The Spokane falls are gorgeous!
Year: 2013
Debating playing with Instagram again. Took this on Friday back in Eburg.
Death of a Furby
When I was growing up, our family had a few pets over the years. A bird when I was young (named Vogel, which is German for “bird”, in a rare moment of literalness in my family), then a cat, Filia (my mom’s), then another cat, George (my brother’s). Eventually, though, George left to live out the rest of his days in Fairbanks with my brother, and Filia died.
When Filia died, my mom decided that she didn’t want another flesh-and-blood pet, but still wanted something — so, mom and dad got a Furby. I’ve never been too sure just why or how this ended up being the choice, but so it was, and so they did. I’m sure I didn’t tease them at all about this. Not at all.
One summer, my parents took a trip down to Florida to visit my mom’s parents. Since their “pet” was more easily transported than earlier pets were, they decided to bring the Furby with them to show it to my grandparents. Unfortunately, in the midst of packing, the Furby was forgotten, and was left sitting on the dining room table. Once they got to Florida, unpacked, and realized their mistake, mom gave me a call to ask if I could send the Furby down to them.
“Really? You want me to mail the Furby?”
Yup. She did.
Being a dutiful and obedient son (as always, as I’m sure they’ll be happy to verify), I drove across town to their house, and found the Furby sitting patiently on the table.
Now, I’d never had a Furby. I knew a little bit about them, mostly through cultural osmosis, but this was my first time actually encountering one of these mysterious mogwai-like contraptions. I did know that they were motion-, sound-, and light-activated, though, so I tried to take precautions as I prepared the Furby for its journey.
I gently picked it up, and, moving as cautiously as possible, examined it to see if I could find an “off” switch. I assume that it must have had one somewhere, but if it did, I couldn’t find it. So I carefully wrapped a couple sheets of bubble wrap around the Furby, picked it up, slid it into a padded shipping envelope, sealed it up, and put it back down on the table.
And a high, muffled voice came from the envelope: “No light!”
Oh, dear. It’s awake.
“No light! Furby scared!”
You’ve got to be kidding me.
As I drove to the post office, the package on the seat next to me would chatter for a bit, fall silent, then wake up again as I hit a bump in the road or as the package slid slightly across the seat as I went around a turn.
Standing in line at the post office, I cradled the package gently in my arms. The Furby had been quiet for a while, and I was determined not to disturb its slumber. I reached the desk, gently put the envelope on the counter, and slid it across to the post office worker. “This needs to go to Florida.”
“No problem,” the attendent said, as she picked up the package and dropped it onto the scale.
“Furby scared! No light!” And the package wiggled a little bit as the Furby (assumedly) opened its eyes and frantically looked around its prison, wiggling its ears in panic.
The attendent raised her eyebrows and looked at me. “Um…it’s a Furby. It’s kind of my mom’s pet, and she wants to show it to her parents….” I trailed off, feeling foolish, as the muffled nonsense language of the Furby continued to come from the package.
I don’t remember anymore if she rolled her eyes or smirked — or both — but she did carefully attach a “FRAGILE” sticker to the outside of the envelope, along with however many stamps it took to ship a pound-and-a-half bundle of babbling furry automaton from Alaska to Florida. “Thanks,” I said, as she gently tossed the envelope into the outgoing bin, to the accompaniment of muffled “Wheeeeeee!” from the Furby. “No problem,” she said. “NEXT!”
As I left the post office and drove home, I couldn’t help but giggle to myself, over and over, as I pictured the poor, traumatized, blind Furby traveling across the country. Falling asleep in bins at one or another stop on the way, only to wake up as soon as it moved, crying out for light, for company, for comfort. At the poor post office workers and delivery people picking up an apparently innocent package, only to suddenly have it wiggle in their hands as a small voice cried out at them — “No light! Furby scared!”
