Umbral Echoes Blog

From the web comic xkcd.com

I’ve had a few discussions with people over the past few weeks concerning friendship. If a friend disagrees with you on something, does a “real friend” tell you, or do they keep their mouth shut? Or do they bite it down, and agree with whatever you’re saying?

Personally, I’ve always told friends when I disagree with something they say, or do. I don’t (or at least, try not to) do it in an in-your-face manner, but strongly enough to let them know that there might be another way of looking at things. Then again, I’ve always played the devil’s advocate — and not just after I played the part of Satan in a church play when I was 16.  I hate the “yes-man” type of friend, who always agrees with you, and never challenges anything you do or say.

On the other hand, friends should always be supportive of one another, even if they don’t agree with each other.  I guess it’s the same sort of mentality as, “I don’t support the war, but I support our troops.”  That isn’t to say that if your friend is getting hooked on heroin, you should support that.  Which I guess is another dimension — if you think a friend is doing something detrimental, how far do you go to try to stop them?  At what point do you say, “It’s their life, and they’ve made their decision?”

I’m watching the State of the Union address, and as usual there are a lot of “duh” moments in it. Yeah, we’re trying to get our troops home. We need an economic stimulus package to get pushed through soon. Et cetera.

As I watch this though, I’m drawn less to what’s being said, and more to what both sides of the auditorium (Republican and Democrat) applaud on — as opposed to which points only the Republicans applaud on. And also, which comments get standing ovations from just one side, or both. It’s like a gauge of what is going to happen, and what might or might not.

As a quick example, the first thing I saw both sides applaud on was a measure to make congress vote on all earmarks — if it’s important for tax dollars to be spent on, then it should be discussed and voted on publicly.

And dear lord, man. “Nuclear,” not, “nukular.”

As an aside, David Elsewhere is my hero of the day.

When people are sad, sometimes they play sad music to reflect their mood.  Sometimes they play upbeat music, to try and lighten their mood.  Generally I fall into the latter category — I watch a comedy, or listen to some happy music.  But I find that when I’m in  a particularly sour/depressed/bad mood, it doesn’t really work.  In those times, I try to do something to take my mind off whatever it is that’s got me stressed or upset.

What are your experiences?  How do you generally deal with “bad” moods?

Best. Trailer. Evar.

So I’m reading the headlines from a computing newsletter I get, and this immediately jumped out at me:

A German Aerospace Center Space Agency research team led by Sami Haddadin has developed a robot that intentionally hits people in the face…

Now, the research is aimed at making robotic machinery that works near people able to detect if it hits a person.  But that first sentence had me laughing out loud.

I’ve been thinking about the concept of democracy a lot lately.  Or at least, I’ve been gnawing on it in the back of my brain anyway.  I’ve come to the conclusion that democracy doesn’t work.  And I don’t just mean this flawed two-party democracy that we live in, but democracy as a whole.

For the record, I’m a libertarian in theory.  I think that people should be free seek happiness as they please, so long as it doesn’t encroach on other people’s ability to do the same.

That having been said, people at large are idiots, and don’t know what’s good for them in the long run.   Or put another way, people are inherently selfish, and are fine with taking from society at whole if it means more for them individually.  Some people expect that the government should pay for all of their health care.  Some people see no problem in getting permanent disability pay, when they don’t actually have a disability that prevents them from working.  What ever happened to, “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.”?

I like the idea of democracy in general — having one person make the final decision on things for an entire population seems awfully silly.  But I think voting should be both a privilege and a duty, but not a right granted to everyone.

Ideally, I would say we should do away with Congress, and a much larger number of qualified individuals (i.e. both intelligent, and know the issues at hand) should vote to enact laws and policies.  These people wouldn’t be elected by the masses, because the masses don’t know what’s good for them.   There would be some sort of unbiased procedure for determining who “qualifies” to vote on what.  And those that qualify, would be duty-bound to vote.

I know this could never work, because inevitably the process of choosing these “enlightened citizens” would become biased.  So like all other such ideas, not so great in practice.  But I feel like some day, that’s what it will come to through some combination of technology and social evolution.

I was browsing the Office Depot site today, looking for some multi-line cordless phones for work.  One of the phones that was listed as multi-line actually wasn’t, so I was going to contact them to let them know about this.  I click on their Contact Us page, and something jumps out at me…

Apparently Office Depot is popular with vikings.

My favorite sushi place in the whole world is a little place called Sushi Yoko in Doraville.  It looks pretty ghetto from the outside, and I only went there on the advice of a friend.  I took my friend Bagwell with me, and upon entering, we were the only two Westerners in there.  Naturally, we felt a little out of place.  Until, that is, a long-haired obviously-American dude came in, at which point we rejoiced.  And then saw that he was holding a little half-Japanese girl by the hand, and then heard him speaking what seemed to be fluent Japanese on his cellphone.

Anyway, this place has the best sushi I’ve ever had, and it’s very reasonably priced, too.  It’s next to a Japanese market called Tomato.  Well, apparently Tomato recently decided to paint the walls leading to their place with happy little tomato figures.  Except this one rather stuck out.  You can draw your own conclusions.

Here’s a video of a firedancing chick at the White Wolf/CCP party at GenCon last weekend: