Okay...WTF? Stupid Parents

Yeah, made-up languages are neat and all (and totally artificial, but hey!), but Jesus H. Christ, what possessed a linguist to do this?

Dr. d'Armond Speers, a Denver-based linguist who spoke only Klingon to his son until age three-and-a-half

Obviously, Dr. Speers ignored the anthropological and sociological aspects of stunting a child's development in real language. As much as I hate how litigious the US is these days, I really hope that kid grows up and sues his old man.

Seriously, I can't believe how egotistical people are. We throw 2500 words together and decide that it's a viable language, and that we understand how language works and therefore it's okay to learn this fake language, and teach it to our children. Did I mention that this language is fake? Klingons aren't real, people. The Klingon "language" has never grown or evolved. It has no ancestor or offshoot languages. It has never pidgined. And no, if someone somewhere has written a "history" of the Klingon language and made up previous versions, that doesn't count. More artificial data doesn't validate existing artificial data!

It is not a language, it is a code. And we are really no closer to understanding how language works, fundamentally, than we were in the sixties. I can't believe the arrogance of this so-called linguist.

I guess it just goes to show that "educated" people can just as easily be stupid parents as anyone else. ;P

Stupid parents are one of my biggest pet peeves. As an idealist, I have an ingrained sense of justice and fairness that is completely decimated every time I encounter a person who has children and yet, somehow, doesn't understand that these children are people. It is a parent's job to ensure that the child learns how to learn, is protected, and grows into a capable adult. But what do we have instead? Negligent, self-absorbed pricks who see their children as pets or commodities or annoyances or science projects. What. The. FUCK?!

All the stupid people just go around having babies whenever they want, or when they don't want, or whatever, because they're too stupid to think that maybe they should use birth control, or a condom, or wait to have sex. Some of these stupid people then go on to kill the baby, also known as "terminating" or "aborting" the "unwanted pregnancy". Nice clinical words there. Also nice that the baby doesn't get a say. That the baby, who has been conceived and is alive and would have grown into a person--was already a person--has his or her life snuffed out without ever even getting a chance to live. All because the stupid parents found it "inconvenient". "Yeah, gee, sorry, you being alive really cramps my style, so I'm gonna have to kill you. No hard feelings?"

Then there are the stupid parents who decide "Gee, having a baby is neat! It's just like having a doggie!" But after the reality sets in, instead of doing the responsible thing and letting someone else take the children, they keep them. "They're my children! Just like my TV and my stereo! You can't take my stuff!" And so these stupid parents just "try to live with those annoying brats," neglecting, abusing, and toying with their children as though they were pets or playthings. Yeah, that's fantastic. Good job, assholes.

Meanwhile, there's me, a person who, as many of you know, has been thinking about the best way to be a parent since I was a child. "When I have kids..." is a phrase that comes naturally, even now. I have read, and continue to read, articles on parenting and early childhood development and learning processes and anything that could help me help a child learn how to get along in the world. I would have given my life to my children, do you understand this? But I can't have any; oh, no. No, all the children have already been allotted to the goddamn fucking stupid parents.

I don't write about this much. I don't like whining and I'd rather you all not have to hear it. I'm writing now because I'm so angry I'm about to cry. I think about it every day. Every day someone mentions babies, or pregnancies, or children. It is impossible to avoid it. I try to be strong, I try to ignore it, I try to be happy for the other people who have babies, but then I read stupid shit about stupid parents who ought to be fucking castrated, and I can't hold it in anymore.

ATTENTION STUPID PEOPLE: A CHILD IS NOT A TOY. A CHILD IS A PERSON. IF YOU CAN'T DEAL WITH THAT, THEN DON'T HAVE ONE. IF YOU ARE STUPID ENOUGH TO GET PREGNANT, DON'T TRY TO AVOID YOUR RESPONSIBILITY BY KILLING THE EVIDENCE OF YOUR STUPIDITY. GIVE THE CHILD TO SOMEONE WHO ISN'T STUPID. K? K.

Have we found Atlantis?

And will we like it, if we have? I for one will be disappointed if there aren't flying machines.

May the Force be with you. Always.

:: how jedi are you? ::

"Hello, Fidel? Is your refrigerator running?"

This has got to be one of the funniest things I've ever seen.

Ending the war on fat

I just read an interview with a gentleman named Paul Campos who believes that obesity is not a problem in the United States. He's right when he states that we don't know how to make a fat person thinner...if we did, more people would be thin. And since we don't know that, how can we know that it would be better to be thinner? We have no experimental evidence of such. The argument is rather compelling.

Campos' last statements were the most interesting to me:

I'd just like to emphasize the message that there is really no basis for believing that trying to get people thinner makes sense as a matter of medical practice and as a matter of public health policy. There is really no basis for that belief. What we need to do is let go of a belief that doesn't make any sense. Once we let go of that belief we will be healthier and we will be happier. Here is the ultimate irony. We might even be a little thinner. Not that being thinner really matters in terms of health and happiness. It does not. But the fact of the matter is that by obsessing about weight and obsessing about dieting and engaging in all these obsessive compulsive behaviors towards food and our bodies and so forth, it is clear that [we] ended [up]weighing more than we may have ended up weighing as a group. So the ultimate solution to the war on fat fueled by the obesity myth is stop fighting the war. If you stop fighting it, you win. This is not the first war that can be won by that strategy, but I think this is one that is well suited for such an approach.

