The Political Compass Test

If you’ve been on social media for any length of time you’ve no doubt at some point seen one of your friends post the results of a test that some website has generated. The vast majority of these tests are nothing more than humorous time wasters and I normally ignore them, but several times a year I’ll come across a test that catches and holds my attention. Such was the case recently when I took the Political Compass Test. Unlike all those tests to determine which character of a particular fictional universe I was, this one actually seemed worthwhile, given that I couldn’t remember when, if ever, I had taken a test to gauge where I stood on a political map. The test is formatted to six pages of political statements, and for each statement you are asked to indicate how much you agree or disagree with it. After completing the test you are taken to a page that explains the methodology of the political map the test employs, as well as how to interpret your standing on that map, though I suspect most people just scroll past all of that to get to their results at the bottom of the page. Below is a screenshot of what I got.

According to the test I’m slightly right of center with a touch of libertarianism, which seems about right. That said, I acknowledge there are always limitations and flaws to these sorts of tests, so I take the results with a grain a salt. For my part, I did take issue with two or three of the political statements that I had to rate my agreement/disagreement with, since in my mind they were highly situational. For example, one of the early statements you have to rate is “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.” In my mind that really depends on who the enemy of my enemy is and what I know about him. If this enemy of my enemy is of noble character and I have good reason to believe he won’t turn on me once my enemy is defeated, then yes, he is my friend. However if this were not the case then maybe I wouldn’t consider allying myself with him. It’s all about the details. I also do wonder how certain responses are interpreted, such as with the statement “The most important thing for children to learn is to accept discipline.” While I do think it’s very important for children to learn to accept discipline, I don’t think it’s necessarily the most important thing for them to learn, so I’d be inclined to disagree with it, but I wouldn’t want the test to interpret my selection of disagreement with the statement as my being against the disciplining of children.

Despite a few personal qualms about the Political Compass test, I wouldn’t discourage anyone from taking it, as any flaws with it are fairly minor in the grand scheme of things and I think it does a decent job of gauging where people fall on the political map. If you’re curious to take the test yourself and see how where you fall, you can follow the link below.

https://www.politicalcompass.org/test

Writing Project - March 2017 Update

This month I have a small but important update to share with you regarding my writing project. During some of my spare time, I have outlined in detail the first two chapters/episodes of my story. By this I mean I have written out everything notable that happens, along with small bits of dialogue. While some authors are capable of just starting with a premise and running with it, I need to know roughly what happens and where everything is going before I begin the war of attrition that is long-form writing, which might be a weakness on my part but if it is then at least I’m aware of my weakness. This coming month I hope to outline several more chapters/episodes, and when I get to the point where I can see the entire story arc from start to finish, then the real work will begin.

Jury Duty Update

Yesterday I fulfilled my civic duty in reporting for jury duty. In the end I wasn’t selected, so I can’t write a riveting account of courtroom drama and mind blowing legal argumentation, but I can at least give the bare details of what happened. Because I’m not totally sure how much I’m legally allowed to say, I will keep things fairly vague and not give any names.

