Mand'alor Dash

A 20 becoming 100. That's inflation for ya.

He gave away a used game (rather inexpensive product), and in doing so, made the sale of a brand new Xbox 360 (a significantly more expensive product). Sounds like a net gain to me...

If you're familiar at all with the Call of Duty games, then you can probably see the relation between FNaF's plot and that of the infamous zombie mode. That wiki article is rather long, and I don't quite know why it includes the Mob of the Dead map, since it's completely separate from the main storyline, and actually a very solid example of unfolding storytelling, but the jist is rather simple. You start small, but complicate the story further and further as you go along. You just make the whole thing up as you go along, and pretend you had it planned this way from the beginning. Stories of this nature tend to have drastic tonal mood swings, absurd plot elements, loose continuity, and only seem to get bigger without ever tying themselves back together. It's a bit like a soap opera, or the DC/Marvel comic universes before each reboot: Storylines that exist only to continue into proposed infinity. But the FNaF/CoD Zombie method has one very important element that differentiates it from comic books. The most important part of these stories is to hide the most important plot elements behind extraordinarily cryptic "easter eggs," and require the community to solve them. The beauty of this method is that the internet has united the world since the 90s, so while these puzzles may be nigh impossible for any given individual to solve, the combined hivemind of the gaming community will figure them all out and summarize them within days. You look smart, and your fans ignore the ridiculousness of the storyline because they're perplexed by the sheer genius of turning wall tiles into buttons. And, when what you give them isn't enough, because you're 3cryptic5me, people try to figure the plot out for themselves. The theories start circulating as every individual line of dialogue and continuity error is taken out of context and reinterpreted as a work of high art. It's a very cheap trick, but it works. You can be a mediocre, or even terrible storyteller, and still create the "unfolding masterpiece" of the millennium just by following these steps. Of course, if you want to say people only care about FNaF's storyline because the game's already good/scary in its own right, then that's a different discussion. But the story itself is not one that can stand on its own. It's lackluster at best, and uses cheap tricks to fabricate audience investment.

Holy shit. It's like he wrote a new bucket list every other week. It's sheer madness what this man accomplished.

Because that's what the world needs, right? More fucking bans. Maybe we need a tobacco cartel. They've already got an established market and everything. The 86 million people killed in the world wars, or the 94 million killed by communism, the 1-3 million killed in Vietnam, or even the 160K killed in the middle east certainly didn't choose to be there. I'd also like to know how they arrived at that 600K a year number. Even counting casualties of war often comes down to extremely rough estimates. The CDC has the estimate at 2.5 million since 1964, which is 49K a year on average (41K in recent years). While not insignificant, this gross disparity leads me to believe that there were more than a few liberties taken with the data. For comparison, drunk driving kills 10K people every year, but we (thankfully) aren't looking to ban alcohol. Not really going to touch the issue of first-hand smoke, since it's not 1922 anymore. Tobacco has been linked to cancer since 1951, and if you choose to smoke in 2015, you put your life in your hands. I will say, however, that it's not as statistically significant as it may sound. Referring back to the CDC, smokers have an average life expectancy only around 10 years shorter than non-smokers. What this means is that even if it was the smoke that caused their death, it's not like it cut their lives in half.

I would argue the opposite. If you are a private business owner, you should be allowed to refuse service for any reason. Any at all. Good or bad. You shouldn't be forced to do business with somebody you don't wish to do business with.

So, I had an interesting idea for a fanfic. Right now, the working title is The Iron Age. It owes some inspiration to the premise of Conversion Bureau, but not much. The idea kicks off in Ponyville. During an otherwise normal day, Rainbow Dash notices a very peculiar object flying over the town, and goes to investigate. That object is revealed to be the Spirit of St. Louis, the iconic airplane of aviator Charles Lindbergh. The year is revealed to be 1927, and Lindbergh had just discovered a new continent in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Lindbergh and Princess Twilight finish the flight to Paris, where they are greeted with open arms. Equestria is quickly recognized as a sovereign nation by the international community, and as an important port of trade between Europe and North America. The 20s quickly overtake Equestrian culture, as new technologies and concepts modernize the medieval nation overnight. From here, we get an anthology of the two worlds colliding, with an overarching plot dealing with the twelve tumultuous years that followed between 1927 and 1939. The Great Depression, the polarization of political extremes, an Equestrian civil war, all leading up to and culminating with the start of WW2 at the end of the story. A major theme of the story is the declining "Ages of Man" from Greek mythology. The idea that as time goes on, the world will only progress further into darkness, which I feel is an apt metaphor for the 1930s. Each "age" will also see its own descriptive motifs, such as the titular "Iron Age" having scenes of factories producing thousands of cast iron tanks. I even wrote out a short, In Media Res prologue: A conversation on Greek mythology between Twilight Sparkle and an art curator at a New York museum. So... What do you all think?

Sadly, I am starting to feel like music has gone the way of the parody film. The entire industry is designed to cut corners at every turn, and new, enterprising artists are only getting into it for the wrong reasons. There are certainly exceptions, but for the most part, it's all about shunning talent and promoting cheap marketing tricks.