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Technically speaking, God is immoral for making violence the standard operating procedure for life.

Yeah, that's probably true. But I doubt you'll catch any human being calling athletics immoral. There's something about the CIVILIZED slant on athletic competition, that tempers the morality of survival-level violence and aggression.

One of the reasons I'm a humanist. Human beings have shown the wherewithal to say Fuck You to God-styled violence, and turn it into something where we can reap the jollies, without willy-nilly ending life over them. We should be congratulated for that, rather than tagged immoral.

The WWII era movies, they're part of this civilized thing. People SAYING they're eager to go out and kill Jerry is a whole 'nother world away from ACTUAL warfare and warriors. Some of whom may talk that talk initially (thanks to being weaned on such movies in the culture), but who oddly enough quickly learn that real violence, terror, and warfare is gut-level repugnant to us.

And it's that repugnance that makes us more civilized than god.

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But I doubt you'll catch any human being calling athletics immoral.

Not athletics. Just extremely violent athletics. Again, in principle this has to be so. If not, let's bring on the gladiators. On some place on the continuum between feeding Christians to the lions and Tiddlywinks, there's a point where most people say "We shouldn't do that. It's immoral." I'll catch hell at places like Coulter.com for saying this, but morality isn't fix. At one time it was considered quite moral to feed the Christians to the lions.

I think boxing is one of the hold-over vestiges of a more violent time. Will our attitudes eventually change so that boxing is included in the list of immoral and prohibited sports? I think that's a distinct possibility. Some will say that, safeguards or no, rules or no, we should no more be gaining pleasure from watching two people pummel each other than we should watching a cock fight.

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One of the reasons I'm a humanist. Human beings have shown the wherewithal to say Fuck You to God-styled violence, and turn it into something where we can reap the jollies, without willy-nilly ending life over them. We should be congratulated for that, rather than tagged immoral.

I don't have any problem calling boxing immoral while at the same time allowing the liberty of people to take part in it. And ritualized violence is preferable to a more bloody and final sort of violence. But I think we would do well to realize what's going on, what exactly we're getting our jollies from. I'm willing to face it and say, "Yeah, I like watching the NFL. I like watching players get hit hard and even hurt. I don't mind at all that many of these guys are going to be walking on crutches and undergoing hip and knee replacement surgeries like they were going out of style just as long as I can kill an afternoon by watching a little TV." Actually, when real injury does occur in the NFL, that's exactly when I feel like the modern equivalent of some yokel in the Coliseum crowd cheering his head off when the gladiator makes the final thrust.

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And it's that repugnance that makes us more civilized than god.

Hey, repugnance is my theme of the moment.

Talking about boxing what I thought was ridiculous was Muhammad Ali refusing service in the military on some grounds that he doesn't believe in the military when he was making a living at pounding the shit out of people.

Muhammad Ali is one of the biggest sports hero phonies that there ever was.

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Talking about boxing what I thought was ridiculous was Muhammad Ali refusing service in the military on some grounds that he doesn't believe in the military when he was making a living at pounding the shit out of people.

LMAO. Quite literally I had a mouthful of Diet Coke when I read that and I had to purse my mouth shut very hard to keep from spraying the screen.

Yeah, but my point again is, boxing isn't the same as WAR. Pounding the crap out of people with big padded gloves is not the same as putting bullets in their skulls.

Ali got a bum rap for being a conscientious objector. Later vindicated. He was a big-mouthed, nation of islam kool-aid drinker, but he was a damn fine boxer in his prime. And I think it's ridiculous what the government did to him. I'm definitely on his side there.

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Yeah, but my point again is, boxing isn't the same as WAR. Pounding the crap out of people with big padded gloves is not the same as putting bullets in their skulls.

My point would be that boxing, war, and shoot-em-up video games are all related in that they are fed by, or play on, our instinct for violence. We've evolved to the point where it is second nature. It obviously materially better to play video games than to kill people in the Coliseum for public spectacle. But in between those extremes are things such as boxing and football.

That's like saying between the extremes of being frozen solid and burning to death in fire, we have comfortable couch-sitting in front of the TV. Related only because they do in fact occur in the human experience.

