Tales to WoW you, part 5

I realized I had been sitting on my last "tales to WoW you" for 6 years now.  Probably because I was embarrassed to be writing World of Warcraft fan fiction.  Having lost any sense of shame and decorum in the meantime, I present the next installment:  Death and Taxes.  For those not in a place to enjoy dark humor, this post is probably best avoided.  The main characters are undead zombies known as the Forsaken.  Their existence trends towards the morbid. 

Of course, those interested in fine writing are encourage to keep on trucking as well.  I wrote this yesterday because I had to and it entertained me.  Your mileage may vary.  Contents may settle, etc.

Death and Taxes

By Parallel H
Age 37 

*A small hillside covered in sickly grass, plagued weeds and diseased trees sits in the foreground, caught in the murky, mid-afternoon sunlight of Silverpine Forest.  Demon hounds frolic mirthlessly in pursuit of an unwary traveler, scrambling in panic up the hillside.  It soon becomes clear that the hounds are toying with him. *

*A word of power explodes behind them.  The hounds start, whip around to face the newcomer, growling in the disturbing atonalities common to possessed wildlife.  A second word of power booms across the hillside, and the hounds choose discretion over death and disappear over the top of the hill.*

Traveler *Wide eyed and panicked*:  Oh, thank the light!  If you hadn't come when you did I don't think I would have made it!

Hooded stranger:  *speaking in a gravely, raspy voice the young traveler is too excited and naive to notice* It was no problem at all, my son, no problem at all.  What do they call ye back home then?

Darren:  It's Darren sir, and I'm pleased to meet you.  *Darren is still visibly shaken*

Stranger:  Here Darren, drink from this,  it will calm your nerves. *Offering a tonic to Darren, who receives it gratefully and downs it in one gulp.   The hooded stranger reaches into his robe, removes a small card and writes "Darren" in large, friendly letters on the face of it.  He reaches out an pins the card to Darren's vest, before the other realizes what is happening.*

Stranger:  Darren, a quality name, quite fine.  *pointing at the card* That is so they know what to call you when you wake up.

Darren:  When I wake up from what sir?  Do you know of lodging nearby?

Stranger:  Of a sort, lad, of a sort, we'll carry you there free of charge of course.

Darren:  *Confused, and looking increasingly poorly.*  Carry me, why would you do that? 

Stranger: Because you'll be dead in about half a minute from the plague I put in your drink.

*Darren, looking alarmed, has fallen to his knees.*

Darren:  *ack*

Stranger:  *removes his cowl, revealing the cold, slick, unnaturally preserved skin of a Forsaken priest.*  There's no need to thank me, my son.  Soon you will be born to a glorious new world, where even death cannot defeat you!

*Darren dies quietly, confused.*

Stranger:   *Looking off majestically into the distance.*  I am but a humble midwife, bringing brave souls into the tender care of our Dark Lady.

*The stranger snaps himself out of his reverie, looking around.*

Stranger:  *Mumbling to himself*  But this isn't at all what I was here for, just a happy coincidence . . .  *He unstraps his ornately carved staff from his back and begins weaving it in intricate patterns over a couple of unremarkable lumps in the ground nearby, chanting a dark spell the living would tremble to hear.  The earth cracks, split with seams filled with light, before two sickly golden beams of unholy radiance burst launch skyward, throwing dirt, bones and debris every where.*

*A few moments pass, while the dust settles.  One preserved hand, mostly bone, rises up and claws the rim of the newly excavated burial mound.  Another, with a little more meat on it, joins it shortly.  A Forsaken skull, worms and beetles still tangled in its hair, follows soon after.  Gulveris the rogue of little renown pulls himself the rest of the way onto the ground.*

Gulveris:  Oh man, what a rush!  *He turns over on his back and starts laughing.*  Kar, man, that was crazy.  *There is no response.*  Kar?

*From the other mound, a muffled voice:*

Karibou:  Why can't I die?!  For the love of all that's unholy, why can't I die?

Gulveris:  Why must you always be so negative?

Karibou:  You!  Your fault!

