Blackmoor Vituperative

Just watched Hustle & Flow. To my surprise, I liked it a lot. Craig Brewer and John Singleton get the South. They get it.

Everybody gotta have a dream.

Trying to find a reasonable conversation in 2015 is like trying to stand between raindrops to stay dry. There is no context. There is no humour. There is no spectrum between virtuous and despicable. There is only self-righteous rage, and the imperative to vent it… somewhere.

My opinion on ethnicity and religion: they are, at most, as important as being a fan of a sports team or a film franchise.

If it causes you to share good times with people in the same group, great. If it entertains you and a competing group to be opposed in a safe and friendly contest, that’s great, too. If it’s an excuse to be mean to other people, or take something away from some other group, or reserve some benefit solely for your group, you are doing it wrong.

Exactly one year ago, I held a rum-tasting at the Midnight Frights​ party at RavenCon​. The best one we tried was the 12-year rum from Trinidad, followed closely by the 5-year rum from Barbados. The 8-year rum from Haiti was a distant third. The New Orleans rum and the Cruzan 5-to-12-year rum were not very good, but perfectly serviceable when mixed with orange/pineapple/banana juice and ginger ale.

(I am posting this here so that I can easily find it when I am at the liquor store. If you find it useful, that’s a bonus.)

Happy Mother’s Day, Moms of America! Now go back to work.

I agree more with libertarians than I do with any other political cubbyhole that I have been able to find, but I think I might not actually be libertarian. Libertarianism is all about putting theory into practice, without exception (that theory being, in essence, “an it harm none, do what ye will“). There are, as far as I know, few libertarians who consider financial exploitation “harm” (I may, in fact, be the only one). But I think one would have to be deliberately blind to look at the USA around us and fail to see the harm done by financial exploitation.

Being “rich” in the USA in 2015 means you have a house and you can pay your bills.

That’s messed up, and it’s getting worse every year.

The thing is, twenty years ago, I was a hardcore libertarian. I sincerely believed that the world would be better if there were no laws preventing, say, an employer from tracking your every move, 24 hours a day. I sincerely believed that the world would be better if there were no laws requiring cars to be safer, or requiring employers to pay no less than a certain minimum, and so on. I didn’t believe these things because I wanted people to be underpaid and driving death traps — I believed that freedom of choice would result in the greater good. So what has changed in the past twenty years? What changed my mind?

Seeing how the world actually works for twenty years is what changed my mind. Because in theory, if everyone is free to choose, they can all choose not to work for employers who invade the medical privacy of every applicant. In theory, they can choose not to work for $2.13 an hour.

In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is.

Just finished watching Gaslight (1944), with Charles Boyer, Ingrid Bergman, and Joseph Cotten. It’s interesting to contrast Cotten’s performance in this with his role in Shadow Of A Doubt, released the previous year. If you’ve not seen these two films, I suggest that you do.

And is that a very young Angela Lansbury as the saucy house maid with aspirations “above her station”? Why yes, it is! In truth, I did not recognize her. I only know this because I read the credits.

When confronted with the “antis” — anti-immigrant, anti-gay, anti-gun, anti-women, anti-science, anti-South, anti-sex, etc. — who seem so devoted to their agendas of hatred, ignorance, and irrational fear, I am reminded of a line from Anaïs Nin‘s “Seduction of the Minotaur” (echoing a much older idea):

We do not see things as they are, we see them as we are.

Just watched Lucy with Susan and Vixen. Vixen and I LOVED it. What the Matrix is to computer science, Lucy is to biology. No, it does not make sense, and in fact it’s absurd on several levels, but it is nonetheless AWESOME and perhaps even mind-blowing. And much like the Matrix, any sequel(s) would be both superfluous and inevitably disappointing.

Vixen agrees.

Stop the madness! Write to your federal and state representatives and ask them to do away with so-called “Daylight Saving Time”. It costs money, it costs lives, and it accomplishes absolutely nothing.

I was having a problem with my home network. I have a static IP address from my ISP, and I have that IP address mapped to a domain name through DynDNS. Yet, periodically, I would discover that the network was no longer accessible.

Initially, I thought it was due to a recent server upgrade, and that I had my firewall settings or selinux settings wrong. But those were correct. I looked at the port forwarding settings in the router (Advanced Settings >> WAN >> Virtual Server / Port Forwarding), and those seemed correct, too. On a lark, I clicked the “Apply” button on the port forward settings page in the router’s administration screen, and suddenly the network was externally accessible again.

A few hours later, it happened again. This time, I logged into the router’s port forwarding screen and clicked “Apply”. It worked. Then again, this morning, it happened again.

A great deal of searching later, I have discovered that there is a bug in the Asus RT-AC87R router port forwarding — it simply stops working from time to time. Why, I do not know. I have the most recent firmware, so there is no fix to be found there. The only way to prevent this from happening appears to be by disabling the “NAT Acceleration” (which is called “Hardware Acceleration” in some routers): go to Advanced Settings >> LAN >> Switch Control >> NAT Acceleration, and set it to “Disable”.

This also applies to the Asus RT-AC87U router (which is the same router in slightly different packaging).