Here’s something I found interesting. The article says, in reference to the market recovering:

Other investors may look to obscure indicators such as the Baltic Dry Index, which tracks the cost of shipping iron ore, grain and other materials. Rising rates can indicate demand for raw materials is increasing, which suggests a strengthening economy.

And here’s what the Baltic Dry Index looks like for the past 12 months:

I’m no economist, but it looks like there’s a pretty noticeable trend over the past couple months. I’m just saying.

Last month I touched on the enormous (and heated, and probably eternal) debate about the significance of violence in videogames. It’s not an easy argument to resolve; on one side you have gamers and game makers defending their hobbies and livelihoods, if not their very identities. On the other are a group of concerned citizens honestly believing — however erroneously — that they are protecting the innocent from nefarious forces.

You know what I do for a living, so you can probably guess which side I come down on. I know — from longtime, extensive, personal experience — that videogames do not turn otherwise conscientious, reasonably well-adjusted individuals into slavering, murderous social deviants. It just doesn’t happen. If it did, you and I and just about everyone we know would be in jail.

Furthermore, we can be reasonably assured that the vast majority of the slavering, murderous social deviants of history had very little exposure to videogames. Linear time’s a bitch, baby.

So why all the hubbub? It’s pretty simple, really: Outsiders look at the, ah, ethical freedom offered by advancing game technology, and it scares the living crap out of them. Because, yes, some of the things we can do in games would be genuinely evil were they done in the real world. They watch us stealing cars or running over pedestrians or pulling off a totally sweet headshot on a moving target, and they think, “Oh dearie gracious me, what if I were that poor, unsuspecting pedestrian? What if that were my car?”

They worry that we will confuse games with reality because they confuse games with reality.

Don’t let that upset you too much, though. It’s understandable — we’re at an unbelievably dynamic moment in history, technologically speaking. These finger-wagging pundits may be hip enough to know that games exist, but they’re not nearly hip enough to ever have played one. So it shouldn’t surprise us that games seem like reality to them — a living world, magically squeezed into a set-top box. They don’t understand that players of first-person shooters are no more likely to pick up a shotgun in real life than players of Monopoly are to liquidate their assets and start building hotels.

They’re right about one thing, though. There is a game that to all appearances seems to be every bit as dangerous as they claim. There is frequent, documented evidence of players (and even spectators!) committing real-world crimes. Players routinely inflict real, physical injuries — often vicious — on their opponents in typical play. There were 23 documented deaths associated with this game in 2001 alone.

But in spite of all this frightening evidence, this game is not only tolerated in this country, but actually celebrated. Young people are encouraged to play it — high schools even hold weekly competitions! On school property! And those who do it professionally are paid, on average, almost a million dollars a year. You’ve probably even played it yourself.

It’s called football.

And why isn’t anyone concerned about the likelihood of kids raised on football going out and randomly chasing, tackling, or stiff-arming innocent bystanders on the street? Because it’s just a game. |

Yeah, me either.

That wouldn’t bother me so much if I weren’t confronted by ordinary goodness every single day. I look at CNN or Yahoo News or the local paper and I think, “The real world isn’t like that. Things are not this bad. They just aren’t.”

Do bad things happen in the world? Yes, of course. Sure they do. They happen all the time. But they aren’t the only thing happening, and they aren’t even the most common thing. Humans are, by and large, good people. The problem is, our brain is wired in such a way that only the exceptions stand out. Which means that only the exceptions are “newsworthy.”

Do the bad things happening in our world need to be talked about? Absolutely. We should be aware of events in our community, whether that community is our immediate neighborhood or the entire freakin’ planet. But here’s my question: Do they need to be the only thing talked about?

I say no. I say the reason we see only the bad news is that only the exceptions sell — and the news media has to sell ads to survive. We are fascinated by train wrecks and car crashes, so the news feeds us an endless stream of train wrecks and car crashes, hoping we won’t change the channel.

I say: enough.

I’m tired of it. It’s depressing, a bombardment of negativity that gives us an utterly skewed view of the world, from our perception of people in far-off lands to the fact that OH MY GOD A PREDATOR COULD LEARN YOUR CHILD’S BIRTHDAY BY HACKING HIS DS OVER WIFI!!!!!!! EVERYBODY PANIC!!!! (When I was a kid, we roamed the neighborhood from dawn until the streetlights came on. Now there is a predator behind every bush. Has the world changed that much in 25 years? No, it hasn’t. We just hear more about the bad shit that goes down. We hear more about the exceptions to the general okay-ness of people.)

And on top of this, there’s this sudden proliferation of websites devoted to letting you tattle on strangers anonymously. Don’t like someone’s driving? Post their license plate online! Think someone was speaking too loudly on their cell phone? Post all the personal details you overheard! (Yes, because the simple human exchange of walking up to the person and saying, “Excuse me, are you aware you’re speaking very loudly?” would be so far out of the question. Because you might get shot, of course. Or sued! Let me ask you a question: Out of all the people you personally know, how many have been shot, or sued? Yeah, exactly.)

So: enough.

I propose that the news media has got the job of circulating the bad news pretty well covered. So let’s take on the job of circulating the rest of the news ourselves.

Here’s what I’d like for you to do. Take a moment and think about something kind, or honorable, or just plain good you’ve seen someone do recently. It didn’t have to happen to you, and it could even have been you doing it, if you’re comfortable with blowing your own horn. Think of something you saw recently that made you think well of humanity. Then write about it. You can just drop a comment on this post, or write in your own blog and leave me a link.

