The Case Against Prop 8

Today is the first day of the Trial against Prop 8 (more).

I can't help myself... rant time. A number of small unrelated rantlettes follows:

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One of the statements made today was that same-sex marriage "De-institutionalizes" the institution of marriage, [thus, I presume, harming the marriages of heterosexuals]. What absolute utter bonking absurdity.

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In blog comments, I saw a slippery-sloper argue "If gays are allowed to marry, what next? We'll have to let siblings marry each other!"

For the sake of argument... let's ignore the 'inbreeding' angle for a moment. Siblings are already 'family', automatically imbued with state and federal recognition of their of their relationship. As "Next of Kin" they have legal rights that have, in many cases, TRUMPED the rights of a sibling's domestic partner. For siblings to marry each other would be, honestly, somewhat redundant. All they need do is NOT marry someone else.

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I swear, if I hear one more person complain about the "liberals attempting to re-define the institution of marriage", I'll scream.

Think back for a moment... who were the two biggest advocates for Prop 8, trying to entrench their "one man, one woman" definition of marriage? The Catholic Church, and ancient order of unmarried men who have a shameful history of harboring pedophiles... and The Mormons who got their start believing that women were so utterly inferior to men that guys should be entitled to multiple wives.

If you ask me, both groups have 'issues' that render them unqualified to be 'defining' marriage for anyone.

They're welcome to believe whatever they want. It's a free country.
... or it was until they joined forces to impose their beliefs on the rest of us.

The next shift...

Been thinking about the next Geek Culture shift.. (Tech Geeque?) and what flavor it is likely to have.

Certainly it will have something to do with AR (augmented reality).

If you look at the evolution of music 'technology' and 'usage' you have:
* LIVE - nothing but live performance for centuries, limited to what local culture preferred and what talent could offer
* RECORDED - musical recordings made a wide variety of music available to anyone at almost anytime
* BROADCAST - broadcast music made music easier to access and built an economy of scale for popular performers
* PORTABLE - listening to music became portable thanks to smaller devices and car stereos
* PERSONAL - music became more diverse and more intensely 'personal' thing thanks headphones/earbuds
* PERVASIVE - internet radio stations at work, car stereos, music in stores, it's inescapable

To a limited degree much the same has happened with movies, which use to be more of a social phenomenom, now with home theaters, netflix, iPhones, tivo, LCD screens running commercials at gas pumps... watching visual media has also becomes portable, personal and pervasive.

Person to Person communication, from written correspondence, books and newspapers to email, twitter, facebook, and (video) blogs on the 'text' side and on the voice side you go from hit-or-miss shared party-line bake-a-lite house phones to blue-tooth earpieces. Both being more portable, personal and pervasive than ever.

Even computing resources, which started off as large timeshared systems are now laptops, tablets, PDAs, and of course, more portable, personal and pervasive, etc.

Same will be true with "Augmented Reality". At the moment it's little niche-y instances like "hold this postcard up to your laptop camera and on the screen you'll see some 3d model spring out of the page. Or the iPhone app that uses GPS to provide you a clairevoyant view of transportation/services around you. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ps49T0iJwVg)

As rendering/display technology gets cheaper, lighter, smaller, faster it won't be long before semi-transparent glasses with built in displays become available, tied via bluetooth or something like it to a key-fob sized processor allow us to view the world through filters that we select. You like noire? Stroll through downtown and through your lenses all the buildings will be dark with red velvet drapes in every window. Jog through the neighborhood and use the sky as your big screen to watch the music video that goes with the music you're listening too. Easily see the names of friends at crowded events.

* driving, you could have lanes of traffic or off-ramps haloed in red, yellow or green depending on reported traffic conditions, and have 'personal signs' added to the side of the road guiding you on your way

With simple eye-tracking controls you could, for example:
* activate a digital zoom, night vision, or digital 'x-ray' view, snapshot or record video of what you're looking at
* go shopping and look at UPC codes as you pick up items and price compare, or count calories, or manage your shopping list.
* scan and mark your personal calendar nearly instantly
* be reminded of names and notes of people you encounter with face recognition

As phones are rapidly becoming 'hands free' devices. It's only natural that PDA's will too, eventually.

9/11 terrorists coming to trial in NYC

Apparently the right wing is all up in arms about how terrible/awful/bad/unsafe/disrepectful this is --> http://crooksandliars.com/susie-madrak/alleged-911-masterminds-be-tried-nyc

Only because they rely on their strength of numbers can they get away with this cowardly ignorant un-American hypocritical protest.


We are a nation of LAW. Bush undermined that by fiat when he ignored due process, and the rest of our government was too shocked/intimidated/confused or sold-out to protest as they should have. So much for liberty and justice for all.

Yes. The terrorists are not U.S. citizens, and technically not protected by our constitution or bill of rights. Ask yourself this... they committed the crime HERE. Where should they be tried? HERE. How is that not blatently obvious? Even the supreme court seems to agree (in Boumediene_v._Bush)

"But American lives will at risk if they get off on a technicality". Excuse me? Imagine you're a terrorist who helped bring down the world trade center... and now you have a chance of being set free... Which is the LAST city on this planet you'd want to be set free in? Hm? If you paused even a moment before saying "New York City" you're an idiot.

Will "Americans" be hurt by these trials? Likely yes... the bastards that ignored American law and principles may be be exposed for what they are: instruments of a tyranny. They are people that brought shame on this country in how they responded to this attack and have disgraced us in the eyes of the rest of our planet. They made hypocrites of us all.

To use some of the right's vile rhetoric: "We invite future terrorist attacks by..." by showing we're so quick to disregard our laws and ethics... things that we, as a nation, hold to be an inherent definition of what we stands for.

Not to make light of 9/11, but if we forget who we are anytime some jihadist knocks down a few buildings... they're going to continue trying just for the sport of it, like a malicious child tormenting ant hills to see the fury and chaos that results.

Bringing these people to trial is a good thing. And they all should come to trial, not some of them secreted away to 'military tribunals'.

It is time to stop playing at their level and return to our own.

Aion

For anyone else that may be playing (or interested in playing)... Aion.

I currently have 5 Asmodian characters, all on Yustiel:

Jopsy - Chanter
Tortis - Templar
Jopster - Spirit Master
Jormungand - Sorcerer
Presto - Mule (err... Spirit master)

gmail = amsterdam?!

Okay, just minding my own business here, tried to access my gmail stuff and got no response from their servers. (A rare enough occurance that my curiosity spun up).

So, I wanted to know if I was getting through to the gmail servers... and if there were problems between me and them.

Turns out... I'm being routed to AMSTERDAM?! I can't get my email because it's at a pot bar somewhere? ;)

Bizarre. San Jose I would have expected... but Europe? Whiskey Tango Foxtrot.
traceroute to gmail.com (74.125.79.83) ...
1 192.168.5.1 (192.168.5.1) ...
2 98-99-121-165.sbx14022.sandica.wayport.net (98.99.121.165) ...
3 12.90.139.97 (12.90.139.97) ...
4 cr83.sffca.ip.att.net (12.122.110.102) ...
5 cr1.sffca.ip.att.net (12.123.15.109) ...
6 ggr3.sffca.ip.att.net (12.122.137.21) ...
7 att-gw.sanfran.level3.net (192.205.33.78) ...
8 vlan79.csw2.SanJose1.Level3.net (4.68.18.126) ...
9 ae-74-74.ebr4.SanJose1.Level3.net (4.69.134.245) ...
10 ae-2.ebr4.NewYork1.Level3.net (4.69.135.186) ...
11 ae-94-94.csw4.NewYork1.Level3.net (4.69.134.126) ...
12 ae-91-91.ebr1.NewYork1.Level3.net (4.69.134.77) ...
13 ae-3-3.ebr4.Washington1.Level3.net (4.69.132.93) ...
14 ae-94-94.csw4.Washington1.Level3.net (4.69.134.190) ...
15 ae-92-92.ebr2.Washington1.Level3.net (4.69.134.157) ...
16 ae-44-44.ebr2.Frankfurt1.Level3.net (4.69.137.61) ...
17 ae-2-2.ebr1.Dusseldorf1.Level3.net (4.69.132.137) ...
18 ae-1-100.ebr2.Dusseldorf1.Level3.net (4.69.141.150) ...
19 ae-2-2.ebr1.Amsterdam1.Level3.net (4.69.133.89) ...
20 ae-11-51.car1.Amsterdam1.Level3.net (4.69.139.130) ...
21 GOOGLE-INC.car1.Amsterdam1.Level3.net (212.72.46.230) ...
22 209.85.254.250 (209.85.254.250) ...
23 64.233.175.246 (64.233.175.246) ...
24 72.14.239.199 (72.14.239.199) ...
25 209.85.255.118 (209.85.255.118) ...
26 ey-in-f83.google.com (74.125.79.83) ...

