Protesters in L.A. Miss the Point

Many of those behind the mayhem in L.A. seem like common criminals to me, but those legitimate protesters who feel that the Zimmerman case pivoted on race seem politically naive. Zimmerman is free because he had enough money to hire a good defence. The incompetence of the state attorney's office probably had something to do with the outcome as well. Florida's state attorney's office sounds like a bunch of nincompoops judging by that letter that their Managing Director wrote. Not that much money is ever required to hire enough brains to outwit the state. That is why poor people go to jail, and rich people write a check and go home.

Money Buys Impunity from the Law

Money is freedom, as Mr. Zimmerman and O.J. Simpson discovered. With enough money, one can get away with almost anything, including murder. For the poor, the slightest infraction results in heavy penalties. I think that is the lesson to be learned from the verdict. Morality and stringent adherence to every law and regulation is required of the poor, and vast armies of hired henchmen work night and day to detect and prosecute even the tiniest violation, real or perceived. No expenses are spared in apprehending those poor workers like Mr. Snowden that do something that displeases the powerful. Meanwhile, the rich do as they please, living like playboys, and even when they kill their playmates, as long as their playmates are poor, they often get away with it.

Florida Showing its Bare Butt to World (Again)

Florida can't seem to stop making a behind out of itself. The 2001 election was bad enough, but now the Zimmerman case just takes the cake. I don't know what to think about the case anymore, now that there are allegations of a cover-up in the state attorney's office. I tried wading through the six-page monstrosity penned by the Managing Director, but it was such a convoluted tale dripping with venom and pomposity, and my interest in the matter is so limited, that I confess I resorted to skimming before giving up. I really don't know who is in the right of the matter, not judging by the letter alone, which was boring, poorly written, difficult to understand, and angry. The art of letter-writing is in a sad state, I'm afraid.

If the whistleblower to whom the letter is addressed really got away with so many wicked deeds, then one wonders who is at fault for hiring him in the first place, and who is to blame for retaining him for such a long period of time, and who is to blame for permitting this damage to occur. The full-of-herself Managing Director fails to comprehend that the motives of a whistleblower are immaterial; his veracity is the only salient point. Truth and justice are of greater moment than petty personnel matters. The letter seems like a big shot venting their spleen for their own personal satisfaction, which is rather naive, because the letter has been entered into history and may be read by academics ten thousand years from now, if our civilization survives in some shape or form. I would shudder to think of such a relic representing me. I am sure it will provide fodder for many in the media and beyond.

Perhaps the Managing Director might have been genuinely provoked, perhaps she is in the right of things indeed, or perhaps the provocations are in her imagination, who am I to know? As the writer noted, none of us are qualified to have any opinions on anything because we don't have a law degree. We should just shut-up and let attorneys spoon-feed us and change our diapers and beat us when we get uppity. That sort of arrogance rubbed me the wrong way and turned me against the writer. Listen, if we the people cannot interpret the law, then the law is wrong, not the people. I don't like the professional arrogance of those who stand upon their expensive degrees as though their money grants them more intelligence than others.

She would have been better off writing a short dismissal notice of no more than two paragraphs or perhaps delivering the news in person. I may not be a big shot Director, but I at least know the value of conciseness and moreover the value of silence when circumstances demand it.

Garlic

I watched a superb old documentary about garlic made by Les Blank probably in the 1970s. Very good and well-worth watching. It is available on DVD. Some of the bright and happy young people in the film were of the so-called counter-culture, and perhaps because of that, were relatively deep in philosophy and history at least compared to today. One of the lines stuck with me for several days. I still ponder it when I am lying in bed at night. The film advocated Epicureanism in relation to eating garlic as a way of enhancing the pleasure of food, and to this end, placed text on the screen that read,

"When you're dead, you're done. Long live the living!"

It is not necessarily an atheist statement, but expressive of disbelief in the afterlife. I do agree with the sentiment. There seems no future in death at all. I find it very difficult to believe we possess any substance other than flesh and bone. I don't believe God plays coy with immortality, hiding it from us as some kind of test just to check whether we will believe in it because the Bible says so.

Of course, whether individual consciousness, that is, our own life, matters or not is purely a matter of perspective. I suppose the evolutionary purpose of our ego, which is so dominant in the human psychology, is to ensure we find great value in our individual consciousness and will do whatever is required to maintain and sustain it, even to the extent of conjuring up fantasies about surviving death in one form or another. An unhealthy ego may in turn lead to insufficient or ineffective maintenance--one may eat bad foods or use harmful substances or fail to perform all the little tasks that tend to prolong life. Yet I think a healthy ego may reject belief in the afterlife on the noble ground of reason. I believe truth matters. That is a judgment call on my part, a bias I have for reality. If a thing can not be so, then one should not believe in it.

