Or: Obnoxious Horseshit
Okay, so admittedly when I first saw the Rent-a-Negro website long, long ago, I thought it was funny. And it is. Or rather, it would be if it were just a goof that someone thought up while drunk and joking around.
Alas, I suffered the misfortune of listening to Ms. Damali Ayo on NPR tonight, and having heard the background to the web site, I now find her and all her work obnoxious. Far from being an amusing prank, this woman actually makes a living and takes seriously this pretentious shit.
My objection is not really particular to her. She is part of a larger class of people who are basically parasites to society in a far more egregious way than the poor or the people on welfare. These people are commonly know as "artists."
Note that my problem is not with art but with _artists_. Art can be interesting, thought-provoking, beautiful, and stunning. Artists, unfortunately, are self-involved, pretentious, condescending, self-important pricks who overestimate their value to the world.
Case in point: Ms. Damali. She went on and on about how people view race, and how she was challenging people's perceptions by doing assinine shit like pandhandling for slavery reparations, and how people "really should think about race more." She made the point, which she seemed to think was profound, that when you see a white person walk by, it's "a person," and when you see a black person go by, they're "a black person."
You know what? Fuck her. And fuck artists who think like that. They seem to be under the delusion that because they're artists, they somehow have a deeper understanding of the world and see it from a different perspective. And they don't. If they have a different perspective, it's because they've spent too much time admiring the depth they perceive in their own thoughts and getting other people like them to do the same. And that's not insight. That's fucking egotism and intellectual masturbation.
It reminds me of a conversation I had a while ago (yes, with the same person who wants more time to watch tv). We were discussing the fact that there's a class of academics who are under the mistaken impression that anybody gives a shit about what they're doing besides other people doing the same thing, and moreover that what they're doing matters. In general, it doesn't. From my perspective, at least the social scientists who are doing empirical studies are actually learning something objective about the world and about people, but even their research has little to no bearing on how anybody views the world or governs. Even that tiny useful sliver, however, evades the "conceptual artists" (like Ayo) and social theorists and the like who actually get paid to come up with arbitrary ephemeral horseshit that has no bearing on the real world nor any effect beyond their incestuous little academic community, and, as if that weren't bad enough, have the fucking balls to talk about their work like they found the cure for cancer.
Stop it. Please. You're all fucking pompous douchebags.
Now, as I said, I don't necessarily have a problem with art (though the next artist to draw a black square off-center on a white canvas, call it art, and claim it "challenges traditional notions of visual art and forces the viewer to confront themselves in their role as audience, thus inviting an entirely new dialectic between the painting and the viewer" should be strung up by his testicles (or whatever relevent sensitive bits he, she, or it may have) and then quartered. That's not art. It's a fucking rectangle.) But artists need to understand that all they do, at best, is entertain their audience. That's it. End of story. No greater social purpose or contribution, no expanding of human knowledge, and no forcing of dialog. You draw a pretty picture, I pay you, and then you go the fuck away. That's how this works. If you want to actually make a difference in the world, go do something useful. Go to law school and do civil rights litigation. Get involved with a non-profit advocacy group. Go do miscellaneous community service to feed someone or build them a fucking house. But I swear to god, one more pretentious conceptual art piece that you talk about like the second coming of Christ and I will smear you in meat sauce, throw you in a pit with Rush Limbaugh, G. Gordon Liddy, and Ann Coulter, and enjoy the fucking carnage.
So Ms. Ayo, with all due respect, shut up and go do something useful. If you give such a shit about race, go actually do something about the issue and stop taking up valuable air time.
(oh, and for anyone who might be retarded enough to try to make the "yeah, but, see, she got you talking about it, so she is making a difference!" point, just stop right there, Scooter. My roommate has gone on _at length_ on numerous occasions about how proud she was of a dump she took. Just because she talked about it doesn't mean it's a goddamn epiphany.)
Tuesday, November 29, 2005
Sunday, November 27, 2005
Xbox 360 crash cause?
Seems the cause of the Xbox crashes is power supplies overheating.
You'd think they'd have caught something this stupid in testing, but apparently not...
You'd think they'd have caught something this stupid in testing, but apparently not...
Saturday, November 26, 2005
Friday, November 25, 2005
Rap battle
I'd love to be able to freestyle but I'm...what's the word?...white. Really, really white.
Wednesday, November 23, 2005
360s already crashing?!
Sigh.
Looks like a hardware error, honestly. I wonder if there is a bad batch of xboxen floating around somewhere.
Looks like a hardware error, honestly. I wonder if there is a bad batch of xboxen floating around somewhere.
