This topic came to mind in a similar way to Cory's blog post regarding Trump as a solid candidate for president (which you should also read). For a long while now I have believed that people should be more aware of how to both recognize and in turn make logical arguments for or against a position. This has become even more obvious of a shortcoming in most people's education during the current presidential election where the typical (albeit maybe slightly worse than usual) shit flinging between different sides has commenced. Note that I am talking strictly about the irrational sides of these debates, as I am aware there is still the occasional logical debate between different candidates or supporters. Obviously I am not trying to say that this is the only thing that K-12 schools need to implement, nor that it is necessarily the most important. There are a number of reasons that personal finance should be taught from a young age as well because we have an epidemic of poor money management. However, topics like personal finance have been discussed frequently in other articles, attention that I feel philosophy and especially logic have not gotten. Whether it is promoting Hillary Clinton because she is a woman, Republican candidates because they are Christian, or Donald Trump as an actual candidate, to denouncing Bernie Sanders because he is Socialist (and that is for communists and is what Nazi Germany was apparently) or any candidate from the other political party simply because they are not in your group, people are trying to pass illogical and irrelevant conditions as important to the voting process. None of the above mentioned shortcomings or benefits are particularly relevant to the presidential race, aside from Bernie being a Democratic Socialist (an actual political stance with policies included) which is included simply for the vast number of times that it has been mis-allocated to fascism and stealing. If the American public had a better grasp on logical arguments perhaps we wouldn't be in a situation where the Republican party has a front runner like Donald Trump intending to implement a number of fascist policies (ACTUALLY like Nazi Germany this time) and whose candidates feel the need to sprout Christian values and anti-democratic sentiments in the primaries just so that they can get the nomination. Democrats are also at fault here with Hillary Clinton pushing ahead in polls despite her criminal negligence with top secret documents and information in her emails and her unusually tight bond with the increasingly disproportionately rich corporations. With a higher base understanding of debates and logic we might actually have intelligent discourse between candidates (as hard to believe as that may be).
Philosophy ties in to this in how closely related it is to logic. The two subjects can easily be taught simultaneously and they play off of each other quite well. It is impossible to have a grasp of philosophy without first having a basis in logical thinking and logic having to do with knowledge is in itself a branch of philosophy. If people as a whole had a better grasp of knowledge and what it means to "know" something I feel that we would have the potential to go a lot further as a society.
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Coming out of 2015 we have seen quite a large number of independent games do quite well just last year alone. 2015 had the likes of Rocket League, Undertale, Her Story, and Life is Strange. All four games were huge hits that introduced fantastic new ideas to games in creative ways with Rocket League and Undertale taking the year by storm in popularity and discussions. Now I know that none of the above games came out in 2015 but they are also a homage to the massive success of some well crafted games by small independent teams in previous years. While Rocket League and Life is Strange are pushing it a little for the "indie" title as they had quite large teams with rather large budgets, but Undertale was made by a single person and Her Story a rather small team and both were quite successful (and good). Following the 1980s when most games seemed like they could be made by a single person or a small team and with the advent of 3D games the development cycle seemed to shift much more towards large budgets and AAA games which sold huge numbers of copies. This was especially true in the early and mid 2000s. But recently there has been quite a resurgence in independent game makers, and for good reason. The above image was made in Unreal Engine 4, a video game engine that is free to use (you just have to pay a percentage of your profits to them if you sell the product of the engine). With the release of engines like this, and Amazon's game engine which is now in the beta phase and will also be free to use, it is easier than ever to hop right into the actual art, sound, and design aka "game-making". Making a game engine is very taxing , time consuming, and requires a lot of know-how. Now everyone has access to some that have the potential for "Next-Gen" graphics. No, even with these engines independent games are not likely to look as good as AAA games which have much bigger art and design teams but with how good modern graphics have gotten the downgrade for indie games hardly ruins the experience like it might have in the past. Never before have AAA games and independent games been on such even footing for graphics and game development capabilities.
