Make America Stand Again

So I’m sure you’ve heard about the hot new controversy that is sweeping the nation. The one where a 49ers quarterback decides to protest by sitting down during the national anthem. And before I talk about what I want to talk about regarding this “controversy” I’d like to make it clear what my opinion on it is.

I don’t care.

I really, really, really don’t care. Like, on a scale of 1 to 10, it’s a 0. I don’t care. This is exactly the bullshit kind of “controversy” I talked about in a previous post and I was over it before it was even real news. He’s a football player, he’s protesting about something he cares about, let him do it, who fucking cares. Honestly. You don’t need to interview experts or other athletes or bring it up to politicians. It’s not news. It’s not a story.

The best thing I saw on it was “Colin Kaepernick is a rich quarterback, why should he be protesting anything? Because if he was Colin Kaepernick, employee at Verizon Wireless nobody would give a shit.” Which is exactly true. The only reason anybody cares is because it’s a sports guy doing a thing. If the guy next to you at the football game doesn’t get up during the national anthem, do you get in his face about not being a patriot? Do you go bare-knuckle brawling in the aisle? Is your experience ruined if the guy in seat 42B across the way didn’t get up? Are you going to walk over there and give that person a piece of your mind?

It’s manufactured controversy. It’s dumb. I don’t care.

BUT.

I do care about psychology, because I majored in it. And what I really find interesting about it is the cognitive dissonance that is on display during people’s reactions to it. I’ve seen things like pictures of people holding an American flag standing on Colin Kaepernick’s jersey to prove a point. What point? That apparently this quarterback jerk is disrespectful to the flag, to the country, to all the soldiers who have died to make America free, etc. etc. A big argument I’ve also seen is the “well, I understand he’s expressing his First Amendment right, but I’m going to express my First Amendment right and call him an asshole.” And that’s understandable and perfectly fine because, you know, First Amendment rights and all that.

But let me tell you something. There’s this guy who’s been on TV for over a year now who has been saying America sucks every chance he gets. He’s been belligerent, insulting, misogynistic, and racist. He’s been exercising his First Amendment right to be an asshole (and call people assholes) all over the place. If you missed my thinly veiled reference, I’ll immediately clarify: I’m talking about Donald Trump.

If you disagree with me, don’t forget his campaign slogan is “Make America Great Again.” He is directly implying that America as it stands is not great. That it needs fixing. Which I’m pretty sure is the reasoning behind Colin Kaapernick’s sit-down protest. He thinks there are things in America that need fixing.

And yet there are people who in one breath say they want to make Donald Trump president, but in the very next breath say that Colin Kaepernick is a spoiled brat and an idiot. One is “speaking his mind” and “telling it like he sees it” but the other is “trying to gain attention” and “a daft prima donna.”

So what’s the difference between the two situations?

(Some of you are going to say Trump is white and Kaepernick is black, and while yes, that is a big difference and in all likelihood a huge factor, that’s not what I’ll be delving into here.)

The difference is simple.

Colin Kaepernick “disrespected” the flag. He “disrespected” the national anthem.

And for the love of God, people love their symbols.

I’m not knocking it. It’s so much easier to get outraged when an object is attacked over an idea. Plus, you get emotionally invested in those symbols. Somebody loses their wedding ring down the shower drain and they go nuts, but it doesn’t mean the marriage is over. But there’s an attachment there. It’s why people give a shit if you burn the American flag. Or a book. Or a bra. It’s a symbol of something.

Donald Trump talks in vague ideas. He wants to “build a wall” but skips around how he’s going to actually get it done. Similarly, his disrespect is vague. He wants to make America great again, but he never crosses the line to actual disrespect of the country itself by attacking a specific symbol (other than the President, I mean HA! It’s not like the President is the leader of the country and a huge symbolic presence in the world at large, right? Right guys?).

