Umbral Echoes Blog

This week, we’re running a promotion at work giving away lots of free RPGs.  For those interested in such things:

ThanksGiveAway Promotion

A selection of products each day, until Friday.  Last weekend, I got the fun of setting up 6 new download servers in preparation for this.  While I was at it, I also spent some of my personal time tweaking a publisher tool for sending out mails, which was received with praise along the likes of, “Shouldn’t you be doing something more important than this?” and, “I hates it!  Make it like it was!!!  Change is BAD!!!!”  The second of which is expected (and somewhat deserved, since the page didn’t work so well when the email list was in the thousands), since every time we do anything, various small publishers invariably liked things better how they were before.

If we’re to believe them, then apparently RPGNow in 2005 was the pinnacle of perfection.

In other news, we finally got a Wii.  I thought it might be useful to have since we’re having the housewarming party this Saturday.  Which you’re invited to, if you’re reading this.  Yes, you too.  But please RSVP if you are coming, so we know how much pizza/beer/etc. we need to get.

But I digress.  The Wii is as fun as the hype claims, though the boxing game is very hard to control.  I perform the exact same motion 5 times, and I end up with a jab-jab-hook-nothing-jab.  Cary bought Zelda, and has been spending lots of time with that — except at the moment, since he’s currently at the White Wolf company retreat and no doubt seeing just how many beers it takes to damage the liver.  Kirstie has been having lots of fun with Rayman, which is a fairly insane game composed of tons of mini-games which involve you (a duck) abusing bunnies.

Don’t worry, these aren’t cute bunnies.  These are bunnies that you’d see in a Roman Dirge or Jhonen Vasquez comic.

All right, back to whipping the servers into submission.

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.

Went to see The Bourne Ultimatum last night with Grem and Missy, courtesy of Sam who is the manager at the Phipp’s Plaza AMC. It’s always awesome to have a friend that can get you free movie passes. The theater was sold to capacity, and unfortunately we had to sit in the 2nd to front row, over to the right. Not the greatest viewing angle. This will come back in a few moments. Also, the air conditioning was broken. So imagine, if you will, a theater with every seat filled, feeling like a sauna, and trying to watch a screen from a viewpoint that causes it to appear distorted.

The movie started off pretty strong. Cool action, lots of spy stuff. Some cool fighing. Reminiscent of the other Bourne movies, but done even better in my opinion. Well, after the first few scenes, I started getting nauseas. I soon realized why (in addition to the vantage point and heat): the camerawork.

I think they were going for the gritty, in-the-middle-of-the-action feeling with the shaky camera, panning around and zooming in and out randomly. After just a few minutes, I figured out their secret: they found an epileptic monkey, strapped a camera to its right hand, and had trained it follow the action. The one thing they didn’t account for is that the epileptic monkey was also a compulsive masturbator. Because seriously, I swear this movie was filmed by an epileptic, masturbating monkey with a camera strapped to its hand.

Needless to say, I spent much of the movie with my eyes closed to avoid losing my dinner. But the movie was good. I think.

Do you know any people who are in the goth crowd? Of course you do; everyone does. Have they told you how totally cool they are, because they’ve had real absinthe? Like, not the fake American stuff, but the real stuff from [insert European country here]. What’s the difference? Well the real stuff makes you hallucinate, because it’s got wormwood in it. It’s illegal in America, because it’s that damn cool.

Well, my friends… such poseurs might have had hallucinations when drinking “real” absinthe, but they were probably caused by the same lack of oxygen to the brain that killed enough of their brain cells to make them buy into the absinthe hype in the first place. Real absinthe does not make you hallucinate.

Let me repeat that, because it bears repeating. Real absinthe does not make you hallucinate.

But, but… it’s got wormwood! Fuck wormwood. The chemical in wormwood that supposedly makes you hallucinate is called thujone, and it’s a GABA (Gamma-aminobutyric acid) inhibitor. There is no evidence that thujone causes hallucinations, even in high doses. It does block the things that inhibit neural activity though, which means that combined with alcohol, it causes you to have a rather alert drunkenness. And the one thing that that real absinthe will do is get you bloody drunk — it’s typically around 110 to 140 proof.

I could go into the history of absinthe, and why it was banned in many countries, and why it had a sudden revival as being the “cool” drink (no goth movement, but an insidious corporate scheme, I assure you). But you can look all that up on your own. Here are a few links of interest:

How Stuff Works’ entry on absinthe
Wikipedia entry on absinthe

Read, be educated, and call some tool on their “real absinthe” story, my people!

From NewScientistTech.com:

The computing giant is developing software that could accurately guess your name, age, gender and potentially even your location, by analysing telltale patterns in your web browsing history.
…
So far it can only guess gender and age with any accuracy, but the team say they expect to be able to “refine the profiles which contain bogus demographic information”, and one day predict your occupation, level of qualifications, and perhaps your location.

The engineer in me appreciates the skill it takes to create such an algorithm.  The paranoid part cringes.  And the marketing-mind boggles at the possibilities — every day it seems like companies are getting better and better tools to learn about consumers and target advertising in a more focused manner.

Which really, I personally don’t mind.  Take such simple things as Google’s ads.  On a number of occasions while searching for something, I find a useful product or service when I glance at those ads on the side.

I think it would be completely awesome if, when I was watching TV, I could see ads about things I might actually be interested in.  Okay, I have a media center PC, so I fast forward past the commercials… but I do actually rewind sometimes to watch one if it catches my interest.  Like the Apple ads.  I don’t really like Macs, but those ads are great entertainment regardless.  But I really hate having to sit through ads for herpes medication, or Herbal Essences, or a damn My Little Pony.

