I have to hope, I have to believe, that this was Brown vs. Board of Education. If I were to stretch an analogy, I’d call Gavin Newsome the Rosa Parks of the movement. What happened tonight in Cambridge was the unquestionably legal version.
Month: May 2004
I’d been pretty pleased with the Freaks and Geeks DVD set through six episodes, but in the seventh episode the beautiful new girl in class walks into the room in slow motion to the dulcet strains of Billy Joel’s “C’etait Toi.” And Jason Schwartzman guest stars. Now I’m just wholeheartedly recommending it.
18 hour-long episodes, drama with a lot of comedy to it, teenagers in a Wisconsin high school. Not unlike That ’70s Show, except not played for laughs. Decent acting, mostly by people who didn’t act much before or after — I’m sure there’s a story to the whole ensemble and how the show got made, but I dunno what it is. Painful if you don’t want to relive your high school years.
A while back I posted about a slew of identical letters to the editor from Americans in Iraq. It turned out that Lt. Col. Dominic Caraccilo wrote the letters and passed ‘em around to the troops to sign them.
At the time, a couple of the soldiers said he didn’t actually sign the letter. One of them, Shawn Grueser, just posted in the entry linked above confirming that he didn’t sign the letter but saying in no uncertain terms that he would have. I still think you don’t forge a guy’s name without getting his permission, but if Sgt. Grueser doesn’t mind, that’s a pretty strong mitigating factor. And it sounds like he may have been pushed into giving the negative quote he gave at the time.
Here’s what I get from this graph:
If, on September 12th, 2001, you would have told a pollster that you did not approve of George Bush? You are in about a 10% minority. I’m in the same minority.
Oh, sure, it’s also the case that Bush’s support is steadily slipping; you can be satisfied to realize that the majority of the country now agrees with your prescient wisdom. But still, I like being reminded now and again exactly how far out to the fringe I am.
The City of Cambridge will be issuing marriage licenses at the City Clerk’s Office on Monday at the stroke of midnight. The City Clerk’s Office is in the City Hall, at 795 Mass Ave. I intend to be there with champagne, if I can convince any like-minded celebrants to come with. Anyone?
Regarding prisons in Iraq:
“When the duke occupied the Romagna he found it under the rule of weak masters, who rather plundered their subjects than ruled them, and gave them more cause for disunion than for union, so that the country was full of robbery, quarrels, and every kind of violence; and so, wishing to bring back peace and obedience to authority, he considered it necessary to give it a good governor. Thereupon he promoted Messer Ramiro d’Orco [de Lorqua], a swift and cruel man, to whom he gave the fullest power. This man in a short time restored peace and unity with the greatest success. Afterwards the duke considered that it was not advisable to confer such excessive authority, for he had no doubt but that he would become odious, so he set up a court of judgment in the country, under a most excellent president, wherein all cities had their advocates. And because he knew that the past severity had caused some hatred against himself, so, to clear himself in the minds of the people, and gain them entirely to himself, he desired to show that, if any cruelty had been practised, it had not originated with him, but in the natural sternness of the minister. Under this pretence he took Ramiro, and one morning caused him to be executed and left on the piazza at Cesena with the block and a bloody knife at his side. The barbarity of this spectacle caused the people to be at once satisfied and dismayed.”
Secretary Rumsfeld! Ware, ware the knives! Look to your own neck!
Six Apart changed the pricing and the license. You can now buy addons to a personal license at the rate of $10 for one additional weblog and one additional author. They have also removed the CPU limitation. Finally, although they didn’t mention this specifically in their update, they’ve changed the credit requirement from one link per page to one link per site.
They have not removed the prohibition against reverse-engineering, the restriction on automatic computer-generated publishing, and it’s still not legal to put a PayPal link on your Movable Type Personal License weblog.
