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Remember when you showed up at the Worldwake pre-release this weekend past, and the organizers put you in an un-air conditioned room with only a couple of posters, made you sit still at little desks, and ordered you to “stop talking while the man at the front of the room is talking,” sending you on a long, psychotropic flashback to the hellish years of high school?
No?
Must just have been Tom Haddy and the other judges at Melbourne High, then.
Magic tournaments have always had annoying aspects to them: waiting for stallers and illiterates to finish their games before you could go on to the next round was always my least favorite. But Melbourne’s pre-releases have gotten a lot worse since I’ve been going to them. It doesn’t help that they used to be at places like RMIT’s main cafeteria or the Abbotsford Convent, where you were shielded from the elements and there were things to look at and places to eat, and are now in a spare room at a private school where all the doors are locked and the Jam Factory is just far enough away to make you miss the next round if you walk over.
It’s more than that. We used to have door prizes – for about two sets, until the organizers apparently decided it was too much trouble. We used to have representatives of stores set up at tables where you could buy, sell, and trade – until Chris and Isaac decided Meta Games was just for them and their friends. We used to not even feel the time passing – until some of the players at these things decided that conversation distracted them from “optimizing” a deck whose contents are based 100% on luck.
I’m a longtime player with a huge investment in Magic, and even I am fed up. Can you imagine a new player turning up last Saturday? What would someone like that decide Magic is like? You don’t need an MBA to know that running tournaments as though they were a day camp for high school students is bad marketing. It’s time for everyone who’s a serious fan to vote with their feet and with their money, and not give any of it to Russell Alphey or any other Melbourne pre-release organizer until they decide to treat us like serious fans.
“I leave it in your hands.” – Alan Moore, Watchmen
“I came upon the prison ship, weighed down by iron chains;
I fought the land, I tilled the soil, and waited for the rain.”
-- From “I Am Australian,” written by Bruce Woodley and Dobe Newton
I’ve lived in Australia for about half my life now, but even after all these years, I still want to cry whenever I hear the song “I Am Australian.” It reminds me that the country which I have made home for that time was once one giant prison for the British empire's “undesirables,” and I can’t help but wonder what scars it has left on Australia’s national psyche.
Y’know who else deported criminals and malcontents to a wilderness on the other side of the world? Stalin.
Australia made the best of its situation, and managed to find good in the results of the British crown’s atrocities. The question is not what can be done about it now, but why does nobody ask what can be done about it now? Considering that some countries hold grudges and base modern diplomacy on incidents that happened over a thousand years in the past, why should Australia (and America, Ireland, and Scotland, for that matter) be compelled to whitewash or forget things that happened only a century ago?
It’s easy to forget that the NATO system and worldview whereby everything west of Bavaria is “like us” dates only to World War II. It’s even easier to forget that America’s last major interaction with Britain prior to World War I was fighting the War of 1812. Seventy years is a long time, but not as long as even a young country like America or Australia’s history. If we were starting new today, would we find anything in common with any of our current “staunch allies?”
“The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.”
-- Winston Churchill
And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do; and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech.
-- Genesis 11:6-7 (King James version)
As we all know, the non-serious Magic expansions Unglued and Unhinged were printed only in English. The ostensible reason for this was that the humor in the cards would not have translated well into other languages. But even regular Magic sets contain English humor – and other things that don’t translate so well into Chinese or Russian.
Consider, for example, the Tenth Edition uncommon No Rest for the Wicked.
The title refers to a well-known English proverb. I have no idea whether other languages even have an equivalent. The Spanish version, for example, has a title line that says “No hay reposo para los malvados,” which makes it one of the few card names that is a complete sentence, and one which is not even a proverb in that language.
Then there’s Guildpact. The Izzet guild’s defining identity was “impulsive learning,” indicated in many card names by either strange compound words or pre-existing words that just sound strange.
Schismotivate is basically “schism” plus “motivate,” which you can just invent in English and have most people understand what it means. At least the basic parts of this word exist in other European languages, but even so, it was transplanted nearly directly for most languages. Interestingly, some European versions of this card add one or two letters to make its name instead “schizophrenia” plus “motivate,” which suggests that the adaptation may have been based partly on the flavor text.
Finally, even serious sets always contain at least a couple of cards with humorous flavor text or presentations. One of the most famous and facepalm-inducing is the Urza’s Saga and Planechase uncommon Goblin Offensive.
But this card only works because the English words “offensive” meaning “attack,” and “offensive” meaning “offensive,” happen to be spelled and pronounced the same way. What if you need to print this card in a language that doesn’t have that quirk? Should you use the first meaning in the name, and change the flavor text? Should you change the name to something closer to whatever the equivalent joke in that language would be? I don’t know the answer, and I wonder what Wizards of the Coast would do if they ever reprinted the card in other languages.
