On Faith. Nobody could have said this better.

One of the best thing said, ever:

Yeah. I'm calling your "faith" bullshit. This man needs medical help if he can't get through his life without something invisible to believe in. Y'know, I wouldn't mind all this half so much if there was some historical truth in it. This whole concept of "faith"— of believing in something that isn't fucking there— was invented by a man to cover up the cracks in the "christianity" he cobbled together with the Romans. This whole god thing comes from the days when our brains weren't as connected up as they are now, and we all hallucinated daily!

It was, of course, written by Warren Ellis and said by Spider Jerusalem.

Flickr, thank you for protecting my feeble brain from teh boobies.

So, apparently Flickr feels the need to protect me from the evil that is the boobies in this shot from the Suicidegirls stream. It says this is some Safesearch protection, although I have that bullshit explicitly turned off. I hear it's about Yahoo being afraid of German courts or something.
Fuck Flickr.
Fuck German courts.
I need two things now: An alternative to Flickr that doesn't feel the need to protect my feeble me, and a tool to get my pictures from Flickr before I delete my account.

EDIT: Zooomr is looking pretty good right now.

The stupid, it hurts.

Wow. AACS head honcho Micheal Ayers is either incredibly stupid, in denial or lying through his teeth. But I guess at least two of those are a requirement to work in the DRM field. No bonus points for Mr. Doctorow for "liking" Ayers. The man is reprehensible. And what makes me fucking want to puke is that he actually may have the law on his side. And even if he doesn't, the giant consumer-fucking machine that he is a little cog of can certainly afford good enough lawyers that it doesn't really matter.

On What I Believe

I believe in the self-sufficiency of the Human Meat Machine. I believe that we, the Extraordinary Flesh Machine Corps, make our own way in this wholly wondrous universe, and that all the wonders we wreak are our own, as are our atrocities. I believe that the Amazing Flesh Computer every one of us is equipped with is a mighty tool, a tool mighty enough to decide and to deduct, to discern what is Right from what is Wrong. I am proud when I or my brethren in Meatship use this tool to correctly discern this difference and act accordingly, as this is a decision made under our own Computational Power, and I am sad when this tool fails somewhere in this process and mistakes are made; I therefore believe that our existence is cheapened by the supposition that a set of moral commandments, handed down from on high, coupled to the promise of eternal doom and despair should we stray, is necessary to keep us moral.
Atheism is not an absence of belief. It is not the anti-belief, at least not for me. I do not believe in nothing. I believe in Meat Machines, self reliance, emergent systems, science, and evidence. My belief is strong, and it gives me comfort, pride, and peace of mind. And sometimes it gives me grief, when I have to struggle with the stupidity that has still not been eradicated, but I never have to struggle to reconcile my system of belief with what is happening, because all of this is contained therein.

Tinkering, tinkering

So, while switching to the new-fangled customizable layout I thought I'd change the look of this place completely. So far, I like the new look, and I definitely like working with the new layout in the background. As with nearly all things Google does, the interface is straightforward and good. It doesn't afford me the kind of control manual editing would, but as you can tell from my post frequency, I don't really want to put that much time into this (and the little time I do put into it better be spent posting), so I'm really grateful for this.