“Raw” is a dangerous aspiration to have as a musician. It’s supposed to mean artistic freedom, and the throwing away of artifice and pretension. All I can think of is that raw things give you salmonella.

Rob Zombie’s puzzling third album takes all the electronics and danceable aspects of his past work and replaces them with…nothing much. Bare fragments of grinding riffs and Iggy Pop vocals drive the album. Not a single track sounds like it could have been on Hellbilly Deluxe (although Hellbilly Deluxe has a song called “How To Make a Monster” that sounds like it could have been on this one) and even his vocals sound totally different. It’s was a bold move to throw out every aspect of his previous sound, and a curious one, as his previous sound was mostly working for him.

But there’s an explanation: his film career.

His directorial efforts almost deserve a documentary in their own right. Basically, 2003’s House of a Thousand Corpses had a sweetheart of a deal that he obliterated with a poorly chosen joke on a TV show (or something), and his funding disappeared with the film half shot. Rather than cancel the film, he somehow figured out how to get the rest of the footage just by shooting stuff for free around his house. Sounds like a recipe for a shit sandwich, but when he watched the final cut, he actually liked the zero-dollar shots better, and his films have essentially relied on that approach since.

I imagine he wanted to try the same approach with his music. Just throw together some stuff with a live band and see what happens. Well, something happened. I don’t think he covered himself with glory here, but it has some strong moments, particularly in the deeper cuts.

After an arty piano tribute to the Halloween theme called “Sawdust in the Blood”, “American Witch” kicks off to unimpressive results. With a plodding tempo and a chorus that sounds like it was made up on the spot, it’s just a boring song. A lot of tracks here are like that. “Ride”, “The Devil’s Rejects”, “17 Year Locust”. None of them are complete throwaways, but they just don’t have enough actual content to sustain your interest. It’s like being at a party with twenty people, but the host only bought enough snacks for ten.

Then there’s the songs that provoked revulsion among the Zombie faithful. “Foxy Foxy” is kind of cute. “Death of it All” is an all-acoustic track that I like. “The Scorpion Sleeps” sounds like a fucking beer commercial. The two best songs are “Let It All Bleed Out” and “Lords of Salem”. The former has the energy and the latter has the heavy. Either of those songs would have been a good direction to explore more fully. Rob Zombie’s never been comfortable playing all-out metal, but I wish he’d get comfortable, because the closer he gets the better he sounds.

Well, it’s an experiment, which guards it against criticism in a way. This is just a lab experiment, to be accepted if it works, and flushed if it doesn’t. I think it does a little of both.

What’s the big advantage of having a monopoly? That you make lots of money?

No. It’s that you can enjoy a quiet life.

Traditional businesses succeed or fail by a power law. When you start one, you are staring down the barrel of a 71% failure rate over ten years. Success will depend on various factors, many of which you cannot control. And even if you succeed, uneasy hangs the head that wears the crown. Your continued success requires luck, skill, ability to respond to market changes, and on a long enough scale all businesses fail anyway. Uber (according to Yves Smith) is apparently “succeeding” by kicking the can down the alley, postponing the date of its inevitable failure until the guys at the top cash out.

But a monopolist is free. Free to grow complancent, free to deliver substandard products and services. When there’s no rivals nipping at your heels, you can walk, or trudge, or even sit down. You can even go backwards.

Piers Anthony once had an editor point out a continuity error, and he defended himself by saying “anything can happen in Xanth.” Monopolies have the same dubious virtue – anything can happen in them! As far as I can tell, this is the central argument to be made against monopolies, they have no reason to be excellent, or to do anything beyond ensuring that they continue to exist. It’s not as simple as the monopolist not having any competitors. I can imagine scenarios where a single monolithic entity produces excellent work. But there clearly needs to be some kind of pressure, otherwise innovation and quality in a market dawdles.

It’s a difficult pill to swallow, because other than this problem, you’d expect a monopolistic business to outperform a business in competition. Global co-ordination. The ability to leverage economics of scale. No wasted resources spent fighting competitors.

