Overswarm

I’m going to Ireland!

That’s about it. I’m going to Ireland. Hopefully. Trying to do a study abroad program for the summer…. but money may be tight!

Published by Overswarm on January 16th, 2008 | Filed under Uncategorized | 354 Comments »

Good news: Halo players are going to get a lot more attention because I’ll have more time and a whole lotta stuff up soon. I had been saving some stuff already finished so you guys wouldn’t be neglected when Brawl came out, so now I have a surplus.

Published by Overswarm on January 15th, 2008 | Filed under Uncategorized | 653 Comments »

Things to improve Halo 3

There are some simple, basic things missing from Halo 3. Things that are kind of in the vein of “duh” . As such, this will seem like it is a very negative article when in fact, it isn’t. Halo 3 is fun, and it made it into my “I’ll play this consistently” list. It has a lot of good things, and Bungie has a lot of fun ideas. My biggest issue with Bungie is that, well, they didn’t take the time to get good at their own game. They don’t even know what Halo 3 IS. As such, when people who actually play video games get their hands on it, all of Bungie’s plans fall apart. This makes for a very bad experience for many, as having to “settle” for one of the top selling games in history is disgruntling, at best.

#1. Custom games list

This has been around since Quake. Quake ONE. The fact that Halo doesn’t have it is about the equivalent of a bank robber not having a gun. The effort is there, but it just isn’t as good as it could be.

What a “custom games list” does is it puts the life of the game in the hands of the players. Naturally, popular gametypes will evolve and grow; the more popular they are, the more they’ll have. So if I get on Halo at 2 a.m. (common) and decide I want to play, I could have three choices:

1. Play matchmaking

2. Play the custom game I want

3. Play a random custom game that is available

Looking at those options, it is obvious that at least ONE of them will be a good option to take if I just want to play. If I want something specific, a custom games list will greatly increase that chance. With only 100 friends, it is difficult to imagine a time of day where I can play the gametypes that I want without constantly shuffling my friends list.

I feel sorry for the people that play things like Zombies. They have to wait until Halloween to play their gametype with people other than their friends list.

So custom games list = the big one. The fact that they didn’t makes them all cheeseheads. You heard me, Frankie. Cheeseheads. You can challenge me to a humpday challenge if you’d like; me and my NSCS supporters vs. Bungie team. Cheeseheads.

2. An easily understandable, constantly updated matchmaking playlist

The current matchmaking playlist is pretty confusing, and isn’t updated enough at all.

To tackle the confusing aspect: how many games does it take to gain a level? Do you know? Do you ever? I’ve won 20 games in a row without gaining a level. I’ve lost the same without losing a level. I’ve won 2 and gained a level, I’ve lost 2 and lost 3 levels. There’s no obvious rhyme or reason to it.

Solution? SIMPLE MATH.

Point system:

1-10 = 10 points to level up

11-20 = 20 points to level up

21-30 = 30 points to level up

31-40 = 40 points to level up

41-45 = 50 points to level up

45-49 = 60 points to level up

50 = 100 points to level up

That little system right there allows you to level up quickly, but still makes level 50 a big accomplishment.

What are points?

For every victory against someone/some team at your own level, you get 3 points. For every victory against someone/team 1 or 2 levels above, you get 4 points. Anything past that gets you 5 points.

For every loss at someone/team your own level, you lose 3 points. For every loss against someone/team 1 or 2 levels below, you lose 4 points. Past that, you lose 5 points a game.

Some of you may be doing the math and say “well that’d take forever to level up to the level I want! I can’t play all day”. That is a good thing to look out for! You want people who deserve to be at the top to get to the top QUICKLY. If they don’t, they don’t have fun and the people they play just get raped.

So, introducing the most common point-based varient in the game: the multiplying factor!

If you win X games in a row, you get x2 points. If you win Y games in a row, you get x3 points. Z games in a row, you get x4 points.

X, Y, and Z would have to be researched, but for simplicity let’s say that they are 5, 10, and 15.

So assuming you are starting at level 1 and only playing teams at your same level (add up the numbers of your team to get a sum; two teams of level 1’s = 4 and 4, meaning equal), if you win 5 games you should have gotten 15 points. Yay! You are now level 2’s, and 5 points away from level 2!

