None of my clients, thankfully, have ever done this to me, but there is at least one PDF publisher I know and whose blog I used to read who openly and repeatedly ADVOCATES doing this to artists (which is why I don't read his blog any longer).

I have about had it with the Forge from a technical/usability standpoint. The vast majority of the time I try to log on to read posts or reply, I am confronted with 503 errors and timeouts.

It gets fixed for a couple days, then has issues again for weeks, which I find personally ridiculous. And the users are never told what's going on with the problems, why they keep cropping up, if anyone is actually doing anything about it or trying to get to the bottom of it.

So I'm pretty close to just removing it from my reading/posting list, given it took me fifteen minutes tonight to make one two sentence post.

Are there any other decent tabletop discussion forums out there (NOT Story-games, thank you) that might serve as a decent replacement for game and theory discussion, and who might host independent forums for small presses?

More plot holes. You're telling me the Air Force doesn't have some serious protocols and rules involved with their super-secret deep space program, especially regarding Ancient body-switching technology and the people using it?

Such that anyone can just go running around in someone else's body without someone else from the Air Force keeping a close goddamn eye on them, let alone being allowed to go off-base? Seriously?

I call bullshit.

All the lack of such makes for is cheap drama (and bad writing).

We watched "Time" as well. And, well, still waiting for SOMETHING to happen. I like Stargate. I do not like Stargate the big human drama soap opera. This is not what I watch Stargate for. Seriously. Character arcs. Yes. Mindless crap straight out of daytime television?

BORED NOW.

This is not science fiction. This is a contrived soap opera with spaceships. It is like watching the worst episodes of BSG. And "contrived" is the word I keep returning to most when thinking about the show.

The crew is aboard a ridiculously vast alien spaceship of Ancient design flying through galaxies billions of light-years from home, and we are constantly treated to trite, drawn-out bullshit Earthside, or overly-long (they're more "dramatic" that way, I assume) off-ship missions. All tied up with nonsense on why they can't make the ship work.

Right, the amount of Ancient technology the SGC has retrieved, cataloged, and figured out how to work (the whole city of Atlantis, anyone?) and these folks have barely been able to figure out how to turn the light-switches on?

I would buy that, if the group weren't in constant contact with Earth, and the brains aboard their ship just weren't ones all that knowledgeable about Ancient technology, language, etc.

But given the two-way communication, that is simply completely implausible.

For me, SGU has this season to rescue itself, unless it just keeps crawling along doing nothing, pretending to be dark, and complex, and interesting while actually being dull, banal, and thin, in which case it may not even have that long.

"Only science idiots believe black is not a color."

"Except black is not a color, it is the absence of color."

"Once again, you show how ignorant you scientists are: we SEE it as a color, so it is one."

"No, it is still the absence of color. There are no black photons. It doesn't have a wavelength. Any scientist or science text can show you this."

"In 1949, Penderton showed in a renowned study that perception is reality. We see black, we perceive it as being a color; so it is a color. There's even a simple test found in art schools worldwide: they have 'black' crayons in boxes of coloring crayons. But clearly you've never seen a crayon box, or are you going to argue 'black' is the absence of a crayon?"

"Don't be stupid! Honestly, I don't even know where to start taking that nonsense apart."

"Don't call me stupid! Once again you scientists resort to calling people names to dismiss their arguments. You can't even refute me, which just showcases your willful blindness to the truth of the issue."

"Wait a minute, you've been calling me names since this started! You called everyone idiots. And you've been making patently absurd statements that contradict known facts, quoting fringe psychologists no one takes seriously except for colorists. Knock it off with the insults."

"I am not calling you names because you keep proving how pointless it is to argue with you and how ill-informed you are. All artists know that 'black' is a color, but none of the scientists you run to for 'facts' want to admit to it and the broken 'color' model you have been brainwashed into buying."

"Oh brother. What about wavelengths and photons? These and how they work are well-known ideas, long-supported and agreed to by peer review."

