Entries tagged with “NSDM” from Things You Don't Care About
No, the Awakening isn't coming three years early, I just thought I'd blog about all the stuff going on for me this year. After almost ten years of having the exact same routine, this year could be one of the craziest I've ever had. What's coming up for me this year?
Well, in roughly chronological order:
Anyway, I know I haven't told a few of you folks about this stuff yet, so....there it is.
Well, in roughly chronological order:
- When the end of March rolls around, I'm flying out to Scottsdale for a surgical consultation with Toby Meltzer. I've been waiting for this for...longer than I care to think and now it's getting closer and closer. I'm still not entirely sure it feels "real" to me yet. My dad's going with me, and we're planning to see a Cubs game during spring training while we're there.
- Operation Get The Hell Outta Here. It's been 27 years since I first moved back here to the land of corn and soybeans with my parents, and really, I want to try living somewhere else and hopefully doing something closer to what I really want to do for a living. I love my parents, and I'll always look back upon this place fondly, but I really need a change of pace for a huge variety of reasons, but especially for my mental health. Not quite sure when that will happen this year, but I really hope it does.
- GenCon Indy 2008. Wasn't sure I was going to go GenCon this year, because of everything else going on, but now I think by August I'm going to need the break, and now that I'm actually doing some writing and looking for a new job in the gaming industry, I suspect GenCon will be a great place to do some networking. Plus, I'll get to see the NSDM folks again, as well as some people from Eve and RPGnet who I haven't met before.
- Presumably, soon after GenCon, I'll be flying out to Arizona to actually have surgery. Keeping my fingers crossed about this, at least.
Anyway, I know I haven't told a few of you folks about this stuff yet, so....there it is.
So those of you who know me (which is everyone, because I'm pretty sure no one who doesn't know me personally reads this) know that one of the things I look forward to every year is NSDM at GenCon, and that I am fairly involved with the people who run the games, more than most other players anyway. To that end, I'm on the NSDM listserv, which is usually just people passing along various articles on national security topics. Every once in a while though, there's an article that strays a bit more into politics (which is a focus of the game too) and it will spark a (usually) fairly interesting and generally well-informed debate.
As you might imagine from a group of people who are, for the most part, ex-military or current military, the political slant of most people on that list is fairly conservative; there might be a few people more towards the center, but there's no one really on the far left, for the most part (and neither am I, really). However, that puts me in a bit of an odd place; I'm by no means the most "liberal" (in the current sense of the word) person ever, but I generally tend to be very socially liberal and I've not really been a fan of the Iraq War, as previous blog entries will show. That's not generally the prevailing opinion on the NSDM list (there are folks there that can find some virtue in Fox News, at the very least, which I would be hard pressed to do).
In contrast, in my daily life, most of the people I deal with on a regular basis are completely the opposite -- generally very center-of-the-aisle or left-leaning, though I'd hesitate to call any of them "liberal" in the Nancy Pelosi sense. Most of them have similar political views to myself, so it's a very different environment from an NSDM event or the mailing list there. Today brought up an interesting example of this, when someone sent a story to the list about John Murtha saying that Bush's "surge" was working, and indicated that it could end up being bad news for the Democrats, opening up a chink in their armor; the same person sent along the story about the Democrat-aligned questioners at the CNN/YouTube Republican debate.
Now, on the topic of the CNN debate thing, I suspect that's a lot more CNN being irresponsible and/or incompetent, not malicious. I'm less inclined to believe that about Fox News with their mysterious "mislabeling" of disgraced Republicans as Democrats and other journalistic problems, but I admit that's at least partly because I think most of the talking heads on Fox News are idiots; perhaps that's a bit contradictory. I certainly don't think it was anything on the scale of Karl Rove blaming the Iraq War on the Democrats. That said, I think CNN should have at least spent a little effort to make sure they weren't letting the Democrats stick their people in the Republican debate like that. On the other hand, I would much rather have candidates answer questions they aren't prepared for or that make them uncomfortable -- whether they are Republican, Democrat, or any other party -- than hearing them answer rehearsed pablum that tells you nothing other than that they love babies and hate criminals. It's a lot harder to say you think atheists cannot be patriots or citizens or that gays will ruin the military when someone who fits the exact description is sitting there asking you about it. I do think that CNN should have at least told these questioners to disclose their ties with Democratic campaigns, even if they let them ask the questions (which frankly is not really a problem, I think -- it would have been interesting to see it in reverse that the Democratic debate).
