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Many years ago, I worked a Dominick's, a large chain of supermarkets here in Illinois. While I was there, we got bought out by Safeway, which I had never heard of but apparently is a dominant force in groceries across most of the rest of the country.You can see they're keeping their hand in the pot, too. Take a look at the two pages I linked up there, and you'll notice a number of similarities. As part of the buyout, all us employees were required to attend a meeting in the second floor stock room of a different Dominick's. I don't know why we had to go to a different Dominick's, as everyone there was from my store. For that matter, I don't know why their stock room was on the second floor.

The meeting, as anyone with any familiarity at all with corporate America can guess, was basically a big old bluster-fest designed to tell us how things were going to be run now that Safeway was in charge. I'm pretty sure I signed a non-disclosure agreement or something, so I can't really say much more, except that the buzzword for this program was "superior customer service." That and it was basically four hours of us being told how to comport ourselves in public, something every one of us presumably had learned how to do at the age of about 6. It involved watching a lot of stupid videos that I think were made by the same yahoos who made the videos I had to sit through in Grade School. They certainly weren't treating me as if I were any older or more sophisticated. That and every one of the videos said pretty much the exact same thing as all the others.

As a side-note, one of the women from my store had a minor emotional breakdown about halfway through the meeting. She had to be led away, and I recall her saying between the tears "It's too much to remember!" While it would please me greatly to say that the woman had simply rebelled against the doldrums of corporate drone-hood, I have to be honest and say she just wasn't a stable person. She was generally on the verge of tears even at the best of times.

The thing I remember clearest about this meeting was that, among the suits from Safeway deigning to breathe the same air-conditioning and dust as us (seriously, why is it always dusty in stock rooms? There's damn near constant motion in those things), was our store manager at the time. He informed us that earlier that week, he'd attended a meeting much like this one (though I imagine in cheerier surroundings), being told about the new policies and whatnot we would be working under. He told us that he "walked away from that meeting feeling very excited."

It was the first time I'd heard that particular word in a business setting, but it sure as hell wasn't the last. I think the main reason I remember it was that it sounded so alien coming from this guy. While he wasn't exactly the Boss From Hell, I just couldn't see him being excited about anything. He was the kind of guy whose emotional scale, if you'll forgive the musical pun, was barely an octave. I'd seen him mildly upset, vaguely disappointed, putting on a fake smile for the customers, acting warm and friendly in a rather distant manner with the employees, and sternly disciplinarian. In all but the faux happiness, his facial expression was generally of one suffering from mild but uncomfortable constipation. No matter how I stretched my imagination, I couldn't see him getting excited over anything, save a laxative.

Fast forward several years, to my office job at SecurityLink from Ameritech. I had gone from pushing carts to pushing buttons. I was pleased with the change, and it should tell you something about working as a bagger at a grocery store that I considered the move to cubicles, grey-on-drab color schemes, and its ilk an improvement.

I had been working there for not quite a year when a bunch of changes took place. From what water cooler gossip told me, Ameritech, which was in the process of being bought out by SBC, had to get rid of its security company (that being the part I worked for) because of some anti-trust law or something. So we get bought out by this mom-and-pop security company called Cambridge. That lasted about a week, before Cambridge got bought out by ADT. I've always had the sneaking suspicion that Cambridge bought SecurityLink to sweeten the deal with ADT. Especially as from what I could tell, Cambridge spent pretty much all the money they had in buying us. At least, that was the excuse they gave when raise time rolled around and we all got royally screwed. I'm not kidding, either. My boss explained to me that the average raise that year was $.08 an hour. I explained to him that it would have been less insulting to get no raise.

So after working for Ameritech for almost a year, then SBC for almost a week, I worked for Cambridge Security for about a month before the merger with ADT was complete. And soon after that, ADT got bought out by Tyco. For those keeping score at home, in the course of a month, I worked for five different companies, while keeping the same actual job. Maybe that's pretty normal for corporations in a world of constant mergers, buy-outs, bankruptcies, and other uncertainties, but it was all new to me, and it all happened pre-9/11, when our economy was supposed to be going strong.

One thing with all the paperwork I was getting welcoming me to the new company of the week: I became very familiar with corporate buzzwords. I could have hosted party games where someone had to drink every time some permutation of the word "excited" appeared in a memo, but I didn't want anyone dying of alcohol poisoning.

