is my topic

My passion blog will stay the same, talking about different cool things in animation and anime.

My civic issues blog will be about food sustainability issues such as logging, water depletion, and antibiotics use in animals.

This I Believe Ideas:

I believe that almost all people have their own reasons for taking what actions they do and that it’s most important to understand why they believe what they do.

I also believe that fiction is in many cases far more important than reality in how it changes how humans perceive and look at different events.

Passion Ideas:

Last semester I blogged about animation and tried to recognize unique or well done instances of animation in anime. So I’m most likely going to just keep doing that since I’m pretty familiar with that subject.

Another blog I could do would be on eSports and interesting competitive gaming moments that occur around the world. Gaming has become increasingly popular both casually and competitively and it could be cool to document major events.

Civic Issues Ideas:

I’m quite interested in using my civic issues blog to talk about the role of public education and what kind of knowledge and experiences that college classes should be aiming to give their students.

Another idea is to talk about the increasing problems cropping up in regards to America’s food practices and what problems that can cause down the road. For example, the overuse of antibiotics and the potential disasters of a super disease.

For profit prisons have garnered unwelcome media attention in recent years due to reports of abuse and corruption. One outstanding prison failure was the Walnut Grove Correctional Facility. The town Walnut Grove, of population 1900, beat out several other towns for the private prison.The towns all desired the private prison because of the revenue it generated and the people that could be employed. The Mississippi Department of Corrections thus contracted with Cornell Companies. Opened in 2001, the for profit prison was designed to harbor young male offenders. Although it originally was built to house 321 prisoners, the facility was eventually expanded but the number of correctional officers did not change. In a state audit in 2005, the ratio of prisoners to guards was 60:1, compared to the standard 10:1 found in most other prisons.

A 2010 audit reported that there was over one fight a day in the facility, with staff members being assaulted every other day. Not only did gangs run rampant throughout the facility, but the guards were part of the gang, abusing their power and causing fights. Further complaints included guns and drugs being brought in by guards, inhumane holdings in isolation, inadequate medical care, and rampant guard-inmate and inmate-inmate violence. A 2012 Department of Justice report confirmed many of these complaints, adding that “The sexual misconduct we found was among the worst that we have seen in any facility anywhere in the nation”.

Even though as reports of violence and abuse rose in the facility, the town of Walnut Grove profited off of the prison. According to an NPR report in 2011, the taxes that the facility paid accounted for 15% of Walnut Grove’s annual budget. The reasons to keep the facility ran even further than simple economy reasons. Corruption controlled much of the decisions to keep the facility around. In 2014, a federal investigation called “Operation Mississippi Hustle” was conducted into bribes given to Chris Epps, Commissioner of the MODC and the president of the ACA. The bribes totaled to $1.5 million, and allowed Epps to pay off his mortgage while allowing Cecil McCrory, a former contractor, to do whatever he wanted with the prison. This led to reports of abuse and negligence. To date, the investigation has prosecuted 13 public officials related to the private prison system.

Private Prisons

Private prisons are an increasingly controversial topic in the United States. It’s harder for information about private prisons to become public, as the prisons are incentivized to coverup possible scandals to retain their contracts. Private prisons incarcerate over 100,000 in the United States, and potential human rights abuses can often be overlooked. Additionally, private prisons want to keep offenders in jail no matter what, often lobbying the government for harsher sentences and less leniency in court. They favor the idea of punishment over rehabilitation simply because it makes profits for them. This would be a good topic because it’s gaining attention in the United States.

Antibiotics in Animals

Animals are often giving a whole load of antibiotics in order to combat possible diseases in the herd. This can lead to farmers using antibiotics in order to offset the effects of bad living conditions for the animals. Additionally, the use of antibiotics in animals can lead to the diseases gaining resistances to those diseases and causing problems when humans or animals actually need those antibiotics in order to survive a pandemic. Because mass usage of antibiotics is so ubiquitous in the United States, it’s hard to change the status quo. This could be a good topic because it’s weighing the risk of biological disaster vs. the difficulty of implementing changes across the U.S. and the world.

Intro: The nature of the video game industry lends itselfkoo to playing it safe and developing games that don’t change the status quo. This is why we see games like Madden which have been produced with the same mechanics since 1988 and will probably always be produced until the heat death of the universe. Recently however, there has been a large uptick in the development of indie games. This is because of several technological improvements that destroy the obstacles that would normally plague a game developer.