The Furby did make it to Florida — however, mom confirmed that by the time it got there, its batteries were well and truly dead. Which, horrible as it seems, couldn’t help but launch me into another fit of guilty hilarity at the thought of the poor confused Furby, cocooned in bubble wrap, slowly expiring, expending its last, desperate reserves of energy on ever-quieter pleas for light and comfort.
I’m sure a new set of batteries worked their magic and revived the Furby to its usual happy chatterbox state. But I’ve always felt a weird sort of guilty glee at my role in the (temporary) psychological torture and murder of a poor, innocent Furby.
On Dickwolves
Since I’ve commented a time or two (on Facebook, unfortunately, I’ve really got to start remembering that I have a blog more often…the posts are here and here) on my problems with Penny Arcade (primarily including, but not limited to, the “dickwolves” incident), it’s only fair to recognize that Mike has posted a clarification expanding on his comments at this year’s PAX.
Good things: This appears to me to be the most honest and (hopefully) heartfelt recognition of the damage the comic and the ensuing brouhaha caused. That strikes me as an encouraging step, and hopefully some sign that Mike is actually learning from all of this.
Not-so-good thing number 1: He still seems to be pinpointing removing the dickwolves shirt from the store as the action that “opened the wound back up.” This strikes me as problematic, because, as others have pointed out, removing the shirts was actually one of the few good decisions (possibly the only one) PA made during all of that. The wound was already open; removing the shirt was a band-aid. That’s why people have been so upset at his most recent comment.
Not-so-good thing number 2: Though he says he understands why the original comic upset people, and that he regrets the follow-up comic, that seems to be as far as he’ll go. Now, I’ll admit that I can (and do) see what PA was aiming for with the original comic (in his words, “point[ing] out the absurd morality of the average MMO where you are actually forced to help some people and ignore others in the same situation”).
However, the joke itself does not need to use rape as the setup for the punchline. The joke boils down to:
Prisoner: Take me with you!
Hero: I only need to rescue five. You’re number six. Get lost.
Prisoner: But horrible things happen to me here!
Hero: I said, you’re number six. Cope.
I’m relatively sure that the guys at PA could find all sorts of horrible things that would be horrid and funny that aren’t rape.
It seems to me that the best thing to do now (and what would have been the best thing back then) would be to come up with some alternate “horrible thing”, substitute the text, and re-upload the comic, with a statement along the lines of, “We have realized that we went too far with this joke, apologize for causing offense, and have adjusted it accordingly”. It certainly wouldn’t erase the original comic from existence (it’s been copied and referenced far too many times for that to happen), but it would at least recognize the problem and that people were hurt, it would go a long way to backing up their insistence that they’re just good guys (or at least guys who are trying to do good) with a twisted sense of humor, and it would allow the joke itself to remain part of the PA archives. (If they were to go this route, I would suggest removing their followup strip, however. I’m not sure that one can be salvaged.)
I’m still not going to start reading PA again (it was never one of my “must-reads” anyway), and as I’ve stated before, I’m not enough of a gamer to have much interest in going to PAX, so on that level, I suppose my opinions/advice don’t really mean all that much. However, I do hold out hope that Mike may actually be learning from all of this, and that things will improve in the future.
No such thing as “just metadata”
With all the recent news concerning the NSA’s surveillance programs (Prism et al.), one of the common defenses has been that for at least some of these programs (though not all), the government is “just” collecting metadata. For example, should the government access your email records, they might not have access to the content of the email, merely the associated data — like who you communicate with, when, how often, who else is included in the messages, and so on.
Techdirt has a good overview of why the “it’s just metadata” argument is a foolish argument to make — basically, there is a lot of information that can be derived from “just metadata” — but there’s also an MIT project called “Immersion” (noted in the TechDirt article, though I found it elsewhere) that gives a good visualization of what can be learned from a relatively limited dataset.
Immersion scans your Gmail account (with your explicit permission, of course), and then runs an analysis on the metadata — not the content — of your email history to create a diagram showing you you communicate with and the connections among them.