People like to throw around the word "soulless," but I hesitate to apply it here. It seems to me that it's more like blind dogged follow-the-leader antics. If that's the same thing to you as soulless, so be it. What seems to happen is, some guy makes millions (or billions, if millions are no longer the gold standard) climbing the corporate ladder, and then he publishes a book chronicling his achievements. Others in similar positions (or who want to get there) read the book, and decide that rather than it being that one guy's personal success story, it's some kind of alchemical formula that, if followed exactly and perfectly, will lead to the exact same success in everyone else who attempts it. So you've got hundreds or thousands of corporate drones fly fishing in the Andes while only wearing boxer-briefs because that's what the CEO of Megacorp does.

The ironic thing is, you've got all these people aping the actions of a man who made himself famous for not doing what everyone else around him was doing. All they're really accomplishing is setting up a staircase for the next outside-the-box thinker in the right place at the right time to ascend. In a way, it's Social Darwinism at it's very finest. And you have to wonder how much of that guy's personal fortune are due to royalties from the book on how he became a success?

-Long Days and Pleasant Nights

Musings on Music

Bad jokes aside, I never understood people who, when asked what kind of music they enjoy, respond "I listen to everything." I guess it's a good throwaway answer if you're just having small talk, but there are circumstances when I actually want to know what they listen to. The worst part is that most people who say that seem to actually believe it to be true. At least, until they hear the kind of stuff I listen to.

I think a lot of the blame falls on most people having a very narrow definition of what constitutes "everything." At least half of what they hear is music made in this country, and even then only in genres popular in whatever area they live in. It reminds me of that joke from The Blues Brothers. Elwood asks a woman at a bar they're about play at "What kind of music do you usually have here?" She responds "Oh, we got both kinds. We got country and western." It's funny cuz it's true.

I've got a few different genres of music I listen to regularly. On my phone, I've got groups such as Metallica, David Bowie, Michael Tolcher, Iron Maiden, Phil Collins, Beck, and The Scorpions. There's even a two-disk compilation of Trance music on there. A bit eclectic, perhaps, but I note that almost all of it falls under Rock or Metal. And that's hardly everything.

I don't know, maybe I'm being pedantic. But it just bugs me sometimes, this "I listen to everything" stuff. Perhaps if we actually did give "everything" a shot, we'd broaden our horizons. Or perhaps not. No matter how much we deny it, we're comfortable with what's familiar, and we don't like change. Even the most left-leaning open-minded person will balk at anything that goes against what he or she is used to. It's just how we are. I'm probably no different, even though I'd like to think I am. Does that make me a hypocrite? I hope not.

Deus Ex

There's a sort of unofficial slogan for the game Deus Ex: When it's mentioned, someone will reinstall it. It was created by Ion Storm, a division of Eidos noted for games that became cult classics. It was released in 2000, followed by a watered down version for the PS 2 a couple years later. Your average gamer has either never heard of it, or considers it one of the finest games ever made. There's very little middle ground. It's one of those games that people like to pick up and replay every couple years. So what is it that has made it such an enduring game?

Deus Ex is a first-person shooter with role-playing overtones (it was described when it came out as "the first person RPG"). takes place sometime in the 2050s. The exact date is never really pinned down in the game. The world is your classic Twenty Minutes Into The Future cyberpunk dystopia; urban decay, eroded values, a populace made shiftless with ennui, mega-corporations, and corrupt governments. On top of that, a mysterious plague known as the Gray Death is threatening to wipe out humanity, especially the poor. Domestic terrorism has reached new heights, with its main goal being the confiscation of Ambrosia, the only known cure for the Gray Death.

In Deus Ex, the player takes control of JC Denton, a raw recruit in UNATCO (United Nations Anti-Terrorism Coalition). JC is a recipient of nano-augmentation, a radical new technology being tested as a replacement for disfiguring and soul-destroying cybernetics. He is only the second person to have received nano-augmentation, the other being his older brother Paul Denton.

The game starts with JC being transported to Liberty Island in New York (regardless of what New Jersey has to say about it), where UNATCO headquarters  is located. On the dock, he's approached by Paul, who briefs him on a situation developing. It seems that terrorists have stolen a shipment of Ambrosia and are currently holed up in the Statue of Liberty. Or rather, what's left of it. A terrorist attack on the Statue years earlier resulted in the head and arm being blown off, and much like the site of real life terrorist attack, nobody's done much with it since. To the right is a screen shot I took (with an added caption).

Paul advises you that you've been ordered to go and locate the Ambrosia so that UNATCO can reclaim it. Since you only just showed up and aren't carrying anything except some stuff you found lying around on the dock, Paul gives you a choice of three weapons to take with you: a hand crossbow with tranqulizer darts, a sniper rifle, or a rocket launcher.