• Before the 21st century, most games were distributed in retail – requiring developers to contact a publisher to make physical copies and to advertise their product.
  • Most publishers would only take games that were guaranteed to make a profit, redoing formulaic game mechanics that had worked before. This lead to a stagnation in many mainstream games.
  • It was incredibly hard for an independent publisher to afford these costs, and most of the time it would be impossible for them to even get to a retail store. They got no exposure and it was harder to make games.
  • comment on how only graphics have improved
    • talk about GTAV
  • Digital distribution started in the 2000s and it became increasingly easy to buy and show games online. Show Steam stats.
  • Show part of Newell quote
• PC and mobile games were very beneficial towards digital distribution
  • most digital distribution developed for those platforms
  • ios store gained 500 new games every day on the ios store
• Indie devs inspire others
  • anecdote about indie game expo I went to
• Easier than ever
  • Unity Engine, GameMaker, Unreal Engine
  • crowdfunding
    • show Kickstarter stats, talk about Star Citizen
• Games could be art with the rise of indie games
  • compare to regular artists
  • diversity of industry is crucial
• Conclusion: Currently AAA games are restricted by the necessity of profit because they cost so much to make. With the advent of community – produced indie games, many of those restrictions disappear and the freedom of creation is given over to passionate developers. This shift could revolutionize the state of the gaming industry from a profit-drive enterprise to a form of expression.

The most interesting thing I find about the shift towards indie games is how rapidly the shift occurred. Driving factors like the digital distribution of video games rapidly changed, going from a quarter of all games sold to three quarters of all games sold. How quickly the indie community formed and built off of each other was truly astonishing, and it bodes well for the future of indie game development.

The reason I find the rise of indie games important is because video games have so much potential to become an form of interactive art where the whole package of art, music, and writing is included as well. Done correctly, video games could surpass plays, paintings, and movies in terms of artistic freedom and expression- but the reason that games can’t do that right now is because developers have to sell their product for profit, and make their game entertaining for their audience. It could affect anybody in the future because of how unpredictably video gaming could evolve, with the advent of VR adding to how immersive a game can be. Video games can provide a unique experience to anybody, it’s just that most developers don’t have the creative freedom to make their passion alive.

The dominant culture in video game culture was mainly based around the production of game consoles and games for those consoles before the paradigm shift that allowed indie games to be produced all across the world. During the late 70s and early 80s companies such as Atari and Coleco succeded in selling hundreds of thousands of consoles, while PC games were still simple and not very widely played. As the 90s came around PC games saw a marked improvement in graphics and gameplay mechanics, and really hit off with development of first person shooter and real time strategy genres. Games like Quake and Age of Empires became increasingly popular, and web browser games became easier to make with advancements in Java and Flash.

Quake, one of the most influential first person shooters

This set the stage for users to “mod” already existing games – some of the most popular games today were mods of older games. Team Fortress 2, a mod of the original Quake game; Defense of the Ancients, a mod of Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos; and Counterstrike, a mod of the first Half-Life game, have been extremely sucessful with huge playerbases and popularity associated with them. As online distribution over the internet grew, it only made sense that independent game makers would be able to reach a wider audience now that they no longer had to burn games to discs and physically distribute them. An increasing number of niche games were able to be made because the risk of production was much much lower.

Defense of the Ancients Gameplay

As the internet grew, so did the abilities of indie game makers. Plug-ins such as Adobe Flash allowed developers to easily create, and open source libraries and game engines would serve as a basis for people to start from. To make the process of making a game even easier, software such as GameMaker Studio, Unity, and Unreal Engine allowed anyone, even those not so familiar with programming, to make a game.

Anyone can use Unity software to create something cool

Additionally, digital game store platforms such as Steam allowed indie games to gain further awareness, especially with the creation of Steam Greenlight, which specifically highlighted indie games and developers. Crowdfunding through sites like Kickstarter also benefited indie game development as the community would be able to remove another barrier to developers looking to risk creatively driven projects.

A good pitch can lead to ez funding

Barriers to indie games at the start were mostly technical in nature. Nowadays, many indie games have come to be successful, from Minecraft to Fez to Braid, and many more are being created every year. While the sales of indie games still pale in comparison to AAA games produced by huge companies such as Rockstar, BioWare, or Blizzard, the industry is still successful and it inspires others to follow in their footsteps. There is no societal attitude that exactly opposes the making of indie games, but instead technical, monetary, and time factors preventing the creativity of individuals from being realized. As indie games are generally less marketed, they get less of the spotlight, and developers generally use a decent indie game as a career stepping stone to get into the mainstream industry. Overall however, the idea of indie games has gone from completely impossible to common and relatively popular.

1. The first paradigm shift that I find interesting is the revolutionary change of thought between classical mechanics and quantum mechanics. As someone greatly interested in physics, it’s interesting how classical mechanics cannot explain many natural phenomena. Quantum mechanics is the explanation for phenomena that occur at the smallest scales of energy for subatomic particles. Quantum mechanics came to be because of the failure of classical physics to explain things like wave=particle duality. It has greatly changed the way that physicists and other scientists
2. I think another interesting paradigm shift was the pre-atomic bomb and post-atomic bomb ideas of war. After the US dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the Soviets showed that they could also replicate that destruction, the consequences of a world war became much more dire. Instead of hundreds of thousands or millions of dead soldiers, a world war could lead to world annihilation and a nuclear winter. I think this shift in public attitude was mostly in response to the fear that the Cold War caused and the aftermath of the bombs on Japan.