Watch Without a Watchman

This is a selection of extremely weird writings on the subject of self injury. I'm not really sure what to write about it and I really want to not be staring at my computer, but I think that people should read it.

Joel M.

I've gotta find a copy of In My Skin. It sounds really cool.

Joel M.

Looky here.

God! You know that NASA is fucked up when fricken' Bush and his tame Congress can make them look bad!

Joel M.

OK, I'm a little confused about America and guns. There are lots of perfectly good arguments in favour of allowing people to own and operate guns that I totally agree with. The one that strikes a chord with me is that gun violence is a problem of education and ethics and that the solution is to educate people.

How can that not work for me? It's the same thing I think about just about anything that isn't, by nature, excessively harmful to inocent bystanders: drugs, alcohol, tobacco, weird politics, dangerous jobs, freaky sex and frightening sports. Why not guns?

The problem is this. As far as I know, the US and Canada aren't really that different, other than the fact that the States had guns built into the constitution from back when it was conceivable to change it. Of course, the framers of the COnstitution had a whole different vision of what America was supposed to be about, but that's another story.

So what's the problem? Is my 'rational actor' view of controversial stuff totally blown? Is it impossible for people to handle dangerous things in a responsible manner? This is really bugging me!

Joel M.

Here's a little something to brighten anyone's day.

Joel M.

NQAS

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Joel M.

Ah, Wurzeltod! I think I'm in love!

Joel M.

Awesome new development in the field of prosthesis. I can't wait to hack my arms off and replace them with superior tech!

Joel M.

I need to get myself some real web publishing knowledge. BME has a real hottie on their front page that I would love to preserve in my blog forever. Better hurry, before they change it!

Joel M.

Went to East Side Mario's at Chinook Mall last night. It was the most attrocious experience ever! Cold, greasy, fries. Cold, tough steak. Cold, flavourless lasagna. Slow, stupid service.

Needless to say, we tipped less than five persent and left a bitchy comment card that said we would never be back, even though we told the waitress that everything was fine when she asked us how everything was.

Embarassingly, though, I left the new video game that I had purchased on the table and I had to run in to get it. The waitress got it out of the office for me, but she looked really pissed off and said, "I knew you would be back."

In hindsight, I think that it would have been better to tell the server "Actually, this food isn't very good. Could we just pay for the drinks and the appetizer and get out of your hair?" That way, she could recoup her tip by bailing us out of a terrible dinner that was largely the kitchen's fault and we wouldn't be lying to her face.

I really wish that actually being satisfied with food and service was somehow part of the etiquette of dining out and tipping.

Joel M.

The story of the real Popeye.

This is a really cool reinterpretation of the character. He sounds like a real bastard. And the humour is great:

On those rare occasions when Popeye finds himself between ships he does not, contrary to popular opinion, live in a garbage can. Usually, he finds work as a dogcatcher in San Diego.

Joel M.

This is totally awesome! A site that has archives of stop-motion plant photography! It's amazing! Look at the Morning Glory twinning movie under Nastic movements! It's unreal!

Joel M.

Porno karaoke!

I wonder when good ol' Ducky's (the karaoke bar) is going to give this a try?

Joel M.

Speaking of stomach churning, I feel fucking sick. I think that my body has taken a one-two punch from a combination of being around too much cat waste yesterday while sorting out the crap that one of my Mom's tenants left behind and the insanely high levels of chlorine in the tap-water here in Medicine Hat.

Oh, yeah. I'm still in Medicine Hat right now, but I am heading back to Calgary right away.

Joel M.

It's fascinating. There are so many sex acts that seem to turn some people' stomachs that other people relish. What do the freaks know that everyone else doesn't?

Joel M.

Warning: This is a personal musing about a topic that I not only know barely anything about, but that is guaranteed to piss some people off no matter what I say. If I do piss you off or you decide that I don't know what the fuck I'm talking about, please feel free to stop reading at any point.

So, how do I feel about drugs? They're great, but not in my brain.

Of course, this isn't to say that I don't like certain drugs or that I don't do certain drugs fairly regularly. I'm a pretty good boozer, for example, and I sometimes like to eat magic mushrooms.

