Guns, Sandy Hook, and political parasites.

I am not going to discuss the Connecticut shooting. The day of the shooting, Facebook was filled with so many left-wing anti-gun @$$h0l3s trying to politicize dead children that I had to point out that the bodies were not even room temperature yet, and the political parasites were trying to stand on their still steaming bodies.

There was even someone on Facebook within six hours who stated that,  yes, he would have rather that the children has had all been set on fire, because at least then they wouldn't have been shot.  He said that. I cannot make this crap up.

Do you want to know what's worse than killing children?  People trying to make political points off of their dead bodies. These people make me violently ill.

And the worst thing?  There are already people making excuses for this murdering psycho -- "bright," or "autistic" or "Aspergers," and other exculpatory or complimentary words are being thrown at us to excuse mass murder, as though blaming the guns for the slaughter.  Again while at the same time defaming innocent civilians, painting 94 million American gun owners with the same brush of mass murder.

People make me ill. And I've made myself sick just writing about this. Notice, I haven't said one thing about the shooting itself, just the aftermath.

The people of ancient Carthage were a money-worshiping people. To sacrifice to their god, they would toss the biggest drain on their pocketbooks into a fire. They would throw in their children.

If you were someone who spent time online on Friday talking about monsters who own guns instead of passing along prayers, then look in the mirror. You already threw the baby into the fire for your political points. Enjoy.

Music blog. O Come, Emmanuel

Christmas music!

Enjoy

Video Games: the Next Generation?

I try not to make this a blog for solely my own personal opinions, I have another blog for that, but I read an article last week that kinda annoyed me. I deeply appreciate the artwork, the graphics, and even the storytelling of some games. The graphics of the upcoming Lara Croft game, or the storytelling of the Mass Effect trilogy, could go toe to toe with movies, and could certainly replace some actors.  I mean, seriously, look at the video below.
  

  

How long did it take you to see that this was NOT live action?

But for all that, there’s been an ongoing debate in the video game community that goes something like this – the last round of major video game consoles came out in 2005 (the Xbox 360 and the Playstation 3), and the technology has advanced soooo much since then, surely it is time to move on.

You might smell a bit of burning rubber at this point. That’s my brain hitting the brakes hard and going “huh?”

When the Xbox 360 came out, game companies needed to increase their hired programmers tenfold as games transitioned to HD. The PS3 came out at the same time, and it came out in Blu-ray, which was even higher definition, and made the costs of making games so prohibitive that it took years before the PS3 had a solid roster of games.

But now the game companies themselves insist that the next generations of consoles must come out, so they can use the latest and greatest technologies. Their logic is that they’re losing money because their games are not as shiny as they could be.

Really, everybody? First, I quite literally don’t know what I’m missing. So I can’t see how I can be biased against your games because there’s something better out there – because, as the companies themselves have noted, there isn’t anything better than the current generation. Is there really a problem with getting the most out of the technology we have?

Let’s take a look. To the right, this is the original Xbox game Halo: Combat Evolved. Dinky by today’s standards, but I remember when I saw it and said, “Awesome.” It’s still a nice looking game.

Fast forward ten years. There was a rerelease of the original game with Xbox 360 technology, and it was called, to no one’s great surprise, Halo: Combat Evolved. Anniversary.  

You can see the difference. The position of the body isn’t as stiff, the graphics are more detailed, the colors are richer. It is visibly better.

And now, finally, we look at Halo 4, using the exact same Xbox 360 graphics. It already looks like they’ve gone through another generation already.




Here’s a side by side or two, just to make it even clearer.

I’m hard pressed to imagine how anyone could think that we’ve hit the limit of the current generation of gaming technology, since Halo 3 and Halo 4 are the same generation. Will the next round look even better? Of course. My question is – is there a rush?

Second, could there be another reason why companies are losing money? Let’s think about this a moment. Their video games are $60, or $70, brand new. They’re not cutting costs on the games, and with gaming seasons that have over a dozen new, top-shelf games coming out at the same time, do they seriously expect people to drop over $700 on their products? Does anyone have $700 just lying around anymore?

I think I would rather pay $14, or even $30, on a used game – games that the distributors like Gamestop make money on, but the original publishers don’t. There have been so many games played that way, there has been talk of making video games non-sellable my giving out a one-time code that make the game unusable to anyone else.  If you want to trash the video game industry, make it impossible to play used games.)

