Author Archive for Db0

7th Sea CCG on OCTGN

Published

on February 8, 2012

Recently I’ve finished porting all the 7th Sea CCG sets to OCTGN and like my previous post about Doomtown, I thought I’d make a post on how to setup and play the game.

First of all an introduction for those not in the know:

The 7th Sea CCG is a defunct collectible card game based around naval combat in all forms. From blasting your opponent’s ship to splinters with your cannons, to boarding them and hacking them to bits. It plays around the common theme of Swashbuckling Pirates and Privateers and thus you do stuff such as send your crew on adventures and generally try to control the 5 seas the game is played in.

Deck building revolves around many things:

Selecting what faction you want to play, as there are dedicated pirates, army captains, chartered privateers and even the undead, each with their own rich history, story and gameplay tendencies.
Deciding what basic strategy you’re going to use to achieve victory: Big Cannon Attacks, Small Cannon attacks, Boardings, A bit of this and a bit of that, Controlling the Seas or some other wacky experimental build – like playing the Viking Raiders and using your Laerdom sorcerers to destroy opponent’s ships through weather catastrophes.
Deciding on the type of cards you’re going to use, as too much of one card might make you strong in your chosen tactic, but might cripple you if you’re ever trapped in a boarding.

And there’s a lot of other fine strategies in deckbuilding that emerge once you start to understand how the game works and the cards interact with each other.

The game is primarily designed for 2 players playing as opponents, but you can easily play it with more, albeit a Free-For-All is not recommended. However some of my fondest experiences with card games were when playing this game as 2 vs 2 team matches.

So now that you have a basic idea of what it is, here’s how to get it running on your PC.

Once again, starting from the basics, in order to play a game in OCTGN, you need 3 things: The OCTGN client, the game definition and the card sets you’re going to use. Thus in order to be able to play the 7th Sea CCG you need to:

Download & Install the OCTGN client from here (Windows only I’m afraid )
Grab the game definition from here. Save it in a location you’ll find it again, such as D:\OCTGN\7ThSea
Grab all the card sets inside this directory as well as the Markers & Tokens set.
Open OCTGN and login with a Google account^[1]
Go to the games Games tab.
Use the “Install Game” button and select the .o8g file to install the game definition first.
Then click on the Doomtown game that appeared and click the button to install sets. Select all the sets you downloaded (You can select multiple at the same time) and press OK. After a short wait, OCTGN should announce that all sets were installed and you should be able to see them in a list.
Press the Deck Editor button and create or import a deck. I suggest again you save it in the same place you downloaded your Doomtown files (e.g. D:\OCTGN\Doomtown\Decks). Eventually I’ll create some starter introductory decks for people new to the game to use.
(Optional) In case you’re a new player, grab the rulebook from here

Now that we have the game ready, the only thing that is left is to find someone to play with. Fortunately, the new OCTGN 3 has a built-in game lobby capability, which means that whenever you go to the host/join tab, you’ll see any available game lobbies for the games you have installed, and if you host a game, anyone with the same game can see it and join. Unfortunately the 7th Sea CCG is even less active than Doomtown which means it is unlikely anyone will be hosting or looking to join a game at the same moment you are. Even worse, there’s not even a specific community for the 7th Sea CCG. There’s a Facebook group with 4 people (at this time) which you might ask in, A Facebook page with more fans, but related to all things 7th Sea, which for most people is only the RPG, and of course our own OCTGN Game fora where you may inquire if anyone if up for a game. But very likely, your best bet would be to contact me directly

The 7th Sea CCG version for OCTGN is not yet as automated as Doomtown, mostly because I “power” my motivation to code this stuff depending on how much I actually play the game and thus see areas for streamlining and improvement. Given that I haven’t managed to find a single person to play with (something which I hope to change with this post), it’s no surprise that the scripting behind it is minimal. Still, I do plan to improve it as much as I can, even if I don’t play much personally. Eventually I hope to make it as streamlined to play as possible and take away much of the “carpal-tunnel” tediousness that online play introduces to card games as well as help players avoid common mistakes done while playing complex games.

If you do get to play a game with your friends and find things that annoy or could simply be improved, do contact me and I’ll work on it as soon as possible. And of course, spread the word.

Enjoy!

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Notes

The authentication goes encrypted straight to Google,so no worries

Other similar posts you might also enjoy: Doomtown on OCTGN | Full Bundle for Doomtown on OCTGN updated | A game of Doomtown in action

Another tooth bites the dust

Published

Db0

on February 3, 2012

So, a few hours ago, I got back from the university dentist clinic…with one tooth less. Finally my odyssey in finding why I’ve been in having pains when chewing with this tooth and lately simply constant extreme pain on it and around its area, are at and end.

You see, this particular molar had been torturing me for years, I initially noticed a few years ago, shortly after I got my wisdom teeth removed, chewing particular foods with it, (especially “chewy” ones like rump steaks and the like) sometimes caused extreme pangs of pain, but it was infrequent enough that I could dismiss it. Unfortunately it wouldn’t dismiss me.

The pains started getting more frequent and later on affecting other kinds of food as well. I mentioned this multiple times to my dentist when I visited for my regular check-ups, but every time he looked at it and said that it doesn’t look as anything more than pressure from my grinding issue. With alarm I kept mentioning that the pain was growing in frequency and intensity as time passed but nothing else came of it.

Eventually, one week ago, things came to a head, ad this tooth simply started hurting constantly one day. It started as a weak pulsing pain but day by day it increased to annoying, then distracting, then intense, then “the painkillers, they do nothing!” to “Gawds please kill me quickly” kind of pain. At around the point where it was just “intense” I decided to get a second opinion, since my regular dentist couldn’t find anything wrong with it (“But it’s a perfectly healthy tooth!” were his words – granted this was before the pain become a constant experience, rather than only present when chewing on this tooth). Frustratingly, this second doctor made the same exact remarks and thought it was simply pressure as well and gave me a small drilling to alleviate it. However to his credit, he did passingly suspect the true cause and said that I should return if the pain persists.