It was a cold, wet morning when I arrived at the courthouse; sort of like the weather I remember from the last time I was in Seattle. After going through the security checkpoint, I found my way to the juror waiting room where myself and everyone else who had been summoned that day sat around while waiting for things to get going. At the appointed time, one of the courtroom staff gave us the rundown of what to expect that day and we watched a short video with further details on Colorado’s legal system. Then we waited some more for the judge’s assistant to arrive, which he did about fifteen minutes later. He escorted us to the courtroom where the trial was to take place. It was much smaller that I expected, but it was fitting given the nature of the trial. There was no high-profile case today—instead it was just your average DUI offense. The judge introduced the parties of the trial and gave us more details on what would be happening that day. Juror numbers were then called. One by one, twelve persons were selected to sit in the jury seats. My number wasn’t called, but the juror whose number was one digit above mine got selected. At that point a combination of both relief and guilt came over me. The relief was from knowing that my odds of selection were now absurdly low—the only way I getting on the jury would be if more than half of the twelve people seated for jury got disqualified—and I’d soon be on my way out of the courthouse. The guilt was over feeling relieved—I shouldn’t have been feeling relieved about escaping from performing an important duty of US citizens. Though I didn’t get selected, I still had to sit around for another hour while the judge and the attorneys for both parties questioned the seated jurors. At this point I could have just tuned out of the proceedings, however I did my best to pay close attention to everything that was going on, as there was still a small chance I could get put on the jury and if I ever found myself on trial I would want potential jurors that did me the same courtesy. Both attorneys were probing the potential jurors for strong opinions related to the subject of the trial, and there was one juror in particular whom I could tell was going to get off the jury due to what he was saying. Maybe he really believed what he said, or maybe he was just trying to get off the jury. When the defense attorney finished with the questioning, the attorneys and the judge briefly convened at the judge’s seat to discuss things. Interesting, in this courtroom the audio speakers will play white noise when the judge and attorneys need to talk in private, which I think is a pretty clever way to keep the jurors and audience from hearing what they are saying. Once the judge and attorneys finished their chat the judge announced that everyone not sitting in the jury seats could leave. I shuffled out the door along with everyone else and made my way back to my car. It was still cold, cloudy, and wet outside. As I was driving out of the parking lot, I saw that one guy with strong opinions leaving the courthouse. Sure enough, he had been dismissed.

Now that I’ve got a bit of separation between myself and the experience, I think I can honestly say that I walked out of that courthouse with a better appreciation for the legal system here in Colorado. No, it’s not perfect, but I think, at least from what I saw, the court in this case was making an honest effort to provide the kind of justice we expect in our society. Then again, this was my first time reporting for jury duty and it looked to be a fairly vanilla trial, so maybe I just need more time in the courthouse to turn myself sour to our legal system.

Dualshock 3 vs Dualshock 4 - the feel

Last weekend I started playing the first game that will be featured in my Replaying the Classics series of writing pieces. Turning on my PlayStation 3 and booting up the game, I immediately arrived at my very first hurdle—getting reacquainted with the PlayStation 3 controller. Though the PlayStation 3’s Dualshock 3 controller is very similar to the Dualshock 4 controller of the PlayStation 4, there are enough differences between them, and there had been a long enough gap since the last time I had played a PlayStation 3 game, that the Dualshock 3 felt somewhat awkward in my hands and my gaming muscle memory needed to be recalibrated as I was playing the game. For those that don’t have experience with both controllers, below are a pair of photos I took of a Dualshock 4 (left) and a Dualshock 3, (right). Just FYI, Dualshocks come in several colors, and I also have a black Dualshock 3, but I went with the silver one for these photos to make the differences a bit easier to see.

The Dualshock 4 has longer and slightly larger handles than the Dualshock 3, and the parts of the controller that house the analog sticks do not protrude out quite as far, and these two small adjustments actually make for the Dualshock 4 having a noticeably more comfortable grip in the player’s hand. The analogue sticks and triggers were also changed on the Dualshock 4 to be slightly concave, as opposed to the rounded analogue sticks and triggers on the Dualshock 3 that could on occasion result in a finger sliding out of its intended position. There are a number of other differences between the two controllers, but these were the ones that were most immediately apparent when I was feeling the controllers in my hands. Generational jumps between controllers are always big, but oftentimes its those small tweaks that stand out.

September 15, 2017

That’s the last possible day that I’ll be working at my current position for my current job. Should things continue as they are, and should the possible job changes I’m investigating not pan out, then September 15, 2017, would be the day I quit. The next week after that I would fly out to Japan for about a month. Upon returning I would seek a new source of income. The countdown clock has officially started ticking.

