Month: May 2012

Alper point­ed me to this slight­ly retard­ed but at the same time engross­ing rein­ter­pre­ta­tion of the com­put­er RPG: mis­sions and ene­mies are laid out on a grid. You fin­ish or defeat them by click­ing repeat­ed­ly (shades of Cow Click­er here). Then hov­er over the XP and mon­ey that appears to cash in. To get to the hard­er ones you need to lev­el up and pur­chase kit. There is no declar­a­tive lay­er what so ever but it still works. Strange.

This com­ing Novem­ber, you may be one of the mil­lions who will pur­chase Call of Duty: Black Ops II. Before you start fan­ta­siz­ing about a Los Ange­les under drone attack and the under­cov­er sol­diers who will save us all, you may want to think about the hor­ri­fy­ing his­to­ry of under­cov­er oper­a­tions and the actu­al­i­ty of drone wars today.
http://m.kotaku.com/5908216/the-trouble-with-call-of-dutys-scary-new-war-of-the-future

Refresh­ing analy­sis of the rise of pop­ulism in the Nether­lands, argu­ing that it is not the result of pol­i­tics bow­ing to grad­ual, nat­ur­al change in soci­ety (the grow­ing edu­ca­tion­al divide). But in stead, the result of the new right’s active cam­paign to influ­ence pub­lic opin­ion. Which means that what is need­ed is active opin­ion shap­ing from oth­er polit­i­cal move­ments, not paci­fi­ca­tion of populism.