You could even argue that a benevolent monopoly would be in the interests of consumers. A big issue with fractured, balkanized industries is that they are susceptible to negative externalities – if I own a factory in Region 1 that pollutes a river running through Regions 2 and 3, sans regulations I might say “not my problem”. But if I own all the factories in all the regions (and hence am accountable to all customers), then maybe I’ll take pollution seriously.

A state can fulfill this role to an extent, but they’re not really anyone’s go-to example of efficiency par excellence (see Shturmovshchina), and an ideal solution seems like a fusion: how do we combine the best features of the free market (competitive drive, innovation, efficiency) without the crappy gridlock and balkanisation?

I don’t know that if this would just be good to have. I think we might need it. I was reading about nuclear power, and what’s stalling it in the US. It seems to be dying a death from a thousand cuts, including ever-changing regulations, competing standards, PR disasters such as 3 Mile Island and Fukushima, and the lack of a stable and reproducible plant model. Looming above everything, like Zeus throwing thunderbolts, is the fact that nobody’s on the same page.

“…our electricity sector is split up among dozens of different utilities and state regulators. As a result, US nuclear vendors had to develop dozens of variations on the light-water reactor to satisfy a variety of customers. “

(They also mention a few interesting things: although high-profile disasters didn’t help public acceptance of nuclear energy, construction of new plants was already tapering away before 3 Mile Island.)

The article also looks at the countries that have gotten this right, they mostly seem to have either state-owned utilities or a single industry working on a single solution. But statecraft also has the ability to choke nuclear power, as we see in France. What’s the solution? A market monopoly over nuclear energy, perhaps? But that introduces another wrinkle – this is really something we really need the regulation of a state over. Success means nuclear power lighting up America. Failure means…the exact same thing.

I strongly unhate this game. I played it for roughly 2 or 3 childhoods, and it’s still a blast today, whether you have the original CD, the Battle.net edition, or a cracked release (I have all three). Blizzard really got their shit together with this one. Warcraft I belongs in a display case, this one belongs on a hard drive. My excessive bitching is a testament to my obsessive playing, as all the game’s weaknesses (which it has in abundance) have had a long time to chafe.

The core of the game is the same as the first one. You harvest resources, build a city, train soldiers, and make the rivers run red with blood. The game is essentially a choice between an early rush, and arms race to acquire the later, more powerful units. The mechanics basically worked then, and they basically work now. There’s something visceral and satisfying about the way Warcraft II battles go down, bloody and chaotic, with every single unit being important. I can’t think of any other game that captures its dynamic.

They eliminated some of Warcraft’s more enraging features (such as how buildings must be connected to a road) and added new features, such as water and aerial combat, walls, and games with up to eight players. Even simple touches like the “fog of war” (you can see explored terrain, but can’t actually see the enemies there unless you have a unit nearby) were revolutionary for the time.

In a genre that can feel mechanical and sterile (hey, did you realise level 3 Murderdeathbots get a .15% attack multiplier against Stabfuckdroids?), Warcraft 2 is overflowing with human touches. Landscapes are bright and colorful. The way your units argue with you when you click on them is endearing. The story in the manual was fantastic, and I was disappointed that the actual game didn’t do it justice. Glen Stafford’s music is great. The thing Blizzard really did right was put together a game full of lavish, attractive content.

As Warcraft 2’s terrible AI makes the single player experience fairly lackluster, I recommend learning a few builds, and then playing multiplayer as soon and as frequently as you can. This is where the game sparkles. You’ll learn that a lot of the the maps shipped with the game are broken or unbalanced. You’ll learn that the orc bloodlust spell makes the human race noncompetitive. You’ll learn that half the players are walking abortions who insist on terrible custom maps like Chop Chop and Laser Tag. You’ll learn that water combat is poorly implemented and micro intensive. But you’ll also have the time of your life. Again, Warcraft II has a quality that no other game has.

An expansion came out to this in 1996: Beyond the Dark Portal. More crappy single player maps, and a new tileset that’s nearly indistinguishable from one that was already in the game. I can’t imagine playing Age of Empires I or II without their respective expansions installed, but Warcraft II’s I can take or leave. The fact remains that version 1.0 of the game is still probably the apex of the Warcraft series, and my own favourite Blizzard game. They really did a superb job with this one.