But you’ve won 5 games, so a multiplier is in effect. Now, you get x2 points. So for each game you win from now on without losing, you get x2 points! Assuming you are playing only equal level teams, you are getting 6 points a game.

Next game you get to 21 points (level 3).

27 points.

33 points. (level 4)

39 points.

45 points. (level 5)

But what’s this? You’ve won 10 games in a row! x3 multiplier! Assuming that all your opponents are on the same level, you are getting 3×3 (9) points!

54 points. (level 6)

63 points. (level7)

72 points. (level 8)

81 points. (level 9)

90 points. (level 10)

Now that’s 15 games in a row you’ve won! x4 multiplier! 4×3 = 12 points! Now you need 20 points to gain a level.

102 points.

114 point. (level 11)

So on and so on.

Now, the numbers would undoubtedly change. They’re variables. The amount of games you need for a multiplier, the amount of multipliers themselves, the number of points necessary to level up, etc., etc., those all need to be tested internally. Sitting with a laptop for a day at a desk would give you more than enough time to figure out exactly what you wanted to test, and even then you don’t need to test internally. You can take an average time of games and figure out how long (estimated) it would take someone to get to level 50. You want it to be long, but not too long. Once you get some really good examples going, then you test them. From there, you can see the average number of games the “good teams” win over the “bad teams”, and you can see when you should kick in the multiplier. It may be that the multiplier has to be kicked in earlier for winning teams and later for bad teams.

That’s just a rough sketch, and it is already better than their leveling system simply because it could be understood. Hell, they could write a program that could tell you exactly where you were points-wise on your profile, and show you how many games until your multiplier. Added bonus? De-levelers would de-level ultra fast. The really persistent de-levelers would sink to the bottom of the barrel in an instant, and they wouldn’t have to be dealt with for very long.

The updating dilemma:

This is not rocket science. I hate Bungie’s ideas of “fun” and “fair” gametypes, but with the new “Veto” option it shouldn’t be that big of a deal. Look at each gametype, look at the % that is vetoed. Every week, lower the occurance (or remove completely if it is a high %) of the most vetoed gametype, and slightly raise that of the least vetoed. Would anyone be upset if TS on Guardian showed up a little more on Team Hardcore, while Neutral Bomb on Isolation didn’t show up as much?

By doing this weekly (and letting the public know), you create a subtle, yet dramatic, change in the matchmaking playlist. It makes it so that the public gets immediate feedback. Most people don’t play every day. They play every other day, every third day, that kind of thing. The only people that play every day don’t have jobs or have Halo AS their job. Most others float around. What does this mean for matchmaking players? It means the average player wouldn’t notice a problem. You would have higher occurances of the most popular maps (as they do not get vetoed) and lower occurances of the least popular maps (as they get vetoed a lot). Those that are consistently vetoed would get the boot off of the playlist immediately. This also means that new gametypes and maps can be added into a playlist without much worry from the developers of people getting upset. Want to try Valhalla on Team Hardcore? That’s about as smart as chewing fire crackers, but you can give it a shot anyway. People will see it once, play it once, say “screw that”, and mash x every time they see it. Lo and behold, it is unpopular. You remove it. Playlist improves and evolves.

The only downside is you have to pay someone to do that. But honestly, anyone with minimal education can read graphs and charts. You could probably write a program to update the playlists automatically based off user responses, even.

3. A stage to use the map editor on

Foundry doesn’t cut it. Give us a large cube (NO WALLS IN THE MIDDLE) with a smaller cube inside it with a smaller cube inside that. This creates the illusion for the creator that this is merely a very tiny box, kind of like forge. Fortunately, they can delete the initial four walls, ceiling, and floor. This now gives them a medium sized map. Delete those walls and you now have a large sized map. Ta da. You are now finished with making maps of the sort. Now all you need to do is make different doodads and textures they can use so they can decorate their maps differently.

4. Audio control

There’s music (non-existent in multiplayer), ambient effects, player effects, and item (weapon/equipment) effects.

Why can we not have an audio option that let’s us edit those? I don’t want to put on my Turtle Beach headphones with the intent of hearing footsteps and instead hear birds going CAW CAW through the match, and I certainly don’t want to hear water rushing that shounds a lot like static. If I could turn down the ambient effects, I could easily make my experience more enjoyable.

