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I don't know of a better way to send comments directly to a user, so I'm just going to leave this journal entry as an inbox of sorts in case anybody wants to get my attention for some reason.

Alright, time for confessions. I only post journals in an attempt to get Ethanol_fueled's journals off the front page. So here is my anti-Ethanol_fueled journal entry. Maybe, in a future when Soylent News is a self-respecting news aggregator, such measures will not be necessary. (And yes, I know, that at present they are futile.)

I just used my last moderation point to troll rate someone. OK, it was not someone, it was an asshole. Seriously, who are these people that in this day and age can keep spewing racism, sexism, and how they are metrically challenged in the organ department? Guns? F**king Cowards. If you need a gun to defend yourself, you are probably a criminal. Bad boyz? White Bad Boyz? KKK Boyz? You know, if you are an oath keeper, you are already a lying sack of it. Defend the Constitution? You do realize that this means you have to be able to read the Constitution first, so you know what it is you are defending? Else, perchance, you find yourself defending the Protocols of the Teutonic Knights! You know, Nazi shit?

Recently I came across a video of John Cleese explaining Fox News with the insight that you have to know at least enough to be right in order to know you are wrong, and this is exactly what conservatives are lacking. Ah, here it is! Now this is the problem, and it does point out how arguing with these people is really no use at all. Seriously? Cops saying they _are_ the cop that shot the kid? Are they actually saying that they are racist child-murderers? See: too stupid to know that they are stupid.

I think it is nice that Soylent News covers these terribly fascist events in American, if only for the edification of the rest of the world. But let not all these people who do in fact listen to Fox New think that somehow they are right, or even in the majority. Liberals have more guns that conservatives, and they are better shots, since they do not get all emotional about their targets.

So I am not saying that we kick out all the neo-conservatives and neo-liberals and neo-nazis, I am just saying that if you are one of those, expect no mercy from things like reality and logic and humanity, and ethics. We owe you nothing less.

OK, my contributions of late seem to be more complaining than anything. I really try not to smite idiots with negmod points, seriously! But I do hang on to the last few mod points, just in case a late-breaking egregious post should be made. And here is my latest complaint. Mod points come with a nice notification, and even some direction to proper usage. That is all well and good. There also is a date and time of expiration for said mod points. But my expiration time always seems to be an hour off. I am assuming this time is changed to local 24-hour format, no problem. Perhaps Slashcode is unaware that not all time-zones practice Daylight Savings? Or perhaps I am not where I think I am. I guess I could just remember, for Soylent News Mod points, that 18:05 is not 6:05 local time, but in fact 5:05. Wait, is it leap ahead, or fall back, if you do not have Daylight Saving Time? (And what fools think we can save daylight? If we could, the whole solar power at night thing would already be solved.)

Any way, it is probably better that I lose mod points before I can use them in nasty ways. Live long and prosper, whatever time matrix you find yourself in.

Once in a long while, I post something that is beyond the ken of mere mortals. Unfortunately, mere mortals take this as a disagreement of opinion. But in fact, it is not. I am right, and they are wrong. You may think I am being conceited in this, but I assure you, I have grounds for my position.

So I am wondering why, in the grande scale of things, I am disturbed when some ill-advised comment of mine is appropriately modded down. Yes, I probably had it coming. Yes, it is probably justified. And if I had just waited half a day, this would not have happened. But can't you see that I have gone from a karma rating of 50 to just a paltry 49!! Oh, really, not a big deal. We are all after the same thing here (except for those libertarian free market fucks that are trying to pump the site for all it's worth and then sell us out down the river to some corporation niced.).

Yes, I mod down posts, especially if they are ethanol fueled and full of racism, misogyny, and ignorance of too many categories to be categorized. Or Republican. We need to stand up for reason, science, evidencem and logical thinking. Any religious stuff is right out, and any libertarian/Republican economic ideology is on the same level. No bias, no prejudice, just that bullshit needs to be called bullshit, and not allowed to pass as polite conversation.

We are the last best place on the internet. We are People, we are soylent. We have to act like people, people who can think, reason, argue according to the rules of logic. That is all I ask. I hope it is not too much.

Then-PFC, now-SGT Bergdahl may in fact have deserted his post. There are certainly credible accusations to that effect, and if so, then he should be tried and convicted for the crime. But it's a whole lot easier to investigate those charges with him here, and we don't let the Taliban mete out justice for us.

