Author Archives: tacit

The many Faces of Liam

Posted on by
16

Since zaiah and I have moved into our house here in Portland, I’ve set up my office in the basement. One of the things I’ve done since moving in is put a set of shelves on top of my computer desk, the very same desk where I spend a great deal of my time working for clients who tend to pay me late.

But I digress.

Anyway, the cat Liam has taken over the bottom shelf on top of the desk, and likes to sit there while I work. In fact, he likes it so much that zaiah put a small blanket on the shelf just for him.

I spend my afternoons working at the computer desk, and Liam spends his afternoons on the shelf watching me. These pictures were taken over a span of about a week and a half or so.

Yes, I know my desk is a mess. Hush.

Dear God, what can of worms am I opening?

Posted on by
42

Okay, so my ‘main’ Web site has been on the Interweb for more than twelve years now, which is, like, 614 years in Internet time. It’s hundreds (literally, hundreds) of static HTML pages, each with a hand-coded navigation system. That means it’s clunky, inconsistent, and a big honkin’ pain in the fucking ass to update. It is time to reign in the madness.

I’m considering, God help me, moving the whole mess to a content management system. I’d kind of prefer one that doesn’t suck, but figmentj says there’s no such thing as a CMS that doesn’t suck–the only thing you get any say over is how bad it sucks and in what way it sucks.

Here’s what I’d like:

– Security. I don’t want to have to install security patches every three days and I don’t want to get pwned if I don’t.

– Flexibility. I don’t want to port every page over to the CMS, but I do want to port big sections over. I want hard-coded, static HTML pages to be able to live happily side by side with CMS-managed pages, and the navigation to work consistently across all of them.

– Template flexibility. I do not want the entire site to have the same template; I do not want the whole thing to get poured into the same HTML containers. I want, for example, all the BDSM pages to have a consistent look, all the polyamory pages to have a consistent look, but I want to make the BDSM pages look different from the poly pages.

– Ease of updating. WordPress sets the bar here. When I log on to WordPress, if there’s an update, there’s one button that installs the update automatically–downloads the files, unpacks them, installs them, updates the back-end database, all with a single click and all without disturbing any settings or customizations. If WordPress can do it, I figure other people should be able to do it too.

– The ability to incorporate JavaScript (even if it’s built against a library like Jquery or Mootools) into pages as I please.

– Compatibility with analytics tools.

– The ability to specify an exact URL on managed pages. This is very important. Right now, for example, my BDSM page at http://www.xeromag.com/fvbdsm.html has awesome Google rank and literally thousands of inbound links. I do not want this URL changing to something like http://www.xeromag.com/cms/scripts/showpage.php?sectionid=4&pageid=23 and I do not want to create redirectors from existing URLs to point to the new, managed page URLs. The ability to do this is non-negotiable and is an absolute dealbreaker for any CMS that can’t manage it.

– An optional comment system that can be turned on or off on a per-page basis.

– Free and open source.

So, lazyweb, whaddya think? Am I living in a Utopian fantasy dreamland where naked mermaids cavort with dolphins under a cotton candy sky, or is this actually going to be doable? Is there a CMS out there somewhere that will do what I want?

More back art!

Posted on by
32

I’ve written a couple of times before about zaiah‘s habit of drawing on me with Magic Markers. Last night she did an especially interesting bit of art that I have an especially bad photograph of; the one thing I don’t like about my iPhone, which is in all other respects a life-changing piece of technology for me, is the crappy camera in it. C’mon, Steve, you can do better than this.

But I digress.

Anyway, clicky here for octopus!

Quote of the Day: What I Have Lived For

Posted on by
8

“Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a deep ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair.

I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy—ecstasy so great that I would often have sacrificed all the rest of life for a few hours of this joy. I have sought it, next, because it relieves loneliness—that terrible loneliness in which one shivering consciousness looks over the rim of the world into the cold unfathomable lifeless abyss. I have sought it, finally, because in the union of love I have seen, in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven that saints and poets have imagined. This is what I sought, and though it might seem too good for human life, this is what—at last—I have found.

With equal passion I have sought knowledge. I have wished to understand the hearts of men. I have wished to know why the stars shine. And I have tried to apprehend the Pythagorean power by which number holds sway above the flux. A little of this, but not much, I have achieved.

Love and knowledge, so far as they were possible, led upward toward the heavens. But always pity brought me back to earth. Echoes of cries of pain reverberate in my heart. Children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors, helpless old people a hated burden to their sons, and the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be. I long to alleviate the evil, but I cannot, and I too suffer.

