This was not something I really wanted to do, but, in the interest of my future professional aspirations and the increasing scrutiny of online personas, I have decided to make this blog "friends only." I did not take this decision lightly, as I get rather annoyed when I find someone interesting on a Livejournal community, go to their journal to read more of their opinions and to discover more about them, and then run smack into a "FRIENDS ONLY" wall. It's like being dumped before you even went on a first date. However, after I started evaluating my future path, I realized it was a step I needed to do, and now I understand why others do so as well.

I have unlocked a handful of Writer's Block entries, so you can get the gist of whom you're reading and meeting, and I may unlock more in the future. I do this as a service to you, the reader, who wants to know what s/he is getting into.

If you wish to become my friend and thus see all the entries and goody bits behind this privacy wall, drop a comment below. Note, I am a bit picky nowadays with my LJ friends; I'm not the kind of person who just randomly accepts people like a Facebot. If I don't know you well, I'm not friending you. Don't get offended, it's just a personal policy.

Don't drop anything here about talk_politics community moderation; this isn't the place for it and I will delete it. We have threads set up for that over there; if you really want to talk to me about something, send me a private message and we'll talk.

Also, if any of my friends from Facebook or other social networking sites want to comment here, log in with OpenID, drop a comment on this entry, and I'll let you in. Easy peasy.

Originally published at Quantum Matrix Scribe. You can comment here or there.

I’ve been pretty much convinced over the past two days that Geneforge 5 is utter bullshit. There’s no way that game is balanced. I’m playing it on casual–because I like story more than gameplay–and my characters are getting murdered on silver platters.

Either I’m doing something INCREDIBLY wrong here or this is just unbalanced. I think it’s the latter. The new Avernum remake didn’t have the same problem–in fact, on casual, it was almost too easy. I don’t see similar things in the Avadon demo. So I think Geneforge 5 is BS.

Edit: I’m not the only one. 

Originally published at Quantum Matrix Scribe. Please leave any comments there.

It seems that no matter what your ideological position is…you hate Thomas Friedman.

Not that it’s hard. I blogged about him last year and how much of a pompous moron he was (and still is today.) My only question now is: why do so many people take him seriously? Or do none of us take him seriously, and this is all one big in-joke? No, the New York Times isn’t that smart.

Originally published at Quantum Matrix Scribe. Please leave any comments there.

Watch Tamron Hall Go Nuts | Washington Free Beacon.

If you really want to know why people continually dislike and distrust modern, contemporary news media, look no further than this outburst from an MSNBC anchor which makes her look like she’s five years old.

I’m serious.

The topic in question is this BS story about Romney allegedly cutting a guy’s hair in school back in the 1960s, a story which really doesn’t have any relevance to anything today (and which might, apparently, actually be false.) Tim Carney, of the Washington Examiner, was trying to put the story into context, and why whatever Romney’s response really shouldn’t matter. It’s something I wholeheartedly agree with–even though I am no fan of Romney–but apparently, Tamron didn’t:

HALL: So there you have it Tim. And the point is, he’s doing local television—that’s a local reporter asking something that is important to the people of that particular state. His response, you know, people are raising an eyebrow about.
CARNEY: Okay, well, I’ll talk about the marijuana in one second. But what you’re doing here is a typical media trick: You hype up a story, and then you justify the second-day coverage of the story by saying, “Oh, well, people are talking about it. Here’s how Romney responded to it—“
HALL: You don’t have to answer a single question I ask you. You do not. And you did not have to accept the invitation to come on. You knew what we were going to be discussing. [Unclear]
CARNEY: [Unclear]
HALL: Hang on, Tim. You’re kind of in my house here. The problem is this: The story’s out there, and you’re right—I am not saying that we should belabor what happened 50 years ago. We are talking about the response by the campaign and the governor, not just on this issue, but—
CARNEY: You are bringing up a meta story here, which is, “What is the Romney response to this other non-story?” I’m trying to go meta-meta on you, and say here’s some media treatment—
HALL: You don’t want me to go anything on you, because you are actually irritating me right now. I’m going to be honest with you—yes, you are, because you knew the questions and topics we were going to discuss. You knew them; you agreed. And we are not talking or demeaning—listen, 50 years ago, I was a much tougher kid probably than Mitt Romney was in high school. I’m not talking about the issue of whether he was bullying or not. He says he doesn’t remember; to be fair, I cannot say he does. What I am asking about is how the campaign has handled this situation, how he handled the Colorado reporter, how he handled same-sex marriage where he said he agrees with gay parents be able to adopt, but he does not agree with same-sex marriage? Just the handling of questions beyond the economy. If you’re not comfortable talking about that, I am a-okay, but you’re not going to come on and insult me, you’re not going to come on and insult the network when you knew what you were going to come on and talk about. Done. Now, let me talk to Jimmy, I’m done.
CARNEY: Are you going to cut me off?
HALL: Yes, I am.

