Site design is still chugging along, but was slowed by some crazy work deadlines that have kept me pretty crazily busy over the last few weeks. I’m trying to keep my posts here sparse since I’ve already migrated a bunch of shit to the new server/database and such and I don’t want to have to port a bunch of content over. It’s coming though. And it’ll be great. Going to work on it a bit this week and hopefully have it running and changed over this weekend.

I’ll have links to some of the iPhone apps I’ve been working on for work available as well. And hopefully I’ll be submitting some of my own in the near future.

KEEP ON TRUCKIN!

Jabberwock

Site redesign is coming along well. I’m aiming for having everything important ported over by this weekend. It’s going to take me a while to get ALL the legacy content in there.

One new thing that’s going to happen is going to be user accounts, which will allow you to do a lot of interesting shit, and which will be required for commenting because the spam shit gets exhausting even with the filters.

I’ll keep you all posted.

Jabberwock

Okay, so something’s fucked up with the site. I’m investigating. I think it’s probably because I haven’t updated WordPress in a while, and we’ve been having some server issues. This is part of why I’m totally redesigning the site from scratch and migrating content to something I’ll have (mostly) built myself.

Thanks to Kasey for bringing this to my attention. Should hopefully be fixed shortly.

Jabberwock

Oops, sorry about the multiple posts — the server was having kind of a fit last night. Apparently it was actually going through when I was hitting “Publish”, but the server kept timing out.

Jabberwock

So, my friend Tom and I have started a podcast. It starts out nearly unlistenable (which is why episode one was “lost in a fire”) but it’s been getting really good of late.

Click here for the second first episode.

Jabberwock

So, gentlemen. And, uh, ladies. Or do I have to call you gentlemen, too, so that you don’t feel excluded from what you like to call the “boys club”?

Anyway, it turns out people aren’t buying enough of our… whatever the hell it is we manufacture. We’re losing money. Like crazy.

I’ve hired some expensive consultants to come in and break down our costs, figure out where we can reduce spending so that we can fix this company and make it prosperous once again. No sacrifice is too small, and none of us will be immune.

[pause for laughter]

Haha, yeah, I know, right? We already know how to cut costs, and it ain’t from our salaries and bonuses that’s for fucking sure. So, we’ll be moving manufacturing to… I don’t know, Mexico? China? The Marianas? Where-the-fuck-ever we can get away with paying people pennies an hour to do jobs we’re currently paying people like seven freaking dollars to do. That should buy us enough time to squeeze out maybe a few more years of ludicrous salaries and bonuses and shit from this sinking ship before they file chapter 11 and we bail.

Agreed? Good! Thought so.

Now, you might be wondering who’s going to be buying our products. There’s already a sharp decline in sales on account of the shit-show economy we’re mired in, and if we start laying off tens of thousands of our own employees, they’re not going to be able to afford to buy much. And, of course, none of those dumb fucks we’ll be paying pennies to manufacture this shit will be able to buy any of it either. I understand your concerns, but, well, for one thing, we don’t employ every goddamn person in this country. People who work in other places can still buy shit! Just as long as we’re among the first of the American businesses to carry out this plan, we’ll be a-okay. We just need to hope that EVERYONE doesn’t start doing this.

Plus, there’s always credit cards.

Besides, who gives two tugs on an old goat’s labia about them? We have money. That’s what we need to preserve, here, in all this. That’s what’s important. And honestly, what incentive do we really have to consider anything but our own prosperity at this point?

Jabberwock

You’ll be seeing a few changes to the site over the next few… uh… weeks? Months?

It’s been sort of long-neglected, for a handful of reasons, which I’ve already gone over in the past but which include: Being just incredibly busy with work and personal projects and trying to squeeze in some time occasionally to relax and hang out with friends; being burned out on politics and religion and kind of crushed by the futility of screaming against certain brick walls until they’re painted in the blood I’ve been coughing up; being generally depressed and lonely (until relatively recently, for some reason, and I think it has to do with feelings of fulfillment from the aforementioned personal projects, or maybe some other psychological thing is going on).

Now that I’m feeling a bit better and realizing once again that I don’t necessarily need to have all my content in the form of giant, well-reasoned essays, I’m going to try to put up at least one update a week.

