Seebach Exhibit 7

Lolcat an sich!

Okay, so, lolcode is an attempt to build a programming language from lolcat captions. (One can only assume that this suggests a return to the older term for them: "cat macros".)

I think that, if lolcats are going to get serious, we should consider metaphysics, not just the hard sciences.

I have discovered an elegant proof of the essential reality of things in and of themselves, but TL;DR.

It's funny, but is it a cat macro?

There's a popular hobby for internet users, of captioning cats -- the results are sometimes called lolcats.

I got curious about these, and made a couple of my own. The above was today's effort. My spouse remembered my previous contribution, and observed a pattern:

I seem to like making things which are clearly cat macros, but which do not depict cats. Go figure.

What I wish Weiss Kreuz had been

So, I was watching an anime called Weiss Kreuz, aka Knight Hunters. (Yes, I know that Weiss Kreuz is bad German for something that is not "knight hunters". They have a hospital named "Magic Bus", I don't think there's any kind of intent of coherence in the use of non-Japanese languages.)

It's awful. I men, really, truly, awful. The characters are not two-dimensional; no, they're like those cardboard standups, where there's a tiny little two-dimensional bit jutting out the back to stabilize them a bit. The result is almost worse; their dark pasts are incoherent and do nothing to justify their surreal presents.

The heroes (if we may use the term) are a group of four "beautiful" (bishounen, anyway) assassins, who work for an organisation called "Weiss", where they are assigned the task of destroying truly evil people. For instance, in one episode, a girl wakes up in a swimming pool full of ice, to find that she's had her kidney stolen! It turns out there is a deadly team of rogue doctors (well, a rogue doctor) who have a movable medical facility, and they are harvesting the organs of the young for various customers. Weiss gets involved after the girl calls a late-night radio program with her story; she had no one else to turn to, as the police didn't believe her. (Presumably, they thought the missing kidney was the result of mere youthful high spirits.)

Now, here's the thing. When the omnious shadowy figure that orders them arround commands them to kill ("Hunters of Night, deny these Dark Beasts their tomorrows!"), the targets are always, well... It's the doctor. Nothing is done about his clients. When a trio of kidnappers is caught, after kidnapping twenty children for some other organization, it's just the kidnappers they go after. There's no hint (at least early on) of any kind of search for the customers, so one can only imagine that, three days later, new patsies have been found to continue getting killed by the pretty boys.

What would have made this great would have been the discovery that Weiss is the criminal organization hiring these people, and the assassins are just cleaning up loose ends. That would have been a cool story. Instead, it's just anatomically-questionable fan service, and mediocre angst.

Bye-bye, Mr. Falwell

You know, I don't think anyone would call me a fan of the late Jerry Falwell. Whether it was blaming gays and abortionists for 9/11, or suggesting that we should "blow them away in the name of the Lord", Falwell had an astounding talent for offending people, and in many cases, their offense was justified.

On the other hand, there are people out there who encountered him at his best, not his worst, and some of them quite liked him, or at least, recognized good things that he did. Even people who staunchly opposed his blurring of the line between spiritual authority and temporal power might approve of his charitable efforts.

Today, Mr. Falwell is dead. And today, millions of people who are normally pretty decent are doing their best to emulate Fred Phelps, and cheer at a man's death, and laud the suffering of those who were close to him. I don't know what to make of that, but I can't say I like it. I have never been a fan of the hostile, gloating, responses some people have to the deaths of hated enemies. It struck me as a grave illness that some people couldn't refrain from gloating when Pope John Paul II died, and to this day, I remember a particularly disgusting editorial piece written about Jerry Garcia which made a half-sentence's lip service to not speaking ill of the dead, then proceeded to excoriate him at length.

The guy deserved better than this. We all do. I really don't like this hostility and mockery. Whatever the man's faults, is jeering at his funeral, metaphorically or literally, going to correct them? I don't think it is.

p.s.: In a fit of dramatic irony, Fred Phelps has announced plans to gleefully preach at Falwell's funeral about how the man's in Hell, thus confirming my theory that they're just doing whatever it takes to get people to hit them so they can sue.