Link to the Weekend #5

I have tomorrow off, so figured I would try to get the Links to the Weekend up early for those unfortunate souls still in the office tomorrow. Also haven’t done this in a while, so have quite a few I can throw out here.

I am seriously freaked out by Furries, which in case you don’t know are folks who dress up like animals and yiff each other stupid. So far the creepiness of Furries has been unmatched. That is, until I saw this picture. The only thing worse then Furries are Furries dressed as Tauntauns, ruining Empire Strikes Back for me. I will now not be able to do anything but cry when I see Han shove Luke in a Tauntaun and say “I thought they smelled bad from the outside”.

Following the Lost season finale, I found this on io9 concerning how using plot devices based around fate/divine entities negatively effect a story line. Even if you don’t agree with all their points (I certainly don’t) it is never the less a good read. (Some minor spoilers)

Speaking of LOST – here is a quick look at how it SHOULD have ended (spoilers)

Texas is still dashing my hopes that someday we will be able to live in an enlightened society. This article did leave out an important part though, as it fails to details Texas’ plans to build an android and send him back in time to kill Susannah Darwin before she can give birth to her son, Charles.

I have a few lists that caught my eye this week. First being the only vegans that I think I could ever feel threatened by.

Secondly – some things everyone should keep in mind concerning the crazy-haired real-life mini-Lex Luthor…

Whenever I see weird gross out foods it just makes me hungry. This list is little exception to that.

It’s the prospect of encountering and having to tolerate people like these that make me I’m glad out of high school. There were still those who dressed/acted like vampires, but it seems like the subculture is getting even more progressively annoying since it super-fused with emo culture. If I were still going to High School I probably would have been in a lot more fights.

And finally…hit him in his Origin of Species...I had totally forgotten about him, but I can see Dana Carvey is still a funny motherfucker.

And speaking of stuff from Funny or Die, if you haven’t check out the Drunk History videos, they are indeed epic. My favorite so far is the Don Cheadle/Zoey D-something/Will Farrel one talking about Fredrick Douglass. They're posted by Jeremy Konner.

Some of the choice SNL commercials from the 90’s – back when SNL was still funny

The tell-tale funk

A conversational overview of WTF the deal is with Koreas right now...

I was chatting with my sister, who doesn't keep up with current events like I do - and partly as a joke and partly for something for her to read as she tried killing the work day she asked for a history of what the news is on Korea. I wanted to see how much I could accomplish in a five-minute blurb. Here is the comprehensive low-brow description of what is going down and the history behind it.

So, Prior to the US involvement in WWII, The Japanese face-fucked most of East Asia into submission and made them part of their illustrious Empire. During this period, a lot of the former ruling classes of Korea were in exile in the Soviet Union. This is the time/place where Kim Jong Il was born. After WWII, when Japan got curb stomped by the allied nations, and they busied themselves rebuilding Germany and Japan and the Cold War was heating up - those exiles returned to Korea.

Initially it was founded as a Republic, but after a series of failed elections that all saw heavy allegations of fraud and corruption - a growing socialist party tried to grab power. The power grab quickly devolved into a civil war, and both sides brought their backers in. North Korea pulled in the Soviet Union and the recently formed People's Republic of China while South Korea drew aid from NATO and the US. Enter the Korean War and every episode of MASH that you may/may not remember. The Korean War was most noteworthy on a global scale as the first significant armed conflict in the Cold War.

It was also known as the funniest of all 21st century wars due to the wide-spread deployment of wise-cracking doctors...
The war never officially ended, but an armistice was reached on July 1953, with a DMZ established at the current battle-line of the 38th parallel. After lengthy negotiations the world lost interest and Korea rested in the relative obscurity of the World's eye.

Fast forward to the fall of the Soviet Union; With the Soviets down North Korea lost one of its major backers, and its economy turned to shit. Progressively Kim Jong Il, who had recently inherited power from his father, started getting even more crazy and ruthless (an accomplishment for any dictator). With the continued boldness of North Korea and their desire to be viewed as a world power, they started to lost support from their last major supporter, China, who is also turned off by their constant and shady attempts to develop nuclear weapons.

He is the reason I have a standing policy never to trust shirtless Asian people (except Bruce Lee)

Developing nukes and their constant funding of extremist organizations has seen them under constant scrutiny by the UN and getting slapped on the wrist with numerous economic sanctions and angry letters.

In recent news - on 26 Mar a South Korean corvette (The Cheonan) sunk along the NLL (Northern Limit Line), the northernmost naval boundary between the Koreas and a site of numerous clashes since it was established after the armistice. At first North Korea stayed quiet and all officials were really reluctant to name any cause. A week after the Cheonan sank, it was found that the ship was conclusively sunk by an external explosion, and North Korea started making denials. When the international team of investigators found remains of a North-Korean produced torpedo amongst the wreckage, South Korea was pissed and demanded an apology from the North. North Korea told South Korea to go fuck itself, and in response North Korea cut off economic ties (this was Mondayish)

South Korea is responsible for a HUGE portion of North Korea's income, so this doesn't make the North happy. In response after a day or two they cut off all diplomatic relations with South Korea and expel all South Korean citizens (an action normally reserved for when a country is RIGHT about to go to war).

