Dissent

It's kind of funny how dissent works. I recall that during the George W. Bush years, questioning the President was tantamount to treason - why, you're giving aid and comfort to the enemy in wartime. Now that we have a Democratic president, it's okay to criticize, it fact it's our patriotic duty to criticize! Part of patriotism as I see it, part of being someone who loves his or her country is being able to see what parts of it can be improved, what parts are dysfunctional, what parts are just plain wrong and make suggestions about how to fix them. The answer is not to stick our heads in the sand and pretend that our country is perfect and above criticism, but to make dissent commonplace. Saying like "America - love it or leave it" or what I saw on Facebook this morning about how if anyone was "offended by the flag" the poster would help them pack. Other than being a strawman proposition (who are all these people in the United States who are offended at the U.S. flag?) - it suggests that criticism of what the flag stands for - the United States - is grounds for deportation. And of course there's the originator or the photo in question, a U.S. Marine; somehow there's that assumption that if one of the "troops" say something, it is beyond question. So, unlike the Marine who would help the imaginary people who are offended at the flag pack their bags in preparation for residence elsewhere - if you are offended at dissent - I will not help you pack your bags, because the First Amendment is still in force.

Tribal Wars Withdrawal

About three years ago I started playing the online game called Tribal Wars. Tribal Wars is one of a number of online strategy games by German based Innogames. The basic premise is that you sign on to a "world" (they recently opened their 64th world), a self-contained grid where the various players join together into "tribes" with the goal of taking over the world.

The play begins with each player being assigned a village randomly placed somewhere in the world. Players who sign up early are placed in the center of a 10x10 grid - 100 squares, each one called a "continent", or a "K". As new players are added they are assigned places farther and farther from the center (the "core") - this area becomes known as "the rim".

Your initial goals in your new village are twofold: recruit troops and improve your buildings. Let's look at the buildings first.

• Village Headquarters: building or improving the other village structures takes place here. The Village HQ can be improved from a Level 1 to a Level 30. the higher the level, the quicker the construction of other buildings takes place. 
• Farm: the level of the farm determines how extensive your building improvement can be, as well as how many troops. Each level has an increasing amount of "farm space". This is important because each type of building and each type of troop takes up a different amount of "farm space". A Level 30 Farm gives you the room for maximum building levels and maximum troop strength
• Resources; Clay, Timber and Iron are all harvested in mines just outside the village walls. These three resources are the raw materials which you use to improve your buildings and equip your troops. 
• Wall: The wall helps protect the village from attacking troops. The higher the level of the wall, the more efficient your troops will be.
• Recruiting Centers: A barracks, stable and workshop are where you recruit, train and equip your troops. The higher the level, the quicker your troops are ready.
• Smithy: types of weapons are "researched" in the Smithy before you can equip your troops
• Academy: Where you educate your nobles (more on them later)

Troops are extremely important in order to defend from attacks or attack in return. All troops take a set amount of resources to equip. The more effective troops tend to be the most expensive in terms of resources. Many new players tend to neglect troops in favor of buildings. Each building level adds points to a players total, troops do not, so many "noobs" (newbies) are "point whores", racking up points at the expense of troops. 

• Offensive Troops; Axemen, Light Cavalry, Rams, Catapults. All have varying levels of effectiveness. A chart is included in the game outlining their comparative offensive and defensive strengths. A "nuke" is a collection of troops designed to either "clear" a village (kill all defending troops), knock down the walls, or conquer it. A nuke might consist of 9000 axes, 2000 light cavalry.
• Defensive Troops: Spearmen, Swordsmen, Heavy Cavalry. Spears are most effective against cavalry, swords against axes, heavy cavalry are heavy duty quick support. 
• Nobles; Once certain building requirements are met a player can educate nobles. A noble is used to conquer another player's village by lowering what is called "loyalty". Each village starts with a loyalty level of 100. Each successful attack that includes a noble will lower a villages loyalty level by 15-35 points, or an average of 25. Typically four nobles are sufficient to conquer a rival village. 

A quick note on "farming". In addition to your resource mines, a way to garner resources is to send your troops off to plunder other villages, typically unoccupied villages. Each type of troop can carry a specified number of resources back with him. The best players use automated algorithms to constantly farm, allowing them to build quickly. 

So, to recap, your early goal is to improve your buildings, which enables you to equip more troops and educate nobles, this in turn allows you to conquer other villages. This then becomes the cycle that you repeat over and over as you play Tribal Wars. Your sources for other villages to conquer include other players and what is call Barbarian Villages. A barbarian village, or "barb" is a village generated by the game that is not owned by any player. It may be one that was never player-owned, or it may have been occupied by a player who quit, leaving a village full of troops with nothing to do but kill your attackers if you fail to send a large enough force. As the game progresses, most player disdain the barbs. There are two reasons for this: one is that it is cooler and more challenging to take a village from an enemy player, or a rival in your area than an undefended village. Second, barbs generally only grow to a certain low level before plateauing - taking over a small village means that a lot of resources will immediately be required to build everything up. taking over an enemy village that has its buildings maximized means that you have a fully functioning village right away. An exception to this is "large barbs", fully built-up villages that had belonged to a player who quit.