I've heard that sort of rhetoric before, and to an extent I agree, but I think that a line has to be drawn between "not thinking about it in order to live a healthier lifestyle" and "not thinking about it and just letting yourself go".

Robert says that the best thing to do when you want to enact a change in your life is to "re-frame" it into something pleasant. So, instead of thinking "I have to exercise", think "I'm going to go meditate, which I do while taking a brisk walk". It's an interesting approach, one that's certainly better than continually beating yourself up.

I think Campos is definitely on to something when he says that the focus should be on health, not weight. However, I don't know if I'm totally convinced that weight isn't an issue. That seems a little too idealistic. Probably the truth lies somewhere between the two extremes.

Two women, two completely different sets of circumstances

To Brahimi: congratulations. To Goodwin: I'd put you up here, if Sean would let me.

Polls

This morning I came across this article (via Metafilter) by Paul Waldman, editor-in-chief of the Gadflyer, about how nationwide polling works. Waldman brings up some good points that a lot of people miss...mostly very basic statistics stuff like how to evaluate a poll using the margin of error. He also explains the theory behind polling, which is what I'm the most interested in:

As far as the poll is concerned, your opinions have been taken into account, by someone just like you. The essence of survey sampling is that you don't actually have to interview everyone to get a good idea of what everyone thinks. As long as everyone has an equal chance of being included, we've created a "random" sample, which is the essence of good survey design.

Waldman does not go into how the margin of error is determined. I believe I learned how when I was studying statistics in high school, but I couldn't remember, so I went searching for more information. I found this article by Matthew Mendelsohn and Jason Brent at Queen's University (side note: Anne of Green Gables went there, I think, back when it was Queen's College!), Ontario. It's brief but very informative, and it includes a general way to calculate the margin of error. Their description of margin of error struck me, though, because I felt it made me understand the concept differently than Waldman's article did:

Most polls report a "margin of error". If a poll reports a margin of error of "3.1%, 19 time out of 20," this means that if you were to conduct exactly the same poll at exactly the same time again (you would end up surveying different people, however) 95% of the time (19 times out of 20) the results would be within 3.1%, up or down. So, if you repeat a poll one month later and find results that differ from your previous results by more than 3.1%, you can be "95% sure that public opinion has shifted." It is still possible that public opinion has not shifted: 1 time in 20 you will receive a result that differs from your previous result by more than 3.1% even though opinion has been stable. This is commonly referred to as a "rogue poll." This does not mean that the poll was poorly done; it is simply the case that on the basis of chance, 1 poll in 20 will differ by more than 3.1% -- but it usually won't differ by much more than 3.1%.

"Margin of error" assumes that the sample is a random, representative sample of the population. It also assumes that the questions were appropriately worded and that interviewing was of a high quality. "Margin of error" therefore is only a statistical calculation based on probability and the size of the sample; it says nothing about the quality of the poll itself.

What I was interested to know at this point was how they determine that, as Waldman says, "everyone has an equal chance of being included". I figured that pollsters must use some sort of categorization, like income levels, location, maybe even skin color and sex...so, I wondered, what are the categories, and how specific do they get, and how do they know that there is an equal chance for people from all categories to be picked? If the poll covers 1000 people, then do the pollsters assign 1000 categories to the people of the United States?

It's a little more complicated than that. David Ropeik at MSNBC explains the process like so: first, pollsters take all phone numbers in the US. (All of them? Even unlisted numbers and cell phone numbers? He doesn't specify. Fortunately, Gallup does; see below.) Then they "stratify" the numbers by geographical area:

Do you just pick 1,000 phone numbers completely at random? No, because there are different voting patterns by region and by state. So pollsters determine, from previous elections, how many people vote in each region of the country. Twenty-three percent of voters are in the East, 26 percent in the South, 31 percent in the Great Lakes/Central region, 20 percent in the West.

So you want to make sure that 23 percent of your 1,000 phone calls, 230, go to states in the East. Another 260 calls will go to the South, 310 calls will go to the central region and 200 calls will go to the West. Pollsters also break down the voter turnout by state, and make sure each state gets the appropriate number of calls.

Here comes the interesting part. In order to categorize the votes, demographic information is also taken during the poll. Ropeik says:

After a poll is done, the initial results are grouped by these demographic categories. Let's say that of the people responding to a poll, only 40 percent are women. The pollster adjusts the results from women up, and the results from men down, until they accurately match the American population. If only 2 percent of the respondents were Hispanic, the pollster juggles the Hispanic response up, and the other groups down, until everything matches "real life." They adjust all their findings to accurately match America?fs demographics in categories of age, race, religion, gender, income and education.

It may sound like a less-than-random tinkering with the numbers. But remember, everybody out there had their chance to be called when those random phone numbers were picked. These adjustments are done to more accurately reflect all the subparts of the overall universe of voters. You might call this fudging the numbers. Pollsters call it "weighting."

