Indignant Desert Birds

Warning: these are not the real US presidents.

It’s Sunday Morning. Sundays are for sleeping past 5:30am for the first time in a week. Sundays are for playing video games and waiting for your partner to get off work so you can… play some video games together. Sundays might be for introspection. Perhaps- just perhaps- Sundays are for watching Disney movies.

This week the US president went on vacation worked from a more scenic office. This week I seem to have acquired a girlfriend. This week NATO-backed rebel forces marched on the Libyan capitol. Also this week: Palestinians launched rockets on Israel- probably in reprisal for Israel doing bad things to Palestinians- Israelis who are pursuing legitimate security concerns stemming from Palestinian actions. And also: People employed by Verizon have agreed to end their strike and resume working under terms of an expired contract while a new one is being negotiated. Fun fact: the only direct quotes newspapers are giving about this Union action seem to be coming from Verizon’s management team. Ah, capitalism.

The news for the past year or so has been awful. War, rumors of war, and class war have dominated the headlines. I do, however, remain fundamentally optimistic about human nature. Any species capable of turning legos into a camera is worthy of respect.

The 20th Century was an age of monsters. Stalin. Mussolini. Hitler. Milosevic. Pol Pot. Shirō Ishii. And we might as well add Churchill to that list, for his directly and knowingly causing a famine that killed millions. In addition, the century started with a conflict knows as “The Great War”- until mid-century brought something so terrible that we had to invent a whole new category of crime to describe it. The 21st century has brought with it a more peaceful species, and perhaps the long-dreamed-of peace is nearer than we can imagine.

Humans are, by nature, social creatures. Nonetheless, saying that single player experiences will be “dead” in such a short time frame seems bizarrely wrong. It’s a bit like predicting that the Walkman would never take off because people enjoy sharing music with one another. There simply are certain experiences that can only be had by lone individuals. Those won’t go away anytime soon.

I watched “The Help” earlier this week. It was a rather good movie, though more than a bit emotionally exploitative. I’m not sure how intentional this was, but the movie did a fantastic job of deconstructing the Magic Negro archetype. The women portrayed in the movie are professionals, who know they’re engaged in terrible work, but are determined to do that work as well as they possibly can. Being a professional sometimes means gritting one’s teeth and telling a spoiled white girl that she’s “kind, smart, and pretty”.

Years after I realized that I lacked the essential ingredient required for a person to be Christian, I was invited to a friend’s baptism. Of course I agreed to go. This was a time for him to confirm and celebrate a new relationship in his life. When people are celebrating, it seems fitting and natural to celebrate with them. If my choices are to celebrate joy or cause misery, I don’t need to think very hard. I’m not sure why anyone would chose to create unhappiness if they have a choice.

It almost seems like the Post Office is mandated to run at a substantial deficit. I wonder what the justification for this is?

Last week I linked to an article about a married couple being torn apart by America’s decision not to recognize their marriage. It seems that Obama has ordered anti-immigration officials to start recognizing that families can be created by two people of the same gender. Which is a major advance for human rights.

In a perfect world, big tech firms would be fighting tooth and nail for customers. They would be fighting for customers by creating good, better best, cheap, cheaper, cheapest products. Big firms hate competition. As a result, they take legal action to keep one another from using certain types of technology. In the end, everyone ends up a little bit worse off. The system needs changing.

It makes an intuitive sort of sense that if someone kills a person with a car, they might permanently lose their right to drive. Likewise if they take a life with a gun. Ruin lives with criminal accounting? Never again ought that person have a business licence. Laws that keep former criminals from voting, though? Those were developed in conjunction with laws aimed at black people, to keep black people from voting. They’re anti-democratic, and need to be scrapped.

Buffy can save your soul.

Centuries ago, young men would duel to prove that they were not afraid to die. This was, of course, stupid. During times of actual conflict, duels declined precipitously. It would be interesting to see dueling culture make a comeback. Beats the hell out of lawsuits, frankly.

Los Angles police are notorious. For decades, there was barely contained rage between citizens and police. This has made a dramatic turnaround. A new police chief seems to have figured out that the police must be responsible to and for the community. Once they became active participants in neighborhoods- rather than an occupying force- conditions improved.

In 2011, it’s still common for people to think of feminists as “man haters”, “lesbians”, or somehow thinking that no woman could ever be fulfilled as a wife and mother. For people who think this way, here are a great collection of corrective essays. The “political correctness” essays are highly recommended.

Superhero costumes are absurd.

If you read just one link:

Eric Blair once was part of a machine which attempted to impose English rule on India. While there, he came to understand that he was trapped in the machine as surely as anyone he ruled over. And thus George Orwell was born.

Don’t mess with the Bard.

Tags: Sunday // 1 Comment »

Mega Man. Mega Man. Does whatever his defeated enemies can!

It’s Sunday Morning. Sundays are for Dim Sum. Or Sundays are for celebratory piercings. Possibly Sundays might be for, you know, doing the work thing.