However after the pain didn’t dissipate and one particularly painful night, and a suggestion by liriel and my mother-in-law, I decided to go for the ultimate investigation and visited the university clinic. Unfortunately I didn’t know the correct time, so I ended up in the emergency care, after roughly 3 hours of waiting around, I got to sit on the dentist chair, and the doctor that checked it, announced that I have aggressive periodontitis. She did some cleaning and said that I should visit the clinic again during daylight hours and go see the Periodontology experts.

Fortunately, the cleaning she did seemed to stop the general pain all around the area (until then, the pain was a “throbbing” kind that seemed to move from tooth to tooth, and even reached my ear), which allowed me to sleep easier. Unfortunately, it focused all that pain into the problematic tooth itself which made the pain constant, rather than throbbing and made it so that even the slightest touch hurt like a motherfucker.

So into the periodontology clinic I went, and after significant waiting again, I got looked at by a certain long-haired expert who announced that I definitely do not have aggressive periodontitis. Dismayed I asked “Then what do I have doctor” who then, to my frustration announced “I have no idea, but it looks very healthy, albeit suspicious”. Fortunately he had the good grace to say that a healthy tooth shouldn’t be hurting like this, so he would refer me to some other experts who would drill in to check the nerve itself…next day. I went into the clinic at 1pm and left at 5:30 so they were about closing at that time and I had to practically run to an arranged meeting I had for Mage Knight (Note to self: Not a good idea to try to explain very complex board games while having intense tooth-ache).

Anyway, so next day (i.e. today) I started quite early on and went for a visit to those other experts. Fortunately the waiting time was much less and soon I was in to figure out what the problem was. After a few tests on how alive my tooth was, where I didn’t even neither cold nor electrical shots to it, they declared that I had…aggressive periodontitis. Their suggestion was they should simply clean the area and make me come back next week. Fortunately I managed to convince them that this was definitely not a good idea with the amount of pain I was in, and that they should go and consult with the Periodontology expert who said that I don’t have periodontitis. More specifically, I asked them to look for the long-haired blond dude^[1] and see what he thinks because I damn well was not going home without a definite diagnosis today.

Fortunately the guy was still available so they went to fetch him. After a while however, rather than him, I saw yet another dentist come in, in a rush, wordlessly grab his utensils and start banging on my teeth once more. Once I made it clear that the molar really really fucking hurts when he’s banging on it, he discussed a bit with the others and then got to the anesthetics. At around the time, the long-haired dentist (by now I knew he was dr. Roellke) arrived as well and he got to see them drilling it to figure out what the hell was wrong with it. Fortunately, they suspected correctly this time (I must have got the drilling expert this time) and they saw my tooth had a small fracture right down the middle…vertically.

This kind of fracture was positioned in such a novel way^[2] as to make it invisible to x-rays as well as to the naked eye, which is why my regular dentist as well as everyone else couldn’t see anything wrong with the tooth and announced it as perfectly healthy. Unfortunately, all this time, the fracture as deepening until it eventually reached the nerve area, which allowed germs to pass through and wreak merry hell on my pain receptors. I suspected something was horribly wrong with the tooth for years now, and perhaps if we had caught the fracture when it was still beginning, we might have saved the tooth, but everyone was so focused on my grinding problem that they didn’t believe me that this tooth has a special kind of pain.

Unfortunately this meant that the tooth was unsalvageable, so this time dr. Roellke himself took me to the surgeons who would extract it. 3 different anesthetics and some serious pulling later, I had the bad tooth lying in front of me, looking all ashamed for its act. However, I really don’t care. Testing my teeth now, I finally bit down without any pain, which is something I haven’t had for years no, so one bad tooth is a small price to pay for this.

Time for my first golden tooth methinks!

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Notes

I am so fucking lucky he was distinctive like that and I could make them figure out who he was, without remembering his name
seriously, they came and took pictures to teach other students about it

Other similar posts you might also enjoy: 2 little bastards down. 2 little bastards to go | Ouchie | Sore Throat…again

Quote of the Day: American Gulags

Published

Db0

on February 3, 2012

Quoth Tim Cushing

Over all, there are now more people under “correctional supervision” in America-more than six million-than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height.

An interesting tidbit of information about the police state of the US of A, and how their capitalist system has found a way to rework the justice system itself in order to secure cheap and maleable labour.

Patriot Americans love to remind everyone on the socialist side of the prism, about how better capitalism is than everything else, and bring about comparisons with Russian gulags and the like. It’s hilarious to point out that they’re actually far worse than they were.

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Other similar posts you might also enjoy: Communism in the garbage bin of history | Socialism is not merely Anti-Capitalism | What is Socialism?

Yet more proof that all MOBA (AKA DotA-clone) communities are absolute shit.

Published

Db0

on January 27, 2012

I’ve spoken in length about how sexist S2 and Heroes of Newerth is, which is not surprising given how bigoted their CEO is, and other have written about how Riot games and League of Legends is not far behind in providing fan service and all the other things that implies. But I still had some hope for DotA 2,which was being developed after all by Valve, which has at least somewhat a better record at how it presents women, as seen by the absolute top male nerd fantasy: Alyx Vance. Sure, their promo images of the game characters were obviously sexist and others have raised concerns about the direction the community was taking already, but hope dies last as they say, so despite all this, and despite the fact that MOBA communities are the absolute scum of the earth, I wanted to believe that some Valve guidelines and strong moderation might improve things

How wrong I was.

It seems that the DoTA2 community is shaping to be as bad, if not worse than the S2 community and the all-powerful report function isn’t having any effect whatsoever, especially given that the moderators are actually of the same shitty opinion as the rest of their scumfuck players.

There’s really not much else to say, that the community can’t say by itself. Some choice quotes

I’m not homophobic and I call people fags all the time.

george just come out of the closet already

Because, of course, only secretly members of marginalized communities might ever be against their oppression. This argument would be so bad if it wasn’t so fucking common.

