Anyone who saw the title of this post and went “she’s posting more cat pictures, isn’t she?” go ahead and give yourselves a round of applause. It’s the beginning of NaNo and I have an essay I need to finish before starting on that, so, yeah. Cats. Relaxing a whole lot more than I am.
Sometimes getting up in the mornings is hard when there’s a cat leaning on me, but they’ll accept replacement pillows.
And sometimes, getting up is really hard.
A couple weeks ago my best friend introduced me to Among Us. Yes, the game that it seems everyone is suddenly talking about. It’s got fan-made songs, animations, fanfic… but some of you are probably asking, “What actually is Among Us?” Allow me to explain.
Have you ever played Mafia? Or Are You A Werewolf? Among Us is like the digital, slightly more complicated sci-fi version of those. In those games you have the “night,” when the killers (be they mafia or werewolves) choose a victim, and then the “day” where you find out which one person has died, and vote someone out. Either the citizens vote out the killers and win, or the killers murder enough citizens that they can’t be voted out by majority, thereby winning.
In Among Us the crewmates have another goal: complete your tasks. Each crewmate is given a random selection of assignments, like fixing wiring, downloading and uploading data, and entering their ID. Some of these, like the ones I just listed, can be found in any game of Among Us; some are specific to certain of the three maps. For instance, “Align Engine Output” wouldn’t be useful on Polus, which is a planet’s surface, but since the Skeld is a spaceship it makes sense. Neither of those maps have a greenhouse, but the airship by the name of Mira HQ does, so “Water Plants” is a perfectly reasonable task. A small handful of these are also “visual tasks,” meaning other players can see them, which, since imposters can’t do tasks, proves your innocence. Submitting a Medscan is the most well-known of these, but there’s a handful of others as well. Whatever your tasks are, if all the crewmates finish theirs they win the game. This simultaneously gives the imposters pressure to kill quickly and the crewmates an alternate objective, rather than solely focusing on the murder aspect of gameplay.
Though, admittedly, the murder aspect is important too. The imposters’ job is to kill all the crewmates (or, rather, enough that there’s the same amount of crewmates as imposters, just like in Mafia and Are You A Werewolf). They have a couple of tools to help them achieve this: a partner, depending on server settings (there can be 1-3 imposters in a max of 10 players), vents that allow them to move unseen between certain rooms, and sabotage. With this last functionality they can close doors to slow down their targets (on the Skeld and Polus, at least), sabotage communications, temporarily making the list of tasks inaccessible, turn off the lights (narrowing all the crewmates’ range of view), and cause a reactor overload or (on the Skeld and Mira HQ) an oxygen depletion, either of which left unchecked for long enough will automatically result in a victory for the imposters. Each of these has a different means of reversing them, but whatever the case they help to slow down the task progress and sometimes draw people away from a fresh corpse.
That’s important because, unlike Mafia and Are You A Werewolf, it’s not a matter of one voting session per death. Rather, a meeting is only called when someone comes across and reports a dead body, or presses the Emergency Meeting button that’s in the Cafeteria on the two ships and in the Office on Polus. This button is primarily useful for when you saw someone going into/coming out of the vents, witnessed a murder on the security cams, or watched someone’s vital signs terminate (each map has multiple means of monitoring; the Skeld has security cameras and Admin, which gives a headcount for each room; Mira HQ has Admin and a Sensor Log for each of three sensors you can pass in the hall; and Polus has security cams, Admin and a vitals monitor). As an interesting aside, crewmate’s ghosts can still complete their tasks to contribute to victory, and imposter’s ghosts can still sabotage. This is a compelling reason to stick around even after being voted out or murdered.
How many kills the imposters can manage without anyone noticing depends largely on location and how strategically they’re playing, but unless they’ve won, a body is eventually found and a meeting called. Then, of course, there’s the accusing phase. I won’t get into the strategies for that here, at least not this week (I don’t think I’ve ever done a follow-up on a game before but if y’all want one or I feel like it I may), just the process.