This week Western Civilization got ever closer to collapse. The war in Libya continued past it’s 20th (or so) week, making the world wonder how many weeks it does take before it turns into “months”. And human-caused global climate change lead to the thinnest arctic ice shelf in human history. It’s not all bad: Google Plus is letting users play games on it’s service.

Once upon a time there was a TV show called “Junkyard Wars”. They’d take two teams of ordinary people and put them in a junkyard. Those teams were told that 24hrs later, they’d have to engage in a specific competition using whatever they’d built. The hovercraft races sold me. It was while watching that show that I had a revelation: humanity is glorious and endlessly inventive. Any species that can turn junk into an underwater pressure suit, or a minesweeper, or a hovercraft is just alright with me. Along those lines: here is a panoramic view of the control console for a space shuttle. If you’re an American, this is your tax dollars at work.

I’d have to check, but I think most of the last Several Sunday posts have contained something about Monopoly. This version teaches us important lessons about both class warfare and board games.

The function of government is to solve collective action dilemmas, and create situations which enable win/win “games” to be constructed and played. Which is fancy talk for “government threatens to kill us if we don’t get along, which makes us all better behaved”.

The problem is that in order to get us to behave better, government really does have to threaten to kill us. And sometimes they have to carry out that threat. That’s not actually the problem. The problem is that government is run by humans, and Lord Acton was pretty much correct in his assessment of how humans deal with power. Figuring out how to create a government of the correct size is basically the ongoing technocratic struggle.

I have mixed views on American slavery. On the one wrist: I consider the idea that a human can be owned as morally repugnant. Dehumanizing a single person devalues humanity as a whole. At the same time: slavery has been so roundly practiced by so many people– people who otherwise might have been wholly admirable– that it seems impossible to merely condemn it.

Slavery is the issue most often danced around when talking about cloning. There is no reason that a clone ought not count exactly the same as a utero-gestated human. The humanity and potential genetic sequence is identical. Yet the very possibly for creating millions of identical humans seems to short out the part of our brain that assigns value to clones. I hope we figure it out before we get there.

Every now and then I have the terrifying thought that humanity isn’t the only sentient species on Earth. The things we do to apes and chimps would be terrifying if done to humans. I won’t talk about dolphins, though. Fuck ‘em.

Too serious this week? Let’s learn about punctuation.

Until there is a zombie outbreak, guns have a single and sole purpose: to turn living things into dead things. I’ve done target shooting a time or two over the years, and I have no special fear of guns. Nonetheless, the idea that there are a good many people in the US for whom a gun represents a political argument is, frankly, terrifying. There does seem to be an interesting racial undertone to the American history of gun ownership and control. This probably speaks more about America than it does about guns.

This is possibly the most bad-ass person alive.

If you want to have a child in Argentina, the name for that baby has to come from a government approved list. It’s a fairly long list, but if your ideal name isn’t on it, you have to prove that you didn’t just make the name up. Here are all the approved names starting with the letter “A”.

Stereotypically, the worst drivers in America are old Asian ladies. In reality, the worst drivers in America are young white men. Tell people this, and the first reaction is often to deny it. The thing about stereotypes is that they exist more as insults than as actual, living constructs. Americans used to make fun of Mexicans for being lazy. Now we make fun of them for being among the hardest working people in America. Whatever you (or I!) think you (or I!) know about [subgroup of humans] is likely wrong.

It’s ok to be racist against Frost Giants, though. Those fuckers really do want to destroy your soul.

About a year ago, I worked on a case which started out as a simple barbering licence SNAFU, and turned out to be about gay marriage and immigration law. The absolute most I could do for the couple was recommend some good, LGBT friendly, immigration lawyers. Anyone who says that allowing gay people to get married will harm the institution of marriage has to account for the number of marriages that the lack of recognition has destroyed.

Several English cities rioted this past week. This Jackass doesn’t realize that he’s the problem. Here’s a friendly tip: when you’ve got a large part of the population who’s only regular contact with the government is a police checkpoint, there is going to be resentment. When the government’s meager services get cut back, there’s going to be more resentment. And when the police murder citizen, well. There damned well better be some noise.

If I were told that I could borrow a million dollars today, and in 5 years I’d only have to pay back $900,000, I’d say that I’m being lied to. But if there were facts, figures, proofs, and documents attesting to this fact, I’d jump on it. A person would have to be crazy not to jump on it. This is the deal our government is being offered. We’re crazy.

You know who else liked the Welfare state? Superman.

Troy has finished the final nation in his series chronicling how various games have quantified national history. This series might honestly be among the finest in game journalism. It says much less about games than it does about humanity’s view of itself as the 20th century has given way to the 21st. I do hope you’ve been reading them.

Captain Morgan’s ship has been found. No word yet on his booty.

Money is a vehicle by which labor can be stored. There is, of course, a lot more to it than that. That’s what has been so fascinating about watching the rise of private currencies. Store gift cards are money issued by a company which trade at 1:1 with the USD. Microsoft/Sony points are a floating currency. Airline miles may be the most abstract of all the corporate currencies– they’re constantly being revalued. No one is quite sure what they’re worth.

