Roborant is dead. Long live Roborant.

Did cathy come in today or what? I'm startin not to like what she's doing...she's always wearing jeans and this is a company where you wear dresses.

Once, long ago, I posted a link to a video called Daft Punk Girl. Jordan (Not Granite. This is going to get confusing) responded in the comments that that girl would be his wife.

Well... free up your testicles, Jordan. I present the simultaneous successor to Daft Punk Girl and Daft Hands. And the best part is that there's two of them.

Enjoy.

There's no Sex in your Violence

So, I promised Jordan that I'd put something up last night about XKCD. But I guess that this is really a post for Blake.

You'll notice that I haven't supplied a link to what XKCD might be for the unknowing. There's a reason. XKCD is a webcomic, and it kicks ass. The reason that I didn't post about it last night was that I was still busy trawling through the archives, which I have recently finished.

Sooooo.... Let me cut to the chase: In addition to being one of the best webcomcs I've ever read, XKCD has an unusual secret. Whoa Hold on. I just had a strange revelation: Unusual may be the only word in the English language that goes u-consonant-u-consonant-u. I challenge "U" to disprove me.

What is this unusual secret, you ask? It's URL. While most people (like Jordan and Google) will find that the comic's URL is xkcd.com, I happened to run across it being hosted on an entirely seperate and much funnier one:

cu.nniling.us

(that's right, you're going to have to type it in if you don't believe me)

Isn't that the best URL you've ever seen? It made me laugh only because I was busy poring through the archives absentmindedly for about half an hour before I even saw it.

Now, what is even stranger is that the nniling site is almost an exact copy. When at xkcd.com, all facets of the site (comic, archive, forums, blag, store, and about) are linked through xkcd.com, but when at cu.nilling.us only the blag and forums are linked through xkcd.com (for the obvious reason that updating the two in parallel would be a hellish waste of effort), while clicking archive, store, or about, will take you to a totally identical but seperate page hosted from nilling.us.

I find this incredibly cool. That is all. The only real question is why does this comic have two URLs? And why does the less funny one show up in Google?

Moving on:

Another aside: I was killing time thinking about what to write next, so I opened a new tab and hit the StumbleUpon button. It took me to an XKCD comic. Then it took me here.

Oh, this might be a good time to announce that the war is over. I'd love to say that I won, but it's a little more complicated than that.

Here's how I like to think of it:
1) Jordan's post was so badly written that I easily misinterpreted it.
2) Based on those misinterpretations I declared war and launched an offensive.
3) Rather than rebuffing my offensive, Jordan published a highly reformatted version of the original post which effectively removed the whole reason for declaring war in the first place.
4) I can now claim that I won because my attack went by undefended against and unchallenged. However, Jordan can claim that he didn't really lose either given that I wasn't actually attacking his ideas.

Things are pretty much like the war of 1812. The US will always claim that it won the war because they won some pretty good victories against Canadian troops on US soil (and because they're ignorant of most other parts of history as well). Canadians will sensibly claim that there was no winner given that neither side lost any territory. Although we could claim that the US technically lost given that they didn't fulfill their objective of taking over Canada, whereas we technically won given that we fulfilled our objective of not getting taken over. But it doesn't really matter anyway.

What I also wanted to clear up in this post was a lingering idea that I wanted to get to but didn't have time for: The whole basis of the conflict was totally irrelevant for 2 different reasons.

1) It was an American conflict. Girls here in Canada can already get on the pill with no problem by visiting their doctors. Every girl I knew in highschool who was on the pill, with the exception of one, was on it with parental knowledge because they had "really bad periods". Now, that may have been true, but it's also a rather convenient excuse given that it's impossible to disprove as well. The reason that this is an issue in America has a lot more to do with religious conflicts. Do you want to know why the girls getting the pill in this article were all "middle-school" and not "high-school" students? Because in the states if your highschool teaches any method of contraception except abstinence it immediately loses all federal funding. So, when your normal perspective is that contraception is immoral, then the idea of giving it to teenagers for free without their parents necessarily knowing is pretty scary/newsworthy. If that isn't your perspective, the article comes across with more of a "hmmm, saves them a trip to the GP I guess".

