There are many ists out there, and the four definitions of the suffix at wiktionary seem to cover all the typical cases, but it seems a stretch to consider rapist as any of them.

The first definition says it signifies a system of belief. Perhaps to some rape is a way of life, but is the act itself an expression of a belief system?

The second possibility is that it describes a profession or field of interest. I can’t imagine many making a living through their rape, nor it being a field of interest for anyone.

The third is that it’s something a person uses. This is a pretty vague definition so it seems the most likely candidate for the origin of ‘rapist’ as a term. Rape is often said to be an exertion of power and dominance over people. In prison, and elsewhere, rape is a weapon used to control people. Still, this seems like a fairly substantial allegorical stretch.

Finally, it could mean it’s a biased view of some sort. Admittedly, raping someone probably means your preferences are biased in your favour but is committing the act of rape equivalent to the personal belief that a specific subset of humanity is less than another? I don’t deny that rapists might frequently be sexist, but does that make rape itself an ist?

So while, none of these really fit ‘rapist’ as well as I’d like, a common thread in these definitions is that all these ists are what a person is. It is something that defines them. Put simply, ers are what you do, ists are who you are. There might be a few exceptions to this, but rules always have exceptions.

But let’s overthink the implications of this linguistic hint briefly. Is it a coincidence that Ist sounds like His and Er sounds like Her? Is there a subtly sexist/chauvinist theme carried through the implied nature of ist? That things that are described by an ist are more robust, more steadfast, than the fickle actions of an er? Are we tacitly endorsing an ist every time we use an ist? No, probably not, but thinking about and subsequently overthinking these sorts of things is just what I do.

1. Shortly after I had this thought, I came to a place in George RR Martin’s A Feast for Crows where someone is called a “raper” and wondered what that implied about the act of rape in that world.

But it’s also a lesson, I think, that the sorts of awkward things we try to avoid talking about with our kids, things like sexuality and homosexuality and racism, are exactly the sorts of things they need to learn when they’re young. Whether we like it or not, it’s very hard to break the prejudices of our youth. Growing up in a family that eschews acknowledgment of homosexuals will betray an implicit otherness to children. But talking about these things in a straight-forward manner, invariably works.

A few years ago, at the dinner table with my dad, my sister, and her daughter we were having a conversation and homosexuals came up. My niece asked what that was and I explained it very matter-of-factly as my sister and father looked on with shock. After I finished my explanation, she got a look on her face that meant she thought it was weird that some men like men the way most men like women, but once she knew it wasn’t a soul shattering experience.

It’s not that the new generations are inherently more accepting, the conversations are just happening earlier.

Plain Old Memories are things you can re-experience in your mind, maybe even evoke the scents and sensations of the moment. The tentative hold before you approach for your first kiss, the first time a girl you like smiles back at you, that night you started at a basement party and wound up dancing naked in the fountain. These memories are much less reliable than Remembered Facts, they’re so rooted in emotion and passion that over time they become little more than the emotions of the moment with a few sprinkled images and a healthy imagination to fill in the rest, but they’re so much more human than that second form of memory.

Remembered Facts are things you know happened to you, but they feel distant, like facts from a table you had to memorize at some point. As an example, at my fourth birthday party I had pizza. Something didn’t sit well and I got sick from it. I didn’t eat pizza again until I was in grade 6. I’m sure there was a point when that event felt real to me, but at this point I simply know that it happened. I know that it happened in exactly the same way that I know that World War 2 happened. I can attach emotion to it, but the emotion will never come from it. There’s an immutable distance to it. Do you remember it? No. You know it happened, but you don’t really remember it.

I always tell people I have a terrible memory and this is what I mean. So much of my youth is obscured by veil of abstraction, a dehumanizing wall that lets me know things happened but never re-experience the urgency of them. I know that many things have happened to me. But I don’t remember them in the way I think most people remember their personal histories.

Because we started small and grew big, there are basically two ways the universe can end; it can either fall back in on itself creating a Big Crunch (which could potentially instigate a subsequent Big Bang), or the universe will continue to expand faster and faster ultimately spreading itself so thin that all the energy will be too spread out to be of any use to life, often called the Heat Death or, for symmetry, The Big Freeze.

At its surface, the Big Freeze seems to be a less than optimal way to go. At least with the Crunch there’s the possibility that life could start over in the new universe the Crunch might create. But what if that weren’t the case? What if, at some point in the very distant future, the universe has spread so far out, the spaces between space so remote, that space-time itself ruptures? The universe would shatter across an infinite number of vertices with each atom, each quark, each gluon being torn apart by the universe’s expansion. And each particle ripped apart becomes a brand new Big Bang. A trillion new universes. Neat idea, right?

David Foster Wallace said in an interview with Charlie Rose that footnotes become addicting, a fact to which I can attest. Sometimes, they ease the construction of a sentence, allowing me to include all the information I find pertinent without building a sentence as complex as might otherwise be needed. Other times the information I want to include has no purpose in the context of the post, though it is still worth noting, information that I think is important but would be unacceptably extraneous in the article proper. And then there are other times that endnotes are just fucking fun.

But even I’ve found the inundation of endnotes in my more recent posts a tad tiring. I can’t promise I’ll try to stop or at the very least reduce my endnote output. But I’ll try to try.

In this increasingly connected world, I’m obviously not the first to discuss this on their puny insignificant blog and I certainly won’t be the last, but Michael Jackson is dead at 50. My eyes welled up when the initial shock washed over me. He went beyond all superlatives. And, despite his troubled life, he will be missed. Though, I suspect, never forgotten.

That didn’t happen. Autonomous robots are still a fanciful thought with the closest approximations of thinking and feeling robots merely mimicking emotions they’ve been taught to mimic and parsing the expressions on our faces through complex analysis which ultimately comes down to further training of what emotions a certain kind of face means.

There are some efforts out there that rely on emergent properties popping up in simple loops of code which are initially taught a few base commands some of which would allow the code to modify itself. These are slow going but I think they are the best bet right now.

A few years ago I was considering a minor in cognitive neuropsychology, primarily because I was interested in AI and I wanted to try it from a different angle. Rather than come at it from a mathematical deterministic manner, I began to think about AI development from an evolutionary standpoint.

Intelligence didn’t come from nowhere; it took thousands of generations of incremental improvements, both physical and mental, to get to the level of humans, or even the level of dogs. Which is why self-modifying programs seem like the best bet of the available options, but I think there is one thing that self-modifying programs lack that could be crucial in developing truly independent and self-aware intelligent machines: childhood.

I’m sure that my stance has either been attempted enough times to be proven useless or is actively being researched by people in the field who know much much more about all this stuff, but I think that the AI researchers out there need to start looking at creating families. Instill in the base code of the first generation of programs a need for procreation and a few other basic operations and let life flourish or crumble.

I’m not saying that this is easy, but I think it will be the method by which substantial artificially intelligent machines will be created. Rather than create something in our own image, we must generate an environment conducive to development and allow it to persist.

I did enjoy the movie — I simply accepted the sexism as a part of the universe in which the story’s told — but my reaction to the sexism was visceral. And I most certainly didn’t have that reaction when I saw it in the theatre. If anything, I’ve become more aware of sexism. That said, I’m a little bit sexist.

I’ve noticed as my volume of blog reading has increased, I will often find myself reading a blog post and having an assumption challenged. Very deliberately and scholarly written posts I tend to attribute to men unless I know who the author is or there is a reference to the author’s sex in the content of the post. Similarly, light and airy posts are assumed to come from women. Neither of these prejudices are particularly appealing to me. They’re not harmful, I don’t think; when the evidence tells me that my assumption was wrong I make a note of it and move on reading the content just as I did before. But it’s not something I like about me.

Are these quiet assumptions harmful? I’m not really sure. My intuition is that they’re not, so long as you are aware of them and their flaws. Our brains have evolved in a very specific manner, but that sometimes makes them screw up. When we see something in water we know it’s not in the line of sight because of refraction and we adjust accordingly; I see these ongoing corrections I make as a similar adjustment we all must make to override any prejudices we may have, however they come about.

One of the “rules” of Strunk and White the author of this article, Geoffrey K Pullum, notes chidingly is “write with nouns and verbs, not adjectives and adverbs,” except it’s not a rule; it’s what the book calls an approach.

The book is separated to five segments: Elementary Rules of Usage, Elementary Principles of Composition, A Few Matters of Form, Words and Expressions Commonly Misused, and An Approach to Style. That last section has some questionable advice, some which I consider outdated and therefore ignore, or rather I put less weight on them when I make my decisions.

On the other hand, I, to this day, agree with all the Rules of Usage and following them does indeed generate more pleasing sentences. In the rare cases when those rules can be broken, they should be broken knowingly and by someone well versed in their proper usage. For example, splitting up a sentence into briefer, less grammatically correct, sentences can affect the reading of a line of a novel, giving greater urgency to the words. Overall, those elementary rules are truly elemental to good writing. Pullum criticises little of this section, and I’ll save my response to that for later in the post.

Following the Rules of Usage, there are the Elementary Principles of Composition. The one rule in this section Pullum derides in particular is “use the active voice.”

We are told that the active clause “I will always remember my first trip to Boston” sounds much better than the corresponding passive “My first visit to Boston will always be remembered by me.” It sure does. But that’s because a passive is always a stylistic train wreck when the subject refers to something newer and less established in the discourse than the agent (the noun phrase that follows “by”).

For me to report that I paid my bill by saying “The bill was paid by me,” with no stress on “me,” would sound inane. (I’m the utterer, and the utterer always counts as familiar and well established in the discourse.) But that is no argument against passives generally. “The bill was paid by an anonymous benefactor” sounds perfectly natural. Strunk and White are denigrating the passive by presenting an invented example of it deliberately designed to sound inept.

Pullum failed to notice the subsequent paragraph which discusses that very point:

If the writer tries to make it more concise by omitting “by me,”

My first visit will always be remembered,

it becomes indefinite: is it the writer or some undisclosed person or the world at large that will always remember this visit?

Which is absolutely correct. And completely unaccounted for by Pullum. He then criticises the book for three of its four example passive sentences in its “Passive vs Active” sentence pairs not actually being passive sentences. At least not grammatically speaking. Of course, that’s not really what that section is about. What is specifically stated at the start of the section is “the active voice is usually much more direct and vigorous than the passive.” While some loose grammatical terminology is discussed, the crux of the argument centred on the passivity of the sentence. And no one can deny that “there were a great number of dead leaves lying on the ground” is considerably more passive than “dead leaves covered the ground.” It was the indirect way in which these sentences got their point across that chafed Strunk and White. Perhaps they could’ve done better in their description of the difference between their examples, but the advice is no less valid; nitpicking the difference between grammatical passivity and semantic passivity seems childish.