So, what is the problem with the current generation of consoles? Well, let's see -- coding has filtered down to street level. Anyone who knows what they're doing with a computer can probably start putting together their own game -- and anyone with a Kickstarter account can finance it. Low-rent competition is good for the soul.

Maybe I'm just a backwards Catholic, who acknowledges that progress is cumulative. You can't get to point Z while simultaneously jettisoning point A-Y -- Catholics throw out nothing. Don't believe me? Look at the Vatican archives sometime. But most atheists, so-called "progressives" (of all sides of the spectrum), and now the video games, try throwing out everything from the past, and hope really hard that no one else will remember it either -- be it how many atheist regimes disintegrate, or how truly dark the "Dark Ages" could have gotten without the Catholic church.

I prefer to get the most out of what's there than try to move on and pretend that last console (or, on the larger scale, the last few hundred years) didn't happen.

The Hobbit and the Piano Guys

This is a music blog sort of day. You may recall that these are the same people who brought you "Cello Wars" and my music blog featuring "Bring him Home" from Les Miserables.  If you don't recall them, you'll still like this -- they're doing the entire soundtrack of the Ring cycle (Tolkein, not Wagner) with two guys.

Enjoy all.

 

interview

It' been a lazy, annoying, tiring weekend. I want a vacation from my long weekened.

However, I do have something for you.

I have another interview.  Who knew that anyone else wanted to talk with me?

Enjoy.

Darth Donald and Padawan Mickey -- Disney eats Star Wars

It's a bit late to comment on Disney buying Star Wars from George Lucas, but there have been so many rumors and lies around the project, it's hard to know where to begin.

Item 1: Disney owns Star Wars, Lucas will be the creative consultant on Episodes 7, 8, and 9.  The Schwartz will be with Disney (Mel Brooks joke, ignore me).  Episode 7 is slated for 2015, putting it up against the next Avengers film, supposedly, a Justice League Film, so that'll be fun.

On the one hand, Disney seems to know what they're doing when it comes to franchises -- they acquired Marvel without destroying the Avengers Storyline -- no matter what the NYTimes whined about the Avengers film -- and have yet to ruin the marvel movies. So, we'll see.

Item 2: The writer for Toy Story 3 will be penning the script, and we don't seem to have a lock on the director yet.

This actually annoys me a bit.  Star Wars has enough writers with the books to write a whole television series -- were Michael J. Stackpole and Timothy Zahn too busy?  In fact, forget stackpole, I'll take Zahn.  No, I don't need to have The Heir to the Empire series Zahn wrote twenty years ago as episodes 7-9; for one thing, everyone is too bloody old. Unless, of course, you're going to recast everybody, in which case, we can have a party ...

Nathan Fillion as Han Solo anyone? Morena Baccarain as Princess Leia? Sean Maher as Luke Skywalker? Adam Baldwin as Darth Vader?

Oh, did I not mention that?

Item 3: THEY'RE BRINGING BACK DARTH VADER......

Ahem....

I'm really, deeply, seriously hoping this is a joke. A bad joke. Told by Fozzy of the Muppets.  Where's the "Wokka Wokka"?

Item 2 (Reprise) -- if you want to talk about writers, were Zahn or Stackpole asked? Were the writers of the Bioware videogames (who have made the best Star Wars stories outside of Zahn for the last 15 years) even considered? Or did they have the writer in mind when they started negotiations to buy the series?

Conclusion: I'm wary, but hopeful. Lucas is being shoved out of his own company. Creative consultants are what happened to Joe Quesada when he was replaced.

Disney may not screw up Star Wars even more than it already is. Here's hoping.

Music Blog Lindsay Stirling's Moontrance

For this one, you have to listen for the music.  Otherwise, it just looks like a really strange rendition of Thriller ..... only with better music.  Also, I think the only reason this vid was done with zombies had more to do with Halloween than anything to do with the music itself.

Enjoy all.

Again, ignore the zombies.

Sex, politics and comic books. Oy!

So, twas the week after the election, and all through the nation, you had 19-petitions to secede, from places as diverse as Texas to New York, a wave of people want to get the heck away from Barack Obama.

What does that have to do with this blog? Nothing. Nothing at all.  Except for the fact that the top ten blog posts of all time  for A Pius Man has to do with either sex, politics, or comic books.  So, somehow, I have to link up Obama's appearance in Spider Man with the latest sex scandal, and I will have the ultimate blog post -- especially if I have a musical interlude by Two Steps From Hell.