Quick recommendations for others: if you’re doing a one-person simple personal weblog, I’d use the free version of Movable Type 3.0. If you’re an author who uses her weblog to self-promote, I would find a new solution rather than buy a commercial license. If you’re doing a group blog, you’re going to want to move, I think.
The new pricing plan is not a problem for me, both because I can afford to pay a little more than I’d like and because I don’t run a group blog on Movable Type. It is a problem for others. For a personal license, it would make sense to have an unlimited weblog/author option. Mean Dean has an excellent pricing suggestion. Probably a little low, but you could boost the base price for a personal license to $50.00 easily enough.
At this stage of the game, I’m going to wait and see. WordPress is proving a little cranky; it is not a polished product. The biggest blocker for me is that Brad Choate’s version of Textile 2 is slightly more feature rich than the version that comes with WordPress; I’d have to do a lot of hand-tuning on hundreds of entries to migrate to that solution. I’ll pause while I contemplate how unwise it is to use a platform-specific markup solution… OK, done.
I’ll keep fooling with WordPress and other blog solutions, however, because I think at this point I might want to be on an open source platform. It’s safer for me as a user. It’s not, again, that I’m not willing to pay for software — I paid $50 for Movable Type already! On the other hand, now that I’ve dug into the new plugin capabilities, I have to step back a little from my comments about new features. Movable Type 3.0 is exceedingly feature rich from a plugin point of view.
So, yeah, we’ll see what the future holds. A basic Personal License would cover everything I do; I may still want to move to another solution, depending on exactly how many cool new things third-party developers do with the plugin architecture.
I wonder. Is it a bad sign that I’d sort of prefer a superhero parody movie night to a straight superhero movie night? I mean, hey — The Specials, Mystery Men, and The Incredibles vs. what? Superman, Spider-Man, and X-Men 2? I think the goofy superhero movies are winning. Not by a lot, but they’re ahead.
Possibly The Incredibles will suck, but I would not bet against Pixar.
I can answer these in any order I want! And I want to do WISH 93 right now.
Does joining a game with a lot of background thrill or intimidate you? What do you do to try to learn the background, or to compensate for not having it? If you GM, how do you help newcomers to a background-heavy game? What has worked for you as a player/GM, and what hasn’t?
I kind of like it as an opportunity to play supporting character. I always feel a bit of pressure, when starting a new game, to help establish group dynamics and character. As a newbie to a big game, I can play a supporting role and feel satisfied — I can be there to support someone else’s characterization happily. That’s a lot of fun for me.
It’s also convenient as a method of getting real newbie characterization. The other PCs know things which mine do not, which means I can play wide-eyed or naive effectively. “Look, there can’t possibly be UFOs.” That sort of thing. It’s a dynamic that’s hard to get in a new campaign because everyone’s on equal ground.
I guess in general I’m saying that it’s fun to leverage unequal OOC ground to provide good unequal ground roleplaying in character.
So let’s take a look at the new Movable Type Personal Edition license. Not the whole thing, just excerpts. I’ll stick this in a cut so as to avoid annoying all the nice people who’re wondering when I’m gonna talk about politics or gaming again.
Except for one bit which is so funny and sad that I have to highlight it. A number of people are pointing out that we should expect to pay for good software. I completely agree. However, I also believe that software companies should be expected to write reasonable license agreements, and a license agreement that’s violated by a default installation of the software is not entirely reasonable.
You must maintain, on every page generated by the Software, an operable link to http://www.sixapart.com/movabletype/ , with the link text “Powered by Movable Type”, as specified by Six Apart, unless otherwise stated in the terms included with your copy of the Software.
This is ridiculous. Once I pay $70 for software, I expect to be able to use it without a credit link. I do not have to include a “generated with Microsoft Word” credit on every document I write in Word.
Also, the default Movable Type templates do not include the credit link on pages other than the front page. So just to be clear: everyone who buys the personal edition of Movable Type and installs it will be in violation of the license unless they carefully modify a minimum of ten templates.
On to the other stuff.