I think it's probably a glass-half-empty thing. You can CHOOSE to view sports as brutal and emphasize their derivative violence, or you can choose to see how far they have fallen from true violence, and emphasize that some sort of civilization has taken place.

Me, I don't look at Jocks and see killers or sociopaths. I think they're two different flavors of human.

The truly violent, and the athletically inclined... even if that's football or hockey or boxing, don't operate on the same frequency. The similarities really aren't worth noting, unless what you're really trying to do is say something pessimistic and derogatory about worst-case human beings.

In other words, if you see every football player as a murderous gladiator waiting to emerge... or every boxer as one punch away from some darker, more violent mugger-like persona emerging.

Couldn't it be that civilization has given us these methods of coping with violent or more aggressive tendencies? Maybe sports are just sports now, not an excuse to go neanderthal.

We can certainly tell the difference between sport, or games, and real violence. There are vaguely similar excitement responses, but the differences are more important. Still, I must admit, it's interesting to explore things like UT-rage. I had a kid who got so hot about corpse-desecration, I thought he was going to blow a gasket.

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I think it's probably a glass-half-empty thing. You can CHOOSE to view sports as brutal and emphasize their derivative violence, or you can choose to see how far they have fallen from true violence, and emphasize that some sort of civilization has taken place.

Oh, no doubt it is more civilized to sit down with a beer and watch the NFL then to, as in our hunter-gatherer days, go out for a morning raid-and-raping of your neighbors. But the derivation of things such as boxing and the NFL are still there. To point them out is to point them out. I still think you're used to dealing with people who point out such things in order to eradicate them. Me, I'm simply fascinated by the many shades implicit in things such as sitting in front of a video game and trying to hunt down and kill a competitor. And it's even quite enthralling and scary at times because some of the more realistic games (such as Far Cry) really put you into the whole mindset of going to war. Shooting pixel monsters in Space Invaders is a very very far-away derivative from actual combat. But some of these games are precisely fun and entertaining because they are very good simulations of some aspects of the real hunt. As soon as they can hook some electrodes up to your skin in order to impart a little pain, they'll really be onto something. And I'm sure that's not too far in the future.

We humans find violence and the hunt to be entertaining. That's a wonderfully dark little bit of human nature right there.

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I still think you're used to dealing with people who point out such things in order to eradicate them.

Yeah, I think you're right there, good call.

And there is no denying that the "realism" level in a video game seems to add to the thrill.

It is fascinating..

I've found some very cool Quake III maps for downloading here. You have to set up a free registration at File Planet, but it's very easy.

I'm not sure if I asked this, but did you BUY Quake, or did you find it free somewhere? I'd love to try that game.

I've finally got my PC back in shape for UT 2004 and have been getting my legs back there. I forgot how much I enjoyed that game. The only part of it I find impossible is the space battles. There has to be a trick I'm missing. I normally love space shoot-em-ups. With UT, it seems impossible to maneuver, find and kill opponents.

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I'm not sure if I asked this, but did you BUY Quake, or did you find it free somewhere? I'd love to try that game.

Brothel bought it way back when. I guess the source code is now open source, but I haven't seen anywhere where the game itself is downloadable. Give me your Super Secret P.O. Box or something and I can rectify that. I would be giving you the original, of course, as making copies of software is illegal. And we never do that. Ever. Never. Oh, once in a while an archival backup in case the original disk is damaged. But only then.

I will email you the super secret P.O. Box, just in case you wanted to send me a belated birthday, christmas, or kwaanza present.

Just to clear this up. The engine of Q3 is open-sourced for some time. But the maps, designs, sounds are NOT. :-)

When you email the super secret address I have a protocol in place. It's similar to the Monty Python one from the sketch about the worlds' most deadly choke. The joke was so deadly that, when translating it from English to German (it was to be used as a weapon), each person was restricted to translating just one of the words. So will be the routine when it comes to dealing with your secret address. Only one digit of that address will be known by each member of the crack crew I have assembled for this job.

L.M.F.A.O.

Well, we've only known each other for what, seven or eight years. I THINK I can trust that you're not secretly the creepy death-threat guy from Apple Delusions, or MFI or Mac NN or wherever he was from.

I remember that Monty Python bit. The guy keeling over from the joke and dropping stone dead... classic.