If one is to believe social media, there is no allowing for a middle of the road approach. I have right-wing friends who are somewhat sane-ish (no one I know is completely sane), but some of the left-wingers were so loud for so long with some pretty heavy-duty insults, I had to defriend some of them, and block at least one altogether from Facebook.  There was a "worship Obama and watch only MSNBC" or "you're an evil, right-wing homophobic 1%-er with no human decency, and that goes double if you're Catholic."  And if you're Catholic, you're old-fashioned and stupid.

And after Obama won, it got worse.

And, of course, whenever someone was called out on it -- such as "I hold the belief you're pissed off about, you think I'm evil?" -- the reply of everyone is a standard, "Oh, I don't mean you!"  But after a while, when they make no distinctions between "you" the "friend" and all of those people who are evil for even holding an opinion contrary to their own .... yes, they do mean you. I mean, hell, when they say that you're a threat to humanity, you hate people (women, puppies and Christmas), and you start to get the impression that if a church filled with Catholics were blown up, they would celebrate, and maybe shed a tear or two when they found out you were in it.

After Kathey Giffords was shot by deeply psychotic Jared Loughner, we were all told that rhetoric kills, and we all have to be civil.  Where did that go?

If you're now wondering about my politics, I covered them here, so you can save your disparaging remarks.  Frankly, I'm on the side of civility, and right now, the loud, utterly psychotic ranting is coming from the left side, and I see no one on the left throwing a net over their more insane members. Read through the article on my politics and when I'm no longer being labeled as evil for even having opinions on these topics, then we can talk.

Now, if the current atmosphere keeps up, I'm sure I can get more blog viewers by tacking hard to one political end or the other. I'd rather not, because I like holding onto what sanity I have with both hands, and maybe my teeth.

I'm also sure I can get more readers by introducing sex as a topic more often... but, again, I'd rather not.

And I stopped reading comic books a while ago.

If I do not hear back from Chesterton Press by the end of the year, I will give self-publishing a try on A Pius Man.  It'll take me a while though. So, we'll see what goes on here. And, with any luck, it'll work.   But I'd much rather not. Really, I'd rather not.

I'm out. And I'll talk to you all later. Hopefully, I'll have a topic next time, as opposed to these vague meandering posts that barely have a point.

Getting back to work

So, this blog is called A Pius Man: A Holy Thriller.  But there's a graphic for a novel called It Was Only On Stun! by a Declan Finn when the blog is by a John K. For those of you keeping track, you know that I gave up on traditional publishing and went my own route, experimenting with a lesser novel that was a murder mystery at a science fiction convention.

So, what's happening with A Pius Man?

First, A Pius Man should be coming out next.  It will either come out in January, or else we'll be working on getting it out next year.

Who's we?  Well, that's a funny story.

When I published It Was Only On Stun!, I interviewed as many places as possible. I wrote as many guest blogs as I was allowed.  I spun my wheels until the tires popped.  I've sold about 60 copies, more or less.

However, it was not all for naught. You see, what's happened is that my guest blog on Catholic humor caught someone's attention.  It was around the same time I kept tagging John Ringo on Facebook and didn't realize I was posting on his wall at the same time.  However, a friend/fan of Ringo saw the words "Catholic humor" and decided to swing by. He's a freelance editor with Chesterton Press.

If you check, you'll realize that Chesterton Press is a Catholic press.  They like Catholic books.  And A Pius Man can qualify, for the most part.  ously, how many Catholic presses are going to read a book where there are RPGs flying all over the place and priests who look like they could be assassins?

One will be more than enough for me.

So, while I'm waiting on that for happen, I'm considering my options. I've recently gotten a full time job -- well, it's not full time as I'm writing this, but may be as the blog is published.  I'm working as a writer at NYU-Polytech in Brooklyn.  It's a bit of a hike, but the hard part is getting to the trains  After that, I get an hour to read ... usually, if I can even lift my arm in a train crowded in by sardines in a city that just suffered from a major hurricane. 

So, don't worry, I haven't completely lost my mind, blog posts to the contrary.  I just had to rid myself of some toxic people in my life as a bit of a cleanser. Think of it as green tea for the soul. 

I'm just glad the elections are over. Those things were annoying as hell.

Music Blog: Assassin's Creed 3, by Lindsey Stirling