Entries Tagged 'Guide to World Domination' ↓

In some religion (or possibly a court resolution from the Industrial Revolution), it says that you should have 8 hours of sleep, 8 hours of work, and 8 hours of play each day to live a perfectly balanced life.

I’ve always scoffed at this interpretation of reality, possibly because my belief structure has always been more like “worketh your butt off and ye shall be rewarded with social happiness, financial security, and lots of Apple products.”

I’ve always had problems setting limits at my job, working nights to please and killing myself over small issues to make sure they came out right for the company. When I was a mortgage processor, I’d go over hundreds of pages of potential liens for each refinance line by line, trying to track down any potential threat before we issued title insurance papers (which, by the way, included an affidavit saying that we weren’t responsible for said liens in the case that we missed one). I once freaked out that a food order for a staff-appreciation lunch wasn’t going to be 100% perfect at a job that paid me $8/hr to count change. Over and over, I’d drive myself to extremes that were great for getting me recognized and promoted, but in the grand scheme of things, were pretty pointless.

It took the following to change my definition of professional success:

• 14 years in various workplaces
• having a child
• honestly examining the best case scenario of where my career was heading 10 years down the line

I still agree with the 8 hours of work thing, because I always need to have a problem to solve and a next step to plan in order for my brain to be happy. But, I’m learning to set limits, and am grateful that my various bosses respect them.

Instead of automatically saying YES YES YES I WILL DO ANYTHING (that is not morally repellant), I try to work hard every second when I’m on the clock, and to not answer my work email when I’m not. It’s hard not to check in, especially with all those apple products around, but it’s an infinitely better life.

A big motivator is that I’m trying to share the playtime with Maddox whenever possible. After a few months of taking Maddox out of daycare on random days to see how much free time I have with this new work schedule, we’re decreasing his days at daycare from 5 (full week) to 3 1/2.

Since it’s been summer, he and I have been doing a lot of playgrounds and walks, which mostly consist of him stuffing things down sewer grates while I listen to the latest “stuff you missed in history” podcasts in one ear, both of us exclaiming over sticks and fire hydrants (by the way, good job, city planners of Newburyport, there are a TON of hydrants in my neighborhood).

With an early-to-rise 2 year old and an addiction to late-night reading, the 8 hours of sleep thing is just never going to happen, but that, my friends, is why they invented Keurig machines.

I’ve been playing Tropico again.

For those of you who may not remember, Tropico is like SimCity, except you’re on an island and you are not a paltry mayor, you are El Presidente, so everyone must bow to your omniscient view from the sky. You also start the game with a palace.

First off, Jon figured out how I could play the game in Parallels on my MacBook. My mac is all for world domination, but sometimes the island music gets to it, so it prefers not to run Tropico directly.

Then, I opened up the game, set up my dossier to scale things towards total success in farming (I NEED my goat farms) and began my regime.

59 years into it, I was voted off the island.

See, generally you get a nice note every decade or so, reminding you to hold a free election. I must have picked a dossier that turned this feature off, or else the game has changed and you no longer get these reminders.

Apparently, not holding elections for 59 years has a slightly negative impact on your people’s feeling of liberty.

I figure, it’s good to find these things out in a virtual setting, before actually trying it on, say, France, and losing all the time and resources it took to conquer.

So, tonight I started a new island, this one concentrating on mining and building churches. (You have to build a lot of churches, or people get angry.)

I had another one going, but it was based on tourism, and all the tourist avatars are so fat and sassy that you just want to encourage the natives to eat them.

Unfortunately, there is no “Eat the Tourists” edict. Also, while that would probably raise your local population’s food-related happiness, it might strain your relationships with the US and Russia.

In any case, if you’ve never tried this game, I recommend it. Everyone should get the experience of watching teeny virtual papaya plants grow, and also the sheer awesomeness of building 10 construction offices and watching 50 little workers go to town on your apartment complex.

More on the new version of Tropico here.

Image credit: tropico and goat, cathedral & tourists.

When it comes to console games, I’m a Viva Pinata kind of girl. I like fluffy bunnies and love-struck squirrels and building houses. If I’m looking for a more hardcore game, I’ll play a driving game and run repeatedly into road dividers.

But I’m just not into shooting games. Or games where you hide in a warehouse and a swarm of zombies comes after you and you have to fend them off with your limited ammunition and defective shotgun.

I can handle key bindings for PC games, and it’s easy to aim with a mouse. You just float over what you’re going after and right click. But X Box controllers are beyond me. It is counter-intuitive to me to walk and aim with the left side of my body and look and shoot with the right.

Needless to say, when Jon suggested that we try out Resident Evil, I refused, until bribed by ice cream.

I got beat down by an angry man with a very large axe and more needles stuck in him than a homicidal acupuncturist’s victim. Apparently in Resident Evil, once you’re out of bullets, you can only kick once or twice. Maybe your legs get tired, I don’t know.