Replaying the Classics - a preview

Earlier this year I mentioned that I was going to dedicate some amount of time in 2017 to replaying games from years past. I think it’s now high-time for me to get going on that, and today I’m announcing that as I play through these favorites of mine I’ll be creating a new series of writing pieces called Replaying the Classics. Currently I’m not sure what the format of these writing pieces will be, but I think it’s fair to assume that they will be a little different from my Late to the Party series of writing pieces. Ideally I would write and publish these writing pieces on a regular schedule, but with my job taking up so much of my time, and the fact that some games on the docket are longer than others, I can’t really say how frequently Replaying the Classics will appear on this website. Another bummer is that because I’ll be playing most, if not all, of these games on PlayStation 3, I won’t have any ability to take screenshots or videos to accompany my writings about the games. I guess that means going back to my old ways of utilizing Google Images and trying to find media that doesn’t have watermarks or other copyright indications. The first edition of Replaying the Classics should go up sometime next month. Prepare yourself for a dive into Ricardo’s gaming catalog.

Bolder Boulder 2017 training has begun

Well, I ended up registering for the Bolder Boulder. I’m still not totally sure if I’ll be able to do it, but now that I’ve paid for it I’ve got some skin in the game, so it’s time to commence training. Last weekend I did a two-mile run and didn’t die, so I consider that to be a good start. This month I’ll mostly be doing my regular gym routine during the week and then running on the weekends, but next month the running will kick into high gear and I’ll be hitting the pavement regularly. My goal this year will be the same as last year—finish in under sixty minutes.

Del Taco

In my quest to expand my culinary horizons, as well as my waistline, I paid my first, and possibly last, visit to Del Taco. I’m normally not a fan of these faux-Mexican fast food establishments, but I decided I would give Del Taco at least one chance to prove itself. Upon entering Del Taco I looked over the menu and a single item caught my eye—something called the Epic Steak & Potato Burrito. I ordered it (but told them to hold the sour cream) and took it home, and once there I stood in judgment over my latest food adventure. While nowhere near the biggest burrito I’d ever seen, this Del Taco burrito could certainly claim the “epic” title in the sense that it was much larger than the average burrito you’d get at a fast food restaurant. Just staring at it I could tell that it was at least 1,000 calories of who knows what. A large bite into it revealed a veritable cornucopia of things that I probably shouldn’t have been putting into my body. Still, I had paid for this monstrosity, and I wasn’t about to let my investment go to waste. Ripping more chunks out with each bite, I tore into the burrito like a wolf devouring a fresh kill. The taste was decent, though a different sauce would have complimented the other ingredients better. It wasn’t the best thing I’d ever had from similar style fast food restaurants, and it wasn’t the worst either—it just was. Maybe that should be Del Taco’s slogan: “We are what we are. It is what it is.”

The urge to pad writing

As I was preparing Friday’s post on Destiny, I ran into an issue that I’ve encountered a number of times in my writings. When I was proofreading the final draft I saw that I was very close to hitting 2,000 words, and the thought floated in my mind to add just a little more to my work. Two, maybe three, more sentences and I’d cross that magic threshold into the 2,000-word territory. Yes, what I had at the moment was all well and good and encapsulated everything I wanted to say, but think about how much better it would feel to add another entry to the 2,000-word writing piece catalog. It wouldn’t even be that hard—just insert an extra observation and/or opinion here, and another one there, and just like that I’d have that special 2,000-word satisfaction. I entertained this line of thinking for several minutes until my inner editor put a stop to the fantasy train. Yes, getting past the 2,000-word mark would be nice, but I’d be compromising the writing piece by padding it with material merely for the sake of achieving a particular word count. That extra material did not belong in this writing piece. I came to my senses, finished proofreading, and then moved on to preparing the writing piece for publishing. The urge to pad my writing had been resisted, that time at least.

Destiny 2 Wish List

Seeing as how my days playing Destiny are coming to an end, it’s time to look forward to Destiny’s sequel, which will be released later this year. From my own experiences with the game, I’ve come up with seven things I’d like to see in Destiny 2. Hopefully developer Bungie does at least a few of them.

Updated thoughts on Destiny

Today is post #500!!!

Last year you might remember that I did a writing piece for my Late to the Party series on the game Destiny. I played just the base version of the game but I liked it so much that I decided that at some point in the future I would purchase a full version of the game that included all the expansion packs that had come out. Not too long ago I finally made good on that decision, and since then I’ve put most of my limited gaming time into playing more of Destiny. With all the new content I’ve experienced it’s only fair that I give some updated thoughts on the game.

