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.

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.

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

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

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?

“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

I am re-posting the article for 3 reasons.

If you have not yet made up your mind, I hope this will encourage you to think about how electing McCain and Palin will affect your life.

If you have made up your mind to vote for McCain and Palin, please read the article to confirm that her beliefs are your beliefs and that, whenever possible, her decisions would be your decisions.

If you have made up your mind to vote for another party, please continue to voice your reasons why. Be fearless but conscious of others’ opinions, passionate but level-headed, and firm in your beliefs but willing to listen.

Enough of my motivations and wishes.

Here is Drill, Drill, Drill by Eve Ensler

American playwright, performer, feminist and activist.

“I am having Sarah Palin nightmares. I dreamt last night that she was a member of a club where they rode snowmobiles and wore the claws of drowned and starved polar bears around their necks. I have a particular thing for Polar Bears. Maybe it’s their snowy whiteness or their bigness or the fact that they live in the arctic or that I have never seen one in person or touched one. Maybe it is the fact that they live so comfortably on ice. Whatever it is, I need the polar bears.

I don’t like raging at women. I am a Feminist and have spent my life trying to build community, help empower women and stop violence against them. It is hard to write about Sarah Palin. This is why the Sarah Palin choice was all the more insidious and cynical. The people who made this choice count on the goodness and solidarity of Feminists.

But everything Sarah Palin believes in and practices is antithetical to Feminism which for me is part of one story — connected to saving the earth, ending racism, empowering women, giving young girls options, opening our minds, deepening tolerance, and ending violence and war.

I believe that the McCain/Palin ticket is one of the most dangerous choices of my lifetime, and should this country chose those candidates the fall-out may be so great, the destruction so vast in so many areas that America may never recover. But what is equally disturbing is the impact that duo would have on the rest of the world. Unfortunately, this is not a joke. In my lifetime I have seen the clownish, the inept, the bizarre be elected to the presidency with regularity.

Sarah Palin does not believe in evolution. I take this as a metaphor. In her world and the world of Fundamentalists nothing changes or gets better or evolves. She does not believe in global warming. The melting of the arctic, the storms that are destroying our cities, the pollution and rise of cancers, are all part of God’s plan. She is fighting to take the polar bears off the endangered species list. The earth, in Palin’s view, is here to be taken and plundered. The wolves and the bears are here to be shot and plundered. The oil is here to be taken and plundered. Iraq is here to be taken and plundered. As she said herself of the Iraqi war, “It was a task from God.”

Sarah Palin does not believe in abortion. She does not believe women who are raped and incested and ripped open against their will should have a right to determine whether they have their rapist’s baby or not.

She obviously does not believe in sex education or birth control. I imagine her daughter was practicing abstinence and we know how many babies that makes.

Sarah Palin does not much believe in thinking. From what I gather she has tried to ban books from the library, has a tendency to dispense with people who think independently. She cannot tolerate an environment of ambiguity and difference. This is a woman who could and might very well be the next president of the United States. She would govern one of the most diverse populations on the earth.

Sarah believes in guns. She has her own custom Austrian hunting rifle. She has been known to kill 40 caribou at a clip. She has shot hundreds of wolves from the air.

Sarah believes in God. That is of course her right, her private right. But when God and Guns come together in the public sector, when war is declared in God’s name, when the rights of women are denied in his name, that is the end of separation of church and state and the undoing of everything America has ever tried to be.

I write to my sisters. I write because I believe we hold this election in our hands. This vote is a vote that will determine the future not just of the U.S., but of the planet. It will determine whether we create policies to save the earth or make it forever uninhabitable for humans. It will determine whether we move towards dialogue and diplomacy in the world or whether we escalate violence through invasion, undermining and attack. It will determine whether we go for oil, strip mining, coal burning or invest our money in alternatives that will free us from dependency and destruction. It will determine if money gets spent on education and healthcare or whether we build more and more methods of killing. It will determine whether America is a free open tolerant society or a closed place of fear, fundamentalism and aggression.

If the Polar Bears don’t move you to go and do everything in your power to get Obama elected then consider the chant that filled the hall after Palin spoke at the RNC, “Drill Drill Drill.” I think of teeth when I think of drills. I think of rape. I think of destruction. I think of domination. I think of military exercises that force mindless repetition, emptying the brain of analysis, doubt, ambiguity or dissent. I think of pain.

Do we want a future of drilling? More holes in the ozone, in the floor of the sea, more holes in our thinking, in the trust between nations and peoples, more holes in the fabric of this precious thing we call life?”

Thank you for your time. Please keep reading – there is so much available to you – and please keep thinking, instead of just accepting.

Another fun article on Sarah Palin.

• It’s decent, especially for a government organization.
• It’s easy to find what you’re looking for.
• It’s current (there’s even an RSS news feed).
• The copy’s accessible and the font is readable.
• There are puzzles on the Kids Page.

The Languages

The CIA offers training in 16 different languages. And they give you “monetary incentives” if you learn them. Wow, pay me to learn a language! Paying for it myself only got me to the subjunctive tense in Spanish and to the point where the French don’t want to kill me when I visit their fair city. Just barely.

It’s Classified

Aliens. UFOs. The real reasons behind the wars. Apocalyptic messages in the Bible. Codes. The minds behind political assassinations.

Seriously, who doesn’t want to know this stuff?

The Salaries

Based on a brief glance through the open positions, the average salary with the CIA seems to be $50,000 to $100,000 a year. So, I know you make more as a hedge fund manager or a consultant. But seriously, as a sign language interpreter?

Whoa, I take that back, sign language interpreters clean up.

Anyway, $100,000 a year sounds nice.

Clandestine Service

Here are the keywords that got my attention in this job description:

• “Clandestine”
• “weapons of mass destruction”
• “elite corps”
• “national security”
• “narcotics”

I want to be part of an elite corps of clandestine spies who traffic in weapons of mass destruction and narcotics with detailed knowledge of national security.

Oh wait, maybe I just want to be in the mafia.

Shooting is a Skill, Not a Crime

So, I didn’t see much about weapons training on the website. This is a shame.

I did find a lovely article about the Iraq War and Biological Weapons (here) and an interesting article about Vietnam (here), which you may read at your leisure.

I Can Use My Major and You Can, Too

Look! Look! They have graphic design/illustration. So, it’s not fine art, but hey, it’s something. Check out yours here.

Apply Now

You can apply to work for the CIA on their website. It can take 2 months to 1 year +, and it involves a background investigation, polygraph, a mental & physical exam, and a test to measure your potential to be coerced.

Although this does not sound like fun (especially the coercion test, which to me reads “TORTURE”), most of these skills are handy if you’re actively pursuing world domination, so I suggest you start now.

Recently, someone sent me a link to howmuchisyoursoulworth.com. We were discussing online quizzes, and he brought this up as an example. He had originally found it on JohnChow.com, and John Chow, I have to hand it to you – thanks for posting about this. And, thanks to the co-worker, who directed me to it.

I love this quiz. I want to seek out the writer behind it, and hire them as a copywriter for my World Domination propaganda pamphlets. And all my World Domination marketing campaign landing pages. You go, Satanically-inspired writers of the world, get your freak on.

I’ll tell you one thing. I set that #($*#) line on fire. And, I wish I could apply that to lines in traffic, too.

In conclusion, I have no idea what a soul dollar is, but I suddenly have a burning desire to know the soul dollar worth of everyone I know.

Take the quiz! Post your worth! Force your friends to doubt (or be impressed by) their self-worth by making them take this, solely for my amusement. It’s fun, and it’s what a good friend would do.