Weighting makes a certain sort of sense, when you think about making the poll results match nationwide demographic data, but think of it this way: in the times when you inflate the numbers for a certain demographic, you are projecting the opinions of a very small percentage of that demographic onto the whole group. I'm not sure that this can be considered "fudging" anymore...it seems a little too inaccurate. Do you truly have a random sample of the demographics? No, what you have is a random sample of the United States.

It should be obvious by now that you can't use a nationwide poll to gauge how Hispanics or women are voting. You would have to know exactly how many respondents were Hispanic or female, and you'd have to calculate the margin of error based on those numbers, before you could make any claims. The margin of error would likely be so high that you couldn't make any claims at all. In order to evaluate a demographic subset, you'd have to take a completely separate poll!

However, I'm starting to think that doing separate polls for each demographic would be the best way to go. Only poll men, women, Hispanics, African Americans, etc., and then create a huge aggregate of the responses. This would still be inaccurate--how many of the women you polled were African American, for example?--but it would get closer to the "random" sample that statistics require.

Ropeik included a rather flippant explanation of random sampling, involving a batch of 100 marbles:

If you are really random about the way you pick your batch of marbles, 95 times out of 100, your batch will accurately represent the whole collection. Statisticians have fancy numbers to prove this is true. Decades of polling experience backs them up.

Well, gee, as long as they're "fancy" numbers. As far as "decades of polling experience" go, well, if they do the same thing the same way for years and years and get the same kind of results, I'm not sure why they're surprised.

Obviously, that was an oversimplified answer, a response-in-kind to Ropeik's oversimplified explanation. I want to know exactly how and why these decades of experience have caused them to believe in their statistical techniques. Ropeik seems to want us to accept that they know what they're doing on blind faith...and, indeed, this is the point at which most explanations falter or gloss over the process.

Ropeik described the process as starting with phone polls. However, as Waldman mentions, many people polled on the phone don't respond. (Ropeik explains it as follows: "It takes 7,000 to 8,000 phone numbers to get 1,000 useful responses. Some numbers aren't working. At some, no one answers. And only a third of the people who answer agree to participate.")

Gallup polls are probably the most trusted and respected polls in the US. But even they have their issues. They claim (as of 1997) that 95% of Americans have telephones, so now all their polls are conducted by phone...and, further, they say:

In the case of Gallup polls which track the election and the major political, social and economic questions of the day, the target audience is generally referred to as "national adults." Strictly speaking the target audience is all adults, aged 18 and over, living in telephone households within the continental United States. In effect, it is the civilian, non-institutionalized population. College students living on campus, armed forces personnel living on military bases, prisoners, hospital patients and others living in group institutions are not represented in Gallup's "sampling frame." Clearly these exclusions represent some diminishment in the coverage of the population, but because of the practical difficulties involved in attempting to reach the institutionalized population, it is a compromise Gallup usually needs to make.

They do not say what percentage of the population they are leaving out by polling this way. They do explain, however, how they pick their household phone numbers:

In the case of the Gallup Poll, we start with a list of all household telephone numbers in the continental United States. This complicated process really starts with a computerized list of all telephone exchanges in America, along with estimates of the number of residential households those exchanges have attached to them. The computer, using a procedure called random digit dialing (RDD), actually creates phone numbers from those exchanges, then generates telephone samples from those. In essence, this procedure creates a list of all possible household phone numbers in America and then selects a subset of numbers from that list for Gallup to call.

While they have eliminated the problem of unlisted numbers, I still have to trust somebody's computer program. How do they determine which phone numbers are attached to residences? How do they allow for cell phones? Sean and I don't even use our land line phone--it's installed, but we don't have a phone plugged into it. Sean's parents don't have a land line phone at all. Are we just weird exceptions, or is this a growing trend? If the latter, how do pollsters deal with it? (Of course, this article is from 1997. They may have new procedures not outlined here.)

Gallup does have a very interesting random selection process that occurs once a household is reached (emphasis and typo Gallup's):

Once the household has been reached, Gallup attempts to assure that an individual within that household is selected randomly - for those households which include more than one adult. There are several different procedures that Gallup has used through the years for thiswithin household selection process. Gallup sometimes uses a shorthand method of asking for the adult with the latest birthday. In other surveys, Gallup asks the individual who answers the phone to list all adults in the home based on their age and gender, and Gallup selects randomly one of those adults to be interviewed. If the randomly selected adult is not home, Gallup would tell the person on the phone that they would need to call back and try to reach that individual at a later point in time.

I really have no problem with this, or with Gallup's question-asking process. Their methodology seems to be the best it could possibly be in these areas.

However, I found this interesting:

Once the data have been weighted, the results are tabulated by computer programs which not only show how the total sample responded to each question, but also break out the sample by relevant variables. In Gallup's presidential polling in 1996, for example, the presidential vote question is looked at by political party, age, gender, race, region of the country, religious affiliation and other variables.

So even Gallup falls into the trap of analyzing the demographics, rather than simply providing the answer to the question that started the poll. In the case of a nationwide poll concerning the presidential candidates, the answer would be "blahblah percent favor Kerry while blahblah percent favor Bush". That is all you can say definitively. To gauge the opinions of a particular demographic, you would have to focus on polling only that demographic in order to get a random sample of that demographic's opinions. How can you say you have a representative sample of a certain demographic when your poll results come from the entire country--and when you've inflated or deflated that demographic's results to match the nation? If someone has a good answer to this question, I'd like to hear it.

