Indignant Desert Birds

(I know Western Christmas was yesterday. This video was too good)

It’s Sunday. Sundays are for waking up snuggled next to your girlfriend and hustling through your chores so you can introduce her to your friends. Sundays are also for playing games. Lots and lots of games. Alternately, Sunday could be for taking care of cute critters before picking up your partner and going to see Black Swan.

This week was a busy one for the US Congress. They ended Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, passed a treaty which let America send inspectors to Russian nuclear sites, and a few other things. And then took a break for the holidays.

Also this week, a really hot, nerdy, awesome girl asked me out. I said yes. Better believe I did! Folks: http://hejibits.com/comics/2010-10-18-on-fps-fanbases.png"target="_blank">never underestimate the power of a silly hat.

But perhaps Slate captures the conventional wisdom on what happened this week.

In about 3 minutes, Barney Frank takes conservative memage apart. The reporter is basically arguing that a) straight people currently don’t shower with gay people b) straight people shouldn’t shower with gay people and insinuates that c) gay people will be overcome by hotness that they will rape straight people. This is obviously silly.

How much challenge is too much? How much is not enough? This is obviously a question which plagues the video game world. It’s also something that parents and society at large should give some serious thought to.

Py Kory has half a point here. He’s not wrong that (we) Democrats do a lousy job at selling ourselves. But suggesting, as he seems to, that a better narrative would help us more than fixing the economy is just backwards. Then again, a better sales job would let us push our (correct, I think) solutions passed the legislative branch, and help us win seats in a self-reinforcing cycle.

Perhaps a bit more about that dynamic? Adam Serwer brings it. He makes the point that the “liberal” congress has been seriously engaged with the conservative critique of liberalism. We really, truly have sold our liberal narrative. In exchange, we got healthcare and gay rights. So maybe it was worth it?

I’m not sure if this graph shows that the Free Speech Movement was a crushing success, or if they were merely a leading indicator of a new social norm.

Free speech only goes so far, though. Stop using Comic Sans.

The economist looks at the site of medieval battle, to show how awful it could be. It’s a fascinating historical piece.

Today is the first Day of Christmas. Seriously: the “days of Christmas” tell a fascinating tale about the “Great Schism” that divided the “Eastern” (orthodox) church from the “Catholic” (universal). That’s all just throat clearing justification for posting this great story.

This one too: Americans are no more religious than people in other countries. But we’re much more likely to lie about it.

The internet has it’s own culture. It has it’s own, traditions, games, etc. Even it’s own dialect of Standard American English. Congress is exactly the same way. when cultures clash, it gets funny. So we’re clear: I’ve got a foot in both worlds.

San Francisco is beautiful.

It’s not really science fiction, though. Salon has a slideshow of places that stand in for Science Fiction

Salon also has a great article about how the South rationalizes secession. The irony, perhaps, is that every time we Californians think about seceding, we want to do it because the South is part of the US.

Sometimes I think the South didn’t have to succeed at secession, because they won the culture war that followed. How else can we have written African Americans out of the social narrative of American History, and allowed the wretched “Citizens’ Council”to look like anything but monsters?

Mumbles does music. Go listen. And yeah, I’m really grooving on About You.

Popdose also does music. But a) it doesn’t alliterate, and b) you have to buy the albums, rather than listening to free music. Anyway: worth a look.

This week’s theme was… fuck it. No theme. Since today is boxing day, who is/was your favorite boxer, box maker, or type of doggy?

Tags: Sunday, Uncategorized by Punning Pundit
1 Comment »

I’d link to the Walking Dead’s Hulu page, but it doesn’t have one.

If you listen to only one collection of 6 songs while reading this post, make it these

There’s a newish TV show called “The Walking Dead”. It’s set just after zombies have done their work of killing damned near all of us. We’ve been watching movies about Zombies for decades. And shooting them in video games for years. So it was just a matter of time before there was a TV show set in the zombie Apocalypse.

Zombie games let you shoot people-looking entities without feeling guilt about murdering people.* Zombie movies put characters into extreme circumstances and demand they try and survive when the rest of the human species cannot. A zombie TV show has the potential to be… a very different sort of beast.

