August 12, 2003

I wish I understood what makes me stiff and sore. I don't overexert myself, but I also don't loaf around. Just walking around alot can't possibly make muscles in my chest sore, can it?

I'm getting quite sick of the neighbors upstairs; either their toddler is constantly pounding around (making way too much noise) or they're having a fight. 24/7. No breaks. Then the neighbors behind us keep us awake by starting loud shouting matches amongst themselves, in Spanish, for at least an hour at a time.

I will not miss apartment living. Not one damned bit.

Sprint began its parade of lunacy early by delivering the new parts we need for DSL at the new house (filters, basically). 'cept they delivered them to the new house. I got a call this morning from a very perplexed staffer at the site (since we don't actually live in the damned house yet) asking me to come get the stuff.

They also delivered a shiny new DSL modem. It's exactly the same as my current one. Except it's surely not configured and would mean I'd get to play around with their damned Windows-only configuration widgets just to make the bloody thing work.

Heh. Good news is I can completely ignore the new one and use the old one. Plug-and-go. Woo!

We noticed today the dryer is slightly too big for the doors in the laundry area to close completely. Oh well. I care not -- if that's the worst I face moving into this house, I'll take it.

I used to live in a small town that had the most lovely garden. It was right in the center of town, and everyone was free to plant whatever they wished. Some people planted big plants, some planted small plants. Some people bought their own seeds, and carefully nutured their plants, while a few others simply stole their plants from someone else's garden. Other people planted beautiful flowers, while still some others planted what could only be classified as weeds.

Everybody loved the garden, and something was always in bloom. People were always coming and going, and planting this and that. It was always the busiest place in town. No one ever thought to call someone else's plants inferior, and indeed, most were too polite to even mention if they noticed a plant had been nicked from down at the local nursery (especially since the head gardeners were as guilty of this as everyone else). Everybody just enjoyed caring for their own plants, and even the "weeds" of others were interesting to look at.

As time went on some of the better gardeners decided that they only wanted the best plants in the garden. The better gardeners began to push out many of the plants that were not as large, or as pretty as theirs were. This didn't happen all at once, but slowly, over a long period of time. Many of the amateur gardeners eventually quit coming altogether. They loved the garden, but they didn't feel at home in it anymore.

The better gardeners soon enacted more and more rules as to what kind of plants were allowed in the garden. They continued to get new plants, and they were lovely, but a half of a dozen old plants died for every lovely new plant.

Some people stuck it out and continued to visit the garden. There were never as many people around as there used to be. Most of these people fondly remember a time when the garden had hundreds of new plants every day. Sometimes you would see them crying when they realized that the garden now only got a few dozen new plants each day, and usually cut down several hundred older ones to make room for them.

The last part is a bit hard to explain, but eventually the garden itself just slowed down. It took longer and longer to simply look at a plant, or to chat with one of the gardeners. Many more people got frustrated, and stopped visiting the garden, or at least cut down on their visits.

The head gardeners seemed oblivious to all of this. They saw how lovely their garden was, and didn't really care that no one was really enjoying it anymore. They continued to make more rules and regulations about gardening and plants, and even decided to chop down all the plants that people had stolen from the nursery down the street.

It has always been a very lovely garden, but I just don't think I enjoy visiting it the way I used to.

It's hot. Very hot. Now it's 38°C outside (102°F), and it's not the hottest moment of the day yet.

In Paris, usually the temperature goes up to 38 or 39°C once every year, at most. This time, it has reached that level, or even more, every day in the last 7 or 10 days. In other parts of the country it will go up to 41°C today. At first we used to compare that situation with other exceptionally hot summers, like 1976 or 1946. But the comparison doesn't stand any more. This summer is not exceptional, it's unique.

Last night was the hottest night in history since they started to record the weather conditions in 1873. In my apartment the walls and the tables were warm. The water in the kitchen was so hot I couldn't wash my hands in it. Not even the tiled floor in the bathroom was cool. I went to bed at 1am; it was as warm as if someone had been sleeping in it. It was not an easy night. At 6 a.m the temperature was still 35°.

Fans are useless. When you stir hot air, you only produce hot air. I once learnt the three laws of thermodynamics; only now I really understand them.

