Day: June 18, 2013

The Zappas on Video Games

2013-06-18, 9:09 pm
Categories: Books, Cartoons, Games, Movies, Music, Politics, Stream of Consciousness, Tech

The benefits of being a pack rat:

Sharkey posted this on his blog in...according to the date stamp, November of 2002.

I remembered it a couple days ago and I thought, you know what? I bet I don't even have to dig through old hard drives to find it. I bet my obsessive process of backing up data and copying it over from old computer to new has survived two new computers, four different Linux distributions, and I don't even know how the hell many hard drives. (I am, after all, the guy who corrupted his hard drive when he installed Windows 98 and recovered the data in 2008.)

Anyhow, I was right. Sitting right here on my current computer, after all those moves.

(And then I get to thinking, "Wait...I've only gotten two new computers in the last decade?" But then I remember no, there's also the Mac Mini I used to have hooked up to my TV and now use as a backup server, the Win7 desktop I currently have hooked up to my TV, my laptop, my phone, my tablet, and assorted old towers that have managed to pile up in my office and get used occasionally for various purposes. Plus my wife's desktop and two laptops.)

You know, just the other day my coworkers were talking about Hoarders, and I commented that the nice thing about being a digital packrat is that the data I've been holding on to for decades doesn't take up a hell of a lot of space. My comic collection, on the other hand...

Anyhow, not the point. The point is, here's Innerview: The Zappas on Video Games, by Merl H Reagle, JoyStik, January 1983. Scanned by, and from the personal collection of, Scott Sharkey, and preserved through over a decade's worth of computer migrations by packrat Thaddeus R R Boyd.

Innerview, Page 1Innerview, Page 2

Interesting, but not altogether surprising, that games were already being scapegoated by politicians and the media for juvenile delinquency as far back as 1983.

I also love the story of Frank recording the noise in an airport arcade and then listening to it on the plane. I think he also tells the story in The Real Frank Zappa Book -- that or I've been misremembering where I read it for the past decade.

(Christ. An interview from 30 years ago which I've been copying from hard drive to hard drive for one-third of that time...)

Props to Perry

2013-06-18, 8:44 pm
Categories: Politics, Stream of Consciousness, Tech

There's a lot I don't like about Rick Perry -- about his state, its legislature, his party.

But as I noted a few weeks back, that legislature just passed a landmark E-Mail privacy bill.

And last week, Perry signed it.

Obviously, in the intervening weeks there have been some stark reminders about why government snooping on E-Mail should be reined in. And I'm sure that informed Perry's decision.

But the bottom line is, he did the right thing. At this moment in time, the governor of Texas has a better record on E-Mail privacy than the President of the United States.

There are moments -- they're rare, but there are moments, like this one -- where I see the Republican Party live up to its promise. Where it demonstrates that it can defend individual liberties from runaway government. That I think, y'know, maybe they've got something here. Maybe they can be a force for good.

And then I see a photo like this one
Pat Robertson and Donald Trump
and I'm like, "Oh, right. Republicans."

But what the hell -- Jonathan Strickland, the guy who sponsored this bill and, I assume, the son of Hank Hill's boss, is 29 years old. He'll be around long after those two assholes are dead. If guys like him and Derek Khanna represent the future of the Republican Party, then it's a future where I could maybe someday see myself aligning more with the Republicans than the Democrats.

They're really gonna have to do something about that whole anti-gay, anti-woman, anti-minority, anti-poor people, anti-science thing first, though.

(And I really should be careful about that "Republicans I'd consider voting for" label. I voted for McCain in 2004 and look how that turned out.)

(I also voted for Jan Brewer in 2006. Though in my defense, I was misled into believing I was voting for Janet Napolitano.)

(Come to think of it, the "Democrats I'd consider voting for" list hasn't gone so well for me either.)

Photo courtesy of Talking Points Memo, as linked by Mark Evanier.