Joseph Gordon-Levitt turned 29 today, IMDB informs me, which serves as a painful reminder of how much I haven’t accomplished with my life.
Paris Hilton also turned 29 today, which reminds me of how much I have.
Category: Angst
More on transparency versus regulation
Aaron Swartz has a better essay than I could have put together on why transparency alone is ineffective and even harmful.
Attention conservation notice
I know I’m kind of harping on this, but I remain really upset and angry about the Citizens United decision, and it would appear I am not alone. Public Citizen and three other organizations have launched Free Speech for People, a campaign to fix the problem, constitutionally or otherwise. Even if you don’t feel like signing their petition or throwing some money at them, they’ve got a blog that I hope will be a good clearinghouse for news on the fight.
Uncle John has made the case that requiring full disclosure of corporate campaign spending would be a good compromise solution–that transparency would allow voters to simply turn away from candidates if they didn’t like where their money was coming from. I respect that opinion, but I really couldn’t disagree more.
We already have disclosure requirements that the decision didn’t affect, and they haven’t yet solved anything. Disclosure didn’t keep Max Baucus from getting the tiller on health care reform after taking four million dollars from the health care industry. It didn’t keep Mitch McConnell from taking three hundred thousand from coal and then, coincidentally, fighting to keep mine owners from having to measure mercury discharge. It’s already a shock when an entrenched politician manages to say a few stern words about a regressive, destructive industrial backer; actual voting that way is unheard of. Doesn’t that indicate our ingrained acceptance that our representatives’ ballots are already purchased?
About half the people who voted against Obama didn’t believe he was born in the United States. A quarter of those, in turn, believed that he was born in Hawaii, but that Hawaii was not a state. What does that mean? That people don’t vote on passive facts; they vote on what they hear and see. Money isn’t speech, it’s volume, and when you turn the volume up too high, it distorts.
I have been sick all week about this
So the Supreme Court made a very bad decision and now we have to deal with the consequences of this inexplicable belief that corporations have a pulse. This gives very rich people the ability to exercise unlimited political influence through partial human beings, using other people’s money. One would think we would have learned that lesson, but no! The right to free speech must be defended, where by “defended” I mean “contorted into hideous shapes.”
This is a nonpartisan issue, kids. No actual human beings are well served by infinite money being poured into politics, which is why even the people who get that money kept trying to make laws against it. If that’s like 535 heroin addicts trying to collectively decide whether to accept, y’know, a bunch of free heroin, then the Citizens United decision is effectively a mandatory heroin prescription that comes with an IV bag and drip stand. Except they’re not ruining their own lives with their addiction; they’re ruining ours.
The only way to legislatively overturn a Supreme Court decision is with a constitutional amendment. I’ve seen that proposed as one route forward, but not very convincingly. I think I have a better one, and what’s more, it’s one that the party (sort of) in power should be familiar with.
Tax campaign contributions and political spending. Tax the living fuck out of them. I’m talking five hundred, six hundred percent. Not on everything–just contributions from corporate general treasury funds, and just the ones that exceed the old McCain-Feingold limits. There’s plenty of precedent: we already do this to discourage behavior we consider legal but harmful, like smoking or self-employment. And one couldn’t very well argue that it restricts “free” “speech,” given that the production and purchase of political news or entertainment are already taxed in all kinds of ways. Want to make it popular? Promise to throw the money raised at the deficit or Social Security or tax breaks for plumbers. You don’t even have to actually do that, guys! Nobody will ever contribute enough to pay the tax unless they get caught cheating.
This is called an economic disincentive. Disincentives are about 80% of the reason government exists. It’s really, really past time we remembered how to create those and use them for good.
The dark side of self-exposure
Sumana called me out on my 2007 goal-announcement entry and asked what the follow-up was for 2010-2012. First, HOW IS IT 2010 ALREADY. Second, I thought I’d already done an update on how those goals went, but I can’t find it if I did, so here we go:
Accomplished
- Get driver’s license
Failed
- Everything else
Okay, so at 28 I have managed to just reach a 16-year-old’s level of basic competence. Right on track! I got accepted to Clarion but couldn’t afford it, and GSP gently declined my teaching application: this indicates an unsurprising trend of nonprofit programs being happier to take my money than to give me more. I stopped running not long after I posted that entry in 2007, but I struggled into reasonable shape last summer and might be able to get there again now that I own an inhaler.
So. Let’s try this again.
My goals for 2010 are to script a graphic novel and run a half-marathon.
My goals for 2011 are to write a novel and publish a computer game.
My goal for 2012 is to be out of non-student-loan debt.
In which scrolling through Google Reader gives me a mild heart attack
Rian Johnson is posting like twenty pictures a day to the just-created Brick tumblr, for some reason. Happily, today he included this DVD-cover fan art that I did back in 2005. I always meant to clean that up and redo it; I had a couple other ideas for doing similar treatments of different scenes, but I don’t remember what they were now.
I’ve been thinking about Brick a lot the last couple of days, actually, because it’s occurred to me that I have pretty simple tastes in terms of plot. Give me any of the following and I will squeal with delight (double points for setting it in high school):
- Emotionally crippled badass tries to get to the bottom of things (Brick, Neuromancer, Veronica Mars)
- Young woman comes into her own and learns how dangerous she can be (Howl’s Moving Castle, The Privilege of the Sword, Bone, everything by Robin McKinley)
- Tenuous network of friends and lovers collapses under the simple pressure of human desire (Lovebot Conquers All, Battlestar Galactica, Magic for Beginners)
And, of course, the latter is why I love Scott Pilgrim. Take away the video-game trappings and the fight scenes and the hipster music references and the fourth-wall humor and… okay, don’t take any of those, they’re great. But the real reason I have such an aching priapism for those comics (which I didn’t pick up until 2008! GAH) is the way O’Malley spends so much care and attention setting up what we in the Indie RPG Club call a relationship map. He gets you to like everybody in it, gives them each their own petty little wants, and then lets them tear each other apart.
