Jim’s Brain Online

Posted by Jim at February 28th, 2006

I was listening to NPR at some point recently (within the last few months anyway) and heard a professor being interviewed who argued that anti-immigrant feeling in US politics could be traced to the economy. Basically, the idea was that people were more nervous about immigrants when the economy was bad or percieved to be bad.

I can’t cite sources, but it sounds right to me.

I remember my sister giving a Christmas gift to a friend of hers in middle school. Her friend’s father worked for a company that made auto parts. This was during the early 1980’s. The US was in a recession and everyone was worried about how the Japanese were dominating the world economy, how much better their educational system was, and how they were buying US companies and landmarks.

The pencils were made in Japan. Her friend’s father broke them.

He still had a job, but he feared the inroads the Japanese were making in the auto industry.

Nativism has played an on-going role in US politics. Apparently it led to support for the temperance movement and prohibition (in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s) because immigrants were percieved to be the ones doing most of the drinking. It’s showed up on an off throughout our history, but in my lifetime people seem to be most worried about immigrants when the economy is bad.

As mentioned earlier I remember the fear of the Japanese economy in 80’s, but I also remember people being highly worked up about illegal immigration from Mexico back then too.

Think about some of the issues people have been worked up about lately: offshoring jobs (to India or wherever), illegal immigration (again), the whole mess with a company from the United Arab Emirates leasing portions of our ports (often reported as buying our ports for some reason), China’s growing economy, the US being educationally behind other countries (again)…

Basically they seem to be different versions of “those foriegners are taking our money.”

I don’t get too worked up about these issues. I remember Japan. They’ve been in an economic slump for the last 10 years or more now and may be coming out of it, but they’re not exactly the economic force they used to be.

I’m not saying we should ignore issues like offshoring or how US educational effectiveness compares to the rest of the world’s, but, I think a sense of perspective helps.

Posted by Jim at February 25th, 2006

My wife informs me that I should be writing more blog entries that people actually want to read. By this she means entries that she wants to read–ones that do not talk about intricacies of various operating systems or role playing game theory/practices.

Thus today I’m writing an entry on something that touches everyone deeply: bacon.

I never really tried to cook bacon on the stove until about five years after being married. The reason for this is that microwaves are pretty decent at cooking bacon. Decent at any rate if you have the sense to buy one of those special plastic pans for cooking meat in the microwave. I don’t. I tend to cook bacon on plates and cover the plates with paper towels to prevent spattering.

Typically this results in well cooked bacon, but also bacon that melds into a solid mass on the plate. Worse, sometimes the paper towel gets mixed in with the bacon. Also, I’ve sometimes shattered plates in the process.

Thus, I’ve been motivated to actually start cooking bacon on the stove. This was harder for me than you might expect. I’ve burned a lot of bacon lately. It turns out that (so far as I can tell) the best way to cook bacon is to heat up a burner a bit on the low side of medium. That way the bacon gets slowly cooked, ending up entirely done but still soft. Cooking the bacon on medium (at least when I do it) is likely to result in the bacon getting simultaneously undercooked and burned in different places on the piece.

There we go… I have now written a post that does not include role playing games or computers.

Kristen, this one’s for you! *

* I wonder if Kristen will find this funny?

** Kristen, if you are reading this, see what happens when you leave me alone with only a mission, children, the internet, and my sense of absurdity to keep me company?

*** You’ll note that I didn’t mention my sense of humor. That’s on vacation at the moment.

**** Ugh. It’s nearly noon and all of us are still in pajamas. I wonder if I should do something about that?

Posted by Jim at February 23rd, 2006

I like to keep some form of GUI on my desktop even in unix. Basically, I want to click and point when I’m working on the inessential stuff–stuff that I don’t want to specifically configure. Thus I’ve set things up so that I can click and type in a password rather than manually start things.

Kind of like in Windows or Macs.

Except… In those operating systems they allow for the possibility of children existing in the house. They probably deliberately test for what random button pushing may do to your computer.