And right there is one of the neat things about the game. The world is very open-ended, and it allows you to customize your character to your style of play. You can't carry every single item you find in the game, so you've got to choose what you carry with you based on what you consider the most important. If that sounds annoying, don't get too upset. They made it even worse in the sequel. The game has a large variety of weapons to choose from, in all shapes, sizes, and categories, so whether you like sneaking up on a guy and tazing him, shooting him from 300' away, or blowing him to holy hell, there's something in the game for you.

Nano-augmentation also forms a large part of the game's customization. When the game starts, JC only has a couple augmentations: nightvision, and a computer in his brain that allows him to store data, as well as working as a video phone that only he can see and hear. Throughout the game, you find augmentation canisters, each linked to a different part of JC's body. These can be used to gain new abilities. Each canister will give JC a choice of two new abilities: which one you choose depends on your style of play. For instance, the first canister you find will augment JC's musculature. One choice lets JC inflict more damage in melee combat, the other lets him lift heavier objects. Folks who like getting up close and personal in fights will prefer the damage bonus, while those who like exploring the game world will find the lifting bonus more useful.

Also, when building your character, you are given a number of points which you can use to buy and upgrade skills for your character. There's a number of skills, which do a variety of things like determine how well you can pick locks, how accurate you are with different variety of guns, or more esoteric things like how long you can survive breathing toxins. Some guides will probably tell you things like "ignore this skill, it's useless," or "you should really get some points in this," but really, it's all up to you and your style of play. If you feel that having more time to disarm a mine is more important than being able to fire a handgun more accurately, then do it that way.

As I said before, Deus Ex is a very open-ended game. There's no one right way to complete an objective. As a simplistic example, take a situation like the one presented in the screenshot on the right. Regular handguns and rifles are useless against a massive armored robot like the one in the picture. But, there's still a number of options for getting past it. If you have a rocket launcher (and you might not, as they take up a lot of inventory space), you could simply blow it to Kingdom Come. Also, the game has a number of grenades, which can all be mounted on walls and turned into proximity mines. Robots in the game all move in perimeters, so planting one in it's path shouldn't be a problem. Or, if you don't have anything to attack it with, or don't think you'll be coming back that way again, you can just sneak past it. The game even has ways of facilitating that, including an augmentation that turns you invisible, another that makes your footsteps silent (and some NPCs in the game can hear you tiptoeing across shag carpet from the next room), and other items to help you sneak around.

That's one of the things that gives the game the its replay value. The world is so sprawling, and there's so many ways to accomplish your goals, that even if you're careful to explore as much as you can, you probably won't see everything in the game your first time around. Another big thing is that the way you play the game affects the game itself. Nothing huge, the overall plot doesn't change, but people's attitudes toward you, and other small but sometimes significant things, can change depending on something as simple as whether you run into a room guns blazing or sneak in and tranq everyone inside. The main reason I'm replaying the game now is that I had done (or rather, hadn't done) one big thing that I thought was impossible to do, and now I want to see what the game's like having done it different this time. I won't say what it is for folks who haven't played, as it's a pretty big spoiler, but I will drop a hint for those who have played it. What I'm talking about involves Paul in the 'Ton Hotel before you go to Hong Kong.

If the game has any drawbacks, it's that the graphics aren't all that impressive, even for the time it came out. But they're not horrible or distracting, so I see that more as an aesthetic issue than a gameplay issue. Plus, these guys have been working on a patch to improve the graphics of the game. It's not complete (and considering the last update was in 2006, I wouldn't hold my breath on it), but there is a demo version you can download which touches up some stuff here and there. Also, if you pick up a copy of the game, make sure to get the latest patch for it. It was pretty buggy when it first came out. It's actually fairly notorious for its bugs, I've seen pages dedicated to documenting weird bugs in the game. Nothing fatal, I think the worst I ever encountered was a door in one area that kept opening and closing on its own. It was a bit spooky, but that's it. I also found an exploit in the same area where repeating one action kept giving me skill points, but if I did it too much, the game crashed. It's probably been fixed since then, anyhow.

I can see where the saying mentioned in the beginning comes from. I'm having fond memories of the game just talking about it, and I'm playing it at the moment. So, if you play games on your PC, and you like first-person shooters, then Deus Ex is a game you really ought to check out. And if you do, don't be surprised if you find yourself throwing it back on your PC a year or so later. Have fun.

