David B. Calhoun’s Blog

I have this idea to write a paper on the ethics (or lack theoreof?) of filesharing.

That’s all.

(this is just a reminder to myself!)

I’m making a resolution. And this one is not too hard to keep.

It’s not to get married or get romantically involved with anyone.

Seeing as I haven’t had difficulty keeping this resolution up till now, I shouldn’t have trouble in the future.

Life is more than than this. There are now more divorces than successful marriages. There’s too many women who divorce and take all their husband has, including kids, and leaves the husband worse off than he would’ve been if he simply stayed alone.

So I will stay alone. I get to have no household disputes, fights over money, fights about or with children, etc. None of it will happen.

Pretty boring? Yes, at home. But the secret is not to stay at home all the time. Get out and enjoy the world. Read in coffee shops, etc.

It’s not too hard. Lonely maybe. But not hard.

I am getting to have a really unreasonably hatred toward certain online communities.

And when I mean “online communities”, I really mean: 4chan.org, ytmnd.com, the World of Warcraft forums, etc.

Each community has their own distinctive features: World of Warcraft forums are filled with people who, not satisfied with the normal butchering of the English language featured on the internet, take it a step further and make posts that are almost undecipherable.

The distinctive feature of the 4chan boards seems to be being unabashedly horny towards ALL THE WRONG THINGS. Pixelated animated Japanese women is one thing, but it’s quite another to be responsible for coining the word “Rule 34″ (look it up on Urbandictionary). That’s NOT something to be proud of.

Ytmnd is less of an issue for me nowadays, since I hardly ever visit that site anymore, but it generally has all the characteristics of what I hate about a lot of forums.

What seems to be common to all of them is an utter lack of respect for anyone - most posters seem to forget is that who they’re responding to is an actual HUMAN BEING behind the screen, who took the time to write a post. No doubt people would be more respectful if they were actually talking face to face. If people in real life acted the way they do on the internet, it wouldn’t be surprising if they were beaten to a pulp and kept from procreating, simply out of principle.

Another thing that I hate, other than lack of respect, is unoriginality. This is especially evident in posts that look like this:

Post 1. Hi guys! I’m wondering if I can find a picture of….
Post 2. Rule 34
Post 3. Rule 34
Post 4. Rule 34
Post 5. Rule 34
Post 6. Rule 34
Post 7. Rule 34
Post 8. Rule 34
Post 9. Rule 34
Post 10. Rule 34

Note that posts 2-10 are all by DIFFERENT POSTERS, who think they’re being cute.

ALRIGHT, WE GET IT ALREADY!! You can copy and paste! And you can parrot the previous poster. You think you’re being cute and clever. You’re not. You look like fools.

This is why I will always have more respect for, say, a forum on a website such as the Rational Responders - while I utterly disagree with their beliefs and their methods for spreading their beliefs (atheism), I have so much more respect for a community such as theirs, that values well-reasoned and respectful (MOST of the time) replies to posts. Contrast this with the garbage, utter nonsense, and retarded behavior that’s only acceptable in certain corners of the internet.

Maybe the internet has allowed these places to thrive because people still want to act like children and avoid growing up and acting like an adult?

Argg, ok, enough ranting. I had to get that off my chest. I hope I’m not the only one who feels this way.

One of my favorite websites, Stage6, has been hacked and has been offline all day :(. Think of Stage6 as YouTube, but 1000x better quality.

Freakin hackers - you’re supposed to take down the BAD websites, not the good ones. I’m sure no one would mind seeing microsoft.com hacked. Although, I’d imagine it would be a lot harder, since they probably have more security measures in place. Just imagine, they must have a guy who sits there all day, refreshing the site to make sure it’s still up and working.

Anyhow, sad day for it to go down, too, being a Saturday and all. All the techs are home playing video games. Looks like we’ll wait till Monday until it’s up again!

So I quit World of Warcraft. Again.

I’ve had a sort of love-hate relationship with the game. At times I spent way too much time on it, improving my character and such, and wondering in awe if people really actually spent MORE time than I did playing. They do, of course, because there were always people with better gear than me.

Anyhow, I started playing shortly after the game came out. The game was released in November 2004, and I finally picked it up in January 2005, and was always struggling to catch up to my friends who had started it before I did. I kept playing until sometime mid-2006, when I devoted myself full-time to work and school, and writing my Philosophy Thesis.

When the expansion, Burning Crusade, was released in January 2007, I picked up a copy and played it for about a month before realizing that it was really just more of the same stuff. Go here, get this quest, kill 80 boars, bring this guy back the head of so-and-so. There WERE a few new and fun quest types, like one where you had to throw down bombs from a gryphon rider. But for the most part it was just more of the same stuff. So I quit sometime in February.

Come January 2008 and, after not having played for a year, I start thinking about how fun it would be to play again. One of my friends had even logged back in so he could get his character up to the level cap, level 70. I spent the next month or so trying to finally get to level 70 (I had quit at level 65). Most of the quests and instances were the same stuff as before, just rehashed and given a different name. I do admit that there were a couple of pretty different and fun quests. There was this one quest that stands out in my mind right now - it was one where you somehow transform into a squirrel so you can sneak into this ogre camp and taint their beer kegs. I kid you not! The best part about it was that you could actually STEALTH. It was hilarious to see the squirrel go into stealth mode. You even had the ability to distract your enemies with a “Throw Acorn” spell. I remember messing around in “squirrel mode” around this one Alliance character for a while, just for the heck of it, because it was so fun.