*A Forsaken soldier in seriously dented armor claws out of the earth, murder in his eyes.  He advances towards Gulveris menacingly.*

Gulveris:  *laughing carelessly*  Oh what are you going to do Kar, kill me?

Karibou:  Let's find out!  *Kar draws his sword and takes a few practice swings, envisioning how, precisely, he will carve Gulveris into fine pieces.*

*Before Karibou can launch himself towards his adventuring buddy in the interests of science, experimentation and hyper-violent revenge, the hooded stranger barks another word of power, bringing them both up short with a wince.*

Stranger:   Gentleman, I did not raise you both simply so you could tear each other apart.

Gulveris:  Ah!  The undead of the hour, to what do we owe this timely resurrection?

*Karibou is now simply staring at Gulveris, his teeth grinding loudly.*

Stranger:  Ah, it is not me you owe so much as the Dark Lady.

Gulveris:  Oh, of course, all hail Sylvannus, the Dark Lady of Lordearon!

Stranger:  *coughs delicately.*  Ah, it is not so much your praise you owe her, but there ARE some tax payments which, I'm afraid, you both are QUITE overdue on.

Gulveris:  *Astonished.*  Impossible!  I paid my taxes in full two months ago!  And Karibou's far too much of a square to have skipped it I am sure.

*Karibou snaps out of his murderous reverie and glances around the hillside before finally looking towards the stranger.*

Karibou:  Oh no.  How many years of taxes do we owe exactly?

Stranger:  *Glances through a small book he brought with him.*  Ah, gentleman, you both owe 7 years of back taxes I'm afraid, accrued while you took your rest out here in the country. 

Karibou:   Well, our rest wasn't exactly intentional now was it!  *begins muttering to himself darkly about death, undeath, taxes and exactly what he was going to do to Gulveris later that afternoon.*

Gulveris:  And how much do we owe, exactly?

Stranger:  40 gold pieces from each of you will be enough to satisfy your debt with the Dark Lady.

Gulveris:  Well, that's not so bad, right Kar?

Karibou:  *Mimicking Gulveris sarcastically*  "That's not so bad, right Kar!"

Stranger:  Oh, and, ah, of course 1 gold each for the resurrection fee.

Karibou:  Well this is great Gul, because of you I can't die, I can't live and I'm broke.  Fantastic. 

*The stranger glances at Darren's poor body, and a wave of compassion overcomes him, he is a priest after all.*

Stranger:  I'll tell you what, if you take this newborn to the nearest crypt for processing, I'll wave the resurrection fee, how does that sound?

Gulveris:  See Kar?  It's not so bad!  *Gulveris fishes most of his gold out and hands it to the priest.*

Karibou:  *Again, mimicking mockingly*  "See Kar, it's not so bad!"  *Karibou hands over most of his gold as well with a resigned air.  The forsaken couldn't die, but the taxmen in Undercity could make the afterlife . . . unpleasant.*

*A screams splits the afternoon air, faintly to the south*

Stranger:  Ah!  Another soul in need of aid.  I am off to continue our great work!  Gentlemen, I bid you farewell.  *The stranger moves swiftly off, in that unnatural lope most Forsaken seem prone to.*

Karibou:  *Looks at Gulveris, now more depressed than anything.*  You're like my own personal plague, you realize that don't you?

Gulveris:  *Rolling his eyes so hard they nearly pop out.*  Again with the drama.  You love me with all the passion that cold heart can muster and you know it.  Come on, help me with this body.  The sooner we get it to a crypt, the sooner we can catch up on what's been happening since we've been gone.

Karibou:  Well, it can't be anything THAT interesting if we slept through it, now can it?

*Karibou and Gulveris carry Darren the soon-to-be-reborn off into the distance, arguing re-animatedly.  After a short time, the shadows on the hill lengthen, gather and solidify into a tiny goblin and a much larger void of demonic energy, bound with ornate, golden wristbands, staring thoughtfully at the corpses carting a corpse behind a copse of trees.

Ashauss:  They'll do, don't you think?

Void Demon:  *In an unearthly whisper*  Release me.  I don't like it here.

