I’ve been reading Pauline Kael’s “For Keeps” which is over a thousand pages of her movie criticism. I don’t agree with Kael a lot, but her work always makes me think. I love her book on Citizen Kane, which is included here. Last night, I was reading through and caught this sentence, on how Mankiewicz, who wrote the film, used the script to take apart not just Hearst but also Orson Welles:

One can sometimes hurt one’s enemies, but that’s nothing compared to what one can do to one’s friends.

About a month ago, I was amazingly sick for a long time, and I found myself in a strange situation where I understood that I was operating at some fraction of normal intelligence, sick, with people disagreeing with me. My hazy plan, despite repeatedly feeling light-headed, was to stumble back on a ferry, get to Seattle, reconsider a plan of action, most likely taking a bus to get home.

People around me, though, strenuously disagreed, and felt I should go to the hospital, and I had to make a really strange decision: am I thinking straight? Trying to make that decision, of course, meant a contradiction, namely:
– if yes, then my original plan’s entirely valid
– if no, then my original plan’s a bad idea, but then how can I be trusted to evaluate whether I’m thinking straight or not?

I decided to stop thinking about that and take advice, which meant I went to the hospital for a while, felt a lot better, and went home.

I had a similar experience deciding to go to Clarion West this June. I didn’t really expect to get in, and when they called, I had a whole set of problems:
– no money
– accepting meant I had ~two months and then would be gone for six weeks, so no one in their right mind would hire me
– standard problems being away for six weeks

I didn’t know what to do for a while, and I agonized over whether I should go or not, whether it would be awesome or not, if I could go in future years, if it would be worth the sacrifice of taking a promising job, and so on. I was looking, a little bit, for a set of justifications for not going.

In the end, what swayed me was other people: when I talked to my friends about it, they told me to go and volunteered to loan me the money. Once, I think I might have shrugged it off, but when a lot of the people who really knew me lined up for it had the same reaction, I had to step back and think “Am I really acting rationally, or am I so tied up in the situation that I’m unable to look at the whole?”

Once I made the decision, I feel great about it, even though it meant walking away from job possibilities I was really interested in. And I don’t think, if I hadn’t placed my trust in the judgment of a bunch of people I didn’t know when I was really sick, that I’d have so quickly said “as conflicted as I am, the universal view of others is to go, and to do what I have to do to go, so I’m going to take that course”. It’s been a strangely-won piece of wisdom.

Not that I’m going to let reddit users vote up or down on my meal choices.

I run this and the Cheater’s Guide blog open, which means anyone can swing by and say whatever, but they’re moderated, the other more heavily than this one, and I’ve got the built-in spam comment thing on. They catch ridiculous amounts of spam. I can’t even believe how much. And I haven’t seen a false positive on either blog yet, and I’m reasonably diligent about scanning for them.

So, here’s the weird thing. At USSM we use registration, which means you have to provide an email address and get signed up, ensuring at least that there’s some fairly low bar for users to leave comments. Since we went to registration, I’ve seen only a few dozen spam comments, almost all of those caught by content filters for keywords (or secondary criteria I set up).

I cranked Akismet up a while ago there, and its false positive rate in that environment is 100%. Every comment it has identified as spam was an actual message. None of them particularly worth keeping, sure, but all of them were real comments.

It’s interesting to me that given a target-rich environment in which spammers dominate, Akismet absolutely shines, but in a target-poor environment with no spam, it seems like it gets bored and starts picking off passer-by.

There’s a number that you can’t post, though you can find many links to it, because it’s an HD-DVD processing key that got into the wild. This is a great example of the sheer absurdity of modern copyright law: it can be illegal to post a number, because someone else used it as a key. You might, by that logic, be prohibited from saying your birthdate is x/x/y because that’s someone’s locker combination.

But here’s the other thing. Let’s say I generate a similar number, at random:

32 40 04 1A 2B 07 16 07 39 01 0C 15 0B 04 37 0A 21 37 11

for instance. Or

0A 14 25 35 40 15 2F 17 2A 27 1B 40 0F 03 1F 14 3F 3E 11
1C 0C 0F 2E 1A 2B 0C 0B 15 00 1D 0A 1A 26 0B 11 26 22 40
3D 1C 28 1D 06 05 1D 1E 10 3A 25 14 21 3F 29 12 23 0C 36
04 35 08 25 12 0B 15 00 16 22 16 21 21 08 20 0F 2B 24 14

These numbers are not, as far as anyone knows now, illegal. But they’re either potentially illegal in the future or they’re not, but it’s potentially illegal to discuss them in the future.