If you read just one thing:

I’ve written a lot this week about how governments and citizens interact. Sometimes that’s much less important than how humans connect with one another unofficially.

This week’s theme has been government. How it works and why it fails. In the comments below, let me know about your favorite experience with a government worker.

<"http://www.collegehumor.com/moogaloop/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=6582695&use_node_id=true&fullscreen=1"target="_blank">After all that, I think we could use a cuddle, eh?

Tags: Sunday // 3 Comments »

Rotate it!

It’s Sunday Morning. Sundays are for Cleaning playing Batman as soon as you get home and can tear yourself away from Catan on your phone. Or Sundays might be for having brunch with a good friend sleeping in. Sundays are occasionally for looking forward to live-altering surgeries. Though perhaps Sundays are for recursively reflecting on the sentence you’re reading right now and wondering how I knew that you’d be recursively reading this sentence. And then cursing again.

This week: The US pushed back the clock on financial Armageddon by setting off a large nuclear warhead in it’s economy. Also this week: the American political world acted surprised by the fallout from this self-inflicted attack. Also: NASA sent some legos to Jupiter. Also also: tens of thousands of Verison workers went on strike.

Let’s start this Sunday off with a Hymn. There’s only one that you ever need to know, and it goes like this Boom De Yata

I almost think this comic was written by someone who knows me.

Over the past several years, many of my fellow progressives have been demanding that President Obama stop being so damned nice, and start going on a left wing tear that will utterly transform America. He can’t. Much as I use the first person when speaking of progressives, most of the country– most of the Democratic party– doesn’t. The failure for this lays strictly with those of us in the progressive community. It is our job to convince people that we’re right. It’s Obama’s job to get away with as much as he can get away with.

The fastest way to piss me off is to express the view that humans are evil, stupid, or in some other way deficient. My general sense is that no matter how odd a tradition might look to an outsider, it’s probably got a very good reason to continue being celebrated.

One of the scarier parts of being an American at the dawn of the 21st century is how badly messed up our system of governance is. I honestly can’t think of a single piece of infrastructure that doesn’t need fixing. Our roads? In need of repair. Congress? People have been advocating that the president become a dictator because Congress is so bad. Our system of promoting the useful arts and science is doing the opposite.

One of the scarier parts of our Intellectual property laws is the way that it inhibits or prohibits anyone other than the Rights Holder from preserving shared cultural heritage. With the current version of IP laws, the Christian Bible couldn’t have been written. The paper would have literally rotted to nothing before anyone would have been allowed to hand copy it.

Tom Lehrer gave up satire because reality was outpacing his cynicism.

In some very real sense, I simply am Punning Pundit. It’s a name I use everywhere; I respond to it when shouted. I do use my own birth name– I have a small bit of bemused pride at having come from a line of men with my same name. Not everyone is so lucky. For some people the ability to hide their real names is a matter of life and death.

Spider man? He wears a mask because he catches criminals just like flies. Also: He’s a young black/Latino man. Or, rather, he will be going forward. The fact that superhero ethnicity is so plastic is a huge sign of how far things have come.

There are certain things that everyone “just knows” about how ridiculous certain events are. For instance: the lady who spilled coffee on herself and sued McDonalds. Or Van Halen’s bowl of Brownless M&M. The thing that everyone “just knows” about both of those stories is wrong.

Epic headlines.

Congress passes a lot of laws. Most of them are actually fairly pointless, but every now and then they do important work. Sadly, though, congresspeople are human- and so laws have unintended consequences

In serious onion news, labor won the right to collectively bargain against capital- an entity that always bargains collectively in it’s own interests. Remember kids: you don’t have to write for free, work for cheep, or fight alone. Only your enemies want you to.

Maybe if DC writers were unionized, they’d have a better understanding of how to treat their female characters. Probably not. But the work environment for their female staff might be less hostile.

Bob Dylan once said that “Money Doesn’t Talk, it Swears“. More importantly, I think, is that money makes politicians swear fealty. This can actually be good- I feel very comfortable helping city council members swear that they’ll stand up for the iron worker’s union. And if a state legislator kneels before the Chamber of Commerce, I want to know that, too. This new ability for unlimited bribery where only the recipient and giver know who’s interests are being served, though, is scary.

This story line needs a small amendment: 2009: progressives give up on Obama.

Sometime before humanity settled down into villages, we traded genetic evolution for memetic evolution. We humans haven’t reached the top of the food pyramid by being fast, strong, or sharp-clawed. Instead, we’re smart and inventive. Memetic evolution, though is as path-dependent as it’s meat-based counterpart. I wonder what sorts of advancements we would have made had we taken a very small left turn down some other technological path?

