Classes started again today, and I have a rather difficult course load this semester. So, to the few readers I still have left: I apologize that I will not be posting in the upcoming weeks.

I will still be reading and responding to comments, and I am always available via email.

Sigmund Freud (born 6 May 1856, died 23 September 1939) was an Austrian neurologist and psychologist and the founder of the psychoanalytic school of psychology.

While many of Freud’s theories about psychoanalysis are no longer believed to be fact by most modern psychologists, he often had very profound things to say, both about his field of psychology and about other subjects.

On the subject of religion, he had the following things to say:

• A religion, even if it calls itself a religion of love, must be hard and unloving to those who do not belong to it.
• Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from the fact that it falls in with our instinctual desires.
• Our knowledge of the historical worth of certain religious doctrines increases our respect for them, but does not invalidate our proposal that they should cease to be put forward as the reasons for the precepts of civilization. On the contrary! Those historical residues have helped us to view religious teachings, as it were, as neurotic relics, and we may now argue that the time has probably come, as it does in an analytic treatment, for replacing the effects of repression by the results of the rational operation of the intellect.
• The whole thing is so patently infantile, so foreign to reality, that to anyone with a friendly attitude to humanity it is painful to think that the great majority of mortals will never be able to rise above this view of life. It is still more humiliating to discover how a large number of people living today, who cannot but see that this religion is not tenable, nevertheless try to defend it piece by piece in a series of pitiful rearguard actions.

There’s no truth to this conspiracy, of course. The provision they point to is one for voluntary end-of-life counseling, which was actually proposed by a Republican and is overall a pretty good idea.

However, there already is an entity that will sit in judgment of you when you get sick, deciding whether you are worthy of treatment. It is official policy among the private health care providers in the US to look for ways to deny care to sick people.

They are perfectly happy taking your money when you aren’t sick, but once you try to make a claim they will scour through your record looking for any reason to deny your claim. A small error on your application form, even an insignificant one or one that you could not have known about or fixed, becomes justification for revoking your coverage and handing you the hefty bill for your treatment. For many patients unable to pay for the treatment, this is a death sentence.

Forget a government bureaucrat between you and your doctor; this is a profit-driven corporation standing between you and your doctor.

Why does the right worry about their fake, hypothetical “death panels” when a more serious and sinister problem already exists, and is already killing innocent people?

Mind. Blown.

A physicist, an engineer and a programmer were in a car driving over a steep alpine pass when the brakes failed. The car was getting faster and faster, they were struggling to get round the corners and once or twice only the feeble crash barrier saved them from crashing down the side of the mountain. They were sure they were all going to die, when suddenly they spotted an escape lane. They pulled into the escape lane, and came safely to a halt.

The physicist said “We need to model the friction in the brake pads and the resultant temperature rise, see if we can work out why they failed”.

The engineer said “I think I’ve got a few spanners in the back. I’ll take a look and see if I can work out what’s wrong”.

The programmer said “Why don’t we get going again and see if it’s reproducible?”

Look how hopeless he looks — irresponsible even with his own health. Surely a great PR strategy.

Except the photo is doctored. Photoshopped. The original photo was taken by Kwame Ross on Aug. 3, 2004.

I’m not alleging that the Arizona GOP doctored the photo themselves — just that they didn’t bother to do any research before posting the photo. Obama does smoke. This doesn’t bother me but might bother some people, so it makes sense that the GOP would try to use that against him in their propaganda. Hard for the Arizona GOP to pass up an opportunity to use a photo that shows him looking so tired and hopeless while smoking, though, even if it’s a fake photo.

Parts 2 through 7 below the fold.

After a valiant and creative defense from Charles Nesson and his law students, Joel Tenenbaum lost the legal battle that has captured the Internet’s attention for days under the nickname Joel Fights Back, in reference to the fact that Joel chose to go to court rather than settle under pressure like the majority of the targets of the RIAA. The final verdict of his case came in a few minutes ago.

