Irony, Thy Name is Indie

I note with no small degree of amusement that apparently the new hotness among the self-defined “Indie” crowd is, of all things, marketing.

Y’know, the same sort of commercial, business-oriented approach to publishing that had me labeled as “corporate” and “not-Indie” or “The Man” or whatever, by the self-same community, just a scant while back.

They’re even doing *webinars!* Where you can hear the marketing theories of people who have products that have moved as much as several hundred copies!

Political post: Libertarians

A Democratic administration is in power, so of course, time has come ’round again for a rise in popularity of Ayn Rand’s so-called philosophy.

Very popular in geek circles, and of course, among Conservatives who want a label that doesn’t lump them in with the Southern Regional Populist crowd that has taken over the Republican party.

Of course, I’ve always been very fond of this quote from the blog kung fu monkey:

“There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs. ”

The reason why *every* political philosophy, across the spectrum from conservative to liberal, is better than Libertarianism, is that the other philosophies aren’t based on bad novels.

The sad thing about Libertarians, is that they apparently all think that they are John Galt — that they are the alpha-industrial-creatives that the “masses” live off of — who will stop production and really show them all.

What they never seem to grasp is that they are the masses, not the alphas. It’s sad — a bunch of wanna-be Galts, toiling in obscurity, who think the world should work the way it was presented in a badly-reviewed bomb of a novel from 1957.

It would be almost funny, if they didn’t actually believe it.

They’re like the Scientologists of politics.

Klingon Propaganda

OK, this is just cool. A fan-created animated propaganda short, entirely in Klingonese, apparently done for the www.tlhingan.org fan site.

Brilliantly animated. (…and apparently uses a Turkish children’s song from the late 70s/early 80s as the background — Turkish was one of the languages that was the inspiration for the development of the fictional Klingon language for the Trek films, so that works…)