Tax Season 2017

Once again, it is that time of year where I prepare my tax returns. As always, I’ll be preparing my tax returns on my own without the assistance of software or a tax advisor, but then again my tax returns are usually pretty straightforward so there’s really no need for assistance to begin with. Time to give to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and then pray that he doesn’t squander most of it.

Daylight Savings Time

Twice a year in America, we adjust our clocks by one hour. Last week we sprung forward an hour into Daylight Savings Time. Later this year we will fall back an hour into Standard Time. Personally, I’d rather we as a country just pick either Daylight Savings Time or Standard Time and stick with it all year long. No more clock adjustment, and no more screwing with sleep schedules.

Vault 7 (and Sargon)

As if we didn’t need another reason to distrust the American government in general and the CIA in particular, last week we had the release of another large batch of leaked CIA documents via Wikileaks. Referred to as “Year Zero,” this initial batch of over 8,000 documents comes to us from “Vault 7,” whose origin is purported to have come from an isolated high security network within the CIA’s headquarters in Langley, Virginia. These documents shed more light on the CIA’s power to spy on both America and world, and once again raise serious questions about what our government and the CIA are doing with that power. Of course, 8,000 documents is a lot of material, but thankfully we live in the Internet Age and many people have been posting helpful summaries online. Personally, I would suggest a video made by a Youtuber called Sargon of Akkad, which can be found here. It’s just under 20 minutes long and provides a good synopsis of what’s going on without overloading the viewer with too much data, though if you want to know more he has a link in the description of the video to the sources he is drawing from.

Unrelated to Vault 7, at some point in the future I’d like to do a writing piece on Sargon, as he’s another online personality whose videos I’ve found myself watching lately. He’s not as controversial (or famous) as Milo, and comes from the other side of the political spectrum, but like Milo he’s an interesting figure who bucks some of the trends we would normally associate with people from his political persuasion. Sometime in the next month or two I’ll hopefully have a writing piece on him ready for publishing.

It exists

Just after the publishing of my 400th post, I set a goal of registering the domain of a new website for my writings before the publishing of my 500th post. In today’s post, which happens to be #496, I am pleased to announced that the goal has been met, and the new website domain exists. At the moment there’s nothing there, but I’m one step closer to migrating off of Blogger and onto something a bit more distinctive and that I can call my own. It will be some time before I’m able to fully construct the new website and transplant all the content from Blogger over to it, but whenever that happens I’ll have a big announcement for you.

“Excuse me, were you a CU student?”

In early 2016 I did a series of posts on this website dedicated to interesting little side stories from my 2015 trip to Europe. That series concluded in early February 2016, and I thought I had detailed all the stories worth publishing, but just yesterday I realized there was at least one side story that I had forgotten to write about. Thus, today the Europe 2015 Side Stories catalog has been temporarily reopened for a single day in order to add another entry to the series. For this story, we need to go back to Istanbul.

One of my days in Istanbul was spent checking out the major sights in the Old City, and at one point on that day I was standing in the area near the Hagia Irene church when a stranger walked up to me. “Excuse me, were you a CU student?” he asked. I was surprised both that a random stranger had started talking to me, and by the fact that he somehow seemed to know me. I told him that I had been a CU student, though I didn’t know who he was. He explained that he was a professor at CU and recognized me as a student he had sometimes seen walking around campus years ago. I didn’t recall ever having him as a professor, or even seeing him while I was a student, so I couldn’t say that I recognized him. We chatted briefly about our respective travels before parting ways, and when he left I had this incredibly odd feeling come over me. Somehow, someway, this guy who knew me just so happened to run into me in Istanbul, of all places. Were I more paranoid I would swear that I was being stalked. I’ve never had another experience like that before or since my meeting with that professor in Istanbul. I wonder whatever happened to him.