2) Contraception is already ubiquitous (although I suppose 'in Canada' may be important to add here as well). Who cares if kids can get the pill at school? If you're too afraid to make a doctor's appointment and get on the pill, all you need to do is go to the Health Unit. While they can't give you the pill (which is really a good thing, given that it's a prescription med), they will give you all the condoms you want, as well as the "morning after" pill. If you're too shy to go over yourself, you can send anyone to get condoms for you (or buy them anywhere), and any woman to get the MA pill (I think. If they make you take it there then I guess you'd have to go yourself). Seriously, a minimum of effort is involved already, why is it a big deal to make things slightly easier?

And that's all I have to say about that.

Let me cap off this post with some announcements:

1) Wolfgang has begun posting again. Read it, leave a comment, and maybe the next one won't be 10 months in the making.

2) Also, I didn't properly ring out the fanfare for Tingles (or Wolfgang's girlfriend), when I put up my link to her. This would be a good time to check her out since her latest post is a humourous look at Halo-themed pillow talk.

So, tune in next week when the Liam is the Awesome tour resumes, and I head back to beautiful Waterloo to see Wolfgang, Tingles, and some leftist radicals (and any RCG boys who want to get in on the fun). The weekends after that are open, but I'm going to try and spend some time in TO since I haven't been there in so long and there are so many people worth seeing.

Toodles.

No, that was a Blender, I Know You didn't have Blenders Either Back in those Days. No, We didn't. But We did Drink.

Alright, let's get this started.

Here is your required reading.

Now, Jordan seems to have accessed a third article or some other resource when writing his post because he has quite a lot of information about waivers that I haven't read. If you'd like to post a link to that, Jordan, it would be appreciated.

An Introduction:

This is the part where I would talk about how much I love Jordan, etc, etc. Jordan knows I love him. To go on about it here would only weaken the issues I'll be discussing here by making them seem irrelevant.

I love busting balls. It's possibly my favourite thing to do above anything else. My online ball-busting is usually limited to an incisive comment here and there. I mean, if you say something dumb and don't back it up properly, I'm gonna bust 'em. Really, even if you do back it up, I'm still gonna try.

So when I read Jordan's post, I immediately began to get into ball-busting mode. I kept reading, though, and slowly realized that there was just too much to cover in one comment. I immediately began planning a transfer of this topic to my own blog in order to expand upon it and showcase the entirety of my anger and confusion. However, given that I only had 10 minutes until I went to work, I had a choice to make. I could start work on my post, finish it over the next day or two, and spring it on Jordan with no warning (Like opening a cupboard to look for salt only to be pegged in the side of the head from 1500 yards by a CIA operative with a case of mistaken identity) or I could drop a small post informing Jordan of my intent. A declaration, if you will.

I'd come home from work that night with the intention of reading the post again and formulating ideas for my own while I slept. Apparently Jordan took my declaration as an act of aggression in and of itself, and removed the post in question and sat sitting by his computer waiting for a response. Unfortunately, without the original to work from, I couldn't begin writing my response, so I went to bed. Apparently Jordan passed out in front of his computer an hour after I got home from work anyway, so there was no great tragedy.

This morning I woke up late. I checked the blogzor before I went to work, saw that the post was back, and copied it into a text file in case it left again. But since I was immediately expected at work, I didn't have time to read it and spent my 7 hours at work thinking about really odd things (which I will post about in more peaceful times). The 7 hours completed, I came back, checked and wrote emails, replied to comments on various posts on various blogs, checked all the other blogs, and sat down to the task at hand armed with a delicious sandwich.

Which brings us here.

This post is going to be a tremendous ball bust of Jordan's post, but it is not a first-strike offensive. Jordan, by putting his somewhat unfocused opinions onto the internet at large, made the first strike. It wasn't aimed at me, but the concepts he attacked have no way of defending themselves.

