Posts

Tim Bray wonders if the use of “stand up” to mean “deploy” is a defense/intelligence IT coinage. I think the answer is yes. I hire ex-military IT people when I can (see below), and they always use “stand up” like that. Sidenote: in my experience, IT people who’ve spent a while in the military are diligent and responsible and get things done. I look for people who’ve reenlisted a couple of times, rather than people who’ve done one term and left. The kind of discipline they learn is incredibly useful. For example, military IT people will invariably write runbooks. (Hire a veteran today!)

Feeling fitful. Posting to be light or non-existent until such time as feeling goes away. Nocturnals M&M book v. good. Adventure! D20 as expected; not v. good but solid. Pavis/Big Rubble omnibus reprinting v. good. Believe I have finally cracked the Glorantha mindset. Much like perl mindset, but with less punctuation. (Previous sentence, while jocular, is not a joke.) Still not king.

OK, but I will take a second to note that my respect for Pat Tillman grows more and more the more I learn about him (original). Sounds like he thought a lot. Sounds like he didn’t care much about convention. I already knew that he turned down big money to go fight for his country, and I already knew that he turned down a large contract earlier in his career so he could stay in Arizona with his team. I didn’t know he attended a christening in drag, or that he read as much as he seems to have. ...

Any MMORPG in which I can create a big bruiser wearing a green suit and a sleek black shirt, with a wrestling mask to match? That’s an MMORPG which is perfectly OK by me. I had a refreshing evening of beating up thugs and muggers, during which I looked a lot like this (click the thumbnail for the big picture): Now, that’s what I call entertainment.

The eloquent Bill provides his own Kaiju review, which touches on all the Lovecraftian elements I ignored. Plus he opens a much needed discussion on the subject of Super Wrong, and how Super Wrong’s valets failed to do right by the budding superstar.

In April, people grabbed the index.xml file at the root of this site 499 times, presumably hoping for an RSS 2.0 feed. Mostly it was two aggregators politely retrieving the file once per hour. Sadly, that file hasn’t gotten any new content for three months, since I decided to only maintain an RSS 1.0 feed and an Atom feed. I was going to hand-craft a new item for that feed explaining that I had given up on it, but then I noticed that it was already in RSS 1.0 for some reason, so I just linked it to the RSS 1.0 feed and had done with it. This entry may or may not reach the eyes of the people behind those two aggregators, but if they’re paying attention they’ll see it. (Hi, guys! I’d switch to /index.rdf, but you don’t have to if you don’t wanna.) ...

I girded my teeth. I gritted my loins. I ventured out, bold and unafraid, into the strange world where art students meet wrestling and nothing is safe; where every entrance theme is J-Pop; where the heels are square and the faces are from Mars. I did it — for Johnny. I dunno, man. It’s like wrestling, but they wear big Japanese monster suits made out of foam rubber. And it happens in my city. Like I wasn’t gonna get down to a show eventually. ...

I now believe that Hollywood is in imminent danger of being destroyed by an angry God. It’s an unavoidable side-effect of reading the fall 2004 TV pilot roundup. It’s nice to know that Seth MacFarlane (“Family Guy”) is working on another animated show. I did not particularly want to know that Rob Lowe is in a pilot in which he plays the in-house doctor at a Vegas casino. Nor do I have much hope for the premise “Animated show about Siegfried & Roy’s Vegas act, told through the eyes of the animals.” Or “Suburban mom uses psychic powers to solve crime.” ...

Compare and contrast: “Are we going too soft in Iraq? Some people think so. It seems that way to me, too, though I’m reluctant to make a judgment at this distance. But in my lifetime, at least, the United States has generally erred by not being violent enough, rather than by being too brutal.” That’s Glenn Reynolds, April 30th, 2004. “It was American soldiers serving as military police at Abu Ghraib who took these pictures (original). The investigation started when one soldier got them from a friend, and gave them to his commanders. 60 Minutes II has a dozen of these pictures, and there are many more – pictures that show Americans, men and women in military uniforms, posing with naked Iraqi prisoners. “There are shots of the prisoners stacked in a pyramid, one with a slur written on his skin in English. “In some, the male prisoners are positioned to simulate sex with each other. And in most of the pictures, the Americans are laughing, posing, pointing, or giving the camera a thumbs-up.” ...

t.rev is cranking out some excellent stuff in the comment thread below. In a war, you have a large set of actors and a much larger set of actions taken by said actors. Some actions will be heroic, some will be atrocities, many will be just grim violence, and the vast majority will be mind-numbingly tedious. Some actions will be essentially unobserved (no one will survive them), most will be observed by a handful, and a tiny fraction will be observed and communicated on a wider scale. Each side in a war will have what you could call an ‘atrocity-averseness’ factor, which is going to be dependent on two things: the expected number of observers of a given atrocity, and the damage that a given perceived atrocity will cause to that side (in morale, diplomacy, etc.) I would argue that the US has an extremely high atrocity-averseness factor, for reasons that I think are obvious (or deserve a different essay, anyway). ...