[the scourge of modern society. People who follow politicians and Fox News]Farmville
[nice, orderly, small, square plot- totally unrealistic]
[if you build it, they will come]We have the phenomenon of Farmville. It looks like a harmless passtime. We have thousands of kinds of real and computer games to keep us busy when we're not working like oxen.
It's not too realistic, since most farmers need 100 hectares just to make enough money to survive, what with Sainsbury and Tesco squeezing them to lower prices, and the government get funding from Sainsbury and Tesco, turning a blind eye to survivability of the food supply, two years before prices go through the roof, and shortages begin. Also, there's no allowance for smelling the waste from a 3000-head pig farm, and watching it pollute the water table, poisoning the nearby citizens, just for profit. What about the use of pesticides with the cancerous growths on illegal Mexican workers? How about the Monsanto cows with bloated bags shooting out puss all over the place?
wait a minute. I dare say, I'm gonna checkitout and see if I can do that.
You can argue that Farmville is a waste of time, but that would exclude most passtimes, and frankly, pretty soon, we won't have time for any passtimes.
Grandpappy Farmer will have his shotgun on the porch, looking to head off any police or robbers. Daddy Farmer will be out in the field guarding the cow with a shotgun to stop any rustlers. Mommy Farmer will be taking the kids to school and shopping, with a shotgun to keep from getting car-jacked. I mean real farmers. All hell will be breaking loose in a couple of years.
[cunning, socialist, smoking animals]Political Allegory
"wickedness, indifference, ignorance, greed and myopia
destroy any possibility of a Utopia"
You could run with that during any period in history. Today, it would have Tony the Pig Blair, George the Resus Monkey Bush killing the brown animals and stealing their....stuff. As you know, we are currently living through a period of socialism again, destroy any possibility of a Utopia"
corporate socialism.
[there's a lot of mileage in this anthropomorphic stuff, and no defamation suits]checkitout: from Wikipedia
Animal Farm is a dystopian allegorical novella by George Orwell. Published in England on 17 August 1945, the book reflects events leading up to and during the Stalin era before World War II. Orwell, a democratic socialist,[1] was a critic of Joseph Stalin and hostile to Moscow-directed Stalinism, especially after his experiences with the NKVD, and what he saw of the results of the influence of Communist policy ("ceaseless arrests, censored newspapers, prowling hordes of armed police" - "Communism is now a counter-revolutionary force"),[2] during the Spanish Civil War. In a letter to Yvonne Davet, Orwell described Animal Farm as his novel "contre Stalin".
....
Time magazine chose the book as one of the 100 best English-language novels (1923 to 2005);[4] it also places at number 31 on the Modern Library List of Best 20th-Century Novels. It won a Retrospective Hugo Award in 1996 and is also included in the Great Books of the Western World.
The novel addresses not only the corruption of the revolution by its leaders but also how wickedness, indifference, ignorance, greed and myopia destroy any possibility of a Utopia. While this novel portrays corrupt leadership as the flaw in revolution (and not the act of revolution itself), it also shows how potential ignorance and indifference to problems within a revolution could allow horrors to happen if smooth transition to a people's government is not satisfied.