This post is not going to have anything to do with whether or not Jordan's post was 'well written'... necessarily. I will not be grammar-policing, spell-checking, or calling his lack of sources into question. There is some very emo whining and a plaintive request for god to smite humanity that will not be mentioned again for the duration of this document. However, I am forced to excrete criticism on any post which is either structured so badly that people cannot read it, or throws out pretty heavy-duty accusations and assumptions with no backing. So, depending on your definition of 'well written' I may or may not be attacking his post on the grounds of how it was written.

Anyway.

I'm going to begin with a line by line dissection of the post I've been talking about, outlining specifically every item that didn't sit right with me. We'll see what happens from there. Prepare to have the viscera of this post torn gorily from its body and smeared across your monitor.

Jordan begins by explaining that he was only reading our school newspaper because it was preferable to having cutlery stuck into his eyes. I concur, and I can only assume that the cutlery in question must have been either very dirty or covered in electrified barbed wire, because he found himself reading an article by Ashley Csanady, who is possibly the worst person who ever decided to become a journalist (as you may have divined from reading the article yourself). I hope she dies soon. Moving on.

Jordan outlines some back story in the next paragraph. I feel tempted to add at this point that the kids are directed towards counseling, which is somewhat different than waiting for them to ask for it out of the blue.

The following paragraph is where Jordan discusses the waiver. Given that I don't know about it, I won't speculate.

Now, this is where things get interesting. In this paragraph the bells began to go off in my head, and they really didn't stop until the end. So, permit me to dwell here awhile.

This paragraph sets the tone for the rest of the article. Although it has only two sentences, it colours the reading of every word after it. First, Jordan suggests that allowing minors to have doctor-patient confidentiality is a bad idea. In fact, this confidentiality is often essential in ensuring an accurate diagnosis. If children are too afraid of their parents' judgments to tell the truth to their physicians, those physicians are exponentially more likely to fuck up their diagnoses and harm the children further.

The second sentence, though, is where things start to get strange. Jordan paints a somewhat strange picture of Sally (and since Sally isn't real I'm going to say that she can be safely extrapolated to represent many girls her age) as a raging slut-bomb, looking around for the first willing penis to blow herself up on (or vice versa)... Except that she isn't on the pill yet.

This idea is actually frightening to me because it relies so heavily on ideas about contraception and sexuality that are simply false. I mean, let's leave alone the implication that Sally would be perfectly safe meeting a sex offender if she wasn't on the pill. Let's focus on the idea that Sally will abstain from sex with Jimmy or Hank if she isn't on the pill. Likely, nothing is farther from the truth. Contraceptives do not make people have sex, sex organs do, and I'm pretty sure Jimmy, Sally, and Hank already have those. I mean, let's turn the tables here:

Jimmy turns 15, and his father sits him down and gives him "the talk". Or he tries to. Then he just chickens out, gives Jimmy a box of condoms, and says, "Be careful, son."

Does Jimmy grab the condoms and immediately begin plotting how to get rid of all 12 ASAP? Does the mere reception of the devices trigger a change in Jimmy that sends him running into the streets baying for pussy? Of course not. Good lord, how long did any of us hang onto condoms we were given by other people without even knowing how to put them on properly? Let alone actually get around to using them.

So let me say it again: Being prepared for sex doesn't really make you any more or less likely to have sex. If you want to, you're probably going to whether you're safe or not. If you don't want to, you'll probably keep your protection close by anyway until someone tells you that keeping it in your wallet weakens the latex and makes it more likely to break, and then throw it out and pick up a new one.

The fact that birth control exists is not a testament to the fact that people will do anything to have sex with no drawbacks. It is a testament to the fact that people will do anything to have sex, so keeping them safe is important. Continuing.

Jordan is normally in favour of letting women have birth control. Well, that's good, because most women likely don't give a shit about whether or not a man wants them on the pill. He just isn't in favour of giving it to women who won't be (or aren't educated enough to be) sexually responsible. My opinion on the matter runs entirely in the opposite direction. Women who are irresponsible or uneducated on their sexuality are the ones who need birth control the most. If they're more likely to be having sex without a condom and/or with men who don't care about them, then I don't want them peopling the world with other idiots. This brings me to a smaller side-point: Use a condom every time. The pill is effective at stopping pregnancy, but not preventing disease. All it does is elevate women onto equal sexual footing with men. Men can easily 'fire and forget' (although not as easily in the age of DNA pat tests), and women have always been left holding the baby. Anyway, my point is that stupid women should be given as many opportunities as possible to avoid throwing 20 years of their lives away over one mistake.

