quote:
Originally posted by Myy:
1.- What do you think is going to happen in December 20122.- if you could dream up any alternative event, would do you wish would happen in December 2012 ( can be as far fetched as you like)
3.- How do you make cube fun for people that just wanna play EDH? or do you just ignore these people and wait until they want to play cube?
4.- So many people end their relationships in divorce. why do you think this is? Do you think don't take enough time to actually get to know the person b4 proposing? do you think new age newlyweds tolerate less than before? what do you think about this?
5.- Dices que hablas muy bien el Español no? Quisiera saber cual fue tu razón por aprender un lenguage que realmente no es tan importante en la industria en la que vivimos. A diferencia del Frances o hasta el Chino. Y alguna vez has sorprendido a alguien hablandoles en español? Que es lo que más te gusta del leguage?
6.- What are your thought on the next V#CB? are you going to ask us? are you going to decide by yourself? will you bring up crazy formats like 'two headed giant' V#CB or PAUPER V#CB?
1. I think that we will see the END OF THE YEAR happen! Other than that, nothing too spectacular. I have a desk calendar at work that only goes until Dec. 31, 2012. This is not to say that the company doesn't anticipate that people will need calendars in 2013 because the world will end, just that they only make calendars one year at a time, usually (or 16 months). If you go to Chinese restaurants, sometimes there will be a Chinese calendar that displays the birth years for different animals and in addition to the past years, sometimes they also include years in the future. At some point it stops, but not because they are predicting that at some future year the world will end. There's just a practical limit to how many years you can fit on the calendar or how many you should. I don't give any special significance to the Mayan calendar ending at 2012. It's an arbitrary ending, and while it may be cool to see your car's odometer roll over to all 0's, it's not a sign that the car will explode just because they didn't add enough digits.
I lived through 2000 and all the hype regarding both Y2K disaster predictions due to computer systems failing and from religious people misinterpreting the Bible. We didn't see planes crash from the sky, massive blackouts, or nuclear weapons launch from missle silos. A few people who didn't update their computers experienced some minor inconveniences, but it was pretty forgettable. I had a friend who wished that the end times would come on 1/1/2000, but skeptics and believers alike asserted that it would be very unlikely that anythign significant would happen. For those who lend great weight to the Bible, they should all remember that Jesus said that we would not know the hour of his return. Snatching up people at midnight on 1/1/2000 seems like an unsurprising time to have that happen. I think it would be far more surprising if you were at a restaurant giving your order, when *POOF*, suddenly you're whisked away. Didn't see *THAT* one coming, did you? If you had, you probably wouldn't have spent so much time deciding whether you want the soup or salad.
2. Okay, if we're allowing my crazy imagination to run wild...
On Christmas Day, the Earth is suddenly surrounded by mysterious spacecraft in orbit. It lands and out comes an alien who announces that the world as we know it will end. He gets back into his ship and using technology so advanced that it appears magic-like to us, he circles the globe and as he passes over various parts of the earth, he teleports away all weapons. He remains in orbit to remove any other weapons we create. Our violent nature is still intact, though, but if you want to kill someone, you're using your bare hands.
3. EDH encompasses so many different play styles and attitudes that it's really hard to please everyone, especially since EDH is a constructed format and cube is a limited format. Some EDH players want to make a brutally efficient deck that wins, even if it means "unfun" infinite combos. Some EDH players like super casual games. You really have to ask your group what they want most out of their games, generally and specifically. This may mean that you want more cards like Kiki-Jiki and Squee, which lend themselves more to building combos. Or you may want more dragons and other big creatures. In the end, though, you are catering to two different groups and may disappoint people who want to play deck X with their favorite cards and it's just not the same in a draft.
4. I think this is a loaded question, but it's not your fault. It's premised on a few things - divorce is bad, the number of divorces is too high now, and the number of divorces used to be lower.
I won't dispute the rise in divorces (either as a raw number or as a rate), but I will argue with the other assumptions. Before I do, I'd just like to mention that statistics regarding divorces are almost always misleading. The most common one is "50% of all marriages end in divorce". So, people conclude that a newlywed couple has a 50% chance of divorcing. That's actually not how it works. Let's take a small sample of 10 people.
