Burrowowl

Recently there has been a lot of talk about civilian casualties in the Libyan civil war. Terms like “indiscriminate shelling” are thrown about, painting Muammar Gadhafi’s troops as abject villains. I have no intention of painting them as otherwise, but something keeps coming to mind when I read such reports: why are we only hearing about indiscriminate shelling in rebel-held towns?

To turn this situation on its head, let us look at recent press regarding reform protests in Syria:

Syrian security forces fired bullets and tear gas Friday on pro-democracy demonstrations across the country, killing at least 49 people — including a young boy — in the bloodiest day of the uprising against President Bashar Assad’s authoritarian regime, witnesses and a human rights group said.

49 people killed? That’s terrible. Including a young boy? Those monsters! How could they… wait a minute, hold up there. Who the heck brought a young boy to a protest against a brutally-repressive dictatorship? Against a regime headed by the son of a man that reputedly massacred 10,000 to 40,000 people under similar circumstances in 1982? The Syrian security forces may well be callous, inhuman monsters to fire on a crowd of protesters, but somebody was seriously negligent to let their son attend such a thing. I’m not blaming the victim here, I’m just assigning a fraction of the blame to the people that were supposed to be responsible for him.

Going back to Libya, it seems that rebels have holed up in a close-quarters situation that exposes the local civilians to an undue amount of risk. If they had taken up positions outside the city, Gadhafi’s forces probably wouldn’t be attacking the city. They are using the city and its inhabitants as a shield, in hopes of staying the hands of their adversaries and stirring up the international community against their dictator’s atrocities.

A bit from Al Jazeera on this subject that caught my eye:

Marine General James Cartwright, vice-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the drones can help counteract the pro-Gaddafi forces’ tactic of travelling in civilian vehicles that make it difficult to distinguish them from rebel forces.

Those dastardly pro-Gadhafi jerks are using civilian vehicles to sneak out of the city. Because it makes them look like… Yeah, it makes them look like rebels. Because the rebels are hiding themselves amongst the civilians. Which makes the civilians look like targets.

Let’s keep in mind that both sides had a hand in this.

This year, I’m planning on celebrating four simultaneous Earth Days. Single Earth Day is evil. Cubic Earth day is the real deal. Wake up, people.

The above is a Wordle of the content of Timecube.com. The formatting was randomly pre-selected by the site, which I felt was too appropriate to tinker with.

Hey! You, there! Remember Chaos;Head? Me neither. Not very well, at least. You see, it had a really good start with a mysterious-but-cool premise, nice presentation, passable character design, and I was initially quite excited to see where it was all going. Then everything fell apart. By the time I found out what was actually going on I was seriously disappointed and the show ground down into an inevitably lackluster ending.

Stein’s Gate just started up this past week, and is based on a visual novel by the same team that brought us Chaos;Head. Again we’ve got a mysterious premise: our protagonist, an under-funded mad scientist, goes to attend a lecture on time travel. A satellite falls from the sky. Some woman he knows from the academic world ends up getting stabbed. Upon returning to his lab, the mad scientist discovers that the lecture he attended had never happened, that he shouldn’t have witnessed the satellite crash, and maybe he’s a little more crazy than he thought he was. Or maybe there’s some time travel happening, after all.

Oh, and some bananas are put through a microwave. This is very important to the protagonist’s research, you see.

I’m generally opposed to time travel fiction. It encourages some of the worst narrative excesses and discussion of the topic nearly always involves ridiculous notions of the supposedly-necessary consequences of paradox and alternate timelines. Fie on all that nonsense.

One episode in, the main characters appear to be the aforementioned mad scientist, his absent-minded female assistant, and a stereotypical overweight computer geek. Their adversary appears to be the paranoia of their own leader, who believes The Organization is moving against them, attempting to stifle their important scientific work that will overthrow the social order of the world. A little more slapstick and we would see shades of Excel Saga.

Give it a shot. I fully expect this to be awesome for at least five episodes.

From the way-back machine:

September 1, 2004

How to get files

Here on the XXXXX Inc. website we only make a handful of files available. New releases are up and ready for download shortly after they are created. However, to get older chapters, you’ll need to get into IRC and download the files that way. As this is a moderately advanced use of the internet, as far as most people are concerned, this document may be of some assistance.

This document is not geared toward any particular IRC client, though mIRC and BitchX are long-standing favorites amongst the oldtimers. Use whatever IRC client you please.

