Work, Movies and War ... or is it peace?

That is, not including the days at work where my job was to drink a bar tab or test games. But still, it felt quite nice to sit at a computer 'creating light' for half the day then to meander through some simple geometry changes to some buildings.

I know this is hardly the sort of place comments like that seem appropriate but I've had this reminder each time I've visited this site that my profile isn't complete because I haven't filled out a journal so I thought I'd start today and that was about the most note-worthy thing to say.

Other then that, for the first time in my career I have become genuinely interested in what the important people in my industry have to say. I work as a game developer and have always approached the field with a healthy dose of cynicism. But lately the industry has matured a lot and is now getting similar levels of respect as other forms of entertainment, such as sock puppets, bullying, sport and whaling. And while I consider myself good at my job, I'm hardly currently a high flier so I can appreciate how much it must take to run a successful company like Valve or Rockstar.

So I've been reading and listening to interviews at the same time as actually caring what they're saying. In the past, I might've been searching for a reason to hang crap on them, like a lot of other gamers. But instead I was just trying to hear what they were saying. Sure, 2 of the most recent were very old and it felt like I was time travelling, listening to Gabe Newell talk about how bad Longhorn sounded. But I still got something out of it.

And yeah, I've managed to type up a veritable essay already but I'm not all about games so I thought I'd cover another couple of subjects.

First, I read an article on wikipedia about a major Naval operation from WW2 in the Mediterranean Sea that should definitely be made into a movie some day. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operatio… was an attempt by the British to get past Italy and resupply the most heavily bombed territory of the war, the island of Malta. Read the story if you're interested in why I think it should become a movie. The ending is the perfect cliff-hanger / happy ending scenario war movies thrive on.

Asides from that, my usual cynicism of the contemporary version of the above events was put aside for a while. With new, 'more responsible' government across much of the developed world I assumed the guy pulling the strings of the puppet on the left and the right had decided it was time to pretend we had democracy again. The case for my long argument I just summarised in a sentence was further advanced when American's started going out in protest marches against "COMMUNIST" health care yet again. Then, under the radar, came this little news story that kept on bouncing back and forth between the major participants. Obama had cancelled Bush's plans to put missiles on Russia's borders (pointed at Moscow). Then Moscow had decided to stop building new missiles. Then both parties all of a sudden started talking about FULL nuclear disarmament. No one noticed. The news was full of car accidents, football and who got plastic surgery as per usual so the same old fascists were still in control and I wasn't dreaming. But SOMEHOW a President with actual policy got elected to the White House, the first time thats happened since the 1950's.

I was and am still positively shocked. I mean, don't let the significance of that subside. The man we were told for a decade was trying to restart a Cold War by the "free media" just shook the US Presidents hand after BOTH parties just agreed to dismantle missile systems aimed at each other and to discuss nuclear disarmament. This is the moment the hippies of the 60's dreamed about and average Joe said would never happen. And whats funny is no one gives a fuck. People are far too apathetic about the fate of the human race. What is this? Are we all on some kind of anti-depressant or has growing up in an environment where nuclear war is a subject of entertainment made actual discussion of pre-eminent subjects like this outlandish?

I might actually be disappointed in this development if no one comments here and says "Oh I heard about that and I laughed, I cried and I danced a little." Because if we honestly don't care at all about the fate of our own species at such a pivotal point in its history, can we actually claim a right to exist?