As far as the Iraq war, my feeling is that right now, we have two options being presented, and both are idiotic. The first, from the Republicans, is that we need to stay in Iraq, no matter the cost, until the job is finished -- but don't worry, it's not a big deal and we can totally keep this up for decades without impacting the American way of life whatsoever (to say nothing for our image around the world). On the Democratic side, the option presented is that we must withdraw from the country immediately because the situation is completely untenable and it will never be won no matter what, and it's only getting worse and worse, and our leaving isn't going to do anything to make it worse than it is already.
Now, while my opinion is closer to that of the Democrats than the Republicans, both are gross simplifications of the issue -- the truth of the matter is that it is probably possible to stabilize Iraq eventually, if we're willing to put the effort in to do it. The problem is, it isn't going to happen with things as they are now. It's not going to happen with 150,000 troops, and it's not going to be over in a few years. Chances are it will take a draft to get the number of people we need to put in the country, as well as a substantial shift in military funding from gee-whiz tech gadgets that get manufactured in Congressional districts to equipping, training, and paying soldiers much better than they are now. It won't be cheap and there will probably be a lot more body bags landing in Dover before it's over.
If the Democrats (or the Republicans) came out and laid out the facts, said it was possible but it was going to cost us dearly, and that stabilizing Iraq was going to require the same kind of commitment that the United States had to endure in order to win World War 2, that pulling out now would have long-term and possibly rather bad consequences for the Middle East as a whole, and that Americans needed to decide which of the two crappy possibilities they wanted to accept, they would have a nearly unassailable position. The problem is that half-assing it like we are now isn't going to accomplish anything but waste a ton of money and piss off the Iraqis, while not actually contributing the stability of the country or the region. The problem is that that isn't a position that can be articulated in a 15 second sound bite and it requires the voting public to make a difficult decision with no easy, good answers.
Sadly, that doesn't appear to be what anyone wants to hear.
As you might imagine from a group of people who are, for the most part, ex-military or current military, the political slant of most people on that list is fairly conservative; there might be a few people more towards the center, but there's no one really on the far left, for the most part (and neither am I, really). However, that puts me in a bit of an odd place; I'm by no means the most "liberal" (in the current sense of the word) person ever, but I generally tend to be very socially liberal and I've not really been a fan of the Iraq War, as previous blog entries will show. That's not generally the prevailing opinion on the NSDM list (there are folks there that can find some virtue in Fox News, at the very least, which I would be hard pressed to do).
In contrast, in my daily life, most of the people I deal with on a regular basis are completely the opposite -- generally very center-of-the-aisle or left-leaning, though I'd hesitate to call any of them "liberal" in the Nancy Pelosi sense. Most of them have similar political views to myself, so it's a very different environment from an NSDM event or the mailing list there. Today brought up an interesting example of this, when someone sent a story to the list about John Murtha saying that Bush's "surge" was working, and indicated that it could end up being bad news for the Democrats, opening up a chink in their armor; the same person sent along the story about the Democrat-aligned questioners at the CNN/YouTube Republican debate.
Now, on the topic of the CNN debate thing, I suspect that's a lot more CNN being irresponsible and/or incompetent, not malicious. I'm less inclined to believe that about Fox News with their mysterious "mislabeling" of disgraced Republicans as Democrats and other journalistic problems, but I admit that's at least partly because I think most of the talking heads on Fox News are idiots; perhaps that's a bit contradictory. I certainly don't think it was anything on the scale of Karl Rove blaming the Iraq War on the Democrats. That said, I think CNN should have at least spent a little effort to make sure they weren't letting the Democrats stick their people in the Republican debate like that. On the other hand, I would much rather have candidates answer questions they aren't prepared for or that make them uncomfortable -- whether they are Republican, Democrat, or any other party -- than hearing them answer rehearsed pablum that tells you nothing other than that they love babies and hate criminals. It's a lot harder to say you think atheists cannot be patriots or citizens or that gays will ruin the military when someone who fits the exact description is sitting there asking you about it. I do think that CNN should have at least told these questioners to disclose their ties with Democratic campaigns, even if they let them ask the questions (which frankly is not really a problem, I think -- it would have been interesting to see it in reverse that the Democratic debate).
