For some reason I have the Snoop Dogg song “Drop It Like It’s Hot” playing on repeat in my auditory cortex.

Don’t even like the song, but it is a strange one.

Lisa Mitchell, you’re my only hope.

I wish sf felt more foreign. I wish it felt more like my attempt at learning to read Egyptian hieroglyphics did.

I know this isn’t practical. But at least steps in that direction could be.

Just watched the Star Wars: Rogue One trailer. First, I think it’s great that two Star Wars movies in a row have had female protagonists. It’s weird that some people see this as a “stunt” when they don’t say the same thing about a male protagonist in any film.

But back to the main point — the trailer didn’t at all feel like it was from a galaxy long ago or far away. Even accepting the humanoid morphology of the main characters, they felt culturally American/British. A Western in space — again. (Don’t get me wrong. I like Westerns in space. Firefly, the paragon of the genre, anyone? But we need more than that.)

Strange how nearly all sf contains characters with our mores, or even worse the mores of the 1950s, with similar clothes and hairstyles and ontological outlooks as contemporaneous people. I know why it is this way, philosophically speaking. But it no longer pleases me. It’s no longer enough for me.

I don’t think anyone makes the sf I’d most want to read or to watch. Maybe I’ll have to do it myself.

What a lot of people term “extreme dieting” now would’ve been when I was a child called simply a “normal meal” or even in some cases a large meal.

The same progression happened with soft drinks. When I was seven or eight, the largest size you could buy is now the very same size as the smallest size available at most fast food restaurants.

The “small” 8oz size that used to be what most everyone ordered is now not available at all, anywhere.

Damn, the new Ars Technica design is foul.

Mobile and morons have destroyed the internet completely. That site is an abomination. Does anyone actually want that?

Won’t be visting as much any more. Impossible to find anything.

I’ve lived an epic life.

No intent to brag; just grateful. So much more than I thought my future would hold, could ever hold.

And so fortunate that I was smart enough or lucky enough to not get caught doing some of the things I did when I was younger, and even more clever that I stopped doing them.

I’ve seen amazing things. I’ve even done some of them. Through providence and circumstance, through pain and chance, I got to do just so many things that so many people insisted on telling me were just not possible for someone like me. And all with an amazing and unreservedly lovely partner, too, for the past decade. And a great friend for nearly as long, too.

I’m not even angry at those people anymore, by the way. I don’t need to show them anything. They do enough to themselves. Once you’re really happy, it doesn’t matter anymore.

I’m not where I thought I’d be at nearly 40. That was dead, by the way. Not only am I not dead, but have such a life that my younger self would’ve boggled at.

Fuck yeah for not giving in to the people telling me what I couldn’t do.

I love it when people want me to write a work instruction for some extremely complicated, highly context-dependent activity. And of course to write it in such a way that someone with no experience can follow it end to end.

This is not possible. Just not.

If you could have some document telling an intern what to do, you WOULDN’T NEED ME.

Sure, I’ll write that document. I’ll write it and then I’ll spend the next three days either explaining to said Level 1 person how to do the actions, actually doing the actions for them, or correcting the huge fuck-ups that result when management convinces itself that 20 years of experience can be distilled meaningfully into a Word document.

I know, it sucks paying me such a sum for what I do, that you can’t yet outsource it to someone chained to a wall and beaten with bamboo rods on the hourly.

But that’s the way it is. The intern can’t build a datacenter. The intern can’t even boot their own machine up.

If I could write a work instruction for most of what I do, I’d write a script and sit at my desk and lollygag while the script did my work for me.

Simple as that.

It’s interesting to see so many older people so terrified of something as relatively innocuous and unlikely as Bernie Sanders having had the slim possibility of being president.

They are more frightened of that prospect than of Trump winning — which I can’t make sense of, really.

I suspect part of it is that Sanders is an implicit critique of the entire ethos under which they’ve lived their whole lives — and during which they’ve indeliberately but nevertheless in a very real and direct way harmed their own offspring. Though they are not the first couple of generations to bring great harm upon their own progeny, those in the 45- to 75 age cohort are perhaps the first to do so with the most awareness — possible or actual — that it was being done and how to stop it if they so wished.

They did not and do not wish that, it turns out.

This guilt must be an enormous and insuperable weight. Otherwise, how to explain Kevin Drum, Lance Mannion and their weird maundering posts about how Bernie Sanders is some Josef Mengele-level corrupt evil genius.

Just some New Deal democrat whose party has retreated so far from him he’s had to call himself a socialist.

For those who’ve demonstrably made the world worse for their own children, how could they support a candidate like Bernie Sanders, or like Jill Stein, when this is a condemnation of their very selves?

They could not, of course. The human psyche does not permit such things, such self-negation.

I’m not sure what’s with lately all the counsels of despair on the possibility of losing weight.

This latest example at The New York Times combines some dubious science with poorly-derived “conclusions.”

Important questions are omitted such as if everyone is inevitably destined to be the size of a tractor-trailer, why 50 years ago were people of that size relatively rare?

Even I am old enough to remember when seeing someone over 350 pounds was really, really unusual — so much so that it caused a social ripple through people nearby. Now it’s so quotidian no one even notices.

The questionable science — unsourced of course — is that one can be healthy and obese at the same time for very long. This does not appear to be the case.

And there’s this bit which is almost guaranteed to be false.

After several months of eating fewer than 800 calories a day and spending an hour at the gym every morning, I hadn’t lost another ounce.

Self-reported calorie counts are highly suspect. Almost everyone lies to themselves on this. Unless she is an extreme, one in 10 million genetic freak, with working out an hour a day and eating less than 800 calories she would’ve been losing well more than a pound a week.

Reality is that she was probably not counting snacks, drinks, “just this onces,” etc. Of course.

It’s probably not the only problem (perhaps this is the main one), but one problem is that Americans want to be told that they don’t have to change a thing, don’t have to move a muscle, to have that perfect body, that ideal shape — or, worse, that they are just a perfect little snowflake just as they are, in all their corpulent glory.

Alas, neither image comports with reality nor ever will.

Now here’s the truth: most things worth doing in life are fucking hard. But ain’t nobody want to hear that. It is athwart the entire cultural current of “one weird trick” and “easy weight loss, guaranteed.”

So the refrain of impossibility is all that will reverberate in most ears, and much failure will ensue.

One thing I can say for sure: I will never train my replacement.

Severance: don’t give a shit.

Health care: don’t care.

Lawsuit: have a good time. Send the subpoena to Micronesia, general delivery.

To quote Meghan Trainor

My name is no
My sign is no
My number is no

If you’re gonna let me go.

Most arguments about consciousness, its ramifications and its formation, are beginning to feel to me like debating how much phlogiston a burning log gives off.

There’s much being missed, or perhaps not much to miss. I’m not sure yet.