What happens when the rules aren't fair?

I got back from my big Lobby Thing last night. It went fairly well, I think. The conference itself was informative at times, if exhausting, and while I'm not sure much was accomplished with the visits (though the academic freedom meeting was pretty promising), it was an interesting experience and I met lots of people and got the civic duty warm fuzzies and besides which got to go see friends and uh family and travel on someone else's dime (come to think of it, if you are reading this, it was very likely your dime, or a fraction thereof), so it was basically rewarding on the whole.

One thing that I'm still puzzling over is the fact that it takes a 2/3 vote in the state legislature to pass a budget (I believe we're one of three states where it's like this, the other two being Rhode Island and Arkansas), and the governor can reduce or eliminate any item in the budget, in addition to being able to veto the whole thing. Now then. The vote to override the veto? Also 2/3. This is very confusing to me. Why would the governor ever veto a budget or other urgency measure? And actually San Diego has it even worse, on account of our nice new eight-member city council. Basically what I learned more than anything else this weekend is the inherent weirdness of all political systems.

I wanna live with a cinnamon girl

The realization that I hate minty toothpaste has led me to experiment with some different flavors. The bubblegum flavored Spongebob toothpaste? Didn't really live up to my childhood memories. I've also had vanilla, which tasted okay (and is generally a pretty interesting idea, y'know, in an "affront to God" kind of way), green apple, which was pretty good, oh my god the orange was so foul, and cinnamon, which was probably the best of the bunch. Unlike orange (it still haunts my dreams), cinnamon is a fairly easy flavor to synthesize well, and for this and other reasons, making something taste like red hots is basically a pretty safe bet in my book. I could totally burn dinner or whatever, but I'd be okay with it as long as I had some way of making the food taste sufficiently like red hots.

Oh, I have a poem for you, from the beginning of Jack Pressman's Last Resort:

Gentle, clever your surgeon's hands
God marks for you many golden bands
They cut so sure they serve so well
They save our souls from Eternal Hell
An artist's hands, a musician's too
Give us beauty of color and tune so true
But yours are far the most beautiful to me
They saved my mind and set my spirit free.

-Written by Lobotomy Patient #68,
ca. 1942 (from the archives of James W. Watts III, M.D.)

Suffice it to say, that patient was perfectly calm, Dude.
(Calmer than you are.)

Doo, doo, doo, looking out my back door

Bureaucracy day!

Here is a game about filing paperwork. The amazing thing is that it actually sounds pretty fun. I am thinking of getting a copy just to admire the sheer achievement of it. Basically the way it works is you send documents around trying to get all the offices to process them in the order that is most advantageous to you. But there are lots of cute things involved like paperclips for counters and the consumption of stimulants in order to get extra turns.

And this provides a nice segue to telling you about my coffee. Yesterday I got an "espresso con panna" for the first time, and the coffee jerk very graciously served it with a ridiculous amount of whipped cream...
Hm. Actually I've already told this story; my heart's not really in it anymore. The payoff is just that if you reheat "espresso con panna," it becomes "espresso con butter" upon cooling.


Enough tangents. The inspiration for bureaucracy day in fact came in a meeting today in which we were swapping stories about how ridiculous the university is, so I thought I'd share an example regarding, I don't even know, like the Capital Outlay and Space Advisory Committee or something.
When the school decides it needs a new building, it determines what it wants and what its budget is, like "I want a building that does xyz, and I have $20 million to spend," and everyone bids and such, saying "Here's my plan to do that for $25 million" and like that.
As a matter of fact, all of the bids do invariably exceed our limit, so then we go back to the drawing board and try to come up with something cheaper, and by the time the proposed building goes through the process again, the bids are the same amount as before because the costs have gone up. So basically the university is planning itself into successively cheaper and cheaper redesigns of the same building just to keep up with rising construction costs.
But wait. We have a solution. Naturally, in coming up with the building project, the committee has estimated how much it will cost, and all this goes into its plan. Even so, once it solicits the bids, it wants to get a head start on planning the revisions, so it goes out and hires an expert to estimate just how far overbudget all of the bids are going to be. Isn't that funny?

Ok, if you did not find this funny I will spare you my story about Reg Fee (or the "Registration Fee Advisory Committee," if you're not into the whole brevity thing).

I will choose a path that’s clear / I will choose free will

Hello!
More links!

This is probably the best part of McSweeney's, and further proof that food is indeed hilarious.

Have I linked to the department's philosophy blog yet? This stuff is basically what I do for a living.

Here is a video of an honest-to-God Transformer.

Andreas Katsulas was way cool. I am sad.


Also here's one of my favorite things I've read about the compatibilist project, from Frank Jackson's From Metaphysics to Ethics:
"What compatibilist arguments show, or so it seems to me, is not that free action as understood by the folk is compatible with determinism, but that free action on a conception near enough to the folk's to be regarded as a natural extension of it, and which does the theoretical job we folk give the concept of free action in adjudicating questions of moral responsibility and punishment, and in governing our attitudes to the actions of those around us, is compatible with determinism. There is, accordingly, an extent to which the compatibilist is changing the subject, but it is a strictly limited sense. For compatibilists do, it seems to me, show, first that the folk concept of free action involves a potentially unstable attempt to find a middle way between the random and the determined, second, that the folk conception is nowhere instantiated, and, third, that a compatibilist substitute does all we legitimately require of the concept of free action. It is hard to see how we could better motivate a limited change of subject" (p. 44-45).

What a wicked game to play, to make me feel this way

It has been an exciting week for comments! I think soapbox week was a success. Yesterday I was gonna do one more rant about how Star Trek III is the most egregiously underrated member of the franchise, but I wasn't really in the mood, so I wandered off and found some computer games instead, and then I forgot to post anything. So, now that I don't have anything else to say, I guess I'll tell you about these games?
(Also I just want to mention how pleased I am with the last few post titles. Yay me.)

1. Weird Worlds--This is the sequel to Strange Adventures in Infinite Space. These broadly follow in the 4x space tradition, but have the feel of a quick ten minute game of solitaire. You just zip around the galaxy in your ship, collecting amusing alien devices, blowing people up, that sort of thing. Weird Worlds offers a number of improvements: first, it is just amazingly gorgeous, especially the starmap and the combat scenes; second, there are lots more aliens and stuff; and third, and perhaps most significantly, there are now three different kinds of missions, including military and scientific. These contribute the most to the replay value of a game that would otherwise probably get a bit repetitive over time.
It occurs to me that a lot of y'all are reading this on a Mac. At present, this game is PC only, but since SAIS was ported to the ol' Etch-a-Sketch, this one probably will be too.

2. Speaking of pretty games that you need a real computer to play, Torus Trooper is an older "race around a tube shooting enemies" game that is pretty dang satisfying. The collision detection is somewhat nonintuitive; most of the dozens of bullets that appear to hit you actually don't, which for me evokes fond memories of being nine years old and playing arcade games with only a very poor grasp of the actual mechanics involved.

3. The dreadfully-named Pax Galaxia is available on Mac, and it is an interesting departure from the regular Risk clones, in that one's unit commands are given and continually carried out in real time. It's pretty okay, but I bet multiplayer would be downright intense.

4. Democracy (also Windows-only, haha sucks to be you guys) is a political simulator which seems pretty fun. Basically you run a country and try to get all the different groups of people to like you enough to reelect you. I need to play it more before I can really pass judgment, but for now I will say that its interface is an informational marvel.

It can cut you like a knife, if the gift becomes the fire

Man so uh just to change the mood a little bit, I think I'm already gonna move on to diatribe number 2.
This one addresses a much more controversial issue, and one with significant social implications.



