Author: Archturiat

From Reddit…

Posted on by Archturiat in blog 2 Comments

I recently posted this to Reddit to a “DAE” post about fathers.  I don’t know why I felt like sharing it.. it just felt like a good thing to share.  I repeat it here for completeness.

I had a lot of fond memories of my father. But the best was a bit of a time-release memory, not realized until long after my father’s death.

My father, when he was in his early 20’s, was a camp counselor at a place called Camp Union, somewhere in Massachusetts, probably back in the 1950’s. This I knew.

What I didn’t know was that he kept every single piece of correspondence he ever received from the young men and the families he worked with. I found the box of letters in cleaning out his house after he passed away.

A few of the letters were actually recent. I reached out to a few of the most recent letter-writers, and discovered one of the men was now living nearby (I live in Oregon presently). We met for coffee one day, and he shared with me many wonderful stories of times at the Camp. And he shared with me many of the letters my father wrote back to him over the years.

But the best was the letter I got from this gentleman a few days later. What he could not express to me that day was that my father apparently worked with “at risk” boys from the inner city of Boston, and that my dad was one of the key reasons he straightened his life out and went on to be a “pillar of the community” when he was well on the road to being a street thug.

And suddenly I realized that my father was not only my father, but the father of a lot of other struggling young men in the 1950’s long before I came into his life. And I have a lifetime of correspondence to read and cherish, knowing that as much as my father meant to me.. that there are hundreds… maybe even thousands… of other men who’s lives he touched.

And that makes me proud of my father in ways no one single memory can ever do.

IMPORTANT..

Posted on by Archturiat in Uncategorized No Comments

If you have a webpage hosted somewhere on feedle.net, please call me ASAP. Dreamhost (one of the companies I use for hosting) has had a database compromise, and they have reset all user logins to new passwords.

Note this does not effect the listserver.

It doesn’t mean shit.

Posted on by Archturiat in blog, current events 5 Comments

You want to stop the RIAA and MPAA? It’s really this simple.

Stop buying RIAA-produced music. Stop buying movie tickets to MPAA-produced movies. Stop supporting the content industry in general, who produces vapid mind-rotting “culture” and abuses artists and technical people alike.

10% of us doing this would do more to hurt the industry than if every website opposing SOPA/PIPA went dark for a month.

To all Non-Christians: We Won the War on Christmas.

Posted on by Archturiat in blog, rants No Comments

When you think about it, it’s almost comical, because we’re not even aware we won.

“But wait,” I hear you cry, “how can you say we won when Christmas is everywhere.. starting from Halloween until .. well, Christmas Day!”

That’s exactly the point. Christmas has become a one-day holiday for the vast majority of Americans. It’s become the day we travel “over the hills and through the woods” to Grandmas, eat ourselves silly (like we don’t eat ourselves silly the other 364 days of the year), and give thoughtfully mass-produced gifts to one another completely devoid of any deeper meaning other than.. “here.”

If you think about it, all the traditions everybody celebrates on Christmas Day are not Christian. The gifts. The tree. The fire in the fireplace (Yule Log: they didn’t even bother to change the name on that one). The celebration of the birth of the Sun God.

Sorry, that one just leaked out.

But that’s the greater point. In all this talk of the Religious “Right” about a War on Christmas, nobody ever mentions the fact that very few people in the United States celebrate Christmas.. um.. “properly.” I drive around my appropriately festive upper-middle-class neighborhood and I already see my Christian neighbors dismantling the lights outside. It’s not even New Year’s Day yet and one neighbor had already put the tree at the curb for collection by the garbageman.

Don’t They Know It’s Christmas?

Maybe because I grew up in a staunchly proud quasi-German family that held on to the few traditions they felt mattered, but Christmas decorations went up on Christmas Eve (maybe a couple of days before in some cases) and came down on the Twelfth Day of Christmas.

You remember Twelfth Night, right? Surely, you’ve heard.. if not actually sung.. that “Five.. GOOOOOLDEN… RIIIIIINGS!!!!” song. The Twelve Days of Christmas? The Christmas Holiday starts on December 25th (or, in fine Abrahimic tradition, the evening of the day before) and runs for the Twelve Days of Christmas. Each day has some significance in the more orthodox Christian sects, including the Feast of King Wenceslas, ending at Epiphany (the day the “three wisemen came to the manger”) on January 5.

Of course, the entire “Twelfth Night” thing harkens back to Pagan Europe’s traditions of the Lord of Misrule and the traditions of Samhain and Saturnalia.

But the greater point is that Christianity adopted many of the traditions of the pre-Christian peoples of western Europe and adapted them into a wonderful story of their Christ, rich with symbolism, some of which was adopted of course. But some of it was meant to teach Christians what it means to be.. Christian.

