WWdN: In Exile

yet another xkcd that I absolutely love

hillary clinton: the psycho ex-girlfriend of the democratic party

As many of you know, I'm an enthusiastic Barack Obama supporter. I have never been so excited or inspired by a candidate -- or, really, any leader -- in my life, and I view this election as an historical opportunity -- maybe even a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity -- to not only save my country from the disaster wrought by Bush and Cheney, but fundamentally change how my government interacts with the rest of the world, and how it works for me and my fellow Americans.

Knowing all of that, I'm sure it will come as no surprise that over the last 10 weeks or so, I've gone from respecting to feeling sorry for to actively despising Hillary Clinton.

It's over. She knows it's over. It's been over for almost three months, but she's been moving the goalposts and cynically and cravenly pandering to voters in a way that's not only insulting, but is embarrassing. John Cole frequently says that he can't believe he ever supported Bush, and I can now join him in saying that I can't believe I ever supported, defended and believed in the Clintons.

The thing about all of this is that, with a Clinton victory in the primary about as likely as jumping off the roof of your house and landing on the moon, it's become clear that this whole thing isn't about Democrats or beating McCain (who is inexplicably running for Bush's third term) or saving our country from the catastrophic failure of the Bush years. No, it's all about her. It's about her ego. It's about refusing to admit that she did her best, but voters (except those encouraged by Rush Limbaugh to cross party lines and fuck with our primary) have pretty clearly said "No thanks. You're a good senator, but we want something different now."

It's been crystal clear for weeks, yet she refuses to put party and country over personal ambition and drop out of the race, forcing Barack Obama to not only run against McCain and the Media, but also against her. It's particularly galling, because she can only win if her campaign can force Democratic superdelegates (one of the worst creations in the history of politics) to tell millions of Democratic voters -- many of them first time voters who, like me, finally feel truly inspired by someone -- to go fuck themselves.

It's driving me crazy, and I hope that someone sits her down with a calculator so she'll make this primary that is just strengthening McCain -- who, I feel obligated to point out again, is running for Bush's third term. That would be George W. Bush, the most universally hated president in American history.

At times like these, when it would be easy to despair, I find comfort in humor, like this post I saw on Reddit this morning: Hillary Clinton: The Psycho Ex-Girlfriend of the Democratic Party.

It's 2:31 AM. The Democratic Party is sleeping peacefully when it hears its phone buzz on the night stand. It rolls over and sees "Hillary" on the caller ID. It pauses briefly, considering pushing "END" and not dealing with this shit tonight. The thought is appealing but the Democratic Party knows that if it doesn't take this call, another one is only minutes away.

DEMS: ...Hello?

Hillary: Hey baby.

DEMS: C'mon Hillary. Enough with this.

Hillary: Don't you get it? You NEED me.

DEMS: No, I don't. It was fun while it lasted but I'm with Barack now. I made my choice, it's done.

Hillary: You can't really mean that. How can you say that after all the good times we had?

DEMS: To be honest, I started hanging out with you because Bill's pretty awesome.

Hillary: But I'm just like Bill!

DEMS: No, you're not. Bill is charismatic, inspiring, and gets me really good weed.

Hillary: Fuck you. You're elitist!

DEMS: I'm going back to sleep.

I hope that, after the crushing defeat in North Carolina and few thousand vote "victory" in Indiana, the undeclared superdelegates (again, the absolute worst idea in the history of politics) will respect the will of the people and commit to Obama, so we can all focus on introducing the real John McCain -- not a Maverick, not a nice guy, not an honest guy, not a regular guy, not substantially different from George W. Bush in any meaningful way -- to the American people.

And allow me to just head something off right now that's already come up on Twitter: I'm not sexist. This isn't sexist. That's a stupid straw man, and if you try to make that claim, I will point and laugh at you.

Update: Here, let me try this one more time for the humorless and professional victims out there, who seem to have shown up in a flood today: Gender, race, sexual orientation, things that make us different that we don't choose . . . they just don't matter to me. At all. People are people and identity politics is stupid.