Patriotism is directly tied to symbolism. Americans stand behind our flag as a symbol. We stand behind our soldiers as a symbol. Just being in the military demands respect because we put high value on serving the country. But we don’t respect other flags as much. Would you hold the same outrage if Kaepernick didn’t stand during the Canadian national anthem? Do you think Canadians would have the same outrage if a Canadian athlete didn’t stand? And religion is tied to symbols, too. A Christian is probably going to directly oppose burning a Bible more than they will burning a Quran. Catholics might not care if a Book of Mormon gets torn to shreds, but a member of the LDS church would. Some of the most powerful beliefs are tied to the symbolism. A right-side up cross is holy, an upside-down cross is Satanic.

And Colin Kaepernick’s act of sitting down is two symbols clashing. It’s America’s patriotism clashing with America’s love of sports. We idolize our athletes. We wear jerseys of our favorite teams. We have pennants and jackets and helmets. We’ve turned them into symbols. It’s why we’re heartbroken when a respected athlete turns out to have been doping, or gets into a domestic violence dispute, or is Tim Tebow.

And that’s where this cognitive dissonance comes into play. Politicians we don’t respect. So Trump can say whatever he wants because he’s SUPPOSED to say America sucks. He’s SUPPOSED to insult the President and his rival, because we’re a two-party system and Republicans are better than Democrats, obviously. He’s going to fix everything!

But sports stars are our symbols. And we can’t have our symbols disappoint us. So we get outraged that one symbol isn’t respecting another symbol.

I’m using the royal we here. As I’ve said before, I don’t care. I don’t put my faith in symbols. But it sure is fascinating to watch others react.

I don’t really have an ending to this. This was a spur of the moment post. All I had was a slight rant prepared, and I don’t really have a rug to tie the room together. So I guess I’ll just end with a link to a psychology piece on the social function of symbols in case people feel like reading about it a little more.

And for the love of all that is holy, be happy! Don’t let media (social or otherwise) dictate what you should feel outraged about, or that you should feel outraged at all! Focus on happiness! CBS cares!

9 Reasons I Hate Clickbait Articles – You Won’t Believe Number 7!!!!

1. Whenever I see a clickbait article.

2. When people tell me “it’s just how news is right now.”

3. LOL.

4. When Psych perfectly encapsulated how I feel about Buzzfeed.

5. When cats are adorably funny!

6. When Tom Hanks’s initials spell Thanks.

7. In 1997, Bill Clinton enacted a secret government program to quietly introduce a drug that was unapproved by the FDA into the national water supply. This drug is supposed to boost dopamine levels to make the entire American society as a whole more compliant in the wishes of the Big Pharma 6. However, in .000001% of the human population, this drug had an unimaginable side effect – it turns humans into wendigos, cannibalistic creatures that feast on living flesh. The men in black have managed to keep this from the masses at the behest of former President Clinton, because his wife is one of these awful, wendigo creatures. I have hidden a non-binary code in the metadata of all these gifs and jpegs so the men in black do not find me, and the believers out there who are smart enough will be able to piece together this data and prove once and for all that the wendigo conspiracy is real and they ARE among us. Don’t be complacent. Don’t elect a wendigo president this fall.

8. But seriously, cats are adorable!

9. My feelings when clickbait articles have no proper ending!

A Controversial Post

This is just going to be a short post about language – namely, the word controversy, which I feel like in the internet age has lost all meaning. Much like words such as “literally” and “epic”, the overuse (and incorrect use) has made the word “controversy” pretty much a non-word.

The definition of controversy: “an argument that involves many people who strongly disagree about something; strong disagreement about something among a large group of people”

Before I continue, let me list a few “controversies” that I’ve read about in the last week:

-Donald Trump encouraging Second Amendment people to “do something” about Hillary Clinton
-Donald Trump calling Barack Obama the founder of ISIS
-Malia Obama smoking weed at Lollapalooza
-Gabby Douglas not putting her hand over her heart during the national anthem
-Players not being able to interact with other players in No Man’s Sky video game
-Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson has beef with one of his Fast 8 co-stars

With the advent of the internet and social media, “controversy” is pretty much everywhere. After all, what bigger group of people is there than the entirety of the internet? Anything that people might disagree on has become controversial simply because the internet allows everyone to interact at once.

But let’s face it: is the dress being blue or white actually a controversy?

No, it’s not. Yes, by definition, it’s an argument between a lot of people disagreeing about something. But is it really controversial? Have you even thought about the dress in the last six months before I just talked about it?

