Archive for the ‘Reviews’ Category

Life in the United States hinges on the fact that a vast majority of people are willing to follow rules and harbor beliefs based more on faith and idealism than they are practicality or scientific truth. However, there is a group of individuals within the greater animal, one that looks at commonly held beliefs and questions their true worth, asking if the way things are is the way things should be. You might call them… skeptical of what is happening and what is believed or taught to be true.

In recent years, Skeptic’s Societies have been popping up in universities and other show grounds of “forward thinking.” Missouri Western is luckily one of those universities, as it is the home of a modest group of skeptical students, thriving on the development of a different, recognizable view to what is regularly offered on the plate of day-to-day life.

The organization was started in 2009 by David Carr, a Psychology major who began questioning popular religions early in life, as his parents moved from one church to another. The goals for the group, as listed on its Facebook page, include establishing a “home for atheists, agnostics, and other freethinkers at Missouri Western State University,” to “challenge believers in God, psychics and all other supernatural occurrences with arguments based on scientific evidence, logic, and reason” and to “present a positive view of atheism to the community.”

It’s clear that the group is still forming at an early stage, having only 17 members on its Facebook page. There is definitely room to grow, and there is a presence on campus that would take interest in a meeting of like-minded skeptics.

Senior and biology major Matthew Stehly was happy to hear that the group existed, and that he would be drawn to future meetings. Among Stehly’s various skepticisms, he included religion, the existence of God, pygmies and teapots in space. He is a prime example of atheism on the Missouri Western campus, choosing his own beliefs without treading on someone else’s.

“If it works for you, that’s completely fine, but don’t take hand-me-down beliefs as being true,” Stehly said. “Think for yourself. Use logic.”
Some students, like Junior Hanna Greenwell, think that the Skeptic’s Society would be a good place for people to get their different ideas out in the open.

“I think people should be skeptical and open minded to certain things of their own interest,” Greenwell said. “Everyone’s different, so I guess it just depends what meets their fancy, you know?”

While the Skeptic’s Society meets on Wednesdays on campus and at the Rolling Hills Library on Sundays, one can see that the on-campus presence of skeptics falls short of the group of older members who attend meetings at Rolling Hills.

“The majority that come are at least above 50,” Carr said of the off-campus meetings. Obviously, the more experienced and world-weary members of the St. Joseph community are showing off their skepticism at a much higher level than the young. However, all organizations have to crawl before they can walk, and the numbers have grown slowly but surely since the group’s first meeting at Hazel’s Coffee Shop, with only two people in attendance. It stands to reason that the longer the group holds out and more word spreads, more curious and open-minded people will arrive to discuss matters of belief, truth and logic.

While the group is mainly made up of atheists and agnostics, anyone with a knack for Devil’s Advocate would surely find a worthy forum to profess differing opinions and explanations for various behaviors.

Having a Skeptic’s Society around could do a lot of good for communities in the Bible belt, showcasing opinions that go largely unheard in a public gathering, especially any gathering with a sense of formality and purpose.

Religious groups are obviously welcome to defend their beliefs, or at least discuss them and try to help others understand them better, which could be the ultimate benefit of Missouri Western having a Skeptic’s Society. Believers and non-believers alike have a common ground where the purpose is to challenge one another with conflicting thoughts so that a new plateau may be reached, further promoting the ultimate goal of all houses of thought.

I love strippers. The whole concept is wonderful. When I think about the low lights and the bumping bass and constant motion of a strip club I smile. Maybe it is just because I am a guy but the idea of a dozen or so women in various states of undress writhing and grinding in wanting ways for just my arousal is one of the top five things I can picture for any days plans. I really love strippers. But outside of dating a few in my early twenties, I never really stopped to think about the mental landscape they must live in. Then I read Searching for Suzi by Nancy Stohlman.

This book is a fast firing flash fiction about womanhood, sexuality, exploitation, emotional evolution and the world of stripping. It is the tale of Natalie, a thirty something mother who retraces the steps of teenaged beauty pageantry and stripping to search for the first woman she slept with. The trail takes the reader on a ride through time that reveals a life of emotional abuse, squalor and eroticism.

It makes the reader think about the lives of strippers and the esteem issues inflicted on women in a world that tells them that they have to be beautiful. It asks serious questions about the effects our sexuality has on our lives.

