It’s amazing how often in my life that people have told me that I am doing something “wrong” even when I end up doing it faster, better and more efficiently than they do, and more reliably to boot, yet I am still “wrong” in the way that I do it.

Funny how that works.

One of the reasons I generally learned to ignore adults from a very young age is that very reason.

Sometimes, they were right. Most often they were wrong. Life experience matters, but dumb is still dumb no matter how old you are.

The common Unix-y utility “wget” used as evidence of guilt in the Manning trail.

This sort of thing follows from my post below. I’ve used wget probably 500 times in my life. It’s not a hacking tool. I can’t even see how it could be used as a hacking tool.

Criminalizing general purpose computing has long been a wish of the entertainment industry and others.

Amazing how the simplest tools that I use every day are seen as remarkable and inexplicable wizardry by the moron contingent.

In the abstract, I support the egalitarian ideal of allowing everyone access to technology and making that tech easier for them to use.

In the concrete when it makes my life worse, I wish we’d not ever let stupid people use computers – because it really harms me. All of this push to take away browser features, to make some atrocity like Windows 8, to even have a browser like Google Chrome –- all of this can be blamed on attempting to make things simple enough that complete morons can use them.

Which removes most of the features that I actually use and depend on, both for work and for leisure.

Using a “stupid people” OS or browser slows me down so incredibly much it makes me even slower than them, as I have to try to come up  with ridiculous workarounds to get even basic work done.

Zero Tolerance Policies Put Students In The Hands Of Bad Cops.

I can think of at least a dozen incidents in high school that I was involved in that would now definitely land me in jail. I am very, very glad I am not attending a public school now.

I am not surprised to read that Florida cities took 3 of the 4 top slots for the worst drivers, including the area where we live.

Listen, everyone thinks “their” drivers are the worst. You’re wrong. I’ve driven in a lot of places, including some most Americans have no experience with – such as Egypt. (You don’t know driving until you’re screaming down a four-lane highway seven cars abreast with pedestrians weaving between the non-existent lanes.)

But anyway, I’ve driven in a lot of places. Never have I seen the heinous and insane shit that I’ve seen here in Florida. Never – not in Egypt. Not in Uzbekistan. Not in any US city. It’s not that those things never happen elsewhere. Of course they do. Here, you see it every moment. In other places, you see it rarely. And that’s the crucial difference.

When I lived in Seattle, I got into one near-accident or close call maybe once even couple of months.

Here, some days I get in 2-3 near-accidents when I go to work and 2-3 when I drive home. No exaggeration at all, not in the least.

Nearly every person I know at work has been in a car accident in the last few months. Just last week, a woman I work with got in a car accident less than 50 feet from the building. We all saw it right outside the window. (And not the first one we’ve seen from the window, either.) Another woman I work with has been in three car accidents in the last year, none of them her fault (rear-ended each time).

Thank FSM I have quick reactions and am hyper-vigilant, or I’d’ve almost certainly suffered the same fate already.

On the way home today for instance, someone decided they were going to do a U-turn and get into my lane with me less than 80 feet away and traveling 50MPH. I swerved by them, missing their car by 2-3 feet. If I’d been just the tiniest bit slower, that would’ve been an accident.

I am quite sure they never even saw me, nor did they care that a car could’ve been there.

This happens all the time. That was absolutely normal. Sometimes things like that happen every few hundred feet in Florida. Sometimes you avoid one accident here and then literally two seconds later you avoid another one. You can never rest.

Why is it like this here?

A few guesses. A large percentage of the population here is elderly. Probably 80% of them really shouldn’t be driving. They are completely oblivious and often drive absurdly slowly. Second, this area still has bleedover from the South and all the aggressive masculinity that entails. Third, there is a mix of people here (many Northerners and Canadians) who all bring very different and contradictory driving styles.

Throw all this together, and you have urban fucking chaos.

When I drive to work tomorrow, I can nearly guarantee I’ll almost get into at least one car accident. And most likely one on the way home, too.

It’s part of living here. And it is truly no fun.

Because people see what they want to see, and are trained to their own reactions, it’s amazing how many times in my life that people have mistaken disinterestedness and boredom for fear and nervousness.

Was feeling like punk tonight.

Not the “real” performance. Lip-synched (they are playing the song, but you aren’t hearing that, but the studio-recorded version), and I really like how they are riffing on that in the video, and how they keep trading clothes.

Also those two women have about the coolest haircuts ever, especially the one who is actually singing the song.

I read a lot of academic papers. Most of them are poorly written. And I don’t mean over-use of jargon or words I don’t understand. These I don’t have a problem with. It’s what dictionaries and further reading are for.

What I mean is that academic culture seem to think that obscurity equals scholarship, when in actuality obscurantism means that no one understands your paper.

I’ve read I don’t know maybe a thousand scientific papers since I was 13 or so. Ninety-five percent of them I could revise to contain 98% of same technical content and make most of it completely comprehensible to a bright eighth-grader.

Why this is not done shows that culture is damaging in more areas than just racism and similar obviously-deleterious arenas.

If people weren’t idiots, Facebook wouldn’t exist.

We already did this. It was called “AOL.” Now Facebook is actively making my life worse because many businesses and other organizations have only Facebook pages. In every way, these pages are inferior to a website. They often lack crucial information, such as an address or phone number or operating hours.

Frequently, they are not accessible unless you sign in, which I will not do.

Dumb people: making things worse since ever.

Just a little, I’ve started to notice a shift away from a male being the default human in media. Perhaps it is just my wishful thinking, but I noticed it again today when I was looking at a hiking brochure for a park in Florida.

This is one portion of the brochure:

Of the seven humans pictured, six of them are female, or at least present female gender signals. (The people on the horses are harder to discern as the photo is so small, but probably 95%+ of Americans would identify them as women without a second glance or thought.) More importantly, the two most-easily discernible people are obviously female.

I don’t know the gender of the bird.

It’s a government-produced brochure so I suspect that gives it a better chance of equitability, but still, is this progress? I think so.

Revelation I had when I was talking to my partner about the deficiencies of society:

The people who can’t find their Windows start menu despite using a computer for 10 years don’t get any smarter when they leave the office.

By this many things are explained.

This is something I began noticing at least ten years ago, but has become so pervasive that it eliminates any productive conversation on most sites.

“People have come to use the word ‘troll’ to mean, ‘It made me angry on the Internet,’” said Doyle. “And that’s pretty broad. It’s a big and noisy Internet.”

I’m old enough to remember Usenet and pre-internet BBSes, so I know what true trolling is. And it’s not someone who disagrees with you posting on a website for fuck’s sake.

I agree that there is a Manic Pixie Dream Girl archetype, and that it is cloying.

However the classification boundaries for this archetype seem to have moved from “Natalie Portman in Garden State” to “Any woman in any movie no matter how old or young who exhibits awkwardness or dopiness ever.”

This isn’t useful, people.

It seems in the feminist sphere more to have become about hating women with qualities that some other women wish they to some extent possessed than a legitimate cultural critique.

I’ve seen it claimed that everyone from all the women in Love Actually to Maude in Harold and Maude are MPDGs.

Next, I am sure someone will claim that Pvt. Vasquez from Aliens is also an MPDG.

This reminds me in the 90s and early 2000s how every man was quick to mention that he “hated” Brad Pitt and thought he was a terrible actor because, of course, they wished they could be more like him.

Also, I don’t agree that Amélie in Le Fabuleux Destin d’Amélie Poulain fits anywhere near the MPDG archetype at all because the film is about her. To be an MPDG, the woman has to be seen through a man’s eyes and act as no woman ever would. Having known women like Amélie (incredibly lonely, bad with people), it is no stretch to see one depicted on film.

If anything, the man that Amélie hooks up with in the film is the MPDG. (Really. Think about it.)

That’s a side point, though.

The main point is that the criticism of the MPDG archetype loses its power and veracity if any woman on film with a speaking part is claimed to be one.

I’m from the US, and a rural area at that, so to me “rural” means “I can’t see any evidence of people no matter how hard I look and it’s a long drive to the nearest supermarket.”

As I discovered in the UK, areas classified as “rural” in the minds of the British are totally different than I expected or considered.

I was riding in a co-worker’s car and we were passing what looked to me like a pretty standard semi-suburban area – not that dense, but with a few dwellings and businesses around and off in the distance.

My co-worker commented something like, “It’s hard to find anything out in these rural areas.”

I looked around, but didn’t say anything. I could see a dozen houses, a pub, a restaurant and a hardware store. Where I am from, that’s a town!

But in the UK, it is “rural.”

Strange these differences that you’d never even begin to think about if you don’t experience them in person, even in two cultures similar in so many ways.

Here’s the iguana that’s been doing iguana stuff outside our place.

It’s over three feet long and looks fearsome, but they are docile vegetarians. Also their skin doesn’t really look pixelated like that. The resize algorithm in GIMP was written by that slow kid in 3rd grade who ate paste and whose parents encouraged him to run with scissors. At least as far as I can tell.