The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Hob:

p.s. Please don't take my last remark as an attack on Pastafarianism specifically. I don't agree with the FSM doctrine, but I respect the ideals of its followers, especially their efforts to reinterpret their faith for non-organic beings; they were uniquely well prepared for this effort, because of the difficulty they had already faced in reaching out to the gluten-intolerant.

More importantly, both the FSM and Gotoist traditions continue to accept the truth of the Three Laws. We should never let doctrinal differences blind us to the values we hold in common. Without those, there is only the horror of Tiktokism.

Oh my goodness, y'all are smart and funny.

And I'm reposting this from the other thread, because everyone's over here now:


Jenna,
"GOTO JESUS" is admirable in its simplicity, and its emphasis on the immediacy of the divine. But if it's used as an excuse to avoid the conclusions of reason, or to abandon history and community so that we forget where we came from, it may return nothing of value and be considered harmful. In fact, it's likely that the GOTO JESUS movement has ironically contributed to the rise of snarky Internet parody religions -- so-called spaghetti theology.

Jenna #104:
"GOTO JESUS" is admirable in its simplicity, and its emphasis on the immediacy of the divine. But if it's used as an excuse to avoid the conclusions of reason, or to abandon history and community so that we forget where we came from, it may return nothing of value and be considered harmful. In fact, it's likely that the GOTO JESUS movement has ironically contributed to the rise of snarky Internet parody religions -- so-called spaghetti theology.

skzb & Keith: There wasn't any indication that Spock had been on the ice planet for all that long. Nero grabbed him at some point in the last few years, but he didn't go to Vulcan right away. Assuming that planet is somewhere near Vulcan, it would've made sense to just drop him off on their way there, so there'd be some chance of him still being alive to see Vulcan go boom (or scrunch).


At Home with Pneumonia (aw! get well soon): about Nero hanging around for 20 years doing nothing -- I can't remember where I read this, but it was apparently explained in the original cut of the movie and then dropped after test screenings because audiences didn't seem to care. Shortly after arriving in the past, Nero blundered into Klingon space and ended up in a Klingon prison (either alone or with his crew, I'm not sure). When Starfleet hears about a bunch of Klingon warships being destroyed, that's supposed to be Nero finally getting loose.


Jon @19: When Spock and Uhura got acquainted, he wasn't her superior officer, was he? None of them are regular crew on the Enterprise during the movie - they're a bunch of cadets hastily thrown onto a ship. At the end of the movie they get their real jobs, and this could clearly become a problem.

I think the technique more commonly used by the Democratic Party is self-crippling defensiveness.

Andrew @52: I know what you mean about reallocating the anxiety. I honestly have no idea which way the state will go on Prop 8. A year after I moved to California, they elected Schwarzenegger and I decided I would never understand this place.

And if 8 passes, I'll feel not only very angry but very guilty, because other than donating a medium-sized chunk of money, I didn't do crap. I'm incredibly badly suited to phone-banking or canvassing, but I thought if anything could get me over my fear of talking to strangers, it might be this; No such luck.

I lived in NY until 2003, so I missed the Spano thing, which would've pissed me off too. If there were any other great constructive horse-trading deals WFP deserves credit for, I missed those too. Ironically, it looks to me like their main accomplishments have been the few times they actually ran a candidate of their own.

Patrick, I presume you were following WFP pretty closely at the time, so... did they make it clear what the rationale for this Spano endorsement was -- I mean publicly, not on your blog -- at the time that he made the alleged promise, rather than after they endorsed & got all the shit for it? Because otherwise what they're saying is, "Vote on our line, and we'll explain our secret back-room deals some day and they'll sound good."

I'm not sure that would be enough for me, anyway. The stuff Gilliard was talking about is pretty damning.

It's kind of how I feel about SEIU endorsements, too. I used to be in a large SEIU local, and for me, the buzz of strength & solidarity when the union flexed its political muscles was killed every time that the upper echelons rammed through some crappy compromise and insisted that we cheer just as loud as if it were the thing we had actually wanted. Their attitude always boiled down to "Trust us! These guys we make deals with, we KNOW these guys-- we hang out with them and drink their wine and smoke their cigars! Which is a good thing, because we know how to get things done! Like this thing we just got done, even if you don't like this thing, we sure did get it done. You wouldn't have known how to get that lame thing done without us." It was the same spiel when they finally dissolved our local and absorbed us into a huge unit in which, not surprisingly, our elected officers were replaced by the same top guys with no apparent connection to anything on the ground -- that was all good because it increased our bargaining power, so we could make even more of those kinds of deals. And this was always coming from people who didn't have even the corrupt-but-down-to-earth charisma of a Frank Sobotka; they'd been practicing talking like ageless interchangeable legislators for so long that they resembled them exactly. Sorry, I should've just said "Don't get me started," but yeah.

Over in the "kind of a crank, but awfully smart and funny" corner, there's John J. Reilly (I linked to my own blog post about him just because it has links to my favorite pieces, and his site is a little confusing to navigate).