5. A player-specific kill-to-death chart

End of a game, I get to see who I killed the most and who I killed the least. Why can’t I see exactly who I killed and how often :(

6. Armor color permutations

The number of colors we have to choose from keeps growing… but why can’t it match the number of colors that can be available on Microsoft Paint? I can understand the removal of Black as an armor color, as that means EVERYONE turns black all the time so they can have the advantage (even though brown was the best color in halo 1), but I can’t understand putting in 3 types of red instead of having an entire rainbow of red, from white to black with all the varients inbetween.

7. The ablity to choose host

So simple. One person hosts the party, one person hosts the game. Make the host a simple thing to checkmark before the game starts. Why would that be so bad?

But that’s about it.

Published by Overswarm on January 14th, 2008 | Filed under Uncategorized | 55 Comments »

Halo 3 stuff going at a good pace

The only distraction recently has been my girlfriend and my urge to do OTHER things related to my halo projects (instead of finishing what I’ve set out to do).

The whole “wanting to play Halo” gets in the way sometimes too.

I have some different little fun things I’m doing, and one of them gave me a little chuckle. While making a little collection of “bullshit” kills like random sticks, no-scopes, etc., etc., I had clips of some pretty funny stuff over the course of Halo 3’s current lifespan. Ironically, in 3 different games at 3 totally different time periods, I either stick or no-scope someone named KSI Ion 32. It really threw me for a loop. I mean, really, how unlucky can you get?

Published by Overswarm on January 12th, 2008 | Filed under Uncategorized | 7465 Comments »

Aliens attack!

The following post is going to be about a dream I had that ended approximately 15 minutes ago. If you aren’t interested in that sort of thing…… you probably won’t find this interesting! Oh, if you haven’t figured it out y et, it is about aliens.

You dream every night, whether you remember it or not. What determines whether you remember it I am unsure of, but I know waking up in the middle of the dream helps. The “severity” of your dream can be manipulated as well. Dreams become more vivid and strange when you are sleeping in an unknown place, when you go to bed when you aren’t tired, things like that. The only link I can find between them is that you think a lot before drifting off to sleep in all of those places, but I happened to go to bed very early yesterday (this morning?) at 2:00 a.m., much earlier than I normally do over the break.

The dream started with my roomates, my girlfriend, and me all playing video games in my apartment. It was warmer out, we had the door cracked open for a nice breeze, the shades were up, the windows were up, it was a clear day outside, and my friends and I were all laughing while playing the game.

Immediately after the dream “starts”, someone points at the sky. They mention offhand, not in a panic, that the sky is much darker than it was before; I assume they were commenting on the probability of a thunderstorm.

Being the inquisitive creature I am, this particular incident spurned by a potential natural phenomenon had me up and out of my seat to go gaze at the sky. After walking out the door and looking into NKU’s courtyard, I froze and I can still feel my heart stopping to an immediate halt.

There was a decently sized (about twice the length of a helicopter) ship floating down towards the ground. It was predominately white, with a faint lining of light purple and crimson as a “trim” (whether they were lights or not I do not know), and it made no audible sound. Instead it made vibrations that I could feel. Kind of like when a bass amp goes off, except a constant stream that reverberated so intensely that I could feel my body shake from the invisible force. I could see a bunch of creatures, predominately silver with faint traces of a deep plum color, running at speeds slightly faster than human, and they were shooting with a form of gun in their hand. Their actual gun shot nothing, but the people, trees, and anything else at the end of the “barrel”burst into flame. People were screaming, I was frozen in place, and it was about this time that I saw dark red “hover bike” esque things deploy from the sides of the ship that would fly across NKU’s campus in front of my eyes. More astonishing than their incredible speed and agility was the fact that they could easily change alititudes to be as high as a buildings with five floors. While looking up at the hoverbikes that were zooming around, I could see that the sky was littered with about a dozen ships identical to the one on the ground. When I turned around, I saw about eight or nine more in the sky behind me.

Looking into my apartment through the open door, I could see my girlfriend crying and screaming into the phone at someone, presumably her parents (you know how in the dream you just know what is happening even though there is no way for the you in the dream to know? Kinda like that), and the rest of my roomates were looking out the window at the ships on that side of the campus, one of them saying “oh shit” over and over again.

