Q. What do you call a jew who says he’ll be right back and never returns?
A. The Messiah

I’m an athiest. I’m not an agnostic, one of those who thinks that waiting for the most illogical of doubts, just maybe, just might prove true and I’ll only find out when I die. Nope. I know NOW. Wanna know why? Because most everything that we’ve imaged in the last 10,000 years that is related to “religion” has provably become false.

One cannot predict the future with stars or entrails. The world is not flat. The universe does not circle the earth. Lightning is not caused by Thor’s Hammer. Therefore man was not made in God’s image. There is no god. Humans do not have souls. No spirits. No karma.

Belief doesn’t enter into this: Life is observable phenomena, one moment followed by the next and every action having a reaction on the world around me. These actions and moments combine into larger patterns and those patterns for ever greater meta-patterns. But even with the patterns, you can’t take it for granted that somewhere there’s a guide, a master architect or even a turtle that has a controller.

And if there’s no god-architect-turtle, there’s no payoff or penance at the end of my life. No heaven or hell. There is nothing that will “balance” all my actions in total for good or bad.

What we do today has no significance other than the significance we place on our actions. In the same way, it’s a seller’s market on significance. If you can get someone to buy what you do is significant, then it has value.

The problem with being an athiest is that it has baggage with it, the foremost being an atheist’s very existence agitates non-atheists. When someone says, “I’m a [enter denomination of religous brand here]” and the response is “Oh, I’m an atheist” is frequently pervceived as “No you’re not.” That’s a difficult wall to leap with others.

Granted, it’s nothing personal to you believers. You can tell yourself the great pumpkin is going to be reborn all you want. I just think that since most of you no longer believe in Santa and the Easter Bunny, you really need to give up this unhealthy fantasy of a balance at the end of your life. There is no balance. Doing good now is the reward for doing good.

But this article isn’t fantasy-centric, it’s about the athiests. So, what’s my suggestion for the “I’m an athiest” conversation?

Say it loud and say it proud. You’re not a believer in athiesm, you ARE an athiest. Don’t discuss the trivialities of athiesm/fantasists like “death” or “heaven” or “morality” - just tell the fantasists they are wrong and leave it at that. Leave the doubt in their mind that you can live just wonderfully without [insert messianic figurehead here] and that your [insert transubstantive delivery to underlife] is just fine, thank you.

OK, I’m a libertine when it comes to sex, a position that is not popular and very hard to understand. I’m very OK with extreme body modification. The rainbow of kink is welcome as long as, at the end of the day, the participants can think back and say they learned from the experience and were willing participants.

So, by my definition, this leaves out molestation and snuff, and arguably animals. So what’s gonna happen when society crosses the stupid teen-ager problem of myspace.com (the pit of all inanity) with PornoTube.com (soon to be the pit of all perversity) with multiple juridictions of the world.

In Thailand, the laws are fairly strict (in a puritan ethos) but not very enforced. In Russia, they are hardly strict at all and enforcement is rare. In other nations the concepts of Child and Adult comes down to hair between their legs.

The key issue here is America is going to come full face-to-face with it’s holier-than-thou, save the children, my [daughter or son] doesn’t have sex denial. Worse, it’s gonna be broadcast on the internet live for everyone to see.

With a sex industry that is continually hungrier for more transgressive images, I’m expecting every sicko to post on PornoTube and the US justice isn’t going to know if they actors are legal or not. And we’re not going to be able to limit access to sites like PornoTube.com. The demand is too great.

A suggestion? Start a world-wide initiative to define what is and isn’t an adult and standardize on the rights, responsibilities, and priviledges that adults have. Here’s a few ideas, at age 13 a human will have the right to…

• have sex with anyone
• participate in elections
• own property and live alone
• sign legal documents
• hold a job, including being a soldier

And with these rights, they’re responsible for

• be responsible for their progeny
• pay bills
• be tried as an adult

Arguably, I’d allow a split of moving sex, legal, job, soldiering, bills and trials to 15 or 17, but the point is, if someone has the drives to act on his or her emotions and base nature, then maybe our society should accomodate them rather than mentally lock them in a closet and expect them to keep their pants on. And while that that does cause more diversity in the perversity, it’s what these “moral authorities” are trying to prevent.