Air conditioning almost doesn't exist in private houses here, because, you know, France has a temperate climate. At school they told me that France is situated on the 45th parallel, along the Atlantic Ocean which brings the Gulf Stream to it. For all these reasons, France has a pleasant climate. Here it's not supposed to be hot as in North Africa; or cold as in Scandinavia; or both hot and cold as in Central and Eastern Europe; or disordinate as on the American East Coast. That's what I learnt at school. I'm afraid it's not true any more. In 1999, at Christmas, we had a terrible storm. This year we have very long "dog days". We have also had floods.

I shouldn't complain. Yes, my apartment provides me with a preview of what probably awaits me in Hell after my death, but at least I have air conditioning at work. Earlier today I saw stone men and other workers. They were eating their sandwiches with a gloomy face. I also saw an old woman who walked very slowly in the street; I asked her if everything was all right; she said "yes", but I didn't entirely believe her. These days, I'm happy not to be in holidays.

Cool Man Eddie tells me that this node has been editor-cooled and that I am cooler than liquid hydrogen. I wish I was.

Tuesday – August 12, 2003

I am tired, cranky, and cross. (In other words, everything is normal for a weekday morning. I am not a morning person.) I had to deal with RCSD (Richmond County Sheriff’s Department) this morning. I saw a woman drinking a Coors (a crappy beer that tastes like cat piss) and driving erratically. Weighting my options (pulling the hit the back corner panel to cause a spin out trick you see on TV, blowing out the tires with my .45 cal, getting out of the car and asking what the hell the lady was thinking), I decided to pass her and call RCSD (which we pronounce as rik-sed). I immediately blurt to the dispatcher about DUI, the license plate number, the description of the car, and a description of the driver. I even through in a description of the beer can to be sure I did not miss anything. And the dispatcher puts me on hold!!! So, three minutes later, while I am counting to ten, the dispatcher asks me why I didn’t follow the DUI. Explaining, using the simplest words possible, that I was more concerned for my safety and that since the road does not have any exits until it dumps out onto 15th street, I figured that the lady would not pull off into the canal. The dispatcher asked me how I could be sure of that! I pointed out that the lady would be a self-correcting problem at that point.

To make a long story short (too late), I was asked to wait for a deputy. So, while waiting, I watch the drunk lady drive by, clip a mailbox. Not one of those small ones, but one of the big postal service drop-off boxes. She just drives off. The cop, a nice lady, comes up and I politely point out the trail of mayhem. (RCSD have a .40 cal G-22 Glock side-arm, a semi-automatic shotgun, and a M-16 rifle all in their cars. I am polite to people carrying that much firepower.) The nice deputy follows the clear path to the perpetrator and I go to work.

Spurs has an interview today with a nursing home to get a job as an activity directory. I hope she gets the job. She is so happy when she is working

I bid you peace, stormcrow309

There Was No Suicide Note, Just A Crumpled Allegory

In the last book of V for Vendetta, Alan Moore discusses the concept of anarchy. The lead character, V, has brought down the fascistic ruling state, and there is a spate of rioting, looting and generally aggressive lawlessness on the part of the people. This, V explains, is the land of take-what-you-want, a facade of anarchy symptomatic of release from authority. True anarchy comes in the form of the land of do-as-you-please. It seems to me that while chaos (take-what-you-want) may be a necessary precursor to anarchy (do-as-you-please), it is preferable to strive for the latter. I would say that an essential aspect of true anarchy is respect. Not forced respect or blind respect, but certainly respect for one another and respect for what we have, and what we could have, what we could create. There is no respect in the land of take-what-you-want. Divided against itself, it cannot stand; it has to evolve.

I swear to God I will never daylog again. Unless.

Back in my post-college pre-real life days, my mate got me a job in a sex shop. It was cash in hand, so I could still claim the dole at the same time, and have plenty of money to go out with.

At first, it was great. We had a wide selection of porn, sex toys, magazines, videos, equipment, dolls, the usual thing. We prided ourselves on having the most bizarre, exotic shit from all over the world, bring the sexual deviancies of all other cultures together under one semen stained roof.