At this point, I see most of the creatures on the ground get down close to the earth and stop moving. Those on hoverbikes immediately go underneath the ship closest to the ground and hover beneath it in a circular pillar. The vibrations get more intense for a moment, and then I see light emit from the ships above. Not lasers, but very intense white light moving very much at the speed of light. Upon seeing them, I am momentarily blinded by their brightness; when I regain my vision, the creatures are moving in tightly unified groups towards different buildings, the hoverbikes are circling the group, and NKU is on fire. For those of you that don’t know Northern Kentucky University very well, it is made predominately of concrete. For it to be on fire is a very unsettling thought.

Looking back towards my apartment, no one inside is moving. They are all on the ground, dead, and I can see very unsettling things inside. The glass has melted and frozen in such a way that there are now holes in the windows, and there are “slits” in the walls from where the light came through.

My girlfriend and roomates dead (don’t worry, my girlfriend comes back for a bit later. It’s a dream so it is allowed), my college campus on fire, and hostile beings with superior technology walking in formation near my location, I make the decision to book it. I run down the stairs as fast as I can, then stay near buildings with my back to a wall, making sure to keep out of sight. At this point in the dream I think of how foolish it was to assume that they acted off of sight, but it is all I know. It wasn’t hard to be unnoticed, since there were dozens upon dozens of people screaming at the top of their lungs and running off in al directions, many to their cars. Occasionally, one burst into flame if they got too close to one of the creatures that seemed to have no problem keeping up with even the people that were in shape.

My car was very much out of the question, especially since the hoverbikes could catch up with it easily. I know the location, there are supplies like food, communications equipment, weapons (if I could reach the police station), and hopefully other people. So I do what I can to survive in this location: I hide. They seemed to be targetting buildings, so I went a short ways away from some of them and merely jumped in a dumpster (which was luckily not full), turned my phone on silent (my dreams have attention to detail), took my keys out of my pocket so they didn’t jangle, and then I sat and heard people scream for several hours while I waited.

The sun went down and the screams stopped, but I still heard movement outside and I still felt vibrations. Occasionally I’d hear someone burst into flame. I’m guessing the aliens found people who were playing hide and seek, or maybe they were just malicious enough to burn bodies. Who knows. After over 24 hours in the dumpster, just sitting and waiting and eating thrown away pizza crusts and other disgusting things, the vibrations stopped. The ship “noise” not in the air anymore and the lack of bustling and rustling outside gave me a little bit of confidence, but I stopped myself anyway and waited. What if they had just landed to set up camp, or had gone to eat or something ridiculous like that? So I waited, but no vibrations returned and it stayed quiet.

Over my 24 hour get-away in the dumpster, I decided I wanted to go home. My real home, not my apartment home at school. I had also decided to risk using my car if it was still intact, as it was my best bet. Maybe aliens wouldn’t attack a place that wasn’t heavily populated? Maybe I just wanted to go home. I don’t know.

At this point, my girlfriend, Erin, is magically back to life and we both come out of the dumpster and go towards my car. Fast forward through driving that I don’t remember and we are halfway down the highway, nearing my house. I can see ships floating ominously in the sky, and there are several other cars driving around (there aren’t speed limits anymore, my friends). At one point I see the hatches open on the side of a ship that is eerily close to the highway, and I realize they were the hatches that released the hoverbikes at NKU on another ship. After a brief moment of fear and cursing, I pull over to the side of the road, take the keys out of my car, and I grab Erin and go off the road. For some reason there is a drainage pipe large enough to walk in under the road, and that’s where I’m going to hide. I race down the slopes made of large stones with Erin behind me. I make it inside the drainage pipe in time to hear Erin say “ouch” very loudly when she falls a bit on the rocks. She looks at me and says “you’re going too fast”, and then immediately afterwards bursts into flame as a creature on a hoverbike flys by. I am now depressed, helpless, and hopeless, at this point in the dream.

It’s important to note that when I know my dream is a dream, I don’t take it seriously. I can magically make whatever I want happen. The scary thing is that I didn’t know it was a dream, and so I thought this was all real.

The creature on the hoverbike was the first I had seen up close. It was predominately silver colored, with dark plum-colored pieces of something underneath the silver. Perhaps skin, I’m unsure. The head was remarkably like a duck. It was small and rounded at the head, and had a long bill sticking out. Also interesting was the fact that their lower “bill” was much shorter and more like a human jaw. They just had a really long bill on top, all of it colored silver.