Tuesday, November 22, 2005
Monday, November 21, 2005
Thursday, November 17, 2005
On libertarianism
Ok, I've been suckered into a rant on libertarianism. Mostly because I got suckered into posting a response on Slashdot to a paranoid, rambling, libertarian idiot babbling about how campaign finance rules were an egregious affront to freedom of speech (don't start with me Okwui).
At the risk of drawing my former roommate's ire, libertarians piss me off. Now, don't get me wrong...I totally respect libertarians who do, in fact, grasp what they're actually saying: that they want a return to jungle law because they think they can claw their way over most of the rest of humanity to hoard as many resources as possible and rule their defeated foes with an iron fist. I'm okay with that. I respect it, because it's honest. Much more infuriating than self-interest is self-interest cloaked in a veil of magnanimity.
But these warbling retards who think everyone would be better off if all government did was provide an army to fight off invaders and enforce contracts piss me off. The first problem is that there was never, ever a time in which everyone got to start off on equal footing. Resources have never been equally distributed or equally available. Ever. So it's effectively like dropping 20 people on an island, giving all the food, water, and supplies to one person, providing them with an armed guard to make sure any "contracts" they drew up were adhered to, and saying, "Okay, go make a civilization!" Unequal bargaining position anyone?
But ignore that for a minute. Pretend everyone's on equal footing. You're still going to end up with a crappy outcome, because some small percentage is going to be smart/crafty/clever/conniving enough to negotiate/strongarm/coerce everyone else into putting them in a position of power over people and resources. It just naturally happens that way if for no other reason than people are dumb and often won't notice it happened until it's too late. And once you're at a competitive disadvantage, you're pretty much screwed. See above.
So what you end up with is a few barons controlling everything, a few more priviledged underlings who maintain those barons' power in exchange for a share in some of it, and on down the pyramid to the wide base of people who are serfs and basically screwed. Now, I don't call that an ideal society, do you? That's really not much of an improvement over medieval despots. In fact, it's pretty much identical.
Now, that said, I'm no socialist (no, honestly, I'm really not...I used to think I was until I thought about it and realized it was a terrible idea). I don't think you should have a single, centralized arbiter of all resource allocation. Why? Because a) people generally hate it and want the opportunity to compete with and screw each other over, and b) because you can't design a system that is impossible to corrupt (or, to put it another way, someone has to administer that centralized allocator, and that person is likely to be a sleazy, unscrupulous fuck. See Bush, George W.)
So I think competitive markets do have their place. But you do need a regulatory infrastructure to temper those markets to social aims and to make create the environment in which they will optimize results. For example, it would be stupid to have different companies own major highways because you can't exactly build an alternate to interstate 95, now can you? Only one road fits in any given place. You can, however, have different companies use those roads to deliver stuff, because they can both deliver using the same roads. (Incidentally, Congress doesn't seem to get this concept because they think it's ok to have one company own every wire that goes into your house. Then again, these were the same retards who thought it was a good idea to get into the whole Terry Shiavo thing and rename frech fries "freedom fries.")
Anyway, it just pisses me off. Markets are useful things, but they have their limits. They have no conception of social justice, and libertarians don't seem to get that. They seem to think if we had no government the world would be in idyllic la-la land where everybody could do everything they always wanted and everyone would get along.
Maybe they're just fucking hippies and they don't even know it.
At the risk of drawing my former roommate's ire, libertarians piss me off. Now, don't get me wrong...I totally respect libertarians who do, in fact, grasp what they're actually saying: that they want a return to jungle law because they think they can claw their way over most of the rest of humanity to hoard as many resources as possible and rule their defeated foes with an iron fist. I'm okay with that. I respect it, because it's honest. Much more infuriating than self-interest is self-interest cloaked in a veil of magnanimity.
But these warbling retards who think everyone would be better off if all government did was provide an army to fight off invaders and enforce contracts piss me off. The first problem is that there was never, ever a time in which everyone got to start off on equal footing. Resources have never been equally distributed or equally available. Ever. So it's effectively like dropping 20 people on an island, giving all the food, water, and supplies to one person, providing them with an armed guard to make sure any "contracts" they drew up were adhered to, and saying, "Okay, go make a civilization!" Unequal bargaining position anyone?
But ignore that for a minute. Pretend everyone's on equal footing. You're still going to end up with a crappy outcome, because some small percentage is going to be smart/crafty/clever/conniving enough to negotiate/strongarm/coerce everyone else into putting them in a position of power over people and resources. It just naturally happens that way if for no other reason than people are dumb and often won't notice it happened until it's too late. And once you're at a competitive disadvantage, you're pretty much screwed. See above.
So what you end up with is a few barons controlling everything, a few more priviledged underlings who maintain those barons' power in exchange for a share in some of it, and on down the pyramid to the wide base of people who are serfs and basically screwed. Now, I don't call that an ideal society, do you? That's really not much of an improvement over medieval despots. In fact, it's pretty much identical.