But then it all started to go wrong. The boss got religion, which always fucks anyone up. He started saying weird shit, like we couldn't stock anything that might injure people - so the Mexican anal piano wire had to go, along with the inflatable compressed air ben-wa balls, the Wank-O-Vomit, and the auto-erotic asphyxiation kit. Then he was all like, hey guys, what if a mother came in and saw Pregnant Bitch Monthly, how do you think she'd feel? And what if a nun came in and got offended by Wimples Filled With Cum, or what if an officer of the RSPCA came in and saw a VHS copy of Donkey FuckWhores 12?

It got weirder. He started insisting on all natural women in the porno flicks - no silicone, no face lifts, none of that. Busty blonde babes were out, unless we could prove they were *natural* busty blonde babes. Then it was all, no facials, no blowjobs, no mouth to genital contact, no money shots, no erect penises, no penetration. I mean, Christ, what porno flick isn't full of blonde chicks sucking cock and getting their huge fake tits covered in sperm?

Slowly but surely, we scaled back our selection. Some days the bin men wouldn't know what was going on, seeing deflated sheep and nun dolls poking out of the dumpsters. The local perverts had a field day, they'd start hanging around at night, waiting to pounce on what we were throwing away.

After a while, it didn't even look like a sex shop any more. The magic was gone, along with the Jesus dildoes and the camel speculums. I started to feel dirty when I looked at porn now, instead of empowered and turned on. So I went there one night, and burned the fucker to the ground.

Two weeks later, when the police came to question me, I learned that some kids had been in there at the time, punk teenagers looking to steal some porn. They all died later in hospital, in terrible, agonising pain. I didn't care. I felt cleansed. Pure. Filled with the light.

(It's public because it's a message, okay?)

I’m sorry, but I don’t understand why so many of our senior members are so pissed off by the new changes. This latest move in particular. It’s an enforcement of copyright, for goodness’ sake. It’s a move to legitimize Everything’s status, to make it more like a community and less like a robbers’ camp. It’s getting rid of things that never had any right to be here. Things that were STOLEN. Yes, they were stolen. When you copy lyrics without permission, you are stealing. I’m sorry if this offends a lot of people, but it’s true. All the justifications and whining about free information and enriching the database don’t change the fact that you are taking something that you are not entitled to.

Sure, it enriches the database. And if I steal your computer, it enriches me. How cool is that? Do all of the whiners about the beloved lyrics nodes also believe that property is theft, and that it’s all right for me and my gang to break into their houses and steal their computers, TVs, rocking chairs, kittens and refrigerator magnets? ‛Cos I’ve got this kickin eclectic theme going on in my living room, and I’d love to enrich it at their expense.

This is not the end of creativity, people. This is putting our ships in order. This is saying that if you really, really think the Holy Database needs to contain the lyrics to ‛Rain from Heaven’, you can do it - IF you take the time to contact Andrew Eldritch and ask him for permission to do so. (Don’t bother - he’s the kind of guy that will not only deny permission but probably join E2 and raid your nodes for future lyrics.)

I’m pretty sure most of us follow the “Cut and Paste writeups will die” philosophy. Why is it so hard for people to see that lyrics nodes are Cut and Paste writeups? Why do so many otherwise reasonable people think that if it rhymes, it’s okay to steal it? What kind of blinkers are you wearing, people?

---

Then there is the general trend of established users who don’t like the whole Braisin the Gar business. These claims have a little more validity, I think. I can certainly sympathize. There is a place for frivolity in Everything, I think. There is a place for wild experiments that don’t always work right, and there is a place for practical jokes as long as they don’t hurt people.

That doesn’t mean Everything has to be based on Animal House. Let’s face it, Animal House is a great place to visit, and they have the best parties on campus, but I wouldn’t want to spend the rest of my life there.

Think about that last phrase, please. Because this is a problem that’s been going on for a long time. Detractors of the “New Everything” are quick to point out that lots of users are now leaving, and fewer new users are signing up, because of the seriousness and high standards of the place. I would call your attention to another phenomenon: experienced users who left because they felt they had outgrown Everything, and casual browsers who never signed up because they felt the place was too wild/silly/eclectic/juvenile for them.

