only low point value systems, while mine were high value and I got a lot of extra points going gangbusters in the tech race.


Ben & I played a 2 player game of Ascension while waiting for the final game.


Final game was a six player Bang!  I misread my role card, thought I was an Outlaw when I was actually the Renegade.  Ended up being the first one dead.  Ben (as a deputy) & the Sherriff made a good stand against what amounted to four Outlaws, but in the end the outlaws managed to win.


Bonus:  I have 3 book reports!


Cowboy Angels by Paul McCauley.
The book is a kind of alternate history where something called "Turing Gates" have been invented.  They are gates that allow us to travel to parallel dimensions ... alternate realities.  The USA in the dimension where these gates are invented adopts an official policy of alliance with all versions of the USA across any discovered dimension.  The challenge is that not all USAs hold the same values.  The USA that was taken over by communists, for example.  Or the USA that engaged the USSR in a minor nuclear exchange after the Cuban missile crisis and is being rebuilt with aid from its European allies.  Eventually, that peacenik Jimmy Carter gets elected president and shuts down the program, leading to a crisis in the agency charged with how we use the Turing Gates.


Adam Stone was one of the first agents to travel through the Turing Gates to try and foment these alliances.  He has since retired, but comes out of retirement to help save Tom Waverly, another of the first agents and a good friend of his who has gone rogue with some mysterious, murderous agenda.


I thought the concept was really cool.  The delivery was okay.  McCauley relies heavily on the characters in the book knowing things that haven't yet been revealed to the readers.  It became kind of a mindless read because why try to figure things out when doing so requires information you don't have?  Won't have until the solution is presented? And that's kind of too bad in a book about a really thought provoking idea.


I mean, it was a fun read, but I just felt like it could have been more.


The Good the Bad and the Smug by Tom Holt.
Mordak, King of the Goblins, has some revolutionary ideas about being evil ... such as working alongside elves of all things!  When the Dark Lord himself begins having similar ideas, something is certainly amiss.  And when the humans get their finances in order!  And how is it all related to the number of Goblins being recruited, via interdimensional doughnut, to work in Hollywood?


Tom Holt writes in a style very similar to Terry Pratchett.  Maybe a little more absurdist than I personally prefer, but still a fun read.  The book is even thematically similar to a Terry Pratchett book called Snuff.  One of my all time favorites, in fact.  I guess inviting that comparison is really this books shortcoming.  If you're thinking of reading it, I'd just suggest reading Snuff instead.  At least read Snuff first.  Or just don't miss the chance to read Snuff because you spent your precious time reading this book instead.


I did enjoy it enough that I did finish reading it, though.


This Is Not a Game by Walter Jon Williams.
Dagmar, Charlie, Austin and BJ were the core of a gaming group back in college.  Though they have since gone their seperate ways, they all live in the LA area and stay in touch.  Charlie is the owner of Software company AVN Soft. Dagmar is the director of alternate reality games (ARGs) for Great Big Idea, a subsidiary of AVN Soft.  BJ was Charlie's partner at AVN but was fired from the company before it became successful.  Austin is a successful venture capitalist.


When a murder occurs that affects them all Dagmar begins to use (i.e. manipulate the participants of) the current ARG to solve it.


The book was very exciting.  The characters were fun and engaging.  The plot was intricate and unfolds well as the story progresses.  The recurring theme about the value of crowdsourced ideas is well developed.


Our library categorized the book as Science Fiction.  I assume because role playing games are central to the development of the story, but they're not really what the book is about.  It's more mystery than scifi/fantasy.  I would suggest reading this book to anyone who enjoys either genre.  The only real criticism I have about it is that Williams portrays Frito Casserole as a bad thing.  I mean, YUM, Frito casserole!

Book Report: Ready Player One by Ernest Cline.

John Douglas suggested that being an 80s gamer dork I might enjoy reading Ready Player One.   A few pages into the book as a man named James Halliday is describing his discovery of the first easter egg in a video game called Adventure made for the Atari 2600,  I knew John was right.  This book was written for me.  Or not just me, I suppose, but for people like me.  Reading Halliday's experience transported me back to when my family got an Atari 2600 back in, I don't know, 1980?  or so?  Adventure was one of the first games we bought.  It was my favorite.  I remember having vivid dreams (graphics way better than the game's) in which I was the main character, travelling from castle to castle fighting dragons.  I remember finding the easter egg Halliday spoke about.  There was no game magazine, no website spoilers ... just me finding a dot on the ground in the game, then noticing that I could pick it up, and there was a corresponding dot on a wall somewhere and if I was holding the dot I found, I could walk through that wall to a secret room.  It was awesome.  I felt exactly the way Halliday described feeling.

And so it went throughout the entire book.  Total nostalgiafest.

In Ready Player One, Halliday had developed a new interface with the online environment.  Originally designed for immersive 3D game play, Oasis quickly became the preferred way to interact in all online experiences. Of course, this made Halliday insanely wealthy.  He had no heirs when he died, so he designed a game to find a series of easter eggs in Oasis.  The first person to find all three would inherit Halliday's wealth, including a controlling stake in Oasis itself.

So much money was at stake that the game developed its own subculture ... people who dedicated themselves to becoming professional egg hunters, or Gunters as they came to be called.  Ready Player One is about one Gunter named Parzival and his group of friends who are racing against Innovative Online Industries, a corporate internet service provider that has hired and trained an elite group of Gunters in the hopes of winning the controlling interest in Oasis and making some extremely profitable (for them) changes.

