Terran Franklin

If you’re thinking that this is about the new sequel that arrived today, you’re wrong.

I just want to ask the folks reading this a question:

What would be the first thing that came to your mind when I mention Ayn Rand’s name?

For some people, it was a philosophy which I’ll mention later this article.  For some, it was a book some bored English teacher made you read.  For some of the 9-12’ers, it’s what some of you are bending towards.

But if you’re like me, if you think of Ayn Rand, your mind leads to this:

How many people haven’t even thought of Objectivism until Bioshock came about a couple years back?  No need for hands.

For the uninitiated, Bioshock is a unique form of first person shooter that takes a belly-up spin on Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged.  In this version, all the strikers setting in an underground city in the middle of the Atlantic.  Unfortunately, the John Galt of the tale, Mr. Andrew Ryan, was not as perfect as Miss Ryand’s beloved revolutionary.  The underwater city of Rapture became a stark example of what happens when Objectivism goes bad and makes Karl Marx look good, with little girls reduced to stem cell collecting beasts who get their stomachs ripped out, while almost everyone is either wallowing in guilt over their own sins or drowning them with DNA-altering substances.  And that’s not including walking tanks in diver suits.

And then there that Atlas fucker.  Would you kindly don’t get me started on him?

Two things came to my mind at the end of Bioshock 1:  The first was the obvious:  How would Ayn Rand do on this game?  When I looked over Bioshock on TV Tropes, I was shocked to find that some Objectionists actually want to be in Bioshock’s Rapture, if not the original version Ryan intended.  Couple this with the negative concepts of Ayn Rand herself.  Ayn Rand believed that all sex is rape, even the sex in marriage.  (What would she say about Masturbation?) Ayn Rand had a religious-like trait of “My Way or the Highway.”

Would Ayn Rand be at home in the bottom of the sea in a bunny mask, strung up on Eve and Harvesting the LIttle Sisters?

Bridget Tannenbalm:  Tsk!  I didn’t know brutes came in females, no?  I suppose she rips her own children from her womb for an encore.

Will someone help me if I’m wrong.  I wish I was making this kind of shit up.  (I heard in one site that the best thing to do with a little sister is to just leave it be.  Assist her Big Daddy by killing off the Splicers, and maybe she’ll thank you with a little Adam and walk merrily on her way.  Unfortuantely, it isn’t an option in the first game.  Or the second either.  It should.)

The second one not only deals (a little bit) with the sequel, but also comes into play in Blood and Metal book II, which is between drafts right now.  In a sense, I made my own version of Rapture in the alien city of Vintnaos.  Or at least the ruling family there.  Especially their patriarch, John Galt Knothole.

The reference is more telling once you know his story, which is called “The Shrug” in Maatlan history.

In a nutshell, Maatla had their own version of Atlas Shrugged in the Medieval continent of Ritanica, where most of Book 1 takes place.  500 years earlier, the continent was more together, but they were exploiting their successful people—the innovators, industrialist, inventors, artist, and what have you—to the point where they couldn’t function, much less live, in that continent.  They eventually started to move en masse from the region, often with just the shirts on their backs, fearing that they will be hunted down and dragged back into slavery by their government—and an occasional rogue church.

Enter John Galt Knothole.  He founded Vintnaos from a trade post in between countries from an ancient civilization.  (Most of it had to be taken down, but there is an historical park where relics are stored.)  He offered the strikers an opportunity to come to Vintanos and be citizens there, protected by an army of Knights and represented by a King who believes that the strength of the country comes from the people, not their government.  JGK was a realist, though. He knows that some rules needed to be made and some taxes needed to be taken, but he ensured that his control on the government would be minimal, that the successful people will be able to operate their businesses without overdue restrictions, and promised a kingdom as free as it was possible in that era.

Not knowing any other alternative, the strikers ran full tilt to Vintanos, at times picked up and hunted like dogs—pun non-intended, we’re talking about a furry planet here—by Ritanica’s Tyrannical Rulers, in Maatla’s bloodiest chapter in history.  One particular battle in a valley gorge could top Gettysburg in the gore category.  When the smoke cleared, Vintanos became the second greatest city second to Vidica—Maatla’s answer to Rome—and their top Economic power, while Ritanica regressed to the dark ages and their countries splintered into warring states.

We fast forward to Blood and Metal.  Vintanos is ruled by an inexperienced Sarah Knothole, forced into the throne by the loss of her father.  Here comes this alien wolf with a sign of him being alive and planning his return.  And with them, a philosophy that could be considered JGK 2.0 in some people.