Ashauss:  *Pats a wristband gently*  Soon enough.

One small step for a man child

Why it happened at 1am I don't know, but I finally wrote the introduction to the story I've been dragging my feet on for over a year now. It will require some serious revising, but it actually turned out a little better than I thought it would. And most of all, it was fun! New ideas came to me as I put it together, which is, I guess, how the process works.

I am still second-guessing my ability to put words together in a fashion pleasing enough to pay me for (because my brain feels so out of shape right now), but I think I need to try anyway, because I think it's important to me to know I tried. Now if I can just break though my ever-present fears of failure and change long enough to finish the rest I'll be set to start cracking it apart again with revisions. I can already see where I'll need to re-write, or do more research so I sound like I know what I'm talking about. But I'm thinking I should write out what I think I want it to be, then fill in the gaps in my knowledge with research, and go back and make it more interesting.

Although maybe I should outline the plot before i get too much farther. Maybe things should happen somewhere between the beginning and the end.

1) Opening Scene
2) ?????
3) Victory!

Is probably not quite enough to go on. Well, I have an idea of how the last scenes go pretty well, and a few scenes in between, but I'm not sure how to make the intervening scenes flow smoothly and keep the reader invested, and I haven't quite gamed out how things unfold given the set-up, the players and the end goal.

First things first. Write the first thing first.

Gratitude

I'd like to give a shout-out to the spam bots that constantly link to this site, hoping I'll click back.  Thanks for reading. 

Please flag these kind words for recall both during and after the robot uprising.

On Proof

I generally like XKCD.  I like the science nerdery, but this isn't a particularly reasonable or scientific statement.  It's proof by hand-waving.  Yes, I know this is a joke, but it's a joke that's supposed to be funny because it's true, and it just isn't.  A fairer statement, but one which would not leave much room for a joke, is:  legions of cell phones have not yielded any conclusive proof of paranormal topics like bigfoot, lake monsters, flying saucers and ghosts.

I have more I want to write on this later, and really this comic is just a convenient jumping point for stuff I've wanted to talk about for a while, but for now let me quickly go over how poor a dataset just having a cell phone is for proof of the paranormal.  First, people looking down at their phones, aren't likely to be particularly aware of their environment.  Just having a cell phone on you, doesn't mean you would have the wherewithal to pull it out and snap a crisp, well-defined picture while seeing something unsettling and outside of your normal realm of experience.  Cell phone cameras do not take good, high-quality pictures in the dark, or at a distance.  Everyone in the world, with a cellphone isn't religiously monitoring the skies, lakes and forests for UFO's, lake monsters and big foot.  People aren't inclined to report the strange thinks they see for fear of being made fun of by "reasonable" people.  Youtube is full of strange videos of UFO encounters some of which are undoubtedly fake, some of which are more convincing.  But the first thing anyone will say is "that's fake" whether it could be real or not, because CGI exists and has gotten very good.  So how could the video from an amateur on a phone be taken at face value? Anything abnormal will be assumed to be fake, regardless of it's seeming validity.  Entire towns (Phoenix, Stephenville, TX) have had mass UFO sightings that are as yet unexplained, and everyone just hand-waves it away as some kind of hysteria.  So no, the fact that people have cell phones now is NOT proof that UFOs, bigfoot, ghosts and lake monsters don't exist.

Of course, there's still no conclusive proof that any of it does exist, so I think reasonable people are perfectly justified in not giving too much attention to UFOs, bigfoot or lake monsters, no matter what experiences people claim to have had.  There's certainly no evidence that this is something we should be overly concerned about in our daily lives.  But I'm getting tired of the people constantly and self-righteously claiming to be the most reasonable people on the planet making grandiose and unsupportable claims about what is and isn't proven.  There's some shit we just don't have enough evidence for to say for certain either way, and that's okay.  I understand the push back to people claiming with wide eyes that all these things exist, especially considering how many sightings/experiences turn out to be frauds or entirely explicable.  But it goes too far to say "you can't possibly have experienced what you experienced because other people didn't see it." or "we've completely disproven these events because I haven't seen any evidence that convinces me."  It's reason enough not to worry about it to much, or not believe in it, but it's not reason or evidence enough to declare the truth of the matter.  I think it's enough to say we don't know, and there's not enough evidence to do anything about it right now without declaring other people crazy for having an experience they can't verify or declaring what is an isn't the ultimate truth of the universe because we have some emotional need to have our world view validated.  And an emotional need to have a world view validated can be something "reasonable" materialists can be prone to as much as anyone else.

