Corvus Corax with Wadokyo at Wacken last month. This is incredible. What can you do with a degree in medieval music? You can be an incredible badass in front of thousands of cheering Germans!



This is somehow just about the most metal thing I've seen in ages.

Republican Tears is retweeting the best in GOP meltdowns and tears.

So mostly I post on Facebook these days. I think I'm starting to annoy people because the number one subject of my posting in the last month or so has been "Fuck Mitt Romney". I'm as "ehhhh" as any leftist about Barack Obama- I believe very strongly in harm reduction and focusing on outcomes, so I'm gonna vote for him- but Mitt Romney, well, fuck Mitt Romney. He is basically everything I despise about America and capitalism, and I merely loathed him until his attempt to play politics with the deaths of the Benghazi consulate staff. You may have heard that one of the guys who died was Sean Smith, an IT guy known online as Vile Rat, Goonfleet diplomat and Something Awful forums moderator. Vilerat did a great job modding my favorite SA subforum, Debate and Discussion, and was the kind of guy who'd be evenhanded and fair even if he disagreed with you. I liked him a lot. Watching Romney try to exploit his death flipped me from finding Romney loathsome to full-on hate.

I'm probably gonna dump some links here, because I hate being a contributor to the "LJ is fucking dead" phenomenon.

It occurs to me that I haven't posted any pics of myself here in years, but in fairness I've barely posted in years.



The stripes and the way the shirt's shaped actually kind of hides my gut, which still sticks out as far as it did before I started losing weight- it's sort of collapsing in on the sides.

I was 255 lbs on New Year's. Feels good.

Let's talk about keyboard shortcuts! They're combinations of keys that you can press at the same time to quickly do things on your computer. I like 'em because you can work without having to move your hands back and forth from the keyboard to mouse over and over. Many of these work in several different programs, since coder nerds love efficiency and tend to know a good idea when they see one. These are all for Windows unless otherwise noted. To use one, press all the keys at once, starting with the modifier keys- that is, Ctrl, Alt, and Shift, all of which do nothing on their own- and then release all at once. So to use Ctrl-X, hold Ctrl and then press X and release both at once.

Working with windows:

Alt-F4 - Close the currently active window.

Ctrl-F4 - Close the currently active subwindow (such as a document within Word or a tab within a web browser).

Alt-Tab - Switch to a different window. Press it repeatedly to switch back and forth between the two most recent active windows, or hold Alt and press Tab to bring up a list of open windows. You can keep holding Alt and press Tab repeatedly to move one window at a time, and release Alt to switch to the window you have selected. If you linger on a particular window while looking at the list, it will pop to the foreground behind the list. It sounds complicated, but just hold Alt and hit Tab a couple of times and you'll pick it up very quickly. You can also click with your mouse on a window in the list to switch to it.

Shift-Alt-Tab - Go backward in the list of windows. You can also press it while not looking at the list to bring up the least recently-active window. Again, just fool around with it for a minute and it'll be second nature.

Ctrl-Shift-T - In a web browser, open a tab that was closed. Very handy for when you accidentally close a tab. Keep pushing it to move back through the list of closed tabs.

F5 - This is almost always set to refresh, whether it's a web page, the contents of a folder in Windows Explorer, or whatever else. In web browsers, hold Shift-F5 to force your browser to delete its cached copy of the content it's viewing and fetch a fresh copy from the server if you think what you're seeing isn't what you should be.

Alt-arrow - Alt-left is frequently used as a shortcut for Back, i.e. in a web browser or in Windows Explorer. You can also hit Alt-up to go up one level, to the parent folder, in Explorer (and in most "show me my files" programs regardless of Operating Systems).


Content manipulation:

Ctrl-A - Selects everything in the window you're working in. Select all the files in a folder, for example, or all of the contents of a spreadsheet or Word document.

Ctrl-C - Copy the selected text. You can select text either by dragging over it with your mouse or by placing the cursor at one end of the intended selection and holding Shift while moving the cursor with the arrow keys. Copying moves the text to a part of the computer's memory called the Clipboard.