Oh, and luckily he contradicts himself 2 sentences later with, "Furthermore, I acknowledge that it is necessary to have protection when participating in these acts". But... hunh?

We've reached the halfway point of the post. This is where it gets kind of cool and thought provoking. Unfortunately, the thoughts it began provoking in my head were "What?" and "Where is this coming from?" rather than "Hmmm, that is a neat way of looking at it".

While it does seem interesting to juxtapose the idea of kids being forced to have parental permission to play violent games against the idea that kids can get birth control without anyone's permission, the two ideas don't quite stack up.

First, just remember not to confuse the idea of having birth control with the idea of kids having sex with each other. They are two different things.

However, let's ignore that in favour of a simpler argument. Let's actually consider a side-by-side comparison of your kid wanting to play violent video games vs. your kid wanting to have birth control, or condoms, or an IUD, or whatever.

You say, "No violent games, it will turn you into a raging psychopath". Chances are that your child will go somewhere else and play them. It's what I did. Expected outcome: You child does not become a violent killer. In RL.

You say, "No pill, no condoms, no nothing. You shouldn't be having sex so you shouldn't need contraceptives. Abstinence is the only effective form of birth control" etc, etc. Chances are (drum roll) your child will have sex anyway. Without contraception. Expected outcome: Your child has a kid (since you're so in favour of abstinence you're probably pro-life, too) and throws away the next 20 years raising it, or your child knocks up someone else's kid and throws away the next 20 years working shitty jobs trying to pay child support, or can't/won't pay and gets looked down on as a deadbeat for the rest of his life.

Now are those two situations really comparable?

Luckily, in the next (or 3rd from the end if that helps) paragraph, we're given another comparison to work with: Cheating the government out of tons of money with no consequences is the same as having sex without parental approval.

Now, you can probably guess that I also don't agree with this, but the reasons are different. I agree with the words written here in a literal sense, "Become exceedingly wealthy without dealing with punishment? Hell ya. Become sexually active at fifteen without my parents knowing a goddamn thing? Hell ya. I am all over that". I think I can safely say that I would have done it (and still would do the theft part), but that doesn't tell the whole story. The thing that seriously pisses me off about that paragraph is another unspoken assumption about the two acts:

They are both criminal in some way. Follow a line of thought with me:

Theft -> Is a crime -> Crimes deserve punishment -> You go to jail

Now let's try it again:

Sex -> Is a crime -> Crimes deserve punishment -> Your 'rents kill you

In both cases Jordan's argument removes the last step and replaces it with "You get away with no consequences". But does it make as much sense with the second starting point? Children should be afraid, although perhaps wary or concerned would be better words, of sex. You can be easily hurt, catch a nasty infection, or have a fucking baby. They shouldn't have to be afraid of being punished for trying it as well.

To finish it off, let's meander together through the last paragraph:

"How did this happen? How did we get to a point where no one is ever willing to sit and talk about anything? Everything has to be secretive. Hushed whispers behind closed doors. Everyone is walking around with blindfolds on and grinning because we think things are okay."

Now this one, I can agree with. No snide turn-arounds, no sarcastic remarks. Most people don't talk to their parents or their kids as much or as openly as they should. But that shouldn't be used as an argument to remove people's privacy. If your kid doesn't want to talk to you about their sex life (or lack thereof), you should not immediately be thinking about how you're going to find out about it through other means.

Being a parent is hard work. Put yourself in their shoes, your kid could be doing anything without your knowledge. But you need to trust a little. Trust too much and it's as bad as not trusting your kids at all, but there is a sweet spot there in the middle. It takes years of talking to your kid and really getting to know them long before they reach puberty in order to find it, though.

So use fucking contraception, or you're gonna have to start getting to know your kids a lot sooner than you might think.


fin

And now that we're past the ball-busting session, I can safely say:

Jordan, don't hate me. I do respect you seriously as a friend and I hope we can weather this. You just happened to really push my buttons there.