Tucked away in Concrete Forests

I'm trying to write artfully about the kind of society we built for ourselves and I'm failing.  For now I'll just say I find the layers upon layers of civilized protection, obstruction and distance from the natural world to be less helpful than I'm sure they were originally intended to be.  What exactly are we progressing towards?  Why does progress mean isolating ourselves as much as possible from the things our minds and bodies find the most soothing, like peace, quiet, the wind in the trees and water in a creek? 

It's not that simple, I know.  But regardless, I feel out of balance, and out of sync with both civilization and the natural world, and I'm not sure what exactly to do about that.

As always, the answer may just be that I'm the one who's crazy.

Kal, son of Zod

In my haste to politely disembowel Zach Snyder for his sins against Superman, I missed some of the outright clumsiness and confused themes from other parts of the story.  My theory is Mr. Snyder doesn't really understand heroism, or the concept of subtext, and what messages his characters might be sending by their actions.  This is most notable in the way he bungles the central conflict of the movie between Zod and the House of El.

In the beginning of the movie, on Krypton, the central division between Zod and Jor-El comes when they can't agree on what to do with willfully blind leadership who won't take action.  Zod decides to take over, and save only those families he feels are worth saving.  Jor-El objects to Zod playing God and trying to impose his own vision of Kryton using eugenics, and the conflict is born.  This is a fairly decent set-up for a conflict.  Jor-El has a strong moral case, and Zod comes off as a complicated character who's out to save his people, even though his means are questionable.

Which is why it's really strange when Kal-El morphs into Zod's spiritual heir at the end of the movie.  Granted, the Kryptonians on Earth aren't behaving, and Zod, for no apparent reason, now thinks nothing of killing an innocent species, instead of, I don't know, setting up shop on Mars.  I mean, it's not like he has a terraforrming machine and a yellow sun that makes him highly adaptable or any . . oh wait.

In any case, questionable motivations aside on the part of the Kryptonians, it strikes me as odd that Kal-El ends the movie by playing God in exactly the way Zod was trying to, by unilaterally deciding which Kryptonian bloodlines live and which die.  Bombing the Kryptonians into the phantom zone (an act which gives every indication of killing them) and twisting Zod's neck might be forgivable if a) this wasn't a movie about Superman and b) the central conflict wasn't clearly defined from the beginning as "it's evil to murder Kryptonians you don't like."  But the scene where Zod wins over Jor-El, by forcing his son to adopt his values, is the scene where Kal decides, unilaterally, to destroy the last Kryptonian seed ship.  Kal-El contains the entire genetic history of Krypton in his cells, and he's on a ship that can read that and make perfectly innocent and teachable Kryptonian babies.  And then, instead of following his father's advice and "saving all of them," he follows in the footsteps of Zod, and kills any future his species has, erasing all Kryptonian bloodlines but his own with a snarled "Krypton had it's chance," as brutally as Zod would have.  Kal-El decides which Kryptonians live and die.  All hail Kal, son of Zod.

Twisting the concept of heroism is one thing, but it takes real skill to to resolve the central conflict without realizing you've turned the hero into the bad guy with the hollowest of victories.  Nolan's Batman had the famous line, "You either die a hero or live long enough to become the villain."  Apparently with Superman, he just decided to start as the hero as villain, and go from there.

Bro of Steel Movie Review

I've posted my review of Man of Steel at my other site.  I try and make the argument that Snyder/Goyer/Nolan diminish and distort the character in much the same way that Nolan did in the Dark Knight Rises by portraying Batman as a guy who isn't all that dedicated to fighting crime.

