Political junkies might be interested in this news. Howard Dean’s 17 year old son was arrested for stealing booze from a local country club today. No big deal; the Senate Majority Leader’s son was just arrested for DUI. Rove’ll try and spin it, though.
Author: Bryant
BookSense allows you to order books online and pick them up at your local independent bookseller. Unfortunately, it’s dog slow, and I’m a bit perturbed by their offer to sell me a book named simply Harry Potter — seems to me that there aren’t enough words in that title.
Also it would be better if they did not direct me to a bookstore in Canton when I live in Somerville.
Warren Ellis has some simple words of wisdom on the Mark Waid firing. Let it rip, Warren:
I dunno. I used to know Mark. He’s been humped by Marvel two or three times previous to this. If you keep going back to a place where they fuck you in the arse with spiky metal things, then after a while people will simply assume you like it. It’s kind of a non-story.
WISH 52 asks what Robin Laws classification fits you best. I’m Iron Man! Um.
Robin Laws identifies several types of gamer in his book of GM tips: The Power Gamer, the Butt-Kicker, the Tactician, the Specialist (plays one type only), the Method Actor, the Storyteller (plot and pacing fan), and the Casual Gamer. Which of these types do you think you are, and why? Most people aren’t pure types, so multiple choices are OK.
I’m some unholy blend between the Method Actor, the Storyteller, and the Tactician. The first two are fairly obvious — I like playing interesting characters, and if you want to call that immersive you can; I also like backstory. Maybe that doesn’t make me a Storyteller, but there’s no Lawsian classification for “people who dig a coherent world.” Unless it’s an aspect of Method Actor, which it might well be.
I blame the Tactician in me on too much exposure to Hero gamers. On the other hand, I do really like D&D 3E grid combat. It’s an interesting challenge at about the right level for me to be interested in it. Wargames and miniatures do not capture my interest, but pushing a little lead figure painted to represent a Celtic Bronze Age priest of Mercury around the map? That’s quality fun!
I mentioned Paul Krugman’s piece on liquidity traps last month — I’d link to it again, but the NYT doesn’t have free archives. Pity. However, thanks to MetaFilter, I can show you this paper (PDF) from the Dallas Federal Reserve. It’s a nice clean explanation of liquidity traps along with some speculation about ways to fend off the one we’re about to hit.
The Game Boy Advance SP is the best computer gaming device I’ve bought in two years and it’s a close second to my Windows PC as the best gaming device I’ve ever bought. It blows my Playstation and Playstation 2 away. Man, what a cool little device.
I had an old Game Boy Color, and it was OK, but it did not have the superslick form factor of the Advance SP. This thing is small enough to carry around comfortably in one hand. Plus it’s got a backlit screen. Plus the CPU is powerful enough to do interesting games.
I am basically a casual gamer, and having a reasonable powerful game system that I can honestly carry in my pocket is perfect for me. Advance Wars is a great turn-based strategy title, and Crash Bandicoot is a decent platformer. Wario Ware, Inc is bizarre and fast paced and I can dump half an hour into it at a time. Which is really the key factor. The Game Boy Advance SP is powerful enough to give me good gaming experiences, but not so powerful that all the games are complex 100 hour extravaganzas of challenge. It rules.
David Neiwert just published the final installment of the “Rush, Newspeak, and Fascism” series. Sorry about the self-link; he doesn’t have a table of contents anywhere. But he says there’s a PDF coming soon.
Anyhow, this installment is fascinating material on the connection between religion and fascism, made all the more important and relevant by the recent Rudolph arrest. And, yes, it’s interesting when considering Islamic terrorism as well. Key coinage: “fascimentalism.”
It’s not time to vote yet. Maybe soon. Who knows?
It’s a pretty tricky issue. The problem is that if elections are held now, you’re going to get either Islamic extremists or Baathist remnants in power. In many ways, Jay Bremer is right. The long-term goal of a democratic country would be poorly served by holding elections right this minute.
This is not, however, news. Most anti-war people noted this problem many months ago. The problem is not that Bremer is putting off elections, it’s that he doesn’t have any clear plan on how to get to them — as predicted. Unfortunately, saying “So what will we do when we win?” was apparently a sign of anti-Americanism.
I think it’s pretty reasonable to ask for a plan at this stage of the game. It’s not as if we’re asking for military secrets. Rather, we’re interested in the question of reconstruction. Surely a wider understanding of how to reconstruct a severely damaged country (damage mostly done by Saddam, just to be clear) would be good for the world?
P.S.: We can’t look at the Afghanistan model, cause it isn’t working. So says the notably left-wing commie pinko symp loonie liberal group known as the Council on Foreign Relations.
I just removed my RSS .91 feed, which should discommode almost nobody — I got about 15 hits on that feed over the last week, most of which were from Web crawlers. Conversely, I got seven hundred or so hits on my RSS 2.0 feed. Thus, I’m not too worried about discommoding people, and I’ll point index.xml at index.rdf just in case. Administrivia done; read on if you care about why I’m making the change. (Hey, he rants about things other than politics.)
The last few days have seen some occasionally heated, occasionally peaceful discussion about Movable Type’s use of RSS 2.0. It was triggered when Dave Winer made the off-hand claim that Movable Type does “funky” RSS. The concise version of the question is simply whether or not Movable Type should wedge some RDF into their RSS 2.0 feed. There is no question but that the spec supports what they’re doing. Dave wrote the spec. Nonetheless, he says that their application of the spec is “totally wrong.”
I would say that it could be improved. For example, the RSS 2.0 spec has <pubDate> as an optional element, and Movable Type uses <dc:date> instead. As a scripter, I prefer working with the latter, since <pubDate> uses RFC 822 date format and is harder to parse than the ISO 8601 date spec used by <dc:date>. Leaving out <pubDate> and putting in <dc:date> is valid RSS 2.0. On the other hand, it wouldn’t hurt to put <pubDate> in as well and it might make some aggregators happier.
However, “it could be improved” is a far cry from “it’s wrong.” And bitching about something in public, then refusing to explain complaints is a terrible way to get things done. From all accounts, Ben and Mena Trott (the people behind Movable Type) are nice friendly folks. If I’d been in Dave’s shoes, I’d have emailed them and suggested adding a couple of fields to the default templates. I bet they’d have done it — why not?
Instead, we get paranoid fantasies in which the Trotts stuck in the RDF in order to gain a competitive advantage. That’s nuts. The only way that’s a competitive advantage is if there are aggregators which will do extra things with the extra information… and if that’s true, then I can’t see how the Trotts can be faulted for taking advantage of that. Nothing’s stopping Dave from doing the same thing.
Long story short, I don’t care to support Dave’s formats. I don’t like the way he writes a spec which permits namespaces, then implies that any use of namespaces is bad. So… no more WinerRSS for me; I’m content with RSS 1.0. And, from the evidence of my Web traffic logs, so are the vast majority of my readers.