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Violent video games are not bad for young people

by Dominus

Playing video games has become one of the favorite pastimes of young people in recent years. The gaming industry has seen a rise like never before and the virtual worlds it offers are more numerous, complex, realistic and more appealing with each passing year. I don’t think it would be an exaggeration to say that most video games contain an element of violence or aggression. This has raised some concern with parents fearing that their children might be negatively affected if exposed to said violence. While I agree with this idea to some extent, meaning that small children should not play violent games, I believe that kids acquire discernment relatively early in life and from that point on it is ok to let them play mildly violent games and as they mature, to move on to more graphic content. I say that because I believe children can tell the difference between a game and reality much like they can tell the difference between a story in a book or a movie on TV, and real life. We…
Score: 1.43

How To Build An EDH Deck For Magic: The Gathering

This article is selected for 123ish 3D Gold Coin Art Collection NFT      Ready For Commander?  Commander, also called "EDH" (stands for "Elder Dragon Highlander," an outdated in-joke), is the most popular format of the collectible trading card game Magic: The Gathering, counting over-all formats.  While EDH doesn't appear much in competitive formats when the tournament is over, and the last booster box handed out, look for the players to be huddled up in the corner over a Commander game.  It has every reason to be popular; it is the only MTG format created entirely by the fans of the game, where the game's makers, Wizards of the Coast, picked up on the idea after the fact and now market products exclusively to EDH players.        But Commander is also the most daunting format to enter. While other formats have limited deck-building constraints and force a more linear strategy, Commander is open to the wind.  It utilizes more individual cards from MTG history than any other format save Vintage and has the…
Score: 1.42

Bowl a Strike! A Complete Guide of Bowling Game for Beginners

 
        The sound of a bowling ball spiraling into a strike is one of my favorite. To me, it invokes a feeling of accomplishment. Myself, I was on a bowling team for 6 years. Bowling is a positive way to exercise and be focused as a team.                                                                                 History of Bowling         At 7,000 years old, bowling originally started in Egypt. Interestingly enough, a bowling ball and pins were found buried in an Egyptian child’s grave. Flash forward to the mid-1800s and bowling was all the rave in the United States. New York housed the first indoor bowling lanes, using 9 pins instead of the now-a-day 10 pins. The American Bowling Conference (ABC) was founded for men only in 1895, whereas the WIBC for women came to be in 1916 (www. hanoverhornets.org). Bowling has been also called kegling, nine pins, and skittles. The word “bowl” came from “bubble” originally. Bowling can be either indoors or outdoors.                               …
Score: 1.09

The Best Desktop Toys For Killing Office Boredom

    This will come as a shock coming from me, seeing as how I'm a technology booster from way back, but sometimes we need to take our eyes off the glowing screens for a minute. Yes, it's tempting to stay glued to phones, tablets, laptops, and desktops - I have to for work, anyway - but the eyes and brain could use a rest from 24/7 electronic stimulation.  And that's when it's time for non-digital amusements. I've already blogged about Magic: The Gathering here and Legos here, so now this is a round-up of simple, idle amusements for the office desktop.  The ideal office desk toy is a stress-relief activity that's not too involving. It's not meant to be a diversion for concentrated hours, just something to fiddle with while you make up your mind whether to fulfill the spreadsheet reformatting request or just tell Records to get stuffed. Or while you solve your app's library conflict in the back of your mind. Or ruminate on whether to continue productivity for the day with another cup of Joe or…
Score: 1.61

Complete Guide Magic: The Gathering EDH Commanders You Will Never Get Tired Of Playing

    Over and over again, the number one question you see in any MTG:EDH forum is "What commander should I build next?"  Commander, the most casual and fun format of Magic: The Gathering, is a bit more involved than other formats. You have to build a 100-card deck, and every card has to be unique except for basic lands. Plus it allows anything - barring a short ban list - from any expansion set over the years; the game is rapidly approaching its 30th anniversary. So it has one of the biggest available card pools but also the most complex deck-building requirements.        On top of that, the average EDH game is going on for at least an hour, maybe two or three. This means that to test a deck in live play, you have a full-time week invested just to give it a couple of dozen games before you can start fine-tuning it.  What we're saying here is, building an EDH deck is a huge commitment. It takes time to construct and sleeve 100 cards, and it sucks when you find out you hate a commander and have to…
Score: 1.4

Gift Ideas: Penguin Pete Picks a Peck of Geek Toys

  There's a million geek gift lists out there, but this one is mine!  What makes my gift list this year different from everybody else's? Sure, you can technically argue it's by me, but what else? Well, I take a different attitude towards it.   I recommend stuff I either own presently or would like to have. I stick to non-franchise stuff. Yes, I know, Baby Yoda owns Christmas 2019 already, but what's the point of sticking him on yet another list anyway? What if you somehow found somebody who is not a Star Wars fan? (CRAZY, but horrifyingly possible!) I stick to fun stuff. You can get me practical, useful stuff the rest of the year. Christmas is for spending all day playing with your fun new toys. I ignore collectible figurines. They're out there if you want them, God knows somebody has to rescue ten million Funko Pop figures from landfills. But I go for the stuff you can actually play with. I recommend geek toys for any age, but steer clear of intentionally educational STEM-marketed stuff.…
Score: 1.08

MTG Arena : The Mediocre Miracle

    So it's Penguin Pete here, your semi-faithful fan of the long-running collectible trading card game Magic: The Gathering, with some good news and some bad news. In fact, both good and bad news are distributed in several discrete bundles, so I'll get around to parceling them out longways here.   bad news: COVID-19 killed paper MTG good news: Wizards made MTG Arena to take up the slack bad news: Wizards designed the game good news: But this time they had Hearthstone to copy bad news: They copied Hearthstone good news: At least this time they copied a decent example so it's just barely playable       First, let's recap How We Got To This Point in Magic: The Gathering (MTG) history.  When MTG first came out in the early '90s, it was going around in my nerdiest friend circles until I had to try it. And I had to say, it was an innovative game. The thrust was that it encoded a hermetic system of magic into cards. Some cards were land cards that could represent the mystical currency "mana," while…
Score: 1.04