I don’t really care that much one way or the other, but I think Ben Affleck is actually pretty perfect to play Batman if you think about the role.

Seem somewhat innocuous and uncomfortable when not in the suit, but who can still be charming at need? Affleck has that.

Be intimidating and gruff when in the suit? Affleck can do that.

Batman is not a difficult role. Who really gives a crap who plays him.

What would’ve been really fun is if they’d cast a woman in the role.

Agreed, completely.

And nothing disrupts thought the way noise does, Schopenhauer declared, adding that even people who are not philosophers lose whatever ideas their brains can carry in consequence of brutish jolts of sound.

I think so much better, so much more fluidly and quickly, when I am out in the countryside away from city noises. Really it’s like I become whole different person mentally. In a city, I am stultified, dull and far dumber. And I am just the opposite away from urban noise.

One of the best things my partner and I have ever done in our home is to spend quite a bit of extra money building our very own whisper-silent computers. I now have to get within a foot of my machine tell if it’s switched on or not.

Our next living arrangement is likely to be far more rural than where we live now, mainly (for me) due to noise.

I’ve never been an overachiever, so luckily I’ve never had to face dilemmas like this.

In my early life, I figured I’d be dead in a bank robbery gone wrong or similar before I was 25, so everything now feels like gravy.

If that sounds ridiculous or uncharacteristic of who I am now, consider this: right after I left for the army, a large group of my friends went to jail for a long time. If I’d still been hanging out with that crew, it’s pretty likely I would’ve gone to jail with them, too.

Every day when I wake up next to my amazing partner and get to do the things I want to do and am still alive – to me, that’s a really good day considering the future I could’ve had, and thought I was bound for.

It’s a long story how all this happened, but years ago an unhinged brother of a former co-worker threatened me and another former co-worker’s kids with bodily harm.

Shit, threatening me I am used to. I’ve been in more fistfights (mostly in grade school and high school, but some as an adult) than most people been in arguments.

But threatening my co-worker’s kids? What the hell.

I told the guy that it was it, I was done, and I was – more than he realized at first. It’s always mystified me that people don’t take me seriously when I say I am going to do something. I don’t make threats. Threats are cheap and worthless and only make you look weak. Where I grew up, threats got you nowhere but on your ass crying.

Anyway thanks to me, two days later, he was fired from his high-paying job at Microsoft, his car was towed to some unknown repair shop (hehe) to have expensive repairs done, his cable was disconnected and the police showed up at his house questioning him about why he had threatened to kill a four-year-old and a two-year-old.

I believe all this happened on the same day, but it definitely happened within two days of one another.

I could’ve done a lot more. I only stopped when he and his sister (who was instigating all this) begged me to. He’d had enough, and I was barely getting started.

But to paraphrase The Game, I do believe that when someone begs for mercy, the beef is over.

I stopped then. Enemy defeated. Mission completed.

What I did wasn’t quite an act of revenge. I needed that idiot to stop terrifying my friend and her kids. And he did stop.

Probably calling the cops would’ve been enough. But doing what I did taught a life lesson that simply calling the cops would never match.

No matter how much I think about it, I don’t think I will ever understand the desire some men have to keep women out of so-called geek communities.

Who cares if a woman shows up at an sf convention cosplaying as the Scarlet Witch just because she read half of one comic and liked the costume?

And just looking, there is no way to tell, anyway.

Besides, do you think that anyone was born knowing all the history and trivia of geekdom? People have to start somewhere.

Funny, I’ve never read an entire comic book. Never will. My brain – not being visual at all – just can’t process them. Yet if I showed up at a convention dressed as The Joker, no one would question it one bit even though I’ve never even held in my hand a single Batman comic book.

And the aforementioned cosplaying Scarlet Witch might teach you something you don’t know – about rock climbing, or nin jitsu, or cooking, or a non-geek movie you’d never considered watching. Or she might be the biggest comic book or sf nerd in the world and tell you about some Romanian sf translations you’d never even heard of.

I just don’t understand the purity urge, especially when it is so senseless.

Here’s a particularly funny example of gatekeeping gone wrong.

Even though I know intellectually that Tatiana Maslany plays all the roles that she does on Orphan Black, I can’t quite wrap my head around it when I see her on screen playing against herself. It just does not seem possible that it’s the same person.

I don’t even understand how someone can learn to move their eyes and their face so differently. In a hundred years, I could not train myself to do what she does.

That she makes it look so effortless, that it is in fact unnoticeable unless you consciously repeat to yourself as you’re watching the show, “They’re all the same woman. The same woman. The same woman,” demonstrates just how hard it must be.

My favorite moment from Episode 8, and one where Maslany particularly shines is when Allison is venting and gives this little speech:

Alison:  We’re all messed up, except you, Sarah.
Sarah:  I’m the biggest mess there is, Alison.
Alison:  No.  No, no, no, because you say, “Eff it.”  I tried to say, “Eff it” today and I blew up my whole life.  I just wanted to say, “Eff it,” “Eff you,” and I effed it.  I effed it all up.