Until I know more about the process, I'm going to have to say that my position on polling is still "skeptical". The demographics weighting doesn't sit right with me, and polling by phone skews the data towards 1) people who have phones and 2) people who actually answer the poll (and, in Gallup polls "which track the election and the major political, social and economic questions of the day", 3) people who live in "households").

An interesting project for the future might be to obtain a full Gallup poll, as they are "public domain", and make my own analysis.

Don't try this at home, kids

Seriously, watch the whole thing. At first you think it's just another stupid Flash animation...and it is. But it's a funny stupid Flash animation!

Wrestling with software

I've fought and fought today to get Gallery to work properly, but it doesn't seem to like being embedded in Post-Nuke. I've heard that Post-Nuke is a poor choice for a CMS anyway, and I've pretty much come around to that point of view. I'm not sure what else to install, though, so it's staying the way it is for now.

Basically, the "Photos" link points directly to the Gallery installation instead of to the module-loading php file. That seems to skirt the embedding issues. Since I reinstalled Gallery while trying to make it work, everyone who had a user account will need to have it readded. Email me and let me know. (Mom, I've already done yours.)

Anyway, if you missed it in the previous post, Savannah pictures are (finally) up. Enjoy.

Along the same lines as the last post...

The Silmarillion in 1000 Words

MEN OF MIDDLE-EARTH: Shiny tall wonderful wise sea-king dudes! Yay!
NUMENOREANS: Here, have some stuff and wisdom.
MEN OF MIDDLE-EARTH: <3 <3 <3

Witch-king & Co.: great opportunity here! End-of-year bonus could be big!

Shade passed me this must-read. A couple excerpts:

ringwraiths@Mordor.net
Found 'em, Boss. Or at least we thought we found them. Busted up their hiding place real good, but they escaped into Old Forest, which is very scary. We would have gone in after them, but locals sounded incredible fire alarm. Took a vote and decided to head to Bree, wait for hobbits.

Sauron@Mordor.net
You took a vote?! (Sigh). Fine, whatever.

ringwraiths@Mordor.net
Now in Bree, but rest of Black Riders not here. Barkeep wants us to pay their tab. Pal Bill Ferny said homeys are retracing their steps to see if No.5's ring fell off on way from Isengard. Rented great room with view. Expense request enclosed.

Sauron@Mordor.net
2,000 farthings for 'Dwarf massage'?

and

ringwraiths@Mordor.net
Right you are, Boss. We five are plenty for the job. I guess we'll get the others' bonuses, ha ha. Anyway, turns out the hobbits have joined forces with a Ranger, named Strider. Job suddenly got harder. They also bought Ferny's pony; Bill got hit with apple from one of the hobbits, but lived. He said they went cross-country, which means we'll just have to hope they rejoin the road up ahead. Thoughts?

Sauron@Mordor.net
Thoughts? Yes, try following them.

:D

My dream car is on eBay!

Rich people, feel free to buy this for me. [I've heard rumors that this isn't quite legit...oh well. -4/4/23 6:53am]

Blueberry bagels with strawberry cream cheese

Mom and I used to go to the hospital a lot, for my checkups. On the way home, we'd always stop at the little bagel place that used to be on Nicholasville Road just before Man O' War Boulevard. That was where I first discovered blueberry bagels with strawberry cream cheese. I almost invariably got one every time we went.

After a time, the bagel place closed and was eventually replaced by Popeye's chicken. This happened towards the end of my hospital visits, though, and soon enough Mom and I weren't taking routine trips up to Lexington together. I started going to UK, making the daily jaunt up Nicholasville Road alone. Soon I discovered the Intermezzo up on the mezzanine of Patterson Office Tower, central campus. That casual cafe became one of my regular haunts...and I'd always get a blueberry bagel with strawberry cream cheese to munch while doing my homework or reading.

For my first year here in Georgia, I really didn't eat bagels. I hardly ever went anywhere, and I didn't have an income to speak of, so they weren't high on my priority list. But now that I've got my own job--a place to go during the week, plus money--I've been adding bagels to my shopping lists.

So now I sit here at my desk on my lunch break, preparing to dig into a nice blueberry bagel with strawberry cream cheese. :)

...and here they are

The first half, anyway.

This links you to the main "Trips" folder, in which all the pictures currently live. Note that there aren't any pictures in the second folder...yet! [All pictures are now up. -9:50]

Aunt Bev (trying to get into the habit of calling her Aunt Chris, but it's hard!) will be sifting through these pictures for a week!

While I'm waiting for Savannah pictures to upload...

Here is a really doofy article. Yes, that is a tabloid.

It's an interesting claim, but although I think that unconscious knowledge does help fuel our decision-making, I'm not exactly sure how we would be able to "tell by looking" that Kerry has more royal blood than Bush, or why that would make us choose Kerry. I would be interested to see if the claim that the Presidential victor always has the most blue blood could be backed up by fact, but of course you'll never see that sort of devotion to balanced reporting in the National Enquirer.

So, apparently I took so many pictures in Savannah that I can't fit them all in one Gallery album. What I'm going to do is break them up into two groups, then go through later to add captions/descriptions and remove pictures that aren't so great. Hopefully that will cut the number down to 290 or below, which seems to be the limit. (At some point I need to update the Gallery software, but I haven't had the time.)

