Dec 01

Scarsdale

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At the dentist yesterday, the dental tech examining me and giving me a cleaning: “You have a lot of scars on the inside of your cheeks. Were you in an accident?”

Me: “No, just been hit in the face a lot of in my life.”

Conversation was sparse after that. But don’t ask about people’s scars if you don’t wanna know the answer, yeah?

Dec 01

Brulu

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Zheani’s “Lulu” and Olivia Rodrigo’s “Brutal” are the songs and videos most emblematic of our zeitgeist.

Hyperreality, image manipulation (in many layered senses), the despair of the social, tacit abandonment of wokeness and a mishmash of cultures and styles — both women are living slightly in the future and presaging it.

“Lulu” is probably my favorite song of the past five years or so.

Also, don’t let people tell you that you have to be stuck in the music you liked when you were 17. Man, I woulda hated “Lulu” when I was 17. But look at me now.

Nov 30

Res Dig

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It still amazes me that people use shit like Spotify, Facebook, Discord, etc. And smartphones (unfortunately, there is no way to get out of using one of those today — we’re trapped).

It’s more “convenient.” Yeah, only if you have no fucking self-respect and dignity.

Nov 30

Trash Tech

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Not that it will matter to anyone at all, but I won’t be following anyone to Mastodon, reading anything on Mastodon, using Mastodon, nor otherwise doing anything Mastodon-y. I don’t waste my time on trash tech.

Nov 30

Also Can

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I turn off most notifications almost all of the time.

If they’re not my friends, they can wait. If they are my friends — check this out — they also can wait.

Nov 30

Winston Wolf

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Why does the IT Department always become the “fixers?”

I’ve thought about this a lot over the years. It happens in every company. IT becomes the go-to for any complex task.

And I think it’s this: troubleshooting is a rare skill and being able to dynamically execute a series of steps is as well. I’d guess that in the general population, the rate of those being present at a competent level is maybe 0.5%. Due to its nature those skills exhibit themselves at about a 20% rate in the IT world. This means that even though most IT people also are not good troubleshooters or systems-comprehenders either (still only 20%), the prevalence rate is 40x higher there than it is in the general population.

Thus, IT gets many, many non-IT tasks because they are literally the only group likely to be able to execute them at some acceptable level of competence.

Nov 30

Force Field

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Insane Clown Posse was not really wrong about magnets, by the way.

No one — and I mean no one at all — really understands how or why electromagnetic charge is a thing. It’s just a fact of the universe. There is no deeper understanding and may never be one. Yeah, physicists will prattle on about Noether’s Theorem and gauge symmetry and all that but that doesn’t really explain anything, but is just a very convoluted way of saying this: “Charge emerges from how the universe is, and we don’t know why, but here is a circular definition that convinces those without the mental horsepower to understand it that we know more than we do.”

As I’ve become more capable of understanding more and more of science over the years, it turns out that a lot of it is like that. That is, it’s deliberate obfuscation to conceal lack of knowledge from the hoi polloi, rather than explanatory.

Nov 30

Cupola

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Some kind of world cup thing going on?

Fuck, soccer is the most boring sport in the goddamn universe. It makes recreational snail racing look exciting and adrenaline-filled. But I suspect that’s why it became popular: it’s easy to run around aimlessly for a long time with very little equipment. It’s super cheap and accessible.

It’s a failure of a sport, though, that so many matches end in a 0-0 draw. What a joke.