Now, that said, I'm no socialist (no, honestly, I'm really not...I used to think I was until I thought about it and realized it was a terrible idea). I don't think you should have a single, centralized arbiter of all resource allocation. Why? Because a) people generally hate it and want the opportunity to compete with and screw each other over, and b) because you can't design a system that is impossible to corrupt (or, to put it another way, someone has to administer that centralized allocator, and that person is likely to be a sleazy, unscrupulous fuck. See Bush, George W.)
So I think competitive markets do have their place. But you do need a regulatory infrastructure to temper those markets to social aims and to make create the environment in which they will optimize results. For example, it would be stupid to have different companies own major highways because you can't exactly build an alternate to interstate 95, now can you? Only one road fits in any given place. You can, however, have different companies use those roads to deliver stuff, because they can both deliver using the same roads. (Incidentally, Congress doesn't seem to get this concept because they think it's ok to have one company own every wire that goes into your house. Then again, these were the same retards who thought it was a good idea to get into the whole Terry Shiavo thing and rename frech fries "freedom fries.")
Anyway, it just pisses me off. Markets are useful things, but they have their limits. They have no conception of social justice, and libertarians don't seem to get that. They seem to think if we had no government the world would be in idyllic la-la land where everybody could do everything they always wanted and everyone would get along.
Maybe they're just fucking hippies and they don't even know it.
An inevitable question
So, having watched the South Park episode on Scientology (after having watched the episode on Mormonism a while ago), the question inevitably arises:
Do Mormons _also_ think Scientologists are batshit insane? Do Scientologists think that Mormons are batshit insane? If so, how the fuck do they justify it?
"Garden of Eden in Missouri?! That's just stupid. Clearly an evil alien overlord dumped other aliens in a volcano in Hawaii, and their souls now live in us. Retards."
Do Mormons _also_ think Scientologists are batshit insane? Do Scientologists think that Mormons are batshit insane? If so, how the fuck do they justify it?
"Garden of Eden in Missouri?! That's just stupid. Clearly an evil alien overlord dumped other aliens in a volcano in Hawaii, and their souls now live in us. Retards."
Wednesday, November 16, 2005
The internet boogyman
Of course you were going to get a rant on this paranoid rambling.
Actually, it's not so much paranoid as naive. Paranoid implies perceiving a threat that isn't there. That's not true in this case...the threat posed by the "carriers" (or the "pipe-owners" if you prefer) is real. People like SBC, Comcast, etc. would love to control far more than they do. Sure. Fine. We knew this.
But remember...they're not the only ones with money, and in this world, money talks. And guess what? The number of players out there who have a vested interest in keeping the underlying infrastructure of the internet relatively neutral far outweighs the number of players that have delusions of controlling it, and they have a hell of a lot more money. Hell, Microsoft alone could just sneeze and SBC and Comcast would spontaneously combust.
No, I'm not worried even slightly. Too many companies depend on the existing structure of the internet for it to change particularly drastically. It is _the_ communication medium of the modern world, and the behemoths of Wall Street will roar mightily if anybody dares threaten that.
Relax. Breathe. It will be ok.
The more focused question of one-way media is the interesting one. Sure, the RIAA and MPAA are utterly abusing their position as gatekeepers of media in a totally unjustifiable way. Proposed DRM schemes are far, far too draconian, and people are and should be pissed off about it. I don't, however, think DRM is necessarily a priori a bad thing, however. Just like every other control technology, it's a matter of how it's used.
The problem with people like Doc is that I have yet to see them propose an economically viable alternative artistic promotion mechanism. If one exists, I'd love to see it. Certainly the above-mentioned acronyms are overbloated, greedy entities, but there is nonetheless a certain basic cost for creating and distributing art, be it music, movies, or anything else, and that would be true even if they didn't exist. Sure, the internet drastically reduced the distribution cost, but that doesn't mean it's free to create art. Artists have to make a living somehow, and most modern movies require a non-trivial budget. Where is that money going to come from?
The NEA? Maybe. Theoretically, you could centralize all artistic funding. Personally, liberal though I am, I don't think that's a good idea. There is some benefit to having market forces act on the creation of entertainment. I think Battlestar: Galactica is a fantastic show, but it's fucking expensive to create. Do you think it ever would have gotten enough money to be as good as it is out of a government grant? Without any tangible results like a vaccine or a weapon? Just "something pretty?" No, I don't think so.
So, you have to be able to generate a revenue stream somehow. So how do you do it in the Information Age? I don't have a good answer if you don't let me use DRM. An "unencumbered" internet has the property that as soon as a piece of media, a movie for example, is digitized into a transferable format, potentially every possible audience member can watch it without giving a dime to its creator/distributor. Sure, the distributor can charge for the initial release, but once it's out, it's fucking _out_. Do you charge the first person to download the movie $10 million? Are _you_ going to foot that?