Immediately following this minutiae-obsessed drone about passive voice comes an attack of another rule of composition: put statements in the positive form. The critique of this is once again a case of nitpicking. Because Strunk and White wrote the sentence “the adjective hasn’t been built that can pull a weak or inaccurate noun out of a tight place,” which includes a dreaded negation, Pullum calls them out as hypocrites and purveyors of inaccurate advice. Naturally, while doing so, he completely ignores the actual content of the section.

Make definite assertions. Avoid tame, colorless, hesitating, noncommittal language. Use the word not as a means of denial or in antithesis, not as a means of evasion.

So, because Strunk and White wrote a sentence which definitively asserted that adjectives cannot replace well chosen nouns — that is, as a means of denial — they are hypocrites.

And when Pullum isn’t misrepresenting Strunk and White’s advice, he cherry-picks from the collected vocabulary of English to refute their supposed arguments.

For example, Chapter IV, in an unnecessary piece of bossiness, says that the split infinitive “should be avoided unless the writer wishes to place unusual stress on the adverb.” The bossiness is unnecessary because the split infinitive has always been grammatical and does not need to be avoided. (The authors actually knew that. Strunk’s original version never even mentioned split infinitives. White added both the above remark and the further reference, in Chapter V, admitting that “some infinitives seem to improve on being split.”) But what interests me here is the descriptive claim about stress on the adverb. It is completely wrong.

Tucking the adverb in before the verb actually de-emphasizes the adverb, so a sentence like “The dean’s statements tend to completely polarize the faculty” places the stress on polarizing the faculty. The way to stress the completeness of the polarization would be to write, “The dean’s statements tend to polarize the faculty completely.”

I am an avid supporter of the split infinitive, primarily because the arguments against it are rooted in the limitations of English’s progenitors. And “to polarize completely” does place more emphasis on the completeness of the polarization than “to completely polarize.” But the example which Strunk and White use — “to diligently inquire” versus “to inquire diligently” — is the exact opposite. (And really, is it placing more emphasis on the boldness of it to say “to go boldy” than “to boldly go?”) Strunk and White note the difficulty of split infinitives later on when they write that “some infinitives seem to improve on being split,” and describe the decision the author must take as “a matter of ear.”

Beyond these childish criticisms, none of which carry any real persuasive power, though, is the deeper problem: Pullum is a linguist, and an idiotic one. Following these “scathing” criticisms, he moves on to a different tact: the appeal to popularity.

An entirely separate kind of grammatical inaccuracy in Elements is the mismatch with readily available evidence. Simple experiments (which students could perform for themselves using downloaded classic texts from sources like http://gutenberg.org) show that Strunk and White preferred to base their grammar claims on intuition and prejudice rather than established literary usage.

Consider the explicit instruction: “With none, use the singular verb when the word means ‘no one’ or ‘not one.’” Is this a rule to be trusted? Let’s investigate.

• Try searching the script of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) for “none of us.” There is one example of it as a subject: “None of us are perfect” (spoken by the learned Dr. Chasuble). It has plural agreement.
• Download and search Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). It contains no cases of “none of us” with singular-inflected verbs, but one that takes the plural (“I think that none of us were surprised when we were asked to see Mrs. Harker a little before the time of sunset”).
• Examine the text of Lucy Maud Montgomery’s popular novel Anne of Avonlea (1909). There are no singular examples, but one with the plural (“None of us ever do”).

It seems to me that the stipulation in Elements is totally at variance not just with modern conversational English but also with literary usage back when Strunk was teaching and White was a boy.

The naïvete here is a little baffling, to be honest. How a linguist can claim a style guide published in 1959 should not only mirror the style of how text was written fifty years hence but also remain completely valid fifty years later is beyond me. Language is constantly changing. Maybe it was considered archaic to write in the manner of Oscar Wilde or Bram Stoker in the wake of the scores of literature-changing novels that emerged in the intervening fifty years. We don’t suggest using the term “help meet” to refer to women anymore, either.

Despite this utter lack of understanding of how languages change — from a linguist, no less — Strunk and White once again have preempted this false criticism:

A plural verb is commonly used when none suggests more than one person or thing.

None are so fallible as those who are sure they’re right.

And yes, the appeal to popularity should carry some weight when writing a book like The Elements of Style, but I’m sure that there are just as many examples of “none of you is perfect” that Pullum either ignored because they weren’t written by authors as famous as Stoker and Wilde or simply to prove his point.

But, for the moment, let’s ignore the appeals to popularity, and the straw men arguments he attempts to construct, and the cherry-picked sentences; there’s one sentence that, in my opinion, discredits any analysis Pullum may proffer.

There are many other cases of Strunk and White’s being in conflict with readily verifiable facts about English.

The Elements of Style is not a formal description of the language and its syntax. It is not there to describe what is possible in English. It describes one way to write well, not what can be written.

Many sentences can be written which meet the grammar of English and make no sense at all. Even further, only a limited subset of the infinite permutations of possible sentences that can be written will read well.

To talk of the “facts about English” in this way, when the subject matter is explicitly discussing the style of English, is absurd. It borders on dishonesty. It’s true that some of Strunk and White’s advice isn’t universal, but to claim that they considered it such is farcical. Strunk and White offer up intelligent guidelines while admitting that “the shape of our language is not rigid; in questions of usage we have no lawgiver whose word is final.” Pullum seems content to throw the baby out with the bathwater, choosing to ignore all of Strunk and White’s inestimable advice because of a few outliers in our complex and beautiful language.

The red “FF” icon is video decoding using ffdshow. The blue “FF” icon is audio decoding using ffdshow. And the white Omega-ish icon is Haali’s media splitter, a tool to split a movie file into its video and audio parts for decoding purposes. I guess what I’m trying to say here is, my computer’s pretty busy right now. It’s also sort of mind-blowing how utterly normal it is to be able to do all this video and audio rendering simultaneously while still watching a movie, browsing the web, and myriad other tasks which only a few years ago would’ve had to be pre-empted by any video rendering, let alone multiple renderings of different videos.

The first computers were used to calculate polynomial equations, and ballistic trajectories. Now we use them to create Kyle XY videos and Lolcats. At first glance, that’s a bad thing, a sign of the dumbing down of society. But in reality, it’s a sign of the democratization of power. Computing power, that is. Those other tasks are still performed by computers, but now computers can do more than that. Beyond that, computers are more readily available. More people have more access to more computers. And we’re not all mathematicians tired of calculating polynomial tables. We have varying interests, some meaningful, others less so. Some of the things which interest modern society may disgust me greatly, but they are not signs of the devolving of society. They are side-effects of the ease with which anybody can express their true interests.

We’re not getting dumber, merely more aware of how dumb we all are.

That said, most of what I read is still wrong. I just rant about it elsewhere, at the moment. I’ll try to redirect some of said ranting to here. After all, I wouldn’t want my blog to be targeted at a specific audience thus resulting in higher traffic. Cause that’d be foolish.

But before we talk about the real story of this week, let’s talk about the “Man on the Street” segments that open each act. The public perception of the Dollhouse has been mostly lacking from the show until now. Aside from Ballard, the FBI almost universally thinks the Dollhouse is a ridiculous notion. And we knew that  They were probably the best way to get the various mindsets the public would have about the Dollhouse. As with most things, it depends on your scenario. The sassy black woman compares it to slavery, and just as was implied when Caroline said in the first episode she didn’t have a choice, when told that some think the Dolls are volunteers she replies “there’s only one reason someone would volunteer to be a slave, is if they is one already.” The disenfranchised twenty-something asks where to sign up for the life of consequence-free good times with rich people. The creepy-in-a-good-way old dude wishes he’d had it back in the day, and the pretty, though slightly chunky, professional woman won’t even tell the camera crew the acts of depravity she’d commit if the Dollhouse were real.

The young hippy chick — whose opinions are notable placed immediately after hearing about why Joel Mynor, Patton Oswalt‘s character, uses the Dollhouse — are about the beauty of reliving, or creating whole cloth, beautiful moments through the Dolls. The young environmentally-friendly socially-conscious chick, who I would’ve called a hippy if the free-love quixotic variety hadn’t already been used tonight, considers it repulsive and tantamount to human trafficking. The butch dude with his arm draped across his wife has a very distinct and hilarious stance on it which I will quote in full, because it’s awesome:

Hey everyone’s got their fantasies right? Guy wants to know what it’s like, you know, be with another man. Just once, nothing queeny, two guys checking it out and then the other one forgets. That could be sweet for some guys.

There’s also the requisite (uber-)crackpot who says society is already a giant Dollhouse but no one’s willing to admit it. Finally we have what I consider to be Joss Whedon’s stance on the Dollhouse. It’s not funny, but it’s powerful, so let’s put it here for everyone to read and ponder:

Forget morality. Imagine it’s true. Imagine this technology being used. Now, imagine it being used… on you. Everything you believe: gone. Everyone you know: strangers, maybe enemies. Every part of you, that makes you more than a walking cluster of neurons dissolved. At someone else’s whim. If that technology exists, it’ll be used. It’ll be abused. It’ll be global. And we will be over. As a species, we will cease to matter. I don’t know, maybe we should.

I’m belabouring all this seemingly filler material because I think it’s something the show has been missing, to its detriment. The show has left you wondering what goes on in the mind of the Doll. Alpha’s ongoing journey to awaken the other Actives, Echo’s glitches and missions gone awry. It’s all within the Dollhouse universe. But what do you think about this? What should you think about this? The show shouldn’t dictate to you, but to show people not caught up in the machinations of the Dollhouse asking these questions is a necessary action at this point. We’ve been asking all these questions to ourselves, but the show had yet to announce that it too is asking these questions, and that it wants you to ask them.

OK, so now that I’ve finished my little rant, let’s get on with the rest of the episode. This is the first episode that truly integrates Ballard’s search for the Dollhouse and the Dollhouse itself, so it’s fitting that it begins with Ballard, watching a TV report about the Dollhouse that says the FBI denies the Dollhouse is being investigated. He’s looking into the kidnapping case from the pilot, the case closed by agent Tanaka played by BSG and Firefly vet Mark Sheppard. Tanaka causes a fuss, telling Ballard to “stay out of his soup,” to which Ballard says “shoulder dislocate!” but he speaks more with actions not words.

