Category: Angst

blah blah Brendan’s pet issues

September 29, 2004 /

I shouldn’t do things like reading this list of banned books, because it just makes me hate everything and accomplishes nothing. But still. My favorites are the parents who challenged the curriculum inclusion of books by Madeleine L’Engle and C. S. Lewis for promoting “witchcraft and demons” and “mysticism,” respectively. I don’t need to tell you how thoroughly Christian their books are, because you already know. See? Accomplishing nothing!

In other nonaccomplishment news, I’m going to wait and see about IPac. On the one hand, their statement of principles aligns with a lot of what’s important to me, politically. On the other hand, this is also true of the ACLU, and there are reasons I don’t belong to the ACLU. I know it’s only a word, but I just don’t like the designation of “political action committee.” For some reason I’m comfortable supporting the EFF and Downhill Battle in a way that I don’t associate with any PAC.

Okay, there is one thing I’ve been meaning to write about. The place where the EFF and Downhill Battle intersect is Save Betamax, a combined effort to stop S. 2560 (which used to be called the INDUCE Act) from taking away your iPod, TiVo, CD burner, Kazaa, VCR, scanner, tape deck or whatever else the RIAA and MPAA decide is “inducing” people to violate their own definition of copyright. I don’t much like political blogging, but 2560 is bad. I’m unfortunately writing too late to tell you to sign up for the call-in days (as I did), but I’m sure there will be more opportunities to help stop the bill from becoming law. There’s an enormous effort by a huge coalition of companies, groups and individual humans to keep veto power over media innovation out of Hollywood’s hands. I hope you’ll join it, and I hope it works.

That accursed picture

September 27, 2004 /

First Leonard called me out on it, then Maria called me out on it, then Leonard sent me a text-only debunking, then tonight Jon of all people sent me the definitive Snopes proof. Yes, I would have noticed the weird TV shadow and the odd intersection of the panel and the teletype if I’d been looking for it, but I wasn’t, OKAY? OKAY! I TAKE IT BACK! I’M SORRY! I QUIT!

I don’t actually quit.

I feel like getting arrested

September 3, 2004 /

Hey, wanna see if you’re a terrorist? Excuse me–“Specially Designated National or Blocked Person?” Thanks to the Department of the Treasury, you can, in PDF or ASCII flavors! (As stated above, I do feel like getting arrested, so I was going to write a form script that would search the file for you, but it’s 1.35Mb of unmarked-up plaintext, and I don’t want to kill my webhost with that much sequential search.)

I’m aware of this list because today I had to write down some personal info and sign a release form at work. My company could be getting a federal contractor as a client, so every employee name has to be checked against the list. Fair enough. I don’t like that, but it is the law.

I do have a problem, though, with the fact that we contracted an outside firm to do the checking. Everybody in this company had to sign a paper saying that neither my employer nor this firm were liable for any consequence of having yourself checked. Then everybody had to print his or her first, middle and last names, DOB, and SSN. The forms will be sent off to VeriCorp, who of course can be trusted with my SSN and corresponding information! I guess!

Keep in mind that my employers are probably paying thousands of dollars for this: VeriCorp is going to take a list of a few hundred names, then they’re going to take the text file linked above, and they’re going to have some people hit CTRL-F a few times. And if one of those people makes a typo and you go to Secret Terrorist Jail, whoops! Oh well! They’re not liable!

I am making use of hyperbole here, obviously. Nobody’s going to go to jail; if you’re on the SDN list and the FBI doesn’t know where you are, you’re certainly not going to be working under your real name, much less putting it down on that form. This whole thing is a redundancy measure, a legal fallback.

My point is that there is no reason to be sending hundreds of people’s personal info to an outside contractor, liability-free, when the list is publicly available, and we have an in-house software development team who are all experts at data correlation. I guess the potential client doesn’t trust us to verify our own employees, because we’re an interested party in the negotiations. But if they don’t trust us to verify the information correctly, why trust us to send it correctly in the first place?

August 17, 2004 /

It occurs to me that all known arguments for censorship–in fact, all possible arguments for censorship–are logically rude.

Gerda: I wish to { purchase, view, broadcast } this material.
Grobian: Upon reviewing this material, I find it to obscene. You may not { purchase, view, broadcast } it; it is harmful to the mind, inhibiting moral judgment and causing its viewers to confuse fantasy with reality.
Gerda: Why is it permitted for you to review the material and judge it, and not for me to do so?
Grobian: I have been tasked with reviewing such material, and would not be so tasked if I were incapable of viewing it safely.
Gerda: But if the material impairs judgment to such a degree, and prevents its viewer from realizing that his or her judgment has been impaired, how do you know that your verdict is not the result of impaired judgment?
Grobian: I am striking it down as obscene, instead of running out to commit vicious criminal acts, which I would clearly do if the material had affected me.
Gerda: So your prediction is the opposite of the only available evidence–your own case–of the effects of reading this material. Doesn’t this empirically disprove your prediction?
Grobian: No. If you, for example, were to view this material, you would commit vicious criminal acts.
Gerda: How do you know that?
Grobian: You’re a pervert. The fact that you want to { purchase, view, broadcast } this material proves it.

