There will be some downtime over the next few days as the server (read: Raspberry Pi) on which this site runs is being moved to a new location. Should be down 48 hours at the most.

I don’t really update this place anymore. If you want to keep up with what I’m doing, check me out at JDH Creates!

This is a review of Radley Balko’s Rise of the Warrior Cop, available here: http://www.amazon.com/Rise-Warrior-Cop-Militarization-Americas-ebook/dp/B00B3M3UFQ/ Police in the United States are a constituency politicians rarely feel comfortable taking on. Republicans praise police for being tough on crime, and Democrats are reluctant to criticize police because of their long-standing alliance with unions and public workers (and police represent both.) Nevertheless, if the news stories of the past several months have taught us anything, it’s that our police forces need much greater supervision and accountability.

I wrote a lengthy piece about GamerGate for the site Drunk Monkeys, which you can find here: http://www.drunkmonkeys.onimpression.com/actually-it-is-about-sexisma-history-of-gamergate/ Enjoy!

If you play video games and pay any attention at all to the industry itself or journalists who write about video games, you have almost surely heard about something called “GamerGate.” If you haven’t, then it will bear some explanation. (If you’re already up to speed on the controversy, skip to the next section.) At the heart of this story are two women who don’t really have anything to do with each other apart from the fact that they are involved with video games.

There should be a big post incoming later tonight. We’ll see. To celebrate, there’s a new theme in place! I think it looks nice.

I wrote this a few years ago as the first part of a series, but I never wrote more than this entry. It may be a bit rough and/or crummy. In any case, here it is. 1998 Alaska. Halloween night. Jake didn’t dress up, just so people would ask him what he was supposed to be. “I’m my evil twin, Ekaj,” he would explain. “But you don’t look any different,” the irritating questioner would retort.

Note: this piece will meander between personal narrative and editorializing. Pardon the erratic format. September 11, 2001 was supposed to be just another ordinary day for me. I would get up, get showered and dressed, go to class, go to work, then come home and go to bed. I was a sophomore in college at the time. I lived with my mother, stepfather, and my younger sister and brother, in rural Indiana.

I haven’t updated this blog in about a year, and all of a sudden I’m posting something potentially controversial. That’s just how I roll. No one thing prompted this post. It’s been a combination of many things, mainly discussions of women, feminism, sexism, rape culture, and so forth that I’ve had recently, with different groups of people in separate venues. By that token, the time feels right to dig a little deeper into this and express my thoughts.

I plan to have several entries regarding Budapest, considering that’s where I spent the bulk of my trip. They may be more impressionistic in nature rather than straight accounts of things that happened. After all, it has been almost a week since I returned and the days sort of run together. Fortunately, I have photos to jog my memory, or something. I arrived in Budapest about 15 minutes earlier than scheduled.