Abby and Rebecca love to push buttons on my computers–even the FreeBSD computer, an operating system more commonly used for servers than childrens’ toys. They like pressing buttons, moving the mouse, and making the menus move.

In particular, they like changing the theme to the logon screen. Some of the themes suck. For example, one of them should be named “Almost Completely Black.” I am not sure who would want to use that one–presumably people who can see finer distinctions of color than I.

GDM (the GNOME Display Manager) makes language preferences available as well. With very little messing around, a person can change the language preferences to Turkish or Estonian.

I don’t speak Estonian. Or read it.

Ditto Turkish.

And Bulgarian.

I’m thinking that fencing in a portion of my basement sounds good right now. Do you suppose there’s a tax deduction for that?

Posted by Jim at February 22nd, 2006

My wife recently noted that I hadn’t written much of anything in my blog lately and she’s right. I’ve been somewhat busy, wretchedly tired, and generally unmotivated for the last week or so. Nonetheless, I do have something to write about at the moment even though it is something that Kristen will find entirely uninteresting.

I’ve been roused from my stupor by the on-going crankyness related to Ron Edwards’ post about how some people who play role playing games have had their ability to enjoy stories (and notion of what stories are) damaged by certain sorts of games. Specifically, he seems to mean the games of Mark Rein-Hagen.

He may be right about this, but, I’ve no way to know from experience. As someone who’s done an awful lot of gaming with Ed and Joe, I’ve never actually played Mark Rein-Hagen’s games (with the exception of Ars Magica which was co-written with Jonathan Tweet). Though I had some mild curiousity about Vampire, I never ended up playing it–largely because either Ed or Joe (I’m not sure who) regarded it as a pretentious pile of steaming crap.

I don’t know that anyone used that precise terminology, but that’s the impression I got.

Anyway, I’m not going to go too far into the specifics of any of that. Ron Edwards may be right and he may not. I don’t know, but, the idea that you’re marked by the sort of role playing games that introduced you to the hobby does interest me.

Personally, even though I like a lot of the ideas and games that come out of the Forge, I find that I’m still drawn to the old player/GM relationship in which the GM gets to do pretty much whatever he/she wants and everyone else ends up responding to his/her ideas.

I’m not saying this is good. In fact, I’ve had some of the better gaming experiences of my life with Forge influenced games so I’m open to the possibility (even necessity) of changing this relationship.

What I am saying is that my perspective on gaming is undoubtedly colored by my introduction to the hobby in the form of Basic Dungeons and Dragons (which was quickly followed by AD&D). As experimental as my gamng has overall been (I dropped dice entirely following the release of Amber Diceless RPG till last year), certain things haven’t been questioned.

In messing with some Forge-influenced games and reading some gamer theory blogs, I’ve run across yet more things to experiment with and that’s a good thing.

That being said, everybody’s got a point at which they somehow lack the ability to quite grasp a particular change and incorporate it into their thought.

In reading a history of Jazz, I noted that the writer would often point out that a great musician was trained during one movement in Jazz, broke with that training and became known during the next movement in Jazz, and couldn’t quite absorb the movement after that. I don’t remember why he thought that musicians failed to absorb a third iteration of the music.

I do remember listening to an interview with Ray Charles (who was not primarily a jazz musician though he did play jazz) talking about rap. He basically felt that he had nothing to learn from it.

It seems to me that in order for someone to move away from the view they find comfortable, there’s got to be something cool on the other side that they want. I know that I want the level of player involvement that I’ve seen in Forge influenced games. That draws me. A critique of what’s wrong with me probably wouldn’t draw me in.

Posted by Jim at February 15th, 2006

Grandpa Zoetewey died about 20 minutes ago now (now being 9:34 PM). It’s pretty unreal at this moment.

Grandpa came from the Netherlands at the age of 4. His father, Marinus Zoetewey, worked a variety of jobs, ranging from farmhand to factory worker to being the foreman of railway maintenance crew. The family lived briefly in Holland, MI after they immigrated and then for reasons I don’t know moved to Colorado.

