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Disks in Rotation: Books Lying
Open Soul-Devouring
Worry When I Grow Up:
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Saturday May 18, 2002 |
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of the Day I think there's no way they should have to teach [math] now. We have computers. We no longer need to know why 3x=2y/4. -- Rosie O'Donnell, who is well known to be dumb as a box of rocks |
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Daily
Blog I've always loved roller coasters, but haven't been on one in many years. I was last at Magic Mountain around the end of high school, probably when I was about 17, since the guy I went with I don't think I did anything with once school was over (he moved). I've been to Disneyland since then, though not for at least 5 or 6 years, and anyway, their roller coasters are a pale imitation of the real screamers at Six Flags. I'm looking forward to that much more than I am to E3, which as I said, gets boring after a few hours. It's cool to walk around and see the massive booths and displays and all of that, but if you aren't actually interested in any of the specific games, it's all pretty pointless. Like watching clips from TV shows you've never heard of and will never see again. In 1999 and 2000 it was a lot of work, with D2 being shown, pre-release, and I absorbed info that became 10 page reports. Which was a lot of fun, since I was obsessed with the game then, and getting to see it, play it, talk to the guys and girl making it, etc, was awesome. Last year there was virtually zero D2 presence there, and anyway, it was during the D2X beta test, so I could have gotten more info in 30 minutes playing at home than I did standing around watching the demos there. There were also very few Bliz North employees around, since the Bliz display was almost all about Warcraft 3. This year it will be even more of that, with nothing at all about D2 or D2X, some Warcraft 3, but mostly World of Warcraft. Which I'm somewhat interested in, but keeping myself from paying much mind to since I don't have the time to get into another game hardcore at this point, and I'm not going to be doing any website coverage of the title. I had hoped to get hired to work on the game, as a quest designer, but I didn't get the job, and if I'm not going to be paid to cover the game, I can't afford the time spent. At least that's what I keep telling myself. It will be interesting to see in person, anyway, and I do enjoy seeing the Bliz people, though I doubt I'll see many of the Bliz North ones that I know pretty well. I can do a little bit of D2 questioning perhaps, but the guy who is doing most of the work on D2X now, the upcoming v1.10 patch, never goes to E3, and I could just email him if I really wanted to know anyway. News. The whole letters-full-of-Anthrax thing has pretty much vanished from attention, despite the fact that no one has been arrested, and there's nothing to say that another dozen military/weapons-grade Anthrax-filled letters might come through the mail tomorrow. I hadn't given it much thought myself, other than absorbing vague right wing nut conspiracy theory ideas, and hearing that it was indeed anthrax stolen from, or grown from samples stolen from, a US army laboratory. I was glad to see this site, appropriately-titled Anthrax Investigation, and to read the info on it. The topic is covered in amazingly-exhaustive detail, and I just hope the FBI has gone over things to this degree. I've been interested in the Koreans eating dogs or not story for a while, with various news items pre-World Cup about them serving dog soup at games, while other articles claim dog eating is illegal in the country. By far the most thorough article on the subject you're going to see is here. It's very tasty.
A news item with skinheads, murderous threats, bestiality, and jail time can be seen here, from New Zealand. And you thought only Americans did stuff this weird. Cute article about rat shows. I've had pet rats for about 10 years, though I can't be arsed to enter them or attend any rat shows, and I sort of like that people think they are filthy and evil and pestilence-spreading, so I don't entirely agree with the push to make them seem more acceptable, come to think of it. What's the fun in owning one when everyone else does too? You might as well get a goddamn Golden Retriever. If you have an @hotmail.com address, you can expect a lot more spam in the immediate future, this article tells us. Hotmail utterly sucks, in my experience. At the D2 site if I have an email that I'm considering replying to (as in it's not crying out for a reply, but I might do so if I have the time/inclination) and I see that it's from @hotmail.com, I generally just delete it. Probably 50% of the mails I sent to @hotmail.com addresses bounce for technical reasons, or their mailbox being full. We ran a contest recently and the winner used hotmail for their entry, and got my confirmation mail about a week and a half after the deadline for them to reply. Hotmail is the 5th class insufficient postage of email. I posted some weeks ago about the German Chancellor suing magazines that had made some comments about his dying his hair. This is still a big story there, and he's about to get an injunction that would prevent all publications from posting any articles in any way commenting on his hair being dyed. Really. A woman who was stalking Richard Gere has been deported back to Germany. She'd made thousands of phone calls and visits to the man, harassed his assistant, made veiled death threats, and was facing up to a year in prison, but they figured it would be easier to just send her back to Germany, and put her on the INS black list, so she won't be allowed back into the country, apparently ever. I'm sure you're like me, and find the most amazing part that Richard Gere still has a stalker. I couldn't have sworn that he wasn't dead, tell you the truth. |
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You often hear about the left wing media in the US. This seems to be a tenant of faith for most conservatives, and an painfully amusing concept to most progressives, and a wishful thought to most liberals. The funny thing is that this concept is bandied about constantly by conservatives, on their media programs. The concept is brilliantly lampooned in a recent This Modern World cartoon. In a related item, Spinsanity has an interesting article about the president. George 2 has been going around excusing the suddenly massive (and growing) budget deficit by claiming the "trifecta" of doom has hit, which is to say we're at war, having a recession, and we've had a national emergency, all at once. Bush's point is that there wouldn't have been deficit spending unless all three of those happened at once, so it's certainly not his fault, it's due to events outside of his control. It's arguable that war wouldn't always equal national emergency, and also arguable that there wouldn't have been a deficit anyway, with the tax cuts for the rich and corporations, and increased spending in so many areas, but that's a debate for another day. What the Spinsanity article points out is that there's no evidence Bush actually ever said this at all, pre-election, which is what he's been repeatedly claiming.
The media has been far from all over this, and in fact have more or less ignored it. You can see articles about the perpetual "me too" syndrome of the media, where once something becomes an accepted concept, they beat it to death. Gore was painted to be shifty, and made a few dumb comments about inventing the Internet, so every time he said anything there was a rush by media to investigate and see if it were true. Initially Dubya was an idiot, Quaylesque in malapropisms, so everything he said that made little sense was reported on. With the war and serious events giving him so much to do as president, all of the old news about the stupid things he did has been buried and is no longer being reported on, so he can get away with outright lies such as this trifecta thing, and no one calls him on it. It's sort of an odd state of affairs; we expect candidates to lie outrageously and promise the world trying to get elected, but seldom do we see ones who have been elected (well, sort of) and then start reinventing their candidate speeches. It's sort of a minor point really, we're in the trifecta, and have a huge deficit, and whether or not Bush mentioned it before he was elec... became president is basically irrelevant. If you like Dubya it won't change your opinion about anything, and if you dislike him you'll just have one more log for the fire. Speaking of the media, Dan Rather makes some interesting comments about US media practicing self-censorship in an interview on British Television.
Early on in the Afghanistan invasion/war/whatever, there were quotes from media saying they'd had more freedom to report when the Soviets were running the country than they did now. The US military learned the lessons of Vietnam very well; keep people from seeing what's really happening, feed the press info that makes you look good, and there's no major outcry back home about atrocities or casualties, etc. This is, at times, a necessary strategy, since civilians are faint-hearted and bandwagon patriots, and a few dead Americans being dragged through the streets, or hospitals full of napalmed children, tends to erode the righteous fury necessary to keep on track. Military commanders accept that casualties and occasional errant bombing runs are part of the struggle, and they choose to look at the bigger picture, and take some losses to accomplish their goals. Plus they know that all the smart bombs and such don't really get the job done, unlike the propaganda they had the media lapping up after Desert Storm in Kuwait/Iraq a decade ago, and that some soldiers must die, and some innocents must get caught in the crossfire. However you'd hope that the media would realize they're being spoon-fed, and show some balls to work to try and uncover the real stories. These days with so much of the American (and international) media being owned by giant corporations that have no desire at all to report on bad things that might cause unrest and hurt their corporate sales goals, there is editorial pressure to censor the news. Dan Rather wasn't going to admit to that, but what he says is valid also, in that the media are gutless and want to be loved, and since patriotism and popular sentiment was very much in the "kill the dirty terrorists", they didn't have any real inclination to point out facts that might have discouraged that feeling, or other perspectives on events. And yes, I'm making gross generalizations. |
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