I recently read[1] that you got a notary public to sign a piece of paper that states that you claim the Sun as your property.  While I disagree with your interpretation of the United Nations Outer Space Treaty, it does establish that you consider yourself the owner of the Sun, which may be enough to make you responsible for its actions and effects on others in some jurisdictions.  Unfortunately, none of the several news articles I found on Google News provide contact information for you, so I am appealing to the Internet to bring this to your attention.

This morning, as with many mornings, I was rudely awakened by a bright light emanating from your claimed property, and unable to return to sleep because of it.  I ask you to cease and desist this intrusion onto my property.  I frequently suffer from insomnia during the night, and have difficulty sleeping at hours that are convenient to me because of your claimed property’s emissions.  Blocking my window would reduce the security of my car parked below it.  My driveway is lit by an artificial motion-activated light, with intensity and direction that I can control, so I am not taking advantage of the Sun for security.  I also take artificial vitamin D supplements, and do not use the Sun’s light for any home or business purposes.  While I recognize the benefits it may convey to others, its invasion of my home causes material harm to my quality of life, as well as skin and eye damage from ionizing radiation that may degrade my eyesight or cause cancer later in life.

Please let me know when this letter is brought to your attention so that we can resolve this issue amicably.

Sincerely,

Chris Snook

[1] http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2010-11/29/spanish-woman-owns-sun

So, yeah, that was me.  My first YouTube video got 100k views in its first week.  Pretty cool, huh?  A cursory look at the comments shows that it’s an issue that resonates across all political boundaries.  I really hope I don’t have to do a sequel.

1. When you don’t know what’s going on, gathering information is more important than shooting, even if you’re being shot at right now. If you just start shooting at random, you’ll be lucky if all you do is waste ammunition.  You may hurt yourself, strengthen your opponent, destroy something that could help you escape, or make new enemies.  Even if you do ultimately need to shoot something to solve your problem, you won’t know what to shoot, where to shoot it, or what to shoot it with until you’ve scanned and analyzed it.
2. Complex problems generally don’t have simple solutions. Indiscriminate violence is fine for breaking small inanimate objects, but when sentient beings are trying to keep you out of their WMD labs, at the very least you need some carefully planned violence.  Evasion and guile will save you a lot of trouble.
3. Holy sites are very dangerous places for foreigners, even if you’re trying to help. Many games have temples and churches, and if they belong to the character’s culture, or the character is invited in, they provide healing, sanctuary, and knowledge.  But the moment you set foot on holy ground without being explicitly invited in, no matter how noble your intentions, the biggest, angriest thing you’ve ever seen will come out of the ground, ceiling, or walls, and you will not survive unless you learn a hell of a lot about it very quickly.
4. Everything is territorial. Now matter how cute and docile a creature may be, if you get too close to it or its home, it will attempt to remove you.  If it’s alone, it might just try to push you away, but if it’s got family, it won’t think twice about blowing itself up to protect them from you.
5. Military activity does not excuse you from your domestic obligations. If you don’t put down the controller and do the dishes, take out the recycling, go grocery shopping, and pay attention to your girlfriend, you will starve.
6. War is always bigger and more expensive than it appears going in. I originally planned to spend $25 on Metroid Prime 3.  Then I found out about the whole trilogy being released for Wii, for $50.  Then I started burning out batteries, and, in the name of future-proofing my battery situation, spent $30 on rechargeable batteries and a charger.  So that’s triple the action for more than triple the price I anticipated going in.
7. Just because you can win a fight, doesn’t mean it’s a good idea to start it, or even finish it. When there’s an enormous beast that costs a lot of your most precious resources to defeat, and it lives smack in the middle of an area where you spend an awful lot of time, it might be a good idea to just go around it, even if it shoots first.  If you fight it every single time, it’ll take forever to make any progress with your real agenda, and you’ll be very weak when you encounter new threats that you don’t yet know how to handle.

I’m not suggesting that the gay community should settle for less or accept incrementalism as sufficient, but rather that they should recognize the persuasion of the populace as a critical aspect of their struggle for equality, at least as important as the persuasion of the various branches of government.  Don’t Ask Don’t Tell forced the recognition of gays in the military, and its punitive enforcement laid bare the fallacies behind prohibiting gays in the military, by reductio ad absurdum.  It is shameful that it has taken so long to take the next step, but the effort of those who made that poignant example so obvious to our nation and our culture should not be denigrated.  To do so is to forget the even more extreme injustice of the policy it replaced.

Don’t Ask Don’t Tell is a punch line now, showing both the absurdity of mandatory ignorance and the absurdity of banning that which can safely be ignored.  In that capacity, it may have done more for gay rights than its authors could have imagined.  It’s unfortunate that such a work of inadvertent satire was necessary to sway the most conservative parts of our military, government, and society, but it has clearly done that.

(You may now commence flaming my weak morals.)

I agree that swearing reflects the failure to find adequate language to describe something, but I vehemently disagree with the arrogant assholes who unconditionally blame this failure on the speaker.  Language is inherently limiting, and thus it is impossible for any language, however sophisticated, to adequately describe everything worthy of communication.

Swearing is a wildcard.  It represents that which cannot otherwise be adequately expressed by language.  It can certainly be misused, diluting its significance, but in extreme circumstances, nothing is so eloquent as a simple invective that says “There are no words for this.”