Qwerty

As much as I hate to bring this up, I need to talk about the war and 9/11. Nobody says that 9/11 wasn’t more-than-likely the worst thing that has happened to us. But it will most likely go down as one of the grandest terrorist attacks ever as it has gotten this huge thing started about the war; which as a matter-of-fact, is tearing our country apart. That is why it will be marked as so large, because you can attribute almost anything that is going to happen to America to 9/11; not to say we aren’t to blame ourselves, because we are. Wherever America goes from here though, is at least partially because of 9/11.

If we move into tyranny or a revolution or anything along those lines then 9/11 got the ball rolling and started this. If it wasn’t for 9/11 we wouldn’t be in this war across the ocean about nothing. We wouldn’t have to be afraid of the republican candidate, we shouldn’t have to be scared of what will happen if he gets into office. But we are, and we do need to be scared of it; because of the war and our own bad decisions. 9/11 has been the anchor point that Cheney/Bush have used to take control of this country because of what they say will happen if we don’t let them have complete control.

9/11 has allowed us to become a fear based society, which is much too vulnerable for it’s own good. But don’t think that I’m blaming 9/11 for this completely, it only started it. We need to take responsibility for our actions and accept what we have done, and then fix it. Nobody wants to do that, but everyone has to. We cannot go around saying we had nothing to do with what America has become; that’s just wrong. It’s built into us to avoid things we don’t like, and that’s fine. But this is not a situation we can allow ourselves to do that in.

If we don’t say, “We did it, we messed up, it our fault.” If we don’t accept it, we will never move past it. What we did was wrong, what we are doing is wrong. We can still fix it, we can still recover. It won’t be easy or fun, but it’s honestly our only chance to survive as a race. We need to be accountable and change where we are going right now. Don’t just stand by and let this country and the human race fall apart, take a stand. Be what you want to see in the world, be the change. Set an example to the rest of the world. Let them know that we can recover from anything. We have a chance to finally make a change in the way we think. Take that chance, there have been too many missed oppourtunities. We might not be able to survive another one. I’m not telling you what to do besides be what you want to see. If there’s one thing I know, doing just that will make the world better.

So, I would assume that everyone knows what open source is. You know, free software and whatnot, it’s awesome. Anyway, I’m going to talk about how open source is needed to save our economy. “But wait, I thought you didn’t get paid for open source?” Well that’s right, you don’t. At least not in the traditional sense of being paid. Also, you probably don’t spend enough time designing open source that it would matter.

I was watching TED talks the other day and I came across this. It is a very smart man, Yochai Benkler,  talking about the design of open source. He brings about this idea of the 80-20 curve. Which as some of you may know is the general theory that the top 20% of participants in an unorganized project (open source) do 50% of the work. So, why is this good? Because, I’m using this from the video, in an organization based on “good” workers the bottom 80% wouldn’t be employed as they didn’t do enough work. But that also means that you would lose 50% of what you could have attained. If you use all of the workers you would get twice the output.

Open source does that. It uses everyone that wants to work, not just the “good” ones. Say you’re bored and want to do something, with open source you can work for any amount of time and still contribute to the project. 5 minutes, ok. 1 week, ok. No matter what, as long as your work is not negative, it will be accepted. It’s basically a community project where everyone volunteers. This increases productivity to an impressive degree.But for us to truly achieve this format of open source we need to change the way we use currency. It would be idiotic to think that we could do that in the short-term though, it would take a long time. We would need to change the way we see each other as humans.

This is not impossible though, there are projects around the world directed at creating community and improving the way we look at each other. At the moment we see each other as people, that’s it. We have no opinion about them, no one has a particular care for each other except the small amount of people you have as friends; sometimes called a monkeysphere. I understand that we cannot change the fact that we can only have 100 people we really know. But that doesn’t mean we can’t change the way we look at everyone else. We need to be much more willing to help people and not have a default negative opinion of people.

If we do this we will help each other more, and there won’t be nearly as much poverty. The difference between the rich and poor wouldn’t be nearly as much either, there would be some level of equality. Humans would be taking care of each other, not just themselves. It would be an amazing change that we desperately need to move towards. So many people blames bad acts on all these outside things: war, greed, power ect. When really what causes this is just not thinking about other people, we forget perspective, stop acting as a group and slowly dig ourselves deeper into this hole. We need to start changing the way we think, soon. Or else, as a civilization, we will fail.

Well, this is my first post on this blog. I would like to say in advance that I have no idea what I’m doing.

So, lets begin.

I am a gamer for the most part; you know, those people that are supposed to always be at their computer doing nothing but gaming. Well, I play Frisbee as well… Which for those of you who disagree with it being a sport, Wikipedia “Ultimate Frisbee,” the first thing it says is sport. So, BAM. Right there buddy, with all kind intents of course.

Oh, which reminds me. I played yesterday; and ultimate is supposed to be a no-contact sport, right? Well, someone didn’t think so and they tackled me. It wasn’t some small person either, they were about 6′1″ and at least 210 lbs… Put shortly, it wasn’t pleasant. I’m still in a bit of pain.

Anyway, to go back to gaming. I play Counter Strike: Source… A lot. I’m in this clan, Enigma (Enigma Gang Forums - Home). We’re mostly Gun Gamers (Don’t worry about it if you don’t know what that is.) Also, my steam name is Colwyn_Myself. For those of you who use it. It’s pretty fun and we might be doing TWL. People should visit our server: 8.3.28.134:27015. That’s our GunGame server, it’s pretty popular; but be absolutely sure to read and follow the rules, we’re kinda strict. We’ve got some other servers too: Rotation, Deathrun and a Private Server.

On top of that I play Conquer Club and Urban Dead for a couple minutes a day. They don’t take up much time and they’re really fun. Conquer Club is basically Risk online with more maps. Urban Dead is “A massively multi-player web-based zombie apocalypse RPG.” That’s what they call it at least. It’s brilliantly fun for a bit.

For the last little bit describing myself, I study psychology and physics (quantum FTW) in my spare time. I use photoshop too and I’m learning PHP and attempting to learn German and hopefully Russian in a bit. Oh and I plan to learn Jujitsu soon as well. Not to ruin the stereotype of a “gamer,” but that’s what I do. I’m 16 as well. I could go on about politics and the such as well, but I really just don’t want to bore you.

On that note. I will post here at least once a week, unless something goes horribly wrong. In my second post I’ll probably say some more stuff about myself etc… Anyway, see you all next week.