May 20

Welcome to the New Germany

Posted in: links, politics

I’m not too big a fan of re-posting other people’s stuff on my own blog, but this little clip here really got my attention. With the elections in the European Union coming up in a few weeks every German european citizen should really take a step back and think about for whom he or she is going to vote.





Personally, I’m a supporter of the Piratenpartei. There may be many reasons why one shouldn’t vote for a party like that, but I have run out of options a long time ago. Every time I open up a newspaper it seems like the big parties are trying to pass each other on their race to make me puke my guts out before breakfast.
But to whomever you give your vote – make sure you know who they are and what they stand for. If you’ve followed the news during the past couple of months you have seen the kind of uninformed knee-jerk reactions to current events that systematically erode our civil liberties and make a joke of the once highly held concept of the presumption of innocence. The seemingly rampant voracity for total surveillance paired with a downright ludicrous display of incompetence is nothing short of grotesque. And it’s enough. This needs to stop, and it needs to stop now. It simply can not be that all the politicians have to do in order to push any legislation through that they see fit is play the terrorism or child pornography trump card. Don’t make me quote Benjamin Franklin.

The elections are coming up. And it’s time to take a stand. To say it with the immortal words of Howard Beale:

I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!

Get mad. Make your voice heard. Make your vote count.

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Nov 19

The Morning Routine

Posted in: links

Just as expected from any online media, web comics have several big advantages over their traditional (in this case printed) counterparts. The two big ones for me are longevity (the ability to browse through the entire archive of published strips, which can be important when you missed a few episodes of an ongoing storyline) and connectedness (being able to follow links from the annotations and to cross-reference sources mentioned in the comic, very convenient when the strip is touching on current events).
This is of course old news, but I was painfully reminded of it during the last couple of days. While I was in Munich I decided to read one of those fancy newspapers that, once opened up, can only be folded back together by those few who hold at least a 3rd degree black belt in Origami-Do. There were plenty of articles where I thought yes, I would like to know more, but paper turns out to be quite unclickable.

I do not recall when I first started reading Penny Arcade but circumstantial evidence suggests that it must have been in early 1999, along with PvP, and I’ve been an avid reader ever since. Several other comics have joined them my bookmark folder in the years that followed. Among them are, roughly ordered by personal preference:

This list also happens to be the reason why I practically never get anything done before lunch. Just in case you were wondering.

Happy 10th anniversary, Penny Arcade.

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