I've noticed many cases where I'll be doing something that's technically illegal, but given the circumstances has no bad repercussions. It's moreso than just doing it with no cops around. I'll try and explain with some examples.
You're at a stop sign. There's a car in front of you. You want to turn right. You can clearly see the road in both directions. A spot opens up and the car in front of you goes, and you notice you can safely turn right and do so. As in, when they go, you advance forwards and then make your own turn without re-stopping at the stop sign.
The letter of the law says that you're supposed to stop at the stop sign. Being the second car in line doesn't count as actually being at the stop sign. Yet the spirit of the law is to get you to stop and observe the situation and make an educated decision about when to continue your journey. This situation, while technically illegal, is still perfectly plausible.
Another example. You're at another intersection, this time with a traffic light and a "No Turn On Red" sign. It's 4 AM, there are no pedestrians, and the light has a ten minute cycle, meaning you're going to be sitting there for a while waiting for it to turn green. However, since there are no pedestrians, you make your right turn and go on with life.
This is once again illegal. After all, the "No Turn On Red" sign is there for a purpose. This intersection is in a highly foot-trafficked area within a state university. Disallowing turning when the light is red can easily prevent 99% of all pedestrian injuries. However, as previously stated, it's 4 AM and there are no pedestrians. It's always going to be illegal to do that right turn on red, but the pedestrians the turn restriction is there to protect aren't there, so safety isn't an issue.
As you can see, there are plenty of situations where understanding the spirit of the law technically brings special cases where the letter of the law can be justifiably questioned. However, this kind of works against us as well, as in this next example.
The speed limit on the road you're driving on is 25MPH (typical two lane residential street). There's no traffic, no pedestrians, and nobody backing out of a driveway or wanting to enter from a side road. The letter of the law states that the speed limit is 25MPH, plain and simple. The spirit of the law is to make sure that people on the road are going a speed that gives them enough time to react to changes in conditions, and to some extent, to cut down on noise. In this situation, it's possible to be going faster than the speed limit and still be in control of the vehicle, and without endangering anyone else. If it's during the day, you're only going to be bothering the nocturnal people who apparently don't have the right to a good day's sleep. Grr.
Oh I thought of another example.
You've been at a friend's place, and had some alcohol (not much, I'll use tonight as an example since this actually happened about an hour ago, so you've had an ounce of irish cream, an ounce of strawberry irish cream, and maybe two ounces of a cheap kahlua knockoff, and you're a fat bastard who can handle your alcohol). It's been a few hours since your last drink, you know your limits and definitely know you're not truly impaired, yet at the same time you figure that if you were to be pulled over, you'd fail the breathalyzer. The letter of the law states if you're over a certain BAC, you're under the influence. However, the spirit of the law is taking the typical range of lightweights and heavyweights into account and providing a general guideline as to what is considered safe. While probably being over that BAC, you're not really impaired and in fact make it home without event, issue, or interruption.
If the spirit of the law means nothing then I guess there's three things I've done before. Not that I haven't ever broken the speed limit, but I try my best not to, since it saves gas.
Also, lol disclaimer: The above post is not intended as legal advice and should not be interpreted or construed as such. I am not a lawyer, I'm just a 26 year old NEET with nothing better to do. If you do something stupid and get caught, you're a moron. Also, I'm not responsible for your actions and decisions.
Showing posts with label philosophical bullshit. Show all posts
Showing posts with label philosophical bullshit. Show all posts
Friday, April 24, 2009
Sunday, July 27, 2008
How opinions morph (also, pacifico is a fag)
I had been trying to avoid directly mentioning 4chan on this blog, but I've used some decidedly *chan-culture-based word phrasing in the past and am currently suffering from severe withdrawal because pacifico is a fag.
But that's not what I planned on writing about when I started this post.
I was watching the ROFLcon video of the Internet Leaders panel with Ryan North (Dinosaur Comics), Randall Munroe (xkcd), and moot (4chan). Towards the end they were discussing topics that for whatever reason got me thinking about how I got into 4chan and how I'd respond if I was ever asked.
