audendi

Tell me who would win in a battle of wits, my friends (and my enemies, numerous as they may be on these internets). Leo Strauss or Ron Paul?

I’m not so concerned with the Straussians or Leo himself, but the totally crazed disciples of his that made one man’s philosophy a religion of death and destruction.

Essentially, I dare you to comment coherently in this blog. I’m sure you know I’m biased one way, and you know whom I would pick in this grudge match. Win, lose or draw, say your piece.

Your Internet Pal,

Daniel Greene

They deftly maneuver, and muscle for rank
fuel burning fast on an empty tank

Beyond my problems with their content and editorial practices, my problem with the Dayton Daily News and Dayton City Paper is that their websites are difficult to use and in general, not very good at all. For a paper with a huge budget, DDN’s website is a disgrace. For DCP, their website is understandably bad as they have a comparatively meager budget. But still, it could be a whole lot better without increasing their costs too much.

To sum up, they don’t care enough about their work to present it well on the web.

Which says a lot about how they report the news. I get the impression that the Dayton Daily News’ ownership does not give a rip about our community. Which is really too bad, because their print edition is very nice. The web edition just needs a lot of help.

Without a doubt, the best Dayton blog is run by Jeffrey over at Daytonology (http://daytonology.blogspot.com/).

His blog is accessible, stylish and cogent - along with coverage of the local cultural scene, he provides easy to understand analysis of political, economic, and social issues that affect Dayton, using statistical trends and data relevant to Dayton’s various contemporary issues. He manages to do it in a visually appealing and readable way - you can scan an article in 30 seconds and get a good impression of what he is getting at, or you can spend 10 minutes reading a single entry if you want to get that deep. Plus, his politics aren’t bad either.

His article, Considering the Core Creative Class in Dayton, best sums up what I’m talking about.

In my opinion, in almost eight years of blogging, Jeffrey’s Daytonology is the best overall blog in Dayton today, without question. Most importantly, I have fun reading it.

What do you think is the best overall blog in Dayton? How about the best Dayton music blog? (I pick Buddha Den!)

We’ve opened up a new front on the war on terror. It’s an attack on the unique, the unorthodox, the unexpected; it’s a war on different. If you act different, you might find yourself investigated, questioned, and even arrested — even if you did nothing wrong, and had no intention of doing anything wrong. The problem is a combination of citizen informants and a CYA attitude among police that results in a knee-jerk escalation of reported threats.

This isn’t the way counterterrorism is supposed to work, but it’s happening everywhere. It’s a result of our relentless campaign to convince ordinary citizens that they’re the front line of terrorism defense. “If you see something, say something” is how the ads read in the New York City subways. “If you suspect something, report it” urges another ad campaign in Manchester, UK. The Michigan State Police have a seven-minute video. Administration officials from then-attorney general John Ashcroft to DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff to President Bush have asked us all to report any suspicious activity.

The problem is that ordinary citizens don’t know what a real terrorist threat looks like. They can’t tell the difference between a bomb and a tape dispenser, electronic name badge, CD player, bat detector, or a trash sculpture; or the difference between terrorist plotters and imams, musicians, or architects. All they know is that something makes them uneasy, usually based on fear, media hype, or just something being different.

Even worse: after someone reports a “terrorist threat,” the whole system is biased towards escalation and CYA instead of a more realistic threat assessment.
- Bruce Schneier

Read the rest here.

World of Warcraft, or WoW, is a particularly engrossing MMORPG that many of my friends play or have played. WoW is not just an ordinary game, but a lifestyle - a social environment where people can lead entirely different lives, devoting the majority of their time to operating in this digital realm. Neal Stephenson predicted all of this in Snow Crash, by the way. If you have a chance, pick it up and read it. In Snow Crash, Stephenson describes a virtual world where you can walk on a virtual street with your online persona or avatar. It was assumed that the avatar would have a connection to your real self, with the quality of that persona dependent upon how much money and time you were willing to spend on it.

This is exactly what WoW is, a virtual world where you can interact in new ways. The reason it is so popular is two-fold:

Social Interaction: WoW provides a safe, filtered environment for social interaction. If you have avoidance problems with real life interaction, just make up a new person and use it as your layer between other people. The reason WoW succeeds is due to a combination of anonymity, ease of use, and a gaming format that basically requires social interaction.

