I thought Rick Warren was bad

Rick Warren is an asshole. Also, a boring bastard. Anyone who saw the prayers at the inauguration yesterday could see that. Rick Warren gave an invocation that was utter bullshit, coming from him. Inclusiveness, indeed! Unless it involves gay people having rights (apart from the rights to cookies and water, or whatever stupid fucking excuse he gave for how he loves gay people). Meanwhile, the man who gave the closing prayer, Joseph E Lowery, was fantastic. I know some who've asked exactly what religion has given us: I point to such things as the answer: black rhythmic preaching. Granted, they've also given us the awful, dull, monotonous old-white-man RC/C of E preaching style, but you take the good with the bad. Plus it works great as a soporific.

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Speaking of religious idiots, there's this story from Oz. This is a story of a Muslim cleric giving a sermon (or whatever they call them in Islam) on "Keys to a successful marriage". One of which was if your wife doesn't do what you tell her to do straight away, kick the bitch's ass. 

Perhaps "kick the bitch's ass" is too strong, actually, as he advised restraint - well, he said the husband cannot make her bruise or bleed. Then again, he certainly didn't draw the line at rape, because he said the woman must fuck her husband the instant he demands it. Now, in civilisation, we have this thing called "not being in the mood" and "choice". Both of them mean nobody HAS to have sex with ANYONE at ANY TIME if they don't want to. This guy is in AUSTRALIA! 

He even comments about how absurd he thinks it is that a man can have sex with his wife without her consent and it is considered rape. Maybe all he needs is a dictionary. Maybe all he needs is a dictionary smashed about his head and neck. That's the very definition of rape: when one is forced to engage in sexual behaviour with another against their will. It doesn't matter if they're married, engaged, have had sex together before, planned to have sex together someday, or anything else. No means no (unless you're doing kinky stuff, in which case "red" means no).

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Lost is back tonight. I remain one of the few sci-fi nerds who doesn't give a monkey's left ball about it. Don't get me wrong: I watched the first series and thought it was awesome most of the way through it. I enjoyed many of the characters and their stories. I just need a balance of character development and something actually happening.

The first series was something like 75 percent backstory. Now I'm normally fine with a lot of backstory, but frankly, when you have multiple one-character backstory episodes per season, and it's only the same four or five characters, YOU NEED SOMETHING TO HAPPEN SO BAD YOU HAVE NO IDEA. Which brings me to the stuff that DID happen. If you didn't watch Lost season one and want to sometime, stop reading now (all one of you who read this).

They crashed on an island in the South Pacific on the way from Australia to LAX. The plane was ripped in two in mid-air somehow, and there were about forty-something survivors. They kept getting a signal on the radio and eventually found it - it was some French woman. Then they found "The Others" (DUN DUN DUNNNNNNN) who were there much longer. "The Others" stole a baby or something, I'm not really sure. Meanwhile, John Locke (yes, that's his name), recovering paraplægic (thanks to the Island's MAGICAL POWERS) finds a hatch in the ground somewhere in the jungle. He spends about two months of episodes trying to get into the damn thing and then in the finale, GASP! THERE'S A TUNNEL INSIDE THE HATCH! It was about at this point that I decided I could give the entire series a miss. Oh, and there's some sort of monster that you never see (think of another JJ Abrams project, Cloverfield). 

I've been told by many that the series really picks up around series three, but frankly, I'm a completist and I can't bear the thought of sitting through the boring seasons to get to the good ones. I'm already doing that with Doctor Who serials.

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Now playing: Audra Heaslip, Chuck Cage, Sean O'Hara - GWC Podcast #146: Two Hours With Richard Hatch
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I wrote this on an "illegal" copy of Openoffice.org

A friend linked me to one of the dumbest stories of the year. The fact that the year began just over 20 days ago doesn't make me feel better about this situation.

