Help with Magic: The Gathering

I have been a small time gamer over the years but not dedicated to much outside of World of Warcraft. I have dabbled a bit in Magic: The Gathering in the last few years. I first started playing on deployment in 2009 in Afghanistan while waiting on a flight back home to the states. We had two days to kill and a buddy handed me a spare deck and told me I had to learn. We are both geeks at heart.

I recently have tried to look further into playing with a little more depth. I have on many occasions beaten friends and family but never have a beaten a seasoned player… mostly because I do not play often. I have tried a few websites on my own.

One site is a blog by Dee Barizo called Magic: Game Plan at http://magicgameplan.com/. In this site, Dee goes into several aspects of the gaming experience with MTG like deck building, pricing, playing and strategy. With it, Dee has several links throughout his sight that I personally found very helpful.

Dee also has a Bio page where he talks bit about himself and how he came to play and love the game. He talks also of his experiences getting started and some of his success along the way.

I am not saying that this blog is a be all/end all in the Magic: The Gathering repository of knowledge. But it is a small place that I have found useful to myself in a few ways to enhance my gaming experience. If anyone reading knows of any helpful sites on this or other geeky subjects please comment and share.

We can learn from the bloggings of others.

I believe that online blogging has a tremendous potential for what we as a culture can contribute or take away from it. Blogging is simply a way for voices normally insignificant persons to be heard by others who may have never met or even heard of the author. The rapid exchange of ideas often invokes quick and varied formation of ideas and processes.

If you think that online communication does not have a big effect on life nad culture changing events, consider the current “crisis” in Egypt. Many people with similar ideas came together to protest their concerns about their government. One of the Egyptian Government’s first acts was to cut the Internet knowing that any online collaboration from protesters could multiply their influence and advancements.

Seeing the changes in Egypt that possibly stemmed from or at least was assisted by online communication, some may think that a global revolution of democracy could lead us closer to a Utopian type of society. We may for a moment think that our problems can be solved if troubles and with them solutions are brought to light in nontraditional forums. However, differences also arise through blogging and online communications.

A dystopian society is rather unlikely as well. This is simply because many people will be able to bring to light many grievances they have against authority and government allowing for enough distrust to keep leaders inline.

All in all I personally believe that online forums and blogs can add to an average persons over all education about things they would normally not experience personally. If more moderated forums online were available for structured education, like academics, then we would likely see a whole lot more information available to the average individual. Fewer resources would be spent on a greater variety of education brought to the student. Formal education would be where we would likely see a more revolutionary and constructive change to society.

What did they use in writing The Matrix?

In one of my recent school papers, I described and attempted to explain the movie trilogy The Matrix. For those of you who may not have seen it, it is simply a story of a dystopian society where people are controlled by a massive machine driven computer program. If they try to escape from it, they are hunted down like animals. In studying this movie, I found that the Wachowski bothers that wrote it used both pathos and logos style of rhetoric to convey their message.

Usually, anytime the entertainment industry creates a performance to relay a message to the public, you can bet that they are playing on our emotions. Not that this is wrong in any way. It is just that simply their stories aim to entertain. If there is not an emotional response invoked, what good is the entertainment? Therefore, we can say a fair amount of pathos rhetoric has been used.

However, looking much closely and more seriously, in the movie series The Matrix, we see a great deal of logos rhetoric. Logos simply means logic or logical. They movies pointed out how man can become so reliant on something, in this case machines that he can simply get too comfortable and allow that thing to control his life. The movie pointed out how man used the machines for his survival and in the end, that machines were given enough control to use man for their survival. The logic, although perhaps a bit more science fiction than reality does use some interesting logic to point out possible flaws in mankind’s society.