I had heard about it almost from the very beginning, I think I was shown 4chan by a friend sometime in 2004. It was still widely filled with name/tripfaggotry and the whole concept of Anonymous hadn't taken hold yet (because forced anon hadn't been introduced). I didn't regularly browse the site by any means and actually struggled to remember the URL.
Later on (in 2006), after 4chan had pretty much grabbed its place in society (probably by the balls, yanking as hard as possible), I kept seeing more and more people pasting a link to an image on 4chan and discussing it, laughing, saying "that's horrible", often about the same image. I finally broke down and visited /b/ for the period of a week. I did nothing but lurk that week, as for whatever reason my internet connection was horrible (or maybe it was 4chan, I dunno) and while I could access the server /b/ was on (img.4chan.org), I couldn't access the server that processes its posts (dat.4chan.org).
That was very brief, I saved no images, laughed at a few things, and generally felt stupider at the end of the week.
It wasn't until I got tired of having the shitty wallpaper I had that I really became a regular 4chan user. My wallpaper, for the longest time, had either been nonexistant, an official wallpaper from some company (SPAM, for instance), or more recently, screenshots taken from in-game events in Guild Wars.
My concept of a good wallpaper is the opinion that the title of this post refers to. When I first started sifting through /w/, aimlessly searching for images, I had been used to wallpapers that had logos, text, and other things that I now consider to be sacrilege. Almost immediately I noticed the anti-text sentiment on /w/, as detext threads are common.
After a while of building up a collection, and finding that I had enough stuff to start being able to fill requests, I noticed a complete 180 in how I thought about text and logos on wallpapers. I hate them. Whenever possible, I photoshop them out or ask /w/ for a detext. A few good anons (and some name/tripfags) have been the source of some awesome detexts that I'm very thankful for.
I have this thing about wanting to contribute to a community while benefiting from it. I guess that's why I like BitTorrent, and also why I joined the staff at MAGFest, but I'll save those subjects for another time. So, I boned up on my clone tool skillz and started doing detexts. Not as a huge project or anything, but if I see a wallpaper posted and someone asks for the detext and I think I can do it, I'll give it a shot. The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya album on my Google Picasa account contains one example of this, someone posted a wallpaper that was originally severely infested with text. After looking at it for a bit, I said "I can do this!" A good portion of the wallpaper could actually be detexted by using the rectangular marquee to copy and paste portions of the wallpaper and superimpose them over the text, but that's what happens when there's a grid pattern.
Another case was a wallpaper of Yomi from Azumanga Daioh, dressed in all black, pants slightly unzipped to reveal black lace panties. Pretty damn sexy even before the clothing is mentioned. However, she was wearing a cross on a necklace. I don't subscribe to that mythology, yet I wanted the wallpaper badly, so in about 50000 hours, I clone stamped it out and posted my version up in the thread.
Most detexts and other wallpaper edits I do are primarily for myself, but I try to contribute them back to /w/ whenever possible. There's a nice warm fuzzy feeling inside when you go to post an edit of a wallpaper you did several months ago, the thread you posted it in is long gone, etc., only to be stopped by the "Duplicate File Entry" error, meaning someone else posted it already.
Think about that. Someone else liked an edit of a wallpaper I did (fixing a weird background color, removing as much of the JPEG loss as I possibly could, and saving the result as a PNG) so much that not only did they download it to their hard drive, but they reposted it. I've always liked when I can see some sort of verification that I've had an impact on society, no matter how small.
From /w/, well, I always had /b/ open as well. But after getting used to /w/, I decided to branch out a bit and see what else 4chan had to offer. I don't remember the exact order of events, but I've come to lurk (and post on) /b/, /ck/, /gif/, /r9k/, and /w/. From doing even just this little, it's very easy to notice that within 4chan's culture, it seems like every board has its own subculture(s).
