A quick comment on devastation

Human beings are, collectively, quite stupid. Natural disasters can happen anywhere at any time...and, ultimately no one is 100% safe from, say, flooding or storm damage and so forth--but there's a way to minimize the risk.

DON'T LIVE IN PLACES PRONE TO THEM.

Every year, some part of Florida gets raped by a hurricane. Now it's N'Orleans turn. Every year, tornados rip the hell out of large tracts of the Midwest. Sure, body counts in these situations usually aren't very high, but just think of how many folks have lost all their property, their homes, and--for all intents and purposes--all structure to their lives. The toll is depressingly high.

And yet...folks continue to live in these places. How many times have you heard a tornado survivor, standing in the splintered wreckage of his/her home, say something along the lines of, "Well, I guess I'll just rebuild here, God willing." Yeah...so that next year another tornado can blow through a smash your brand new home to kindling.

Don't be so fucking stupid, people. When the world smashes you flat, it's more often than not because you live in a risky area. That's not always true, of course, as freak weather conditions can happen anywhere...but if you live in an area prone to yearly tornadoes, hurricanes, floods, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, mudslides, plagues of frogs, or whatever, just LEAVE. It's clear the planet doesn't want you there.

Jozart Studies and Cal U, Day 2

Office hours today. Drank a lot of caffeine. The end.

Then I took a walk down to Jozart Studios in downtown Cal to see my old professor/colleague Fred Lapisardi, who works with the place and also sells old books there. Holy COW is that place awesome! There's a coffeeshop that just has the best prices ever on imported teas, a huge amount of space with chairs and couches and all manner of comfy seating, a stage equipped with professional lighting and sound, art everywhere...quite frankly, it's the most impressive art-space I've ever seen. It beats every studio/arts center in Pittsburgh. I've already spoken to the owner about performing there and becoming involved with the running/maintenance of the place--and I've already gotten a few students interested in going there, the most noticeable being Mortuary Girl, who was there when I walked in. Apparently, it's her favorite place on campus and she's been bringing all her friends down. I demanded that she tell everyone she knows about the place or she'll fail my class. :)

More on this later, of course, as I'm going to an opening there this evening....

But check it: Halloween. What say Nyarlathotep, the Crawling Chaos, performs a live soundtrack to Nosferatu as part of the festivities? The crowd is almost guaranteed to be frickin' huge!

Bloggity Fun!

In between classes, today, I discovered two awesome blogs that you all may dig:

Queen of Cream is a fairly new (i.e., only three or four entries) blog concerning working in the sex industry in NYC--particularly, working the counter at a sex-toy store. The most recent entry concerns the day Hillary Swank and two ultra-gay friends stopped in. It's friggin' hysterical but...honestly, the reason I like the story so much is that I can't stop picturing Hillary Swank in a vinyl policewoman's uniform. LE ROWR!

And then there's demonbaby, the hysterical blog of some fellow from the Left Coast who travels a lot, posts pictures of silly things he finds while travelling, and tells hysterical stories about goofy shit. A while back I posted a link to his Japanese sex-toys post, but the rest of his stuff is even BETTER!

Best quote ever: "I fucked it. I fucked it, and I hated myself, and now it's gone." (From the story he tells of poking a vagina-in-a-beercan contraption bought as a joke in NYC. I bet Cherry Bomb from the first blog sold it to him!)

Microsoft chokes on Hollywood's Dick! News at 11!

Oh, this is smart: Windows Vista is going to be riddled--literally riddled--with "antipiracy measures" enforced by Hollywood studios.

Is this going to matter much to power users like myself? Almost certainly not. It's going to be hacked long before the OS even reaches RC1. But is it going to matter to average, everyday people who just want to watch a fucking DeeVamaDee on their computers? Yes. A lot.

I've already begun telling people to forget about Vista unless they want to take the time and effort to learn how to hack it properly. If they're not interested in that, I've told them to just get a PowerPC-based Mac running OS X.4.

Conversely, though...I wonder if all this DRM bullshit in Windows is going to encourage more people to cross the line from being plain ol' vanilla end users to learning more and more about their OS so they can beat it into working the way they thing it should? I never knew shit about Win 3.1, but as soon as Win95 came out I began to learn everything I could about the fundamental processes of the OS so I could make it actually work instead of crash every ten minutes.