But that’s beside the point.

The point is, there’s going to be a bit of a repurposing and redesign going on here. The redesign is mostly going to be a visual thing — at least when viewed from the front — but it’s going to simplify the layout a bit. I’m a fan of minimalism, and, well, if you look at that menu over on the left, that’s pretty far from minimalism. Too many categories and too much shit. Behind the scenes, I’m going to be building some interesting new shit. The way Dissections work will change, hopefully resulting in more frequent updates to those.

As for the repurposing, this site’s going to become sort of an aggregator for all the things I’m doing, pulling in content from my other sites and from my Twitter feed and etc, which will result in far, far, FAR more frequent updates. You’ll also get previews and information for things like iPhone apps I’ve just recently started developing, other projects and content I’ve been working on, a photo stream, a better way of serializing novels… and all of this with a simplified, intuitive interface that’s not like this huge list of semi-redundant shit and poorly-thought categorization. This site’s been kind of a beast (which, I guess, lives up to the “Jabberwock” name), which also contributed a little to my avoidance of it, but its rebirth is going to be great.

For right now, I have a few technical decisions I need to make, but you can expect the changes to begin within the next month or so. Especially the visual redesign, which is already underway.

Stay tuned!

Jabberwock

Do me a favor and help my friend John get his new book made. I know I haven’t really been updating regularly here and have thus probably lost a shitload of readers and credibility at this point, but, well, his stuff is really good and it’d be awesome if you could help out. He’s already reached his goal (I intended to put this post up about a week ago but I’ve been crazy fucking busy lately — in mostly a good way, but kind of exhausting as well) but any extra would probably help out a lot. He’s a great guy, and it’s worth it.

You can find the info here: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/john-sundman/creation-science

Thanks in advance!

Jabberwock

Boy, I sure am glad I don’t have to pay very slightly more in taxes. Sure does beat either having a relatively sizable portion taken out of my paychecks to cover my share of the insurance coverage my employer has selected for me, or having to pay an even larger sum out of pocket if I have no insurance at all! Now THAT’S what I call CHOICE!

Jabberwock

I find myself here having to apologize once more for infrequent updates. You know I love you guys, but everything’s been so busy and crazy and I think I’ve gotten into another of those lulls where I feel like my rage meter has sort of become all overwhelmed and stopped working properly. I still get really fucking angry about a number of things, but before I can think to write about them it just kind of bursts and sputters out and I can’t bring myself to give a shit about them. There are only so many times you can read about, for instance (among many), people for whatever reason earnestly defending insurance companies before your brain just kind of shits itself and says “fuck it, just play some video games or something for a while, I can’t do this right now”.

This has happened before, and passed, and I feel like this time it will as well, but while it persists my updates here are going to be relatively infrequent, and I’m sorry.

In the meantime, I’ve started a new webcomic that captures at least a portion of that anger. It’s incredibly lazy, and is all basically transcripts of conversations I have (mostly — and all to this point, at least — with my friend Tom who you may have seen in Rocket Man) throughout the day that I basically just copy/paste into the database to be spat out as a sort of pseudo-comic. It takes about three minutes of my time outside of the conversation itself, which would be happening anyway.

You can find it by visiting Human Mammal Dot Com or basically clicking on that link right there. There’s so much content that it’s going to be updated daily simply because if I didn’t I’d get this tremendous backlog of material that would necessitate me eventually putting up like eight posts a day or something just to keep up.

I want to keep providing you guys steady content, but it’s hard when I have to sit there and write out some long essay on top of everything else. So while I muscle through this terrible lull amidst my general existential angst and depressive issues, you can check that out. It’s still in beta and I know there are a bunch of bugs, and I’ll be adding more functionality soon, but it’s there and it wants you to look at it so please do.

MORE TO COME!

-The Mgt.

Jabberwock

I’m going to respond to the following comment on the front page, here:

commodorejohn said: Man, Jabberwock, you’re usually pretty good about being fair, but…damn. Is it that hard to acknowledge that at least some of us just don’t want the government running it? That maybe not everybody who’s opposed to your positions is some sort of capitalist-fetish lunatic who would fellate the corporate world if they could? Is it so hard to understand that some of us would just rather keep our options open than trust the federal government to look after our good health the way they look after our privacy and financial solvency? Christ.

Allow me to put this into perspective for you:

TENS OF MILLIONS OF PEOPLE in this country — myself included, along with some friends of mine, one of whom needs prescription meds filled on a regular basis — are LIVING WITHOUT HEALTH INSURANCE. Which means that we are either GOING WITHOUT HEALTHCARE, or we are BEING BANKRUPTED BY and CHARGED OUT THE ASS for NECESSARY MEDICAL EXPENSES.

Think about the private health insurance business model for a moment: The only way they can make any money is to ensure that their customers get as little coverage as possible. It’s not about actually providing anyone health coverage. The ultimate truth of the matter is that the insurance industry has absolutely NOTHING to do with healthcare — it’s just a middle man that exploits the fact that people need medical care throughout their lives in order to continue living.

Now, if our goal is to allow this particular rent-seeking industry to profit at the expense of human lives, then great — we’re doing an awesome job, and our system should be commended for getting a portion of the population to pay substantial amounts of money for a service where the bulk of what’s being paid goes toward ensuring that the customer doesn’t actually get the service they’re paying for through whatever loopholes are intentionally written into the policy. U.S.A.! U.S.A.! *trumpets* *fanfare* *Romanesque chariots being driven through rose-petal parades*

But if our goal is to actually ensure maximal healthcare availability to everyone, regardless of their income or employment status, then we’re total failures.

So we need to examine our priorities: It’s the insurance industry or it’s our health — we can’t have both, because the former ONLY THRIVES WHEN THEY DENY US THE LATTER. Do we provide healthcare, or do we facilitate the exploitation of human lives by the insurance industry? That’s what this is all about.

And then there’s the issue of workers’ rights. Businesses have a sort of bargaining wild card in that they can control whether or not you have health insurance. During any kind of negotiation for better pay (until they recently raised it, the Minimum Wage actually decreased in value, corrected for inflation, since the mid-1900s) or treatment or whatever else, a business can always threaten to take away employees’ health benefits.

Why should your boss have the power to decide whether you live or die? Whether you can get your cancer screening this month? Whether you can afford dialysis? And why should you be forced to stay at a job that’s unfair or unsafe or uncomfortable or that you otherwise hate just because if you leave, you might either a) not get health insurance at your next job, or b) not be able to get coverage after you lose your current plan because of a pre-existing condition?

And yeah, it’s easy to say “well I have insurance so why should I care?” but in this economy, maybe it’s a good idea to remember that no job is permanent.

So yeah, you might have health coverage right now, but that doesn’t mean you’re guaranteed it for the rest of your life. Under a single-payer healthcare system, you WOULD BE, whether you got laid off tomorrow or you were born with cancer or you just found out you have lupus or whatever else. And under our current system, that’s very much not the case. So why perpetuate it? Really, why?

Why pay deductibles? Why get less pay because your employer’s taking a cut out of it to pay for part of your insurance plan? Why pay for a service whose primary business model is to deny you that service?

Why?

So, yes, it really is “so hard to understand”. Especially when what you’re basically doing is condemning me and millions of others to death should we happen to not remain absolutely healthy until we hit our sixties and Medicare kicks in.

I completely respect your right to your opinions. I just don’t want them to kill me and tens of millions of other Americans is all.

Hope your job lasts forever, by the way. Good luck with that one. And if you do happen to get laid off or fired or too sick to work or your employer decides it has to cut back on your coverage or the myriad other things that can (and do, I’m sorry to say) go wrong, I really do hope that you and your then-uninsured family remain perfectly healthy until you can either find another job that offers health insurance or we can actually pass a plan that would guarantee you (and everyone!) healthcare.

Jabberwock

Hey, I just had the best idea:

How about, in addition to health care, we tie the ability to BREATHE AIR to employment status? And for the people who ARE employed, we can have a private industry built around deciding whether or not people are worthy of breathing. But the catch is, the breath insurance businesses will have a disincentive to allow people to breathe because the more people inhale the less money they’ll make, somehow.

