And my sour gummi bears say unto your plain gummi bears, "we are sour, and we are your superiors. Worship at our feet or be destroyed."
---Whir

A post, they say. A post.

Well, I guess I could talk about the new MWDA xpack, Falcon's Prey, just came out, and how it's fairly good, and how Jade Falcon was better than we thought they'd be, and how playing pure Jade Falcon I came in second in the tourney last night, but since all of one of you plays MWDA on a regular basis, I think I won't.

Or I could talk about the Rome: Total War demo is awesome, except I don't actually know that yet, because I can't install it because Service Pack 2 is taking like an entire epoch to download, let alone install. Nevertheless, you must go to http://www.totalwar.com and download it, for it shall be good. I have faith in its filling Roman-y goodness.

Creating battle armor for Battletech is about one of the coolest things ever, right behind creating Mechwarrior 3 characters, but I'm not going to talk about that a whole lot either, except to say that Cole and I almost didn't play a game of BT last Saturday because, well, designing battle armor really is sort of fun. And when we did play, it was all kind of going my way, except how the head shots really weren't. Really, really weren't. But on the plus side, I only got one gyro crit or so.

Also, null sig r0x0rz j00.

I'd also like to talk about Temple of Elemental Evil, except I stopped halfway through because it was boring me to tears. That and radial menu suckness. And I guess they're going to come out with an NWN2. Can you feel my apathy? We've fallen pretty far on the RPG front in the past couple years. I mean, BG2. Morrowind. And then...what? Anybody?

As to books, well, 1634: The Galileo Affair was sort of entertaining, sort of like how the whole 1632 universe has managed to keep me entertained by being a sort of Island In the Sea of Time lite for a while now. Speaking of which, SM Stirling's Dies the Fire isn't bad either, once you get past the really bad plot device used to set it up. My liking for the book might have something to do with its being set in rather familiar settings, like, say, Corvallis. Sort of a funny Postman homage, except Stirling so far as I know never went there. Oh well.

And on that note, for driving around today, I randomly drove around Albany, then took 99E through some random little towns to Junction City, then to home. Most of these places I have never been to before in my life, despite my having lived here forever and ever. Not that, yknow, Shedd is all that exciting, but it's sort of strange that I've been to, say, Rome and not Albany.

*shrug*

I'm going to go check out R:TW now.

I've always wanted to do this, so...

Yes, I've always wanted some strange, strange things.

And if you're good, I promise entertainment at the end.

Having done that, I spent some time pondering the whole U2 singles thing. All will become clear upon browsing, say, here and here. This is made somewhat worse by the fact that nobody's names for all these things bears any relation to each other/reality/something useful. But I eventually figured something out.

And, as it turns out, I'm not doing too bad. It's like this. I have:

While I have the albums in question, I'm obviously missing all the singles, with no way to get them because they're all OOP.

From Achtung Baby:
The Fly
Mysterious Ways
One
Even Better Than the Real Thing
Need Even Better Than the Real Thing Remixes
Who's Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses

From Zooropa:
Need Lemon
Need Stay (Faraway, So Close!)

From Passengers: Original Soundtracks 1 (which I need)
Miss Sarajevo

From POP:
Need Discotheque (US)
Discotheque Remixes (UK/EU)
Staring At the Sun (US)
Need Last Night on Earth (UK red cover)
Last Night On Earth (UK green cover)
Please (US)
Need Please (UK)
If God Will Send His Angels
MOFO Remixes

From All That You Can't Leave Behind:
Need Beautiful Day (Canada white cover)
Beautiful Day (Canada blue cover)
Need Stuck In a Moment (Canada white cover)
Stuck In a Moment (Canada blue cover)
Need Walk On (Canada gold cover)
Need Elevation Pt. 1 (blue cover)
Need Elevation Pt. 2 (grey cover)

Random:
Need Sweetest Thing '98 Pt. 1
Need Sweetest Thing '98 Pt. 2
Need Electrical Storm (Canada white cover)
Electrical Storm (Canada blue cover)

That is, I'm sure you'll agree, quite a lot. And it's more of a "get all the songs" collection than a "get all the CDs" collection, because if I tried to do THAT, I'd be here all year and then some.

Now that I'm done with obscure music geekery, I shall endeavor to entertain you all.

First, we must note that in Eugene, there is a Memory Lane, and it is paved with gravel. Most of Eugene is asphalt. This is amusing if you think about it.

Second, Cole and I were having this conversation, and it's like this (with apologies to everybody but Whir because you won't get this):

Cole: so yeah... BT tomorrow then?
Me: Aff.
Cole: are you ready for gyro hits?
Me: Heh.

Picture, if you will, William Wallace standing before the assembled Scottish rebels in Braveheart, and instead of shouting "Are you ready for a war!?" shouting "Are you ready for gyro hits!?"

I guess you'd then have to put Longshanks in an Atlas or something, but.

And the son gets...a Stinger.

Cole: nah, the 3050 ostscout
Me: Ooo...yeah. Definitely the 3050 Ostscout.

And William Wallace drives a Daishi. Modded with a sword.

Cole: nah, he gets the Katana, because, really, the english do beat them in the end
Cole: or he gets like the goliath or something
Me: The No-Dachi.
Cole: because as we all know, only Wiliam Wallace can wield the MRM
Me: And head flunky dude gets the RAC Axman.
Cole: and the old man gets a javalin, the one true mech by Trooper Boy standards
Me: And the Irish dude gets...

Shit. I dunno what the Irish dude gets.

Cole: the Gurkha
Me: Good call.
Cole: ummm.... let's see here...... oh, what do you give those random general dudes for the english?
Me: 3025 Griffins? I mean, just good enough to be ok, but not...good, yknow?
Cole: aff, wait, the old guy gets the Grizzly
Cole: because that thing won't die
Me: And the Scottish nobles all get Dashers. With the MASC on and the throttle locked in reverse.

--------------

Yes. I know. I promised to actually ENTERTAIN you. Sorry. I'm a bastard like that. So instead, I will link to a random Megatokyo, because we do those sorts of things around here.

Also, this picture.

I'm done now.

Pop pop pop pop pop pop pop muzik.

Life at the moment is, well, much the same. As in it sucks. Temp agencies aren't talking to me, even. Hell, only people who ARE talking are the Army. Bah.

But there's a new U2 album due out November 22nd or so. Woot.

And while we're on that note, I went out and picked up a couple singles - Electrical Storm (blue cover) and Stuck In A Moment You Can't Get Out Of (UK). We ponder a few things from this. First is, while Electrical Storm isn't a bad disc, featuring as it does a 12:28 conbo of Bad, 40, and Where The Streets Have No Name done live, I'm rather liking Stuck In A Moment better at the moment. This is rather paradoxical, considering I absolutely hate that song. On the other hand, while the Beautiful Day remix is a bit odd, Big Girls Are Best rocks. Rocks rocks rocks. And if this and Electrical Storm are any indication of what the new album is going to be like, it's going to kick ass. Not that U2 doesn't routinely kick ass as a matter of course, but All That You Can't Leave Behind really didn't impress me all that much. And I know that pretty much me and that one other guy who always agrees with me on everything think that, but still. Pop ruled, and you're all losers for not thinking so.

While we're pondering things, let's be all up into how Sam Goody just so happened to have both CDs in stock, and believe you me it's damn difficult to get anything but albums from CD stores in these here parts. But Amazon is cool, so whatever.

But getting back to the whole (blue cover) / (UK) thing, I ponder U2's way of doing singles, which while it means I get more music and that's cool, means I REALLY gotta find a new discography somewhere, because so far as I can tell there at least two Electrical Storm singles (one of which I didn't get), and at least one if not two more Stuck In A Moment singles I don't have. And let's not forget the at least two Walk On singles and the at least two, and damn Sam Goody for not having these, Elevation singles. There's also another Beautiful Day single I don't have, for that matter. Not that I remember getting the first one, but it's there all the same.

But it gets worse. Leaving aside random totally uncollectable by me stuff like, say, the 22 or so various pre-Achtung Baby singles I don't have, there's STILL a bunch of stuff I'm missing. I thought I had all the humanly-collectable AB stuff, but no, there's an Even Better Than the Real Thing remix CD I'm missing. Much less Lemon, Stay, Discotheque, Please, Mofo (maybe), and The Sweetest Thing, which I might note has an awesome cover.

Dammit, I'm a completist. This sucks.

So the AC in the house crapped out, and it's 85 degrees at night in here. Sucks a lot.

But then, yknow, there's Whir. And I quote:

"This whole parking in the school lot just to get internet thing is kind of crappy."

You say 'And EVERYBODY likes squirrel aliens.'
Whir says 'Well ya. Who wouldn't like squirrel aliens?'
Samson says 'How can you not like furry little rabid space creatures?'
---Samson, Whir, and myself

This is probably way too long for the comments, so Cole gets his own blog post. Yay, or something. It's been a while since I've had a good political argument.

I once heard that if you don't have a job, you should treat job hunting like it's your job, and make that clear to your parents. I have no idea of the usefulness of the advice, but it sounds good, so I pass it along.

This, of course, is what they've been saying as well. Some days this works better than others.

Speaking of Calm Like a Bomb, I watched the Matrix on TBS last night. It was sorta screwy how, in the foyer shootup scene, they had the security guard say "Holy smokes!" instead of "Holy shit!", and then kept every single frame of shooting.

Another me would rant about the hypocrisy of that sort of thing, but I find that I've lost my energy for that sort of thing over the years, and people like Ebert say it better anyway.

On to other things.

Dwip, I know this will make a lot of people furious, but what the world can't stand is a leader who thinks he's right, and does what appears to be the right thing in a timely manner. They especially hate it when he is right in what he does, but that is my opinion which has little bearing on this group of left wing extremist people.

There's part of this that I agree with, and part of this I don't. I happen to be one of those people that thinks that invading Iraq was the right thing to do, or at least a better thing to do than what we were doing, which wasn't exactly a paragon of success. Similarly, I'm not especially happy with the UN among others for being all wishy-washy on the whole thing, and let us not forget France and Russia in there, too.

On the other hand, there are basically two problems I have with the whole operation. First of them is, yes he did it, but he seems to have done it without any sort of realistic plan in place. And if you look at things long enough, it becomes fairly obvious that no, the administration didn't seem to have a whole lot of plans for the peace. Then again, with as much as Bush beat on the whole nation building concept in the 2k election, and I remember him doing it, I shouldn't be surprised. In short, I pay these people quite a bit of money to make decisions and act in a competent manner, and when they do not I feel the need to question them on it.

The second part of this, and perhaps the most serious, is that in order to pull this whole thing off, the administration either lied to us, was misled, or willingly decieved itself into believing a whole host of things. Amongst those things were the Niger uranium deal scandal/Plame affair and all that British WMD evidence that was apparently based on a whole lot of nothing. I recall thinking at the time of Powell's big presentation in '03 something along the lines of "That's it? This is the best evidence you've got to offer us, despite hyping it to us for weeks? You expect us to go to war based on THIS?" And I'm a hawk, remember. And then when one hears stories about manipulation of the CIA and exposing agents for political gain, well, one is not impressed. And let us not forget the supposed Al Queda ties. I'll forgive the WMD, but not that. If Bush didn't blame 9/11 on Saddam Hussein, he sure didn't go out of his way to try and stop us from thinking it.

And this whole policy of truth thing, or lack thereof, extends further than Iraq. I just got done reading a rather persuasive rebuttal of the whole Swift Boat Vets Against Kerry thing, a group which Bush either supports or refuses to denounce. And on that whole subject, there's always that fun military records stonewalling we've been having since, oh, hell. Before 2k, anyway. The list goes on, but I can't be troubled to repeat it.

In short, then, if the United States is going to proclaim itself as some sort of force of moral righteousness in the world, and engage in the level of moral crusading we've been engaging in lately, I expect our leaders to be, well, moral about it. The means, in other words, does not always justify the ends.

And, hell. While we're at it, let's just tackle the whole left-wing extremist part of the whole thing. I should note that I've been accused of that by all of like three people, all of whom are exceedingly partisan Republicans. I know a number of partisan Democrats and the like, whom I disagree with on a variety of things, and yet I've never been called a right wing extremist. Hrm. Me, I prefer to think of myself as a political moderate, but the reality, I suppose, is more complex. I'd characterize the far left as being very freedom of choice (repeal drug laws, pro-abortion choice, etc). Most of that I'm ok with, to a degree. Lower the drinking age. Do SOMETHING about the failed War on Drugs. Yay choice. So probably pretty much guilty as charged. Too, I would characterize the far left as being pretty much regulatory/protectionist on economics. Me, I'm a sort of iffy free marketer, if you could call me anything. Regulation has a place, and I'm generally in favor of things like, say, the minimum wage. I'm also something of a conservationist. There's got to be a balance somewhere between, say, drilling the ANWR and outlawing nuclear power. I think that's a pretty centrist sort of view on things. And getting back to Iraq, and foreign policy in general, the far left is pretty isolationist/non-interventionist as a whole, I think. And of course I'm all for the whole nation-building thing. So, you know, whatever. If anything, I suppose I'm sort of a Bill Clinton Democrat, never mind that I'm a registered independent. This, of course, is enough to get me labeled all sorts of nasty things by the sort of Republicans who have an almost irrational hatred for the man, much in the same way some people have an almost irrational hatred of Bush, or of Reagan for that matter. Be that as it may, there's a considerable amount of ground between Clinton and, say, Nader.