Getting back to the film, I found it positively gushing about garlic, too enthusiastic by half, but that did not stop me from enjoying it. I do not believe that garlic can cure disease, although it does have antiseptic and antioxidant properties and makes a wonderful spice for all kinds of foods. I have always loved garlic and always will.

The Secret of Mummies

Mummies are not a popular species in Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, and looking at the aptitude chart explains why--they suck at everything. By far, they are the weakest species on paper. It would seem that the developers hate Mummies and wish to defeat whoever plays them.

However, like vampires, mummies do not need to eat, so they can remain on a level for as long as they like until their aptitudes improve or they find whatever it is they are looking for. Unlike vampires, mummies do not lose their undead powers due to lack of food, and they regenerate without food.

I prefer to play mummies for a simple reason. Eating is a bother. Not having to eat allows me to focus upon more interesting aspects of the game. In addition, not having food occupying inventory slots allows a mummy to carry more. I believe that the ideal worshipper of Nemelex Xobeh is a mummy for any number of reasons, but being able to carry more decks of cards is certainly a big one.

I suspect mummies and vampires are an essential rationale the devs have for generating out-of-depth (OOD) monsters, in order to provide a modicum of risk to those players that hang around the lower levels biding their time and building up their skill levels.

Blog Status

I updated my public .htaccess blacklist, in case anyone's interested. I assume someone is, because that post has received 11,000 hits, and they can't all be bots. My guess is that people are using it as a resource to check up on an IP address. I can tell you that from using it, the number of bots getting through declines by about 99%. Some will still get through, but the list grows over time due to my efforts, and those that get through, don't get through for long.

My efforts to monetize this blog via AdSense have fallen flat due to a technical error on AdSense's side. I left a message in their help forum but haven't received any answers. They do not permit ordinary mortals to contact them via email. So I will leave a post on my front page into perpetuity that points the finger at AdSense, which is broken, dead as a doorknob, kaput, game over on my site due to an AdSense bug. I imagine their developers are too busy drinking coffee and eating donuts to work on boring stuff like code.

I like working on code and am pretty good at it, but I am not allowed to do so anymore, because all the programming jobs were given to foreigners. I believe that politicians in Washington, D.C. right now are working on ways to eliminate even more jobs so that they will make a bunch of money on the stock market. The politicians are bribed, bought and paid for by corporations and don't care about America or, much less, American workers.

Trying Ads Again

I decided to try adverts again, because I put a lot of effort into the blog over the years, with a big wonky zero in the way of return. Many people come here and find the information they need to solve the problem at hand and then leave without so much as a thank you. Even if I only make five bucks a year, in ten years time, I'll at least be able to buy some bananas. I like bananas.

Well, it looks like Google Adsense is programmed by morons. Adsense sent me an email saying they put my account on hold until I update my tax info. I'm not permitted to update my tax info because my account balance is below $10. Thus, my sites are on hold forever or until Google hires intelligent programmers. I'm on hold forever.

Zimmerman: Malice Aforethought

The excessive focus on the voice recordings in the Zimmerman Case puzzle me. To me, the recordings are irrelevant. It doesn't matter to me whether the victim or the shooter were screaming. Perhaps both of them were. To me, the case seems cut and dry. A murderer stalked a man at night while carrying a loaded firearm. He shot this man dead, a man who he had no business confronting, a man not committing any crime, not trespassing, not doing anything wrong at all, a unarmed man whose only purpose was walking home from a convenience store. I think the jury can find for malice aforethought.

I don't know what's wrong with Florida that the police did not arrest Zimmerman on the scene for first-degree murder, but certainly the case has the stench of racism all over it.

I've been a pedestrian, just like the victim, walking on the side of the road in the middle of the night, minding my own business. I've had big ugly SUV's pull up beside me, honk their horns, act obnoxious, throw litter, throw rocks, squirt water pistols. Big ugly SUV's are the choice of cowards, and cowards like to carry guns, because they are afraid of everyone else and know that they could never win a fair fight. They need that gun for protection, because otherwise they would surely be beat soundly for behaving like the disgusting louts they are.

Maybe I'm not black, but there are many parallels between myself and the victim. The victim is Mr. Martin, by the way. He is dead, a young man who had his whole life ahead of him. Mr. Zimmerman is not the victim. Mr. Zimmerman is the murderer, the one with blood on his hands, the one who got all flustered because the young gentleman he stalked at night hit him a few times.

I think in this case the victim, Mr. Martin, needs to be given every benefit of the doubt. Since he is not here to speak for himself, every member of the jury must assume Mr. Martin behaved like an honorable gentleman. The moment he was murdered by Mr. Zimmerman, he became a saint. It is likely that Mr. Martin was highly provoked by Zimmerman, who has displayed on numerous occasions an appalling lack of basic social skills. Murdering a witness should not give the murderer the benefit of the doubt. Otherwise, every man that ever fights another will see to it that he kills his enemy, in order that only his version of events is ever heard by a jury.

The Post Office Spies on Americans

I wasn't really surprised to read this article in the New York Times about government spying, because of my recent experience. An undercover agent contacted me a few months ago and tried to entrap me using the U.S. Postal Service. She claimed she ran an organic grow operation out in California and wanted to send me a bunch of weed for free through the mail.

Well, I'm still blogging, aren't I? That means I didn't succumb, she didn't add to her quota, and those long tedious sales pitches she wrote me were for naught, although I suspect she copied and pasted a canned rap that she uses with everybody. She was probably corresponding with hundreds of people just like me. I wonder how many succumbed to her entrapment?

By the way, Facebook, Amazon, etcetera are all crawling with undercover agents using bogus profiles, and Facebook cooperates 100% with the spies. The spies target anyone that likes weed, for sure, and probably a lot of other groups as well. Are you one of the groups being targeted? Beware, the next friend request might just be the government trying to lay a felony charge on you.

Gay Marriage is Good for All

Sometimes I wonder about gay marriage, "what's in it for straight people?" A tangible benefit exists for heterosexuals:

1. To the best of our knowledge, homosexuality occurs in all families, throughout history, without regard to race, nationality, or culture.

2. Thus, every straight person may, through heterosexual intercourse, produce a homosexual offspring. This outcome can be viewed as a risk, an opportunity, or a possibility, depending upon one's attitude towards homosexuality.

3. The straight person who has a homosexual offspring will experience better financial, legal and social outcomes if that offspring can marry and receive all the benefits of marriage. The entire family is strengthened. Everybody wins with gay marriage. Nobody loses. All families will experience better outcomes throughout all future generations.

One's view on gay marriage pivots upon whether one has any notion of teamwork. If one believes that if any person in a team does better, the entire team is likely to do better, then gay marriage has more appeal.

On the other hand, if one's worldview is shaped by competition that requires winners and losers, then one may oppose gay marriage. There is a notion that if other people are miserable, even siblings and offspring, that makes one's own lot seem better by comparison. Some people want to think of themselves as the winners and everybody else as losers. They are willing even for their own families to be losers. What exactly do they win on a personal level? Nothing. But there is apparently some satisfaction to be found in keeping others unhappy and burdened by legal restrictions.

Are We Ready for Democracy?

I wonder sometimes whether we are ready for democracy as a species.

Is Egypt ready for democracy?

More to the point, is the U.S.?

I just read the comments section on a major news web site. The article concerned Mr. Snowden, who is deemed a traitor or a patriot or somewhere in-between, depending upon one's point of view. Comments generally were in favor of hanging, I do believe. Armchair executioners are in great abundance.

I think that many citizens still have the mindset of living under a monarchy. They remain, in spirit, loyal subjects of a monarch, just as things were a thousand years hence, and why should they not? Why should people not believe that fealty comes first? Those among our ancestors who believed otherwise were executed.

Is the world ready for democracy? Not really. Even Republican forms of government arrived too soon for our species. Our progress in evolution suits us for a monarchist form of government, and yet I can't help but feel that we should continue trying to make republican forms of government work, even if they are ill-suited to our primitive mentality. Perhaps with experience, with the progress of centuries, we may learn to make republics work better. Is the liberal philosophy correct? Should we believe in amelioration?

What was the Civil War About?

A real hero of the Civil War that I should have learned about in school was Strong Vincent, a Union colonel who, it is said, turned the tide at the pivotal Battle of Gettysburg. He died during the battle, but was remembered long after death, at least in the North.