But the messenger, Eric Krockett, would have a word of caution for those who only think of self-interest.  Or consider that Altruism, which makes the driving force of the main antagonists in Bioshock 2, to be the Enemy of John Galt/Ayn Rand/Andrew Ryan’s philosophy.  It needn’t be.

We’re talking Ying and Yang here.  Eric would prefer that people balance their self-interest with public responsibility.  Either side, pushed to it’s extreme, is bad.  And now we have examples with both extremes.  Move too far into self-interest, to the point where you’re taking advantage of other people, and you make Lennin a realist.  Move too far into altruism, to the point where individual efforts are squashed and people lack no sense of self, and you make Miss Rand a prophet.  She’s already being made a prophet during the last year with the Tea Party movement.

Eric’s American Philosophy seeks a balance between the two extremes, where one is leavened by the other.  Your right to throw your fists ends in another person’s face, so to speak, and the best way to help others is to do it in a way that helps yourself as well.  He’ll also speak of the kind of riches that do not have monetary value, and that sometimes it’s better to reserve some rights to something rather than go all or nothing.  (AKA the Open Source Creative Commons approach, one of the many Earthling intentions Maatla adopts.) This happy medium might prove to be the most approachable by the general population of the city, and could prove to be better for the less fortunate of the citizenry than the occasional call for revolution.  (Hell, they might be making Che-style shirts with Eric’s face on them.  I think I have a marketing idea here.)

But anyway, expect Bioshock’s sequel to be out by now, and do keep posted on this blog for the progress of BAM II, would you kindly?

You wanna know why this guy’s so popular?  (The bald guy who was the former marine, Chicago Cop, and Jerry Springer bouncer, not what I call his ‘Pet Moron of the Day.’)

It’s because of assholes like this guy:  http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,584361,00.html

Wouldn’t you want to just smack someone who would light a puppy on fire in front of their kids?

If Wilcos wasn’t a Marine, he would.

But he wants to, oh, would he want to.

That’s what I thought about this report:  http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,583948,00.html

Phoebe Prince is a recent victim of what’s known as Bullycide, where a young child has been pushed so far by bullies that they ended up killing themselves.  It’s one of the terms that should have been penned decades—or even centuries—prior since I believe these stories weren’t so rapidly reported yet; I think the (local to me) story of Megan Meyer finally brought the term to the forefront.  It is also driven worse with the internet and the post 9-11 environment where people have been in general a lot more jackassicial (is that a word, it should though) and we have the recent trend of cyberbullying, or Internet Harrassment, or outright trolling that is the proverbial plague that is killing the internet, or so the meme goes.

Most people would have just mourned the loss of this bright and pretty freshman who was driven too far and left it at that, and even have a web page made as a memorial for her friends to remember her by.

Unfortunately, they made that memorial on Facebook.  The page is friends-only.  And there’s a reason for that.

And the assholes literary came out of every nook and cranny giving her the An Hero treatment.  I don’t know if there were the same bitches who drove Phoebe to death and all, and I wished I knew what those deleted responses were so I can show what an asshole is, but I can be certain that there are some who would want to write Phoebe’s eulogy the same way they did Mitchel Henderson.  (Knowing what would happen to me here is a great suicide deterrant.)

If you have no words to say about how someone can jeer someone’s death, you’re not alone.  All I can say is that it’s the general sense of disconnectedness that we have today from the mid naughts on.  It started with the still-prevalent and chronic trend of Bush Derangement Syndrome and it trickled down to open hostility to your common man.  You occasionally see it in real life, but it’s more of less status quo in some parts of the internet.  And believe me, it can be downright nasty.  We’ve fell quite far from the time where people considered the people around them as a fellow human being; even if they didn’t look on with affection, they at least show a live and let live.  We don’t have that today, and it’s why some of us feel that we as a people, or at least this country, has backslidden considerably from our pinnacles in the mid to late 20th century.

It isn’t the kind of world our forefathers wanted to have for us, and like I said so often here, it’s not the kind of world I want to live in.

(which means, if you want to tell me to kill yourself, I have three words:  “You first, asshole.")

Here’s a fine example of why an important news reporter in Vinanos, an occasional narrator in Blood and Metal, is inspired by this guy:

It’s a pretty honest take on Ba Rock, which is pretty much on par with where I’m coming from.  I do tend to highlight the moments when the President does right, as I said before, because I believe that he’s doing what he thinks is the right thing even though he and I might stand on different ideologies.  And in some cases, he gets it.