As far as the Iraq war, my feeling is that right now, we have two options being presented, and both are idiotic. The first, from the Republicans, is that we need to stay in Iraq, no matter the cost, until the job is finished -- but don't worry, it's not a big deal and we can totally keep this up for decades without impacting the American way of life whatsoever (to say nothing for our image around the world). On the Democratic side, the option presented is that we must withdraw from the country immediately because the situation is completely untenable and it will never be won no matter what, and it's only getting worse and worse, and our leaving isn't going to do anything to make it worse than it is already.
Now, while my opinion is closer to that of the Democrats than the Republicans, both are gross simplifications of the issue -- the truth of the matter is that it is probably possible to stabilize Iraq eventually, if we're willing to put the effort in to do it. The problem is, it isn't going to happen with things as they are now. It's not going to happen with 150,000 troops, and it's not going to be over in a few years. Chances are it will take a draft to get the number of people we need to put in the country, as well as a substantial shift in military funding from gee-whiz tech gadgets that get manufactured in Congressional districts to equipping, training, and paying soldiers much better than they are now. It won't be cheap and there will probably be a lot more body bags landing in Dover before it's over.
If the Democrats (or the Republicans) came out and laid out the facts, said it was possible but it was going to cost us dearly, and that stabilizing Iraq was going to require the same kind of commitment that the United States had to endure in order to win World War 2, that pulling out now would have long-term and possibly rather bad consequences for the Middle East as a whole, and that Americans needed to decide which of the two crappy possibilities they wanted to accept, they would have a nearly unassailable position. The problem is that half-assing it like we are now isn't going to accomplish anything but waste a ton of money and piss off the Iraqis, while not actually contributing the stability of the country or the region. The problem is that that isn't a position that can be articulated in a 15 second sound bite and it requires the voting public to make a difficult decision with no easy, good answers.
Sadly, that doesn't appear to be what anyone wants to hear.
This weekend I went up to Ashland, OH to help run a game of NSDM being sponsored by the university there. I had a good time and it was an interesting experience for sure, being the first time I've actually really spent much time in Ohio and also the first time I've helped out with an NSDM event outside of GenCon. Aside from having a good time though, I felt pretty good about being asked to help out in the first place, especially since I have only really been involved with NSDM in any real capacity for a couple years.
My iPod has decided to die on me, so I was listening to the radio on the drive over there, and I have to say that going to Ohio is a bit of a change from Champaign. Radio-wise, when you're looking for something to listen to that is like what you usually listen to back home, you run into a lot of stuff on the way that is...unusual. I don't think I've ever heard quite as many Christian music/talk stations before as I heard on the trip through west Indiana and Ohio, and the conservative bias even on the commercial music stations (one of which was evidently having Ann Coulter as a guest on their morning show in the upcoming week, which I would find hard to fathom here in Champaign) was pretty weird. In terms of terrain, I didn't realize Ohio was as hilly as it was either; I got to experience the lovely weightless queasiness of cresting a steep hill for the first time in quite a while. I also discovered that Columbus is a lot bigger than I thought it was; I thought it was maybe twice as big as Champaign or Springfield, but I think it's probably a lot closer to Indianapolis or St. Louis than either of those.
As far as the NSDM game went, we had originally planned to run three cells, the US, the PRC, and Iran. However, we had a few less players than anticipated and ended up only running the US and Iran. Even so, it was still a good game, with a lot of stuff happening (too much at times, it seemed to some of us), helped out largely by the new US cell design Ed Rollins came up with. The old cell used mostly members of the executive branch and actually marginalized the role of Congress as much as possible, mostly because getting anything passed was gigantic hassle, and it was hard to have enough people to adequately staff Congress. The new cell made most of the cell members of the legislature (and didn't bother splitting it into House and Senate), and allowed them to adjust various parts of the budget rather than force endless hashing out of the budget between Congress and the president (I think -- I admit that I missed the explanation of the cell, so I wasn't clear on all the details). The end result was that the budget didn't take up nearly as much time as it used to, which gave the US players a lot more time to actually work on legislation and getting things done.
