I’m not a very big computer gamer. I play them, unapologetically: you get a lot of bang for your dollar, especially if you tend to pick up just a couple titles and play them forever (I have very specific tastes).

Particularly, in my case, I like to do this for a few hours whenever I need to recharge, and to percolate on ideas that aren’t going anywhere. Like taking a hella-long bath, only quite a bit more social. And the percolation works: I’ve pulled some fairly interesting research ideas out of playing Medieval:Total War and it’s successor titles. (For instance: “mechanical artillery was a largely mature technology in the high-medieval world. So why did not a single European medieval power make notable use of field artillery except in relation to siegecraft? Or, put another way, why was it such a shock to the late-medieval world that the Taborites did make use of it, when the wagon-laager had been around as a tactical element in Central and Eastern Europe for centuries?”)

And late last night I once again proved to myself that I am a total nerd by looking at Galactic Civilizations 2 and thinking “oh, no wonder I can never seem to get anywhere economically. The economic engine isn’t built upon a capitalist model, but a mercantilist one. Duh….” This realization should have reached out and slapped my forebrain around like the former was a 1930s gangbuster, and my brain a sleazy pimp running wood alcohol. “Of course it’s mercantilist, you idiot, it’s a colonization game…”

And in the course of that, I think I solved a serious issue I’d been having with felt-making. Because that’s, um, relevant to far future space opera, yeah, that’s the ticket… if I’m right, I have to figure out now how to make a hat-maker’s press large enough to produce that kind of felt in large pieces. Once that’s achieved, I’ll be able to replicate the kind of felt used for cavalry coats in Hungary, and which is largely never seen even in the online felt-making communities outside of people making extremely expensive hats for rodeo folks.

But, anyway, back to video games. If it’s quite clear that at the beginning level of development, a mercantilist system is as good as one is likely to get (whether the power receiving raw materials is a government or a corporation), does it not behoove anybody who’s serious about strip-mining the asteroids to chunk this silly notion of getting into space with lightweight materials, and instead develop the political will to build an Orion Drive? Forgiveness is easier than permission, and when the world sees a four-hundred-thousand-ton spaceship bigger than the Starship-freaking Enterprise loft into orbit, complete with huge water banks for eating up radiation and giant spherical rotating sections for artificial gravity, nobody will give a crap how it’s launched. You want to motivate kids to do well in math and science? Watch those imaginations catch fire, when you tell them that if they work hard, one day they can grow up and work on THAT….

Hey now, you think it’s hard to be a moderate, centrist Democrat? Try surviving this during your primary season:

I don’t know about you, but I have had it with the D.C. Democrats, had it with
the DLC Democrats, had it with every calculating, equivocating, triangulating,
straddling, hair-splitting son of a bitch up there, and that includes Hillary
Rodham Clinton.

This kind of thing is good news for Democrats and Republicans both.

For Donkeys: you’re either leftist, or you’re not. Molly Ivins is a standard Democratic Progressive. Aka, typical Austin-style leftist. There are a lot of leftists in the Democratic Party, and the Dems have a serious identity crisis that is not going to be papered over without a serious party struggle. Any Democrat who tries to sail between the Scylla of the DNC and the Charybdis of Harold Ickes’ new database is going to suffer the slings and arrows of “Flip Flop!” But this time, it’s going to be from a very loud, very vocal, and thanks to leftist softies with deep pockets and an atrocious taste in ties like George Soros, probably well-financed. The Dems, if they are going to survive as a party, need to decide whether they are the 1930s torchbearers of Progressive Socialism, or whether they are going to reinvent themselves as something else.

For Elephants: short term, anything that divides the Dems is good news. Medium-term, if the Progressives win, the Republicans are likely to wipe the walls with them electorally, forcing the emergence of a new party as the tension between the ideological and the “country club” wings of the party finally can no longer be contained.

Either way, it’s a plus for voters, because all of this potential for conflict is predicated on politicians actually paying a slightly higher percentage of lip service to what their constituents want. Rove has the Republicans play to the base for a reason, and had Bush not consistently governed as the Country-Club semi-moderate that he is, he’d have higher approval ratings. Senator Clinton’s crowd would govern as socialists… but don’t dare actually say that in public… and their constituents who are honest-to-goodness ’68ers have finally decided to truly call them on it.

Should be interesting.