This has been my life. I have found it worth living, and would gladly live it again if the chance were offered me.”

–Bertrand Russell, 1956

Link of the Day: Legacy

Posted on by
8

This link goes to a very short (only a few paragraphs long) story written by kennric as part of a project he’s doing to write 52 original short stories in 52 weeks, one story per week for a year.

This story is number 17 in the project, and it’s called Legacy. It’s a meditation on transhumanism and uploading and what it means to be a copy, and it’s quite beautiful. aclaro, figmentj, datan0de, femetal…I think you guys in particular will enjoy it. Thanks to zaiah for the link.

Warning: Reading this story made me cry.

The cosmos is full beyond measure of elegant truths.

Posted on by
8

This has been making the rounds of the Internet, and if you haven’t seen it already, you should.

If you have seen it already, you should see it again.

It seems to me that scientists and others who explore the physical processes of the universe are without question the very same people most filled with awe and wonder at what it offers.

Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking: A Glorious Dawn

List o’ Linky-Links, Christian Fundamentalist Edition

Posted on by
22

My browser has 32 open windows, so you all know what that means: time for another list of Linky-Links, where we see who fed it and who ate it all across the Whacky Wide Web!

This episode seems to have a special theme: those whacky Christian fundamentalists, up to their silly hijinks in their classic laugh-a-minute way that we all know and love.

So without further ado, on to the links!

First up, we have this breaking news from Muckflash: Christian Group to Produce Clean Pornography.

The group, recently incorporated as the Southern Coalition for Progressive and Pure Change (an obscure sub-branch of the International Congress of Church and Ministries), will pay for the production of 5 films which they say will act as a “stepping stone away from iniquity” as viewers use the films as an intermediate step as they “switch paths from the sexually impure world of the devil to the white shining path of the Lord.”

“We’re envisioning a kind of ‘nicotine patch’ for the tortured souls that struggle in this world to find a Christian voice in the midst of a popular culture that has lost the Word of God in a heathen cacophony of selfish desire,” said Reverend Dr. Stanley Lovett, Founder and Executive Director of SCPPC.

Let’s not forget the subtext of racism and good old-fashioned slave-era stereotypes about blacks, which tend to follow conservative Christianity like flies following a charnel wagon:

Dr. Lovett was willing to give a general description of the the first film, however. According to Lovett, Jodie and the Great Black Whale will feature an 18 year old missionary in Jamaica who is swayed by native temptors into working as an exotic dancer.

And just in time, too, because over at the God and Science site, we learn that pornography leads to sex with robots, and sex with robots leads to the extinction of the human race.

The data underlying the “radical” predictions laid out in this page come from scientific studies that have examined the pervasiveness and effects of pornography upon men and women. In particular, recent data show widespread acceptance of pornography among today’s young adults as “an acceptable way to express one’s sexuality.”1 For males the acceptance rate is 67% compared to 37% for their fathers. Among young adult women the acceptance rate is 49% compared to 20% among their mothers. So, the rate of acceptance of pornography has doubled in just one generation. When those young adults raise their own children, the acceptance rate will probably be greater than 80% for both males and females. The step between watching pornography through technology and engaging in sex acts through an attractive technological object is not that far, especially when the object acts as if it were a real human being.

I don’t know what’s more silly about this article–the notion that human beings don’t actually sex out to have babies and certainly won’t go out of their way to have one if there’s a convenient, non-baby-making alternative, or the even more insulting notion that human relationships are a dismal, unhappy affair, filled with complication and weighed down by erratic, moody women, and that anyone who could skip the whole sordid mess by having sex with robots would never want human companionship.

The Religious Right truly is the village idiot of American culture. These guys never cease to blow my mind with their bizarre misunderstanding of basic human emotion. They really, truly do not get it, on a level that borders on autistic.

Oh, and anti-intellectualism. Mustn’t forget anti-intellectualism. Over on the NY Times Stanley Fish blog comes this astonishing condemnation of intellectual enquiry, Does Curiosity Kill More than the Cat?

Most conservative Christians seem content to keep anti-intellectualism as the subtext of their basic world view. Not so for Stanley, who puts it right out there:

In short, curiosity — sometimes called research, sometimes called unfettered inquiry, sometimes called progress, sometimes called academic freedom — is their God. The question, posed by thinkers from Aquinas to Augustine to Newman to Griffiths, is whether this is the God — the God, ultimately, of self — we want to worship.

And finally, PZ Myers posted this little gem, which neatly sums it all up: