Trapping Justice

Chapter 14 is about two different constructions/conceptions of justice. The one I'm focusing on, because I think it's more interesting is the idea of justice as purely procedural. This conception of it is something that makes justice seem less...divinely inspired.

Justice as a construct as best practices, constantly revised. Or in other words, improving by increments. We do not simply become more just by existing, we become more just by putting in place and keeping in place rules that reinforce justice, as we see it on the ground of 2011.

Justice becomes a kind of efficiency, unless equality is preferred. One part of justice becomes setting up a system and then trying to replicate the process. (Of course it can't work.) Justice not as an ideal, but a reflexive process. Maybe this is really basic stuff that I don't know because I never took a course on it, but the process as something evolving is new to me, when I'm forced to think about it.

There was a limited series comic called Cry For Justice. (It was terrible, and the rumor mill has it that DC editorial had their hands in it, contorting it, Twister-style.) The title gives off the idea that justice is something with a capital letter and that it's conferred upon something. And that's not quite right, according to what I believe the book to be saying.

Justice is what you make it. Maybe? Literally. If you make justice some cowboy western arithmetic, it's going to be cowboy western arithmetic. How much value that has is up to you. Justice is a product of the construction process. If you have more tools, it can be refined pretty far. Whether it's a good conception of justice or not, I don't know. But the idea sounds intriguing and feels fun to play around with. I think that's what this blog is for and it makes a pretty okay ending.



I saw Trap Them recently and they were wonderful. I describe them using a description from Greg Rucka's Private Wars. They're a IED slathered in rat poison. The rat poison is an anti-coagulant, which means that if someone is bleeding from the blast, the blood will not clot and they'll continue to bleed out. Trap Them sounds, on record, like that, with the anti-coagulant level of attention to detail.

They started off their set with Fucking Viva, which is a stellar opener. It's methodical and it builds in a way that lets you know there's so much nasty heavy coming. Fucking Viva opens the record it appears on with this line: So, in the rivers float your modern times and your alpha death decree. Ignore the alpha death decree part, for a moment since it makes explicit what's floating in the river.

What's important is that the record opens with the idea that modernity has a price and it's paid, brutally, in front of us. Modernity might be good for us in terms of justice, but Trap Them reminds us there's a price. Or: Think of Fucking Viva as the evil answer to We Will Rock You, which is another description that I got from somewhere else, but I can't remember where. Anyway. This is a metal band. Play loud and bang your head.

What's Keeping Me From Sinking

"The Disposable Culture might offer many things, but stability and longevity are not among them. I fear for the "fully digital" push--because one war, one bomb, one EMP, one earthquake, and it all can go away. Marketing idiots and future-philes want us to teeter on the edge of another Dark Age, to embrace the possibility of losing all of what makes our culture tick, all for convenience. But what happens when something goes wrong, as things inevitably do? Everything "virtual" disappears, maybe forever.

No thanks. I'll stick with printed paper and physical discs. Because this push for pretend possessions has no appeal to me, and I think it's more dangerous than we are led to think. There are points where marketing and the drive for profit winds up hurting the companies, the culture, it's trying to serve, and I think this is getting awfully close. Maybe conceptualizing future war or disaster is a little bleak, but a quick look back at history tells us war and disaster is about as common, and certain, as rain and sunrise. "

I ended up seeing something very late last night on Kotaku (see above) about how this person was fed up with what he/she referred to as "the disposable culture" videogame people had found themselves in. This person also spoke somewhat hysterically about how "one EMP or earthquake" could lead us to a new Dark Ages, and oddly enough, that if this disposable culture went to its logical conclusion by everybody purchasing more digital pieces of media, those pieces of media will be beholden to the people who'se service they're on and when that service goes under, historians will be lost as to find those media.

This person holds on to their NESs and a couple games, confident they'll be able to play them in continuing years, but the plebs who buy things on digital services can't count on that.

This person is wrong, of course. Most of the catalogs of any digital storefronts are the same, with a couple oddly timed releases here and there. Quick: Name something that Steam won't get if Good Old Games goes under. This person is also wrong about the decay of systems. I'm not sure the half life of a Sega Genesis is anything to bank on in 2020. Or a PlayStation, for that matter. And! That's assuming TVs still have the same kinds of audio/video/etc plugs in those years.

He's right in that we're going to have to pay for it again, (or not, if we go to...unauthorized digital services, to employ a euphemism.) but those digital storefronts will be purchased or acquired by others starting up.

What's the shelf life of books? This isn't a joke. Finely bound books might have a better chance of survival, but I'm pretty sure my wall of paperbacks is going to survive into 2030.

But that's not the point. What is the point is the idea of backwards compatibility and a universal file type for information. Your computer may not play .m4a files, but it sure as hell will play mp3s. Your computer may not be able to read a .doc file, but it will be able to read a .txt file. Do we have that going forward? That's what I hope we have. Because: if we're ever living in some crazy Fahrenheit 451 scenario, the entire works of Western literature, or at least three books by Dickens, can fit on a 1 TB external harddrive. (That's a joke, kids. Dickens was paid by the word so his stories are exhaustively long.)

Even if we don't have that now, look back at OINK. That was a place that had almost any piece of music you could have ever wanted, with more constantly being revealed and provided by music obsessives. Yes, OINK was shut down, but it's hard to believe OINK hasn't been entirely reconstituted elsewhere, even if it's a collective of other trackers. Somewhere in the world, there are at least hundred people who have every book ever digitized, because they literally can't stop.

It's those people that will keep books/music/video games/movies going and spreading. The obscure stuff will fade, but obscure stuff always does. Yes, everything virtual eventually disappears, but so does everything tangible. My bookshelf of books I haven't read three feet high shows that I'm unlikely to ever prefer the digital version of something, but I recognize it has an incredible value who'se upside is constantly growing.

I was going to leave a cool ending here, but I just saw that one of my friends had iTunes delete everything off of his iPod touch on Twitter. I want to leave that hanging in the air instead.




Clash covers are usually good. Here's an unusually good cover of Straight To Hell by the Menzingers. There ain't no need for youuuuuuuuuuu....

Videogames I Actually Played in the Last Decade

Lots of other websites that make things like sense and money have best of the decade/year lists and I thought I'd do the same thing. Unfortunately, as I haven't played many, many of the games they list and I don't feel like lying about what I've played, here's a top 10 of the last decade of games I've actually played.


Persona 3 and Diablo 2 are here because they took in shitloads of my hours for the last decade. Persona 3 most recently, and Diablo 2, for basically middle and high school. Diablo 2, by virtue of the loot/kill dudes cycle that Borderlands added guns and a first person perspective to.

Persona 3, I've spent 140 hours on (finished both it and the expansion) and I still have a feeling in the back of my mind that I should go back to it. Yes, there's probably youtube videos of the interactions I want to see, but the fact that the "play it again" feeling is stuck in the back of my head means that there's something in the game that worked.

SSX 3. It does for snowboarding what Burnout does, which is communicate one thing: You aren't going to win unless you go faster and take chances. Are you barely hanging onto control of your rider? Are you not going for the crazy jumps? Be content with third place. At the final peak, you don't so much play SSX 3 as guide a human-shaped bullet down a mountain that's trying to kill you and the only way you'll survive is going fucking faster.

Chrono Cross. Not a sequel to the universally revered Chrono Trigger, but instead the next game in the series, Cross did too many things differently from Trigger for fans to appreciate it, but for me, the game comes to me when I think of best RPGs ever. There were 45ish characters, who all reacted differently to the game's stimuli, which means: you could play the game as serious or as straight forward as you wanted to, with the game's approval.

The battle system has aged well, the story's vicious little twists haven't lost their punch, the music is varied and rich, but what stands out to me, to this day, is the color palate and the environments. They were all evocative, they all were stages that had their own identities and reinforced the narrative.

When people say games don't make you think, I say put this in front of a fourteen year old boy and see the blown mind when he's finished.

Rock Band 2. It's a videogame where you play music with a band. Do you read this website?

Timesplitters 3: Future Perfect. My favorite first person shooter, which plays very very quickly, with a casual disregard for plot and a focus on a so bad it's good script. It had a fantastic sense of humor but also pacing, each end of the level boss was bigger and tougher than the last one and usually, more outrageous, too.

There's time travel, zombies, Russians, KGB, nuclear weapons somewhere, a train level, but more importantly, enemy types with character, level design that made me think before jumping in guns blazing and lots and lots of guns.

Ratchet and Clank: Up Your Arsenal. Speaking of guns, that's what the Ratchet and Clank series is known for and this iteration does not disappoint. True, there's no mind-control disco ball, but there's plenty of other oddball weapons for you to rain down murder with. Ratchet and Clank has always been a series about exploration/platforming and guns and here, they reach the sweet, sweet spot on the PS2. The weapons upgrade in an RPG like path, there's always a puzzle to break up the action and when they get to the final boss battle, it's basically a textbook on how to ramp up the difficulty in a way that's visible to the player.

Okay: That boss battle. It's in three stages. The first stage is a circular room, enclosed and it's just you and him. From there, he retreats to the sky where he uses his untouchable shield and death ray to harass you while you also fight off his elite units, using whatever you've saved up from the boss fight to get through them, culminating in a bridge where you fight two tank guys that more or less absorb ammunition every 50 feet.

Once you get past the bridge, you bring the boss back to earth, now more powerful than before, on an even smaller stage with all that copious extra ammunition leftover from going through another level's worth of enemies and a boss.

Resident Evil 4. Less jump scares, just more bad guys that you're not sure you can kill in increasingly small spaces. The terror comes from being trapped, desperately pumping bullets into enemies thinking "I literally don't have an inch I can move further backward into and the thing with two heads isn't stopping." The story isn't terribly exciting: Save a girl and get into progressively bigger trouble with higher caliber weapons, then the sprouting scythe head zombies show up and that's when you get HOLY FUCK THAT'S A TENTACLE SPIDER RUN MAN.

Metal Gear Solid 2. Say what you want about the looooooooooong cutscenes the game is known for, the Kojima Productions team knows how to set atmosphere and keep it. For half a year after I beat the game, I was so paranoid I peeked down corners to see whether there was a PMC guard on patrol. Also one of the subjects I used when I wrote about the military industrial complex in my mind: I can tell it to be terrified and produce the adrenaline but telling it to relax and think calmly? Much harder.

Super Smash Bros. If there was a gathering in college or free time in high school with other people, I was probably playing Super Smash Brothers, or one of the sequels. It's an icebreaker and something that accounted for hours of strategy practicums, by which I mean fighting Zach's Donkey Kong with my Kirby.





The title (and first track) from We Are the Pipettes. Look on the upper left, there's someone else's hand holding up the We Are sign, which I like as a subtle way of hinting at the band's post-Motown origin, "an experiment in manufactured pop," in that they manufactured themselves. The girls are out front and the male backing band is as invisible as they can get away with. There's also been enough lineup changes that I'm pretty sure the founding guitarist and that girl who sang on Pull Shapes are the only ones still in the band that recorded We Are the Pipettes, so, in that way, it's authentic to its manufactured origin. Anyway. We Are the Pipettes. Play loud.

A Theory Of the Second Day of 2011.

Since I've finished 2666, this leaves a vacancy in the A Theory Of.... posts. This will be replaced, so far as I can tell, by Whatever The Hell it is That I'm Reading. So. One week it might be A Theory Of The Long War, another week it might be A Theory Of The Last Run and another it might be The Three Trillion Dollar Theory.

In short: A Theory Of Justice is in the title not because it's always going to be in the title, but it's one of the two formidable books I'm reading. Subsidized Sincerity being conceived in a moment of just do it and figure out how later, the idea of doing it is paramount. It might take a while to finish, but it's something I'm engaged in as opposed to not.

For Subsidized Sincerity, I should always be jumping in, head thrown forward proudly. (Or maybe just for the book posts.) I will, of course, smash my head on rocks. Hopefully, less often than I don't smash my head on rocks, but I'm reaching the end of this metaphor's range. I think hope it's clear what my idea here is: I'm going to say yes to big ideas. This figures into my next idea for 2011: Increments.

I don't like where I am and I know I have to change. I can't think myself to change, as Johnathan Hickman put it in Secret Warriors #23, I have to get up and fucking do it. But there's a mountain between where I am and where I want to be. And every time I think about the mountain, I think of how big it is and how small my steps are. That it's never going to work and I'll just sit here, again, eating chocolate covered pretzels or thinking about anything other than A Theory Of Justice or a book/author that intimidates me.