I know that Grandpa grew up on a farm for the most part, but I don’t know the details.

I know that Grandpa worked for Schrader Brothers (later Samsonite), I don’t know how he got the job. I know that he struggled to make it through the Great Depression, unloading boxcars and doing odd jobs to make ends meet. He never did have to go on welfare, but I know that my grandparents would sometimes buy groceries on credit when my Dad was a child.

When he was younger, he drove a motorcycle and also rode trolleys to work.

I remember him telling me about working during World War II. Congress passed a law exempting men with three or more children from the draft, saving Grandpa from reporting for duty in the engine room of a ship. Grandpa spent the war working for Samsonite. He made and tested bombs and grenades. As a foreman, he managed a team of deaf people, learning some sign language to do it.

We found a few grenades and a bomb (minus explosives) in my grandparents’ basement when they moved out of their house and into an assisted living center.

I know that he was respected and trusted within his church. Mostly I know this by the fact that he was continually elected to be a deacon. This was true when I was a child in the 1970’s and visiting Denver. Grandpa would stay after the service and count the money. It was also true years before (the 1950’s?) when the church’s safe got broken into. Grandpa discovered the break-in, putting himself under suspicion of doing it in the eyes of the police. Grandma still remembers wanting to buy new clothes around that time, but not being able to buy them because it would look as if they’d suddenly come into money.

In my experience of him, Grandpa Zoetewey was a tall, quiet man, balding, but with a deep voice. He seemed never to be without a jack knife. I remember his cars–which thanks to mild Colorado winters dated from the 50’s and 60’s.

When they came to visit us in Holland, MI, he would do two things. First, he would read a lot of books and second, he would build something. On one occasion, he enclosed the space under our basement stairway, making it into a place for my Mom to store canned food. On another, he added a closet to our house, building a table and chair with the leftover materials. Last I heard, my brother still had the table. I don’t know what happened to the chair, but my brother, sister and I used both of them for years afterward.

He worked into his seventies. After retiring from Samsonite, he worked briefly with one of his brothers on a small printing press and then worked as a janitor for a local Christian school. I’m told that because of his dry humor some people there referred to him as “Deadpan Jim.”

That’s one of the things I remember about him—his tendency to be both very quiet and very funny.

I also remember hiking in the Rocky Mountains with him. That was one of things that the family did together when we were out there. That and fish. And camp.

For me, treeless peaks and rocky outcroppings are most associated with stuffing the entire family in the car and driving out to the mountains. People would talk, pull candy tins out from under the seat, and look out the windows as we drove up mountains at speeds Colorado natives find comfortable (i.e. quickly).

Though we would go every summer when I was a kid, I was last in Colorado two years ago now. It wasn’t the way it used to be. Grandpa had a stroke a few years ago and wasn’t been quite the same afterwards—though medications did help him. On the bright side, my children did get to meet him and he them.

I don’t really know why he died today. Though he’s been slowly declining, he hadn’t been having more problems than usual lately so it was a shock for everyone, even the people still in Denver. On the other hand, of course, he was 98 years old. We all knew it had to happen sometime.

My parents are flying out there soon. Possibly tomorrow. I wish I were going.

I also wish I could write more about him in this than I am. Undoubtedly there are some wonderful stories about him that I’ve never heard. There are some that I have, but can’t find a way to make them fit.

Here’s one that I shouldn’t (at the risk of turning this into more of a ramble than it already is) include:

Grandpa went fishing in the mountains during the late fall or possibly early winter. He came home with a creel of fish. Somehow (and I am not quite sure how), he forgot to take the creel out of the trunk. This was okay because it was cold and so neither he nor anyone else realized it was there.

I am told that it smelled very bad in the spring.

Posted by Jim at February 10th, 2006

You must watch the David Hasselhoff video for “Hooked on a Feeling.” I’ll grant you that funnier videos exist, but they were trying to be funny.