At the Dollhouse, Victor and Echo are enjoying a meal and Sierra comes by and sits at a nearby table. Victor doesn’t like that she’s alone. He thinks that since she usually sits with them, maybe she just didn’t see them. He goes over and grabs her by the shoulder, causing her to leap away screaming. In the next scene Dr Saunders has Sierra up on her gynecological stirrups, so we already know something shadily sexy has gone down. She asks if Victor upset her. Sierra says that Victor pretends they’re married. I know this is supposed to make you think Victor is screwing Sierra but given how peaceful the Dolls have been so far, I immediately saw that as a red herring. Unless doing pretend dishes and worrying about the mortgage can cause Sierra to be psychologically traumatised, because that’s totally the sort of stuff I imagine are entailed in Victor’s pretend marriage.

Dr Saunders consults with Boyd and Sierra’s handler Hearn — played by Kevin Kilner who I mostly recall from Earth: Final Conflict, so to see him in respectable television is a bit jarring — and informs them both that Sierra has had sex. “No, sir” says Hearn. “Her last engagement was with the governor’s niece at a children’s cancer ward.” Saunders says it wasn’t during a mission, it happened within the Dollhouse. Boyd asks what she said about Victor, and she says the Victor liked to play, which isn’t really the whole truth. Regardless, Hearn is confused. Dolls don’t have sex drives. Right? Boyd and Saunders look uncomfortable, although neither Saunders nor Topher talked to Boyd about Victor’s “man reactions” during last week’s episode so it’s left unclear how he learned of them.

Hearns is disgusted. He’s livid! Which of course, means he’s the one that did it. “Just because I’m not Andy Griffith with these guys doesn’t mean I want to see them abusing each other.” Yeah! Only he can abuse them. He worries that Victor could be “Jekyll-and-Hyding” like Alpha. I’m not sure if that’s been established before. It’s being implied here that Alpha pretended to be a good little Active for a while before staging his escape, which could be interesting if one of the Dolls does the same thing at some point.

Saunders warns Hearn not to jump to conclusions. Hearn retorts that they can “go to the video tape.” And yeah, he says it as though “video” and “tape” are two separate words. It’s weird. Anyways, there are two days of “video tape” to examine, so it shouldn’t take too long. And if Victor was “playing doctor when not imprinted with an MD” he goes to the Attic. After Hearn leaves, Boyd asks Saunders if Sierra has shown any other signs. Echo is there to clue everybody in. Turns out Sierra cries in her pod when they go to bed. And here’s where I have to correct a previously stated opinion. A couple episodes ago, when Echo was reset after her trauma in the antiquities vault, I said that they must be completely reset after each mission, but that’s clearly not the case. Because this episode has established that they have long-term histories of each other that persist across missions.

Ballard is now gushing to his boss about the connection he’s found between the kidnapping case and the Dollhouse. In particular, a payment was made to a massive hedge fund just after the kidnapping, the same hedge fund that one Joel Mynor, long suspected of being a Dollhouse client, pays into on the same day every year. The amount shown on the monitor is $439 million. Every year. Fuck me, that’s a lot of money.

That yearly payment apparently happened either that day or will happen the next day, because Ballard thinks he can catch Mynor in the act by the next day. But before he does that he has to have dinner with his neighbour Mellie, played by Miracle Laurie, where they bond over the “Rickishness” of her former boyfriend, who broke up with her using stock jargon despite his job at a donut shop. By the way, who really uses the full spelling of donut? Doughnut? It’s not like they’re nuts of dough. They’re rings of dough. Get with it, society. Anyways, Mellie goes fishing for compliments saying that she’s not the Gold Standard in LA. Which is a good thing, because the first thing you do in times of economic turmoil is dump the Gold Standard. Ballard obliges by calling her gorgeous, which she is. But Ballard’s still got a Caroline fixation, since he’s talking about bringing “her” in rather than “them.”

The next day, Joel Mynor gets a visit from Rebecca Mynor, AKA Echo. He’s got some news for her: he just bought their first house! Ah young love. Unfortunately, while explaining to Rebecca that the stove in their kitchen actually cooks food, a miraculous event to many living a shit life waiting to make it big in LA, Ballard kicks a shit tonne of ass and then asks them both to turn around very slowly. Then he sees “Rebecca” and freaks the fuck out. And the credits roll.

Oh man, I’m only finishing up the pre-credits act and I’m already over 1500 words. Looks like this is gonna be a long one.

When we return, Ballard explains he’s an FBI agent and Rebecca instantly assumes that Joel’s new success, which afforded him the luxury of a house, was porn. The best part about this though is that she assumes he performed in porn. She really loves this guy, because a) porn doesn’t pay very well for men, in general, and b) Patton Oswalt is not a very pretty man. Of course, for men looks aren’t a prerequisite for success in porn, so maybe she just knows he’s a well-endowed and fabulously skilled lover. Ballard tries to explain to a distraught Rebecca that she’s really Caroline and she’s being used, but before he gets any further he’s tased by Joel’s security forces, who Rebecca didn’t know about before now and so she, again, assumes they’re “porn men.” This woman’s obsession with porn is really telling. No wonder Joel pays $439 million a year for her.

Rebecca continues to freak out, and the taser’s effects begin to wear off and so Ballard goes nuts on the security guys. In the ensuing melee, Boyd appears and gets Rebecca safely away and off to her treatment. Now that Rebecca’s gone, and Joel’s security forces are taken care of, Ballard and Joel have a heart-to-heart. Joss Whedon has always been good at writing conversations between enemies and this scene is another great example of it. Ballard asks him about the Dollhouse, which Mynor delightfully describes as a place where “we learn about urges,” but Ballard’s had enough and tosses a table aside to prove that point.

After a brief period where Ballard plays Mr. Self-righteousness, Mynor begins his psycho-analysis of Ballard. “If we’re gonna talk, we’re both gonna talk.” He tells him that everyone has fantasies, that we need them to survive. He calls out Ballard’s “Knight in shining armour” complex. In particular, his obsession with Caroline/Echo/Rebecca. It’s a lot of fun, seeing Ballard squirm over the accuracy with which Mynor describes his life, from the broken marriage, to the way he discovered Caroline, to his own fantasies of saving her and whisking her away. He says Ballard’s fantasy is sadder than his. And what is that fantasy? Stay tuned to find out!

Victor’s getting questioned by Topher and Dr Saunders. He thinks Sierra’s special and different, and that she makes him feel better. Sounds like a rapist to me. Outside, Victor’s handler is chatting up Boyd. He’s astounded that he’s gone for a week and his Active “invents rape.” I’m not really sure that rape is something you can invent, and if it was then its invention was many many years ago. Maybe he meant “commits?” Boyd is calmer. He says that Hearn, who’s been doggedly investigating this outrage (hint hint), hasn’t found anything on the tapes. Victor’s handler, who I will call Bicks even though I’m not sure that’s his name, during a long rambling rant wonders why Sierra only cries at night which sets a light bulb off in Boyd’s head. Bicks asks if maybe Sierra is broken. Boyd says “they’re all broken” and heads off.

Back in the Mynor residence, after calling out Ballard, Joel describes Rebecca, the real Rebecca. She was a beautiful nurse, who loved him and trusted him for years while his near-successes in the tech world kept coming up short. Then “long story, still kinda long” he finally hits it big — his first cheque had more zeros than the Lutwaffe, which Ballard corrects saying Japan had Zeros, not Germany. First “Sweet Home Georgia” now this? He’s becoming the show’s little pedant, isn’t he? — he bought a nice little house that he knew Rebecca would love and called her up telling her to meet her at the address and that it was really important. He’d rehearsed how he’d tell her that the house was theirs in his head as she raced over there. But three block from the house, she was hit by a sanitation truck, and died instantly. She never found out that he finally had success. So every year on their anniversary, he recreates the scene as he wished it happened. A lot of stand up comics become actors without any real reason or talent, but Patton Oswalt is not one of them. He’s a talented guy, and he really sells the emotion of this scene.

With the touchy feely stuff out of the way, Ballard calls him a predator and threatens to bring him to court, but Mynor knows better. He says if Ballard brings him to court, they’ll take Ballard down. He says they’ll “throw the Kindle at you,” which is a line that only Joss Whedon would try or could pull off. Now sirens can be heard in the background, so Ballard has to leave, but not before he promises to take the Dollhouse down, leaving Mynor alone to toast a happy anniversary.

Meanwhile, Boyd is looking at the security camera placement within the Dollhouse, starting with the pod room. Finally he comes across a small alcove near a wall of plate glass windows out of the view of the cameras. He picks up his phone and tell Mr Dominic that Victor needs to isolated, along with his handler. Now, what did Bicks do to deserve this?

Victor is sitting sadly on a sofa. Echo shows up and he says that he did something bad, but nobody will tell him what, then a smiling woman tells him to come with her (if he wants to die). Echo asks Boyd and Hearn why they’re taking Victor, and so Hearn, who will soon be revealed to be a despicable rapist, has to up his douche quotient and tell her to go paint something. Boyd tells her that he’s protecting Sierra, and that she won’t cry anymore.

After the utter failure that was his Mynor meeting that day, Ballard’s invited Mellie over to help him lick his wounds. Whether that’s only metaphorical is yet to be determined. Regardless, he’s walking around incredibly topless. And you just don’t do that to your love-sick neighbour. Or me. I mean, I’m straight, but god damn.

He’s busy blaming himself for screwing up because he let his feelings for Caroline get in the way. Mellie asks if he got a chance to talk to the client and what the client said, which causes Ballard to reach forward and give her a kiss. Looks as though Joel’s therapising made Ballard reexamine some things. For the better. Or at the very least, for the increase in near nudity, as we will see shortly.

Mellie appreciates the kiss, but doesn’t want him thinking about Caroline when he kisses her. They should forget it. And just be neighbourly. He tells Mellie that the client was Joel Mynor. Mellie is astounded. The creator of “Bouncy the Rat?” Some have said the whole “Bouncy the Rat” conceit, which has carried on throughout the episode, is a reference to Ratatouille, since Oswalt provided the voice. I can sort of see that, but I’m much more inclined to believe that even if the role hadn’t gone to Patton Oswalt there would have been something like that there, otherwise Mellie would have no real reason to know who Joel Mynor was prior to this scene.