My argument is invalid

I’m not merely a gamer, I’m a PC gamer. Not for any reasons of snobbery, but I simply spend most of my time in front of the PC and so it makes sense that I’d game there as well. For some reason, big lable game developers hate me. Which is a weird way to try and get my money.

To summarize points 1-4: Don’t be a dick. Which reminds me: I need to write a post about how to insult people.

If you click just one link:

Beta Earth.

This week’s theme was a short prayer for the zombie Apocalypse. It might actually be the only thing that saves the economy. In the comments, let me know if you read this weekly missive for my writing, or for the links themselves.

Maybe you’re a shitty cameraman, I don’t know!

Tags: Sunday, Uncategorized // 2 Comments »

Classes about International Relations are mostly theory. Lacking a TARDIS, or similar device, it’s impossible to run a statistically valid study on occasions when nuclear war did not break out, and contrast them against times when it did. Science can still be done; mostly by constructing elaborate models (called “games”) and seeing how they can approximate real-world conditions. All of which explains why I know how to win a game of chicken: the winning player is the one who throws away their steering wheel.

Seriously. that’s what I was taught in class. The professor was talking about nuclear conflict, telling us that if both sides knew they were both equally trigger happy (ie: neither side could move their own car), neither would let things get bad enough to press buttons. In practice, this worked- spectacularly- once (the Cold War) and failed- spectacularly- once (The Great War).

Since roughly 1980, America has been going slightly crazy. We call it the culture war; most Americans hate it. We hate it so much that in 2008, we elected a guy President on the basis of a four year old speech in which he agreed with us that he, too, hated it.

In 2008, America elected a steering wheel. Watch that speech. Barack Obama is promising to be a steering wheel. In 2010, progressives stayed home on election day. Because of that, a whole hell of a lot crazy people got in office. The Republican party took the House with a specific promise to throw away the steering wheel.

There is, in my mind, no question why the last month of American politics played out the way it did. Both sides showed up ready to do the job they were elected to do. The deal that Congress reached was the inevitable result of those dynamics.

The damnable part is that a different president couldn’t have gotten a much better deal through Congress. That’s a different post.

Tags: Uncategorized // Add Comment »

This is the greatest thing

It’s Sunday Morning. Sundays are for laying about. Or working on layouts. Or selling brunch to the post-church, pre-rapture crowd. Sundays are for music, good and bad. Or Sundays are for blowing raspberries at the last bits of a head injury.

This week: The US House of Representatives passed a debt deal that will not pass the US Senate. A major labor action came to a semi-successful conclusion, and there will be a football season after all. Also this week: Spain called for elections- possibly as a result of the Spanish “indignant” movement. How did no one tell me about these wonderful protesters? Also also: Wars, rumors of wars.

Before we begin in earnest, I want to apologize to any of my customers who I may have gotten sick. See: without health insurance, or paid time off, I’m heavily penalized for staying home from work. As a result, if I get sick, so do a lot of other people. Other countries have mandatory sick leave, but some many of our citizens feel that creating laws about that would be a step towards government tyranny.

My life needs more boardgames. But so many of them are expensive! Cheapass games does exactly what their name implies- gives you a high-quality game as cheaply as possible. Some of them are even free.

I’ve said before, possibly even last week, that most people only think they hate board games. Most people have only played Monopoly and Risk, and those are both very bad games. Turns out that Monopoly is much better than I’d thought- I’d simply been playing it wrong.

One of the awesome things about video games is the way they can be a power fantasy. In real life, I’ve got to be a living part of the economy. If I fail to show for work, I’m probably going to start starving eventually. In a game, I can save the universe and build a civilization. Even when I’ve done government work, I’ve enjoyed playing Sim City- the problems are at the very least solvable. The problem with games is an extension of this- your character really is the center of the universe. This wouldn’t be nearly as big a deal if we didn’t live in a patriarchal society. However, with games being yet another media telling people that women have no sexual agency save that granted by men, it becomes problematic.

The Smurfs movie. Oh, the Smurfs movie. I can’t even begin to understand who thought it might be a good idea. Honestly, I had no idea that it started as a comic in 1958. Given it’s origins, it makes sense that it would have some archaic notions of gender dichotomy. None of which explains why, in 2011, there is only one female Smurf. That’s kind of unSmurfing believable.

A very small, thumbnail history of India. Because gaming, at it’s best, tells us about the society we live in, and the one we think we live in.

The second best press release of all time.

I can’t find the specific quote, but Antonio Gramsci once made the observation that for propaganda to be effective, it needs to operate at two levels. The first is aimed at the elite, the little lies they tell themselves with the psudosophistication of unknowingly regurgitated thought. The second is aimed at the masses, the unsubtle lies endlessly repeated. This is why the Right has both Rush Limbaugh and Dinesh D’Souza. The Left lacks this sort of institution. It also lacks governing power.

We lefties keep trying to explains that the stimulus worked, but it wasn’t big enough. If we had every morning DJ in America explaining this simple fact, there is no way that congress would be more worried about debt than about joblessness. Debt is the line the Right is pushing, and so it’s what Washington thinks is important.

