Blog Archives
Share and enjoy
This should be the first post to be auto-shared on Tumblr, which means I’ll finally be using Tumblr for something. I never quite worked out what to do with it, really.
Since I’m sharing things, here’s an Etsy shop you should check out. Go buy something. In fact, read this blog post and figure out a way to help RC Murphy, because she’s awesome. While you’re there, read some of her stories so that you’ll understand why she’s awesome. (Although she is responsible for Aksel, so clearly she’s far from perfect.)
That’s it for now, I may have something of substance up soon, or maybe not. My internet is being unreliable and it’s so frustrating to deal with I’m tempted to walk away and do something useful with my time instead. Bleh.
A journey
I’d planned to post a lot more this weekend, but I got a little distracted by Uru Live. That’s the online Myst game that started in 2003 and has been canceled, uncanceled, recanceled, restarted, released as open source (at least partially) and is currently free to play and surviving on donations. Most of the time I was at a computer this weekend I was exploring the mysterious remnants of the D’ni civilization.
I guess I should say something more. Uh, if you liked the Myst games, you’ll probably like this. Figuring out how to work the machines is always fun for me. There are a few puzzles that require manipulating objects, which is made unnecessarily hard by the fact that the game doesn’t let you pick them up and put them down. Seriously, you’re trying to assemble a makeshift bridge by kicking things along. That’s pretty maddening.
I haven’t messed with the multiplayer side of it at all yet. Haven’t been feeling like meeting new people. That’s all I’ve got for now. Have a good night.
Irrational Fears
Last night I was randomly bouncing around TV Tropes a bit before bed, when I stumbled across the Slender Man and was promptly unable to sleep for most of the night. I’d copy the photo here, but I don’t want that creepy thin bastard on my blog!
It’s funny how something can evoke dramatically different reactions in people. Clowns are a classic example, some people think they’re hilarious, others find them boring, and to some they’re terrifying.
I’ve liked horror fiction all my life, especially the more atmospheric types, but I won’t turn down a cheap slasher flick filled with half-naked college kids and spring loaded cats. One of the few things that has consistently scared me for real is the image of a humanoid, but clearly not human, figure in the background. It’s why the first half of Signs terrified me, to the great amusement of my friends in the theater. I think it’s an uncanny valley thing. Or possibly emotional trauma caused by childhood alien abduction.
Come to think of it alien abduction stories are pretty scary, too. Though in that case it’s the helplessness and the ignorance, having no idea what they want or what they’re doing, and being completely unable to resist as they casually take you from your home, where you feel most safe.
The Slender Man is effective on a different level. Especially in the photo on that TV Tropes page, where it’s broad daylight in a park filled with children. You have what’s generally a safe place, you have kids, and you have this… weirdness. It would be creepy without the caption, just because of the instinctive fear for children’s safety.
What’s really neat about that though is going to the Something Awful forum and watching an urban legend being born. I really have no doubt that kids will be telling each other scary stories of the Slender Man soon, if they aren’t already.
It reminds me of Bloody Mary, she of the bathroom mirrors. I encountered that one at the daycare center I stayed at during elementary school. We’d turn out the lights and start the chant. Usually alone, sometimes in a small group. We always stretched things out and hammed it up as much as possible, making a big dramatic production out of it was part of the fun. Often we’d get scared or start giggling and not be able to finish it. By the time we finished the chant we’d be so worked up that any tiny unexpected thing would be terrifying and we’d run screaming back into the light. Naturally, we’d then start exaggerating our experience so that by the third time we told the story we had bloody ghosts reaching out of the mirrors.
Good times!
On a side note, poking around the Slender Man’s background this morning I found a link to the Dionaea House, which I read live near the end of its run in 2004. If I can find time I’ll have to read it again and see if it’s as good as I remember.
Anyway, now that I’ve analysed it a bit, the Slender Man can’t scare me anymore.
At least not in the daylight.
The Mime’s Nightmare
Walking down the street, lost in thought. A shock of pain as his nose hits an unseen wall.
Taken aback, he notices the silence. All is quiet to him now, in the heart of a bustling metropolis.
He feels the smooth surface of the invisible wall, trying to find the edge. Instead he finds a corner, and then another.
Trapped on a crowded sidewalk, in an invisible box. The city’s pedestrians continue past him, deftly stepping aside.
He pounds on the walls and screams, but the people take no notice. They go about their business as if unaware of their surroundings.
He tries to lift, to shake, to rock, but the unseen prison will not move. The people ignore him, he is just another obstacle in the sidewalk.
He looks at the city, and it does not look back. He sees secrets, unexpected beauty and hidden ugliness, but he cannot share them.
With a sinking heart he realizes that they’re all in boxes, unseen personal prisons for each individual. While he cannot see the box that traps him, the crowd cannot see anything else.
Bad day
Some days you just don’t have it in you. I did get a proper post started, but it’s not going up tonight. Maybe in the morning it’ll seem less daunting. Good night everyone.