/w/ has people who clean up scans to make wallpapers out of them, people who gank somewhat decent wallpapers off of animepaper and release them into the wild, people who do detexts, and people who do vectors. Occasionally there's some original content as well. Also, there's a sense of dependency from one subculture to another, that I notice whenever I see a wallpaper or "post your desktop" thread anywhere on 4chan other than /w/ or /wg/. A good portion of 4chan users, while not regularly browsing /w/ or /wg/, nevertheless depend on those two boards for wallpapers.
I speak primarily of /w/ when documenting 4chan's subcultures because it's still the board I like the most in all of 4chan. /w/ alone has changed me. I went from maybe having an unorganized folder containing two or three random wallpapers that had logos, text, credits, etc. that I'd manually change between once every few months to having a dedicated "wallpapers" directory filled with very many wallpapers, organized into subdirectories by source, very few containing text or logos, and rotated once every 4 hours by WinWall. I'm in the process of looking for a better way to organize and rotate my wallpapers (pImgDB is going to be awesome whenever the fuck praetox finishes it), and have remnants of not one but several personal projects aimed at organizing and rotating them saved in various places on this computer as well as on my server.
Now that I think about it, all of 4chan has changed me. /b/'s inane activities, the memes, stupid sayings that will get you strange looks should you utter them in real life, even in the company of other channers, and much more have all become an irreplaceable part of my life.
So in summary, fuck you pacifico. Even if what you say is true and it's not currently raidchan continuing the DDoS attacks. If you want to DDoS something worthwhile for a change, why not fchan (furries), deviantart (furries), gaiaonline ('nuff said), livejournal (emos), somethingawful (fags), anontalk (cancer), ebaumsworld (cancer), the RIAA/MPAA (cancer/cancer), or PETA (cancer)?
Hell, DDoS the WoW realms. That way I get my friend back (until you stop). I guess he's not much of a friend if he only contacts me wanting to get together and do something when WoW is down (though strangely, during WoW's regularly-scheduled server maintenance, he's still silent).
But that's not what I planned on writing about when I started this post.
I was watching the ROFLcon video of the Internet Leaders panel with Ryan North (Dinosaur Comics), Randall Munroe (xkcd), and moot (4chan). Towards the end they were discussing topics that for whatever reason got me thinking about how I got into 4chan and how I'd respond if I was ever asked.
I had heard about it almost from the very beginning, I think I was shown 4chan by a friend sometime in 2004. It was still widely filled with name/tripfaggotry and the whole concept of Anonymous hadn't taken hold yet (because forced anon hadn't been introduced). I didn't regularly browse the site by any means and actually struggled to remember the URL.
Later on (in 2006), after 4chan had pretty much grabbed its place in society (probably by the balls, yanking as hard as possible), I kept seeing more and more people pasting a link to an image on 4chan and discussing it, laughing, saying "that's horrible", often about the same image. I finally broke down and visited /b/ for the period of a week. I did nothing but lurk that week, as for whatever reason my internet connection was horrible (or maybe it was 4chan, I dunno) and while I could access the server /b/ was on (img.4chan.org), I couldn't access the server that processes its posts (dat.4chan.org).
That was very brief, I saved no images, laughed at a few things, and generally felt stupider at the end of the week.
It wasn't until I got tired of having the shitty wallpaper I had that I really became a regular 4chan user. My wallpaper, for the longest time, had either been nonexistant, an official wallpaper from some company (SPAM, for instance), or more recently, screenshots taken from in-game events in Guild Wars.
My concept of a good wallpaper is the opinion that the title of this post refers to. When I first started sifting through /w/, aimlessly searching for images, I had been used to wallpapers that had logos, text, and other things that I now consider to be sacrilege. Almost immediately I noticed the anti-text sentiment on /w/, as detext threads are common.
After a while of building up a collection, and finding that I had enough stuff to start being able to fill requests, I noticed a complete 180 in how I thought about text and logos on wallpapers. I hate them. Whenever possible, I photoshop them out or ask /w/ for a detext. A few good anons (and some name/tripfags) have been the source of some awesome detexts that I'm very thankful for.