That’s what he’s doing with Haiti.  While people say that what’s happening at that unfortunate island is a centuries-long karma debt being paid <cough>Robertson</cough> or an indirect attack from the US by some weapon thought up by too much sci fi and masturbation <hack>Chavez</hack> or even claim that we as a people caused this earthquake because we didn’t take the lead in some climate change treaty <wheeze>Glover</wheese>, President Obama merely kept things on a realistic level, he shoveled all that nose with the rest of the bullshit and focused on the poor people suffering there, and pretty much just asked people to give how they can.  That’s what we as a people, globally, should do.  The world’s shitty enough, people, please don’t add to it.

Meanwhile, I think that the recent surprise win of Scott Brown to Kennedy’s seat in the senate would be a Godsend to him.  (At least now we can finally retire Teddy’s liver.  I think it was still functioning and could possibly speak and stab people.)  I believe since November of 08 that he should work on bridging the gap between Republican and Democrats, Conservative and Liberal, Red and Blue.  Unfortunately up to now, he had a congress pretty much run by Reed and Pilosi, two radical Progressives.  These are where most of my negativity is aimed at, mainly because they had the desire, and was clearly seen with the ability, to really push some very bad laws down the people’s throats.  Especially laws as long as some telephone books and include shit that will remind some of that recent Glenn Beck documentary.  (Nobody will stand to having to go to some grand jury and have to justify their existence to a group of people who are listening to your perceived whining with one hand and jacking off with the other.  In fact, the person trying to defend his right to exist will actually hear the fapping.  I wish I was making this up, I’ve just described how Sarah Palin’s son would fare, or that kid who got voted out of sixth grade, or Chris-chan, or myself.  It wouldn’t hurt to think of that Niemöller poem in reverse; they might be coming for you sooner than you expected.)

But now that the Republicans now have a filibuster-able minority in the Senate (The Progressives will have to use some dangerous moves that will flat out guarantee their power, but also their demise if they use them.  That’s why they call it the “Nuclear Option”) and there’s a good chance that they’ll get a lot more seats in both houses during the mid-term, President Obama would have an environment that will actually be more productive for him.  For a long time, I’ve been saying that the radical left in congress that is dragging the President—and all of America with him—to places that most of America—and possibly Obama as well—do not want to go. All these Tea Parties we’ve seen this year did not occur in a vacuum, you know.  With a more balanced congress, Obama can now focus on working on Legislation that will be a vast improvement than the crap that we’ve been seeing this past year.

Health care does need some needful changes, no argument with me there; it can be a real flustercluck in some areas.  But it must be done right.  It would be better to do nothing than push through an encyclopedia long reform bill that nobody has a chance to read and contain so many regulations, pork, and dreck which is what Pilosi and Reed are doing, with an upturned nose to every non-progressive person in the whole country.  It was what Pilosi had explicitly done.  If starting over from scratch and have the folks at the other side of the aisle actually have their say and be listened to…and considered for once…just so that we can have some decent working—and readable—reform, and that we won’t have horror stories like what we’ve heard over the past summer—or just last Friday on Fox News—so be it.  I’d rather see it done right, than right now.

It took me a while for me to do it, but I managed to get enough story in the Second book of Blood and Metal to get it out of the first draft.  Finally.  Now I can move on to the second draft of the project, and I’ll start with the Scarlet PI Book 1 first, since that book’s been waiting longer in the queue.  With whatever time free from that and whatever artwork commissions you buy from me, let me know if you’re interested ( davidfoxfire@foxfirestudios.net ) I’ll be planning out a new project for Script Frenzy, the script version of NaNoWriMo.  Since this happens in April, I have some time to piddle about and plan.  I’ll tell you more about it as time goes on, but I’ll say now that it’s 1) a shorter project, only a one parter, and 2) it’s probably the last part of the projects I’ve taken from my Lost Decade, where I take a character that I’ve been working on for a long time—in fact, it’s one of my first characters I’ve made—and give him a story to call his home and then leave him or her at peace.  I might rework one more project (Piasa, of all places) but it’ll be as completely redone—if not more so—than what I did with BAM.

But that’s out in the future.  I need to read over the Scarlet PI book some and work on those revisions.

