WillWybrow.com

This is how it starts. And then everything goes downhill. First one, then the rest and it spreads like a virus. Sometimes when things get infected, the only answer to save yourself is amputation. Serious amputation. Nobody ever considers the limb’s feelings with an amputation. It may well be perfectly happy to continue, ignorant of its malady. Or maybe it wants to drag the rest of the body down with it? Sorry, but you’re just not that important.

Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, FUCK!

They say that a bad workman blames his tools, but I think that’s a little unfair on the workman.

Sure, if he unfairly blames them, the saying still holds. If the tools are in full working order then he has no excuse. Should have practised more.

If he’s got a shitty set of tools but has every opportunity to get new ones, the saying also still holds. He has only himself to blame.

If, on the third hand, the workman has no choice but to be supplied by a third party and cannot do anything to improve the quality of his broken hammer or blunt saw, he can’t exactly take responsibility for doing the best he can with what he’s given. I think there is a minority of unfairly blamed metaphoric workmen who are struggling along in silence, unable to point out the flaws in their shoddy equipment because everyone jumps to the conclusion that he’s projecting his own faults onto his stuff.

My best wishes go out to them, wherever and whoever they are.

Well, I finally got around to joining the BHA, the first of my friends to do so, I believe (correct me if otherwise).

While searching around on their pages, I noticed their list of student and local humanist groups. And what did I discover? The Warwick Atheists aren’t listed! What the fuck, guys, how can we have missed this?

So I sent a nice e-mail down to ask them to put up the society’s details.

It helps if you look at the five-long series of films as not a series of films, but more like a TV serial. In each one, we’re introduced to new people and we learn more about the old ones. Saw could have worked if it were a horror-plot-twisting weekly thing to tell the same story. Sort of a Dexter-Lost hybrid.

The problem is, people don’t look at it that way. They expect each installment to have its own riveting plot and have a beginning and a proper conclusion. Well, it totally doesn’t work that way. One has to look at the story as a whole.

And obviously the people who say “OH LOL SAW IS JUST AN EXCUES 4 LOTS OV BLUD AND VIALENCE ITS NOT VERY GUD LOL” are really closeminded. Maybe I should get some DVD rips and edit it together as a kind of Saw TV show. As long as I don’t tell Lionsgate about it, I should be fine, right?

“Smith’s Law“

You know full well that there have been more religious atrocities than just September the Eleventh, and that it was just one example out of the thousands that there are of religion or religious privilege leading to suffering.

It’s obvious that you don’t actually care or aren’t fully convicted to your sentiments, otherwise you would have donated your money to someone working to prevent starvation. But let’s carry on as though you didn’t base your comment on hypocrasy. Maybe these charities that are feeding and educating those in the third world would also be prohibiting contraception in AIDS-plagued countries.

If you want people to donate more to reduce the ’suffering’ of those dying of starvation (and chances are if they live in poverty, they’ve been dying of starvation their whole lives), then you have two options. You can forcibly take money from the rich and deal it out to the poor who need it. You can be Robin Hood and look after the lowly at cost to everyone else. Or you can realise that nobody is going to give more than they want to, and those who want to aren’t going to give more than they can spare.

That means that, in order to maximise what is given, we have to work on three things: the generosity of the people involved, their wisdom to make the right choices in picking charities and the amount they can afford to spare. There is always going to be a massive difference between the poor and the rich. We will never have people who are not ‘worse off,’ I’m sure you can agree. So the only way that the worse off will become less worse off is if everyone becomes less worse off. The whole scale moves up a bit.

There’s a family I know back in Basingstoke whose main household earner tithes to his local church. That’s ten percent of his wage, straight up, going to that ill-deserving building and community. Now imagine that this man had been raised freethought instead of Christian. Imagine the good people that have been sucked in by religion that could otherwise have been free to put their money to better use.

Next, in your own presentation you talked about the Church requesting money from the Government to upkeep their buildings. You’ll have to remind me of the figure, but I know it was immense. And I don’t think it’s wrong to assume that this kind of thing happens really often. But so what? Well, what if the Government put the Church money instead into the Gift Aid scheme? What if the Government promised to match 100% of a charitable donation by UK taxpayers instead of just ~20%? That could almost double the outgoing donations of this country. How many people would die of malnutrition then?

This site clocks the running cost of the CoE at £1,000,000,000 per year… If you don’t see that source of money as something worth tapping into by spreading reason (specifically: humanist values) throughout our little country, why do you support secularity? Just to be less annoyed at theists getting all the breaks?

While I would love to think that our donations are actually making a difference to the millions of suffering people in the world, it’s hard to shake the feeling that we’re just putting a bucket under a leaky pipe. Instead of going after the source of the problem, we’re enabling the numbers of those suffering to keep steady, neither dwindling through getting what they need to stand on their own two feet nor dying out completely because nobody cares anymore. The people with the money are wasting it on churches, and it’s high time people did something about that.

