I recently listened to a Lenny Bruce album and realized something: Lenny Bruce wasn’t a comedian. I mean, maybe what I listened to was an off night or something, but the guy wasn’t that funny. If anything, he was a political theory lecturer with a good sense of humour.

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 finally hit rock bottom. After years of relative silence in one particular format I kicked it off again. I’ve written poetry once more.

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.

I learned a few things the hard way on my first comic-con pilgrimage. In this ongoing series I’ll be documenting the things I did wrong and how you can avoid them should you ever go to comic-con. (Or maybe I’ll never write one of these again; I’m fickle that way.)

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.

I recently came across an… interesting blog that is written by a supposed proponent of incest, bestiality, and the killing of so-called “useless” members of society (which he mislabeled euthanasia). For the most part, the posts I read seem to be a devil’s advocate look at the extremes of human rights and freedoms that our society will likely tackle in the next few decades, though sometimes — like, say, when he’s writing that children from first cousins are not particularly at risk for defects, therefore direct sibling incest is equally acceptable, genetically speaking — I’m not so sure.

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.

The problem with free will is that it means humans can do shitty stuff. The bigger problem with free will is that when there’s an after-life or there’s reincarnation or something beyond what little time we have here, there isn’t a pressing need to improve the world around you or be a positive member of the community around you; this isn’t universal, many religions teach you to cherish the earth, but with any promise of some form of afterlife there will be people who will just not give a damn.

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.

You know sometimes I need to be reminded how absolutely, breathtakingingly, heartbreakingly beautiful the world can be. I spend so much time sitting at a desk, both at work and at home, that when I finally get out of my seat I tend to treat the world as a means to an end. I go out into it to get the basics and return to my cave. That’s why every once in a while, when on my journey to the outerworld interstices, I stumble upon… the world. I looked up just a half hour ago and saw a perfectly clear night sky. It made me want to go drive out into the deep woods where no artificial light pollutes the sky and just stare at the stars. Even here, in this oversaturated suburban night I stood there agape for a few moments, unable to look away, my vision transfixed on the unending void. Of course, after a short while reliving my former years as a quixotic romantic I politely shelve it away, remember that I must let that part of me out more often and return to my life as it was. Then I blog about it. Sigh…

First off, that theme song fucking rocks. It’s “Johnny Appleseed” by Joe Strummer & The Mescaleros and I’ve become infatuated by the song. I’ve been listening to it incessantly since I found out what it was. I’ve never been a huge fan of The Clash but damn if this song isn’t rocketing up the ranks on my favourites list.

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…)

When I first saw this picture I was certain that it couldn’t have been Pareidolia, it looked so much like a face. Over the years I heard the explanations of how wind and erosion and similar actions could have made the face but they never truly convinced me. But recently, I’ve been listening to The Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe podcast and they have, on numerous occasions, derided the Face on Mars as obvious pareidolia; I was amazed by their audacity! This picture was burned into my memory and I was certain that it was indeed a face… then I looked into it. I have to admit that looking back on the picture the shadows concealing half of the face made it easier to see the face but even then it seemed quite clear that it was not an entirely natural formation. Of course then I read those little squiggles below the picture; some people call it text. Anyways, I read this “text” and it informed me that the picture taken in 1976 was from a pretty shitty camera. It then showed a comparison of a picture by said shitty camera and one taken in 2001 by a more advanced space probe. The 1976 picture in the comparison is not the same one as displayed here but it is similar enough to see how, depending on the lighting at the time, they were the same. The newer picture was much a higher quality photo which showed the same hill with higher definition and looking nothing like a face. It actually stunned me that I had to fight to find the structures of the hill that were perceived as a face in the older picture. The real problem was that I was living on old information; I had never seen these new photos which show how obviously it is a natural formation and was oblivious until I investigated. If only people with similar assuredness in their beliefs could look into things before baselessly berating the detractors; I suppose that’s asking too much.