…about THIS;  http://www.thestar.com/entertainment/movies/article/752779—avatar-gives-lucas-impetus-to-revamp-star-wars-for-3-d

Wait til after his dad goes “Trust your feelings, you know it to be true!”

That was my initial response to Lucas going over to his glory days to further fuck it up, don’t you.

Will somebody PLEASE Force Choke George Lucas!?

Pat Robertson is an Asshole!  http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,582988,00.html

Small wonder people cheered when Oral Roberts died.

Or anything that comes out of  Bathtub Boy, Keith Oberfuckerers, fluffer mouth.

ITEM:  Scarlet PI

The first draft of the Series book 1 is out of the first draft, and will be the first in the Second Draft queue right after BAM Book 02 when I finish with that.  Hopefully by the end of this month.

ITEM:  Art Commissions

I’ve finished all paid commissions—finally—after the holidays, so I’m free to do that if you want.  I have the pricings available at my Deviant Art page, and we can haggle if need be.

ITEM:  Script Frenzy.

Script Frenzy is the April Script version of National Novel Writing Month, and is available online at www.scriptfrenzy.org .  I’ll be making a long-desired run at a Script, and I’ll tell you more in the coming weeks.

ITEM:  You’ve Gotta See This

This is a clear sign that you might want to tone things down when you’re in a car.  These new one’s can’t handle the rock and roll like the older models can:

I would have posted this sooner, after some decent holidays, but there was an emergency:  A loved one of one of my out-of-state uncles died, and my mother had to go to Chicago for the week. And guess who had to be yanked out of bed too early in the morning to petsit for a week?

So much for all those leftovers I had, right?

<shrug>  Oh well.  But at least the response wasn’t like this shit:

Rush Limbaugh is in hospital for chest pains.  Left Bloggers have a collective fap.

God as my witness, I fucking wish I was kidding about the masturbation.  When I heard that Ted Kennedy had finally passed away, outside of the obvious, “Well, we don’t have to preserve the body, do we?” crack, I pretty much left him alone.  (I’d probably do the same with Oral Roberts.  “Well, looks like God finally called his ass home.  Let’s move on.”  Compare that to the wingnuts who would line up to Rush’s grave to piss on it, and then go to Michael Jackson’s grave and offer offerings hoping he could acquire sainthood. (And weren’t they considering him little more than a wacko pedo, oh, I don’t know, just about This Time Last Fucking Year?)

I keep finding myself turning to Cracked for my editorial references.  I’d like to drag some people’s noses doggie style to this article, where David Wong written these bits of sage wisdom that I, or Eric Krockett for that matter, would live by:

“Celebrating the death of somebody you disagreed with pretty much makes you a dick….Falwell had a family. Friends. He was a human being. You cheer over his corpse and you’re just acting like a pecker.”  (And I should add, regardless of whatever he lives or dies by this, Rush Lmbaugh.)

Or for that matter, Sean Hannity, or Glenn Beck, or even—start bewailing me now—Chris-fucking in front of the webcam-Chan.

Honestly, when I reported that my mother had breast cancer, my first thought wasn’t about my mother, but of someone putting it on the Chans and rail at me over it saying that I fucking gave her that cancer by all the stuff I posted online.  (Think it wouldn’t happen, in a way?  I just described Tony Snow.)  I did not put that above some people.  Fortunately for me, I had a more supporting response.  At least directly.

…<sigh>  And people wondering why I’m re-writing Blood and Metal as a transplanting America to another country?  America is a bud from a rosebush that might be dead by 2020, or even 2012 for that matter.

In comparison, the Orc Land storyline from Domminic Deegan is coming to a close.  And while some people decry and debase just about every strip that Mookie makes—or for that matter, every panel or even brush stroke—he does have a point to make at the end of the story.  Here is Luna, a human cursed since birth by an Orc to have orc teeth for all of her life, and was pretty much dragged through hell since birth before she met Dom, and trust me on this, she had self-esteem issues something fierce.  But she has somehow overcome all that and began the steps to restore the Orc’s homeland in spite of the orc—shown in the strip above—who cursed her.  In the next strip, this chief begged her forgiveness, and if it were any other Callanian, he would have—and from some opinion should have—been executed on the spot.

But that is not the Orc’s way, or even Mookie’s, as he’ll state in his blog:  (Scroll down for the words.)

If I wanted to be truly realistic about the orc clans coming together under the rain I could spend another year telling that story alone. If orcs were more like humans they would debate about how the miracle truly came to pass, which of their belief systems was the “true” one that brought it about, the implications of another race interfering in a time of great religious significance and countless other things that you’d find in the news.