Getting started

• Acquire and install an IRC client. Configure it however you please, but you will want to enable DCC sends.
• Connect to irc.XXXXX.net. This is the server that the official XXXXX Inc. channel is on, and the only place we can assure you that these files will be available on. The commandline syntax for this is /server irc.XXXXX.net.
• Join the #XXXXXinc channel. The commandline syntax for this is /join #XXXXXinc.
• Once in the channel, you’ll be greeted by the current topic. This will typically include a listing of the group’s most recent releases.

Getting Files

• From here you’ll have two main means of getting files. One is to take advantage of the md5 “bot.” A listing of everything on this bot is available at www.XXXXXinc.com/xdcc/.
• The other means is through fserves (file servers). Various people run fserves with a variety of content, not all of it related to XXXXX Inc. at all.
  1. To obtain a listing of fserves available, enter !list in your chat window.
  2. You will be presented with a number of advertisements for people’s file servers. This will include the trigger for each server, and (with any luck) a description of its content. They’ll look something like the following:
     

     -XXXXXinc- [Fserve Active] – Triggers:[/ctcp XXXXXinc manga & /ctcp XXXXXinc other manga] – Users:[0/4] – Sends:[1/2] – Queues:[4/24] – Bytes Sent:[91.11GB] – Message:[XXXXX Inc. and #A-Z manga] – SysReset 2.53

     This advertisement is telling us that the person logged in as “mangainc” has an active fserve. It has two triggers, /ctcp XXXXXinc manga and /ctcp XXXXXinc other manga. Each of these triggers will make different files available to you. This fserve also has zero users currently connected to it out of a possible four. It is capable of sending two files simultaneously, but is currently sending one. Of twenty-four queue slots, four are currently being used (probably by the person that the server is currently sending to). The advertisement also claims that this fserve has sent 91.11GB of data, that the fserver contains XXXXX Inc. and #A-Z manga, and that it is using the SysReset2.53 fserve script.

  3. Enter the trigger of a server that looks promising, and it will initiate a separate, private chat with you.
  4. Most fserves will give you a welcome message including a list of valid commands. Typical commands include dir, cd, and get.
     • dir: This works just like the dir in MS-DOS. It will give you a listing of all the files and directory in whatever directory you are currently in. Enter dir right when you get into a fserve.
     • cd: This works just like the cd command in MS-DOS or UNIX variants. It allows you to change directories. The syntax is cd DIRECTORYNAME. Once you have issued a cd command, it may be a good idea to issue another dir command to see what is available. Tip: “cd ..” will take you back to the parent directory on almost all fserves.
     • get: This tells the fserve that you want to get a particular file. Syntax is get FILENAME. The fserve will either immediately start sending the file to you, queue it for delivery after other transfers have completed, or inform you that it cannot send you the file for some reason.
• Once you’ve found the file you’re looking for and issued a request for it, you may want to go ahead and ask for another file. Some fserves will let you queue literally dozens of files at a time.

Caveats & Admonitions

• Some channels have set rules of behavior. It may be to your advantage to enter !rules when you first join a channel that you’ve never been to before.
• Stay in the channel. If you close out of the #XXXXXinc channel before you’re done downloading your files, fserve gremlins will infest your computer and haunt your dreams. Oh, and you won’t get all the files you have queued up.
• Don’t be a nuisance. Repeatedly sending requests at a server that has all of its queue slots filled doesn’t help anything.
• Don’t complain about slow transfer speeds. The people hosting these servers are not being compensated for their bandwidth, time, and effort. If you are downloading and not contributing back, you are a charity case.

[originally] Posted by Burrowowl at September 1, 2004 07:06 AM

Not a sufficient or even sensible reason for California to just break off from the United States entirely, but something I realized last night: California has more teams in the NHL playoffs than Canada does. Canada has 33.3 million people, California has about 37 million. Of course, Canada has 225,000 registered minor players in Ontario compared to California’s measly 4,300.

Of the three NHL teams located in California,

• The Ducks have 11 Canadian players
• The Kings have 11 Canadian players
• The Sharks have 18 Canadian players

Conversely,

• The Duck have 0 Californian players
• The Kings have 0 Californian players
• The Sharks have 0 Californian players

While not as self-sufficient as Minnesota or Massachusetts at providing our own hockey players, I think California has demonstrated a more-than-adequate ability to import high-quality Canadians to supply all of our domestic puck-chasing needs.