Name Our Ship! Win Some Stuff!

So I've just got some free stuff on Steam that I already have. Time for a contest. First, here are the prizes:

Cthulhu Saves the World

and

Breath of Death VII: The Beginning

These are both comedy games that recall the good ol' days of 8-bit and 16-bit RPGs a la Final Fantasy or Dragon Warrior.

Now for the contest.

 

I’m in a gaming group that’s about to embark on a Rogue Trader campaign. Rogue Trader is a game in which the players take the roles of officers aboard a city-in-space trading vessel. So we need to name our ship (1.8 km long, crew of 25,000. Image at left. It’s not necessarily that color). Wanna help?

Comment on this article with an awesome ship name (or just “a ship name”). Regular ship names (as all Trekkies know) also make great starship names. So if you’ve got a great name for a boat, an airship or a horse, drop it here. I'll pick the two that I like the best and suggest them to the rest of the crew. The two people that submitted the winning names will each get one of the above-mentioned, very inexpensive (but still cool) prizes.

And by “drop it here,” I mean comment right here, on this blog that you’re already reading. This is a Google site that lets you sign-in with your Google account, so you don’t need to make a new account or give anyone your phone number. If you don’t have a Google account (seriously? they still make you?), go back to Facebook and comment there. But isn’t it about time you got a Google account?

Just so everything is on the up-and-up, you must know that you cannot actually use said prize unless you have a Steam account. I'm positive (unless they changed it last week) that you can receive a gift from another Steam user without having bought anything, so maybe this will be the thing that finally convinces you to get an account.

I reserve the right to choose just one name that I think is clearly the best, but I'll only do that if there are less than five entries. I'm giving this until Thursday night. 00:01:01 Friday morning is the cut-off.

If you succeed in actually naming our ship (I choose your name, suggest it to the crew, and they decide to name the ship that), I will buy you a (some number)-pack of non-cheap, manly beer. If you’re not old enough to legally receive a gift of beer… we’ll work something else out. If you live far enough away from me that a gift of beer would be more hassle than it’s worth, some solution will happen whereby you shall still receive beer.

So post some names, and if there’s one game that you’d prefer over the other, post that too. No promises. If you don’t care for the games, but you’d like to suggest a name anyway, that’s perfectly okay also.

PS I've also still got a copy of DOTA 2 (also on Steam) kicking around from when I "bought" DOTA 2. So if anyone would rather have that instead of the above games, I'm cool with it. But there will still only be two winners. If someone wants DOTA 2 instead, the other winner will get both of the other games.

Bullying

Can we talk about bullying? Let’s talk about bullying.

Did you ever get called names or shoved in a locker or beaten up on the playground or called a fag or called stupid or just good old-fashioned got teased about your physical self when you were a kid? I did. Are you better or worse off today because that happened? I'm better.

Will I teach my kid not to be mean to others and not to shove people? Of course. Will I jump in and bail him out when it happens to him? Absolutely not. Bullies in childhood teach people to overcome bullies in adulthood. In adulthood, there’s no daddy to come save you. And there will always be bullies in adulthood.

So you can have people reach adulthood knowing how to handle a bully (both emotionally and socially), or... ya know. Not.

Having said that, there's bullying and there's bullying. If my kid’s getting the shit kicked out of him on a daily basis, I don’t really have an ear for why. It needs to stop. If he’s getting teased and picked on and (physically) pushed around a little, he needs to learn how to stand up for himself.

Let's say there's this kid (we'll call him Jon) who's mom died giving birth to him and he doesn't know her name or who she was. He lives with his dad (let's say he's the governor of... I dunno... Ohio) and his step-mom hates him and treats him like shit. Doesn't beat him or anything; just doesn't show him any of the affection that she gives her own children and makes it known that she resents having him in her house. Everybody at school knows this about him and throws it in his face every chance they get.

This is a shit sandwich. This kid has some choices. He can let them beat him down. He can allow himself to believe that he's worthless and punch somebody in the face every time they tease him about his family life. Or he could curl up in a psychological ball and never come out. Or he can be a bastard. He can wear it like armor and own it.