Back when I was a boy, textbooks, encyclopedias, teachers, and even my grandmother idealized the wrong man, Robert E. Lee, general of the Confederacy. He was intelligent, but wicked, because he served evil, a similar case as Rommel in WW2. How many Germans now idealize Rommel? Not many, I would think.

The Civil War was about the Southern elite defending their right to enslave other human beings. That was all the war was ever about, and yet people deny it throughout the former Confederacy because they have been indoctrinated to do so. The rich plantation owners of the 1860s were determined at all costs to do harm unto others that they regarded as "inferior" by murdering, raping, torturing, confining, forcing into labor and selling their slaves. Had the landowners ever shown the least resolve to stop committing these atrocities, there would have been no war.

The Southern elite have for hundreds of years set themselves above minorities they regard as inferior, preserving their privileged status and keeping minorities down through legislation and force. This attitude is still in evidence today. Among the Southern elite, there persists a desire to keep others down--anyone regarded as "inferior"--due to a belief that somehow the misery of others makes their own lot seem better, if only by comparison.

Victory through Nonviolence

Gays won on the legal, political, and cultural battleground because they spoke the most reasonable words with the most moderate voice. Their dialogue was one of human rights and dignity. Their opponents varied, but never made a good impression upon me. There was never a time I listened to a homophobe and thought, "Gee, he might have something there." Instead, I always wondered what variety of mental disease these haters suffered from. All too often, homophobes were exposed as closeted homosexuals, which was extremely damaging to the anti-gay lobby, rather like tossing a fragmentation grenade into the officer's tent. The Wiccan law applies: when one points a finger at others, three are pointing back. Too clear was the hypocrisy, meanness and ignorance of homophobes. As for the gay activists, why, they were for the most part non-violent, even in the face of outrageous injustice. There is value in taking blows when others must witness it, because those who watch will wonder when they will be struck next, because violence has a way of spreading, of engulfing communities, turning against minorities first, and then everyone. So when Matthew Shepard was martyred by the brutal murderers, that was one of the turning points in the battle, when people of conscience could no longer accept the injustice, hypocrisy and wickedness. That was the point when many good people said, Enough. Because there are things in life of more value than popularity, material or power. There is a spiritual and moral dimension that transcends the world we live in and life itself. Spiritual force can be overwhelming, as many a cynic has discovered at a late hour.

Fixing a Broken Shutdown Shortcut

Kubuntu 13.04 offered some updates today that broke my shutdown shortcut. After a bit of poking around and trying various things, I found that this syntax fixes the problem:

sudo chmod u+s /sbin/shutdown

I don't notice any improvements from the updates. Devs, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. And here's my corollary to that general rule: if you can't help yourself from fixin' what ain't broke, then don't break it.

At least I was able to fix their fix.

Historic Life-Changing Ruling by Supreme Court

The greatest ruling by the Supreme Court in my lifetime has come to pass today. This means the world for gay folks. Equal protection under the law is closer to becoming a reality in every state. The ruling means peace, it means liberty, it means justice.

I am proud of my country. Little I have read in the media the past few months has made me so proud as this. There used to be a time when gays were denied employment in the State Department, because it was thought they were vulnerable to blackmail. Now the case is just the opposite. In China and Russia, homophobia and discrimination are part of the law. Perhaps China and Russia have this vulnerability, but not the U.S.

I am surprised and pleased, but wish the ruling had been unanimous. States' rights, after all; why did the conservative jurists not defend their cherished ideal, states' rights? They do so in all the other cases, the ones where big money for corporations is at stake. The minute the question is individual liberty, suddenly states' rights doesn't matter to 'em. Not much effort is required to expose the motives of Scalia and company.

I think I'm going to have to cast about for a state where gay marriage is legal and relocate! My red state is going to remain decades behind the times on this issue, just like it did on civil rights for blacks. History repeats itself. I think a court order will be required for my red state to do what's right. Wikipedia has a good article listing the states where gay marriage is legal. I view it as a travel guide for gay couples.

I didn't expect to live to see this day, but I'm glad I did. There's a feeling of unreality, of living in a dream. I always chuckle to remember back when I was thirteen and thought I was the only gay in the world. Goodness, there must be a lot of gays out there besides me. And after all, gay is not threatening. By its very nature, gay is not threatening. The more the issue is discussed, the more truth that is brought out into the light of day, the more people realize that it is not any kind of threat. As my straight brother puts it, "If some guys don't want to do it with women, that just means more for me!"

