Human desires

Almost all human interaction, begins with one person's desire to elicit a certain kind of response in another person.

Unfortuneately, this statement is too vague to be of much use to anyone.

Future thoughts, predictions

I believe that someday we will have programs for predicting human behavior, just like we do the weather, and they will be just as innacurate.

An annoyance with MTG

In Magic the Gathering, I find my favorite tricks are card draw and mana acceleration. Unfortuneately, these will not win a game by themselves, so I often struggle to build an effective deck that I like. One thing that makes it especially difficult, is that I don't like using counterspells, and counterspells seem to be the most powerful aspect of Blue. So it's like playing with a major handicap, doesn't lend itself well to fun when playing with strangers.

RTS thoughts

I think a large part of what makes starcraft a great game, is that it isn't a game of rock-paper-scissors. Most units work well in many situations, not just one, and very few hard counters exist. Additionally, every battle is likely to cost resources, even when you win. The higher the cost of victory (relative to the one you defeat) the more likely it is for a game to be close, and the more likely for the loser to make a comeback.

Warcraft 3 added upkeep for large armies, which helps to increase the cost of victory over an enemy (the victor keeps paying upkeep, while the loser rebuilds without) but this added cost was more than made up for by the availability of healing which reduced the cost of the battle itself.

In Anime...

I think I know what is behind all the shows with Super Sayajin style fights. It's peoples desire to unleash all their rage upon an enemy. The punishment the heros take and endure is like all the pain they feel they have aquired over the years, and the final assault/big climax, is the final release of all that pain and anger upon it's source. It's the solution they dream of, being able to send all their pain back to the source, and never deal with it again. If only life's real problems were so simple.