Might Makes Right

Nathan on 2019-10-22

I normally don’t like being involved in politics. Confrontation is something I avoid and politics is usually full of it (instead of compromise from both sides). Last night, however, I was thrust into it by some of my classmates in college. Needless to say, they have some kind of questionable beliefs that make me genuinely scared for the future.

Child Abuse

The night began with discussing some casual child abuse. Now, we have laws in this country about how you’re allowed to treat a child. After all, the child is unlikely to be able to know the full ramifications of it’s actions, nor defend itself when attacked and generally makes an easy target for excessive aggression. The fact that we’ve codified this as a specific set of laws should be enough for people.

However, it appears as though many people are still, at least outwardly, okay with casual child abuse. My professor was wistfully talking about how the nuns at his childhood school would routinely beat up the students there and that his fear of nuns is deeply rooted due to it. He also described how his coach on various sports teams would rough him up, to the point of black eyes and whatnot. Both of these accusations seemed not only normal to him, but acceptable and the proper course of action when dealing with children.

Many of the students in class seemed to think this was an acceptable solution to what they perceive as the current issues with children misbehaving. Instead of understanding what the problem is, working through it and finding a solution to the problem. Like an adult. Corporal punishment is a savage and backwards way of making children behave, in fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if it made problems worse later in life.

Trump

According to my class, not only has he done nothing wrong, but other than some minor slips of the tongue, he’s been great. Despite the laundry list of things that he has done in the last few months that will likely take decades to fix, if they’re ever fully fixed. Despite the very public and very obvious character flaws that both he and his VP have, especially when dealing with women and minorities. Despite all this, they want him to stay.

I wish I could say that this is an abnormal class and that there are still people who don’t think child abuse is acceptable, and that being a toxic personality on the international stage is not very presidential. However, there many more people around me that believe the same things. There are even public officials at the tax office who have been caught failing to register people to vote if they identify democrat.

I know it’s not all broken. I know there are people out there who are not blindly following this strange 50’s-esque mentality of might makes right, let the men do the talking and women and minorities need to get back into their proper places. I know these people exist… but I feel disheartened and discouraged. I’ll vote, but I’m so tired of trying to fight this that it’s almost easier to just give up.

Reasons to be Cheerful

Nathan on 2019-10-21

Reasons to be Cheerful is an editorial project dedicated to “stories of hope, rooted in evidence.” A project spearheaded by David Byrne of Talking Heads fame, Reasons to be Cheerful reports stories that “balance a sense of healthy optimism with journalistic rigor, and find cause for hope.”

Reasons to be Cheerful — Discover

Press (Y) to honk

Nathan on 2019-10-20

Yes, I’ve been playing that game.

More than that, I’ve enabled a little feature on my site. Seems to only work with Blink/Webkit browsers, but it’s too good to not keep. But first, a story.

Way back in the day, I administered a little website for a law school. This was, at times, painfully boring. As one does when one is bored and feeling a little overworked at times, you tend to add “features”. Easter eggs is their technical term. One day, I had a particularly bossy client who had rapid fire changes that needed to be made to this static site he had forced us to use for his pet project. I was getting annoyed because the code was in shambles and I was required to support it, which meant fixing it all. In addition to fixing up the code, I added an easter egg to the site behind the Konami code that would invoke Cornify to… redecorate… the site.

I obviously had to show it off to my co-workers. It was a great success and people loved it. They wanted me to show it off to everyone who came by for meetings. I eventually cleaned up the original trigger code and applied it to the site template for all the pages on the site. That way you could get your pink unicorniness on regardless of the boring subject you were reading about.

Yes, that was all a massive aside to tell you that if you press Y on my site, and click on a link or other element, you’ll hear that good ol’ goose honk.

End of an Era

Nathan on 2019-10-20

I got rid of my Linux gaming workstation the other day. The ~10 year old machine had served me well, especially considering it had cost me less than $1000 when I built it. Additionally, I only put minor upgrades into it. A generally unneeded extra 8gb of RAM and a sorely needed Nvidia 1060 6gb graphics card. The decision didn’t come lightly. I have been a gamer on some level for most of my life. I’m moving on from that, generally, now.

The decision to stop playing PC games was not one I wanted to make, but it was somewhat forced on me. As I grow older, I’m loosing out on time to more important tasks. I have schooling I’m trying to focus on, and I have a job, family and other responsibilities that I can’t ignore. Couple that with the fact that I don’t really need multiple gaming systems dividing my attention for entertainment, and that I just got a laptop that more than covers my mundane needs. I made a choice to remove excess.

Right now, I’m siting here, looking at all there is left of that system. A stack of Corsair RAM, several HDDs/SSDs and the 1060. I can’t help but wonder if it was the right decision to make. I’ll miss out on Doom: Eternal and probably the PC port of Monster Hunter: World – Iceborne. I find that I don’t care, though. I’m well enough entertained and the future is bright as far as the Switch, 2DS and iOS gaming goes. Maybe when I retire I’ll build myself a gnarly-ass rig and go all out — I doubt it, but it’s a nice thought.

Here’s to you, old PC, you got me through more than my fair share of downtime.