Month: January 2009

This will be another one of those entries where I essentially ponder out loud, so you’ve been warned…

So, “Dark Future”…

I was going through my movies this afternoon, looking for something to watch that I haven’t seen recently, and didn’t find much. So I checked out my friends posts here on ye olde journal and read Lyon’s glowing reviews of “Repo – the genetic opera”, so I went to the web site and it got me thinking…

I went back and looked through my movies, books, and poked about a bit online and I’ve determined that the media is precluded by law from portraying a “happy” future. It’s always dark, bad, repressive, and full of horrible things.

Why is this?

I think this might be the root-reason for the lack of success for “sci-fi” games:

In a fantasy setting the strife mechanic is a result of situational issues, not the environment. In fact, the ‘past’ is usually portrayed as idyllic – it’s a great place to live, you just need to evict the Orcs first…

In SciFi the strife mechanic is more often than not a product of the environment; life sucks for you because you live here and even the air kills people…

The one real exception to this seems to be “Star Trek” – where the future is good and the strife is situational. The human race has managed to survive long enough to grow up a bit and things on good old Earth are pretty awesome. The strife is caused by external forces rather than simply being a product of “the future”.

As we all know, people tend to make their own reality by spending a lot of time thinking about it. So are we dooming ourselves to a miserable future by pumping the population’s collective conscious full of killer robots, evil megacorps, and plagues?

I really can’t say for sure, but I hope not. I want my personal robot and flying car damnit, and I can live without the plagues and evil aliens thanks. 🙂

Here I am at the top of day 133…

Today promises to be fairly laid back: I don’t have to work on the WarWagon and the PT finally has plates and can be driven – but I don’t have anywhere to really ‘go’ to…

I might drive down to Denver and visit with Wolf and Lyon, and last night Aryntha mentioned wanting to go out and do something – so there are options, I just have to decide on what to do.

Unfortunately Aryntha (being part vampire) won’t be awake until the day is mostly over, so I won’t even know what they have planned until 1-2pm.

So I guess I’ll log into WoW for a bit and see what Wolf has planned… She’s an early riser like I am (I think it’s an ex-military thing) and tends to do the same thing: Log into Wow and piddle about until someone else wakes up.

Before that though I’m going to drive over to the little coffee stand in Aspen Park and get me some Dazbog. 😉

So, that’s my plan for the day – such as it is.

Well, my drives into work are a little brighter now.

Over in Aspen Park someone opened a little drive-through kaffeehaus that serves Dazbog. Dazbog (with an ‘s’, not a ‘z’) is another ‘Colorado Thing’ that I treasure…

See, up in Seattle they have 11 kinds of rain and 22 kinds of coffee. Here in Colorado we only have a handful of coffees, but Dazbog stands above them all – in profile, fists clenched at its sides, looking upwards into a sunrise while a Russian flag waves in the background.

Better yet, in your best Russian accent say “This is not spineless cup of capitalist coffee”. 😉

Anyways, Russian imagery aside, Dazbog is awesome coffee. It’s made by a couple of Russian immigrant fellows in Denver who came here to live the American dream and roast awesome coffee… I think they’ve achieved both.

Another thing that makes Dazbog so awesome is all the Cyrillic and pseudo-Russian iconography on everything – even the cups. For example, the paper cup in front of me is red, white, and black with a big star logo and says things like “даст бог кофе” and “Растет Всемирно а Русскими Поджаривается” – My Russian is quite rusty so I have no sense of grammar, but those translate to something like “give god coffee” and “grow universally while a Russian roasts”.

So, yeah, I get to have a fantastic cup of coffee on the way to work now… This makes me happy.