Nature Leseul

Commander [Vimes], I always used to consider that you had a definite anti-authoritarian streak in you. It seems that you have managed to retain this even though you are authority. That's practically Zen.

—Havelock Vetinari

Some good news for all those "whiners" who are being screwed over by our "fundamentally sound" economy—it seems like at least one authority figure has figured out who's really at fault (and who's not) for foreclosures, and is doing something about it.

Chicago's Cook County won't evict in foreclosures

The sheriff here said Wednesday that he's ordering his deputies to stop evicting people from foreclosed properties because many people his office has helped throw out on the street are renters who did nothing wrong.

"We will no longer be a party to something that's so unjust," a visibly angry Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart said at a news conference.

[...]

This week, an attorney asked that Dart be held in contempt when his deputies did not evict tenants after determining they were not the owners and did not know about their landlord's financial problems.

A judge denied the attorney's request, Dart's office said, and Dart said that after talking to the Cook County state's attorney's office, he is confident he is on solid legal ground.

"My job as sheriff is to follow court orders, absolutely," he said. "But I'm also in charge of making sure justice is being done here and it is clear that justice is not being done here."

What a crazy idea—following law and justice instead of following (and giving) orders. That's policing as it's supposed to be.

The "Ancient One" jokes were just too obvious to pass up.

( Arkham Horror Ancient One card for John McCain )

Made with Strange Eons.

Edit: I'm having entirely too much fun with this.

( Herald card for Sarah Palin, plus associated components )

So litagemini posted a link to this a few days ago.

As far as I can tell, this random blogger had a crappy relationship with her husband, decided video games were to blame for it, and went on to decide that "game widows" are a massive silent social phenomenon that she needs to speak out about. It's unclear what qualifications she has to make such a sweeping claim, but she has written a book on it. And there are some fairly sane voices that she claims have endorsed said book, so maybe she does make her case better there than she does in her blog, but the linked post and the others in her blog are pretty weak, based on badly flawed pop statistics and negative stereotypes about gamers that sound more like a rant about her husband's specific perceived flaws than about serious psychological research of the gamer population as a whole.

Now, the paragraph that jumped out at me from her "crunching the numbers" post is this.

If we’re talking Massively Multi-player Online (MMO) widows and widowers, it makes sense to work from the sales figures of the most popular MMO, World of Warcraft (WoW). According to a Blizzard Entertainment press release, there were 10 million people playing WoW as of July 2008. According to Nick Yee’s research, the average MMO player is spending 22 hours a week online. Of those gamers, 30.5% of MMO players are male and dating, 26.2% are female and dating, 33.1% are male and engaged, married or separated, and 60.3% are female and either engaged, married or separated. This means that there are more than five million adult female game widows either dating, engaged to, married to, or separated from a gamer who spends about 22 hours a week playing online, and about one and a quarter million adult men experiencing the same situation with a woman gamer.

Now, there's plenty wrong with using the statistics this way, primarily the fact that she tries to imply (both here, and in her later paragraph about PS2 sales and demographics) that anyone who is dating a gamer qualifies as a "game widow." litagemini has made a pretty good post about other specific errors made in the use of these numbers, and others cited in the article, so I won't go into that too much.

But what I want to point out is that 22 hours number. This blogger seems to be trying to suggest that 22 hours is a huge amount of time to spend on an activity, and anyone who spends that much time must be neglecting his girlfriend in order to do it.

Well, let's crunch some numbers on that topic. There are 168 hours in a week. Assume that the population of MMO players gets 8 hours of sleep a night, and works 40 hours (though the reality is probably lower in both cases). That's 56 hours of sleep, and 40 hours working, leaving 72 hours of leisure time. 22 hours is a bit over 30% of 72 hours. So, taking that (already flawed) 22 hour figure at face value, that would mean that the average MMO player is spending roughly a third of his free time playing WoW. Just a third.

Now, I would not consider a relationship in which someone spends a third of his free time doing something other than paying attention to his girlfriend "game widowhood." In my world, that's what we call a "healthy relationship."

And I'm tempted to argue that this is a symptom of a culture that is inundated with deeply damaging messages about relationships, and tends to make people feel like their partner (singular, of course) needs to involve them in absolutely every aspect of their lives, and that anything less is symptomatic of "commitment-phobia," if not outright cheating.

But when I think about it, that's really not even true. I expect that plenty of people spend a third of their time watching football, going drinking at bars, playing poker, going to beauty parlors, going shopping, and so on with "normal" activities, and yet you never hear anyone whining about "football widows" or "shopping widows." It's more just gaming in particular, and the fact that the negative stereotypes of games and gamers that many people in our culture still hold make people feel that if someone gets that excited about something that is "just a game," then something must be wrong.

---

I do have to point out this sentence, from a fan letter this blogger received regarding her book:

I read an article awhile back on the front page of the [Seattle] Times about people selling virtual money – for those of us that are not gamers it seems so bazaar.

Given the level of literacy evinced by the rest of that quoted letter, that's probably a misspelling rather than deliberate cleverness, but it's pretty awesome in either case.