Over the last 10-15 years, TV has become a long-form narrative. This opens up new space in the zombie story milieu. The show opens and the zombie war is over. The zombies have won, and society is destroyed. This point is rather blatantly reinforced when the show has a uniformed cop tell a woman that looting laws no longer apply– so she should go ahead and take that necklace for her sister.

In politics, and in political science, we have the understanding that laws must not be made which contradict human nature. Laws, rather, must be made which guide and push humans into desired behavior. Naturally, we in the political sphere try very hard to figure out what the fuck “human nature” might be.

The problem is that human societies already have laws that are pushing humans to behave into some way or another. It is incredibly easy for observation bias to destroy our ability to think critically about what humanity is at base. Political philosophers therefore try to imagine humans in a “state of nature”, or under a “veil of ignorance”** to figure out sorts of societies are ideal for us.

Yes, this would be easier if we had non humans to contrast ourselves against.

Enter, once more, the Walking Dead. Humanity is now in a state of nature. There is no law. No society ordering us about and giving structure to our decision making process. The rough beast has come ’round and mere anarchy is loosed upon the world***.

Even if the show weren’t explicitly about that (And the comicbook is, at least according to the author. Also of note: This is explicitly the story of Rick Grimes), it would be impossible to tell this story without also giving some insight into someone’s idea of human behavior.

There is a telling vignette early in the series where the racist redneck (Merl Dixon) refuses to work with a black man (T-Dog. No seriously. That’s the name he’s given in IMDB) because… because the white dude is too stupid to live, really. After beating the hell out of T-dog, Merl the racist cartoon holds an “election” to get himself declared king of the ruins. That’s when the hero, Rick Grimes, punches Merl and handcuffs Merl to some pipes.

On a symbolic level, the lesson seems to be that democracy is rule by violent thugs, and only people in uniform can be trusted. After the characters return to the main camp, we learn that Rick’s wife, as well as the cop he used to partner with, are in the group that Rick randomly bumbled into.

A major difference between an apocalypse story and an actual “state of nature” is that the machinery is still there. Water is still easy to get– it just needs someone who knows how to turn the crank. Food is fairly easy to get– all the Twinkies in the world are sitting in stores. Weapons? Every police station- and military base- and about half the private homes in the country- have a ton of them. Electricity? There is no reason to believe that Hydroelectric dams would have shut off. There are only 2 limited assets in a zombified world: human capital and time.

Naturally this is what the characters choose to waste. They try and fix a crappy old van rather than just take a new, working one. The fearless leader chooses to risk a shootout over a bag full of guns– rather than simply walk into a sporting goods store and take new ones. One of the women has a college degree (the only degree we’re told about any of the survivors having). She’s pushed into laundry detail rather than being allowed to use her brain.

These people are too stupid to live. Many of them die.

The major question we’re left with, then, is whether this is a vision that the producers have for all of humanity– or merely this group of survivors? Watching a group of dysfunctional humans try and overcome their own neuroses to create a flourishing society would be interesting. Consider it high-stakes psychotherapy. It would be nice to know that elsewhere, outside the vision of our protagonists, there are other people. They would be basically sane, relatively healthy people engaged in the small dramas of carving out a place for human beings amidst an incredibly hostile environment. That story would be less interesting, perhaps, but I think also truer to who we are as a species.

I guess I’ll do the HDTV equivalent of “tuning in” next season for the answer to that question.

*Yes, gamers really do care about the fact that they’re slaughtering people. We’re no more likely to be bloody psychopaths than the average human.

**Which might help explain the subhead of this blog. But not explain the typo.

***And yes, there are probably some Indignant Desert Birds chattering that the beast is too nasty.

Tags: Uncategorized by Punning Pundit
3 Comments »

Now is a great time to be human

It’s Sunday. Sundays are for slowly drinking that second cup of coffee while thinking about how awesome the winter can be. Or for hurriedly doing chores so that you can meet your friends in Dickensian London for a fun afternoon. Or for feeling greatful that you can be among friends and family while your religious calendar ticks over to “holy day”.