Holy crap, this is GENIUS!

And then we can have situations like:

“Sorry, your lungs are too big. BREATH DENIED!”

Or:

“You have air in your lungs already.”

“But I’m exhaling. In fact, I’m speaking to you right now, meaning my lungs are putting out the air that’s inside them.”

“Sorry, you already have air in your lungs. My hands are tied. BREATH CLAIM DENIED!”

Or:

“You have asthma? I’m afraid your breath isn’t covered due to a pre-existing breathing condition. Maybe if your breaths were more efficient. BREATHING DENIED.”

I mean, seriously, fuck, why not, right? This is what conservatives and morons seem to want is private industry controlling whether we live or die, so why not let’s just go right ahead and make it a quick and direct process, huh?

Jabberwock

Click to view full-sized image.

When I can boil this down to eight colors, I’ll submit it to Threadless. I’ll keep you posted, so you can head over and vote.

Jabberwock

This was originally written in response to a Facebook post made by someone with whom I went to high school:

“God will never tempt you, Satan does. Will you choose to sin when you are tempted? Or will you turn away? God always offers a way out.”

And her subsequent response to my initial reply (which I’ll refrain from posting for the sake of brevity and because the rest of my response renders it redundant):

“I believe that there are demons (Satan) working against believers in Christ everyday. Satan knows when and where we are weak and will take every opportunity to attack. God has set eternity in hearts of man, and I believe that there IS more than this life. Revelations is VERY differnt than that of the rest of the bible..however it does reveal some about what is yet to come. Eternity of punishment=death=sin. Eternity in Heave=life=obediance…..

“Which is Which? Thats a battle believers in Christ struggle with everyday…Is this God speaking to me? or is it my flesh? (Sata) the deeper the relationship with Christ, the clearer it becomes..”

I liked my own argument so much that I wanted to share it with all of you. (Also, she appears to have deleted the entire thread instead of replying. Thanks, Sally. Guess that means I win the argument.)

I’ve modified it slightly for flow/conciseness/etc. Anyway:

The problem lies with authentication: How do you identify the tricks when you see them? If God is giving you some kind of signal, how can you be sure it’s not a forgery? That is, if Satan is truly cunning, it should be possible for him to fake God’s signature sometimes.

Everything gets so oversimplified that God and Satan are reduced from omnipotent or nigh-omnipotent super-beings to these caricatures that can barely pull off cunningness at the level of which humans are capable. It’s all cartoonish and blatant, like the depictions of Satan as a rascally pitchfork-wielding red guy, always causing childish and puerile mischief. But if he’s really such a threat as to necessitate this big, long battle over human souls — something some would argue is one of the most important things we could concern ourselves with — he HAS to be capable of tricking us into doing or believing just about ANYthing.

For instance, maybe Satan wrote the Bible, and every time someone worships the God depicted therein — a God who would commit genocide against humanity when it disgusted him, or who created two people with no sense of right and wrong and expected them to understand the significance of obeying rules and then punished not only them but every one of their descendants forever when they didn’t use the facilities that they didn’t actually even POSSESS until AFTER they’d eaten the apple — every time you align yourself with this petty, irrational, arbitrarily cruel entity, you’re worshiping the REAL Satan — the one who was so devious, so deceitful that he masterfully wove together this elaborate and effective framework of religion and faith, manufacturing and demonizing bogeyman opposition, so that people would eagerly throw themselves with the best of intentions and hopes right into his trap.

And sure, you can say “well I know the difference, I have the clarity that God has given me to recognize the truth”, but that’s exactly my point: How can you be sure? How can you know that that feeling you have, that understanding you feel you possess, is the genuine article and not just a forgery intended to keep you obedient to the REAL Satan?

Maybe the real trick is to get you to think that something is a trick when it’s not. Or that something else isn’t a trick when it is. And whatever clarity you might think you’ve attained is also just deception.

Jabberwock

Sorry for lack of updates of late — I recently got a new job and started a new relationship and am basically just extremely busy in a number of different (but pleasant! for a change!) ways.

There are a couple new Chick Dissections in the pipeline, though, and a handful of other things.

Stay tuned, and sorry again for the update infrequency.

Jabberwock