No Pretteh Zerg Babiez! (Starcraft 2 Spoilers)

This blog entry is adapted from a post I made on Battle.net a few days ago.  Posting it here because I found on Google Analytics that at least one person came across my blog while searching "Raynor and Kerrigan child" or something like that.  The lolcats-esque title comes from something I saw on SCArmory, another Starcraft forum, about this topic.

On other Starcraft forums and to a limited degree on Battle.net itself, there are some people (probably the hardest-core Raynor/Kerrigan supporters) who think the two of them ought to have a kid now that Kerrigan has been de-infested (or "fumigated," as someone cleverly called it).  At least one person said this hypothetical kid would play some kind of messianic role in defeating the Dark Voice.

Is it just me, or would that be a really bad idea, both logically-speaking and story-wise?

Several reasons:

1. They're not married. Moral considerations aside, it would also be out-of-character for Raynor. Little Johnny Raynor (Raynor's son who died in what was in all likelihood the Ghost program, mentioned in the novel Liberty's Crusade) was born in wedlock, after all.

2. If they were ever officially a couple prior to New Gettysburg, it wasn't that long. Rushing into things of this nature is a very bad idea. Especially since going back to the way things were before Kerrigan was captured by the Zerg at New Gettysburg would be impossible (see below).

3. One word: Fenix. That's a really big elephant in the room. Plus, if something resembling Kerrigan's human personality is in charge post-deinfestation, she's going to be a mess.  She felt bad about calling the Zerg to attack the Confederates at Antiga Prime and objected strongly to Mengsk calling a much large group of Zerg in to attack the Confederate capital of Tarsonis.  She's going to look at what she did as the Queen of Blades and be thoroughly horrified. I imagine Raynor would be willing to be try to work this out, but still.

(And the "Queen of Blades" is in my opinion Kerrigan's unrestrained dark side, not some usurper entity using her body. Some aspect of the Queen was always there and will always be there--and it might well be stronger than it was before.)

4. They both have more important things to do right now.  Mengsk is still on the throne (and due to the revelations about Tarsonis, he's probably weakened enough to kick off it) and the first Hybrids have already arrived in the Sector. The End of Days is coming and it's coming soon.

5. Per my comment about coming soon, there won't be time for some red-headed telepathic redneck to become the Savior of the Sector.

6. Pregnancy would sideline Kerrigan, who (assuming she's on the side of the angels again) would be one of their most powerful fighters, at least in its later phases.

7. Both characters are intelligent enough to realize how tremendously impractical this would be.

Now, I did make comments in my earlier posts on Starcraft 2 that I would like to have a happy ending for both of them and brought up the notion of them retiring to Mar Sara and having red-headed telepathic kids who play with Zerglings like most kids play with puppies.

However, that's for later, as in, after Mengsk is overthrown and the Dark Voice and its army of Protoss-Zerg hybrids is defeated.  Right now, there's a war on.

News Article Round-Up: Iraq and Minimum Wage Laws

Here are some interesting news articles, with my comments:

"Sunni Awakening" Officers Kicked Off the Force in Iraq

Now this isn't a good idea.  These guys switched sides during the worst of the insurgency in Iraq to fight against the al-Qaeda foreign fighters alongside the Shi'ite-dominated Iraqi government, never mind the sectarian divide that existed between them and their newfound allies.  The "Awakening" program brought peace to the Anbar Province, previously an ugly running sore claiming many American and Iraqi lives.

That being said, if they're not qualified for the positions they've got, perhaps some training or education is in order.  That appears to have been done in at least some of the cases here.  Having unqualified police officers and officials (at least some of them have been given the option of being beat cops, so they're not all being tossed out onto the street) is a bad thing, but depriving people who are likely to be al-Qaeda targets of the protection the police force has provided is a poor reward for what these men have done.

Wage Laws Squeeze South Africa's Poor

This is an example of the law of unintended consequences and why a minimum wage, or at least one that is too high, is not a good idea.  Businesses that cannot pay the minimum wage will employ fewer people or close down entirely, producing a net increase in human suffering.  And in South Africa, being unemployed is a heck of a lot worse than being unemployed is over here in the USA.