For example, I have multiple homosexual friends including one who enjoys dressing up in feminine clothing and a wig, putting on make-up, to become his alternate persona “Greere Grimes”. He has 2 or 3 friends that do this as well regularly. When we see each other at the gym and talk to each other, and he says something such as (This is a true story), “Did you see the guy at the check-in? OH MY GOD I couldn’t breathe!” and I laugh and go “Dan you’re such a fag ahahah”, he chuckles and says “Oh I know! I’m gonna go talk to him” and viola. There is no offense taken because he understands that while society attaches negativity to the word, he knows I personally do not and as well, he is in fact a faggot and is fully comfortable with it.

This is the same person who as Greere Grimes was at a bar and left early without his friends, while 3 men followed him outside and broke multiple ribs as well as giving him many bruises including a black eye. These was a hate crime and the 3 men are still at large. He was in the hospital for 4 days.

Someone who understands the hate that people can have in their hearts, and HE is comfortable with someone calling him a faggot?

[...]

I will continue to call people faggots until nobody is offended. And then I will use the word to refer to homosexuals. Because that’s what it’s already supposed to be doing.

There are no words…

I don’t get offended at asian jokes being asian myself

Nor do I get hurt by random t2s randomly throwing out racial slurs and happen to hit one

Never will be and never have been.

If I talk to my mexican friend and say something about her getting smuggled over the border she will just laugh.

If I talk to my blonde friend and tell her a really crappy dumb blonde joke she wont care.

Someone please bring out the Special Snowflake award.

This is like black people still crying about shit all the time. “Yo we can say nigger but if you white people say it that shit racist yo”

^ THIS WAS A GAME MODERATOR SPEAKING ^

Same game moderator went ahead to complain about how hard straight white mailes have it. Seriously.

Anyone who actually posts in here and tries to defend it saying that its hurtful are gay. Straight up I want your wiener in my mouth gay. Now get your ass outa the closet and stop being a white knight of the internet.

Quality

I gave up shortly after the last quote.

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Apparently ChristianDatingSites.net wants Antichristians as affiliates.

Published

Db0

on January 25, 2012

художник на икониSo, yesterday I received this email:

Hi,

My name is Cindy and I’m the owner of ChristianDatingSites.net–would you take a look at my site and consider possibly listing it as a resource on your website?

ChristianDatingSites.net is the only website exclusively devoted to Christian singles who want reliable information about avoiding the financial and physical dangers inherent in using online dating, serving our readers by authoring articles on topics like how to identify dating site scams and how to deal with one if you fall victim.

Please take a look at ChristianDatingSites.net, and if you agree that it’s a valuable resource, perhaps consider adding a link to it from your site?

Thank you in advance for your consideration,

Cindy McDonald
Blogger | Owner

Cindy, my dear, consider your wish granted. We, the devoted antichristians of the net would love to endorse ChristianDatingSites.net wholheartedly. All Antichristians should consider this as their first stop if they ever consider christian dating given the recently converted nature of its owner: Cindy the Antichristian. Welcome to enlightenment my sister.

I know, I know, it might come as something of a shock to the previous audience of ChristianDatingSites.net, but such are the realities when one finally wakes up to the nonsense of the Christian belief system. I’m sure Cindy’s recent deconvertion will not affect her professional conduct in her role as webmaster and that is certainly shown by her rational choice to contact The Antichristian Phenomenon to list her as a valuable resource.

We hear and we acknowledge Cindy! Of course, we do not expect that you link immediately back to the ACP, as that might alienate your readers, but I’m sure you have plans to slowly spread more and more antichristianity and when the time comes, a proper link back to us will be provided. Until then, feel free to copy some of our texts for covert dissemination to your audience. Wink,wink.

For all our christian readers out there, you can now see they the ACP is the top religious blog on the net, when even Christians reach out to us for endorsements.

Tell your friends.

More Antichristianity: FAQ finally up | A small pwnage | Theme update

Quote of the Day: Dignity

Published

Db0

on January 15, 2012

Quoth Mandy Hiscocks (via Guelphabc)

You speak of dignity, that everyone should be treated with dignity. I agree with you. But you can’t treat someone with dignity, or expect to be treated with dignity in return, while one person is up high and the other person is down low, while your boot is on their neck.

It is unfortunate but expected that the Anarchist Mandy Hiscocks has been sentenced to prison time for their acts in the G20 protests. In their closing statement, they provided a scathing critique of the “justice” system and its support for systematic oppression. I can’t recomment reading it enough.

Also visit Mandy’s blog.

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Other similar posts you might also enjoy: Quote of the Day: Feminism | Top Anarchodog | (Right-)Libertarianism, Denial and lulz

The kind of anarchist who hates me on reddit

Published

Db0

on January 15, 2012

This has been a common trait of almost all the ones who have expressed their intense dislike towards me^[1] since the Great /r/Anarchism ShitStorm of 2010, while I was acting as a mod, and even now where I’m not.

Case in Point.

Even more hilarious is that about half a dozen of those most vocal about me being too “liberal”, ended up transforming into authoritarian Marxists of various strains.

I find it very disconcerning that many self-professed anarchists will support some of the most authoritarian decision-making styles, if it will “get things done”, without ever thinking of the costs. As if a movement which based itself on hierarchical and authoritarian “get things done” mentality would somehow transform into a democratic and mutual aid society after those things had been done.

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Notes

for not being “anarchist enough”. I was also hated by many on the other side of the coin for supposedly facilitating authoritarians

Why are black people so annoyed all the time?

Published

Db0

on January 6, 2012

The ShitRedditSays Fempire is quickly becoming the only worthwhile place to hang out in Reddit (aside from a few places that make an effort to being inclusive such as /r/anarchism). One of the classic things that happen with some regularity are the so-called “effortposts”, which are basically long text posts, meant to go into some depth into reddit depravity, or simply into a specific subject.

Such is the case with this amazing effortpost on racism in contemporary America and how it’s alive and kickin’ in the 21st century, regardless of what privilege blind white dudes think. I can say, as a white dude, that this was immensely educating, especially since I am very unfamiliar with the realities of racism over the pond.

