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During an epic wine and cheese date last night at our neighbor’s house, we got to talking about my old idea to design a game based on political economies. So today, after a good long lie-in, I started working on that.
Thus far, I’m fleshing out the different political ideologies and their economic counterparts (e.g. fascist, totalitarian, communist, socialist, libertarian, and anarchist states, as well as republics, democracies, social democracies, and juntas). It’s been fun to learn and re-learn what a lot of these mean, but it’s slow-going!
The basic premise of the game is that you have to create a wealthy state with a happy populace; so, a capitalistic democracy might become wealthy, but its happiness index would be difficult because of the class oppression capitalism necessarily creates; likewise, a fascist state might depend on patriotism and nationalism with fiercely loyal citizens, but it might have a difficult time creating wealth and prosperity. The mechanics have yet to be designed, but suffice it to say, it’s looking complicated.
Obviously this is very early on, and I’m going to have to combine or limit the number of similar states (republic, democracy, social democracy are somewhat closely related, as are totalitarian, fascist, and junta states, as are libertarian and anarchist states, as are socialist and communist…there’s a whole huge spectrum). But what I’m working on right now are the Wild Rhetorical Cards! Since rhetoric and the careful use of language is at the base of much political force, these essentially wild cards you play to either help yourself or hurt your opponent, particularly when it comes to wielding influence over others, be they other players or your populace.
For example, you might play the John-McCain-inspired Maverick card to do something that would ordinarily piss someone off, but allows you to get away with it just this once; perhaps there could be an Argentinian Love Affair card you could play on an opponent to undermine his or her regime’s popularity; the Lose Your Voice card means you lose control of influencing anyone.
I’ve considered the following, but am not sure exactly how they’d be used yet:
Conservative Blowhard
Loony Liberal
Debate (you win or lose based on the roll of the dice)
Ann Coulter/Maureen Dowd Mudfight (sorry, couldn’t resist…)
Freedom, which lets you do something invoking “freedom,” like ease restrictions or declare a war (?)
I know it probably sounds pretty sketchy at this point, but if you happen to make sense of this rambling and feel inspired, your suggestions for Wild Rhetorical Cards are more than welcome.
me: let’s go to the grocery store.
matt: sure, but can we swing by the craft store first?
Transcript of yesterday’s e-mail exchange:
chelsey: you killed my butternut squash. prepare to meet my shovel as it swings at your head.
matt: I’m so sorry! I thought it was that inedible hybrid thing that produced squash-colored rocks! I’ll ask you first, the next time I use the shovel as a machete.
me: …well, they were very selective about–
brother: you mean subjective? or selective? subjective means–
me: I HAVE A MASTER’S DEGREE IN ENGLISH i know what subjective means
[later, the niece has been picking parsley from the flowerbeds and giving it to everyone. i take a bite of mine]
bro: you know she washed that parsley in the pool
me: shrug
bro: where the dogs drink. I HAVE A MEDICAL DEGREE AND I’M NOT EATING IT
Make me fill out a very long, online job app form that asks for detailed information, and be sure my session times out in ten minutes so that I have to do it all over again. Crikey.
Every time I take a step forward with the new blog/website, I get a little excited — and then something happens to forestall the excitement. It’s kind of like when we were sitting in Stanstead airport waiting to catch our plane to Greece (to Greece!) and even though we hadn’t slept for more than an hour out of the past 48, I was still sitting on the edge of my seat, jiggling my leg up and down with anticipation: watching the plane come in, unload, get cleaned, meals loaded…and then the intercom notified us that the Athens airport was overcrowded and we’d have to wait 30, no, 45, no 50 minutes to load.
POR QUE?! [insert hand-wringing here]
That’s what moving to the new blog is like, albeit less expensive and I don’t have to sit for hours in a cramped cattle compartment that hurtles through space at hundreds of miles an hour with children kicking the seat behind me.
Erm. Anyway.
I’ve encountered the following bugs, many of which are still unfixed:
- No bulleted or numbered lists of any kind. For example, this list should be bulleted, but it’s not. (The Husband says this is fixable. However, he has also taken to texting me from his iPhone WHILE SITTING NEXT TO ME, so things are a little tense right now.)
- No quick-edit tag at the bottom of each post. (The Husband says this is fixable, but when I texted him back and asked how, he replied *yawn* BRB, pushed my feet off his lap and went to bed.)