The story's from a blog, so there's no dateline. There's also no dateline because the nice people at HeliOS didn't want to out a complete fucking moron to the entire universe. A teacher in the Austin Independent School District saw a student giving a presentation on Linux. The teacher confiscated the discs, called a “conference” with the student (as we all surely remember, “conferences” with teachers in anything lower than university-level would be more accurately described as dressings-down). She found out about HeliOS and sent an email to Ken Starks who runs the HeliOS blog. Among the utter idiocy published in this email:

At this point, I am not sure what you are doing is legal. No software is free and spreading that misconception is harmful.

No software is free, is it? Hmm, that means I must have “stolen” my copies of Firefox, Opera, iSquint, Openoffice.org, Yahoo! Messenger!, TweetDeck, TwitterPod, VLC media player, iTunes (when I used Windows), Last.fm, AVG antivirus programme, iAntiVirus (for Mac), Google Earth, Handbrake, and Twitterrific. Damn, that's quite the list of charges, isn't it? I think if it weren't for Opera I'd be okay, but since I have Opera, it's a Federal Pound Me In The Ass Prison!

[…] if you are doing anything illegal, I will pursue charges as the law allows. Mr. Starks, I along with many others tried Linux during college and I assure you, the claims you make are grossly over-stated and hinge on falsehoods.

What the hell do you think Linux is, lady? Is Linux the “L” in LSD? Linux isn't a drug, it's a fucking open-source software platform! I tried Linux on a trial version of Parallels once and guess what? The only problem was Parallels wouldn't let me connect to the fucking internet! I would consider using Linux if I didn't have a good thing going with OSX and if I could program things my damn self. The latter, by the way, isn't a deal-breaker. I'd figure it out on my own if I had to program.

[…] putting linux on these machines is holding our kids back.


Now that's just fucking stupid. It's been approximately two years since Windows Shitsta came out and underwhelmed took a steaming shit on everybody who got it, and Linux is holding people back? I sincerely doubt learning to use a computer that works is going to disadvantage anybody. In fact, if more people were willing to try other operating systems, the so-called marketplace of ideas could stop being a capitalist's wet dream and become an actual way of determining what is good, what is bad, and what functions well enough for the time being.

This is a world where Windows runs on virtually every computer and putting on a carnival show for an operating system is not helping these children at all. I am sure if you contacted Microsoft, they would be more than happy to supply you with copies of an older verison of Windows and that way, your computers would actually be of service to those receiving them..."

Even the idiot arguing for Microsoft Supremacy acknowledges that to “actually be of service to those receiving” these computers, they would have to be equipped with older versions of Windows. Now, certainly, old-ass software on old-ass machines can be of service. Okay, I'm totally lying. I've worked jobs where I had to use Windows 98 as recently as the past two years, and if there was one thing those machines didn't do, it was SERVE me in any useful way. Certainly I got to smack something around in a way I couldn't do to anything else at the job, but as computers, old computers with old systems are worth doo-doo.

Now I'm not a Linux or Mac evangelist. Well, I tell Windows users they need to get a Mac, but I don't go out of my way for it. I tell them this only after they've complained about how shitty Windows is. I offer them an alternative, and usually I get the same response: “I can't afford a Mac.” Linux is, in fact, free, and is, in fact, better than Windows. Granted that doesn't say a lot but it's true. Thanks to this idiot, I'm going to start trying to educate people who ask about the two significantly better alternatives. Thank you, Karen Namewithheld, for being so stupid to inspire me to action yet again.

Idiotic Adverts

I'm watching the Rangers-Penguins game because it's the first time in a very long time I've seen hockey on TV, and it's in HD to boot. It's the first interval now, and I'm seeing some adverts I've wondered about for some time.

I'm sure nearly everyone has seen the poker website ads. There's one where a bunch of cards are trying to get on board a bus but they can't because there's already a hand on board. There's another similar one with the cards in a bar. There's still another where a guy is talking about how you're playing everyone until there's one left, implying he's playing himself (I think).

The thing these ads have in common is the website they're for. I don't know if it's literally the same website, but every one of the sites is "not a gambling website". How do you have a poker website that isn't gambling? What's the point? If I want to play poker Senate Rules, I'll download a freeware game. Apparently it's a learning website. Really? It's a "learning" to gamble website. I don't think that qualifies as "not a gambling website".