Not that I would know anything about what that’s like.
I think the engine is on the beach. The metaphor might have gotten away from me here
It really was pretty disorienting last year, having the television tell me that the thing I wanted from politics was actually happening. I didn’t know how to handle it. The guiding keel of my cynicism ran up short on a beach of unexpected joy.
It wasn’t really a beach, of course: it was a sandbar. Now, as we watch the you-know-what bill being painstakingly converted from a mild rebuke for the insurance industry into a roaring engine of fellatio, it’s almost soothing. Yes, yes. This is what it’s supposed to be like.
It even stopped airing in spring of this year!
Wait. Hold on. Comedy Central has a pseudo-cinema verité show about a radio program? A radio program where one of the hosts is relatively grounded and knowledgeable and the other is the wacky, grating narcissist? And then there’s a new guest every week and things go poorly? And the jokes depend heavily on bleeped cuss words? And nobody’s ever heard of it?
WHAT THE FUCK.
I saw Snüzz live in concert solo only once, last year, while I was living in North Carolina with Jon and Amanda. It was some kind of multi-band benefit thing, and the Brasfields, ardent fans of his, convinced me to go and take a cute girl from OKCupid.
The show (like the date) was a mixed success. It introduced me to Midtown Dickens, my favorite lo-fi act, but while Snüzz was great, he only played for about twenty minutes. Afterwards he sat next to us in the audience, and I mentioned that I was a friend of Jon’s; he smiled broadly and said hey, yeah, Jon and Amanda were awesome, he hoped to see them again sometime. Then I said I’d enjoyed the show but wished it had been longer. He opened his mouth, hesitated, then smiled (less broadly) and just said thanks.
Turns out he was probably forced to stop early by the symptoms of his then-undiagnosed lymphoma. I wish I’d known to say something more tactful. He’s holding the second of a couple benefit concerts himself now; the first was to raise funds for his medical bills, and this one for a group that helps buffer cancer victims against unforeseen costs.
It’s not like I have many non-Brasfield contacts in North Carolina, but hey, if you like good music you should go and toss some money in the hat. It’s this Sunday night at the Blind Tiger in Greensboro.
Biting the wax tadpole
This piece of xenophobic garbage was the top Google News story under Sci/Tech as of a few minutes ago. It makes me so angry I want to blog.
Basically, ICANN–the governing body for domain name registration–finally got around to saying people could register domains with country codes in their own character sets. Country codes are the national domain endings, like .tv (yes, Tuvalu) and .kr, that until now have been abbreviated in Latin characters for absolutely no reason. Thanks to ICANN’s legendary corporate/Western bias, people in those countries have been forced to use kludgy keyboard settings to type in Latin characters when they want to go to a website. Is it any wonder search engines were desperate to do business in China? It’s easier to click through to your site via Google than it is to type its name into the damn address bar.
And so far, country endings are still the only part of domain names to which the change applies! You still have to type the rest of the domain with Latin characters. The rest of the domain scheme is coming, but only ICANN knows when.
So naturally it makes sense for David Coursey to start mongering fear. Oh, sorry, I meant “Tech Inciting.”
“Is this a change for the better? Perhaps, but is there any doubt that if another country had ‘invented’ the Internet–say the Russians–that we’d all have had to learn to type Cyrillic characters by now?”
Jesus Christ, what decade is it? C’mon, “journalist!” LET’S GO TO HISTORY SCHOOL. Setting aside your blazingly simple-minded assertion that “the U.S. invented the Internet,” if you’d bothered to go even Wikipedia-deep in your research, perhaps you’d remember–or learn–that the URI addressing scheme was invented by a British scientist working at a lab in Geneva. Unicode’s been around since 1992, two years before Berners-Lee’s RFC 1630 and RFC 1738 formally set out URL syntax. ICANN’s policies have restricted, not fostered, the Web’s growth into a truly worldwide entity.
“How many new domains will be needed to protect international brands?”
Oh, I take it back! I hadn’t considered the possible damage to brands!
“Will there be hidden domains that cannot be displayed on some computers or typed on many keyboards?”
HEY DIPSHIT! See the fifth sentence of this entry, because THERE ALREADY ARE.
“Will cybercriminals some how [sic] be able to take advantage of this change?”
This sentence is so stupid that it must have set some kind of Internet record.
“Practically, I am not looking forward to perhaps someday having to learn how to type potentially 100,000 non-Latin characters that ICANN has embraced. How many keys will keyboards need to have?”
Record broken!
Go ahead and read the article–it’s a cornucopia of minor idiocies in the same vein. This guy is, to all appearances, a professional blogger published by a real-world magazine (albeit one with a circulation smaller than some webcomics). In a world where major news organizations fight and win legal battles in defense of their right to knowingly lie, I suppose I should be expecting media of every vintage to continue stoking the terror of small minds to drive their dwindling profit engines.
This has been Brendan Makes Fun of Something on the Internet! I will now return to my usual activity of narrow-eyed hunting for the tilde key. And hey, David Coursey: Φάτε ένα εκατομμύριο πέη.