After a cautiously long wait, I get out of the pipe and see my car still intact, as is every other car. There just weren’t people anymore. I decide to drive again anyways, as I don’t see hoverbikes anymore.

I somehow get to my house, and my family isn’t there. My cell phone doesn’t work, and I see my family’s vehicles all lined up at my house… but no one inside. There are no ships above my house, but I can see some in the distance moving fairly slowly across the sky.

For some unknown reason, my house starts to fill with people. One of my neighbors had come up looking for a better place to stay (his house had no food), and others just kind of showed up. Don’t know how.

Well, that night, aliens attacked. It was a series of “shorts” in my dream. Instead of a long, detailed segment of a dream like at NKU, this was just a bunch of short pieces of action from different perspectives.

People in my house are bursting into flame, some are hiding, some start to fight back.

Segments that appeared, in no particular order:

-people bursting into flame

-a duck creature on a hoverbike running into a large window, cracking it and causing him to fall off his hoverbike (my reasoning was that they couldn’t “see” glass. Like I said, attention to detail)

-a duck creature being set on fire by someone in my house with a blowtorch. Apparently, these creatures are very flammable and have screams that don’t really sound like a duck’s.

-a duck creature being picked up and thrown by someone, and then consequently beaten to death with a baseball bat

-me breaking a duck creature’s neck, then back, then arms, then legs, and every other joint I could find that didn’t bend two ways once I discovered how fragile their bodies were. Like breaking sticks.

It sounds from the above like we were “winning”, and we technically did because the dream went on, but the house that was full of people is now down to about eight.

I drag one of the bodies into the dining room of my house for better lighting, flip on the light, get my video camera, and then I cut open the head and look at their brain. It is very tiny, purple, and wrinkled. I open up the rest of his body and I don’t remember what it looked like, but the brain was the closest thing to human there and it didn’t even look the part. I was recording it with my video camera (which my lovely girlfriend, now dead twice in the dream, got me for Christmas in real life) in the hopes that I could put it online and someone could see what they looked like inside and figure something out about how they worked.

At this point, there was a long stint of boring nothing happening in my dream. For some reason we had about 12 dogs that we had to keep outside, I had to keep unplugging christmas lights and yelling at people for turning on lights in the house (like the aliens didn’t know we were there already), and other boring things. Well, the boredom was broken with another attack by the duck things again, this one a bit more vicious than the last. Everyone but myself and two others had died very quickly, and instead of shooting us the aliens led us outside. Figuring this had to be better than bursting into flame, we went with them. They had this odd “pad” set up on the ground that we could step on. I was last in line, and three duck guys took the guy first in line to the pad. He stepped on it, and they pointed their guns at him and visibly made sure not to touch anyone. The vibration from the ship above increased, and they all disappeared. Mostly. The person that had been standing on the pad was now in pieces, still on the pad. Most of him was missing, a lot of him was not. Blood was pooling where he used to stand, and about ten seconds after the initial vibration, another one occured and the original three duck people came down, along with the remaining pieces of the first person in line. They pushed the pieces of this poor guy online, and then immediately walk forward and take the second person in line to the pad. There are two duck guys standing guard behind me. The second person is very obviously upset and scared of this beaming operation, seeing as how random pockets had appeared in the person in front of him. When I say he was in pieces, I don’t mean that he was cut up. There were large caves in him, as if someone had carved them out with an ice cream scoop. Limbs were randomly missing, holes had been punched through him. Very clean and clear holes.

The vibration increased, and the duck people beamed up with the second person. This time, less of the person was left behind. Just a few pieces of his legs. He came back down about ten seconds later with his three duck creatures, and he was screaming very, very loudly. Some of his fingers were gone, part of his face was missing, pretty gruesome stuff. It was put to an end after he was pushed off the pad, as the aliens shot him with the gun and he was instantly a cinder.

It was now my turn and I don’t want to go on the pad. The three duck people go back up without me, and I feel some relief. Then I realize that I was the last one and the two duck people behind me were putting me on the pad.