Higher Education

I don’t have any children, but if I did I would be very concerned for their future college educations. Not so much because of concerns that used to be at the front of peoples’ minds when sending their kids off to college—such as substance abuse and bad behavior—but because of the climate that has been spreading across college campuses like a cancer over the preceding years. This climate has been marked by repressive intolerance of any position that doesn’t align with established orthodoxy, and recently reared its ugly head again at Middleburg College in Vermont, when students at the college shut down a planned speech from a conservative social scientist named Charles Murray. After disrupting his speech with constant shouting and foot stomping, Mr. Murray’s was moved to a private room to have his speech delivered remotely, but that too was thwarted when the protestors repeatedly pulled the building’s fire alarm. When it became clear that Mr. Murray was in real danger, he was evacuated from the campus, but in the process was mobbed by a group of students who seriously injured one of Middleburg’s professors who was trying to escort Mr. Murray from the premises. The crazy thing is, from what I’ve read about the incident online, almost none of the student protestors actually knew who Charles Murray was or had read anything he had written. Maybe Charles Murray is a bad person, but they didn’t even try to understand him before rejecting him. All they knew is that he held views contrary to their own, so he had to be destroyed. I wish I could say that this was an isolated incident, but if you’ve been following the news on college campuses lately you know that this sort of anti-intellectualism is becoming increasingly common. Any dissent against the ideologies prominent on campuses is met not with civil discourse and a free exchange of ideas, but instead with screams, protests, and sometimes violence. I would never want to send a child of mind to a place that treated opposing views with such abject hostility, and if my child held conservative political views I would probably be scared for their very safety, seeing as how conservatives seem to be the primary target for the thought police now roaming campuses nationwide. Perhaps it’s best then that I don’t have children, so that I don’t have to live to see them subjected to this sort of oppression.

Drive through windows

Would you believe it if I told you that I can’t remember the last time I used a drive through window at a fast food restaurant? It’s true. I have a strange aversion to using drive through windows and always walk inside the restaurant to place my order. The reason for this is probably some sort of irrational subconscious fear or need that I’ve never identified. Maybe next weekend I should just kick myself and go through the drive through of Chick-fil-A or McDonald’s to try to break this silly habit of mine.

Jury Duty

It would seem that my services are required by the county court system. A jury duty notice has come for me in the mail, and at the end of this month I’ll have to report to the Boulder courthouse. Whether or not I get selected remains to be seen. During the selection process I’ll answer questions fully and honestly, and should I be selected for the jury I will perform my civic duty with all due seriousness. This is only the second time in my life that I’ve gotten notice for jury duty, and the first time was when I was a student, so that time I had valid excuse for not serving. Some time next month I imagine I’ll do a writing piece on this experience, with the length dependent on whether I serve or am dismissed.

New Passport

Well, that was faster than expected. My new passport showed up in the mail this past weekend, so I am now officially ready for international travel (to any country that doesn’t require a visa for Americans). Like my previous passport, this one is good for ten years, and hopefully I’ll get a nice collection of stamps in it.

Game Changers

I’ve played a decent number of video games in my short time on this earth, but there are a few from over the years that have stood out from the others within their respective genres. While not necessarily the best games I’ve ever played in those genres, these games were eye-openers in that they fundamentally changed the way I thought about games. Some of these games were my introduction to their respective genres, while others were from genres I was familiar with but gave me a new perspective on them. Today I thought I’d list five different gaming genres and briefly detail the games from them that proved particularly influential.

Fighting Games

Tekken 5

I had scattered experiences with fighting games growing up, but I didn’t find them particularly interesting or enjoyable. All of this changed in college when I bought Tekken 5. I had played Tekken 4 thanks to my roommates owning it, and I had a positive enough experience with it to take the chance on buying Tekken 5 when it came out. Hours and hours were put into learning the characters and playing against my roommates, and somewhere in that time something clicked in my brain and suddenly both the appeal of fighting games and the underlying logic of them started making more sense to me. While to this day I still don’t play fighting games very often, I’m no longer hesitant to giving them a try.

