The Dungeon Master

I'm saddened today by the death of Gary Gygax, creator of Dungeons and Dragons and thief of many of my waking hours (many of which should have been spent sleeping or going to class) during my high school and college years.

The Lizard Man Returns!

Lizard Man attacks car in South Carolina? - Boing Boing

Writer William F. Buckley dies at 82

Although I shared very few (read: almost no) political beliefs with William F. Buckley, I admired his wit and his facility with language. He was one of the few true intellectuals. The public is rarely exposed to any depth of analysis, instead being subjected to endless streams of brainless pundits, some of whom have the audacity to consider themselves the spiritual and intellectual offspring of Mr. Buckley. I grew up, at least partially because of nothing else being on TV, watching Firing Line, and I learned a lot from it.

Stuff White People Like

This--Stuff White People Like--is a great blog. The LA Times says it grew from 0 to 300k daily hits in six weeks. It's really excellent.

BIL Conference - Minds Set Free.

The BIL Conference - Minds Set Free. looks interesting. Alas, I'm stuck on the other coast.

Salon.com | News Wires

I think Castro stepped down because he won.
Salon.com: Court Rejects Domestic Spying Appeal

Cultographies

I love it when academe and one of my other loves come together, so see Cultographies, a new series of monographs about cult movies!

will.i.am video for Obama

On Wealth

Philip Slater: It's the Pathology, Stupid - Business on The Huffington Post is one of the best short analyses of wealth and the wealthy I've seen. I've not thought about the idea of the continuous pursuit of wealth as a pathology before, but it's an interesting argument.

Cinematic Titanic

Cinematic Titanic is the return of one of my all-time faves, Mystery Science Theatre 3000, or MST3K. Here's a link on the return. Yay!

San Diego

Here I am in San Diego, and I realize how long it's been since I posted. I'm posting some photos on my flickr site. Enjoy

LibraryThing | Catalog your books online

I f'ing luuv LibraryThing. I have cataloged all the books in my office. You can do up to 200 books for free. I'll be buying a life membership ($25) very soon. Check out my collection here.

Two Great Ideas

These great ideas were originally posted at one of my favorite new blogs, Rule the Web (named after the book by the same name by Mark Frauenfelder of one my other faves, Boing Boing)

Idea 1: Free voicemail from AOL, called AIM Phoneline. It's a free service if you settle for incoming calls. If you don't want to give out your main phone #, it's great. My number is 864-335-6221. Here's the link. You'll need an AOL or AIM (?) account to get the number and check your messages online, but it's free.

Idea 2: Using Twitter. I have a twitter i.d. (steplow) but it's pretty useless without a network of folks to interact with. Mark has a list of ideas for Twitter's actual real-life usefulness here. Let me know if you sign up.

Cheers!

home

I would live in one of these.

Check out the cozy living area:

101 Greatest George Carlin Quotes

Love the George Carlin. One of the first 8-Tracks I ever bought was one of his concerts. Yes, I said 8-Track.101 Greatest George Carlin Quotes

Ordinarily I hate these things, but:

Imus and hypocrisy

Salon.com has a selection of African American culture critics on the Imus issue. If you want something that's really worth reading on the matter, try this link. You may have to deal with advertising unless you subscribe to Salon already. One quotation from Greg Tate, author of Everything but the Burden: What White People are Taking from Black Culture: "Yet do I marvel at the power of hip-hop, still so marginal in American culture as a whole, if we use the minimal radio, television, film, news and even Internet space it occupies as a guide, to be the frame through which we will now attempt to grapple with the nation's racist-, sexist-, greed- and gossip-ridden soul."

From Joan Morgan, apropos of the issue of "where's the criticism of rap from the black community," as if Jesse and Al were the only recognized authorities capable of speaking for and to the black community: "Hip-hop has always had its own critics -- writers, scholars, activists, feminists, filmmakers like myself, Kevin Powell, Bakari Kitwana, Elizabeth Mendez Berry, Mark Anthony Neal, Tracy Sharpley-Whiting, Rosa Clemente, Byron Hurt, Tim'm West, MC Lyte, Yo-Yo, Davey D, Moya Bailey, Michael Eric Dyson, Greg Tate -- who have been dedicated to doing the incredibly gratifying, hands-on and unsexy underground work of critical self-examination and consciousness-raising in the last 20 years. Our motivation? We love hip-hop enough to hold it to its highest standards." How many of those people have even the most educated and erudite white people heard of? Other than MC Lyte, Dyson, and Tate (whose name I didn't know until connecting it with his book), I certainly hadn't heard them.

From the aforementioned Dyson: "Long before the Imus affair, there had been great concern in black quarters about the harmful impact of gangsta rap's lethal misogyny and its glorification of violence. But not until white bodies are at stake do black bodies become relevant or noticed -- and only then as a prop for a larger mainstream agenda, even if that is to prove how harmful black pop culture is and, by contrast, how even a powerful, arrogant white man like Imus can't escape its influence."

The significance of this discussion is that even enlightened media watchers like myself really don't know what's going on in black American outside of what the media is telling us. If we don't believe what the media tells us about the Bush administration (for example), why in the hell should we believe what they tell us about black America? Sort of a double standard, isn't it?

OUTRAGEOUS

Think Progress: Florida Legislature Forces University To Idolize Jeb Bush

More Battlestar, Season One Complete

Some thoughts on Battlestar: Galactica, Season 1. First of all, this show continues to disturb me. The moral ambiguity of which I wrote some time back (shortly after starting the series, in fact) continues, though it’s more clear who the “good guys” are—or at least it was until the cliffhanger. One of my friends (jec, who loaned me the series) asked about the significance of the fact that the humans are polytheistic while the Cylons are monotheistic. For a while, I thought it represented the impact of Judaism and Christianity in Europe and Asia Minor, where polytheistic religions gave way to the power of monotheism, even though it took a while. I gave up on this toward the end of these last two episodes because the series seemed to be heading in another direction. Some of this theme remains, however, in the form of the Moses-like Dr. Baltar, whose purpose appears to be to bring the Cylon plan, or God’s will, into fruition.

The symbolism of the Cylon-human “hybrid” has escaped me for the moment, though of course there are various pop-cultural references (The X-Files, Demon Seed) that come to mind. The Cylons, at least the female ones, feel love, as well as other emotions, and the fact that they’re genetically human—or close enough to reproduce with human—indicates something more than the standard alien vs. man trope that is common to the genre. The Cylons are us: they feel the same emotions, they have bone and blood, they can procreate with humans. But they are at the same time something else: born of computers, they are copies of each other. They also appear to be networked somehow.

I’m planning to rent season 2 tomorrow. . . .

My favorite Fark headline in a while

"Kerkorian offers $4.5B to buy moribund Chrysler. Unfortunately, what Chrysler needs right now is Kevorkian, not Kerkorian"

Here's a link to the CNN story.

Here's Fark.