How do you make money if your revenue isn't directly tied to viewership? Without DRM, letting one person view something is equivalent to letting everyone view it. Do you somehow charge everyone who _might_ view it to create it? That's essentially the centralized (or *shudder* socialist) model since your audience is everyone. Hell, it's uber-socialist since your audience is potentially everyone in the world.
The only answer I've ever heard anyone come up with is advertising. That's why television is free (ok, relatively). The advertisers pay to have shows distributed as widely as possible because they piggyback advertisements on top of the entertainment, and the more people view the entertainment (and hence advertising), the more business they get. Okay, fine. But in a world where everything's just bits, some douchebag hacker is going to find a way to redistribute the entertainment without the annoying advertisements or at least create a viewer that will filter it out. So you're back to square one.
So please...tell me how you're supposed to support artistic creation in this magical new technological world. I would love to know. If you can convince me there's a way to do it without DRM, I will happily walk alongside your army, bazooka in hand, to the MPAA and RIAA headquarters and get rid of the parasitic fucktards once and for all. But intellectual property was created for a reason, and that was to promote the production of art and ideas. Just because that law mechanism has been hijacked by unscrupulous players doesn't mean the idea was flawed or is any less relevent in the Information Age. Quit yer bitchin'.
Actually, it's not so much paranoid as naive. Paranoid implies perceiving a threat that isn't there. That's not true in this case...the threat posed by the "carriers" (or the "pipe-owners" if you prefer) is real. People like SBC, Comcast, etc. would love to control far more than they do. Sure. Fine. We knew this.
But remember...they're not the only ones with money, and in this world, money talks. And guess what? The number of players out there who have a vested interest in keeping the underlying infrastructure of the internet relatively neutral far outweighs the number of players that have delusions of controlling it, and they have a hell of a lot more money. Hell, Microsoft alone could just sneeze and SBC and Comcast would spontaneously combust.
No, I'm not worried even slightly. Too many companies depend on the existing structure of the internet for it to change particularly drastically. It is _the_ communication medium of the modern world, and the behemoths of Wall Street will roar mightily if anybody dares threaten that.
Relax. Breathe. It will be ok.
The more focused question of one-way media is the interesting one. Sure, the RIAA and MPAA are utterly abusing their position as gatekeepers of media in a totally unjustifiable way. Proposed DRM schemes are far, far too draconian, and people are and should be pissed off about it. I don't, however, think DRM is necessarily a priori a bad thing, however. Just like every other control technology, it's a matter of how it's used.
The problem with people like Doc is that I have yet to see them propose an economically viable alternative artistic promotion mechanism. If one exists, I'd love to see it. Certainly the above-mentioned acronyms are overbloated, greedy entities, but there is nonetheless a certain basic cost for creating and distributing art, be it music, movies, or anything else, and that would be true even if they didn't exist. Sure, the internet drastically reduced the distribution cost, but that doesn't mean it's free to create art. Artists have to make a living somehow, and most modern movies require a non-trivial budget. Where is that money going to come from?
The NEA? Maybe. Theoretically, you could centralize all artistic funding. Personally, liberal though I am, I don't think that's a good idea. There is some benefit to having market forces act on the creation of entertainment. I think Battlestar: Galactica is a fantastic show, but it's fucking expensive to create. Do you think it ever would have gotten enough money to be as good as it is out of a government grant? Without any tangible results like a vaccine or a weapon? Just "something pretty?" No, I don't think so.
So, you have to be able to generate a revenue stream somehow. So how do you do it in the Information Age? I don't have a good answer if you don't let me use DRM. An "unencumbered" internet has the property that as soon as a piece of media, a movie for example, is digitized into a transferable format, potentially every possible audience member can watch it without giving a dime to its creator/distributor. Sure, the distributor can charge for the initial release, but once it's out, it's fucking _out_. Do you charge the first person to download the movie $10 million? Are _you_ going to foot that?
How do you make money if your revenue isn't directly tied to viewership? Without DRM, letting one person view something is equivalent to letting everyone view it. Do you somehow charge everyone who _might_ view it to create it? That's essentially the centralized (or *shudder* socialist) model since your audience is everyone. Hell, it's uber-socialist since your audience is potentially everyone in the world.
The only answer I've ever heard anyone come up with is advertising. That's why television is free (ok, relatively). The advertisers pay to have shows distributed as widely as possible because they piggyback advertisements on top of the entertainment, and the more people view the entertainment (and hence advertising), the more business they get. Okay, fine. But in a world where everything's just bits, some douchebag hacker is going to find a way to redistribute the entertainment without the annoying advertisements or at least create a viewer that will filter it out. So you're back to square one.
