Month: November 2003

Scott of The Gamer’s Nook wants to take a leaf from “National Novel Writing Month” (or, NaNoWriMo) and do something called International Game Design Month, during which people who like role-playing games (or, RPGers, for short) would spend the month designing a world from scratch, or something like that. He wants to do this in January, which I’ve always thought would be a better month for NaNoWriMo anyway, given that January doesn’t have anything in it like Thanksgiving Weekend. If you’re an RPGer and you’ve been meaning to do some game design, drop by Scott’s blog and discuss it. Imagine thousands of gamers worldwide, embracing their inner Gygaxes….

(I did some RPG stuff in college, strictly AD&D, and I’ve never done anything with it since. But at least I can still tell you what “THAC0” means.)

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I’m not sure how I missed this, or forgot to note it here, or what. But there is such a thing now as the Robot Hall of Fame, and one of the inaugural members is none other than everybody’s favorite garbage-can shaped Swiss-army-knife from a galaxy far, far away, R2-D2!

The Robot Hall of Fame seeks to enshrine both robots from science fiction and robots from real life, which is pretty cool. I do quibble a bit with their induction of the HAL-9000, whom I’ve always thought of more as a computer than a robot. But I’m not on the selection committee, so my opinion matters for naught.

Anyway, here’s hoping for the future enshrinement of such wonderful robots as Robbie, the Iron Giant, and the Terminator(s). I’m not sure if C-3PO warrants induction on their criteria, but I’m pretty much convinced he should be there. He did, after all, manage to sway the Ewoks to the Rebels’ side, thus allowing them to take out the shield generator and basically win the whole thing. Or something like that.

I suspect, though, that the whole “Robot Hall of Fame” exercise should be shut down if they ever come round to inducting this robot.

(Link via Aaron.)

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Matthew Yglesias points out a British political cartoon that’s not funny. I mean, it’s really not funny. See for yourself. This cartoon is a one-panel clinic in how to not be funny: make your joke so obscure that your point is undecipherable, engage in caricature for no particular reason, and invoke the dead, just for starters. Wow.

Matthew makes the point that a lot of times when people say, “I don’t think this cartoon is funny” what they’re really saying is, “I don’t agree with the political viewpoint being expressed here”, which is probably true in a vague and general sense. But there’s a lot of political cartooning I don’t find funny on the liberal side, and the only conservative political cartoon I personally know of — that Ramirez guy, who I believe cartoons for the LA Times — I actually do happen to find funny on occasion. Those are probably exceptions that prove the rule, though. I’m not sure if I have a point, so I’ll stop now.

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Winter appears to be arriving in Buffalo today, in the form of an incredibly windy storm that’s also packing some snow, although the wind is such that right now there is virtually no chance of snow actually accumulating. Thus it begins.

UPDATE: Now, six hour or so after I wrote that post, the winds have slackened a bit, thus allowing the snow to begin accumulating. The amount isn’t such that it can be meaningfully described in terms of inches, yet, but it may get there. But hell, after spending last winter in Syracuse (which gets significantly more snow than Buffalo), I’m ready. Bring it on!

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A really rich guy is basically giving a lot of money to the Democrats. This is a very welcome development. Something that’s been bothering me in recent years is what I’ve come to call the “Assumption of eventual victory” attitude of liberals: it’s the idea that our views are just plain right, goshdarnit, and since the truth always wins out, all we have to do is wait for the people to come ’round to our way of thinking and sweep all those wrong-headed conservatives out into the street. Thus we end up with lackluster candidates who basically “play defense”. Matthew Yglesias pointed a form of this out last week, as did Morat. It’s quite a problem, and it represents a dilemma I’ve been stewing over for a while: What is more important to me as a liberal? Is it beating George W. Bush in 2004? Or is it starting the longer, harder work of pushing the debate in America back toward the left, even if that possibly means taking a huge one on the chin next November?

