Tradition ain't nothing but a great song in a musical. That's it. I want little to no part in tradition. Tradition is selling your daughter for a few cows. Tradition is putting in overtime at work. Tradition is punishment over rehabilitation, gaming the system, and believing in the good old days. There were no good old days. There are no eternal truths. Tradition is violence. Tradition is war as an institution. Tradition is hazing and initiation and bitter sexual encounters. Tradition is static.

AND

Non-Participation == DEATH

If you are not participating, then just don't bother. If you don't intend to help us oust Bush in 2004 by compromising on a candidate who would at least reverse the most damaging moves of the current regime, then don't bother protesting, complaining, moaning, or whimpering.

If we do not remove Bush from office, we cannot get on with the discussion of improvements to our system that could create more desire for participation. Like proportional representation in the congress to facilitate more involvement and voice for alternative party participants. Wouldn't that be a better ammendment to make?

OK, I'm writing raw here, but I just had to get this out. Of course I saw the great dictator on TV this morning, and I was outraged from the start: Gay marriage, or any other kind of marriage, is neither a threat to our safety, our own marriages, or our world in any shape or form. In fact, legalizing same-sex marriages would further equalize our system of governance and further increase the benefits of freedom, equality, and respect to all of our citizens under our social union.

And then there's the Constitution itself: You can't just amend the Constitution directly against the Constitution. I just can't believe that we'd let someone do that, no matter who their daddy is.

Let's face it: GW hates gays, lesbians, transgendered, bisexuals, thinkers, critics, reporters, women, and people who think to much.

It's pitiful: GW gives fewer press conferences during his presidency than any other president in the 20th Century, and he hates homosexual/s/ity so bitterly that he must come out on television and tell us all about it. In fact, he has so much hate for same-sex marriage, and apparently it so hurts and endangers the president's own marriage, that he wants to make it a major issue for the next 9 months -- he wants America to finally elect him to office based on his hatred.

I feel neither hurt nor threatened by the issue of same-sex marriage. I feel extremely threatened by the chilling effect the Bush administration's rampant bullying, both at home and abroad.

Let's get together on a choice for 2004, because we'll all be hurting by 2008 if we don't get a regime change.

Old websites are grizzled old beasts that should be put out of their misery. I've been moving GF! (http://www.gamesfirst.com) over to a new server -- our old Idaho host just wasn't cutting it for us. We were really willing to deal as long as it was free, but it ain't no more. We're with 1and1.com now, which has been a good place so far. Dealing with two hosting services and Network Solutions is about enough to make you pull your hair out, though.

We seem to have made it through with minimal hassle. We serve about 250K readers per month, so we wanted it to be as smooth as possible. Now we begin the work of re-creating the monster in the image of a dynamic PHP and mySQL -based website. Whoo! Get on the PHP bandwagon!

With luck everything will be in place in time for our 10 year birthday. Wow. 10 years online...

w3rd, the UT2k4 demo is available and it pretty much roxor my world, y'know? It's just such a high-energy, adrenaline-fueled speed shooter. Now that they added loads of badass vehicles to cruise around in, it's like a whole new chaos to luxuriate in. It might be the exact opposite of Second Life... (until somebody programs a good enough UT2k3-like game to play in SL, which would be a fun project). But I know that I'm not the only one who enjoys both. Anyway, the demo rules and you should download it. Check the Downloads section on Unreal Tournament dot Com :

Paul's built so many cool things into (e:s) here that I haven't had time to take full advantage of all of them. However, I had a disturbing experience when I noticed I could click on my user image. I did so, launching an audio message telling the user that the journal owner had not posted an audio file. It was that completely characteristic Clearvoice TTS.

I'm the kind of guy who hates robotic voices on answering machines and tries to humanize my own messaging systems. So I decided the time had come to upload an audio file. I'm trying to generate new material for another DJ FnW feat. CM album, so here's a wee sneak peek at some experimentation I've got going on... The quality on the journal sound file is kind of cruddy in order to get it in under the filesize limit. But I've posted a full CD quality version on my personal webspace. Click the link to download the MP3: