Everybody Staze...

Yup, that’s right, two posts in one day. Well, more like 24 hours since I did sleep between the last post and this one. But hey, beggers can’t be choosers.

So, here goes.

First off, let me say to all you that might not know… I am not Druihd. Never have been, never will be. She is a friend… I give her space to host her–albeit bandwidth intensive–website. Those of you who know me know more than this… but to protect her as well as myself, I will not say more than this. I do talk to her often though, and have heard about a con she recently sent artwork to. Ohayocon. In Columbus, Ohio. Punny, no? That must be one of the only things going for it. Cause from what I’ve heard, everything else sucked. First off, it was in the same convention space and time as a huge Christian Gathering. Very conservative ones at that. But hey… that’s not that big of a deal. Most of what pisses me off is the fact that Druihd took her time and money to send artwork there to be sold, and it first was misplaced (the woman running the art show didn’t remember getting it, then found it when reminded). Then, the art show room was hidden so no one could find it. Not that it really mattered, because there was NO SILENT AUCTION. All you could do was look at the stuff in the art show room… and then have to wait until Sunday to bid in a live auction. Well, god willing (har har) that would have been fine, HAD THERE NOT BEEN A HUGE SNOW STORM THAT WEEKEND. So everyone left early. There were reportedly all of about 20 people in the auction… for a con of more than 2000. Them’s pretty shoddy turnouts… don’t ya think? So, okay, the auction happens. Then what? Does the woman running the show contact Druihd to tell her what she sold, or made? No. She hears through other sources what happened… and only after 2 weeks of waiting does the woman finally email her and say “I’ve been busy with school, I’ll get intouch with you soon”. Or something along those lines. Excuse me, but, WTF mate? You mean to tell me that you ran an art show full well knowing that you would not be able to follow through with everything because of school? How irresponsible is that?

So, basically, I’m writing this for a couple reasons. One, this isn’t how art shows normally are. SakuraCon has an excellent art show coordinator. Ushicon has an excellent one that contacted Druihd within 24 hours of the con being over. Druihd herself ran the artshow for Kumoricon. These aren’t difficult things to run. You basically just find a biscuit or two to watch the room for you, and then you just make sure people pick up the stuff after the con. Simple. Now, there are other bad art shows… Otakon was pretty bad… it took about 2-3 months after the con to get her check, and the people made absolutely no effort to contact the artists directly. Sure, Druihd made bank at that con, but that doesn’t excuse the lack of responsibility on behalf of the con staff. Druihd made serious bank at Ushicon last weekend, and that woman contact her within less than a day!!! See, it can be done. It has nothing to do with the size of the con. It has everything to do with finding responsible people who take their job seriously. They’re out there. There is a reason Kumoricon got such high marks despite the fact it was only a 500 person con.

So, yeah… I now declare (for what that’s worth) that Ohayocon is blacklisted. It will receive no artwork, no recommendations, nothing. It will have to prove to me that they are past their previous ways. But until then… I suggest all artists that routinely send art to other conventions no longer send any artwork to Ohayocon… it was a waste of time for all those involved… and at this point, I’ll be happy if she just gets her artwork that didn’t sell, back.

Until my next post.

As most to all of you should know, I am a resident of Oregon. A “blue” state. We always vote for the democrat in presidential elections, we are known for our “liberal” and “progressive” stance on many things. We’re the home of the bottle bill, and FPEP… we have medical marijuana, doctor assisted suicide, one of the (if not the) highest minimum wages in the country ($7.05/hr), and many other ideals that are WAY out there in the political scale. But like the rest of America… someone mentions “taxes” and we all turn into tight assed, hypocritical, heartless assholes. Today was polling day for a temporary $800 million dollar tax bill. Why did it go to the polls? Because a few years back a man named Bill Sizemore (all you Oregonians know him) got a measure passed that made it so Tax Increases had to be voted on if they didn’t receive a 2/3 majority in the State House. So basically, they always go to the voters. And what do voters do? They vote on shit they know very little about. All they see is “tax increase” and go “HOLY SHIT! The man wants to take more of MY money to waste on worthless shit”. Yeah, worthless shit like state health care, education, roads, police, firemen, etc etc etc. I even saw a sign that said “No on 30. 30 means more Unemployment.” Riiiiight… anyone have a clue how many state workers are going to be laid off because of this? Or how many people will suddently not have state healthcare?

We claim to be an evolved species… we have computers, machines, we talk, read, etc… but we’re no better than any other animal when it comes to helping another? Sure, we’ll stop and maybe see if they’re okay… but when it comes to actually putting effort into helping them… very few people can pull it off.

You may be saying, “sure, what do you care? you make very little… the tax increase wouldn’t have hurt you (much)…” and you’re right… it would have ment MAYBE $20 a month. But you know what… I work for the government. I attend a state school… I have no healthcare because my mom’s employer is a hospital and doesn’t believe that her son deserves healthcare because he’s 23. But hey… we care about people… we’re in Iraq because we wanted to free the people from Saddam…

So yeah… welcome to the new Idaho. We are being pushed further and further down the ranking in lowest taxed states… soon our freeways will be nothing but chunks of asphalt, and the unemployment lines will be many times longer with former government employees in the lines, and fewer people at the counter to help them.

On the plus side… it does look like the country is fed up with Bush, and as of tonight, it seems like 9 of the 50 states in the country want Kerry to be the Democratic Running in 2004… and Lieberman bowed out. Wow… if I were living in another state today might have been a really good day. Bush’s approval rating keeps falling… I believe it’s now at something like 48% (from the Garner Group). While that number still seems high, it’s nice to see that even conservative numbers place him as an unpopular president. If it does turn out to be Kerry running (which I must say, I like him much better than Dean), I hope he can really keep the momentum going and whoop Bush’s ass back to Texas just like Clinton whooped his daddy.