-Long Days and Pleasant Nights

The Lost Fleet

I picked up a new series of books the other day, The Lost Fleet by John Campbell. I have the first three volumes, which I grabbed off Amazon.com since they were cheaper as a set. I was worried at first that I'd bought three books in a set that I might not like, but so far the investment has been sound.

The Lost Fleet is military Sci-Fi, a sub-genre I haven't read much of, with the exception of Robert A. Heinlein's Starship Troopers. There's very little comparison between the two, however. Starship Troopers is as much a political treatise as it is a novel. Thematically, The Lost Fleet is very different.

The back story is this. In some indeterminate point in the future, Commander John Geary is in charge of a small squadron of ships which is ambushed by the Syndicated Worlds. They are greatly outnumbered, and Geary's ship is damaged enough that it can't escape. So he stays behind and orders the rest of his ships to retreat while he holds the Syndics off in a last stand. Just before his ship is destroyed, he gets in his escape pod and puts himself in suspended animation. Unfortunately, his escape pod's distress beacon is damaged, and he floats in space for a century.

He's awoken by a fleet passing through the system and brought on board the flagship. He discovers to his horror that the war that started with the ambush on his ship is still ongoing, and that he was presumed dead and elevated to mythic status. He was given a posthumous promotion, and to every citizen of the Alliance, Captain "Black Jack" Geary is an infallible hero.

**Warning: Minor Spoilers Ahead**

The main theme of the novels, especially in the first book, is the deconstruction of our views of heroes from our past. Nearly everyone Geary meets practically worships the ground he walks on, and are convinced he can do no wrong. The Alliance is a society of ancestor worshipers, compounding Geary's problems. Because he knows he's not infallible, the adoration he receives from others terrifies and sickens him, and he lives in fear of what will happen when the people around him discover he's just as human as the rest of them.

There's also a healthy dose of culture clash, as in the hundred years of war, much has changed, especially in the military. Ships on both sides fight more like savages than an organized unit. The fleet is extremely reluctant to move away from it's bloodthirsty attacks which kill as many of themselves as they do the enemy, and it's an uphill battle to get the fleet to learn to fight again as a cohesive force, even after such tactics prove to be devestatingly effective against an enemy unable to cope with it.

One thing that I found odd: there's no prologue, or flashback, or anything of the like, describing Geary being anbushed and stuck in stasis for a century. It's brought up here and there throughout the books, but that's it. At first, I had worried that I'd accidentally started reading the second or so book in the series, but Dauntless is indeed the first book in the series. I guess the author decided to throw the reader right into the action, rather than go into something anyone would know after reading the first chapter or glancing at the back of the book.

I'm on the third book right now, and they're rather good. The science is pretty hard, with the exception of things like FTL travel and shields, which people have grown to expect in all but the very hardest of Sci-Fi. Much is made in books about the speed of light, and how conducting operations in space can be difficult when it takes minutes or even hours for someone to see what someone else in another part of a star system is doing. To get an idea of what that entails, think about when you watch a reporter on the news interview someone in another part of the world. The reporter asks a question, and there's a noticeable delay of a second or two before the other person responds. That's because even at the speed of light, it takes a second or two to for the signal to get shot into space, bounce off a satellite, and reach the person on the other side. Then, it has to do that all over again to send the reply back to the reporter. By the same token, the sun is about eight light-minutes from Earth. That means, when you look at the sun, you're actually seeing where it was eight minutes ago. Now multiply that by distance by several factors, and you can see how it gets difficult to predict the actions of a ship sitting on the other side of the system from you.

There's six books in the series so far, and after I'm done with the one I'm on, I plan on getting the rest. It's got a good blend of intrigue, action, human interaction, and food-for-thought. The space battles are spiffy, and Campbell manages to make each encounter and situation unique. The series doesn't take itself too seriously, but neither does it make a farce out of itself. The characters, especially John Geary, are complex and very human. He manages to execute what Jayne Cobb called "thrilling heroics" without turning the heroes into a bunch of swashbuckling Mary Sues. They're real, they're flawed, they're sympathetic. You groan when they make a mistake, and you cheer when they're victorious. It's a good read, and it's got me thinking I should look more into the sub-genre of Military Sci-Fi.

-Long Days and Pleasant Nights

New Blog

I have established a new blog, dedicated to tracking my writing career. It is called The Joy Of Writing and can be found at emaxfieldmoen.blogspot.com.

-Long Days and Pleasant Nights