Another ad that utterly fails to convince me of the quality of the product is for My Bloody Valentine 3D. They're advertising it as a movie full of sex and violence. I'm actually in favour of advertising that, because that's what's IN the damn movie. I don't see it as a bad thing because it's a MOVIE. Anyway, in the adverts, there's a blond girl having sex, looking up into a mirror on the ceiling, and saying, "I'm SO hot." Nobody told me Paris Hilton was in this film!

Seriously, the girl is much more physically appealling than Hilton, but that makes her just appealing enough to be murdered in a horror movie. The part that makes the ad even more unsexy is when she's being chased by the murderer through what looks like a rural motel car park ... still bare-ass naked. Is there a rule now that says horror movies have to have a Tara Reid lookalike running about naked? I can understand why many view that as a good thing, but I would hate to see nothing but Tara Reid clones in horror movies. For one thing, Tara (and very probably her clones) cannot act for SHIT. Her most convincing line ever was in The Big Lebowski - where she said to The Dude, "I'll suck your cock for $1000." Best delivery she's ever done.

Naturally, the ad ends with Naked-Tara-Double hiding under the bed (still naked). Maybe I'm weird but I don't find naked blondes running in sheer terror through a parking lot to be sexy. I don't even find it necessary for a horror film - not even a cheap slasher flick like this is obviously intended to be (let's be honest, nothing says "cheap slasher flick" like 3D glasses). When a film has a naked blonde running for her life, it makes me think her performance was so bad but they already had her under contract, so they decided to throw in a nude scene so they didn't feel bad for casting her.

Don't get me wrong; I have no problem with gratuitous screen nudity. But sometimes it actually takes away from the film. I greatly prefer when gratuitous nudity is in a film as a BONUS feature (not on the DVD, I mean you go to the movie to see the movie and SURPRISE! tits). If your movie needs to advertise gratuitous nudity (in 3D or not) to sell the god damn movie, you are doing something wrong.

Skiing holiday

I'm completely knackered after my dad and I went on a skiing holiday at Paoli. Anyone who's properly skied would laugh their asses off at this hill, but it's nearby and I like it. I'm not writing today because of all that, but instead I got some nice photos of other completely random people doing jumps and stuff.

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Now playing: MSNBC Rachel Maddow (video) - 01-16-2009-195223
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Time for a change

Earth was the final straw. Laura Roslin has to go.

Laura Roslin as President of the Colonies has led us on a fruitless chase for earth. She has caused uncountable deaths of civilians and military men and women. She attempted election fraud which, if successful, likely would have doomed the entire human race. And she took hallucinogens and based her government off those hallucinations. Recently she wandered off on a selfish quest for "answers" (to what, we'll probably never know) on board a Cylon BaseStar, where, if the reports are accurate, she based even more judgements on hallucinations (this time from a Cylon Hybrid).

It has become clear to me as well as many others that President Roslin is unfit for the job of President of the Twelve Colonies of Kobol and should resign post-haste. The Vice President should also resign, in fact he never should have been in office. But when I think about it the Vice Presidency of a convicted terrorist reflects more on the judgement of Roslin than anything else.

Neither Laura Roslin nor her Vice President Zarek have ever been elected to the highest office in the fleet, yet we constantly find them on Colonial One. How do they keep ending up there? Certainly, Roslin's first term is excusable; the line of succession was carefully detailed in the Articles of Confederation. There should not have been a fight over whether the election should take place seven months after the destruction of the Colonies, but there was. It is clear from that incident, not to mention Roslin's attempt to falsify the election results, that Laura Roslin is anti-democratic. What, I have to wonder, is she doing in democratic politics?

There is one man who I think should be Laura Roslin's obvious replacement. It is not Gaius Baltar; he's busy with leading his new monotheistic cult. Not Galen Tyrol, the leader of the New Caprica and Fleet Unified Workers; he is still needed fighting for the working man (ironically against Laura Roslin's union-busting hard line). One man has worked as a lawyer, soldier, and politician, and therefore knows all the aspects of power and how best to balance it. He commanded a Battlestar, rescued us off New Caprica, has a long career as a Viper pilot (and Commander of the Air Group), successfully defended Gaius Baltar against one of the most controversial trials in the history of the Colonial Justice System. And most recently he has served the people as the Quorum delegate for Caprica and, when Roslin went on one of her vendettas, Acting-President of the Colonies. I speak of course of Leland Joseph Adama.

