Category: Obsessions

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?

August 5, 2004 /

Found via a new challenge (and a difficult one) at constrained.org, the Endless Limitations introduction makes some excellent points on restrictions and creativity. It makes a better argument for artificial constraints than I’ve ever been able to do, actually, and the way the site’s author (and the book referenced as an inspiration) applies it to education is equally interesting. It’s a whole new look, for example, on why I never get things accomplished without the extreme focus of a deadline, and yet why I don’t learn well when I cram.

June 30, 2004 /

I have indirectly rediscovered A Softer World, which I originally found and enjoyed in the pages of the one comped issue of NFG that I got from Zack’s roommate when I was in California. It was raining at the time. Fortunately, I had a hat.

But! The comic! Is really good. I’m probably going to read the entire archive today, although I don’t know how much quantity exists, since the magazine comics I read (presumably written and drawn in January) did not list a website, and the new ones do. Hopefully they’re all up there. ASW seems designed to appeal directly to me–it’s a three-panel comic built with tightly-zoomed candid photography, lower-case text in odd arrangements, and the kind of dark gray whimsy that I’d love to consistently capture in Anacrusis. I am very glad to be aware of its interweb existence.

Update 1252 hrs: They are all on the site, except the ones they sold to NFG–those were selected from a span of March to July 2003. These strips are painfully good; worse, they started out that way. If I wasn’t enjoying them so much I’d be gnawing my thumb with jealousy.

June 30, 2004 /

Spider-Man 2 is out today! David Koepp didn’t write it, and Michael Chabon did! Life is considerably better than it was five minutes ago, before I learned that.

I loathe David Koepp, in case I haven’t made that sufficiently clear before. He’s written screenplays that adapted three of the icons of my childhood–The Shadow, Mission: Impossible, and the aforementioned Spider-Man–and all of them were pretentious, humorless, cliché-ridden claptrap. I haven’t read Michael Chabon yet, but he won a Pulitzer for writing about comic-book creators; I strongly believe this is a better qualification than, say, Snake Eyes.

June 18, 2004 /

After a bit of a scuffle with NewsBruiser 2.4.1, I’ve upgraded this thing and made it work again, and I’m very happy with it. I try to suppress my fervor for certain computer concepts or programs, because I get really annoyed by other evangelists of similar concepts or programs, but sometimes I just have to gush about NewsBruiser.

I’ve ended up using a lot of different web journaling utilities, and NewsBruiser is completely the best, hands down, period. It’s fast and massively customizable. It’s free, not just to download, but to develop and hack. It has every type of syndication feed in existence, and lets you apply custom licensing to everything you write. It can provide links to specific years, months, days, entries, and words within an entry. It can import from anything, including flat HTML–even broken flat HTML. It has an intelligent comment-spam filter, and–in my opinion, most significantly–a powerful, integrated search engine that doesn’t rely on Google crawlers.

Name one other piece of blogging software that does all of that. Come on, I dare you.

June 18, 2004 /

I’ve been staying mum about it, because I didn’t want to jinx it like last time, but I have now actually won a round of BlogNomic. I’m quite puffy with pride, although I couldn’t have done it alone.

If you’re at all interested in malleable gaming, I think you should join BlogNomic now–I’m going to put a lot of effort into making this round fun. All you have to do is post a comment on one of the more recent entries, stating your name, your wish and your email address, and we’ll get right to you.

June 18, 2004 /

You know what nobody ever says anymore? “It was highway robbery!” I seem to remember people used to say that all the time.

Nobody’s been robbed on a highway in a few hundred years or so, but I’m just saying.

June 9, 2004 /

It’s not online, unfortunately, but trust me when I say that the front page of USA Today has the sub-head

U.S. Olympic hopefuls face drug accusations

Battle looms to compete

which, I… I don’t know, might just be the best ambiguous headline ever.

Geraldine kicked her ride into gear and rumbled out of the gate, into the Istodrome and its ambient thunder. The others were already circling the floor: Dallas Gator and his two-treadle rig, Jingo Smith on her lean ShuttleMatic, and Sam Scarwood’s weird upside-down contraption. Geraldine shook her head. Unless he got with the times and added a double back-beam, he wasn’t going anywhere.

The announcer’s boom brought her back to the arena. “Your final contestant… the Tartan Trampler… Geraldiiiiine O’Maaallleeey!“

Geraldine grinned, checked her trigger action, and shot off a salutatory flare from her Battle Loom’s smokestack. The crowd went wild.