The military idea of "taking care of your own" has a lot of different aspects. Holding the line and leaving no one behind are obvious; less obvious, perhaps, is that our people are ours. Loon or no, deserter or no, even traitor or no, whatever else Bowe Bergdahl may be he is someone who raised his right hand and took the oath, and that means that whatever reward or punishment he receives is ours and ours alone to give.

It astonishes me sometimes, having at this point been out of the service several more years than I was in it, how strong and pure those ideas still are in my head: how much "us" the profession of arms still is to me, and I suppose always will be. I'm a civilian and happy to be one now, but both the infantryman and the medic are still very close to the surface. The latter is concerned mainly with bringing back the wounded--and the former is ready, willing, and perhaps even eager to kill anyone who stands in the way of that mission.

Whatever else we did, whatever else we may do, we had to bring him home.

So, it appears we have quite a community of DF players here at SN, and enough I think to warrent getting a succession game going. For those who are unaware, succession games are when one plays for one year (Spring to Spring traditionally), then passes off the fort to the next player in line. Boatmurdered is perhaps the most famous of the succession games ever done, though there are others, such as Battlefailed, Failcannon, and .

I'm interested in doing this, especially since it requires relatively little in infrastructure to setup. I'd like to do it on SN itself, perhaps either with a shared account as journals, or just creating a new section on the site. Obviously I'm going to have to tweak the codebase to allow images, and it gives a way to help build our community out. So, if we do this, here's what we need to decide:

• What version of DF? 2012, or wait for the new release

• What type of biome?

• Any mods?

And probably some other stuff. I've been playing a fort which is at war with the elves, and I find its quite a bit of fun since you regularly get seiged, and requires that we have a badass military to survive (and there are ways, even in stock, to get military training to work and start churning out Lords and Masters relatively quickly.

I recommend we apply bugfixes to the raws such as elven treecap diplomacy, and human merchants, which seriously helps getting the supplies we need. I've had good look with Accelerated Modest Mod for bug fixes, and preventing FPS death even in crud hardware so its my vote if we just don't go vanilla. I also recommend we also use all the DFHack fixes (the patrol bug one is almost essential).

Post below if you're interested, turn list is first come, first serve, but you can sign up for a second turn after your first (likely necessary since I expect only 5-6 players). Regular updates, and timely turns are a must as well. Beyond that, the sky is the limit.

Once upon a time, screens were 4:3, video equipment produced 4:3 video, YouTube videos were 4:3, and all was well.

Then the industry said: Let there be 16:9. And there was 16:9. And the chaos began.

It began with 16:9 TVs which deformed 4:3 material to fit the 16:9 screen, and players that allowed to configure a 4:3 screen for output, but deformed 16:9 material to fit the 4:3 screen instead. But not only that, even TV stations did deform 4:3 material they used in 16:9 broadcasts (like old 4:3 recordings showed in new 16:9 news). It continued with pure 4:3 broadcasts no longer being broadcast in 4:3 (although still technically possible and understood perfectly by any 16:9 TV), but 16:9 with black bars left and right, which on a 4:3 TV causes a black frame around an image that is much smaller than necessary.

But at least those were professionals, so while their decisions were not always what you would wish, what they did was at least halfway sensible. But on YouTube, you'll find an even worse situation: 4:3 material converted from 16:9 to 4:3. What this results in is a square image surrounded by black bars left and right, and certainly again the ugly distortions which non-proportional rescaling brings.

In short, since the advent of 16:9, there are masses of terribly distorted videos. And strangely, I've not even seen a single comment about that terrible distortion (but maybe having a minimal sense for aesthetics is strongly correlated with having no desire to get an account with Google — which actually is the main reason why I didn't leave such a comment on such videos).

OK, granted, I no longer see any comments on YouTube, so I can't tell if it has changed (I guess it's related to Google+ integration). But I'd expect such comments to have been made early on anyway.

Managed to kick out the first draft of the bylaws, they're here on the wiki http://wiki.soylentnews.org/wiki/Incorporation/Bylaws for anyone who wishes to take a look. I need to fill out some more paperwork, then submit the entirity of the mess to a lawyer. I got a few recommendations, so mostly now is lawyer shopping.

I realize this is a bit of a longshot, and I don't want to run a QA on the site for this, but does anyone have a lead on a lawyer in New Hampshire to help me through incorporation? I'm also looking for a CPA, but those are relatively easiler to locate.

I've looked at various services such as Harbor Compliance, but they don't seem to be legal help, just document filing services ...