As an example, here’s my result (with names removed). This is an analysis of almost 52 thousand messages over nearly nine years among 201 separate contacts. Each dot is a single contact, the size of the dot is a measure of how often I’ve communicated with them, and the lines between them show existing relationships between those people (based on messages with multiple recipients).
In that image, there are two obvious constellations: the blue grouping at the top right are my family and long-time friends; the orange/green/red/brown grouping to the left are my Norwescon contacts. The scattering of purples and yellows are contacts that fall outside of those two primary groups. While there’s not much here of great surprise or import for me, I did already learn one thing of interest — apparently one of my old high school friends has had some amount of contact with one of my Norwescon friends (that’s the single line connecting the two constellations). Now, I have no idea what sort of relationship exists between them — it could be nothing more than my sending a group email that included one and accidentally including the other as part of the group — but some sort of relationship does, and that’s information I didn’t have before.
Now, my metadata is fairly innocuous. But for argument’s sake, suppose I was involved not with Norwescon, but with some other group of people that, for whatever reason, I wanted to keep quiet about. Maybe I’m involved in the local kink scene, and could face repercussions at my job or in my personal life if this became known. Maybe I’m having a gender identity crisis that I’m not comfortable publicly discussing, but have a strong internet-based support group. Maybe I’m part of Anonymous or some similar group, discussing ways to cause mischief. Maybe I’m a whistleblower, and these are my contacts. Maybe I’m a news reporter who has guaranteed anonymity for my sources — but suddenly, this metadata exposes not only who I communicate with, but when and how often, and if there’s a sudden ramp in communication between me and certain contacts in the weeks or months before I break a big story with a lot of anonymous sources, suddenly they’re not so anonymous any more. And, yes, of course, because no list like this would be complete without the modern boogeyman that is the government’s excuse for why this surveillance is necessary — maybe I’m a terrorist. (For the record, I’m none of the above-mentioned things.)
However, of that list of possibilities, terrorism (or, less broadly, investigation of known or suspected crimes) is the only one that the government should really have any interest in, and that’s exactly the kind of investigation that they should be getting warrants for. If they suspect someone, get a warrant, analyze their data, and build a case from there. But analyzing everyone’s data, all the time, without specific need, without specific justification, and without warrants? And then holding on to the data indefinitely, allowing them to troll through it at any time for any reason, whether or not a crime is suspected?
There’s a very good reason why terms like “Orwellian”, “Big Brother”, and “1984” keep coming up in these conversations.
Fight for the Fourth
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Personal Privileges
A list that rumbled its way through my head today at lunch: I am a…
- 40 year old (neither particularly old nor young)
- middle-class (not rich, but by no means poor)
- employed
- cisgender
- straight
- white
- male
- married
- homeowner
- in good physical and mental health.
That’s a whole lot of privilege all piled up. And I’m sure that doesn’t cover all of it.
I have friends and acquaintances (and there are millions of others just here in the United States whom I’ve never met) who don’t fit into one, a few, or all of those categories. They have every right to live their lives just as comfortably and without fear of repression, censure, or attack as I do. But for far too many of them, that’s just not possible.
And that’s why, more and more, I’ve been finding it incredibly important to pay attention to issues like equality, sexism, racism, ageism, and whatever other -isms we all come across, directly or indirectly, in our day-to-day lives.
My issue with “Straight but Not Narrow”
While I don’t think I’ve come across it terribly often lately, one of the phrases that used to be common among LGBTQ allies was “Straight but Not Narrow.” I’ve used it in the past, as have other friends, and I have a CWU Pride shirt from a few years back that uses that phrase.
However, as I’ve thought more about it over the past year or so, I’ve become more and more aware that something about that phrase really bothered me. I’d started putting it into words a little while ago, and had talked it over with Prairie, but something I came across today brought it back to mind.