Ctrl-X - Cut the selected text. This is the same as Copy, but it also deletes the text from its original location.

Ctrl-V - Paste. This inserts the copied/cut text wherever the cursor was.

Ctrl-arrow - Hold Ctrl and press right or left to move the cursor one word (usually to the next space, though different programs handle different punctuation in different ways) instead of one character. In some programs, hold Ctrl and press up or down to move the window up or down without moving the cursor. You can also hold Shift while doing Ctrl-arrow to select as you go, allowing you to select a lot of text quickly.

Ctrl-Z - Undo. This just undoes the last thing you did, whether that was typing something, drawing something, or whathaveyou. Different programs interpret this differently; some will undo the last single action you took (the last line you drew, the last character you typed), while others monitor your activity and will undo the last set of actions you took (i.e. if you typed a whole sentence without stopping, ctrl-z might remove the last character you typed, or it might remove everything since the last time you started typing). Try it out in different programs to see how it works!

Ctrl-Y - Redo. Didn't mean to Undo something? It's not an officially-defined keyboard shortcut, but most programs that have an Undo feature will have a Redo feature that undoes the last Undo. I know that sounds kind of confusing, but try it out and you'll get the hang of it quickly. Some programs let you step back and forth by hitting Ctrl-Z and Ctrl-Y over and over, while in others (certain Adobe products spring to mind), there's single-use Undo/Redo and a different command for going back and forth several steps at a time.

Tab and Shift-Tab - When you're working in a form, you can move forward and back between the fields by hitting Tab and Shift-Tab respectively. You can also use these to move between interactive elements (links, fields, and so on) on a web page.

Half-assed new style because I got sick of staring at the black on white every time I come back here. I hate black on white- it's like staring at a piece of paper with a lightbulb behind it. For hours.

Employers who pay their employees poorly are, fundamentally, demanding that other businesses and the government subsidize their parsimony.

Consumer demand is fundamentally what drives capitalist economies, and that one of the biggest drivers of consumer demand, if not _the_ driver of consumer demand, is disposable income (subject, of course, to the marginal propensity to consume- for what should be obvious reasons, a million people with $1000 of disposable income each creates much, much more demand than a single person with a billion dollars of disposable income). Disposable income comes from high wages, and this right here is a big reason why the post-war era was so prosperous- wages skyrocketed, creating a working class with lots and lots of disposable income, which in turn creates demand for goods. The demand for goods creates jobs making those goods, and the income from those jobs creates demand, and so on.

What we're seeing right now is what a capitalist economy without a lot of disposable income looks like- there's no jobs, because nobody's got the disposable income to buy things, which means that jobs don't get made... The extremely reductionist summary of Keynesianism holds that in such a situation, the government should spend money to stimulate demand, causing jobs to be created to fill that demand, and then you get the positive feedback loop going. Once things are okay, the government stops spending to stimulate (since it's no longer necessary) and pays off the debt incurred by the stimulus spending with the taxes generated by the increased economic activity, and also saves up so that the next time stimulus is necessary, they'll have the cash to pay for it up front as much as possible. And it will be necessary- the pressure in capitalist economies for every firm to grow to the greatest extent possible means that the ups and downs aren't a result of bad policy- they're just part of capitalism. Keynesianism aims to make those ups and downs as painless as possible.


Stay with me a moment for a seeming tangent about cartels.

For those who aren't aware, a cartel is (broadly) an economic arrangement among the producers of a particular good in which the producers agree to control production and prices so that they can gain higher prices for their goods. The best-known cartel is probably OPEC, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, who agree amongst themselves to restrict oil production in order to keep prices high.

Cartel members are subject to an interesting logic, in which each member is incentivized to cheat. In the case of OPEC, this takes the form of overproducing oil, since you can sell more at the higher price the cartel obtains. Of course, if every member of the cartel cheats, the whole system falls apart, as the reduced supply that was causing prices to rise is eliminated by the cheating. So while every member is individually heavily incentivized to cheat, if more than a certain threshold of members cheat, everything goes to hell and nobody wins.

