Nationstates

Once in a while, I'll remember this thing exists (usually by Kriss) and take five minutes to plunge my great nation further into depravity and lawlessness. NationStates is an online "nation simulation" game based on author Max Barry's novel Jennifer Government which is evidently a dystopian view of a government with too little power. I haven't read it, don't have any real inclination to read it and was surprised to learn what the novel itself is about, considering that I have been trying to see what happens if I ramp up civil liberties while having basically no economic restrictions in my little nation of Murphspot.

The gameplay is simple. You register a nation and its performance and well-being are determined by the government's (your) action on issues that are automatically generated. The solution to these issues is usually to pick one of a few very extreme positions, which makes the decision sometimes difficult, but it is good to see that both positives and negatives are acknowledged for every choice you make. To take an example from an issue I had recently:

Recent studies showing that the sources of Murphspot's most common street crimes (vandalism, muggings, joyriding, and witchcraft) are children under the age of criminal responsibility has prompted a national outcry for government action.

My options were to treat juveniles as adults and sentence them to long prison sentences (an option which did not define any age limits) which would stop a lot of the crime but would lead to a rise in taxes and could affect those who are caught up in petty crime and would not be likely to become dangerous if not incarcerated with violent criminals, to write it off as "childish mischief" which might be accurate and avoids a tax increase, but does nothing to solve the problem and to prosecute the parents of the offending children, which addresses the problem in an indirect way and might be unlikely to yield results.

As a result of trying to see what happens if I go with full on civil and economic libertarianism (a philosophy which, as the novel critiques a situation where the government is powerless), my nation is officially listed as an "Anarchy" with a street crime problem, but "superb" civil rights, a "strong" economy and "superb" political freedoms and is led by a "large, liberal, pro-business government" and peopled by citizens who pay a flat 16% income tax rate.

It's an interesting distraction. There's also a lot of activity on the associated forums and a very strong RPG aspect to participation, but I tend to stay away from that (partly because I'm not really all that good at role-playing) and stick with seeing how allowing me to pick a Supreme Court Justice would lead to the downfall of society.

If you'd like to see exactly how that's leading to the breakdown of everything, go to there and do a search for "Murphspot" and enjoy the ocelots, biker gangs and large private sector.

I'm A Terrible Musician

Once upon a time, not long ago, when people wore pajamas and lived life slow, I played the bass guitar. Not very well, mind you, but I still played it, dammit. I'd played mostly the lines to songs I knew which tended to be incredibly easy. I improved slightly when I joined the jazz band in college and discovered that "Hey! I can't read music." That worked sort of well for a while. I still wasn't terribly good, but learned enough to play the accompaniment to alto sax in the intro of 'Round Midnight in a dining room in Erie, so I considered it a success. I haven't been playing much recently. Part of it is that I don't plan my time out very well and end up playing NHL06 instead, but a larger part is that I don't have anyone to play with recently, and playing bass unaccompanied by any other instrumens is fine if you're Vic Wooten, but not so much if you're mortal.

I have thought in the past that the solution to this would be to either find someone that plays another instrument (a difficult prospect for a graduate student) or learn how to play guitar. That's been kind of on hold for a while because, in addition to not actually having a guitar yet, the whole "playing more than one note at once" thing kind of eludes me. That's where this comes in. I'm not exactly sure how "Guitar Hero for an actual guitar" would work, as the easier settings on Guitar Hero are made easier by skipping long passages, which doesn't really work if you actually want to play a song. Still, it's an idea that intrigues me. I'm a big fan of the Guitar Hero franchise, don't buy into the whole "stop playing this and start playing a real guitar" thing in general because the point of a video game is not to delude the user into thinking they're actually acquiring a skill other than "playing the game", and because people who whine about that somehow don't say the same thing of, say, people who play Madden but don't actually play professional football.

So yes. Perhaps this level of "slow down there, cowboy, and we'll show you how to play a guitar" tutorial will motivate me to actually pick one up and learn. Or maybe I'll take up basketweaving.

One of those two.