Blessed by the Potato

For the long and tortured life of this site, I’ve always reserved my copyright through the rather barbaric means of putting in the copyright notice at the bottom with the date of the last update. Considering how important this could potentially be, I’ve decided to look into the matter a little more.

Obviously, I’m allowing free, non-commerical reading/access to my content by the simple existence of this website, but haven’t made any mention of copying, performing, derivatives, or any of the other issues.

First and foremost, I’m not interested in releasing my stuff into the public domain: I have to retain certain rights, especially my right to later sell some of my crap. For example, if the site gets big enough an interesting enough, it may be possible for me to bundle it all together into a book form and sell it to those who love the site so much they wish they could put it up on the bookshelf and dust it once in a while (some people have strange ways of showing love, for example my cat shows her love for Wayfare by sneezing on her, and her love for me by sitting in my lap, purring, then getting frightened of random noises so faint as to be undetectable by the human ear, and jumping away in a panic, digging her claws into my groin for traction).

For the interrobangers out there who simply must know the motivation behind each post: no, I haven’t had any sort of publication deal, no matter how much I visualize it; this actually comes from election discussions, and how ineptly the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Canadian Heritage Sam Bulte handled the accusations of corruptions stemming from the fact that she’s accepting huge donations from record companies and the like who want sterner copyright legislations… legislation that she drafted just prior to the election, which is languishing in parliament. (there are several different links buried in her title :) In the process of this, I uncovered a neat site: www.howdtheyvote.ca that details how each MP voted on, from what I can tell, pretty much every motion made in parliament. Could be a handy research tool, and a way to check up on your MPs after the election.

Anyhow, back to copyright: I’m a little torn on allowing people to copy my site. I know that if they did, I’d require a link back and a mention of the site’s title (Blessed by the Potato), or my real name for printed material. I don’t want to restrict someone’s ability to quote me if they’re writing an article of their own, and if say, Robert Munsch were to do me the great honour of performing Thump, I wouldn’t want to have him suffer the indignity of getting permission in writing; but I don’t want someone to just cut & paste the site whole cloth and put it up as their own (even with the required citation, it would still essentially be like someone else taking credit for my stuff). Obviously, I don’t want people making money off of my work without getting a piece of it myself!

As for derivative works, I don’t want to restrict someone else’s creativity if they can take something of mine and build off of it, but once again, want to reserve some rights (specifically, the right to make money :)

Some parts of the site have been opened up, though. For example, my WordPress theme (the style & layout of the page, the colours and fonts chosen, a limited amount of the functionality, etc.) is copyleft under the GNU license. That’s partly because I didn’t sink too much effort into it (so I wouldn’t be upset if it were stolen), partly because I know I’d never in a million years sell it, and partly because I based it heavily on (or more properly, made minor modifications to) the Darkfall theme that is itself released under the GNU license.

So, anyway, I’m thinking of using the Creative Commons “Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5” license. Any opinions on that before I throw that into my page footers?

It solves all of my issues, I think (except my distaste for whole-cloth copying, though that is unlikely to happen anyway). I retain most of my rights so that if, by some miracle, a situation presents itself where I can sell my crap, I can. But, it also gives permission for a large number of reasonable uses without requiring specific written permission for each one — the issue there is that, as far as I know, a copyright holder must enforce his copyright to maintain it. So if, for example, I happened to find a site where one of my essays had been posted verbatim, even if it was noncommercial and had my name & website referenced, I would have to demand that the site’s webmaster take it down until they had negotiated permission from me for that particular use. If I didn’t, then if I later found out that someone else was selling that essay and demanded that they stop or give me my share, my claim would be void, since I had failed to enforce my copyright earlier with the free site, and thus my crap had become public domain. It really sounds like a pain in the butt, and with a license like this, I won’t need to worry about most non-commerical uses.

Of course, the open-source communist hippy inside of me might even want an even looser license, such as allowing any sort of derivative works (allowing people to build on my stuff without requiring that they also allow others to do the same to theirs).

On the topic of suicide I have but three things to say:

1. It will be the last thing you ever do in your life. Don’t fuck it up.

Do some deep inner searching and be sure whether you just want to call out for attention or really want to end it all. If you just want attention then maybe ask for it politely, or stand up on a desk and scream at work or in an exam or something. Don’t go damaging your liver or cutting on yourself just to make a point, you’ll regret it later.

Oh, and it’s down the street, not across the block.

2. Think about it, seriously.

There are many religions in the world. Many of them believe in some form of afterlife or punative reincarnation. Almost all of them frown upon suicide, and the few that do allow it tend to have very specific rules for when it is and is not appropriate. For example, to avoid dishonour or capture, or to blow away any useful bits of brain before the zombies turn you is often acceptable, earning you a “good death.” Doing it because you’re sad, scared, chemically imbalanced, or just really, really fond of flavor-aide yet never developed the ability to critically survey your surroundings generally doesn’t score you any points.