People come to universities to hear interesting ideas – and, increasingly, conspiracy theories. Just today, for example, I overheard someone explaining to their acquaintance that the real cause of world hunger is high food prices, engineered by large multinationals to squeeze the maximum possible profit out of recent all-time record harvests which were apparently enough to feed the entire world. I didn’t have time to stop and ask the obvious questions (what sort of nutrition value would each of the 6.3 billion people on Earth get? How do you expect farmers to make a living if they just give their crops away? etc.), and I wonder if they even had the answers to them.
I always try to understand the arguments in favor of positions I don’t agree with, but I must admit to being absolutely perplexed by claims that any country needs more population. Anyone who claims with a straight face that this planet is not overpopulated already has clearly never been to Hong Kong or Bangkok. Even Melbourne has severely strained water supplies and public infrastructure, despite having a population of “only” around three million and a much larger land area (which makes Kevin Rudd’s repeated claims that Australia needs more population especially confusing and irritating). Given that overpopulation and the resulting conflict over resources has been shown to contribute to not only elevated stress, anxiety, and dysfunction in individuals but also conflict between nations and ethnic groups, there is no basis to claim that any country needs to grow its population for economic or security reasons. There is not even, in truth, any historical evidence to support this; unless you have a different explanation for why Switzerland has traditionally been considered a more successful country than Russia, or how a few thousand Dutch merchants and soldiers controlled tens of millions of Indonesians for more than four centuries
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“Sign, sign, everywhere a sign,
Blocking out the scenery, breaking my mind.
Do this, don’t do that, can’t you read the sign
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Remember the discussion a few years ago about ”South Park Republicans?” Notice how it completely disappeared without further discussion, right when the Republican Party is considered to be needing a new direction and image?
Part of it is just alignment incompatibility between the mainstream media on the one hand and Trey Parker and Matt Stone on the other. There seemed to be some hope that the new face of the Republican Party would be overall less conservative, a sort of “Democratic Party Lite;” hence the initial interest in South Park’s support for gay rights. But their interest cooled as other episodes lampooning Democrats were released, and some of their other opinions are either conservative or downright illiberal. (Ever see the one where Stan’s parents get divorced? Even James Dobson would probably say they could stand to be a little less militant about it
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I have here four of the last unopened Time Spiral boosters in Melbourne. One of the retailers I usually buy boosters from is all out, and the other (where I got these) has only three left. If I go back next week, they’ll probably still be there; 2006 is generally considered kind of old already, even though the cards are no less cool and no less fun. With Time Spiral, there’s also the problem that some newer players didn’t get all the references to older cards.
This one isn’t even from that long ago.
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There’s a certain country that’s beginning to get a bad reputation in many parts of the world. It overwhelms local cultures with its business and products. It props up unpopular regimes to further short-term interests. It demands ever-increasing amounts of primary resources, often resulting in environmental devastation. It pursues petty territorial disputes, often in places it has no real connection to, solely to exert dominance over its smaller neighbors. It’s called China, and –
Oh, wait. You thought I was talking about America? Understandable, as we’re not really encouraged these days to examine any other country’s foreign policy in this way. It’s sort of a strange dark mirror to the idea of American exceptionalism: the United States is not just another country, but a unique exemplar of expansionism, greed, and dishonesty. As such, we lose sight of some elements of other countries' foreign policy, even the bizarre and pernicious ones. If you ever paused to wonder what the hell the Chinese government was thinking by claiming that part of the Philippines belongs to it, or why the Moroccan government allows its sanctioned imams to publicly dream about reclaiming Andalusia, or how the ayatollahs of Iran could even imagine nuking the supposedly holy city of Jerusalem, you might conclude that America’s financially-motivated meddling wasn’t so bad after all
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MagicTheGathering.com just finished “Spike Week.” If you haven’t been reading their content for a long time, that won’t even sound like English to you. The design team sometimes looks at players in terms of psychographics, specifically the reasons why they play Magic. This helps them decide which cards are likely to appeal to which players. Spike is the more competitive of the three psychographic profiles, referring to someone who gains enjoyment from winning games and, often, playing in tournaments. As such, Mark Rosewater had a section near the beginning of his article on Monday, encouraging Spike to be Spike:
“It's just Spikes? Good. Here's what I want to say. I know Spikes get derided a lot for taking things too seriously. ‘It's just a game’, they say. Exactly, it is a game. And what's the point of a game? What are you supposed to do by the very nature of a game's design? Win. There's no medal for the runner who has the most interesting gait or Poker bracelet for the player who has the best time. The point of any game is to prove your dominance by following the rules and achieving the objective, to be the best. That's what you're doing. You need make no excuses for doing what games were created to do. Embrace your Spikeness and make no apologies
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I’ve discussed Magic players’ predilection for annoying jargon once or twice, but I was reminded of the problem in Borders the other day. There was a book on sale which purported to help you uncover hidden or deeper meaning in the names of people, places, and things. Did you know that Clint Eastwood is an anagram of “Old West Action?” Yeah, I didn’t think it was relevant either.
But like a Rihanna song, the idea was stuck in my head, whether I liked it or not. Sifting through even one expansion for anagrams would take way too long, even for me, but my thoughts turned to one particular set that is everyone’s favorite
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