So please...tell me how you're supposed to support artistic creation in this magical new technological world. I would love to know. If you can convince me there's a way to do it without DRM, I will happily walk alongside your army, bazooka in hand, to the MPAA and RIAA headquarters and get rid of the parasitic fucktards once and for all. But intellectual property was created for a reason, and that was to promote the production of art and ideas. Just because that law mechanism has been hijacked by unscrupulous players doesn't mean the idea was flawed or is any less relevent in the Information Age. Quit yer bitchin'.
It's the little things that make life so amusing
Found a new "relationship status" option in Friendster: "it's complicated."
I love it.
I love it.
Cheney can bite me
Re: your most recent public moralizing:
Dear Mr. Cheney-
YOUR CHIEF OF STAFF WAS INDICTED FOR PERJURY AND OBSTRUCTION OF JUSTICE.
You gave up the moral high ground a long, long, looooong time ago.
(Somewhere around the time you were CEO of Halliburton, created offshore subsidiaries in order to do business deals with blacklisted countries, and were recorded on camera praising Arthur Anderson's "creative" accounting practices.)
In fact, you are sitting in the moral equivalent of the bottom of the grand canyon shouting _up_ to used car salesmen.
Fuck you,
Nick
Dear Mr. Cheney-
YOUR CHIEF OF STAFF WAS INDICTED FOR PERJURY AND OBSTRUCTION OF JUSTICE.
You gave up the moral high ground a long, long, looooong time ago.
(Somewhere around the time you were CEO of Halliburton, created offshore subsidiaries in order to do business deals with blacklisted countries, and were recorded on camera praising Arthur Anderson's "creative" accounting practices.)
In fact, you are sitting in the moral equivalent of the bottom of the grand canyon shouting _up_ to used car salesmen.
Fuck you,
Nick
Tuesday, November 15, 2005
Monday, November 14, 2005
On achievement
I had what was, in some ways, a very troubling conversation with a friend last night.
I can always rely on him to provide me with a unique view of the world. Bizarre, warped, and twisted to suit his particular biases, yes, but unique nonetheless. It got me thinking about people's ideal state.
My friend maintained that he would be happy if he had enough money not to worry about it (e.g., enough to comfortably pay rent, car, insurance, etc.) and could spend his days watching Aqua Team Hunger Force and smoking pot. Personally, I spend a lot more time in bed than most people, and yet I want to spend more. I have been saying for quite some time that only good things happen to me in bed. The bad shit only happens when I leave bed.
Case in point: today was a good day. Why? Largely because I spent most of it sleeping. I got up once or twice for things like food and bathroom, but by and large my time was spent sleeping. And it was wonderful.
Now, I know that sleeping a lot is a sign of depression, but in my case, it's really not that. I'm quite happy with my life. I just love being asleep. Being in a soft bed, under the covers, with no responsibilities to anyone other than curling up and falling asleep is the best thing in the world. In some ways, it's more fulfilling than either sex or masturbation. Certainly more wholesome. I mean, who can get mad at you for having a sleep addiction? Sure, I guess it falls under the auspices of the sin of sloth, but the Christian Right doesn't seem to give much of a shit about sloth these days. Really more lust that gets their panties in a twist.
Anyway, here's the thing: sex is work. With sex, you have to worry about the other person. It's really more of a cooperative activity than an indulgence. Sure it's fun, but it's nonetheless work, and it's not really relaxing. Even masturbation, which you can do on your own terms, on your own schedule, and worry about no one but yourself, feels somehow hollow because you are alone. After all, most of us don't fantasize about masturbation, do we? We fantasize about sex. So masturbation feels like a poor proxy for actual sex, and I've already discussed the inherent problems with sex itself...it never lives up to the ideals you have of it in your head.
Sleep has no such complications. It is pure, wholesome, good for you, and poses very little risk of disease. And it feels fantastic.
It really makes me wonder...why bother doing all this other shit we do? Was that comment in Office Space really much deeper than we ever imagined?
Lawrence: Well you don't need a million dollars to do nothing, man. Just take a look at my cousin, he's broke, don't do shit.
The problem with achievement is that it never stops. You never achieve something and then say, "ok, I got that thing I was after. I'm done now." All that work for...more work.
I dunno...I can never figure out whether Americans are overworked or lazy fucks. Compared to the Europeans (and Australians, for that matter), we take tragically few vacations and work way too many hours. They think we're crazy, and they're probably right. We have way more stress-related illnesses, among other things. On the other hand, we're fucking lazy compared to, for example, the Chinese. The Chinese still understand what it's like to be a third-world country where you have to work just to survive. They have no notions of having the universe owe them rest and leisure time. They work their flat little asses off at whatever they're doing because some deep, dark part of their brain tells them that if they don't, they will be discarded as worthless and starve. From that perspective, maybe we're just all spoiled. I don't know.
