Month: April 2005

Sucked In To Something Positive

One of the webcomics everybody seems to like is Something Positive. I’d checked it out before and given it the “eh.” It’s smart, it seemed funny sometimes, but at the time I looked at it there was a lot of soap opera going on, to which I didn’t know the backstory, and as always it was just so damned bitter.

This was 2004, the year I spent obsessively watching the Democrats spend a year losing to the worst president in generations, while continuing to take it in the shorts in terms of congressional seats and governorships. I had more than enough bitterness in my own soul to go around, I didn’t need a webcomic that gave me more.

But now that I’ve achieved some relative peace by ceasing to have any hope whatsoever for our political process as it stands, and stuff like that, for some reason I went back to Something Positive. I guess it was all the links to it on the webcomics I *do* like. Or maybe there was a hole in my heart left from having gotten about a storyline and a half behind on Scary-Go-Round for some reason. Anyway, I came back to Something Positive and started reading it from the beginning, and ya know, I’m kinda getting into it. There’s some funny stuff. The characters are horribly bitter and mean, but they do have hearts hiding under there and if you read about ’em enough you start caring about ’em. And if you read the thing from the beginning, you get to see where Choo-Choo Bear, the creepy boneless cat, came from.

I’m afraid I might actually be hooked on S*P.

The Long Emergency

There was a recent article in Rolling Stone (via pk at Puddingbowl) about imminent consequences of passing Peak Oil — that is, the point where the oil we can get from the world’s reserves starts diminishing, until eventually it’s all gone. The author has a blog too.

This has been the “preying on my mind and threatening to depress the hell out of me” thing of the moment.

I dunno. We lived through the Cold Wr without reducing the world to radioactive slag. We managed to fix our software to the point that the Y2K problem passed us by with barely a blip. Maybe we’ll get through this all OK too, if it happens. And maybe the changes that do happen won’t all be bad ones.

Wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing if America wasn’t Super-Global-Corporate-Military-King-Of-The-Walmart-Universe anymore, if we had to be just another nation in the world, getting by as best we could.

It’s just that if civilization as we know it does collapse over the next few years, well… that is so far from being something I could conceivably do a damn thing about, worrying about it isn’t gonna do much except make me miserable right now (as opposed to when civilization as we know it collapses).

Right?

UPDATE: One of the few days I go the whole day without checking BoingBoing, and it turns out they have a lengthy and several-times-updated article on Peak Oil, which contains a lot of different points of view on Peak Oil, its date, and its possible consequences.

Haroog! Ey, Woimy’s back

Haroog! Ey, Woimy’s back — if you read Dragon magazine back in the late 70s or early 80s, you may have seen a strangely wonderful fantasy comic about dragons, imps, and ogres with New Jersey accents, and a hillbilly cyclops.

This site collects (low-quality but still readable) scans of dozens of Wormy pages. I remember as a 13 year old child being fascinated and befuddled by this one… completely out of context, it was the only issue of Dragon I owned for a long time… Look at that last page! LOOK at it! THAT is fantasy art!

The creator of Wormy, and a lot of the best art in the original Advanced Dungeons & Dragons books, David A. Trampier, disappeared in 1988. There was apparently considerable doubt in the gaming community as to whether he was even alive or had met some sudden end, though most commentary on the issue I see on the web holds to the notion that he is in fact alive and just rendered himself unfindable and uncontactable by anyone who knew him through gaming. One of those weird mysteries of roleplaying games.

Anyway, I’m gonna have to browse through all these and find out exactly what was going on with Wormy…

Hatin’ on Ubuntu

Via Alterslash/slashdot, apparently the elder lords of Debian (including the Ian in Deb-Ian, but not the Deb apparently) are annoyed by Ubuntu because Ubuntu’s software, based on Debian’s unstable version, isn’t very compatible with Debian’s almost-stable-but-not-quite-there-still version.

I use Ubuntu now on my linux box. I used to use Debian exclusively (after having gone through a “try every distribution under the sun” phase where I’d always end up back with Debian cause it was the best thing I could find). But I stopped recommending Debian to friends about a year or so ago when I tried to help two friends install Debian’s stable version on a desktop and server machine of theirs and realized how bad it had become, at least for people like me and my friends.

The then-current stable version of Debian, Woody — which by coincidence is also the now-current stable version of Debian — had crappy-ass hardware detection, worse than any other linux distribution, I kid you not. X11 configuration was a total nightmare for the friend who wanted a desktop OS, and we had a dead rotten time trying to find drivers for the network card for the friend who wanted a server os. After those two installs I just couldn’t honestly say “hey, you should try Linux” to a friend anymore. Maybe to an enemy.

When I stopped recommending Debian it wasn’t because I’d discovered Ubuntu and liked it, it was because I stopped liking Debian and no longer had any Linux distribution I could confidently recommend. As far as I could tell, there were distros that installed well and had recent software but were hell to maintain and upgrade (anything but Debian), and one distro which was hell to install and had nasty old software but was pleasant to maintain and upgrade (Debian). I couldn’t happily recommend either of those. My linux advocacy took a dive. I drowned my sorrows in the beautiful Aqua interface of OS X and tried not to think about the proprietary software.

A few months ago I decided to give Ubuntu a shot, having heard some of the good buzz about it. As far as I’m concerned it’s everything that Debian hasn’t been for years and should have been. Yes, it’s dependent on Debian, and it is able to be so good because of the work Debian volunteers put into things. But why isn’t *Debian* able to be so good because of the work Debian volunteers put into things? Well, it’s probably because they support about 50 architectures and won’t go forward with a release till they can get an archaic version of GNOME to compile on Debian-SomeStupidProcessorIveNeverHeardOfAndOnlySixPeopleUse-64 (DEC). And real Debian guru types don’t give a crap about people less geeky and technically competent than themselves, because that takes time away from flaming each other in political wars on the dev lists. Not that I’m bitter. But if you want to see everything that’s loathsome about Linux people, try asking a question in a debian IRC channel. I only did it once. It was enough.

OK, so whatever, that’s fine, Debian has its goals and producing an operating system that I can recommend to friends and hope to keep them as friends is not one of them. That’s all good. But if somebody’s going to come around and actually produce such an OS (and Ubuntu is such an OS, usability bugs notwithstanding), then do the Debian developers have to come out hatin’ on it?

Yeah, of course they do.

I love Debian. And that’s why I hate Debian.

Psychology Today: Happy Hour

Psychology Today: Happy Hour (via MetaFilter).

Interesting stuff about what makes us happy and unhappy, and why we are very bad at predicting what will make us happy and unhappy. Interesting tidbits:

  • We seem to have an internal “happiness setpoint” that means that we tend to stay just about as happy in the face of external circumstances which one would imagine would make us much happier or sadder — winning the lottery or losing the use of your legs, say, have a remarkably small effect on your overall happiness in the long term. However…
  • We tend to get happier as we get older. On the whole, the elderly are much happier than the young, maybe partly because they’re less worried about the future cause they’ve got less of it to worry about — so they can focus on the present. Speaking of which…
  • Focusing on the present moment, being engaged with it and mindful of it, is a big key to happines. A lot of other things that make us happy or unhappy do so by making us engaged or disengaged from the present moment.