I love Family Guy, though I'll concede it took me a bit to get into it, so I think that establishes a history of at least understanding Seth McFarlane's style, but holy cow was American Dad bad. It turns out Family Guy would really, really stink if it wasn't constantly jumping out to flashbacks. But the bigger problem is the characters. One can't fairly criticize an opening show for shallow characters, the only antidote to that is time.

I thank Fark for this link to my alumnus newspaper. Really gives me the warm fuzzies to see it show up on a site largely devoted to links that highlight stupidity in one form or another. I wanted to point this quote out: English junior Jennifer Lee said she does not agree with the consequences of urinating in public and sees the act as harmless. "It would affect the party scene at MSU,"

Interesting thought for solving the Democratic identity crisus, albeit completely infeasible: Every Democrat jumps the aisle to Republican. Split the Republican party along whatever lines seem natural at the time. This comes up because I just saw someone rooting for a "Republican filibuster-proof supermajority", and it occured to me that is basically the worst case scenario; the Democrats providing just enough opposition to hold the Republicans together, but not having enough power to accomplish anything themselves.

A few days ago Alwin posted about his referrer spam and a solution he is using to at least cut it down. (Once the referrer spammers move on to v14gr4.somescummyhost.com it'll stop working, but hopefully they don't get that desperate, because hopefully they'll realize the pressures that drove email spammers to do that don't apply to them. But expecting intelligence from spammers has proven a futile endeavor.) I went ahead and implemented it.

At this point in our political discourse, the terms "liberal" and "conservative" are meaningless labels that for historical reasons are applied to what they are applied to. They have no reliable relationship to their historical meanings, or the meanings used in other countries for the same terms. "Liberal" and "conservative", in literal modern non-political usage, both refer to a resource allocation strategy; a "liberal" strategy allocates a lot of resources to something, while a "

I'm still buckled down with work, but financial stresses are getting stronger and stronger. I had thought that was why I wasn't posting much, that and the depression (not strong, but real) this has been causing me. But today I got up "early" for a conferance call, and while waiting for it, I've posted more today than in the last month. Maybe I'm not posting because mornings are my "

From The Anglosphere Challenge to the Political Left: On the Right, I believe that it is still possible to discern the tensions and compromises that one would expect in an alliance-building environment. The loose coalition includes libertarians and moral conservatives, deficit hawks and tax-cutters, immigration supporters and immigration opponents. What has emerged on the Left is a core of rigid, dogmatic, conformity enforcers. Its organizations, such as MoveOn.org, the Howard Dean campaign, or the movement to resist Social Security reform, are self-marginalizing.

What this story doesn't say, but should, is that the Parents Television Council is the almost the sole source of the "mounting complaints" Powell refers to near the end. From a Mediaweek article: The number of indecency complaints had soared dramatically to more than 240,000 in the previous year, Powell said. The figure was up from roughly 14,000 in 2002, and from fewer than 350 in each of the two previous years.

I've released XBLinJS 0.2, which includes some example widgets and much better documentation.

OK, forget my last post about what the Democrats need to do. After a few more hours both online and on TV, I can't help but think that those actions are a little too mature for too many Democrats. Let's start more simply. Speaking as a Bush voter, here's a short list of things various Democrats need to stop doing, lest they continue to marginalize themselves. Stop explaining to us why we're stupid.