"Anyone who knows basic color theory can tell you that's garbage. Crayons have mass, so they exist, there's no 'absence' of them. And black crayons color black, which they couldn't do if there were no black photons, they would leave behind no marks at all if it were an absence! It is a color, but you just want to foolishly keep ignoring the truth. I've been an artist for fifteen years. I know what I'm talking about!"

"Look anywhere! Scientifically supported color theory shows black is not a color, but the absence of it. And that is not how it works. Check out Hodges or Micks on the subject, not discredited wackos or fringe colorist arguments."

"Those colorists you dismiss built the world of color and art! Without them you would be living in a gray, ugly world."

"The original artists were not colorists. They were all sorts of people, heck, colorists didn't even exist back then. Again, actually read Hodges and Micks on the subject. And Hodges, as a colorist, even argues that he only sees black as a color semantically."

"I have read about them, but clearly you haven't. They might not have called them colorists, but that is who they would align with today. And I can't believe you're calling me ignorant about the subject when you don't know Hodges recanted his claims. I wouldn't expect the garbage the scientific establishment to report on that, though. You need to read better books."

"Oh, bloody hell..!"

I had this exact argument. But about economics.

It was with a Libertarian.

(Big surprise.)

Now, I haven't been in personal conflict with right-wing nuts for some time. Been keeping away from them and their hangouts; enough left-wing nuts out there right now. Unfortunately, I did not realize this person was part of that distinct group until too late.

( ...how it works... )

Anyways...

There's an old chestnut used by the right-wing to decry welfare and other free, public services as the most evil thing ever, which can be summed up in a quote by Tolstoy some of them like to use: "The more is given the less the people will work for themselves, and the less they work the more their poverty will increase."

"Giving is bad, make people work for what they need, or else it will be worse for them!" is the attitude (or sometimes, "Why should I care if YOU starve? Sounds like your problem and your fault."). I'm fairly certain it arises from the screwed-up Puritan ethic our country was founded on and that flourishes on the right. In the inherently paternalistic, authoritarian worldview of that ethic, which believes that suffering is divine and wholesome, that it builds character, that it is necessary and right, and that leisure makes you a tool of the devil. Ye olde "Spare the rod, spoil the child" mindset...and you're the child.

So on work-ethic and paternalist reactions to welfare: what I find interesting is how much concern conservatives seem to have for my soul when it is my body that is starving.

But as a number of us commies (or "socialists" or "liberals" or whatever Red Scare term has been invented to describe and dismiss us this decade) have noticed over the years, to our amusement: everything people create and make available on the internet makes a pretty good case that even if you give people lots of things for free, or don't pay them for what they are doing, they will still make themselves busy creating very cool things and doing things, even good works, for themselves and others.

And that's aside from the studies that show people are more charitable with their time and money when they aren't struggling to survive or living in fear of falling into poverty from of one bad medical emergency or losing their job or their hours or anything else. When you create a baseline cushion you don't let people fall below, the majority tend to become better people.

But scares the ever-loving crap out of certain people. The idea of suffering and struggling as something good and just, as divinely mandated, is ingrained into the brain of these conservatives. They don't just avoid it, they deny that reality as being a terrifying assault on the foundations of their concept of the world.

( ...authoritarianism and on the left... )

Part of a long, rambling post Robert put up the other day on his blog really made me nod and say "yes". Because, you know what, yes. Because it touches on something I've been arguing for years.

Despite what I had to say in the last post about on-the-job word ninnies, I am about the job at the job, and my actual response to other people's reaction to the way I talk is...I tone it down when I know I'm around somebody the swearing will bother.

I hold back on the trucker talk, you hold back on the Jesus talk, and we don't jump down each other's throats when some of it slips out.

If you can't do that, hold it in for other people, you're a jackass and you'll just keep getting in trouble and wondering why. If you run to HR whenever somebody's else's Stuff That Irritates You comes out, everybody around you will hate you, you will not get that tolerance when you need it, and...you probably won't figure out why, either.

See, that top bit? That's what I do, too. No, not here in my journal space, though I may and have if asked by someone sincerely, but if you know me in-the-flesh, you know it and know I won't poke at it, whatever "it" happens to be for you.

But it's really about this:

If you can't do that, hold it in for other people, you're a jackass and you'll just keep getting in trouble and wondering why.

I want everyone to look at that, and instead of going, "Yeah, see? That's what people need to do!" also look at the other half of that, which is:

If you run to HR whenever somebody's else's Stuff That Irritates You comes out, everybody around you will hate you, you will not get that tolerance when you need it, and...you probably won't figure out why, either.

People need to do that, too. And the nuance here is what I think the various critics who have shook their finger at me about these things, and various anti-racism (or anti-whatever) activists and leftist "oppression" and "correction" and "privilege" experts, just don't get. Those folks end up being the hated, clueless git who can't get the tolerance they keep demanding when they actually need it, precisely because...well, they can't figure it out.

(Which is amusing, because Robert is talking about the right-wingers who don't get it, either.)

But it's not that hard TO figure out, so I leave it to anyone who is in the "doesn't get it" boat, or the "I deserve not to be tweaked by my issues" boat, who can't figure out the balance between those to work out for themselves (ie: those who have a horse to ride about privilege and invisible knapsacks and cultural racism/sexism/discrimination and "welcoming" environments and so forth).

And we're not really talking about a business environment or HR here, which I hope we all get. It becomes an analogy for the bigger social environment. Really, they're running to the media, or the government, or their friends, or anyone who will listen to them for five seconds every day complain about how bad everyone else is for upsetting them and how they all better just stop because they're bad people, especially if they don't.

And we're talking about how those people hear that criticism of that behavior and think it means they have to just shut-up all the time and get run roughshod over and so forth and OMG-more-oppression-oppression-oppression. Which is why I said they don't get it.

Discussed here:

Contacting employers, contacting family, threatening to kill people and talking about how they deserve to be sexually assaulted, cracking passwords, contacting webhosts to report them for alleged Terms of Service Violations, contacting a show’s producers and actors to blast them for another set of fans’s actions. Most of the most egregious behavior doesn’t get documented out of fear of both sides going after the document-er for getting the story wrong... [Ed: all the above is also done to those who do document.]

...Fail fandom is generally about some one taking offense at something someone did or said or implied. Sure, yeah, the subtext of fail fandom is often about a power play in fandom but at the onset, it generally doesn’t look that way... [Ed: as it is dressed up to be about racism or sexism or vulnerability, etc.]

...The attacker looks for vulnerabilities. They look for places where they can exploit your weakness in order to push you out of fandom, to get you to stop being in conflict with them and to further their own agenda.

All that is stuff I saw in the RaceFail crowd, both before and during that fiasco. It's a good part of why I think they are wrong, philosophically and logically, and why they disturb me so, with all the rage and violence and hate-talk, and all the social dominance behaviors. ( ...during the Fail... )

The final batch of illos from the noir contract. So that is it for art-sharing from this contract! I don't think I missed posting any of them. Also, I received word earlier today that my cover is slated to grace Fight On! issue #9. I can't wait, and I'll finally be able to share it with you guys! Bonus.

As usual, click below to jump right to the images, or jump directly to my deviantArt gallery.

The Syndicate

The Legion (or the alternate)

The Limelight

I don't like the Legion as much as the other two: it just turned out too rough. I don't know if I was having a bad week or what, but things just didn't seem to click with it. The Syndicate and the Limelight, though? Definitely grooving on both.

A while back, the girls decided that they could get chicks to hatch from carton-eggs if they just cuddled them and warmed them up. They even took some of the eggs up to their room.

We had thought we had rescued all the eggs (and hence the room/house/clothing/bedding/furniture) that day--even despite the fits that were thrown when we tried to explain to them that you can't hatch chicks from carton-eggs--and gotten all our edible ovum back into the fridge without problem.

I discovered this morning that wasn't exactly the case. We missed/they hid one. In a pretend makeup case, in a "nest" of used candy wrappers. That they'd managed to crush when they closed it.

I'm surprised it didn't start smelling sooner...but this morning made up for any prior lack of smelliness on its part. Which is how I found it. I wasn't even certain what it was (other than extremely stinky) until I found the egg-shells while scooping out the goo-sheathed wrappers and hosing it down.

So the Nook is available for pre-order. It looks spiffy enough that I might want one for reading all the e-books I've collected over the years and barely touched -- especially since it has native PDF support. I could actually get through all those gaming PDFs I've purchased and barely read!

Also, it runs the Android OS. Yes. The fscking Android OS. Whoo! Which means it is not going to be a walled garden like the Kindle, and I sense some awesome hackery and Android app-making will commence shortly.

Plus, I could bring stacks of books with me to bed to read. Instead of having to decide on just one, I could hop in bed and make the decision from there. Though, really, that's the draw of any e-book reader.

This might be the e-book reader that gets me to take the plunge and buy one, assuming the PDF support is more-than decent. We'll have to see what the reviews say after its release (supposedly end-of-November).

Earlier this year there was a push to ban a horror movie called "Orphan". I'll let you read all about it here and then the sane view here.

I'll say only: this is what post-modernist activism bullshit nets you. Everyone's personal, internal issues--and fears of being "left out" or perceived badly--become a crime. No separation of fiction and reality, or grasp of context.

Gods forbid any of these people actually manage to force legislation on things like this. Think about how we laugh at Christians when they freak-out because somebody mocks or "misuses" Jesus or sacred ritual, but we're all so stoic and sober and run to the lawmakers when some personal issue of ours is mocked or "misused", or even appears to be.

Someone on Fred Hick's FB friendlist just posted the argument (and complaint) that the Big Purple is a mind-controlling, mod-heavy "Cultivated Positive Only forum" -- that no one there is either allowed to or actually does post blatantly negative comments or behave rudely...

...someone is taking hallucinogens, and I'm pretty sure it isn't me.

In the "not really news" category: Another wealthy, bootstrap-believing, poor-hating, foul-mouthed, sociopathic right-winger sets out to prove not all conservatives are wanton wastes of human flesh and breathable air all conservatives are jerks.

Because, you know, picking on kids, the poor, and senior citizens from your ivory tower gated community really shows what a man's man you are.

Oh no! The left-wing morality police have finally arrived at FailBlog:

I personally find distasteful adolescently crass references to genitals and sex acts, as well as depictions of real injuries and deaths. But that, to me, is largely a matter of taste.
I find disturbing a number of !mages that have appeared that conjoin children with sex. That, to me, goes beyond questionable taste and is a matter for concern and reconsideration.
I find abhorrent !mages that condone and celebrate racisim, ethnic slurs, and homophobia. That to me is immoral, and, in my opinion, should just stop...I wish to transform the discomfort I sometimes feel here into a reminder that we can do better.

Thankfully, there appear to be intelligent people there as well whose sense of humor and ability to understand context aren't withered and dying by years of POC bullshit:

Some of the blogs are g-rated, and some are not, and that is for a reason. Not to mention, the site in general mocks instances of racism or child/sex displays by use of the word “FAIL.” It’s subtle, I know, but most literate people usually understand the intent.

The subtlety and sarcasm of the insult drips beautifully from that last bit. I salute you, sir.

These also popped up as responses:

In the end, what is “abhorrent” to one person can be “hilarious” to another. “Taste” and “morality” are relative and subjective, not to mention an important part of each individual. While I understand Dave’s point of view, and fully support his desire to express said view in an effort to modify the feelings resultant in one individual from viewing this site, i personally find above post more reprehensible than most any picture i’ve seen on any of these sites.

And:

Censorship can cause a lot more harm than several controversial pics...

Amen.