The image of the workers in the factory protesting the police coming to close the factory for violating laws intended to benefit them is rather telling.

Thoughts on "Law and Order: SVU" (spoilers for 9/22 episodes)

I admit I'm drawing the following conclusions based on relatively little data, but here goes...

Is it just me, or do episodes of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit throw everything but the kitchen sink into their plots?

In the episode "Witness," which ran in mid-March and I watched while working out late at the gym, a woman with a not-so-great reputation is raped by some lowlife who claims she'd led him on and the only witness is a woman who it turns out is an illegal immigrant from the Congo.  She had been raped repeatedly, in really bizarre ways that I'm not going to describe here but actually do happen in real life.  The Immigration and Naturalization Service tries to deport her in the middle of the trial, claiming she's married to one of the perpetrators of the Rwandan Genocide.  It turns out she had been forced into this marriage after being carried off to a camp where coltan, a mineral used in the developed world's cell phones, is mined by slaves controlled by militias.

(Let's see--blaming the victim in rape cases, illegal immigration, terrorism, the Congo, and conflict minerals.)

Tonight was another late night at the gym and an episode entitled "Locum" was on.  In this one, a 10-year-old girl named Mackenzie adopted from foster care runs away and the police initially detain a man they think is a pedophile who had lured Mackenzie away from home.  The man claims to have had a sister who was raped and committed suicide and was part of an anti-pervert advocacy group who had befriended Mackenzie online with the goal of keeping her from running away and falling into the hands of a real pervert.

(The man--Erik Weber--is much more than he seems, but that doesn't pop up until the next episode, "Bullseye.")

Mackenzie's ludicrously overprotective adoptive parents are apparently trying to use her to replace their biological daughter Ella.  Ella disappeared while on a hiking trip with them several years before at the age of 10 after going off to play with a mysterious red-haired teenager.  An elaborate trail of investigation leads to a young prostitute who had been involved in underage pornography who it turns out was the red-haired girl. 

What happened was, she had been ordered by her drunken father to lure Ella away from her mother.  Her dad, whose wife had left him weeks prior, intended to use Ella as a replacement wife.  The redhead ran away from home after watching her father apparently beat Ella to death, becoming an underage porn star in order to survive.

The SVU gang arrives at the pervy dad's house out in the woods and it turns out Ella is there, still alive and convinced the redhead's skanky redneck dad is her husband.

(Let's see--"helicopter parents," creeps befriending girls on the Internet, dysfunctional adoptions, kids bouncing from foster home to foster home, underage pornography, prostitution, and screwballs kidnapping young girls and brainwashing them into captive pseudo-wives, like that case in California involving the girl missing for over a decade.  Yikes.)

I do admit these complicated plots do make for interesting viewing, which I guess is the point.  I spent a lot more time doing cardio to watch "Locum" and less time doing weights, since I could not see the television from the weight machines.

Perhaps I'll swim 20 laps tomorrow, to make up for the neglected upper-body workout.

"Tomorrow, When The War Began" Trailer

I've never read the books on which this was based, but it looks really cool.  Unfortunately, no U.S. release date set thus far.  There still hasn't been a U.S. release of the Solomon Kane film either, despite it being based on the stories of an American writer, Robert Howard, so I'm not optimistic.

If it came out here, I would see it.  I haven't read the books (I don't think the entire series has been released in the U.S.), but they're well-reviewed and the series has been extremely successful in Australia and New Zealand.

The invading country still isn't named, but an Australian member of one of my Internet forums said they recognized a J-10 (a Chinese fighter aircraft, one of the most modern) shooting down an Australian F/A-18.  I was under the impression that, in the books, the invading country was Indonesia (something that many Australians used to fear), but in the movie, it's described as being a coalition of countries.