This week the US congress finally got around to letting gays serve openly in the military– thus making the military complaint with the 14th Amendment. Also this week: the legislature of Venezuela gave it’s president “emergency” powers, thus abdicating their responsibility in an apparent belief that their system is fundamentally broken. Seems like Star Wars Episode 3 isn’t popular down there. Also also: it looks like UN peace keepers in the Ivory Coast may soon come under fire from troops loyal to outgoing president Laurent Gbagbo.

Ayn Rand’s A Selfish Christmas is my favorite of John Scalzi 10 holiday specials that sucked.

This week holds the second-holiest day on the Christian Calendar, so naturally atheist groups have to celebrate. They’re doing that by taking out ads on billboards and buses. As obnoxious as this behavior is, I’m not sure it’s avoidable. Atheists aren’t treated well in American society, and simply knowing that they’re not alone can be a tremendous psychological boon. I’m not sure there’s a way to say “I reject theology” that doesn’t include a silent “including yours” at the end of it. That’s always going to be a little annoying.

Know why I love the Universalist Unitarians? They welcome everyone, of any faith or none and ask only that a congregant strive for self betterment. That’s good works!

Speaking of Faith, Electronic Arts has been trying out a whole new business model. This one involves such weird things as not abusing their customers, and delivering long-term value for money spent. As a result of this, EA’s reputation in the gaming community has soared, and they’ve stopped shedding members of their core audience.

Our tax dollars have been spent on finding new and ever more awesome weapons of war. I’m glad the US is capable of defending itself against every conceivable earthly threat, but couldn’t we put this money to other uses? On the other wrist, I admit to a sort of childish glee in the amount of destruction that can be leveled by these guns. Maybe we can use them to launch stuff into space?

George Orwell talks about the blitz. He talks about insanity as an every-day event, impossible to avoid. We should think about this sort of hell before we next start bombing another country.

Speaking of crazy: what’s up with this bathroom?

I’m honestly not sure how I feel about Senator Leno’s desire to add an LGBT curriculum to California schools. I’m eager to see nondiscrimination policies applied to education! I also remember having to figure out in my early 20s that school textbooks had lied to me about racism being a solved problem. I’d hate to see that replicated for the LGBT community.

Speaking of discrimination. Sometimes we discriminate thoughtlessly, rather than through conscious choice. For instance: sites that do poor implementations of RSS can cause disabled web-surfers a whole lot of problems.

We are very small, and the universe is very big. Right now, all of humanity is trapped inside this one sphere of oxygen and water. It wouldn’t take a very large rock, falling from space, to slam down and kill every last one of us. Let’s get some people on Mars.

The universe is vast and these pictures tell us how small we are

For years, we Americans have been told that the only way we can be lifted out of griding, medieval, poverty is if we let the super-rich get even super richer. Here are some graphs suggesting that this pernicious meme is what keeps us trapped in poverty. America is basically a very rich 3rd world nation.

The CEO class believes that Homo Economicus are the only people who know correct behavior. This might be the basic problem in America.

The suits of James Bond, in Doctor No. Was I the only one who didn’t know that pleats had reversed direction since the 1960s? I wonder how that happened?

How does our higher education system currently? What do we want our higher education system to look like? Why are those things different?

The PhD challenge is getting a specific phrase into a peer-reviewed academic journal. I have much respect for this year’s winner.

In 1996 Nora Ephrom talked to some graduating students at Wellesley College. She talked about the way things were when she was younger, and the way things were in 1996. Looking at the way things stand in 2010, I’d say we’ve made… not enough progress. But we’ve made some. Yes indeed we have.

Another report from Bangladesh. Seems Ms. Barrow is enjoying the curry.

Think of the thousand small annoyances that fill your life. People mowing their lawns at 8am on Sunday morning. Netflix instant watch not having the movie you want to watch. Or maybe you hate it when a commercial comes on TV and suddenly the volume jumps about 10 decibels. Obama signed a law this week fixing that last one.

As we all know by now, public roads are a precious and limited resource. Therefore to make efficient use of them, we should charge people who make inefficient use of them by driving. How is this even controversial? Why on Earth should I subsidize people who chose to drive? Anyway: The San Francisco board of Supervisors agrees with me.

When playing a game, you basically click buttons. But how you click buttons matters a great deal. At it’s base level, good game design makes you forget that you’re just clicking a button. Rob Zachny tells us how cover based shooters reinforce, rather than hide, that we’re pressing buttons.

