Forbeck.com

On Sunday, my wife and I went to see Michael Moore’s new film, Sicko. Going to school at the University of Michigan, I’ve followed Moore’s career since Roger and Me. I don’t always agree with his points (although he often has good ones) or how he drives them home (I don’t think his stunts are as effective as letting others make his points for him), but I appreciate him standing up for what he thinks is right and for asking questions.

For Sicko, I stand squarely in the choir to which the film preaches. The health-care industry in America is a disturbing, embarrassing, life-threatening mess. I could throw stats and anecdotes at you to back up that point, but Sicko does an excellent job of it. If you’re interested in the issue (and how many Americans aren’t ever worried about health care these days?), make a point of seeing it. In Rock County, it’s playing at the Wildwood Movies 10 for the rest of the week, by special arrangement with DR!VEN.

If you keep up with the news, you probably know that Congress recently approved a bill that allows for the revocation of habeas corpus and permits the President to define what constitutes torture, among other things. I don’t want to turn this website into a political forum, but let’s say I’m less than comfortable with this.

A good friend of mine, Blaze Miskulin, has come up with a cool idea for registering a protest to the Military Commissions Act of 2006. He’s going to send a copy of the U.S. Constitution to each member of Congress who voted for the bill, highlighting the points where the two documents clash. He’s looking for co-signers on the letter. If you’re so inclined, you could chip in a few bucks to help cover the copying and postage too.

To quote another great American work of art:

“We got to take these bastards. We could fight them with conventional weapons. That could take years, cost millions of lives.

”In this case, I think we have to go all out. I think this situation absolutely requires a really futile and stupid gesture be done on somebody’s part.“

”We’re just the guys to do it.“

This story’s a bit old, but I’m just now getting around to poking into it. On April 12, a couple that claimed to have given birth to sextuplets admitted that it had all been a hoax.

As the father of quadruplets, I’m not surprised that someone tried this kind of a scam. People ask us all the time “what did you get” for having so many kids at once. There’s a modern myth that if you have so many kids at once the big companies get together and hand you everything you could need.

Maybe that happens with sextuplets and septuplets, but quadruplets are old hat these days. We didn’t get much from companies at all. I think a three-month supply of formula was about it.

The people in our community, though, poured out the support for us. We had dozens of people coming in and out of the house at all hours to give us a hand with the kids: feeding, diapering, doing laundry, cleaning up, and more. At one time, we had 30 to 40 volunteers coming through every week.

This is the kind of support that matters more than money. It’s one thing to get cash to help out. Money always comes in handy. But we could not have purchased the sort of help that these wonderful people gave freely.

That’s what tripped up these hoaxers. When their community started to rally around them, the media got involved, and the whisper-thin web of lies they’d woven unravelled.

To me, this illustrates both what’s wrong with the world—and what’s right.

The Stateline News, a free weekly newspaper published here in Beloit, ran a “People You Know” article about me in the Sunday (12/31/05) edition. If you’re a local, you already have it. If not, my apologies, but there’s no web link to any such piece.

Mostly, I’m happy with it. I always appreciate free publicity, even in a publication with such a clear right-wing bias. (It regularly runs statement papers from the Cato Institute as editorial pieces.) However, the article did liberally misquote me in a couple places. For example, “Our young people need to understand the value of education and hard work.”

While I don’t disagree that there’s value in education and hard work, I would never have given this quote. For one, I never refer to those under eighteen as “young people.” Second, to imply that only the young need these values—and that merely by being older I’ve climbed some kind of mount from which I can dispense my hard-earned wisdom—strikes me as condescending. It’s one of those clichés along the lines of “kids these days” that’s grated on my nerves ever since I was a kid myself. It’s right up there with walking uphill to school—both ways.

I’ve seen all sorts of misquotes and inaccuracies, though, in just about every article I’ve been close to. The speed at which local news is reported means the papers rarely have a chance to go back and check facts. The mistakes are rarely worth getting bothered about, so most of the time people just let them slide. Normally, I do too. As long as there’s no malice intended on the part of the paper or the reporter, it’s usually harmless.

I’ve done a bit of journalism myself, after all. I used to write for InQuest, and I still write an article for each Games Quarterly Magazine. Accuracy doesn’t come easy. It’s a goal you must continually strive for if you care to achieve it.

I don’t normally post links to this kind of stuff, but since it involves a game designer getting ripped off by a large corporation, I just can’t help it. Apparently whoever programs the Fuddruckers website hotlinked to a Flash-based version of a game called Burgertime hosted on the author’s own website. They didn’t even bother to swipe the code, just linked to the game as if it were their own.

Of course, this means the author can do whatever he wants to do to what’s attached to that link. And he did. Late on a three-day weekend. Ouch.

Tony Caputo, publisher of Now Comics, recently argued on ICv2.com that Marvel Comics should give up the publishing business and license out its properties (its characters) to other publishers. I think he’s wrong, and I wrote ICv2 to tell them so. They published my comments yesterday. Let me know what you think.

I sometimes do a little ego-cruising on the web, wondering what people out there have to say about what I do. Not that I don’t love all of you who come by here, but those who are wiling to stop by and sit a while are most likely to say kinder things. After all, posting a comment here means I’ll read it for sure. It’s the internet’s equivalent of saying something to my face.

It’s in the more distant corners of the net you find other opinions, like on Amazon.com. The people who write comments there aren’t professional reviewers, but they paid their money and read the books, so they get to say what they like—or don’t, as the case may be.

In the case of Marked for Death, the Amazon reviewers have given the book some good marks, some fair, and some bad. If you liked the book, I’d appreciate it if you could stop by there and give your opinion too. Amazon is the largest seller of books on the web, and I could use all the kind words I can get there.

Now, I’m not asking you to be a shill or to write something you don’t believe in. However, one of the best things you can do for an author is to recommend his or her work to other people. Many people have written privately to thank me for my work. If you can share those thoughts with the rest of the world, then you have my thanks.

If you don’t have a Mac, you might want to tune this one out. If you do, be sure to read it.
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I turned 36 last week. I’ve never been one of those who shy from their birthdays. I’d rather keep having them than not. Still, it got me thinking about the adventure gaming industry.

When I look around at my peers, it seems that most of the “young” designers are people in their mid to late thirties, right around my age. This raises the question: Where are all the younger designers?
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I got my first bits of spam in the comments sections over the past week. Unless, of course, I number Levitra sales reps and online gambling casinos in my readers. I blocked the offending IPs, but I’m told this sort of thing may get bad. Movable Type 3.0 is supposed to have some powerful tools to fix this sort of thing, but it’s in beta right now.

In the meantime, we’ll hold on tight and see what happens. If worse comes to worst, I may have to close down the commentary sections. If that does happen, remember you can always reach me by e-mail.

On the cool side of things, I’m testing out this new posting program for Mac OS X: ecto. So far, it’s pretty darn neat.

[Posted with ecto]