Will of the People

The novel 「Let the Right One In」 is rather good. It's a lot more chatty than the film, and the plot feels fuller. The film is still a masterpiece and the better of the pair, but I can recommend the book as well. Apparently young vampire romances are all the rage right now, with 「Twilight」 being the next series to succeed 「Harry Potter」 in popular novels. In contrast to a number of people trashing Twilight online, I'm just happy to see people reading instead of watching TV.

Sarah Palin resigned as governor. With her being unpredictable and tempermental, nobody's sure why she did it or what she has planned in the future. So long as she stays out of politics, I wish her well in future endeavours. She has the wrong temperament and is not qualified for high political office, but she's not particularly reprehensible. There are a lot of people like her - I think many people I've known who have not put a lot of effort in self-improvement would act as she has in most regards - she's recieved a lot of attention in the media that would look just as harsh shining on most people. Only a few people are suitable for high public office, and only a few can manage to look good enough to be elected to it. We just have to hope that we get more of the intersection of those bubbles rather than just the latter (maybe if we can raise the level of public discourse high enough the latter will be less of a concern because people will learn to recognise the former, presuming we stay in our current rough form of government).

Last night's "adventures":( Read more... )

Incidentally, as it's come up recently, I know I've been mopy and probably often not very pleasant to read - if you don't want to read my LJ, feel free to remove me from your friends list without any worry that my feelings will be hurt. For most of you we're just acquaintences in real life anyhow (even though in many circumstances I wanted more). Know as well that if I do so I don't necessarily mean to be saying anything beyond that I am not regularly interested in reading your posts. There have been times where I have unfriended someone as part of cutting them out of my life entirely, but I will trust people to use overall judgement to figure out when I am doing that if it is not obvious.

The Valve/STEAM games are pretty neat, but they're quite buggy and I had to hack on some config files. I understand this has to do with their trying to be AMD64-aware.

The relation of Wikipedia's don't be a dick to judgement in law is something I'm chewing on again, particularly in the context of thorny torts like tortious interference. I think it's a problem when people seek to skirt the edges of laws (in areas not meant to be hard edges) to protect problem behaviour (we need some mechanism as a society to complement law with shunning/shunning/penalty for acts harmful to the more abstract interests of society, ideally one with fewer (but not no) teeth but also without the constraints of ex post facto), but there are several instances where it is unclear what the resolution should be. For instance, we can imagine environmentalists who learn of contracts against the interest of the biosphere to do their best to make it impossible for such contracts to be met. Tortious interference? Should business interests in the general case take interest over ecological interests except in narrowly defined circumstances? Contracts become ways to bind third parties when such an intent entirely within an organisation would presumably lack such protections. Yet it's not difficult to imagine circumstances where it is a useful tort to recognise.

The building next to Crazy Goat (near Whole Foods) is bizarre, interesting, and not unattractive.