So you need to ask yourself whether it’s worse to just endure what you’ve got going now, or get yourself onto the fasttrack for eternal suffering (or, another go round of a mortal life, only with worse starting conditions). Or, if you’re willing to bet heavily on the atheist point of view, would just going blank and having nothing be better?

Naturally, even after considering the above, many people do go ahead with suicide. Which brings me to an interesting point: where does suicide come from? Is it an evolutionarily supportive behaviour that can somehow perversely be explained along similar lines to altruism?

Basically, you start with depression, which is caused by improper neural firing in the brain that leads to extreme feelings of unwell. It’s a very primal emotion, telling you that things are not right, and it sends all sorts of reinforcement signals to try to get you to escape whatever situation you’re in, to change things, to call out for help. But the thing of it is, you often can’t just up and make things better, so you sort of retreat, and get this severe repression of initiative/action while at the same time an overactive emotional centre. So what I mean is that you sit there with all of this repression going on so that you almost can’t even move (lethargy, fatigue, etc.) but inside your mind is going a mile-a-minute, but you can’t focus on anything since it’s all emotional (so what you can focus on more consciously and logically tends to be your worries, which just makes the emotional state worse).

Since this depression is usually caused by factors outside your control (whether they be real-life factors like a sick relative, a chemical imbalance, or a life gone to the shitter so badly that you just want to call a mulligan and take the last three years over again) so you can’t really do much with your internally raging fight-or-flight type responses, even if you could get past the outer depression (or agoraphobia) holding you in place. So you’re stuck there with these negative feelings (“negative affect” as we call it in smarty-pants class) overwhelming you, sort of the worst thing your brain could do to you (right up there with chronic pain).

Now the interesting thing is that your brain does manage to find an out: via death (though as I said above, I’m not sure it’s necessarily a good out). I find it interesting because in order to see that as a way to stop the suffering, you have to first realize that you’re alive and that being dead will be something different, where maybe this won’t happen. So perhaps suicide is a sign of self-awareness? I’m not familiar with any reports of animals (not even primates) committing suicide, though I do find the prospect morbidly fascinating.

Anyhow, the point is: be sure you’ve thoroughly thought it through since science and almost every religion tells us that this will be a completely irreversable move (assuming you don’t fuck it up: see #1).

3. Be considerate to those you left behind.

I read an interesting statistic recently (one of those damned lies, I’m sure — consider it even less trustworthy than regular statistics since I can’t find the source now) that said that of troubled teens who had decided they would kill themselves, more than twice as many boys went through with it as girls. A correlation with that is that far more boys decided to use jumping, cutting, or death by firearm as their method of choice, while more girls chose drugs or asphyxiation. We can theorize that guys are less considerate, and less afraid of making a big giant mess (with some of the dumb kids I’ve seen around the university, I’m sure they’d be going “cool, look at the splatter!”) so they pick the method that is more effective; with pills you’ve got maybe a whole hour to reconsider and induce vomiting. But seriously, ick. Someone’s going to have to clean that up.

Which brings me to another point: many people say that putting up suicide barriers on bridges and restricting handgun availability won’t reduce the suicide rate, since there are so many ways to kill yourself if you’re determined. Yet it is much easier to kill yourself with a handgun than it is with other methods — that is, after all, their purpose and heck, people do it accidentally sometimes by not unloading them before cleaning. Once you force them to take that extra step, you give them another chance to reconsider, and I’m sure that would lead to a drop (even if only a minor one). Similar reasoning applies to crime: while crooks can rob, kill, and maim with a knife or hunting rifle, it is decidedly harder to pull off than it is with a handgun or assault rifle.

Back to being considerate. This comes in two basic parts.

3-a. Leave a note. Be as accurate as you can, since you won’t be able to answer follow-up questions. Try to leave out some of the morbidity, and always try to spare the feelings of those who will be grieving (if you want to blame it all on your boss, then go ahead, since he’s a dick who probably isn’t grieving; after all, he’s the one that drove you to your early grave — but never, ever say anything that could be construed as blame on your mother).

No matter how moody, how depressed, how down-on-your-luck, no matter how goth, no matter how many hours you wasted on AOL before you got real internet, nobody ever sees your suicide coming, so you’ve got to explain it to them. They won’t understand. They probably won’t afterwards either, but you have to try. Remember, while you somehow came to the conclusion that it was the only way left, everyone else sees it as a hugely extreme move to take, something so far out there as to be inconceivable (or at the very least, unpredicatable).

This stipulation has other benefits: as you compose your thoughts into your last message to the universe you might just attain that moment of perfect clarity where you can see the solution the problems in your life (or at least put them in perspective), which may make you change your mind.

3-b. Don’t make a mess. Unless it really plays an important part in the artistic motif you’re going for, keep the gore to a minimum. Don’t disrupt traffic by jumping from an overpass or into the subway (come on, that’s just rude). Someone is at some point going to find you, so you probably want to find a balance between forcing your roommate/family to stumble on you and the severely public methods, while at the same time not being too hidden: when you go missing, they’ll look for you, and eventually they’ll find you. No point in being hidden so well that you get all gross and corpsified during the search. Also, as applies to #3 in general (consideration for the living), a long search is heart-wrenching, since the whole time they’ll be fearing the worst while still holding out hope. Remember, someone is going to have to find and clean up after you.

I think that’s all I have to say on the topic. More on important matters like Kraft Dinner later.

It’s been a recurring theme here, but it bears repeating: I have no idea what to do about hosting. Something that would go a long way towards helping me make my decision would be an idea of how many people use this site; a census of sorts. So I’m asking everyone who hasn’t already left a comment to please leave me one just so I know how many unique users there are. If you’re shy, you can email me at holypotato at gmail instead. Or, you can leave a comment with 3 or more URLs in it, which will then cause it to be caught by my spam filter. I can from there delete it without anyone seeing it.

To encourage you, I’m going to offer a cookie to anyone who leaves a comment to this post. I’m assuming, of course, that right now I’ve only got a small handful of readers located in a small geographic area (that is, friends of mine, or friends of friends). If it’s not feasible to get a cookie to you (or if you wish to remain pseudoanonymous, which I totally understand), then perhaps we can work out some other form of cheap-as-free incentive.

Edit: yes, a real sugary cookie, not some truly worthless tracking file in your web browser.

On to other matters: Kraft Dinner.

It really deserves it’s very own post, but I’ve been wondering lately why I like it so much, and couldn’t wait to author a proper post. It’s so artificial, and it’s not even all that cheap any more (the logs now run at just about a dollar, and the fancy white cheese, spirals, and three cheese flavours all top $1.50). But I love it any way. Not a month goes by where I don’t have a pot, and usually more like once a week. My cat likes it, too, which only strikes me as a little bit strange. What’s really weird though, is that I hate macaroni and cheese, by which I’m referring to that casserole stuff with real macaroni noodles and honest-to-goodness cheddar cheese baked on top.

I’ve had an interesting few days over here. As far as I know, I’ve only slept 8 hours in 2 days (based on time clocked in bed since I got back to the L-dot on Sunday night), yet I’m missing more time than that. For instance, I’ve been working on 4 things since I got up from my nap yesterday: my BEMs abstract, shopping for a new computer online with Wayfare, looking for information on my Windoze error (see last post), and these two posts.

Somehow, it’s tomorrow morning, and I never went to bed.

I know I’m a lot slower in the head lately, especially since my kidney incident, but I know I “only” spent 2.5 hours laptop shopping with Wayfare, an hour on the website and windoze error, and there’s no way it took me another 7 to do my BEMs abstract. Makes me wonder if I’m blacking out or something. Quite possible, since I don’t feel any more tired after this unintentional all-nighter than I have for the last month or so. In fact, right now I’m feeling less tired than I was yesterday afternoon when I just had to stop and take a nap.

Having watched Fight Club recently, it makes me wonder if my kidney pain might have an alternative explanation…

Edit: I just rememered, I played almost an hour of Warcraft as well, but that was multitasked with the laptop shopping (I just tabbed out a lot; I was just making potions and stuff to get ready for tonight’s raid). Other than that, I haven’t played any video games in almost a week (since Thursday’s raid). I haven’t even installed Civ4 on my desktop here. Maybe the stress of not playing that really did make me go crazy…

I’ve had a strange error in Windows XP for several months now. It’s intermittent and as far as I can tell, random. I’ve had no luck searching the web for solutions, so any advice would be greatly valued.

What happens is basically folders will stop responding. I can open up one folder, and then a few seconds later if I try to open another folder file within that folder, there will be no response. No error message, nothing. Right-clicking a file to try to get properties also yields no information. During this error opening subfolders never works, but sometimes I can open files (though I can’t right-click for properties, and if files do open, there’s always a 20 second or so delay).

Usually the last folder I successfully open won’t have a menu bar, just a white space with the windows logo (see the image below). In case you don’t see the distinction, that space usually contains “File, Edit, View…” etc.

If I wait long enough (usually 10 minutes or more), functionality comes back. If it happened once though, it will likely happen again within a few hours, and every few hours until I reset. It very rarely happens within a day of a reset.

In other news, another record number of hits yesterday: a whopping 79. It’s enough to make me wonder if there’s someone out there hitting refresh a million times a day (or if my own testing of the RSS capabilities did the same… I don’t think they would, but it’s possible). Hardly anyone’s leaving comments, so I’m inclined to think that this isn’t real traffic. If it is though, it might be time to look into a new web host to handle that sort of load. I’ve had suggestions for blacksun.ca, hostgator.com, and lunarpages.com. If anyone has any other suggestions, or more importantly, if you get any sort of kickback for referring me, leave a comment! (All else being equal, I might as well go with the host who’ll give my friends a free month, eh?)