I am thinking here of the 1964 election, when the Republicans sent Barry Goldwater to his doom against Lyndon Johnson. Goldwater got blasted out of the water. The election was not even remotely close, and it seemed that liberalism was ascendant once again. But in the wake of the 1964 campaign, Republicans started the long process of gathering future voices for their party (including a fellow named Reagan), and basically laying the ideological groundwork for the eventual conservative era that began in 1980 and reached its current high point starting in 2000. So what’s more important? Preventing any more damage (as I see it) from this President, or working now to ensure a “New Liberalism” in 2020 or so that will hold sway for several decades? I’d love to see a Democratic President take office on January 20, 2005; but I also want to stop “holding the line”. I want to see Liberals discuss things not in terms of “stopping the bleeding” or “preventing any further damage”, but in terms of enacting what we believe. What scares me is the prospect of getting beat in 2004, and having liberals basically go to sleep again until 2008.

So I think it’s time for Liberals to start doing some heavy lifting. We need to fix our own ideological infrastructure and get some arguments; we need to stop waiting for the country to wake up and see the natural goodness of our positions. And if we do get blown out next year (which I emphatically do not believe is a “given”), let’s make damned sure we do it in such a way that gets the fires burning again. This means being proactive in shaping the debate and concentrating on winning local, grass-roots elections with good, articulate candidates — two things the Republicans have been really good at doing for a number of years now, and two things the Democrats have not.

(Demosthenes has more thoughts on Soros.)

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I’ve been stewing for a little while over a few comments I’ve seen in various blogs and comment-threads, such as in Kevin Drum‘s recent postings about a strike of supermarket workers in California. (Additional posts by Kevin here, here and here.) I don’t want to comment on the whole vagaries of the strike and the various unionization issues involved, but what has got me worried is the tenor of some comments I’ve seen. Specifically, statements like this (rough paraphrases; I’m not looking up specific quotes here):

“Jeez, how much do we want to pay unskilled labor, anyway?”

“Go get yourselves a college education, and then we’ll talk about health care.”

I find these kinds of thoughts enormously disturbing, and I’ve been reading a bit more about low-wage workers. Right now I’m on a book called The Betrayal of Work: How Low-Wage Jobs Fail 30 Million Americans, and it’s quite the eye-opening volume. It’s more of an academic study of the low-wage part of our economy than, say, Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed: it covers some of that territory, but it also gives a lot of numbers backing up the problems faced by our nation’s low-wage workers. I’m about two-thirds of the way through the book, but so far the most valuable stuff I’ve found here is the demographic information about low-wage workers and the jobs they hold. Here’s a hint: low-wage workers are older, whiter, and better educated than the general stereotype implies.

:: Forget “flipping burgers”. Fast-food jobs constitute less than 5% of low-end jobs.

:: Teenagers hold 7% of low-wage jobs.

:: A majority of adults who hold low-wage jobs also have families.

:: Nearly two-thirds of all low-wage workers are white.

:: While blacks and Latinos constitute a minority of low-wage workers, they are represented in the low-wage workforce by a greater percentage of their overall workforce than are whites (31.2% of blacks and 40.4% of Latinos, versus only 20% of whites.)

:: Women constitute 60% of the low-wage work-force.

:: Three-quarters of those women are white. (But again, blacks and Latinos are overrepresented here.)

:: 40% of low-wage workers have a high school diploma, 38% have some post-secondary education, and 5% have a college degree.

I found all those stats useful in reminding myself that low-wage workers aren’t stereotypes; they’re real people working real jobs, facing real problems. Too much of our rhetoric seems to completely forget that, as in the two representative comments above: Do we really want only the college-educated to have access to affordable health care? Do we really view these people as lacking skills:? Do we really not see the rank elitism inherent in such views of the people who are, after all, a giant part of our economy?

Show me an unskilled and uneducated worker, and I’ll show you a worker. In fact, I’ll go you one better: I’ll show you a worker who isn’t unskilled, but a worker whose skills are underrecognized and undervalued by a society that sometimes seems to equate “skill” with “number of diplomas”. It’s a curious thing that we should build our economy around the efforts of these people and the jobs they work, and then look down our noses upon them while they’re working.

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If you’re smart, then screw you, because my essay was meant only for people as dumb as me.