BBC News article that backs up claims like “our money isn’t helping” and “people give unwisely to charities”. Enjoy, motherfuckers.

Yeah, I donated to a fucking CHARITY.

How selfless am I?

The Tool Chronicler was a much better blogger than I am. I have lost it over the years. All I chat about these days is the mundane stuff that happens in my life. There is no more of the ranting at ill-educated single mothers who smoke over their children, or rude people who expect to be appreciated despite their discourteous attitude. No more complaining about idiots who can’t use the self-checkouts at the supermarket; they’re just laughed off nowadays. There’s not even that little feeling of superiority when I realise that these people just aren’t as perceptive as I am, and if I looked at the world through their eyes, I’d be a touch less self aware and maybe see everything through a foggy haze, or as though I’d been drinking a bit.

It’s because everyone’s much cleverer now. And more serious. I can’t just yell at an idea without having some solid reasons, or my criticisms will be open to criticisms. So that just leaves me with moaning about bad personal experiences (installing Linux) or jesting at things we can all agree are bad ideas (religion).

But I still hate Million Dollar Baby (because it’s shit).

An odd way to start, I suppose, but I haven’t written here in a long time, and I have two things to tell you. I will start with “faith”.

Atheist Bus Campaign

I’m sure many people must have heard about this already, so I’ll keep it short. The first atheist advertising campaign in the UK has received incredibly overwhelming support from everyone. And I mean everyone. London buses will, starting in January, sport the slogan “there’s probably no god, now stop worrying and enjoy your life.” Damn fucking straight. None of this hellfire bullshit, just plain old humanism. Donate to them or just check out the official website.

Home Media Server

My dreams of creating a superpowered home server to do everything imaginable were shattered with my rejection letter from ASDA. Maybe they have enough staff… maybe not. I don’t see how they could possibly deny me, I’m hyperqualified for the job. In the interim, however, I am using the box I collected from Basingstoke last weekend (and carried all the way home from the station) to start things rolling.

My first attempts to install anything from Ubuntu 8.10 to OpenSUSE were painfully shot down by unspecified, random errors. After trying about six different distributions, I thought I’d give OpenSUSE’s “memory test” option on the installation disc a whirl. Lo and behold, my RAM was ruined. So, harvesting some from an old, broken machine I keep around hoping it will be of some use one day (and how right I was to do so), I slapped in Ubuntu 5.10 and fired her up.

The installation was successful, I suppose. But Ubuntu comes in two flavours these days, ’server’ and ‘desktop,’ and I know which edition I didn’t get. It was fun to play with, but two things irritated me: not enough applicable software included on the CD and too lovey-dovey with Gnome. To make matters worse, apt-get is a piece of dogshit. Or maybe it’s because of how old the distribution is.

Whatever the reason for this series of repeated failures, I finally sucked it up and took the 6-CD download of Fedora 9. Oh, pretty Fedora 9, you do make me smile. Everything I wanted was included on the discs and they all installed without a hitch. Seriously.

I had a bit of a struggle with SELinux’s overbearing, right-wing approach to things. It felt like living under the threat of thought-police, who would punish you even if you considered doing anything wrong. So I disabled that motherfucker. The firewall, too, was somewhat amusing. Apparently “disable” means “enable,” and “enable” also means “enable,” so I just had to do it the old-fashioned way and open up all the ports I wanted.

The media streaming program uShare also came on the Fedora CDs, which is pleasant because the PS3 is hooked up to the only TV in the house, and everyone’s movies are on different computers, so a centralised server with massive storage is the best option. When I tried installing uShare on Ubuntu, it gave me a big old one-fingered salute and bade me to walk right on.

But all of this is really irrelevant when you look at it, because it’s all running on an 800MHz Athlon with 256MB of RAM and 30GB of combined hard disk space. Fucking useless, all of it.

I dream of numerous cores, high-speed RAM and SATA disks joined in an unbreakable alliance to bring the power of streaming media to the house whilst also serving a bittorrent managing service and maybe even some other fun side projects, like a bit of webspace.

If Sugar Puffs are toasted puffs of wheat, and Rice Krispies are toasted puffs of rice, why is there not a breakfast cereal of toasted puffs of corn, basically: popcorn? It might seem weird, but think about it for a second. You know that Butterkist popcorn stuff that’s laden with toffee; that would make a good breakfast cereal, right? Maybe it would. Someone should try it and get back to me.

Writing about Red Alert 3 made me realise that there needs to be a cool word for the DRM crisis that EA have instigated. I wanted to make a play on the word “dictatorship,” but it didn’t pan out. So for now, we’ll have to call it DRMinism. It rhymes with ‘feminism,’ which is almost good enough. But, fuck DRM.