I don’t recall ever playing a game of Mafia or Are You A Werewolf with a time limit on voting, but each Among Us server has a set discussion time before voting opens, and a set time from there before voting closes (both set by the server host). As you can imagine, it’s a lot of back-and-forth pointing of fingers and “Where was the body? Any sus [suspects] nearby? Where was everyone else?” It’s also a race to get your argument in before people vote, since voting doesn’t happen all at once in Among Us; rather, you can submit your vote anytime after voting opens, and when the time is up or everyone has voted all the votes are revealed.
Once voting for a meeting has closed, there are a few things that can happen. If there’s a tie, nobody gets ejected. If skipping vote gets the most votes (yes, “skip” is an option, but no, not voting at all does not count as a vote to skip), then nobody gets ejected. If, however, any one player gets the most votes, they will be joining the ghosts. How depends on which map they’re playing: since the Skeld is a spaceship, ejections there occur by flinging them into the vacuum of space via airlock. Whoever’s voted out on Mira HQ goes skydiving without a parachute, and on Polus they take a quick stroll into a lava crater. Whether you get to see if they were an imposter or not at the point of ejection depends on the settings set by the host.
If it’s not clear by how long this post is, I enjoy this game immensely. I think it’s a brilliant, engaging twist on a concept I was already fond of. I highly recommend trying it, whether for free on mobile, for a small fee on PC, or, like I’m playing, on PC for free through an app player called BlueStacks that enables Android applications to run on PC (for info on how to get Among Us that way, click here).
So we’ve Mom’s been sorting through the bookshelves in the guest bedroom, deciding on what we should get rid of (yes, gasp, I know, but we need shelf space for more books!), and for a period of time all those chosen had been relocated to the living room. This was the result. (Note: the cat is not going anywhere. Ever. He just likes getting in the way and being too cute to remove.)
No matter where you go in the world, there’s a local mythology, and in each of these mythologies, you’ll find a creation story. Why? Well, to put it succinctly, they’re an attempt to rationalize the world around us.
Humans have a natural curiosity — that’s why we have science and exploration. Of course, there was a time when those weren’t as advanced as they are today, but the yearning to understand was always there. These stories are so abundant because though mankind wasn’t there to witness when many parts of our world came to be, we knew they couldn’t always have been. To explain these, we speculated.
While tales of creation vary from culture to culture, there are certain constants: earth, water, and humans, as key parts of every civilization, as well as the frequent use of a higher power to explain how these were formed. In a time predating the science to formulate theories like the Big Bang, it’s unsurprising that the general consensus was, “Humans couldn’t possibly have done this, so there must be something bigger.”
There are other themes in common, as well. For example, take the Iroquois, Hebrew, and Norse creation myths (“The World On The Turtle’s Back,” “Yahweh,” and “Odin and Ymir,” respectively). All of these stories set up a dichotomy, not necessarily between good and evil, but between opposing entities. “The World on the Turtle’s Back” is a conflict between two brothers, Othagwenda and Djuskaha; the Hebrew tale is about the humans disobeying Yahweh’s command not to eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil; and “Odin and Ymir” is primarily centered on the gods defeating an evil frost giant. This is likely because mankind cannot conceive a world or time bereft of conflict, and therefore it features in our attempts at explaining the world around us.
There are many differences between the creation stories. According to Iroquois legend, a vast body of water existed before land, and a woman fell from heaven. In “Yahweh,” land came before sea, and humans were fashioned from earth. “Odin and Ymir,” in complete contrast to the other two, suggests that neither earth nor sea existed at first, but after the other realms came to be and Ymir was slain, his body was used to create the earth, his blood the sea, and his skull the sky, and the gods later formed humans from logs.
Despite this, there are, as I’ve suggested before, many common themes, due to the universal truths of our world and of human existence. It is, after all, because of curiosity, one of these human truths, that these stories were written in the first place, and continue to be told. For the people of the past, these stories were products of their yearning to understand the world. Now, they’re shared because of our yearning to understand those who came before.
Usually, I try not to do multiple weeks of cat photos in a row. That said, this week has been havoc, so… cats.
Most impressively, the rare non-food-related instance that June was close to Zuko without growling!
