Die of the Gods For some bizarre reason, this lovely 12-sided die has shown up on the streets of Seattle, right outside the Seattle Art Museum. It must weigh a ton because nobody's tried to steal it. I suspect it's a paean to one artists's lost past of D&D and similar games.
Jammin in the Streets This picture does not do justice to the energy or volume this guy was putting out. I was two blocks away when I started to hear him, and he was just wailing away at this little toy kit. The other guy was noddin' his head, havin' a good time listening to this ongoing cacophonic rhythm. It was impressive stuff.
Hopeless in Seattle This picture was one of those things that's become very common even in Seattle: a drunk passed out in an alleyway in broad daylight. Over lunch this afternoon I had a conversation with a co-worker about some writer's new book about how much better off the Earth would be without us, or even if we fell back to 19th Century population levels, and I pointed out that 19th Century population levels have 19th Century economies: you just don't have enough people to power the upper end of the power curve, and you
need those people to have any innovation at all. Then I see guys like this at the bottom of the curve and I wonder if there wasn't a way to drag people up, so that the minimum standard of human dignity freed people to something of intellectual value. I doubt we could do it without genetic engineering.
Assphalt! While the family was driving over to coven this evening, we ended up behind this truck, owned by the Northwest Asphalt company, and this lovely sticker on the back of their truck. It's hard to tell how new the sticker is; it may have been just put on, or it may have been there at least a few days, but it's relatively free of signs of aging, so it's not too old. Even so, it's the responsibility of the truck's operators to remove or obscure it. It's in bad taste and lacks propriety. Kouryou-chan thought it was dumb: good for her. I can't help but wonder if these guys are due a traffic ticket of some kind.
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Date: 2007-08-15 08:45 am (UTC)We're on the same fringes of censorship as a magazine cover or a calendar with the same image, with all the same arguments over public display. There's a whole 'nother argument about the stereotyped depecition of female sexuality. Let's not hide all that with a traffic ticket.
(Evil thought about automobiles as phallic substitutes, and what that would lead to....)
no subject
Date: 2007-08-15 03:19 pm (UTC)Really? You must not be male. ;)
Seriously, that's the kind of sticker that causes the male of our species to do the double take and "pedal to the metal" to get close enough to "make sure" she's really as naked as he thinks she is....all because he's, well, male.
I would say that presents a traffic hazard.
A male version would not get the same result from the female of our species, simply because we don't react that way.
no subject
Date: 2007-08-15 04:05 pm (UTC)I think you're off base for this one. Consider that in the 19th (~1 billion) century, we had not optimized our resources sufficiently to industrialize more than Europe and North America (more or less) -- that was approximately 20 percent of the population. (Let's give another 5% for areas outside those two continents.) Even so, not all of Europe had industrialized.
Today, if we were at the equivalent population level, we could afford to industrialize all of it. (Let's say 20% gets left behind due to civil war and such, yet the best and brightest would still make it out if they so chose.) As such, you have the potential to involve the entire power curve rather than a small portion of it.
no subject
Date: 2007-08-15 05:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-08-16 03:10 am (UTC)