And here comes the Religious “Right”, who wants department stores to use the words “Merry Christmas” rather than “Happy Holidays”, and gets offended when some non-Christian politely asks that we tone down the Jesus stuff, because we’re Not All Christian After All. Meanwhile, the very things they are arguing for serve to only reduce the meaning of Christmas to a secular holiday we celebrate on (or about) the Winter Solstice. None of these Jesus Junkies are out there telling people to go out there and celebrate the Divine Liturgy on the Saturday after Christmas Day, or to invite a (poor) stranger into one’s home for the Feast of King Wenceslas.. the latter being doubly ironic because these same people sing the carol attached to that day without actually listening to the words.

All of that has been lost in all the clearance sales, sports games, Doctor Who specials, and leftovers.

So, congratulations, my fellow Heathens. We won the War on Christmas.

Posted on by Archturiat in blog No Comments

As I look out my window out in to a frostbitten forest here in Oregon, my spirit feels as cold as the landscape.

It seems strangely appropriate that a magical woman, who’s life began three days after Beltane in 1947 departs this world 64 years later at Yule.  Winter has chosen Her Sacrifice, and this year it is one of our own.  Our beloved High Priestess, friend and confidante, lover to some and mother to many, and to all of us known as simply Celeste, passed on at 11:04pm December 21, 2011 after suffering what appears to be a severe brain hemorrhage earlier in the day.

Words cannot describe my feelings as one of the Elders of our small tribe.  Anything I can say to you will be mere words to fill an empty hole left by the sudden departure of a dear friend.

Celeste lived her life in service to not just our Lord and Lady, but in service to each and every one of us.  The light of our dearest Star is now no longer living amongst us, but it is not (and should never be) gone from this world.  We all have the ability to bring Celeste forward in service to our God and our Goddess.. and most importantly to each other and every other being in this Universe.

As long as we remember our Star and High Priestess, and strive to dedicate ourselves to her memory, her bright spark will continue to glow.  She will continue to live through us, and her love for each of us can never be taken.

 

-Archturiat “Tristan Angelchild”
High Priest, Starlight Covenant

We created SOPA/PIPA, citizens of the Internet.

Posted on by Archturiat in Uncategorized 2 Comments

I’m going to go out on a limb here and say something that I’m sure is likely to be an unpopular opinion amongst people I know.

We have nobody to blame but ourselves for SOPA/PIPA.

For years I’ve watched as the Internet has been a hotbed of blatant copyright infringement.  I’m not innocent myself in this, and I acknowledge my role in creating this monster.  But at the end of the day, we’re the ones that have given the media industry the tools they need to argue for the blunt force instrument coming from the SOPA and PIPA Acts worming their way through Congress.

Because by in large, those of us who spend our days building the infrastructure of the Internet.. and those of us who act as gatekeepers and moderators on forums.. have played a very tedious game of lip-service to the content industry’s complaints: and we must admit that while some of them are patently (pun intended) ridiculous, there are valid concerns hidden in the industry’s hubris. Some of us (and some way more than others) have made the “I don’t drop the Bomb, I just make it” argument like that really absolves us of any ethical responsibility when the tools we build are used for criminal copyright violations.

We all know what a joke it is to whine “But Usenet.. and Napster.. and BitTorrent.. and RapidShare.. and (insert technology of the week).. all have valid legitimate uses other than copyright infringement!” because no sooner are those words out of our mouths we open up Transmission and grab the latest Doctor Who episode.  We have never made any compelling story about what legitimate uses these services have outside the seedy underground of the Internet.. because, well, they don’t have any outside a few fringe groups precisely because most of the use (by bits per second) is violative.  How many of you can honestly say that you’ve used BitTorrent to download more open-source software and public domain media vs. “unauthorized copyrighted content?”  If the number of peers and seeds of Linux Mint vs. a recent Doctor Who episode is any indication, it’s laughable to even consider this argument.

So, we honestly didn’t expect the content industry to eventually strike back, and strike back hard with all the might that their billions of dollars can bear?

We picked this fight.  We had the power in our hands to use the Internet to better ourselves, to create a new society based upon open sharing of knowledge and communication.  Instead we used it to download Britney Spears and The Biggest Loser.  We created an Information Superhighway, and all we did was use it as a high-speed getaway van.

When the last unfiltered packet is passed along the backbone, we will only have ourselves to blame in the end.

Let it expire.

Posted on by Archturiat in blog 6 Comments

Today, I got this interesting postcard in the mail.

Here in the wild-and-wooly Territory of Clackamas County, we have a levy on property taxes that pays for the Sheriff’s Department. Since I live in the incorporated City of Oregon City, and in an apartment, we can debate how much I really need to care about this issue, at least in the abstract.

But what I find interesting is that the Sheriff’s Department just spent a good chunk of change to tell me they .. um .. need more chunks of change.

Let’s do the math on this one. Clackamas County has (according to the US Census’ 2007 estimate) around 140,000 households. Based upon how this was addressed (“Postal Customer”), it’s pretty safe to assume that this postcard went to every household in Clackamas County, or at least a vast majority of them. (EDIT: it also appeared in my Post Office Box in Milwaukie as well, which tells me that my 140,000-piece estimate is actually a low-ball figure). Let’s assume that the cost of producing the postcards, printing them, and mailing out 140,000 of them ran the Good Sheriff 50¢ per postcard. 140,000x.50=$70,000.