I don't expect a surge of gay marriages. For one thing, many gays aren't couples. However, I feel that monogamy is a good thing, for many reasons, and I think that whatever serves to encourage monogamy (short of compulsion or force) is a good thing. Therefore gay marriage is a good thing both for gays and for society, of which gays are a part. I think over time, gay marriage will become more common.

However, I hope young and idealistic gays don't rush into marriage just to prove a point. I believe a couple--whether straight or gay or somewhere in between--should live together for at least three years prior to marrying. There are, of course, downsides to marriage, which individuals need to examine at their leisure with objectivity. Marriage has always been a problematic institution. However, for some couples, the happy ones, the long-term partners, marriage solves a great many legal and financial loose ends, such as hospital visitation, medical questions, custody of children, inheritance, immigration, federal and state benefits, insurance, and so on. I would advise gays to observe and learn from the experiences of their heterosexual peers however, because divorce can be unpleasant and unfair. I believe marriage and divorce could stand some reforms to keep pace with the evolving roles of men and women. But that is an issue for another blog post at another time.

My Brain is Sprained

On a consistent basis, I drop a word, usually a preposition, conjunction or noun. I have to read my blog posts over and over again, about five times on average, before I detect the missing word. I used to produce near-perfect copy. I think it is a sign of decay that will only get worse as time goes on. However, I find consolation in mainstream media sites, such as CNN and MSNBC, which display the same human frailty.

Blogger Fails in Firefox

I've been using Blogger since 2009. Starting around 2012, Google made ill-conceived changes to Blogger that have made me dread editing my template's html or css. I have given up on maintaining a custom template. The Template and Layout functions of Blogger are horrible. Blogger has crashed Firefox so many times that I've lost count. How does Blogspot set about crashing a computer? Constant and nonstop hits to web sites like twitter, facebook, and google's own. Continual processing for no apparent reason, endless loops just burning the cpu up until 100% of the processor is in use, accomplishing nothing whatsoever. Blogger crashes Firefox on both Linux and Windows systems, I might add. It doesn't matter what kind of computer I use or how much memory I have or how fast my Internet is or which operating system I choose. Blogger will crash Firefox in a heartbeat. It will also bring a computer system to a crawl and force a reboot.

Like most things, Blogger devolves rather than getting better. I suppose Windows doesn't set a good example in that regard. The only thing Google cares about is making money off AdSense, but I can't see running ads on a web site where I cannot even edit the html or css at all without the computer crashing. I certainly can't recommend Blogger to anyone who wants to start a blog, unless they like rebooting their computer every five minutes.

On the plus side, I do like the stock template. It's nice and dark and seems more pleasing to the eye, although I could ask for a bit more color. We have color monitors--shouldn't we use them? Black and white seems, well, a bit of a throwback to the 1970's, when I actually had a black and white television set. It's a sign of age if one can remember watching television in black and white.

I would have preferred the option of selecting and installing a new template rather than being pressured into doing so by a kludgey editor that crashed my computers. Nobody likes being forced to do things.

Classroom Dream

I dreamed that I was in a classroom with many students sitting on those old-fashioned wood and metal contraptions they used to use back in the day, with a hard wood writing surface and chair with steel legs and a steel compartment under the chair bottom to put books and papers inside. Those things could be broken, as some boys discovered after trying the better part of a school-year or multiple school-years, but not easily, and they could be repaired, too.

I was young again, I don't know how young, but at the age when sitting in such an old-fashioned desk would have been right, and reunited with my best friend at the time. We were aware of the passage of the time, so this was not a flashback to the past, but a reunion in Heaven. We realized we hadn't seen each other for--what is it now, twenty years? More, I think. Thirty? Of course we remembered the reasons for going our separate ways. Yet for whatever reason, we were back in the place where we first met all those years ago, doing mindless busy work we used to do in school. The teacher, who had no face, no name, and not a very memorable voice either, had assigned a score of questions to be answered by reading a chapter in our textbook. I don't know what the textbook was about. Something incorrect or inaccurate, no doubt, and not written very well, like most textbooks in school.

I was euphoric at being reunited with my old friend. The magnetism was strong, like magic, and I was curious. I had many questions, but these were left unasked. He was friendly and seemed to understand everything. He was serious about schoolwork as he always was and working on the assigned questions, which he finished before anyone else. I took his notebook--I had that privilege with him that I didn't need to ask--and began copying his answers into my notebook to save myself the effort, smiling all the while.

