In MY name...

next time you think bad thoughts of the chinese... or feel comfy and secure in your bed... remember that the US Govt is torturing people who have done nothing wrong so you can sleep well. Where's the 2nd amendment when i need it...

taking a cue from jake...

beady little eyes
looking for cheese in the dark
i move them outside

yes, my little neighbors have returned... the tip traps are down... very little evidence of them so far, but i figured they'd be headed this way once the temperature dropped. The electronic rodent repelling devices do nothing btw... i hear a second... but the smell of cheese is a harsh mistress - and soon he too will be somewhere down the hill enjoying the weather with his friends and the stoners.

Nice weekend. Dinner with friends saturday. In town to watch game 7 last night. Would have gone in to watch football with Jake sat but i slept in... Fairly uneventful... as usual. You know I must be crazy, to show this as my way of living (no cutting up the pieces though...)

Old company is going south, finally, in a somewhat catastrophic way (or so it seems). Not terribly surprised - i hate working with people who play the work game as an opportunity to make everyone else play the 'it's all about me' game. God but they make me sick.

Writers strike looks more likely... should ping cali... go visit since they'll be stopped. In the mean time - since all the TV is about to get even crappier than it already is... i suggest using something like this - there's some good stuff from england in there and it'll keep you busy. I wont bother suggesting cartoons... no one watches them but me ;)

Mona Shaw is a hero
She's also a terrist

Can terrists be heroes? well, i think the answer quite obviously is yes.

If I were Verizon - i'd have a TV ad up and running inside a week featuring this woman and a claw hammer sporting the tag line 'Verizon, Phone and Internet service, no hammers required'

its the new fall season - and yes, there are a couple shows i like (and a couple shows others would probably like, considering the impending hollywood writers strike is going to kill an awful lot of domestic content here in a couple weeks)... but that's not what i'm posting about.

Today the manhunt is on for a pedophile in southeast asia who learned that the twirl function was not a good method of masking one's identity... Yesterday they arrest this guy in nevada who had sex with a 2 yr old girl - and videotaped it. Beyond screwed up. ok. put me in a room with that one and only one of us will come out (sorry, the pain some of my loved ones have suffered on that front may never go away). well, this season in japan there's a series called Kodomo no Jikan (Nymphet for those of you playing along - link to synopsis w/ picture). Lets go through the short version... 23 yr old male teacher's first day on the job, is told by young 3rd grade girl (ah yes, the 8's too late joke rears its ugly head) that since he doesnt have a girlfriend that she'll be his girlfriend... gratuitous fingersucking... gratuitous skirt lifting to expose panties as reward for saving the nice kitty... you get the idea. Now - even the Japanese think this one crosses some boundaries - and they have censored the living hell out of it... and in japan they show it at something like 4 am or somesuch... and even then 2 stations dropped it. But you still get the theme - loli taken over the line and censored back to what must be considered the very edge of socially acceptable storytelling.

This is NOT Nabokov here - though i wonder, would we allow that sort of expression in today's America - have we moved so far in the other direction from the freedoms of expression we shared in 1955 w/ Lolita...at what age does Phoebe Caulfield lose her innocence? are we allowed to have someone, through cartoons or games, explore socially unacceptable behaviors involving sex rather than violence? For anyone who's played a Rockstar game it does beg the question - did you really need to shoot the hooker afterwards to get your money back... or climb over the counter and splatter the guys hiding in the back of the burger joint just because? SAW is about as close to 'socially worthless' and thus 'pornographic' as anything i can imagine - no wonder so many family-values-centric cultures have such a problem with the export of western culture to their wasteland hideaways. Then again the japanese have a whole genre of odd dating/sex games - some of them certainly seemingly portraying youngish characters (though a technically 'of age' japanese girl can be drawn tiny because, honestly, they ARE tiny - something Konota pointed out rather repeatedly in Lucky Star). So where's the line? Is a game over the top? How about the places in japan where you can go to have sex with a sexdoll dressed as a child? That creeps me out... but on cable i've seen the 'vice guide to travel' detailing the howto and whereto (including an amusing if not pathetic sequence of the main host simply unable to bring himself to do anything to his doll). How do we apply local standards (since those are the ones the supreme court has dropped on us for pornography) to materials drawn from international locales? If we make the rule 'you cannot sexualize an underage character' well hell - better lock Britney up for that first video... Gordon Ramsey would have been unacceptable 20 years ago - but now it's fine so long as you censor the cursing a little.