Sierra and a few other Dolls are walking down a hall, the same hall in which Boyd noticed the camera gap, and as they all continue down the hall — except for one Doll who seems to have screwed up the stage direction because she totally slows down with Sierra at first and then walks in front of Sierra and then breaks her dumbass face and looks toward something, which I can only assume is a pissed off AD — Sierra slows down and eventually stops. Once the other Dolls made it down the hall, she approaches the glass wall and one of the panes opens to reveal a hidden area. She walks in, the door closes, and a douche’s shadow appears. Even from the shadow we all know it’s Hearn. He asks her if she trusts him, to which she instinctively answers “with my life.” And that’s even worse. The fact that he’s a rapist? That’s bad. The fact that he’s raping someone who probably barely understands that rape isn’t good, some who is “broken?” That’s even worse. But he’s taking advantage of her pre-imprinted trust of him to commit this heinous act? That’s the worst part of all.

He asks if she wants to play the game. She’s not in the mood, actually. But he doesn’t care about mood, so long as she knows to be quiet. “Noise is upsetting” Sierra replies. Hearn tells her to lift up her dress, and this scene becomes unbearably disturbing, but then Boyd comes from the darkness and punches Hearn right through the plate glass window. Sierra says “That wasn’t quiet” and Boyd replies “It wasn’t meant to be.” Hearn is too busy bleeding profusely to have a witty comeback.

DeWitt looks out her window, her hands resting on her hips, as she asks Boyd why he left them out of the loop on the Hearn feint. Boyd explains that Hearn needed to feel completely in the clear to be willing to try again. DeWitt tells him he will never take action like that again, which he obliges. She tells him a bonus has been wired to his account, but Boyd doesn’t need a bonus. Unlike some people. DeWitt, however, needs to give it to him. Boyd leaves and DeWitt and Dominic talk shop. Turns out they’ve been keeping an eye on Ballard and caught his conversation with Mellie about Joel Mynor. Dominic is worried: a handler was abusing an active, and now Ballard has interrupted an engagement and spilled the beans about the Dollhouse to a civilian. The higher ups won’t like the smell of this, and the hammer will likely come down hard on the both of them, though mostly on DeWitt. DeWitt’s not too worried though. She wants Hearn brought to her, and she wants Topher to prep Echo for a “second date.”

Topher apparently got the specs because now he’s building a brain for Echo. A sexy super agent. At this point, you’d think he’d have a couple of those ready and waiting. His first attempt leads to an instability. Note to self: control issues + enhanced combat skills != crazy delicious. His Asian assistant Ivy, who previously appeared as a huge bitch on Dexter, suggests some modifications which lead Topher to rant about food and then send her off to get something from the kitchen for him. She heads off and Topher creates a successful personality for Echo’s new mission. He loads it into a drive and takes it over to another computer. Those should probably be networked together at some point, given the problems this step introduces. As he’s uploading the imprint — which he says aloud in a very “are my actions too confusing? well let me narrate to myself for you” sort of way — Boyd interrupts him to talk about something. Before he leaves, the door behind him is closed.

Boyd tells him that he’s been taken off duty, but Echo’s been engaged. He wants to know what her mission is. Topher lies that it’s a life coach mission, and then congratulates him on figuring out what Hearn was doing. Boyd is very nonchalant about it and then leaves. Topher heads back in to finish the upload and the door that was previously closed is now ajar. And when is a door not a door? When it’s ajar.

The thing about this open door is that it was clearly done to reinforce a future scene. When Echo tells Ballard that somebody on the inside inserted her “tell Ballard to keep looking” parameter into the imprint, we can easily take that as a part of the personality. Maybe DeWitt just really likes fucking with Ballard. In fact, the first time watching this episode I was unsure, but this door discontinuity reinforces that it really was someone on the inside. Was Boyd in on it? Could be. There’s also the question of who did the imprint. It seems like the only person with enough experience to insert new parameters into an imprint would be Ivy, Topher’s assistant, but it could be someone else who was given something that could do it all automatically. These are questions for future episodes to answer.

Anyways, Echo is brought to Topher and he asks her if she’s ready to play. Which again, this is sort of innocuous, but if you look at it for more than a second you realize Whedon is comparing what Topher is about to do, erase her mind and give her a new one, to the “game” that Hearn asked Sierra to play earlier. Just because Echo won’t remember it doesn’t mean it’s not as bad.

As Topher and Echo play a game, Hearn is suffering the consequences of his. Hearn asks DeWitt if she’s going to turn him into an Active. Which just goes to show you how conceited this douche really is. Which DeWitt makes note of. Hearn leers and sneers at DeWitt and so Dominics knocks him upside the head. Hearn screams at her, saying that he won’t beg. He says “You want to kill me, you want to put me in the Attic, I can’t stop you.” And let’s examine that for a moment. Handlers can be put in the Attic too? It’s possible he’s equating the Attic with death here, but it’s much more likely that the Attic is something more universal than mere storage for broken Dolls.

Anyways, DeWitt want to hear the sordid details of his “game” and Dominic says he’s disgusting. Hearns says “we’re in the business of using people.” DeWitt retorts that he knows less about their business than he thinks, a line that foreshadows the conversation Echo and Ballard will have in a few scenes.

After a few more exchanges where Hearn digs a deeper whole of evil for himself, DeWitt asks Mr Dominic to leave. DeWitt admits that they’re in the business of using people. But what is the best use for someone like Hearn, she asks. He hands her a dossier with information about Mellie and tells him that she’s a problem for the Dollhouse. She needs to be killed. “And it can’t be clean” she adds.

Speaking on unclean, here’s Mellie and Ballard being very “neighbourly” in the dirtiest way that can possibly be interpreted. Her pants and moans, which start before the scene starts, are clearly not the sounds of an attack. Unless it’s an attack of penis, because she’s having an orgasm. Ballard (who I’ll probably have to start referring to as Paul at some point, now that he has a personal life and it’s relevant to the plot) and Mellie are now extra cuddly, and extra naked, talking about their future. Mellie, for her part, will not freak out if he wants to forget about all this. Mellie is being extra cool this episode, charmingly chiding him for his affection for her, which in the Joss Whedon world means he’s preparing to kill her.

Mellie thinks that he should keep looking for the Dollhouse, that his work is important. He wants her to help him. I’m not really sure why he thinks someone with no experience in crime would be able to help him unravel this conspiracy, or if he’s allowed to show her any of that information since I assume it’s classified, but what the hey. Let’s just call it Love. He says he’ll go pick up some dinner and when he gets back they’ll “look over his case files” though that’s unfortunately not a sexual metaphor.

At the Chinese restaurant, he sees Caroline in a reflection in a window and goes to investigate. He reaches for his gun, but she gets to it first. He says he doesn’t want to hurt her, which she appreciates. Because it’ll make her job of killing him that much easier.

When we get back from commercials, there’s an awesome fight sequence between Echo and Ballard. When it spills out of the restaurant’s kitchen and into the alley the stunt doubles make too many, and too noticeable, appearances but otherwise, the fight is really cool. I’m not a stunt choreographer though, so I won’t describe it. At one point Ballard gets the upper hand and hesitates because Echo feigns fear, then she knocks his shit down and tell him that the Dollhouse is real, they’re aware of his work, and they’re going to get him taken off the case.

Ballard wants to know why she’s telling him this. There’s a person inside the Dollhouse who’s working against it. They fiddled with the imprint. Ballard wants to know if it’s the same person that sent him the picture and the DVD, but Echo says it’s not. Ballard wants to know where the Dollhouse is, but Echo says that’s the wrong way to take the Dollhouse down. She says there are over 20 Dollhouses in cities around the world. They’ve got deep pockets, deep influence, and there’s no way Ballard can take them down either on his own or by targeting the LA branch alone.

Ballard wants to know why the person that set up this meeting wants to help him. Echo says “The Dollhouse deals in fantasy. That is their business, but that is not their purpose.” They need Ballard to find out its purpose. See this is where the show starts to get really interesting. We’re moving beyond the simple reason for Dollhouse’s existence — that if the technology exists, someone will use it for profit — into more murky waters. Given the pace of the show thus far, I feel like we’ll get the answers some time this season, but I’m sure they won’t be the end to the mysteries behind the Dollhouse.

Echo says that his allies will contact him again, with Echo’s body again if possible, but in the meantime, he has to let the Dollhouse win. Or at least think they’re winning. She hands him back his gun just in time to point it at the cop that came racing into the alley and fire. Echo’s mission was exactly this. Get Ballard implicated in the shooting of an officer to get him suspended from active duty. Now that it’s been accomplished, no one at the Dollhouse will know they spoke. Echo then tells Ballard, somewhat non-sequitorially, that they don’t want Ballard dead, but anyone else with information about the Dollhouse is fair game. And so Ballard realises the danger Mellie is in and goes running back to her.

Meanwhile, Mellie being all sexy wearing a dress shirt with no pants (seriously ladies, that is the one outfit choice that no guy can resist) when Hearn comes in to make a messy mess of death. He throws her around and she flails uselessly. Ballard races down the street while calling Mellie with his phone. Mellie crawls across the apartment floor, but Hearn grabs her by the legs and turns her over. Ballard continues to run down the street with his phone held to his ear. As Mellie struggles, the phone rings. Hearn mounts her and starts to choke her. She pulls off his mask. The answering machine comes on, and Adelle DeWitt says over the machine “There are three flowers in a vase. The third flower is green.” and Mellie immediately switches from frightened girl to cold killer. She punches Hearn off of her, grabs him by his crotch and slams him into the wall, beats him up and then throws him down onto the coffee table and kicks his neck into the table, killing him. DeWitt, seeing that Mellie’s mission is complete, continues “There are three flowers in a vase. The third flower is yellow.” And once again Mellie revert to her normal personality. Confused by what happened and how Hearn came to be dead, she stumbles over to the wall and begins to cry. Ballard finally arrives and, after confirming that Hearn is dead, falls down beside her and holds her in his arms.

OK, so Mellie is a sleeper Active. I thought she might be an Active from her very first appearance, but I was hoping she wasn’t simply because it gets a bit too much if everybody in Ballard’s life is an Active in disguise. Nevertheless, I enjoyed the twist when it ultimately happened. And while Joss defied expectations by not killing an awesome character in love, he still made that experience a manufactured reality. And that scene was awesome for Miracle Laurie. I mean, put that shit on your acting reel, and spend the next month turning down auditions. Wow. Great stuff.

The next day, Ballard is handing in his badge and gun, the backlash from the police officer shooting. Dominic receives word of this — and in the previous scene Tanaka seemed to be taking a bit too much pleasure in this so he might be the man on the inside of the FBI, informing the Dollhouse and keeping their dirty laundry out of the FBI reports — and informs DeWitt that Ballard’s been suspended pending an investigation. They’ve also made sure that Hearn’s fingerprints come back as those of a Russian floater to tie Ballard’s feud with the Russian mob to the break-in, ensuring that no one will be able to connect any of this to the Dollhouse. And even though their sleeper Active worked perfectly, DeWitt wants to bring her in just to make sure.

