Scars I’ve got. I don’t have many I guess considering the crazy shit I’ve done:

§Scar on my right ring and pinky finger from punching some guy in the face, before I had fighting training. (He attempted to steal my rucksack in basic training and then pushed me over a stack of rucksacks when I grabbed it back. Then I punched him.)

§Scar on my chin from some older kid with a ring punching me when I was 12 or 13.

§Nose out of alignment/lumpy from having it broken when I was 15. Beat up by a group of 3 older kids after not backing down over sitting at “their” lunch table. I did not go to the hospital because no health insurance and poor. My mom attempted to “fix” it. Did not do a very good job.

§Scar on my left hand from gouging a hole in my hand somehow during a jump into Kazakhstan.

§Scar on my right hand from catching some feral cats for a friend.

§An internal scar I guess? A poorly-healed broken bone in my right foot, probably broken during a jump. I didn’t notice it at the time and it doesn’t bother me now other than looking knobby.

That’s all. You?

I’ve never much cared for Dooce (Heather Armstrong) or her writing. It all seemed too manufactured, too curated specifically to appear un-curated. And it all seemed completely faux-spontaneous to me. It was like reading about someone’s life with anything interesting sanitized out. Why people found it fascinating I can’t guess. Mundanity appeals to the mundane. Or perhaps it’s just not my thing.

However what she writes here is I think true.

Attentions spans are now 140 characters long, sometimes as short as a video or a picture that self destructs in a few seconds. I have stood in a line at a coffee shop and watched as seven people in a row ordered something without looking up from their phone.

On balance — and notice please that I am saying on balance — Twitter and smart phones are negatives for society. Yes, they provide many valuable things and would seem absolutely science-fictional to someone from 1970.

However like Facebook they are a further method of disengagement while appearing to be engaged.

For all of Armstrong’s faults, at least her writing was actual writing and not a 140-character stream of garbled discontinuous bullshit.

The internet as a useful and positive and non-corporate-captured boon for society peaked around 1999-2002.

After that it has become a tool of control and a place for increasingly witless people to spout nonsense and ignore their own lives.

The fat acceptance movement, the Sad Puppies Hugo debacle, the Tea Party entire, the complete disregard for global climate change — all these demonstrate that the American mind is mainly used for self-delusion.

We could power entire nations with all the delusional thinking that we have.

I wish evolutionary psychology were a better science so it could possibly definitively explain this.

This is actually a more interesting discussion than I was expecting on Tumblr.

I’ve been to a strip club once to see what it was like when I was 18 or 19. It was not really fun. I don’t enjoy social interaction normally, so paying for it seems even worse to me.

Luckily the club was very not busy so one of the women sat down with us at our table and talked with us for an hour. (Yes, I did tip her.) She was a student at UF. I told an older female friend later on that I’d gone and what had happened and she said, “That was me 15 years ago.” She’d put herself through the very same school partially with sex work.

About the club, I don’t expect I’d enjoy it any more now. Probably less. I am more curmudgeonly and anti-social than I was then, though more socially capable.

And as expected even though it wasn’t very busy, there were a lot of creepy and rude men in there (which is why I suspect that woman spent so much time at our table).

Not my scene at all.

I hadn’t looked at the byline and I was only a few paragraphs into this article when I thought, Wait, is this article written by Natalie Angier? It’s annoying me greatly so I bet it’s written by Natalie Angier.

And it was.

I don’t mean to pick on Angier particularly. Her writing just grates on me, sort of like some people react to fingernails on a chalkboard (which doesn’t bother me at all, by the way).

Kind of an amazing feat that someone’s writing can be recognized so easily.

As much as I’ve tried, I’ve not yet sussed out what makes Angier’s writing nettle me so much — perhaps its cloying cutesiness combined with sophomoric flourishes best left in the first draft.

Douglas Hofstadter is another one whose writing just alternately bores me and makes me want to hurl the book across the room, and for many of the same reasons.

He’s the only person I know who can expand a fifty-page essay into a thousand-page doorstop.

Yeah, that’d be Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid.

The tagline for that book was, “A metaphorical fugue on minds and machines in the spirit of Lewis Carroll.”

The tag line of course should’ve been, “One boring over-hyped idea per 200 pages that only those under four years old have any trouble understanding in two seconds or less.”

This all seems so strange to me.

When I was a kid in the late 70s and early 80s, I must have spent hundreds of hours in the car waiting for one or both of my parents in stores.

I hated stores and was not well-behaved, so it was a good place for me to wait.

By the way, this was not unusual. It was very, very, very common to have kids wait in cars, even in Florida where I grew up.

This is one small part of the social changes that I discuss from time to time on this site that many people seem intent on denying but that are common and numerous.

I don’t really care much about the Sad Puppies’ political leanings.

Neofascism is not all that neo- anymore. It’s a permanent strain of and stain on world politics in the modern era.

I don’t care about bloc voting either. Any voting system is susceptible to it; most such as our American party system absolutely depend on it. The Hugo voting numbers are always so small that it has almost certainly been gamed in the past.

No, what I care about is that the works nominated by the Puppies are bad. Bad sf. Boring works. Substandard bordering on abysmal.

I’ve read some works in the past where the politics are disagreeable or disgusting but that I still liked. I know many people can’t separate the two but I can easily. So I do.

However, none of the Sad Puppies’ creative output that I’ve examined so far would’ve gotten printed in the average middling high school newspaper.

They are all terrible. And that’s really what bothers me the most.

Language fluency is a spectrum.

I meant to write about it the other day and then lost the link, but I saw some moronic linguist claiming that no one was “truly” multi-lingual — basically that someone being fluent in four or five languages is an impossibility.

Of course that linguist was using “fluent” basically to mean “knows absolutely every word in every language one claims to know.”

I work with a woman who is demonstrably fluent in German, French, English, Spanish and Russian. I’ve heard her speak all but Russian, conversing with native speakers in each. She has no problems at all making herself understood and understanding each language in turn.

Is she fluent? By any normal measure.

Yet I am quite sure because I am a word collector that I know some words in French that she does not — so by that measure the linguist-not-worthy-of-the-name would say she’s not truly fluent in French. Yet her practical French is far, far better than mine will probably ever be.

Fluency is a spectrum. Can not be anything else.

With the SJW “absolutely everything is racism and appropriation” crowd on one side and the “women should be in the kitchen and evolutionary psychology explains everything” crowd on the other side, it’s a good time to be a misanthrope.

Polarization is increasing; studies show this.

When you’re non-tribal in nature and care more about being on the side with the evidence in its favor what do you do when you have no side?

Whine a lot, like I do.

Hey, it’s the American way. And I have to do some American things too I guess.

I agree with the posters below this piece who says milk chocolate is for children.

When I was young I remember not liking chocolate all that much. And then going to the UK in the late 80s and deciding on someone’s recommendation to buy a chocolate bar despite it costing two pounds (five times as much as a bar in the US).

Damn, what a difference. It contained actual cacao that you could taste. It was rich, flavorful and didn’t taste like someone was squirting sugar straight into your mouth.

After that I was a dark chocolate devotee. (In most European countries it is almost impossible to find chocolate of the terrible quality of almost all US chocolate.)

So now when I buy chocolate it’s usually got 60%-80% cacao content.

So much better.

Milk chocolate is indeed for children.

And Americans, I guess.