$22500 per MP3 is completely unreasonable. To put it in perspective, Air France paid $24000 to each of the families of the victims of the crash of Air France Flight 447 from Rio de Janeiro to Paris. This makes a single MP3 worth slightly less than a human life.

I won’t recount the whole story here. The link above as well as these blogs do a better job of explaining it all than I ever could. I just want to share my thoughts on the subject.

I pirate music. All of my friends pirate music. Any of us could have been in Joel’s place. Indeed, the MP3s he shared were shared by millions of other people. He was just a drop in the ocean. This is where the injustice bothers me most; it’s just luck that he’s on that stand, rather than me or one of my close friends, or pretty much anyone my age. Hell, I’d bet that every single student I see on campus when school starts again is guilty of the same crime Joel is. How can any of us say he deserves such a verdict?

This isn’t justice, and it makes me ashamed of my country’s justice system.

UPDATE: JoelFightsBack.com is accepting donations. I have donated $30 to helping Joel out with this financial burden, and (hopefully)with future legal defense. While I don’t like the idea of paying money that could end up in the hands of the RIAA, I sympathize so strongly with their cause that this was the least I could do.

-Most AT&T DSL (largest ISP in the US, 15.5% of US Internet users) customers ARE currently not able to access img.4chan.org (/b/ & /r9k/)

-There are a few AT&T DSL users that are NOT affected. Florida, and Ohio are where we’ve gotten those reports. (Parts of Georgia are still alright as well.) AT&T is a megacorp made from the smaller pieces it was broken down into in the 80s- different equipment and such.

-AT&T Mobility (Cell Phones) and AT&T Uverse customers ARE NOT AFFECTED.(Lie, Uverse is blocking it also)

-It IS NOT a DNS issue. Affected people have tried OpenDNS with no success.

-It IS very visible on a traceroute. It drops within the AT&T network.

-It DOES NOT affect AT&Ts Tier 1 backbone (major bandwidth backbone in US).

-It DOES NOT affect other servers on 4chan.

-People HAVE called customer service (allegedly) and confirmed a block, but agents have denied further info.

Near as I can tell, multiple customer service agents have confirmed that this is intentional, and not a bug or an accident. The ED article seems to be updated regularly. The story has also been covered on Reddit, with a very active discussion.

The apparent reason for this was to alleviate bandwidth costs on the part of AT&T due to a DDoS attack against 4chan. As far as I know, ISPs have the right to throttle connections, but not to arbitrarily block a connection like this. It appears that AT&T is breaking the law.

Of all the sites AT&T could have chosen to filter, 4chan is probably the one that’ll put up the biggest fight. Part of me is looking forward to watching what happens next. Don’t get me wrong, though; censorship is serious business. Something needs to be done.

EDIT (11:50pm, Jul 26): AT&T has begun to allow access to 4chan again.

AP Protect, Point, Pay - Click for full size

So, it’s just text content, but it can call home, track where it has been, and secure digital rights. Good luck with that.

The strife began in February when West Bend couple Jim and Ginny Maziarka objected to some of the content in the city library’s young-adult section. They later petitioned the library board to move any sexually explicit books — the definition of which would be debated — from the young-adult section to the adult section and to label them as sexually explicit.

Ginny Maziarka, 49, said the books in the section of the library aimed at children aged 12 to 18 included homosexual and heterosexual content she thought was inappropriate for youths.

She and her husband also asked the library to obtain books about homosexuality that affirmed heterosexuality, such as titles written by “ex-gays,” Maziarka said.

“All the books in the young-adult zone that deal with homosexuality are gay-affirming. That’s not balance,” she said.

So, fundie Christians are offended that books in a library say being gay is okay, and they call for the books to be removed from the library re-labeled as sexually explicit and moved to the adult section (thanks for the correction, WBCFSL and Frack). “Inappropriate for youths” they say. Apparently they don’t realize how hypocritical this is, considering all the violence, sex, and rape in their own holy book.

