I wish I could personally punch in the face whatever fucking idiot at Google made a quoted search such as “fucking idiot” not be a true verbatim search.

Way to make your search engine worse, for the users who need that functionality the most.

I work really hard in my media consumption to make sure that I find films, books and other artwork that feature or at least include women as fully-realized, self-motivated characters.

It’s not easy, and it’s getting harder.

I’ve just never seen any reason at all to ignore half the human experience. That’s what I watch movies and read books for, even as non-social as I am – to partake in human experiences and ideas that I otherwise would not get to learn about.

I don’t feel like I should get a cookie or deserve congratulations for this. I feel like those who don’t do this are shortchanging themselves and lead a very desolate cultural life.

And truly, if you are not interested in watching a story about a woman, or have no women heroines or those you admire then I probably (almost certainly) want absolutely nothing to do with you. It means you are a misogynist prick in the most common case, or at the least culturally blinkered and thus also uninteresting to me.

When I was in an early grade, a classmate noticed me reading a Judy Blume book. I was already a much more advanced reader than this (was reading adult textbooks and National Geographic in first grade), but it was in the classroom so I picked it up.

It was good; I kept reading it. Then a classmate said to me, “That’s a girl’s book.”

So I said, “That’s good, because I like girls.” (Was not affirming a hetero orientation, just meant this in a general sense.)

Note I had not read any feminist theory then, and certainly no one around me in redneck North Florida would admit to being a feminist. I likely knew the word even then, but probably only had a vague idea of its true meaning.

However, I was already and always have been a pragmatic contrarian, and would frequently call out things I thought idiotic which lead to many fights and visits to the principal.

This time the classmate shut up, not really knowing what to say, and I kept reading the book.

Who knows how much is nature and how much is nurture? But I sure was at an early age ignoring and refuting bullshit that didn’t seem correct, and that really kept me distant from my peers, despised by many teachers, and I am sure made my parents contemplate burying me in the back yard.

Some things that are almost certainly true but that almost everyone now highly doubts, and nearly everyone will call you crazy for believing:

1) Humans face a much greater chance of extinction than nearly anyone acknowledges; this lack of acknowledgement is mostly due to hubris.

2) Eating meat from formerly live animals will in less than 100 years will be seen as nearly as monstrous as killing a human being.

3) If (and that’s a big if) humanity manages to avoid extinction and technological society continues, we or our much-different successors will attempt to leave the solar system, and likely succeed.

4) Creating an AI is absolutely inevitable, and that may mean the extinction of humanity.

5) We will succeed in “uplifting” animals to human intelligence and beyond.

6) If humanity does avoid extinction, within 10,000 years human bodies as we know them now will be no more.

7) In the future, there are really only two alternatives: Nearly no one has jobs as we now think of them, or nearly everyone is in slavery.

8) Sometime before we relinquish physical bodies altogether, changing physical sex will be as easy as wishing to do so.

And for those who doubt the extinction risk of humanity, ponder this.

Ninety-nine percent of the species that have lived on Earth have gone extinct, including more than five tool-using hominids.

Why would you think humanity would be any different at all, especially with all the amazing tools we have now with which to kill ourselves?