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23 January 2004 (much later)

As it turns out, I lied flagrantly when I said that I was going to go to bed. I actually stayed up and wrote a CLAWmarks article. Which I just submitted to the Kommmittteee. w00t!

23 January 2004

CurrentAffairs ? is back in action; yay! (No, I haven't actually updated the page yet; I am very sleepy and just online to check my email.)

Favourite example of orthographical ineptness for today: people who spell voila "viola". I am tempted to pepper my replies to them with random exclamations of "harpsichord!" or "xylophone!".

17 January 2004

I've been accepted by the engineering faculty! I will be doing a Bachelor of Science in Engineering (Mechatronics). I will make an appointment with a student advisor at some point to find out how much of the four-year degree I will actually have to do. I hope to avoid the first year at least.

...

I briefly contemplated removing the ranty bits from down below (lots of other people have removed their comments on the subject), but I've decided to leave everything as it is. This isn't actually a real blog, but it's meant to behave like one - so while I will add comments to my past entries, I will not subtract anything.

If I were to comment on this whole thing again, I would probably say some things differently, and express some of my thoughts more clearly than I did. However, I said what I said, and I can't unsay it. My words will exist for at least a short while in the memories of other people, and until the internet blows up they will be stored in the Wiki's history, where anyone can go and look at them. So removing them from my page would be pointless.

I'm not trying to make any statement about the disagreement itself by doing this; I'm just doing what I believe to be the appropriate thing to do. I believe that disagreements which start in the open should be kept in the open, and that people should take responsibility for their words. Selective removal of information from a public debate can only sow confusion and encourage misunderstandings.

For those of you who are confused newcomers, as I was on Wednesday, a somewhat coherent summary of what everyone is obliquely and obscurely arguing about was made by PlosiGuant ? on WikiRant ?. Useful, this.

12 January 2004

You are all invited to my

Birthday Party

Venue: 8A Cloete Rd, University Estate (ElfBoy ? and InfernalRabbi ?'s place)
Date: Sunday 18 January 2003 Time: 18h00
Theme: Multiclassing (I have applied to the engineering faculty; yay!) Other: No swimming. Bring your own helicopter.

ElfBoy ?'s Helpful Directions: Take the Roodebloem Road off-ramp from the Eastern Boulevard. As you come off the freeway you will arrive at a T-junction. Turn left and travel up Upper Roodebloem Road. Cloete Road is the last left turn before you reach De Waal Drive. Number 8A is on your right shortly before you reach the end of Cloete Road.

In other news, I used three of my vouchers to get Cryptonomicon (very cool!) , The Mammoth Book Of Best New SF 16 (which is very cool so far), and The Science of the Discworld 2. I'm saving the fourth for the first book, which will apparently be back in stock soon.

ElfBoy ? helped me install Fedora Core I on my com-pew-tor. It is sw33t. The install was more complicated than absolutely necessary because of Thorin, Despoiler of CDs ? - the discs ElfBoy ? made were a bit screwed, and we had to do a bit of cunning surgery with a Red Hat 9 installation. I have the disc images on ElfBoy ?'s huge hard drive now, so it's all fine.

I'm intending to get CurrentAffairs ? running again, now that Cas is back. Yay!

<rant>

Feeling out of the loop a bit owing to distance from internet. Read HardBoiled ?'s page. Being out of the loop, I have absolutely no idea who did what to whom, how and why, but I think that damning an extended and varied social group on the basis of the actions of one unspecified individual is a bit extreme, and that the characterisation of the group given is unfair. A fair number of us are entirely secure geeks, do not snivel, and feel no need to inflict unpleasantness on others. I am curious as to what HardBoiled ? considers to be the "majority". New CLAWs? One of the scattered factions of Old CLAWs? One of the CLAWs Auxiliary Corps? An entirely different subset?

Eh. I'm not trying to criticise any specific person here, but a mentality that has long irritated me is that of the Born Again Mainstream Person. Like the science fiction writer who vociferously denies that he writes science fiction (because science fiction has no literary merit, of course), the Born Again Mainstream Person tries to distance himself as much as possible from subcultures, activities and people who are considered by the mainstream to be geeky or otherwise uncool, in spite of having once participated in and socialised with them respectively. It's not so much the distancing ("I'm totally over that goth/cardgaming/insert other uncool thing here stuff") as the attacking ("Well, obviously they can't get laid/are socially incompetent/are depressed/do various bad things because they're a bunch of loser geeks") that pisses me off. It is amusing to hear such attacks from people who are accusing others of being insecure.

I don't believe that there is any correlation between degree of subcultural obsession and niceness. If you have sound evidence to the contrary, show me. There is really no need to treat people like crap merely because you no longer find their interests as fascinating as they do. Can't we all just fucking get along?

</rant>

Tuesday addendum: At no point did I suggest that you should remove what you had written, or that you didn't have the right to write it. We are all entitled to say absolutely anything we want on the wiki, on our personal pages or otherwise. However, everyone who reads what we have written (and our personal pages are also something that other people read - we're not just all shouting into a vacuum) is entitled to disagree with what we have said, and say so. Such is the nature of a public forum, and this is what the wiki is.

You indiscriminately directed some rather harsh criticism at a group of people which included me. I thought you were wrong, so I said so. I apologise if this unduly startled or upset you. I interpreted the reasoning you gave for your opinion as an instance of a broader phenomenon, which I commented on above. You say that I have misjudged you; perhaps you are right. As I said, the rant was not entirely about you or this specific issue.

And name calling? C'mon. After "corpse-eating social mentality" and "snivelling geekdom" I'd say that you're one up on the unflattering epithet front, but I think we can call it even.

That's pretty much all that I have to say.

01 January 2004

Yay! Second post!

Updating from Conrad's house at the ClawParty ?. Have seen woefully little of the internet during holidays; received half a computer for Christmas; situation will soon improve. Have just heard that wireless internet connections will be available in Cape Town early this year. Boundless joy and happiness!

Also received many book vouchers. Mmmmm, book vouchers. And ROTK was cool. Am sure that the extended edition will be better. Am determined to acquire all three rapidly. Also to get lots of Star Trek, since at Reuel's party I remembered how much I like Star Trek.

For those of you who don't know (I have mentioned it sporadically over the past couple of days), I am planning to return to varsity and do an engineering degree. So that I can make killer space robots. Yay. Hopefully I will be able to register late without too many problems.

In the meantime, I am at a party, with ducks, and a dog with the most elastic slobber in the world. Hooray! See you all later this year. Have fun.