Alison is wound so tight even when she tries not to be that it’s like she is going to explode at any moment. What a great character, because you both empathize with her and don’t like her very much. That takes skill beyond skill to pull off as an actor.

What Maslany does is art in motion. I’d hate to act on the other side of her. No matter my credentials, I’d feel like such a poseur.

The project that we are starting in 4-5 months is going to require me to eat a lot more. That will be a little hard to get used to now, I think. I’m accustomed to eating very little compared to most Americans.

Now when I observe an average American eat, the quantity of food they consume seems a bit grotesque to me.

Very roughly, it appears that I will have to eat an additional 1000 to 1400 calories a day to maintain the weight I am at right now.

That is nearly double what I eat per diem in my “regular” life.

Past evidence from trips to London and Vancouver where I walked a lot more (especially London) also support the above hypothesizing.

This is why I don’t really classify myself as a liberal.

I can’t even conceive of the mental self-deception and pusillanimousness necessary to write a piece of tripe like that.

I’m a firm believer that one cannot voluntarily make one’s self a slave, that no matter if one “consents” to oppression, that it is still oppression and should be treated as such.

Islam does not exist as a structure and practice that oppresses women? It takes some really fantastically stupid mental ju jitsu to get to the point of saying something like that. It reminds me of Margaret Thatcher claiming that “There is no such thing as society.”

One doesn’t need to be Muslim, Iranian or a woman to state unequivocally that a system that arrests a woman for showing her wrists is oppressive and horrifying.

The ridiculous extremes that many liberals go to avoid offending anyone, ever, boggles my mind.

I can never be part of any group of people that stands so weakly for so little.

It’s strangely difficult for people to understand that if you provide more money for something, the price rises – that is to say, if the money supply increases in a supply-constrained world, prices go up.

The number and ease of getting loans for college is directly responsible for the rise of tuition prices. This is where this lack of comprehension comes up the most often. More money for roughly the same product is one widely-accepted definer of inflation.

I don’t feel well today so this post isn’t perhaps as cogent as it could be, but when money (via credit or other means – all money is fungible, remember) floods a market where the product isn’t getting more abundant, or isn’t getting more abundant faster than the demand is rising, prices go up and up.

Eliminating college loans outright isn’t the answer. But just wanted to point out the should-be obvious fact that the more easy money we provide to students, the more colleges will charge if they are allowed to do so.

Remember the housing bubble? Yeah. Same thing.

If the average IQ were about 10 points higher, Facebook probably would not exist.

Think IQ is bunk? Fine, use whatever intelligence estimate suits you best. The point still stands.

Rule: If you have photos embedded in your page and they are clickable, they should be larger than what’s embedded in your page.

If they aren’t at least 30% larger, it’s not worth it to click on them.

And if they are smaller, being slapped with a trout should ensue immediately.

I don’t feel any need nor desire to carry a gun, but without a pocket knife I feel nearly naked. They are so useful and handy to have around.

Partially it’s because I’ve been carrying one since I was six, I think. Yeah, I grew up in North Florida, in a world that is now gone. Things were very different then.

Did this guy take some kind of dumbass pill or something?

Books, those bound paper documents, are part of an ecosystem, one that was perfect, and one that is dying, quickly.

The book business, perfect? The publishing industry is absolutely chock full of collusion, country-exclusive deals, rights issues, blockbuster focus and innumerable other problems. And books are very expensive. Only someone like Godin with a great deal of money would claim they are cheap.

Of course ebooks aren’t perfect. No system is perfect. And bookstores are indeed pretty cool places. But it’s not like public spaces have to disappear as books do — that is not a fait accompli. No. That is just a choice, like privatizing everything, or building Wal-Marts everywhere.

Apparently something I’ve speculated about is already occurring, as general purpose computing disappears.

The truth is, kids can’t use general purpose computers, and neither can most of the adults I know. There’s a narrow range of individuals whom, at school, I consider technically savvy. These are roughly the thirty to fifty year-olds that have owned a computer for much of their adult lives.

GP computers are the most powerful devices any human has ever been given. Most people barely use a small fraction of their power. Even me. That they will effectively disappear in my lifetime de jure or de facto is quite sad.

For a project we’re going to embark on soon, I have a lot of money in my checking account. Like, a real lot.

When you realize you can buy that absolutely gorgeous blue used Aston Martin V8 Vantage right down the street in straight cash, it’s a bit harder to resist.

Of course I am resisting. I want to do the project far more. I don’t even want an Aston Martin. Even if I were truly rich, I’d probably not buy one. But it’s so damn pretty.

It’s just so much harder to resist is all I am saying when you can show up with a briefcase full of hundreds, point to the car, fling the briefcase open and say “Gimme.”