A Scene From My Life

INT. LIVING ROOM  NIGHT

DAVE is lying on a COUCH under a BLANKET watching FUTURAMA
on a TELEVISION. Other than the light from the TV and a
light in the adjoining dining room, the room is dark.

Silhouetted, KARRI enters from the dining room wearing a red
plaid flannel jacket. She carries a pack of CIGARETTES.

                    DAVE
          You're gonna smoke? You didn't even
          invite me?

                    KARRI
          You're naked.

                    DAVE
          That doesn't mean I won't come smoke
          with you.

DAVE presses pause on a REMOTE and the PICTURE freezes on a
scene in a locker room. The picture shows LEELA wearing
nothing but a white towel.

                    DAVE
               (continuing)
          Actually, first I’m going to masturbate
          to Leela in a towel.

                    KARRI
               (disgusted)
          You’re going to masturbate to Futurama?

DAVE starts to get up, wrapping the blanket around himself.

                    DAVE
          Nah. Not to Leela anyway. They draw Amy
          really sexy sometimes though.

The two make their way through a DOOR into…

INT. GARAGE  NIGHT

The garage is mostly filled by a CAR and a MINIVAN, both
green. Various bikes, tools, and toys line the walls. There
is an old COUCH made of light beige leather against one
wall. KARRI and DAVE (still wrapped in the blanket) sit down
on the couch.

                    KARRI
               (lighting cigarette)
          If you ever jack off over a drawing….

                    DAVE
               (lighting cigarette)
          Even if it’s lesbian hentai? They draw
          some really hot naked girls with great
          big eyes and purple hair.

                    KARRI
          Purple hair?

                    DAVE
          Sometimes blue.

Republican Talking Points Bingo

How to Play

• Make some friends
• Buy some beer (optional)
• Gather them
• Enter the number of players in the box over there and press the button
• Print the page that pops up
• Give one sheet to each player
• Turn on Fox News
• Mark off each talking point as you hear it
• The first player to mark an entire row (up, down, or diagonally) should call out “Clinton’s fault!” and be declared the winner
• Repeat until nauseated

Additional Rules

• Talking points inside quotation marks should only be marked if the words are spoken more or less exactly. There is play in this though. Obviously “Weapons of Mass Destruction” can be marked off if they say “WMD’s” and “Al Qaeda wants to kill your children” should count for “Terrorists want to kill your family”. You get the idea. It doesn’t have to be exact, but pretty darn close.
• Items not in quotes (which are also incidentally in italics) are more along the lines of talking themes. Obviously, any type of gay bashing will count for the Gay Bashing category. It’s not like they’re going to say “Let’s get back to the gay bashing for a moment, Sean”. Well, not often anyway.
• Any game-related disputes should be settled by voting with verifiable paper ballots. If paper ballots are not available, the strongest player should seize control in a (possibly bloodless) revolution.

I am not the first person to have this idea (see here and here), but as far as I can tell I am the first person to actually make the game. If anyone knows of prior art, I will gladly acknowlege and link to it.

The talking points I used are a set currently being used in the right-wing media. Over time they will grow stale. If this turns out to be popular, I will do my best to keep them updated.

The randomness of the game cards would improve with more talking points. Mrs. FatDave and I were only able to come up with 31. If you have suggestions, please leave them in the comments, and I will add my favorites to the program.

This was inspired by the Right Wing World segment of The Stephanie Miller Show

Moved to WordPress

OK, so I finally got fed up with Blogger’s mandatory link bar at page top and its apparent inability to generate standards-compliant XHTML. And of course the unease I feel at having anything less than total control over my data. I mean, do I really want my ramblings sitting on some server I don’t have control over? Not really.

So, to combat those issues, I’ve moved to WordPress, which so far seems like a fine blogging system. But my pages look pretty god-damned bland right now. And there’s probably some supporting pages that aren’t showing up right. I’ll get all that taken care of though. Not like anybody fucking reads this shit anyway.

I Owe My Career to Tim Berners-Lee

Sung to the tune of “Lord Won’t You Buy Me a Mercedes Benz” by Janis Joplin

This is a song of great financial import.

I owe my career to Tim-Berners Lee
The man who invented HTTP
He gave it away, but it’s spelled big bucks for me
Oh, I owe my career to Tim Berners-Lee

I owe my career to Mr. Larry Wall
If it wasn’t for Perl, I’d have no job at all
He built a new language and I answered his call
Yes, I owe my career to Mr. Larry Wall

I owe my career to Steve Wozniak
If not for his computer, I’d never learned to hack
He made me a geek and I never looked back
Oh, I owe my career to Steve Wozniak

Science Fiction Cliches and The Musical Expression Thereof

So I came across this list of science fiction cliches. About a third of the way down the page is this one:

Eyes that glow (sometimes accompanied by minor-key chords in TV and film)

First of all, there’s no such thing as a minor-key chord. There are minor chords, but minor chords exist quite happily in major key progressions (and vice versa), especially when they’re built on the 2nd or 6th interval from the key root.

But yeah, they just meant minor chord, why get all technical, right?

Well, because glowing alien eyes are never accompanied by minor chords. They’re accompanied by diminished chords. Not only do they have the flat 3rd that the minor does, they also have a flat 5th. That makes all the difference in the world. A minor chord just sounds sad. Are glowing alien eyes sad? No. They’re fucking creepy. And for fucking creepy, diminished is definitely the way to go. If not diminished then augmeted (sharp the 3rd and the 5th), which can be pretty creepy too. Throw in a flat 7th and/or 9th for extra fun. If you can work a theramin in somewhere, all the better. Or some synth portamento.

Yeah, so exactly one of my regular readers understands what the fuck I’m talking about. And incidentally, he’s probably the only one who will appreciate the sci-fi cliches. I probably just should’ve emailed this to him, but then I haven’t posted anything here in forever.

FatDave’s Guide to BitTorrent

Lately I’ve been explaining BitTorrent to a lot of different people. Finally, I decided to write up a guide to it, in my own inimitable style. You can read it here.

This may be the first in a series of guides. Then again it may not be.

So Long DVD Decrypter

So suppose some of your fondest childhood memories are saturday mornings spent with Bugs, Daffy, Sylvester, Wyle E. and Marvin. Now let’s also say that you (somehwat reluctantly) grew up (or at least aged a bit) and now you’ve got 3 kids, ages 5, 3, and 2. You want them to enjoy the same animated violence you grew up on, so you go out and buy The Golden Collection on DVD.

Trouble is, kids and DVD’s just don’t fucking mix. Doesn’t matter how well you think you’ve locked them up, a shiny DVD is better than the most expensive thing the toy store has to offer. Trust me, I once found a two year old surrounded by DVD’s, and which one was he banging against the entertainment center? The special edition of Fight Club which had gone out of print almost exactly one week prior. Thankfully, there’s this thing called eBay.

So anyway, you figure you bought the DVD, it is yours now to do what you want with. In fact, it has long been considered fair use to make an archival copy of copyrighted material that you have purchased, provided you don’t sell or give said copy to anybody else.

Of course the entertainment companies had a problem with that, so they came up with all kinds of copy potection schemes. Macrovision for VHS, the Content Scrambling System (aka CSS) for DVD. Oh and what the hell, why not throw Macrovision onto DVD’s as well, so you can’t tape them.

Now, let’s digress for a moment and travel way back in time to about 1984. Many of you were probably not using computers circa 1984, but I was. For me it was all about the Apple //e and the Commodore 64. Software piracy was then, as it is now, running rampant. The software companies had a cow, and came up with countless ways to fuck up a 5-1/4 inch floppy disk so it couldn’t be copied. Of course they never denied that a user was legally allowed to make a backup copy of the software for personal use, but they set out to make it as hard as possible. An entire industry of high-grade disk copying programs sprang up. If you were there, you surely remember Copy ][ Plus and Locksmith. Every time a company came up with a new copy protection method, the copying programs would put out an update to bypass it. Apple never used copy protection on their own software, not even Appleworks which was easily the best selling software of the time. By the late 80’s the software publishers realized they were fighting a useless battle, and copy protection on computer software became a thing of the past. Iit remains so to this day. For example, Microsoft couldn’t give a rat’s ass how many copies of Windows XP you make, provided you buy a license for each one.

OK, back to the present, or at least the more recent past. It wasn’t long after the introduction of DVD that the CSS copy protection was shown to be laughably easy to break. However, not to let a little thing like fair use get in its way, the entertainment publishing industry managed to get a US law called the Digital Millenium Copyright Act passed by congress. The DMCA is full of odious stuff (agreeing to an unread license agreement by opening a software package, outlawing reverse engineering) but perhaps its foulest offense is making it a bonafide crime to circumvent copy protection. There was a huge battle over the above linked DeCSS code, many websites were shut down, and for awhile it was actually argued that it was illegal to even link to the source code. It was ruled that source code is not protected speech. In the most beautiful of ironies, the DeCSS source code was submitted as evidence in one of the trials, and thus became a matter of public record. Last year the publishers gave up and dropped their case.

So anyway, back where we came in, suppose a person bought The Looney Tunes Golden Collection, didn’t want their kids to destroy it, and had a legal right to make a copy for their own use. Well, there was still the issue of that pesky CSS to get around. Thankfully, a nice person made an incredibly easy-to-use DVD Decrypter, which he called DVD Decrypter. It was a nice one-click affair, put in a DVD, click a button and it was unscrambled and saved to your hard drive, or if you prefer burned to a blank DVD.

Could this software be used for piracy? Of course, but it also had legitimate uses. It’s a favorite argument of the gun lobby that, sure, you can use a gun to commit crime, but they must be kept legal since they have so many other legitimate uses. Seems to work for them, but not for the evil bastards who allow people to back up their DVD’s.

Well, anyway they just shut him down. He’s no longer allowed to update or distribute the program, and his domain name has been taken over by whatever company decided to crack down on him. Here’s a copy of his farewell message. All this thanks to the fact that it is now against the law to circumvent copy protection, even though you and I have a right to make copies of media we purchased for our own personal use.

But you know what I say? Fuck them. And you know what else? A lot of other people say that too. I advise everyone to check their favorite P2P network for DVD Decrypter 3.5.4.0, which will be the final version. Do they not know that they’re fighting a losing battle? Does the phrase “363 seeders” mean anything to you? Fuck. Them. Hard.