"When I went to see Man of Steel the other night, I made the same mistake I've made with every blockbuster I've seen the last few years:  I believed the trailer and harbored the faint hope that I would leave the theater not feeling cranky at the current state of storytelling.  Alas, it was not to be.  To be fair, I should have known better.  I've seen this movie before.   Which is a shame, because I was really hoping to see a Superman movie this time"

read more

Romancing Robots

I can't recommend the the documentary All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace by Adam Curtis enough.  The premise is that machines have failed to liberate us, and instead have just over-simplified the world in ways that still skew power towards the few.  I don't think this thesis is entirely supported by what he presents here, but the idea that machine logic doesn't take us as far as we want to in the direction we want to go in is worth grappling with.  His perspective on history and historical events is worth a listen as well, although I think it's important to take it all with a pinch of salt.  At the very least, it may serve as a good launching point for some further reading.  Be warned, parts of the third are quite graphic and a little disturbing.  Our love of electronics lends fuel to FAR more problematic situations than sweatshops in China.

I want to review this slightly more in-depth later, but I'm still trying to digest it, especially the culminating punch delivered just before the credits roll.  If you have 3 hours and are interested in this kind of thing, it's well worth your time.

Insecurities

I am not a fan of pick-up artistry or, by extension, the neg, but I have always find the second to last panel of this XKCD comic to be disconcerting, even though it's not aimed directly at me.  It's too close to the heart of my insecurities.  Which is partly what makes it such a brilliant comic of course.  In any case, I find it entirely unsettling.  But clever.

Surviving in the digital age

I love everything about this article by Jaron Lanier, Fixing the Digital Economy.

Ted Nelson was the first person, in the 1960s, to describe how people might use digital networks for collaboration or expression. His work foresaw both the problems we face and the potential solutions to them. A Nelsonian solution might look like this: Institute a universal micropayment system. Keep track of where information came from. Pay people when information that exists because they exist turns out to be valuable, no matter what kind of information is involved or whether a person intended to provide it or not. Let the price be determined by markets.

All Strings Attached

I'm a little surprised at the uproar over the NSA phone record database. It's not like the tech sector has been exactly secretive about the fact they they track just about everything we do online. They've been announcing the many splendid wonders "big data" is going to bring to our lives for months now. Why is anyone surprised the government wants to use the same data to identify potential terrorists?

Was everyone asleep when google established a massive database tracking your every movement, google search, web history and online purchase so as to better deliver you to advertisers who have a few offers they'd like you to consider? If you have a cell phone, and you keep it on you at all times, the government can track your movements for the past couple years without much effort. Not only has it been established that every major corporation is tracking your movements and spending habits (and ANY OTHER trackable activity) to better manipulate you into spending money, but it's also well known they'll happily give the government any of this information on a moment's notice if a big frowny face comes up on screen when the government runs your online history through one of their secret algorithms. But it's just now, when the existence of a not-so-secret 7-year-old NSA program that tracks your phone records becomes public knowledge, that you start to worry about your privacy? Tracking the feature on your phone that you use the least and has the tracked data with the least personal information stored about you?

The ball is on the one-yard line, you're on defense, and some of you have just looked up from your phone and realized you're playing football. Welcome to planet Earth citizens. I sure hope you brought a hell of a defensive line with you on that spaceship.

Infinite Snooze

Forgive me Zod, for I have sinned. I have lived like I have all the time in the universe in infinite supply. I have lived like there will always be tomorrow to begin, another day to start, plenty of time to finish that which I am waiting to begin. I have wasted time, because I believed I had time to waste.

At first I lived as if nothing here mattered except belief, because eternity was a few years away, and I was told my best and lasting contribution to the world would be to convince people to believe what I did about the unknowable. I believed the end of the world was only a few years away, and was out of my control, so what did it matter what I did? And while I knew this was wrong, I felt powerless to oppose the wrongness in philosophy of my friends and family and escape from this worldview. So I chose to play dead.