And despite the sheer non-PC-ness of the concept (an Asian nation invading Australia, teenagers becoming insurgents, etc.), I've only seen one criticism of it on those grounds online, which claimed it was a base attempt to appeal to the Australia First Movement.

(According to Wikipedia, AFM was a pro-fascist organization during WWII.  However, some more googling indicates a newer organization by that name that is strongly opposed to non-white immigration.)

I really doubt this movie is racist.  Heck, the trailer features the group's one Asian member, Lee Takkam(Chris Pang) making out with a white girl, who based on the Wikipedia articles, is probably the protagonist Ellie Linton (Caitlin Stacey).  Given how a great deal of racism is fear of "The Other" getting their hands on "our" women (Emmett Till was murdered for whistling at a white woman in the Jim Crow South, for example), it is improbable in the extreme that a movie intended to be racist would depict the female lead's love interest as being non-white.

Heck, that makes it more interesting.  According to TVTropes, Asian male characters never "get the girl," whereas white male characters get with non-white females all the time.  This is a nice subversion of that.

(BTW, the thought processes spinning off this led me to a make one of Andrew's allies who appears later in Escape from the Wastelands father-in-law to a military officer of an indeterminate Asian ethnicity and grandfather of a mixed-race toddler.  Hooray for subverting tropes!)

John Monds and Why He Could Be Good for the GOP

I read about John Monds, the Libertarian candidate for the Georgia governorship, in the Atlanta Journal Constitution this morning.

Here's the article about him:

http://www.ajc.com/news/libertarian-candidate-john-monds-616835.html

Although voting for a third party with a similar position to an established party tends to benefit the established party's rival (Greens hurt Democrats; Libertarians hurt Republicans), the circumstances of this particular Libertarian candidate indicate he could do significant damage to the Democrats this time around.

For starters, the Democratic Party has been very strong among African-Americans for the last several decades.  Monds was a leader in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and many African-Americans believe, rightly or wrongly, that the Republican Party is racist.  A black Republican could be branded a token, a sellout, or window-dressing, but Monds is not a Republican and he was the president of the Grady County NAACP.

Some African-Americans are already interested in him, for that reason:

http://dekalbganaacp.blogspot.com/2010/01/will-georgia-elect-its-first-black.html

Furthermore, I believe research has shown that African-Americans are incarcerated at a higher rate for drug crimes than whites are and it is the incarceration rate (and the consequent difficulty in getting jobs or education after being jailed) that has hurt the African-American community, particularly men, rather badly. 

Given how the Libertarian Party has historically been opposed to the War on Drugs, this position could help make Monds attractive to African-American voters (in addition to him being black and involved in the NAACP).

Also, of the two policy positions Monds takes in the article, one of them is a socially-liberal defense of allowing horse-racing, casino gambling, and Sunday alcohol sales in Georgia on the grounds that although he may not like them, it's not the state's job to enforce his moral notions.  I don't think socially-conservative members of the Georgia Republican Party, the ones who picked Nathan Deal over Karen Handel, are going to be defecting en masse to Monds due to this issue.

However, those who are leery of social conservatism but also leery of the Democratic candidate Roy Barnes due to his previous term might be willing to vote for Monds.  See the book The Emerging Democratic Majority and the strong showing of Karen Handel, a more socially-liberal Republican who did well in Metro Atlanta, where half the Georgian population lives.

In short, Monds might be able to keep the Democrats from making inroads among independents and could divert black votes from Barnes, weakening him but affecting the Republican Party less severely.  And since he is an effective campaigner--he got over a million votes running for Public Service Commissioner in a prior election--he could do some real damage.

Even if all he does is force a runoff, this would force the Democratic Party to spend more money on Georgia, money that could be spent elsewhere.

Anyone Having Problems With My Blog?

Over the last few days, I've noticed that when I go to the main link for my blog (http://www.accordingtoquinn.com/), it gets a "cannot display this web-page" white screen.  When I hit "refresh," it loads normally.

I've tested this out at work, on a Mac computer, and I get something similar, with the suggestion the site must be very busy.

