You give ToyBuilders.Com a front and side photo of your head, they convert into a solid model and then output it to a special machine and boom — you’ve got an action figure of yourself. I’ve gotta get one of these ASAP.

One of the things that happens if you are a reporter is that you get detached from the stories you write about, because you have to on an emotional level. I can, for example, write about how outrageous American foreign policy is in Colombia, but at the end of the day you won’t find me losing any sleep about it either.

The one topic that I get very emotional about and causes my blood pressure to start rising is the way the justice system treats people who kill infants. I have a manila folder somewhere in my house just of press clippings of such cases. For those of you not familiar with this area of law, usually such murders get very light sentences unless there is an aggravating circumstance such as a sexual crime. A person who say molested an infant and then committed murder would probably get quite a bit of jail time, but if the same person simply shakes the infant to death, it is unlikely he or she would serve more than 3 to 5 years.

A case in point is Brian Peterson who is back in the news thanks to John Rocker of all folks (Arrest at baseball stadium may put killer back behind bars). Raymond Maniaci, a New Jersey resident, threw a bottle at Rocker during a recent Yankees game. Peterson was sitting next to his friend Maniaci and was arrested for interfering with police. He claims he was trying to comply with the officer’s order to move.

In 1996 Peterson and his then-girlfriend, Amy Rossberg, murdered their newborn son in a Delaware motel room. He turned state’s evidence and testified against her. Peterson got a 2 year jail sentence; Rossberg 2 and a half years.

Peterson got time off for good behavior and was out of jail after serving only 18 months.

That’s downright obscene. Typically these people get short sentences because they are young and generally have no prior arrests or convictions. In addition, often prosecutors reach plea agreements for manslaughter convictions rather than go for a murder trial, since often there are no witnesses other than the defendant and for some reason juries tend to buy the claim that the defendant lacked criminal intent to murder, for example, when a person shakes a baby to death. Peterson was allowed to plead guilty to manslaughter for what was clearly a crime of pre-meditated murder.

Aside from the very elderly, it is hard to think of a more vulnerable population than newborn infants. The sort of person who could help kill his newborn son and then several years later casually go to a New York Yankees game is not the sort of person who needs to be walking the streets a free man. People such as Peterson need to serve 8 to 10 years, not 2 to 3 years for their crimes.

Unfortunately this seems to be part of a larger societal trend in which people seem to shirk their moral and ethical duties to children. I have seen so much bizarre stuff that most of it doesn’t even shock me anymore. From the neighbor across the street who has watched pornographic films with his 9 year old son, the next door neighbor who has several kids in high school who have a Playstation but have to come to us to borrow a dictionary.

The other thing that really gets me is kids who die in hot cars. A couple years ago there was a case in Arizona where a couple of men took their kids mushroom hunting. The men left the kids locked in a car with windows closed and after 4 or 5 hours of mushroom hunting were surprised when they returned to find the kids dead. If I remember the prosecutor there did charge them with manslaughter, but how someone can be so callous and indifferent to human life is beyond me. I wouldn’t leave my cat in a closed car in Michigan’s relatively mild summers, yet alone leave my daughter even for an instant in a hot car in the middle of the Arizona desert.

The other day the local news broadcast ran an item about a support group to help new parents cope with juggling parental duties with their other obligations like work, etc. I think such groups are often extremely condescending, and I told my wife that with the barrage of support groups, offers of government aid, and other things that we hear about it’s almost as if there is this belief that we are the first generation in 50,000 years to have kids. As if people haven’t been dealing with the problems (and wonders) that children entail for literally millennia.

Then my wife reminded me of the way the neighbors treat their kids and the news stories we share by e-mail of parental abuse, neglect and indifference, and that ended that conversation.

Having children — even engaging in sex that might lead to a child — involves assuming a vast web of moral and ethical duties. Please don’t have kids if you’re not willing to accept such responsibilities.

At his Dreamzone weblog, Mark Morgan points to a very good article by Julie Hayden on the role of independent web sites, Indie Exposure: It’s All About You.

The first part of the article describes perfectly what I’ve been trying to say about the web,

The fact is, with very few exceptions, e-business never packs the impact of the independent content producer. These are the people who are pushing the boundaries, harnessing the power of the web, and building the things people want and need.

No one throws large amounts of money at them, and the stock market doesn’t rise and fall on their pronouncement, but they are the heft, the substance, and the texture of the web.

They are what makes the web go. That hasn’t changed.

I couldn’t agree more. The only large e-business sites I tend to visit are those that aggregate content from the real world, such as CNN. But in many subjects that I’m interested in, I not only don’t buy the print version anymore but I don’t visit the web sites either. I used to buy a lot of computer game magazines. Don’t do that anymore, and I haven’t visited any of the web sites of the big game magazines in a very long time. The smaller sites are a lot better at getting me the news I want, and some of them are literally run by people in their spare time.