Of course, I'm not going to leave the pictures up forever, because the sheer number means they take up a lot of space on the family website, but I'll at least leave them there long enough for my travel companions to see them :)

Link to album one coming soon.

I slept ALL DAY

When I got home from work today, I had barely settled in when I decided to lie down for a minute to cool down (it was really hot again today, although the heat was mercifully offset by the occasional breeze this time). A little later, I noticed that I had been sleeping for awhile. I shrugged, got undressed, and went back to sleep.

I think I woke up one other time and went to the bathroom, but after that I didn't awaken until...

11:30 p.m.!!!!

So yeah...I guess I was tired. :>

Curiosity about toilet flushing distracts me from work, and my car is laughing at me

The thought struck me that I still didn't know whether or not toilets flush in a counterclockwise direction in the Southern Hemisphere, so I looked it up on Snopes. (Yeah, I know, this is extraordinarily important.) I'm glad to have the mystery solved, but what really got me was this quote:

The Coriolis effect produces a measurable effect over huge distances and long periods of time, neither of which applies to your bathroom.

:D I love that.

When I started my car this morning, the headlights, dash lights, and radio all came on. I didn't check the interior light. I was too busy feeling shocked and annoyed.

I guess the headlight switch is "on the fritz"...well on the road to going out, but willing to work intermittently. I'm not going to trust it on a road trip, the little tease.

Random tangent: I used to call my car Walton, after my grandfather, the car's previous owner, but the name never really fit. Recently I came up with the perfect name...but now I can't remember what it is.

As if I didn't know this already...plus, I'm not going anywhere for awhile

I've been curbing my addiction to caffeine--haven't had a caffeinated soda in a couple weeks now, and I've even avoided my beloved Southern sweet tea and green tea--but this makes me wonder if I'm neglecting a more important problem.

Leanne Ely's Saving Dinner has helped me to make more nutritious (and delicious) meals this year, but I'm still falling into the trap of fast food and ordering in. And hell, I work every day for a restaurant marketing company, so I deal with images and descriptions of food all the time. Could this be as harmful to my figure as thinking about babies (specifically, multiples) all the time seems to be to my emotions?

(I'm exaggerating, of course. I love my jobs, and it would be ridiculous to blame them for my own issues.)

In other annoying news, my car is acting up, so I won't be able to go to DC this weekend as planned. A few weeks ago a car electronics service technician diagnosed the problem as being an old/faulty headlight switch--without actually looking at the car. I was a little skeptical, and I had Reid look at it for me before I left for Kentucky. He replaced some fuses, and everything worked fine again, so I was able to make my trip with no problems.

Yesterday, though, as I was heading out of work, and just as a pretty piano piece came on, suddenly the radio just stopped functioning. I clicked the buttons and fiddled with the volume for awhile, but it was just dead.

"Oh, shit," I said, because I had a premonition. I flipped on the headlights.

Nothing. No headlights, no dash lights.

This was pretty damning evidence already, but I checked the interior lights just in case...and they didn't come on either.

Looks like I need a new headlight switch after all.

I guess I will be calling the car electronics guy today. He knows how to order the part, and install it of course. I doubt very seriously that this work will be done by the weekend, though, so I've gone ahead and cancelled with Noelle and the Sushicam people.

This is rather disappointing...I was looking forward to seeing Noelle again, and DC, and meeting Jeff from Sushicam (and, of course, taking pictures). But bleh. What can you do?

I was frustrated yesterday, and thinking that we should go ahead and buy a new car...but we really can't afford it. Some stuff has come up at Sean's work that may mean he'll have to change jobs, taking a pay cut in the process. He was hoping that he'd be able to stick it out until his security clearance came through, but it's sort of out of his hands now...which sucks. So...no new vehicle for awhile.

Does anyone out there have job security? Lately everything feels so impermanent. While I love being flexible, ultimately it's also nice to know that I can afford it.

The sooner I get my raise, the better. And the sooner I can get going on my own business venture, the better. There is a lot of work I'll need to do just to get started, but I need this. We need this.

I'm destroying the world

ecological footprint quiz 2004:

CATEGORY: ACRES

FOOD: 5.4

MOBILITY: 0.2

SHELTER: 5.7

GOODS/SERVICES: 5.4

TOTAL FOOTPRINT: 17

IN COMPARISON, THE AVERAGE ECOLOGICAL FOOTPRINT IN YOUR COUNTRY IS 24 ACRES PER PERSON.

WORLDWIDE, THERE EXIST 4.5 BIOLOGICALLY PRODUCTIVE ACRES PER PERSON.

IF EVERYONE LIVED LIKE YOU, WE WOULD NEED 3.8 PLANETS.

Hmm. Isn't that nice?

In a time of uncertainty and fear, a hero rises from the darkness...

Or something.

I wish Augusta had its own Batman and Robin.

Fleet warfare, and how I learned to love the game

I'm hesitant to link this, simply because Den Beste seems to be inundated with emails as it is, but I think it's a really cool article about the history of ship/fleet warfare. This sort of thing does not interest me at all...or at least, I never thought it did. Den Beste's overview was really informative, though, and I read it beginning to end.