I have this thing about wanting to contribute to a community while benefiting from it. I guess that's why I like BitTorrent, and also why I joined the staff at MAGFest, but I'll save those subjects for another time. So, I boned up on my clone tool skillz and started doing detexts. Not as a huge project or anything, but if I see a wallpaper posted and someone asks for the detext and I think I can do it, I'll give it a shot. The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya album on my Google Picasa account contains one example of this, someone posted a wallpaper that was originally severely infested with text. After looking at it for a bit, I said "I can do this!" A good portion of the wallpaper could actually be detexted by using the rectangular marquee to copy and paste portions of the wallpaper and superimpose them over the text, but that's what happens when there's a grid pattern.
Another case was a wallpaper of Yomi from Azumanga Daioh, dressed in all black, pants slightly unzipped to reveal black lace panties. Pretty damn sexy even before the clothing is mentioned. However, she was wearing a cross on a necklace. I don't subscribe to that mythology, yet I wanted the wallpaper badly, so in about 50000 hours, I clone stamped it out and posted my version up in the thread.
Most detexts and other wallpaper edits I do are primarily for myself, but I try to contribute them back to /w/ whenever possible. There's a nice warm fuzzy feeling inside when you go to post an edit of a wallpaper you did several months ago, the thread you posted it in is long gone, etc., only to be stopped by the "Duplicate File Entry" error, meaning someone else posted it already.
Think about that. Someone else liked an edit of a wallpaper I did (fixing a weird background color, removing as much of the JPEG loss as I possibly could, and saving the result as a PNG) so much that not only did they download it to their hard drive, but they reposted it. I've always liked when I can see some sort of verification that I've had an impact on society, no matter how small.
From /w/, well, I always had /b/ open as well. But after getting used to /w/, I decided to branch out a bit and see what else 4chan had to offer. I don't remember the exact order of events, but I've come to lurk (and post on) /b/, /ck/, /gif/, /r9k/, and /w/. From doing even just this little, it's very easy to notice that within 4chan's culture, it seems like every board has its own subculture(s).
/w/ has people who clean up scans to make wallpapers out of them, people who gank somewhat decent wallpapers off of animepaper and release them into the wild, people who do detexts, and people who do vectors. Occasionally there's some original content as well. Also, there's a sense of dependency from one subculture to another, that I notice whenever I see a wallpaper or "post your desktop" thread anywhere on 4chan other than /w/ or /wg/. A good portion of 4chan users, while not regularly browsing /w/ or /wg/, nevertheless depend on those two boards for wallpapers.
I speak primarily of /w/ when documenting 4chan's subcultures because it's still the board I like the most in all of 4chan. /w/ alone has changed me. I went from maybe having an unorganized folder containing two or three random wallpapers that had logos, text, credits, etc. that I'd manually change between once every few months to having a dedicated "wallpapers" directory filled with very many wallpapers, organized into subdirectories by source, very few containing text or logos, and rotated once every 4 hours by WinWall. I'm in the process of looking for a better way to organize and rotate my wallpapers (pImgDB is going to be awesome whenever the fuck praetox finishes it), and have remnants of not one but several personal projects aimed at organizing and rotating them saved in various places on this computer as well as on my server.
Now that I think about it, all of 4chan has changed me. /b/'s inane activities, the memes, stupid sayings that will get you strange looks should you utter them in real life, even in the company of other channers, and much more have all become an irreplaceable part of my life.
So in summary, fuck you pacifico. Even if what you say is true and it's not currently raidchan continuing the DDoS attacks. If you want to DDoS something worthwhile for a change, why not fchan (furries), deviantart (furries), gaiaonline ('nuff said), livejournal (emos), somethingawful (fags), anontalk (cancer), ebaumsworld (cancer), the RIAA/MPAA (cancer/cancer), or PETA (cancer)?
Hell, DDoS the WoW realms. That way I get my friend back (until you stop). I guess he's not much of a friend if he only contacts me wanting to get together and do something when WoW is down (though strangely, during WoW's regularly-scheduled server maintenance, he's still silent).
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