A co-worker comes up to you and says “How’s it going?” by way of greeting.

How many of you pause almost awkwardly long, trying to decide whether to give the truthful answer (“sucky”) or the expected one (“fine”)?

I preordered Left 4 Dead 2 the other day.  Just throwing that out there.

Also, Tim Buckley (author of the popular Ctrl+Alt+Del webcomic) has articulated quite perfectly my own opinion on the L4D2 boycott.  Two posts of interest, both found here.

I watched the premiere episode of  Stargate: Universe with my wife the other day on the (idiotically renamed) SyFy channel.  (That link goes to Hulu, where you can watch the episode.)

The premise is decent, as far as it goes.  The plot, though, has several gaping holes in it.  I’m going to hide this behind a “Read More” link, because there are spoilers in what I have to say.

Before that, I’ll just say that my conclusion is a hesitant “I’ll keep watching it”.  It is Stargate, after all, and I do love SG-1 (though I haven’t seen Atlantis yet).

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I just read a few articles, and thought I’d share them with you, and some brief thoughts.  Feel free to comment on one or all of them.  Some of them are fairly old, but that’s ok

• Orson Scott Card finally came back from a hiatus writing his WorldWatch column.  I no longer agree with his political views.  He’s gone from “I don’t like Obama for his policies” to “I don’t like Obama because I’m accusing him of breaking every single promise he’s ever made, and some he hasn’t.”  OSC used to provide support for his arguments.  Now he makes unsubstantiated claims.  One quote that shows OSC’s viewpoint (which I disagree with):

Now [Obama has] shown us that he’s a radical leftist at heart and all his promises — every one of them – were lies. But he’s still relatively harmless domestically because he’s such an incompetent leader, unable to hold his course or persuade even his followers.

• This opinion column in the Wall Street Journal compares global warming to a religion – and I agree completely.  Supporters of the idea of global warming don’t seem to care about the evidence; to them, any and all climate changes are evidence of global warming, even if that evidence is global cooling.  One choice quote:

And surely it is in keeping with this essentially religious outlook that the “solutions” chiefly offered to global warming involve radical changes to personal behavior, all of them with an ascetic, virtue-centric bent: drive less, buy less, walk lightly upon the earth and so on. A light carbon footprint has become the 21st-century equivalent of sexual abstinence.

• A commentary in the LA Times on the continual Democratic accusations that the Bush administration lied about Iraq.  The summary?  Democrats conveniently forget that the word lie implies intentional deception; nobody has ever shown that to be true of the Bush administration (and in fact, in 2004 the Senate Intelligence Committee unanimously found the claim to be false, as did the bipartisan Robb-Silberman report a year later).  One choice quote:

Four years on from the first Senate Intelligence Committee report, war critics, old and newfangled, still don’t get that a lie is an act of deliberate, not unwitting, deception. If Democrats wish to contend they were “misled” into war, they should vent their spleen at the CIA.

• A blog post about moral consequences.  Politicians of all colors seem to claim that if they were in charge, things would be better, but they all forget that the things they don’t do carry their own consequences.  Personally, I think (my) religion drives that into us fairly well.  This blog post is not inherently political in nature (that is, the poster does not claim any particular political viewpoint), but is instead simply an examination of moral consequences, and uses various real-world examples.  One choice quote:

If you adopt the notion of “doing no harm”, aren’t you then responsible for harm that comes because of what was left undone, or done some other way?