Londo the Pantless Wonder

I used to think it was awful that life was so unfair. Then I thought, 'wouldn't it be much worse if life *were* fair, and all the terrible things that happen to us come because we actually deserve them?' So now I take great comfort in the general hostility and unfairness of the universe.

--Marcus Cole, Babylon 5

I like Jeff Atwood a lot. Come to think of it he may be my very favorite tech blogger. He has a lot of good stuff on a lot of topics, and having run social media platforms for several years (heard of Stack Overflow? He's a cofounder) he's got a lot of thoughts about how human beings interact, both on the internet and in general. And his latest is a thing that takes a lot of digesting, because it's about why we're all so terrible to each other.

I've been trying to come up with a cogent summary of his most recent post without just regurgitating half of it, but instead, I'll say this: If you liked that one amazing MetaFilter thread about emotional labor, you know, the one that I spent two weeks reading comments on, that dethroned the 10-year reigning champ for "best thread on the entire internet", that one - if you care about how humans treat each other on the internet, why they're bastards, why we seem to be meaner to women than men - basically if you're any of the hundred or so people I think actually read my LJ on any kind of regular basis - carve out 10 minutes to read this damn thing, consider reading the links on the thing, and expect to spend a few minutes when you're done just going "well that was kinda heavy."

But make the time.

They Have To Be Monsters

Have you ever played Call of Cthulhu? Of course you haven't.

So there's this game, and it's in the same "pencil and paper RPG" category as Dungeons and Dragons, except, instead of playing valiant heroes out to save the world and gain treasure, you're playing everyday schmucks trapped in a universe that does not give a shit and will probably not even notice if it steps on you. The winning strategy in Call of Cthulhu is to stay the fuck home and remain ignorant until the day you die, which hopefully will be relatively quick and without pain. I mean, this is a universe where there's this one entity that sometimes shows up in front of people and says "hey I've got a deal for you, how about I implant these eggs into you, and over the next couple months they'll eat you alive from the inside and drive you insane, and consume your body and mind for sustenance until they eventually erupt from inside you, killing you, but don't worry be then you'll probably be too far gone to notice," and you say "hm, I'm not sure how I feel about that, what are my other options?" and it counteroffers with instant death. Fun, right?

But if you wanna be super intrepid, and gain a tiny smidgen of power - not enough to do anything except maybe lord it over some poor schmuck who has taken the aforementioned winning move - you can go out and find some truly dangerous books and learn magical secrets. The problem is, you were Not Meant To Know these things, and learning them really will drive you permanently mad, by reducing both your current sanity score, and your maximum permanent sanity score. Becoming a sorcerer of any real power requires you to a) be willing to make yourself permanently nuts and b) get really lucky on your permanent-sanity-reducing rolls. (This is a problem in a game where even just *looking* at most Weird Things can push you towards madness.)

Today I confirmed some terrible things about a particular Oracle driver I'm using at work, and it's an interface that's implemented SO BADLY that I feel like I have lost sanity points just for learning about it, and forcing myself to work around it. If you're into databases, the description is here. If you're not, then really all you need to know is that it's sort of like a firearm that has a safety switch that doesn't do anything. It's not technically *guaranteed* to cause trouble, but it probably will make someone somewhere relax their guard and something will get a fresh hole blown in it.

Ok, so anyone who's looked at education in the last decade knows what "STEM" is.

But now they've added an A. Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics.

...isn't that, you know, basically... all human knowledge? Don't we traditionally just call that "education"?

