Author: Ed That Goes Ping

Webcomics Thisandthat

So Scott Kurtz is full of these empty ideas about the value of “Making It Big.” And then there’s this ignorant review of PvP and Penny Arcade… I dunno. If I have read all of something, I don’t need to hear a review of it from somebody who has attempted to sample representative parts of it for purpose of reviewing it. If you have to do that, just say “I don’t like it much” and leave. That’s your review. You don’t have to like it much. Nobody’s asking you to. Just let the people who like it like it and get on with life.

Would you read a review of the Lord of the Rings from a guy who said “I couldn’t be bothered to read the whole book, but I read a whole chapter from each book of the trilogy for purposes of this review.”

Maybe you could pull something like that if you are a paid reviewer who is handed something to review that you may or may not want to review but it’s your job. But if you’re just a yutz on the web with a blog? Here’s a clue, there are a lot of us yutzes on the web with blogs who are willing to talk about things we actually have read all of. Perhaps too many of us. For that reason, if you can’t be bothered, don’t bother, and don’t bother the rest of us with it.

I could criticize PvP myself. It’s not the world’s greatest, funniest, most perfect webcomic. Sometimes it’s not funny for long periods of time. Sometimes Kurtz makes an ass of himself. Maybe I’ll get sick of it and stop reading it next week. But somehow I’ve come to care enough about the characters and laugh at enough of the jokes to just keep on reading it so far.

As for Penny-Arcade, I’m completely not the target market, most of the inside references mean nothing to me, but enough of the comics have, despite all that, made me laugh hard enough to threaten urinary continence, that I’m a devoted fan. But you know, nobody else has to be. It’s fine if you don’t like it. I don’t like lots of things other people like.

I only heard of this review cause Kurtz linked to it in his news, and Websnark had snarked it. From Websnark’s description of it I actually expected it to be worth reading. I was disappointed.

Don’t know why I’m blogging about it except to express my disbelief that this guy would go to the trouble of reading small portions of a work he didn’t enjoy in order to say “Eh, I dunno. It’s not that great” to the World Wide Web.

Insanity

You know, I remember reading, a while ago, a popular book on profiling by FBI profiler John Douglas. He said that a lot of people try to pull an insanity defense, but the really insane people are pretty easy to pick out: they’re the ones who are easily caught, because they’re out of touch with reality enough not to cover their tracks.

For example they might form a corporation to protest corporations, and kill a police officer to protest police brutality, and publish manifestos confessing to their crime and explaining why they did what they did. They might push away their family and fight tooth and nail against attempts to force them to be declared insane, in the belief that they will be vindicated by the contents of a gigantic manifesto they are preparing.

That’s of course the kind of person who needs the insanity defense most, the kind of person who will refuse it unless forced into it — but the adversarial justice system we have encourages each side to care more about winning than about the truth. So prosecutors (and prosecutor-sympathetic judges) will allow a plainly crazy guy to represent himself all the way to the electric chair.

Here’s the story.

At first when I read this story I was going to react to the way they portray him as some kind of “terrorist of the left,” and I was going to speak up as one humble left-wingish type and say UM PLEASE NO MURDERING IN OUR NAME WE ARE NOT ABOUT MURDERING ANYBODY WHATSOEVER AND THAT INCLUDES POLICEMEN THANK YOU VERY MUCH.

But reading more about it, political considerations seem completely beside the point. This kid’s completely crazy. And he’s probably going to die for being crazy.

OS X Emacs

I’ve been using Carbon Emacs for my coding. It’s the official Mac branch of Emacs.

Just noticed AquaMacs, which is similar but “enhanced” to make it more friendly to general Mac users.

I tried it and my head exploded, because they remapped old-fashioned keys I use constantly (control-v to mean ‘scroll down a screen’). It may be better for new users but it was not good for me. Oh, and the proportionally spaced font — very pretty, but useless to me for coding in Perl, which is what I do in Emacs all day. Disaster. And new windows popping up all over the place all the time!

On the flipside, I also discovered Emacs-On-Aqua, which is based on the old NextStep port of Emacs, so it’s Cocoa-based, not Carbon-based.

Eh, it’s OK. I think I’ll just go with a recent build of Carbon Emacs.