Transit of Venus
So the lesson I’m learning here is that if I send a picture to the blog from my phone, I only get one and I can’t say anything about it except in the title. Wonder if I can tweak how the blog treats MMS messages somehow.
Anyway, let’s get the other, slightly better picture up here.
I made these using a cheap little pocket spyglass to project the image onto a sheet of paper, and my cheap little cell phone. Technology is awesome.
I’d have liked to get a better image, but I had no way to lock down the little scope and couldn’t hold it still enough for good photography. I had an awful time focusing because this managed to happen on a rare windy day and my paper kept trying to fly away. Still, that I could do it at all is pretty cool, especially since I could send it to the blog from outside. We live in fascinating times!
Symbols
(I should really point out that I’m not an expert on anything. This essay is part personal experience, part faded memories of books read both recently and long ago, and part stuff I found on the internet while looking for public domain images to use. Any correction or discussion is most welcome.)
I’ve always liked symbols, sigils, and signs. My mother tells me that before I started preschool she would sit with me and point out car company emblems in the newspaper, teaching me to recognize them. She thought it would be good preparation for reading. Perhaps my lifelong love of symbols stems from that game, perhaps not, but I’ve always liked the idea that a shape can mean something, can represent a concept, complex or simple, if only you know what the person who made it had in mind.
Anyway, since I need to write more and I’m sick of stuff that makes me angry or depressed, I’m going to write about symbols. Maybe I’ll make a series out of it, there are certainly enough interesting symbols to keep going for a long time. We’ll see.
Right now I’m going to discuss my personal favorite, the pentagram.
As symbols go, this one has some serious history. Variations of this basic shape have been in use for at least five thousand years. It has been a pictogram, standing for the Sumerian word UB meaning angle or corner. It has been a symbol of peace and protection, and also of pain and death. It’s been a part of magic and mathematics. Secret societies and sovereign governments have both used it. In fact so many different and diverse groups have used it in so many different ways that any given pentagram could be intended to mean almost anything. Read the rest of this entry
Why I care about religion.
It’s not uncommon for atheists to be asked questions like “Why do you spend so much time talking about religion if you don’t believe it?” or “If you think religion’s a fantasy, why do you care if other people are wasting their time with it?”
This is why.
(I stole this from JT Eberhard, who got it from his brother. I have no idea where it originated.) Read the rest of this entry
“remember it all started with words”
I was reading up on some internet drama, related to a subject I’d rather not get into here, and I saw this comment, the heart of which I will quote here. This was spoken by an Auschwitz survivor, presumably near the end of his life.
“People get angry when you mention Hitler, but. think of this – he did not go straight to slaughtering [people], who would have stood for that?
He said that criminal were bad, and people not working and contributing [to society], people agreed. Then he said that crazy people and crippled people were not good. I hear that from politician now, in here and America. Difference is that Germans did not know like us, that these illness cannot be helped, not blamed on the victims. They just had no money and were hungry, and saw these people not working either, so they agreed.
He made people hungry and tired, then they believe anything they’re told, a good trick. After that it was too easy to blame the hard times on Jews, on people opposing him, gypsy, Russian, women, writers.
All their fault, shut them up, make them pay. That country was deranged, but remember it all started with words, by saying how people were different. That’s clever. Split people, ignore that we’re all the same with little differences. Make the differences big, make the same small… Then the rest is easy”
There’s really nothing I can add to this. I just wanted those words here.
Dulling the Point
So a while back I was making a purchase on Thinkgeek and decided to spend some of my geek points. These are bonus points you accumulate as you buy stuff, that can be used to get more stuff. Kind of like Camel Cash only you’re not destroying your lungs and they’re less likely to quietly shut down the program leaving you with a sack of now worthless paper that you saved up over ten years of throwing your health and money away. Not that I’m bitter.
Anyway, I chose the green mushroom lamp. To be honest it really caught my eye because it was listed twice with two different geek point costs. (And I totally failed to check how many they actually deducted for it. Accounting seems easier when there’s a dollar sign on the numbers.) It’s the perfect sort of purchase for geek points, something I want to check out that I don’t want to spend actual money on.
The best pic my cheap little phone camera could manage.
I like the strange little lamp, and thanks to it I noticed something interesting about the way contrast changes the character of a room. Read the rest of this entry
“No, YOU’RE a War on Women!”
Twitterfall is a pretty cool thing. If you want to search hashtags while still seeing your normal timeline it’s just what you need. Plus I like that you don’t have to click anything or press a button to see new tweets, they just drop down periodically. Wish it had a better way to track conversations like Twitter proper does.
So once I hooked that up to my Twitter account, I tossed a few searches I thought might be interesting on it. Last night I added #AFPcountdown to keep up with the festivities over Amanda Palmer’s Kickstarter party, and that was pretty cool.
Today, on a whim, really, I added #WarOnWomen. This was probably a mistake. So far it’s led to a lot of anger and depression.