I’m sick of hearing only bad things about other people. Aren’t you? Let’s do something about it.

I’ll start:

One of my favorite bands of all time was called Jawbox. The primary singer and guitarist was J. Robbins. These days he does a ton of really excellent producing work (he’s maybe even produced bands you’ve heard of, like the Promise Ring) and also plays in a band called Channels with his wife. Last year they had a child named Cal. It turns out that Cal has a pretty serious, and generally fatal, neurological disease for which there is no known cure. So his former bandmates, who now own a small record label, put up a post on their website about it, and took it upon themselves to ask for donations to help Cal’s parents with the astronomical medical costs.

Shortly thereafter, J. posted this on his blog: “Our great friends Kim Coletta and Bill Barbot took the step of setting up a donation page for Callum on the DeSoto Records website back in December, which has opened the door to an incredible surge of goodwill and support from friends and acquaintances around the world. It’s given us energy and resources to move forward that we simply wouldn’t have otherwise, and it’s hard to find the words to express our gratitude. We both dream of a day when we can try to explain to Cal how, when he was just a baby, so many people rallied to give him a shot at a better way forward.”

Here’s an excerpt from a more recent post: “A bunch of friends did benefit shows for Cal this weekend: Nick Pimentel and the Owls and Crows folks did one in DC; Jessica Hopper organized one at the Empty Bottle in Chicago with Bobby Conn, our pals in the Life and Times, and Red Eyed Legends; and our old friends at North Six in Brooklyn put on a show with Ted Leo, Medications, the Forms, and Last Letters. Cal is so lucky, and we are so lucky, to have these friends and this kind of support. I don’t know how we will ever be able to thank people for the kindness they are showing. I don’t see how Callum will ever grow up to be a proper cynical punk rocker, since he is already experiencing undeniable proof that at least some people are essentially good at heart.”

It is terrible and tragic that a child should suffer this sort of disease. But it is beautiful and moving that so many should come together to support him and his family.

Your turn.

I’ve been following this thread over at the GAF about a guild who crashed a virtual funeral in World of Warcraft, and it makes me sad. Basically, what happened is this: A member of a WOW guild suffered a stroke in real life and died. Her guildmates, knowing her only through the game, but nevertheless wanting to offer some remembrance for one of their own, decided to hold a memorial service in the game. A rival guild decided that would be a great time to show up and kill everyone. Hilarity ensued.

Now, is it sort of creepy and vaguely sad that a group of people elected to hold a virtual funeral? I’d say so. It lends a depressing weight to the stereotype of basement-dwelling gamers who can’t function in the real world. In my opinion, it trivializes the real loss that this person’s real-life loved ones feel. But saying gamers aren’t the most socially adept subculture isn’t going to surprise anyone, and the fact is, these people did have a relationship with the deceased, however unorthodox. You can’t criticize someone for feeling grief simply because they haven’t met the deceased in the physical world. You can criticize their method of paying their respects, but I don’t see how you could criticize their right to do so, or the validity of their desire to do so.

And so this rival guild storms in, in a very well-planned strike (and yes, it’s pretty comical if you don’t think about it too hard), sending virtual mourners scurrying and leaving a trail of virtual bodies in their wake. Were they within their rights as WOW players to choose this moment to strike against a rival guild? Oh, absolutely.

But “within your rights” does not equal “right.” Fred Phelps is acting “within his rights” when he pickets the funerals of servicemen, trying to convince people that God is killing soldiers because America harbors homosexuals. The KKK is acting “within their rights” when they hand out their entertaining little photocopies (as an aside: for a good time, ask a Klansman what race Jesus was).

These phenomenal fuckwits who thought it would be funny to take advantage of the (admittedly naive and perhaps misguided) funeral proceedings to boost their stats — or even just for entertainment’s sake — were certainly within their rights. They’re also a bunch of gaping assholes.

“But wait!” you may say, “It’s just a game! How can you criticize this but defend killing hookers in GTA?!” The distinction is quite simple: The hooker is not a virtual representative of a real person. A game is “just a game” when it has no impact on the real world. But you put another person on the other side of the equation and things change. Is killing a person’s avatar the same as killing a person? Of course not. It’s not close. But it does have a real effect on that person. You are inflicting suffering upon someone else, even if only putting them through the tedium of building up another character. We have ways to describe people who get off on inflicting suffering on others. One of them is “sadistic.” Another is “evil.” (Another is “gaping asshole.”)

The important distinction here is that for many (perhaps most) players of MMORPGs, the game is just a medium for socialization. It’s one step removed from instant messaging…which is one step removed from telephone interaction…which is one step removed from face-to-face contact. It’s different only in degree, not in substance.

The amazing, anonymizing internets have made it easy to forget that there is a real, living person on the other end of your messageboard diatribe or your Fark flamewar. (And please, before you hash out a comment along the lines of “ZOMG YOU HYPPACRIT YOU ARE DISREPECTING SERENTY NOW BY CALLING THEM GAPPING A$$H0ELS!!!111!” understand that these guilds forfeited their right to be treated with respect when they acted like gaping assholes.)

As socially inept as these virtual mourners may be, let me ask you…who is behaving with more social grace? The gamers who chose to pay in-game respects for a real-world loss, or the ones who used a real-world loss to gain an in-game boost? Who’s more in touch with the real world? Who would you rather have living down the street?

Am I alone in thinking this way?