I found this post hilarious because it satirized the behavior of an ex-girlfriend/ex-boyfriend/ex-robot who just refuses to accept that it's over. I've had a psycho ex-girlfriend. My friends who are women have had psycho ex-boyfriends. In all cases, the behavior has been exactly like the behavior satirized in the post I linked. Get it? Get it? I'm talking to you now, people without a sense of humor: It. Is. Not. About. The. Gender. It. Is. About. The. Behavior. The Behavior. The Behavior.

Everyone get it now? Am I spelling it out simply enough for you? Let's all say it together. Use a puppet if it helps: It's about the behavior. It is not about the gender.

That's the whole point, that's the humor, that's what inspired me to link this post. If you're unwilling or unable to understand this . . . well, anything I'd say now would waste even more of my time, so I'll go back to pointing and laughing.

Final update:

Well, I'm just going to throw up my hands here. I've made it as abundantly clear as I possibly can that I don't care about Clinton's gender, and I don't have a problem with women. What I *do* care about
is watching a woman I once respected degenerate into a Republicanesque Karl Rove monstrosity in a Quixotic effort to destroy a candidate I believe in. What I care about is beating John McCain in November so we can start to put our country back together.

If you want to boycott me, go nuts. As a life-long activist, I understand and totally support the concept of voting with your pocketbook and voting with your feet.

But stop telling me who I am and what I think and feel. I know what I was thinking when I wrote this, and it's not what many of you have accused me of.

I'm not going to waste any more time on this, and I'm locking comments on this post. May I suggest that you take whatever energy you'd use to tell me what a terrible person I am and use it to put some good into the world instead.

Writing to your congresscritter and demanding an end to the war would probably be a good place to start.

in which i write a prequel

Ficlets is this cool collaborative writing project that I occasionally play with as I work out my creative writing muscles. Ficlets takes the philosophy that creativity is born of necessity and applies it ruthlessly: writers only get 1024 characters -- not words, but characters -- to tell a little bit of a story.

Where Ficlets really shines, though, and what makes it so unique and inspiring, is that it's a collaborative writing process; each story has a link attached to it that can be used to write a prequel or sequel to any of the stories people submit (which are all released under a creative commons license.) Stories can have lots of different prequels and sequels, too, as each ficleteer finds and expresses their own inspiration.

There have been some fantastic prequels and sequels written around some of the stories I've put up there, but today was the first time I was ever inspired enough to write one of my own.

Last night I saw that Will Hindmarch (a very creative a hoopy frood) had written a really quirky and awesome story. I instantly wanted to build upon it, but nothing came into my mind. I told my brain to run it as a background process until it returned something useful, and at 7 this morning I suddenly woke from a deep sleep with the entire idea fully formed (core dumped, if you will) in my head.

Because the ficlets are so short, it's not really practical to excerpt them, so I'll just direct you to Will's story, A Loaded Gun in the Mailbox, which you should read first, and my story, An Unremarkable Factory.

The challenge I gave myself was to not just write an interesting piece of fiction inspired by Will's, but to also write it in a style that flowed well with his. At the risk of sounding entirely too pleased with myself, I'm very happy with the result.

If you want to take the Creative Commons experience all the way, listen to tracks five and six of Nine Inch Nails' Ghosts I while you read mine. I had them on while I wrote it.

three quick things

I'm super busy today, so I only have time to post five three things:

1. I am way way way behind on Happiest Days orders. I'm going to catch up this afternoon and tomorrow. If you haven't gotten your "I'm shipping this" e-mail from PayPal (International orders won't, because of the way I have to process those) keep an eye out in the next 24 hours. Thank you all for your patience, support and understanding.
2. There are tons and tons of fantastic, entertaining and thought-provoking comments in yesterday's Star Trek posts. In fact, after reading them all, I'm going to go ahead and upgrade my Star Trek Movie condition to something similar to Charlie Brown going after the football.
3. I found my original Gameboy Tetris cartridge this morning. I was feeding my dogs, and when I went into the garage to get their kibble, it was just sitting on a stool next to the washing machine. Man, if this thing could talk . . . well, it would probably say, "Thanks a lot for leaving me in the garage, you douche."

thanks, but i think i'll pass . . .