Well… it’s almost 0400… I’m going to get some sleep. Tomorrow I hope to make a post I’ve been wanting to for over a week now dealing with a shitty anime con that should be completely blacklisted from the listing of all anime cons.

Well, since Chris asked for it, I’ll go ahead and talk about it. Not sure what he covered on it already in his LJ, but I can certainly go over what comes to mind.

First thing, and it’s a major concern with the idea of objectivity. Being Human. The very notion of someone trying to be objective is in some ways, ludicrous. You cannot possibly remove yourself so far from personal feeling to become completely objective. The human experience is based upon personal experience of every human, and when it comes to analysis of a situation, those experiences are used. Let’s say you’re a lawyer or a judge and all you are using to base your decision on is previous law. Well, that’s all due to interpretation too.

Relativity. It’s entirely what is it. The idea of objectivity is really the same as the idea of truth. You have personal truth, and universal truth. Due to the limits of the human experience, you cannot possibly know universal truth, so even if by chance your personal truth was the exact same as universal truth, you would have no way to know. There is no basis for comparison. So, what’s truth? Personal experience, opinion, rational thought, etc etc. All this is what builds someone’s personal truth. So really, objectivity is kind of a myth… though there are exceptions. One, if god exists (something that knows whatever Universal Truth). Another is a computer… but even that is programmed by a person, someone that has experience that tells them that heat is hot, cold is cold, etc etc. To a computer, what does that mean? All this is programming a computer to share experiences that a human has… so while it may be able to be more objective than a human, it’s still only objective from a human point of view. It’s not all bad though… there is a reasonable exception… math. It’s pretty damn objective… but again, only to the human point of view. To another species, or to the universal truth, it could be a long way from objective.

So does this mean objectivity is the same as truth? Seems like it to me. This isn’t to say that people shouldn’t be objective. They should be. But they shouldn’t pass it off as Truth to everyone. Societal objectivity might be able to do this… but only within that society. And until there is a world wide gathering of people into one national society, it seems rather silly to think that the US societal truth is valid to a group of Shiite Muslims on the other side of the world, or even a group of Americans… some would say that you accept the societal truth if you become a citizen of that state… that may be truth to an extent, but you cannot expect people to sign off on a truth that is only written in stone for some people, and is easily changable or avoidable to other people. But then you might argue that those two groups are difference societies… which says there’s even more of a reason to create a world society so there is no group that is able to get around these rules. But you certainly don’t want a subset of people that are non-representative creating this.

This really morphs into something Chris and I have been talking about the past few days. In Japan he has been faced with the reality of being an American in another country, and having to fight with the stereotypes that American’s face in other countries. We’re Cowboys, we don’t care about what the rest of the world thinks, we consume 70% of the worlds GEP, we have a moron for a president (that we didn’t elect), and anytime we don’t like someone, we go to war with them and to hell with what the world thinks. I think that’s basically it. The sad thing is, most of it’s true in one way or another. But, the thing that really doesn’t get across to the world at large: it isn’t all the people that are this way, it’s a subset of the population.

Texans are cowboys, a lot of the midwest are hicks, we all do help consume that much (it’s a group effort), we do have a moron president, but we didn’t vote for him (most of the nation did NOT vote for him), and anytime a subset of the nation doesn’t like someone, they send another subset of the population off to kill them.

One of the main problems, American’s don’t go abroad. They don’t show the world that the average Joe isn’t like his ruling class. It is a ruling class by the way… it’s the top 1% of the country that does all this, and the cowboy thing, well, that’s just movies and Bush (and before him, Daddy and Reagan). A lot of people come to the US from their native country, but a lot of them stay… and others go back, and talk to a small population of their native country and don’t really get across the idea that we’re not all like their pre-existing idea of us. So when someone like Chris goes over to Japan, he gets to face people from Japan, or from other countries saying something about the way Americans are… and Chris having to get into a debate with them about how we really are. Someone saying “Oregon is a hick state” (this came from someone online talking to Tara). And then having to say, “umm, actually Oregon is the most liberal state in the country, and we have the highest Lesbian Percentage of the population in the country” (would that be a percapita thing? lol, kidding, kidding).

So, what do we do, as a nation, to solve this? Well, first thing would be to quit killing people we don’t like. That would be a big chunk there, and really short term too. The other things are going to take time, are going to require something that the US has very little idea of. Long Term Solutions. As a nation, the longest we tend to look into the future is 4 years: the time from one Presidential election to the next. Last time we looked more into the future than that was when Kennedy wanted to go to the moon… but that still wasn’t very far sighted of us. We need to start thinking 10,20,40 years in the future. We need to start educating the people of this country. Raise the national education level of the country up to the point where it should be for the world’s richest country. Get the people to the point where they can truly vote in their best interest, instead of just voting for some pretty commercial add. How about we put however many billions of dollars that Bush is putting toward Mars toward Educating the Nation. But no… that would be taking money that would be going toward Corporate America and spending it within the government. And to get people to vote for you, you have to convince them that Government spending is down. Well, it is, within parts of the Government, but the money does flow. More and More each year… that’s called Growth. I think we need to coin a term for modern republican values…. Retroactive De-evolution Spending. Spend a lot to move the country back to where it was pre-Roosevelt.

Eh, I’ve gotten into Ranting. Comment on this if you want me to cover anything else… I’ve kinda lost the groove.

Until next time.