This is why people are ceasing to watch TV news, or read the newspapers. It’s a combination of the shortsighted arrogance that news anchors and journalists decide what is and isn’t a story, and the technique of trying to hype up things in order to be “entertaining.”

In other words, it’s complete and utter horseshit. And people aren’t buying it.

Newsflash to Tamron Hall: More people get their news through Twitter and blogs than your TV show. Kicking Tim off your show won’t change any of that.

The whole point of having news is having a wide variety of opinion. Yes, there is a point where you have to say “stay on topic,” but you can do that in a far more civilized and adult manner, and you could also ask first where this is going. Second, Carney was talking about the topic at hand. She was asking about Romney’s response to a reporter, and how that might be the same nature as what Romney exhibited in the past, so Carney decided to talk about the media’s hyping up (which is really what it is) about the past story.

Trying to control the discussion in that manner is not news, that’s propaganda. And that shows a distinct lack of integrity on Tamron Hall’s part.

(In her defense, though, that “I’m going to go meta meta on you” line from Tim just sounded utterly crass, and he should not have said it. That was dumb.)

People got that sense from media coverage around the 2008 election, and they’ve been getting it a lot during the Obama administration (and a little before that too; we had it during the build up to Iraq, for example.) This was a crystallization of that distrust. And I think when people think about what’s going on here–not the mindless ravings from places such as ThinkProgress–you’re going to find that 52% trust in the media will evaporate.

This is why people read blogs, go on Twitter, and generally get their news sources from places you wouldn’t traditionally think of as news. It’s not just technology–though that plays a part–it’s because the traditional media outlets are extremely haughty and think they have the right to be the gatekeepers of all knowledge. And if you don’t toe their line…you get Tamron’d.

Also, a couple of quibbles:

1. “I bet I was a lot tougher than Mitt Romney when I was a kid:” REALLY? You went there? Wow, that’s like, so, like, awesome, like. Seriously, isn’t that a phrase uttered by children? Because you’re so tough when you’re a teenager. Really.
2. Where, at any point, did Carney insult you or the network? As I’ve said repeatedly, all he was doing was providing context to your question. If you don’t like that, well tough. That’s what he’s doing. He was discussing your question. If anyone was insulting, it was you, Ms. Hall, for saying “You don’t want me to go anything on you.” In fact, that might constitute a threat, which might be at the level that can bring on legal action.

I normally don’t get involved in these things–I said nothing about that whole Chris Loesch Twitter pseudo-debacle–but I abhor bullies, and that’s exactly what Tamron Hall was today. A bully. MSNBC should be ashamed of itself for having her on the show.

[Note: Tried to write this faster but I was so angry I had to get up and pace around my office. This video infuriates me that much.]

Originally published at Quantum Matrix Scribe. Please leave any comments there.

As I wrote in one of my earliest blog posts (to which I never supplied the promised sequel), I was raised in the United Methodist Church. I never fully bought into it–even as a child, I considered myself an “agnostic Methodist” of sorts–but I do remember it quite fondly, particularly as it is far more moderate than many of the hardcore conservative evangelical denominations (such as the jerkface from North Carolina who advocated parents hit their kids if they start turning gay.)

I don’t see the Methodists in the news very often, so I was surprised when I saw Matt Yglesias tweet about them banning products made in the settlement territories in Palestine. From the New York Times:

The United Methodist Church, the nation’s largest mainline Protestant denomination, voted against two proposals on Wednesday to divest from companies that provide equipment used by Israel to enforce its control in the occupied territories.

The closely watched vote, at the church’s quadrennial convention in Tampa, Fla., came after months of intense lobbying by American Jews, Israelis and Palestinian Christians. After an afternoon of impassioned debate and several votes, the delegates overwhelmingly passed a more neutral resolution calling for “positive” investment to encourage economic development “in Palestine.”

However, the Methodists also passed a strongly worded resolution denouncing the Israeli occupation and the settlements, and calling for “all nations to prohibit the import of products made by companies in Israeli settlements on Palestinian land.”

An international movement for “boycott, divestment and sanctions” has gained steam as the peace process in the Middle East has come to a virtual standstill, and allies of the Palestinians have argued that these strategies could pressure Israel to stop building settlements and return to the negotiating table.

I may not consider myself to be a Methodist, but by gosh by golly do I agree with the above sentiment. Let’s be honest about what’s going on in Palestine, here: Israel has turned the West Bank and the Gaza Strip into bantustans, depriving the Palestinians of water, food, electricity, and basically anything approaching a free market, all in the name of “security,” and now is moving into what little land they have and taking it. And they have the gall to wonder why they’re being rocketed? Really?

It doesn’t take a braniac to see that occupation leads to violence. Anyone would notice that. Kudos to the UMC for taking a stand, though personally, I think a boycott of goods made in the territories will do jack squat. This is just symbolism.

Unfortunately, the Church balanced out the good with some bad. Again, from the New York Times:

The United Methodist Church, at its convention in Tampa, Fla., on Thursday, voted not to change long-contested wording in its book of laws and doctrines that calls homosexuality “incompatible with Christian teaching.”

The vote was 61 percent to 39 percent against the change to the church’s “Book of Discipline,” indicating little change to the deadlock on an issue the church has been debating for the last four decades. The delegates also defeated a compromise amendment proposed by the advocates of equality for gay members, which said that Methodists can agree to disagree on homosexuality and still live together as a church.

Now, there are multiple considerations here. First off, it is certainly a religious tenet that homosexuality is bad. That’s their religion, and if that’s what they believe, they shouldn’t change it. But certainly they can still be accepting of those who are they way, instead of blatantly stating that their lifestyle is “incompatible.” (I mean, when we think about it, is Christian teaching is also incompatible with cheating on your wife, war, and misleading your flock? Does it mean you should be bothering people at funerals when they put their loved ones to rest? I have to wonder what else is “incompatible” with Christian teaching.)

But second, I always got the impression the United Methodist Church, while not “okay okay” with homosexuality, was “okay” with it, at least in the toleration sense. That’s why I’m a bit surprised to see this sort of language. I always figured they just didn’t mind all that much about it.

This is also why, although Christians currently make up 78% of the US population, that they will basically dwindle away to nothing. People just don’t see homosexuality as an evil any more, which makes you wonder about the whole social constructionism of religion. If a religion gives way to something else that jives more with society, does that mean the previous religion was never the true way, or that the true way has changed, or what?

But this is why I’m an atheist. I’m not going to let some “General Conference” tell me what is or isn’t okay to think. (Though, technically speaking, that means I’m a “freethinker,” not necessarily an atheist. Though if there’s an “Atheist General Conference,” I’d like to hear about it.)

Originally published at Quantum Matrix Scribe. Please leave any comments there.

The good news is, I submitted my entry for the DC shorts screenwriting competition yesterday. It was probably not the best I could do, though I had been fiddling with it off and on for the past month, and I decided that it was time to submit. Supposedly, Leonardo da Vinci once said “Art is never finished, merely abandoned,” and I feel that is quite accurate. However, part of the competition is getting feedback, and since that’s all I really want to obtain, I already consider myself a winner.

The bad news is that I failed to finish the ScriptFrenzy script I was working on. I had to have 100 pages by today, but I think I have somewhere between 20-25 pages. Why? Why did I fail? I think the sole reason was because I did not work on it constantly. I got myself into a position where if I wrote six pages one day, I felt I could take off the next day and not feel bad, but that was a mistake. Seemingly every day I got home from work I would feel wiped and unable to write. On the weekends when I would shoot for big gains, whatever I produced was marginal due to multiple reasons (which I won’t really dig into here.)

Ultimately, the lesson I learned is that you must write every single day. Any pause and there will be major issues.

I will continue writing it, however, because the idea that I’ve had for this has been in my head for years, ever since middle school. And I think that, as long as I put my butt in the chair and write–even if its only 3-5 pages a day, or less than that–it will work. It’s all about routine. It’s Jerry Seinfeld’s “Don’t Break The Chain” concept. And while to me it seems like a cheap cop-out, I think, after looking back on this, that its the truth.