How funny is it that I'm decrying the retcon and bitching about the "reinventing" of Star Trek on the same day that io9 writes Captain Wesley Crusher: SIS:

The Star Trek franchise has always been about "big picture" stories, but the next Trek series should take the opposite approach, narrow the scope and focus on a few well-developed characters - primarily Wesley Crusher. Yes, the much maligned ensign should be brought back as the captain of a Starfleet science vessel that warps around the Alpha Quadrant solving mysteries for the Federation. Think of it as CSI . . . in space! Here's how it would work ...

How do they handle the whole Traveler thing? Easy:

Oh yeah, about that whole resigning from Starfleet and tripping around the universe with that space-hippie, The Traveler? One word: retcon.

The whole thing is very entertaining, and I honestly don't know what to say when a science fiction site says nice things about me, so I'll just say thank you.

highlights from my damn geeky weekend

So my geeky weekend was totally awesome, and there were a few moments I thought I'd share. Before I get there, though, I need to clear something up: On Friday, as I was running out of the house, I said "Go see Iron Man this weekend. It is awesome. I saw a preview screening on Monday, and other than the score (which is absolute crap) the movie is damn near perfect. I think it’s the best comic book movie since Sin City, and blows Transformers and the last two X-Men movies into oblivion."

Uh. Yeah. I don't know how, but I managed to leave Batman Begins and Ghost World out of that, which is further evidence that I am a complete moron. Lots of people disagree with me about Sin City and X-Men. Those people are all wrong, of course, but my leaving out Batman Begins and Ghost World is just inexcusable. I deeply regret the error, and hang my head in shame while I carefully fold up my nerd cape. I'll be in the corner for a little bit, thinking about what I did.

Okay, now that we're done with that, allow me to share some highlights from my weekend with you:

Friday night I said to Anne, "When I finish this martini, I'm going to think it's a great idea to have another martini. It will, in fact, be a very bad idea for me to have another martini, and I'd appreciate it if you'd remind me of that fact when the time comes."

When the time came, she wasn't at the table. Oops.

Saturday morning, we unsurprisingly slept too late to get breakfast at the hotel, so we went to a supermarket and got yogurt, bananas, juice and stuff. I think we ended up having a more healthy and less expensive breakfast than we would have had at the hotel.

I wasn't nervous at all about my reading at Mysterious Galaxy, which was really weird. In fact, while we were driving there (Anne was driving, I was reading from my book because I got it into my head that it may be a good idea to try something new about 20 minutes before showtime) I said to Anne, "You know what's weird? I'm not nervous at all." It was at that very moment that I got nervous.

There were more people at Mysterious Galaxy than I was expecting, and when I walked into the store, the whole place fell silent and everyone was staring at me. You know how you walk into a room and feel like everyone was just talking about you? It was like that. I mean, they probably were, but it was still weird. It didn't do much for the nervousness.

When I started my reading, I heard words coming out of my mouth, but I didn't know what they were. I do that when I'm nervous and haven't prepared any introductory remarks. If you were there and noticed this, thank you for not booing me.

I usually read blue light special and maybe exactly what I wanted, but I thought the MG crowd would be entertained by and relate to beyond the realm of the starlight. It turns out that they liked it, so my last minute decision to change the usual program was rewarded. In the future, though, I think I'll stick with the cards, lest I get a visit from Nick Fury when I'm done.

Unrelated to this post: Time Machine is making a backup right now, and it's making my mouse jumpy. That is SO FUCKING IRRITATING.

Right. Back to business:

After I was finished reading, I took some questions. The thing about this is that nobody ever has questions when I say, "I'd be happy to entertain your questions," but when I'm signing their book, they have tons of questions, so instead of getting to tell my hilarious and charming jokes to everyone, I get to tell them to one person at a time. I must come up with some way of helping people not feel self conscious when it's Q&A time. I should also clarify that I don't mind answering questions or getting my geek on when I sign your book. In fact, I've noticed over the years that when I sign books for people, we almost always end up having some huge geek moment about movies or software or other geeky topics. I absolutely love that and hope it won't ever go away.

While I was signing books, a girl about my age walked up to the table. She extended her hand and said, "Hi, I'm Gina."

"Hi Gina," I said. "It's nice to meet you."

"I'm a blogger," she said.

"Oh? Cool!" I said. "What's your blog?"

"It's called 'Lifehacker,' and --"

It was at this point that I completely lost my shit and spent the next eleventy hundred minutes telling her how much I love Lifehacker. I think I slimed her pretty hard, but she wrote the nicest thing in the universe about me on Lifehacker today. Uh, wow. Thanks, Gina!

I also met a reader who nearly made me cry when she told me about her relationship with her stepdad, and how my books were a part of it. Stepkids: it means more than you'll ever know when you tell your stepparents how much you love them, and when that moment finally comes where you accept how much we love you back, it's the most cherished moment in our lives.

Saturday night was much more sedate and responsible than Friday night (and how lame and old am I that 3 martinis now qualifies as crazygonuts?)

Sunday morning, we got up early enough to eat breakfast in the hotel, and I wished that we hadn't. I had a waffle with berries and maple syrup, but forgot to ensure that the "maple syrup" wasn't that corn syrup bullshit that makes me sick to my stomach before I infected the entire waffle with it. I still ate about half of the waffle, though, because I was so hungry.

"I am really looking forward to eating lunch at Stone," I said to Anne, "because I'm seriously thinking about going all Karen Carpenter on this breakfast."

We eventually made our way up to Escondido, wandered around the beer garden (which is awesome and beautiful) and settled in for a nice long lunch.

It ended up being longer than I'd initially planned, because the restaurant was ridiculously busy yesterday, and we didn't get our food until about 15 minutes before I was supposed to go read. As I watched tons of people stream in with my book in their hand, I got the nervous stomach and couldn't eat. Awesome. Greg Koch, who is the co-founder of Stone and invited me, reminded me that, once people are in the beer garden, they relax and live on "beer time," which is much more laid back than real time. This actually put me at ease, which is very hard to do before I am about to perform.

Oh! Please enjoy this moment from lunch, which I sent to Twitter:   Anne: It's Jedi day! Me: What? Anne: May the Fourth be with you. Me: OMG I am so sending that to Twitter.

My reading was great. There were about 50 people there, and I felt like my introductory remarks were much better than they were at MG, probably because I spent some time really thinking about what I would say. Amazing how preparation helps me feel prepared, isn't it?

There were lots of questions when I was done, and I had a good time answering them (some marginally inappropriate answers were brought to you by Oaked Arrogant Bastard Ale.) I think everyone had a good time, and Greg said that I could come back with future books, which I intend to do as long as I can keep coming up with stuff that's worth reading.

After the reading, we had dessert, and I was finally able to enjoy a Ruination IPA. Anne drove us home in time to watch one of the funniest episodes of Family Guy I've ever seen, and I ended the night watching one of the most exciting NHL playoff games I've ever seen.

It was a fantastic weekend, and I want to thank everyone from Mysterious Galaxy (which has autographed copies of all my books, now, if you want to order them) as well as everyone from Stone who put on these events. Most importantly, though, I want to thank everyone who made the effort to come out and spend some time with me this weekend. I did my best not to suck, and I think I mostly succeeded.

"reinventing?" uh-oh. i'm not sure how i feel about this

Wired says that JJ Abrams promises to "reinvent" Star Trek:

"Effects for Star Trek have never, ever been done like this," says Abrams, who credits George Lucas' Industrial Light and Magic for the visual fireworks.  

Abrams was fanatical about Star Wars as a kid. But Star Trek? Not so much. Directing the new movie, he tells the Associated Press, "was an opportunity to take the characters, the thoughtfulness, the personalities, the sense of adventure, the idea of humanity working together, the sense of social commentary and innovation, all that stuff and apply it in a way that felt genuinely thrilling."

Without a lot of context, it's tough to puzzle out exactly what this means for guys like us who've loved Trek forever and ever. If he's just talking about bringing modern special effects to Star Trek, which totally would make it more thrilling to watch, this is great news.

However, if this "reinventing" -- which is such a loaded term in this post-Episode One world (5-19-99 never forget!) -- extends to some of the fundamentals of the Star Trek mythos, and if he wants to make Star Trek more like Star Wars, we could be looking at the biggest geekriot in history.

On one hand, this could be Abrams saying, "I'm going to take Star Trek and make it relevant to an audience that hasn't loved it and watched it for 40 years." That's not necessarily a bad thing.

