I’m either making the biggest mistake of my life or making the best choice of my life, or more than likely I’m having a procedure done. In a few hours I’m going to have laser beams shot into my eyes, on purpose. I’m strangely calm about the whole concept, and vaguely optimistic that everything will be fine. At the end of the day my expectations are that I will awake in the morning and not need to use glasses any more. I’ve been wearing them since my Freshman year in High School, which I understand isn’t too bad amongst the bespectacled. Many of whom have been wearing glasses since young childhood. I’ve been considering Lasik since the first time I heard about it, but the cost of the process and the idea that they shot lasers into your eyes made it seem like something I could hold off on, especially since I’ve never found wearing glassed to be a burden.
I finally decided to bite the bullet. Mitzy’s sister-in-law works at a place that does Lasik, and she and her husband had their procedure done there. Plus they do a free consultation, which is par for the course now a days, but since my current glasses were in need of replacing I figured I’d go in and check it out. So I did, and I was impressed with the place, and I found out that I’m a particularly good candidate for Lasik (which I’m sure they say to all the girls), so I set the thing up.
We’ll see I guess, or maybe not if the whole thing goes south.

I was going to put something here, but now I’ve forgotten what it was.
Instead I’ll relate a harrowing tale. I was having a sit down up on the sixth floor, and that area sees people who are special needs, including Downs Syndrome. So one of these gentlemen, and his friend come into the restroom while I’m there. There’s some expected hand holding as the fellow settles down to business in the stall next to me, and I went back to play Sudoku on my iPhone. It was the end of the proceedings that gave me some perspective on life, our many blessings, and the deep graciousness of others. To cut to the chase, the friend of the young man in the other stall, after telling him his time was up (a brief aside, I now count as a blessing the ability to dawdle in the restroom without interruption), opened the stall door. I was trying to be discreet and not pay attention, so it was a moment before I grasped the reality of what was going on. The young man had gotten up and turned around, and I’m not trying to be crude here, but in my mind the phrase ‘assumed the position’ wafted through my cranial space. His friend then performed such duties as you would imagine he would under the circumstances.
Again, I’m not trying to be crude, or to poke fun at others, but there are things that go on in the world that you know happen, and you think you grasp the concept. But then when you’re in close proximity to one of these things it kind of brings it in to the light and you’re given the opportunity to dwell on the concepts, or essence, of what’s happening. I admit I’ve taken the idea of being able to wipe myself for granted, and I hope that I always can, but it can give one pause to be really thankful for a lot of things. And it brings to the forefront the very depth of compassion that some people have for others, one has to imagine that if there were a way to harness the essence of this compassion then there would be no thing we could not overcome. Even if you chalk it up to callous desensitizing, I think you could postulate that such matter of the fact task completion on that level could be a powerful force. Grim tasks always lay ahead of us, and being able to undertake them with stoic presence of mind would be an asset, I think.

I’ve been considering a Civ based game lately. I’ve been tinkering around with Civ IV Beyond the Sword lately, and as much as I love that game it always gets me to thinking of a Civ style game that I’d really like to see.
Instead of controlling a civilization, building cities and units, you would control a people, or a culture. Starting off as a group of tribal nomads you would hunt and gather, follow herds and do whatever it was that stone age peoples did. Then as time goes by, if you find sustainable sources of food and learn to farm you can setup villages and begin the process of becoming a civilization. But let’s say that someone else advances more quickly than you and develops a large and powerful civilization early on while you’re still a tribal civilization? Or maybe you prefer running a nomadic, tribal society. The big powerful Civ eventually starts to expand, militarily or culturally, or both and your people find themselves with options to fight, assimilate, or become a lesser state within that Empire. And as is usually the case you find yourself defeated, the game then shifts a little in style to trying to maintain your people’s cultural identity within a larger empire. Perhaps you eventually subvert the empire from within, or perhaps as the empire weakens you’re able to break away, forming your own state and establishing territorial boundaries. Maybe you’re assimilated into that Empire, instead of the game ending you are then able to take over the empire and play as that society, now having to deal with multi-layered society with different cultures.
Exploration would be handled by being able to fund expeditions and diplomatic missions, sending them out in general directions, and after awhile you get a report back and some FoW is removed. Maybe you never hear back from them. There was a game called King of Dragon Pass that operated in this manner, you sent out parties and got reports back, you didn’t control them yourself. Now for the sake of game play perhaps you could guide them via some mechanism, but you’d not have full control
Militarily you’d have to deal with the impact of raising an army on your society. At basic levels you’d have to weigh the pros and cons of forming a war party versus keeping men at home to work the fields. Again, Dragon Pass had something like this, and if you sent off a war party to invade your neighbor you risked loosing your men and then enduring a famine when the harvest wasn’t brought in. You could scale this up as societies and technology increase, because there’s always a guns vs. butter issue to deal with when waging war. You shouldn’t be able to simply crank out military units with not impact to production.
I’d also like to see a model of battles between armies based on military technology and level of development, both hardware wise and doctrine wise. For instance your level of military tradition would reflect on a war leader for your army…there would always be a general for an army, but based on your society’s prowess in battle…Military history, tech advances, societal philosophy and what have you would all be factors in determining the quality of leaders and troops. So instead of battles being decided by static values of units you’d have a little more nuance when it came to battles.
So anyway, just thoughts that needed out of my head.