Now let's say that none of that is true except for the core facts. The kid never knew his real mom and lives with his father and his step-mom. She loves him like her own and would give her life for his any day of the week. No one at school ever teases him about being adopted and he has lots of friends. The lesson he's going to learn is that people are basically kind-hearted and don't want to hurt his feelings. So when he grows up and discovers the world isn't that way, he'll have to learn as a man all the things he should have learned as a child.

If you think that's no big deal, I challenge you to try it. Go change something about yourself. Intentionally and drastically alter your own worldview as an adult. Go stand up to a bully like you never did as a child. Good luck with that. I HAD bullies in school and it took me until I was twenty-five to figure my own special brand of dealing with them (but I have a legitimate learning disability). Children are designed to learn and adapt to new and changing circumstances. Adults are notoriously not good at that.

So go ahead and make bullying illegal, so that every time a little boy playfully puts ink or glue in a little girl's hair he gets expelled from school for bullying. I guarantee that's what will happen. You will also catch the actual bullies, and that (I feel) is also a tragedy.

You'll have an entire generation of pussies who are completely incapable of standing up for themselves. Then you'll have a second generation of them because the first generation won't have the experience to teach their children. And that will be that. Bullies will run the world because no one else will have any balls.

In my opinion, it is imperative that you discipline one kid for punching another kid in the face. It is equally crucial that both of them learn their lesson in a constructive way. The lesson should not be "whenever you have a problem with someone, find someone who outranks you to settle it." That's what anti-bullying legislation teaches.

If you feel like someone has wronged you, don't try to talk to them about it, don't find a clever way to stick it to them, and for the love of God don't frankly and honestly express to them your discontent. Call the police and they'll decide what should be done. That's the penultimate lesson of anti-bullying legislation.

"Bullying" is such a non-definitive word that you can make an argument for any disagreeable act being labelled "bullying." All the things listed in this "graphic" I found on Facebook: part of growing up. Everybody goes through it. You learn to deal with it or you kill yourself. Almost all of us are strong enough to survive that particular rite of passage.

We need for the government to stop babying people. Should you wear a seatbelt? Yes. Should it be required by law? No. If you’re too dumb to wear a seatbelt, you’re too dumb to live. Should you smoke cigarettes?  Should you shoot heroine?  Should you put a steak knife in your butthole?  Should you eat at McDonald’s? We all know you should never do any of those things: they’re bad for ya! You also shouldn’t swim for at least a half-hour after you eat. But let’s not make all that stuff illegal, okay? It’s unnecessary, and it dilutes the gene pool with people who should have been allowed to stupid themselves to death. To quote George Carlin: “The kid who swallows too many marbles doesn’t grow up to have kids of his own.”

If you want to pass legislation that mandates strict, no-nonsense penalties for underage perpetrators of violent crimes, I'm okay with it. On second thought, no I'm really not. When I was in grade school, I got in fights. I threw rocks at people. I got “punished.” I stopped doing it. If this anti-bullying horseshit had been going on when I was a kid, I’d be in prison right now. Kids need to be allowed to make mistakes with only perceived consequences. It's how they learn without fucking things up for them down the road. Anti-bullying legislation means there will be real consequences for kids who just need to be taught a lesson. You can't expel a kid for bullying somebody. That's what kids do. They behave like children: like there are no consequences for their actions and they can treat people however they want. AND THERE NEEDS TO BE NO LASTING CONSEQUENCES FOR THAT BEHAVIOR.

By expelling (or in extreme cases, prosecuting) a kid for bullying, you’re teaching him that he has to always follow every rule and never, ever, ever put one toe out of line or his life is over. He'll either take that to heart, still be expelled, and resent you and the system for a good long time, or he'll not take it to heart, continue being an asshole, resent the system forever, and never be a productive member of society.

You'll be teaching the "victim" that whenever anyone does something that hurts his widdle feelings, he should run and tell someone in authority and the person that said that mean thing to him will just go away. That's real healthy.

I've been bullied as a child and I've been bullied as an adult. I would not be the man that I am today if either of those things was not true. I would be a whiny, entitled mama's boy with a lot (I mean really a lot) of not-very-close friends, a room all to my self at my parents' house and no son to carry on the family tradition of being awesome. I’d also be a Republican, which is weird but nonetheless true.

