Peter Howard is Wintermute, mythologist

digital delivery

30September2004 [directLink] [myth]

Ripped unashamedly from Penny Arcade:

“Imagine that you had to go to a well every time you wanted water. Then, somebody figured out a way to get the water to come out right inside your house! I don’t blame them for being scared.”

Re game publishers and digital delivery (cutting out the middle man), the same of course applies to the movie studios and RIAA

funky google trick

28September2004 [directLink] [webprog]

Cool trick, discovered this in a roundabout way. Some librarians got together to create a bookmarklet that could link direct to a catalogue given a books ISBN. Played with the URL, and it looks pretty easy to build a ‘go’ search tool for a website.

Build from the following link:

http://www.google.com/search?btnI=true&q=site:wintermute.com.au

Then you could create a box to enter keywords that append to the end of that string. So if you entered Matrix it’d append that to the string, giving you this link via Google (which is just the top result for the selected keywords)

Once I get a better webhost it’ll be even safer, for now there’s the slim possibility that the top result could lead to another site hosted by swiftdsl that contains the words wintermute and matrix, but I did a search with just wintermute separately, and all the results are my site… Update: I’ve updated the links to reflect the current site address

Ref: Library Stuff - and others

appeasement is a dirty word

10September2004 [directLink] [myth]

How long till the ‘JAKARTA BOMBING’ (!!) gets used for election purposes. Johnny’s probably smart enough not to blatantly say anything, but he’ll hint at it, and pretty quickly commentators will start suggesting that Australia is coming under attack because Labor is appeasing terrorists by suggesting they’ll pull troops out of Iraq. It’ll be interesting to see - if the Libs suggest such a thing too strongly it could very well backfire on them (cf, the Spanish elections)

pro-one-choice

07September2004 [directLink] [myth]

Sydney Uni Life Debate on Abortion today. Unfortunately both sides tended to stray into stereotypes and cliches, unwilling to really engage the other. Both argued that women are in a bad spot, one said abortion needed to be reconsidered, women need more information, women are pressured to abort, &c. The other said yes, bad spot, therefore women need a way out.

The problem with the pro-life movement is that we try to fight pro-choice on their terms, rather than on ours. It’s going to take a significant change in the discourse - we need the language to describe the foetus as a Person - not a potential person, not an unviable person, just a Person. Only a Person can have the rights of a Person - if it is anything else then the rights of the woman should come first!

The main argument of pro-choice is that the State (or Church) has no right to tell women what to do with their bodies (even if it isn’t really said in these terms anymore) - if the foetus is ascribed Personhood, then the State is merely defending that Person.

And the pro-life slippery-slope argument, while accurate, holds absolutely no weight in an argument - it condescendingly assumes that the other side is stupid, and that we need to stop them going too far by stopping them before they get the chance.