These sorts of fun drugs aren't the ones that I am thinking about, though. I tend not to think that a drug done strictly for fun, with no expectations that it will do anything other than make the user feel funny and within certain defined situations, is not the same animal as a drug that is done regularly to affect real changes in thinking or personality. Not that the one can't turn into the other, of course.

I guess what I am thinking about are things like Ritalin and Prozac. Stuff that basically constitutes an admission that there is something broken or undesirable about a particular brain. Stuff intended to change the way a person thinks on a long-term basis. On the knee-jerk level, I just don't cotton to the idea.

It goes like this: if I am unhappy, I think that I should be taking steps to address whatever it is that causes me to be unhappy. Seems logical, right? It does to my knee.

But when I think about it a little more, it gets less clear. What if my brain just doesn't have enough of whatever it takes for me to be happy when I should be happy? OK, so I don't feel ecstatic when things are great, but isn't that just a quirk of personality? Lord knows that people tend to display a wide variety of inappropriate emotional responses. How is this different? Well, I'm not sure that there is one, really.

So that leaves me in the same position, right? If I'm generally less happy than I should be, it's just the way I am and I shouldn't be trying to monkey around with it.

No, there is something else. A quirk is just a quirk until it starts to fuck up your life, then it's a problem. Let's say that I am prone to being less happy in a happiness inducing situation than is normal. As stated, this is in itself not a big deal. Now, let's go on to say that I find myself in a circumstance that would normally induce a person to feel very unhappy, and I am even less happy than that. How is this different than if I were, say, more inclined to feel nauseous in a nausea-inducing situation than most people? It is because too much unhappiness seems able to prevent a person from taking steps to become happier, whereas I can't imagine any amount of nausea having that same capacity. Hence, I can imagine that people who are inclined to unhappiness may find themselves in a situation where a little help, chemical or otherwise, can go a long way.

Now this may be a tangent, but what is it that causes an unhappy person to get stuck? I've got a few ideas about what it might be and the answer is probably some combination of they and others.

One of the first, and most damning, ideas is that unhappiness seems to have a certain inertia. Why damning? Because what I am saying here could otherwise be described as laziness. I know that it is easy for an unhappy person to let more unhappiness accumulate. If you can't lift a truck, goes the reasoning, why would it matter if you couldn't lift a truck with a motorcycle in the back?

Another, related, reason why unhappiness might be so persistent is that it, like anything else, can become habitual. People get into the habit of being active or lazy, inquisitive or apathetic, playing sports or playing board games, and making love or fucking. Why not being happy or unhappy?

Then there are external circumstances. They might start off sparking a bout of unhappiness, but intensified unhappiness might result in actions, such as snapping at a loved one or missing work, that cause the external circumstances to get worse. And, as the external circumstances get worse, they might feel worse and take actions to make their circumstances even worse. There is a name for this: a feedback loop.

And then there's the dressing up in black and moping around at coffee shops. Sometimes, being unhappy is just a person's style.

So there are some ideas about what might cause an unhappy person, particularly one who is inclined to feel more unhappy than they strictly should, to stay unhappy. They may all be crap or the truth may be in there somewhere. Whatever the case is, I can argue to myself that it is as possible for an unhappy person to get stuck in that position as it is for a person to get stuck in a crappy job. It's a problem and it can fuck up your life and it maybe can't be fixed without some help.

So maybe I think that drugs are OK when you're not just getting smashed. Maybe they're a little OK when a person is really in the hole and they don't know where to go or what to do. But only if they're the right drugs taken in the right amounts and, I think, definitely not just because you aren't feeling happy or arefeeling a little unhappy. This is about being so unhappy all of the time that you can't see, to do anything.

Joel M.

Reason has an interesting article that applies Parkinson's Laws to state government spending practices.

Naturally, I don't particularly care about the details of states fiscal policies except to hope that they burn themselves in ways that do Canada as little damage as possible, but the laws themselves are cool and true:

1. "Expenditure rises to meet income."

This one is simple and obvious. I myself am perfectly happy at my current level of expenditure, but from time to time I catch myself lusting after more money so that I can spend more.

2. "Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion."

I don't think I even need to talk about this one.

3. "The matters most debated in a deliberative body tend to be the minor ones where everybody understands the issues."

This one is a little less general issue. It would probably be easier and more applicable to say that "Given a choice between hard tasks and easy ones, the easy ones tend to recieve the most attention."

Joel M.

An excellent article on the ethics of filesharing.

I especially liked the comment that file sharing doesn't feel like stealing.

Joel M.

Just finished reading Smoke Ring by Larry Niven. I really like Niven as a writer for his hard science methods and inventive settings. The characters and plots aren't always earth-shattering, but I suppose that one can't have everything.

One thing that pisses me off, though, is that he set himself up for a sequel from Hell and never wrote it. Bastard!

Joel M.

Warren Ellis is slapping up some fairly disturbing stuff at DPH. Original content! Amazing!

I wonder if I'll ever get around to that?

Joel M.

Holy shit. Check this out! This means you, Quidge!

It's a really awesome 3D cell-shaded Hellboy that, get this, looks exactly like a frame from a comic when you pause it. That's right! The image at the top of the forum, right before the links to the video, is a capture from the video!

Joel M.

Well, China's man in space is back, and questions have been raised about the specifics of what, exactly, thay're getting up to up there.

Let's just hope that it's not the weapons-grade fuckupery that characterizes the States in space.

Joel M.

Here's a little something that isn't making me feel good about Islam.

As a man who had to suffer through innumerable bouts of blue-balls while growing up, I have this to say to people who believe that male arousal is somehow uncontrollable:

Fuck you.

Yeah, it's tough to get all hot and bothered and not be able to get some. I really bleed for you. I feel your pain. That pain that makes your balls feel like they are going to simultaniously implode and explode.

No, that sort of pain isn't nice. But come fucking on people! Just because your little 'nads are going to be sore for a few hours does not mean that you have any sort of right to spread that pain around! It's ridiculous for anyone to even suggest it!

Now, this isn't a claim that is unique to Islam by any stretch of the imagination. All sorts of westerners have made that claim, from rich jock assholes to drunken celebraties to the worst sort of trailer trash. The thing that bothers me, though, is that people openly claiming that sort of thing in the west tend not to be religious or political leaders. They tend to be reprehensible bastards who are generally on trial for rape or playing witness at their bastard friend's trial for rape.

Muslims of the world! If you want people to take you seriously, grow up a little and stop putting this sort of human trash in charge of anything!

That being said, thank goodness that this guy is at least only the leader of the largest opposition party in Malaysia instead of actually being in charge.

Joel M.

Tardblog.

This is fucking hilarious. It's the sort of thing that God himself would write if he were "teaching" a class full of retards.

Joel M.

They did it! China now, officially, has put a man into space!

Maybe I'll talk about this more, later.

Joel M.

Not to say that everything Reason publishes is a load. This piece on Gray Davis' last days in office draws attention to some of the stuff that happened in California under the shadow of Schwarzenegger's presence in the campaign.

Joel M.

A laughably inadequate attempt by Reason to skewer gun control legislation based on the fact that studies have not conclusively shown that gun control legislation curtails gun violence. And, naturally, since Reason is a libertarian publication, it must follow that gun laws are inherently pointless.

I just don't know. Normally I'm pretty much in favour of a reduction in the amount of involvement that government legislation has in the lives of people, but something about the idea of removing gun control legislation makes me feel twitchy. I like the idea of there being fewer and fewer guns in the world.

Maybe I'm just too Canadian to understand, but I just don't see the reason why this is such a big deal. What are guns for, after all? Hunting, self-defence, and keeping the government in line. Well, you can hunt just fine with a bolt-action .30-06 or a break-open shotgun and these aren't the weapons that gun legislators really care about since they aren't generally prominent in gun crimes. As for self-defence, my guts tell me that trying to shoot a burglar when you could be jumping out the back window is as likely to result in a dead home-owner as it is a successfully protected home. Finally, something that your average brain-dead hillbilly militia man doesn't know but should is that the presence of guns in the hands of civilians is not something that policy-makers think about when they are deciding whether or not they should convert the US government into a Facist dictatorship. And anyway, they're already half-way there and the War on Terror has said brain-dead hillbillies on their side!

Joel M.

I don't know if anyone who might possibly read this would care, but this article about a laser-powered aircraft is really cool.

The ability to power an aircraft from a remote ground station means that such an aircraft doesn't need to waste energy lifting its own fuel off of the ground. If this premise was applied to the airline industry, several things would happen. For starters, the price of actually flying wouldn't go down since any money saved by not lifting fuel would be more than eaten up by the cost of building ground stations. However, it would definitely be a good thing from an environmental standpoint since the total energy spent flying stuff around would be lower. It would also make air travel far safer since jets wouldn't be giant bombs on wings. Actually, the giant bombs on wings point brings up another point: big prop-driven laser-powered jets would be almost impossible to hijack and worthless as a weapon.

The problem, though, is that it makes a network of independent agents, in this case the airplanes, into a centrally controlled network that, while more efficient, is also more vulnerable. In this case, while no individual aircraft would be a useful tool to an attacker, the network as a whole could be compromised which would result in widespread inconvenience and economic loss.

As for whether or not something like this is a good idea, I don't really know. As usual, I call both sides of the coin.

Joel M.

Today I am researching the technologies and medical concerns of transdermal implants.

I don't know why I felt compelled to share that.

Joel M.

Another wacky website.

It seems that storing buddhist prayers on your hard drive converts it into a prayer wheel. So, if you're into that sort of thing, you can purify negative karma like crazy while hardly lifting a finger.

Personally, I think it sounds a little silly.

Joel M.

Update: I was a little interested in finding out more about Buddhism's role in the governance of Tibet, so I played with Google for a bit. The Lonely Planet has an interesting concise history of Tibet posted here.

So I'm in Medicine Hat, the old hometown, for the Turkey-Day weekend.

Normally, this is a cause for a great wailiing and a gnashing of teeth for you see, I have no friends left down here. Or so I keep thinking.

Of course, this is nothing like the truth. I actually still have a number of interesting and entertaining people with whom I simply don't spend enough time down here. Last night, this fact was brought to my attention when, hanging out at the Silver Buckle, I ran into none other than Dana and Jana!

I've also added more links to comics on the sidebar. Surf them at your peril! Doooooom!

Joel M.

For all of my fans! Yes, for you I have actually learned how to use HTML at roughly the same level as a vaccum cleaner and put some links in at the right. Aren't they special? See what I do for you?

Joel M.

Somthing I asked my friend Allie:

Do you ever if you're actually, secretly, genuinely an evil person? Like if good and evil are real, absolute properties that a person can have and, despite your best efforts, of you are evil?

I was going to rant at length about this, but when I tried I wound up finding a contradiction in my thinking that was bugging me too much to keep going.

So, anyway, do you? Have you ever? And what did you do about it?

Joel M.

Well, my buddy Chuck has decided to put up a blog. One of these days I'll get around to putting actual links on my page and everything. Maybe a comment system, even! Maybe, god help us all, I'll even change the way the God forsaken thing looks.

Anyway.

Joel M.

An anti-American Korean propaganda video. I liked the part where George Bush's head morphs into a vampire.

Joel M.

Warning! Pompous pontification presiding! Feel free to ignore this drivel!

An interesting rant by the Lizardman on BME.

That enough links for ya?

Anyway, the thrust of his argument seems to be that the government owns people and that body modification related laws are expressions of this ownership. That legislation against tounge-splitting, for example, is analogous with a farmer taking steps to preserve the value of his cattle.

This looks OK as an analogy, since if the government is analogous to a farmer, it is in competition with a lot of other governments and needs its herd to be as healthy and efficient as possible. This can even extend to other arenas such as drug laws.

One problem, though, is that it presupposes that "the government" shares many attributes with the farmer. Attributes like self-awareness, a grasp of concepts like competition and efficiency, the ability to extrapolate possible future scenarios based on current conditions, and so forth. Does it? No. Not unless groupd of people can generate a higher conciousness that is inaccessible to the people in the group but which does, nonetheless, influence the actions of the people in that group.

