Mar 07

Banished

I was considering banishing from my reading list all blogs and twitter feeds that are climate change deniers, but then realized under my more-accurate definition of climate change denial that’d be just about everyone.

So I discarded that idea….

Mar 07

Genes

I can’t wait as I get more muscular and then fairly ripped someone will say, “I wish I had good genes like you.” It is 100% inevitable that it will occur.

And then I’ll unkindly inform them that MOTHERFUCKER MY GENES WAS FIGHTING ME EVERY STEP OF THE WAY.

Get out of here with that “genes” shit. Genetics is the excuse that people fall back on for why they aren’t doing something, anything, to help themselves.

Mar 07

175

Finally hit 175 pounds on the bench press!

I only work on that one intermittently so it’s a bit slow but I got there. That’s at a body weight of 161 pounds. Next stop, 180.

Mar 06

Far Away

This attempt to remove responsibility (mostly) explains the Fat Acceptance and other similar movements — even centrism and the like. We are told very convincingly that by choosing between a range of sterilized and indistinguishable consumer products that we are making consequential decisions. This is a lie, of course. We’re every day engaged in a constant and unrelenting battle to control our own minds. In a way, since the advent of organized religion, this has been true. What has changed is that that we are told that making a selection among a range of very circumscribed choices is complete freedom. Most people buy into this (equivalence very much intended) utterly and are flabbergasted when you reject all the options because they didn’t even realize such a thing was possible — and it offends them and scares them, which is exactly what they’ve been trained to feel when someone doesn’t do what’s “natural.”

Mar 06

Diff

This is cute, but I’m surprised no one on Tumblr had a meltdown because there is five year age difference between Janelle Monae and Kristen Stewart. Usually any couple with more than 1-2 year age differential is heavily criticized there.

Once, I saw a man in in his late 40s criticized as a “pedophile” for dating a woman in her early 30s — which is truly repulsive because it minimizes the true harm and vileness of pedophilia, thus causing yet greater harm.

Good job, Tumblr.

Mar 06

Bozo

I’m really stuck with what OS I can use in the future.

With MacOS removing subpixel anti-aliasing, when the version I am on becomes too unsupported I won’t be able to effectively use that any longer and won’t be able to upgrade because the fonts look like hot garbage and nuke my eyes.

Windows 10 isn’t an option and Linux is even worse. I’m guessing then in a year or two I will use the computer less then as no OS will be worth using and so I will just read more books.

Still not sure why Apple had to destroy their desktop OS, and one of their main advantages, but Jobs is gone and the bozo explosion is in progress there.

Mar 05

Pert Plus

Experts are great if you need expertise in the very very VERY specific 0.000001% of human knowledge they have any idea about.

But if you don’t require that, experts are worse than useless and most likely attempting to rob you. Because of course the problem with experts is that they know a great deal about very little, but believe that they have an abundance of knowledge about much more because of their mastery of one infinitesimally tiny area of human experience.

Almost no one (expert or not) is even passable at systems-level thinking, and experts almost to a one are worse than anyone else, even non-experts. STEM training and the like causes you to be far inferior as a systems-level thinker, as it’s designed to do this (among other things), while it convinces you that your mastery of one area leads to intuitive comprehension of all others.

So if you have glioblastoma and you need an expert on this, depend and rely on the expert on glioblastoma-specific information only. But I wouldn’t even depend on them for advice or any true knowledge on migraines, much less any other topic.

Lately, I am obsessed with systems thinking because I believe that is a hugely unappreciated and understudied area, and one where I can use my innate skills to really upgrade my own understanding.

Mar 05

Abyssal

This way, the abyss. This attitude, as much as I like Emily, is just moronic and counterproductive. It doesn’t make anything or anyone better; it’s just virtue signaling.

The problem is, of course, that moral standards change over time, and sometimes very quickly, and not in ways that are predictable or obvious. The whole idea of jettisoning the past is attractive, especially in the context of the neoliberal mindset, but it is dangerous because in the future all of what we do and are now will be seen as problematic and tossed away just as cavalierly.

This discarding of the past leads to an ahistorical ever-present now where we must “re-derive” everything, which is an enormous waste of time and also impossible, and rather than grapple with moral quandaries or imperfection we instead just plaster over it, pretend it never happened, and invite the same mistakes again and again.

People can usually identify a problem but their solutions are often the worst of any that are available. This is yet another example.

Mar 04

Spherical

Ah, shit, I’d nearly forgotten all about Websphere! Dead on. We keep reinventing the wheel, somehow attempting to make it more wheel-like while not realizing more than wheels might be needed.

Mar 04

The Reasons

SpaceX successfully rockets Crew Dragon ship for astronauts into space.

I was there to view this launch from as close as you can get. Even with all the waiting in queues, the standing around and the security theater, it was worth every moment of inconvenience and annoyance to stand across the lagoon and watch that violent candle punch its way into the sky.

It’s easy to see why so many — liberals and conservatives alike — are opposed to projects like this, are offended in a deep sense by their very existence. Hearing the palpable excitement and the cheers of the SpaceX employees and NASA staff over the audio feed as the rocket flawlessly ascended into the exosphere, the moment of triumph had united all of us into a collective assemblage, a unit that could threaten existing orders, could take unified action, could become a common polity.

Instead of the reasons people profess to believe something, I attempt to discern the true rationale behind their ideological approach. And in this case, our current social acculturation simply demands that we disavow collective actions like these, that we disdain anyone or anything who wishes to transcend our individual limitations, who wants more than to have us as pawns hopping around a chessboard, doomed to be picked off the forces of economic “reality.”

No, SpaceX and NASA isn’t perfect. Nothing is. But the nitpicks and remonstrances of the apathetic naysayers reveal more than they know: that they want us to stay earthbound in reality and in philosophy, with no dreams, no aspirations, nothing but Jackson’s “conditions of absolute reality.”

This is not how humans live. This is not how I live or can live. I reject and deny these conditions, just as the launch did. Just as we all should.