Since then, I have entertained a number of contradictory notions that I have known not to be true from any philosophical angle. The foremost and most pernicious of these is that I will be granted infinite and special dispensation of time, so I can wait as long as I want to before growing/waking/shaping/perking up and taking the first step on finding the path before me.

This idea is, of course, irrational and unsupportable, but I believe it anyway. It is, in fact, on of my deepest beliefs. It is a spectacular delusion born of my cowardice in the face of the challenges presented by my fellow man and my refusal to admit to my own mortality. And a special and strange delusion it is, that I should not grapple with the world as it is, but take my leisure and wait for a better world to present itself to me, the insane prince of null-time.

It has been a profound disservice to myself to entertain the notion of special dispensation. I frequently blame the people around me for this. I lament that no one asks more of me, while asking very little of myself. While there is a certain rightness to the idea that people need to speak up when I am not meeting their needs, it is transparent bullshit that it is on other people to motivate me or prod me to join the world of the living. Is is, in fact, MY job to find my own purpose and decide what is and isn't wasting time. It is not the job of other people to monitor my time for me. It is not the job of other people to define my motivation for me. It is not the job of other people to remind me that time is always passing, falling and slipping away. My time is the only meaningful currency I am given, it is up to me to guard it from those who would take it without asking, and to spend it well.

I am the only one grasping this part of the elephant. I am the only one who can describe the view from my position. I am the only one who can try to address the cracks in the world no one else can see from way over there in their own heads.

The only thing that matters in the face of my morality is using my time well, in pursuit of what I understand to be important. The sense of panic, denial and shame in the face of mortality all stem from the knowledge that I don't do as much as I know could, that the time I spend is too frequently on activities that I know to be unimportant to me or anyone else. It is the knowledge that my response to my inevitable end and the inevitable obstacles placed between me and my goals has been, since I was young, to do the bare minimum it takes to get by, and then to sit back, and let time slip away, in the hopes that a better universe with more time would present itself. Presented with a mountain to climb, I set up a hammock at the bottom and took a 30-year nap.

If I want to die at peace, that needs to stop.

I don't fear dying with my work incomplete, I fear dying with my work not begun. I fear dying not having tried at all. I fear dying after a lifetime of hitting the snooze button, when I could have just woken up.

Meta Monday

Building a personality entirely around opposition to crowds, and the "the thing that is popular" is not necessarily a recipe for happiness.  I enjoy feeling superior, inferior, independent and weird, but at some point denying fun that is popular is counterproductive to having fun, is it not?

Which is to say, the problem with standing apart, is it doesn't make one popular at parties.  And problems which require a group effort and a good network become substantially more problematic.  Which is to say, the problem with standing apart, is that I am standing apart.  The problem is this is also the awesome thing about standing apart.

At what point does the meta-analysis of a thing consume any enjoyment of the thing?  At what point does a world-view focused on the abstractions of life diminish, detract from and otherwise overshadow the actual lived experience of life?  Is it possible to enjoy a story while deconstructing it down to its forms and shapes?  Do I like Community because it is funny or because it is ironically telling me that it is inhabiting the forms that the masses typically think is funny.  *wink*  Is a milkshake best consumed ingredient by ingredient or processed into a pleasing sludge?  I intend to bring a centrifuge to the malt shop and test this theory.  My hypothesis is that my hypothesis is flawed.

I was a hipster before it was hip.  We just called it "being a loner" and "socially awkward" and "wildly projecting our insecurities onto outwardly happy people" and "unable or unwilling to distinguish between reading the story and diagramming the plot."   I would say "you wouldn't get it," but you probably do.  Breathing is so passé', I only drink water through my ear.  I'm afraid I'm going to skip spring and go straight to summer, unlike the rest of you sheeple, this year.  Wake up sheeple people.  The seasons were invented by invisible, angular forces mean to keep your head tilted off-axis.

The problem with ironic distance is that the inability to enjoy an experience is not an improvement on the human experience.  It's just the refusal to have one.

The Usual Route

I just want to walk into the desert and returned changed.  Is that so much to ask?

