Friday, April 12, 2002

I am waiting for the network administrator who is called Tim to call me back and continue working a problem with me. I will no doubt be here for several more minutes.

Two days ago, my father was in a monstrous car accident. He appears to be OK, though his car was completely destroyed. While traveling to work on US-59, he hit a freeway divider and his car was spun across all three lanes of traffic and into many tiny pieces. He hit his head against the side window, but was otherwise uninjured, which is nothing short of miraculous considering the severity of the accident. He's recovering at home right now, feeling stiff and sore and with a huge headache, which the doctors seem to think is probably a mild brain swelling. My mom is watching him, though, and he has drugs. We shall see.

One of the reasons he's feeling so bad right now is because of the car-shopping trip; shortly after the accident, when the insurance adjuster pronounced the words "total loss," he began the process of buying a new car. His daily commute is close to 40 miles one-way, and a car is an absolute necessity. So, he spent most of Wednesday and a good part of Thursday running around to the bank and to car dealerships. Not the best restorative, to be sure.

I have found myself trapped into going to a wedding with Mistress tonight. I've been dreading it, since the last one she dragged me to was terribly, terribly long and I thought I was going to pass out before it was over. There were speeches. There were songs. There were wedding vows. There was a Unity Candle. There were True Love Waits vows. There were more speeches. I would have gladly gouged out my own eyeballs if I could have, if only to make the hurting stop. Mistress assures me that the one for which we're bound tonight will be shorter, though I have my doubts.

The only way I can get through it is to force myself to think of it as a learning experience. Our own wedding date is January 11, 2003--the more weddings we go to from now until then, the more experience and ideas I'll have that can be applied to our own wedding. Or something like that.

Sweetie, if you're reading this, I love you and I'll go anywhere with you--even to places I don't want to go, as long as I can at least bitch about it.

Posted by Keeper @ 02:21 PM CST [Link]

I find this news heartening--Google has backbone, and more importantly, the money to compliment that backbone.

Everyone do your part--if you've a web site, link to Operation Clambake to push it up in Google's PageRank.

Posted by Keeper @ 02:03 PM CST [Link]

Saturday, April 6, 2002

I seem to have fallen into a different way of thinking. My view of consumer goods has been quantized.

I do not view goods in the same way that the manufacturer might wish. I want to buy what I want, when I want, in the quantity that I desire. I want to buy a book, read it, and then sell it. I want to buy a movie and watch it as many times as I want, without restrictions, and rip it off the DVD and watch it on my computer, if I so desire. After all, I bought it. I want to buy an album--no, even better, I want to buy three songs off an album--and listen to those songs on my PC, on my stereo, in my portable MP3 player, and in my car.

My view of consumer goods is becoming divorced from the medium in which those goods are designed to propagate. I am interested in the good itself, not the packaging or the context. I don't care about your licenses or your end-user restrictions or your void-where-prohibited-by-law prohibitions against usage. I buy it, and it's mine. I won't change it, I won't edit it, and I won't try to claim it as my own, but I didn't buy the license to use something--I bought the something, part, parcel, and package.

I am told by the distributor, with their lawyers and their guns and their endless amounts of money, that I own nothing; that all my movies and music are still belong to them, though they might consent, for a pittiance, to let me watch them or listen to them for a short amount of time. I am told that I am limiting commerce and destroying free speech by trying to loose myself from their restrictions. I am a Communist unless I play by their rules. I am told I have fair use rights, even though those rights are shut away behind a door whose unlocking is a felony. If I do not abide by thier model of distribution, artists will not create, and society itself will stagnate.

Artists do not create for money. Money is a wonderful dividend of creating, but artists do not create their art simply to get paid. If that were the case, then there would be no artists; whores, perhaps, but no artists. Artists create art--paintings, songs, sculpture, and all the other infinite kinds of art--because they love to create art. If there were a massive, Mad Max-style nuclear war tomorrow, and the United States of America, a Subsidiary of Hollywood, Inc., ceased to be, after the survivors crawled out from under the wreckage and figured out how to get food and water you would still have people who would sing, or paint, or sculpt.

It's not done for commercialism.

It's done because that is what humans do.

So fuck your license agreements.

Posted by Keeper @ 12:07 PM CST [Link]

Tuesday, April 2, 2002

I've been playing Dark Forces III: Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast for most of the weekend, though I understand that they've finally dropped the "Dark Forces" monicker. It's a decent game, though the game design is bland and repetitive, and the first two levels, until you get the lightsaber, are absolute torture to play through. Once you get the lightsaber and you get to start whupping butt with the Force, it gets a bit more interesting before it becomes stale again. As with most FPP-shooter games, I can only play it in small, hour-long doses before I get bored. No matter how much you try, and no matter what creative license you apply to a game, it's impossible to make "run into the room, kill all the guys, hunt for the switch or door, run into the room, kill all the guys, hunt for the switch or door..." very interesting. And the disgusting fascination level designers seem to have with "make the switch or door hard to find, leading to an hour of boring wandering around" is a terrible, terrible thing.

Right now, I'm in the swamp outside the Jedi Academy, having just blown up Lizard Man's entirely-too-large and stupifyingly-boring-to-run-around-in starship. I'm glad that I blew it up, too, because it was filled with pointless rooms and needlessly stupid structurs, as well as absurdly complicated systems. After going through what I went through to set the communications array--and I ended up just turning on the "no clipping" cheat rather than spend a half-hour running and jumping like a reject from a Super Mario Brothers video game--I have to question the logic of the ship's architect. If I had to crew a ship that was laid out like that, I'd throw myself into one of the seemingly endless array of trillion-mile deep chasms that litter the ship's open spaces.

"Right, lieutenant, we need to raise the base on the communicator. Go set the red, green, and blue switches to correspond with the following meaningless symbols."

"But, sir--does this mean that I'm going to have to spend an hour running and jumping around amid the floating cubes, trying to find which cube houses the proper symbol for the communications array?"

"Indeed, lieutenant." [force grip] "And I find your lack of faith disturbing."

Why am I still playing this game? Because, let's face it--even with all the shittiness, it's still hella-fun to whack people with a lightsaber. I do so love those "woob-woob" noises.

Posted by Keeper @ 10:22 AM CST [Link]