Shit, I'm a Nihilist AND a Minimalist

I regularly read Diesel Sweeties, but rarely does it fit my life this well. 

Practical philosophy

Goddamn I love smbc comics:





By the way, one of the people involved is a Reedie. Check out the videos for references to Renn Fayre and to see a Reed diploma in the background.

So 'true'

I have lots to update about, but instead I will leave you with this:

Existentialism and parenting, part 2

(once again taken from the glory that is Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal Comics)

Epistemology

Does anyone know where Eddie got his boots? Apparently Homestar Runner does!

I refuse to believe that there is no photographic documentation of the red moon boots, but I am unable to find any, so if you have pictures please send them my way.

Update: Speaking of philosophy and webcomic-y stuff, the new edition of Dungeons and Discourses is now complete! In the words of Tiny Carl Jung, "This is the best game ever!" Seriously, I want to actually play it someday, especially since the people I have played D&D with are some of the few people anywhere who could pull it off. I would be a Wittgensteinian: at early levels I could trap enemies in rigid logical structures, and at higher levels I could undermine the very idea of following a rule, including the rules of logic, math, language, and (most interestingly for gameplay) physics.

Hell

An eternity of this really would be my hell. The comic also has a pretty good idea of my reaction to heaven:


Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal generally has great takes on religion:


There are lots more good ones, but this post is long enough already.

Inauguration speeches

I finally got a chance to watch Obama's inauguration speech (I don't think I would be able to stomach the rest of the ceremony) and I give it a resounding 'meh'. It sounded like a stump speech, and not even one of his better ones. Granted, Obama's stump speeches are better than the majority of speeches ever given, but this inauguration speech isn't even in the same league as Kennedy's in 1961. Hearing it still gives me goosebumps. Everyone knows the 'ask not what your country can do for you,' line, but when you hear the build up it gets exponentially better.



(Seriously, give it a listen; it's only fourteen minutes.)

Update: This article makes me feel better about Obama's speech. It made me realize that the speech was brilliant, if not particularly inspiring to me, because it wasn't talking to liberals. Obama used the language of conservatism to try to get conservatives behind liberal ideas, which will be essential if they are to be enacted. The best example of this was the "These things are old; these things are true" line, which resonates for conservatives in a big big way, but among the 'traditional' values he listed were tolerance and curiosity, the latter of which in particular seems pretty damn radical after the quarter century of Republican leadership and completely antithetical to Bush II in particular.

Existentialism and parenting

(blatantly stolen from Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal comics, which is somehow both updated daily and consistently hilarious)

I expect that we existentialists make many lousy things, including parents. This is actually one of the reasons I never want to be have children: there would be far too many instances of me saying thinks like "Well, I don't think that I would like having my eye poked out, but of course there isn't anything inherently good or bad about it. There is no reason to prefer--say--the taste of ice cream over the experience of extreme pain. I do have that preference, but there is no reason for it. If you think you might prefer to poke out your eye over having two functional eyes then feel free to keep playing with that sharp object near your face." Or if asked if Santa Clause is real: "It is true for your friends that Santa exists but it is not true for me. I don't know whether or not it is true for you. It depends on whether the opinions of your friends outweigh my opinion on that issue."

The other philosophy-based problem I have with parenting is that as far as I am concerned parenting consists of conditioning your children, whether you are doing so purposefully or not. Thus I would want to have a plan in place as to what I wanted to condition them to believe and desire, but I have no idea. I wouldn't want them to share my values because my values are self-undermining, but people with radically different values from mine drive me crazy.

Update:

It's like I rolled a State of Nature 20!

There's a new Dungeons & Discourse cartoon! And a promise of more on the way too. I love anything where you have to be nerdy about philosophy and D&D to get the jokes. It's like it was written for me and my friends...

Update: Speaking of webcomics, XKCD was kind enough to make a metric conversion chart that was precisely the kind I have wanted in the fortnight I've been abroad.