Okay. How many copies of Spore do I need to grab for people? Also, is there anyone who cares enough about the game to want the special edition?

Note that for today they have a one per person limit on it, so it'll be a day or two before I can grab a huge stack of them.

•  The drive to Miami is a lot shorter if you take the Turnpike instead of I-95. Between the shorter drive and the fact that I'm no longer driving a crappy Ford car with an engine designed to make your penis grow rather than to make your car go, I could probably have gotten there and back on a single tank of gas, if I'd wanted to risk it.
  • I refueled at half a tank at an overpriced Chevron station on my way out instead. 
• When you're at a nude beach and it starts raining, and everyone around you starts packing up and running for the parking lot, don't follow suit. Because:
  • Being naked in the rain is actually quite pleasant, and
  • With the beach cleared out, you'll be able to claim a choice spot. 
• Occasionally, there are girls who actually do want to meet random guys at the beach. 
  • And I actually did meet someone, after seeing her stop and talk with enough other random guys to persuade myself that she was amenable to my approaching her. 
• I really should investigate this strange idea of "sunscreen" one of these days. 

Well, I own this t-shirt and like the anti-marriage message of it a lot, but but I've always been somewhat bothered by the implicit sexism and reinforcement of gender stereotypes. So I decided this morning that I'd finally look around for its opposite, with a frowning bride and smiling groom, which I've heard exists.

Now, maybe my Google-fu is just failing me today, but it's hard enough to find that design in the first place, and the one or two sites that actually do have it, only offer it in women's sizes. (And the original only in men's sizes.) For example, here and here. Do the people who make these things just not bother to consider the possibility that men just might sometimes want to recognize that marriage can suck just as much for women? Fail.

And I could understand if it was good-quality Target shirts that had made that choice, to focus their limited manufacturing resources on the styles that are most likely to sell. But this is a CafePress shop, for Goddess' sake. They could easily provide these things in any conceivable style with five seconds' thought and a click of a button.

Of course, what I'd really like to find is one with both figures frowning, but that might be expecting too much.

Still, police state or not, it's good to have my attention diverted from it by a rather inspiring message from xkcd, exhaustively researched and fact-checked by the Google.

Although, of course, the data referred to are already being skewed by clever bloggers Google-bombing the phrases in question.

Out of curiosity, I checked the phrases "I shouldn't have told her" and "I should have told her" as well, and the ratio is similar, with 36,200 for the former, and 260,000 for the latter. Although those results may be skewed by the existence of a couple of songs with "I Should Have Told Her" as the title.

This is the kind of story that makes me want to get out of here.

xzarakizraiia is setting up and maintaining the LJ community brafree for a project in her women's studies class, so I'm helping her promote it, in case there are any interested parties reading my journal.

( Link and banner below cut )

Today I saw a flyer in the drive-thru window of a local bank for a pool party in the area, one which offered not only "summer fun," but also "God's word." Most of the text on the flyer consisted of a list of rules for the party. From memory, they included:

• Only dark-colored shirts and long pants or skirts are to be worn. No white t-shirts.
  
• No spaghetti straps or crop-tops.
  
• Modest dress required!
  
• Swimsuits may not be worn, except under clothing.
  

And in other news, George Bush is just like Batman. And it's not entirely untrue, really; it makes one wonder whether American culture is really doing such a good thing by celebrating pragmatic, consequentialist anti-heroes like Batman and Jack Bauer. The difference between superhero movies and the real world, unfortunately, is that you don't know who the bad guys are before you start torturing them.

So I found this tonight:

( Arkansas code, § 5-68-204 )

So, it is illegal in Arkansas to be naked in the presence of anyone other than your doctor or your spouse. Regardless of whether it's in a public place or not. In fact, it pretty specifically includes private property in the prohibition.

And it's illegal to "advocate, demonstrate, or promote nudism." Meaning I were simply wearing, for example, this shirt within the state of Arkansas, I would be committing a crime. I'm not sure how the Arkansas legislature managed to reconcile this in their uncivilized little minds with pesky little things like the First Amendment.

Furthermore, as this article points out, that clause makes it effectively illegal to campaign to change the law.

I think this may well be the dumbest law ever, and I'm including the ones about transporting whales by truck or changing π to 3. Unlike those laws, this law doesn't have the excuse of being a leftover from an uncivilized and barbaric age; it was passed in 1994.

Well, damn. After rediscovering just how perfect a song "Nowhere to Go" is, I really wanted to respect Melissa Etheridge.

Unfortunately, it seems I can't.

There are many things people do not know about BARACK OBAMA. It is every American's duty to read this message and pass it along to all of their friends and loved ones.

( The TRUTH )

My stimulus payment?

A whopping $45. w00t!

Thanks, Dubya! I'll get right on stimulating the economy with that.

So the Web filter at work has entertained me for quite a while. Whether MySpace messaging is available, for example, has always changed every other month for about as long as I've been here. More recently, I've been seeing similar behavior with Facebook messaging, Google docs, and free image hosting sites. (For what it's worth, as I write this, MySpace and Facebook messaging work, Photobucket works but ImageShack doesn't, and Gmail and Google docs are both blocked.)