If Bill Gates hadn’t gotten shoved in a locker every day in high school, he’d be a software engineer at Apple. I’ve been saying that for a long time, and I really hope somebody doesn’t somehow discover that Bill Gates was home-schooled or something. lol.

The bottom line is: nobody benefits from severely punishing bullies. The bully learns nothing, the bullied learns to be taken care of, and society gets polarized into whiny little pussies and serial bully assholes.

So let’s go to the phones. I know somebody has something to say about this.

Ten Ways to Get the Right Guy to Like You

*sigh*

So a couple of my friends from STCC shared this on Facebook, so of course I had to watch it. I don’t know why (before you ask); I just had to.

Apparently, I've been waiting for this video all week, because I just went on a huge rant here. I don't mean to be disparaging or to lecture (but I’m going to), but this kid is waaaaay too young to have any idea what he's talking about. Some good advice here, but... Well on with the show. Watch this. And try not to puke, because as dumb and brainwashed as this kid is, he does make a couple good points, some of them accidental. Don’t worry; we’ll be going over all of them after the break.

 

#10. I agree with what he says, but not what he makes it mean. Yes, wait for the right guy. But how do you know he's the right guy? You date him. I agree with "don't date every guy that comes along," but you don't buy a car because it's the right color. You do your research and figure out which one's right for you, then you wait for it to go on sale. Do your research. If you call that "dating," then date some guys you think are interesting. If you call it "hanging out with a guy to get to know him better," then do that.

I just have to say one more thing about #10. You don't need a man. You don't. If you think you do, you don't know yourself well enough. Here's what I tell any teenager and twenty-something who will listen: if you think you need a man (or a woman, if you're a guy) to make you complete, you're not emotionally mature enough to have one.

#9: Yup. I would take this one step further. Know yourself. If you're < 25, you don't know yourself. Maybe you know who you are today, but you don't know who you're going to be when you're forty.

So let's say you meet some guy (who's 22, just like you). You're both into the same kind of music, you both like the same kind of food, you both like shopping at the mall and you both hate Barack Obama. You date for a while and get really involved in each other's lives. So now you're 24 and you're getting married. Cool. You're young, dumb and in love, so you get married.

Fast forward six years. Now you're thirty, you've got a three-year-old kid, and you don't understand why you don't get along with your husband anymore. It's because when you were 22, you didn't know who you were going to be yet, and he didn't know who he was going to be either. But you both decided that you liked who the other person was right then, so you did something stupid. Over time, you both changed into something that the other person didn't like very much. Now you're stuck in a loveless marriage, and worse, so is your three-year-old.

And yeah, your self-esteem shouldn't be defined by anyone but you. Don't let anyone else define what makes you love yourself. Whether that means being with a guy who literally tells you you're worthless, or building your entire existence around your sweetheart. Be who you want to be, then find somebody who wants that. In that order.

#8: Umm. Okay. I agree that you should generally be nice to everybody, but I don't see what it has to do with this topic.

I do have to take exception to #7. Don't learn about "things guys like." Seriously, the next time somebody tries to tell me how different men and women are, I'm going to punch a baby (not mine). Men and women aren't different. PEOPLE are different. Everyone is different. I know plenty of (straight) guys who like Twilight, and plenty of (straight) girls who play World of Warcraft because THEY like it. My mother-in-law has gotten me hooked on more sci-fi shows than I've gotten her on. It's like a competition. And she didn't start loving Star Trek to get any guy to notice her.

But there is a certain amount of sitting through "Gilmore Girls" or being forced to watch March Madness in any healthy relationship (no lie; I love Gilmore Girls. My glasses got a little foggy when Rori decided not to go to Harvard. And Kerry goes ballistic if she misses a playoff game). We do these things because sometimes it's important to spend an hour doing something you don't like because someone you love wants you to. Ever take your grandmother underwear shopping? I have. That’s a story for later, but it just further illustrates my point.

If there's something that your significant other is into, try it. Maybe you'll enjoy it too and that will be one more thing you can do together. But don't go bowling three times a week if you don't like bowling. You're doing it just to impress him. If that makes him feel special, you're robbing the cradle and that's not cool.