It’s amazing to me that sometimes clicking a button makes virtual people die, and sometimes clicking a button makes virtual societies flourish. How do you grapple with the the history of China: as video game mechanics. Troy Goodfellow tells us about it.

Last week I talked about how we are not fundamentally different from the people who went along with the NAZIs. This week Mr. Coates talks about how he could have been either a slave or slave holder.

Tags: Uncategorized by Punning Pundit
No Comments »

Grab some coffee!

It’s Sunday. Sunday are for lounging in bed until you realize you’ve got to write a Sunday Morning post for all your readers. And judging by my Gchat list, Sundays are for sleeping. Or possibly supersaturating pig products in a delicious omelette.

This week the US government picked a fight with the internet. It appears to be losing. Fortunately, the government is using proxies (Amazon, Paypal, Twitter, etc), and the internet is fighting those proxies. Also: it looks like Stockholm was bombed. Too bad the internet won’t fight against terrorists, also. And an entire US prison went on strike. The prisoners won’t do anything for 24hrs. That this docility seems to annoy the guards says a lot about the mentality of US prison-guards.

Ta-Nehisi Coates was on fire this week. This isn’t a surprise: He’s on fire most weeks. In 2 small pictures, he manages to show the human cost of slavery.

The reason I like Coates’ writing is that he is enormously sympathetic to the human condition. It is fun- cheap- entertainment to spit hot fire at one’s enemies. But to look someone in the eye and say “I know why you did that, and I think I might have done the same thing”– that’s harder. It’s also more necessary. Think very hard about your life. Now think very hard about the life of someone living in Germany in 1925. What is the difference between you? Probably not much. The biggest difference, for me, is knowledge of what the NAZIs and the Fascists did. Knowing that at all times and all places humanity is always German- and it’s always 1925- should at the very least scare us into being better people. In this powerful post, Coates finds sympathy for the wonder of newly-freed slaves. It’s the opposite of what I was saying above. But it’s also identical.

I am incapable of producing anything that a discerning person would think resembles music. Possibly because of this, I am fascinated by the role music plays in conjunction with other art forms. For instance: video games. The right musical cue can transform a gaming experience. It can heighten terror, or give a sense of grandeur to what might be a weird series of mouse clicks. A track from the Civilization 4 soundtrack was nominated for a Grammy. There’s a reasonable chance this song will be the footer of today’s post. since I didn’t post that as the footer, here’s a link to it

Once upon a time, telephones were new. So new that it was considered rude to use them to invite people to dinner. I have to imagine that taboo existed mainly among the bourgeoisie. But then: they would have been the only ones who could afford a phone. So who knows. Anyway, go read.

I recently watched Season 1 of “The Walking Dead”. It was… interesting. And if you ask nicely, I just might remember to write a post about it. Zombie stories give us a nice window into the philosophically hypothesized “State of Nature”, but with characters we can actually recognize as our friends and neighbors. Alternately, I can just use a generic Zombie Article Template to really get the job done quickly.

We are at war with Mexicans and terrorists. We have always been at war with Mexicans and Terrorists.

Markets rely on 2 things: perfect information exchange, and competition. In advertising, there are a lot of firms competing for every dollar. If someone has a new or good idea, it’s easy to start up a new kind of company. Hell, a quick perusal of Twitter or Facebook will show thousands of “social media experts” (marketing people) who seem convinced they know how to turn those platforms into dollars. By definition they couldn’t have existed 5 years ago. Which is why I’m fascinated that advertising rates plummeted as soon as they had reliable metrics

Who uses Twitter? Women, people of color, Urbanites.

I’m an Urbanite. I live in San Francisco (home of Twitter, yo!), and walk all the time. I grew up in the suburbs, though. Every now and then I try to walk around my childhood neighborhood like I would my own. It’s really difficult. Here’s an explanation- in graph form- of why that is.

This is a long, fascinating interview with Assange. I get the impression that Wikileaks is a much bigger deal to corporations than it is to governments. It seems like an intramural fight between giant corporations doing bad things than a gun pointed at the heads of governments.

The most terrifying of all the wikileaks documents.