Anyhow, I digress! The thing is, once I got to level 70 last week, the same old level cap wall hit me. Unless I had ridiculous amounts of time to spend in dungeons or PvP (player versus player) matches, I really didn’t stand a chance against everyone else. So I PvPed in the old, familiar, and boring PvP battlegrounds for a while, got some decent stuff, and then realized that I wasn’t really enjoying myself. It was just becoming another grind. And to top it off, when Blizzard supposedly releases their expansion this year, all this effort will become worthless.

So basically what I’m trying to say is, the best part of the game is leveling up. The worst part of the game is when you hit the level cap.

Also, it wasn’t fun leveling up from 65 to 70, because for the most part my friends weren’t logged on. There had been a time when we all got on Skype and quested and did instances and had a good time, but gone are those days!

I’ve also become annoyed with the player base, which is another terrible part of the game. Most everyone on there is out for their good, or the good of their guild, and nothing more. And there is a large group of people who don’t think twice about using exploits and cheating to get ahead. “It’s all part of life”, they say to try to justify it.

In WoW, there is NO honor.

When I used to play Red Baron 3D, a WWI combat flight sim, after a dogfight each player would salute each other. In World of Warcraft, after you’re killed by your opponent, they spit on you.

That about sums it up.

Last night I took off all my hard-earned gear and sold what I could of it. What I couldn’t sell I destroyed. I sold/destroyed everything in my bags and everything in my bank. I completely destroyed everything I worked hard to earn up to that point, then gave all my gold to my guild. I did the same with my level 60 alternate character.

Somewhere there is a naked troll rogue and a naked undead priest having coffee together.

What’s so hard with forgiveness?

Especially in Christianity, forgiveness is regarded as a real virtue. When someone has done us wrong, it shows great maturity that we could honestly forgive them.

But why is it so hard sometimes? Because we know that the person will probably do us wrong again, but the next time they won’t be as surprised when they’re forgiven. That’s my fear anyway. I’m afraid of being exploited for my forgiveness. This is along the lines of “turn the other cheek” - just how much should a person yield to another person? Should someone ever take a stand, and NOT turn the other cheek? Shouldn’t we expect there to be times like this?

Similarly, should there be times when people are not forgiven?

I don’t know - I’m beyond pessimistic about this world, and so far I’ve been pretty much hopeless in it. Forgiveness is something I’ve always known to be a virtue and a great thing, but maybe because of some past experiences I’ve just found it extremely hard to forgive as of recently. I want to protect my heart - I don’t want people to destroy it, have me forgive them, then leave my heart open for another attack.

I guess this comes more out of recent circumstances than anything else.

Sorry, my thoughts are a mess tonight, and there’s no easy way to organize all of this, so I’ll just leave it.

I live in Los Angeles, one of the largest cities in the world. It’s not by choice - this is where my family planted itself about a century ago, after moving away from the farming life in rural Kansas, in search of better jobs and a better life.

More and more of the world is becoming urbanized, we’re told. More of the world is becoming like congested, smoggy Los Angeles.

There are plenty of great things about the city - plenty of choices for entertainment, dining, schools, etc. Contrast this with a small town, where the choices for entertainment are the local bar or the bowling alley, the choices for dining are Cafe #1 or Cafe #2, and where you only have one school to choose from, unless you want to drive out on the interstate 100 miles one-way.

Of course the main draw to the big city is the opportunity for jobs. As a result, rent is driven up and it forces single people to get together and share rent.

But what is the problem with the metropolis? It’s precisely the best and worst thing about the city: the fact that there’s so much choice. This is probably partly to blame for the high divorce rate in the US. Why stay together when you have literally millions of other options? This is also why it’s so easy to have an affair. If your spouse doesn’t satisfy you, all you have to do is leave your dwelling and confidently look for someone who WILL satisfy you.

I’ve always thought the metropolis was also harmful to organized religion. In the small rural town, the church would be the epicenter - the thing that brought everyone together. And you would have just one church. Contrast this with the big city - you have dozens of churches in your immediate area, and a lot more than that if you’re willing to drive a little farther. The free market capitalism that improves businesses in competition with each other in the city also affects churches. Why stay at this boring church, where the pastor rambles on and on and where the people are snobbish, when you can join a better church that’s a short distance away? In business, this prompts competition, but in terms of churches, this usually ends up in a mass exodus from one church to another, and the slow, eventual death of the former church.

In the small rural town, you were stuck with what you had. This was a bad thing, but this was also a good thing: if people have no other choice but to go to that church, then they might as well make the best of it and try to improve and contribute to that one church, to make it just a bit better.

The same with marriages: in a small rural town, there’s not a lot of selection for a spouse. If you are lucky enough to find one, you will bend over backwards to compromise and make the marriage work. Or you will simply be unsatisfied in a marriage, but will stay together for convenience, or for the children.

Nowadays, the city promotes the idea that if you’re unhappy with whatever you have, be it your job, your spouse, your church, your friends, etc, you can simply dispose of them and easily find new ones. How degrading, and how depressing to be a piece of human waste, used and then disposed of in favor of something else.

How can someone survive in such a hostile environment?