What a voice.

I’d like to write an sf novel written in Egyptian (late period) hieroglyphics.

I spent much of my early life creating my own languages, and during that time as I was studying enough to attempt something like that, I examined very deeply many other languages and writing systems*.

I attempted to learn to read and to write late Egyptian hieroglyphics as well. I did that for about two years, and it is much harder than any currently extant human writing (or reading) system. Those are relatively easy for me. Hieroglyphics not so much.

Even at the height of my learning I could only accurately decipher — after much effort — 20% of even the simplest writing.

But if I had infinite time on earth, I really would learn it and then write an entire sf novel that way just for my own amusement.

Now that would be cool.

*Which let me tell you is so so much harder in a hick town pre-internet with basically no real library and no transportation, as compared to now. When I look back at what I was able to achieve with basically no resources and so many people even in my own family actively, violently hostile to me, I’m frickin’ amazed. Go early me!

It’s way, way too far out to do this but I’m doing it anyway.

With all the soothsaying savvy at my command, I predict that Scott Walker will be the Republican nominee and if the economy is in a downward trend during the presidential election, he will be the next president of the United States.

If the economy is in an upward or flat trend, it will be Hillary Clinton, narrowly, and Bernie Sanders will be her running mate.

The rich, diverse, free web that I loved — and spent years in an Iranian jail for — is dying. Why is nobody stopping it?

Not intending to get into deep sociological analysis here. Like most things I write on this blog, this is reactionary and typed up in five minutes or less.

But I miss the old web. Before social networks and the vast invasion of the stupid people and the corporate conquest and subjugation. It really was a bit of a weeder when it was more difficult to do anything useful.

People are content to give away their life and their freedom for 10% off at Outback. I will never, ever understand this. Fuck those people and everything they stand for, everything they are. We have no common ground at all.

At least I got to live through the wild west of BBSes and the early web, and to feel that promise even if at the time I recognized it as probably false.

Humans are like any other animal: their own doom and their own nemesis. Why would we be immune from any natural laws that govern other creatures? We are not. We’re just acting out an old, old play on a larger stage.

History, prove me wrong. But is so very rarely does.

The term “cloud” makes me laugh as it’s all just crap on a server somewhere, just like always.

Just now the server is farther away, performance is worse and your data is also really insecure.

What the fuck is wrong with Mozilla?

Drop FTP support? Why, why would you ever do this?

FTP sites for downloads are incredibly common. This would be an enormous mistake and even regular users would be turned off as their browser would often appear “broken.”

Of course the goal is to push people to app stores and other walled gardens, so in that context this makes perfect sense.

Fuck Mozilla.

WebRTC being used now by embedded 3rd party on http://nytimes.com to report visitors’ local IP addresses.

Yet another technology implemented by Mozilla in Firefox with nary a thought to its potential harm.

In Firefox to disable, do:

§Enter “about:config” in the address bar and press enter
§Press the button “I’ll be careful, I promise!”
§Type in “media.peerconnection.enabled” in the search bar
§Right-click the entry choose “Toggle”, the column “Value” should now be “false”

This vulnerability is also present in Chrome but I don’t and won’t use that privacy-thieving piece of shit so I have no idea how to disable it there.

Lucid dreaming for a while this morning.

I was morphing bodies and other cool stuff, Mystique-like.

As I was beginning to wake up, I actually forced myself to stay in the dream. Been a long time since I’ve done that.

Two tiers of thought: surface and reverie — is like thinking with two linked brains concurrently. It feels very strange, like being two people at once.

Lucid dreaming is the nearest thing I know to living in another world altogether.

Ellen Pao is now gone as CEO of Reddit. Good riddance even if it was some strategy to enact unpopular changes and then have a scapegoat. I don’t believe the Reddit staff is that smart, personally.

But at least one person at Slashdot understands what the bans were really about.

Don’t mistake what the FPH ban was : a political move to gain mainstream political correctness point in the eyes of the HAES and FA movements. Remember : 70% of americans are now overweight (source : http://www.niddk.nih.gov/health-information/health-statistics/Pages/overweight-obesity-statistics.aspx [nih.gov]). It pays to cater to the majority.

The Fat Acceptance SJWs think they won a great victory. But if SJW crap falls out of favor, their subreddits will also be shitcanned faster than a CEO racks up dollars in Caymans bank accounts. (By the way, I think Pao was making $500 an hour as CEO, not that high as far as CEOs go.)

FA in my mind stands for “Failure Acceptance” these days. FA: for when you’ve well and truly given up.