The US State Department is using the full pressure of the US government against Assange. Naturually they’re going to host a Free Speech event. The first Amendment is only for people who don’t embarrass the US government, right?

The biggest problem with the Government’s response to Wikileaks Is that it is being extra-legal. Near as I can tell, Assange has broken no law in the US. At least, not as relates to Wikileaks.

My friend Funranium can’t look at any wikileaks coverage. Something to do with his security clearance. Did you know that Funranium once defused a nuclear weapon? True story.

Oh hell. Have some more zombies

Team Fortress 2 fans will find this just too cool for words.

Girl Talk’s latest Album is a pleasure too sublime to be guilty. I cringe when I think about how much I want to listen to the album again. Here’s that album in charts.

Where should I locate my wretched hive of Scum and Villainy ? Space, of course!

It’s a simple market dynamic: if there is a scarce resource, we expect either more of it to be made, or the prices to rise (or both). If more of it cannot be made, and prices remain the same, then the owners of the goods are leaving a lot of money on the table. parking places are a scarce resource of which no more can be made. When cities refuse to raise prices, taxes must go up in other areas. Let’s be clear: under priced parking represents a transfer payment from people who do not drive to people who drive. Class warfare?

It’s possible that people who read Business Insider will be shocked by the growth of income inequality evidenced by these 15 charts. But people who read Sunday morning posts won’t be.

Why has income inequality grown so bad? Here’s a description about what England has gone through over the past generation or so. Same thing happened in America. Class Warfare.

Where the tax cuts are going.

There is no Social Security crisis. None. Well, that’s not entirely true. If America starts defaulting on her debts, then there will be a social security crisis. That would also mark the end of America as a sovereign nation, so what happens to the Social Security fund would be secondary. Turns out, though, that the people screaming about the need to slash social security to fund tax cuts for the rich? Rich people. Class Warfare?

Yes, Virgina, etc. Santa Claus and the multiverse.

Today’s theme seems to be zombies and class warfare. This almost begs me to play “eat the Rich” as the footer video. Instead we get a demonstration of your tax dollars at work:

Last Sunday I had to ask a friend to take a look at my butt and tell me if it really was a hernia (it was). So… what’s the most embarrassing conversation you’ve ever had? Leave a comment!

Tags: Uncategorized by Punning Pundit
2 Comments »

(Actual political rhetoric from the Adams/Jefferson campaign of 1800)

It’s Sunday. Sundays are for waking up at 7am so you can shoo your house guests out the door so they can go have fun at Dickens Fair. Sundays are also for performing at your first choir concert in about a decade. If you’re very lucky, Sundays might be for snuggling with your cat and dreaming deeply.

This week the world did not engulf itself in nuclear fire, though there’s always next week. Also: anonymous sources told the world that American diplomats are competent, capable and know how to keep their mouths shut about things they shouldn’t be talking about to anyone other than their superiors. The same sources also revealed that Nancy Pelosi scares the crap out of the Chinese Government. NASA found a type of life (on Earth) composed of poison. Comedy writers everywhere thanked their deities for reasons to blow the dust off their EX-Partner jokes.

I want to start off preaching. Well, I’m not going to preach today. I never preach on Sunday Mornings. Fred Clark? Yeah he can bring the gentle nudge in the tuchus that some folks– most folks– including me and you (probably including Fred Clark)– need. Here’s a sample: “We chose to hike the road to Jericho rather than the road from Jericho because, even though it was the same path, the latter route is a much more grueling walk. Jericho, you see, is 850 feet below sea level, while Jerusalem at the other end of the road is about 2,500 feet above sea level. So that road provides a vivid illustration of what is true for all paths — the experience of traveling on it varies according to the direction of the traveler.” Go read the rest.

Several years ago when Baen started giving away e-editions of their books as loss leaders, it was a fantastic idea. People don’t care to read an entire book while chained to their desktop– or even their laptop. Now that Ebook readers are becoming cheap, ubiquitous and just plane nice to use, I wonder how long their strategy will remain effective. In the mean time, here are all the works of Lois McMaster Bujold. If you enjoy sci-Fi diplomatic fiction, this is good stuff.