Some of the arguments by new faces on the WotC DarkSun boards would make for great entries on NotAlwaysRight, specifically the ones where the service rep keeps repeating an answer to a customer, who just doesn't grasp, at all, in any way, what the actual problem is, and resorts to repeating their argument as though it is somehow a valid response.

I could call it the "But my boss is Jewish!" fallacy or the "But I have a ticket!" fallacy.

Amusing as hell reading about it happening to someone else, but damn is it freaking annoying when you're the one on the receiving end.

Me: "I find it ridiculous that six-thousand years of history is basically 'Rajaat did this, Rajaat did that' and no one else ever burned their toast or ate a bad piece of meat in all that time. History doesn't work like that."

Fanboi: "Rajaat was immortal, so he had time to do all those things, make long-term plans, and so was more effective in the destruction he caused, and its effects were more widespread than with a mortal."

Me: "Good points, I agree with you, and I am not disputing that. I'm actually criticizing the idea that for six-thousand years no one else did anything important that he wasn't involved in."

Fanboi: "But Rajaat was immortal so he could have done all those things!"

Me: "Yes, I know. But beings not involved with Rajaat didn't do anything at all during that entire span of time. Don't you think that is kind of odd?"

Fanboi: "Rajaat. Was. Immortal!"

Me: *headdesk*

We have become a society of prudes, or perhaps "returned to being" is a better phrasing, giving our Puritan history as a country...because of this, and perhaps worse, we are a society that acts as though my problems are your problems, or rather, my issues are your issues.

This is a symptom of that disease: we have made sex and sexuality criminal, and we make people pay for it, even children.

You may think I am damning the Right in saying this, given their well-known stance on sexuality, nudity, pornography, and so forth, and you would only be half-right, for the Left is not only complicit in this state of affairs, but outright engaged.

Because the two prongs of this attack upon and erosion of freedom, in the name of "social mores", have been certain so-called "feminists" and "family-values" conservatives. Two groups who should be diametrically opposed, and yet have come together to absolutely damn natural biological behaviors in our society and to criminalize the body itself.

Don't see the connection? Then think about pornography and how each group views it, as filthy, disgusting, exploitative, wrong, offensive, even criminal...

( ...who and what to blame... )

A little over a week ago, while Jen was getting out of bed, the frame on the bed snapped. It had a shoddy-ass welding job, so I'm actually surprised it lasted this long.

Anyways, I called and had it replaced under warranty (with one day left, HAH! Awesome). Waited the necessary week for replacement parts to arrive, sleeping on the couch in the meanwhile. A friend with a truck helped me haul the old parts in and bring the new parts home.

But at the store, I find out they ordered the wrong parts. Footboard and rails instead of headboard and rails. "Oops, I typed the wrong order code," she says. The gods smiled, however, as they found they had the same headboard on display and gave me that one.

Yay, I thought, now I can sleep in our bed again. Yet when I went to put it together, and despite asking specifically, twice, of two separate employees, if all the bolts and such were in the box and being told "Definitely!"...

...No bolts. No nuts. No washers.

Perfectly good frame (and with much better weld on this) with no way to actually put it together BECAUSE THERE'S NO @0$$#*& BOLTS!

I shake my tiny fist at you, capricious spirits, for making me sleep on my couch again! And at customer service people who aren't doing their jobs.

This is (at least) one more uncomfortable night on the couch. Growl. I'm almost ready to just say "fuck it" and jury-rig it together with sticks and bungee cords.

I'll call tomorrow afternoon and hopefully they will have the bolts, etc. and not have to order them.

How can someone who has ever played D&D or read a fantasy novel seriously claim "an evil, immortal, uber-wizard with crazy plans to destroy the world and an endless army of minions led by evil lieutenants" is not a cliche? HOW?

I'm not stunned by this stuff any longer because it is just too (sadly) commonplace; instead I just rolled on the floor laughing. Because, seriously? Really? You really asked that?

Behold: Christianity and ignorance! Where would they be without each other? Though, to be fair, it isn't like they have a monopoly on it.

Tangentially: here's a clue about why the answer is wrong as well.