The Default State Is Broken

There are a number of places that I just can't seem to stay away from. Most of them are online, and one of them in particular is where I actually met a ton of people whom I later became friends with in real life. The thing is, places, especially online-places, are volatile. They change with time, and the makeup of the community itself changes, sometimes in ways that aren't always agreeable to, well, me. But the power of nostalgia, the impulse to believe with a little bit of effort the places that I remember will become those places again, is like gravity for emotions. It can be enormously powerful, despite the very real truth that the place that you remember will never, in fact, exist again. And so, if you're me, you get incredibly frustrated by the fact that, as an old and cranky bastard, the new population of these places I used to remember are now different, and I don't really want them to be different, but they are. So it's time to try and take another bre

Score one for DRM making me a pirate. I had bought a blu-ray player for my new computer so I could watch hi-def movies on my entertainment-center projector. Apparently, despite paying extra for the hardware, I needed software to play the blurays. OK, fine, I said, and the person who helped me build the machine downloaded some software that would play the blurays. Then, tonight, I went to watch my copy of Inception, and it played for 4 minutes, at which point the software stopped working and insisted that the bluray disc wasn't valid, unless I ponied up $60 (59.95, 25% off for the new year!) to "upgrade" to the latest, licensed version of the software. So, not only did I have to pay extra for the hardware, and extra for the media, I now have to pay extra for the software. Pardon my language, but FUCK THAT SHIT. So, now I'm working on finding a less-expensive way to watch the movie (well, actually, the extra content) that I ALREADY BOUGHT. I've also uninstalled th