Tuesday's Brain is Mixed with Swill and Giddiness...

Ex-Terror Detainee Says U.S. Tortured Him

At the age of 19, Murat Kurnaz vanished into America's shadow prison system in the war on terror. He was from Germany, traveling in Pakistan, and was picked up three months after 9/11. But there seemed to be ample evidence that Kurnaz was an innocent man with no connection to terrorism. The FBI thought so, U.S. intelligence thought so, and German intelligence agreed. But once he was picked up, Kurnaz found himself in a prison system that required no evidence and answered to no one.

We tortured Kurnaz. So what? This is old news.

It takes a special kind of vicious mendacity to claim that because the Kurnaz affair happened two years ago, it's "old news," that the torture that happened to him is irrelevant. John Holbo makes a stronger observation than I did.

Paul Berman: I Told You So?

This is probably only of interest to those in the blogosphere who pay any attention to ivory tower punditocracies, like me. Paul Berman is now going around claiming that he was for war in Iraq, but didn't say so because he knew George W. Bush would prosecute the war badly. Yet his own words show that he was saying so, loudly and enthusiastically. Matthew Yglesias calls him out. Spencer Ackerman has more of the silliness.

Meet John McCain's Economics Advisor

John McCain's economics advisor is Senator Phil Gramm (R-Tx), an anti-regulation fanatic who helped create the conditions for the current mortgage and other financial crises we're currently seeing. McCain's recent speech didn't just call for "doing nothing," as the press has repeated; he actively called for less regulation and less transparency in the markets where this disaster began. The article provides links to many more analyses of the kind of damage Gramm has left in his wake.

Money quotes: When an elderly widow told Gramm that his Medicare reforms would make it difficult to remain independent, Gramm responded, "You haven't thought about a new husband, have you?" And this ditty about how his cuts to Social Security would hurt 80 year-olds: "Most people don't have the luxury of living to 80, so it's hard to feel sorry for them."

From this day forward, I shall no longer wince when someone refers to the Republican candidate as "Grandpa McCain." I used to think it was unfair. I still think it's disrespectful. But anyone who embraces the idea that we shouldn't care too much about Social Security's benefits to 80 year olds because there are only a few of them doesn't deserve fairness or respect.

"Only those people who embrace the idea of being evil and think that evil is cool have any business voting for the Republican Party ever again. Ever. Again." -- Brad Delong

Speaking of whom: Brad DeLong welcomes back Fafblog!

And with the same enthusiasm I did. See? I'm not alone in my unholy devotion to The Medium Lobster.

Publius Loves Fafblog!

Kieran Healy loves Fafblog!

(I'm not gonna stop until you get the message.)

Wilson's Therapy Blend Coffee

Dear Friends: You know I love my coffee. If you want me to keep loving you then never, ever bring this stuff within twenty meters of my anatomy. kthxbye.

Reviews of the MMO "Outside."

I recently read two reviews of the Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game "Outside," which has some of the best graphics and great socialization capabilities, but is remarkably ill-tuned in terms of developer interest. Some of the rules are just incredibly unfair.

This mostly positive review notes

The physics system is note-perfect (often at the expense of playability), the graphics are beyond comparison, the rendering of objects is absolutely beautiful at any distance, and the player's ability to interact with objects is really limited only by other players' tolerance. The real fundamental problem with the game is that there is nothing to do.

The respawn rate of objects and players is ridiculously slow. A dead player can expect to wait for years to respawn, and will be set back to zero assets and a tiny, nearly helpless form. Death is hardcore, and resurrection all but impossible.

In terms of the social environment, almost anything goes. Outside has a vast network of guilds, many of its players are active participants in designing the game's social environment, and almost any player will be able to find company to undertake their desired group quests. On the other hand, gold-buying is rife, the outskirts of virtually every city zone in the game are completely overrun by farmers, and the developers have so far proven themselves reluctant to answer petitions, intervene in inter-player disputes, or nerf broken skills and abilities. Indeed this reviewer will go so far as to say that the developers are absent from the game entirely, and have left it to its own devices. Fortunately, server uptime has been 100% from day 1, despite there being only one server for literally billions of players.

On the other hand, Thudfactor doesn't like it:

Although there's no monthly fee, almost everything requires payment. Accessing many of the zones costs money. All forms of travel above a walk cost money. Earning money costs money (they're called taxes) and paying for things costs extra money (also called taxes). Even sitting and doing nothing is expensive, since you are required to "eat" several times a day. And if you want to store any reasonable quantity of food or possessions you have to get the "Inside" expansion – which is where most of the breathtakingly huge monthly fees are hidden.

Speaking of safety, despite the hostility of many of the players and the depth of the PvP system, it's considered bad form to attack anyone except under very strict, very controlled circumstances. This is apparently because getting killed in the game actually removes you from the game forever. What genius thought that one up?

What fascinates me however, is how close the comments for these two reviews are from being not so tongue-in-cheek.

There's a scene in 01011001, in the chapter "Liquid Eternity," where several characters debate "going Outside," and one goes for it to see what it was like to be made of meat once more. (It's a rather banal and drudging experience, he discovers.) That's a lot like what these reviews feel like: the writers are one step away from wishing they could do away with "Outside" forever: there are better worlds, with more interesting environments and fairer rules.

I could see something like this a century from now, only not tongue in cheek. This looks like great fodder for a book.

Y'know, sometimes I disappoint even myself...

"That doesn't sound too hard."

Charlie Stross has written about having The Trunk, the place where all the novels that he's written but that will never get published go to die. Many other authors mention The Drawer, that place where manuscripts lie hoping, someday, that market forces will come around and make them marketable once more.

I have The Slush. The Slush lives on my PDA, built weekly by a plucker script that compiles it into a PDB document so I can carry it around. It's my entire Work In Progress folder, and it allows me to review my progress even when I'm not able to open up the laptop and work on something directly.

It also allows me to back over old works. And as I was reading through it, I found the dropped subplot of Sterlings.

Make no mistake, I think Sterlings is a pretty good book. It follows three women (Polly, Rhiane, and Dove) as they try to figure out where and how to live now that their universe has expanded so incredibly with their exposure to the Pendorians, and the romantic (and sexual, this being The Journal Entries, after all) entanglements and hijinks that ensue.

There was an entire subplot to the story, involving Senator Kacea Alfan of Athena, a woman stuck in a wheelchair, and the nominal representative of the "conservative" wing of Sterling thought. There were a number of philosophical points made during her scenes about why the intersection of Pendorians and Ys is so dangerous to the Sterling future and about what "substrate independence" and "substrate comprehensibility" mean to a thinking civilization. Ken and Aaden have a cameo appearance in a critical scene in which Kacea games the negotiations, and wrestles with her own guilt at "selling out" her entire civilization, to get herself Pendorian-level medical attention now, and a panicked scene in Dove and Jaylene's hotel room when they start to realize that the Sterling military contingent is going on alert, locking down the temporary embassy (trapping Rhiane and Ilonca inside), and nearly 10% of the Sterling contingent has "gone missing."

I wimped out, and just cut it. It was about 12,000 words all told, and I just left it on the cutting room floor.

Ah, well. There may well be chances to revive it, but I loathe the idea of revising the book. It's fine the way it is. It stands on its own. This is one of the reasons I'm not comfortable with selling the JE's as books: there's always more story to fit into the interstices of existing storylines.