I haven't changed anything on either computer, so it's not something I've done that's been causing the problem.

Earlier this evening, I emptied the cache and deleted the cookies after seeing that as a troubleshooting suggestion on the Help page and it loaded normally on the first try.  However, after a bit of surfing, it went back to the same old problem.

Has anyone been having problems viewing my site?  If so, post them on the comments section of this page.  I'd like to get more data and try more solutions before reporting this situation to Google.

Lead Me Not Into Temptation... (Starcraft 2 Spoilers)

I said I wasn't going to write anymore fan-fiction when I was finished with The Revenge of the Fallen Reboot, but an idea has occurred to me that would make a nice post-Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty story.

It's extremely derivative of the ending cinematic of the human campaign of WarCraft III: Reign of Chaos, but that's part of what makes it awesome.

So here goes...

On Korhal, capital of the Terran Dominion, we see that the army has returned from the great victory over the Zerg at Char.  Ranks of Marines, tanks, fighters overhead, etc. form a gigantic victory parade headed by Prince Valerian Mengsk, General Horace Warfield, a Marine in black armor, and a Ghost.  The common folk of the capital cheer, throw flowers, etc.

The four of them lead the parade to the doors of the palace of Emperor Arcturus Mengsk and go inside, where the Emperor receives them in his throne room.

Then Valerian orders the doors to the throne room closed.  Daddy Mengsk starts looking a bit nervous.

Then the Marine and the Ghost remove their helmets.  It's Raynor and Kerrigan respectively.  Mengsk's Marine guards raise their guns, but Warfield orders them to stand down.  They do so.

Kerrigan gets a funny look on her face and snaps her fingers.  Two Ghosts who were hiding in-cloak around Mengsk's throne, fall down, de-cloaked and psionically-immobilized.  It turns out one of them is Nova.

"You're out of your league, little girl," Kerrigan says.  "Stay out of this."

"What are you doing?" Arcturus asks Valerian.

"Succeeding you," Valerian says.  He turns to Raynor.  "Commander?"

Raynor steps forward and draws the pistol he intended to kill Mengsk with but ended up using his one bullet to kill Tychus Findlay instead.

"I want you to see this coming," he says.

CRACK!

Given that there are hints in SC2 that both Mengsk Sr. and Mengsk Jr. are involved with Duran and his creation of an army of Protoss-Zerg hybrids, I don't think Arcturus will go down that easily.  Also, since in the first game, he said he would rule the Koprulu Sector or see it burn around him, I can easily imagine him and whatever loyalists he's got going over to the Dark Voice and its hybrid army if Valerian or Raynor looks like they're going to unseat him.

Still, the tyrannical SOB certainly deserves something like the above scenario happening to him.

However much fun it would be to write that, I should probably focus more on Escape from the Wastelands and other projects that could make me some money.  I've got maybe a fifth of Escape done after all.

Got To Give Credit Where Credit Is Due...

In the immortal words of the country song, "I've got to give credit where credit is due."

I acknowledged Matt Schafer by name for helping me out in regards to my Starcraft project, but did not do the same for the gentleman from my other writing group who clarified for me "show, don't tell."  Given the importance of showing and not telling, this is an oversight.

So, thanks to Gary Henderson for clarifying that, which should be helpful not only in Chapter Seven of Escape from the Wastelands but in future writing endeavors and, if need be, revising older writing endeavors.

A Late Productivity Update

I promised a productivity update on my personal writing the past couple of nights, but I had a church function one night and caught up with an old friend the other night, so I'm writing this now, before work.

I went to DragonCon with the goal of making contacts with Blizzard in regards to a proposed Starcraft novel entitled The Calm Before the Storm.  It would take place in the aftermath of Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty and before Starcraft II: Heart of the Swarm, which is slated for release 18 months or so from now.  I figured it could be a good way of bridging the two games, much like how StarCraft #2: Shadow of the Xel'Naga filled the gap between the first game and Starcraft: Brood War and the Dark Templar trilogy filled the gap between Starcraft and Starcraft II.  If released just before Heart of the Swarm, it could build buzz for it, just like Starcraft II: Heaven's Devils did for Wings of Liberty.