Donald Trump’s run for president is controversial because people have been arguing about it for over a year. Black Lives Matter and the treatment of minorities by police officers is controversial because it’s part of an important civil rights movement. Abortion is a controversial subject because even though it’s been legal since Roe v. Wade 40 years ago, there are people still trying to outlaw it and condemn it as wrong. Prostitution is a controversial subject because it’s illegal and yet is still considered the world’s oldest profession and it’s usually readily available to anyone who wants to go looking for it. Vaccines are a controversy because people are idiots who don’t understand that there is absolutely no research connecting vaccines and autism, but still choose to believe there’s some sort of connection.

A teenager smoking weed at a big concert is not controversy. A person not holding their hand over their heart is not controversy. A game not having a feature is not controversy. Two alpha male actors disagreeing on a movie set is not controversy. Hell, a few months ago Harambe was a “controversy” for a good week. Now the only thing I hear about Harambe is when people get their dicks out for him. At best, all of these things were manufactured to be news stories – people wanting to argue for the sake of arguing, and other people stoking the fire because they know people like to argue.

And aren’t we better than that? Shouldn’t we, as a culture, be better than that? We have our moments – there was lots of social media backlash at the attempt of creating controversy for Malia Obama smoking pot, and a general outright refusal to accept that bullshit as a news “controversy.” Don’t fall for bait, don’t argue about things that aren’t important. Debate is fine, but stop letting media dictate what you should and shouldn’t care about.

Don’t allow yourself to fall victim to manufactured “controversial” subjects. If you want to care about something, do it. Life’s too short to get angry and argue about trivial things. Life’s too short to let the media and other people make you mad because they want you to be angry, too.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go visit a forum on the internet and complain about controversy being overused. Because that makes me angry.

Overwatch Overkill & Beyond

So I haven’t written a blog post in a while – about two months I’d say – and so I’m taking the time now to do a little write-up of exactly why I haven’t been writing and producing content for my blog here.

I’ve been playing Overwatch.

Yeah, pretty much all of my free time has ended up dedicated to a single game for the last two months. Even for me, that’s pretty crazy. I normally have a fairly short attention span regarding video games, I’ll play one for 10, maybe 15 hours total and have my fill. Some games pull me in for longer, others I get bored of even quicker. But Overwatch – a game that has no single-player and is focused on being a team-based multiplayer shooter – has kept my attention for two whole months, to the point that the only other game I’ve really played at all (outside of party games with friends) was Zero Time Dilemma, a game I’ve been looking forward to for years.

According to the in-game stat tracker, I’ve put a whopping 133 hours of playtime into Overwatch. That’s five and a half WHOLE DAYS. 850ish quick play matches, 100ish competitive matches. I don’t think I’ve ever dedicated this much time to a singular game at one time ever. It hasn’t caused me to be less social – I still hang out with my friends, I’ve gone on trips – I haven’t been a hermit and played only Overwatch. But any time I’ve spent not at work/at a planned event has pretty much been “Time for Overwatch!”

So what is it about this particular game that has drawn my attention so much?

Well, first let me explain what Overwatch is. It’s a team-based multiplayer shooter developed by Blizzard (who also developed games like Starcraft, Diablo, and World of Warcraft). Unlike other shooters (Call of Duty, Battlefield, Killzone) where the objective is usually racking up the most kills, Overwatch has objective-based maps where you’re either fighting to capture a point, or escort a payload from point A to point B, or stop the payload from getting to point B, etc. Killing the enemy is important, but not what a win/loss is measured by. And that’s one of the reasons why I enjoy Overwatch so much – I have never been a huge fan of Deathmatch games (unless they’re named Goldeneye and Perfect Dark), especially in recent years where the longer you’ve played a game the better equipment you have access to, which makes games not newbie-friendly.

Overwatch does not do this. Instead, it has a wide variety of playable characters (22 at this time) that each have their own playstyle and serve their own purpose, which means gameplay doesn’t get stale. All of these characters are available to anyone at the start of the game, and all skills are available as well – making it very new player friendly and something I appreciate. On top of that, you’re encouraged to switch characters on the fly and learn more than one – instead of focusing on “maining” a character and getting to an expert skill level like a lot of multiplayer games do (see Street Fighter or any fighting game, and any class-based shooter where you likely want to focus your skills on developing a singular class).