Razors are so awful.
I've participated in discussions of such matters, and, yes, I realize I'm one of about ten dudes under the age of 45 who uses an electric shaver, but I've always considered it enough for my modest needs. They're pretty good nowadays, what with the swiveling springy heads and 800 whirly blades. And also, I confess, there is some amount of inertia involved; it's what my father shaves with, and it's what I first learned to use. Still I've long harbored a secret suspicion that I was missing out on some sort of ultraclose baby's-behind-esque shave that could only be bestowed upon me by one of the increasingly ridiculous disposable razors out there.
And though I long avoided such a shave (out of a general distaste for effort and the application of sharp objects to my face), it appears that I could not escape my destiny. Long story short, I found myself separated from my shaver and getting scruffier by the minute. So I bought a pack of the most ostentatiously-featured razors I could find and went to work. It was not especially difficult, though I proceeded cautiously, and afterwards I found that it did indeed result in a marginally closer shave. I made a mental note that the extra time, labor, and discomfort might be warranted on special occasions...I might use this razor again someday if I was getting married, or arraigned. However, the comparative closeness of the shave wore off after about 8 hours, which happens to be when the first shards of diamond-cuttingly sharp needlestubble began to pierce their way out of my face. I guess it's a side effect of cutting one's hairs a couple micrometers closer to the skin that these hairs are honed into monofilament weapons of doom.
What the hell is wrong with you people? Do you enjoy agony?
God.

Here's the moral and the story from the guy who knows

It's soapbox week, and I have a couple rants in store for y'all. I had planned to start with the funny rant and close with the serious one, but for fear of getting all Journey into Reason on you guys, I'm thinking it would be better the other way around, so here goes.
It has come to my attention that something like 80% of Blogspite readers are or have recently been in an open relationship, so I thought I'd share with you my recent thoughts on why they are mostly pretty terrible.

At this point, since I know somebody is going to ask, I would like to emphasize that none of this has anything to do with me, okay. Sometimes I think about things is all, especially things that are currently devastating the personal lives of 80% of my readers. Not me. End of digression.

So, until recently, I had had some sort of vague intuition that the demand for exclusive relationships was mostly just a form of puritanical oppression. Sure, if two people wanted to get together and practice monogamy (as, for instance, I do), great for them, but since I'm a modern dude who realizes that there's nothing inherently immoral about polyamory, I was uneasy about the idea of denying it to one's partner...isn't that just the result of some kind of perverse jealousy that treats people as property? One should not be subject to such constraints on one's personal and emotional freedom.

But why on Earth would I think that? Have I suddenly forgotten about the whole notion of positive rights? This freedom talk I had been invoking only works in some kind of demented laissez-faire fantasy of libertarian autonomy. If A and B are a couple, then A's "freedom" to hook up with another person is only one side of things; we must also protect B's freedom from relationships where such things take place. The latter strikes me as not only the more basic right, but also the more harmful to violate, as there is much greater potential for emotional fallout in an unwilling poly relationship than an unwilling mono one.

But what if B is totally okay with that? After all, mutual consent is a crucial feature of responsible polyamory, as articulated by its advocates. Supposing one knows what one is doing, I can certainly see how one could legitimately waive one's right to exclusivity. However, this right could still be violated, and catastrophically so, unless the waiver were revokable at any time, and under any circumstances. And this seems like more trouble than it's worth, as the circumstances under which it is likely to be revoked are precisely those that are most liable to give one's partner emotional whiplash when one does so, which A presumably also has a right to be free from. So, on pain of winding up in some serious deontic blind alleys, I conclude that it is generally better that the whole mess just be ruled off-limits entirely.

In conclusion, people suck, yay fascism.

All day long I think of things but nothing seems to satisfy

Not much this time, just some pilfered links. It's been a good week for links, I guess.

First, from Jose: A torrent site with movies that are now in the public domain. So you can watch Metropolis, say, or some old Buster Keaton.

Next, from Pinguino: Steam powered robots! Enough said.


A discussion some of us had about role playing games prompted me to check out what's been happening with Paranoia, which was recently revived a in a new and rather improved edition. Here are a couple of relevant blogs I found, one by one of the designers, and another that is, uh, fictional, by the ULTRAVIOLETS of Paranoia-Live. You know, I am not in a position to judge.
Oh and also I found this site, which sells RPG books (including some that are pretty out of print) in pdf format, apparently for quite decent prices. As a matter of fact, this is an idea that Steve Jackson has also been toying with, especially for those books that would've had an unusually small print run.
(And of course all this electronic stuff gives me some small hope that academic publishing is maybe not totally screwed.)