August 12, 2003
Very good online comic. Dreamy in style, very sophisticated, with an interesting plot. I decided not to go to my Monday Group last night, as I’m still rather tuckered out from last weekend. So, instead, I stayed home and watched movies. I’ve seen three anime films in the past two days: Kaidohmaru, Ghost in the Shell, and The Cat Returns. They’re all about as different as they could be. Kaidohmaru is an impenetrable […]
Monday, August 11, 2003
So. Let’s say you want to become the best human you can be. You want to improve. You want to be more than you are. You want to know twelve languages, conjugate Latin verbs, know people from every social stratum, fence, and have a chiselled physique. Okay. Try playing The Game. Choose three or four areas in your life that you’d like to improve. They can […]
Sunday, August 10, 2003
Otakon report: I had a great time with Saalon, but the con itself was a disappointment. Most of they anime showed was already out or uninteresting, the dealer’s room was pretty much obsolete in this age of internet anime merchants, and the con was packed with overexcited anime fans. It was that last which really ruined it; I can live with a merely average con, but when you’re […]
Friday, August 8, 2003
Oops! Forgot to write anything of real substance for today. Which, perhaps, is good, as so much is going on in my life. I suppose I’m best served by shifting into Immediate Update Mode until my life slides back into a less turbulent phase. I stopped by my parent’s house last night to swap out my truck for their SUV. It’s a Nissan Pathfinder, a good, solid SUV that doesn’t dominate the road like an angry […]
Thursday, August 7, 2003
Well, I had every intention of posting yesterday – had a couple of paragraphs ready to go, in fact – when the internet went down at work, and stayed down until mid-afternoon. And at that point, I’d forgotten about updating the journal. Yesterday was a frustrating day. A friend of mine has been out of town for a good chunk of the summer, and we’d arranged to meet for coffee (well, I’d drink tea) at a nearby Starbucks yesterday afternoon. […]
Tuesday, August 5, 2003
Warning: Long, rambling post today, responding to several online discussions and finishing with my enthusiasm for a film. Brennen‘s right; I didn’t read all of Orwell’s Lion and the Unicorn article before I wrote my response. But I did skim it to ensure that the paragraph I responded to was pretty much in tone with the rest of the article. And, sure, I can see why Orwell would believe that military might is the ultimate sign of political […]
Monday, August 4, 2003
Brennen quoted a bit of George Orwell: Hitler’s conquest of Europe, however, was a physical debunking of capitalism. I can’t agree with this. Orwell’s argument appears to be that the fascist system — “a form of capitalism that borrows from Socialism just such features as will make it efficient for war purposes” — worked incredibly well. It created great economic prosperity, and it turned Germany from a gasping, starving […]
Saturday, August 2, 2003
Just came across some interesting discussion on comp.games.development.design about “honeypots.” What’s a honeypot? Think of Whinnie the Pooh when presented with a pot of honey. He simply can’t resist it. From what I’ve read, a computer honeypot is a service/computer/etc. that’s very attractive to hack, that’s meant to be hacked. But once hacked, it actually does no damage, and provides information about the hack to the person who set […]
August 1, 2003
Stephen writes, as part of a larger discussion: “The more and more one focuses on daily life, the less and less one sees of the greater picture. It’s kind of like falling into a rut, eventually you don’t see very much at all because you’ve got dirt walls on both sides.” I have to disagree with this on some level. Daily life is life. The “greater picture” – and I don’t know exactly what Stephen […]