Risk and Reward: Within an allegedly fun gaming format, WoW has predictable risk and reward payoffs. Importantly, you are generally insulated from bodily harm, property loss, and outright social humiliation. For a relatively minimal amount of risk you can get an immediate, gratifying reward. Your avatar can gain experience (known as leveling), new attributes or abilities, and special items. For someone whose life is full of misses, playing WoW is like going from an environment where you are batting .133 to batting .933. Especially for someone with low risk tolerance, this shift can be immensely satisfying. It’s a pretty safe bet.

And Then The Reader Thinks: So It’s Just Another Stupid Game?

I recently commented to a friend that I thought WoW was just a particularly engrossing, extended form of masturbation. But it is more than this, because of the social aspect - entire communities (clans) are springing up and forming out of nothing, with their own rules and customs. It’s like watching human micro-evolution. Entire sections of the population are adopting this new kind of social interaction, and for some it has become a way of life where they devote the majority of their time to playing the game.

In spite of my criticism, is self-gratification such a bad thing, especially if it yields positive results? I wonder what long term effect World of Warcraft could have on the suicide rate amongst young, first-world people between the ages of twelve and twenty-five. Many people have decided that the game they were born into sucks, and they would rather not play. They see online gaming in its countless forms as a suitable alternative. So, I guess you could say that masturbation saves lives.

Greene International, the name of my web design business/group/project, has existed in one form or another since September of 2002. At one point I was legally incorporated, but I let that lapse due to a spate of reasons. I have been using it to host this blog and other people’s websites for at least that long, but I felt it was time to get back into the business.

If i make any money, for the moment I will just file my revenue as personal income, unless I get to the point where it makes financial sense to incorporate or create an LLC. I hate paperwork, mind you. In any event, Greene International is back in action, and we have a few new projects coming around the bend.

Headed to sunny Michigan! While I’m away from reliable internet access, all comments are going to be moderated. It seems last night I got hit with a a dozen spam comments, which means my PageRank must be going up. In any case, your comment won’t show up until I approve it.

UPDATE: Comment moderation has been turned off if your comments have been approved in the past.

The Ohio GOP blog, which is anonymously written, links to the websites of all of the officially announced candidates for the Republican Presidential nomination, and even link to Fred Thompson’s website, who has not even announced. Guess who they don’t link to?

That’s right, the only principled anti-war candidate in the whole field, Ron Paul.
UPDATE 8/13/07: It looks like they just updated the links within the last hour (I checked earlier this morning) and they have removed Tommy Thompson’s link from the list and added Ron Paul’s! I would like to know whose decision it was to exclude Dr. Paul from their blogroll, but at least he’s finally on there.

I’m using Apathy, a clever new theme that has some features I have been wanting to implement on this blog for some time, but am too lazy to implement myself. More thoughts on this and blogging in general inside this post.

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Looks like Hillsdale College, after some seven years roughly, has finally redesigned their website. It looks good! If it had been designed seven years ago, that is.

Yep, it looks great! All the content has been reorganized with a new interface and what looks like a new(er) backend - at closer inspection it looks like they are running the same ASP based content management system. In any event, that’s fine. I mean, if they want to use IIS, that’s their problem. The website does at least look a little better than the old iteration. Unfortunately, the change will probably jar a lot of longtime users who are accustomed to the old design. Perhaps it could have been a little more evolutionary, but it’s too late for that.

Of course, the real clusterfuck about this whole situation is that since they reconfigured all the content and changed all the pages URLs, Google searches of Hillsdale’s website are essentially worthless. To access any content you have to use the Google Cache. For example, a search of hillsdale.edu for the term ‘Shakespeare’ yields plenty of results. Try clicking any of the top three results. That’s right, 404 error, page not found. They even moved some parts of the old website entirely to a new URL, for example, the Collegian Newspaper’s website is now at hillsdalesites.org. People, like say, alumni who donate money and read the newspaper to keep up with things at the college, and who have bookmarked a simple url, hillsdale.edu/collegian, will now be met with an entirely unhelpful 404 error. I cannot emphasize enough how bad this is. It is bad design practice. Linkrot should really be unacceptable for such an organization, especially if their content management backend has not actually changed.

Many people rely on search as their primary means of navigating the web, and now a 404 page is the result of clicking just about any google result for the time being. This will probably settle out as google reindexes the website, but it will take a while, and there will still be lots of dead links. They could have provided a custom 404 error without too much work to help ameliorate this transition period. Perhaps this redesign was necessary, and the scorched earth policy of redesign just had to be done, but I’m skeptical.