He originally started out planning to write about the plausibility of and possibilities for future/space fleet warfare. To do this he had to begin with descriptions of the history of fleet warfare, and it got so long that he decided to put off writing the space part! I'm looking forward to seeing what he comes up with on that front.

There's your introduction...remember that he does not want emails, so if you just want to shoot the breeze about this article, post your comment here! ;D If you have some sort of life-altering, fascinating, amazing insight, then you can probably go ahead and email Den Beste. Disclaimer stated...here's the link!

Some of my last posts on the AMRN (I haven't posted recently, and I'm thinking yet again of quitting) were for Milla Frank, currently the XO of the UNS Etrakis. Mr. Justice hadn't been posting much for Captain Youngman, so I was pretty much the active senior officer during a rather interesting crisis: first contact. (For our fleet, anyway; it came out that our government already knew about the aliens. Also, since it's Macross, you could argue that it's not really first contact since we've already met so many other aliens...but I'm not here to discuss semantics!) I had to make executive decisions about deployment, get our people out of harm's way and, later, negotiate a truce with the new aliens while trying not to look like a sissy.

This was really the only time in my almost five years of playing on the AMRN that I felt that I both had a decent grasp of what I was doing and that my actions had a direct impact on the game universe. In short, I was actually playing the game and having a hell of a lot of fun at it.

Virtually all of my fun in the past came from non-combat, relationship-motivated character interaction. There is a disparity between "combat" and "down time" that many players and GMs have remarked upon. "Combat" is meaningless flying out to attack the enemy of the week (or month, or year), typically never quite finishing the mission, and having a neat resolution packaged up by the GM that essentially nullifies any actual impact you had on the game. This can happen under a single GM--perhaps s/he simply doesn't have the time to rewrite his/her plot, or something--but it's most noticeable when one GM leaves and another takes over. The successor typically has no idea what occurred in game or what it might have meant for the characters, so s/he simply washes the slate clean. Convenient for him/her, annoying for the players.

Down time, on the other hand, is not so closely monitored by the GMs, so the continuity is maintained directly by the players. If my character starts flirting with another character, that character will be affected, and so will anyone observing. Flashbacks to this occurrence could happen months later (real-time). It was in those times that I really felt that I was building story.

At the same time, though, I always had the niggling feeling that I wasn't building a complete story. Yes, characters are the most important thing (at least, to me), but the setting and the events of the universe are part of what shapes the characters. Much of what I have done in the game could be done anywhere. There is nothing that makes my characters' relationships and motivations particularly bound to the world of Macross. A few little changes, and we could plunk them right into, say, the United States Civil War. When I started realizing this, I started losing my interest in the game, and it's been declining ever since.

My experience with Milla has shown me what a real game can feel like. In fact, I strongly believe that that experience is the only reason I read Den Beste's article all the way through. I had been thinking about similar principles in order to create a favorable outcome in my game...and because I was having a direct impact on what happened (to an entire fleet!), the learning was actually interesting.

I don't gain anything by knowing mecha statistics. The GMs don't know them, either, so they tend to resolve rounds in general ways that don't depend on the combination of mecha type and actions. The GMs who do "know" mecha stats often disagree with one another, meaning that there is no general consensus and therefore no point in trying to learn. Why bother, if there's no guarantee that my knowledge will be useful? If I get the same result by simply understanding the basic principles and maybe adding a few mecha-specific details, why bother taking it to the next level? What is there to be gained?

This is most likely why I find mecha stats so boring. I have no time for knowledge I don't have a use for.

I would like it if there were some way to give all players the feeling I had during the first contact (or whatever) scenario. I'm not going to say it was perfect--at times I felt as if I was being "guided"--but it was a hell of a lot better than pretty much all of the rest of my AMRN experience. There is no perfect game, because people are all different...but I think that having a direct impact on larger-than-life events would add a long-missing excitement for every single player.

Some linkage

Savannah was awesome, and I'll be posting up some pictures and a blurb or two as soon as possible. Until then, though, here are a few fun things:

• Reminiscent of my discussion of the "well said" phenomenon in Japan, here are some advertising quotes (I love the longer ones).


• An exciting new technology, whereby plants are used to cleanse the soil of deadly chemicals that remain after an area is mined for gold, is being implemented in South America. The plants not only absorb the mining chemicals, but the gold remaining in the ground. This gold is then used to pay the costs of the cleansing and of training the locals to farm the land once it's cleansed. This is what technology is all about!


• This cracked me up. Just go look. (I especially love that "unique WWW address"...no wonder people needed code books back then!)


• I link this because it's the first time I've laughed at Mac Hall in quite some time. The last panel just totally gets me.


• Penny Arcade, on the other hand, pretty much invariably makes me laugh. This looks like it would be fun. Sean and I are going to some sort of Asheron's Call 2 convention in August, so I don't know if we would be able to swing PAX, but it's something to think about.