Kodomo no Jikan isnt my thing... it seems its more the scene of the 16 hour a day sleeper... the loner who spends all his time on porn, tv, comics, porn, and porn... the greasy guys with that ogle-look in their eye and the faint hint of spittle on their lip who dont quite know what to do with a girl other than breathe heavily (i'd call that an unfair generalization but, well, it isnt)... but it IS interesting in that it forces you to consider where do we draw the lines between what's acceptable in literature or art and what's acceptable for a sleazebag with a 2 yr old and a video camera. The true otaku basement dweller is a very sad individual - but is his odd loli obsession with cartoon 3rd graders something that must be stopped? I know the domestic licenseholder for the manga dropped the book out of concern that there would be domestic backlash. Do we say games dont hurt anyone - does anything go? And why do we seem so hung up on sex crimes as where we draw the line... you can murder a 2 yr old on tv... hell, cook her grind her up and eat her in an r-rated film, but if there's anything sexual then everyone's goin to jail. Yes - i have a personal and extremely negative reaction to sex-crime - but i wonder, should we be less concerned with the sexualization of extreme unrealistic cartoon characters or more concerned with the gratuitous violence we depict on much more realistic characters for visual gratification in full view of our children. Or as Jake asked yesterday - in how many states is it illegal to buy a dildo?

Loli is twisted and creepy... but doesn't it stop there?

From today's NYTimes

The jokes... they write themselves...

time for corporate america to grow up

apple restricts its products to only apple provided apps? heh... in come the 13 yr old kids.

The latest Sims2 expansion ships with Sony's SecuROM DRM protection scheme that results in disabled DVD drives, crashed computers, and 4,146 posts from 883 people on the EA boards in 24 hours... and a cracked no-DRM version is up on piratebay within the same period.

with Radiohead's album, then NIN and Madonna leaving their labels, i think you're starting to see the artists figure it out - too many involved in the manufacturing process are not interested in the consumer past taking his/her money - and they're going to fail at that if they don't start charging LESS for the entertainment and do LESS to screw with people.

Artists have a right to be paid for their work... but the cost of transport of information has DECREASED the per-unit value of said work, while dramatically increasing the potential marketplace. Sure, a huge swath of radiohead fans will decide to pay nothing for the album - but a huge swath will pay full price or more - and with artists getting 1/9th of the money associated with the sales - i bet they do just fine with this arrangement.

oh - and if you sell me something that screws with my computer? yeah... dont ever expect me to buy your products again.

So I was reading about the idea that people will be falling in love with (and having sex with) robots by 2050. The article is a bit silly - since it seems to think there'll be some sort of legal jurisdictional oversight that would be required/involved before you'd see it happen... and the whole sex with robots thing seems pretty much a near-term event...

what's more interesting here isnt the sex... it's the love thing... and man doesnt it go right after all sorts of classic sci-fi scenarios. I think where this gets interesting is the question of heuristics... when you get to a simulated personality that goes well beyond the turing test, and gets to a point of having unique opinions based upon a wealth of personal experience you're going to have something that people are capable of falling in love with. Now - that doesnt mean they will... and lots of people wont remotely consider the possibility... but i think that as those simulated entities get more and more dynamic (and, honestly, we're almost at the point where they'll be improving upon the simulations themselves... i mean... how many millions of generations of modeled synapse characteristics will machines be able to map in a minute 20 years from now?) I think there's a threshold - and it's going to be different for different people - but there's certainly a point where simulated pets are as real as live ones in the next 5 or 10 years... maybe moreso.

People should be quick to model thereafter.

Is it wrong for Harrison Ford to fall in love with Sean Young? Is it any less real? We can't know what sort of emotions any of our partners truly feel - and speaking from some experience on the subject, it's certainly reasonable that some people we choose to love are really only modeling reality as best they can. Actually - the years spent with a Borderline tend to give me a fine appreciation for the question. Besides which - to be honest - how many people ever reach that state of self-actualized behavior... and for the rest, the vast majority of humanity that never get beyond Ethics 101, that dont marvel at a sunset or a Discovery Channel program on Llamas or the sweep of the milkyway on a moonless night... will they ask for all that much in a simulated partner? When Cherry2000 ships to a store near you, or a Persecom like Chi, wont people abandon their "real" relationships for that Lucy Liu android at the drop of a hat?

This will happen faster than they think (assuming we're all still here).

want me to vote republican? it seems it'll only cost $15m...

As someone with the experience and capacity to post one of the more detailed, thoughtful, and appropriate responses to this...

toldya so

in honor of Al Gore's award of the Nobel Peace Prize

i'm getting more and more like a rockstar mouse (the ones at the end of the overpopulation experiments who just sit back, let other mice bring them food, and preen themselves as it all goes to hell around them). i'm not proud of that... and i suppose i'll break out of it... but there's a point where the actions of my fellow man seem designed to inspire hopelessness. Then again - maybe that's the effect of living in a red state in a country that elects morons - and then seeing the 'opinion' pieces on CNN that demonstrate that these idiots arent fringe - they're a freaking tidal wave of dumb

one that gives me hope...

Happy Monday

Yeah.. Aya is hot...
but the Tshirt? lol - god how i wish we'd see Britney wearing that one....
Highlight "Did you cum twice too? Feel so dirty!!! I need a tongue bath!" to see what it says.

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