Blackmoor Vituperative

I received my lovely (and exorbitantly expensive) HTC One today. It’s a well made phone, attractive and solidly built. I was very pleased with it until I discovered it has no SD Card slot and, more importantly, no way to replace the battery!

Like most people, I assume, I am paying for this phone over the course of two years. As we all know, the Li-ion battery in a cell phone typically lasts a year or so. To put this into perspective, I have worn out and replaced three batteries in my previous phone before the phone itself died and needed replacing. (That’s why I bought the HTC One.)

So now I have a phone that will literally not last as long as the payments on it. I can’t express how disappointed I am. How on Earth could anyone think that making a disposable $580 phone was a good idea??

I’m sending this back tomorrow. I don’t know what I’ll do for a phone. Maybe a Galaxy S4.

P.S. I bought a Samsung Galaxy S4, which arrived yesterday. I am well pleased, and would recommend the Samsung Galaxy S4 to anyone considering the HTC One.

Republicans claim to oppose high taxes, but they vote for more Big Government — and higher taxes. The latest case in point is a U.S. Senate vote to pass an Internet sales tax bill that would force online retail outlets to start collecting taxes on behalf of state governments.

(from Republicans and Democrats vote for new Internet tax, lp.org)

I can’t tell you just how bad an idea this is. Much like some other recent legislation that died in the Senate (cough gun control cough), this is legislation that pretends to fix a problem that doesn’t exist, and actually makes a real problem worse.

The problem it pretends to fix is the failure to tax businesses that sell online. Fun fact: every American business that sells online pays sales taxes to every single state (and county, in many states) where it has a physical location. I wrote the sales tax code for DriveThruRPG, so I know for a fact that this is not a trivial amount of work for a small business. Expanding that added bureaucracy and back-end work to pay every single county in the USA is GODDAMNED INSANE (I am speaking for myself here, not for DriveThruRPG).

Adding injury to insult, it actually makes a real problem worse. The real problem is that local brick-and-mortar retailers can sometimes be undercut by online retailers. A solution to this problem would be to make sales tax lower, making the local retailer more competitive. Erecting a massive bureaucratic impediment, discouraging local brick-and-mortar businesses from selling their products online, actually makes their situation WORSE.

And, as usual, the only political party with two clues to rub together are the Libertarians.

I have another idea for a political cartoon. On the right hand side of the cartoon is a gate with the sign “Glue Factory”. A horse is on the left side of the cartoon, wearing a blanket that says “2nd Amendment”. A guy in a suit is pulling on the horse’s bridle, trying to lead it to the glue factory. The man in the suit has a voice balloon saying, “What are you worried about? No one wants to get rid of you. Just take one more step!”

“No one wants to take your guns” is bullshit, and everyone on both sides of the fight for and against that particular civil right knows it. We all know it’s a lie. It’s an insult to the intelligence of anyone that hears it, right up there with “separate but equal”.

I Am A: Neutral Good Elf Sorcerer (7th Level)

Ability Scores:
Strength-11
Dexterity-11
Constitution-11
Intelligence-16
Wisdom-13
Charisma-13

Alignment:
Neutral Good A neutral good character does the best that a good person can do. He is devoted to helping others. He works with kings and magistrates but does not feel beholden to them. Neutral good is the best alignment you can be because it means doing what is good without bias for or against order. However, neutral good can be a dangerous alignment when it advances mediocrity by limiting the actions of the truly capable.

Race:
Elves are known for their poetry, song, and magical arts, but when danger threatens they show great skill with weapons and strategy. Elves can live to be over 700 years old and, by human standards, are slow to make friends and enemies, and even slower to forget them. Elves are slim and stand 4.5 to 5.5 feet tall. They have no facial or body hair, prefer comfortable clothes, and possess unearthly grace. Many others races find them hauntingly beautiful.

Class:
Sorcerers are arcane spellcasters who manipulate magic energy with imagination and talent rather than studious discipline. They have no books, no mentors, no theories just raw power that they direct at will. Sorcerers know fewer spells than wizards do and acquire them more slowly, but they can cast individual spells more often and have no need to prepare their incantations ahead of time. Also unlike wizards, sorcerers cannot specialize in a school of magic. Since sorcerers gain their powers without undergoing the years of rigorous study that wizards go through, they have more time to learn fighting skills and are proficient with simple weapons. Charisma is very important for sorcerers; the higher their value in this ability, the higher the spell level they can cast.

Find out What Kind of Dungeons and Dragons Character Would You Be?, courtesy of Easydamus (e-mail)

Warning: this video is graphic. It shows dead people. You’ve been warned.

Now for my thoughts:

The first segment, on the Philippines, illustrates the scenario that I think motivates some of the anti-gun hysteria in this country. Ironically, I think that divisive rhetoric and attempts to infringe on other people’s civil rights makes that scenario more likely rather than less. I hope, really hope, that Americans wake up to that and stop with the attacks on each other. Ignorance, hatred, and irrational fear are poor foundations for public policy.