I don't really want to start a cult afterwards though.  I'd be really proud of it until it spawned a massive religion that eventually lost the plot and lost track of the core principles in the name of perpetuating the organization at any cost.  My heart just wouldn't be in that kind of cliche, you know?

Alternatively, 6 months on an island floating on a small, quiet lake with its own waterfall would do just as nicely.  Although I suspect the cult-appeal lies in the heat and starvation.  Coming back from a tropical island, tanned and refreshed just doesn't have the same spiritual cachet. 

Although I suspect, somewhere in an alternate universe, I make a fabulous cult leader.

Important Saturday Links

Teeming Brain is providing me with a number of great links to long form essays that provide me with things to think about.  The first, is The Bacon-Wrapped Economy by Ellen Cushing:

"I don't know. I don't identify with the term 'rich.' But I think I make a shit-ton of money," a 24-year-old Google employee making low six figures told me. Another told me he considered himself upper-middle-class, but "definitely not rich." Part of that's inevitable: The vast majority of Americans, at all coordinates of the economic spectrum, consider themselves middle class; this is a deeply ingrained, distinctly American cognitive dissonance. And when industry is so intimately tied to place, as it is in the Bay Area, you get something of an echo chamber: Many young developers move straight to San Francisco when they finish college and necessarily become friends with other young developers, aided in part by the happy hours, office parties, and other events that have become an integral part of both the tech world's social fabric and every company's list of perks. "If you don't have other friends, you're surrounded by people telling you, 'This is normal, this is normal,'" an employee of a large company told me. And at startups, especially, where the culture is one of long hours and marathon coding sessions, there's an idea that, as one person said, "you deserve it, because you work hard."
Indeed, said another, "It's very easy to think, 'I am special. I am better than other people at certain things. My skills are more valuable than others.' It's easy to fall into that trap and think you're getting paid more than other people because you're better."

Second, this piece by Evgeny Morozov, The Meme Hustler about Tim O'Reilly and the mis-use and changing definitions of the word "open" with regard to software, tech and government is great:

So what did matter about open source? Not “freedom”—at least not in Stallman’s sense of the word. O’Reilly cared for only one type of freedom: the freedom of developers to distribute software on whatever terms they fancied. This was the freedom of the producer, the Randian entrepreneur, who must be left to innovate, undisturbed by laws and ethics. The most important freedom, as O’Reilly put it in a 2001 exchange with Stallman, is that which protects “my choice as a creator to give, or not to give, the fruits of my work to you, as a ‘user’ of that work, and for you, as a user, to accept or reject the terms I place on that gift.”

I highly recommend reading the whole thing.  I can't say I whole-heartedly agree with either of these %100, but they resonate strongly with my own, admittedly limited, thinking on various aspects of modern society that really bother me.  The foremost of which is increasingly the apparent lack of curiosity about the underlying philosophies driving social change, how those affect us, and whether they are consistent with our notions on what we have traditionally believed drives a good life, philanthropy, public service and effective government.

Important Friday Links

If I could write half as well as the people in the following links, I would be a very happy man.  First, This is a very thought-provoking article by Marilyn Robinson, even if you don't subscribe to christianity or religion in general.

Another answer, favored by those who claim to be defenders of science, is that religion formed around the desire to explain what prescientific humankind could not account for. Again, this notion does not bear scrutiny. The literatures of antiquity are clearly about other business.
Some of these narratives are so ancient that they clearly existed before writing, though no doubt in the forms we have them they were modified in being written down. Their importance in the development of human culture cannot be overstated. In antiquity people lived in complex city-states, carried out the work and planning required by primitive agriculture, built ships and navigated at great distances, traded, made law, waged war, and kept the records of their dynasties. But the one thing that seems to have predominated, to have laid out their cities and filled them with temples and monuments, to have established their identities and their cultural boundaries, to have governed their calendars and enthroned their kings, were the vivid, atemporal stories they told themselves about the gods, the gods in relation to humankind, to their city, to themselves.

Reclaiming a Sense of the Sacred, Marilyn Robinson,  The Chronicle of Higher Education, February 12, 2012 via The Teeming Brain

Also, most of the blog posts by Jacob Bacharach make me teem with envy.  I want to be this kind of fabulous gay writer.

