The times they are a changin'. From here on out, personal thoughts, ideas, and posts will land here at me.raddevon.com. My former blog is now devoted to tech, the Internet, and gaming. Check that out at raddevon.com.
This is my first post exclusive to this version of the blog! I also blog at Vox.
I started this blogging experiment just a few days ago. I wanted to get something going quick so I went the blog farm route. I tried LiveJournal, WordPress, and Vox. The first two were trying so hard to sell upgrades. I went with Vox which was pretty cool. I think it’s ad-supported, but, being an Adblock Plus user, I didn’t have to worry about that. I liked the selection of themes, and their community is really great. I did, however, notice some problems. Text colors are persistent for the remainder of the post after you have colored even just one word, and it doesn’t matter if the word is in the middle of your post so far. All the text you add after coloring some will retain that color. There’s no way to remove text formatting which would have been an easy fix for the aforementioned problem. Phantom spacing between paragraphs and at the end of the post often manifests upon editing. The sidebar widgets cannot be rearranged. It’s nothing major… just a lot of minor annoyances.
No matter how much I want to fancy myself an intellectual, and regardless of how much I hate popular culture, there are facets of it that I can’t seem to escape… nor do I really feel the need to do so. One of these is electronic gaming.
My relationship with video games was very simple for the majority of my life so far. I played them almost any chance I got. I rarely finished them, but I got a taste of them all. This was the way things were until about 3 years ago when I swore off television. Read the rest of this entry »
Unfortunately, I lack the vocabulary necessary to talk about cinema or works of fiction, but I do want to share a couple of movies I watched recently and absolutely loved. Read the rest of this entry »
What justification do we as Americans have for our belief that democracy is the end of the evolutionary cycle of government? We say it gives power to the people and that it’s the best system out there. Even if both those claims were true, should we cease? Given an unlimited number of options, can we say that we have somehow hit upon the absolute most perfect one and that we are practicing it in its most perfect form? I’ll humor the apologists and assume that we should stop here if both these tenets are true. Read the rest of this entry »
I will periodically post links that I find interesting. This is one such post. The post title will begin “Link:” and the most recent ones will remain in the sidebar as “Post Links.”
It’s wonderful to find a fellow atheist with such clear thinking. I would like to say I don’t need anyone to feel the way I do about the supernatural in order for me to believe what I believe—and, if it comes down to it, I really don’t—but it’s undeniably reassuring to find intelligent people who share my thoughts. I was the first atheist I knew. I knew atheists existed, but I hadn’t met any. That may be a function of a sheltered childhood. I’m proud of where I am now in life. I have morality that isn’t anchored to a tenuous relationship with a supernatural being—morality governed by logic not by the whims of faulty humans who the gods seem to always task with transcribing their word for the masses.
My girlfriend and I used to rent movies at the Movie Gallery here in Knoxville. I liked them because they had lots of obscure films and because they didn’t try to play “moral police” like most of the major players. She liked them for these reasons and because she worked there for several years. A couple of weeks ago we went to rent some movies, and they had closed for good! All the movies had already been moved out of the place! We asked around, but no one seems to know what happened. Well, recently we had an itch for a movie. We were going to go to Blockbuster except that one rental is two-thirds the cost of a month of their rental plan. We decided to try a rental service. I wanted to look for alternatives before going with the Blockbuster plan. Of course, there’s Netflix, but they have some troubling policies, too (read: rumored political censorship and the dreaded throttling). Read the rest of this entry »
There’s one disclaimer before I post this information. This is a facet of my personality of which I’m not very fond. I don’t like starting things that I don’t finish, but I do it. I’ve always done it. This isn’t something I’m wearing like a badge.
One of my personal missions is to purchase responsibly in as many ways as I’m able. I hate consumer culture, but I can’t deny that I am a part of it. I try to minimize my damage by not purchasing from companies that have poor labor practices. I have found that information about the manufacturing of products is very difficult to come by. I often have to contact companies directly to find out where there products are made. I oftentimes get no response even then. I decided it would be nice to have a wiki which would catalog different products and where they are made as well as other information that may be of ethical concern to prospective consumers. Read the rest of this entry »
I’m always a little embarrassed to bare any of myself. I always feel like the way I think and the conclusions I make about the nature of things are trite. I guess that mostly stems from people making me think that is so. I feel like older people who may have shared your ideals at some point in life believe that you will without a doubt become jaded in the exact same ways they have and end up believing the things they now believe. Read the rest of this entry »
RT @ninjapocalypse: @BobertHepker Don't buy that paint if it's not 1080p. You don't want to spend $4800 on a can of paint just to find it's interlaced.
