Virtual Thought

I’m a big fan of Penny Arcade... by turns subtly brilliant and mind-wrenchingly disgusting (the description on today’s post about testicles shivering in fear and committing hairi-kairi through an interesting use of the Vas Deferens is something to behold both in grammatical construction and sheer gross imagery). Today, they pointed me at a webcomic called Unshelved which is to librarians what Penny Arcade is to gaming geeks: damn funny comic about my world.

But what has endeared me forever to Unshelved is this comic about Ursula K. LeGuin’s A Wizard of Earthsea. This comic rocks hard.

Incidentally: read the Earthsea books and completely ignore the stinking pile of shit that was the SciFi movie.

I’m a big, big fan of the Spring framework, or, more accurately, the .NET implementation. I’m also a fan of the C# language.

That’s why I’m very pleased that Mono has a Mac distribution (they’ve had it for a while) and that, apparently, Spring.NET works fine on the Mac.

So, uh, cool. ( =

Here’s an interesting article that lays out the debate rather nicely.

Help me for I am in Hell.

Apparently the Media Powers that Be think an O.C. video game is a good idea. Taken from the CNN writeup:

The style of play is similar to reality-simulation titles like “The Sims,” allowing fans of the show to explore the “O.C.” universe by dressing to impress, joining the right cliques, dating the right people and striving to fit into the ultra-trendy community, [Gameloft president Michel] Guillemot said.

The emphasis is mine. Seriously, now, WTF? Not only do we have girls with body image problems in real life (thank you Tina Fey for accusing Lindsay Lohan of having Mischa Barton arms) and an increasing number of people who feel as though high school is an alien landscape not meant for them but instead for an inimical species bent on their very destruction… but now it’s also attractively packaged, costs $50, and will, in all likelihood, have shitty gameplay?

Yeah, no thanks.

NB: I’m pretty sure a lot of my anger stems from the fact that this season of the O.C. really, really sucks.

I read this article about how the Chinese government is increasing the restrictions on Inernet use in their own country and preventing their people from reading “approved” news sites. Previous to this, Chinese bloggers had to register with the state—this is just going to the next logical step, really. No surprise there.

I got really angry when I read this. Angry exclamations about freedom and personal choice rang in my head, and I left that page open so I could blog about how Chinese people should have access to any information they want.

Then I came across this article about Pennsylvania’s court battle over intelligent design and how the school board is being taken to court by a group of parents and the ACLU to prevent this thinly veiled attack on the separation of church and state from getting set into the school curiculum.

I got really angry when I read this. Angry exclamations about freedom and personal choice rang in my head, and I left that page open so I could blog about how Pennsylvanian students should not be taught intelligent design in their schools by their science teachers since this just isn’t science and how the court should rule against the intelligent design folks.

Then I paused for a sec.

“What’s the difference here?” my mind asked me (creepy, I know). “So Chinese people should be able to get any information they want but Pennsylvanian ninth graders shouldn’t hear about alternative theories in science?”

And that’s when the mystery cleared up for me: the key word in that last question is science. Intelligent design is not science since it has no hypothesis that can be tested through repeatable experiments. Also, the court isn’t saying that intelligent design as a concept is anathema and can never be spoken of or researched; they are saying that our schools will not teach it. This idealogy isn’t forbidden; it is just not available in schools.

So, yeah: the Chinese people should have the freedom of information access that they deserve and ninth-graders in Pennsylvania should have the science education that they deserve.

Wordpress is dead, long live Wordpress.

Well, okay, not dead in the global sense… but I finally decided to take the plunge and move to Textpattern for my personal CMS needs. I’ve always greatly admired it for its clean design and very active community. Finally, what made me jump ship was that Wordpress doesn’t handle non-blog pages very well… yes, it can make static pages but doesn’t let you intelligently organize them in anything more complicated than a simple hierarchy… down with hierarchical thinking!

So, anyway… for a while I was despairing of ever finding a Wordpress-to-Textpattern import utility and was thinking about writing my own in Ruby… when, lo and behold, it turns out that this is built in to Textpattern. Importing from Wordpress, Movable Type, and blogger are all built in to Textpattern. And it was super painless, too: I pointed it at my old database and whoosh! all my content came over.

Including a lot of animal sex comment spam. Fuckers.

So that’s all cleaned out and the site is reorganized and now I’ve found my new home. Yay!

Wired has a neat article about the ramification of George Bush’s pee-break note to Condi Rice.

What I found most interesting was this passage:

But if Kranz is right, the thing that establishes the veracity of an image is not the image itself, or even the words that put it in context, but our relationship of trust with the person speaking those words… if you’re really intent on falsifying, the last thing you’d do is leave evidence of your alterations… The more I think about my own photography habits, the more I’m convinced that the idea of an “unmanipulated” or “unedited” photo is an absurdity. I’m manipulating and editing the whole time! I see the picture in my head, choose the focal length of the lens, zoom, frame the composition in my camera viewfinder, sense a “decisive moment,” press the shutter, then later open the downloaded images in Photoshop, select the best ones, rotate them, change the cropping, bring up the contrast, make the colors look more natural, clean them up.

I like the non-discrete definition of truth as a relationship between the producer and consumer of the media rather than measured against some absolute. Every play a game against someone (like Killer Instinct or Quake) and been accused of being “cheesy”? The complainer is, in fact, expressing two things: “I hate it that you are beating me,” and “I believe in an absolute standard of quality game playing that you are failing against.” The first statement is easy to answer: “Don’t be a wuss.” The second is harder: haven’t we all, in each of our fields (coding, playing games, writing music, etc.) felt that there is some Yardstick Of Truth out there measuring us? That if we could only stretch forth our efforts our measurements against this Yardstick would show progress towards some finite and reachable goal?

Bullshit. As that last passage from the Wired article indicates, there’s no fidelity to be gained by assaying the Absolute Truth of things whether its photography or fighting games or coding or whatever. That’s a much more interesting world to me.