Stop SOPA!

I normally don’t blog about things like the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) here.  I figure the few readers I have want to hear about RPGs, comics, or other nerdy pursuits.  Today, I felt I had to make an exception.

I am not pro-piracy.  In fact, I believe strongly in voting with my dollars when it comes to the things I like.  I want the people who make these things to get paid so that they will continue making them.

I can even understand the frustration of the people who watch their intellectual property get pirated over and over.  While I disagree with him strongly on SOPA, comic book writer and novelist Peter David sums up this frustration over at his blog.

None of this justifies a bad law like SOPA though.  SOPA assumes guilt without proof.  I don’t want an Internet where the mere accusation of piracy can get a website removed from DNS servers, effectively erased from the web.  Under the current Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) companies like Warner Brothers have issued takedown notices for files they have never looked at based solely on the filename.  Do we really want to make it easier for this sort of thing to happen?

So I urge you you to contact your congressman and tell them you are opposed to SOPA.  Sites like Stop American Censorship make it easy to get this contact information.  Congress is supposed to represent the will of the people, not that of corporate lobbyists, but it is up to us to let them know what our will is.

Stop SOPA!

Waiting Rooms and Fragile Things

I have been spending a lot of time around hospitals recently, which means I have spent a lot of time waiting.   Waiting while my wife had surgery.  Waiting with my wife in the ER.  Waiting to get her transferred up to the hospital.  Even waiting while she was getting discharged.

I would just like to say waiting sucks!

Especially hospital waiting rooms.  You sit there full of an uncomfortable mixture of anxiety and utter boredom.  Literally, there is nothing to do but stand around and worry.

Well, I suppose you can read.  I have enough enough experience with waiting rooms that I always grab a book on the way out.  That's how I read Confessions of a Part-Time Sorceress in its entirety while in a waiting room on Wednesday.  It is also how I read  Fragile Things over the last two days.

Fragile Things is a collection of short stories by Neil Gaiman.  A more accurate title would probably be "A collection of random bits I have written over the years that really don't fit anywhere else so here you go!"   Perhaps that title might have been a bit too on the nose.

Nevertheless, it was a fascinating collection of short stories precisely because it was so random.  There was a story that crossing over the works of Sir Conan Arthur Doyle and H.P. Lovecraft.  A story directly translated from a nightmare.  A story about an old professor who just might be Susan Pevensie from the Narnia books.  A poem about how to survive in a faerie tale.  A story set in the Matrix.  A continuation of his novel American Gods which includes an adaptation of the Beowulf within it.

All and all, it was a great cross-section of Neil Gaiman's work.  I enjoyed it a lot.

Don't know if I would recommend reading it in a hospital waiting room though.  A lot of it was too heady and contained too much musing on the nature of life and death for such an environment.  So if you find yourself in one, read Confessions of a Part-Time Sorceress instead.