The second segment, on the Taliban and Afghanistan… that’s almost too tragic. I have trouble even wrapping my head around it. It would be easy to blame religion, but the suicide bombers aren’t even being told what their own religion says. They are lied to and manipulated by their Imams and Muftis, who are distorting their own religion to use these children as weapons. The horror of it baffles me.

I am so grateful that I live in a relatively safe, relatively sane country. I hope it stays that way.

The author of this letter to “gun control” Democrats is a left-leaning supporter of reproductive rights “who participated wholeheartedly in the Occupy movement and in the national campaign to expose ALEC”. They make six suggestions on how to better present the argument for gun control in the USA. It’s worth reading.

I had an idea for a political cartoon. There would be three people at a table, and in each panel they would each say something, expressing their opinion about a topic. The first person believes in creationism, that there’s no evidence for evolution, that evolution is a plot by satanists and atheists, etc. The other two people would follow a similar pattern, but with homophobia and “gun control”, respectively (e.g., there’s no evidence that homosexuality is natural or that guns save lives, it’s all a plot by the gay Jews in Hollywood or the gun lobby and the NRA, etc.). In the final panel, they would each say that “90% of Americans support…” their own particular brand of ignorance, hatred, and irrational fear.

It’s too wordy for a cartoon, though. Also, it strikes me as a bit unkind. Just because someone has a different opinion, even an opinion I consider hateful and ignorant, that alone doesn’t make them a bad person. It’s not that simple: even genuinely good and kind people can have genuinely horrific opinions. Human beings are complicated.

“Human kindness can be found in all groups, even those which as a whole it would be easy to condemn.”
– Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning

An image or “meme” equating traffic lights to restrictions on firearm ownership has been showing up recently in the usual places. I find this disappointing, because it’s such an absurd analogy.

Let’s set aside, for a moment, the essential difference, that vehicles are for transportation (important, yes, but is it a basic human right?) while firearms are for defense of one’s life (an essential human right). Setting that aside, a traffic light’s purpose is to prevent an operator of a vehicle from driving their thousands-of-pounds of metal into the direct path of others’ rapidly moving thousands-of-pounds of metal, because this would be a direct and imminent danger to the lives of other people. This is completely reasonable. An equivalent (or nearly equivalent) analogy would be some form of signal intended to prevent a firearm from being fired at other people, or where other people are quite likely to be. And, in fact, we do have laws that serve this exact purpose, although they take the form of general prohibitions rather than signals. And these, by and large, are also reasonable.

The people who “like” and redistribute images like this one, alas, are anything but reasonable.

I love this Todd Rundgren song. It reminds me a bit of early Rick Springfield.

What do you mean, who is Rick Springfield? He played a vampire in the movie Nick Knight, which was later retooled as the series Forever Knight, with Geraint Wyn Davies playing the vampire detective, but Rich Springfield played the part first. He was also on a soap opera, the name of which escapes me, and yes, he was also a pop star for a while.

P.S. Here’s another great Todd Rundgren song.

“Things have changed forever.”

We heard this after the World Trade Center buildings were destroyed. We heard it after the Virginia Tech massacre. We heard it after the Cinemark massacre. On Monday there was a bombing in Boston, and we are hearing it again.

It isn’t true. We have had bombings and tragedies before, and we will have them again. We pick up the pieces, comfort the survivors, and we move on. Nothing has changed. None of this is new. Some of the worse bombings in US history were in the late 1800s and early 1900s. The worst school massacre in US history was almost 100 years ago, using a bomb. “Things have changed forever” is nonsense. It’s delusional, in fact. Yes, bad things happen, but there is nothing anyone can do to prevent them. Fortunately, bad things of this particular nature are extremely rare. So why do we pay disproportionate attention to them?

A few people die in an explosion, and that’s major national news, but around 100 people die in car crashes the same day, and that’s barely mentioned in local news, if it’s mentioned at all. And 100 more die the next day. And the next. One-fifth of those 100 daily dead are children. No press conference are held where a sad but resolute politician vows to find those responsible. No “town halls” are gathered where politicians with private chauffeurs insist that we must place “reasonable restrictions” on car ownership.

We ignore a pile of bodies that accumulates like clockwork every single day, but we wail and gnash our teeth at rare and impossible-to-prevent tragedies and vow to implement “solutions” which have absolutely no chance of doing anything to prevent the next rare and isolated tragedy. Our reaction to these things is exactly backward.

More importantly, it isn’t true because the people who commit these crimes are not the norm. We are — the normal, peaceful people who want to live our lives in peace without being robbed, murdered, blown up, violated, spied on, or detained indefinitely. As Patton Oswalt said recently, “So when you spot violence, or bigotry, or intolerance or fear or just garden-variety misogyny, hatred or ignorance, just look it in the eye and think, ‘The good outnumber you, and we always will.’ “