Look through the following, save it in your bookmarks, and rub it in the face of any ~~idiot~~ redditor who tells you that racism in America is over.

An American Perspective: Why Black People Complain So Much.

Also, don’t forget to apply join the Reddit Gynocracy. Start gathering the required amount of foreskins for your application ASAP.

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Alice DSL support is atrocious.

Published

Db0

on January 6, 2012

Rant time children.

For the last few weeks my DSL connection to the internet has been having some pretty annoying problems. Very specifically, the WAN (The connection from my home to their servers) is dropping intermittently and comes back again after a minute or so. How often it will drop varies. I’ve seen it do it 3 times in 10 minutes and I’ve seen if happen once a day. I do know it’s the WAN specifically because I have a router with DD-WRT which can show me exactly what the connection is doing. I also know because I’ve had this exact same problem 2 years or so ago, and after a lengthy investigation back then, they eventually realized the problem was on their end. The problem back then was resolved after 3 months and a dozen support calls or so.

The nature of this problem is likely to be almost invisible to the average user, but for someone who likes playing games online, this is a show stopper. I can tolerate being disconnected once from the game, but once it happens 3 times in 15 minutes, I give up in frustration usually.

So you can imagine my dismay when the same exact issue cropped up a few weeks ago, because I remember last time getting Alice DSL (My ISP) to fix this took an enormous amount of effort on my part, just to convince them to look in the right direction. The reason for this is because their first and second line support is atrocious and it becomes even worse when one does not speak good German.

The first problem one encounters is that they will actually refuse to speak english on their standard tech support line. It’s not like you happen to always fall on the odd person who hasn’t learned a word in english. It seems to be a company policy not to speak to customers in english. After speaking to at least 12 people in their first line support, I find it impossible that not one of them knew even bad english, especially given that every other german I’ve met does, and that all Ggermans learn them at school. There can be no other explanation than that they’ve been instructed not to speak english at first line support.

This is obviously very discouraging for their non-german customers which brings me to my main suspicion that Alice DSL does not care about solving your problems, but primarily about getting rid of you. If they can do that quicker by fixing your problem, all the better, but if they can get rid of you by not allowing you to even report your problem, fine as well. Btw, if you mention that you do not speak german, then your only option is to have some of their english tech support people call you within 1-2 hours via phone appointment (and I think, only during business hours). Good luck if you have stuff to do in that time. Better drop everything and wait for the call.

But even broken german is usually not enough. Much of the time I can somehow speak well enough to make my point and get someone to look into it, but then they will start using some fairly complex words I’m not familiar with and half the time at least, I’ll have to ask my wife to take over.

If you somehow manage to get past the hurdle of language, then you still have to deal with them not knowing what the hell they’re doing.

So as I said, I’ve got a problem on the WAN. This is the first thing I mention, as well as the fact that I’ve had this exact same issue before and it was on their end back then. I also mention that I’ve called before and we’ve gone through basic and advanced troubleshooting. Much of the time, they don’t care so back to basic troubleshooting we go.

Basic troubleshooting of course means that you’d better not be running anything other than MS Windows and Alice-approved hardware. Anything and everything else is absolutely not supported. GNU/Linux? Not supported. Third party router after their modem? Not supported. It doesn’t matter that the problem might be entirely unrelated to the hardware or the desktop, if you have anything that is not MS Windows connected to your network, your Alice support is liable to be revoked. So before you even think of calling Alice support, reboot to windows (reinstall if you don’t have any) and connect their modem directly to your computer and run their crappy installation disk. Otherwise, no support for you.

One time, at my 4th or 5th call to Alice support in 2 weeks or so, after I’ve already replaced modem and had some backend troubleshooting done by them, I called to report the issue persisting and got transferred to second line support again. There was a guy who refused to speak a word of English (of course) and demanded to know if I have a direct connection from my PC to the Alice modem. I told him that it didn’t matter because the connection was working just fine until now and I had already tried connecting directly to the model without success. He insisted in learning if I had anything connected and I said I had my own third party router. After some back and forth in German that I couldn’t really understand well, I passed to my wife to talk to him. He had her go look at the router, which I’d already told him is third-party, and tell him if it had “Alice” written on it. After that, he denied helping us further until we disconnected everything and connected only Alice hardware. And of course then we’d have to call Alice again and get a different technician…

Not all support techs are like that, but there are enough that are, and what inflames the issue is that Alice support refuses to open a ticket to track the progress. I’ve asked multiple times for a ticket number or something so that I don’t have to explain the same thing again and again, or go through the same basic troubleshooting steps every time, but they tell me it’s not necessary. Rather, I would call, and if I managed to get to someone who realized the problem was on the WAN connection, they would do “something” (They wouldn’t tell me exactly what. Usually they mentioned “restarting this connection” or “initializing that line”) and then call them back if the problem happened again. The problem would happen again, I would call, and then there was a high probability I would end up with a tech who just didn’t want to work that day, and start looking for excuses to avoid looking at my problem.

The latest of such excuses was that I was running Windows 7 English. I had my wife on the phone and the tech had her go on my workstation to check the windows settings. This is after we explained that this is the 9th time we called and we’ve already checked all that. Due to there not being a ticket open of course, he could just choose not to believe it, and rather have us check the same basic things again. Unfortunately, the settings the technician wanted to check on my workstation were in English and he couldn’t give my wife the correct instructions. His solution? “Call us back when you’ve had Windows 7 German installed”. At this point my wife hang up the phone in frustration after telling them that we’d rather switch ISP first.

To add to that, apparently the tech support was extremely patronizing to my wife, as if talking to an idiot, so there’s that as well.

And if you think that’s a one-off case, I will note that I’ve had the same exact troubles 2 years ago. Back then, they even sent a tech to my home who finally acknowledged that the issue was on their end. This after replacing virtually all Alice DSL hardware and making me run through hoops with my LAN. After that, finally the problem was fixed (and I got a ticket number), but this time I couldn’t even get this far.

