Ad Terras Per Aspera

So, two weeks ago I switched to Ubuntu from Debian Sid. Did the whole format thing and everything. I have to say I like Ubuntu, even though I usually hate ‘user friendly’ distros; Ubuntu may be userfriendly, but underneath it still has the whole Debian framework, so its still easy to use (instead of being forced to use badly thought out ‘user friendly’ GUI tools).

Nice part is, it boots about 10-15 seconds faster on my P3 550 workstation (at least some of that is attributed to my 5 year old Debian install). The KDE distro is well packaged too, and Ubuntu comes with X.org by default (instead of the old method I was using by stealing X.org from Ubuntu, and replacing Sid’s XF86 with it.)

All in all, its now the best distro on the planet, kicking Debian from that title.

Justin Mason mentioned on his blog the Nazi spam flooding FOSS mailing lists. I’m subscribed to the gcc mailing list, and its been flooded with Nazi propaganda, still in it’s original German. Well, I have something to say to those spammers: Fäule in der Hölle.

So, I watched Metropolis, the critically acclaimed movie and brainchild of Rintarô and Katsuhiro Ôtomo, based on Osamu Tezuka’s comic. I liked it. It wasn’t groundbreaking in animation, story concepts, or execution; but it still was executed quite well. It is on the level that Akira is.

The concept of a robot that thinks its human being the key/core component of a doomsday weapon is not original, but its one that resonates well within the human consciousness; the even idea that humans trying to play God to create a human would in turn bring destruction of the human race is enlightening, if not a little scary.

In my attempts to write science fiction, I’ve played with the idea, and its one of the more fun ideas to play with; except I never knew quite how to deal with it, but I never knew that I wasn’t far off from what others have done.

I wanted a doomsday weapon, two young children (one boy, one girl, both being robots) and have them devoid of emotions in the beginning of the story, and (in sort of a Trigun-like fashion) have them learn opposite emotions.

One (the boy) would learn hate, fear, self-loathing, and the concepts of death, destruction, and murder through a series of unfortunate events; the girl, on the other hand, would learn caring, inner peace, the trust others, and selfless love of others. Complete polar opposites, one would lean towards violence, and the other would do anything to prevent violence. One would serve to destroy human life, the other would serve to preserve it. Death, life. Misery, joy. Black, white.

Except, both are really different sides of the same thing, aren’t they?

I have about 100 feeds in my RSS reader, and I realized something: I am sick and tired of broken feeds. Here is a list of feeds I am no longer subscribing to because they are either missing titles for the individual articles, the individual articles are clipped to a specific length requiring you to visit the website to read more, or are missing content altogether (clumped by issue):

Missing full article text, only contains short blurb:
Apple Insider
Ars Technica (feed also has ads)
Blues News
Curmudgeon Gamer
Daring Fireball
Drunken Blog
Latte
FredArt
GameGrene
LiveScience
Mac OSX Hints
Mozilla.org
Mozillazine
OSNews
Red Assed Baboon
Space.com
Library of Babel
Uncertain Principles
Talking Points Memo (also misses proper titles on the articles)
eToyChest

Missing full article text, missing even a short blurb:
Bureau 42 (also includes the number of comments in the feed name, which fubars most RSS readers: the readers don’t know that the different titles are all the same article)
EuroGamer
LinuxGames
Sci-Fi Storm

Other:
LXer (links for articles do not go to LXer, but to the remote sites’ articles instead)

I am dropping these feeds until their admins acquire enough clue to fix them.