One of the weirder aspects of American public policy is the public blindspot regarding the link between taxes and spending. Americans love getting government services. We don’t always realize we are getting those services, but we’ll notice when they’re gone.

Gravity is a universal constant, right? Nope! Yup! Kinda!. I do love finding out that not only are we wrong about something, but that we’ve always been wrong about it. Not only that: there’s no guarantee that we’re right about it now.

I used to do “musical interludes”, but my main sources for new music seem to have dried up. If anyone wants to point out some music blogs, please do so in the comments. In the mean time: that contradicts Mark 12:17. The point of being a secular society is specifically to keep the various religions and sects from tearing America apart with their different notions of “the good”.

Some prayers, though, can only be heeded by government action. Some prayers should be unnecessary, but have been made so by our continued refusal to understand how to properly invest. The prayer, in other words, isn’t so much aimed at a deity, but at Washington DC.

Everything you need to know about the patriarchy, you can learn from slave-Leia.

I’ve got a weakness for hats. One of the reasons I am looking forward to getting a haircut is so that I can wear my fedora the way it’s meant to be worn. But in the mean time, I have a couple of hats which are specifically for when my hair is too long.

Whitey was on the moon. A black lady was sewing his protective garments. To me, this is a perfect encapsulation of American history from about 1492 until roughly… I dunno: 1970? White (male) Americans doing extraordinary things, being backed up and assisted by Black Americans who were thrust into the (too oft uncredited) supporting role for no better reason than skin color.

American race relations bears a striking resemblance to this calculator.

Since I started taking the Adderall, my coffee intake has dramatically decreased. Turns out that caffeine activates almost the same mental pathways as the ones I needed activated. And so I drank too much coffee. Some days, though, you just need to wake up. Adderall can increase the mental bandwidth, but it can’t actually make you more alert. For that you need coffee. And if one cup won’t do there’s Black Blood of the Earth.

The state of the Internet: 2011 edition. Which ought to have been the name of this week’s post, really.

My childhood wasn’t this awesome.

Along those lines: this is the best argument for having children.

News media does a terrible job at presenting information. The inverted pyramid style of writing is designed for short attention spans, but basically guarantees that nothing worth reading will exist past the third paragraph. Headlines are written by people who have little familiarity with story. Whitespace is an oft-touted ideal, but one that is rarely achieved. Media’s online presentation is even worse.

If you read just one thing:

This story is essential reading for anyone wondering what “meta”, or “post modern” mean. Critical theorist Unite! You have nothing to lose but your identity selves!

This week’s theme has been… Damn if I know. In the comments section, sound off if you use an RSS reader.

I am your grandmother.

Tags: Sunday, Uncategorized // 1 Comment »

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.

Quidditch.

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.

“People down on the Peninsula act as if “the city” is atrociously far away, as if it’s not just a 18-20 minute drive. I work in the city every day and it’s not far away. People act as if you need to set aside a “day trip” just to go to the city. Meanwhile, Luke and I are able to hop on BART and get to the city to have dinner and be back home in less than 2.5 hours.” HINT HINT!

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.

Context is key.

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:

Pure, distilled evil

This week’s theme was a defiant scream against a gathering darkness. In the comments section, leave your war cry.

Tags: Sunday // 2 Comments »

I want to play this.

It’s Sunday Morning. Sundays are for playing wizarding games with Legos on your TV. Or Sundays might be for reading the most anticipated fantasy novel of the past 6 years. Or Sundays might be for swimming. Perhaps, though, just perhaps, Sundays are for feeding the hungry masses. Sundays are certainly for watching the US become the best Soccer playing nation on Earth.

This week was a sort of holding pattern in world history. The various wars continued, and in many cases worsened. The US’s ongoing Constitutional crisis failed to be resolved. The world’s most evil media mogul had some of his more nefarious deeds exposed. Oh, and for added pessimism, the birthplace and only home of the human species continued to get less habitable.

Was all that too depressing? Help fight back against entropy of the human spirit

I think I’m wired differently from most folks. If I asked a woman to be my partner, to have and to hold, etc and so forth, and she told me that I couldn’t help plan the ceremony because “it’s her day… I don’t even think I could begin to be involved with someone who might have that attitude. Simillarly, it would never occur to me to call a small child “pretty”. Talking about books? I can do that all day long…

The women of our species have been engaged in a fearsome match to lay claim to the title of World’s Best Soccer players. America looks set to win the whole thing this year, in large part because we have tried to implement some form of equality between our genders.

I’ve said it before: I love sports. Humans perfecting their physical and mental skills and showing them off before the world. One of the problems with sports, however, is that athletes tend to shorten their lives– literally spending their health in the pursuit of excellence. Which is a reason why I enjoy esports. All the drama and excellence of physical sports, with none of the life-threatening injury.

The economy is terrible. It’s not simply bad because we’re not making as much money. An awful lot of us are sitting around doing nothing. 2 years ago, I was happily working 50-60 hours a week. Currently I’m begging for 30. The economy is keeping me from being able to contribute as much as I am capable of. This is true for a lot of people.

In 2010, the American healthcare system had 2 major problems. First? It woefully underserved the American public. Secondly: it was wildly overpriced. In 2014, America is set to correct the first of these problems. Unfortunately, the price for fixing the first problem was to not touch the second problem– overcharging the American people for healthcare puts money into someone’s pocket. So that’s the next struggle.

Science is scary.

During the darkest hours of 2 November 2004, there were two conversations held between myself and the other Orwellians. Firstly: I was berating them for voting for Ralph motherfucking Nader. Secondly, I was trying to explain to them why California Succession wouldn’t really work.Our current borders are very defensible– but we wouldn’t keep half the State.

Perhaps I should have been lecturing Robb Stark about securing his borders. If so, there might still have been a King of the North.

Google has done some amazing things. They revolutionized email by turning it into a profit center, rather than a loss leader. They have pioneered efforts to make data centers as energy efficient as possible. They also make science fair awards out of Lego brick.

True story: Once upon a time, I was meeting a dear friend in Ohio. I borrowed a car and met her at the airport. “Something you need to know– they don’t have Burritos here.” My friend was shocked. The lady I’d borrowed the car from piped up “Yes we do! There’s a Chipotle on the way back to the office!” My friend Howled her displeasure. “THEY DON’T HAVE BURRITOS IN THIS STATE?!” Burritos would be the national food of California, if we were a nation.

English, like any good comic, steals shamelessly from it’s betters. I yammer a great deal on this bog about the prescitpionist/descriptionist divide. No one, however, questions the need for the language to grow, evolve, and maim it’s memetic competition.

I once tried to explain to one of my sisters how (7+1) * (7+1) can equal 100. I was eventually able to, but the concept that our number system can be somewhat arbitrary is a mindbending one. Similarly, it has only been one year since Neptune was discovered.

When Grover Norquist decided to make government small enough to drown it in a bathtub, the last week of American history is what he has been hoping for. The “beast” has been starved metaphorically. Soon, many Americans who rely on government assistance shall be literally starving. We need to prevent this.

One easy solution to the problem? run the printing presses. This isn’t quite as dangerous as it sounds. Historically, America has run ~4% inflation. Currently, America is running about 0% inflation (gas has gone up. Everything else has gone down). Getting inflation back to historic norms would put a lot of cash into the hands of Americans. Things could be bought. Demand would spike. Business would recover. People would be making taxable income once more!

Gold is incredibly valuable. Why, we can make jewelry and computer parts from it. If we were still using it as money, every computer in the world would cost a lot more–and the information revolution might never have happened.

The internet justifies its existence.

By creating these words that you are reading right now, I am laying claim to a copyright of them. The problem is that in order to read them, a person has to copy them onto their local machine. This is done without my express permission, and is therefore arguably illegal under copyright law. The entire electronic age is built on copying; this makes copyright protections a weird, untenable beast. Some other form of intellectual property protection must be found, and quickly.

Every now and then I read something like this and wonder if we wouldn’t be better off without IP laws at all.

10 simple fashion rules for men.

San Diego has Legoland, Aircraft Carriers, and a board game museum. Sounds like a place I need to visit.

If you read just one thing:

Phone companies are letting people scam you, because they make money when it happens. When credit card companies were engaged in the same sorts of sordid practices, the government set out strict rules preventing it. When it started up with phone companies, government took them at their word that they’d take care of it. Expecting any industry to regulate against its financial interest is simply absurd.

This week’s theme has been gender roles and my own inability to think of anything clever to say. In the comments section, tell me how useful 8hrs of sleep might be.

Tags: Sunday // 1 Comment »

[[Warning: The only important part of a Transformers movie is that giant robots will be fighting one another. You know that going in. Spoilers are thus impossible. To the extent that a spoiler might be possible for this film, I will spoil it. If that keeps you from seeing this movie, say "thank you".]]

This movie is bad. All it really needs to do is give a half-decent excuse for robots to beat one another up, and it fails. It does, however, do one extraordinarily thing right: It calls Michael Bay- the movie’s director/producer!- a giant douchebag. I’m not sure he noticed.

Hollywood formulates dictates that there is a girl (Carly Spencer) in this sort of movie. She isn’t there to be an independent actor, but rather to be a Princess Peach– a motivating force for someone else to act on behalf of. Some of the minor characters in the movie actually seem to balk at putting themselves in danger so that the hero (Sam Witwicky) can rescue his girl, but they go along with the plan once they figure out that the world is also at stake.

I’m not kidding about that.

In a triumph for the say-don’t-show school of storytelling, Carly’s is presented as a intelligent, capable individual. We see her working for the White House, running logistics for a global corporation, and are told that she’s worked for the British Embassy in Washington DC. She is in every way more fit to be the story’s lead than the actual dude performing that role.