Dominic congratulates her on playing a good hand, to which she badassedly replies “I played a very bad hand very well, there is a distinction” which makes me all of a sudden love her character. The power of Joss Whedon, people. She wants Dominic to contact his counterparts in the other Dollhouses about what happened with Hearn and Sierra, so that it doesn’t happen again. He asks if Sierra’s all right. Apparently Topher took the trauma’s out of Sierra. “Ignorance, in this case, truly is bliss” DeWitt quips. “I don’t think they’re ignorant as they’re supposed to be.” Dominic says. But DeWitt assures him “we’re working on it” which doesn’t bode well for the Actives.

Sierra is looking at a book as Victor approaches. Sierra invites him to look at it with her. Things are back to normal. Meanwhile, Echo is painting a house with Sierra and Victor in front of it. DeWitt comes by and compliments it. “It isn’t finished” Echo says. “The picture?” DeWitt asks. And Echo mysteriously, yet innocently, repeats “It isn’t finished.” DeWitt asks if she’d like it to be finished but we’re left hanging on the answer to that question as a Greg Laswell’s song “Sweet Dream” begins to play. We cut to Echo driving up to Joel Mynor’s house where he finally gets to tell his wife the good news.

So, yeah this episode was awesome. Was it “5500 words” awesome? Apparently, because that’s how long this is. The good news here is that the ratings for this week were solid. Solid in that they didn’t drop significantly from last week, although I figured BSG’s finale would’ve affected it at least a little. Hopefully, with this week’s really excellent episode the word of mouth will finally start to kick in and the rating will improve.

P.S. Seriously, the next review will be shorter. Honest.

The worst part is that I know this is a man completely undeserving of pity or sorrow, yet his cracked skin, his broken expression, his aging face all call to me to have those feelings. Photography has the power to imbue its subject with more than it deserves.

Those natives had the wrong idea. Photography doesn’t steal your soul, it preserves it. It puts it out there for everyone to see, even if they don’t want to.

Both of these techniques work as well as they can, but my desire, when examining an episode, is to explore all of this. I want to examine every scene for deeper meaning while not forgetting to describe the actual factual plot of the story. I don’t want to simply describe a scene, but explore the underlying assumptions the characters exert on the scene. All of this is maddeningly difficult to accomplish without writing 5000 words. (One recapper on Television Without Pity, Jacob, gets close to my ideal. His recaps are a little too abstract and shoegazy most of the time, but at least he’s really trying to understand the show he’s writing about.)

At the end of my 3500 word recap of the fourth episode of Dollhouse I hadn’t really explored the subsurface of the story as much as I would have liked and I’d also been too dry in my depictions of the scenes for my taste. Finding that perfect balance between humour, pathos, analysis, and explanation is something I don’t think any site or any writer has accomplished yet. Which is why I don’t hold out any hope for me achieving such perfection. But I gotta try.

It’s all mostly meaningless, so why not celebrate the meaningless by giving importance to an arbitrary marker of the passage of time? Which is my weird way of wishing everyone a happy Pi Day. And happy birthday to the remains of Albert Einstein.

There’s something very discomfiting about this certainty. Obviously, pool is a game of skill but most games of skill have a bit of chance, a bit of uncertainty. The wind can blow in the wrong way, even in closed environment games like darts. But it seems that in pool, there’s no chance left. The friction of the felt, the bounce off the rails, the angle of attack, the position of the stick on the cue, it can all be planned out too well. With enough practice, the game transcends its nature and becomes rote mechanics. I like pool, but I’m not very good at it. If I line up a shot exactly the same twenty times I’d probably only get what I want once, but professional pool isn’t like that.  Professional pool is precise, perfect, sterile. And, now that I’ve shaped this opinion, utterly uninteresting to me.

WIN.

We psychologically stay home, even when we’re gone. I’m doing it at this moment, typing on my laptop while Paris awakens outside. My friend Dan moved to New York to produce a TV show, and says never really saw the city: he had thirteen nights free in four months. He was either on set or on the phone with Los Angeles the rest of the time, and came to see the JFK-LAX flight as a commute.

I see it happening with with this generation of college students. When I left Boulder to go to Drake, and when I left Drake to move to Los Angeles, I left people behind. Through phone calls, letters and visits home, I maintained relationships with a few close friends. But ninety percent of the people I knew vanished in the rearview mirror. That doesn’t happen as much anymore. Through Facebook and email, it’s trivial to keep up with dozens of classmates more or less daily.

But is it really a good idea?

Your twenties are a crucial time, and I’d argue that it’s harder to discover yourself — or reinvent yourself — when surrounded by a vast network of people who already have a fixed opinion of who you are. I went to college and grad school not knowing a single person, and while it was a little terrifying, it was also liberating. Decoupled from my previous opinions and embarrassments, I was able to become the 2.0 and 3.0 versions of myself. I could only do that by going somewhere new. By changing place.

There is a level of permanence to your persona that wasn’t there forty years ago. Becoming a new man, à la Don Draper, is hardly feasible in this world where your blog’s archive sits there for all to read, where your twitter updates lay in neat chronological order, where the photos on your facebook page sit waiting to be found and reported on. I don’t know if it’s a good idea. But it’s certainly where we’d headed.

In an attempt to weed out trolls and flame wars they have strict rules about your demeanor. You have to write grammatically correct and full sentences. You can’t attack personally, you need to stick to the subject of the thread and of the forum. You’re also not allowed to write spoilers in the “episode discussion” threads which is great because you can theorize and question without worrying about someone spoiling the show. But these rules and restrictions come at a price.

Every time I come to the forums, I read post after post which criticizes Kate and Jack. They call Kate a cold-blooded selfish bitch and basically do nothing but wish death upon her. They call Jack an idiot and say that he is the worst and most boring character on the show. But Kate is not a selfish bitch; she has a fucked up history, lots of baggage, a fear of commitment, and lots of other things wrong with her. But she feels every minute of that. And throughout the series thus far, she has been incredibly selfless, and willing to help the entire Island community. Jack is sometimes an idiot, but everyone is sometimes. Jack had to live his entire life under the thumb of a father he was unable to please. A father who would criticize him for attempting to help out a kid being bullied. His entire life is guided by that need to fix things; to impress his father. When he flies to Australia to pick up Christian Shephard’s body, he’s doing more than just mourning a father. He’s realizing that he will never earn his father’s love.

I’m not discussing these crucial aspects of their personality because I think that what they do on the show is what I would do or the best thing to do. It is, however, what I think they would do. These characters are not static. Jack tries to fight these urges, Kate tries to fight these urges. Sometimes they succeed and sometimes they don’t. That is at the very core of humanity, and to attack these characters because they are consistent and not merely set pieces through which the plot progresses is idiotic.

So, when a forum poster attacks Jack for not questioning Kate further about Aaron’s fate and calls Kate a murderer, I respond forcefully with a logical rebuttal. Jack has never seen Kate as a murderer. He has never cared what she did in her past. He knows her. Whether or not he actually knows her, he thinks he does. He trusts her more than anyone else. That’s why he asks her for her support when trying to convince the Oceanic 6 to lie. He loves her so deeply, that he’d give up his freedom and perform surgery on a man he has come to revile so that she could be happy with another man. To think that Kate having murdered someone, no matter how justified or unjustified it was, would sway Jack’s trust of Kate is downright intellectually dishonest.

So, in my response to this practically trollish comment, I called that poster out for making that statement. I asked them if they were really going to use the “Kate is a murderer” line. I followed this up with a calm and correct rebuttal as to why that was a foolish statement. I then followed that up by telling the poster that they should judge the character’s actions by the character, not by what you want the character to be. I held no ill will to that poster, but I sincerely hoped they read that and realized the error in their analysis.

Instead, my message was deleted and I got a warning from a moderator because you are not allowed to discuss other posters on the thread. Which is a foolish rule, because the forum’s users lose any ability to examine the merit of one anothers’ examinations. I’m not saying that we need to be boorish in our critiques but without the analysis of analysis, any improvement of ideas occurs away from the group which results in the group seeing the improvements but not the improvements to the process which led to that. Perhaps, I was too brusque, but my point was valid and even ignoring the direct communication toward the other poster there was still content apropos to the discussion in that post. Deleting it only hurts the collective intelligence of the group.

I understand the need for some level of moderation on forums. Aint it Cool News’ talkbacks have no moderation save some manual processes enacted when a particularly persistent troll writes hundreds of useless messages and harasses the community indiscriminately. Without moderation, most of the internet would devolve into a slew of attacks and slurs. But to delete valid content because it was deemed slightly snippy according to the whims of a moderator is unacceptably, and unecessarily, Draconian.

France created a civil unions law in 1999 for gays but failed to designate gender and now about a third of straight couples getting married in France opt for civil unions because they are easier to get out of. Don George points out the obvious:

…it is terribly humorous and ironic that the French created civil unions to protect the institution of marriage…and now civil unions are undermining marriage because people are opting for them instead of marriage. Talk about the law of unintended consequences. So possibly the lesson for our country is that the best way to protect the institution of marriage is not to deny people marriage by creating a separate but equal system, but to allow gays to marry.

Er: yes. If you read my first ever essay on the topic, in 1989, you will find it was exactly this possibility that led me to back full marriage equality over marriage-lite options such as domestic partnership and civil unions. It was a way to integrate gay people and protect marriage.

What I don’t understand about the conservative viewpoint on marriage is their view that it is an inherent good. That somehow marriage is necessary for society to flourish and freedom to ring through the streets of the world.

Ta-Nehisi Coates, an Atlantic blogger generally found on the other side of the political spectrum, has a different view of marriage:

As much as I can recall, there were basically three reasons for us to get married. 1.) I might leave. Marriage would force me to do the right thing. 2.) To declare our commitment to each other before a community of people whom we loved. 3.) The business reasons–the legalities of your estate and guardianship. I found–and still find–the first two reasons were utterly unconvincing. The third held some sway, but with the help of a lawyer we’ve managed to take care of that. The first turned marriage into a kind of insurance policy, and I just believed that if you felt you needed insurance for the person you were having kids by to stick out, you needed to reconsider the whole proposition. The commitment and community reason held some appeal. But I believed, and still believe, that long-term romantic partnerships are between the two people entering into it.