But no. In my ideal world, when people are presented with a miracle of great benevolence they find it in their hearts to put their differences aside and rejoice as one, truly remembering that we are all in this together and that compassion should not be delegated or debated, but simply shared… where even an old man scarred by racism and hatred can find the will to love and forgive again.

It breaks my heart that I will likely never see this sort of thing in the real world, so I put my ideals, however foolish and naive some may claim them to be, in my world.

There are times I wish humans were more like my orcs.

No shit, Mookie.  Because in our world we have shit like this, taken from YuYu Hakusho #1, scanned from US Shonen Jump 1-1.  (Used as a reference.  Viz even thinks of infringement, I’m going to their office for a little Mind Crushing…with a hammer.)

If you ever made an eulogy as heartless as this (typical) High School Principal, do the world a favor and kill yourself.  If you are a High School Principle and have said that, do it on school grounds.  Both arms.  The long way.  At least do that right.

Let it not be you who eulogized anybody in this manner, or in a manner of a Moonbat bloggie.  Nobody deserves to be fapped over while they’re dying.  Not even Rush Limbaugh.

I saw this article that really caught my eye, and really gave me pause on how much school can get in the way of an education. Especally if the child happened to have a disability (such as Auditory Descrimination or Autism) or—worse—if you were like me as a kid and had Aspergers and nobody even cared to notice.

I’ve talked a lot about my own experiences, where my own ‘major malfunction’ went undiagnosed until well into my thirties. I went from a kindergardener taking classes in the first grade to a sixth grade social promotion case who the principal wishes were his son, “just so he can slap my face”. And I put it in quotes because he actually said that to my face in the cafeteria. That was the extent of what I learned in those six years.

Now take that experience and add shit that even a dominatrix would shudder over. Sure, they’d consider tying people up and restraining them to racks and beds and crap would be de rigor of their work…but would they do that to someone who hasn’t even seen puberty yet?

A Public School principal would. And if they kill somebody, so be it.

Item: Since hearing, states take little action on restraint in schools

This takes the previous horror story of Survivor-like Tribal Councils for a five-year-old—Jeff Probst should sue—and pushes them to the next degree. Never mind having someone stand in the hallway to cool down, a practice I know a lot about. Now they toss kids into closets—we’re taking areas only the janitor should be in folks—for even the most minor of offences. And if they can’t get a kid to sit perfectly still they’ll make them conform to their wishes…by sitting on top of them. Sometimes when they’re face down on the floor!

Note: These might be kids who doesn’t quite got the knack of communicating to anyone, much less an adult, and it goes into the negatives when that adult is an authority figure, and may not be intentionally acting out or causing trouble in the slightest. In their young minds, the teachers are pretty much doing this just out of spite, and with the approval of any peer watching no less.

Another note: If it’s done to a terrorist, it’s a fucking war crime! If you do it to someone in the street, you’re hauled into jail and then a lawsuit gets planted on you! Do it to your own child and it’s abuse! Do you honestly say that it’s all right and perfect for a teacher or a principal to do this to any one 30 years plus younger than him and call it discipline? If you can, then please, for the sake of humanity, kill yourself. And if you work in education and think that, do your immediate supervisor and THEN do yourself. Society has no need for such fucktards.

In the above mentioned article California Rep. George Miller (A Democrat of all people) state that this shit needs to stop, or at least regulated. “Without a fedual Standard to set the bar, it’s the Wild West.”

Sorry, Rep. Miller, but you’re a bit off. We’re not talking Wild West here. We’re talking about this:

Imagine Jack Nicolson younger than 10 in this scene. And believe me, if the schools can get away with ECT and lobotomies to get a kid to be their little sheep, they will.

And in New York, they have!

It’s scenes like this that makes me believe that this inclusion trend to put ‘special’ kids in with the normal class is one of the worst ideas they’d even come up with. Most of the teachers in even the better schools are ill equipped to deal with the kids who have these problems, only to be made to believe, like myself, that he or she is just ‘bad’. And then they had to deal with stuff that only appears in classic movies on mental illness. And you’d wonder why they eventually get a gun.

For more information, with considerable less drama from me, go to http://www.wrightslaw.com/ and look under Abuse and Restraints in Schools. You’ll find that what I said is just the tip of the iceburg, but my comparison is just as apt.