A few moments later, at the far left of the classroom, another student raised her voice and denounced the fellow sitting in front of her, who had copied her questions just as I had copied my friend's. The teacher reiterated that she expected us to do our own work. I looked at my friend's face and he had one of those expressions I was so familiar with, that look of rebuke. Blushing, I returned his notebook and began working on the questions myself.

Upon waking, the dream seemed less charming. Perhaps it is seldom that young friends part on amicable terms. He was the more popular one, the one that knew how to manipulate others. I was not adept at reading social signals, which is so important in our world. When he decided I was no longer useful and could be replaced by someone else, he played pranks on me that he found amusing, fooling me again and again. Back then, I was what you call stupid. Book-smart but not street-smart, which is often fatal. He was cold and adept at making cold decisions. I don't envy whoever he is with now, if anyone at all. If I had had a choice, I wouldn't have dreamed of him, either. He is not the sort of thing I like to dream about.

I think the dream was just an echo of the past. Memory is a funny thing. Facts are stored in memory, of course, but also feelings without regard to the alterations wrought by time. I used to feel a certain way about him, and that feeling is recorded somewhere, just like a fact would be, even though my current feelings are different. The unconscious mind revisited an old memory covered in dust somewhere in the attic. I wonder what the trigger was? Perhaps last night's watching of the first episode of season six of Mad Men. The accuracy of that retro 1960s show amazes me. Upon reflection, I think the antique fashion and style of that show certainly triggered a memory from my distant past, a past I'd perhaps be better off forgetting.

Confessions of a Blogger

The reality as I see it is that most blogs have no readers--or few, if any. The lion's share of traffic consists of bots. Bots with bad intentions, mostly--content scrapers and hackers angling for derivative traffic. ?!Buzzword?! What is "derivative traffic," igor? Well, pardon my jargon, but derivative traffic is traffic that derives from somebody else's labor--writing, photos, what-have-you. Capiche? There are sites on the Internet that have stolen my content, such as it is, despite what may be regarded as its uncertain value. There are many sites on the Internet that rate my site, analyze my site, give every manner of statistics, and give previews and archival history of my site. All of that comes from bot traffic, from unattended software programs hammering this site day after day collecting data.

On this blog, my best estimation is that 90% of the hits are non-human bots. Of the humans that do hit the blog, most are searching for answers to narrow technical questions, and most hit about a dozen different posts that are the most popular posts on my blog. That would include the Dungeon Crawl Cheat, although I don't know how many Dungeon Crawlers actually bother installing the batch file nowadays. Not many people know what batch files are anymore, and I reckon those that don't would be worried about a virus. The batch file is useful mainly for my own purposes. I can't imagine playing Dungeon Crawl without it. I like to have control over death. Isn't that a natural human desire?

Why so many bots? I get asked that question often, especially when I explain that ninety out of a hundred hits to any given web site are non-human. Well, hackers figured out a long time ago that they could exploit weaknesses in human nature and in search engine technology to drive traffic to their own web sites, where they make money off advertising, install malware, flog some worthless software, or just increase the value of an url that they plan to sell later.

Gee, igor, that sounds like an easy way to make money! How come you don't do it? Ha-ha, I've thought about that and a lot of other easy ways to make money. I won't say I'm above temptation. But even though our government sets such a poor example, I still find some value in ethics. I don't want my legacy to consist of crap web sites and increased distortion and confusion on the Internet. I've always been on the other side of that war and have invested too much effort in fighting bots to change hats now. I suspect the government is behind some of these bots, using them in an effort to monitor and exert some degree of control over the flow of information.

I Like

Usually I blog about things I hate. Today, for variety, I blog about things I like.

I like to watch drag, dance, comedy, drama, and documentaries, not necessarily in that order.

I like to fool around with linux, even though I'm the only one I know that does.

I like to play weird, off-the-wall openings in Chess. The weirder, the better, in my book.

I like to cooperate with people and give them good advice. It may be that the only purpose in life is to spread a little bit of wisdom and sunshine here and there.

I like to get paid for doing work that I enjoy, rare enough though that is.

I like to have a lot of that sort of work.

I like to play some of the most difficult races in Dungeon Crawl, such as troll and mummy, just to see if I can win with one of these "impossible" races.

I like to fight crime by working on security for web sites.

I like to discover that strangers are actually good people with good intentions, rather than something else.

I like to avoid complications.

I like reading.

I like cats.

I prefer winter to summer, cold to hot, spicy to plain, and bitter to sweet.

I like zombie movies, and I've finally come around to liking Game of Thrones.