So I came across this thing a couple days ago. You probably know that sometimes we do stuff that generates radioactive waste. When we do, we need a place to put it. One of the places we put it is about 25 miles out of Carlsbad, NM, and it's called the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, and it's going to be radioactive for about ten thousand years. That's about 400 generations of humans. That's about twice as long as it's been since anyone anywhere on the planet invented writing. And there's some people who have been thinking about what to do and how to mark the site in a way that'll last all ten thousand of those years, and be resistant to all the dangers that will happen then. Erosion (easy), silt dunes (less easy), culture drift (hard), and the extreme likelihood that future generations of humans will loot anything valuable, and/or conclude that anything that looks like a fortress must be guarding some kind of treasure (impossible, but maybe we can solve this with creepiness)?

http://www.wipp.energy.gov/picspro…

It's a pretty fascinating read. If you liked the Millenarians when you read Anathem, you should read the crap out of this. If you didn't like Anathem, well, I didn't either, and I still found this article plenty fascinating.

I like people who know who they are, and who are unrepentantly themselves. This washes over into my music, too.

For the last decade or so, two of my favorite bands have been Sonata Arctica and Nightwish. Both metal bands from Europe, specifically Finland. And I perceive a pretty big culture difference between European metal bands and American ones, because the latter are all infused with a need to seem cool. The former are more often infused with a desire to BE AWESOME, and clearly give no fucks if you like them or not. And it was a disappointment to me when both bands have come out with two lame, weak albums in a row: Dark Passion Play (2007, Nightwish), Imaginaerum (2011, Nightwish), Stones Grow Her Name (2012, Sonata Arctica), and Pariah's Child (2014, Sonata Arctica). The Nightwish albums were okay, and they were majorly focused on their lead singer, who they lost in 2005, so a stumble was natural. I have no idea what Sonata Arctica's problem is, but they still seem like they're having fun, even if I'm not having that much fun along with them these days.

Nightwish lost their new lead singer mid-tour, and got an emergency replacement who was incredibly good, and who they later decided to bring on permanently. They released their new album on Tuesday. I was really doing my best not to be invested in it, after four disappointments in a row from my two favorite bands, each worse than the last. But the new singer is really really good, and they brought on a guy who does uillean pipes, also a former guest star on previous albums. And the thought of hearing Nightwish at full blast again was pretty awesome. What they delivered has pretty well blown me out of the water.

Nightwish has always produced music that's entirely free of shame, but this album has done a whole other thing. It's made out of the polar opposite of shame, of a thing that annihilates shame in a burst of energy like matter does antimatter. The songs are centered around evolution, the extreme unlikeliness of life ever having existed, and the extent to which that makes whatever life does exist inherently amazing by contrast. The title of the album (and one of the songs on it) is taken from a quote from Darwin's On the Origin of the Species:

There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

...and really, that spirit infuses the whole album, and is close to the core of what I love about both bands: some of the things they sing about are wonderful, and some of them are terrible, but the spirit with which they engage those topics is universally, wholeheartedly, full-throatedly life-affirming.

The whole thing is fantastic, and there's not a bad song on the album, though for sure I like some more than others. Special mention, though, has to be given to the last track, which is an orgiastic edifice of amazingness. It clocks in at 24 minutes and 1 second. Surely at some point in the process someone must have said "Do you really want to go there?" The response, clearly, was, "We will not merely 'go there', we will drastically change the labor allocation of entire nations with which to build a 'there', and a shining public transit system to 'there' which, alone, could rival any of the Ancient Wonders, and we will see to it that free tickets on this system are delivered to every person now living on this glorious earth." And lo, for the interloper then said, "I don't know, doesn't that seem silly?" and humanity is richer for that person having been ignored. It is the entire band, now a sextet, ejaculating pure prog-rock-symphonic-metal all over your face for almost a half an hour, and I for one am pleased to greet our new rock-bukakke overlords. Indeed, LSD and other substances may well have come into existence primarily so they could one day be consumed prior to listening to this song.

Some day, I will be dead, and so will you. But for now, we are alive, and where there is life, there is at least the potential for joy, and that is a great and wonderful thing.

We were here.

I am doing up sheets for Attack of the Candymancer at Intercon and it is gonna be awesome. Who is around Friday morning?