This video, by contrast, was probably trying to be cool and so, so very not succeeding.

Posted by Jim at February 10th, 2006

I just thought I’d link to what I’ve been working on for the last week of so. Summit on Racism is a yearly conference devoted to changing the experience of race in Grand Rapids and the surrounding area.

It attempts to do more than just talk about race. The Summit is designed to promote action. People get into groups and then sign up to do things during the coming year. Mind you, not everyone continues to be involved for the year, but that’s okay too.

In any case, this year the speaker’s Bobby Moresco, the writer of the movie Crash. Also, (and more importantly) we’ll be deciding the direction of Summit on Racism and GRACE’s Racial Justice program for the next few years.

It should be interesting.

Posted by Jim at February 9th, 2006

Jim: Planning on putting up more comics? I can guess you’ve been too busy to draw lately, but I’m looking forward to future comics.

Ed: You know, I’ve been pretty out of it the past few weeks, but I would sure like to get around to drawing more. Nothing’s entered my head as an obvious comic lately, but that’s OK — just sitting around trying to draw one usually gets me *something*, even if it’s sort of a “zen” “lyrics from a favorite song, acted out” comic.

Jim: Hmmn. Good thing you haven’t been listening to Yes or REM lately. “A season which to call you from the depths of your disgrace and rearrange your liver to the solid mental grace…”

Ed: I always heard it as “a seasoned witch could call you…” (the rest the same) That’d be an even better picture.

Jim: One can only wonder what the witch would be seasoned with.

Ed: hickory smoke I assume

Jim: I can think of several different curry powders that might be good.

Ed: mmm, witch! Yummy!

Posted by Jim at February 8th, 2006

On a gut level, the amount of attention paid to the cartoons showing Mohammed as a terrorist surpises me. Unless you’re an expert in Islam, however (and I’m not), your gut instinct is pretty lousy at understanding religion and world politics.

From what I understand, the whole situation comes out of the fact that some Muslims in Denmark found that they couldn’t do anything to the newspaper that printed the cartoons under Danish law. What they then did was to publicize the cartoons in countries with largely Muslim populations. They included two cartoons that were not actually printed in addition to the ones that were. The unprinted cartoons were apparently even more offensive than the ones that were printed.

It would be easy to dismiss the whole thing as having been deliberately created and partially false in the first place if it weren’t for a couple things.

1. Even if the reaction is based on some flawed assumptions, an awful lot of people are very angry.
2. Dismissing the whole thing will just make people angrier.

Personally, I’m inclined to think that the papers have a right to print what they want, but I don’t think it’s as simple as a question of free speech.

As much as it’s true that this whole mess was partially created by the Danish muslims who publicized the cartoons (and by the Danish press which could have apologised before it got this far), it’s not all from that. It was also created by repressive muslim regimes that actively encourage their population to get upset about this sort of thing to distract them from dissatisfaction with their own governments. It was also created by general anger on the part of some muslims about western influence and power over their own countries. It may even be that anger about Iraq and US foriegn policy affect this as well.

In addition, Europe’s own problems in coming to grips with immigration come into play here too.

For me, the question is less about free speech and more a question of how the West should engage with the rest of the world. According to some people, part of the reason for terrorism is that some muslims feel that western culture is overwhelming their own.

When we make no compromises at all, we contribute to that impression. By contrast, if we engage in such a way that the majority of muslims feel that the West is listening, we do ourselves a lot of good.

I don’ t know what will solve the current problem. I see it as a manifestation of several different problems (repressive governments, etc…) that will have to be solved separately.

At the same time, apologies and an attempt to show respect to other people’s beliefs can’t hurt.

Posted by Jim at February 7th, 2006

I got the iBook back. Everything works now and so I’m finally able to use it again. I’m happy to have gotten two logic boards replaced within the course of one week for no cost.

I’m a little less happy when I consider that if the logic boards are that likely to die or have problems, I’ll probably have another die on me one of these days when my iBook has passed out of the extended repair period.

And that kind of sucks.