Anyway, after a bunch of zombies ripped our organs out, Jon tactfully suggested that when we are selecting our future career goals, we don’t include Expert Zombie Fighting Team. I am inclined to agree with him.

So, if a zombie-infested apocalypse ever comes, be prepared. Have a bunker ready, and a team of assassins (protection) and farmers (you have to eat something) on hand. Not even world dominators can handle every situation personally. When faced with mobs of undead, it’s okay to delegate.

Image credit: Axeman and Viva Pinata

How to Pacify the Masses

A surefire method that works every time.

Step 1: Order 30 burritos.

Step 2: Lay them out on a table.

Step 3: Yell FREE FOOD at the top of your lungs.

Step 4: Wait until a crowd gathers and people start stuffing themselves.

Step 5: Provide couches and lemonade. Repeat as often as necessary. Vary food type for optimal results.

Yes, Virginia, there is such thing as an invisibility cloak. Or a Klingon cloaking device. Check this article out.

Thank you, Reddit, for highlighting this article.

Image credit: Lolcats cloaking device

More articles: Discovery & National Geographic

And Introducing…

Welcome to Tropico, a fantastic world domination game developed by PopTop Software in 2001. This game is not for the faint of heart. You are an evil ruler of a resource-rich island and you are determined to wring it for its last drop of profit.

Alternatively, you can just choose to build a lot of goat farms.

What’s Tropico About?

Basically, you choose a dossier of character traits, each with benefits and drawbacks. I like to be a religious zealot, because “zealot” is one of those words that is just not used enough in conversational American English these days. I also like to have a lot of money, so I generally choose a few financially productive character quirks.

So, you travel to your island, turn off the stupid cloud effects, and start building mines and houses and pineapple farms. There’s a lot of strategy written about this game (which elevation to plant specific crops, how you can keep your population happy) but it’s a lot more fun to just behave in a dictatorial fashion and increase your troops whenever there’s unrest.

Why Should You Play?

1. The announcer calls you “El Presidente” every time he speaks to you, with a straight face.
2. The music is great – that “wepa wepa wepa” moves the soul.
3. You get the cathartic experience of assassinating your enemies.
4. You really can have a goat farm.
5. The joy of expansion. When 15 construction workers are banging away on the roof of your apartment building, you know pure happiness.
6. In this world, government funds can actually go directly towards public education.
7. You can indulge your voyeuristic tendencies and click on people to know what they’re thinking. True, the thoughts are generally pretty boring, but telepathy is just fun on principle.

What’s Next, El Presidente?

While Tropico doesn’t offer the immersion of a MMORPG like World of Warcraft, or the shiny happy imaginary animals of new console games like Viva Pinata 2, it’s still highly entertaining, and a buzz for anyone seeking the experience of world domination without consequences.

So: If given complete power over a small nation, what would you do first?

From the very first Daria episode:

“Mr. DeMartino – Daria, can you concisely and unemotionally sum up for us the Doctrine of Manifest Destiny.

Daria – Manifest Destiny was a popular slogan in the 1840s. It was used by people who claimed it was God’s will for the U.S. to expand all the way to the Pacific Ocean. These people did not include many Mexicans.”

Oh, Daria, I wish you were my friend.

I remember learning about Manifest Destiny in school. Our history books were somewhat selective – for example, in the course of the Miseducation of Leanne Heller, the 50s-70s were a peaceful time, when everyone got along. Before that, we had the feudal system, which everyone liked, especially the serfs.

So, you can imagine how Manifest Destiny was described, embraced, and applauded.

I don’t have a problem with world conquering. (Obviously.) But I don’t understand the need to refer to your actions as Divine Mandates.

One reason might be to sway the masses to do your bidding and like it. Silly, I know. I can’t possibly think of a country where the strict religious beliefs of one political party has prevented voters from reasonably and fairly assessing the competency of its candidates.

Anyway, there’s a fantastic book about this called Rebels of the Heavenly Kingdom. Essentially, it’s the story of animal farm, but with people, and on a slightly larger land mass (i.e. China):

Summary: A rebel group is determined to overthrow the corrupt government, their leaders get used to power & become corrupt themselves, and they proceed to use religion and false divinity to control their population.

Aside from this reason, I can’t see claiming it was my God-inspired destiny to do anything in particular. I believe in the possibility of spirits and prophets. It’s when the other kind of profits get involved that I start to question things.

Using God to justify plundering the wealth of others is uncalled for. If you’re jerk enough to take it, and you have the power to just take it, you should be big enough to say, “Hey, I’m a jerk, and I think I’ll take that.” Sure, you won’t be very popular with the conquered and the righteous, but who is? Plus you’ll have a lot of stuff.

Probably a lot of SHINY stuff.

Anyway, prove me wrong. Have you ever felt divinely inspired to do something? If so, what’s your crusade? How will you handle it if your crusade clashes with another person’s jihad?

And to end it with a conquering spirit, Rock On, Viking Kittens:

More on Daria

More on Rebels of the Heavenly Kingdom