From where I'm standing, the mod scene is in complete shambles. Every day you hear about the latest-and-greatest Counter-Strike clone. I wish I had foreseen the future back when I started on Night's Edge, because the development cycle was so long that what seemed like a wide-open market turned into a glut of realistic first-person shooter mods for every game imaginable before we even released our first beta. And yet people are still starting up teams with the intentions of introducing absolutely nothing new, except maybe their own pet gun which they feel has been overlooked by all the other mod teams.

Even worse, in my opinion, is the people who start up a project like this with the sole intention of turning it into a commercial venture. Again, with the success of Counter-Strike, everyone and their brother believes they can reproduce not only the game itself, but its unfathomable popularity and path to commercial viability. Talk about starting a mod for the wrong reasons! The only other mod that I know of that actually managed to be packaged as a separate produce was TacOps for Unreal Tournament, and I haven't heard good things about it.

The problem is the age-old concept of jumping on the bandwagon. Rather than putting some thought into a well laid-out original concept, people find it easier to just mimic the successful patterns of the most popular idea at that moment in time. Remember the deluge of first-person shooters that arrived after Doom? Anyone else remember, with mixed feelings, the flooded real-time strategy market that followed Command and Conquer? It seems like every two-bit software company threw together a rushed-to-market game in one or both of these categories, and gamers had to shop cautiously as if stepping through a minefield.

There is a silver lining. Eventually, as we all should know by now, the bubble bursts. It happened with the dot-coms, it happened with the RTS games, it happened with the FPS games. Oh, sure, there are still plenty of bad shooters being made, plenty of bad real-time strategy games being made, and Zebulon knows there are still a mess of worthless internet companies doing nothing more than taking up domain names. But the initial boom has ended and their numbers are now back down to more reasonable levels. So eventually, I think, the mod makers will return to what they do best: making original mods that really test the limits of their engine, not our patience.

A lot of people have severely criticized the United States and the Bush administration for its refusal to ratify the International Criminal Court treaty. President Bush even went so far as to unsign the document, reversing Clinton's action. Even Clinton did not try to get the ICC treaty ratified by Congress. And so our nation has received a lot of flak for our "disregard for human rights".

But these comments are hypocritical when you examine the details of the court's framework. Many of the safeguards and rights protected by the U.S. Constitution's Bill of Rights with regards to prosecution and our court system are missing from the ICC. Verdicts do not follow the same appeals process, and the court is basically accountable to no one. The Internation Criminal Court fundamentally recognizes fewer rights than our current national system, and is open to more abuse.

Supporters deny that the court could ever be used by U.S. enemies to prosecute American soldiers and politicians for imagined war crimes, because, they claim, the court is only to be used for violations where the nation refuses to act on its own. It doesn't take a genius, though, to realize that the U.S. isn't likely to prosecute soldiers for following legitimate orders, or politicians for acting in our national interests. There are people out there who insist our actions in Kosovo and Afghanistan are war crimes. Are we going to try Clinton and Bush for either of these? No, of course not. Doesn't that then open the door for the ICC to step in? And what about the soldiers and pilots who actually carried out these actions? The United States didn't refuse to ratify the ICC treaty because we don't recognize the importance of prosecuting war criminals. We ratified it because it is a flawed system open to abuse that recognizes fewer human rights than our own Constitution.

Lessons on life that I've learned from Grand Theft Auto III:

• When you crash into people, they don't stop and ask to swap insurance information. Mostly they just yell at you and keep on driving.
• Cops don't mind if you only crash into their car a few times. They're very forgiving.
• No matter how fast you're going, crashing into a wall just once isn't going to total your car. What a relief!
• Cars are always drivable even while on fire... until they explode.
• Cops are the only people that keep their doors locked.
• However, when a cop leaves his car, he unlocks all the doors.
• It doesn't matter how many times you roll the car or from what height your car drops... you'll never get hurt. In fact, the car is the safest place to be, unless it's on fire or sinking into the water.
• Guns can often be found on the roofs of buildings.
• No matter how many people you kill, painting your car a different color completely exonerates you.
• Common every-day citizens have no problem confronting a lunatic with a rocket launcher. However if you swing a bat at them, they run away in mortal terror.

Good news for democracy is the recent reversal of trends in Central and South America. No longer are nations in these countries ignoring the totalitarian nature of Castro's Communist regime in Cuba. Instead, they are finally starting to condemn it for the despotic, anti-freedom dictatorship that it is. And I say, it's about time. America's own left has consistently turned a blind eye to the island nation's abysmal record on basic human rights. Apparently the most trivial desires of al Qaeda and Taliban members need to be protected while the fundamental rights of Cuban citizens can simply be ignored. It's disgusting and hypocritical the way that the American left cozies up to Communist tyrant like Castro, all the while screaming for civil equality everywhere else.