Thus, with all of this information it is clear that anyone who has a good idea for a game, takes the time to learn how to program a little, and works hard can make an excellent game. So if you have always dreamed about making one of your own, what are you waiting for? Anyone who is aware of the competitive scene in Yu-Gi-Oh! knows that tournaments at any given time tend to have players running primarily a handful of deck types. These handful of decks are typically referred to as "meta" decks. Which decks considered meta frequently changes with the release of new cards and banlists and are usually so popular because they do very well. In the top 32 places of any Yu-Gi-Oh! tournament you will typically see 25-30 of the places being held by meta decks depending on the current state of the game and where the tournament was held. This has led to a lot of gripes from players who feel that it means you just have to fork over the money for a meta deck, which can be prohibitively expensive sometimes, if you want to do well in tournament play. However, I feel that while it is true that meta decks are typically easier to win with they are not necessary to do so and in fact are good for Yu-Gi-Oh! as a whole. It is true that meta decks frequently cost in the hundreds of dollars, quite a hefty entrance fee for someone who is new to the game to try and get a good deck for tournaments. Additionally, as new cards are released or as the quarterly ban list updates come out the meta decks are subject to change, requiring you to acquire a whole new meta deck if you want to stay "on top". However, I think that both the high cost of the meta deck components from vendors and the fluctuating decks are good for the game as a whole. When cards like Nekroz of Brionac (pictured below) hit peak prices of $100-120 it can easily be more worth it to just buy several of the packs that the card comes in and get other cards with it. This encourages players to buy packs rather than buying single cards from secondhand vendors in turn helping the company who makes the cards and encouraging the development of the game. The changing of which decks are considered meta also allows the game to evolve over time. If the game was focused solely on balancing as many different deck types/archetypes as possible then people would have no reason to branch out from decks that they have had for a long time and the game would get stale. As new good decks get released and the older decks have their over powered combos limited through the ban list the game evolves and the play style changes. This makes the game as a whole much more interesting and gives players a valid reason for continuing to invest in it. If I am going to keep buying packs I want to be continuing to gain enjoyment out of the game.
On top of all of this it is also definitely possible to do well in a tournament setting without a meta deck, though I will admit that it can be harder. I am an example, I placed at a regional tournament with a deck that cost slightly more than a nice meal depending on how much you cared if the cards were holographic or not. I assessed that the meta decks at the time had no good way of removing the primary monster card in the Battlin' Boxer archetype and made a deck centered around that monster and trap cards that locked down the popular decks. The popularity of meta decks in and of itself adds another layer of strategy to the game that players with non-meta decks can take advantage of. This allows players who are informed of the game to make good decks and do well in tournaments without necessarily needed a top of the line deck. So in conclusion, meta decks are good for the competitive Yu-Gi-Oh! scene because their shifting nature and popularity allow the game to change over time while still encouraging players to remain invested without necessarily drawing strategy out of the equation. Therefore you should ignore anything Zach has to say on this matter. I recently picked up Shadow of Mordor for Xbox and came across a game mechanic that can be quite annoying: unending waves of enemies. In Shadow of Mordor the orcs spawn continuously, frequently even within range of your vision so you can watch them appear out of nowhere. What this means is that if you get into a relatively large fight with orcs by the time you have finished killing all of the ones near you a whole new group has spawned and the process repeats itself indefinitely. Because of this any time I got caught while sneaking or had a tussle with a couple orcs I usually ended up running once the big mob arrived. Don't get me wrong, Shadow of Mordor is a great game otherwise this mechanic is just rather intrusive. I understand that open world games like this have to have enemies that respawn, and the point of this post isn't to say enemies should never come back, but to have them spawn continuously and rush at you non-stop. Shadow of Mordor isn't the only culprit here either. Big offenders I can think of are earlier CoDs, Far Cry 2, some Battlefields, and of course Neverwinter with the superfluous waves of enemies accompanying every single raid boss. Obviously MOBA's like League of Legends are different because the whole point of the minions is to spawn in a straight line, but outside of that and the potential for a few special missions in games where you are supposed to die and/or be on the run unending enemies reeks of bad game design.