Instead, my counter-idea for 2011 is simply do it and keep doing it. It's easy to get depressed and nihilistic when I'm on page 71 of a 500+ page philosophy book, but by the same token, just a chapter a week. Or a chapter every couple days for weeks on end. The same goes for exercise. I don't have a goal. I just want to put one foot in front of another and repeat the process throughout 2011 and see where I am after this year.

So: Stick around. There will be a proper return to form here next week with full A Theory Of Justice bits, but the station ID stuff got so long that I think it's worth its own post.





I listened to this song walking home while the wind played with my hair. Utterly magical in an extremely comforting way. It wasn't even that cold, either! Happy new year.

More Entries Into Terrible Things For 2010

Station ID time: We're going low power until the new year. No posts after this in 2010. I might clean up or spruce up earlier posts, sprinkle links in where they should go, but I'll catalog what I do. Anyway. See you in 2011! Merry Christmas!

I spent a bunch of time trying to write something about the Julian Assange rape thing and I think it ended up repeating a bunch of the much better, professionally written pieces about the issue, so I scuttled it. I'm trying to pass some kind of judgment on the Assange rape issue without having any kind of access to the evidence of the not-trial either way. What I have to say boils down to a couple things:

First: We ought, necessarily, to sort out what we think about Wikileaks and then quarantine it from what we think of the rape charges. Wikileaks is so big and so pervasive that it will lead us astray. So: Julian Assange is a guy accused of four counts of rape total by two different women in Stockholm.
Second: Until the trial gets under way, all I have access is to is the stuff in the press, which is spotty and unclear how true most things are. Hopefully, a trial where evidence is put in front of a judge, or public will help clear things up. Considering one of the charges is intercourse with a sleeping woman without a condom, some clarity will be useful.
Third: Yes, the CIA could have done this. Easily. And I'm willing to believe it, but damnit, I need some evidence of it. I would like to believe reasonable people take rape charges very seriously. But, before ringing the conspiracy bell, I would like to see something I can sink my teeth into. Or just something. I'm currently reading a book about a government trying to assassinate people, using official cover to do it. I'm sympathetic to the argument that the government is lying, but I've gotta be met halfway at this and I'm not seeing anyone.
Fourth: Because otherwise, I'm taking the idea of a boogeyman over the accusations of women who claim to have been raped that no one has shown a reason to disbelieve. That seems short-sighted at the very least. If this makes me naive, so be it.

The links below are useful. Tigerbeatdown is the hook, Jezebel's link has the larger view and Guardian has the details on just about everything. What you come up with is up to you, but man, I don't think there's answers, just more accurate information that clouds everybody's view.

Here are the links:
Tigerbeatdown-#Mooreandme: On Progressives, Rape Apologism and the Little Guy
Jezebel-Talking About Julian Assange Has Become Utterly Terrible
The Guardian-Assange bail request refused as Wikileaks Chief Fights Extradition, Julian Assange defends decision not to face questioning in Sweden, 10 days in Sweden the full allegations against Julian Assange



Today's song is by Propagandhi, called "With Friends Like These, Who The Fuck Needs COINTELPRO," which includes the lyrics:

The purpose of this new counter-intelligence endeavor is to expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit or otherwise neutralize any parades that you can't jump in front of.

You can view the rest of the lyrics here, but the title's indicative of what you're going to find. It's a live version because a studio one isn't available. Oh well.

2666: In Revue

Torrential is the right word for 2666. There's a lot of it, most of it of conspicuously high quality. Which is what drew me to it, that and the sustained praise for the book as a whole. But I don't think I can read it again any time soon. First, I mentioned a lot about the obliterating fourth section, the one about detectives in Mexico trying to solve brutal murder rapes and it casts a cloud. It's a frightening, towering cloud, but...I can't go back. I will go back. Almost certainly.

But not now. Bolano's basically written 5 stories, each with a different style and intertwined them. And I don't normally read any of those stories. I mean, okay, I read Greg Rucka's comics and I'm only now starting the first of the three Tara Chase Queen and Country books, but the epic road trip or going insane or love triangle or war story is not something I'm familiar with. Yet, it's compelling. Painfully. What's crazy is that I don't even know the important things I've missed. I'm willing to bet the dreams the characters had all line in one form or another and those will be the portions I focus on intently on the next reading. This reading was just to get through it.

It's weird. I'll go back to records. I'll go back to videogames, but books, for the most part, I read once and tear through whatever's new. Can't slow down. I want to see something new more than I really want to suck everything out of a book, but 2666 is so colossal as to require a second reading, no matter how far in the future it will be and no matter how much of my brainspace it'll take up. Whenever I was asked by my friends what I was reading, 2666 was the book that leapt to my mind. Yes, I was reading other books, but they were books That Were Not 2666.

2666 is described by critics as borrowing elements from many different genres and that may be true, since I'm not a literary critic, but, what seems like a more truthful appraisal of the material to me is that it's five different books, sewn together through shared characters, plot and setting. It's at least five different flavors of novel, some fleshed out into full length books, others, one just long enough to fit in a coat pocket comfortably.

I want to move on something else. Something else being, as mentioned before, the three Tara Chase Queen and Country books. I'm 100 pages into A Gentleman's Game and it feels so much...lighter to read. Certainly, Greg Rucka isn't the same kind of author Bolano is, but A Gentleman's Game hits a genre I recognize the pattern of and hits it almost without trying. (I'm familiar with it and the comfort that comes with the familiarity is welcome.)

I'll almost certainly push my reading boundaries again, since I have two stories by Yuiko Mishima Spring Snow (I think?) and a short essay called Patriotism. I almost wasn't going to buy the book (it's really a pamphlet), but then I remembered: with a title like that, I'll put my money down. As for Bolano, it's not like I'll be hurting for more of his work. Maybe the Savage Detectives next? That is to say, next, but not soon.





I have at least 4 BT records somewhere on my music devices and computer, but the only one I ever listen to is the single for the Force of Gravity, which has two remixes and two other extended mixes of songs. Oddly enough, said single doesn't have the original track, but instead has a radio edit. So: It's a single for a song it doesn't contain.

As for why this is the case, well, I basically look for Somnambulist, and never find it, since it's apparently on the one my friend didn't burn for me (remember those days?) and I happened on the tracks years ago and have kept the Force of Gravity in my queue.

An additional aside: Click the link to Somnabulist. It takes you to the official video for the song, which visually, feels incredibly dated. It makes me smile, because I know I'm acting/dressing at least as stupid now, but in different ways. Look back and laugh.

Number Fifty. Also: Friday!

Managing the schedule seems to be the theme of my return to the States. I'm trying to coordinate my return to Italy, double timed, while also trying to hang out with friends and shop for Christmas gifts. (Hint: I haven't shopped for Christmas gifts yet.)

I would say it's hard to take some time out and look back, but it's not. Slowing down is the easy part. Speeding up again is what's hard. I started this blog on the idea that I'd hammer out my commitments and figure out the schedule later and so far, it's worked. I mean, more followers would be nice, but my place is not to bemoan how few people have this thing on their Google Reader or whatever. My place is to write interesting things, on time, and according to a schedule. I've done that and there's been fifty so far, three a week, usually on time.

I might have cheated with the night I went to the Bane gig and came back (posted at about 3 a.m. Rome time), but I would like to think everybody cheats at some point. Also: With the exception of Emmy's update (former Overkill writers get together to jam on one of my main riffs in Overkill is a great feeling), this has been a pretty solitary project. Which, again, I'm not complaining. I could use a chorus of other voices, for sure, but that, at least for three months, this has been a success. Whether I can keep it going for a year or not is, oddly enough, up to me and no one else.

Which isn't as scary as I thought it would be. But it's another thing on the schedule to manage. I was re-reading my diary from, God, 30ish months ago now and one of the things I knew I had trouble with and didn't do was sticking to a schedule and doing work/writing in advance of a deadline and not right before. The problem, as any procrastinator knows, is not that procrastination doesn't work, but that it does. There is a spark borne of terror and it is a more reliable spark (or at least one that's easier to start) than the spark of sitting down a week or so out and trying to bite off a little chunk of the project.

I can look at today, though, and say, honestly, that I have kept a schedule for three months. It's not epic or earth-shattering. No presses ought to be held, but the next goal is clear: 100.

(Well, 51 is the more immediate goal. To 51!)





Why Barlights by fun.? Because I like the song and I'm going drinking with my friends for the first time since I've been back in...huh...less than an hour and a half. (I'm not even home!) Better get going then. Ta!