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.

Products I enjoy

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

Damn the Robots

Most of my blog hits come from a porn bot attempting to get link backs.  This whole "building an audience" thing would probably go more smoothly if I:

1)  Wrote things.

2)  Wrote interesting things.

Long Stories

It struck me this week, that I am still waiting for closure on stories that I started 17+ years ago.  Namely Starcraft and the Wheel of Time.  Although there must be others.  What other stories have drifted through limbo this long?  I lost track of Wheel of Time shortly after Robert Jordan died, and decided to wait until the last book is out before finishing it.  To my joy and consternation I have discovered it is finally finished!  Joy because it is closure, consternation because my optimistically titled "to-read" shelf is already overly full and somewhat intimidating.  This is largely because I still insist on spending my time in digital skinner boxes instead of reading.

Starcraft 2 is not quite a skinner box, but it IS still fun.  In my time as a man-child, few games have pleased me more than the Starcraft series.  I'll grant, it's a direct graft of every major SF series in recent memory presented in a pleasing and non-offensive fashion, but I still love it.  I was initially disappointed that the new story was such a re-hash of the original plot, but in playing it through again so I could play the new expansion I changed my mind a bit.  It's not high-brow literature, and the story itself is more than a little stereotypical, but I was strangely affected by it anyway.  At the very least, I'm excited to see the end to a story left dangling over a decade ago, especially the bits involving Raynor and Kerrigan.

And as silly and potentially problematic as their relationship is, Raynor and Kerrigan were always the heart of the story, but their particular kind of tension can't be sustained indefinitely for a variety of reasons.  "Will they or won't they now that she's a mutated alien hive queen?" gets kind of tired 20 years on.  The arc in starcraft 2 is interesting, and the last couple lines between them strangely affecting.  They basically absolve her of all responsibility for the first acts of genocide on account of her being mind controlled and all, but then, given the choice between a life with Raynor and control of the alien swarm that can give her revenge against Mengsk, she chooses the latter without hesitation.  Which means the romance roulette wheel finally lands on "they won't" with finality, and thank the Xel'Naga for it.  At last I have closure on these silly, stereotypical characters.

From there, it's more or less just simple revenge.  Raynor graciously decides to help destroy Mengsk, because he wants to kill him too, and, well, she was going to anyway.  I really kind of admire how they portray Kerrigan.  She's not a hero so much, but she's strong, independent and doesn't take much shit from anybody.  It's too bad that how they present her in both outfits and pose basically makes her look like a space prostitute.  Seriously, when she mutates into an alien hybrid for the second time, they give her bone high heels and bone sculptures that leave her breasts largely exposed and shaped around her ass like she's wearing a bone g-string bikini.  So, you know, the typical "strong woman" as imagined by video game designers.

Still, after she and Raynor share a tender moment exploding Mensk and his office from the inside out, she takes a breath and simply says: "Thank you, Jim.  For everything."

And he replies, "My pleasure darlin'."  And as she gently floats away on bone wings with no conceivable flight properties, "It always was."

Tropes, cliches and problematic relationship dynamics aside, I like that ending.  It is a "True Thing" in human relationships.  Don't we all know someone it's always been our pleasure to spend time with, no matter how weird it gets?  Mostly though, I just like it because it's finally over.  As far as I'm concerned, the main story reached it's conclusion and for what it was, it was relatively satisfying.  Yes, the protoss and Kerrigan still need to defeat the insane god coming for them, but that just feels like loose ends at this point.  The only likable and relatable Protoss protagonists died with Tassadar and Fenix,and the only bad guy with a constant, malevolent presence in the series just made a state change from water and carbon to vapor and ash.  So, for the 3rd installment it's just going to be moving some pixels around until you get a movie showing an explosion at the end, in the usual Blizzard fashion, or so I assume.  I'll play it, but for me, the story really ended here.  With a post-human psychic renouncing everything she knows to embrace a greater destiny, and a lonesome cowboy finally willing to admit the woman he knew is gone, and was probably never who he thought she was to begin with.

It's about damn time.

Down the Drain

I need one of those waterproof shower note pads.  I had several ideas for a story and a couple of punchy blog posts in the shower today that I forgot almost immediately upon getting out.  I distinctly remember thinking, "Hmm, that would be a great, short blog post for today."  And now it's gone.  All gone.  All I am left with is this lamentation for ideas still caged and forgotten.  Poor things.

Windmills

Blog under real name or pseudonym?  New career or old career?  Vanilla or Chocolate?  Evening or morning?  Forward or Backward?  Past, present or future?  Many chances or one?  Doubt or Belief?  Striding into the future regardless of mistakes or sliding into irrelevance under their weight?  Words or white space?  Vocal or mute?  Humble or Proud?  Order or chaos?  What are these circles that I find in the windmills of my mind?

Please stop the world for a tic, I need gather my wits.

Actually, if we could just rewind it real quick so I can have a much-needed chat with my 18-year-old self, that would be GREAT.  Will only take a moment, I swear.