So I will continue to write and finish this thing, hopefully over the next couple of months. There are already big changes in my life that should help me with that–I’m changing day jobs soon (my current gig is having me bring work home with me and keep it stuffed into my head, which is not fun), and since I recently reinstalled Windows on my home computer (bringing it from the ancient age of XP to the relative modernity of 7) all of my games are gone.

Except for Avernum. Just let me solve that one and I’ll be good, I promise…

Originally published at Quantum Matrix Scribe. Please leave any comments there.

You know, we’ve become too fixated on the internet. It’s gotten to a point where, if we have a computer that is unable to connect, said computer is useless.

Want to edit a video using Adobe? Sorry, you need the internet to verify your program.

Want to see if you can upgrade to Windows 7? Sorry, you need to connect to Microsoft’s server to check for compatibility issues.

Want to play games? Nope, need the Internet for that too. Even in “offline” mode.

Look, I get the Internet is amazing. I love it myself. But when you’re trying to fix an old computer, or just use the damn thing, and it doesn’t have working Internet, it makes it very difficult because all the programs out there are required to use it. This is rather silly. Internet access should not be a base requirement for a program, it should be an added benefit.

But nobody thinks that way and you run into absurd problems like the one I have, which is I’m trying to fix my computer, but am completely unable to do so. I don’t even know if I can upgrade to Windows 7 at this point. What a bummer.

Originally published at Quantum Matrix Scribe. Please leave any comments there.

So the D.C. Shorts screenplay competition page says the following:

Want to save money on the entry fees?  Enter early to pay the lower fee — then send the materials as late as the material deadline below.

Yet, when you try to do that, there is no option to do so–their submission software, “Withoutabox,” forces you to upload your script immediately, even if its not ready.

It doesn’t seem like there’s an ability to contact them about this either; they just say if you ask them about submission issues they’ll send you a form letter.

Utterly bizarre. Part of it is my fault–I should have been ready earlier–but I was figuring that I could just send in the online application and pay now, then send the script later, thus save about $30. Not so, which makes me think there’s something sleazy about it. I’m sure that’s just my inner paranoid, but still, it bothers me.

Of course I will still submit, though. It’s just I’m going to be paying a bit more.

Originally published at Quantum Matrix Scribe. Please leave any comments there.

There is apparently a new and worrying trend where employers are asking for job candidates’ Facebook account passwords:

When Justin Bassett interviewed for a job, he was stunned when the interviewer asked for something more than his experience and references: his Facebook username and password.

The New York statistician had finished answering a few character questions when the interviewer turned to peruse his Facebook page. Because she couldn’t see his private profile, she asked him for his login information.

Bassett refused and withdrew his application. But other job candidates are confronting the same question, and some can’t afford to say “no.”

“It’s akin to requiring someone’s house keys,” said Orin Kerr, a George Washington University law professor who calls it “an egregious privacy violation.”

Companies that don’t ask for passwords to vet applicants have taken other steps — such as asking applicants to “friend” human-resource managers.

I can see the desire of HR and hiring managers to see the private information on someone’s Facebook account in order to get a better look at this person and see if he or she is a dimwit who can be trusted with corporate secrets and get a better look at their character, but quite frankly this is absurd. It’s akin to asking you for your Gmail password or, as Orin Kerr says in the above excerpt, your house keys.

Doug Mataconis over at Outside the Beltway makes the argument that this isn’t really a big deal and not something to truly worry about, but I disagree entirely. Doug writes:

I’m not sure, though, that new laws are the answer here. In the end, employers have a right to screen the people they hire as they see fit and to refuse to hire them if there’s something in their background that they believe would not be in the employer’s best interest, or which potentially makes the employee untrustworthy. Barring employers from using this particular method to discover more about their prospective employees is just going to mean they’ll find other ways to do it because, like it or not, what you do online will  impact your job prospects:

The problem with this argument is twofold:

• You don’t have to get access to someone’s personal life to truly screen them for a position, unless you’re talking national security
• You’ll open up yourself to a lot of liabilities, because many private accounts have protected classes of information, such as religion, ethnicity, orientation, etc. (I’m not an HR expert, so I don’t know the actual classes, but you get the idea.)

His “editor” (co-blogger at this point, really) Dr. James Joyner also chimes in and says he takes the opposite tack, writing:

UPDATE (James Joyner): I addressed this issue over a year ago, taking the opposite position, in a post titled “Want A Job? Give Us Your Facebook Password.”

