Ever notice that seemingly normal people transform into bitter, hate-filled dumbasses as soon as they post on an internet forum or chat room? Well, Penny Arcade has an elegant formula for this phenomena:.

I’ve been reading the comments section below youtube videos, slashdot forums and digg posts and I can’t think of a better explanation than that. A subject like, say, video game design, that over lunch comes out as a reasoned debate over pro’s and con’s of style becomes a brutal four-letter word mudfest between combating comment threads. God help you should you bring up a subject with actual consequences like politics or free speech or religion in an internet arena- you will hear more unreasoning hatred of and by both sides than you could have ever imagined. The urge to strike back, to make your own wittily caustic reply about the original poster’s clear lack of intelligence and patent evidence of inbreeding will only serve to worsen the situation.

Back in the day I used to read Warcraft 3 gaming forums (don’t even start with me), and there was a particular poster whose gameplay seemed to echo my own desires for a smaller, quick paced game. His name was Mr.FunSocks. One day he was in one of his comment wars with another regular named zz33t and I chimed in my support for Mr.FunSocks with what I thought was a well reasoned analysis of both sides- I was promptly mocked by Mr.FunSocks as a n00b (I had only been a member of the forum for months, not years) and by zz33t as totally misunderstanding everything you-idiot-fuckface-why-don’t-you-shut-up-now.

Sigh. My fellow man. Why must you suck? Why can’t we all just get along?

Today is Martin Luther King Day in the US, and it reminded me of a book I’ve been wanting to write.

I was reading Joseph Stalin’s biography (because I’ll read anything) when it struck me that even through all the damage he caused his own country the historians say that ‘it is unclear if Russia would have enjoyed the same economic growth without him’.  He killed the heads of business, science and religion, imprisoned hundreds of thousands without cause, created starvation during years of plenty, and they wonder if things would have been worse without him?  Ugh.

It made me realize that historians and thus history books are unwilling to clearly label rulers of the past as ‘good’ or ‘bad’.  They will hedge.  Now, in some cases there is quite a bit of gray, particularly the farther back you go, but there are some really clear cases of good vs evil in history that we should be able to point to in order to help future generations avoid really, really bad rulers and tend towards the moderately saner ones.

So I wanted to write a book, ‘Good Guys and Bad Guys’, that takes 5 leaders who had incontestible “good” records and 5 leaders who were simply bad people.  Now, you could pick a whole lot more than 5 good and 5 bad guys in the course of history, but I wanted to write something short and to the point.  Most historians can’t name even one of each.

Here’s my list of Good Guys: Martin Luther King Jr, Mohandas Gandhi, Mohammed Yunus (of the Grameen Bank), Nelson Mandela, George Marshall (of the famed Marshall plan to rebuild Germany after WWII).  These were more than good men, they were great men.  Even when they bested their foes they turned victory for themselves into victory for all, bringing peace from war and justice from inequality. 

The Bad Guys: Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Pol Pot, Robert Mugabe, and Frank Lucas (american drug smuggler).  The first four are well known- they came to power on a message of hatred and violence and brought it to their neighbors and to themselves.  The last figure is representative of an entire class of evil, the criminal leaders who bring destruction to their own neighborhoods under the guise of ‘opportunity’.  Lucas, along with other criminal leaders such as Danilo Blandon ended the trend of freedom for their minority communities and did them more harm than the Jim Crow laws a century before.

The cast was chosen not because they are novel choices, but because they are so obvious.  They offer a quick and obvious set of characteristics by which to choose for and against your leaders.  The lesson here is that the bad leaders are not merely “tough” (and thus somehow better to have on your side than working with the opposition), but “evil”, and thus the most damaging (as proven by history) to their own people and those people who are closest to them.

(1) Do they act for or against the Declaration of Human Rights? (2) Do they advocate peace and a better future or demand hatred and war?

There may be shades of grey, but some men are so dark that the light cannot be seen.  Distrust them.  And other men shine so brightly they could make white look dull.  Follow them.  By their hatreds or their dreams you will know them.

It is true, occasionally rain does fall in the fine, dusty city of Los Angeles.   Not ‘drizzle’,’sprinkle’ or the laughable ‘falling mist’, but true rain does fall about 3-4 times a year.

At which point the drivers go insane.

LA drivers do one of two things in the rain: ignore it completely and pretend that nothing is happening or freak out and drive with whitened knuckles at a third the speed limit.  People, work with me here.

Last night I was driving home on the 2 freeway and I see a guy in a big black suburban barrel in from the on ramp.  He’s pushing 75, engine rumbling like it’s proof of his virility,  straight into a huge pool of water that (of course) tends to fill up by the side of the freeway when it rains.  So he hits this huge pool and waterplanes, skimming his steel behemoth over the water, his wheels turning back and forth helplessly as he tries to push his steroid fueled muscles through the steering wheel to the asphalt somewhere below.   Ok, so I can’t prove he was juiced- stay with me.  Soon enough his wheels touch ground again and his suburban jack-knifes briefly before coming in to a roughly straight line with the freeway.  Dumbass then guns it (because he lost some speed while he was skimming) and climbs back up to 75 while I give him lots, and lots of room.

sigh.

One more thing- earlier that day my soccer game was canceled (canceled!) because of the rain.  Have you pansies ever heard of England?  What do you think they do when it rains!?!   grrrr. sigh.

‘nuf said.

I’ve started a philosophical tangent from my last post. If my random walk does not interest you, a blog called “Random Stuff” should have warned you off.

Here goes: Society has within it two constantly warring camps- the camps of Agree and Disagree.

The Agree camp wants everyone to get along, do the “right thing”, obey moral codes, etc. This is championed by the corporations (get a job, work 9-5, be stable), the religions (go to church, be faithful, don’t sin), and the family life (settle down, raise kids, be a good parent).

The Disagree camp wants to throw the bird to all the people that are keeping them down. This camp is best represented by artists and rebels of all flavors, the rockers, the actors, the start-up programmer in his garage, the writers typing furiously on lonely hilltops, national geographic photographers spending 5 years tracking down that elusive parrot, etc. They are going to do what they love and damn the man, damn the money, damn the consequences. This camp (sadly) is also represented by the criminals, the drug addicts, the promiscuous, who also say damn the man and damn the consequences but don’t do much useful with all that spare time they’ve freed up.

Both camps have something to say for them. They also have something going against them. The conflict comes about because single decisions (get a job, go on safari, raise kids, join a rock band) have good aspects as well as bad aspects. You can either agree with the decision, or disagree, but there is good and bad in any single decision.

This is what makes life so interesting. “What shall I do today? Shall I go to work and be a good husband? Or am I going to stay home and do what I think I should do, what I want?”

I think this post coming in at 10:35am on a workday should answer that question, but then again, I do work for “The Man”…

I’ve had this theory for a long time that I call the fat man/skinny man effect.

Have you ever noticed that around certain people you find yourself acting more bad-ass than normally, more artistic, cultured etc etc? Ever notice that it seems to happen when you come across a fellow who is (respectively) a pansy, drab, or uncultured?

I call this the fat man/skinny man effect. It’s the parable about one guy, slightly underweight, and another guy, slightly overweight. The Skinny guy wants the Fat guy to be a little more like him. So he emphasizes his Skinnyness- he talks about it, he admires other people who are skinny, he even gets more skinny than he already was. He is trying to pull the Fat guy over to be more like him. He is trying to go even farther away from the Fat man’s state so that the Fat man will be pulled to be more like him by virtue of his friendship and mutual bond.

Simultaneously the Fat guy is trying to encourage the Skinny guy to put on a few. He offers the little feller some burgers, a few chocolate bars, pokes him in the ribs from time to time. Whenever the two are together the Fat Man really feels his own weight and and thinks that he is just massive, and the Skinny Man talks like he eats salads all day and runs a marathon for entertainment. But when the two separate and go home they are just one slightly overweight and one slightly underweight pair of guys.

I notice this in social gatherings all the time. A mildly dashing, occasionally exciting young woman talks to a slightly bookish, shy middle aged man. Watch how they act, how they behave. The characteristics which are different between the two that the first person wants to see mimicked in the second is emphasized and made obvious. The older man talks about great books, the young woman romanticizes her weekend adventures. They are both trying to pull the other towards “being a better person” or “being well rounded”.

This is the funniest to watch when two social gatherings are back to back with a different crowd. For example, there are a few guys I know who are more caustic than I, more aggressive in their jokes and humor. Around them I am suddenly this saintly puritan, protector of civil rights and humanity. Wait two hours and return to see me talking to a bright eyed volunteer looking for donations to help tsunami survivors: I transform on the spot to a heartless Scrooge who never loved anybody and never will. I am in truth somewhere in between- what’s more interesting is that the two other people are also shifting a little as they talk to me. My aggressive buddy breaks out a few extra minority jokes, the volunteer affects confounded dismay all out of joint with the fact that he’d only been volunteering since yesterday and hadn’t done a damned thing before that.

Is it just me?

Another quarter, another story submitted to the Writers of the Future.

This one is called “Guardian of Stonehaven” for the contest, but I just call it “Dane”. It’s available here: http://www.box.net/shared/p4pko3ackg

I am writing a few shorts as part of a longer story arc. There are 4 stories so far, each from a different character’s point of view: Grimoire, Sasha, Dane and Caldorac.

Again, share etc and if you’re famous enough I’ll even let you plagiarize.

Enjoy.

I’ve been on the internet for a few years now, and all I’ve got to say is…. where’s all the funny at? I figured I’d be buried by now by all the comedians out there.

I decided to do a review of all my favorite bits out there and write ‘em down, but I couldn’t think of anything. I’ll have to edit this list as I think of things
In no particular order:

- www.youtube.com, enter “laughing baby”. Damn near any clip will do. Thanks to Tieg and Ben for this one. You can’t help but smile.
- www.dilbert.com, because it IS half of corporate america. Go to the archives pages if you really need to kill time.
- www.basicinstructions.net, even better than dilbert. The logo is a picture of the author whacking a friend with a 2×4 labeled “knowledge” with the caption “You will learn”. My favorite comic out there. See this, this or this for an example of my humor.
- Flintlocke, for gamer geeks, preferably those who know what World of Warcraft is. My personal favorite comic strip section is where flicklocke goes on autorun, it’s broken into 10 sections or so (click ‘next’ each time to get the full comic… damned funny). It also has the best Valentine’s Day comic ever

- ???

If you’ve got a favorite, send it to me.

As you may know, oh imaginary blog reader, I submit all of my stories to the Writers of the Future Contest- so far I’ve sent in 3 stories, and got 3 very nice rejection letters.
But in recent news my latest rejection letter said that Grimoire made it to the top 10% before being cut out.  Of course, only 3 stories get picked per quarter and they receive something like 1000 stories a quarter… but hey! I beat out 900 other stories! Only 97 stories left to go!

So that’s something.

Hello non-existent viewers of my blog,

Here are some free stories I have written for friends and family to enjoy or ignore.
The crowd favorite is Grimoire, which is my latest.

My first stories were written as a Christmas present to my wife, and are fittingly called Stories for Jessica, which includes “Station Keeping”, “Waiting for my Return”, and “Biking in Westwood”.

Use freely, distribute, etc, but please don’t call them your own.
Unless you’re famous. In which case it’s cool.