Erik Kain

Post image for On the Eve of #LeagueFest 2012

So the time has finally come. A dozen or so Gentlemen and spouses will be converging upon the City of Sin in the next 24 hours or so. Some of the more intrepid among us are already there.

I’m looking forward to some time off – something I almost never take – and to meeting everybody. It’s long overdue.

Of course, not everyone can make it and certainly not every reader can make it. So now seems as good a time as any to discuss the site itself, how everyone is feeling about the direction the site has taken. In particular, I want to know how everyone feels about the sub-blogs. Are they working? Is there anything we can do to make them better/more useful?

Anyways, consider this an open thread.

 

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Post image for Shawn Gude gets a sub-blog

Shawn’s first post at “The Safe Depository” is live. He’s been posting occasionally to the front page, and now I’ve finally set him up with his own sub-digs as well. His intro post is here.

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Post image for Culture is the villain

I’ve had this sort of nebulous notion that culture itself is a problem. Not any particular culture, mind you, but rather the entire concept of culture.  The exclusivity of the group over the individual. A lot of people will hold up individualism against collectivism, but what if that’s just scratching the surface?

Culture is the thread we weave all our isms out of: tribalism, nationalism, and so forth. Identity culture is the nichification of culture writ large. It’s the perpetuation of the need to be aggrieved, oppressed, put-down, whatever.

So I wrote a piece about the whole Alex Knapp vs. The Oatmeal controversy that Ethan touched on earlier. I talk a bit about geek culture and this problem with being forever-aggrieved, forever prickly and defensive. But I’m not picking on the geeks – I am a geek, after all:

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Post image for Monty Python and the Holy Grail: The Game

Over at Forbes I have a post detailing why I think somebody needs to make a Monty Python and the Holy Grail MMORPG. I list out monsters, character classes, etc. So if you have any thoughts on the subject, or notice anything I missed, please check it out and let me know…

 

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Post image for The Real Mitt Romney, Inside the Actor’s Studio

James Lipton offers some good, though likely impossible, advice to Mitt Romney (via The Dish.)

Politics is performance. This has never been more true than now.

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Playing music with children

by Erik Kain May 11, 2012
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This pretty much sums up every time I try to play guitar while my children are around. My daughter is almost five and my son almost two, and their musical tastes tend to be very different from my own. Stop playing daddy, and turn on Sesame Street songs… Hopefully this will change as they grow older and learn to play music themselves. I expect whatever progress is made in the intervening years will be crushed by the time they become ...

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Romney the prankster, Obama the politician

by Erik Kain May 10, 2012
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You knew it would get ugly, and now it has. Romney’s character is being called into question as his past as a youthful prankster and loud-mouthed homophobe is coming to light. Recalling an incident at prep school, Romney’s old friend Matthew Friedemann describes Romney’s distaste for another student, John Lauber, who was presumed to be gay: A few days later, Friedemann entered Stevens Hall off the school’s collegiate quad to find Romney marching out of his own room ahead of a ...

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‘The First Law’ Trilogy Is Fantasy At Its Finest

by Erik Kain May 10, 2012
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I’ve finished Joe Abercrombie’s First Law trilogy: The Blade Itself, Before They Are Hanged, and Last Argument of Kings. And may I just say that this is some truly wonderful fantasy? Because it is truly wonderful fantasy, easily some of the best I’ve ever had the pleasure of reading. Abercrombie’s characters are marvelous and full of depth, and you’re never quite sure what they’ll do precisely because he makes them all so human. There are no clear villains, no clear heroes, no clear friends or enemies. Not ...

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Under the banner of Romney

by Erik Kain April 17, 2012
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At some point, the question of Mitt Romney’s faith will come up and loom much larger than any of his business past. It will come up not just in circles of evangelical conservatives, but as a controversial subject necessary for a healthy discussion of religion and politics. Or at least it should. I have nothing at all against Mormons themselves, and tend not to hold peoples’ faith against them (or try not to) unnecessarily. But faith is an important question ...

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Beyond Derbyshire

by Erik Kain April 9, 2012
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In Oklahoma, this story has been unfolding for the past few days: TULSA, Okla. (AP) — Two men were arrested Sunday in a shooting rampage that left three people dead and terrorized Tulsa’s black community, and police said one of the suspects may have been trying to avenge his father’s shooting two years ago by a black man. Police identified both suspects as white, while all five victims in the rampage early Friday were black. Here’s Derbyshire: A small cohort ...

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Like any truly great politician, the real Mitt Romney doesn’t exist

by Erik Kain March 21, 2012
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“Well, I think you hit a reset button for the fall campaign. Everything changes. It’s almost like an Etch A Sketch. You can kind of shake it up and restart all of over again.” ~ Romney Communications Director Eric Fehrnstrom on whether his boss’s hard-right turn will alienate general election voters. That’s a lovely image: an Etch-a-Sketch of ideas, positions, beliefs, all so transient and loosely held that, when it comes time to run a general election campaign, you can shake ...