Censorship attempts like this are pretty typical, alas. As CNN noted, the American Library Association reports more than 500 such instances in the United States in 2008, mostly in schools and public libraries. But this story gets weirder:

Outside West Bend, the fight caught the attention of Robert Braun, who, with three other Milwaukee-area men, filed a claim against West Bend calling for one of the library’s books to be publicly burned, along with financial damages.

The four plaintiffs — who describe themselves as “elderly” in their complaint — claim their “mental and emotional well-being was damaged by [the] book at the library.”

The claim, unconnected to the Maziarkas, says the book “Baby Be-bop” — a fictional piece about a homosexual teenager — is “explicitly vulgar, racial and anti-Christian.”

Braun, who says he is president of a Milwaukee group called the Christian Civil Liberties Union, said he singled out the book because it “goes way over the line” with offensive language and descriptions of sex acts.

The call for burning the book showed his passion, Braun, 74, said. “I don’t sit on the fence when I do these things. When I make a decision to speak up on something, I go for it.”

The name “Christian Civil Liberties Union” is pretty hilarious, especially in this context. I think the phrase “civil liberties” doesn’t mean what they think it means.

Their case obviously isn’t going anywhere. They have no legal basis for their claim. Still, this story means that there are actually people out there who consider book burning to be defending the civil rights of Christians.

Also, here’s Ginny Maziarka’s blog. It’s hilarious, in a surely unintentional way.

The majority of these games are so-called “casual” games, or video games aimed at a wider and generally older audience. They tend to be puzzle-oriented, and attempt to be both simplistic and addictive (see: Bejeweled). However, it is in this same world of indie games that you’ll find the most artistic, experimental, and innovative titles on the market today.

Aquaria, an indie action/adventure game

These two types of games barely even resemble each other, so why are they both lumped under the umbrella of “indie game?” That label, as I explained above, refers to a lack of support from video game publishers. By that, I mean financial support. These games are made on the cheap.

This limitation is what leads to the two different types of games. Game developers can focus on games that are quick and inexpensive to develop but have relatively high return (casual games), or they can push boundaries and work outside the box, because they don’t have the pressure of a financial backer expecting a commercially successful product. In a way, the developers of the artsy indie games owe something to the developers of the casual games — the digital distribution that allows for modern indie games to reach such a wide audience was largely pioneered in the name of casual gaming.

But major video game producers spend millions of dollars on massive projects like Grand Theft Auto and Halo. How can a small team of developers with a tiny fraction of that budget hope to compete? The answer should be obvious, but you’d be surprised how many times I’ve heard this exact question. Quite simply: more money does not a better game make. When a company like Electronic Arts invests a large amount of funding in a game, they want a safe investment. Experimenting is risky. Doing the same thing everyone else is doing is a safe bet. No one ever got fired for making a World War 2 shooter.

This is one of my favorite quotes, from the brilliant Brian Eno:

“Hollywoodization”:  This is the process where things are evened out, rationalized, nicely lit from all sides, carefully balanced, studiously tested against all known formulae, referred to several committees, and finally made triumphantly unnoticeable.

A major game publisher throws money and people at a project, and the result is something accessible and safe. It isn’t groundbreaking, or even different in any substantial way from anything else on the shelves. But that’s all consumers expect, and it’s against the financial self-interest of the company to deviate from this line and take risks that might alienate consumers. Sure, they might end up with the next Sims (innovative, unconventional, and ridiculously financially successful), but they could just as easily end up with the next Grim Fandango (innovative, unconventional, and a financial failure).

Big publishers have their place, of course. Something like Bioshock could not have been done independently in our current game market. My hope for the long run is that indie games will increasingly become competition for big budget games, and hopefully this will put pressure on the game producers to innovate in order to stay competitive in the market.

In the short run, however, my hope is that “regular” gamers are willing to step outside their comfort zone of magic spells and machine guns and try something new.