On the other hand, it could be him saying, "Look, Trekkies, I know you've been watching this show for 40 years, but I'm JJ Fucking Abrams and if I want to 'reinvent' this thing that means so much to you, I'm going to do it. So don't get your spacesuits in a knot when I put turbines on the Enterprise, okay? They look cool!" That would be a very bad thing.

Speaking as a lifelong geek, my knee-jerk reaction when I hear someone talking about "reinventing" something like Trek is that it will be a tower of suck, built out of an endless supply of Jar-Jars and midichlorians.

However! Ron Moore reinvented BSG, and it's the greatest thing ever, so reinventing things isn't automatically horrible. In fact, if the article had been titled "JJ Abrams promises thrilling effects for Star Trek movie" I'd be celebrating right now. Language is important, as they say.

I guess it comes down to who is doing the reinventing, and if their vision builds upon the existing foundation in an interesting way, instead of pulling a massive, insulting retcon on us all. In his favor, JJ Abrams is really, really good at starting things (not so much with the keeping them awesome after one season, sadly,) but absolutely awesome at starting things. Since this is the beginning of Star Trek, I'm hopeful. Apprehensive, but hopeful.

So, yeah, not entirely sure how I feel about the "reinventing." At least the people who totally fucked Star Trek up aren't involved, but why does anyone need to "reinvent" Star Trek at all? There's a good reason it managed to endure through four decades and several generations of Trekkies and casual viewers alike. I hope JJ Abrams groks that, because I really want to like this movie.

Oh, how about an almost-instant update:

JJ Abrams also says:

 

"It was an opportunity to take what I think has been a maligned world _ to sound crass, a franchise _ and treat it in a way that made it something that I wanted to see"

[...]

"The whole point was to try to make this movie for fans of movies, not fans of `Star Trek,' necessarily,'" Abrams said. "If you're a fan, we've got one of the writers who's a devout Trekker, so we were able to make sure we were serving the people who are completely enamored with `Star Trek.' But we are not making the movie for that contingent alone.

 

"You can't really make a movie for them. As soon as you start to guess what you think they are going to want to see, you're in trouble. You have to make the movie in many ways for what you want to see yourself, make a movie you believe in. Then you're not second-guessing an audience you don't really have an understanding of."

That makes a lot of sense, but, uh, JJ? You should probably understand Trekkies if you're making a Star Trek movie. Seriously, have one of your minions make you a quickstart guide or something; it's not that tough.

Anyway, making it for fans of movies instead of exclusively for Trekkies is something I can completely agree with, and shows that he understands the massive challenge that making a movie like this brings. That's real good news, as long as he doesn't go turning Star Trek into Attack of The Four Toed Statues or something.

He also says:

"I feel like this is so unlike what you expect, so unlike the `Star Trek' you've seen. At the same time, it's being true to what's come before, honoring it," Abrams said.

I'm going to commit heresy right now and say what few people are willing to say out loud: most of the Star Trek movies are absolute garbage. There have been ten Trek movies, and I'd say that two of them are accessible to mainstream audiences, another two are great, and the remaining six are nearly unwatchable. If JJ Abrams wants to make his new Trek movie unlike the 80% of Trek movies that aren't that good, that's just fine with me. Not that my opinion means anything, you understand, but rambling on and on about things like this is the price of being a geek, and I regret nothing. NOTHING!

this is one hell of a geeky weekend

I just put the finishing touches on the note for the house sitter (my favorite new addition to the standard boilerplate: how to hook up Rock Band without messing up my tours) and I'm about to head out to San Diego for some awesome geekery this weekend.

Before I leave, though, I had to say: Go see Iron Man this weekend. It is awesome.  I saw a preview screening on Monday, and other than the score (which is absolute crap) the movie is damn near perfect. I think it’s the best comic book movie since Sin City, and blows Transformers and the last two X-Men movies into oblivion.

Need a little more convincing? Go see it for the pitch-perfect performances, lead by Robert Downey Junior, who absolutely makes this film so enjoyable. io9 says, “Iron Man is the first comic-book movie that’s actually better than its source material. That’s partly because Iron Man is one of the most boring characters in the history of comics, but it’s also because the movie manages to transcend its source.” I was never a fan of Iron Man, but I'm positively looney for this movie.

