Was a woman in my dream again. I think I might’ve been a variant of Sarah Polley in the Dawn of the Dead universe.

I didn’t realize it until I woke up and thought about it for a moment because of course feeling like a woman just feels like being human.

Sometimes dreams are so vivid that waking up to the world is like the phantasm. Not that I wanted to go back. No. In that dream, I was in charge of some experiment to test if the zombies were getting smarter.

They were.

I don’t feel a connection with any city that I’ve ever lived in. Not Lake City. Not Charlotte. Not Bellingham. Not Seattle. Not Sharm El Sheikh. Not Chengdu. And not St. Petersburg.

I just have no ties to them that make me feel anything – not talking about people, but the actual places.

Guess I don’t put down roots very easily and of course I am not a city person. Hate them, really. And none of them felt like home, even when I lived there. Even when my life was happy (which it has been often and still is).

Could I feel at home in a place? I don’t know. Perhaps I am just not that kind of person. Probably.

I did feel at home when I lived on the river but then I was almost always alone. Well, there were fish, and I like fish. I think that rootedness had more to do with the river rather than being alone, though.

I belonged there. In a city, I don’t belong and will never belong. Probably that’s most of it.

Like the NSA spying “revelations,” I am surprised that anyone was surprised that an old Southern white lady is a bit racist.

Shit, I grew up in the South. Ninety percent of everyone I knew was just like this; my closest at the time childhood friend once said, “We had ‘em in slavery once, and we can put ‘em right back in.”

About the NSA stuff, this was common knowledge as early as the mid-1990s. Where has everyone been?

The only thing it has done is made me realize that a blogger I thought was relatively intelligent was a damn idiot, so much so that I’ve now stopped reading the blog altogether.

Yeah buddy, the whole “my rights” and “fourth amendment” thing are there so that no matter what good reason the government has, it can’t just listen to my phone conversations and steal my private data. Or at least it’s not supposed to be able to.

Good fucking god, should we really have to defend this?

Those posts right there are among the two most well-written dumbass posts I have never read.

And that blog has been deleted forevermore.

Figure I’ve been carping and complaining too much around here.

Sarah Polley. Love everything she’s ever been in, and can’t wait to see the documentary she’s made.

Check out ths interview with her.

Then watch this. This sequence is one of the best openings* of any film of its type due to Polley’s reactions and facial expressions. Just perfect.

*It’s actually not quite the opening, but close enough.

Blogs are once again becoming less stylish and less used – mostly the consequence of mass migration to social crap like Facebook.

Perfectly fine with me. It just means the smarter people who can handle long-form, complex discussion will still visit blogs while the simpering masses will inhabit Facebook.

I see no problem here. I’d rather have one smart, engaged reader than 10,000 morons.

No great loss.

I was reading this article about hiring.

I’ve hired a lot of people in my life. Many of them turned out to be terrible. Some turned out to be great. I had no way to predict this from the interviews.

Something I’ve always wanted to try but no HR department would allow is to hire people completely randomly (well, sort of). I’d find resumes that are at least very minimally qualified for the job, put the names in a hat or a randomizing computer program and hire the first person it picks.

I bet the results would not be much different than the rigmarole of interviewing and such. In fact, they might be better.

Are game developers fucking idiots? Apparently so.

Yeah, because the market for new cars was destroyed by having a used cars market. Or the market for new laptops, or cameras.

Actually it is pretty well-known economically speaking that a healthy and robust used market supports the new-goods market. After all which product are you more likely to buy: a brand-new product for $100 which is impossible to resell and has to be thrown away if you do not like it, or a $100 product which you can resell for $75 if you don’t like it?

Q.E.D.

Even at home, I realized I routinely use four different machines. Try that on a damn tablet.

1) My main machine. Right now, running Windows 7. In the past, it has run everything from various KDE-based distros to off-brand Linux distros only heard of by some housecats living in rural Minnesota.

2) Our Linux server that I remote into using NX and\or putty.

3) A virtual machine running Windows XP for various work-related tasks.

4) Another Windows 7 virtual machine for testing/security.

That’s what I use just at home. And yeah, I really do use those all at the same time.

There are many cognitive fallacies that humans are susceptible to.

One of the most insidious and difficult to detect is I believe the false dichotomy. I find myself falling for that one even when I am aware of it. Those very good at setting up false dichotomies (conservatives, Tea Party plutocrats, banksters, etc.) are much more likely to persuade folks than those with more nuance (liberals, anarchists, socialists, etc.).

There is no easy way around this though constant vigilance to avoid it is worth it. One must be aware though that other areas may suffer as a result, causing a person to become more likely to suffer other cognitive fallacies since processing power and attention is finite.

What makes this great catch so funny is that she is the daughter of a baseball catcher so well-known that even I have heard of him, and I’ve never seen a baseball game nor do I know really anything about it.