Without becoming porn, this book looks truthfully at the world of strippers and gets quite saucy. The shifting point of view keeps the reader feeling like they are flowing in and out of the consciences of the narrator. It forces you to wonder how you would feel if you were 17 and your high school principal just walked into the strip club you work at. It keeps a dark subject light in the right places by reviewing stripper tips, like stripper tip #6: underarm deodorant glows under black light or stripper tip #11: smoking pot in the bathroom only makes the night drag on forever.

Sure there are plenty of dirty words to keep your attention and at least two sex scenes that will make you look around to make sure you are alone while you read it, but better than that is the underlying understanding of the story. It is a story about the scars sexuality can leave on us, and how those scars shape us into the sexy little beasts we become. It is also about the connections that you make in life and how things change over time. It is a story about real life and I am glad I read it.

Ghosts and Saw movies never scared me. I always thought they were more of a gore factor than scary. Alien abduction movies have always frightened me, but never have I seen a more realistic horror movie than “Fourth Kind.”

The direction the movie takes is not only original but is what makes the movie as terrifying as it is. The way the director splices in original footage from therapy sessions adds to the element of realism that can be lost when cutting from scene to scene.

Another interesting way the director shoots the movie is the strange focusing he uses. He focuses on certain objects in some scenes rather than the people. This is so you focus on the audio.

Even writing this, I still feel the chills as characters stumble upon the truth about Nome, Alaska, which has the most reported sightings and abductions in Alaska and possibly the United States.

The dramatization of real events gives you enough information to make sense of the story but also keep you in the dark about the truth. There are a few plot twists that are easy to guess, and once you figure them out, you want to make sure you’re right by never taking your eyes off the scene.

Tying the small history lesson in with the abduction story makes for a better case. Let’s just say I never want to hear anything speak Swahili again.

The creepiest part of the movie is the main characters first hand interview about the events that took place. The videos shown of her before the events make her look like a sane and normal woman. Then, as they show her two years later she looks like a woman that has never slept in her life, her big eyes staring into the camera piercing your minding and testing your truths.

“The Fourth Kind” should go into the record books for originality. There is little to no blood and as a matter of fact, there is some gore censored out early in the film.
It’s rare these days to come across a director that doesn’t have to use gore to make a good movie. All he needed was a good story, some original footage and a creepy woman who may or may not be insane.

By the end of the film you are asking yourself, “If our psychologists go insane, who do I go to when I go insane?”

There are a certain class of gamers out there in the wide world of the Web that are not driven by games that are based solely on rapid reflexes and gratuitous grinding. These people still seek stimulation when it comes to surfing the Internet. They seek a challenge to their intellectual process, a certain something to sharpen their strategic skills and fine-tune their resource management abilities. These people are the ones that are into strategy games. For people like this, building and managing a kingdom is where it is at. And it is at Evony.com.

What might be the best browser game out there ends up being free. Evony has picked 5 million users since April of this year. I have been tending to my bonsai tree of browser games faithfully since that time. I have already lost two cities and relocated twice, but I keep working to build up my horde of cavalry and ballista so that Lord Donan can lay waste to all of Server 3. It really is a bonsai. Step by step becoming a tiny work of art.

The game is easy to figure out with a series of quests meant to train the user on how to tend to their kingdom, collecting taxes and winning loyalty, all the while defending your peoples from any number of martial incursions. You can build up to ten cities; I prefer just tending the one.

With a quick chat band it is easy to get tips from others that playing the game as well. The modular form of the cities does allow for some variation in the design of your city. You could build a city with three barracks for extra army growth or a city designed for commerce and then you can rule at the always active market place. You can hire and fire heroes to lead your people and you can gamble on the wheel of fortune. I just won an iron rake with an amulet I saved up.

The beauty of this game is that if you are the kind of person that is online a lot during the day, all you have to do is favorite it, and all day long you can pop in and out of your little perfect kingdom. In the morning you can start your scholars training in the academy, at coffee break you can start recruiting heroes, at lunch you are building your walls up and at dinner you are appointing a new mayor. By bedtime you are conquering a new city.

This game really does rock for those that are into this sort of thing. I wish more of my friends were. I guess if anyone reads this article, you can come find me in land of Bohemia, ruling over Gotham City, right next to the flag 420.