If you're looking for other ways to get your geek on this weekend: tomorrow is Free Comic Book Day, there's a Maker Faire in the Bay Area, JPL's Open House is in Los Angeles and there's a BarCamp in San Diego.

Oh, and did I mention that I'll be in San Diego?

Radio Free Burrito Episode 12

Holy crap! It's a new episode of Radio Free Burrito!

This show is all about Jonathan Coulton, because it's the First of May.

Show Notes:

• The logo was designed by WWdN:iX reader Marc, who asked that I not link to his "in progress" website. Thanks, Marc!
• I drop at least one F-bomb in this show, so you probably shouldn't listen to it around little kids, people with sensitive ears, or at work. Especially if you work in a daycare for kids with sensitive ears. (Hi, Agnes!)
• I encourage you to visit Jonathan Coulton dot Com.
• You may want to examine all the songs produced for the Thing A Week series.
• I know you want to give JoCo shiny gold rocks in exchange for musical and clothical items.
• The video for the Flickr song, as promised.
• Tom Cruise is Tom Cruise Crazy, but just be glad it's him, not you.
• Jonathan Coulton Tour information!
• Paul and Storm on the intarwheebs!
• I didn't bother with chapters and all that for this one, because I banged it out in about 30 minutes. (No, I didn't do it outside, despite the song in the show.) In fact, it's taken me longer to put together the show notes than it did to make the show. I think that qualifies me for several government jobs.
• My silly little news item came from Wikinews.
• Here's the original Misty Morning blog entry at WWdN.
• I got the address for the podcast about as wrong as I can get it without sending you to xkcd by instead. In addition to the Feedburner link (which is just the feed for my blog) you can check out all the posts tagged "podcast" here.
• Hey, did I mention that I'm going to be in San Diego this weekend?
• Radio Free Burrito is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 License.
• This episode weighs in at 21.7MB and is about 24 minutes long.

I won't be able to update this post with mirrors, because I'm going to be in San Diego this weekend (see what I did there?) but if you make one, please leave it in the comments and I'll update when I get home from San Diego, where I'll be this weekend.

Enjoy the show, everyone!

Download radio_free_burrito_episode_12.mp3

Holy crap! It's a new episode of Radio Free Burrito!

This show is all about Jonathan Coulton, because it's the First of May.

Show Notes:

• The logo was designed by WWdN:iX reader Marc, who asked that I not link to his "in progress" website. Thanks, Marc!
• I drop at least one F-bomb in this show, so you probably shouldn't listen to it around little kids, people with sensitive ears, or at work. Especially if you work in a daycare for kids with sensitive ears. (Hi, Agnes!)
• I encourage you to visit Jonathan Coulton dot Com.
• You may want to examine all the songs produced for the Thing A Week series.
• I know you want to give JoCo shiny gold rocks in exchange for musical and clothical items.
• The video for the Flickr song, as promised.
• Tom Cruise is Tom Cruise Crazy, but just be glad it's him, not you.
• Jonathan Coulton Tour information!
• Paul and Storm on the intarwheebs!
• I didn't bother with chapters and all that for this one, because I banged it out in about 30 minutes. (No, I didn't do it outside, despite the song in the show.) In fact, it's taken me longer to put together the show notes than it did to make the show. I think that qualifies me for several government jobs.
• My silly little news item came from Wikinews.
• Here's the original Misty Morning blog entry at WWdN.
• I got the address for the podcast about as wrong as I can get it without sending you to xkcd by instead. In addition to the Feedburner link (which is just the feed for my blog) you can check out all the posts tagged "podcast" here.
• Hey, did I mention that I'm going to be in San Diego this weekend?
• Radio Free Burrito is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 License.
• This episode weighs in at 21.7MB and is about 24 minutes long.

I won't be able to update this post with mirrors, because I'm going to be in San Diego this weekend (see what I did there?) but if you make one, please leave it in the comments and I'll update when I get home from San Diego, where I'll be this weekend.

Enjoy the show, everyone!

Download radio_free_burrito_episode_12.mp3