Adama is pro-union, pro-peace with the Cylons, yet is not above taking a hard line to do the right thing. He stopped Vice President Zarek's prisoner rebellion on the Astral Queen and still solved the problem Zarek brought up of elections. He helped prevent a possible assassination attempt on Cloud 9. He sided against Colonel Saul Tigh's military junta when then-Commander William Adama, Delegate Adama's own father, was under medical treatment after being shot by a Cylon sleeper agent. He almost single-handedly brought down the fleet black market under the control of a mob boss. He is a natural leader: tough at times, sympathetic at others, and always doing the right thing. Best of all, however, Lee Adama is not completely crazy like the past two presidents (one legitimate, one not, at least the second time).

I implore the people of the fleet to vote Lee Adama in the election.

Galactica pwns your face

I, like many of my fellow geeks, have been amping up for the return and finish of Battlestar Galactica this Friday. Then my fiancee's boss has to commit the third-worst case of party-pooping in history and have Liz work Friday night. When the mall closes right when Galactica comes on the air, that's definitely NOT enough time to get home.

If you're reading this and are unfamiliar with Battlestar Galactica (the 2003 series) (yes, it makes a huge difference) I'll give you a rundown of any given episode. There is a Cylon opening bit. In series one it gave a brief history of the Cylons (they were created by man, rebelled, evolved, look and feel human, some think they are human, and they have a PLAN). In series two, they dropped the look/feel human and some think they are, because by this point everyone knew was a Cylon. In series three, the intro only changed the pictures used. Series 4.0 gave a shot of every known Cylon with captions about that (twelve cylon models, etc).

The next part is a "previously on" segment, which is fairly common in serialised television, and I don't have to explain it (thank gods). Then they have a cold open, or a segment of the show that airs before the main titles. This is frequently either a) action-packed and some of the best television ever, or b) heavy on character development and some of the best television ever. Then the opening titles play. Series four's premiere, "He That Believeth in Me," was a perfect example of this format. Hell, that cold open even managed to give us character development AND be action-packed.

What follows the first ad break is some of the best storytelling, acting, writing, etc, that has ever been filmed. Since the show debuted in 2004 (after a 2003 miniseries pilot), it has been nominated for a Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form) every year, winning in 2005 for the first series episode "33". In fairness, the only reason BSG did not win in 2006-8 for Pegasus, Downloaded, and Razor respectively is that those episodes were up against Doctor Who episodes penned by Steven Moffat, the best television writer in the known universe.

BSG has been critically praised and is probably one of the best things Sci-Fi has ever had going for them. Indeed, in late 2007 when their original remake of Flash Gordon was failing ... for good reason ... several Galactica mini-sodes aired during Flash Gordon episodes to draw viewers in as well as promote the upcoming feature-length episode, Razor. Like many things Galactica, the sodes (as they were known in fandom, coined by Galactica Watercooler podcast) brought up more questions than they ever answered. Luckily, that's just how Galactica fans like it. Among questions being asked about this final series include: Who or what is Starbuck, What's up with the final four Cylons, who is the final fifth, are the main group of Cylons going to come back and destroy Galactica and the humans, can the Cylons be trusted, and the ever-present question of Earth.

To quote Joss Whedon, creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, and Firefly: "If you speculate and it turns out you were right, you will have retroactively spoiled me. Which means I will have to retroactively kill you."


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Now playing: Bear McCreary - Prelude To War
via FoxyTunes

What's the matter with kids today?

Every now and then (roughly once a week) I have an off-day. I didn't sleep well last night, when I got back from class I went directly to bed, and now I can't think of a damn thing to write. In an effort to combat such days becoming anything more than an inconvenience, I use these days as an opportunity to watch telly and hope for a muse.