Perhaps Sam is meant to be an audience stand in. A sort of everyperson hero that we can empathize with. That would help explain his constant inability to quite nail the suave behavior that he seems to be aiming for. After all: who among us hasn’t done some really dumb things that we’d rather everyone forget about? This doesn’t seem quite right, however. Sam’s buffoonery is rewarded. It is as if Director Michael Bay doesn’t know the difference between actually awesome behavior and a parody of such. Could it be that he has mistaken Duke Nukem for something other than a cautionary tale?

In a classic display of the male gaze, through the first half of the movie, the camera reduces Carly to a sex object. When she’s in a shot, her secondary sex characteristics are on full display.

Michael Bay has had this problem with women before. Indeed, in the words of one Bay defender “Mike films women in a way that appeals to a 16-year-old sexuality.” Presumably he means “16-year-old [boy]“.

So for the first half or so of the movie, the camera is perving on the female lead. And at one point one of the characters- Bruce Brazos- actually does a double take at her. And everyone in the room reacts badly. Like he’d ruined their fun game by calling attention to it. From that moment on, the camera treats Carly as a human being. I think we can thank the editorial staff for that beautiful and wicked commentary on Transformers and sexism.

Now, if only the writers had come up with something interesting for her to say.

Tags: Feminism, human rights, movies and television // Add Comment »

It seems that Mitch McConnell hates the fact that Democrats won’t go along with his ideas. The fact that his ideas are terrible is sort of besides the point. Remember that gridlock comes, not from congressional obstinance, but from legitimate disagreement about the best course of action for America. That disagreement is good and healthy, but in order to properly weigh and measure which side has the better plan, they must be allowed to implement that plan.

So McConnall has a… call it a vestige of a point. The American political system really is broken. In 2008, Americans elected Obama and a huge Democratic majority. They promised to pass a huge stimulus, pass healthcare reform, and end the war in Iraq.

We ended up with… a continued involvement in Iraq, a barely adequate healthcare reform, and a Federal economic stimulus that almost (but didn’t quite) do enough to cover the anti-stimulus being done by the various states.

The reasons for this had little to do with the leadership of Obama or Pelosi (or Reid!), and everything to do with the mechanics of Congress. It is shockingly easy for a small group of elected officials to gum up all of Congress and keep it from doing anything. Blaming Obama for this is a bit like blaming an engine installer for auto body damage.

If we tried the Democratic plan and it failed, I’d agree that McConnell should be allowed his turn to fix things. Instead, he was able to block the Democrats from implementing their plans, and is furious that Democrats are able to block his.

Tags: conservative, pestilence, politics // 1 Comment »

It’s Sunday morning. Sundays are for departing for points East– Texas, and West– Big Bear. Alternately Sundays are for mourning the sad fact that Space Shuttle will no longer depart for points unknown. Also: Sundays are for enjoying the last day of your vacation before returning home on Monday. Also? Sundays doing the things you have to, instead of the things you’d really like to.

This week Japan was rocked by another major earthquake- that fortunately produced only a minor tsunami. Also this week: South Sudan officially became the Earth’s newest sovereign State. In a display of mind-boggling stupidity, half of America’s major political parties pushed America one step closer to ending itself as a great power by deciding to default on America’s debt.

This week, let’s try and start off light. If you’re a man– or anyone who wants to dress in traditionally male-coded ways– you might want to know how to dress. A person might never develop an intrinsic sense of what the next step ought to be, but like all arts, dressing well merely takes practice.

Imagine my surprise the first time I saw a Herd of Bison roaming around the middle of Golden Gate Park. I had previously believed that it was only movies in which double takes occurred. I do hope the herd recovers.

Empathy is the human ability to say “yeah, that could be me in that situation”. In some ways it’s a cheep way of finding justice. In other ways, it’s the only way that many of we humans seem to stumble into justice. I can’t help but wonder if last week’s decision about games being art was influenced by the fact that many of the current justices know a game designer.

Empathy may be cheap, but without out it, we end up with some rather strange mental disorders.

One of the more bizarre spectacles of the healthcare debate is that we had to sacrifice cost-controls for universality. Getting an edifice of universal healthcare up and running was incredibly important to America’s continued commitment to social justice. Healthcare costs are still going up, though. And America needs to fix this problem quickly.

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away

San Francisco is a young city, but with a weird and wonderful history. Ours was the city in which the United Nations was born. Ours was the city in which China reopened relations with non-Soviet world. And ours was the city in which Mexican food was invented.

I’ve been following this story all week. Dude walks into a gallery, sees a Picasso, takes it off the wall, sticks it under his arm, and walks out. I’d like to believe that this was a spur of the moment decision, but it doesn’t seem to have been. The art thief/waiter’s bail has been set at $5 million. To raise the money, he’s planning on stealing 19 more Picasso sketches.

This is what the phrase Epic Win was coined for.

Google launched Google+ last week. It’s a great service, but an incredibly awkward name. When Google had to create a style guide to help people figure out how to grammatically incorporate their strange creation into our language, it should have been a sign to try something else.

One of the more frustrating aspects of the prescriptivist/descriptivist fights is that the prescriptivists are correct– right up until the moment they are wrong. Language is a shared attempt at communication that only works when participants agree on meaning. An English person who calls an American “love” is going to create a whole lot of confusion. Different cultures attach very different values to identical sets of inputs.

A cereal coma is when a person eats so much breakfast that they pass out. A serial comma is a useful tool for marking certain kinds of distinctions in lists. Me? I’d love some computer programmers to weigh in…

There are days when I really need this button.

Back in 2008, I was in Ohio working on a campaign. You may have heard about it– we did alright. While I was there, I kept hearing horror stories about the 2004 and 2006 elections. In African American districts, for instance, 4 precincts might be put into the same polling station. Each voter would have to stand in the correct (hour long) line in order to cast a valid vote. The lines were differentiated by a (small) hand written note at the front of the (again, hour long) line. Voters who failed to see the note would be told to stand in the correct line, or forfeit their right to vote. In 2008, there was a new Secretary of State, and new rules– voters were given better voting layouts, and more specific instructions about how to ensure their vote would count. Republicans have begun rolling back these protections.

Every time i seat an African American guest in the back of my restaurant, I mentally cringe. I know that I’m good at what I do, and the decisions I make are the correct ones. But still, the optics are bad. How much worse, thento use gangs of black convicts to work the fields of former plantations in a former slave state? Didn’t anyone think this through? Did one person not step up and say that it looked too bad to be right? This is a stench in the nostrils of the gods.

If a human being made this sort of mistake, they would do everything in their power to fix it. Guy would have medical care for a year. Guy would get his car back– or get a new and better car. Guy’s employer would hire him back, or a new job would be found for him. A human did not make this mistake. A corporation did. Corporations literally lack the capacity for shame. And this guy is screwed.

Giant battle blimps are a wacky idea that just might work! Except they’re fucking stupid. Blimps literally went out with the biplane for the very good reason that a wooden biplane was the only aircraft a blimp could outfight. By using blimps as battlefield surveillance, we’re assuming utter control of the skies. We’re also assuming that our opponents won’t have ground-air missiles capable of hitting a gigantic stationary target. Maybe I’m utterly wrong about this. Maybe the pentagon has thought through my objections and has good answers. Maybe.

How Does your coffee taste?

It probably says something about how immersed I am in the language of video games that I’m not sure how much of this article is technical jargon. I’m say that because it’s a fascinating study about how a very tricky problem got solved. It’s a small example of the genius of our species: a once seemingly insurmountable problem has become routine and easy to solve.

About to start talking about the failures of American government. Before I begin, let’s have an amusing list of possible alternatives.

Here in San Francisco, pot is considered fairly normal. While technically illegal, the police are officially instructed by the City that they have far better things to do with their time. I had to have this story of Reefer Madness explained to me. It seems that the Federal government has literally declared pot to be a more dangerous drug than Cocaine. I can think of only one reason for this: the government has secret knowledge that pot is an alien plot to control our minds and steal our precious bodily fluids.

It’s one thing for the courts to dismantle every protection that Americans have come to rely on. It’s another thing entirely to teach corporations how to get away with violating worker’s rights. Corporate America is slowly building up an entire extra-legal system where citizenship counts for nothing. Money don’t vote- it swears.

Admiral Zhou was the last of the great Chinese explorers. He traveled from China to the West Coast of India, and possibly all the way to Africa. On his last trip, he came home to discover a cabal of eunuchs had taken over his country. These gonadless men cut the budget for his explorations. A few years later, a European discovered America, and Europeans would go on to dominate China for centuries. America no longer has a human-crewed space program. Humanity will go into space. America will not. Good luck Europe and China. The future belongs to you.

“That’s the way Democracy dies- to thunderous applause”. Those were my thoughts 18 months ago when President Obama announced that he was creating a deficit commission. The commission wasn’t the problem. The problem- the scary part- was the way he specifically linked an Executive Order as the way around a failed Senate vote. There is a real problem with the American political system. We’re solving it the easy way, the cheap way, the way Rome solved it: Empire. Constitutional reform is needed. Stealth reform that situates a supreme executive at the head of a vast bureaucracy will be a disaster for our descendants.

If you read just one link:

This is a good one. Back in February of 1996, the Atlantic published an article about Why Americans Hate the Media. America has some deep problems that are being left undressed. The media has become the worst possible thing it can be. It’s not that the media is biased. Yellow journalism would be preferable to what they are: lazy.

I’ve been reading Francis Fukuyama’s Origins of Political Order. It’s almost custom build to be superfluous for me, and it’s dedicated to an International Relations laughingstock. Having said that, there are some insights in the book that need to be more widely shared.

This week’s theme was humans doing human things and letting our government fail. So in the comments section, let me know your favorite word starting with the letter S.

Doggies!

Tags: Sunday // Add Comment »