Speaking of trips, I'm going to Washington, DC to meet some of the folks from Sushicam this coming Friday. I'll be lodging at the home of my very good friend from middle school, Noelle. She and her husband John are being very gracious, considering the short notice! ^^; I hope to spend some time with the two of them on Saturday, doing...something or other. Cary (my cousin, who I saw yesterday in Savannah) suggested that I try to go to Georgetown instead of looking at the monuments. She said there are lots of interesting things to see and do, and some great cafes and shops. So I'm kicking that idea around. However, since it will apparently take eight hours to get there, I will really only have Saturday in which to do stuff. It may be that I'm unable to do much sightseeing at all. But relaxing with Noelle and catching up (we last saw each other last summer, at Myrtle Beach) would be just fine with me.

That's it for now. More on Savannah later. For now, let me just reiterate that I had a blast. :)

Off again

This time I'm on a day trip to Savannah. Mapquest claims it will take three hours to get to the resort where Aunt Bev and Cary are staying, so I'm leaving now to hopefully arrive at noon. Since Mapquest also said it would take three hours to get to Myrtle Beach, and it actually took more like an hour and a half, I'm hopeful that I'll arrive early. Then again, it is Saturday, so I may have to deal with other travelers...

I finally downloaded the pictures from Kentucky onto my computer last night, but I haven't had a chance to put them up anywhere. Most of them are normal family things, but a few are noteworthy, and I'll find a place for them later.

Well, here I go. I'll be back much later tonight...whether or not I'll post again is another thing entirely.

Re: The Apprentice

Of course, not every burning issue was cleared up Thursday. For instance, how can 15 people be fired when they were never hired in the first place? That question may never be resolved.

Hahahah. MSN is teh funnay.

Getting something for nothing

This is amazing. I'll post actual thoughts on it later, when I'm not supposed to be working. ;>

Zzzzzz...

I've been pretty busy since getting home from Kentucky. Working full-time, regular daylight hours is a new experience for me, and I'm still adjusting. My past jobs have all been part time or shift work: at Wal-Mart (for the whole week and a half I worked there) I was doing a 2 to 11 pm shift; at Willis Music I worked different hours at varying points between 9 am and 6 pm; at GRW I worked 3 pm to midnight (due to going to school); and at the University of Kentucky night desk I worked either midnight to 4 am, 4 am to 8 am, or both. So yeah, I guess from that lineup I appear to be a night owl, and this new 8 am to 5 pm (soon to be 7 am to 4 pm) shift has me a little wonked. I've basically had to start going to bed at around 10 or 11 pm in order to get enough sleep, which precludes participating in many of the online chats I've come to love. I'm in bed before most of our AMRN people get online; either they're out doing something else until the late evening, or they're on the other side of the world, in which case they're at work or just waking up when I'm going to bed.

This might be a good thing; sitting around chatting could be considered a waste of time, especially if I'm not accomplishing anything else in tandem. But I have always liked being available to my AMRN players and GMs, and it looks like that won't be as possible anymore.

Regardless, this week hasn't been extraordinarily restful. I got home on Monday night after 8 hours of driving, stayed up too late, and then got up early for work the next day. I've been trying to get more sleep since then, and it's worked out all right, but I've had chores and errands to do after work that have made me feel as if I don't have time to do anything. Normally I would catch up on the weekend, but I'm driving to Savannah on Saturday to see my aunt and cousin, so I have to get everything done before then, including get all the junk I brought home from Kentucky out of my car, and two loads of laundry. I guess those will be my chores for today after work, since I don't have any other time to do them.

Yesterday I listened to a motivational CD by Earl Nightengale. It was fairly inspiring, but I've been left sort of befuddled. The main point was that people should pick goals and then work towards them in order to be successful. That has been a real problem for me in the past, and right now. What is my goal? I have a business idea, which I'll not describe here lest someone steal it ;>, but I don't know if that is my goal in life. Then again, I don't know if the goals have to be permanent...I think maybe after you've accomplished one goal, you can come up with another one.

I guess my main problem with doing this sort of thing has been not wanting to give up on certain dreams in favor of other ones...and of course, fear of failure. Once I get past the first one and pick a goal, Nightengale suggests writing my goal down on a card and looking at it whenever I feel discouraged or fearful. I suppose that could work...so I just need to figure out what my goal is.

I was talking with AJ about it, and he suggested that I make a list of all my goals with two columns: REALLY WANT to do, and WOULD LIKE to do. Then, he said, I could prioritize the REALLY list in terms of feasibility. I don't think Nightengale would approve of that second step; I'm supposed to believe that I can do anything. The first one, though, might be helpful.

I need to leave for work in about fifteen minutes, so I don't want to start making my lists now. I'd like to give them some time and consideration. Sadly, I already know one of the things that's going on my REALLY list: "be a mommy".

My body shape has changed somewhat, so that my stomach seems to be sticking out more than it was before. This isn't new; it's been happening to me for months now. When I look at my profile, I tend to feel like I look pregnant. This has caused me to purchase pregnancy tests three times, "just to make sure". Wednesday was one of those times, and seeing the negative result was depressing. Even though I know it's impossible, I still have hope...and that hope invariably leads me to despair.

Working for Proactive Genetics doesn't really help my emotional state. I do all the mailings for the company, and I'm in charge of the affiliate program, so it's not like I can divorce myself from the idea of having children. It's in my face on a daily basis. Every day, some lucky person with twins puts in an order for our zygosity test. I can't even have one, but all these people have two. You can see how this would get disenheartening.

