Snippets

Short random thoughts. Which are likely to be snippy as well.

• Why is it that the sort of person who calls others "sheeple" online, always leaves you with the vague impression that, to them, it might be fetish terminology, like "mpreg" or "shemale"?


• Speaking of Ron Paul supporters (zing!), has anyone else met the subtype whose support for Paul seems predicated on hatred of America, and the "evil" we do worldwide? While I can't fault their reasoning—if America was evil, a President Ron Paul would be what it deserved—I must at least, in justice, call them a minority. Grievously mistaken as they may be, most Paulbots sincerely do think they have the country's best interests at heart.


• My family just watched the Charlie Brown Christmas dealie, and you know, when Sally's making all her present-demands, and saying she just wants her fair share, she sounds just like Occupy Wall Street. Except of course that her voice is more mature.


• I know I've said this before, but the only people who think "making you think" is noteworthy in an artwork or a deed, are people for whom it is a novel experience.


• It is amusing to note that the Occupy people don't seem to know that there can't not be a top 1%, and, since equality is impossible when it comes to material goods (no, literally, even if you have the same quantities some will be made up of measurably inferior goods—this is a principle of metaphysics), that top 1% will always have a "disproportionate" amount of the resources.


• I may have said this before, but the attitude Jeanne Kirkpatrick called "blame America first" (as evidenced by the probably-not-orthodox Paulbot, above), is actually Jingoism. "You can only believe that everything is your fault if you also believe that you are all-powerful"—(Gregory House). Also, the only explanation for their foreign-policy positions is a fundamental belief in their own immortality, or at least in their nation's indestructibility.


• A further example of how WotC is unmoored from reality, as a corporation, is, 6 editions in (I think?), they finally have official elvish and dwarvish fonts. Do they have these for download on their website? Shit no. You gotta go to a completely unaffiliated forum, where some guy has made fonts of them, just from the goodness of his heart. It's free, but you gotta join the forum to download 'em. And oh yeah, WOTC itself mentions this fact in their own forums—"yeah, some unnamed SOB is providing you with a service we won't, here's the address."


• As if that weren't bad enough, they named the dwarvish one "Davek", which, aside from being Cockney for Dethek (the Forgotten Realms dwarf script), is one letter different from "Dalek". So while I'm schlepping all over the interwebs, looking for a font it would've taken WotC 13 seconds to put up as a download, I also have to deal with that. No, Google, I did not mean "Dalek font", and I'm insulted by your suggestion I would.


• Someone said, in a comment over at the darksome pit of time-waste that is I Can Has Cheezburger, that only Dr. Who fanboys and hipsters would get the joke in question. Those two things are virtually identical on this side of the pond, you know. (And no, ane-ue, just because you watch it doesn't make you a fangirl, fear not; you know as well as I do that it's a very stupid show.)


• On the other side of the pond, they like it for the same reason they like the SA-80: it's what their vast unfeeling bureaucracy deigned to give 'em, and it wasn't made in America.


• Incidentally, "Designed by the Incompetent; Issued by the Uncaring; Carried by the Unfortunate", the British grunt's joke about the SA-80, is actually a pretty good summary of Dr. Who, too.


• With a little modification—"Written by the Illiterate; Produced by the Indifferent; Watched by the Indiscriminate"—you really get all TV SF since Farscape, with the partial exception of portions of Stargate shows (other than Universe). And even Farscape was actually fantasy (have I mentioned that the Peacekeepers are the Elven Imperial Navy?), so actually, "all TV SF since Babylon 5, with the partial exception of portions of Star Trek: Deep Space 9, and the Stargate shows".


• The Syphilis Channel was annoyed when people described Stargate Universe, before it aired, as "a soap opera for teenagers". Their response was to point out that most of the cast is in its 40s or 50s. Because obviously, it was the "for teenagers" part we objected to.


• It is funny to me to read British people's descriptions of post-9/11 America. The quaint rustics actually think that event had any impact on our civil liberties outside of the airport. Did anyone remind them about the biggest newspaper in the country printing military secrets, at least once, and getting off without so much as a stern talking-to? Or how about how the dreaded PATRIOT Act merely lowers the standard of evidence necessary to procure a warrant, in a terrorism matter, from probable cause to reasonable suspicion?


• Remember, London is perpetually decorated for the CCTV Day Parade (the Big Brother float is always the highlight of the festivities), and the traffic flow in key areas is, literally, based on medieval castle designs, in order to slow fleeing suspects (law-abiding people's convenience be damned). Why? Because of an IRA bombing that killed one person.


• You think I'm nasty? I really am, if you don't think so you probably need to call someone because the people around you are severely skewing your readings. But you should see some of the stuff I don't say. Like I wanted to say, to the aforementioned America-hating Paulbot (which is still so weird), "I was going to ask how you choke down your hypocrisy, but actually I can guess how you practice." Or this Objectivist, who basically accused me of Rand's fumblefisted accidental pantheism, when I pointed out that God=existence (hey, I'm not the one identifying being with form), said something like "When I sleep with my wife, am I sleeping with God?" I said something rather rude, but what I wanted to say was, "No, you're committing statutory rape, because anyone who'd marry an Objectivist, given what you apes think about adultery, must be a full-blown retard."
  
  Are you horrified yet? The me you usually see is me when I do self-edit.


• Finally, America is the greatest country in the world. So much the worse for the world. Seriously, France, Japan, Mexico, you gonna let these idiots show you up like that?