Author: Aaron Weber

A Excite Game

Two rather interesting web-based multiplayer games with a persistent universe:
Blogshares is a virtual stockmarket where you buy and sell shares of weblogs. Price is based both on the number of incoming links and also on the market supply/demand. Something like the Hollywood Stock Exchange and its affiliate at MuchMusic.

The Game Neverending is like an adventure game, but much, much sillier. Neat technology behind it, and a lot of thought in the economics, theology, philosophy, sociology. Basically, a playground with lots of puns and funny names for objects. Still in beta.

Finance and War

Dear Financial Advisor:
    You recently sent me an article from the Wall Street Journal which closed with the statement that “the meek may not inherit the earth, but at least they’ll get to retire”. With that in mind, I’d like to ask you about avoiding investment in Halliburton. I have read that they recieved a $1bn no-bid contract to put out oil fires in Iraq, and there’s every reason to believe that they’ll get more work rebuilding the country once we’ve levelled it.
    My concern is that destroying and rebuilding Iraq isn’t a viable long-term business plan. They do have a lot of coverage in the financial press, and it’s true that this is the second time they’ve rebuilt Iraqi oil fields, and possibly the third time they’ve built them, but I’m still unsure that they’ll be able to scale this sort of operation.
    I look forward to your thoughts on the matter.

   Yours,
       Aaron Weber

Hilarity

Well, it’s Friday. People keep stealing the campaign signs from politician
Pat Stoner. He’s amused by it, but he says he was born a Stoner and will stay that way. The folks over at Bong State Park aren’t so sure about their name though. Elsewhere, police investigated a man advertising crack sales but it turned out he’d just run out of room trying to write cracklins, as in pork rinds.

Devout Fundamentalist Belief

People who believe sincerely in something can be blind to the facts. Sometimes, it’s funny, like the guy demanding a cervical exam because he’s convinced he’s actually a woman.

Sometimes it’s harmful, as in the case of Dick Cheney’s energy task-force which more or less created and exacerbated the California energy crisis.

Sometimes, it’s both laughable and fatal. Just look: Congress has voted us a day of prayer and fasting, while the radicals worry about the religious right and the religious right gears up for a mass conversion campaign. To try and deflect terrorism and criticism, US students abroad are pretending to be Canadian.

It all begins to make sense when you see headlines like this: Price of Darkness Quits Bush Team. Conflict of interest rules, apparently.

Upstanding Citizens Against the War

You may see protestors out there protesting and think, do they know what they’re doing? We can’t let the Iraquis know we don’t have the heart for a real fight. And look at them. They’re not organized. They haven’t bathed. White kids with dreadlocks! They think they can change the world by pretending to throw up at city hall?

Well, I’m glad to let them shout. This is my shout right here. I don’t give a damn about Mumia. I don’t want to smash capitalism. I think “globalization” is a a word and not an evil. I’m all for free trade and free movement of goods services and people around the world. And I’m opposed to this war.

So is George Soros. Yes, that George Soros. The billionaire financier and philanthropist is the latest to object, sanely and forcefully, to the Bush policies.

I call on moderates and conservatives, preppies and yuppies and button-down shirt wearers, to reject this war! Join me, and the fiscal-responsibility lobby, and the soverign-international-law advocates! Take common cause with the Pope and the WTO and the godless anarchist hippies!

I consider myself a patriot, I really do. And I do not object to all war or all violence. I know a bit about other countries and I like this one because it is my home. But because I love it I can acknowledge its flaws and mistakes (e.g. Guatemala in 1954, Chile in 1973) and speak out against repeating them. I love my country and I would be willing to die for it, and I appreciate the valor of the soldiers who are out there fighting for … whatever it is. But I know this: The US Armed Forces are not in Iraq to protect me or to promote freedom. They’re pawns bleeding for someone else’s empire, or madness, or blind rage. And all the while our executives in the White House and the board room stay home undermining everything we stand for, dividing us, tearing us apart.

I know it’s too late to stop the war, really. It’s obvious by now that a fair number of the Iraqi people support Saddam despite their dislike of him, just like a lot of Americans hold their noses and support Bush in wartime. Bush is our leader, we have to support him, for national pride and for strength in unity. Saddam is their leader, they have to support him for just the same reasons. People have begun to make comparisons with Stalingrad: as awful as Stalin was, and as much as the Russians hated him, they fought to the death to defend their country because Stalin was their evil and they would not trade him for another.

Well, we’ll see be fighting house to house, and civilian bombardment, and we’ll level Baghdad and Basra, and send another half a million troops and quarter trillion dollars before it’s over. We’ll all suffer for this folly. And because I am a patriot I I will suffer with the rest of my country. But I’m not going to just lie down and take it, and I have no intention of letting George W. Bush escape the consequences for what he’s done.

The Bright Side

Achievable goals. Sane list of tasks. Pressure is exciting but not overwhelming. Going home for lunch. Corner pharmacy open on weekends. Meetings with my boss Carlos that always help organize and focus. Taking my summer pants out of storage. Knowing how to salvage the shirt I spilled bleach on. A bar crawl for peace. Waking up to sunlight and then going back to sleep and still making it to work on time. Chocolate. Trail mix. Frank Black. Flirting over IM with people I have never met. Learning to enjoy singleness. Trying to persuade Helen to use the Darth Vader march as her wedding theme.

Home is Where the Hearth Is

Here’s a picture of the radiator in my apartment.

Sometimes when I was in therapy back in high school, I would stop talking and just stare at the floor. The doctor would wait a moment to see if I was coming back on my own before she asked “where’d you go?” I had a hard time explaining.

Daria was amazed once when she looked at me and noticed I was running through some hypothetical conversation in my head. “You’ve got a whole universe in there, don’t you?” It was a revelation to her about how my mind worked. She found it endearing, but I’m not sure what good she got out of it.

Last month I took her pictures off my wall and put them in my filing cabinet. Today I deleted the last two years of email. Ctrl-A select all, Ctrl-D delete, Ctrl-E expunge. If only the universe inside my head had keyboard shortcuts.

Where did I go? Hell, where am I now? How many times have I said to myself “I want to go home!” before realizing I’m at home, it’s just that I’m so completely alienated from the world around me that no place feels right. There’s no place like home. Nothing is homelike. Not even my inner world with its own little radiators painted institutional eggshell.

Commerce and Death

Commerce continues even in the midst of tragedy. It is, after all, one of the ways people can process the world around them: integrating it into their daily lives and rituals. So we get ads for chemicals of cockroach destruction. There’s a Taiwanese company making rice crackers that you can use to act out the conflict. Parodic products, too, like meals of mass destruction.

Of course, the world continues in ways that have nothing to do with the war, as well. It’s all very Auden and Breughel really. While allying with the US against North Korea, South Korea is still pursuing a WTO ruling against the US on tarrifs. Editorials in Taiwan use any opportunity to proclaim the Chinese government as despotic and awful, which is probably pretty accurate. Pioneers of technology and commerce die and are euologized.