Want to do a pullup? Join an airborne unit. They’ll have you doing pull-ups in no time.

When I joined the 82nd Airborne Division, I could barely do one. When I left, I could do 20 easily. Overhand, full extension pull-ups, too.

Every woman in my unit could do quite a few, too.

Just takes training and time.

Why I’ve always hated the minimalism movement.

Poor people don’t have clutter because they’re too dumb to see the virtue of living simply; they have it to reduce risk.

When you are poor, you can’t throw away anything as you never know when you’ll need it again. It’s almost certain you won’t be able to afford it when the time comes, so it’s much safer to keep it all around.

Not being poor anymore, I throw away things I almost certainly will need again in the future just because I don’t want to keep them around for a few months or a year when I’ll need it again.

Not an option if you’re barely making rent.

Saw Zero Dark Thirty, by Kathryn Bigelow.

This movie according to many glorified torture. I wonder if anyone who believes this actually watched the damn movie?

There were torture scenes, and they were horrible. Yes, they are in the movie. These scenes are presented without music, without ornamentation, without many cuts. They are utterly horrifying in their unflinching revelation of the vileness and loathsomeness of torture. Every moment is uncomfortable to watch and is drawn out far too long (for a reason, of course — see above!)

The people who believed these scenes somehow glorify torture — are they psychopaths? There nearly has to be something wrong with them. Only someone not at all connected to humanity in any way could have seen any glorification, any justification, for treating another human being that way as presented by this film. To glorify something is to attempt to give the viewer some sort of thrill, some sort of charge, and if you got either of those things from the scenes in Zero Dark Thirty, then you have far more missing pieces than I do.

The whole fucking point of those scenes is of course that no matter if valid intelligence was gained by such methods, it wasn’t worth it. Nothing was worth that. Else why show 10 minutes of torture that seemed like two hours when it all could have been elided over in a 10-second clip?

There is a school of thought that to show something at all is to somehow glorify it. This is a valid argument, sometimes. But the scenes in Zero Dark Thirty probably did more to turn more people against torture than all the congressional reports and CNN newscasts ever did.

Not only are many people wrong about the film, they’d also fail Film 101 were they ever to take the class.

When I was younger, I used to not care much for music like this. Music that celebrated life? Why? My life was pretty harsh. As I’ve gotten older, my life changed, got better; I’ve tried to raise my fists less, put down the saber, back away instead of striking out. I’ve never been a macho guy, defending my honor at all costs, but I’ve always been fearless (some say reckless) and ready for battle. Armor always on, shields always up. Never letting anyone get beyond the titanium veil.

Hard, hard way to live. Sometimes I backslide. But I try to be over that now, beyond that. In some ways, it’s the harder path, defenses down — but it’s far more rewarding in the end.

What I love about Lisa Mitchell is that when she sings, even though she doesn’t have a great voice, all her defenses are down — in those moments, she’s utterly beautiful (and would be even if she weren’t already lovely). Everything is revealed; not one bit is held back. There’s nothing more alluring than passion admixed with intelligence. Nothing more likely to shatter the universe. Nothing more likely to better the world.

My place in the world might not be the same as hers. If the revolution comes, my posting is and should be in the militant wing. I know this. The leopard cannot change its spots so easily, not completely. But this leopard does enjoy putting away his spots in the spot drawer until they are needed again. Lisa Mitchell helps with that.

She’s not used to singing in the studio. She doesn’t like not being able to hear herself. It’s why she moved the headphones back from her right ear.

Teleporters! Ha! (But interestingly, if teleporters were available, a bottomless suitcase would be unnecessary or at the least a fait accompli of that tech.)

This is a simple song that takes some interesting musical risks, with a really great video.

Though I’ve liked the song for a while, I had not the first clue what Lisa Mitchell looked like until I watched the video today, but she’s about as a cute as a thousand fluffy kittens. Wish they didn’t mostly hide her freckles.

I believe there is also a polyamory reference in the song, too. “Bed for three?” Yep.

What’s up with this headline?

“Unwanted sexual activity?” We have these words “assault” and “rape.” Let’s use them.

Why I switched to a 64-bit browser:

Can’t do that with puny 32-bit. My browser would be crawling and I’d be cursing.

This is a great post.

Here’s how we solve the OMG SO MANY GIRLS IN YA problem: quit treating women like secondary appendages. Quit treating women’s art like it’s a niche, novelty creation only for girls. Quit teaching boys to fear the feminine, quit insisting that it’s a hardship for men to have to relate to anything that doesn’t specifically cater to them.

Anyone who’s not reading YA right now is missing the fuck out (no, I am not talking about Twilight). The best-plotted, best-written fiction in the world right now is being written there. There is no competition, not among literary fiction (which is mostly terrible), not among adult fiction, and not in sf or fantasy.

And wonderfully, it features any number of interesting, relatable and capable female characters.

No wonder it’s attracting so much hatred of late.

I’ve never cared for the music of Iggy Pop or The Stooges, but I do like what he does sometimes.

One time he came out on stage in a purple dress, and when an interviewer asked him about why he’d play a show wearing a dress, he said something like, “I don’t think there’s anything shameful about being a woman, so I liked the dress and I wore it.”

Right on.

When I looked at the odds of long-term weight loss being 10 to 1, I thought to myself, Shit, I beat longer odds than that my whole life. I can beat 10 to 1 odds in my frickin’ sleep.

Perhaps arrogant?

In my view, it ain’t arrogant if you actually do it.

Below, about losing weight, I don’t want to make it seem easier than it was.

It was not all that easy, especially at first. My comparisons are off, as my partner frequently reminds me. My definition of “easy” is far from other people’s, due to my background and proclivities.

Many times, my definition of “not that hard” amounts to “did not lose any limbs or major organs.”

Probably not what most people’s definition is, I am guessing.

But sometimes, even now, I am still hungry. The other day I was thinking about Kate Miller-Heidke’s music and then about the singer herself. Due to eating even less than normal I was quite hungry, so my thoughts drifted unconsciously in this direction: Hmm, Kate Miller-Heidke, she’s cool, I wonder what her favorite food is?

In other words if you can’t stand being hungry, you will probably not be able to lose weight. Me, I can stand about anything if I want to, so there’s that.

Though I disagree with some parts of this, in the main I think it is correct about the self-delusion and general harm done by this sort of thinking about obesity.

But their overriding problem is that the attempt to uncouple obesity and health/well-being/longevity has the same goal as that of global warming deniers: to convince you that the vast majority of evidence, as well as the medical and scientific consensus, is wrong.

As the piece points out (and with which I fully agree), it is wrong still to persecute and discriminate against obese people. But ignoring evidence that is really quite clear and tossing aside well-established medical knowledge is not the path to wisdom and is harmful to everyone, obese people included.

Study after study confirms that obese people have worse health outcomes, and also that they are beset with more chronic health problems, even if they don’t turn deadly.

Some anecdotes (yeah, anecdotes aren’t data, yada yada….).

At work, two extremely obese people broke their ankles on the stairs at around the same time. One was out for weeks; one was out for months. This is not a normal recuperation period for a mild ankle break, and it’s far less likely either break would’ve occurred at all if BMI had been in the normal range.

If I’d broken my ankle at work, I likely would’ve been back the next day, or more typical of me, in about 10 minutes. “Uh, yeah, I think I broke my ankle on the stairs, I’ll go to the hospital after I finish building this server.” That seems a lot easier when you aren’t packing an extra 250 pounds.

Second, I used to be straddling the line of obesity. Over three years ago, I lost 27% of my body weight. I now feel much healthier, can hike much further and my knees have gone from barely-working to fine. I also seem to get sick less and in general just have had a great improvement in personal well-being.

Yes, losing weight is hard and I am an outlier, but it wasn’t even as hard as I expected, so it can be done and is very much worth it.

Also, this comment about losing weight made me chuckle.

So yes, it’s possible to lose weight by constantly monitoring yourself and enforcing caloric deficits by eating less and doing more. It’s also really goddamn hard to do because your body thinks it’s dying and will fight against you.

I was a paratrooper in the US Army. Who gives a shit what my body thinks about anything? When something is tough here’s what I do: I fucking deal. What do other people do?

Yeah, I know, it makes me sound like an asshole. I’m really concerned about it. Sometimes, that is life; you just have to toughen up and do it.

Or not, as the case may be.

If Quidditch were a real game with the rules of the Harry Potter universe, the optimum strategy, given the extremely high value of the snitch, would be for everyone to be seekers (If allowed by the rules; I am not a Harry Potter expert. Even if the rules didn’t allow, having everyone act as seekers while nominally holding other positions would probably be what actually happened).

It’s not a very balanced game, needless to say.

As a corollary, that would mean that most teams would be nearly all girls, as they tend on average to both be lighter and more flexible, meaning they would on average also be better flyers and snitch-catchers.

Most companies, even if they allow it, really hate having workers working from home.

Part of it is human nature – we’re monkeys with barely-modified DNA, so part of us believes if we can’t see it happening, it ain’t happening.

The other portion has to do with power. I realized many years ago that even more than profits, managers and companies care about power. This explains why the MPAA and RIAA deliberately harm their own customers and their own future prospects to exert more power over the marketplace.

This is another way of phrasing the observation that relative status matters more than absolute status to most humans.

Personally, working from home for me is around 2-3x as productive. Not exaggerating at all. I can do twice as much easily. Why is that? At the office, I am interrupted once every 10 minutes, sometimes as frequently as once every five minutes.

Since most of the work I do is highly cognitive and requires focus, any decrease in the interruption rate helps me immensely.

At home, the interruption rate falls to once every 2-3 hours.

And yet, my company is firmly against working from home, despite the fact that the rest of my team is all in the UK, and I have no US boss, and no US team members.

So for the sake of a fake appearance of control, my company is willing to accept me (and many other workers) being 1/2 or 1/3 as productive.

Figure that out, why don’t you?

Making Light is a strange site for me. I like the site, but I hate everyone who writes for it.

All of them are copyright maximalists, with at least one of them apparently not even believing in fair use. That’s not the only reason I hate all of its writers, but that’s probably the top of the list.

I am a copyright radical – in my opinion, society would be better off if copyright were abolished altogether. No one listens to me, of course, as there is too much money to be stolen.