But wait! Governments are made up of people and people have all of those abilities! Wouldn't the people directing the government use those abilities on its behalf? They certainly do, and they certainly try to, but there are problems:

People rarely have the same idea about what is good for something as large as a country and, since everyone with differing viewpoints is assumed to be mentally retarded, they tend to fight. The fighting seems to often extend until a mutually unsatisfactory compromise is forced onto them, either by an authority or by circumstance. Therefore it is likely that no particular action on the part of the government is as simple and clear-sut as a farmer attempting to maximise the value of his cattle.

So maybe the analogy isn't so good. Not that I'm saying that it is right or proper for a government to be outlawing stuff like tounge splitting. I'm just saying that saying that the government views people as owned cattle and treats them such is a little more problematic than it initially sounds.

As for Lizardman's contention that real freedom has, as its guaranteed price, very little in the way of the comfort and amenities that we are accustomed to? I totally agree. I don't buy into the notion that people are mature and responsible enough to conduct their affairs rationally without the imposition of rules form outside.

Note that I don't think that all said rules are necessarily just or right, but I do think that some are necessary.

Besides which, I don't think that there can be a state of freedom with more than one person: sooner or later someone, either by brute force or force of personality, will find themselves in a position to rule and they will do so. Bet.

Joel M.

The Killer. An interesting noir flash project. The first two episodes are pretty good, revolving around a hit man waiting for his target and reflecting upon his job.

He makes the life sound pretty decent.

Joel M.

Unless someone's wires are seriously crossed, Schwarzenegger is in.

As I've said in previous posts, I'm a little ambivalent about the idea of this guy running California. Especially with the allegations I've seen that Schwarzenegger is in bed in any way with the dirty bastards who were gaming the power grid. (Sorry, can't find the article and am very tired.)

Maybe they're just getting the leader that they deserve.

Joel M.

A map of sexual fetishes and how they relate to each other. Where are you? Where's your girlfriend? Where's Waldo?

Joel M.

Happy Tree Friends.

Go. Watch. Try Eye candy, or Sweet Ride, the featured episode.

Joel M.

Anyone following the lead-up to the 2004 presidential election? I'm not really, but I stumbled across this little jewel of a site that got the media critic in me going.

The Democrats have their new guy who looks like he might actually be a threat to Bush. He looks squeaky clean, he was a general, and he's biting all of Bush's soft spots.

His big thing is this "New American Patriotism." I went looking for a little more when his website didn't cough up too much and I found this. A conservative news forum where somone posted an article on Clark and a bunch of people posted their criticism.

It's pretty interesting to see what kind of stuff is being said here. I'm not one to think that rank and file liberals can do any better, but some of this shit is just plain crazy:

Clark is taking a stand against Bush's Iraq posture, so these guys decide to slam him based on the fact that he was a top man of the American involvement in the former Yugoslavia. Great! Except, of course, that he was a military general who got his orders from the President. His opinion about whether or not America should be involved in expensive foreign adventures didn't matter at the time, unless he wanted to resign his post or something.

Also note that Clinton managed to have his illegal way with Serbia and still bring home a budget surplus, which I think is the main reason why Bush's numbers are slipping.

Otherwise, most of the guys in this forum just spank on and on about how Clark is a traitor, how all muslims are evil, or this little gem:

How about those with the courage to speak out in condemnation of those who speak out? Should they be condemned or praised?

I think speaking out against those who are speaking out is, in the sense that this guy seems to mean it, a violation of the constitution that these bully boys are so keen to wrap themselves in.

Joel M.

I scammed this off of Reason:

When some students in the Lubbock (Texas) Independent School District asked to start a Gay-Straight Alliance, superintendent Jack Clemmons said no. But it wasn't prejudice against gays that prompted his decision, he claimed. "I would have denied other clubs whose basis was sex. I would have denied a Bestiality Club. I would have denied a Gigolo Club. I would have denied a Prostitute Club. Likewise, I would deny any club that has as its basis an illegal act, such as the Marijuana Club, Kids for Cocaine, the Drinking Club, etc.," said Clemmons. But even as he was making that decision, Clemmons was allegedly conducting an affair with a school employee on school property on school time.

While it's a little unfair to tar all of the States, or even just Texas, with this one feather, I don't really care. America rules.

David Blaine: revealed!

If this guy is right, which I suspect he is, Blaine is exactly what I thought he was: a showman, not the boldly crazed genius that he tells people he is.

Joel M.

Here's a little fuck-related fun. Sex emoticons!

Joel M.

People are so odd. Check this out. This person has accumulated simply scads of rendered women. Video game chicks. Why? Maybe that's one of her Frequently Asked Questions, but I didn't bother to look.

Joel M.

Too good to pass up: the Acme Catalog!

Joel M.

Man, I've been such a lazy shit over the last couple of weeks. I've applied for barely twenty jobs and I've gotten zero call-backs. I really should be grinding out the resumes, but I can barely manage to get dressed in the morning. Man, if I get fucked up over this, I've got nobody to blame but myself.

To balance out that bit of whine, here's a little cheese:

"My fellow Americans! I had a dream! And in that dream, I opened a refrigerator and found eggs of all colours! Yellow eggs, brown eggs, white eggs, and even a greenish egg in the back corner!"

"And to those eggs I said 'What the fuck are these doing here?' And I proceeded to smash those eggs with my foot! Yes, brothers and sisters, my foot came down on those eggs with a great fury amd a furious equality! And when I was done each and every one of those eggs was just as smashed as the next."

"And so I hope, my fellow Americans, that one day our children will all be free to be crushed, to be stomped, and to be ruined without reference to the colour of their skin or the content of their character!"

Don't ask me what this is supposed to mean.

Joel M.

50 Reasons why Arnie shouldn't win California.

Please don't forget how "environmentally conscious" Arnie is when he's clogging your lungs with exhaust, crushing your economy car into a compact cube of metal on the highway, and pushing your gas prices into the stratosphere with several tons worth of penis-size insecurity. (Yes, we have seen that picture. We consider it inconclusive at best.)

Personally, I kind of want him to win. He's no more basically evil than any career politician, but he knows less about how politics work.

Now I'm not the kind of guy who would chose an inexperienced CEO for my industry "because he doesn't know what can't be done," but I am sort of curious. I would like to know what kind of impact it has when a person steps into a major position without having to jump through the usual prior hoops.

Of course, Jesse Ventura did all of this a few years ago, but he wasn't in as good a position to trash the US economy as Arnie is, nor was he as famous. It will be easier to keep track of him.

Whoops, just read this:

So then Arnie goes and hires Warren Buffett, a Democrat, to be his "top economic adviser." Well, that was certainly an interesting twist. Might Arnie actually be interested in pumping some progressive ideas into his campaign? Nope. When Buffett dared to actually suggest something intriguing – that Proposition 13, which capped property assessment increases in California at 2 percent per year back in 1978, was partly responsible for the gutting of state services, Arnie flipped out. His campaign said Arnie was rejecting Buffett's position, and affirmed that their candidate would never deem to question the validity of the California GOP's sacred text.

Having Buffett on his campaign team was one of the things that made me think that at least he would be hiring and listening to decent advisors. Guess not.

Joel M.

Hilarious article in the Onion.

I'll bet that if Susan and I ever got around to breaking up, this would be the exact sort of fallout that we would collect.

It's funny, yet not. Oh well.

Joel M.

Here's an excellent article by Bruce Sterling: Ten Technologies that Deserve to Die.

Internal-combustion engines are big and clumsy. They are hard to tune, and they waste a lot of effort carrying their own weight. They’ve got a great incumbent fueling system built into place, but they need to be replaced by hydrogen and fuel cells, technologies that are simpler, safer, and cleaner. If you need really loud, macho engine noises, why not just record them and play them on your car stereo?

I'm even not in total disagreement with him about manned space flight. I am a firm believer than humanity needs to leave this stinking rock, but I think that the price to orbit needs to drop to about a tenth before its worth it. So probably not in my lifetime. (sigh)

Joel M.