Sunday Morning Reading Material Fourth Sunday in July 2011- vile despicable not a Lady Edition
Damn it feels good.
It’s Sunday Morning. Sundays are for waking up after not enough sleep and running to work. Alternately, Sundays might be for next steps. Perhaps Sundays are for gardening up in Tacoma (finish your damned book!). Or Sundays are for working on completing a Lego game to 100%. Then again, perhaps Sundays are simply for recovery.
This week American Republicans once more decided to juggle fire over the American economy. Also this week: Norway experienced it’s worst moment of violence since the end of the Second World War. In happier news: New York State began implementing marriage equality.
Years back I was sort of sickened and astounded by the idea of Prussian Blue. Prussian Blue were a teenaged neo-Nazi pop sensation. It seems that they’ve grown up a bit, and had a change of heart. Score one for the good guys.
Music is weird. It is communication that isn’t quite speech. Music is always signal and never noise– even when the sets of sound might be noise in other contexts. It is fundamental to the human experience, and yet not at all unique to our species.
I’m a huge fan of Science Fiction and Fantasy. I find that of all the genres of fiction, they have the greatest potential for A) exploring the boundaries of the human condition and B) letting me enjoy the spectacle of dragons battling spaceships. The problem with creating whole new universes and laws of physics is that there is an ever present temptation to ignore internal consistency of the universe an author has created. That’s when I check out. I’m not sure why animated/drawn works tend to entice authors to break their own rules more than other media. But my experience shows they do.
I cannot begin to understand politics as anything other than an expression of values. Likewise: fiction is a way of exploring values in extreme circumstances. We may never have actually been faced with a “ticking bomb” scenario, but 24 let us think about how we might deal with it. Likewise, epic fantasy lets us understand how ordinary people can do extraordinary evil- or good.
The games industry loves to deride Metacritic, mostly because they’re overly reliant on it. There seems to be a general belief in the industry that a game that scores a “90″ is somehow better than one that scores an “89″. Metacritic has a fairly flawed methodology, but can be a useful rough-guide when making buying decisions. After reading this this, I can’t help but respect them a bit more. Now: if only a games journalist had done the work of actually finding out who had been de-listed.
I can almost, but not quite, wrap my brain around this decision. Traditionally at parties like this, several men are complete jackasses. The response to this was not to ban the jackasses, but to ban their targets. Victim blaming, in plainer terms. Bizarrely, this will have the effect of telling the jackasses that their behavior is acceptable.
San Francisco (and California) allows citizens to amend foundational document without imput from elected officials. This has always struck me as a bad way to make policy– sort of like making changes to an operating system every time you want to watch a new movie. Currently, in order to fix an oopie of a law, citizens have to go back to the polls and fiddle with typos. One of our Supervisors is putting forth an obvious solution to this problem.
Remember kids Cops are not allowed to help you. They are only allowed to hurt you. Once they’ve decided to hone in on you, they’ve created an adversarial relationship with you. They’re hoping you don’t know this.
When archaeologists were trying to understand Viking society, they looked at gravesites, saw that most of the corpses were buried with swords, and concluded that Vikings were mostly male. Recently scientists did some bone analysis on those vikings and discovered two things. Firstly: roughly half those vikings were female. Secondly: institutional gender bias can create enormous problems when trying to understand the world.
Many people think they hate playing board games. I don’t actually think this is true. I think, rather, that most people have a natural aversion to shitty board games. Most of the board games we played as kids were shitty. About 15 years ago, that began to change.
Borders books is going out of business. I am not surprised about this, every interaction I’d ever had with that company was at least slightly negative. I was left with the sense of a company implementing a bad plan. I feel rather badly for the hourly employees- they’ll be left with nothing.
The Republican Party is really fucking crazy.
On Saturday, I overheard a Dad talking with his daughter. “Are you a knight, or a princess? A princess knight?” In 2011, girls can do anything. Well, mostly anything.
Data. Without data we have guesswork and conjecture. With data, we have information and with information we can have a plan. Whenever I read a news article summarizing a study, I know that the article will give me terrible data.
The Rapture failed to arrive a month or so back. This was by and large good news: the world will not be destroyed by an angry divinity in the next several years. It did, however, leave true believers to piece together lives they’d largely abandoned, without the rock of their church to anchor them.
I can’t say that I know the cause and effect, but great nations dare great things. By having a crewed space program, America was making a statement that we would be constantly pushing against the boundaries of the known. By scaling back our ambitions, we’re declaring retreat before the oncoming forces of entropy.
Some people question the value of NASA. I barely know how to begin answering those questions. I don’t understand the mindset doesn’t understand the value of pushing the limits of human knowledge.
Even if America does fall into the dark ages, become a third-rate power, and abandon space, humanity will not.
If you read just one thing:
This week’s theme was a defiant scream against a gathering darkness. In the comments section, leave your war cry.
