Ludum Dare #18 "Enemies as Weapons" Begins

Since this game competition is conveniently set for the weekend before school begins and I don't have anything else I absolutely have to do I have decided to participate in Ludum Dare 18. (a 48 hour game making competition) I The theme is officially "Enemies as Weapons" and now the cogitation begins.... What should I do with that?

11:11 make a wish

I don't really remember who introduced me to this but I remember being out in the parking lot of my high school late one night and I looked at the clock and it was 11:11. When I mentioned this to a friend who was with me they told me to make a wish. I have since adopted the 11:11 wish tradition and since I just made an 11:11 wish I decided I should try and spread the tradition.

The rules of the 11:11 wish are these 1) you must have randomly glanced at the time and discovered that it is 11:11 you cannot contrive to see the time in order to make the wish. 2) The 11:11 wish can only be made at night if it is 11:11 in the morning it doesn't count (of course you could argue that really then it should be the 23:11 wish but that doesn't sound as cool now does it?). 3) The wish must be made before the time changes to 11:12.

If you choose to adopt the 11:11 wish feel free to modify the rules as you like but these are the rules I adhere to.

We must save the oceans

I have long been afraid that the real fight to save the environment will not start until it is too late. It is easiest to see the damage we are doing on land because that is where we live. It is easy to recognize that a barren landscape stripped of trees and devoid of greenery has had real damage to it. But a lake still looks the same when it is full of fish as when it is empty. but a lot of devastation we are causing is easy to see, if we look.

I have often been asked to help save the rainforest by helping to buy protected forest land. I just saved 7.4 sq feet of rainforest by clicking the link on this site. The biodiversity of the rainforest is astounding and so is its rate of destruction, this is also true of the ecosystems of the ocean. Unfortunately unlike the rainforest I can't simply donate to a charity (or click a link) to help have a couple of acres of ocean added to a sort of wildlife reserve. Many barriers stand in the way of creating a similar program for the oceans as already exists for rainforests. The ocean belongs to no country and no one and unfortunately this simply makes it all the easier for the ocean to be a victim of a tragedy of the commons.

Sylvia Earle has been building an organization in an attempt to create a program to create these protected areas of ocean she calls "hope spots". In 2009 she was a ted prize winner and she gave this ted.



Creating these protected waters is a wonderful idea and I think it is probably something we will have to do if we want to really save the oceans, but it isn't the only thing we will need to do. The ocean is getting screwed over not just by our practices of directly exploiting it but also by the way we live. Plastic and garbage that find their way to the ocean stay in the ocean and we now have something called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch of course the patch is called "great" not because it is rather nifty but because it is gigantic. Estimates of the size of the garbage patch vary but the LOW estimate is that is about the size of Texas and there is another similar patch in the Atlantic. The buildup of plastic and other detritus in the oceans is killing birds and whales and no doubt is causing other sorts of trouble which are more subtle. Just as worrying is the acidification of the oceans caused by the uptake of atmospheric CO2. The acidification will adversely affect the organisms which create corals. While I think global warming is tragic because of the loss of the polar ice caps and to a lesser extent because of the raising of the sea levels and the displacement of people that will cause; I am more afraid of the loss of our coral reefs and just of screwing up the chemistry of the oceans in general.