I'm watching West Wing series six and one of Santos's (Jimmy Smits) campaign issues is a longer school year. Personally, as a child I would've kicked this congressman in the tits for suggesting extending the (to me) already long school year. Now, when I see kids in the mall acting like little entitled shitheads who know next to nothing of literature, science, and maths, I think putting them in school year round, six days a week, is a damned good fucking idea. Hell, if you lock the shits in and don't let them go home at the end of the day I'm not horribly opposed to that.

I'm not a fan of kids in the best of times, and can count on one hand the number of children I actively like as people. I like them because they happen to have enough critical thinking skills to make them seem like adult humans as opposed to dropout-adults-in-training like I usually have to deal with. I only recently began actively considering having children of my own, with no small amount of pressuring from my fiancee. I had several caveats such as no faery stories pretended to be real (tooth faery et al), public schooling unless there's no other option, and under no circumstances will they be taught that one way is right and all others wrong without significant information on all levels.

This hasn't brought me any lack of worries that our children would have poorly-developed imaginations. In the end I don't think that's such a problem, as at least half the films in my DVD collection are sci-fi or fantasy. Plus at first glance, ... all of the books on my bookshelf are sci-fi or fantasy. And if there was ever a worry about imagination, we single-handedly ended it by deciding we would read to our child from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Voices and everything.
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Now playing: Rachel Maddow 01-12-09
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But cats EAT fish ...

PETA did it again. They acted like fucking idiots.

This time it's fish. They want to save the fish. Of course, they say there's a PR problem with saving the fish, so they want to rename the entire phylum cordata to "Sea Kittens." I presume the scientific term would be felis aqueous?

Or maybe we should rename anyone having anything to do with PETA Homo Retardus. Seriously, Sea Kittens? I've crapped better ideas than this. I have shoes with more creativity. Plus, maybe they didn't know this little fact because they're anti-pet, but cats eat fish. In the wild, in domestic situations, big cats, little cats, house cats - they all love to eat seafood. Shrimp, trout, flounder, tuna, salmon, fish of any kind, my cat loves it. So has every cat I've ever met. That's why they make dry cat food fish-flavoured: to get them to gobble up what would otherwise be a bowl of Weetabix for cats.

I understand being against animal cruelty; I'm against it myself. I even understand being so against animal cruelty that one doesn't eat meat. That's fine. I would consider it myself if I liked any veggies. Hell, I'm even okay with not eating or using any kind of animal or animal-related product, although if I had to become vegan I think I'd just kill myself. The problem I have is trying to stop other people doing what they want to do when it doesn't actually hurt anyone.

Granted, overfishing is a problem. Granted, it's more ecologically friendly to eat vegetarian. But honestly, eating meat doesn't hurt anyone except the animal that's killed to make the food. That can be helped at least a little by making sure the methods of slaughter (that's a term that really helps) are humane. Buying kosher meats from a local butcher is probably the easiest, if a slightly more expensive, way of making sure your meat is killed humanely. Being a douchebag to an entire geographical area (northeast, northwest and Florida come to mind in this example) and attempting to put entire industries out of work is not a good way to get animal rights.

I live in the US. Nobody in this country has ever done something they didn't want to do without significant pressure. A non-profit organisation has never had enough power to put that much pressure on a person. Churches, corporations, governments, and local "culture" are the only things with the kind of power that can actually forbid someone doing anything or cause someone to think they have to do something. Until and unless PETA becomes that powerful, they will continue to have only "ha ha look at the retards from PETA doing another stupid fucking thing again" stories in the media.

Well, the media that doesn't necessarily follow their philosophy, at least.

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Now playing: Ozzy Osbourne - Gets Me Through
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lol @ the irony of typing an anti-veggie post while listening to a vegetarian ROKK OUT

In what I HOPE is an unrelated note

I went to see The Unborn with Liz and someone from the Sci-Fi club tonight. We got into the cinema right as the pre-show adverts began playing. I don't mean the ones for Pepsi and the National Guard. I mean the local ones.