I have to admit, Zuko is my first experience having a cat who actively enjoys being picked up and hugged, and furthermore will sometimes climb my shoulder and perch there. He’s also our only cat who will frequently, voluntarily assume the role of lap cat. As such, you can bet I took pictures!
As a bonus, I have photographic proof of the unexpected instance where June decided to do the same.
As it turns out, working with a cat in your lap, especially when the task of making sure they don’t slide off is left entirely to you, can be rather challenging. It is, however, well worth the complications. Especially when they’re purring. Loudly.
No, not the eating utensil. Chopsticks is a simple yet entertaining game I learned in elementary school to pass time while waiting in line. It’s convenient, as it doesn’t require much equipment — just two hands (at least four fingers each) and basic arithmetic.
I’ve usually played this as a two-player game, but you can really have as many people as you like, so long as you can fit them all facing each other (directly across for two, circle-ish for anything more) in whatever space you’re playing in.
Each player starts with both hands out in front of them, one finger on each raised. From there, whoever is going first will choose someone (anyone) and tap one of their hands with one of their own. The tapped hand raises a second finger, and play continues either clockwise or counter-clockwise (because it honestly doesn’t matter so long as it’s agreed upon).
It’s not always one that’s added to the hand. The principle of the game is that however many fingers are raised on the hand that taps, that’s the number added to the hand that’s tapped. Once a hand gets to five, that hand is fisted, put behind your back, or otherwise indicated as “dead.” If both your hands are dead, you’re out of the game.
Instead of tapping someone else’s hand, you can choose to tap your own together. This is an action of rearranging chopsticks; for instance, if you have four fingers raised on one hand and one on the other, you might adjust it to three and two. You’ll end up with the same amount of fingers raised, just redistributed, usually to lower the chance of a high-numbered one getting out. The rules vary by group (make sure you confirm them ahead of time!) so in some versions it’s acceptable to redistribute chopsticks to a dead hand, bringing it back into play, and in others once the hand is out, it stays out. It is not, however, a legal move to flip the values of your hands. (Think 2 and 3 to 3 and 2; nothing has actually changed, which prevents the game from properly progressing.)
The winner is, of course, the last person with at least one hand left in the game.
Given the fires on the West Coast of the US, I think this week I’ll just post some pretty nature photos from a recent walk and will water that way. To everyone near the fires — stay safe! (Edit: apologies on the delay; Mom had to pull the post down because the images weren’t loading and I wasn’t awake to fix it.)
As some of you have surely seen on Mom’s blog, we got a kitten. And, since I’ve posted pictures of our other critters, I thought I should give you some for Zuko!
Zuzu’s favorite toy is a leopard-print mouse I’ve named the Avatar, mostly for the comedic effect of throwing it (he will immediately give chase) and shouting “Go capture the Avatar!”
Of course, as a kitten, he’s also more than happy to attack the other cats, with varying degrees of response from them.
And then there’s a group shot, excluding June because she’s avoiding him.
This is a rant posing as an essay. If you don’t want to read the brutal truth as laid out by a fed-up teenager, this is not the post for you. Have some cat photos. For those who do read this, be aware that the statistics listed were accurate as of July 21st, 2020 but may or may not be so now.
Salutations. Today I am here to debate the quote, “Without the ideas and leadership of Adams, Jefferson and Hamilton, the United States would not be the great nation it is today.”
It is a simple fact in this type of debate that I must agree or disagree with the statement as a whole. If the claim were simply that the previously named gentlemen had made the United States the nation it is today, I would concur. However, the word “great” was inserted, and as such, I must most vehemently disagree.
As much as we try to treat our country as if it’s golden, perfect, flawless, it’s not. If it were, we wouldn’t have a total student loan debt of $1.6 trillion, with an average of over $32,000. We wouldn’t be continually denying and ignoring climate change, our immigration policy wouldn’t be so insensitive that there are children in cages, and there would not be US citizens dying because they can’t afford medical treatment, or working multiple jobs just to survive.