I hated the idea of public declarations, because the life blood of the relationship–what bills to pay, how to raise your child, your love life–all of that happened when no one else was around. Kenyatta knows more about me than any human being walking the earth–and this is as it should be. No one knows more about my strengths and my weaknesses, my failings and my successes. I trust her to the end. But that trust was worked for–it was not declared or conjured by the presence of other people.

I’ve had similar views on marriage for a while now, but so rarely has the argument not against marriage, but against the necessity of marriage been so succinctly put. Some people might have a different idea of what a long-term relationship requires. I know that my ex did. But to imply that marriage is an inherent good is misleading.

I’m not a huge celebrator of birthdays, but Darwin certainly demands a bit of recognition for the massive game-changing effect he had on modern science, and since we’re already at it we might as well toss a bit Lincoln’s way.

Enterprise is not a better show. Once Manny Coto took over the show and shifted the plots away from the Temporal Cold War nonsense, the show got markedly better. And at that time, it was probably better than most, if not all, of Voyager. But overall? Not even close.

In truth, I’ve never even seen the majority of Enterprise. I missed most of seasons two and three and what little I’ve seen of it hasn’t made me want to go back to it. Watching almost any episode of Voyager makes me change the channel just as fast but that’s due to the accumulation of ill will. It took seven years of consistent underperforming to get me to that point. Enterprise did it in just one.

But, like Voyager before it, Enterprise had a great premise. Not the specific premise they had, but rather their general idea. Telling the story of the first exploratory crews of Starfleet before the Federation had been created could have been spectacular. There had been stories of pre-Federation colonization from the very beginning of Star Trek, and to see the first official envoys head out into those waters was a tantalizing prospect. There are elements of this in Enterprise but too little of it. Their ship is a little too tip-top. NASA put a lot of work into the Apollo capsules but they were still barely capable hunks of metal.

Beyond this, the very first premise the show pushes on you is that for fifty years after Zephram Cochrane’s first foray into Warp speed, Earth barely ventured out again. Not because the people of the world didn’t suddenly and miraculously form a global government, but because some Vulcans said we weren’t ready.

The real problem is that they wanted to show the birth of the Federation while ignoring all the aspects of humanity that would have led to Earth being impactful enough to be at the head of a large Federation. Aside from our ability to work with each other and form consensuses — a quality the show rarely brings to light — we’re also a fairly egotistical and brutal species. We wouldn’t have listened to the Vulcans, and while we’d play nice with neighbouring species, we’d also be constantly working on attaining military dominance. It’s a show that came out a decade too early. The kind of rough and ragged sensibility behind Battlestar Galactica would have been ideal for a Star Trek prequel.

Brannon Braga and Rick Berman are ultimately at fault. They were involved in TNG and DS9 but there must have been some checks and balances further up the food chain on those shows because once they were the lead architects of Star Trek it went down the crapper. So I hereby rescind any and all endorsements of Star Trek: Enterprise I have ever offered. That show fucking sucked. And I pray I never stay up late enough to see it on my television again.

But still, I chose to explore the possibilities. I thought for at least a moment that immortality would be a good thing. No one else did. What the fuck is wrong with everyone?

When I finally opened the door to that question, the professor asked a few others why they wouldn’t want to live forever and none of them gave the answer I thought. I assumed that most of them, being philosophy students, had thought it out in great details. But no, they all said it was because of global warming.

Global warming. Seriously.

More abstractly, they all talked about the disastrous effect humanity has had on earth thus far. They didn’t think they would want to live forever when 100 years from now the world would be a desolate wasteland destroyed by the cruel banalities of man. More reasonably some thought that earth would survive but humanity would likely be extinct in the near future and then they would be alone forever. To wit, a majority of the students believed not only that humanity would be gone within their lifetime, but that earth would be irrevocably damaged by us.

Our planet survived an impact with a Mars-sized planet. Without ten thousand more years of technological improvement humanity could not irrevocably damage the planet even if we tried. We could destroy the majority of life on the planet and possibly all of it, but life would grab hold again. It’s tenacious like that. That innate tenacity in combination with the intelligence of our species is what makes us the dominant species of our planet. We’ve made many mistakes over the millennia, and with each new generation’s greater reach and power those mistakes become more and more dangerous but we’re not done yet.

There has been talk recently of what might happen if the Yellowstone Caldera erupts as it did 640 000 years ago, because of a recent increase in tectonic activity there. The level of damage that would cause is beyond catastrophic. Ash from the eruption would blanket most of North America and change the climate of the entire planet in ways far more drastic than the accumulation of greenhouse gases we’ve contributed in the past 200 years ever could. It’s hard to imagine just how much the world would change because of an event like that, and yet I’m not worried for the future of humanity. I’d almost certainly die, but humanity would persist.

It seems like the environmentalists have managed to scare the shit out of the world. Gone is the quixotic optimism for the future of the 50′s, replaced by the dour nihilism of now. We talk of alien archaeologists examining our cities thousands of years from now wondering what killed us, but we’re not going anywhere.

We’ve reached a point in our evolution where our intelligence is almost a detriment. Given the comfort of our more base needs, we have more time to think and greater minds with which to think. And so we think of what can go wrong. Each new generation imagines new terrors capable of destroying us with their free time. These thoughts of dread can paralyze us with fear of the inevitable or they can spur us to imagine new solutions. Lately there has been far too much of the former and not enough of the latter.

Here’s what I know about the ultimate fate of humanity. We will go away. There will come a time when no humans exist. That is inevitable. But the question is when. Do we want to give up and whimper away in the next hundred years, or do we want to keep growing, keep getting smarter, keep fighting until the end, until the universe dies around us?

The atheist who refuses “God bless you” or tries to remove “under God” from the pledge of allegiance is just being an asshole who thinks his personal beliefs should be enforced on the rest of the world. I do understand that the pledge was modified early in the 20^th century to include the God statement and it has no place in a pledge to a nation which claims to have a separation of church and state, but the net effect it has on you is nil. No child, sitting in class as they recite the pledge, is seriously examining it to make sure they follow it religiously: they’re droning on by rote.

Once again, I’m not completely disgusted or surprised by what I once said (I save that sort of self-disgust for opinions I held four to five years ago) but it’s not really right, either. Obviously, the pledge shouldn’t contain religious symbols. It is a pledge for a secular nation! A nation which explicitly separates church and state. The insertion of “under God” was done to reinforce the evils of atheism during the Red Scare and the Cold War. It didn’t belong there in the first place and removing it is the right thing to do. It’s true that most children repeat the pledge blindly without really caring about its content, but that doesn’t mean the kids who do listen to the words have to be subjected to theism as a de facto mindset.

The impetus for this shift in opinion came when I underwent the iron ring ceremony for graduating from Engineering. It’s supposed to be a secret ceremony (mainly so we can act like we’re cool) so I won’t betray the trust of my fellow engineers, but it’s safe to say that some of the required oaths of that ceremony are fairly strongly tied not only to theistic belief but to Christian belief. As I read the oaths I noted the explicit religiosity but continued to read, silently swearing to uphold the core principles of engineering while ignoring the religiosity. But a fellow classmate — or so I was told later on while hammered at the after-party — refused to read the oath because it was too religious. Much later, most likely due to the alcohol, I realized that this was what I should have done as well. Most especially because I was swearing an oath with my peers and it should be something I remember and uphold diligently, but also because I had spent far too long being a “fair weather” atheist, keeping quiet about my beliefs because I didn’t want to evoke any controversy. Since then I’ve tried to be more open about my atheism which brings me to “God bless you.”

Ever since I’ve been at my current job, the co-worker to my immediate right has said “God bless you” when I sneeze (which is surprisingly frequent). Again, at first I would mumble something or pretend I didn’t hear it simply because I didn’t want to cause any trouble. But this act of evasion was just another way to hide my beliefs. Now, I still think it’s kind of a dick move to go out of your way to shoot someone down for saying “God bless you” but I no longer feign approval of it. And if you’re my co-worker who always very politely says “God bless you” I’m sorry if I seem like a dick because I don’t thank you for it; I’m just trying to be slightly less of a dick than if I were to “correct” you.

It’s called preference. I don’t want to kiss guys and I think it would be gross. Just because you accept other people’s homosexuality doesn’t mean you have no problem performing homosexual acts.

In some ways it’s right, but at the same time going back to that thread now I see myself as woefully ignorant. Actors are paid to perform roles. And most of the actors who get interviewed about kissing against sexual preference (truthfully, no-one ever asks NPH how weird it is to kiss hot chicks all the time) are famous enough that if they didn’t want to kiss a guy, they wouldn’t have to. And really, even if you’re a struggling actor desperate for a role and you’ve got an audition for a gay character who goes through an intense and intimate sexual awakening (not that I’m working on a screenplay or anything) why wouldn’t you do it? A kiss is only as intimate as you make it. A kiss is only as sexual as you make it. And all of that happens in your mind. It has nothing to do with how deep your tongue goes down their throat or how hard you push your face onto theirs.

Beyond all of that, I’ve grown up a fair bit since then. I’m not wet in the pants to make it with a dude, but it’s not something that disgusts me any longer. And there’s always a chance the dude’s a good kisser.

The legal ramifications of what I’m about to describe are unguessable. I have no idea what rights a civil union like the ones which would be possible below would have, nor do I have any idea what kind of transhuman universe would require so complex a system. This is the marriage database schema to take us up to the thirty-first century, people.

I’m all for it. Marriage as an emotional commitment is a fairly novel concept anyways, so changing it to be even more accepting is a good thing. And the more you think about the arbitrary limitations we’ve placed on marriage and other cultural ideals by virtue of nothing more that historical inertia, the more you’ll be willing to understand, accept, and support it.

Recently, she threw down the cash to head up to space in Richard Branson’s new commercial space-faring venture Virgin Galactic. When asked about it she said:

I’m very scared to do it. What if I don’t come back? With the whole light years thing, what if I come back 10,000 years later, and everyone I know is dead? I’ll be like, ‘Great. Now I have to start all over.’

That’s just so cute I can’t even criticise it. It’s just so endearingly ignorant. Obviously, it’s not right; the time dilation from the minute amount of time she’ll spend in space is negligible. Even Russian cosmonauts who’ve spent years in space “time traveled” no more than seconds. But even still, she says it — or is represented in the media as saying it — with such sincerity that you want to just kiss her on the forehead and tousle her hair a bit.

And then there’s the infamous sex tape. Yes, I’ve seen the sex tape. It’s not the best amateur porn I’ve ever seen, but it has its charms. Specifically, and this may get slightly graphic, near the end she’s giving him a blowjob and says she wants the cum on her face. The reason? “Because you’re my boyfriend.”

I know that that’s a fairly crass moment in which to find innocence and appreciation, but that’s what it does for me. Over the years, Paris Hilton has been trashed for so many reasons, and yet I’ve never really got it. Is she famous for no reason at all? Absolutely. Luckily, I don’t care about fame. And when you take that inherent aggravation out of the equation, she’s really quite endearing. Seriously.

This doesn’t belittle what he accomplished. He was willing to fight obscenity laws when no one else would. He attacked establishments like the government and the catholic church and wasn’t afraid to call them on their corruption and greed. But at the same time, he said some pretty stupid shit.

While discussing pornography and obscenity laws, he claims that pornography and obscenity laws are there to stop entrapment of wholesome people by prurient interests. His defense of what he does and other so-called obscene and pornographic works of the time is that they are not as a whole prurient in nature and so should not be judged by those laws. I’m OK with that part, but along the way he accepts and endorses the initial claim that pornography is essentially entrapment, that people are unable to resist material which arouses them. Seriously?

Are we expected to believe that someone can come across a magazine rack with a Playboy on it and be unable to maintain his composure and act like a rational human being? This seems like an absurdly backward view for Lenny Bruce, someone I’ve always understood to be a very forward thinking man, to have.

At least with pornography he defends most cases of it by virtue of its artistic merit, or the difficulty of objective analysis of artistic merit. But when it comes to drugs he’s just plain fucking nuts. He made the claim that there really are no drug addicts aside from the dozen or so the various law enforcement agencies have on the take. He describes heroin, in spirit if not in exactly these words, as a drug that no one uses. Maybe its merely that Lenny Bruce has the disadvantage of being dead and therefore unable to update his facts to modern day, but heroin and cocaine and other such hard drugs are a huge problem and their users are many.

Lenny Bruce was vastly influential — and without him we might never have had George Carlin or any of the other idols of modern comedy — but from my limited exposure to his work he doesn’t seem like a particularly great comedian, and his political stances, which are the core of his comedy, fluctuate wildly; maybe his own addictions tainted his responses on drugs, maybe the fact that he liked to swear and the fact that his job required not swearing guided his opinion on censorship. Either way, Lenny Bruce was a deeply flawed man, who managed to incite a revolution. Because of his work, obscenity became less obscene. Because of him, and others of that time, I can say “fuck” or “shit” or even “cunt” whenever I want. And that’s a freedom, like any other for which we’ve fought in the history of civilization, we should never take for granted.

I used to post all of my poetry on my site back in the day, but I don’t think I need to punish any of you with that sort of abuse. I’ll instead print it out in one of those creepy kidnapper fonts and send it to my ex-girlfriend.

One of the first mistakes I made was over-scheduling the various panels of interest without taking into account the other events that go on at comic-con: most especially the exhibit hall. The exhibit hall is where you go to see all the booths set up by various exhibitors. If you want to see the latest collectible busts of Hellboy, you can head over to the Sideshow Collectibles booth; if you want to buy 30 Rock t-shirts and Dwight Schrute bobble heads, you head over to the NBC booth; and a quick stroll through Artists’ Alley gives you a broad look at a large range of artistic abilities and sensibilities. I went to the exhibit hall every day of comic-con for at least an hour, usually more, and even though I’d walked the length of it numerous times I saw something new every time I walked the aisles. You could quite easily go to comic-con and simply explore all the exhibit halls have to offer for the duration.

But even exploring briefly in between panels results in a multitude of choices, and all of them tantalizing. Here’s the problem. I went to comic-con vaguely aware of the exhibit hall, but I had my mind set on seeing the panels. That said, I went there with 500 USD in my wallet planning to spend every penny and maybe more, but as I strolled the exhibit hall aisles I realized that didn’t have any room to bring this stuff back with me.

In my zeal to bring every awesome shirt I had to prove my geekiness to other geeks, I packed a duffel bag packed nearly to the brim for a four day trip. I could probably shove it full of any trade paperbacks I purchased on the floor, but comics are much more fragile and would likely get crumpled along the way. No bag and board would solve this problem.

Then let’s factor in other purchases like posters, and movie props, and statues, and even original artwork. They’re all too big or to fragile to withstand being shoved in with my clothes for a plane flight, especially when your bag gets remanded to airline security for a random security check where the word “gentle” is not in their vocabulary (but that’s a story for another time).

So I ended up not buying all that much. Oh I still spent hundreds of dollars buying trade paperbacks, but I couldn’t pick up any of the comic-con exclusive versions of comics I like or posters or prints. That said, I did pick up a great print of art by Mike Sosnowski called The Culprit for my niece because I thought she’d like it, but by the time I got my bag back from airport security, the print was horribly crumpled and I would have been better off ordering it from his website.

So if there’s anything you do in preparation for comic-con, you should plan for the swag. Bring an extra piece of luggage for your gifts that you can bring as carry-on to ensure its safety on the flight, or be willing to swallow the costs and ship your purchases to yourself in well packed boxes. Whatever option you choose, one proferred here or one of your own devising, just be aware of the problem before you go or it could put an unnecessary restraint on the reckless spending inherent in an event such as this.

Here’s a post, with some editing and spelling liberties taken on my part, asking for some arguments on moral relativism, which are especially targeted at an atheist reader.

Today I will play the role of an atheist who subscribes to humanism and the relative nature of morality. Shall we begin?

THESE ARE MY TWO CORE BELIEFS:

1. I believe that certain nonproductive members of society – i.e. the terminally and painfully sick, unemployed and alcohol-addicted street vagrants, serial criminals, and those too old to contribute anything meaningful - should be euthanized for the greater of good of society and mankind.

Resources that they consume can find much better use in advancing civilization and the happiness of other (and more) people. The good and survival of the human species takes precedence over selfish and petty individual needs.

2. I believe that bestiality as a sexual choice should be given the same legal rights and social respect as heterosexual and homosexual human-human relationships.

I am a practicing zoophile who regularly engages in group sex with my fully-mature rottweilers (both male and female) who willingly and often actively reciprocate the intimate eroticity.

We all enjoy it immensely, so what’s wrong with it? For some reason, most people – even the supposedly enlightened individuals at PFLAG – think my sexual choice is disgusting, morally repugnant and unnatural. To me it’s incomprehensible and inexplicable why.

Now please tell me why my stance is MORALLY WRONG from a atheistic, humanist point of view.

Quotes from the Bible or other holy scriptures will not be accepted. Arguments that some god or another forbids it will similarly be ignored. As a atheist, I WILL NOT ACCEPT ANY RELIGION OR PHILOSOPHY BASED ARGUMENTS.

I welcome and eagerly await comments which attempt to persuade me that somehow, my beliefs and practices are fundamentally wrong from a relativistic, humanist, liberal and pluralistic point of view.

Convince me.

Usually, when I read stuff like this on the Internet I just sigh and move along, but this time I couldn’t resist responding. What follows is a comment I posted on that blog in its entirety. Normally, I also don’t repost comments I write on other blogs on this site, but this one is fairly well written and much longer than I originally anticipated. Plus I haven’t posted in a while so I needed to put something up.

First of all, you say that you reject any philosophy based reasoning which is possibly the stupidest thing anyone has ever said. Philosophy strives to create logically valid reasoning. If the premises of that logic are true, then the reasoning is also true so to say you reject philosophy (but accept “atheistic” arguments which wouldn’t exist without philosophy) is really dumb.

As for your first point, there’s a difference between euthanasia and what you propose. Euthanasia is about ending the suffering of people who wish death. You’re talking about killing people against their will because they are no longer useful to society. That’s an egregious attack on the freedoms of people. Not only that but you then need to define usefulness to society. What if someone is intelligent, went through university and even went through medical school and graduated at the top of their class. But once that was all done they decided to make crappy clay sculptures that everyone agrees are not only a terrible waste of their talents but also just in general terrible. He is no longer useful to society and was even a burden on society by going through an unused education process so your proposal would be to kill him, but hopefully you can see that that is no more than cold blooded murder.

Secondly, regarding bestiality. I have a very specific opinion about sex: you don’t do it without consent. Until animals can be proven to be sentient and are capable of communicating with humans their thoughts and opinions, you cannot have sex with one without it being rape. If you want to stick your ass up in the air and wait for a dog to figure out that you want it to fuck you, well that’s fine by me, but you can’t do anything to the dog or any animal because you can’t reliably convince me that it’s consensual.

One final note. Your basic argument seems to be that without God all morality is completely relative. That may be true, but it’s a problem philosophers have discussed for millennia without making any real headway, so you shouldn’t assume your stance to be true. For one thing, morality may be a genetic trait, or a part of the structure of our brain. If those, or something similar, are true then there very well may be an absolute moral code built into us, or at least some moral absolutes from which we can extrapolate the rest. Regardless, a godless world is not necessarily a morally relative world. Furthermore, a morally relative world is not necessarily a world where you can do anything. Morality is a societal construct because morality defines the behaviour between members of a society. Which means the members of society need to agree on the basic terms. Agreeing on the basic terms of a morality, relative or not, will lead to certain limitations. Always.

(Before anyone starts accusing me of teaching Parrots to say “fuck me good” and then going wild, I should say that I personally would never fuck an animal other than a human; I’m just that kind of guy. But I also don’t think that I have the right to tell people who have those bizarre desires, along with animals intelligent enough to have and communicate those desires, that they shouldn’t do that funky business.)

So there’s my thoughts on those particularly grimy and unpalatable. I hope that I’ve both made some sense and also not completely grossed the fuck out everybody reading this.

P.S.: After having looked at a few other posts on the blog, it seems pretty clear that this guy is either bipolar and has two distinctly opposite personalities or he’s a racist neocon who likes to argue that atheism leads to rampant dog fucking and murdering by playing the part of a crazy atheist who thrives on dog fucking and murdering. C’est la vie, but maybe my arguments manage to convince him that supporting someone’s right to do fucked up shit is not the same as wanting to do fucked up shit.

Enter Religion. Now we’ve got a bunch of guys claiming to know how God wants you to act and most of the time it’s decent but some of the time it’s horrific. Of course, the problem with religion is that most of the big ones are pretty loose about their moral restrictions; Christianity, in particular, allows complete forgiveness and acceptance to heaven for simply asking forgiveness on your death bed. It’s supposed to be sincere, but the priest providing the last rites has no special ability to discern sincerity. So you can do whatever the fuck you want to as long as you feign sincerity long enough to ask forgiveness.