Unintelligent Design

Whoever was behind the intelligent design initiative was absolutely brilliant.

What better way to promote a sense of martyred solidarity among the faithful than to offer a seemingly 'reasonable' middle ground between creationism and evolutionism. One that was obviously laughable, ludicrous and offensive to the 'fact-based' scientific community.

Perhaps we were wrong to laugh them down so savagely, it seems to have only further polarized the country along creationist/evolutionist lines more than ever.

There isn't even room for debate any longer. People are on one team or another and they just don't talk about it... and it seems like more of this country is swallowing the 'ignorance is bliss' tainted kool-aid dished out by the likes of Glenn Beck and blow-hards like BillO'Reilly and the mega-churches of the religious right.

Who cares if you're right, as long as the mob is on your side. Speaking of mobs, what the hell is it with the "no public option" loonies? I have yet to find a single coherent logical argument AGAINST a single payer public option. I've looked. And Looked. No one can put it in terms that make any sense to me. Maybe I'm an idiot, how would I know?

Rant rant rant. Anyone want to help me understand the opposition a bit better? Please?

More Aion...

More on Aion ... "Open Beta Week" is over, the above images are my now deceased characters: Frodo (a ranger), Jopsaro (an assassin), Sethgreen (a gladiator) and Elamont (spirit master with his water pet there). (click on them to enlarge)

I know I said I was going to be on Triniel with my Asmodae characters... but apparently that's now considered an 'east coast' server. Considering that I tend to game late at night, I may actually jump into the Oceanic server 'Nezekan'. I'll still use Vaizel for my Eloys characters if I bother with that side. It seems Asmodae are *far* more popular at the moment, that could be a balance problem for Aion.

Aion is fun to play and beautiful to look at.

It's a shame their login system is such a spewing mess of festering dog vomit!

The "Pre-select" phase started at noon today. The point of this is to allow pre-order customers to reserve names and servers they want to play on. Due to "Technical issues" that were not present during either beta phases, I haven't been able to get into Aion to pick my server or names today. "Can not connect to authentication server." is the error I keep getting, when it bothers to give me an error at all. The rest of the time it just silently sits there doing nothing after I attempt to log in.

Somewhat disappointed. More annoyed at how much time I wasted today trying to figure out if this problem was on MY side or not.

YES my dsl link is working fine.

YES my copy of Aion is fully patched.

YES I completely re-installed Aion FROM SCRATCH.

YES I tried it without my firewall up.

YES I tried sacrificing a chicken at midnight. (okay no, not really).

YES I sent a barking mad ticket in to ncsoft tech support... maybe I'll get another unhelpful auto-reply from them someday.

ANYWAY. It's not like I can actually PLAY.. still have to wait for Sunday for that. Assuming I can actually log in on Sunday. (I'm not feeling lucky at the moment).

ANYWAY... sorry. Grumpy. (This blog is for random ranting after all. There you go.)