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Five Leadership Lessons of James T. Kirk: The Movie (Or, How Alex Knapp Plans To Conquer The Universe)

by Erik Kain March 20, 2012
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If you missed Alex Knapp’s article on the five leadership lessons of James T. Kirk you really should read it. Or, if you prefer, you can watch Alex’s video version which he recorded at Forbes headquarters in New York. Video after the leap…

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Scenes from an Arizona snowfall

by Erik Kain March 20, 2012
Thumbnail image for Scenes from an Arizona snowfall

One reason I really do love this town: we just had thirty inches of snow dumped on us, and today it’s sunny and bright and the snow is melting. You can go outside in a t-shirt (though it’s not exactly t-shirt weather.) The sun is warm even if the day is brisk.

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Everyone in Afghanistan suffers PTSD

by Erik Kain March 20, 2012
Thumbnail image for Everyone in Afghanistan suffers PTSD

I’m pretty sure that long before American troops set foot in the mountains of Afghanistan, that the people of that country already suffered from post-traumatic-stress-disorder. Another ten years of war stacked on top of the decades of war and theocratic tyranny there has only made matters worse. When we talk about the failure of the American military to do things like improve maternal mortality rates, or build schools, or significantly improve the lives of Afghanistan’s population, we miss a larger ...

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Arizona buried, again, beneath a tide of snow

by Erik Kain March 19, 2012
Thumbnail image for Arizona buried, again, beneath a tide of snow

I’m tired of snow. I know this is true because it’s hardly snowed this winter at all until now. I took the above picture about half-way through our current storm. It was about the second time I’d gone out to shovel that I thought to myself, “I really need to live somewhere without snow. Somewhere warm.” Typically this thought only comes to me after the fact, but this time the shoveling has me irritated and sore.

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Refresher Course On Formatting Posts And Post Images

by Erik Kain March 17, 2012
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I know everyone is sick of meta, but… It’s very important that any image included at the top of your post is properly formatted. Otherwise it won’t show up properly as a thumbnail down below, and could possibly throw off the formatting of other posts near it. It’s also important that “more” tags are placed after one or two lines or short paragraphs on all posts. This is because I’m shooting for a sort of uniformity on the front page that ...

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Shooting spree illustrates why it’s time to end the war in Afghanistan

by Erik Kain March 11, 2012
Thumbnail image for Shooting spree illustrates why it’s time to end the war in Afghanistan

The latest tragedy in Afghanistan is still unfolding. An American soldier went on a shooting spree, killing sixteen civilians and wounding numerous others: “Stalking from home to home, a United States Army sergeant methodically killed at least 16 civilians, 9 of them children, in a rural stretch of southern Aghanistan early Sunday, igniting fears of a new wave of anti-American hostility, Afghan and American officials said.” This is the beginning of the end for the war in Afghanistan, and a PR disaster ...

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Mass Effect 3, John Carter, and More….

by Erik Kain March 10, 2012
Thumbnail image for Mass Effect 3, John Carter, and More….

In case you’re interested in my other blog I have some kind of interesting stuff up over there right now… I have a somewhat more in-depth look at the day-one DLC included with BioWare’s Mass Effect 3 and why it’s so problematic.

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A vendetta against BioWare?

by Erik Kain March 8, 2012
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So I have a post up at Forbes on the bizarre reaction to BioWare’s latest game, Mass Effect 3, on Metacritic. Despite glowing reviews, the user score has been hovering around 2.5. At first I thought this was a reaction to the gay romances available in the game. Now I’m not so sure. What’s going on here? Is there a gamer vendetta taking place against BioWare? Does it have to do with the fact that the developer has been placing ...

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Country Music and the Culture War

by Erik Kain March 7, 2012
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This was brought up in an earlier thread, but Will Wilkinson’s post on country music is worth a closer look. Wilkinson listens to country music in his car – sometimes I do, too. Sometimes I also listen to conservative talk radio in my car, but unlike country music I find very few redeeming qualities in listening to Sean Hannity or Glenn Beck. Country is catchy, cheesy, and absolutely contemporary conservative art in its most distilled form. Wilkinson says it has ...

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Post formatting and images

by Erik Kain March 6, 2012
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Below are some instructions for bloggers at this site on how to add images to posts to make them work properly as thumbnails and in the new frontpage design. It’s pretty easy. It’s also 100% necessary for everyone to do – not optional, in other words, if we want this to work. If you absolutely don’t want any image attached to your post, okay. But it will not stand out as much as the others. First off, if you are ...

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