And I maybe thought that the old blog scene could use some spicy controversy...

And with that,
LEAVE YOUR COMMENTS AND DON'T BE SHY ABOUT IT!

PS, I have some other thoughts that I might throw down in another post tomorrow. For now I must go buy garbage tags, put out the garbage, and hit the sack.

Goodnight, friends.

(Something Snappy and Instrumental from Master and Commander)

WAR

Yes, friends, this is my official declaration of war.

Yesterday, Granite posted an article so offensive, poorly conceived, and hypocritical that I have been forced to show him the error of his views in the only way possible:

Blog Warz

As of this moment Roborant is in a state of war with The Box. Unfortunately I need to spend the rest of the day at work, so I can do little more than make the announcement and recall all of my diplomats at this time.

Sharpen your blades. Call your muster. Hide your daughters (if you're a beacon of 'modern' catholic values). War is upon the lands.

That being said, war is a gentleman's game. All is fair, but take none of it personally. Or at least not without a large pinch of snuff.

POW Biatch!

Think About the Good Things, Think About the Bad Things, Think About the Right Things, Think About the Wrong Things

I am eminently concerned with the imminent death of our community.

As of this posting, 12 of the 21 persons I link to in this space have not posted in at least a month, most of them far exceed that figure.

This has made me somewhat sad of late, but now worse things are happening:

Fraser (No link... because he has no more blog) simply disappeared as of a week or two ago. I notice that no one else has posted on this, so maybe I've been left out of why.

Hurley has officially resigned. She'll be pulling the page down in a week she says. So someone can notify me when that link goes dead.

We vied briefly for control of the blogging empire that we'd pulled unwillingly from the keyboards of our friends. Maybe she's done the right thing in pulling the plug now. I can't bear to see this thing die, though.

Have the blogs of the Super Friends really turned into guises for meaningful relationships. Maybe they have. Whenever I leave a comment on a post, I am exercising the relationship I have with the poster. But I don't leave very many comments anywhere anymore.

Nora and Carl haven't blogged in a year. Shame on them. Ben, the Super Friend who didn't come camping, hasn't managed a full-length post since September. Blake, Ellen, and I keep it going, but maybe none of us have the time anymore. Of late, mine and Ellen's posts for the most part consist of travelogues, while Blake's consist of a mish-mash of Youtube postings. Should I really expect people to interact meaningfully when all I can write about is "I went out and got drunk and didn't get laid", again?

On the other hand, I don't think my commentary has changed that much since my first days. I still put care into the posts I write. I still try and make them funny enough to be worth reading. I remember the days when my posts could garner 5 or 6 comments the day they were put out. Now, if comment levels are any indication, I'm lucky to get 5 or 6 people visiting this blog (commenting or not) in a week.

I'll keep typing if you'll keep reading.

Of course, this post sort of discounts the RCG. You all seem to be doing well and fine, and I try to comment on your blozor whenever I feel I have anything relevant to add. You guys (or at least Granite and Binks) preceded us, and will likely outlive us all.

To quote myself, "I don't know what to say".

And that seems like a good place to stop.

If You're Frightened of Dying, and You're Holding on, You'll See Devils Tearing Your Life Away

But if you've made your peace, then the devils are really angels...

Freeing you from the earth.



I thought it would be nice to have a little change here on the Ol' Blog. And, as the above quote suggests, it involves making peace, and freeing things from corporeal existence.

Specifically, it involves deleting 95% of the items currently in my bookmarks in Firefox.

And what better way of doing that then by giving them eternal life here on the Internets? After all, even if none of you find it useful, I can use this blog as an external bookmark storage device until it gets destroyed one day.

Oh, and to save time, consider every link presented here to be NSFW. Even if they aren't, the sheer volume of random pages you're going to be looking at over the next little while will probably alert the Powers That Be that you have been neglecting your Facebook during office hours, which may put your employment at risk.

So, without further ado, I present Memories... Part 1

The best way to start a journey of this nature is to crack open a little something special to help pass the time. Why not one of these?