In a flash of oddness and genius, I start taking off my clothes. The duck people seemed confused by this, but I take them all off and set them on the pad. My line of thinking was “anything to change the circumstances of the last two people”. I imitate the stances of the other two duck people as good as I can, and the vibration from the ship picks up. Right about then I lost my nerve and I sprinted off the platform. The two duck people behind me run after me and quickly get in front of me, point their guns at me, and force me to stop. The ship’s beam had not waited for us. I look back, and I see pieces of my clothes missing, but not all of them. For some reason, the ship is crashing because of what I did. I don’t know why, but it is crashing. It is starting to fall straight down into my yard, the nose landing in the center and the tail landing the opposite direction from me. I grab the two duck people, knowing I can carry them as they are ultra-light, and I jump into my driveway and sit behind the concrete barrier we have there (it sounds weird when I word it like that, but our driveway is cut into a hill and we have a short concrete wall that keeps dirt out). The ship above explodes, demolishing my house and turning my front yard into glass. Because it is a dream, merely laying down behind a concrete wall about a foot or two below the explosion and about twenty feet away is more than enough to escape unscathed.

I pick up the duck people, disarm them, and walk back to my house that is magically back. The people are now magically back as well.

I hate that about dreams.

I woke up in the midst of me arguing with the people in the house. They wanted to kill the duck things, I wanted to attempt to communicate with them.

Pretty messed up if you ask me.

Especially that they had duck-like features. It sounds almost comical when I read it from someone else’s perspective, but these guys weren’t funny looking, and they wasn’t a single time I laughed at them in my dream. These guys were pretty scary.

I did learn one thing from this dream. If aliens did attack, we would be fucking hosed.

Published by Overswarm on January 7th, 2008 | Filed under Blogroll, My life | 7413 Comments »

C’est la vie

Trying to work on Halo 3 stuff and my AV cables are broken!

Gotta order some offline and wait until mid-next week before I can do stuff again. It’s really hard to stockpile this stuff when these things keep happening.

Published by Overswarm on January 4th, 2008 | Filed under Uncategorized | 7527 Comments »

Dear Rock Band

Thanks.

Published by Overswarm on December 28th, 2007 | Filed under Blogroll, My life, general gaming, game reviews | 26 Comments »

The inferior race

So the title of this blog post could very well offend a large number of people. This is, of course, before they read any of the text below; I could be talking about orcs and elves, but the concept of an inferior race is thought of as inherently racist. Gone, supposedly, are the days in which someone can say they are superior.

Well, a scientist has recently claimed to discover that the mental capacity of Africans, and those with African decent, is much smaller than those of European decent. In other words, Africans are dumber, i.e., blacks are dumber than whites.

http://news.independent.co.uk/sci_tech/article3239366.ece

Now what bothers me about this isn’t that he said that blacks are inherently less intelligent. What bothers me is that he said he has research that says so, and was then fired for it and slammed by the community. No one asked to see his research. No one heard a lecture on it. No one followed up on his findings, and no one will; it would be academic suicide.

The question I want to know, is what if he was right?

It’s obvious that any mental defeciency that a race has on this planet is minimal. The amount of brainpower the common man needs is so small that a high school education is more about being socially fluent than an effecient worker. The implications of one race being inferior to another for any reason are not exactly implicit. Yet, he is slammed for his work because it is not popular. It could offend someone.

Here’s a game I like to play, it’s called “forced uneasiness based on perceptions of equality”.

Let’s pick a group. It can be an organization, it can be a sect, it can be a race or ethnicity, or even a gender.

Let’s pick gender, since everyone can deal with that.

You start by making a statement that can be challenged. Generally, this is a commonly accept fact.

Women and Men are equal.

Uh oh, he went there. Yeah, that’s generally accepted as fact. Do we have anything other than empirical evidence to prove that they are equal? Not really. A few test scores from high school students, but that’s about it. But let’s assume that it is true, and that for the majority of all people on the planet, men and women have equal brainpower. That’s what everyone believes, or at least says they believe, so if you can prove this fact wrong logically you should be good to go without much research into the matter at all.

Now, to challenge the initial fact, we produce evidence that seems to give a side an “edge”.

Men are stronger than women.

Oh, I believe that is another fact. Men, on average, are stronger than women. While women gain body fat, men gain muscle mass.

Now this creates a dilemma. Men and women can’t be equal if men have an edge, can they?

It’s the woman crowd’s turn. If they can’t pull out a trump card, they will forever be known as inferior!

Women, on average, live longer natural lives than men.

Phew, now we’re back to equal!

Men have better control over their emotions.

Women can give birth, while men cannot.

Men don’t have crippling biological functions that can take us out for anywhere from a week to 9 months.

Women score, on average, better than men in math and reading.

Men have the highest test scores period, and excel in more areas than women do.

So, it could go on and on forever. The point is, men and women… are not equal. They are different. Just like races are. I could do that with white’s and black’s as well. Did you know most black people can’t get head lice? Their hair is created differently than a white person’s hair (which accounts for the change in appearance). Do the white people in the world need to have a rebuttle to that? Are people really so paranoid?

The truth is, people aren’t equal. MLK Jr. said “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal”.

Well, sorry Martin, but you’re wrong. With our increased understanding of genetics and the actual finite limitations of our biological systems that can be radically different from one to another, we’ve learned that is not a truth to be “self-evident”. As a side note, don’t ever believe a truth is “self-evident”. No truth is. Truth is truth because it can be, in one way or another, proven beyond any shadow of a doubt. Anything less is a theory.

But back to my main point, people need to stop worrying about whether or not they are equal. We’re close enough. If you give an asian man, a black man, and a white man all the same job, their ability to do said job will rarely, if ever, be radically different based off of their race or any other genetic pre-disposition that they cannot control. For every black thug I’ve seen walking down the street, I’ve seen a white man selling pot. For every black lawyer, I’ve seen a white policeman. Are they equal? No, they’re different. I might not be able to bench press as much as the next person I can see, but odds are I could beat them in Halo. Who’s a better person?

Neither. There’s never a “better”. There wouldn’t be a “better” even if whites were more intelligent than blacks, there would just be different. It is comparing apples and oranges when you talk of equality, because you can’t even find two human beings that are equal unless you shed them of everything that makes them human.

Published by Overswarm on December 15th, 2007 | Filed under Uncategorized | 33 Comments »

Interview with a Grandparent

I thought I’d share this with whomever would like to read it. I think it is definitely worthwhile. It is a list of questions I asked my Grandmother about life.

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1) What would you say are life’s most important lessons?

To learn early that you have to be true to yourself, and whatever you are gonna be or whatever you are has to come from your own self. Sometimes people around you will shape you, but to be honest with you, it is within your own self. Whatever you want to be or whoever you are has to be through your own self.

Learn from your mistakes, and I mean learn. If you learn from them, you don’t repeat them.

Take each day as it comes.

2) What are the most important things in life?

Family and Christianity.

3) If you were allowed to redo one thing in your life what would it be?

I would be less hard on my children. Be a little more lenient. Try to not make as many mistakes, get more education.

4) What would you tell young people is most important to be happy?

No one can make you happy, and no one can keep your from being happy, if you know yourself. Everyone is always trying to blame something on someone else. You have to like yourself. True happiness comes from within. If you don’t like yourself, no one else will either.

Things will bother you from time to time, but look within yourself for happiness. If you’re happy with yourself, you’re happy with other people, and if you help other people, you’ll feel better about yourself.

Published by Overswarm on December 5th, 2007 | Filed under Blogroll, My life | 31 Comments »

Where have you been?!?!

I’ve gotten several e-mails asking where I’ve been…

Long story short, I’m not a fraud. I know what I’m talking about when I write an article, and I don’t make things up or copy other people’s work when their work is just fine. That means I have to be playing a bit of Halo 3 before I can make some judgements on it. I don’t want to just spout off random stuff. No one really noticed that I didn’t start NSCS right away with Halo 2 because, well, no one knew who I was that didn’t go to my college.

As for Melee, I’m sorry folks but it will more than likely be a dying game in the near future. I’m not going to squeeze a stone and whine about the lack of blood dripping from it; I’m going to wait for Brawl.

The good news is that as long as I can find free time next semester, you’ll have Halo 3 stuff in bulk! I plan on focusing more on MLG-esque updates if possible, but I need to find a good group of people to play with. I let too many people on my FL, and a lot of them are… bad. But it’s okay I guess.

Oh, and you guys should challenge me at Guitar Hero III. I’m not half bad ;)

Published by Overswarm on November 26th, 2007 | Filed under Blogroll, My life, general gaming | 35 Comments »