I do think, however, that a collective social goal should be to maximize leisure time. GDP is a fucking retarded measure of quality of life for the average person. So even is salary. Lawyers make a fuck-ton of money, but they're usually unhappy. Why? They work too goddamn much. What's the point of earning all that money if you have no life in which to spend it? Sure, you can retire early, but it seems similarly pointless to take advantage of your massive hoard when you're too old and frail to enjoy it. Having a 20-something trophy wife when you're in your 50's is great and all, but what's the point if you have to pop a viagra in order to bang her because your dick broke 10 years ago?
Anyway. I digress. I think I'm going to go to sleep now. All this rambling has tired me out and has wasted precious time I could have spent sleeping.
I can always rely on him to provide me with a unique view of the world. Bizarre, warped, and twisted to suit his particular biases, yes, but unique nonetheless. It got me thinking about people's ideal state.
My friend maintained that he would be happy if he had enough money not to worry about it (e.g., enough to comfortably pay rent, car, insurance, etc.) and could spend his days watching Aqua Team Hunger Force and smoking pot. Personally, I spend a lot more time in bed than most people, and yet I want to spend more. I have been saying for quite some time that only good things happen to me in bed. The bad shit only happens when I leave bed.
Case in point: today was a good day. Why? Largely because I spent most of it sleeping. I got up once or twice for things like food and bathroom, but by and large my time was spent sleeping. And it was wonderful.
Now, I know that sleeping a lot is a sign of depression, but in my case, it's really not that. I'm quite happy with my life. I just love being asleep. Being in a soft bed, under the covers, with no responsibilities to anyone other than curling up and falling asleep is the best thing in the world. In some ways, it's more fulfilling than either sex or masturbation. Certainly more wholesome. I mean, who can get mad at you for having a sleep addiction? Sure, I guess it falls under the auspices of the sin of sloth, but the Christian Right doesn't seem to give much of a shit about sloth these days. Really more lust that gets their panties in a twist.
Anyway, here's the thing: sex is work. With sex, you have to worry about the other person. It's really more of a cooperative activity than an indulgence. Sure it's fun, but it's nonetheless work, and it's not really relaxing. Even masturbation, which you can do on your own terms, on your own schedule, and worry about no one but yourself, feels somehow hollow because you are alone. After all, most of us don't fantasize about masturbation, do we? We fantasize about sex. So masturbation feels like a poor proxy for actual sex, and I've already discussed the inherent problems with sex itself...it never lives up to the ideals you have of it in your head.
Sleep has no such complications. It is pure, wholesome, good for you, and poses very little risk of disease. And it feels fantastic.
It really makes me wonder...why bother doing all this other shit we do? Was that comment in Office Space really much deeper than we ever imagined?
Lawrence: Well you don't need a million dollars to do nothing, man. Just take a look at my cousin, he's broke, don't do shit.
The problem with achievement is that it never stops. You never achieve something and then say, "ok, I got that thing I was after. I'm done now." All that work for...more work.
I dunno...I can never figure out whether Americans are overworked or lazy fucks. Compared to the Europeans (and Australians, for that matter), we take tragically few vacations and work way too many hours. They think we're crazy, and they're probably right. We have way more stress-related illnesses, among other things. On the other hand, we're fucking lazy compared to, for example, the Chinese. The Chinese still understand what it's like to be a third-world country where you have to work just to survive. They have no notions of having the universe owe them rest and leisure time. They work their flat little asses off at whatever they're doing because some deep, dark part of their brain tells them that if they don't, they will be discarded as worthless and starve. From that perspective, maybe we're just all spoiled. I don't know.
I do think, however, that a collective social goal should be to maximize leisure time. GDP is a fucking retarded measure of quality of life for the average person. So even is salary. Lawyers make a fuck-ton of money, but they're usually unhappy. Why? They work too goddamn much. What's the point of earning all that money if you have no life in which to spend it? Sure, you can retire early, but it seems similarly pointless to take advantage of your massive hoard when you're too old and frail to enjoy it. Having a 20-something trophy wife when you're in your 50's is great and all, but what's the point if you have to pop a viagra in order to bang her because your dick broke 10 years ago?
Anyway. I digress. I think I'm going to go to sleep now. All this rambling has tired me out and has wasted precious time I could have spent sleeping.
Colorful simile of the day
I had this weird spray-candy my roommate gave to me, and it turned my tongue this really weird, deep blue.
It occurred to me that I looked like I had gone down on a blueberry.
Yes, that's just the way my brain works.
In related news, my two new favorite words are "jewy" and "enwanged." Please find a way to work them into any future casual conversations you may have.