And get things done they did. The US cell got to learn the hard way that social change can't happen overnight. The first things the US Congress decided to make the center of its social policies (reflecting, I suspect, the conservative leanings of Ashland University's student body) were outlawing affirmative action in all its forms, locking down the borders and banning all immigration, and cutting corporate taxes by a third. Of course, they didn't seem to have anticipated the uproar this caused with minorities and unions -- it didn't take long before there were marches and strikes all over the country. Riots broke out not long after as racial tensions continued to rise without abate (leading to the quote that heads this entry), and then when they finally got them under control (mostly by repealing or relaxing the legislation in the first place), they had to deal with the backlash from the far right, including white supremacists. All in all, a nice mess, and that was just their domestic policies....
Meanwhile, in Iran, we had an 8 year old who was the Hizbollah player (and for a very brief time, the president of Iran) who was getting just a little too excited about blowing things up and causing trouble for everyone else, radical students/professors who started a worldwide smallpox epidemic when their personal biological warfare program blew up in their face, Iranian business and industry that managed to basically do whatever they want (including sell a good deal of oil to the US, somehow), and a nuclear program that was destroyed by a US-sponsored Israeli attack that they couldn't really respond to because a good deal of the population was in the throes of the aforementioned smallpox outbreak. At the end of the game, the theocrats were pushing to invade Iraq (which the US was trying to abandon as quickly as possible, while defunding the military's strategic transport and naval budgets) when the army and most of the rest of the country decided they had had about enough of them and seized power.
It was a good game, probably on par with the average GenCon one, though i am really getting less and less fond of the closed-door policy in many of the more repressive cells. Iran had its door closed for most of the game, which really hurt information flow -- it took them almost half an hour to realize that members of their diplomatic staff had been detained by the US government for espionage activities, and it took them way longer than it should have for them to respond to the smallpox outbreak because they weren't talking to anyone outside the country. Having played in a North Korean cell during GenCon, which is probably the most closed of the closed society cells, I can say that you really do miss out on a lot. For me as a player, most of the game is interacting with the other players, and when you are stuck dealing with only a relatively tiny number of people (especially when, as when I played as part of North Korea, it is a shark tank with everyone angling to off the rest of the cell), the game experience suffers. I hope that we can come up with a better mechanic to represent that, instead of just locking out an entire cell.
I am definitely looking forward to playing or facilitating again soon; it's a shame that I don't think I can make it to Fall In or Cold Wars. I'm going to try to make it to Origins and GenCon (again) next year, but that all depends on ye olde financial situation, which is a bit up in the air these days. Still, seeing as how there's at least 2-3 NSDM staffers that live in Columbus, Origins might not be out of the question even on a tight budget. After seeing how things went this weekend, I'm definitely curious how an Origins game is different from a GenCon one.
My iPod has decided to die on me, so I was listening to the radio on the drive over there, and I have to say that going to Ohio is a bit of a change from Champaign. Radio-wise, when you're looking for something to listen to that is like what you usually listen to back home, you run into a lot of stuff on the way that is...unusual. I don't think I've ever heard quite as many Christian music/talk stations before as I heard on the trip through west Indiana and Ohio, and the conservative bias even on the commercial music stations (one of which was evidently having Ann Coulter as a guest on their morning show in the upcoming week, which I would find hard to fathom here in Champaign) was pretty weird. In terms of terrain, I didn't realize Ohio was as hilly as it was either; I got to experience the lovely weightless queasiness of cresting a steep hill for the first time in quite a while. I also discovered that Columbus is a lot bigger than I thought it was; I thought it was maybe twice as big as Champaign or Springfield, but I think it's probably a lot closer to Indianapolis or St. Louis than either of those.