Japanese Role Playing Games (JPRGs)

Final Fantasy 10 

I don’t think I had heard of the term “JRPG” when I first played Final Fantasy 10, but I knew that regardless of what it was, Final Fantasy 10 was revelation. It was both my first JRPG (unless you count Pokémon as a JRPG) and the first Final Fantasy game I ever played, and consequently it holds a special place in my gaming memory. Prior to it, I had never played a massive fantasy role-playing game with a story that kept me engrossed from start to finish. After it, I knew that story-based games were something that would hold a high place in my preferences as a gamer. There are certainly better RPGs (both Japanese and Western) out there, and Final Fantasy 10 seems to be generally regarded as a middle of the road entry in the Final Fantasy series, but it opened the door to a new gaming genre, showing me a whole new world of games.

Strategy Games

Civilization 2 and Total War: Rome

For strategy games I have to call out two games instead of one, seeing as how they influenced me in the two major subcategories of strategy games: turn-based strategy and real-time strategy. Civilization 2 was the dominant game of my childhood, and taught me the ropes of strategy games with its turn-based world of building nations. It trained me in many things related to strategy games, such as planning ahead, city and resource management, and breaking peace treaties with sudden, massive invasions. Total War: Rome came into my life in college and also had turn-based gameplay in its management of cities and army movements, but it unlocked a new aspect of strategy in the real-time battles that occurred when armies collided. The reason Total War: Rome clicked for me in terms of real-time strategy is partially because it taught me history lessons while playing, partially because it was cool to be commanding mass ranks of men in epic battles, and partially because Total War: Rome removed base building from its battles. That last item in particular was something I had seen in other games like Age of Empires and absolutely detested, so Total War: Rome’s focus exclusively on commanding units in battle was what won me over to real-time strategy games.

First-Person Shooters

Battlefield 1942

When I was young, my father’s computer at home had demos of many games as well as a few full versions of games. Among them were first-person shooters like Marathon, Quake, and Dark Forces, but while some of them interested me, none of them captivated me. The eye-opening experience I needed to fully see the potential first-person shooters didn’t come until my late high school days when a friend let me play Battlefield 1942. I had never seen anything like it. Battlefield 1942 had a variety of expansive maps; vehicles including tanks, planes, and ships; and a mind boggling number of ways to play the game. I couldn’t get enough of Battlefield 1942, and after that initial experience is when I truly fell in love with the first-person shooter genre.

Open World Games

Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas

It seems that for a lot of people their moment of revelation with open world games came with Grand Theft Auto 3, but I never played that game, so my moment was with Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. The map of San Andreas was staggering at the time, and the fact that you could go anywhere on it and do whatever you wanted blew my mind. It was the first game I had played with such a level of freedom and it showed me a whole new level of what games could achieve. Also it had some great cheat codes, which allowed you to go nuts and do even more than what was possible by playing the game normally. I’ve hardly played any games since then with cheat codes as good as what I had in San Andreas.

Rebuilding my iPod

In 2007 my parents bought me an iPod as a Christmas gift. Since then I’ve gotten a lot of mileage out of that iPod and it remains in active use to this day, mainly as a way to listen to music and podcasts while at the gym or at work. I haven’t had many problems with my iPod in the almost ten years that I’ve owned it, but a few days ago the iPod finally suffered its first major malfunction, which resulted in me having to do a factory reset that deleted everything off of it. All the audio that it had accumulated over the years, all the playlists that I had crafted, and even the few videos that I would find myself watching once every few months—all if them were wiped out. Now I must recreate my iPod’s library, which I realize is probably the pinnacle of a first-world problem, but it’s an incredible annoyance nonetheless. The house has burned down, and sitting here whining about it won’t cause it to magically come back, so it’s time to sit down at my computer for an hour and rebuild what has been lost.

Doctor Who

I posted the image below to Facebook on Monday, but I think my creation is good enough for me to publish it here too. Also, I worked a continuous 13.5-hour shift today, so I’m in no condition to write a normal post. I’m not a fan of Doctor Who, but that could all change if the dream below comes to life.

I’ve never seen more than bits and pieces of Doctor Who and am largely clueless as to what the show is about, but I am resolutely convinced that Adam Sandler would be the greatest Doctor of all time. Please join me in starting a social media campaign to bring this dream to fruition. #AdamSandlerDoctorWho