There were a few things that bugged me.  James Halliday seemed to have an awful lot of "favorite" movies, books, games, whatever.  Like anytime Mr. Cline needed to explain how his characters solved a puzzle it was just, "Oh Halliday's favorite ~something~ was X and that explains it".  I swear he had five different favorite movies.  Two of Parzivals friends are from Japan and seemed somewhat strongly stereo typed.  I mean, maybe that was some meta-theme ... 80s culture plays a strong role in the book and in the 80s Japanese men were often portrayed with a certain bushido code stereotype, so maybe Parzivals friends were portrayed that same way to play up the 80s culture link. It still bugged me.  Finally, at one point Parzival suffered a very violent loss and yet seemed to just shrug it off.  It seemed unrealistically cool/detached or something.

But overall, the flaws were pretty minor and the fun was oh so much fun.  The characters were cool.  I cheered for them when they succeeded and got angry for them at IOI's dastardly deeds. The writing flows in a way that makes it a very quick read.  Thematically, the book has some depth.  It addresses issues of social interaction in a virtual world; extolling the importance of real world human contact, without devaluing the merits of virtual space.  Most of all, Ernest Cline's nostalgia-fu is strong.

Book Report: Salamandastron by Brian Jacques

A few years ago I read The Hobbit to Tabby.  A chapter or two at a time at bed time.  She liked it and wanted to read the Lord of the Rings, too, so I obliged.  Some ways into it I realized, "maybe these are a bit complex for a 6 year old."  But then Tabby would surprise me with comments like (after Gandalf told Frodo that he was convinced Gollum was alive for a reason), "I bet Frodo won't be able to destroy the ring, so it will be destroyed after Gollum steals it back."  Seriously!  Way back in book 1, in Moria, Tabby called the ending.  In any case, by the time I thought of maybe reading something else, Tabby was too involved in the story, too invested in the characters ... we had to finish.

Once we did I decided we'd try the Chronicles of Narnia.  Good call me.  They instantly became Tabby's favorite stories.

So as we were coming to the end of the Chronicles of Narnia, I was trying to figure out what to read next and remembered that our boys really liked the Redwall series by Brian Jacques when they were little.  Tabby loves animals ... seems like a good fit.  And another good call for me.  She has declared that they are her new favorites and we have to read them all.  Given that there are well over 20 books, that'll be a task.

We just finished our third book, Salamandastron.

The dreadful Dryditch Fever has struck Redwall Abbey, sickening almost everyone.  The otter Thrugg sets off on a quest to find the Icetor flowers required to cure the fever before any more Redwallers die.  The sword of Martin the Warrior was also stolen!  Samkim the squirrel and his best friend Arula the mole chase after the thieves.  Meanwhile, the badger maid Mara, adopted daughter of Urthsripe, Badger Lord of Salamandastron and commander of the Long Patrol, has run away, accompanied by her best friend Pickle the hare.  Soon after Mara leaves, the army of Ferhago the Assassin lays siege to Salamandastron.

Each story line is exciting and fun to read.  The stories of Samkim, Mara and the siege of Salamandastron all eventually come together in an epic climax.  The book is well written.  It touches on so many neat points of Redwall legend that it's a must read for anyone who enjoys the series.  Just for the pleasure of reading about the Long Patrol, visions granted by Martin the Warrior, Guossom shrews and badger traditions.

However, it is also more complex than the other Redwall books we've read.  The characters are likeable and engaging, easy to care about ... but there are just so darn many of them!  Four storylines!  One of them, saving Redwall from Dryditch Fever, even seems somewhat superflous.  I mean, it's a neat story ... but totally unrelated to the others.  Like it should have been in its own book.  Tabby constantly had me remind her who characters were and where we were going back and forth between story lines.

But I guess the important thing is that we did love the book.  We were happy at the end, cheering for the Redwallers, choking back tears of joy as everything turned out.

A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms by George R. R. Martin

A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is a collection of three short stories about Ser Duncan the Tall, a hedge knight in Westeros, and his squire, Egg.  It is the same setting as Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire, but about 100 years before those events.

The first story is of Ser Duncan's first tourney and how Egg became his squire.  The second is about their service to an impoverished noble house dealing with a drought.  The third about another tourney to celebrate a wedding.  In each story there is, of course, a conflict and through each Duncan proves his valor as a Knight.  Given the author, I kept waiting for a hammer to drop, for something to go horribly wrong.  But each story ended happily ... or at least in a reasonable facsimile thereof.  The good guys win, anyway.

The book is well crafted.  Each story is its own, but with common themes throughout.  The characters are engaging and endearing.  The intrigues are fascinating.  The stories are fun and exciting.   I really enjoyed the book.  Whether or not you have read A Song of Ice and Fire, I recommend this one.

Book Review: Reamde by Neal Stephenson

Richard Forthrast has lived an interesting life.  Grew up in rural Iowa, ran to Canada to escape the draft, smuggled marijuana across the Idaho border, amassed enough money to eventually invest in an MMO (massively multiplayer online game).  He did so not so much because it was cool (though it was), but because he wanted a way to transfer money from the online environment to IRL.  It was wildly successful.

When his niece Zula visited him at his ski lodge in Canada, she brought her boyfriend, Peter, and that's where the twist happens that sets the book's plot.  Peter, an IT security specialist, had decided to make a quick, one time foray into crime.  He stole a bunch of credit card data and sold it to some Russians.  He just wanted enough money to pay off his upside down mortgage.  By a stroke of misfortune, the files containing the data were hijacked by a group of Chinese hackers using a virus called reamde that exploits Richard's MMO to launder money extorted to unlock the files.

From there the book gets all sorts of exciting.  I swear, Stephenson must have written this one with the intent of having it made into a movie or something. I would love to see that.  The story is incredible.  the characters so good.  This is a great book.