On the other hand, I completely disagree with Hayden’s view that independent web sites need to be non-commercial.

Being an independent content producer does involve some sacrifices. You’ll have to have the tools to access, use, and create for the net. These tend to require a financial outlay.

Since most of us aren’t independently wealthy, we need Real Jobs [TM] to subsidize this. This also means that you will have to spend some of your precious spare time on this. Consider it a public service.

I’m asking you to share your content with the world. No profit models. No subscription fees. No ca-chings. Just you, your passion, and your world.

I really hope that few of the independent sites I visit take her advice. I like sites that people do as hobby as much as the next guy, but on the other hand I notice from my own surfing experience that a lot of these sites tend to disappear over time. One might the coolest site in the world on Legos is out there on the net, usually on some free hosting service, and the next minute it’s gone. Or you’ll see an excellent site that has everything you could ask for — except the web master stopped updating it 8 months ago because he got burned out trying to keep up with the web site and her regular job.

Not only do I want to get paid for the things I put on the web, I want to pay others. Take Mark Morgan’s main site, VoicesOfUnreason. The site, like many on the web, publishes a wide range of fiction, poetry and essays. It looks great and while taste in fiction is often very personal, I’ve read stories there that were of equal or better quality than the ones I’ve read in anthologies or magazines that I paid real money for. As an example, I think Sean McMain’s The Head Fairy was one of the best short stories I’ve read anywhere in a long time and reminded me a lot of the sort of stuff that Harlan Ellison writes (and to me, Ellison is the beginning, middle, and end of short stories).

I’m not a big reader of fiction, but I figure I buy maybe 8-10 novels a month at an average cost of $8 a piece (I buy a lot of scifi/fantasy paperbacks). Why should I be horrified or a fiction author or web site recoil in fear from finding a model to siphon some of that money to an author or web site I’ve found gives me a fix of the sort of short fiction I want? I certainly don’t want to spend the rest of my life working a McJob and writing my web site in my spare time, and I’m more than happy to do my part to help the independent web sites I enjoy get closer to leaving their “real jobs” behind.

Barring any unforeseen disaster, income and wealth around the world are going to grow as fast as, if not faster than, they did in the 20th century. The upshot of this is that the amount of wealth and income available to support leisure activities, such as reading a story on Mark’s site, is already higher than at any time in world history and only going higher. Somebody’s going to get that money — I’d rather have it be me, Mark, and other independent web site operators rather than Random House, Columbia Records and MGM.

The other day I was ranting and raving about how online publishers need to a) provide more services to consumers than traditional print, while b) lowering the cost, and it occurred to me yesterday that I’ve been shelling out my hard earned money for the past year for exactly just such a site — Steve Jackson Games’ online Pyramid magazine.

Okay, Steve Jackson Games publishes role playing and board games. Even if you don’t play those games you might remember hearing about them several years ago when they were raided by the Secret Service as part of Operation Sun Devil, which resulted in the company almost going bankrupt but also in a successful lawsuit against the government in which the judge had some pretty harsh words for the Secret Service’s incompetence.

Anyway, for many years the company published a monthly and later bimonthly magazine called Pyramid that featured articles on news in the gaming industry, game reviews, and, of course, articles supporting their games as well as games published by other companies. The short version is that publishing a specialty magazine like that tends to be very expensive with very low margins and SJ Games moved the magazine to an online web only version a couple years ago.

And they really did the transformation right. A subscription to the print magazine was something like $24-$30 per year for a monthly or bimonthly magazine. The online version is $15 per year and is updated weekly, every Friday. They put a lot more stuff in the online version than they could afford to do in print and still stay profitable.

Then they added more value. The overwhelming majority of people who subscribed to Pyramid or bought it in hobby stores when it was a print magazine were devotees of SJ Games’ excellent Generic Universal Role Playing System. Most of the articles in the magazine were devoted to GURPS-related material. The online version upholds that tradition, but also allows subscribers to play test and give feedback about upcoming sourcebooks and rule books for the game.

For example, one of the upcoming rule books is GURPS: Deadlands, a conversion of Pinnacle’s Deadlands weird west role playing game. I like Western-themed games, and at the click of a button can download the current draft of the game in HTML or text version. There are discussion forum set up to provide feedback, etc.

The result of this, by the way, is success. Last November the number of subscriptions hit 3,000 which as a note on the SJ Games site put it, “would be a drop in the bucket at a Hanson concert, but in the game biz, it qualifies as a crowd.”

Those subscription figures are only going to go up, too, as more people get online and as the support offered through the magazine adds value to the game which in turn increases the value of the magazine. I think this is an excellent case study of how to succeed in an online venture without spending millions of dollars in venture capital. No, SJ Games doesn’t have a billion dollar market cap, but they make money doing something they enjoy. Who could ask for more?