Support our troops?

posted by jack at 11:00 CET in / politics

Hmmm. For a long time, I've consistently held the opinion that even though the U.S invasion of Iraq is wrong-headed, that the troops who are stuck in the mess over there are worthy of support, since none of them created this war and are presumably trying to make the best of a tough situation.

But then again, there are things like this Don't Loot video that are just scary as all get-out. For those who haven't/can't/won't view that clip, here's an executive summary of this brief clip from frontline:

• Somewhere in Iraq, looting is occurring. Reporters arrive on the scene.
• U.S. soldiers are there, and have arrested some men for looting. The men have apparently taken a couple armloads of lumber and stacked it on top of their car.
• One soldier explains for the camera that "We tried to stop them from looting, they don't understand, so we'll take their car and we'll crush it."
• A couple of soldiers shoot at the car with pistols a bit.
• The soldiers crush the car by driving a tank over it.

I think that the mental exercise of reversing roles can be a useful thing to do here. What if my country was on the verge of civil war after an invading army had removed a brutal dictator but simultaneously destroyed much of my country's infrastructure? Perhaps lumber would be hard to come by. Perhaps I might take advantage of available resources, particularly if it seemed like they were going unused. I sure don't that that punishing me for this "crime" by crushing my only means of transportation would be a noble endeavor on the invading army's part.

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spinvaders 0.0.1

posted by jack at 11:24 CET in / compute / programming / spinvaders

In my copious amounts of spare time (ha), I've recently been teaching myself both python and game programming using a fine cross-platform library called pygame. I have some results!

spinvaders is a direct descendant of the old "Space Invaders" type of game. This first public test release, version 0.0.1, is fully playable and may even be fun! The controls for the game are described at the startup screen, everything should be pretty obvious. One undocumented feature of this test version is that pressing "J" will let you jump to any level.

• spinvaders for Macintosh (OS X 10.3 or later)
• spinvaders for Windows (95/98/ME/W2K/XP)

The Mac version is in a disk image; you can copy the enclosed application and run it from wherever you like. The Windows version is a zip file containing a directory; unpack the directory wherever you like, and run it by starting "spinvaders.exe" from within the directory.

Please try it out and let me know what you think by adding a comment below.

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slutspurt

posted by jack at 10:42 CET in / humor / funny_swedish

In Swedish, slutspurt means roughly "final push" and can be applied to almost anything: the conclusion of a sporting event, the final stages of a project, etc.

In English, Slutspurt just sounds like the name of a porn flick. Perhaps even a whole series!

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the revolution will not be televised

posted by jack at 12:44 CET in / politics

So the glorious Air America is off to a nice start. I managed to listen to the first few minutes of Al Franken's first broadcast before Real Player crapped out (I guess the servers weren't quite up for the initial rush), and have so far only heard bits of various shows. For some reason it seems like I mostly hear Randi Rhodes whenever I tune in, and usually she's griping about the same stuff over and over again. I mean, she's a really good griper and all, but I'd like to hear a little more variation in the griping.

I'm not that happy with the schedule since I'm 6 hours ahead of New York which means that The O'Franken Factor is splattered right across my early evening, the time of day when I'm busy with giving children dinner and baths and putting them to bed, but what the heck. I'm just totally jazzed to hear talk radio that is actually critical of the Bush-Cheney Axis of Fascism for a change.