Hell, if advertisers would make ads more entertaining then I might not mind them so much either.  But I suppose there’s a fine line there — I recall a study finding that when some entertaining ad was run during halftime in the last Super Bowl, only 13% of the people surveyed remembered what the commercial was even advertising.  Not a lot of bang for the buck, there.  To again bring up the Mac ads, these are the epitome of “right.”  They are entertaining, informative, and you remember exactly what they’re about.

Hmm, that went a totally different direction than I had planned when I started writing.

It’s been a while since I ranted, so I think it’s time to work the rust out.

Two friends come to me.  One says that another said such and such to her on an online chat.  The other one tells me that she said no such thing.  Silly drama, and I’m in the middle of it.  So I urge the first person to talk to the second, to figure out what’s what.  Is this propagating the drama, or helping to get rid of it?

It seems to me that the majority of drama comes about because of fear.  People are afraid to talk directly to each other about something that’s causing tension — oh, they’ll say they just don’t want to deal with it, or it’s not worth their time.  Of course they couldn’t be afraid of conflict, because they’re opinionated and strong people who would never be afraid of conflict.  But then they’ll go talking about it to a close friend, or a not-so-close friend, to get it off their chests.  And then eventually that makes its way through the grapevine to the other person, possibly in a highly exaggerated or outright distorted form.  So drama is born into the world.  But if the two people would just talk to each other face to face, it could all be avoided.

Hence it seems to me that often, drama is caused by fear.  Am I off-base?  What have your experiences been?

Most of you probably know about the “Overheard in New York” LiveJournal group.  Well, today I was getting lunch at Subway and something made me think of that.   So this girl was getting stuff put on her sub…

Customer: Put spices on, too.
Employee: Salt and pepper?
Customer: Yeah.
Employee: *puts on salt and pepper*
Customer: Put on some spices, too.
Employee: *confused look… long pause… reaches for oregano and starts shaking it over sandwich*
Customer: *seems satisfied*

I just wanted to grab the woman, shake her sensless (which technically wouldn’t have required any shaking whatsoever), and say, “It’s called OREGANO, you twit!  It’s a TYPE of spice, just like salt and pepper are TYPES of spice!“  But I didn’t, because damned if I wasn’t hungry and just wanted to get the hell out of there.  Then just as I’m exiting the door, I overhear a guy saying, “Put some spice on.”  I stopped, went back in, stared for a minute… then decided it really just wasn’t worth it.

I hate that I have to share my precious oxygen with these people, whose brains were obviously deprived of it as a child.

I took a quiz today at OnTheIssues.org, to see which candidate’s views most closely match mine. The result? I apparently shouldn’t vote for anyone, because no candidate really stands for my views. Well, at least no Republican nor Democratic candidate, which were the only ones it listed in the quiz results.

I’ll probably end up voting Libertarian, but I feel bad doing that because it’s a wasted vote, and also, most Libertarian candidates seem to be nutjobs in their own right. I’m all for smaller government, but I don’t realistically think that we’re ever going to get rid of the IRS. I guess I’ll have to keep a closer watch on the candidates.

When thinking about politics, I often find myself in a philosophical quandary involving the most basic issue. On the one hand, I think that in general people should be free to run their lives as they see fit, with as little intervention from the government as possible (the Libertarian mindset). But on the other hand… a lot of people are really, really stupid, and I’m not sure they could handle that much freedom in a way that would benefit civilization as a whole.

For instance, I tend to think that reproducing should be a privilege, not a right. Honestly, some people just shouldn’t be allowed to breed. But isn’t this an inherent part of being a human? Isn’t it your god-given right to produce offspring and raise them, even if you’re not really equipped to handle it, and will only end up screwing that child up?

I never come up with a way out of that conundrum — freedom, versus protecting people from themselves. Obviously the “best way” (if such a thing exists) is somewhere between the two, but where? The cynical among you might say, “Well if people want to screw up their own lives, give them the freedom to do it.” But it’s short-sighted to believe that they would only screw up their own lives — inevitably, they would end up negatively affecting yours, too.

I could ramble forever, and end up going in circles. So to the two or three of you out there reading this: what are some of your thoughts on these sorts of things?

Every year when April 1st comes around, I wonder why I even bother to browse the Web. Most years, I just don’t — or I stick to sites that I know won’t jerk me around. For example, there’s a story at Engadget about someone successfully hacking the Apple TV to run the full version of Mac OSX. But it was posted today around 3am. So I might as well not even bother following their linked information to see if it’s real or not, because it’s a coin-toss as to whether I’ll be wasting my time or not. And if it is a “joke”… am I supposed to be somehow amused by the fact that I just wasted precious minutes that I could otherwise be using to do something constructive (like download porn)?

I’m really not a big fan of pranks and practical jokes in general. I don’t think they’re funny, either when being the target or the prankster. Every time I see some dumb practical joke, I have the urge to prank the joker… to death with a tire iron. To steal a line from Christopher Walken.

To begin with, I’ve decided it’s too much bother to keep a journal on my own site. So I’m going to be posting here to LJ.

Each year, those of you who live in the northern reaches might experience the first snowfall. Where the white dust coats all that the eye can see, and the landscape turns into a winter wonderland. A glorious time of year where thoughts of Christmas begin to float through your head.
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