IPv6 is the next step in the Internet. At least that’s what was promised over a decade ago when IPv6 was first announced. The problem was the the four billion or so addresses allowed in IPv4 (that’s what you’re using right now) weren’t enough to accommodate everybody. The world was going to run out of IP addresses. And soon. That’s why most home networks use routers; routers allow multiple computers to use a single IP address with the added benefit of making the computers behind the router inaccessible from the public internet. But even with routers and NAT and all the kludges designed to extend IPv4, that’s all they do: extend. We’re slowly and surely running out of IP addresses and that’s why IPv6 was designed.

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.

Master of None. That’s what I feel like recently. I’ve been spreading myself so thin that I haven’t been finishing any of my projects. I have over ten prospective blog posts in various stages of progress. Some are an opening sentence leading into a further discussion and some are virtually fully written but I’m so burned out that I don’t even know if I agree with their point of view anymore.

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.

This will be a brief post because I’ve never been good at writing politically and because I’m busy with school right now. The popular tech news site Gizmodo last week declared that the month of March would be a good time to boycott the RIAA (others have firmer views) and I couldn’t agree more. While the RIAA has no direct control over Canadian policy, it is still powerful and has a Canadian counterpart with similar goals. Not only do they impinge on the freedoms of their customers, but they also exploit the talent of musicians to increase their profit margins. All in all, they’re evil as fuck and, if you can, you should avoid them like the plague for at least one month. This is a heavy task for the music lovers out there as almost every large distributer has RIAA affilitations but be vigilant and don’t give in. If you go to a concert, buy merch; it doesn’t feed the coffers of the RIAA so it supports bands you love without supporting their draconian masters. For those willing to take the challenge, the site RIAA Radar provides a useful database to determine if an album you are interested in buying has been released by the RIAA. Use it for all musical purchases and if you want to attack the MPAA at the same time, avoid those same company’s video releases as well. Support our freedoms and boycott the RIAA this month.

The writers of the show have been sliding this in very subtly as they’ve shown Roy trying to get Pam back. With last night’s episode “Business School” it came to a head in the viewer’s mind and in Pam’s as well I think. Roy is still just as self-centred as before, but instead of not thinking about or caring about Pam he now only thinks and cares for her to demonstrate how much he has changed. You can see it through David Denham’s brilliant portrayal: every aspect of what Roy is doing is counter-intuitive.

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.

A disturbing trend has arisen among the slobbering fanboys desperate to defend their particular show of interest. Specifically, a growing number of people believe that while Lost has no real plan and is a bunch of accumulated randomness and plot twists — or among the less rabid, that it has only a general direction with no planned end game — Heroes has a distinct five-season plan for the show upon which the show will end. Ironically the opposite is the claims of each show. Lost’s creators makes the claim that they have a definite vision for the beginning, middle and end of their show; whether this is accurate or not is something that must be determined at a later date, but I see no reason for them to lie about it and accept their claim. On the other hand, Tim Kring has been quoted in an interview stating that Heroes has a general direction and clear plan for the first season but no definite plan or even end in sight; he has no qualms running the show for years to come.

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.

So, I just got the Wacom Intuos3 tablet I asked for for Christmas. After a weekend of playing with it on a four year old laptop in MS Paint, I was excited to finally get a chance to “turn on Photoshop’s power” as the box promises. To begin, I should say that when I was dabbling in Paint, it was already fun simply because of the direct control; that being said, Photoshop was a whole other world. The pressure sensitivity, the tilt detection, plus the eraser nub actually working like an eraser. It’s fantastic and I suspect that fairly soon I will actually enjoy drawing things on my computer. Who knows, I might eventually get good at drawing things.

I watched the HBO documentary “Hacking Democracy” and while they do not list in details all of the security vulnerabilities they discovered the one they listed in detail is really stupid. The deal is the if you prepare the voting memory card with -5 votes in one slot and 5 votes in the other slot then it will appear as zero votes while skewing the ultimate results without any visible proof in the end. I only have one question for the person who coded that vote counting system: have you ever heard of unsigned integers?