That having been said, let us attempt to characterize the other people who I can think have posted on poltical issues here lately. This is, of course, rather unfair to them, and they should by all means feel free to contradict me, but, and in order of appearance in this thread:

Regina: Socially conservative to some degree or another. I can't recall a position on economics, or for that matter the war/foreign policy.

Clyos: One of two resident Republicans.

Tim: Too little interaction to really say, but I'm guessing at least somewhere on the left.

Whir: Pro-anime.

Marechal: Our other resident (raging) Republican, when he decides to reappear.

Anyway. On to yet another comment.

Afganistan is trying to do to us what it did to the USSR. But we are doing to it what we did to Cambodia. (That statement is not in any way based on anything I've read, only my guess. It's as good an answer as anything I've read though.)

Do elaborate. I'm curious to know what you mean, exactly.

(Courtesy of Navero, which ought to be amusing if you're a D&D geek. Maybe even if you aren't.)

Yeah. It's like this. You cannot make your toaster oven cook french fries with any degree of concern for things like taste and not sticking to the pan. So don't try. Just don't. You'll be happier.

Next up, the amazing MacGydwip will rewire an oven enclosure using plastic conduit, wood screws, and a utility knife.

(Written on 8/6, for the curious, but I just got around to posting)

Ignite, ignite.

Not to go off on a totally Livejournalish rant, but life around here sucks at the moment. Dad around the house all day pretty much threw everything off, to the point where none of us is getting enough sleep, tempers are flaring, and it's all made worse by my supposed job hunt, which involves on the one hand fending off 24/7 requests on my time by parents who then get angry when I haven't the time to jump in the car and drive to town, which is apparently the only true way to get a job. So not so good. And my attitude towards the thing is not the best, either. So just not good. Hopefully we'll be fixing that next week or so.

On a bookish note, the Bourne Identity is pretty good. In ways, it's even better than the movie, and pretty much totally different as well. Worth reading. The Bourne Supremacy, which I have yet to see so can't compare to the book, is also worth reading, with the caveat that it's very much one of those late '80s fascination-with-the-newly-discovered-Orient books (you've read them before, no doubt), and sort of suffers for it. But good. I also found my airplane reading from Michigan, by the name of Road to Baghdad - Behind Enemy Lines, a highly interesting read as well. It's the autobiography of an American officer who got stuck in Kuwait as Saddam overran the place, and a rather peculiar look at the leadup to the first Gulf War.

Which sort of belatedly leads us to a topic which I meant to cover days ago during all those politics posts, but just haven't had the energy to yet. And that's Iraq. I'm a little hesitant to go to this much effort to talk about it, because I think you've either made up your mind about the thing, or you haven't. Nevertheless, I entertain myself with things like this, so deal.

This thread fairly well sums up my views about a war with Iraq before and during the actual invasion part of things. Too, a read through this timeline and the ones after it make for some interesting reading.

So basically, my thinking on the war went about like this:

- Saddam is not exactly a champion of goodness, light, and the warm fuzzy feeling. Even if he wasn't responsible for all the things we said he was responsible for, what he IS responsible for is bad enough.

- Too, Saddam is either trying to acquire WMD or is trying to develop them or has some left over from when he actually did have some. And at the time, pretty much everybody else in the world agreed by default. I mean, throughout the 90s it seemed to be standard operating procedure for everyone to just figure that Saddam was a sneaky bastard who was hiding the things from us. Why else is he giving the inspectors such a hard time?

- WMD aside, there are a number of UN resolution violations to deal with, some or all of which void the Gulf War truce we made with Iraq.

- We've been fighting a sort of low-level air war with Iraq for about a decade. It doesn't seem to be doing a whole lot. And it doesn't appear as if it's going to inside of the lifetime of either Saddam or his kids.

- It would be sort of nice if we could effect an actual democratic government in that part of the world at some point.

So on the strength of all that, I ended up being in favor of the whole thing on the strength of what I could figure out about it, at the same time being fairly distrustful of what the administration had to say about it all. Notably:

- Iraq may or may not have been tied in with Osama Bin Laden, but I tend to doubt that Al Queda had any sort of real presence in Iraq prior to the invasion and resultant chaos.