After 9 calls to Alice with no success to even to get them to listen to the issue, we’ve had enough. All those “call us back if the problem persists” wouldn’t be as bad if we didn’t have to explain the same thing again and again every time, and then still get a few techs that insist on taking us through basic troubleshooting in order to find an excuse to deny service. I should also note that calling Alice support is a charged extra (Yes, you pay them to have them fix their own problems) by the minute and the minimum wait on hold is 5 minutes.

Aaargh.

So I’m still with the same shitty issue. My wife refuses to speak to Alice DSL support anymore (and I don’t blame her) and would rather switch providers altogether. And after 9 calls to support, I doubt we can get Alice DSL to even look at the issue.

The problem is that we don’t know what ISP to go for. I’m excluded some obvious bad choices such as Telekom, but there’s still a lot of options left. So if anyone is in Germany, perhaps you can offer some advice. I’ve been thinking of checking out Cablesurf.de which is a small provider that seems to have the highest speeds and rating on Speedtest.net but my wife is not liking this idea because their small size might mean even worse support from Alice (doubtful but who knows).

If anyone has any ideas, I’d love to hear them.

And any other fellow expat: if you’re not a good german speaker, stay the hell away from Alice DSL.

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Other similar posts you might also enjoy: Is Dreamhost PS simply a way for Dreamhost to wash their hands of support? | Site Hiccups | Ich war lernen…

My new favourite video series

Published

Db0

on December 15, 2011

I’ve started watching Errant Signal from its review of Game Advertising, and every other video I see from him is just as great. Wholly recommended.

We need more videos like these, and less stale and shallow IGN reviews.

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Other similar posts you might also enjoy: Once again…Ξεφτίλα! | Now that is some weird Japanese Gothic | Why I’m excited about Guild Wars 2

Oh Gawds, Wat? The most hilariously deluded libertarian ever

Published

Db0

on December 14, 2011

This is…I don’t…

I am just reading through this interview by a radical libertarian called “Code Name Cain” who expands upon his ideology. I do believe this must be the most absurd libertarian I’ve ever read. Calling him Fractally Wrong is almost an understatement.

Take a look at the six parts interview, read through the thing. It gets much more absurd (and much more hilarious) in the latter parts.

Part I –The Vision

Choice Quote:

ANDREW: Obviously it would be better to have defaulting borrowers be effectively enslaved in a way that fully respects their natural rights.

CNC: Obviously. Now that we’ve cleared that up, can you turn off the tape recorder? I want to get started on my steak.

Part II – The Strategy

Choice Quote:

CNC: With the secession strategy, you don’t need a majority. That’s good, because [t]he mass of people … always and everywhere consists of “brutes,” “dullards,” and “fools,” easily deluded and sunk into habitual submission [92]. Still, there can be no revolution without some form of mass participation. … the elite cannot reach its own goal of restoring private property rights and law and order unless it succeeds in communicating its ideas to the public, openly if possible and secretly if necessary… [93].

ANDREW: Even if you do it secretly, convincing the masses that they are inferior sounds tricky.

CNC: That’s true, but you don’t have to convince Joe the Plumber that he is a brute. You can convince him instead that he is a hardworking, productive individual, and that other people are brutes who are making it so Joe has no control over his life.

(Note red parts are direct quotes from the AnCap ideologue, Hoppe)

Part III – Regulation

Choice Quote:

ANDREW: I know that you think this is very unlikely, but suppose people living in the free society of the future decide that they don’t like it very much, and would like to go back to living in a democracy. Could they do it?

CNC: That will not be possible.

ANDREW: You mean, you are sure that no one will want to go back to democracy?

CNC: No, I mean they won’t be allowed to discuss that possibility.
In a covenant… among proprietor and community tenants for the purpose of protecting their private property, no such thing as a right to free (unlimited) speech exists, not even to unlimited speech on one’s own tenant-property. One may say innumerable things and promote almost any idea under the sun, but naturally no one is permitted to advocate ideas contrary to the very covenant of preserving and protecting private property, such as democracy and communism. There can be no tolerance toward democrats and communists in a libertarian social order. They will have to be physically separated and removed from society. [218]

THAT WILL NOT BE POSSIBLE CITIZEN. Is it me, or does this vision of libertopia sound increasingly like a weird version of Paranoia? The next paragraph expands on how the rich would be controlling armies of death bots!

Part IV – The Journey into a Libertarian Past

Choice Quote:

ANDREW: Noblemen and masters were obeyed because their serfs and slaves recognized that some people were naturally superior to others – but then some GLOs came in and started messing everything up by appealing to racism and jealousy. These “rogue GLOs” are where governments come from.

CNC: That’s right.

That it. We’ve reached peak absurdity people!

Part V – Dark Realities

Choice Quote:

ANDREW: You are sometimes forced to engage in lobbying.

CNC: Yes. For example, the current meme in the investment community is that the combination of climate change and population growth will make it almost impossible to have enough food for the world by the year 2050. Farmland is soaring in price.

My hedge fund discovered uncultivated land in the African country of ***. The land did not belong to anyone, and so we tried to buy it from the relevant government. Outrageously, certain officials from *** insisted on…

ANDREW: Bribes?

CNC: … arrangements before they would agree to sell the land at a fair price.

ANDREW: Was this farmland unoccupied?

CNC: No one owned the land before we bought it.

ANDREW: But was someone living there?

CNC: There were some local tribesmen who claimed that they had a vague traditional “right” to the land. Decisive action was necessary before they stopped squatting on our land.

ANDREW: Involving trucks of men carrying machine guns…

Oh gawds, wat?!

Part VI – Certainty

Choice Quote:

ANDREW: But you changed the story! That isn’t how it ends – the father doesn’t agree with the older son. He says it is right for them to celebrate, for “thy brother was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found.” And most readers assume that at that point, the older brother realizes that he has been acting like a two-year-old.

CNC: Look, I’m not like Ayn Rand or Ludwig von Mises. I don’t think that being a libertarian is incompatible with being a Christian. But since, as Mises put it, “all efforts to find support for the institution of private property… in the teachings of Christ are quite vain,” it is true that the New Testament needs to be edited a
little.

…so fucking funny….must not lol at work…

Response to Reader Comments

Fortunately for this world, the CNC character was fictional. Unfortunately, Hoppe and his red quotes are not. And the red quotes were the primary content of this “interview”

In fact, I found Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s ideas fascinating, but it would have been quite difficult to construct a dialogue entirely from snippets of his book. Even if I had done that, there would still have been a risk of misrepresenting his thought. Code Name Cain was created so that I could try to fill in missing or uncertain details of a Hoppe-like philosophy in the most logical manner I could think of, without attributing these additions to Hoppe himself. Some fine points that a couple readers thought I personally invented were actually adapted (rather faithfully) from Hoppe’s book: in particular, the graphs in part VI showing time-preference curves for different types of individuals (compare p. 8 of Hoppe’s book).

(h/t to the Barefoot Bum)

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Taxes are voluntary…according to libertarian logic

Published

Db0

on December 9, 2011

A frequent and much beloved (Right)-Libertarian talking point is on how taxes are not voluntary and that they are claimed by the state at the end of a gun barrel. “Taxes are theft”, “Taxes are violence” blah blah blah. We’ve all heard the spiel I’m sure. But I doubt how many have realized that such an argument is not really consistent with the logic libertarians^[1] apply in regards to voluntary contracts and choice.

You see, a common aspect of most strains of libertarianism is that any choice made voluntarily – by which they mean, in the absence of active coercion – is morally acceptable for both parties. Thus a person choosing to work for a wage, has made a conscious decision to get in this position, because it increases his marginal utility. In the same vein, a person choosing to work in a sweatshop have made a decision which makes their life better off than before, so the sweatshop practice itself is obviously moral. A female being sexually harassed by her boss, but nevertheless staying in the job, is a voluntary choice which naturally means that the sexual attention she’s receiving does not constitute “harassment”. Naturally it follows that if people do not want to end up in this situations, they always have the choice of not taking those particular jobs.

So, in this context, aren’t taxes voluntary just as well? Consider that when you sign up for a job, you agree to a contract that states that a part of your wage will go to the state. You are volunteering to a contract that stipulates taxes. If you do not like the contract, you always have the choice of not working at all. This is a valid choice, as much as it is for the sweatshop worker, is it not? You weight your options and choose the one more beneficial to you.

Most likely libertarians will mention at this point that even those opening their own business have to pay taxes, even though they have no contract with the state. But that would also be false. They do have such a contract with the state. The contract that leases the land they live on, for it is in the very end, the property of the state. You can’t own any land, unless somewhere in the history of that land, there is a contract between state and the first owner. And that contract, had stipulations for taxes. The taxes of the business owner thus become analogous to the rent of a land owner, and much like the contract with a land owner can have stipulations that you can accept or deny, so does the contract with the state. In this case being that you have to give an amount of your income to the state in the form of income tax, and all contracts with your employees must stipulate income tax as well. If you choose to enter this voluntary contract, then naturally you must think it acceptable. Surely if the land owner was simply a private person, requiring rent from you and everyone you employ, you would have the same amount of choice, no?

It is the case then, that if you don’t like the terms of such contracts, you are of course free not to work at all. Nobody is forcing you to make such a choice. But if you do make it, then it’s under our own volition, is it not?

I can foresee at this point the enraged flames that will start bursting my way. Most likely I will be informed that the choice is an illusion, since the state has artificially and violently limited the options to either paying income tax, or not making money at all. And I will admit, this is a very compelling argument indeed.

Which is why I will have to pull the “switch” to my “bait” now.

You see, the argument that will be made to point out that the choice between “work with taxation or no work” is an artificial one, is the same one I will use myself to point that “work for a boss or don’t work” is an artificial choice just as well. You want the option to live in a society where nobody has to pay taxes, I want the option to work in a society where nobody has to work for a boss.

Libertarians might claim that everyone would have this option in a society with no taxes, but if some landowners already hoard all the available land, then that is simply not true, for no landowner would be foolish enough to sell it rather than rent it. It would be as likely as the state truly selling land (rather than renting it via taxes) and allowing anyone to secede. In fact, that is the truth of the matter: The state, at the moment, is acting just like a capitalist landowner renting you some land with stipulations. The “rent” you pay, is your taxes. Imagine for a moment that instead of states, you had private landowners who asked for rent instead of tax. Would you, as a libertarian, have an issue with this?

Perhaps the smart libertarian will claim that the state came into ownership of this land through violence, and therefore any ownership claims over it are invalid. This is undeniably true: The state did enclose all the land through brutal violence. But what is to be done? The libertarian of a Rothbardian persuasion would undoubtedly claim that the best option would be to simply remove the state as the player, and let the ownership titles stand as they are, or possibly owned by their current workers in a shareholder format. But I would object to that, for this is not a natural distribution of ownership either, rather, it is artificially created by the previous violence of the state and its continued legacy of its collusion with the plutocracy throughout history. If one were to simply declare that the current ownership claims should be treated as “homesteading”, then why not do the same jump and claim that the current state ownership should just as well be treated as “homesteading”? Both these scenarios would ignore violent history anyway, so why not stick to the status quo? After all, I’m confident that very few libertarians would have an issue with the current arrangement if they were paying “rent” instead of “taxes” and they were living under the rule of a private landowner with extensive management staff, rather than a democratic state with extensive bureaucracy.

Or perhaps not. But then, I’d like to hear what the significant difference would be (except the lack of democracy that is).

The truth is that there’s isn’t a functional difference between a state and a landowner. Both simply ask for rent to allow you to live within their ownership claims (borders). The former simply also provides the illusion that you have a say in the policies that affect everyone under these border, as a way to pacify you. And this lack of difference remains whether you have 204 uber-landowners or 2.000.000. The size of their borders might decrease, but the effect of their rule would not.

As such, the original problem would remain. Perhaps the libertarians won’t mind, as long as they have 2.000.000 choices of contracts, rather than 204 but then again, that would mean the problem was in the number of states in existence, not in their taxation.

The lack of choice would still remain. We would still not have the option to live and work without rent and without bosses and landlords. For anarchists like me of course, that is still the biggest problem, but for libertarians it shouldn’t be; after all, bosses and landlords aren’t an issue for them…

Thus in the end, it would be simply hypocritical for a libertarian to claim that the state rent (i.e. tax) is immoral while the rent demanded from a landlord or boss isn’t. Both are based on passive coercion, rather than active. “Work for a boss, or starve” is not much of a choice, anymore than “Pay your taxes or go to jail” is. Both rely on the same exact set of circumstances: The artificial limitation of choices through the past exercise of violence.

Something which we communists like to call Primitive Accumulation…

PS: This post was inspired when I watched the “income tax bait and switch” in action, in this reddit comment thread. Props to watwatwatwatt for thinking of it.

Libertarianism is Incompatible with Democracy (atheism.about.com)
My vote for worst Libertarian website (mojoey.blogspot.com)
Majority Support (radgeek.com)

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Notes

I’ll avoid using (right) for brevity. Let’s just assume it’s implied whenever I say “libertarian” in this post.

Refuting the “Anarchism can’t Work” Bingo.

Published

Db0

on December 9, 2011

I posted yesterday’s Bingo chart I created to reddit and it was very warmly received. A lot of people since then have asked me to write refutations of each square in chart, so that people can easily be linked to them when they do make them. While a lot of the squares are worded in such a sarcastic way so as to contain their own refutation, I think the idea has some merit.

I plan to write a few posts refuting the more compelling parts of the Bingo. They will most likely be short & sweet, and rather than expand mercilessly upon them, I’ll link to more detailed arguments elsewhere. Stay tuned.

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Other similar posts you might also enjoy: The “Anarchism Can’t Work lolol” Bingo | What’s the best compliment you can give to a freethinker? | FSDaily Sidebar

The “Anarchism Can’t Work lolol” Bingo

Published

Db0

on December 8, 2011

There’s a few humorous BINGO sheets available on the internet, from the hilarious Libertarian Troll Bingo, to the sarcastic Sexism in Games BINGO. The latter one, I recently modified slightly and then run through the comments of reddit, which were discussing sexism in games, with great success. I had quite a lot of fun doing it and it also occurred to me that there is another topic where there are so many cliché criticisms that might benefit from a similar treatment.

To this end, I’ve created the “Anarchism Can’t Work lolol” Bingo, which is a humorous view into some of the most common, and usually outright absurd criticisms of anarchism that are frequently trotted out when such discussions occur. You can find it below in a simple html form, or on the side, in an image format (click on the thumbnail for larger version).

So without further ado:

The “Anarchism Can’t Work lolol” BINGO

Whitest kids you know / Something Positive / etc	Go live in Somalia if you like Anarchy so much.	Anarchist Catalonia and Ukraine were defeated in war, so this proves Anarchism can’t work. Democratic France being defeated in WW2 doesn’t count.	Grow up and get a job!	What have the Anarchists ever achieved? The “Haymarket affair”? Never heard of it.
Who would maintain the roads and gather the garbage?	Why don’t you create your own political party and run for office?	People are too stupid and evil to voluntary work together. They need benevolent leaders to do it for them. What do you mean “who would choose the leaders”?	Who would control the huge corporations if the state didn’t exist? Today they’re perfectly regulated and kept in check by our incorruptible leaders.	You’re a Utopian. Anarchy will never work the way you idealize, unlike Capitalism and the State which work perfectly now.
The corrupt politicians in power will never allow any movement that starts to challenge the state. Ron Paul 2012!	You’re not a true anarchist unless you support the rights to private property, capitalism and wage slavery.	Human Nature (FREE SPACE)	Your ethical arguments on how humans should act in an anarchist society makes you as bad as Stalin and Pol Pot.	If you oppose Capitalism so much, then why are you still using a computer and the internet, huh? And why do you buy groceries?
Let’s say tomorrow we magically had an Anarchist society…	An anarchist society doesn’t exist right now, therefore it could never work. Why no, I do not know how old Capitalism is.	The state is required because humans don’t exercise voluntary organization. Much like shoes are required because our feet lack the callouses one would develop by not wearing shoes.	Whenever your revolutions were attempted, they ended up in brutal dictatorships after a bloody civil war. Unlike all democratic revolutions which were peaceful and never failed.	I demand to know the exact details of an anarchist society of the future. People could easily predict 20th century Capitalism during the 19th.
Humans need hierarchy. All human societies throughout history were hierarchical.	Why don’t anarchist start their own communes right now? Just buy the land from the state or capitalists and prove it works. Of course nobody will try to mess with it.	Without a state and laws to tell me how to behave, I’d go on a killing spree immediately.	Libertarian Socialism is an oxymoron.	I agree with you, but nothing can ever change, so why bother…

I don’t believe I need to point out that this Bingo chart is dripping with sarcasm

One thing you might like to note is that I’ve tried to align the chart in such a way so that the middle horizontal axis contains common arguments coming from right-libertarians and “Anarcho”-Capitalists, while the middle vertical axis contains arguments that approach a Marxist-Leninist/State Socialist criticism. This should allow an easy Bingo in case you’re arguing wish such ideologues.

Finally, in case you want to spread it around, or rework it, below I’m including two text files, one containing the bingo options in simple text format, while the other one containing the bingo chart in a way that you can paste into reddit comments.

Let me know if there is a more fitting answer that I’ve missed. A few of them are possibly not that common or absurd, so if you can think of a better replacement, let me know and I’ll update it.

Have fun!

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Other similar posts you might also enjoy: Refuting the “Anarchism can’t Work” Bingo. | Is Anarchism Utopian? | Why Anarchists and “Anarcho”-Capitalists can’t be allies

This Wikipedia section annoys me

Published

Db0

on December 7, 2011

The section about teh mens on the epidemiology of domestic violence looks very much like an MRA talking point rather than a neutral POV. This is the second time I review the section and find that it is full of questionable sources and blatant editorializing. The first time I removed citations which were not only minimal (i.e. “Straus, 2005″, that was all) but sometimes just wrong. I replaced those with a [citation needed] mark, to force those adding those to backup their statements.