A screenshot from the unrelentingly experimental and artistic "game" The Path

Something new, like The Path, a game that isn’t really a game. It’s more of  an interactive, digital work of art. Emotional, symbolic imagery is the weapon of choice here. The Path is sometimes classified as a “horror” game, but the horror doesn’t come from sudden surprises or gore — it comes from those moments in our lives that shake our whole foundation and force us to accept human existence for what it is. It’s a game about growing up, understanding, and changing. It’s vague enough that you can easily connect to it, but it’s specific enough that the imagery and ideas take hold of you and stay with you for days. The only instruction given to the player is to “follow the path,” and in order to play this game you must break this rule. The only objective, if you can call it that, is to lead your “little read riding hood” to her “wolf,” a deeply symbolic encounter that results in your character walking slowly, through the rain, head cast down in despair, toward grandmother’s house. In a sense, the game makes you force the character into this. After your character walks through the rain to grandmother’s house, the game takes control out of your hands completely, as you walk through an abstract, expressionistic house that is constantly shifting around you and represents your character’s fragile mental state.

I could write a lot more about The Path, but hopefully you get the idea. It’s certainly no Halo. It’s nothing like a traditional game, and many critics intensely dislike it for this reason. One of the developers asked, on his blog, if the world was ready for The Path. At the time it struck me as an arrogant thing to ask, but in retrospect he was right to ask it. I really hope the world is ready for games like The Path.

(Title is in German… translates to “Come, Sweet Death”)

Originally written in Japanese by director Hideaki Anno and sung in English, this song features prominently in the movie End of Evangelion. You can find alternate translations and additional information here. This video contains the original, unedited footage from the movie where the song appears (to anyone who hasn’t seen Eva: yes, that footage is actually from the movie), however, the soundtrack version of the song has been dubbed over to remove the dialog and sound effects that play over the song in the movie.

I love this song. When I hear it, I basically stop whatever I’m doing and listen. It’s so emotionally powerful, especially when paired with the striking imagery from Anno’s brilliant movie End of Eva. Every few days (seems more like every day recently) I go back and watch this video, for whatever reason.

I had been using the beta version previously, but had a bit of trouble updating to the final release. The main obstacle I ran into was that I use a 64-bit build of the browser, along with 64-bit plugins for flash and java. I wanted a way to update to the final release via my package manager, and it wasn’t too difficult.

The first thing I tried was adding this repository for nightly builds of Firefox, as it seemed to be the most common solution given at the time to the question of installing the latest Firefox release:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/ubuntu-mozilla-daily/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main

That ended up getting me 3.5.1pre, which is not what I wanted. I don’t want the nightly builds of Firefox — I want the stable, final release.

After a bit more digging, I found the solution. I removed the above line and added this line to /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/fta/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main

… ran sudo apt-get update to update the package list with the information from the new repository, then sudo apt-get upgrade to check for updates on installed software. For me, this upgraded the firefox-3.5 package, which I already had installed previously to run the beta.

For those of you who didn’t have the package already, you just need to add the above repository then install “firefox-3.5″ and “firefox-3.5-gnome-support” (with sudo apt-get install firefox-3.5 firefox-3.5-gnome-support), and the package manager will take care of installing all the dependencies.

If you want to use a 32-bit version of Firefox (or, I should say, if you already are and have no reason to change), I recommend you use Ubuntuzilla to manage your Firefox installation. It will automatically download and set up the latest Firefox release, and monitor it for updates.

Now I’m enjoying the latest Firefox release! It isn’t really earth-shattering, seeing as how I’ve been using the previous versions as they’ve worked up to this one, but it’s still a damn nice browser.

EDIT: I should add that the above instructions will leave you with a program named “Shiretoko,” with Firefox 3.0 still installed along-side it. This is what you want. If you open the “About Shiretoko” page you should see “Version 3.5.” This is Firefox 3.5, just going by a different name.