- Despite my feeling that Iraq had or wanted WMD, much of the case the Bush administration was making was pretty iffy, where not outright scandalous (see also: Plame, Valarie and Intelligence, British). This ought to have been slightly more disturbing than I found it at the time.

- Too, whatever France and the UN thought they were doing, Bush's little leap in the face of world opinion was slightly iffy. I still can't help but think that if somebody like Clinton had been doing all the war buildup, the world would have jumped in line, whereas Bush pisses people off just by being himself.

There were also a couple of other questions to be asked about Iraq, such as "Why Iraq, when we have perfectly legitimate terrorist states like North Korea, who everyone basically agrees do not champion the causes of small forest animals?" To that, I figure, well, there's a fairly large chance that going after North Korea will result in chunks of, say, South Korea going missing, not to mention, well, we're already fighting Iraq, so why not?

So at the end of the day I came down in favor of the war, while being rather distrustful of the administration about the matter. Not the way I'd like to be about it, but whatever.

At any rate, here we are more than a year later. The invasion part of the war is over, and the occupation has been going for a year or so. And my thoughts on that?

- It would appear that we were either very much mistaken about the WMD thing, or the Iraqis were exceedingly clever in hiding the things. Yes, this was a big part of why we went to war. No, it does not to my mind invalidate the whole war.

- I haven't entirely made up my mind on a lot of things about the occupation, a lot of which has to do with my feeling that I'm not getting a very clear picture of what's going on. I blame the media, which seems to have become very very polarized on the subject, to the point that any pretense of objectivity has been thrown out.

- That having been said, there's been a lot said about there not being a plan, and the latter bit of that timeline I linked to previously should illustrate that pretty well. What's the plan for an Iraqi government? We dunno. Where are the WMDs? We dunno. Why the hell didn't you forsee the looting? We dunno. In and of itself, this is deeply troublesome.

- And I dislike the business of trying to compare this whole thing to Vietnam, which was a different war at a different time in a different place about different things. Nevertheless, whatever we're doing with the Iraqi government reminds me very strongly of our escapades in Vietnam, not to mention Latin America. Chalabi and company seemed Diem-like in their unpopularity and their lack of a clue. And Allawi, so far as I can tell, is a rather unpleasant individual, not to mention a former Baathist. This leads one to wonder if we're promoting democracy over there, or a thinly-disguised dictatorship in a way that for some reason reminds me of the 1980s.

Dunno. But I get the feeling that my pet rabbit could run this whole fiasco better than the Bush administration.

And on another note, what's going on in Afghanistan these days? Anybody?

So it's like 3:20 in the morning, and I'm totally exhausted. I've been totally exhausted all day, actually, as it's one of those days where you go to bed exhausted and wake up exhausted, and that never really changes throughout the day. So I should be in bed right now, but I'm not.

Instead I'm setting about cleaning my room. Yeah. I do that every so often, when it's like "I've HAD IT with this shithole, and something's changing RIGHT NOW."

Longtime readers of both the blog and the rants will recognize that I've long been totally unsatisfied with this room as a place to live, primarily because it's got way, way too much stuff in it. For one, there's the desk, which, being as it is a door, is sort of a pain in the ass and takes up a lot of floor space. It can, however, hold two computers. What I'd REALLY like to have happen is the advent of the holy corner desk, but that's not happening, primarily because of the bookshelves, not to mention the stereo. Since the other wall is pretty much all closet and filing cabinet and bed, chances of moving anything are pretty slim. This makes me unhappy.

But it's cleaner than it was. Sort of. Now I just need to do something about the two spare printers in the closet and the spare tower case, among other things. My closet scares me. Really scares me.

I'll attempt to say something real at some point later, but for the moment, here's a damn funny Bushism.

To all to whom these letters may come, Greeting

The State Board of Higher Education, by virtue of the authority vested in it by law, and on recommendation of the Faculty Senate, has conferred on

Erik Russell Wolfe

the degree of

Bachelor of Science

History

with all the rights, privileges, and honors thereto appertaining.

In testimony whereof we have subscribed our names and impressed the seal of Oregon State University on this diploma at Corvallis, Oregon, this thirteenth day of June, Two Thousand and Four.

[Insert signatures of assorted important people here]

I've known this for a while, but, well, I did it. I survived. And they've given me my piece of paper to prove it. And that makes me pretty damn happy.