Oh well, maybe they moved the Collegian to a different URL so that nobody can find any antiwar sentiments on hillsdale.edu.

UPDATE: As Joe has noted in the comments, some URLs now redirect to their proper location. For example, hillsdale.edu/collegian redirects to the new Collegian website. Of course, any URL that is hillsdale.edu/collegian/article/example just redirects to the Collegian main page. An improvement, at least.

Also, they have issued a Custom 404 error page! This is definitely an improvement from an information and usability standpoint. I wrote this post on July 3. Now, 5 days later, it appears someone has fixed a few of the things I griped about. Maybe someone from Hillsdale College is reading this blog.

The election is over and its too soon for me to be able to stand back and properly reflect on the meaning of all the results, etc, so I’ll leave you with a blog quiz! Hah! I love/hate these things alternately, but I thought this one was perfect.

Which File Extension are You?

Finally! My laptop has been fixed. The long national nightmare is over. I can now go back to being uh, productive.

Also, I’m going canoeing etc in northern michigan this weekend, so don’t expect to hear from me…

Well well well, the hipster murder for money fucks at Planned Parenthood have really done it this time: Choice Chick, the gal that nails every guy in the neighborhood and never has to worry about the consequences. Why? Because she can just get an abortion! But its cool, because she fights for her sacred right to kill indiscriminately. I mean, that has always been a cornerstone of our republic, right? Wholesale murder. Anyway, I felt this was ripe for photoshopping. Feel free to save to your own server and redistribute as you like.

Go to http://www.audendi.com/choicechick/ to see the list and download, if you want. This is not a copyright violation, I am exercising my right to free speech. Satire. Peace kids.

Less than a day and I shall be back home.

Apparently, Prizio’s site has been down for a while, and his endlessly useful HBC, or Hillsdale Blogging Community, is no longer available…. until NOW!!

I have copied, redesigned, and updated the HBC. Check it out today. Link to it and spread the word.

Okay, I am being a tad facetious, I admit. To deign to think there is such a thing as ‘weblog theory’ is basically self-parody, or at least wholly absurd. Yet, I found this analysis from Wired.com Adam Penenberg, in an article today titled Blogging Against Convention, to be quite incisive and on-point. It is an article about the effect bloggers may or may not have on the Democratic National Convention:

“Breaking news?” wrote wonkette in a recent e-mail to me. “ldkjflasjflkjsdlkfjlkdsjflksklfdfjkl Sorry, lost control of my hands as I was laughing too hard. Bloggers don’t really report to begin with: They filter, they analyze, they collect. Reporting is something you have to leave your laptop to do…. It’ll be a new experience for most of them (and me). Best-case scenario is that we make things more interesting by fucking it up somehow.” She hopes that bloggers’ presence will add spice to the convention, “but unless one of them gets molested by Rob Lowe, I don’t know if they will.”

The truth about blogs and bloggers is that they are parasitic to the mainstream media they love to hate. Without newspapers, websites, TV and radio to provide them with material to rip apart, many (if not most) blogs would simply not exist. Their motto could easily be: They report, I decide. In essence, bloggers are alphanumeric versions of those pedantic pundits populating cable news and talk radio. You know whom I mean.

As a result, Penenberg inadvertently defines what most blogs are about, and why they are not unique: most blogs recycle existing content and comment on it. This content is typically of a current events or news nature. If its not that it is the typical livejournal blog that goes something like this: OMG U GUYS ARE Gr8 i . Sure, they will offer ‘unvarnished, politically incorrect commentary,’ blah blah blah. Its preaching to the choir. The politically incorrect actively seek out like-minded invididuals, online or in real life. This won’t change anything. If I want honest, politically incorrect conversation, I’ll go to a smoke-filled bar, thank you. I have a low opinion of people who think they are ‘daring’ by making ‘edgy, non-pc’ comments online.

Anyway my conclusion to this barely coherent ramble is this: the reason movies are culturally significant is because millions of people have seen the same films. As a result, they have a similar frame of reference, something in common with others. It takes a lot of ridiculous hurdles for a truly great film to be produced and become mass marketed. If there are great blogs, most people will never hear of them. Most blogs still feel like so much high school aged gossip.