- Uploading photos has yet to be successful, partially because of size and partially because now there’s an extra step: no more uploading straight from the folder, they have to be in a separate folder (I think on the server?) before I can upload them. (Or maybe that has something to do with thumbnails? I don’t know because The Husband doesn’t write in complete iPhone-texted sentences.)
- Importing the posts directly from Blogger to my own server-hosted blog wreaked havoc, with all the less-than/greater-than brackets getting stripped (these: <>), which meant no formatting, no links, no pictures, no videos, nothin’. The fix for this was to import from Blogger to a Wordpress.com-hosted blog, and then export the WP.com blog to my hard drive and import it to my server…but the server apparently has a maximum upload capability that needs to be upped before that happens.
So that’s where things are. We’ll return to our regularly scheduled life when I’ve properly bribed our server admin.
I imported all my old posts from my Blogger blog…only to have all of them come in without the carrot brackets (these: < >). Thus, all the html tags don’t work, nor does the list formatting, nothing. The Husband thinks this is a bug and that I should delete and re-import them, but my go-go-energy-gadget command is also failing. In a word, blech.
Aiiieee, jet lag!
More to come.
Liquids in a plastic bag. *sigh*
Passport and Ambien. These are the only things really necessary.
Int’l Drivers Permit
Learning how to order Greek salad. Only there it’s just salad (
salata).
Oof. Heavy. Can we go now?
For graduation, there was cake. That was the bribe to attract family to help build The Fence.
First we dug post holes.
Then we cemented them in place. Those suckers ain’t ever moving.
Framing.
Affixing via screws.
Gate.
Front fence; gate yet to come.
More fence.
We’re not done — still have a couple gates and a whole side of the house to go (property line issue), but we got a lot done and I much prefer the newer, privater back yard.
On a different note, we have leftover cake, key lime pie, and cookies. Anyone up for dessert some evening this week? Y’know, before we leave for Greece. FOR GREECE, I SAY.
There’s this fencing company in a town about an hour south of here that I found advertising on Craigslist. I’m pretty sure they’re not supposed to do that, but hey, I need fencing supplies and they claimed to have good prices. They had an online “request information form,” which I filled out. I asked the price of pickets, galvanized steel posts, and a double drive-through gate.
Here’s the reply I got from an e-mail account with the name Diane attached to it:
d/drive 10′ opening $182.85. post are 8′ and a structural .116 wall at $12.95 each are 2anbtr 1×6x6′ d/e real cedar this is old growth cedar doing a 3 rail ( includes fence boards post, 2×4’s, hangers,& screws) estimate at $8.20 per foot for more info call toll free 1-866-xxx-xxxx.
Whoa. Paragraphs are your friend, Diane, and I recommend some punctuation, too, while you’re at it.
Anyway, so I puzzled over the reply for a long time. I figured out that the double drive-through gate was $182. Got it. The posts are 8 ft (which I already knew — that’s standard); d/e means dog-eared, which I don’t want; but after that, WTF? “2anbtr”?
I could have called at this point, but the reply was so ambiguous that I thought I’d better see if they even had the type of products I wanted. Simple question. So I e-mailed back and said,
Diane, thank you for your reply. However, I’m having trouble understanding the information you sent.
I need about 150 ft. of fence, which I believe is about 300 pickets. I do not want dog-eared pickets, and I do not want to buy pre-made fencing. Is it possible to buy 300 non-dog-eared cedar 6′ pickets through your company?
Is it possible to get a double-drive gate with square-topped pickets instead of dog-eared?
Thank you.
The reply I got said,
FOR MORE INFO CALL TOLL FREE 1-866-xxx-xxxx mike
*sigh* Dude. First of all, I don’t know why “mike” is answering “Diane’s” e-mail, but WTH, I don’t really care. Second, don’t yell at me. Third, on your website, you have an e-mail form for questions. Clearly you have an e-mail account for receiving and responding to said questions, so you should be able to handle e-mail queries. I prefer to e-mail than call, partly because I have a mild phone phobia and mostly because it’s just faster, and ESPECIALLY WHEN I’M ASKING FUCKING YES AND NO QUESTIONS. I don’t think my expectations are out of line: is it that hard to say “yes,” “no,” or “we might be able to work something out, but please call us to do that”? Can you really afford to give bad customer service in this economy?
At any rate, we got a $50 off Home Depot coupon in the mail yesterday, so I’ll save myself the trouble of calling for more information.
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