Today I visited again and notice that many citations have been fixed, only this time bad citations have been replaced with seemingly working ones, which at the same time are ones that are frequently brought up by MRAs as a silencing tactic. For example, the very first sentence is this:

Women’s violence towards men is a serious social problem. While much attention has been focused on domestic violence against women, researchers argue that domestic violence against men is a substantial social problem worthy of attention.

This is an editorialized title, backed up by two citations. First this, which cites Gelles and does not provide a version on can check online. However I have read that Gelles has explicitly rejected interpretations that put violence against women on the same scale as violence against men.^[1].

The second part of the sentence links to this page of citations, which is very much like the annoying Wall of Text tactic, which primarily used to cower and silence opponents, especially those who are not privileged enough to waste even more time refuting it. This particular “Wall of Sources” is frequently linked and cited by MRAs because it is just so damn effective in cowering their opponents. Who can deny science? However, it’s not the science that we need to deny, but the flawed framing and outright dishonest interpretations of the facts and fortunately David Futrelle of Manboobz has done exactly that.

The problem with citing a Wall of Sources, is that it can be practically used to support anything, even a rhetorical point such as “researchers argue that domestic violence against men is a substantial social problem worthy of attention.” The problem with this strategy is that it is trivial for people on the other side of the argument to respond with an even larger Wall of Sources, many thousands long, that can support the exact opposite ideological point. It then becomes simply a race of who can gather and choice-interpret or outright spin scientific studies, so that they fit their biases. And this is not how the truth is found, and especially not how Wikipedia is supposed to work.

And then there are the editorialized sources in the above Wikipedia article. If you look at the sources cited at references 33 to 37, you’ll note that they all have a short paragraph interpreting them to the audience, rather than let them stand on their own. This is not done commonly in Wikipedia (as far as I know) as it’s the paragraph being cited that is supposed to give this context. And yet, it seems here that those citations cannot stand on their own, or maybe – and this is what I really suspect – that this is yet another attempt to cower anyone challenging these assumptions, as all of those references are simply used to support the following sentence:

Other studies—typically family and domestic violence studies—show that men are more likely to inflict injuries, but also that when all acts of physical aggression or violence are considered in aggregate, women are equally violent as men,or more violent than men.

Again, another MRA talking point which goes counter to the section above it, and thus multiple (editorialized) sources are pre-emptively used to prevent it being challenged.

The whole situation, imho, stinks. And though I’ve tried to shape up the article somewhat by removing the most obvious citation bias, I am loath to really start editing it and likely end up in a citation war with the MRA watchers it’s sure to have.

Anyone more familiar with the Wikipedia bureaucracy have any idea if using such a “Wall of Sources” to support an editorialized introduction is acceptable? I get the feeling it’s not but I’m don’t really care to waste the time required to find out.

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Notes

Unfortunately this Feminism 101 article suffers of of severe link rot, so I couldn’t link to the original source

Other similar posts you might also enjoy: Δωρεάν | Second quote of the Day: Problem Solving | Sexist Schadenfreude

Finding an apt analogy for piracy

Published

Db0

on December 2, 2011

So my article on the ethics of piracy was posted in the /r/games subreddit and the thread pretty much exploded in arguments. I only saw it half an hour before I had to go to a Faun concert (and then straight to bed because I was working early next day), so I could only properly respond 16 hours after the fact, at which point everyone had already moved on. Still I did leave some answers in that first half-hour but I quickly found out I could barely get a word in sidewise, before being downvoted below the viewing threshold. Oh well, not unexpected I guess (albeit mildly ironic, given how anti-pirates are under the delusion that their opinions are unpopular). And it wasn’t just me, anyone who wasn’t explicitly negative toward piracy, was downvoted, even for simply stating facts.

Anyway, one of the classic problems when discussing piracy is finding an analogy that approximates the same dynamics. Anti-pirates will insist on using analogies relating to physical theft, such as shoplifting, car theft and so on, while pro-piracy people try to use analogies that simulate the zero harm caused to the current owner. It almost impossible to see eye to eye on this between these two camps, but on the aforementioned thread, someone did make an analogy that I think is compelling in pointing out how piracy disrupts business models.

Quoth mrbobgray

Essentially, the current business model of video games is like this:

I paint a picture. It is a wonderful picture, and everyone loves it. I realize that people will pay me to see it, so I put it in a closed off room and charge people to come in and see it. This works fine for awhile, and I make a lot of money; then one day, everyone on earth develops x-ray vision. This sucks for me, because suddenly I realize that people no longer need to pay me to see my painting; they can stop by any time they like and see it.

What’s an artist to do? How can I possibly make money from my work?

What the video game industry currently does is simple; they ask the government to make it illegal to use x-ray vision on the walls to my house. Ta-da! Everyone has to pay me to see my painting again.

There is a problem though; it is essentially impossible for the government to tell who is using x-ray vision to look through my walls, and who is merely looking at my house. Thus, some people choose to simply ignore the government, and view my painting using their x-ray vision. There is nothing to physically stop them, and it doesn’t prevent others from listening to the government and paying to see it. I can say that I have lost money from those illegal peeping toms, but have I? How much? Neither I or the government know, because we have no way to tell who of the people using x-ray vision would be willing to pay to see my painting.

The problem with this system is obvious: it is reliant on an old, out-dated set of assumptions; namely, that people don’t have x-ray vision. Instead of adapting to new developments, a law was passed to simply pretend those developments don’t exist. This is where we are with digital goods and copyright laws.

Computers and the internet are truly incredible, amazing things. The ability to store and transfer incredible amounts of data near instantaneously has changed humanity as we know it. So why are we fighting it? Why do we pretend that it doesn’t exist?

The idea is not to prevent people from using the new, amazing developments we have as a society; the old model is fundamentally broken. What has to happen now is finding ways of utilizing these new developments to create even more value. Don’t ask me what that is, because if I knew, I’d be busy counting my millions.