As far as the NSDM game went, we had originally planned to run three cells, the US, the PRC, and Iran. However, we had a few less players than anticipated and ended up only running the US and Iran. Even so, it was still a good game, with a lot of stuff happening (too much at times, it seemed to some of us), helped out largely by the new US cell design Ed Rollins came up with. The old cell used mostly members of the executive branch and actually marginalized the role of Congress as much as possible, mostly because getting anything passed was gigantic hassle, and it was hard to have enough people to adequately staff Congress. The new cell made most of the cell members of the legislature (and didn't bother splitting it into House and Senate), and allowed them to adjust various parts of the budget rather than force endless hashing out of the budget between Congress and the president (I think -- I admit that I missed the explanation of the cell, so I wasn't clear on all the details). The end result was that the budget didn't take up nearly as much time as it used to, which gave the US players a lot more time to actually work on legislation and getting things done.
And get things done they did. The US cell got to learn the hard way that social change can't happen overnight. The first things the US Congress decided to make the center of its social policies (reflecting, I suspect, the conservative leanings of Ashland University's student body) were outlawing affirmative action in all its forms, locking down the borders and banning all immigration, and cutting corporate taxes by a third. Of course, they didn't seem to have anticipated the uproar this caused with minorities and unions -- it didn't take long before there were marches and strikes all over the country. Riots broke out not long after as racial tensions continued to rise without abate (leading to the quote that heads this entry), and then when they finally got them under control (mostly by repealing or relaxing the legislation in the first place), they had to deal with the backlash from the far right, including white supremacists. All in all, a nice mess, and that was just their domestic policies....
Meanwhile, in Iran, we had an 8 year old who was the Hizbollah player (and for a very brief time, the president of Iran) who was getting just a little too excited about blowing things up and causing trouble for everyone else, radical students/professors who started a worldwide smallpox epidemic when their personal biological warfare program blew up in their face, Iranian business and industry that managed to basically do whatever they want (including sell a good deal of oil to the US, somehow), and a nuclear program that was destroyed by a US-sponsored Israeli attack that they couldn't really respond to because a good deal of the population was in the throes of the aforementioned smallpox outbreak. At the end of the game, the theocrats were pushing to invade Iraq (which the US was trying to abandon as quickly as possible, while defunding the military's strategic transport and naval budgets) when the army and most of the rest of the country decided they had had about enough of them and seized power.
It was a good game, probably on par with the average GenCon one, though i am really getting less and less fond of the closed-door policy in many of the more repressive cells. Iran had its door closed for most of the game, which really hurt information flow -- it took them almost half an hour to realize that members of their diplomatic staff had been detained by the US government for espionage activities, and it took them way longer than it should have for them to respond to the smallpox outbreak because they weren't talking to anyone outside the country. Having played in a North Korean cell during GenCon, which is probably the most closed of the closed society cells, I can say that you really do miss out on a lot. For me as a player, most of the game is interacting with the other players, and when you are stuck dealing with only a relatively tiny number of people (especially when, as when I played as part of North Korea, it is a shark tank with everyone angling to off the rest of the cell), the game experience suffers. I hope that we can come up with a better mechanic to represent that, instead of just locking out an entire cell.
I am definitely looking forward to playing or facilitating again soon; it's a shame that I don't think I can make it to Fall In or Cold Wars. I'm going to try to make it to Origins and GenCon (again) next year, but that all depends on ye olde financial situation, which is a bit up in the air these days. Still, seeing as how there's at least 2-3 NSDM staffers that live in Columbus, Origins might not be out of the question even on a tight budget. After seeing how things went this weekend, I'm definitely curious how an Origins game is different from a GenCon one.
So it's about that time when I need to actually polish up my resume again so I don't totally forget what I've done since the last time I've done it, and I came to the realization that I think a ton of the things I've learned and done over the last year that would help me in an interview aren't related to my actual job at all. The only problem is, I don't think putting any of them on my resume would exactly be a smart move.
Over the last 20 months, I've helped to rejuvenate my corporation on Eve and take it from having twenty or so members, loosely affiliated and without a real cohesive strategy, to where we're now a corporation of 50 or so well-motivated people able to work well together, fight against corporations and alliances much larger and much better funded than ourselves, with a profile that makes us one of the better known small corps in the game. During most of that time, I've been the person in charge of recruitment and publicity, and I've had a fairly large role in shaping our corporate policy. The only problem is, I don't think putting that on my resume is such a good idea, at least for most jobs. Maybe if I was applying for a job at CCP, but I don't think I'm doing that real soon.