I may have failed to mention above that these links go back over a year (I have lost 3 hard drives in that time, but Foxmarks has kept my bookmarks from being obliterated). It's kind of funny given my current preocupation with sexual frustration, that I was bookmarking pages on the subject so long ago...

With a name like Your Mom, it has to be good.

Vintage geekdom: A page of mechanical robot toys from the last half of the last century. My personal favourite was not actually available as a toy.

Houls of enjoyment...

You are what you eat. Yet another reason to hate vegetarians.

Think Dawn of War was the greatest game ever made? Close, but it's actually second-greatest (Follow the very simple directions to access the actual game).

Hours of fun from an extremely dated game show phrase. Wow... I was just playing with it and I got "You are the rudest weblog". Isn't that awesome?

This is probably the greatest webcomic in existence. Just keep hitting Refresh.

Just a little example of perspective changing over time. Some things change, but others stay exactly the same (The adds today say it's a 50 year record).

A helpful little reality adjuster for all (or maybe only some) who read these electronic pages. When you come to the end of the test, the second paragraph will list two percentages, mine were 96 and 93 (This is deliberately obscure in order not to give the test away).

This level is classified as low. Enjoy.

Think some of your childhood heroes have been raped by corporate merchandising? Oh, and it mentions one of my favourite albums near the bottom of the page.

Simply by reading this blog you should qualify for an exemption to this test, but it's fun to do anyway!

I got this from someone else who blogs around these parts. Not going to say who, but it is really really really worth repeating at this point that these links are NSFW. Seriously, this is Pr0n, and if you don't find it totally disgusting, you have problems. If you're on your own computer, follow the link. But if you have to share the computer with anyone, don't. And with that, here you are.

Have you ever wondered how to make plasma? I didn't think it was that weird a thing to Google...

I'm sure I've posted it before, but it has to be one of the best movie parodies of all time. Right up there with the one that turns the Shining into a family classic.

Ellen could be doing things like this in a few years! (She could also be 3 items up, but it would be really weird to link to it someday)

And some gun porn to finish it off. And, for the noobs, there are no naked women in gun porn. Just naked guns. And not involving Leslie Nielsen either.

Like I said, that was part 1. Looking over my bookmarks, I'd say that there are realistically at least 9 more parts to this saga. And from then on I'm going to make an actual effort to post my bookmarks regularly instead of saving them up for a year.

But wait, there's a real post after all that!

In keeping with my ideas that things should change here, I've prepared a post which conforms more with the sort of things I see on other blogs. Namely, short commentaries on topical subjects (usually some sort of linkable media).

So here goes:

Finally some sensible commentary on smoking.

I have to say that the opinion expressed in that article is pretty much what I've been thinking to myself all along. Smokers are animals. Animals that don't think rationally. Or something.

Mostly, they just stink shit up. Here's a newsflash for hot girls who smoke: Kissing you sucks. A lot. If you're ugly and you smoke, you might as well prepare for a life of misery. But don't worry, every time you feel unhappy with your situation you can just light up a smoke and it'll make you feel much calmer.

But to get back to the article, I'd have to agree that the most irrational thing any smoker can do is keep smoking. Starting to smoke is easy, and most people do it when they're young and impressionable. Although given that all of my friends smoke, I may be somewhat biased in that statement.

However, I don't think the "crazy muslim extremist cleric" is really that far off of the mark when he says that smokers are idiotic for refusing to quit once the full ramifications of the habit are known to them. One could argue that anyone born in the last 30 years should know the full ramifications of smoking before they ever start, but as I said, starting is easy.

Quitting is hard. I cannot think of a single person I know who has smoked to the point of becoming an addict and who has also successfully quit. Almost all have tried, though, with only one or two exceptions. I believe (or Gmail's Quote of the Day tells me) it was John Mitchell who said, "the finest steel has to go through the hottest fire". Of course, he also said, "The Department of Justice is a law enforcement agency. It is not the place to carry on a program aimed at curing the ills of society."

So... take that with a grain of salt. Oh yeah, he was also part of Watergate.

Whatever.