Now we are in a stand off where China is trying to calm the two down, not wanting to see a fire-fight on their front door. Russia doesn't seem to care and hasn't said much of shit. Japan and the US are like 'Fuck you, North Korea chill out and say you are sorry". With our mutual defense treaty saying that if the two Koreas throw down, we have to jump in to back the South up.

So that's where we are now. While the Obama administration is adamant about trying to defuse the situation, they still make it known that they condemn the attack. They also sent Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to talk to all the regional heads-of-state for a 'diplomatic' solution. Personally I think this is just to piss off all the countries involved because if I had a lot of shit going on and I had to go and talk to Hillary I would be pretty offended and pissed off. Maybe Obama is also hoping she gets assassinated and the US gets a two-fer out of the deal. Hillary Clinton gets off AND Kim Jong Il gets the piss bombed out of his crazy ass.

Sending this lady to talk to you is like the international way of putting a flaming bag of dog poop at your front door (in my personal opinion)

Friending your boss

Haven’t had too much to write about lately: partly due to a lack of inspiration and partly due to the bulk of my time outside of dating and work (my “me time”) has been spent on Warhammer & 40K and trying to get stuff squared away and be prepared for the Dark Heresy game I started running two weeks ago. In layman’s terms – my writing time has been shoved to the side in favor of nerding out.

However, some things did strike me this morning as noteworthy and worth scrawling a bit of a rant about. In the ‘that’s interesting’ department there is an article about seals & dolphins used in homeland security drills. However, I don’t want to get on my soap box about that right now for the devaluing of human life that I feel the last part of the article seems to show. In international news It seems investigators have conclusively found evidence of torpedoes being the cause of the sinking of the South Korean Corvette Cheonan back in late March. Also the riots in Thailand keep getting more and more out of hand and it seems just a few poorly handled incidents away from a full-blown civil war. However, I don’t feel like handling anything that serious right now. So instead something that has been popping up more and more lately I thought I would touch on – something a little more domestic and without the likelihood that people will get shot in the head over it.

Some co workers recently complained that their company had started a facebook page, and had started requiring them to ‘friend’ them. This is a phenomenon that seems to be swiftly spreading and has raised some very interesting conversations in how this relates to free speech and social networking sites. I even made an aside comment on it and got one of the longest and most impassioned series of comment replies I have so far seen on Facebook. (Please note – I didn’t get consent to post this, so all parties have been given cunning cover-names and pictures, everything else has been left in there for purposes of leaving the full context of the conversation.)

There are plenty of articles out there too. Some covering the implications from a privacy rights stand point and how it affects the social dynamic at work (New York Times). Others take a look at it from the perspective of employers and the liabilities it can create (Hubpages). I found more then a few that tackled it from a managerial stand point – most giving mixed results of why its good/bad (MonsterThinking)

To avoid going on a bit of a rant that re iterates a lot of the aforementioned articles cover and continue the beating of a dead horse – I will just throw my two cents out there and just leave this issue be.

I’ve been rolling it over in my head – and while the arguments in favor of an employer coercing employees to join groups or ‘friend’ them have their points: I feel it is in violation of the privacy rights of those employees. More importantly, I think it is contrary to the goal of what Facebook as a “Social-networking utility” is trying to become.

In a mission-statement I found for Facebook - "Facebook's mission is to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected." (Found in an article on the Observer)

So far this seems to have primarily taken the form of people tagging one another in drunken photos. However, it has also shown great potential in connecting people through common concerns worldwide and locally. It also allows people to stay in touch with old friends or family that they otherwise may have completely lost track of, or even forgot about. Quite a few people I knew or were close to in my not-that-long past I have been able to find and reconnect from the opposite side of the globe in some cases.

The part that I keep coming back to is the last part of the mission statement “…make the world more open and connected.” Having your boss peaking over your shoulder as one more needless precaution in our overly nanny-ified society is just one more step back from that. While many postings may seem trite in the grand scheme of things (IE – “Can’t wait till Friday”, “Hate it when the barista gets my coffee wrong”, “Chem class today sucked, FML”, “Will someone plz water my plants in Farmville!!!!?????) without this thought-fodder fertilizing the soil of facebook, the truly prolific will be less likely to grow. If people are constantly afraid they might lose their jobs over one poorly worded post, or are having to wonder what ‘Big Brother’ thinks of what they have to say, they may not say something when they have something truly interesting to say.

All that is the complete opposite of keeping people open and connected…