The reason you can do whatever you want is this ephemeral promise of eternity. So what’s a benevolent God to do? Convince people he doesn’t exist! Without the supernatural crutch of God, people would have to get their act together, do unto others and all that good stuff; you’ve only got one life, so you better not fuck it up. So you wanna know my theory? I think that if God existed, he would be working towards an atheist world where they follow his principles because they think it’s best, not because He thinks it’s best.

You want to know the really insidious thing about this? This means, that religion is a creation of the devil. Yeah. I know. It’s fucked. By creating religion, the devil co-opted God’s kick-ass plan. And the best thing about it (that devil is really tricky) is that God can’t interfere. He can’t come down and say “No! There is no God! Do not follow these religions which the devil has created!” because he would then be co-opting his own plan. Some people say that “the greatest trick the Devil ever pulled, was convincing the world he didn’t exist” but that’s wrong; the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world that God does.

Now onto the show. This is a show that I shouldn’t like. I really truly hate the Jack Johnsons of the world: the people who just let everything wash over them and don’t seem to care about anything except killer waves. That being said, this so-called “surf noir” show is drawing me in. HBO seems to have a particular skill about it when introducing people to disparate genres. When I started watching Deadwood, I hated westerns. I probably never would’ve watched Deadwood if I hadn’t been vacationing in Florida and the house my family had rented had HBO. I had never seen HBO and I’m a TV junkie so I sat there and watched as much as I could. So I sat down and I watched the very first episode of Deadwood and just like John From Cincinnati it drew me in. David Milch has a great skill to take a known genre and turn it on its head. And this show is pure Milch: the dialogue, though separated by over a century, is pitch perfect to that of Deadwood. This is most noticable during the monologues but the touch is sprinlked throughout the series.

I’ll be honest and say that when I first went to watch JFC I wasn’t that enthralled. In fact the first time I went to watch it I turned it off in less than ten minutes. Luckily those first ten minutes had something that made me want to go back: the opening credits. While not as rich and representative of what the show is — as far as I can see, but the show is still young — as Deadwood’s or Carnivàle’s, they are HBO credits through and through. So few shows take the time to create truly memorable credit sequences, that it’s refreshing to see a network sticking with it.

I can’t say I’ll be going surfing any time soon, but for the time being I’ll enjoy the waves. (Oh God, sorry for that really bad pun…)

Now there are lots of valid reasons why IPv6 should be adopted and many other reasons why it hasn’t yet been adopted. There are more knowledgeable people to explain all the intricate awesomeness in IPv6. What I really care about is a quote I read in an ars technica article on the subject regarding the sheer size of the IPv6 address space:

The total number of possible addresses that this gives us [is] 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456. To put this into perspective: there are currently 130 million people born each year. If this number of births remains the same until the sun goes dark in 5 billion years, and all of these people live to be 72 years old, they can all have 53 times the address space of the IPv4 Internet [4,294,967,296 addresses] for every second of their lives.

If that doesn’t get you excited about IPv6… well you’re not a geek like me.

Obviously, I’m taking the time to write this post but it’s considerably less thought out than most and I’ve been slacking on my blog and I’ve been trying to make a concerted effort to sustain the momentum of this blog so I need to write about something even if it’s about my lack of perspicacity. I am currently trying to maintain my courseload (already heavier than a typicaly heavy courseload), keep up with the changing world of JavaScript and jQuery in particular, learn Flash and c++, obtain some level of proficiency with the Adobe Creative Suite, attempting self-taught graphic design, reading up on neural networks, continually trying to learn new aspects of computer science, and in the back of my mind floating amid the maelstrom my future 41x design project which seems more daunting with each passing week.

I sometimes feel like I need to put certain things aside during the school semester so I can focus on what matters, but then I wonder if I do these things to distract myself from the kind of things I that don’t interest me in school. The only dwindling hope is that at some point in the not too distant future, I’ll have a real job and my free time will be my own and not the school’s.

He has to fight every bone of his body to say that he prefers Pam’s artwork to strippers, but says it all the same to maintain the illusion; all to show how much he’s “changed.” He doesn’t want to go to Pam’s art show, but he’s more than willing to state how great it is that he was the only person she knew that came. Rather than comfort her and stay with her during the remainder of the show, he decides to leave since “he’s seen all the pictures.” It doesn’t even occur to him that she could possibly feel bad about the general dismissal her artwork is receiving, especially since he’s showing how good a boyfriend he is by being there.

What’s worse is Pam knows this and doesn’t seem to care. She has been as non-committal as you can be with a former fiancé. Returning the “Love ya” with a “You too.” Rebuffing Kelly’s claim of her stronger love for Roy now that they’re back together. Claiming that now that they are back together she is more mature. Perhaps she associates maturity with accepting the intolerable cruelty of the world.

Roy doesn’t even realise that that this isn’t the girl for him and this makes him all the more pitiable. In the nine years they’ve been together, they’ve gone from high-school sweethearts to a real world couple which is hard enough when you both truly love each other. So much has changed about them and between them that anything they once had is gone and all they have left is nostalgia. And so Roy goes through motions with the muscle memory of his body unaware of the meaning behind the actions. And Pam, having given up on what she really wants, settles for what’s easy. She doesn’t see Roy as her future. She sees what she has and with a sigh of resignation, and perhaps a glance towards Jim, accepts her current situation and prays it doesn’t become her fate.

With every new episode, I empathize and pity Roy more. The writers have done a fantastic job turning his world on its head and showing a man lost in his past expectations doing his best to make sure they come to fruition, oblivious to the slowly receding face of the one he feels he should love.

So what the hell is happening here? Well let’s briefly discuss Gestalt Psychology shall we? You see, Gestalt Psychology has some very useful heuristics designed to help make sense of the world around us. One of the heuristic principles involves continuity; if, for example, a branch of a tree goes behind a trunk, we don’t assume that when we see the branch exit from behind the trunk on the other side that it is another branch. That kind of reasoning would be foolish in our world. This heuristic, among the others of Gestalt Psychology, is helpful in guiding us through an erratic world of occlusion. Serialized television works in this same realm; hiding the whole story from the viewer, slowly releasing the information over the course of the series, intertwining the multifarious events in countless ways. It’s natural to make continuity connections and these connections lead people to believe that there is an ultimate structure beyond the few branches they currently see. This is why when Lost first came out, this was the common thought of the viewers. However, over time this heuristic’s likelihood waned in the face of common sense. If you see a tree branch spreading outward for miles in erratic directions with tree trunks blocking large aspects of it, we begin to believe that maybe it really is just a bunch of coincidentally positioned independent branches. No greater vision, no ultimate purpose. This does not diminish the intent of the creator — that will remain unknown for quite some time — but rather adjusts your perspective of the end result.

According to their creators, Lost and Heroes are very different shows. To continue the metaphor, Lost is a massively sprawling tree whose final form will remain unclear until the very end but whose shape was known to its creators at its inception. On the other hand, Heroes could be likened to a garden of smaller yet still intricate trees, whose roots grow together as the trees diverge. Because of this, Heroes will likely not suffer as many slings and arrows because there is little ongoing mythology to unfold, no ultimate mystery. Lost must continue its ongoing mystery until finally resolved in what could be the finest denouement television has ever seen, or a huge disappointment for all the hopeful viewers looking for answers. Each technique has its strengthes and weaknesses. In any event, enjoy the stories as they continue: if you don’t believe Lost has a real end-point, then don’t watch it, but don’t confuse personal belief with creator intent.

Battlestar Galactica [1x04] Exodus Part 2

Not only were the effects in the sequence where Galactica plummets through the atmosphere spectacular, it really was one of the few things I didn’t see coming. Though I suppose that could’ve been because I’ve been only half watching thus far this season. I need to start watching more concertedly.

Heroes [1x05] Super-Hiros

This is one of the best new shows of the season and the episode was very strong except for a couple of quibbles I have with the book-ends for the episode. In the beginning of the episode, they re-create the end of the previous episode but deviate from the original script. It’s really bothersome when they could have simply shown the footage from last week and picked up from there as other highly acclaimed (by me) serialized shows have done. Also, in the final scene when Peter says he has a message for Hiro, what is the message? The implication (to me, at least) is that the message is from Future-Hiro but the opening scene indicated (again, to me) that we saw all of the repartee between Peter and Future-Hiro, so where is this message coming from? It’s definitely an awesome moment and great way to end the episode but it has no logical support for the rest of the plot.

Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip [1x06] The Wrap Party

Great show, it almost makes me want to go back and watch The West Wing now that I can see how clearly talented Sorkin is (something I failed to notice in the laugh-track filled first episode of Sports Night lo those many years ago). And I appreciate that the show is giving each character a depth, but seriously. Can a dad really be that pissed that you went off to become an actor rather than join the army? Was Bob Hope’s dad pissed cause his son was only making the troops laugh and not fighting with them? I don’t claim to have the best relationship with my dad (or my family in general) but it seems almost comic how absurdly judgmental this father is. In fact it was comic, seeing as I laughed incredulously when the father spouted the line about his other son being in Afghanistan.

Gilmore Girls [7x05] The Great Stink

OK, I usually don’t have issues with the writing on this show. One obvious exception of mine is Logan’s college friends from last season who were written purposefully eclectic and weird. Unfortunately this week’s episode was ruined once again by really stupid characters who were poorly written. The absolute worst moment was when Bobbi, the British sexpot, said some other disposable character should go on “one of those American reality TV series” as though the UK (nay the world!) were immune to the scourge of reality TV. If you’re going to write a character from another country, at least write them as though they were from that country, not just a caricature of a cultured foreigner condescending American culture.

Lost [3x04] Every Man for Himself

I love Lost. Every single moment of the whole confusing mess. Even if in the end, there is no final closure, or even if the final answer isn’t as grand as everyone hopes it to be, I’ll still have enjoyed the ride. This week’s episode had some great Island scenes though the flashback was fairly predictable; though maybe I’m just used to the Con. However, one question that lingered after the episode (for no real mythological reason) was whether or not Saywer really hated that Warden. I know it doesn’t really matter, but was that hatred part of the con or was it already there but because he was willing to do anything to get out of prison he worked with him? He didn’t seem overly antagonistic to the Warden in the final flashback sequence to me… Also, each episode hurts a little more because it means we’re one episode closer to the brutal four month episode halt.

Smallville [6x05] Reunion

Lana Lang is the dumbest character ever created. Ever. I actually pine for her death scene more than I used to pine for her and Clark to get together.