So, a report card, CLOSED BETA performance compared to OPEN BETA performance:

Graphics: No change, still excellent. I'm embarassed to say I've got over 500 snapshots from the game on disk now, which is very unlike me. Maybe part of the photofrenzy is based on knowing my beta characters would soon be gone forever and I wanted some record of having them.

Gameplay: No change, still love it... Glad so much of the content seems to be solo-able and pick-up groups come together easily enough for the few areas where soloing is suicidal.

Chat "content": WORSE. This isn't a technical issue, it's a "newbie behavior" issue. It's better just to turn OFF the region and LFG channels to avoid the trolls. Conversation is dominated by WoW-fans/deserters. Hopefully now that the beta tourist/trolls have to subscribe and pay to blather on things will calm down a little.

The Chat System itself in Aion, frankly, still blows chunks:

1. The /ignore command. We have no choice over how we use caps in our names, why is this command case sensitive? Sorry but that just utterly moronic. Fortunately there doesn't seem to be a limit to how many people you can ignore.
   
2. Local chat prefix is /s, (or /normal ?) It was too much trouble to add /say as an option? Way too many people are confused by this... and obviously so because of #3...
   
3. unknown /slashcommands should NOT be echoed to the current chanel. They should generate an error "command /whatever unknown". or something.
   Chat system NEEDS WORK.

Voicework: Somewhat more annoying. After a week of listening to the clerics yelling "Dombraro" I have to admit I liked whatever they were chanting before. The shriek of the female in their battle cries is just over the top annoying. Fortunately I think that kind of voicework can be easily reduced in volume in options.

Music: IMPROVED. more nicely integrated than last time. More subtle, less stage-stealing/repetative. Yay! =)

LAG: SAME, little to none. Almost non-existant in my experience, had 20 minutes of rubberbanding around midnight and a disconnect, but the rest of the day was smooth as butter. The complaints about lag, (from what sounds like ComCast customers) was unending though. (Unfortunately they weren't lagged enough to completely silence them. ;)

FPS: SAME. very decent with mostly maxed out settings on my 4 year old box. Max-rez tends to make the video cut-scenes stutter some, so I stay on a slightly lower rez setting, with the other params maxed.

New Character Appearance Options: IMPROVED. Heh... Without intending to at first, one of my characters started looking like Seth Green, so, well, I tinkered with his face a bit more and have been getting compliments in game for the resemblance. (er, well, green skin not withstanding) =) oh, and because we can't have spaces or caps after the first letter in names, he was merely dubbed "Sethgreen". Sigh. Anyway.

Questing Choke Points: MUCH IMPROVED. No where near as big an issue as it was in Closed Beta, they apparently added several more 'channels' (parallel instances of the newbie areas)... definitely a better experience than in closed beta where a standing group of 30 people were standing around cutting in line to grab a quest completions item in a few spots. (they only spawn once a minute it seems)

Logging In: STILL AWFUL. The loading screen takes *FOREVER*. Far too often progress never advances from the LOGIN page to the EULA page because the authentication servers are overloaded. Heck you don't even know if the game is hung or still trying half the time. I've waited for EULA page to come up for 10 minutes with no feedback. Bad... bad... bad... terrible.. unprofessional... bad. Add progress bars or *something*. @)#%&)#*$#. I've been trying to get into the pre-select for 45 minutes now. 50% of the time, the login page hangs, 50% of the time I get a auth server not responding. *grr*

Crafting: (no experience with it in closed beta). As a long time Secondlifer, the idea of crafting in MMO's seems more like collecting ceral box-tops and mailing them back in for prizes to me. Normally, I can't be bothered with it. Even so, I dabbled with "crafting" in Aion a little during the open beta, and may play with it further in the live version. The apparatus is nicely modelled/animated, the system seems reasonable. Fair activity to engage in while watching a movie or something on the side. ;)

I still need to shop around to find a large casual mostly PvE, guild of level-headed gamers to join up with. My goals are to explore the classes I've picked to play to their fullest and to see the world... not to farm the same content over and over. That may not be compatible with a lot of guilds.