While I think the prospective employee has a lower expectation of privacy when applying for a government job, especially a particularly sensitive one like military, intelligence, and law enforcement positions, there are limits. And, I’m sorry, “If you don’t like it, don’t apply to work there” has some limits, too.

Should employers Google the names of prospective employees and perhaps check out their public Facebook and Twitter profiles? For many white collar jobs, I think that’s reasonable. But accessing private information seems out of bounds. Indeed, if they can demand to look at the inside of your Facebook account, why not your Gmail account?

Additionally, as noted in the ensuing discussion, employers may inadvertently run afoul of existing employment law with this practice. It’s illegal for employers to ask prospective employees about their marital status, whether they have children, or any number of other issues. Yet, that information will often be immediately available on one’s Facebook page.

Even though I’m a free market libertarian, there is a limit to what I think employers–whether private, non-profit, or government–should be able to do. Granted, they should have a greater ability to screen candidates and chose who they want to, but trying to sneak into someone’s personal life and violate their privacy is just beyond the pale. What next? Hire investigators to find out who we lost our virginity to? Good grief.

I do agree entirely with what Jazz Shaw of Hot Air said and what Doug Mataconis told me on Twitter, with regards to just plain common sense:

Personally, I think this falls back on an old rule of thumb in the internet age. If you need to work for a living or do anything outside of your online life, you simply can’t take anonymity for granted. Don’t put anything out on the web unless you’d be comfortable having your family, your enemies and – yes – even your employer or prospective boss seeing it. Because odds are, sooner or later, they will.

However, I’m not convinced that, in twenty years (or even less) this will even matter. By then, just about everyone is going to have had a social network account and have said something stupid on it. There will also be loads of people who saw this crap happening and decided not to do it. So either way, there isn’t going to any point to checking an employee’s Facebook, because everyone has said it. It’ll be as mundane as saying “I like pie.”

This is how society changes and evolves. It is not a static element; it is fluid and continually fluctuating. The problems of 2012 will likely be non-issues in 2032. It is a very worrying and distressing trend for our time right now.

 

Another, slightly tangential topic that annoys me is the growing number of websites that utilize Facebook to provide comments. I find this to be obnoxious and not worth the point. Ostensibly, the reason for this is to improve the commentating quality, because the comment will be associated with someone’s real name. In practice, however, most people are still assholes. Why? Because a lot of people are just assholes in real life. Forcing them to use their real name and picture (which doesn’t even happen all the time; I’ve seen people make Facebook accounts for their dogs, for chrissakes) doesn’t make their comments come off nicer or more intelligent. I also find it would chill a lot of speech; imagine being a young gay man in a militantly conservative Christian household. You would probably not willingly comment on a lot of issues that affect you deeply, because now your parents can track you. “FlufflyBunny0059?” Not so much.

That’s just obnoxious, though, not truly egregious. They’re not trying to get into your account. I, for one, will never require Facebook commenting on my blog, and in fact, I’m not even sure if you can log in with Facebook (I might have deleted that plugin.) I do know that I keep the Twitter and OpenID login available as options, as well as just commenting pseudonomyously. I feel that choice is the best option for all.

Originally published at Quantum Matrix Scribe. Please leave any comments there.

I haven’t been posting much here (though I have two or three posts to go through and put up) because I have been very busy with work lately. (I also moved across the river into Virginia, which, by the way, is a really cool place.)

I have been writing, working on my novel, which is completely counter to my predictions for 2012 (in which I published a short story, not a novel. Apparently, my left brain and my right brain are not communicating again. Bummer.) But I have also just joined in the 2012 DC Shorts Screenplay Competition, the capitol’s annual short screenplay, er…competition.

15 pages. Due in about two months and a half months. I think that’s a great deadline, a great goal setter. And the best part is, even if I don’t succeed, I will get great feedback.

The question of course is now, what exactly am I going to be writing. I have the general outlines of an idea (or three), but I’m not sure how to condense that (or them) into a 15 page (which comes to about 15 minutes) short screenplay. This is why I’m terrible at short stories, too–I’m always way too expansive. (Although, from what I’ve been hearing, a lot of new writers aren’t bothering with short stories either, jumping straight into the novelist pool. This may work in my favor. Or not.)

If you’re also interested in the competition, check it out at http://www.dcshorts.com/the-scripts/. Honestly, I’m not worried about extra competition. I’m competing against myself.