I have no doubt there’s a war on women going on, in practice at least. I know this because for the first time in my life birth control is being treated as a controversial subject. I know this because we have emergency room doctors refusing to care for rape victims. I know this because there are people making propaganda videos to portray Planned Parenthood as “targeting baby girls” with their evil, evil abortions. Read the rest of this entry
Vulgar Imagery
I’ve managed to lose track of where I found this. It’s certainly striking, though.
Every now and then I’m just a little terrified that I live in a place where a man being tortured to death is a common, everyday image, while breastfeeding is shocking and controversial.
Saunders’ List
Let’s take a look at Peter Saunders list of Ten reasons not to legalise same-sex marriage in Britain. I won’t be quoting his full arguments for the whole list, because this is already doomed to be a very long post.
1. Marriage is the union of one man and one woman
Throughout history in virtually all cultures and faiths throughout the world, marriage has been held to be the union of one man and one woman. Marriage existed thousands of years before our nation began and has been recognised in our laws as the ‘voluntary union of one man and one woman to the exclusion of all others for life’ (Hyde v Hyde 1866). The UN Declaration of Human Rights (article 16) recognises that the family, headed by a man and a woman, ‘is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the State’. It is not up to governments to redefine marriage – but simply to recognise it for what it is, and to promote and protect it as a unique institution.
Wow, factually wrong right out of the gate. Throughout history the most common form of marriage has been polygamous. It’s even in the Old Testament of the Bible, according to 1 Kings 11 king Solomon had 700 wives and 300 concubines, though I suspect he may have inflated the number while bragging.
Check out the basic point here, though. Saunders appears to be saying same sex marriage shouldn’t be allowed because right now it isn’t allowed. So we shouldn’t change the rules to allow it because right now it isn’t allowed.
I’m getting a headache already. Read the rest of this entry
Redefining?
Yeah, this is another gay marriage post. I’ll keep writing them until equality is taken for granted, and then I’ll probably still keep writing them to remind people that it wasn’t always so.
In my internet wanderings this morning I stumbled over this post titled Ten reasons not to legalise same-sex marriage in Britain and was struck by how often the author, Peter Saunders, refers to “redefining” marriage. I’ll address his ten points in a bit, but I think the definition thing is more important so I’m going to talk about this first.
Imagine, if you will, a local sports league, let’s say baseball, that’s been men-only since it was founded years ago. If it changes the rules allowing women to play, is it redefining baseball? If the couples-only three-legged race at the state fair declares that same-sex couples are welcome to participate, does this redefine three-legged races? When the schools were desegregated in the American South, did that redefine education? When women were given the right to vote, did that redefine democracy?
Is it really such a dramatic change to a social institution to welcome those who were previously excluded?
We say “same-sex marriage” or “gay marriage”, but when you get down to it we’re just talking about marriage. The distinction between “a man and a women” and “two people” is trivial. We’re not talking about changing how people do things or what rights and responsibilities they have within a marriage contract, we’re literally talking about being a little more inclusive and nothing else.
In fairness, Saunders is British and talking about Britain, there may be other aspects to the British perspective that I’m not aware of. But I kind of doubt it, because his list of ten things contains nothing that I haven’t already seen in arguments here in the United States. I’ll take a look at that list in my next post.
Working hard to hurt others
I was idly browsing through various blogs and news sites this morning and I was struck by how many stories involve people working very hard at no benefit to themselves in order to hurt other people. Poisoning girls’ schools in Afghanistan, stripping away women’s rights in Egypt, making homosexuality a crime in too many countries to count.
I can understand why the leaders of these things do it, for example Mitt Romney declaring opposition to marriage equality will make him more likely to get elected. What I don’t get is the masses, the individual people who work really hard on these things and don’t seem to get any benefit other than the dubious joy of causing human suffering. Seriously.
The most common explanations for these things are religious, and I still don’t get it. Okay, so your religion says X is a sin, but unless your religion also says you should be cruel to people who commit sin or are sinful by nature, why spend so much of your precious time and energy on it?
Pastor Charles Worley went full-nazi and said that gays should be rounded up and put in concentration camps. Bizarrely, he seems to think after they die of old age there won’t be any more. Not sure if he believes that “recruiting” crap or if he thinks they’re actually a different species. Think of the scale of that project, the cruelty it would impose on tens of millions of people. Read the rest of this entry
Divinations
Late Saturday night I was sitting alone, drinking the last of my homemade booze (which I should have taste-tested sooner) and idly wandering the internet when I stumbled over this site about runes and felt inspired to dig out my bag of runes and cast them. When I was a kid I used to have an interest in divination, and the runes were always my favorite method, but I don’t think I’d done this in any form since I was a teenager. Even before I became a skeptic I had learned from the story of Croesus and stopped trusting oracles.
But that night I was in a mood, so without really thinking about it I drew five runes and placed them face down in an order that seemed right. I’m assuming I used the same method as I did when I was a kid, since it felt familiar, but I didn’t really think about it. One by one I turned the stones over, and promptly received a very clear message about my life and my situation. If you don’t want to be bored to tears with the details of this reading, just skip the next five paragraphs. Read the rest of this entry
The Adventures of Leo Tarvi 