That’s just one example–not all arguments for censorship use such flagrant circular logic (but the FCC certainly does). I’d have a more powerful argument here if logical rudeness were inherently invalid, but unfortunately, it’s not. Then again, if one’s going to be logically rude in the first place, one isn’t terribly likely to mind being invalid too, is one?

Some things were meant to be transparent

August 5, 2004 /

You know what would be great, for that logo of yours that is somehow related to comic strips or comic books or “comic-book action” or humor or anything you consider zany? Would be if you took the name of whatever it represents, and put it in a speech bubble. You know! Like in COMICS!

NO! I’M SERIOUS! IT’S NEVER BEEN DONE BEFORE!

July 28, 2004 /

Yes, for the record, Elizabethtown has been filming about a hundred feet from my apartment for a couple days now. No, I haven’t seen anybody famous (although Ian has), and I’m finding it very difficult to care, except that traffic is worse because of all the blocked lanes. No concern for celebrity! I feel practically un-American.

July 26, 2004 /
  • Gave away what, 60 copies of HONOR? Something like that. Two of them I traded for other ashcans (Yeperynye and The Last Sane Cowgirl), which I totally count as sales. And every copy given away was to somebody whose work I (or Will or Stephen) really respect, which is a worthwhile transaction, in my opinion.
  • Left my hat at Preview Night. Never got it back.
  • Got to meet a lot of cool people from the online.
  • Cool people I met from the online all had a curious need to run off to important, distant engagements within seconds of meeting me. Either I smell bad or I’m Creepy Interweb Fan, or (probably) both.
  • Had a really good time with Monica, Will, Stephen and Maria. And Stephen’s lady Erin, at whose residence we crashed, is maybe the coolest person on the whole planet.
  • Ran out of plane-ticket money and was unable to visit Leonard and Sumana. That was a pretty stupid mistake, and I feel really bad about it. Hopefully, a post-student-loan trip is in the works.
  • Tycho and Gabe were the coolest, most professional people at the whole freaking Con.
  • Speaking of Tycho and Gabe, I had one of the world’s most random encounters: passing by their booth, I recognized Paul Mattingly, a great guy who was in Richmond Children’s Theatre with me a billion years ago and who now works as a Klingon and Second City understudy (!) in Vegas. I literally hadn’t seen him in over a decade. He even has a site, The Famous Paul, though I understand that’s mostly a placeholder for the moment.
  • Getting to California by train was interesting, right enough, and I’m glad we tried it. but the people who work for Amtrak seem unhappy and unhelpful and it’s very bumpy. I think I’ll pretty much be flying from here on out.
  • I thought about taking a whole bunch of stuff to get signed, but eventually decided against it. I had a better idea. Thanks to the unlined pocket Moleskine my family got me for my birthday, I now possess what can only be referred to as

    The Greatest

    SKETCHBOOK

    Ever In The History Of Time

    which basically means I win.

I managed to take a whole roll of film, which is good, considering I frequently manage to wish I had a camera while holding one. Probably more updates after I get that developed, but considering I still haven’t posted the pics from my San Francisco trip in February, one shouldn’t hold one’s breath.

From the pokéblog

July 14, 2004 /

We watched out the balcony window last night as a huge storm thrashed by, and today there are a lot of downed trees along my bus route. This is remarkable mostly because it’s not a particularly arboreal area–I just got on the bus, and I live downtown.

Update 0810 hrs: Actually, our bus has had to take a detour because of one road-blocking tree, after the world’s most laborious three-point turn. The tree didn’t look all that big, really. My GTA experience suggests that we totally could have taken it.

Update 0825 hrs: Almost had to detour twice more, for trees blocking like a lane and a half. Both of them had pulled down power lines; we just managed to squeeze around. The way it looks up here in the Highlands makes me grateful that our building didn’t blow down last night. There really is a lot of damage.

Short things are better than long things

July 11, 2004 /

Okay, saying “it’s one big movie! It’s just cut in half!” is stupid whether applied to Kill Bill or Matrix or, I don’t know, American Pie, whatever. It’s a bad idea to make a six-hour movie. Have you ever seen a six-hour movie? There’s a reason for that. It’s a worse idea to cut it in half. It’s bad enough mentally breaking out of the film long enough to take a five-minute bathroom break; I don’t see why a six-month bathroom break would be better.

If you want to make a long movie, make a three-hour movie and end it. If you want to make several movies, make them short. It’s not hard. Just don’t let any action sequence last longer than five minutes, and kill the freaking monologues.