I think the IT department is using Websense, which basically gives the system administrator a group of fixed "categories" of content to choose to block on the local network. So the variation in what's available and what isn't is due to the administrators of the Websense service changing what sites are included in their various lists rather than any choice by EA's own IT department.

Now, most of the blocked sites are under either the "General E-Mail" category or the "Personal Network Storage and Backup" categories. And that's an understandable thing for them to want people to block, given the need to prevent source code or other proprietary data from getting leaked. (Of course, given that you can't attach files to MySpace or Facebook messages, it doesn't really make sense for those to be blocked under that justification, but whatever.)

Looking at the Wikipedia page and the Websense company's own site, the permissions set by EA are pretty liberal—the software apparently includes categories for, for example, "Abortion" and "Advocacy Groups" which aren't enabled here, as I've been able to go to sites like Amnesty International and Planned Parenthood from work just fine.

Nevertheless, I discovered a couple of months ago—I think when I was trying to visit some sexual health site off of Google for some reason—that our IT people seem to have turned on the "Sex" filtering category. Which irked me a little bit, but was mostly just bemusing. (This is a recent change, given that I spent a few of the dreadfully boring long hours of the 2006 crunch time reading stories on Literotica, which is now blocked.)

Today, however, I got an e-mail from the Obama campaign asking for volunteers for their table at this weekend's Gay Days Expo. Curious about what that event entailed, I clicked the link, and found it blocked. (Although for some reason, the site for Gay Days in general isn't.)

Now, I obviously can't see what kind of scary content this site might have on it from here, since it's blocked. It's possible that there are enough explicit images there make the block justified, at least insofar as blocking explicit images on work computers is justifiable in the general case. (Though it should be noted that Playboy.com isn't blocked right now... WTF?) If I investigate this at home tonight, though, and it turns out that the site in question is completely benign, I think this is about the point where I need to write some angry e-mail to the IT department about Websense's "Sex" category.

ETA: Coincidentally, I just found that the Wikipedia page on sexuality and gender identity-based cultures is also blocked under the "Sex" category. (Plenty of other sex-related pages on Wikipedia are fine.) I tried to access that particular page on a public terminal here, and it timed out; the rest of Wikipedia worked fine, so it wasn't a network problem. (The aforementioned Expo site also timed out, for what it's worth.) What is so special about that particular Wikipedia entry? So strange.

Federal court rules against military gays policy

The military cannot automatically discharge people because they're gay, a federal appeals court ruled Wednesday in the case of a decorated flight nurse who sued the Air Force over her dismissal.

The three judges from the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals did not strike down the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy. But they reinstated Maj. Margaret Witt's lawsuit, saying the Air Force must prove that her dismissal furthered the military's goals of troop readiness and unit cohesion.

...

Under Wednesday's ruling, military officials "need to prove that having this particular gay person in the unit really hurts morale, and the only way to improve morale is to discharge this person," said Aaron Caplan, a staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union of Washington state who worked on the case.

Looking at doing the Discworld party tomorrow (Monday) night at xzarakizraiia's place. Will that work for people?

Given that I probably can't make it there on a weekday until 6:30 at the absolute earliest, and that the movies are three hours each, most likely we'll pick one or the other to watch, and leave plenty of extra time for Rock Band, Mario Kart, strip Smash Bros., etc.

Not only was I unable to get to sleep until around 6 last night, but I get to work today and find that apparently it's "Bring your kids to work day," and I'm going to have to spend all day listening to their inane babbling.

What a lovely week it's been.

So there seems to be enough interest to merit organizing a Discworld movie viewing party at some point in the near future. I purchased a DVD copy of Hogfather from Borders, and have a downloaded copy of The Colour of Magic that I will hopefully be able to burn for easy viewing.

The most probable venue is xzarakizraiia's apartment, next to UCF. Each of the two movies is about three hours long; we could watch one or both, depending on how much time people want to spend on this event. Add to that however long people want to spend doing other things, like playing Rock Band and Smash Bros., eating food, having orgies, etc.

Times are flexible; I'm mostly posting to get feedback from interested persons on what a good time to do this would be. Saturday (tomorrow) is an appealing option, but that would be rather short notice for people. Weekday evenings, excluding Wednesday and Friday, are also generally available, although weekends are probably better, as then the afternoon is available and the loud noises that result from Rock Band are less disturbing to neighbors. Next week I know is exam week for UCF, so people might prefer to wait until that is out of the way.

Just let me know if you're interested and what times work for you.

Full-length live-action Discworld movies exist!

How did I miss these coming out over the past few months?

Goddess, why is BitTorrent so slow?

Edit: I have also learned that there were plans being made once for a film adaptation of Mort, up until some of the people involved made the recommendation to "lose the Death angle," because "the Death/skeleton bit doesn't work for us."

Well, I suppose it's no worse than making a film of The Handmaid's Tale and losing the totalitarian patriarchal dictatorship angle.