OK, so I have to play Quake on the PC though? I really don't quite understand about separating the "engine" from the maps and such. Is that the way of the world now?

I'm curious, because that would be an AWFUL lot like OS X. Where the BSD is free, but the Mac-"skin" on it is developed by Apple and sold. Interesting.

And makes me wonder if that means nobody will ever develop NEW engines, when it's easier to just take the established one and be able to sell maps and other crap for it.

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Well, we've only known each other for what, seven or eight years. I THINK I can trust that you're not secretly the creepy death-threat guy from Apple Delusions, or MFI or Mac NN or wherever he was from

To an old Soviet-style mole, eight years would be nothing.

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OK, so I have to play Quake on the PC though? I really don't quite understand about separating the "engine" from the maps and such. Is that the way of the world now?

The disk I am sending you is just a normal PC install disk like any other PC game. Plus there are a couple updates you'll want to install before playing. I think I was in error about this game needing to have the CD in the drive. I don't think that's so. Maps that you download will surely work with any version of Quake III, Mac or PC. As for the open-source engine, I don't exactly know all that that entails. The thing that is open source must be the basic rendering engine for the game, but not the actual Quake III front end. That's what I'm guessing. They open-sourced the chassis but not the body style.

I'm pretty sure that licensing or buying game engines is probably pretty common, but I don't know what the state of the art is today. But there must be people nowadays specializing in various parts of these things. How else could anyone be making these extraordinarily detailed games for the various game systems? There must be very advanced engines or interfaces for creating maps, animation, characters, etc. The way they crank out these games, that must be so. That would make a great episode of "How it's Made" or something like that.

I also burned a few downloadable maps onto a second disk just to give you some extra variety. Once you install Quake, immediately install [invisible] Orders: assemble team KillThalo at position Q [/invisible] the "q3pointrelease_131" update. Then install the "quake3_1.32c" update. All the maps go into the "baseq3" folder. The maps themselves are the ones with the ".pk3" extension. Don't let the initial installer install DirectX as it's likely you already have a much newer version. Let me know if you have any questions. Brothel says you'll have it in three days. [invisible] Be sure not to mention that it will be delivered by ninjas dressed as the UPS man. [/invisible].

Brothel's Kid stopped by for a while at work tonight. He usually heads straight to the computer where he plays Unreal Tournament. I installed Quake III on it today and had it up and running when he came in. I found a cool map called "UNAVI". He was playing that and a couple guys from down the hall were watching him. Old Little B (4 years old) was beating the bots rather handily making all kinds of swift moves. Not just braggin', but their jaws were on the floor that this kid could do this. Anyway, one of the adult fellows told me about this site for mods and other stuff: moddb.com. It really does look like a great site.

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OK, so I have to play Quake on the PC though? I really don't quite understand about separating the "engine" from the maps and such. Is that the way of the world now?

The engine and the map-data are indeed completely different beasts. The game (Q3) is completely inside the map-files (pk3 etc. etc.) The engine alone does nothing.
ID-Software has successfully sold the Q3-Engine to many 3rd party developers. Many, many games used the Q3-Engine. But i think after Doom3 and Quake4 ID wanted to sell their new-engine and they decided to open-source the Q3-Enginge. A very good move i think. This made it possible that games like UrbanTerror are 100% free and still have a quality-engine. Also it's great because the enginge is getting updates and all that, which would never happen if the engine would've stayed closed-source.

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And makes me wonder if that means nobody will ever develop NEW engines, when it's easier to just take the established one and be able to sell maps and other crap for it.

Well, that's true. Developing cutting edge 3D-Engines is not trivial and quite expensive. Plus you need some brilliant minds to do this. In these days of costsaving you can understand that most game-devs license and engine, modify it a bit and then create the game itself on this base.
Also your beloved Unreal (Epic) has an engine that is used widespread in the game-industry. Many Ps3/Xbox/PC/Mac games use the Unreal3-Engine.

I have been going through the maps on Quake III. There ares some classic ones on it. Great Stuff. I am on Tier Four. I can not get past the last one though. QTourney3 against Anarki. I have come close but he beats me just at the end 10-9 was my best go. His damn taunts are nut driving too.

Other than that I was tearing through the maps.