You may recognize this as a version of the Prisoner's Dilemma.

Employers are subject to a form of cartel logic, though it's one of consumption rather than of production. Every employer wants to minimize the amount of labor they consume- or, to be more plain, each employer wants to pay as little as possible to their employees. That's not because employers are cheap fuckers- though many are- but rather because the point of running a business is to make money, and every penny paid out is a penny less in profit. Labor is just another expense, same as raw materials, maintenance of capital, and so on.

The problem is, the money paid to labor is where the demand for an employer's products come from. When a firm that employs people cuts wages and lays people off, they increase their profit by reducing their labor costs, but they also reduce the amount of demand in the system as a whole. If only a small number of employers do this, the impact is negligible, but if the practice becomes widespread, the result is catastrophic. Just as large numbers of OPEC members overproducing drives the price back down, large numbers of employers paying low wages drives demand down to the point where it actively hurts the economy.

Henry Ford, bastard that he was, understood fundamentally that a working class with disposable income was massively beneficial to anybody who owns a business, and lacking one, did his part to help create one, by famously paying high wages to his employees. In the post-war era, when working-class wages were high, the economy boomed because it contained lots of people with money to spend. At some point, paying low wages and expecting other employers, or the government (quite brazenly, in Wal-Mart's case) to subsidize those wages became the norm.

OUR GOD IS AN AWFUL GOD
HE WAITS DOWN IN R'LYEH
ONE DAY TO RISE ABOVE
OUR GOD IS AN AWFUL GOD

So apparently in Action Comics #900, Superman renounces his American citizenship.

RIGHT-WING MOUTH-FROTHING ENSUES!

( Children freaking out about a comic book character insideCollapse )

You know, I'm not really one for just posting random pictures, but holy shit is this cute:

Of all the Linux distros out there, this is one of the nerdier ones.

Tonight's the last Nachtmusik- not for the semester but, like, ever. So tune in on wiux.org or at 99.1FM in Bloomington at midnight EST OR BE FOREVER DAMNED. Er, or you'll have missed it. I'm pretty much just playing all of my very favorite songs that I can fit into two hours, so tune in!

If you assume that King of the Hill is like Seinfeld or Arrested Development, and that all of the characters are supposed to be dumb and unsympathetic, the show makes much more sense.

Socialism is not a movement for the reforming of capitalism, but for its annihilation.

I'm seeing a fair few number of people talking about how they voted "no" on Prop 19 in CA- not because they're anti-pot, but because they don't like the idea of pot being sold by corporations.

Let me be blunt: if you voted against Prop 19, you voted for more people in prison, being fined, having their lives ruined, for possession of marijuana. You voted for more people being fed to the unholy machine that is the American prison system, you fucking privileged pieces of shit. I don't even smoke, but fucked if I'm going to smile at you and call you a worthwhile human being while you vote for money money and more fodder for the private prison industry.

You are nothing but vermin, and you deserve nothing but a heavy boot to crush you.

Sharron "Second Amendment remedies" Angle to Latino kids: “Some of you look a little more Asian to me”.

So I cut up the onion, the bell pepper, and the celery, and dumped them in some butter to fry for a bit. Meanwhile the chicken and veggie broths went into the big pot along with a can of chili tomatoes, and I set it to half-heat and cut up the chicken and sausage. Into the pot with the broths and tomatoes went the meats, along with some bay leaves and spices, and I boiled some rice in a third pot. Once the rice was ready, I added it to the pot, along with the veggies (being careful to drain off the remaining butter first) and some cajun spices. The whole thing took almost an hour.

Now it's simmering down.

More later.

E: It boiled down and it's delicious. The only downside is that the rice has the consistency of couscous. I'll put that in later next time. Also I will be eating off this for the next couple of days.

I posted to brag.

Nachtmusik returns Wednesday night at midnight on WIUX.