Was just thinking about my friend Aubrey from long ago, again. She’s the only person from those days that I truly miss.

One time, we were on a school trip where someone had ordered a bus that was too small for the number of students. She got on the bus, saw that there was nowhere to sit, looked at me and said, “I’m laying on you.”

I said, “Ok?” So she did just that and said jokingly, “Don’t get any ideas, mister.”

“The only idea I have is that your ass is heavy!” I replied somewhat loudly, making those in the seats around me laugh. Which is, of course, why I said it. She was actually very skinny, even skinnier than me, so I was not making fun of her weight at all.

Back then, I’d do anything for a laugh, and she knew that perfectly well when she sat on me.

Killer Sofa.

Well. Can’t imagine I will take the time to watch that, but never let it be said that there are no new ideas in horror.

The plot of your favorite movie written as an r/relationship post

— desmond (@kyleauxren) August 7, 2019

My (34M) boss was keeping my (1Robot) love locked behind glass and wouldn’t let me have at her, as I knew she wanted. Then she stabbed the goon and mistakenly left me locked in behind the glass! Will she return before I run out of energy drinks, self-pity, and whining?

The US Army is in the process of changing their fitness standards, and for the better in my opinion. Instead of just the traditional push-ups, sit-ups, and two-mile run, they have now added a deadlift (using a hex bar instead of a barbell) event and other real strength measures. Standards no longer differ by gender, either.

A real positive change! The unit I was in pretty much ignored the Army standards, anyway, as they were much easier than what was expected of us there. We would’ve loved this stuff. It’s far more realistic regarding actual combat and general army tasks and matches much more closely the physical training we actually did.

The only thing I disagree with is that different unit types and jobs might have different standards. While this sounds ok on the surface, it causes division within the ranks. For instance, even though I was a photojournalist in a combat unit I still met all the same standards as everyone else in my unit, even those soldiers specifically designated with combat roles.* This left no doubt that I could fight beside them as needed and wouldn’t be a hindrance. Take that away, and why would you want someone not as capable as you fighting with you? That’d just be another thing to worry about.

*Though in a paratrooper unit, you’re really all front-line troops. Couldn’t really be any other way.

The greatest insult the LGBTQ movement has done to feminism is to convince us that being a woman is a fashion statement that can be as easily worn and discarded as drag.

— Megha (@lefthemisphere9) September 27, 2019

I don’t quite agree with this, or really anything this person writes, but it does parallel something I’ve been thinking about myself.

A lot of times when some social practice is brought up or instance of human behavior mentioned, standard liberals and academics will say, “That’s just socially constructed!” Implying, of course, that it’s easily changeable due to its method of instantiation in the world.

This could not be further from the truth and evinces an extremely poor understanding of what a powerful tool and what a heavy weight culture in fact is. It’s not a dial that you turn, or a button you press to change a setting. It’s more like a huge boulder you laboriously shift inch by inch over many many years. This is true equally of the culture that lives in one’s heart and mind and the culture that ramifies out and into the entirety of the human world.

This is generally contrasted with something genetic (which most laypeople and academics also have a poor understanding of), which is considered simply impossible to change. This, also, is usually not true, or at least is not the whole truth, and neither is dichotomous or perhaps even separable in a way that we understand.

The world might be a lot better if it were true, this liberal idea that changing culture could be done with a button press. But that’s just not the way it works.

Go here to watch a 103 pound woman deadlift 388 pounds.

Jesus fucking Christ. For reference, I am a decent deadlifter and I can do 340 at 160 pounds right now.

Sad fucking times we live in when the only capable systems thinkers are literal children, meanwhile the adults mince about puling that the kids aren’t being polite enough about the destruction of the world they’ll have to inherit.

It might be too little too late, but at least Greta Thunberg and her myrmidons are fighting the long defeat. If there had been 10 million of her 20 years ago, we wouldn’t need her now.

I write a lot about how much I loathe the Mozilla organization and its vast hypocrisy. I do hate them. And they deserve it.

People like me as long as as six years ago were calling them out on their conspicuous lies, the largest one of which is the claim that they wouldn’t remove the ability to customize the browser and how it functions. It was an obvious goal all along, this goal of limitation, but they simply could not claim it as their ambition as all their users and proselytizers would immediately abandon ship.

Of course, most did anyway due to that and other poor Mozilla decisions.

They made a calculation that was clearly foolish even at the time and as many (including me) predicted it would, they completely failed, all the while alienating their most ardent users while picking up no new converts to their browser.

They made toddler-level mistakes, harming their product greatly, all for nothing.

Therefore, they deserve all my derision and more.

By the way, these very, very conservative calculations, using a standard (simplified) insurance industry methodology, demonstrate that we should spend about 5% of world GDP right away on climate change.

I’d argue that it should be more than that, probably 5% per year. What I calculated is just a baseline for one-time insurance for a single, one-time, time-limited disaster.

The only living person saying much that makes sense is Greta Thunberg. Those who survive will look back on her as remarkably prescient as the rest of us failed to heed her stern admonishment while the world burned.

We were warned; we didn’t listen. Those who deserve it the least will be harmed the most.

No, I don’t know how bad it’ll be in the developed world. I’d guess only about 20% of those in the 0-16 demographic will die of direct climate-related causes (including war). I’d guess no less than 10% will. But the tail risks are unfathomably large and old people just don’t give a fuck.

Thus, I love that old people hate Greta because she exposes their hypocrisy, their myopia, their malfeasance. They know she’s telling the truth about what climate change will do, and to whom, and they cannot handle it. It drives them mad with rage.