I will make this admission: there's nothing more intriguing than a girl who is into whatever I'm into. In high school, that meant music and sci-fi. Now it's Ryan Reynolds and photography. If there's something that you like to do that's "not girly," let a guy see you doing it and he'll want to know more about you.

Here's another insight into how guys think: any girl who can admit that another girl is attractive is instantly awesome. Seriously. This works on me, and I'm married with no interest in other women.

So I'm watching "Kill Bill" with a bunch of my friends. One of my bros says "Damn. That Uma Thurman is one fine-lookin' woman." Okay. That's something a dude says. Then my sister (my literal sister) says "yeah she is. Especially in that yellow motorcycle outfit." No kidding, every head in the room turned. It doesn't make you a lesbian to acknowledge when another woman is attractive. But in every guy's head, it means you might be into that. And any guy that says that isn't at the very least intriguing is a bald-faced liar. And I mean ANY guy. If your Great Uncle Charlie says it, he's lying to you. If your gay best friend says it, he's lying too.

#6: To start with: "I don't know what I would do without you" is pretty much the single best way to get any guy worried that you're taking this relationship a lot more seriously than he is. I don't know about other guys (in this specific instance), but I have a very detailed plan of exactly what I would do without Kerry, and we've been together for over ten years. If you've been with a guy for a year or 18 months, you can say things like that, and you should. If that scares him, he's too immature to handle an adult relationship. But if you're talking about a guy you've just started dating or don't know very well, this is one of the two best ways to get rid of him fast.

On to the actual point: "make him feel needed." Yeah, okay. I guess. I've just watched this bit five or six times and I'm honestly not sure how I feel about it. But lemme tell you how I feel about it. You don't need him. Making him believe you do is a lie. I'm against lying in general. But hold on. It's true: everyone wants to feel needed and useful, and if you "need" him and he wants no part of it, he's obviously not the right guy for you.

If Kerry hands me a jar and says "open this for me," I give her a look and I say "no." I do that because I watched her take it from the cabinet and hand it directly to me. She didn't try to open it herself and she's just relying on me to do things for her that she could probably do very well herself. And that's not healthy.

On the other hand, if you tell a guy "I need to talk to you about something important," and he gets all uncomfortable and doesn't want to, is that the kind of guy you want to marry? Strictly speaking, that's not the topic for today, but do you really want to date someone you know you don't want to marry? Just sayin'.

So I guess I feel two different ways about this one. On the one hand, don't act needy and helpless, because you're not. On the other hand, if you do act that way, the way he reacts to it will tell you a lot about him and your relationship.

And I wouldn't be me if I didn't rant a bit about #5. "Chivalry," as he calls it, is a lie and a con game. I open doors for everyone, and I stand up when ANYBODY enters the room, because I'm not an asshole and I'm not trying to get into anyone's pants (at this point in my life).

If a guy opens the door for you, he's doing it to impress you and it's not really part of who he is. Don't encourage that sort of nonsense. If he opens the door for the old Korean man who's pushing on a "pull" door because he can't read the sign, he's doing it because he's a genuinely nice guy, and not just to impress you. If he pulls the car over in the rain to help a guy in a tux change a flat, he’s (probably) not doing it to impress you. He’s doing it because he’s an exceptionally nice guy (I probably wouldn’t pull over for that). Any guy who does something just to impress you isn't after your respect, your friendship, your well-being or any relationship that doesn't end twenty minutes (meh) after he gets your clothes off.

Having said that, that's what most guys think of girls who do things that are obviously designed solely to impress us. For example: playing Call of Duty. If you like CoD, play it. But if guys see you doing it, most of them are going to think you're doing it to impress them. About half of them will think it's cool and want to get to know you better. About a third of them will think you're a slut and try to take advantage of you. The remaining sixth of guys will think you're a slut and want nothing to do with you.

Trust me on this stuff: I'm a dude. I hang out with other "Christian" dudes and I know how we think.

I cannot argue with #4. Do I like seeing a naked female? Yes. Is it difficult to have a conversation with one? Absolutely. Dress however you want, but don't get pissy when people stare at whatever you're advertising and don’t really want to talk to you.

