Friday, February 26, 2010

Starcraft II beta impressions

I am in the Starcraft II beta thanks to a connection who shall remain anonymous unless he chooses to identify himself. Thanks, anonymous awesome guy!

I won't necessarily post many updates on this blog, but feel free to follow my initial impressions and the ensuing discussion on this thread at the Motley Fool. If any new threads start on the same board, you can keep an eye on my participation here.

Friday, February 12, 2010

Other blog activity

Just so you know I'm not slacking off on blogging as much as it may look like, I have a few new items on my ever growing number of different places where I write stuff.

New post Castles of Air: Angle math.

Four (yes really!) posts on politics and video games, at my new Daily Kos diary, which I have decided to refer to as "Politics in Plate Mail." Enjoy!

Also, I just joined Google Buzz with my gmail identity, russell.glasser. If you are on Buzz then feel free to add me. You probably won't learn any more from that than you would from reading my Twitter or Facebook feeds; they all update more or less simultaneously. But if you like to collect social media sources, there's another one for you.

Oh and one more thing... Lynnea and I will probably go watch Roy Zimmerman perform at a UU church on Sunday (Valentine's Day evening), assuming we can get tickets once we show up at the door. So if you like Roy, come on over and sit with us!

Arianna Huffington was very, very wrong

I heard something recently that reminded me of something that happened in the 2008 presidential race. During those last few weeks, Arianna Huffington (of Huffington Post fame/infamy) seemed to be appearing on every lefty radio talk show and news show to offer her opinion that Democrats were making a terrible, terrible mistake by focusing on Sarah Palin. They were taking the bait, so to speak. I don't want to listen to all those interviews, but here's an editorial she wrote:

Every second of this campaign not spent talking about the Republican Party's record, and John McCain's role in that record, is a victory for John McCain.

Her critics like to say that Palin hasn't accomplished anything. I disagree: in the space of ten days she's succeeded in distracting the entire country from the horrific Bush record -- and McCain's complicity in it. My friends, that's accomplishment we can believe in.

Then Huffington would go on to say that Democrats are only making themselves appear petty and perhaps sexist by focusing on the many, many shortcomings of the eleventh hour VP nominee that McCain shoehorned into his train wreck of a campaign.

But she was absolutely wrong. Focusing on Sarah Palin was awesome. Making the campaign all about Sarah Palin and the terrible error of judgment that McCain made in drafting her was much better than running a campaign against the perceived heroism of McCain himself. They exposed an obvious weak spot. And after all this time, it's become all the more clear that Sarah Palin just wasn't qualified for the job.

I hardly even think that's a matter of opinion anymore. After Sarah's hee-larious book tour in which she was caught reading crib notes off of her hand, popular perception of her has plummeted, to the point where a new poll shows that 55% of Republicans do not now think she is qualified to be president.

55%. Of Republicans. And the question wasn't "Is Sarah Palin the best candidate?" or "Would you vote for Sarah Palin over Barack Obama (or some other candidate). It was "do you think Palin is or is not qualified to serve as president?" And most Republicans don't think she is.

Look, there are not always two sides to every story. Sometimes an individual person just obviously is not up for the job. Sarah Palin appealed to a very narrow demographic which only got narrower, as fewer and fewer people were comfortable with aggressively defending this clueless loon as their future president, no matter how much she appealed to their jingoism. It's simply not a reflection on any broad category she belongs to (i.e., women) to point this out.