With the success of Battlestar Galatica’s re-imagining , and with the cat-out-of-the-bag that Paramount turned down JMS’s Star Trek: re-boot(PDF), it’s only a matter of time that someone tosses G. Lucas are fixes the problems with Star Wars.

So, here’s my take on the holy trilogy - I mean trilogy in the Piers Anthony style, of course. The man couldn’t count to three without six numbers.

Gender Switch Switch Luke and Leia. Make Leia the hotheaded badass girl-jedi from the yokel desert planet and Luke a competent rebel leader, who’s stoic and strong.

Turn up the PAIN! The galaxy is under the Emperor’s crushing heel! StormTroopers on Tatooine invade houses looking for rebel terroristas and kill entire families. Prisoners are tormented by banthas. The economy is grinding to a halt while he builds up a great war machine. Communication and Jail monitoring are growth industries. Use this study for research material.

Turn up the Angst! Make Han Solo a gambling addict. And a wookie-addict. And he shoots first. Make Obi-wan a memory junky, who spins tales of a galaxy long long ago, where truth and justice reigned. C-3PO is a nerd of epic proportions that instead of being mr. polite, he’s rude and condescending to the fleshy ones.

Evil is inherited… I’m not talking about Luke and Leia, I’m talking about that damn robot. If Darth Vader built C-3PO, lay some pipe. If C-3PO killed someone, or worse, betrayed Luke to Darth, now wouldn’t that be some pipe laying? Since the probability of a robot being built and then magically involved with the builders’ kids is stretching it… either use it or lose the whole builder thing.

No more Mr. Nice Jedi Let’s see these guys open some serious smack down on the evil. Not an arena fight where the Jedi get slaughtered. Have each and everyone of them destroy an army. By themselves. Wearing the gore of their victims.

Good guys wear black Instead of having Darth slowly transform into evil, let’s have him be good. Very good. Since the Jedi are corrupt, in his eyes, creating a better school is good.

Bring in the Noir Remember the line “Darth Vader hunted the Jedi down” according to Obi-wan? Let’s have Darth hunt each Jedi down. Darth vs. Mace, Darth vs. the funky tentacle head chick, Darth vs. the funky Conehead dude. What if jedi were a bunch of super badasses and one by one stopped showing up to club house meetings? Fear tha Dark Side, biatches! Not this sneaky stormtrooper crap suddenly turn on them - that’s not worth my time. And then show Darth killing the children… now that’s evil!

Ewok-ocide! If Ethiopean spears didn’t work against the Italians, Ewoks wont work against stormtroopers - because we all know Italians are dumber than Stormtroopers. Lets have the gritty rebels politically manipulate the kyute wuvvable Ewoks so that the stormtroopers have to commit troops to genocide, so that they can get the job done. “We had to make a choice - kill some furry anklebiters or let the Emperor rule the Galaxy! It was a tough choice, one that will haunt me to the end of my days…”

I’d pay good money for that last one… not the angst, but the killing of Ewoks. That’s pure popcorn-munching statisfaction!

OK, I get that games need to “build ambience” and games should let you get the feel of the character. But I don’t like playing dumb characters or walking through stupid scenes written by bad writers. I suspect others don’t either

In Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth you play a stupid protagonist. I ask you: if you were in an spooky town, with unfriendly, evil looking people, with only one hotel, who’s owner is a serial killer, and has told someone else that he intends to kill you… would you a) sleep in an alleyway, b) run from this town anyway possible, or c) go to sleep in the hotel’s bed and NOT prepare a quick getaway?

In fact, before this scene, your character is so stupid actually walk INTO a building, unarmed, during a firefight. While bullets are being shot. And everyone is dead and you don’t scream “Cease Fire!”