Oooh, data: http://www.redbubble.com/people/wi…

The concept of "mana" as magical power doesn't have anything to do with the Bible. It comes from Polynesia. By way of a Larry Niven book. And then eventually, Magic the Gathering camealong: http://theappendix.net/issues/2014…

You've heard of the Golden Spiral. Someone invented an electrum one. Or something. It's pretty: http://www.theguardian.com/science…

If you've ever found yourself wondering where white supremacist views are incubated, this might be interesting to you: http://www.salon.com/2013/11/17/am…

The Prime Minister of France was born to Spanish immigrants, and says that if anti-Semitism wins, France loses: http://www.theatlantic.com/interna… (Speaking of fucked up things in France, I also liked this: http://www.newyorker.com/culture/c… )

It turns out that the trend of "let the girl handle the paperwork" starts early: http://www.theatlantic.com/educati…

http://happyplace.someecards.com/d… - Does what it says on the tin.

Pope Francis actually said God isn't "a magician with a magic wand" while speaking at the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. He didn't say it formally ex cathedra in an Officially Infallible sort of way, but he did say it: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/…

If you don't know the word "hygge", you should. It's approximately the most wholesome thing ever. http://www.mnn.com/family/family-a…

The USGS put together some photos in desperate hope that anyone will remember they exist. Their photos are pretty cool and come with some awesome text, which you will like if you like stuff like XKCD's What-If? http://www.usgs.gov/blogs/features… You might also enjoy this, which contains some really interesting stuff about the Mississippi River: http://www.americaswetlandresource…

In "The Usual Suspects", the director convinced a lot of the lead actors that [SPOILER]. This is kinda awesome: http://fictionmachine.com/2014/10/…

The science of baking, distilled into one gigantically tall .jpg: http://i.imgur.com/zr77WAz.jpg


Let's talk about war.

The Civil War wasn't about slavery, except that it absolutely fucking was: http://www.theatlantic.com/nationa…

World War II was the best thing ever to happen for the American economy: http://www.theatlantic.com/interna… (short version - every other industrialized nation got blown up a lot)

Race war is happening right now, but this guy is pretty cool: http://gawker.com/police-chief-res…

This guy is.... not cool: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015…

America should maybe fight wars in less terrible ways: http://www.theatlantic.com/feature…

If we don't, we might need to bring back the draft: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazin…

Lastly, folding a fitted sheet is the great problem of our time. These helpful instructions simplify the task a lot: http://thedoghousediaries.com/4491

Robin Williams died today.

He's one of the few real role models I had as a kid. He was, for a long time, the exemplar of "there is clearly something off about that man's brain chemistry, but he's turned it into an asset." As someone who has the former, but not the latter, knowing that sort of thing was possible for me was... a star in the sky to navigate by. A thing to check in on, every now and again, to remind myself that however slow progress seemed, and however unlikely I was to ever actually reach it, that there was a destination, a thing to go towards and not just things to run away from.

His death changes none of that. That he achieved it, showed me it was possible, will remain meaningful for the rest of my life.

But I am a little bit sadder for it.

Last night, the House Majority Leader Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA) lost in the Republican primary. He spent $5 million in the primary (which is insanely high) and lost to a guy who only spent $200k. Normally when someone this famous gets primaried, they think about running as an independent, but Cantor's whole shtick is tied to being Totally A Republican, so that seems unlikely.

This is super crazy, and not a thing I ever saw coming, and so far the news suggests no one else did either. I don't think any House Republican slept well last night, and I wouldn't be surprised if Paul Ryan stayed up all night trying to figure out how to snag the Majority Leader position in January.

I visited my grandmother last night, and she spent a good chunk of the time I spent with her talking about coupon-related shenanigans she'd engaged in, and how cheaply she'd managed to acquire various things. None of them were quite so impressive as her "I got them to pay me to take this food away" stories (triple coupons FTW), but they were still pretty awesome.

So basically powergaming is in my blood.