Patrick the Armorer

I just made some chain mail. First time in nearly ten years.

Somehow I just managed to stab myself in th earm with a screw driver... Like blood and everything...

It's not one of those small screw drivers either... like... a big one. OWWWW!

Thank goodness I have all those huge bandaids left over...

This is what rum in the middle of the day will do to you.

ugg... why can't I fall asleep tonight.

So, my friend Mandy recently raged against the machine and made a long post on her dislike of Twitter.

I'd like to throw Plurk into that mess too. Twitter is bizarre halves of conversations with no one about nothing. Occasionally it's amusing when actual conversations take place between folks that you can read but that is very very rare.

And I don't know why there is this new craze for people to use traditional blogging style tools or other social networking sites to then publish their day in tweets. Tweet recaps... So if I don't follow your Twits by god I'm going to catch the night news equivalent of it...

Twitter isn't a true form of open communication, in my opinion. I don't think sending single sentences on what you ate for lunch and how your fax machine at work sucks from a cell phone is truly an insight into your life or values or anything, and it's basically yelling it from a soap box. It's not conversational, it doesn't welcome other's thoughts or feelings, and as Val put it
"Tweeting is like a cock tease for blogging. Dude don't give me the hors d'oeuvres, give me the main course." --amazonmandy

With blogs there is a thought process to posting. You can read it. You can take part in that or observe and comment sparingly. Twits and Plurks are just statements into the ether shouted into the ether. When did we all become so ADHD.

I wish I could remember who said this quote "There's nothing I can't stand more than a poor argument for a subject I hold dear"

I think this article kind of embodies it.

Many of the rights that protect our sexual freedom come from a broad reading of the Constitution. The right to abortion and privacy in the bedroom are not explicitly set out; they spring from interpreting the Constitution expansively.

When the news is full of shootings there is a cry, mostly from liberals like myself, for stricter gun control laws. This is a bad idea. To understand why, you need to read the Second Amendment to the US Constitution:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

Intelligent people differ over the meaning of those 27 words. You can argue about the wisdom of including it in the first place, but that's not the point. The point is that it's there and we should read it with the same expansive interpretation we apply to the other amendments.

Somehow, we liberals have been convinced that there was a kinder, gentler time when the country wasn’t as violent as it is today. In that mythical time, owning a musket was fine, but owning the equivalent semi-automatic today is wrong. We’re effectively saying that we must return to traditional values and not allow people to own modern guns. We’re also saying that the mere fact of owning a gun somehow makes a law-abiding citizen into a danger to the rest of society. We demonize guns and those who stand up in support of their constitutional right to own them. We argue that the framers could not have anticipated semi-automatic handguns in the days of muskets, could not have known of drug violence in inner cities as if this somehow makes the taking of a right okay.

What does that have to do with sexual freedom, abortion and free speech, I hear you asking. The First Amendment says:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

We fight long and hard against those who would have us believe in a mythical 1950s America free of pornography and noisy radicals. They say that reading erotica or the Anarchist Cookbook or the theory of evolution will somehow corrupt otherwise normal, law abiding citizens and turn them into rapists or terrorists. They say that being critical of an unpopular war is akin to treason. They say the framers never heard of Internet porn or cable TV as if this somehow makes the taking of a right okay.

The arguments are the same—it’s no different to assume that a consenting adult watching legal pornography will suddenly become a rapist than it is to assume that a legal gun owner will suddenly become a murderer. There have always been murderers and rapists and restricting speech or banning guns won’t change that.

When the government seeks to regulate what consenting adults can do in their own bedrooms we cry foul. Yet we fail to see that seeking to regulate what consenting adults do in their leisure time with legally-owned guns is just as insidious.

Similar parallels—perhaps even closer—can be drawn with the issue of abortion rights. The anti-gun forces who paint gun owners as murderers and the anti-choice forces who paint the the pro-choice community as baby-killers use the very same brush.

To interpret the Bill of Rights one way for speech, abortion, privacy and the right to own a vibrator but then suddenly want a strict constructionist view of the Second Amendment is hypocritical.

Worse, every time we argue that a ordinary citizen is corrupted by an idea or an object, we give ammunition to those who seek to restrict our access to ideas or objects because they disagree with their worldview.

--Article found here

And Rayne, what the hell were you thinking!?

Staring back at meeeeee

how did I totally forget Ghostbusters the Game coming out tomorrow!?

Everyone feels down every now and then...

Why do I feel the need to fight it so hard.

Bought a cardboard cutout of Spock today at the mall. :)

I have MRSA.

I am on antibiotics to stop it. One with twenty letters in the name.

RIP: David Carradine

I loved the movie...

but more importantly today... Ally told me a term she had heard... And I felt the need to share.

Remember when Kirk was hitting on Uhuru... Only later to find out...

Kirk got Spock Blocked...

So I'm supposed to get an award today.

10 years of service from DragonCon.

I'm going to my niece's birthday party instead. Oh well.

Marriage is one of those thing that as time passes I begin to think more and more it isn't for me. I have many friends that are happily married and are very much in love, but then I have many more friends that are in the throws or had been in the middle of an ugly divorce.

There are always new reports on how a certain percentages of marriages fail and that number always seems to be rising. A former boss and my current boss are both in really bad divorces.

Today I went to Mel's and Chris's ceremony where after eleven years they redid their vows. I was very moved by it. They are on a road that I imagine is as tough as they come, more than likely tougher than I can possibly imagine. But today I saw a man and a woman very much dedicated to each other completely.

So congrats Chris and Mel.

While marriage may never be in my future, I'm not quite the cynic I was yesterday.