Given no choice from the developer and designer, my character went to sleep and woke up in the middle of an attack that he knew was coming. He staggered into the next room and died. And he did it two more times before he stopped playing, allowed the cthulhuoids to conquer the Earth to go rant on a blog.

Now, I don’t know about other gamers, but I don’t identify with stupid protagonists. Not in movies, when the women don’t lock the doors of house. Not on TV before the second to last commercial I’d actually pull out the macguffin (first seen in act 1). And not in games, where my stupid actions are dictated by a lack of choices. So… what would I do different were I the designer?

I would pull a James Bond, I’d fluff the bed, pull out some cards and play solitaire until I needed to kill or run. I’d also pull the boards from the window BEFORE I went to bed or something else.

Now, I know these actions are Ian Fleming and not H.P. Lovecraft, but even if the plan failed, it would’ve been nice to know I’m not playing a moron in the game. More importantly, H.P.’s stories are full of witnesses, not daring-doers, who passively react to their friends getting killed or investigate a little too far into the tenebrious and rugose. Thus, not even the game is true to it’s original genre.

Working on: The Dinosaur to Oil game. Need to playtest and iterate now.

So, fifteen minutes after I send out an email to the Cadre reviewing HL2: Minerva, someone else responds in seconds with “if you want HL2 for free, come talk to me, I’ll hook you up.”

This behavior is foul. It offends my sensibilities. It’s messed up. So, of course, I went to ask my Cadre friend, let’s call him Am, why he believes he’s entitled to this game (and movies, and music, etc.) for free. He comes up with the same claptrap we’ve heard a million times: 0) I don’t want to pay money for a crappy game , 1) there’s plenty of others who buy them so I’m not cheating anyone out of anything, and 2) I do pay for SOME games, so if it’s good enough - I’ll buy it. In this case, he defended his actions by saying he paid for WoW, which you can’t play unless you subscribe to the monthly fee.

I pretty much got this gist: he doesn’t give a shit about the developers who develop these games. In his logic, if the games were good enough, he’d pay. I suggested he use demos first and his response: Demos don’t give you the full game.

At that point, I realized that Am should to be castrated, strung in the spokes of a wheel and left for carrion.

So instead, I started the following thought experiment:

Stage 1: In a population of Players. Each player has two resources: Time and Money. In our population, we have

Bobs, and
Game Developers aka Devs

And the following rules

Player spend money over time to survive. No money == death.
Bobs generate money over time just because they have “real jobs”
Devs generate games over time
Players want to be Happy
Games make players Happy
Devs only get money the sales of their games (let’s not go into Advergaming here).

Now, were we to use a strict population control model from Dawkin’s Selfish Gene and Extended Phenotype books, I would expect equilibrium to be met quickly. And we all know that some people, we’ll call them Ams, steal games and let’s adjust the model.

Stage 2: Introduce the parasites.

Bobs (good hearted, true I-pay-for-games souls)
Ams (evil no-paying slackers), and
Devs

And the following rules

Ams can steal games with an expenditure of time, rather than money.

Now, were we to use a strict population control model from Dawkin’s Selfish Gene and Extended Phenotype books, I would expect Ams to thrive, Bobs and Devs to wane until a strange equilibrium is met.

Stage 3: Now were we to add a rule on top of this:

Devs and Bobs can grudge a player that steals a game.

Thus once you stole once, if you get grudged, you can never steal again.

You’d end up with a standard grudge model, which has a good equlibrium. Thus, I encourage everyone else: don’t play with theives. While this is totally impractical and draconian, it a fun fantasy to roll over the brain.

Now, before you condemn me for being a republican, it just disturbs me that there’s a notion that someone believes they’re ENTITLED to free games. After all, Tic Tac Toe is free, why shouldn’t [Insert triple-A title here]?” More importantly, opening up the discussion with these people is like discussing evolution with fundies. People like Am are never going to change their mind until someone steals from THEM.

And that’s a sad truth. If a game gives you a smile or exposes you to a thought you didn’t have before, you should be willing to pay for it. If you don’t want to pay, then wait until it becomes free.