Archives, eh
-
# He thinks he's people.
the mere fact that they were not realistic representations of human beings did not mean that they could not be considered people.
You heard it here first. Australian Supreme Court judge deems that, amongst other things:
- Monkeys are people
- Your L70, Tier 7.25 bedecked Human Pally is a person and that Cow Shaman who ganked you last week should be charged with murder.
- So should the handful of borderline sociopaths that I personally know that have trapped a Sim inside a pool or a room with no doors. Murderers!
- The sundry Barbie and Brats dolls I have – in fits of juvenile behaviour – arranged into lewd poses should have me charged with sexual abuse because, damn it, they are people too!
- Oh, and amateurishly drawn Simpsons’s characters depicted engaging in sex acts is child pornography, because Bart & Lisa & Maggie are people.
I wouldn’t – as the saying goes – piss on this Alan John McEwan guy if he was on fire but there is no crime here. No child was abused and arguing that it will “fuel demand for material that does involve the abuse of children” is a first step down a very short path into absurdity.
I’m going to be very interested in what the social conservative whack-jobs have to say to this one. On the one hand they are only a couple of outrages away from being readily parodied as believing ‘bathing your own child == child pornography’. On the other they love to depict all animal rights activists as believing your dog should be given citizenship. I suppose they’ll just be intellectually dishonest and pretend the judge didn’t say the line I quoted.
-
# Links for 2008-08-29
WorldChanging: Paper from Wheat, not Wood
✴English Grammar 101: All You Need to Know
✴Takashi Miike’s Sukiyaki Western Django reviewed. – By Grady Hendrix – Slate Magazine
✴Watchmen, Tintin, and…Drakmar?
✴Mad Magazine’s War on Bush collection – Boing Boing – Mozilla Firefox
✴0xDECAFBAD – UbiquityCommands
✴Tor.com / Science fiction and fantasy / Blog posts / My love-hate relationship with fantasy
“I hate it because I have read too much of it and the new stuff isn’t different. I hate it for giving me the exact same fix over and over.” <- This ✴ -
# Starbucks
I must be a bit unusual; I am sort of, kind of disappointed to hear that Starbucks is going to be closing down most of it’s Australian stores. Why? Why on earth?!? It’s not as if I like particularly like Starbuck’s coffee. I don’t for all the usual reasons: burnt milk and too much of it, and bland blends. I appreciated Starbucks when we were in the US earlier this year because while it was sub-par espresso-based coffee, at least it was espresso-based coffee. It wasn’t drip brewed coffee. We had trouble finding any other outlet selling the kind of beverage we call coffee; even in Manhattan I only ever found one other place, a yarn store in the Village.
Why then will I miss Starbucks? Because where I live – Ingleburn – I’m basically in the same position. There’s not a great deal of demand for quality espresso in Ingleburn; you can’t mix it with Wild Turkey, you see. Well, actually I guess you could, but coke is cheaper and comes pre-mixed in the tinnie. There are no doubt espresso machines there, but they’re operated by the same guy that puts your battered
sharkfish in the oil.Well, them and Gloria Jeans. D drinks Gloria Jeans coffee. I stick with iced chocolate for pretty much the same reasons I don’t drink Starbucks coffee. Earlier this month though I made a resolution not to buy anything from them anymore. I’m tired of feeling awful knowing that however tiny a fraction of my money was being used to support their charity, the one that is just vile enough to occlude anything that might otherwise have achieved. I felt like every time we went into the Ingleburn store I was lining up for just one spin of the prayer wheel to a death cult.
I kept holding out an always forlorn hope that Starbucks would expand out from their Campbelltown outpost – fifteen minutes away in decent traffic – so that I could at least be insulted with poor coffee by people I am comfortable with. Sure, they’re whores. But at least they’re corporate whores. I don’t mind corporate whores. At least they money-grub for mere greed rather than spread hate against their fellow man for the sake of bronze age scribblings.
