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Tag Archives: zombies

Bioshock (for reals)

I actually saw this awhile ago, but I’m only getting around to posting about it now.  Really quickly, if you haven’t seen the article and don’t feel like reading it, PayPal’s Peter Thiel is helping to fund an initiative to create a free-floating libertarian country out in international waters, where residents can be “free from the laws, regulations, and moral codes of any existing place.”  I don’t know about you, but reading that automatically made me think of the BioShock series.  And apparently, I wasn’t the only one.

For those of you who don’t game or following the gaming industry, BioShock and BioShock 2 are RPGish first-person shooter (FPS) games that are set in an underwater dystopia.  Well, it wasn’t founded as a dystopia.  Obviously, it was intended to be a utopia.  Anyway, businessman Andrew Ryan is fed up with government and decides to form is his own laissez-faire utopia where humanity can work and live without that meddling above-water government.  And then…things turn horribly wrong.  You should go play the game.

Now then, doesn’t that sound very much like what Thiel is trying to do?  The only big difference is that BioShock took place under the water and Thiel wants his utopia to be above water.  It seems to me that he wants to create this libertarian, Ayn Rand-esque, laissez-faire place just like how Ryan was trying to do in BioShock.

Um…do you think that Thiel is really a LARPer?  I wouldn’t really be surprised if he is after reading about what he’s trying to do.  He wants to be Andrew Ryan and form his own underwater utopia.  Only, it’s pretty hard to build stuff underwater and I don’t think it’s been extensively done.  Not in terms of whole cities and the like.  I’m sure it’s more expensive than building above water.  I mean, oil rig technology has been around for a long time.  You’d probably have to research all kinds of new building methods to be able to build a city underwater.  You might as well build a city on an oil rig that’s above water.  You don’t become a wealthy businessperson making entirely stupid decisions, after all.  Now you can spend some extra resources on meddling with the forces of nature.  I’m sure Thiel will have something other than Big Daddies, Little Sisters (and later, Big Sisters), and Splicers to run rampant over his now dystopia, but the idea will probably be there.

The thing is…Rapture (BioShock’s dystopia) was underwater and thus fairly remote and cut off from the rest of the world.  Thiel’s project, being above water, isn’t as far removed from the rest of us.  I wonder how we can contain the dystopia, when it becomes such, from spreading out to the rest of us?  Do you think…this is where the zombie apocalypse is going to start?  O.O

Anger Management: The Sleepy Problem

So, apparently sleepy people blame everyone else for everything.  There have been numerous reports about how USians (I don’t really like the term “Americans” and it’s longer too) are sleep deprived.  The pharmaceutical industry seems pretty convinced that we’re a nation of sleep-deprived zombies (and may be making us such too).  It’s pretty well known that sleep deprivation leads to irritability and moodiness.  But apparently, sleep deprivation also causes you think “counterfactually.”  It causes people to ponder how things could have been better and may cause them to be more prone blaming other and revenge.  This…obviously could be a problem.  Um…I think I’m rather prone to blaming other people.  I mean, I blame myself too…I just blame other people more.  Obviously, I’m generally (read: always) correct about everything.  Obviously.

Anyway, it seems to me that a form of anger management could just be sleeping more.  Of course, people can just say that they’ll go to bed earlier and such, but does it ever really happen?  Probably not.  It would be pretty hard to enforce an earlier bed time anyway.  So, how about napping (but not zoymbing).  A lot of us are working or at school in the middle of the day, what if we just declared the hour after lunch as an hour for napping?  You wouldn’t be allowed to do work and such then.  Maybe Spain and the Latin cultures have something there.  They’re pretty well known for taking siestas in the middle of the day.  Some Asian countries are also known to encourage employees to take a short nap after lunch.  Perhaps the US should do that too.  I think I could get behind that.  But nothing too extreme.  I mean, I don’t think work should somehow cause me to feel lazy.  And I normally have a lot of stuff to do after work too, so I wouldn’t want to get out of work too late.

Hmm…all this talk of sleep deprivation and napping is making me sleepy.  Maybe I’ll go take a nap.  Excuse me…