Now, when I worked at that cinema the in-between-shows ads played on a constant loop. I guess the owner realised that's incredibly expensive, so now they play for the 15 minutes leading up to the adverts for Pepsi, the National Guard, and several sports and fizzy drinks. They include businesses right next to the cinema, businesses whose owners are friendly with the cinema owner, and the like. But there was one that made me react with shouting, and the only reason I wasn't ejected from the building was because Liz noticed and put her hand firmly over my mouth until the advert was over. The advert was a recruitment ad.

For the Evansville Police.

Maybe I'm off track here, but shouldn't the police have a higher standard than "Average Moviegoer"? Sure, a lot of those movies have cops in them. Some are mysteries that resemble real policework. Others are shoot-em-up flicks that only resemble policework done in cities hosting the Republican and/or Democrat National Conventions. But either way, most policework consists of filing reports, sitting around, and executing black people traffic duties.

This explains a lot, really. It explains how cops hang out at Starbucks for hours on end. It explains how they still turn on their lights to get through traffic or a red traffic light. It explains why there's a well-known cop in the area whose entire purpose seems to be busting USI students for drinking, even when they aren't drinking. The reason is because THEY DON'T HAVE ANY QUALIFICATIONS BEFORE GOING TO POLICE ACADEMY!

Police Academy is supposed to be the place where cops-in-training learn specifics and how to do their job, not where they learn ... you know, I can't even think of a comparison, because THERE ISN'T ONE. Police shouldn't be fucking psychopaths who enjoy shooting two guns while flying through the air screaming, they should be people who have an actual interest in enforcing the fucking law. I worry that this will continue to provide Evansville with an utterly shitty police force.

At least the film was good.

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Now playing: Atheist Community of Austin - The Non-Prophets 8.1
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Really?!

Three stories on CNN. Three on MSNBC. Only one of the CNN stories even talks about the shooting, another is about the protests that turned to riots (I have heard due to "political tourism", that is outsiders coming in to wreck shit for fun), and one is about the cop who did the shooting resigning.

MSNBC is little better; one story about the riots, one about the tape of the shooting, and another about there being "Two stories" from the shooting. Apart from one story from the New York Times and one from the AP via the Boston Globe, I nearly didn't hear about this shooting.

Well, if it weren't for the blogs, that is.

I personally have a lot more respect for blogs as news sources now. Daily Kos and Shakesville both showed extensive sources for this criminal act. Shakesville even linked a video taken by a train passenger that clearly shows Oscar Grant sitting against the wall with three to four other men, then the police force him to lie prone on the floor while one cop kneels on him. Then the other police creature (I cannot call him a man; I know not what species one has to be to do such a thing) pulls his gun.

Multiple sources say the gun "accidentally went off". That is not remotely the point. He was doing nothing that could be interpreted by a thinking person (or even an extremely jittery, stressed, thinking person) as an attempt at violence or escape. Grant was struggling to be sure, but then again, he did have a cop's knee in his fucking back.

According to the CNN report, the fired shot (I refuse to use weaselspeak and say "Discharged round") entered through Grant's back, ricocheted off the floor and pierced his lungs. He died seven hours later. Happy fucking new year, incidentally, to his four-year-old daughter.

Throughout the period of wrestling Grant to the floor, which was not obviously justified, the people viewing and recording from the train were shouting at the police that their actions, to put it lightly, were not proportionate. One man can be clearly heard saying "That's fucked up" repeatedly. Then the gun goes off (whether accidentaly or not is frankly irrelevant, as the officer should not have HAD IT OFF HIS HIP IN THE FIRST PLACE), and there is a moment of ghastly silence and shock. Everyone begins to shout at the police (quite understandably at this point) and the train doors shut them into the car.

This is possibly one of the most hideous videos I have ever seen. If you don't want to be utterly pissed off, sickened, depressed, or shocked beyond belief, do not watch. link

Judge for your damn selves if it was justified. The police creature who fired the shot resigned Wednesday. That should not save him from at the very least, an incredibly long prison term. As the poster of the above-linked video says, "You don’t get to execute someone and just find yourself on the job market again." Grant was cooperating by all available evidence and is now dead for the crime of obeying a police officer's orders.

Damn the lot of you. You deserve Inquisition-level punishments.