Yes, guys, you can outgrow Everything just like you outgrew Transformers. In terms of human lifespans, E2 hasn’t really been around long enough for much literal outgrowing to have happened. But how many of you know people who left or just plain stopped noding because they felt they had to “move on?” That right there is one of the classic ways of saying “I outgrew it. I discovered I needed something more serious. Something that can actually fulfill its potential instead of eternally looking forward to it.”

Everything has potential. Lots of it. But reaching your potential requires seriousness. No matter what you do, if you don’t take it seriously it isn’t going to happen. Whether you’re a writer, a rapper, a stand-up comedian or a gardener, you need to take your shit seriously or it will never be of any interest to anyone except you and your family. Comedians are a perfect example for my purpose, because they embody the silly and frivolous element that so many people seem to be so nostalgic for. So let’s talk comedians.

The kid in the back of the bus, firing spitballs and mimicking everybody else to make his buddies laugh - you know the kid - is he a comedian? Sure, he’s funny to a point, if you haven’t heard all his routines a million times already, but can he take the stage between Robin Williams and Jerry Seinfeld and carry an audience? Are any of his gags on the same level as Bill Cosby’s Celebrity Basketball routine, which I remember 25 years after I last heard it? Is he, in short, worth a damn?

I don’t think so. He’s all potential. He is Everything just before we started raising the bar. Robin Williams is what Everything could be. If we work at it. If we practice, and polish, and relentlessly toss out the gags that don’t work and the ones that are too blatantly stolen from Jerry Lewis. If we keep our eyes and ears open, and sit up late at night looking for the right words. If we take ourselves seriously. Yes, Robin Williams improvises all the time, but if you think he doesn’t work on his act you probably also think Lance Armstrong is just naturally a good bike rider.

We need to think about this. Because that kid on the bus has equal chances of becoming the future Robin Williams or just another middle-aged waiter in a kitschy Mexican restaurant - the kind of waiter, I might add, that always makes sarcastic remarks about the customers, and then goes home to wonder why he never gets as many tips as the other guys.

We are the kid on the bus. Where are we going?

Once there was a group of people who insisted that they weren't a bunch of "elitist writer snobs" and they just wanted to be a bunch of people hanging out and posting whatever they wanted (whether it was theirs or not) on a website. Then they were told they could only post what was theirs on this website, and they got mad and protested and complained. How did they complain? By writing complex, creative, satirical, funny, annoying, tedious pages upon pages of daylogs as analogies for the "crimes" against them as they saw it. Then the lurker came by and said "gee, I think it's funny that a group of non-writers who want to post other people's stuff has just spent three days WRITING, and on top of that writing nothing but unique, complex nodes that every bit of is their own work and ideas."

The End.

I actually grew up in a garden. It was a lovely garden, or at least I thought so. It was full of wonderful glass sculptures and porceline deities and the like - Gods with names like Shires, and Shanks. In the evening, the Setting Sun would cast Golden Lights from the Northern Sky, which would then trickle through the brightly coloured glass sculptures and shed an amber hue on the ragwort and rat's droppings.

It was beautiful.

People would come, and laugh at me playing in the garden, at its lack of decent flowers or anything very much green for that matter. But I loved the garden. And I knew my parents wanted me to appreciate it too, because they insisted I stay outside. I remember one or two times they even wanted me to experience the whole great outdoors feeling, because I had to sleep under the stars a few times. Or storm clouds. Whatever. That doesn't matter.

It was on one of these frequent outdoors trips that I discovered they had left an old Mills bomb grandad had hidden under his bed-clothes for thirty years, out there, just next to the porch. It caught my attention, in an odd, Apocalypse Now sort of way.

Now I'm not any kind of genius, but I rigged up that old Mills bomb into an ad hoc booby-trap, and left it wired to the cat-flap. The next morning I staggered off to school, thinking nothing more of it. Imagine my horror! Upon arriving home I found all the glass and weeds and porcelaine Gods shattered! Besmirched liberally by bits of Victor Hugo the Cat! I was never able to enjoy the garden after that. I was gutted.

But obviously not as much as Victor Hugo the Cat.

I can only read books, watch films and listen to music made by persons I like, or, at least, do not dislike. Thus, I only managed not throwing away anything by or with The Smashing Pumpkins, Michael Douglas, ... by closing my eyes and sticking my fingers into my ears whenever any information about their personal lives crossed my way.

