Mr. Topp and the Big Bad Blog

The Guardian writes that “Noah’s Ark was circular”, which is a pretty moronic headline for a somewhat interesting article about the translation of a new source of the Noah’s Ark story. A funny reaction is that of the Institute for Creation Research, attempting to debunk the new translation and reaffirm the biblical version as “fact”. The intellectual dishonesty is so blatant that it’s … well, funny.

(Gunpowder art by Cai Guo-Qiang)

Town and village courts in New York State sound very frightening. The article includes an example of a judge who responded to a request for a restraining order from a battered woman with the comment: “Every woman needs a good pounding every now and then.”

Are cupcakes better without frills? The Butch Bakery thinks so.

morning coffee art, butch, cai guo-qiang, court, cupcakes, gunpowder, Institute for Creation Research, law, nedroid, new york state, noah's ark, the bible, wish

When it comes to copyright, the world simply seems to have gone insane.

The UK music industry thinks it loses £200 million each year to piracy. So the UK government is now trying to push through a new set of regulations that would cost £500 million to implement. Which not only does not meet the most basic of cost-benefit analyses, but also would force an estimated 40,000 people offline due to the additional costs that would be passed on to consumers.

Meanwhile, my ISP has promised to start to spy on everything that I download. I cannot recall agreeing to allow them to do this.

But copyright issues in music are old news; the new battle is in books. Book publishers have now realized that many avid readers are now e-book readers, with more to follow on the iPad — now they are beginning to jump into the copyright act. Using the same sorts of measurements that the music and movie industries use, they are claiming to lose $3 billion a year to online piracy. A more interesting analysis takes the same methodology and applies it to libraries, finding that American libraries “cost” the publishing industry nearly $1 trillion every year.

This, of course, demonstrates how silly the claims are. Once one takes into account that those who violate copyright by downloading music, books, or movies are also the industry’s biggest customers, expenditures like those being made in the UK are revealed for being complete farces — rather than protecting profits, it takes away the ability for customers to discover the material in the first place.

There are interesting and sane views out there. Go To Hellman outlines the benefits of library sharing of books. Cory Doctorow discusses the possibility of creating an intelligent copyright system, rather than a one-size-fits-all system that doesn’t work.

None of that intelligent thinking is likely to be finding its way into the Anti-Conterfeiting Trade Agreement, however. The public, of course, is not allowed in on the multilateral negotiations — but big business is. What is sure to emerge are a set of rules to make the demise of the pre-Internet model as painful as possible for consumers and new start-ups, rather than a set of rules that still make sense given the technology available.

And yes, almost all of this has happened during the first 31 days of 2010. And there is no sign that anybody will adopt a system that has any chance of working anytime soon.

(Image from 917press)

Tech and World, observations and opinions ACTA, anti-conterfeit trade agreement, books, copyright, cory doctorow, e-books, go to hellman, law, libraries, music, piracy, publishing

	You can now create your own toilet paper! Yippee!
There are lots of sports stats geeks out there on the Internet. There are lots of comics geeks, as well. But it takes a special soul to closely examine every single Charlie Brown comic strip in order to calculate the character’s baseball statistics.
	Amongst the group of things being banned in Australian pornography are porn stars with small breasts. Australian censors wants to make sure that all porn is big-titty porn.
Goodbye, lightbulb. Hello strange glowing walls.
	Some advice on judges about to come down hard against copyright violators: Try not to plagiarize somebody from the Internet in your decision.
E-mails from a technology entrepreneur.
	Prosecutors in the United States are trying to show that risque photos can ruin their lives — by ruining their lives. The practice of charging children with producing child pornography when they pose for photographs with their clothes on is currently being challenged in court.
Who writes bad sex scenes? Jonathan Littell, that’s who.

linking baseball, breasts, censorship, charlie brown, copyright, darth vader, dragon lizard, firefighters, foam, jonathan littell, julia skobeleva, law, police, porn, pornography, robots, statistics, tits, titties

In 2004, Wisconsin prisons banned the playing of D&D. Earlier this week, an appeals court upheld the decision, and I have spent several days mulling this over in my head.

The rationale used for banning the game is that it forms a gang-like structure. It creates a close-knit group of players with a clear-cut person in charge (the DM), and that the violent fantasy basis of the game could lead to a divorce between fantasy and reality with violent repercussions.

Usually, I would simply scoff at this, but the ruling states that punishment is a fundamental aspect of imprisonment, and prisons may choose to punish inmates by preventing them from participating in some of their favorite recreations. No arguments here. I would not expect to be able to engage in all the recreation I currently enjoy were I in prison. Skiing, for example, would quite clearly be out.

But what of their actual arguments? Again, worrying about gang-forming and violent behaviour seems ridiculous when formed outside of prison, but inside prison could be a different manner. These are, presumably, people who have already been convicted of such behaviour and incarcerated for it.

However, the Wisconsin government has admitted that there appears to be no link between roleplaying games and increased violence or gang activity in prison — that being “divorced from reality” is not particularly induced by roleplaying games. People in such a state should be in a mental institution, not a regular prison. There are many books that could also encourage such escapism, but books are not banned — unless they contain rules for a roleplaying game. Or a shiv.

Still, that does not mean that roleplaying ought to be allowed — prison is a place for punishment, after all. However, here at the Big Bad Blog we do not understand how taking away a creative non-violent outlet from prisoners is productive to their rehabilitation; a prisoner writing a 96-page manuscript for a D&D game scenario that he hopes to run for other prisoners is doing something positive, non-violent, and for other people.

In other words, if the world inside a prison turns out not to be so entirely crazy that a D&D group turns into a gang, running a roleplaying game for other prisoners would seem to be the sort of behaviour that prisons should be encouraging, not prohibiting. These inmates will, after all, be freed eventually.

Of course, with the manner in which Wisconsin has phrased their roleplaying ban — it is not simply a ban on any sort of collective make-believe — diceless systems like Amber which depend on few stats could still be used. Inmates simply need to keep track of everything in their heads and talk.

Wisconsin prisons — and the court — seem to be missing that, at its core, roleplaying is simply pretending to be somebody else in a collective, storytelling, environment. Dice, papers, 96-page-plans, rulebooks and character sheets are just tools that make it easier. Two like-minded people free to converse can roleplay, anytime, anywhere.

Hence their ban — that inmates are not allowed to engage in or possess written material that details rules, codes, dogma of games/activities such as ‘Dungeons and Dragons’ because it promotes fantasy role playing, competitive hostility, violence, addictive escape behaviors, and possible gambling — is pointless. The activity is still permitted, so long as they do not have a rulebook for it.

Seems odd, does it not? A prison will allow prisoners to play, so long as they do not play by the rules …

The final verdict? Legal, but dumb.

Sources
BoingBoing
Inside Bay Area
New York Daily News
The Volokh Conspiracy

Photograph: Roleplaying Pro

observations and opinions, roleplaying D&D, dungeons and dragons, inmates, law, prisoners, prisons, punishment, rehabilitation, roleplaying, wisconsin