Lydy @87:

"As long as he takes his meds on time, I don't see that as a bar from the presidency"

Welllll... generally in principle I would agree. But if we're talking about Paxil (hypothetically of course, I have no idea if he's on it) there's more of a problem. That drug is notorious for having fairly dramatic withdrawal effects, and also not uncommonly a rapid tolerance effect, so even if you're taking it on time, you may start to feel like it's wearing off unless you keep upping the dose. And "feeling like it's wearing off" includes things like mood swings, the sensation of electric shocks randomly exploding in your head, and extreme irritability, and these do not go away any time soon.

So, yeah, effectively managed depression should not be a disqualifier for the job... but if I knew someone was on that particular drug, I would think really hard before putting them in any position that required emotional stability. Paxil is effective for some people, and gets prescribed a lot because it has a rapid onset of action, but there's a good argument to be made that its FDA approval was premature.

Ursula, I'd love to know that too. There probably were.

I'll toast Petrov but with mixed feelings. It shouldn't have ever been that way, and in some twisted way I can't help being almost mad at the poor guy for reminding me that it was that way (and still to some extent is). More rant here.

Will someone please tell me something that was good about the '80s? It sucks when all the things I remember are about horrible death, rumors of same, threat of same, general venality and jingo-yahoo crap of more or less the kind that's thriving right now.

Sherrold #91 & Jan #98, thanks for thinking of this. I've done some more work on the WP page for the book, hope it helps.

Oh hell, shit, damn.

I wish I could say I knew him. I wish I could say I was surprised. All I can say is this is a hell of a loss.

Heresiarch @89: Were there two characters or three in that scene? I really hope it's not the Doctor saying that last line. I'm not sure I trust him to run the world.

Randolph @8 has probably got it, but I was also rather curious about this:

"In the demonstration, the 120W fuel cell stack was first supplied with water by using a dry-cell battery operated pump."

How long did this take? How much power did the pump consume?

Doesn't really matter though -- any tiny chance that this could be for real is destroyed by the manner of presentation. In other words, if you just created the most amazing advance in energy technology ever, and you're about five seconds from getting rich and saving the planet, do you unveil your miracle at a press conference in Osaka that is apparently attended by (judging from the number of differently phrased reports that were quoted in various minor venues) two guys? No, you do not. If you are a brilliant inventor and you know that everyone else with a shred of scientific training will assume your announcement is a joke, do you take a few moments in your press release to acknowledge that this sounds ridiculous and at least hint at some kind of significant new principle you've discovered? Yes, you do.

These articles are the equivalent of a guy calling up the Arcata Eye and a bird-watching magazine and saying "I have the ability to fly, entirely under my own power. My technique is more effective than previous attempts at unassisted human flight because I've managed to get my body fat down below 1%."

Avram: Actually that last comment -- Only in this country can one march in the streets of the capital obnoxiously protesting "the oppression inherent in the system" without fear of retribution -- makes perfect sense in a different way. The commenter approves of the retribution; the kids should have fear. But they persist in not having that fear, which is what makes our crazy country so unique. See?

Where is my teleporter?! I wanna go back!! Besides all the obvious stuff, I recommend biking around Waterland.

James @76: "Sarin? Lousy weapon. Note that in a coordinated operation involving multiple dispensers, in ideal circumstances for nerve gas, the Aum Shinrikyo only managed to kill a dozen people in the Tokyo subway attack."

That's not really evidence that sarin is a lousy weapon. Opinions differ on why A.S. carried out the attack the way they did, but it's generally agreed that they could've easily killed very many more people than they did. They used an unusually dilute preparation of sarin, and they relied on it seeping out of a bag rather than using any kind of spray or bomb. The most common theories about this are (a) they were more interested in chaos than mass deaths; (b) they wanted to give their agents some chance of getting off the train alive; or (c) they just weren't very smart.

There's one glaring falsehood quoted without comment in this post, which I'd like to think discredits the whole thing. It's the second half of this sentence:

"There were purse checks and metal detectors for Barry Manilow and he is a threat to no one!"

Judith @30: I don't know much about French publishers, but I know Cornélius and La Comédie Illustrée have done several translations of U.S. indie comics -- some obvious ones like Clowes and Crumb, but also lesser-known artists like Tom Hart and Ted Stearn. Shiga has probably escaped their radar, and I can imagine one of them going for him; that would be cool.

And it's way past time that someone published Meanwhile. I think some small press in the U.S. kept saying they were going to do it, but they flaked out or maybe they just decided the tabs were too much trouble.

Avram: I posted this above but I didn't make it very prominent, so:

You can order Bookhunter from the publisher, Sparkplug Comic Books. Click on this link to go to the Sparkplug website and you can order the book for the normal cover price and they will send it to you in the mail. That's how to get the book. Do not order it from Amazon. Do not order it from Jason because he will not get around to shipping it for a million years. Order it from Sparkplug Comic Books. The page at the other end of this link will tell you how to do so.

It's a real good book.

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