This post is going to get a little more deep into the philosophical and semantic side of things. I will be explaining how "natural", and therefore also "synthetic", are effectively useless adjectives because there is always a more descriptive one.In normal conversation people bring up the word "natural" frequently, usually considering it a good trait that it was made by nature rather than by man. On the other side of the coin "unnatural" or "synthetic" is often used to describe things that are bad for you or not morally right. I find this distinction of natural being positive and unnatural being negative to be logically unsound on top of both descriptors largely failing to describe any traits about the object in question. The definition of natural is "existing in or caused by nature; not made or caused by humankind", while synthetic is defined as "noting or pertaining to compounds formed through a chemical process by human agency, as opposed to those of natural origin". These two adjectives are clearly opposites with the definition of each specifically mentioning "not the other". What does claiming that something is natural actually tell us about the object though? There are no distinct properties that only come from natural products and vice versa. Natural is often used to describe things that are healthier for human consumption but this is also obviously not universal. There are plenty of natural things that would kill you very quickly if you consumed them (like poison, bacteria, or viruses) and there are quite a few synthetic things that offer a lot of benefits through consumption (medicine for example). On top of being meaningless adjectives I find it can also be rather difficult to distinguish between the two in some cases, making them even more useless. As many people are aware dogs can trace their lineage back to wild wolves before humans domesticated them and bred them to have desirable traits as our pets. We selectively let dogs who had the traits we wanted breed to make sure that we got the best hunting, guard, cute, friendly, and/or playful dogs. We did the same thing with corn, just take a look at how drastically corn has changed through human intervention. Before humans corn kernels looked a lot like the tiny one pictured to the far left. However, even given these drastic changes largely due to human interference with the reproduction of these species people still consider dogs and corn natural (at least corn that isn't a GMO, but that's a whole different beast for another post). Clearly dogs and corn would not exist as they do today if humans hadn't artificially selected for certain traits so why don't we consider them man-made? Additionally, now they can grow, live, and reproduce largely without human interaction like a lot of other "natural" organisms so what traits exist in corn and dogs that distinguish them as such aside from their history?
On that note I have another hypothetical situation that blurs the line between natural and synthetic. Lets say we are a decade or so in the future and we have now mastered the creation of genomes and can make organisms from scratch. To prove a point we take some typical run of the mill grass, copy its DNA, and make an exact replica of it with our Genuine Genome Generator (patent pending). This grass was clearly made by people, we just watched ourselves do it. But, if I took the original and mixed it around with the new one it would be impossible to distinguish the difference. So what does calling the original organism natural and the manufactured one synthetic describe in this case? only its method of creation, every other trait is identical, none of its actual properties. So if we can have two identical objects, one of which being natural and one synthetic, then clearly they are not very useful descriptors. In rebuttal of this last point I have heard that there are cases where synthetic or natural implies certain properties. For example, synthetic oil used in cars has very different properties than natural oil. Thusly people often simply refer to it in short hand as synthetic oil because of the large difference in properties. In this case it seems like synthetic is being useful, but I disagree. Synthetic is merely a more general placeholder for something like 5W-30 (the temperatures that the oil is designed for), there are still much more descriptive adjectives to use. So in conclusion: natural and synthetic don't describe any actual properties of things and can in fact both describe objects that are otherwise identical making them useless adjectives. Try to remember this in future conversations when attempting to describe something. It is interesting, however, to think about how we consider the things we made to be of a different nature than those made by nature itself, even given that all humans occurred naturally from nature as well. If we are natural why are our creations not such as well? One Punch Man is a new anime based on a relatively new manga by the same name. The protagonist is Saitama, a normal guy who decides to quit his day job to become a hero. After following his "extensive" training regime for three years he is now incredibly strong, often beating his opponents with a single punch. The show then follows his story of taking an apprentice and trying to join the Hero Association to be better recognized for his actions. The show is hilarious, the animation is fantastically done, and the characters are awesome. Saitama always manages to get overlooked because of his unassuming appearance and has to constantly fight just to be recognized for what he has done. The whole show is a parody on the standard super hero/anime style. If you can handle subtitles (it is not dubbed in English yet) I highly recommend this show. It's good for laughs and has some intense fighting scenes. There are only 9 episodes as of my posting this so it would not take too long to catch up (more come out every Sunday).