Still, I'm trying to stay positive. Maybe it's possible. If it's not, maybe I can adopt. Unfortunately, with all these maybes, it's sort of hard to make goals! The only thing I know definitively is that Sean doesn't want children right now. Sometimes I wonder if he ever will.

Maybe. :P

I'm petty.

AJ linked me tonight to what may be the greatest video currently on the Internet. I've seen it before...but it never gets old! I think part of the reason I enjoy it so much is that she seems, based solely on her looks, her voice, and that self-indulgent little giggle right before she gets whacked upside the head, to be a total fucking ditzy bitch.

It's shallow, I know. But I can't stop enjoying it. :>

Re: BSSM 26 (I hope she sneezes a LOT.)

Me (12:07:51 AM):		"Luna, it's your specialty to turn into a crazy little human girl with ears and freak everyone out! That's the perfect training for the Princess!"
Shade (12:08:24 AM):		"I hate you, Artemis."

Apathy

Ben said something last night that I thought was hilarious...not necessarily for content, but just the way he said it:

"If no one cared about anything, then...who gives a shit?"

He's a genius, I swear.

I'm awake in the morning today, which is more than I can say for the rest of the week. Every day I've been waking up intermittently and falling back asleep, only to finally drag myself out of bed at around 2 pm. No more, I decided last night. I would get up as soon as I woke up the first time. Armed with that decision, I fought myself valiantly this morning when I woke up: Get up. Get up. You're awake, get up. Get up now. Come on. Get up.

It took my mom opening her door and walking out past my door with the dogs to actually inspire me to move. I figured if they were up, I had no excuse. So I forced myself out of bed, arranged the covers, and hopped into the shower...and here I am. Victorious!

Hopefully this means I'll be able to play with Connor more the next time he spends the night. A few nights ago he was here, and while I played with him during the evening (a rousing game of charades, during which I impersonated a bunny, a crocodile, and his father AJ), I never got up before he left to go home the next day. I've felt bad about that ever since, even though AJ assured me that Connor doesn't hold grudges. It's just uncool to do that to a kid, whether they hold grudges or not. (The worst part of it is, I did wake up and actually went to the bathroom while he was there. He was sitting on Mom's bed and I waved at him, but then I went right back to bed. That's like torture!)

It would take a lot for me to subscribe to Ben's vision of an apathetic world, I guess. I think probably he's more interested in having people leave him alone than anything else. That, at least, I can understand. But I don't think I'd want to get to the point where no one cared about anyone else. That strikes me as a rather cold and unwelcoming world.

Perfectionism

You may have gathered from my previous post that I'm a perfectionist. Then again, you probably knew that already :>

Yesterday I found a link to an article about Web standards on an April Fool's Day joke page. The joke was funny, but the article it linked got me thinking.

First off, you should know that that article is really, really old. It's from 1997! But the things it speaks of--a separation of design and content, and the utilization of meaningful class tags to facilitate swift and accurate information retrieval--don't exist any more now than they apparently did then. Content management systems help, but ultimately all the yokels learning web design are going to tag their HTML for layout. (I never knew using a transparent gif as a spacer was a bad thing! In fact, I thought it was 1) cool and 2) common practice! Apparently only #2 is the case...)

It all makes me want to tear apart this beautiful template I just made and start over.

If you check my source, you'll see that I've put all the CSS in the head. You'll also see that I'm really just using CSS for font weight, style, and size. If I had an ounce of dignity, I'd tag every design element in CSS. The various pieces of the site are currently arrayed in tables--this is, of course, the cardinal sin, and I will be leaving shortly to self-inflict my punitive 60 lashes with the cat-o'-nine-tails.

Ideally, I would have the barebones functions in the Blogger template--nothing relating to layout whatsoever other than pieces to reference CSS code--and the CSS itself in a separate file, called from the Blogger code. In fact, this would be much nicer for me when I want to tweak the layout. Currently I have to republish the entire site, including all archives, whenever I add an element or change a single tag. Yes, that's convenient.

Unfortunately, I'm still not sure how to make CSS do what I want. As far as I can tell, it can't, for example, center the content on the page the way I have it now. My friend Dave says I can use a table for that...but if I give those tables an inch, who knows how many miles they will take!

At this point, I basically can do nothing...but you know this is going to eat at me until I do something about it.

Why?

Why, why, why would you record one take, fuck it all up, and then, instead of practicing until you had it down pat and re-recording, post the fucked-up take to the Internet?

Ugh! UGH! Someone get that boy a fucking metronome!

It seems like more and more people are willing to slap things together, decide it's "good enough", and release it to the public without bothering to make it the best it can be. It's bad enough on the 'net, but at least there it's pretty much free. I see this slackassedness creeping in elsewhere, though...notably in small businesses that overextend and then make fixing the situation a low priority.

Could I be thinking of something in particular? Maybe. Maybe several somethings. :P

All I can say is, this sort of thing really fouls up my mood.

On a lighter note, I'm leaving tomorrow to drive to Kentucky for a nice week of fun with my family. I'll be staying through Easter (yay! Easter dinner! yay! Easter egg hunt!), then driving home on Monday the 12th. This may or may not affect my Internet presence (who am I kidding? I'm taking the laptop!).