Category: General

Unjustified Offings

Every so often I get to being so angry and upset about politics that it starts tearing me apart, and I have to do something mildly to intensely crazy to protect myself. On the extreme end I go and kill my blog and hide from the world. On the mild end I cull out of my newsreader all the blogs that bring me the news that makes me angry. I lose a lot of good blogs that way. Some of them I remember to bring back when I’m feeling better, some I don’t, but it’s quite an unjustified offing of blogs.

Unqualified Offerings was one of the blogs that was too good to survive, so it disappeared a few purges ago. I just remembered to bring it back. Happy me. Henley’s a friend of a very old friend, a libertarian without quite being one of THOSE libertarians, a smart guy and a gamer. Back in the reader, Jim!

Squeak Does RSS

squeak screenshot

There’s a new version of Squeak out — 3.7. The look of it is much prettier than previous versions; much more at home in a world full of Windows XP and OS X installs (not to mention GTK2 GNOME installs and whatever’s the latest and greatest KDE/Qt stuff).

It also has a package browser, which makes it way easy to snag and install groovy things other people have written.

Which is why in 30 seconds after I opened up Squeak for the first time, I had myself a (bare-bones) blog reader. Scoff at the ugly look if you like, but it does more than the current stable version of NetNewsWire can do — BlogBrowser reads atom feeds. (Of course, power users all use the NetNewsWire beta version but I’m just sayin’.)

Gads, I just realized I don’t have a “software” category for this blog yet. Gotta add one.

UPDATE: While Squeak is a wildly sophisticated programming environment, one of its main purposes was to create an environment children could comfortably program in. Squeakland is the educational part of Squeak, and features a bunch of “etoys” created by children in Squeak. Most of ’em are simple animations. You can download and install a squeak plugin for your browser and view them yourself, like a Flash animation.

The difference between a Squeak project and a flash animation is that you can go in and edit the Squeak project yourself, play around with the images, do whatever you want with it, and save your own copy.

It’s like a Creative Commons dream come true!

And if you have any doubt that the example animations were created by children, just go to this page and check out Barfin’ Bill. Authentic to a fault. :)

Another Not Quite So Sucky Drawing Book from Watson-Guptill

In the previous, dearly departed incarnation of the blog that goes PING, I mentioned that there was a Watson-Guptill comics drawing book which was not edited by Christopher Hart, and it seemed not to suck as completely as the ones that are (this one). I just noticed another one — it’s called Scared, how to draw fantastic horror comic characters, by Steve Miller and Bryan Baugh.

The sweet thing is, it contains awesome art by greats like Bernie Wrightson, Art Adams, Frank Cho, Mitch Byrd, and others. There’s a lot of crap and filler too, and I probably won’t get it just because I don’t want a book full of rotting zombie illustrations in the house for my kids to find, but it seems like a neat book.

The Torture President Comes Through For His Torture-Endorsing Supporters

If you had any question about whether my characterization of Bush as “The Torture President” was accurate, I hope you don’t anymore, now that he’s trying to make an explicit advocate of American torture of prisoners our new Attorney General.

Oh, and to top it all off this is the guy behind the “The President can declare any American citizen an Enemy Combatant and confine him, indefinitely, with no trial or access to a lawyer” theory.

Thank you very much, all you pro-torture Bush voters. You got what your torture-endorsing human-rights-hating little hearts desired, didn’t you.

Nice job.

And those of you who are my friends, who voted Bush, who I happen to know to be good decent kind people, I will never, ever understand how you could do this to America. I trust you have your reasons. I will just never understand them.