As a player grows, it is typical to try to establish a "cluster", a group of villages close together. This facilitates self support and makes it more difficult for an enemy to isolate you. 

Real success in Tribal Wars comes from banding together into tribes. The advantages of being in a tribe is basically safety in numbers. You can send some of your defensive troops to other players to help support them when they are under attack, you can coordinate attacks on other players and tribes, and experienced players can educate newer players. Since the goal is for a tribe (or in some worlds an alliance of tribes) to take over the world, the "history" of a world is generally one war after another. In the early stages it's kind of a melee, with everybody attacking everybody else, alliances shifting weekly or sometimes daily in an effort to establish dominance. Early one tribes work toward gaining control of one or two continents. The stronger tribes begin to become regional powers. About mid game 2-3 larger tribes dominate in each quadrant, with a swarm of smaller tribes flourishing along the rim or in between the larger tribes' areas of control. As tribes battle each other, sometimes the winner absorbs the better players from the losing tribe and kills off the rest, not only increasing the average skill level of the tribe, but expanding their geographic reach. In the world that I play on, about a year ago there was one major power in each quadrant, although the northwest had three big tribes. In about six months time the biggest tribe had defeated or absorbed all major tribes and started working on eliminating the remaining resistance along the rim. 

Just this morning I deleted my accounts on Tribal Wars. I have been playing on this world, world 51 (W51) for almost two years and on a variety of other worlds for a year before that. When I first started on W51 I was conquered twice just as I was getting a second village, I joined tribes that disbanded at critical moments until I finally joined up with a functioning tribe that worked well together. I slowly but steadily grew, increasing the number of villages that I controlled to 61. It seemed like every couple of months that the end was near; I'd be under serious attack and then my attacker would disappear for a while. At one point I got greedy and conquered a few villages of a player who I thought was inactive. He beat me down to 20 villages. I was holding my own at about 20-25 villages About six months ago a larger player was quitting and I took over his account of 130 villages. I increased it to 161 villages until this past May when a concentrated attack by 10 players in the world's biggest tribe brought me down to only 30 villages. 

The leading tribal alliance holds over 85% of W51's villages, the #2 tribal alliance, which I am a part of has been just trying to stay alive and delay the inevitable for the last few months, making the big tribe work for their world victory. It was even fun until recently when an ally was unable to access his internet for a week and one of my tribe members started attacking him. My tribe mate refused to return to "stolen" villages, so this former ally began attacking smaller members of my tribe, including me, in retaliation. I've been losing villages at the rate of about one a day, trying to stay ahead by conquering barbs and villages of tribe mates who have quit. The last straw was this morning when several tribe mates started bickering among themselves and dragged me into it. I looked at the situation and thought that it had long ago stopped being fun and I was just holding on just to say that I had stuck it out 'til the end. Well I almost did! 

I can still go back, I still have some "premium points" stored up that I can use, but  took Tribal Wars off my "favorites" and I'm going to stay away...at least for now!

God Exists

Of course he does, how could I think otherwise? After all it's been proved right? http://www.godlessgeeks.com/LINKS/GodProof.htm
 While no one can prove the existence of this being, no can disprove his existence either - people claim all the time that they talk to him and that he talks back (kinda, sorta) - who am I to doubt their experience? I know, those of you who have dealt with me in the past are just waiting for me to say that those who believe in his existence are stupid, or deluded, or...something else nebulously negative. No my friends, I believe that there are such things as spirits and gods, deities and geists of all kinds, and if I believe thus, how could I deny that the god of the bible also exists? Well, I don't. Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that there's any kind of proof, or that I actually do anything about it, just that I concede the possible or even probable existence of the god who English-speaking Western Civilization refer to with a capital "G".

(pause while those who really know me wonder if I've gone off the deep end and like Agrippa have almost been persuaded...)


Belief in the simple existence of an entity does not guarantee that I believe everything that is said or written about said entity. For a lot of people, what they believe about the biblical god is naturally derived from the bible. But what is the bible but, at best, a collection of books, letters, essays and myths setting down what many individuals believed, experienced or speculated about their deity? Parts of the Old Testament are very similar to the creation myths and tribal origin stories of others peoples. Some are heroic legends of the great men (and occasionally women) of a certain people. Still other sections are wise sayings or songs and poems praising the god. the New Testament starts with four oft contradictory accounts of Jesus' life, followed by letters from early leaders, also frequently contradictory. Looked at objectively, the parts of the New Testament can resemble tracts by competing factions attempting to win over the populace to their view and refuting their opponents. In fact, the very early history of Christianity is replete with competing versions of the faith, all with their own literature. One justification for apostolic succession and the Catholic doctrine of papal infallibility was that there were so many writings representing different ideas about Jesus and God that some doctrine had to be promulgated to blunt the influence of circulating gospels and epistles, all which claimed authorship by people who knew Jesus in the flesh.

Other believers in the biblical god set their own parameters for who their god is and what he does, completely outside those set by the bible and by established Christianity. These people often express distaste for organized religion and formulate their own picture of the deity that they share with the churches, but he is often described as completely different than how biblical literalists describe him.

My point (or one of them anyway) is that declining to worship a certain deity or to believe all his press does not mean that I deny the possibility of his existence or the validity of the worship or belief of those who do.