Robot Action Boy

well, it looks like a few of the blogs i had linked to have died. so both neohomo and between a & b have been removed. i kept hoping that brent would start blogging as neohomo again, but now that even the page explaining that he is taking a break is no longer there that is looking a little doubtful. in their place i have added a link to scrubbles where i have been spending a lot of time. his january 30th entry has a call for people to comment on their favourite tv moments. ah television, the great binder of the world.

tomorrow peter and i fly to japan for our lunar new year holiday. so there’ll be no new posts till we get back on the 5th.

do you have old books, dvds, cds that you’d like to get rid of? well, the answer is here: the swappingtons. i was surprised by some of the things i saw up for swap, things i’d pay money for if they weren’t too expensive. i’m not sure how well it’ll work for people outside north america, but after the lunar new year holidays i’ll be giving it a shot. via the excitement machine.

as an offshoot to the bloggies, someone has put together the photobloggies. i didn’t even hear about this until nominations were almost over. i quickly ran off a few nominations, but i’m not sure they made it in before the deadline. official voting should begin on feb. 1st. hopefully the photobloggies won’t be riddled with the same problems as the bloggies have been.

there’s a section in the perks of being a wallflower where the main character(charlie) is given ayn rand’s the fountainhead to read by his teacher. the teacher tells him when you read this “be a filter, not a sponge”. this reminds me of a story my brother told me. he was visiting some friends and when he told them he was reading ayn rand they were horrified. they hadn’t read her, but had heard about her and already condemed her work based on what they had heard about the author’s personality. it got me to thinking, are people these days unable to be a filter? are we unable to read something from a different point of view and learn something from it even if we don’t agree with everything in it?

if this is the case, it seems to be a scary development. when i was in high school one thing my friends and i strove for was to be open minded. i’m sure we failed in a number of ways, but compared to the people we were surrounded by we were much more open minded. i remember reading ayn rand around this time or shortly after high school and i knew very little of ayn rand’s philosophy aside from what is in her books. would of i felt differently if i had heard bad things about her philosophy? maybe, maybe not.

how related is a work(a painting, a film, a piece of music) to the creator’s personality? if an artist does questionable things in their private life should it affect how i feel about their work? how related are the two? i think there is no blanket answer for those questions. there are situations where i won’t want to support an artist because of their politics or what the money they make off me is being used for. but that seems to be a rarity these days, and i’m not certain it’s the right way of going about things. is it just a case of throwing the baby out with the bath water? boycotting an artist is not the same thing as boycotting a corporation after all. i wouldn’t condemn a person based on who their parents are so why do it with a work of art?

the weblog review has reviewed robot action boy. they gave me a 3 out of 5 which isn’t that surprising as what they value in a weblog are often things that i don’t care that much about. i’m not so concerned about how original a template is or the design, as long as it’s easy to read and the font isn’t too small. i rarely bother with people’s about me information, and purposely left one off this site. the review did result in a few more hits than usual which is a little surprising as the review wasn’t that positive. but then, when i read a review i’ll usually check out the site regardless of the rating to see if i agree with the reviewer or not.

well, the bloggies finalists have been announced. whenever i see lists like this i can’t help thinking of all the blogs that seem to be missing or that weren’t even nominated that maybe should of been. the awards aren’t without controversy of course. a nice rundown of the nominees can be found here, and accusation of the nominees being fixed can be found here. but in the end is it more than a popularity contest and does it matter? i don’t know.

ever wanted to live your life over again? well now you can. go here to be reborn.

a scary article here about the riaa winning a court case forcing an isp to give them the name of a user that has allegedly shared hundreds of mp3s. makes me glad i’m not living in the states currently. the problem with things like this, is that the u.s. will often try to strongarm other governments into following their misguided notions. it doesn’t help much when so called journalists take the riaa’s words at face value without looking into their claims that file sharing=not buying cds without questioning it in the least.

two very interesting pieces here and here(via daze reader) about the paul reubens child pornography case. makes me wonder what is not going to be considered child pornography? are we giving up our innocence by looking for child pornography in every photograph ? is all of art history to be searched for any signs of underage sexuality and deemed unfit for that reason? if this is the case, will aaron spelling be out of a job? scary times indeed.

my friend ted, has started his own blog. you can see the afro ken soccer ball i gave him, as well as caption this scary picture of geroge bush. i’m still trying to think of a caption that isn’t totally obscene. but maybe obscenity is a good thing.