It's possible to be attractive without dressing like a whore (I would argue that dressing like a whore is seldom attractive). You know that song: "Every girl's crazy 'bout a sharp-dressed man." While I'm sure that's not literally true (some girls aren't), it mostly is. And it's no less true in the other direction. A well-dressed woman is an attractive woman. Don't believe me? Go check out the photo gallery on the second floor of Building 15 at STCC. Bring a dude. Ever heard a man say he loves a woman in uniform? It doesn't get more formal than that.

#3: Ah yes. The obligatory Christian anti-Hollywood propaganda that has nothing to do with the topic at hand. Okay, I'll bite, even though it is completely off-topic.

Hollywood does not insist that you act as eye candy. Check out this list. How many of those movies make you feel like women are being objectified? My answer: 3 out of 10. Gone With the Wind, Titanic and Snow White.

If you'd rather look at the top ten on this list, which is weighted very heavily towards more recent films, I'd say 4 out of 10. Titanic, Transformers, Pirates and Pirates. And the Pirate movies don't REALLY objectify women (even though they’re Disney, which is unusual for them), but I could understand an argument being made.

So if we're quite finished with THOSE shenanigans, on to #2.

#2: Can't be overstated. But it's not about "moving too fast." Move as fast as you're comfortable with. It's about not doing something you're uncomfortable with just to get a guy to like you. Like I said before, guys aren't stupid. We know when you're doing something just to impress us and we know when you're giving us what we want just because you want us to like you. When a girl does that, we treat her like she's the kind of girl who will do anything for attention. Because she is.

Honestly, you can skip this whole video and just go right to #1. If you act like you think someone wants you to act, they're going to like you right away. But once they get to know you, they might not definitely won’t like you very much any more. I know plenty of people who have gotten stuck in relationships and even marriages that were horrible because they pretended to be someone they're not just to get somebody to like them. It works. People will like you if you behave like they want you to behave. But if that's not who you really are, you're only hurting yourself.

There's a reason half of all Christian marriages end in divorce. It's because Christians tend to latch on to the first other Christian that comes along and consider themselves lucky that they "caught a good one," as if any Christian man and woman, when mashed together, are perfectly capable of having a healthy marriage. God will just make it work.

Again, I don't talk about things I don't know about (without telling you that I don't know what I'm talking about). I spent four years of my life at a Christian high school, and the attitude there was "go to college to get an education. Go to a Christian college to get married." I've spent almost all of my life as part of a church family, and every day (not literally every single day) I saw young people getting married for the wrong reasons.

To finish up: Oh my God I can't believe he really said it. Let me be clear: THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS "HAPPILY EVER AFTER." Even if there was, you wouldn't want it. "Happily ever after" is boring. It's antiques roadshow boring. It's mowing the lawn boring. It's Gone With the Wind boring. If you find a guy who's perfect for you, and you're perfect for him, and you fall madly in love and get married and just make each other perfectly happy every single day for the rest of your lives, you're are the most annoying couple on the block. You're the people everybody tries to avoid at the neighborhood BBQ, because you're just so fake. That just doesn't happen. If anyone reading this right now thinks their marriage is that perfect, they're not going to be married for very much longer. Any person who doesn't piss you off once in a while is a person you don't care about in the least.

Know what else isn't real? Prince Charming. Go watch Cinderella. Right now. I'll wait here.

Welcome back. Let me tell you the story of Cinderella and Prince Charming. They'll be blissfully happy for... a month. And that's being generous. But as soon as she realizes that he leaves the lid up, and he realizes that she doesn't wear ball gowns and glass slippers all the time, and that they got married without knowing a single thing about each other, the shit is going to hit the fan. In this particular case, not such a bad deal for either of them. They're royalty. They only have to pretend to be madly in love for the sake of the realm. Behind castle walls, they can do whatever (and whomever) they want.

But you're not royalty and neither is your "prince charming." You don't get to only see each other on formal occasions and then go to bed with stable boys and scullery maids. You get to make each other miserable for the rest of your lives, or you get divorced. And don't get me wrong. Divorce is an excellent idea in this case. But I've never heard of a divorce that anyone walked away from happy.

If you go looking for a husband, you'll find one. If you don't go looking for a husband, you'll find THE one. Become who you want to be, and someone who wants someone like that will fall into your lap. Hopefully literally, because that would probably be a great story.