Of those 10 people:
1 person never marries
4 people get married once and never divorce
1 person gets married once, divorces once, and never remarries
3 people get married, divorces, and remarry a second time
1 person gets married, divorced, married, divorced, married, and divorced.
(This isn't meant as a true representation, just to show how statistics can be misconstrued)
There are a total of 14 marriages and 7 divorces. So, 50% of all marriages end in divorce.
HOWEVER, 5/10 people never divorced (1 never married, 4 are married once). 7/10 are currently married. Only two are divorced and not married. One person is responsible for 42% of all the divorces.
Looking at the numbers from a different perspective, we suddenly get the feeling that maybe marriages are more successful than we think. Or maybe the problem is FIRST marriages. Of the 9 first marriages, 5 lead to divorce (although 4 of those were followed by a marriage). Of second marriages, 3/4 did not end in divorce. Or as the 1 person responsible for 42% of all divorces show, maybe the problem is in taking the average and generating a statistic. That person's three marriages and three divorces skews the numbers greatly. Throw out that person and suddenly:
36% of marriages end in divorce.
55% of people never divorced.
71% of people are currently married.
14% of people are divorced but not married.
All of these numbers are still operating on an assumption that we want as few divorces as possible and that divorces are inherently bad. While a divorce is worse than a happy marriage, it's highly debatable whether a divorce is better or worse than an unhappy marriage. I would argue that a divorce is often preferrable to a contentious, unhappy marriage.
I've seen this flipped around in ways that greatly pervert what is best for married couples and any children they may have. Some groups love to throw around the fact that children who grow up in a stable house with two parents do better than other children. While this may be true, the danger lies in three kinds of social engineering that often follow:
A) People incentivize marriage
B) People disincentivize divorce
C) People disdain other family structure (besides mother, father, children).
A is problematic because you can't suddenly create happy, stable homes. B is problematic because preventing divorce isn't the same as creating happy marriages. C is problematic because you are setting up an unrealistic ideal, ignore circumstances where the nuclear family isn't possible (parent dies, unfit parent, etc.), and of course, it ignores the possibility that single parents and gay couples can raise healthy children.
What is often ignored in discussions about divorces that demonize the present and idealize the past is the fact that many divorces are done now for reasons that may not have been as acceptable in the past. Also, some people stayed married for reasons that are less common today.
Some people believed completely that divorces were not permitted under any circumstances. This attitude is less common today.
The "'Til death do us part" / "til death parts us" part is taken less seriously these days and some couples omit that line completely.
When women (even those with college degrees) were still expected to eventually marry and depend on a husband for financial support, a divorce carries with it economic strain or disaster. A wife might be less likely to divorce if she knows poverty for her and her children will follow. Working mothers and alimony weren't always present for divorced wives.
Sometimes a judge or religious institution would require a reason for a divorce and the list of reasons do not include many of those cited today - infidelity, abuse, or just unhappiness. The fact that a woman can freely divorce her abusive husband and thus raises the divorce rate should not be lamentable; this is a good thing.
While there may be some increase due to young people foolishly marrying, I think there's a larger social change that has made divorce more acceptable and making it less acceptable for wives to stay trapped in marriages.
5. No puedo hablar espanol muy bien, pero entiendo demasiado para hablar con otras personas. Lo estudiaba en la escuela secundaria y los profesores solamente ensenan espanol, frances, y aleman. Pero, vivo en California; hay muchas personas que hablan ingles o espanol. Cuando perdi mi telefono, un chico mexicano lo encontro; hablaba con su abuela. Ella no puede hablar en ingles, entonces, hablabamos en espanol. "Cuando regresa su nieto?" Me gusta que es mas facil de deletrear.
Colonel? Kernel?
Rough, bough, though, and through?
Drought, Thought, and caught?
6. I really haven't given any though to the next V#CB, and I think the current run is in serious trouble. I know that's absolutely not what you want to hear and I'm sorry you missed out this week, but even if you had signed up, the number of people we've had play has been going steadily down. I don't know what can or should be done at this point, and whether it's worth it to keep the tournament running for the sake of less than half a dozen diehard fans remains to be seen. Even if I'm not running it, there will always be two other alternatives - someone else can take charge of the tournament and try to get more people to play or people can go somewhere else with higher traffic to get more people (MTGSalvation already has a #CB tournament going, but it is NOT Vanishing.)
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posted June 23, 2011 01:05 PM
