I’m not dead. I just haven’t had the time or desire to update this site much. Mostly, my time’s been eaten up by my day job, my second freelance/part-time job, and Champions Online. I will leave it up to the reader to determine the exact percentages of my time eaten up by each item.

Finally got Master of Orion 2 to work, no thanks to Digital River and Atari. Instead, I requested a refund for the purchase, and ordered a used copy from Amazon. Add Dosbox, and the game’s working great!

I’m not a big fan of his in general, but kudos to President Obama for his support of new nuclear power plants. Granted, this isn’t so much an instance of his doing something right as an instance of his continuing a good policy that President Bush laid the groundwork for, but it’s still a good thing.

I’m also pretty pleased by recent moves to lift the stupid DADT policy. I may be pretty conservative and prudish personally, but I see no reason why an individual should be disqualified from serving one’s country simply because of their sexual orientation ^[a]

1. Incidentally, I also wouldn’t mind supporting homosexual marriages, if it’s a.) passed as an actual law, not forced into place by a judge with delusions of legislative power and b.) passed with language that explicitly states that a wedding officiant cannot be sued if he/she refuses to perform a homosexual marriage for whatever reason (I’m actually thinking of ethics/religious objections, but prefer to err on the side of freedom for the officiant here). [↩]

Fake It ‘Til You Make It?

I know I’ve not posted anything lately, despite my promise to do better. I kept writing things that turned out to sound a lot more hostile than I wanted, so I kept ditching the posts I had queued up. Anyway, I think I have a few for the next few days that’ll be better. We’ll see.

First, a question (and answer) from Dave Ramsey’s MyTotalMoneyMakeover.com, about will power and behavior:

QUESTION: A Twitter follower wants to know what techniques Dave uses to delay getting what he wants.

In his response (I recommend listening to the response; I always prefer Dave’s actual words over the summaries on that site), Dave points out that we have to intellectually know why we’re denying ourselves our immediate wants, and he acknowledges that it’s hard. He also points out that as we exercise that willpower, it does get somewhat easier to keep at it.

It’s kind of funny. This is something I have several examples of first-hand experience with, and I keep forgetting it myself. Discipline is hard, but it gets easier if you exercise it. Unfortunately, it gets hard again a lot faster than it gets easier.

It was perfectly okay to call President Bush a “chimp”, but any such comparison involving Barack Obama is racist. Portraying Barack Obama as The Joker is “dangerous”; doing the same to President Bush was “brilliant.” Say Anything quotes a DNC Press release that says that “anger and discord did not serve Republicans well in 2008,” while descriptions used to describe the anger and discord accurately describe the sort of things seen from Democrats as well. President Bush’s warnings that rogue nations could get nuclear weapons and provide them to terrorists were “fearmongering”, while President Obama’s declarations that unemployment could hit double-digits if the stimulus package wasn’t passed (oops) and that we must pass healthcare reform if we ever want to improve the deficit (huh?) are, well, not fearmongering at all, you right-wing fascist!

All of this makes me very tired. It reminds me of a bumpersticker that Kevin Baker (I think) has posted before, which read “Dissent Is Was Patriotic – Now that we’re in charge, shut the hell up” (or something along those lines).

I believe that most^[a] people who want to give the government more power to intervene in the economy, healthcare, and pretty much everything else honestly mean well. I think they’re misguided and dangerous, but I think they mean well. Many of them are intelligent and honest and I enjoy discussing issues with those people. The problem is that they’re largely drowned out by those people who believe all of the things that appear in the top paragraph above.
All of this is part of the reason why blogging has been slower around here lately. I don’t care for the Republican party, but I care a hell of a lot less for the Democratic party, since the freedoms they want to infringe upon mean a lot more to me than the ones that the Republicans tend to step on. So, the current Democratic control of both the Legislative and Executive branches of the federal government (not to mention their control of my state government) is somewhat disheartening.

There are also other reasons for the slower blogging. I’m still participating in the Read 100 challenge from the Kanawha County library system, and have picked up my pace there considerably. I’ve taken up a small project outside of work that’s eating up some additional time, and I’ve volunteered to help the church’s choir by manning the sound board during services.

Of course, there’s also the fact that I’m married now, which provides me (much to my wife’s chagrin) an actual live human being in the house who can listen to my rants. That somewhat reduces my need to write about a lot of these topics.

All of that said, I’m going to try to do better starting this week. I’m going to aim for at least one post a day Monday through Friday, and I’ll try to get a weekend post in as often as possible.

1. Not all, by any means. There also exist, on both sides of the political spectrum, those who take up the arguments of well meaning people simply because they see those arguments as a means to an end, where the desired end is “more power.” [↩]

I posted two posts last month. At one point, a close friend asked me if I had just abandoned One Stack Mind completely. The answer, as I wrote on Tax Day, is no, but that I just haven’t felt all that motivated to write much.

I want this month to be different, though, so I’m starting a challenge. I am going to try to write at least one post a day for the entire month, and each post must be at least 250 words on WordPress’s word count. (That is, I can post shorter posts, but those don’t count — I have to have at least one post with a total of at least 250 words each day).

The good thing is, I have the next couple of Fridays off, so maybe I can get a few spare posts written then to make things easier on me during the week.

We’ll see how this goes…

(This post, as of the word “goes” above, was 152 words long according to WordPress, so it doesn’t count.)

Merry Christmas, everyone!