Unfortunately, I couldn't do that with Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. I read Faust just out of interest when I was 17, I didn't like it¹, but it was kind of intriguing. Anyway, then we read it at school one time, I had to read it for my Abitur another time, plus..., plus a Goethe biography, and since then I get pimples when anyone (I guess it’s pretty specific for my country, so it’s not of world interest, or of any) tries to impress anyone by giving him the Goethe knockout.

When he was a teenager, he wrote an extraordinarily painful poem, in Hessian, about drowning himself because his one and only true love left him. But wait, oh, hey, there she goes, his second one and only true love! Even the fact that the second one had the same first name as I do didn’t help, and the third one and only probably was just off to get him some lemonade.

Well, he was only 17, everyone ages and matures, as he had when Faust was published and naivete was substituted by megalomania. Yeah, Faust‘s

prepar'd to fly
By a new track through ether's wide dominion

like

O'er pine-crown'd height the eagle soars⁰,

but for longing for this in a German Middle Age town, you must first find the time to become an over-educated, frustrated scholar while still pickling and canalizing your teenage wet dreams.

Apropos, Gretchen seemed to be the type of woman he liked, admiring, obedient and fainting when confronted with jewelry, and, as a compensation for his tragic almost-death in the water, dying for him in turn. Well, he shoulnd’t be begrudged on this, as for real life Goethe, his love affairs must have been so dissatisfying that he kept two simultaneously a lot of the time.

Nevermind... He was a classical period genius, he brought up the ideals of Ancient Greece, he sent Iphigenia to Aulis... Which he did, but he also sent a woman who killed her own child to execution²... Huh, this reminds me of something. Now, there’s a humanist!

I know he was a humanist, I know he was an innovator concerning tolerance, humanity, equality, he was a scientist as well as a great poet and so on... but not even in Germany anyone has to drop dead immediatly when being grazed by a „but Goethe wrote...“. I still don’t know what’s the great thing about the meaning of Faust. And besides, there’s still Heinrich Heine, he was a nice guy.³

⁰Taken from http://promo.net/pg.

¹Well, I liked Mephistopheles. So Satan was allright.

²Actually, he was in a secret committee founded by duke Carl August in Weimar which was to decide whether or not the woman, Anna Catharina Höhn, should be executed, which was agreed to by Goethe. She was beheaded on November 28, 1783. (Taken from http://www.morgenwelt.de/kultur/9908-christiane.htm.)

³ He wasn’t. He made himself an uncountable amount of enemies, and in his spare time, he was a melancholic boozer who had several favourite brothels all over Europe. But he was right, and at least he didn’t sit down to write a new tragedy every time a pigeon took a shit on his head.

Nevertheless...

I used play golf with a guy called Gerry. Every Friday afternoon, roundabout lunchtime I guess, Gerry would call me and confirm our weekly golf outing. It was our “thing” we did every week. I’d known Gerry since I was 10 years old. He was best man for me at my wedding and we’d been through thick and thin together.

He was like a brother to me.

One Saturday afternoon, he and I were teeing off from the 12th. I hooked my 3 wood badly and Gerry gave me this really strange look. I ignored it, putting it down to my swing and whatnot, but on the 14th green he did it again as I missed a 6 inch birdie putt.

“Gerry”, I said, “What’s with the funny looks? You act like you’ve never seen me play a bad shot before.”
“Funny looks? What are you talking about? I’m not looking at you funny…”
“Yes you are! What the hell is your problem dude? You never see anyone hit a bad shot before? Jeez, I’ve seen you hit some stinkers in your day.”
“Have not” Gerry replied, obviously hurt.
“Have too motherfucker. In fact, you couldn’t aim shit at a barn door, so enough with the funny looks when I hit a bad shot. Okay?”
“Okay, calm the fuck down like. I only looked at you.”
“Well don’t fucking look at me. Who the hell do you think you are anyway?”
“I’m supposed to be your friend, man.”
“Friend? Don’t make me laugh you boghopping piece of shit. See that guy picking up leaves over there with the green meshback cap?”
“Yeah.”
“He’s more of a friend to me than you Gerry.”
“Where’s all this coming from man? Did you fight with your wife again?”
“My wife? What about my wife? Gerry… are you fucking Sarah? Oh my god, I can’t believe your fucking Sarah. I’m going to kill you man.”

With that, I pulled my 6 iron from my bag and proceeded in chasing Gerry back down the 14th fairway until I caught the bastard on the knee with a mighty swipe. He fell awkwardly, twisting his ankle collapsing in a heap at my feet.

“What the hell are you doing man? You’re crazy!”
“Shut the fuck up Gerry, it’s over. Get what's coming to you.”

I almost beat that piece of shit to death and now he’s in a wheelchair for the rest of his life.

He don’t play golf so good no more.

Some of you are having a hard time distinguishing between what you should do and what you have to do. Understandingly, some of you are confusing the law with what's right¹. More puzzlingly, some of you are failing to distinguish between theft and being a music fan. The last one is not hard.

When little Jimmy borrows little Johnny's fire truck and breaks it, that's petty theft. When Footprints posts the lyrics to Ars Moriendi, that's being a fan of Mr. Bungle. This writeup takes precisely nothing of value from Mike Patton, and does not reduce the demand for this fine rock song. Quite the reverse, it enhances my enjoyment of it, to be able to read those difficult lyrics so well explicated while I play my Mr Bungle CD. I'm going to buy a second Mr. Bungle CD, partly because of Footprints' recommendation and how I have come to appreciate this music.

I shall be sad to see the lyrics go². E2 is a damn good lyrics site, mostly because of the explications and links. Lyrics on E2 are not theft and they are not STOLEN in hysterical capital letters. Removing lyrics is neither morally right, nor good, nor will it improve the quality of the nodegel.

It is however necessary to remove the lyrics. E2 lives in a world of corporations, lawyers and corporate lawyers. I sincerely hope that the "free" world changes its intellectual property trends, but this is neither the time nor the place to make a futile stand.

Peace, and more with the absurd daylogs!.

---

1) Of course "right" is not absolute, it has some lattitude of relativity. However it is a common mistake to assume that it is always exactly equal to the law. Laws can and have in some cases been bought and paid for by companies with thier own best interests at heart. Let's not even begin to think of places and times when the law is just plain morally wrong.

2) Ars Moriendi can apparently stay because it is less than 75 words long. But only if the writeup is padded so that the original content makes up 2/3 of the writeup. Of course.

Stolen thoughts on stealing thoughts:

On the direction of E2:

Well, history and tradition testify that the heart is just about what it was in the beginning; it has undergone no shade of change. Its good and evil impulses and their consequences are the same to-day that they were in Old Bible times, in Egyptian times, in Greek times, in Middle Age times, in Twentieth Century times. There has been no change.

Letter, March 14, 1905, Mark Twain's Letters

On the work of others, purloined or no:

Oh, dear me, how unspeakably funny and owlishly idiotic and grotesque was that "plagiarism" farce! As if there was much of anything in any human utterance, oral or written, except plagiarism! The kernal, the soul -- let us go further and say the substance, the bulk, the actual and valuable material of all human utterances -- is plagiarism. For substantially all ideas are second-hand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources, and daily used by the garnerer with a pride and satisfaction born of the superstition that he originated them; whereas there is not a rag of originality about them anywhere except the little discoloration they get from his mental and moral calibre and his temperament, and which is revealed in characteristics of phrasing. When a great orator makes a great speech you are listening to ten centuries and ten thousand men -- but we call it his speech, and really some exceedingly small portion of it is his. But not enough to signify. It is merely a Waterloo. It is Wellington's battle, in some degree, and we call it his; but there are others that contributed. It takes a thousand men to invent a telegraph, or a steam engine, or a phonograph, or a photograph, or a telephone or any other important thing -- and the last man gets the credit and we forget the others. He added his little mite -- that is all he did. These object lessons should teach us that ninety-nine parts of all things that proceed from the intellect are plagiarisms, pure and simple; and the lesson ought to make us modest. But nothing can do that.

Samuel Clemens in a letter to Helen Keller, 1903

On adding the work of others, with purpose:

PLAGIARISM, n. A literary coincidence compounded of a discreditable priority and an honorable subsequence.

PLAGIARIZE, v. To take the thought or style of another writer whom one has never, never read.