Being involved in NSDM, even in the peripheral way I have been so far -- let's face it, even among players have a long way to go before I'm a standout -- has helped too. Facilitating the few times I have and going out afterwards and taking part in the discussion with Dan, Mark, and everyone else about what went right, what went wrong, and how it could be better has really given me a lot of insight into how you can manage activities like that with that many people and how changes in the game can affect how it is played. Admittedly, NSDM could probably go in my resume if I was more deeply involved, but I definitely don't feel like I do enough with it to actually put it on there -- but it has been something that has really changed how I see things like group dynamics.
The worst part is, those are the sorts of things I find interesting, considerably more than the system administration I do on a daily basis, but when you look at my resume, you'd never know it. Even in my job here, what I like is taking various pieces and fitting them together, trying to find the best way to meet the needs of the service managers I support (without sacrificing the integrity of our infrastructure and procedure). It's not so much how cool a new technology is for its own sake, but how that can be used with other things or in new ways. Unfortunately, I think that whole process is hard to sum up and describe in a good way in a cover letter, and it's really hard to get that across in a resume.
Some days, I wish I was a lot more of a techie, because it's easy to put a list of the 10 languages you know on a resume and then impress people with how knowledgeable you are or how complex the programs are you wrote. It's not so easy to demonstrate understanding of "soft" topics, especially when you don't really deal with them on a daily basis in your current position -- and you will have a hard time getting a job in that kind of a field when you don't have any experience in it. The worst part is that you can hardly blame someone for hiring someone with 5 years of proven experience and a professional track record over someone with no obvious skill in the area.
I've resolved not to get upset about this anymore though. If I keep working on the things I like, eventually I'll be able to parlay that into aspects of any job I have, even this one. More experience and knowledge is never a bad thing. And if I can have a good time collecting it, so much the better.
Over the last 20 months, I've helped to rejuvenate my corporation on Eve and take it from having twenty or so members, loosely affiliated and without a real cohesive strategy, to where we're now a corporation of 50 or so well-motivated people able to work well together, fight against corporations and alliances much larger and much better funded than ourselves, with a profile that makes us one of the better known small corps in the game. During most of that time, I've been the person in charge of recruitment and publicity, and I've had a fairly large role in shaping our corporate policy. The only problem is, I don't think putting that on my resume is such a good idea, at least for most jobs. Maybe if I was applying for a job at CCP, but I don't think I'm doing that real soon.
Being involved in NSDM, even in the peripheral way I have been so far -- let's face it, even among players have a long way to go before I'm a standout -- has helped too. Facilitating the few times I have and going out afterwards and taking part in the discussion with Dan, Mark, and everyone else about what went right, what went wrong, and how it could be better has really given me a lot of insight into how you can manage activities like that with that many people and how changes in the game can affect how it is played. Admittedly, NSDM could probably go in my resume if I was more deeply involved, but I definitely don't feel like I do enough with it to actually put it on there -- but it has been something that has really changed how I see things like group dynamics.
The worst part is, those are the sorts of things I find interesting, considerably more than the system administration I do on a daily basis, but when you look at my resume, you'd never know it. Even in my job here, what I like is taking various pieces and fitting them together, trying to find the best way to meet the needs of the service managers I support (without sacrificing the integrity of our infrastructure and procedure). It's not so much how cool a new technology is for its own sake, but how that can be used with other things or in new ways. Unfortunately, I think that whole process is hard to sum up and describe in a good way in a cover letter, and it's really hard to get that across in a resume.
Some days, I wish I was a lot more of a techie, because it's easy to put a list of the 10 languages you know on a resume and then impress people with how knowledgeable you are or how complex the programs are you wrote. It's not so easy to demonstrate understanding of "soft" topics, especially when you don't really deal with them on a daily basis in your current position -- and you will have a hard time getting a job in that kind of a field when you don't have any experience in it. The worst part is that you can hardly blame someone for hiring someone with 5 years of proven experience and a professional track record over someone with no obvious skill in the area.
I've resolved not to get upset about this anymore though. If I keep working on the things I like, eventually I'll be able to parlay that into aspects of any job I have, even this one. More experience and knowledge is never a bad thing. And if I can have a good time collecting it, so much the better.
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