In this Reddit post (which is actually about problems with the HRC organization — problems I was not aware of before, and will want to consider in the future), a couple lines stood out to me as tying directly in to my discomfort with “straight but not narrow.”
[The “equal sign” logo is] the easy way to display your political stances without having anyone question your gender identity or orientation. It’s the physical embodiment of “I’m not gay but,” much like the rebranding of feminism to “egalitarianism.”
…it’s also extremely offensive, I think, to attempt to distance yourself from the movement with qualifications like “I don’t hate men, but” or “I’m not a feminist, I’m an egalitarian,” and “I’m not gay, but.”
While I know that the “straight but not narrow” phrase is well-intentioned as a way to express support for LGBTQ issues (“I’m an ally!”), the very fact that it starts with the “straight but” disclaimer lessens the impact of that support. If you truly support a community, why express that support through a phrase that begins by separating yourself from that very community? It feels like a socially-accepable way of saying “Well, you know I’m good with the gays and all, but I’m not gay. Uh-uh, man. Not me. No homo, y’know?”
I certainly don’t regret using the phrase in the past, nor having bought the shirt (I’m quite happy to support the campus LGBTQ organizations). Also, please note that I don’t want to sound like I’m censuring anyone who does use that phrase, or doesn’t have problems with it. As I said, it’s well-intentioned, and for many people, that will be fine. This is just a personal thing for me, and I don’t think I’ll be using that phrase or wearing that particular shirt again.
Married!
I think that most people who follow me will already know this from Facebook, Twitter, or Google+, but just in case there’s someone out there still paying attention to this site but not any of my social media outlets…
…just over one week ago, on June 19th, eleven years after our first date, Prairie and I got married in a small civil ceremony at the Kittitas County Courthouse here in Ellensburg.
We’d started talking about this a few months ago, when we started talking about what to do for my 40th birthday. “We could get married…?” And we were off.
We very intentionally kept it quiet. We didn’t want a big to-do made of the event for a few reasons, chief among those being that we’d already been dating for eleven years, living together for eight, and even bought a house together two years ago. Our relationship isn’t new, and this seemed to us to be a combination of something very trivial (a few words from a judge, a few signatures on a piece of paper, and we’re done) and something weirdly big (c’mon…it’s getting married!). Most importantly, we wanted to do this for us and how we were most comfortable, and part of that meant keeping it as low-key and low-stress as possible. We each told our immediate family the month before so that they wouldn’t be caught completely off guard when the news eventually came out, and other than the friends we asked to be our legal witnesses, that was it.
We’d actually originally considered not making any announcement at all, but we eventually decided to have a little fun with it. So, once the ceremony was done and we’d had a short “thank you” gathering at our house with our witnesses, we made the “announcement” by switching our Facebook statuses from “in a relationship” to “married” and waited to see what would happen next.
Of course, what happened was a lot of surprised and happy well-wishes, and we had a lot of fun watching the “likes” and comments come in over the course of the evening.
Thanks to all of you who know already for your kind comments, to our families for understanding (or at least accepting) how we decided to do this, to Cody (and Jackee) and Courtney (and Andy) for being our witnesses, and to Judge Fran Chmelewski for making it official.
Thanks also to Jackee for taking photos, since I couldn’t very well do both at the same time. Here they are:
And that’s it!
Now PGP-enabled
With all the recent concerns about security and privacy in the world of PRISM, I finally decided to carry through on something I’d considered from time to time in the past, and have set myself up to be able to handle PGP encryption for my mail. I’m using GPGTools for the OS X Mail client and Mailvelope for Chrome when I need web access to my Gmail account.
To be honest, I don’t know how often I’ll actually use PGP for anything other than signing my messages — I can’t think of a time when I’ve ever been truly concerned about what someone might find if they snooped through my email (they’d probably be pretty bored) — but as long as the option is there, might as well make sure I’m set up to use it in case I ever feel the need.
My PGP public key follows: