Avram's journal

Arg, no thanks to John Gruber, I spent some time this afternoon perusing Eric Raymond’s blog. No, he hasn’t gotten any better.

I was amused to see a few election-related posts — all dating from that brief period around the end of August and early September when McCain’s numbers looked good — gloating about how Obama’s campaign is doomed, doomed. Not a single election-related post later than Sep 18th, though.

Not that Raymond is a Republican, he hastens to remind us. But, like most guys in the lowbrow right-wing branch of the libertarian movement, he’s motivated primarily by ressentiment towards liberals, rather than a love of actual liberty.

(No, not all libertarians are like that. Honest, I know some good ones. The bad ones just tend to stick out more in my mind. Maybe that’s my own ressentiment towards right-wingers speaking.)

But far worse was “The Post-Racial Hall of Mirrors”, where he starts off talking about how he had to drive through a Delaware slum, and was revolted by all the black people around him. Not because of their skin color, he assures us, but because they were so fat and sloppy. How he deals with hanging out at SF cons, I dunno. He goes on to explain that he can’t possibly be a racist, because his belief that blacks have lower IQs is based on real science, and besides, he used to bang this hot black chick.

I take Raymond as a warning — that being a smart guy doesn’t keep you from being an idiot. I can easily imagine myself having turned into the same kind of idiot that he is, given different life experiences.

Y’know what’s distracting? A dream about a sequel to Sky Captain featuring a love scene between Angelina Jolie and Aishwarya Rai, that’s damn distracting, pretty hard to wake up from.

And speaking of things that aren’t lingonberries, I’ve been thinking of starting up my old blog again. Well, more like starting up a new blog, making half-hearted plans to import my old content into it, and then not getting around to it. And more than thinking, I’ve been doing some set-up work, fiddling around with plug-ins and templates.

See, Dreamhost (where I’ve currently got all my domains hosted for only $10/month, and if you decide to sign up with them, be sure to tell them that “avram” referred you, and then I get money) offers one-click installation of WordPress. It actually turned out to be three- or four-click installation (hint: when they say they need a unique name for the database, they mean unique across all of Dreamhost), but still pretty simple. Now I’m cooking up my own theme, figuring out how the Ultimate Tag Warrior plug-in works, and downloading freeware fonts and playing around with color schemes.

I’m not sure why I’m actually doing this. I think it’s partly ’cause I’m just not satisfied keeping all of what I want to say on LJ. But mostly it’s just an impulse, and I’ve been learning to heed my impulses.

Oh, Dreamhost also offers one-click installation for MediaWiki. Anyone else have a hankering for a Lexicon game...?

Patrick Nielsen Hayden, 28 July 2004:

I'm increasingly convinced that the success of modern American capitalism at providing us all with niche products perfectly suited to our individual quirky selves has led us to feel, vaguely but strongly, that something's the matter when the political candidates on offer don't include options as aptly customized to our desires as our own personal Macintosh. This is a delusion, an error, and a serious threat to real democracy.

James Poniewozik, 20 September 2004:

In life, we ask TiVo or the Web or the Cheesecake Factory to indulge our slightest whims. Asking this is not selfish; in fact, it is a duty. ("Have it your way!" — was that an invitation or a command?) But under a political system devised before the dawn of the fixin's bar, we are suddenly asked to settle for those options that can please half the voters or, at least, five out of nine Supreme Court Justices. That rankles our American souls. We should be satisfied! We should be catered to! We specifically asked for the vinaigrette on the side! And so the losers grow more aggrieved in defeat and the winners less generous in victory. What is it, after all, that most aggravates Democrats about President Bush? That he campaigned as a centrist but led from the right; he lost the popular vote but governed as though he had won in a landslide. And why shouldn't he? In iPod America, every citizen — bolstered by his self-created echo chamber — is a landslide victor in his own head.

Parisian underground cinema. Seriously underground:

Police in Paris have discovered a fully equipped cinema-cum-restaurant in a large and previously uncharted cavern underneath the capital's chic 16th arrondissement. [...]

Three days later, when the police returned accompanied by experts from the French electricity board to see where the power was coming from, the phone and electricity lines had been cut and a note was lying in the middle of the floor: "Do not," it said, "try to find us."

3-D chocolate printer made of Lego:

We've developed a print head that will print 5mm 'pixels' of the consumable. It basically acts as a pump. Its a medium sized lego gear (driven by a worm gear attached to the motor) with four axels that repeatedly squeaze and release a pipe attached to a funnel that holds the consumables. a half-rotation of this wheel yeilds a blob.

Monkey saves Indian democracy from other monkeys:

Mangal, a langur, has been hired by the Delhi Election Commission to rid its premises near Kashmiri Gate of nearly 60 monkeys which have been creating a nuisance there since the Assembly polls last year.

The monkeys had been terrorising visitors and officers at the commission office for over three months now. Their particular favourite was the Form 6, which is filled when one is applying for a voter’s identity card. The monkeys would snatch the forms from applicants before tearing them. Other files and papers have also been destroyed by the monkeys.

Real-time Worldcon blogging — I wish I’d known about this at the con! Hey, I think I know the back of that head.