It is really easy for a lawyer for accidentally create an attorney/client relationship. This seems kind of problematic, actually. I’m sure there’s a fairly good reason it’s this easy, but for the life of me, I can’t think of a great one.

I normally dislike putting links in the Sunday post that reference the news of the week. This owes to my long-standing hatred for all things meta. This sentence exists to let you pause for laughter. Anyway: Leigh Alexander takes the opportunity afforded by Wikileaks to meditate on the responsibilities owed by journalists towards the people they might hurt by telling secrets. Frankly, I think our media has a too-cozy, too unskeptical relationship with their sources. Nevertheless, I’m glad to see the thought process.

One of things we learned from wikileaks is that our government classifies first and asks questions later. Frankly, that’s the part of the whole thing that scares me the most: our government is starting to consider itself separate from We the People. Not, I think in the legislative branch, but the executive branch is routinely engaging in bad behavior. For instance: they will create criminals so they can prosecute them. Makes me kind of sick.

Obviously the entirely legislative branch isn’t blameless in the race to monstrosity.

Oprah has magic powers

I’m of the opinion that the fullest explanation of the human condition is a multi-disciplinary affair that excludes no genre. Life is short, however, and 95% of everything is crap. Therefore, if someone says “this is the best example of THING X”, we should make it a priority. Tl;DR: Go read The greatest science-fiction story ever written.

Speaking of great writing, I don’t really care about food writing. So when I say “Go read this recipe”, you should click that link. Even if you have no intention of making the chili, go be a connoisseur of the descriptive process.

Real zombies are less scary than sloppy thinking and failing to think something all the way through. For instance, what’s wrong with the sentence I wrote immediately before this one?

I watched Airplane this week. Well, why not? Leslie Neilsen had just passed on. One of the jokes is that for “light reading”, someone is given a “pamphlet” detailing “great Jewish athletes”. It’s easy to miss the inherent racism of that 10 second segment. After all: “everyone knows” there aren’t many Jewish athletes. It’s easy to stop thinking there at the common sense answer. So it can be a bit jarring to read that Jews were once considered the dominant “race” at basketball. I like to think about that whenever I see someone perpetuating a stereotype.

It would be incredibly easy to read the Disney cartoon of “The Little Mermaid” as a deeply sexist story about a woman needing a man like a fish needs gills. That’s even a correct reading. But I rather like this overthought article about Ariel being representative of the entire human species. That reading makes the inherent sexism besides the point: we are all female. And male.

There is no way to read this, however, that isn’t sexist.

Dick Cheney may not be an endemic problem like racism and sexism, but he is an odius little toad who shouldn’t walk the streets with decent people. Let me be clear what I mean by that: Pimps should turn up their noses at the sight of Dick Cheney. The day Cheney stands where Milosevic stood will be a good day for justice. Nigeria is bringing some charges.

For that news, this track is appropriate.

55 years ago this week, Rosa Parks decided to sit down in the front section of the bus. I can only imagine what kind of courage that must have taken, knowing that she was inviting the wrath of a government– her government, your government– that was allowed to use physical, crippling (and possibly deadly) force to keep her from sitting in the seat she wished to. If you can’t see the connection between that effort, and the one to white-wash Confederate history, Mr. Coates can help explain.

There may well be someone to whom celebrating the abortion of a nation known as the CSA is merely about “heritage”. But the creators of these videos are mangling their facts, and that makes them liars of the worst sort.

Got your wet suit? Surfing season started this week.

My hometown is a deeply weird place. It can be hard to keep the same perspective as everyone else.

San Francisco celebrates the season with Santa. We have our little traditions…

Good thing we didn’t bring out the Santas before the 1st of December.

It was touch and go there for a while, Hellmode is back!! This article is a mediation on the history of morality in video games. Computer games are like any bit of software: a collection of numbers. If something can’t be quantified, it can’t run. Turning that quantification process into a system of morality is an incredible challenge, yet a lack of morality would send even the best game into the deepest pit of the uncanny valley.

This week we looked at the way lazy thinking perpetuates the patriarchy, and different ways to subvert it. This post was also incredibly self-referential. Therefore this week’s question is: What is the most “meta” thing you’ve ever done?

And now, the internet:

Tags: Uncategorized by Punning Pundit
2 Comments »