It occurred to me that I looked like I had gone down on a blueberry.
Yes, that's just the way my brain works.
In related news, my two new favorite words are "jewy" and "enwanged." Please find a way to work them into any future casual conversations you may have.
Friday, November 11, 2005
Worst...myspace...hair...ever!
I think the First Annual MySpace Stupid Haircut Awards speak for themselves.
Inevitable
I knew this was bound to happen...
This is why Microsoft Research has to be very, very careful to clear any numbers they report on Windows with the Windows team. Because Linux morons jump all over stupid statistics like this.
It's not really an apples-to-apples comparison because Windows does all kinds of shit that Linux and FreeBSD don't on process startup, and they've also optimized thread creation over process creation. And if you have no idea what I'm talking about, count yourself lucky.
This is why Microsoft Research has to be very, very careful to clear any numbers they report on Windows with the Windows team. Because Linux morons jump all over stupid statistics like this.
It's not really an apples-to-apples comparison because Windows does all kinds of shit that Linux and FreeBSD don't on process startup, and they've also optimized thread creation over process creation. And if you have no idea what I'm talking about, count yourself lucky.
Hello kettle
He really has the balls to accuse _other_ people of rewriting history? Mr. Weapons of Mass Destruction/Iraq Has Links to Al Queda? Are you shitting me?
This administration has the most remarkable ability to piss me off...
This administration has the most remarkable ability to piss me off...
Thursday, November 10, 2005
Crazy hippies
Rolling stone article on the ineffectiveness of the anti-war movement.
I find this deeply frustrating. These are exactly the people who have turned "liberal" into a bad word. I don't consider them liberal. I consider them crazy, disorganized, undirected, and addicted to protesting for protest's sake. I consider them idiots who do a disservice to the anti-war movement. They mostly just like yelling and feeling self-righteous and superior. Kinda like the religious right.
It reminds me of Matt Macinnis' editorial at the end of his college tenure about how most of the Living Wage crew were 'tards that caused him to re-evaluate some of his political views. They're just going to turn people who might have been sympathetic against the cause because they don't want to ally themselves with crazy morons.
I find this deeply frustrating. These are exactly the people who have turned "liberal" into a bad word. I don't consider them liberal. I consider them crazy, disorganized, undirected, and addicted to protesting for protest's sake. I consider them idiots who do a disservice to the anti-war movement. They mostly just like yelling and feeling self-righteous and superior. Kinda like the religious right.
It reminds me of Matt Macinnis' editorial at the end of his college tenure about how most of the Living Wage crew were 'tards that caused him to re-evaluate some of his political views. They're just going to turn people who might have been sympathetic against the cause because they don't want to ally themselves with crazy morons.
Tuesday, November 08, 2005
Reality show addict
Show of choice: California election results.
The parental notification prop is dangerously close to passing. Please god, don't let Californians be that stupid...
The parental notification prop is dangerously close to passing. Please god, don't let Californians be that stupid...
I voted!
And I have a sticker to prove it.
As per previous post, voted down everything but 79 and 80. I found a Republican voting guide in my booth and threw it out (immensely satisfying experience), but not before noting that I went against every recommendation they made. And that, children, is how you know you cast the right vote...
As per previous post, voted down everything but 79 and 80. I found a Republican voting guide in my booth and threw it out (immensely satisfying experience), but not before noting that I went against every recommendation they made. And that, children, is how you know you cast the right vote...
Monday, November 07, 2005
Another step in Google taking over the universe
I've been waiting for someone to put their mapping program in mobile form. Goodbye printing out directions!
Thursday, November 03, 2005
Sweet poetic justice
Really, is there anything more poetic than using Sony's anti-piracy rootkit to circumvent World of Warcraft's Warden?
(Probably yes, lots of things, but it's still amusing)
(Probably yes, lots of things, but it's still amusing)
Wednesday, November 02, 2005
Wikipedia
I'm increasingly annoyed with the hype surrounding wikipedia. I am immediately suspicious of any technology people claim will "revolutionize" something, because it usually doesn't. In this respect, wikipedia doesn't disappoint.
First, a wee bit of background. Wikipedia is a democratic encyclopedia. Rather than have annoying "experts" editing the entries, any redneck schmuck can add or edit entries anywhere in the database.
For the most part, it actually works pretty well. Enough people look at the articles to prevent them from being tinfoil hat-crazy most of the time, and no one political group generally can run roughshod over another in any given article.
So what's it good for? Gist. It's great for getting the gist of any given topic. Want to know who the fuck czar Nicholas II was? Check out wikipedia. Want to know what the fuck a kumquat is and why anybody in their right mind would name a fruit that? Flip to wikipedia. It's a great resource for getting a general understanding of something you know jack shit about. In this respect, it is especially good at being a source of information for truly obscure topics. It's a fun exercise to try to find a topic wikipedia _doesn't_ have an entry for.