Mike Lee, who writes Warhammer 40K fiction, told me how to get in touch with Andy Chambers, who used to work for Games Workshop but is now the creative development director at Blizzard.  However, he said that typically, publishers bring authors to the gaming company and not the other way around.  And Simon and Schuster, which has published all the Starcraft novelizations, only accepts agented submissions.

(Mr. Lee, by the way, is a really cool and funny guy.  He'll be in another blog post later.)

I have still not heard back from Mr. Chambers.  However, Matt Schafer went to the Blizzard web-site, found their Legal FAQ section, and informed me that Blizzard does not accept unsolicited ideas.

Looks like I'll need to find an agent, then.  Schafer suggested I find out who represented Heaven's Devils author William Dietz on that particular book and try to contact him.  Time is of the essence--it typically takes a year to publish a book.  I haven't had time to go to a bookstore and look in the acknowledgements section, where I could possibly find the agent.  I can also e-mail Dietz himself, since he does have a web-site and a contact e-mail.

As far as my original work is concerned, I just finished Chapter Eight of Escape from the Wastelands.  This is the chapter where Andrew finally gets out of Carroll Town, although we have not yet met Alonzo Merrill.  I had put Escape on the back burner while I worked on the Starcraft project and rushed to get this chapter ready for review by my Kennesaw writing group this coming Saturday.

I also had Chapter Seven reviewed by my Lawrenceville writing group last Sunday.  They gave some good advice, including finally explaining the show/tell distinction as applied to certain episodes in the chapter and pointing out that having two of Grendel's sons having names beginning with "Ha" could confuse the reader.

Revisions ahoy--once I've got time!

I finally added a new chapter to The Revenge of the Fallen Reboot, which I had let sit for three months without an update.  The human cast is now in North Africa for the final battle with the Decepticons.  It's almost done, and after that, no more fan fiction.

Well, maybe.  I had an idea for a one-shot Starcraft fan-fic that would basically be an alternate ending for Wings of Liberty.  However, I might post that later, perhaps in a thread entitled "Lead Us Not Into Temptation."

U.S. Cartoonist In Hiding Over "Draw Mohammed Day"

U.S. Cartoonist in Hiding After Cleric's Threats

Damn it.

In my last Islam-related post, I said the Koran-burning was inflammatory and risked alienating Muslims who might otherwise support the U.S. in the war against al-Qaeda.  I have recently defended the Cordoba Center--the so-called "Ground Zero Mosque"--as well, even though I caught hell from that from a fellow conservative (albeit one much less educated and more zealous than I).

So anyone who wants to accuse me of being some kind of anti-Islamic bigot, take note.

Now it's time to criticize the over-sensitivity in certain quarters of the Islamic world.  I'm not a big fan of concept of the play "Corpus Christi" but I'm not going to make death threats or try to encourage terrorist attacks on the creator of it.

And although the creator of the play did receive death threats and a recent production in Texas was cancelled due to concerns about safety, Christians worldwide did not react to "Corpus Christi" with the same degree of outrage and violence as Muslims have reacted to depictions of Mohammed, especially unflattering ones.

Did any country block chunks of the Internet?  Did gigantic street protests break out?  Did the creator of the play have to disappear and establish a new identity?  Did anyone actually die?

No, to all of those.  There is not a moral equivalency between the reaction of Christians and Muslims in this situation.

Granted, there is precedent for this kind of behavior among Christians--a very long time ago!  We've since learned to lighten up. 

It would do well for the Islamic world to learn the same lesson--one reason the West once ruled most of the planet and is still the dominant civilization is our open society in which, as Voltaire said, we may not agree with what people say, but we will fight to the death to defend their right to say it.  Open societies encourage technological innovation and the creation of wealth, after all.

And Anwar al-Awlaki can take his threats and shove them pointy-end first somewhere sensitive.