Teeming Brain, where I found the Marilyn Robinson quote above, is also pretty thought-provoking.

Be ye not afraid

I was going to write a post about fear, but Freddie Deboer beat me to the important part of it.  He makes the important point that the United States hasn't been under existential threat, since the fall of the Soviet Union.  Well, that's probably not entirely true, the Russian and U.S. nuclear arsenals still exist, are aging and could conceivably be fired in anger or due to human or equipment error.  But they neither side seems inclined to fire them any time soon, and there's certainly no popular momentum on either side to use them, so the rest of us, more or less rightly, don't worry about the existential threat of nuclear weapons so much.  Although personally, I'd be happy if both sides voluntarily dismantled their capability to destroy the planet.  The point is, terrorists (both foreign and domestic), liberals, conservatives, Iraq, Afghanistan and disaffected loners are not even close to an existential threat to this country.  So why do we keep acting as if they are?

It's frustrating and nonsensical that we are led by people and listen to people who spend most of their time telling us to be afraid of our absolute destruction.  Politicians do it to paint their opponents as weak and as an excuse for abandoning our existing legal framework for one that pleases their base emotionally and themselves and their supporters financially (We're under attack!  We can't afford to do things the right way!).  Talking heads and media types do it to generate a climate of fear that keeps people clicking for fear of being left behind on the latest existential threat to their day (Is your latte killing you?  More at 11!  How can you vote for liberals when they want to let terrorists kill you children?).  How strange is it that the same people who have been loudly proclaiming the supremacy of the U.S. in law and justice are also the ones screaming for us to abandon these principles at the first sign of a terrorist?  Our laws and principles are really not capable of effectively dealing with terrorist threats to this nation?  When Lindsay Graham expresses his deep wish that a U.S. citizen be tried as an "enemy combatant", isn't he expressing a complete lack of faith in the U.S. legal system?  Don't we need better leaders than people willing to abandon bedrock principles the moment things get a little scary?  Who understand that when we put ourselves forth as the foremost beacon of truth, justice and fairness in the world that we actually have to behave in a manner most consistent with those principles? If we're holding ourselves up as better than, then we actually have to ACT better than, you know?

Didn't we used to think of leaders as the people with the clear heads, who were supposed to tell us not to be afraid?  People who would tell us that the enemies who face us are nothing we can't overcome and the challenges ahead of us something we don't need change who we are to face?  Why are we burdened with leaders whose only contribution to the national mood is division, distrust and paranoia?  Well, because we elect them obviously.  I guess my point is, maybe we should stop electing people who tell us to be more afraid, against all logic and judgement.  Maybe we should stop watching talking heads who tell us to be afraid of our neighbor, that we've failed as a group and a society and it's time to buy a gun and start jumping at shadows.  Maybe we could rationally assess our fears, and see if our day-to-day lives really warrant the kind of fearful stance that our "leaders" want to inspire in us.  If not, what should we do about that?  Maybe we could start by not listening to manipulative and fearful people and not voting the same into office.

I don't know, it's just a thought.

Onward

Well, my rambling poetry isn't taking the world by storm.  I guess this means I should write more stuff.

I can't control it sometimes

To be fair, my other site does promise poetry in the sub-header, so actually writing some was inevitable.  Here is an excerpt from Omphaloskeptical Odyssey:


So they would draw on their charts
and cut out some hearts
and offer them up the sky.

Because someone once said
in this book they once read
that it is water, wind, fire and stone
that turns a body/mind into some bones.

"Maybe if you proffer
some gore in a coffer
the elements will leave you alone."

So hearts they uplifted
and entrails they gifted
but never their friends or their own.

****

If you want to read more of that kind of existential silliness, please follow the link.  Just something I wrote when I was working through an existential crisis, thought it might be fun to share.  Those of you without existential concerns or good taste in poetry will probably not find it as interesting.

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For the record, IFTTT.com is pretty cool.  Linked my blogger to tumblr accounts with a simple rule.  Worth checking out.