Which brings me to what's wrong with wikipedia. Or, perhaps more accurately, what people think wikipedia is good for and it isn't. It isn't, never will be, and never should be an authoritative source on anything. Nothing! You hear me? The academic advancement of knowledge depends on being able to rely on the prior work and sources of knowledge it's based on as being objectively correct, verified, and thoroughly scrunized by experts. Wikipedia gives you no such guarantee, and due to its structure, it never can. Wikipedia is a repository for conventional wisdom, but unfortunately conventional wisdom is sometimes wrong, even dangerously wrong.
There's a reason the world has experts, people. It's because they know stuff other people don't. If I don't have a guarantee an article was written by an expert and verified by other experts, it's worthless to me as a basis for other academic work, and the point at which wikipedia adopts that structure is the point at which it becomes just another encyclopedia and loses anything that might have been remarkable about it.
I'm fucking tired of hearing about how the great wikipedia is empowering the everyday joe to overturn the monoliths like Encyclopedia Brittanica. Shut up. All of you. Seriously. Just because something is new and different doesn't automatically mean it's better. Wikipedia can do certain things that traditional encyclopedias can't, but serving as an authoritative source of verified knowledge is not one of them. Get over yourselves.
That said, wikis are a great idea for tech companies to document the development of their products. Everyone in the company is definitionally an expert on the technology they're working on, so you can rely on their contributions to the wiki. Moreover, software is such a dynamic entity anyway that a knowledge repository that can evolve at the same pace as the software development is a godsend.
So go ahead...use wikipedia. But use it intelligently. Use it to figure out where else you should look for more detailed and more accurate information. Just don't, for the love of christ, cite it in a paper. You might as well just stamp the word "retard" on your forehead and be done with it.
(reading over this entry, it kinda sucks, isn't terribly coherent, and isn't terribly funny, but I'm sick and too lazy to rewrite it. Deal.)
First, a wee bit of background. Wikipedia is a democratic encyclopedia. Rather than have annoying "experts" editing the entries, any redneck schmuck can add or edit entries anywhere in the database.
For the most part, it actually works pretty well. Enough people look at the articles to prevent them from being tinfoil hat-crazy most of the time, and no one political group generally can run roughshod over another in any given article.
So what's it good for? Gist. It's great for getting the gist of any given topic. Want to know who the fuck czar Nicholas II was? Check out wikipedia. Want to know what the fuck a kumquat is and why anybody in their right mind would name a fruit that? Flip to wikipedia. It's a great resource for getting a general understanding of something you know jack shit about. In this respect, it is especially good at being a source of information for truly obscure topics. It's a fun exercise to try to find a topic wikipedia _doesn't_ have an entry for.
Which brings me to what's wrong with wikipedia. Or, perhaps more accurately, what people think wikipedia is good for and it isn't. It isn't, never will be, and never should be an authoritative source on anything. Nothing! You hear me? The academic advancement of knowledge depends on being able to rely on the prior work and sources of knowledge it's based on as being objectively correct, verified, and thoroughly scrunized by experts. Wikipedia gives you no such guarantee, and due to its structure, it never can. Wikipedia is a repository for conventional wisdom, but unfortunately conventional wisdom is sometimes wrong, even dangerously wrong.
There's a reason the world has experts, people. It's because they know stuff other people don't. If I don't have a guarantee an article was written by an expert and verified by other experts, it's worthless to me as a basis for other academic work, and the point at which wikipedia adopts that structure is the point at which it becomes just another encyclopedia and loses anything that might have been remarkable about it.
I'm fucking tired of hearing about how the great wikipedia is empowering the everyday joe to overturn the monoliths like Encyclopedia Brittanica. Shut up. All of you. Seriously. Just because something is new and different doesn't automatically mean it's better. Wikipedia can do certain things that traditional encyclopedias can't, but serving as an authoritative source of verified knowledge is not one of them. Get over yourselves.
That said, wikis are a great idea for tech companies to document the development of their products. Everyone in the company is definitionally an expert on the technology they're working on, so you can rely on their contributions to the wiki. Moreover, software is such a dynamic entity anyway that a knowledge repository that can evolve at the same pace as the software development is a godsend.
So go ahead...use wikipedia. But use it intelligently. Use it to figure out where else you should look for more detailed and more accurate information. Just don't, for the love of christ, cite it in a paper. You might as well just stamp the word "retard" on your forehead and be done with it.
(reading over this entry, it kinda sucks, isn't terribly coherent, and isn't terribly funny, but I'm sick and too lazy to rewrite it. Deal.)
Tuesday, November 01, 2005
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