Unfortunately, the truth is that we live in a country that values profits over people, and “freedom” over lives. That’s why there were 418 mass shootings (at least four victims injured/killed in one location, excluding the perpetrator) in 2019 alone but we still haven’t further regulated firearms. A startling amount of the population would rather risk getting sick — and getting everyone else sick — than wear a mask during a pandemic, which is how the United States has 4% of the world’s population, and 26% of global Covid-19 cases! According to the CDC, we now have over 60,000 new cases a day, yet the federal government is pushing to reopen businesses and schools. But that’s alright; we’ve flattened the curve! Vertically.
I imagine my opponents in this debate would argue that those problems have nothing to do with the Founding Fathers. Which is true. The grievances I’ve listed are not their crosses to bear. But as I said before, the entirety of the statement has to be true. As such, these are points to discredit the USA’s purported greatness.
Setting that aside for a moment, there are many points the opposition could make in favor of Adams, Jefferson, and Hamilton. After all, Adams nominated Washington to serve as commander in the Revolutionary War and Jefferson to draft the Declaration of Independence. He helped to negotiate the Treaty of Paris to end the war, and acted as the first American ambassador to Britain. As president, he took a strong stance and set an honest example by refusing to be bullied into unsavory terms during the XYZ Affair with France.
Jefferson, as Adams had nominated him, was the primary draftsman of the historic Declaration of Independence. He wrote the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, which established freedom of religion and the separation of church and state, and he founded the University of Virginia — the nation’s first secular university. During his presidency, he doubled the size of the US with the Louisiana Purchase and devised the Lewis and Clark expedition for further exploration. His extensive personal library went on to serve as the foundation for the Library of Congress.
Meanwhile, Hamilton contributed heavily to the American victory at Yorktown, and went on to play a key role in the ratification of the US Constitution. Defending the monumental document, he, James Madison, and John Jay wrote the Federalist Papers: a series of 85 essays published in six months, of which Hamilton wrote 51. His persistence was also put to use as Secretary of the Treasury, where he established our national banking system.
All of these points are true. I’m not arguing the fact that these men were instrumental in the creation of the United States as we know it, nor that they have their accomplishments. However, the Founding Fathers also made their share of mistakes that we’re still suffering the consequences of.
In particular, I’m referring to the continued systemic racism, sexism, and party politics that can be traced all the way back to the precedents they set. The Declaration of Independence is well known for the statement, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights; that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” And yet the man who wrote these words, Thomas Jefferson, was a slave owner. Admittedly, he was also, at the time, an abolitionist, but even then he believed that black people were innately inferior both mentally and physically to those of European descent. By the early 1790s he had “rationalized an abomination to the point where an absolute moral reversal was reached,” and was bluntly treating slavery as an investment strategy.
His estate of Monticello was, at any one time, residence of about 100 slaves, and he owned over six hundred in his lifetime. Furthermore, at least one of them, and probably five more, were actually children he had fathered with his spouse’s half-sister (who was the product of her father’s affair with one of his slaves). Not only is this infuriating on the basis of racism, but the implicit disrespect he (and Hamilton, who too had an affair) displays for his wife. In fact, Abigail Adams, John Adams’s wife, is reported as “perhaps the only woman he [Jefferson] ever treated as an intellectual equal.”
And then of course, there is the fault of major resonance I find in all three individuals: partisanism. George Washington is credited with saying, “However [political parties] may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.” Despite this clear warning against just that, the Hamilton-Jefferson rivalry shaped America’s first political parties: the Federalists and the Democratic-Republicans. The ramifications of this early-on polarization can easily be felt in our modern two-party system, as can the childish way that Jefferson and Adams handled falling on different sides. Instead of properly discussing and debating their differing opinions, they effectively broke off their friendship, and for twelve years after Jefferson’s inauguration they exchanged no words at all.
To review, I disagree with the statement, “Without the ideas and leadership of Adams, Jefferson and Hamilton, the United States would not be the great nation it is today,” on the grounds that the US is clearly flawed, and while those men made note-worthy accomplishments, they also made resounding errors that continue to damage us as a country. Rather, I believe that, in some part thanks to the ideas and leadership of Adams, Jefferson, and Hamilton, the United States has the potential to be a great nation. But we have a long way to go.