On those who fear change:

CYNIC, n. A blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be. Hence the custom among the Scythians of plucking out a cynic's eyes to improve his vision.

Ambrose Bierce - the Devil's Dictionary

So, today I returned from my well-earned summer vacation, for good this time, I hope.

And the first thing I note is that there's a New Policy.

Finally an excuse to get up from my lazy ass and write a nuke request for all this crap that has been torturing a corner of my mind for all these long years!

I went to user search and saw what nodes had to go.

I fail to see why stricter enforcement of copyright would do harm to the site. I have always valued E2 primarily for the original content; Lyrics and crap like that have always been of secondary value.

I have noded other people's works mostly because they belong to the ever-growing respected group of "recognized net folklore". Yet, even those things are difficult to node. A case in point was a writeup rm -rf /. I noted, one beautiful day, that no one had noded this classic story in its entirety - but wangmu had written a summary of it. I noded the whole damn thing from Wiretap.

Yet, very soon after that it started to gnaw me. Wangmu's summary was good enough. People were also upvoting my easy copy-paste job. Why? Wangmu had needed some effort. I copied. Okay, I had the complete story, but that's not the point.

I'm rather happy that, despite of my sinful transgression and journey into endless nightmares and shameful feelings, the end score is a) wangmu the masterful summarizer: Rep: 57 ( +62 / -5 ) 2 C!s, and b) WWWWolf the shameless plagiarist: Rep: 49 ( +51 / -2 ) 1 C!.

I wish to offer my apologies to everyone involved. I'm sorry.

As for the future, I'll do what I had been doing primarily in past: Write in my own words. At least mostly. =)

I have included here a copy of my nuke request, just for the sake of historical interest. =)

---

The Gigantic Copyright Law-Related Nuke Request
Preserved for future generations, verbatim

(Old Beard Grumbling: Others babbling about "...E2 has ceased to be a community blah blah..." what? No longer a community because we can't cut and paste all of the crap we want? Never stopped us before from writing good writeups, though, that have actual content!)

Right. I'm not complaining much about the copyright deal, the Law is Law. (sometimes a silly law, but let's not argue).

My only complaint is that this was yet another E2 managerial decision (in vein of the honor roll) that favors those with few nodes and is less easier on people with tons of writeups. Like me. Others need 2 minutes to go through their nodes and list the crap. I need a freaking lifetime.

So boohoo. I spent a LONG time - almost, like, 20 minutes - can you believe how long that was? almost an eternity - cursorily glancing at User Search XML Ticker results and decided that following may be Going.

I removed some lyrics and stuff from nodes that had other content and those should be left right where they are (umm, "Brandon Lee", "Walking in the Air"). There are some works I have asked permissions to node to (or have translated) - "The Unofficial Guide to Tinysex" and "Leonardo Da Vinci and the Internet", specifically. There's one case where I removed the original Finnish lyrics and left the translation intact because it was made by me ("Haaskalinnut Saalistaa") - is this okay? Also, I have noded a significant chunk of Principia Discordia (especially the new Steve Jackson edition), which is public domain ("reprint what you like") even when it's a quite modern work.

• Elvenpath
• Over the Hills and Far Away (there's not much to say about it, really, why not just blow it away...)
• Ballad of Linus Torvalds (I'm pretty sure they wouldn't mind it being posted here anyway, the subject of the song being such a fine sharer of code and knowledge, but... No Additional Commentary To Add About The Song. Sorry.)
• Kuusessa Hevon (The translation isn't *that* good, dammit! It isn't even half as funny translated anyway!)
• Humppasonni (Ditto. Well, at least I'm happy with other half of the translation. Not enough, though.)
• The Chair
• Viruwormy (This is almost nearing the status of A Freely Distributable Gem of Net.folklore, but take it away if it feels like the right thing to do.)
• The Chair
• rm -rf / (This is a cut-and-paste job of an Ancient Usenet Legend; Another user's writeup, added before mine, gives an adequate summary of the story.)
• EUnet Finland announcement 5/93
• BananaQuest
• The Creation
• What Shall We Do With The Recalcitrant Poster? (Usenet article)
• The Usenet Olympics, The Usenet Olympics 1991 - Part 1, The Usenet Olympics 1991 - Part 2, The Usenet Olympics 1991 - Part 3, The Usenet Olympics 1991 - Part 4 (Usenet article)
• Make Make
• Sadeness
• The Voice & The Snake
• Bohemian Warranty (again, net.lore...)
• The Best is Yet To Come
• Lapsuuden Sankarille (Oh, a beautiful song, which I also quite badly translated, nothing to worry about... I could rant about this as much as I like, but nothing substantial would surface anyway.)
• The Tao of Internet Relay Chat (again, net.lore)
• Avatar vs. Cloud: Who would win? (Usenet article)
• Hello Cruel World (Such a short thing and the whole point is there, can't elaborate...)
• Spam: Chat with "Jennifer"? (It *may* fall under fair use, but what the hell is the damn point?...)
• Fahrenheit (Already abridged in fears of Being Harshened Upon, please nuke it...)
• Eight Virtues (Usenet ripoff, already covered mostly by the other writeups; I should write about the Codex separately)
• The 12 Traditions of soc.bi (Shameless usenet ripoff)

Quite honestly, when I noded these it did feel quite wrong. The Fahrenheit thing was so bad that it has bugged me every now and then. And the pointlessness of the spam answer. Should have acted earlier.

And if there's any more of the shit out there, I may have missed some - please don't hurt me, just quietly nuke it and let it be. =)

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Today at lunch, I sprang a question on Edward, as I am wont to do, and which he fielded with his omnipresent aplomb.

The question was "What if I were female? The exact same person, only a woman?" He knew, of course, that I was asking what kind of a relationship we would have in that parallel universe.

And he said "You'd be perfect. We'd be married already." As you might imagine, that was one of the most touching things I've ever heard. Even so, if you've never lived across the inch-wide, million-mile deep chasm from the person you love and are devoted to, you may not be able to really realize how it made my heart leap to hear him say it, even while I'll never be able to understand the make-or-break importance that a sexual match/mismatch has to a monosexual person.

I don't want to sound smug, but I maintain that that was a thousand times better than anything someone said to you today. And I have the best friend in the world.

Thank you, Edward!
I'm proud to love you.

online traffic school is a good thing. not only do i not have to spend my weekend in a classroom with creepy people, but it gives me something to do from 1-3 am, when i'm not sleeping anyway.

once again: if you like it, steal it.

Clearing my head,
a penny for my thoughts
A penny here-
A penny there.
Is that all they are worth?

You wouldn’t pick up a penny,
as you walk down the street-
but if my thoughts were in the gutter,
would you bend down to pick up me?

a penny for my thoughts
A penny here-
A penny there.
Is that all they are worth?

Wipe me clean and stick me in your pocket.
Would you keep my thoughts on hand,
Or toss them in a well?

a penny for my thoughts
A penny here-
A penny there.
Is that all they are worth?

Get rich and marry a model,
Drive a fancy car and live in L.A.
With one penny all your dreams could come true.
A penny for my thoughts you ask,
But can you really spare the change?

to the public I must appear to be extremely bitter and resentful...but I'm not-I swear, maybe it's because I write it all out of me...

last night i took the time to tell someone how special they were to me and how lucky i am to have them in my life. this was a really big step for me because he has told me that he has the same feelings toward me, but i have never really been able to verbalize these feelings to him. i guess i realized how important it is to make sure that people know you love them. His response to my heart-felt admition, "you're silly."...I will never understand men...(I apologize for the over-use of elipses, but they fill in where words can't)

The following text appeared on my homenode from 12 August 2003 until 23 February 2004. I used to keep this kind of thing on my Scratch Pad, but daylogs are a useful storage venue, too.

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12 August 2003, Eugene, Oregon

So. Like I said in my editor log for this month, the recent policy shift concerning copyright means I've got my work cut out for me, cleaning out old poetry and writeups and cleaning up the ones I decide to keep. I'm incredibly intimidated by the thought of writing Robert Creeley to ask whether I need his permission or his publisher's okay if I want to keep my writeups about his stuff on E2. On the upside, Dan Bern's webmistress says it's totally cool for me to node about him, and that she can hook me up with an official okay from "the big guy" if need be. Rock!

My last self-indulgently autobiographical homenode journal entry was on 23 June 2003. I've moved it to a daylog, but mostly for my own reference.