I agree with this – Warner Brothers is leaving a few billion dollars on the table by not making any Wonder Woman films.

Get Jennifer Lawrence to play the part, and every fan in the universe would go apeshit and the movie would gross $100 million the first weekend no matter how good or bad it turned out to be.

When people complain about Tolkien’s lack of writing chops, it merely reveals their lack of historical knowledge of what tradition Tolkien was drawing from and what he was attempting to achieve.

He was of course writing in the tradition of epic mythology – specifically Northern European mythology – and following many of the writing conventions and styles of that genre in his most-known work, The Lord of the Rings.

Wagner’s also-turgid and epic Der Ring des Nibelungen flows from the same source, though is considered a classic in most circles because of its genre and that the composer is longer-dead than Tolkien.

If you read translated works of Old English, Norse, German and Finnish mythology, unsurprisingly they sound and read just like LOTR.

It’s not really that Tolkien’s writing was bad, then, but that as an academic he made the mistake of accidentally writing a popular work. And even worse, it had magic and elves in it.

In nearly any field, there are few worse crimes than exceeding your peers. In academia it seems a particularly high crime for some reason, and there were few guiltier of that particular infraction than Tolkien.

And for that he has never been and never will be forgiven.

And this is a pretty good summary of why I do not read and cannot stand most literary fiction – not because it is over my head (whatever that means), but because, well, it is so limited by its attempt to be unreadable to the hoi polloi.

LitFic is a genre just like any other, with its own conventions and limitations. I believe it is actually more limited because it is restrained – unlike many other genres – from using the implausible and fantastic to throw a revealing spotlight on the quotidian and the commonplace.

This is some really good writing about one of my favorite shows of all time that hardly anyone watched – that being Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles.

This group of characters, who are not on Team Connor, add so many layers of depth and complexity to the show, and elevate it from a pretty good show about soldiers and family preparing for a future robot apocalypse, to a truly compelling, complex, graceful piece of television that deals with war, loss, robots, the preservation of what makes us human, and how who and what gets written in the book of myth is only a fraction of the story.

That show went from ok at first to good, then to great, and then to absolutely amazing. Two episodes of that show are my two favorite episodes of any TV show of all time. Others are not even really close.

Lena Headey was so very good in the show. So was Summer Glau. And unlike basically every other show ever, it didn’t treat the female characters as some bizarre species that vaguely had something do with the story and could be killed off at need for dramatic effect, but instead they were absolutely essential parts without which that world (like the real world) would not turn.

When that show was cancelled, it was a very sad day.

I am sure (because I have read some of them!) that such things were written about those newfangled “printed” books back in the early 1500s.

But after close to half a decade of downloading and consuming any number of novels, autobiographies, comics and self-help titles in Kindle form, I have yet to feel as fully invested in the pixels on a Bezos-imagined screen as I do in the indelible glyphs found on good old-fashioned book paper.

Translation: I am old and do not like change.

I prefer ebooks in nearly every way to physical volumes. They are so much lighter. The fonts are better. They can be transferred easily to another device.

The reading experience is in every way simply superior. And not having to carry around heavy objects is always a plus.

Our house is filling with various gadgets, tools and items for the road trip. It will have to be organized and consolidated to fit into a single vehicle, but right now it’s just strewn everywhere.

A good sight, though. A new phase of life and the sort of thing most people wish they could do but do little to make it happen.

Why do people have such a problem believing that luck is a key part of their success? I am fairly successful and I know that luck is responsible for nearly all of my success: luck being born white in a society where whiteness is often seen as automatically better; luck in choosing to go into IT rather than journalism; luck in having enough money to do also-lucky things in the stock market at the right time; luck in being born able-bodied and with the right mind to deal with my rather neglectful upbringing.

There is so much more that could be added. Most of what allowed me to be where I am is nothing more than a roll of the dice, especially if you view it from the philosophical perspective of the Rawlsian veil of ignorance.

Do I think I deserve the things I have? “Deserve” is the wrong word. It’s a reactionary word. I think everyone deserves every chance at a happy and fulfilling life, not some sparse 1% at the top hoarding all resources relentlessly while the rest are immiserated.

Getting there is the problem.

Why would you ever implement a feature like this?

The few hours I suffered through using Office 2013, I wondered why my typing was sometimes 2-3 words ahead of what appeared on screen. Now I know.

What a bunch of complete morons must have designed this. It made me feel like my computer was from 1993, when computers were so much slower that typing could not keep up.

Again, why, why would you ever do that? What the hell is with all the user-hostile design lately?

I’ve used NoMachine for many years to control Linux servers with a GUI. I can’t complain really because it was free, but I will anyway.

They’ve since upgraded to version 4 and holy hell, is it terrible. You have to resort to hacking around to config files to get it to behave correctly as it did before.

Before, it was one click – you clicked a button and it just worked. You were in the target remote machine. Now it’s been turned into some sort of shitty collaboration tool that requires multiple clicks to access the server, doesn’t just spawn a virtual desktop as it should, and is also much slower. And the GUI to set things up is terrible. No use of OS conventions, no discoverability. It should be shown in design schools for “what never, ever to do” day.

NoMachine 3.5 was absolutely perfect for what it provided. Version 4 is optimized for something most of its former users never used it for and is incredibly painful to use.

Will be looking for replacements after the road trip.

I’ve used a lot of laptops in my life. Personally, I’ve owned a half dozen and at the companies I’ve worked at I’ve supported dozens if not hundreds of different models.

Most of them are terrible – they feel shoddy, have bad screens and often just don’t work correctly.

The MacBook Pro is in a whole different class. It feels like alien technology someone stole and brought to earth. Everything on it just works correctly. It is perfectly balanced, cleverly designed and just feels solid enough to stop bullets (I don’t recommend trying that out).

Being a retina model, it also has a beautiful screen that is the best I’ve ever used on any laptop by a very far margin.

Along with my 100mm macro lens, one of the best things I have ever bought.

Anyone who tells you that a $500 Best Buy special is just as good as this piece of embodied elegance is absolutely full of shit.