Here is the link to the official site: www.daisuki.net/anime/detail/ONEPUNCHMAN This list is in response to the list Cory posted just a couple days ago. I figured I would make my own to show how similar we are with some things (and different with others) and why Seth felt the need to mention The Witcher 3 in my bio. I will go ahead and say in advance that the further down the list I go the smaller the difference in my ratings. The top 5 were especially difficult to order. To make things easier on myself I excluded games like Runescape and World of Warcraft that are free to play or require a subscription as did Cory. Some games that are in a series are included together either because the series as a whole was fantastic or because the games play into one another. Honorable mentions: Spyro 2: Ripto's Rage, Left 4 Dead, Call of Duty 4, Bioshock, Elder Scrolls, Kingdom Hearts, and Champions of Norrath (even though I hate it) 10. Super Mario Bros 3 This is one of the first games that I ever played. As long ago as I can remember we had a NES with this game and a couple other games as well, though they were nowhere near as good. I spent forever trying to make it to the end of the game in one go because you lost all of your progress as soon as you turned it off. I can even still remember where all of the flutes are to warp you between levels. Super Mario Bros. 3 is the game that got me started on video games in the first place. 9. Star Wars Battlefront 2Though it wasn't the first shooter game I played it was the first one that I truly enjoyed. I played this game for hours on end with my brother and neighbors trying out all of the different modes, unlocking all of the upgraded guns, and playing galactic conquest. The ability to play on so many settings from the movies and as so many different powerful characters was enough to keep the game from getting boring for a long time. Battlefront was a fantastic example of what a star wars game SHOULD be, and though the new one has its merits it just is not as good. 8. Jak and Daxter One of the first 3D platformers I played, Jak and Daxter is still one of my favorite trilogies of all time. I got so invested in the characters and the world that I just couldn't wait to see what would happen next. We used to take turns trying to get further and further in the game switching off when people would die. I played all three of these games growing up and the existence of the trilogy as a downloadable game is one of the only things that make me wish I had gotten a PS4 instead. 7. Pokemon The presence of Pokemon on this list is probably a surprise to no one. Pokemon Gold Version was the first game I ever got for GameBoy and I carried it with me everywhere (thought I was absolutely terrible at the game at the time). 6. Fire Emblem I still remember the day I got this game waaay back in 2004. I had heard from a friend that it was fantastic and I hadn't gotten a new gameboy game in a while so I got my parents to take me to Toys-R-Us so that I could get it. I then proceeded to play it in the car on the way home, and for several hours afterwards until I was all the way at chapter 12. Even though I let too many of my characters die to make it through the last two chapters on my first play through I eventually went on to beat it about 6 times trying out different characters and difficulties each time. Because of how much I loved this game I eventually went on to buy all of the sequels, and even bought a 3DS specifically so I could play Awakening. 5. Halo 3 Halo 3 was the first multiplayer game that I played over the internet (minus Runescape). The first thing I did upon getting the game was play through the campaign on legendary with my brother. It took so long and we died so many times along the way. But the campaign was only a small fraction of the fun. I still remember the jump from playing locally with my friends to playing on Xbox Live once we finally got the Xbox setup with the internet. We were terrible, died a lot, and generally had no idea what we were doing. But it was still fun and the ability to go into Forge mode and make your own maps kept it entertaining for hours on end. We frequently had parties of 16 people for various custom games, of which I have logged almost 4000. 4. Age of Empires 2 A timeless RTS I still play this game with its HD version all the time against Seth, Zach, and Cory. As I grew up I went through phases of liking different factions, play styles, or units. Everything from the Persions for war elephants to the Koreans for Turtle ships have been my favorite civilization at one time or another. Regardless of what Cory says, having additional trading carts is just fine. 3. Super Smash Bros I was actually behind on this game and didn't really get into it until my freshman year of college playing Brawl with all of my hallmates. The ability to play as all of your favorite Nintendo characters (and a few outside characters) while simultaneously fighting all of your friends in over the top battles just made it so entertaining. Since then I have played the various renditions of this game countless times and I am still enamored with the Wii U version. (Marth and Ike are the best, and everyone else on this website is bad at this game, shots intentionally fired) 2. The Witcher 3 This is obviously by far the newest game on this list (minus reiterations of smash bros and pokemon which hardly count). By the time you finish reading this you'll probably understand why Seth felt the need to put it in my bio. After hearing how good the reviews were for it and how even players couldn't get enough of the game I had to try it for myself. This game is one of the reasons I got an Xbox One and man I was not let down. There is a ridiculous amount of content in this game, and yet I rarely felt overwhelmed or bored with any of it. The dialogue is superb, there are so many characters almost all of whom are very well developed, and it gets you actually caring about what happens to them all at the end of the day. The combat is nothing innovative and is not very complex, but it is not bad in and of itself either and that is the worst thing I can say about this game. This is the only game that I have beaten, and then immediately purchased the season pass to get all of the DLC because I simply wanted more of it. So yes, you should all play The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt if you get a chance. 1. Mass Effect I'm including all three games of the original trilogy for this one (but hopefully ME: Andromeda is fantastic as well). I have played through all three games twice myself, once to get through it and see the ending while probably messing up along the way and then again to get the ending I want/get ready for the next game so that I have good choices carrying over. Speaking of carry over, that was one of my favorite parts about this series. The fact that my choices would impact how I get to play the next game (though there may be some complaints as to how much they actually do) got me really invested in the world. It was fantastic seeing the characters and world evolve over the three games depending on how I led my crew. When I beat ME 3 the first time I was happy that it had been so good, but sad that it was now over.
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NicI'll write about science, philosophy, shows and video games. The first two frequently in regards to the latter two. Archives
March 2016
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