Option 1: those numbers are potentially illegal. If it’s possible for them to sue someone for posting a number that does something in particular, then it’s possible for them to sue me for posting it too, even if I did it earlier.

Option 2: it’s not illegal to post numbers. This makes the most sense, but it’s not what we’ve seen so far.

It’s legal for me to generate random numbers. It’s not legal for me to try them to see if they’re processing keys or not. But if they are – let’s say they decide to sue me for posting one of them – then even though I don’t and can’t have any knowledge now that they’re illegal, it becomes illegal for me to have posted them.

And if it’s legal to know numbers, as long as you don’t know their uses, then we could just post all the possible key combinations somewhere now, and then later you could legally say “boy, I sure do like

0B 0D 3C 06 1E 3C 04 01 2C 09 3E 23 1C 20 10 27 3D 27 1D

… it’s the best number of all” but not “… it’s one of the numbers used as a decryption key.”

If it is indeed, illegal to know particular numbers, we’ve reached the height of absurdity. This is beyond even “it’s illegal to know a fact”. This is “it’s illegal to know that there are numbers of a certain size.” Everyone would need to be taught in school that there are an infinite number of numbers, but you should stay away from ones of certain sizes, because they belong to people who will sue you.

I don’t remember how old I was the first time I went into Powell’s in Portland, but I remember being entirely awed and spending hours there, winding up buying hundreds of dollars of books. The place inspired awe. Each new room was a fun discovery, and I’d wander into sections randomly and start picking up interesting books I suddenly had to buy.

I made it down to the downtown one this morning, before heading back to Seattle, and I had the same disappointment I’ve had the last few years, and it’s compounded by my memories, and the love I still feel when I show up.

Their selection’s amazing. I’ve been looking for the books of a particular science fiction author, with no success (he’s British, and it’s a tough find). Powell’s had a whole shelf. But they were almost all new, and the used ones were priced almost as high as the new ones. And so it went for all the others: books I’d wanted to check out popped up, but at a premium price. I don’t know if I’m just not remembering this wrong, but I remember part of the old joy of discovery being finding bargains, and I haven’t found that there in years.

If money was no object – and here, being out of work since July is a huge deal – that wouldn’t be an issue. But there are a couple of things I’ve noticed in my last few visits.
– no place to sit. If you see a book you want to leaf through, you pretty much have to sit down on the floor or hike
– filing’s poor. They’re not well-alphabetized, so looking through the “D”s in one section I went through DA-DE, broken by a hardback, and then it skipped back. Sections with multiple sub-sections seem to have problems with books being in the wrong sub-section.
– the pricing. I’m spoiled by used bookstores up here, I guess, but I wanted to buy an old pb originally published at 2.95, with no particular collectible qualities. At the Half Price Books up the street, that’s 1.48 (half cover price, even if it’s old). At my local paperback exchange, it might be a buck to two bucks. Powell’s had it marked up to 3.95. In all my searching, I never found a used book at a good price.

It was strange, to experience the same thrill of finding a set of books for authors I usually check for only out of habit, and none of the “I get to try a new author for only seventy-five cents!”

I don’t know how much of it is the economics of bookselling, or why the inventory’s priced as it is, or why their book mix runs so heavily new.

But after many years of finding less and less, this was the first time since I first went to Powell’s and didn’t buy one book. That makes me sad.

Yesterday, I went out for the first extended period in weeks to see the M’s game – I bought my dad nice tickets for his birthday, and while I’m still not feeling great, I wasn’t going to miss it. We went to Elysian, so my dad had great food and delicious beer and I watched, then we saw the debacle of that game, which was amusing. The whole time I’m a little uncomfortable because they’ve got me on drugs that make me a little dizzy, which is a strange sensation. Tough day.

Anyway, I get home starving, thirsty, and tired, and find that one of the connections under the sink’s given up the ghost and is spraying water everywhere, and I end up replacing two connections, the sink’s P-trap, and the whole faucet assembly. I didn’t get to bed until one.

This is to the point where I start laughing when this stuff happens.