(Link)

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Read this Patrick Nielsen Hayden post, and then see if your eyes are tearing up. If not, you are either heartless or Klingon (because they have no tear ducts).

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I pay attention to my ranking in the TTLB Ecosystem on a daily basis. (Right now, I’m a Marauding Marsupial.) Yeah, that sounds kind of anal and geeky; after all, the Ecosystem merely tallies the number of member blogs in the Ecosystem that link to your own blog, and it doesn’t necessarily have much to do with actual readership. (It can get a little disheartening to check Sitemeter, see that I’ve had a lot of hits, and then upon checking the referrals discover that they’re all Google search hits.) But it only takes about ten seconds to check the Ecosystem rankings, they’re only updated once a day (so checking it a bunch of times throughout the day would be stupid), and it is a fun way to track the growth of one’s blog, much like the Technorati Link Cosmos.

But now, I see via Lynn Sislo that some kind of folderol is going on in which some blogger or group of bloggers is involved in collusion to drive up their own rankings (details here and here). This is, as Lynn and the Bear note, a rather silly exercise that is really unlikely to generate traffic, if that’s what the participants are intending. Believe me, I know: I check my hits any number of times throughout the day (again, geeky and all, but also again, it takes all of five seconds), and frankly I can’t remember the last time I got a hit off the Ecosystem page. And for those bloggers in the top 100, they’re there because they have so many inbound links that this is how they generate traffic. Trying to artificially “move up” in the Ecosystem really isn’t likely to pave the way to huge traffic and respect in Blogistan. It’s the blogging equivalent of all those people who think that success in writing is a function of having the right agent, knowing the right people, or getting Stephen King (or Steven Den Beste) to read your manuscript and give it the green light to the folks on the inside.

Yes, I have done a massive-link post as a way of giving a fellow blogger a “boost” in the Ecosystem; in fact, I did it a couple of weeks ago, on Morat’s behalf, but I think it was pretty clear that I was doing that as a one-time throw-away thing (and more importantly, because I really do think that Morat runs a fine blog that could do with more readership). And yes, I know that it can be frustrating to blog one’s heart out and have the posts-of-wisdom go unnoticed by the SDB’s and the Atrios’s and the Reynolds’s of the world. What’s even more frustrating is when I, having blogged for nearly two years now, see someone from Kevin Drum’s comments section start their own blog and get a front-page mention on his on their “launch day”, which almost immediately sends their traffic surging higher than what I’ve managed to build in two years with no such connections. But them’s the breaks.

Just a few more random thoughts about the Ecosystem and such:

:: I pretty much agree with everything the Bear writes, except for his rather ham-handed attempt to describe the whole “League of Liberals” scheme in the light of liberal politics. It’s a goofy scheme, but let’s not try to make it into some larger lesson about liberals in general.

:: Here’s something weird: when I glanced briefly at the League of Liberals blog, I decided to check their Sitemeter, at the bottom. Strangely, the Sitemeter on the League’s blog doesn’t link the League’s Sitemeter stats; rather, it links the stats of a blog called Rush Limbaughtomy, which in turn has five Sitemeter links at the bottom, one of which actually is for the League. What is the point of doing all that?

:: Finally, a brief thought on the Ecosystem’s functionality. I don’t know anything about such things, so maybe it would be too difficult for this to be done, but perhaps the rankings might be more accurate if “dead blogs” could be somehow weeded out. To cite my favorite example, William Burton‘s blog has not been updated in ten months, so should blogs he linked way-back-when still get credit for those links?

UPDATE: Well, on the first of my “additional thoughts” above, where I take the Bear to task for trying to draw some lesson about liberalism from all this, it turns out that he was actually responding to one of the Conspirator’s attempts to do the same. Guess I should have, you know, “read the whole thing”. Yeep!

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Someday I must make it to Arlington National Cemetery, where so many veterans now rest.

Thanks to all veterans, from all wars.

And for those interested in Armistice Day, the precursor to Veterans’ Day, Teresa Nielsen Hayden has enough linkage to happily explore for days.

“We were together since the War began.

He was my servant — and the better man.”

(Rudyard Kipling)

(Arlington link via Lynn Sislo.)

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