And this in particular speaks to me because I hate maining. One of my favorite games to play with friends is Super Smash Bros, mostly because of the large character roster and the fact that I enjoy playing with lots of different characters. To me, playing the same character over and over and over is boring and gets repetitive. Overwatch almost actively discourages you from doing that, as part of the meta game is figuring out why your team isn’t working and picking characters to counter what the other team is doing. As such, I’ve spent no less than an hour playing every character in Overwatch – obviously I like some more than others, but the most combined playtime I have as any one specific character is 13 hours.

Another thing that makes the game more addicting to me is that it keeps track of a wealth of statistics. And boy do I love anything that keeps progress and lets me compare statistics. I’m actually kind of a stat fanatic, especially when it comes to ranking things (my obsession with ranking and lists comes highly into play here). So the fact that I can easily see which characters I’m good with, what my win/loss ratio is, and compare it to other people? It’s like stat heaven for me. There are several different Overwatch stat tracking websites out there – Overbuff is the one I primarily use and you can see just how much I’ve played and which characters I favor there if you’re interested.

It’s also fun to watch. It’s exciting watching pro teams battle each other and how their team strategies come into play. It’s also fun just watching groups of friends play it together – Flik is one of my favorites because he and his friends don’t play too seriously and they do fun themed matches. They also don’t tolerate assholes (as shown in the video I linked to) and are all around good, fun people to watch play games. And when you watch people genuinely enjoying a game, it hypes you up to play the game yourself, ending with me wanting to play the game more, and when I’m done playing there’s more videos for me to watch of other people playing…an endless loop.

So all-in-all, it’s made for an impressive two month streak of me using most of my downtime to play Overwatch. I’m not good at the game by any means but I’m not terribly bad, either – if you dedicate 5 days of your life to something over the course of 2 months you’re bound to have some skill at it, right? I’ve uploaded some clips I’ve saved of my own Overwatch play to my gaming YouTube channel here, if you want to see some of the things I’ve done.

This leads into the other thing I was going to talk about in my blog post – over the next few weeks I’m going to be working on a content creation initiative. Last month I attended RTX and got some good advice and tips from panelists that were experienced in content creation/YouTube channels/Twitch streaming. It’s inspired me to get my act together and try to start putting together various types of content for entertainment purposes.

My goal is to end up linking several different types of entertainment together – between my written blog here, my gaming YouTube channel and my Twitch streaming I have a good base. I’m also considering adding a YouTube video blog, and my friends and I are currently testing out the idea of putting together an audio podcast as well. Ideally I would be putting out content 5 days out of the week – a likely schedule would be a written blog on Monday, a gaming stream on Tuesday, a video blog (or another written blog) on Wednesday, a Let’s Play (or a gaming related video that isn’t streaming) on Thursday, and then some sort of content on the weekend – perhaps the podcast or another live Twitch stream. Once I get a regular schedule going I’ll also probably put together a Facebook page (or website) that organizes the content in one place.

So this is my official kick-off towards generating more content for my friends and the internet-at-large to consume. To keep to my schedule, tomorrow evening (probably around 8 PM EST) I’ll be streaming No Man’s Sky on my Twitch channel here – if you don’t know what No Man’s Sky is, it’s a space exploration game that is procedurally generated and essentially it’s supposed to be a vast universe where everybody gets to explore and name things, and it should be something fun to stream since I’ve kept myself in the dark about what the game may or may not contain. I’ll probably be playing that for two-three hours tomorrow night, provided Amazon gets it to me by tomorrow evening like they say they will. Otherwise I’ll still be streaming…I’ll just be playing Overwatch instead! (Surprising nobody!)

Finally, thanks to anybody who reads this and anybody who watches my streams or videos and actually enjoys any content I create. Otherwise it’s just me shouting about nothing into the void. Now onward to greater and more interesting things!

(Or infinitely more likely, more Overwatch.)