Perhaps a mere drop in the bucket compared to the $10 million the postcard claims will be raised by this levy in the 2013 tax year.

But it does raise the question of where else the Sheriff’s Department is using taxpayer resources in a fashion that might be deemed “questionable,” or at least for purposes other than legitimate law enforcement. $70,000 would pay a significant amount of a rookie deputy’s salary.

Thanks, Sheriff. You just ensured my vote will be “no.” Find a better way of financing your Posse.

This Is Important.

Posted on by Archturiat in Uncategorized 3 Comments

So, first off, I admit that I’ve been guilty of a lot of whinging and whatnot on here over the past few months.  To be perfectly honest, life has been full of challenges for me over the past couple of years, and while I’d like to think I handled them all with a certain amount of grace and style, it hasn’t been easy.

But now I’m reaching one of those thresholds that nobody ever wants to reach: having to choose between staying in the city I love and living on the streets, or moving in with a good friend 1,000 miles away and completely starting over from square one.

It’s not like I haven’t tried desperately to find work here.  There just isn’t any work for me.  Even my attempt to find a pizza delivery driver job near my home has proven to be a challenge.  I’ve heard “I’m overqualified” so many times.. I just want to scream “if I’m so damn overqualified why am I literally starving?”  I’ve had employers string me along for months, only to hire somebody else (or to have the job disappear in a puff of smoke).  I’ve sent out hundreds of copies of my resume, and more often than not I don’t hear anything in reply.

If that wasn’t enough, the contract work I’ve been doing for a few close friends’ companies has largely dried up.  Some of that is seasonal: not a lot of projects get started this time of year because of the holidays or what-not.  I thought I could make the little money I earned this year that way last, but that money has finally run out.

The point is, I have no more choices.  The time for me to find work was a month ago: that hasn’t happened, so now I’m left with no other choice but to put anything I care about into a storage unit and go whereever I can find a roof to cover my head this winter.

As a result of this uncertainty, I’m letting people know in various circles that you likely won’t see a lot of me for the next few months, or maybe years, who knows.  I’m going to have to withdraw from most of my “extra-curricular activities”.  I need to focus on simply getting a job, whatever that job is.. and saving enough money at that job so that I have some financial solvency.  I also need to figure out how to resolve some of the issues I have with my teeth and my overall health, and that’s going to take either a job with passable health insurance (good luck in today’s job market) or a significant investment of what little money I can scratch out.

For many of you, this might seem sudden.  I’ve not been very vocal about my financial challenges, mostly because I know that many of you are one step away from where I’m at: having to pick up bottles and cans on the street to buy food for your pet (which I literally have been doing the past month) and scrounging small change for transit when you need to get around (or begging close friends for gas money).

For others among you, you’ve been generous with supporting me the past few months.  I am in debt to many of you for getting me by.  But as we approach winter, I’m reminded of the True Meaning of Christmas (hurr): that the gifts we exchange and the merriment of the holidays are here to remind each other that we can make it through the winter by sharing what we have.. and that in reality, the Winter of 2009 really has never quite ended for me.   Summer of 2010 provided a small reprieve, in that I was able to scrape enough money out of the sale of my house to survive for a year on my own and pay many back debts.. but since that time, it’s been very lean.

So, in short, the only way I’m going to survive this Winter is to hibernate.

Over the next couple of weeks I’ll be talking to many of you privately about what this means for the particular group you are in.  I’m in a position of trust for more than one group, and I’ll need somebody to take over my responsibilities while I figure out what all of this means.  Please have a little patience with me while I work out some of these details: consider that I am also going to be moving during this time with scant little resources, and I’m focusing on taking care of my immediate personal needs (like food and shelter) before I worry about other activities.  But I will get to everybody before I disappear into the wilds of Montana.

And this is also a final call to action.  If ANYBODY has a job I can do.. regardless of how menial and petty, now is the time to come forward and talk to me about it, regardless of how “overqualified” you might think I am.  I am pretty desperate right now, and would be happy to do any job that I can physically do and will put food on my table reliably and consistently and pay my rent.  I just recently rewrote my resume, if you’d like a copy of it please ask me (I haven’t posted it to the website yet because of formatting issues with the HTML version I’m still resolving).

I know a couple of you will ask me if there IS anything you can do.  Yes, I will be posting something in the next couple of days that will outline what needs to happen over the next 30 days and ways people can help.  Very few things will likely involve much capital outlay.

I love all of you, and thank you.  And it does literally break my heart to have to do this.  But I’m out of options.

It’s shit like this, Google.

Posted on by Archturiat in blog 2 Comments

Image of Google MapsJust a quick note on something I just observed. Google is getting better and better at the sort of UI tweaks that I’ve come to expect from Apple. Maybe Google did this months ago and it was just so subtle that I just now noticed it, but if you look at the “mode change” box in the upper right hand corner of Google Maps, it acts as a lens showing you exactly what’s there: see my example, where you can see the corner of the Oregon Convention Center and MLK Blvd. in the box.

Really cool, guys.