I’m definitely a geek and a nerd, but I don’t really identify much with geek culture at all.

Like most cultures, I never really fit into it even though technically it’s the one most like my proclivities.

I guess it’s because I’ve always had a healthy ego, and never subscribed to the “we’re so oppressed yet superior and we deserve hot women regardless” mantra that male geeks seem to spout. And anyway, I never believed that there were any women out of my league (to the extent I thought about it in that objectifying way at all), or anything that I couldn’t do if I wanted to – that whole “healthy ego” thing.

Basically, I never bought into anything anyone told me about myself. My self-esteem just can’t be beaten down by others. I’m not built that way, luckily.

I also didn’t feel like I deserved anyone’s attention or time, or that anyone owed me anything.

What the fuck is all these geek’s problem, anyway? I’m asocial as all hell, about the opposite of Mel Gibson in looks, and I’ve never had a problem meeting women.

Not being a dumbass entitled asshole goes a long way, strangely. And being interesting and doing interesting things with your life. Not because you want to “score” but because you want to.

If an ugly-ass introvert like me can spend half a lifetime being with amazing women, you people with way more advantages should be like hanging out with Jennifer Lawrence and shit every day.

But leading an interesting life is key. It’s fun, it makes you interesting, and if nothing else leads to some good stories.

Some of the crazy things that have happened to me I actually tone down (sometimes way down) in person as they are nearly unbelievable to the average cubicle dweller.

I usually don’t tone them down on the blog, though, so dear readers you are getting the real stuff here.

The moment I truly realized my life had completed changed from how I grew up wasn’t until I was probably 24 or 25 or so.

It was at work, and I’d agreed to sub in for a woman on a bowling league who wasn’t able to show up that night.

One of the other guys on the bowling league came by my desk and said, “Thanks for subbing in. I thought you were way too cool to hang out with people like us.” He didn’t say it condescendingly or sarcastically; just as a statement of fact.

Even though I absolutely knew he was talking to me, I actually did that thing people do in movies and looked behind me a little bit to make sure he actually wasn’t speaking to someone else.

That’s a long way from being called a “loser nerd faggot” in middle school, for sure.

I’m not surprised that most people who are attempting to “rescue” sex workers actually do more harm than good.

This includes 99% of Western feminists, too.

Ain’t hardly nobody talking about rescuing Wal-Mart workers, or waitresses, or short-order cooks, and believe me some of those people are just as exploited – and probably more so –  as the average sex worker (and they make a lot less money, too).

Mainly “rescuing” sex workers is about sex-phobia and delusion.

When you see ammo “cooking off*” in movies, it’s portrayed as hugely dangerous, like the bullets are firing as if they were in a gun.

But that’s not actually what happens**. The bullet needs something to “push against” to actually fire, and is greatly accelerated by the barrel of the weapon it’s fired from.

When ammo cooks off, it’s the casing that gains speed (think about why, it’s easy!) and is the part that’s dangerous, though usually not very dangerous as compared to a bullet fired from a gun.

Anyway, no matter that it’s not all that risky, you still shouldn’t throw ammo in a fire. While a .22 LR brass might not really hurt you, as the cartridge gets bigger so does the M x A of the casing.

*Cooking off generally refers to ammo that fires from being overheated, but here I am using it to refer to any “outside of the chamber” firing.

**Source: grew up a a redneck in rural N. Florida where I have seen ammo thrown in a fire, and was in the US Army for five years.

American Horror Story, despite being too campy for me at times, is much, much better than expected.

One of the best things about it is that its stellar cast includes at least 50% women as major characters in every season, and in Season 3, 90% of the cast is female.

It’s nice when a show surprises you like this one did to me.

And Season 2 is absolutely unhinged, in the best of ways.

Also, Lily Rabe rocks.

Stop Buying Load Balancers and Start Controlling Your Traffic Flow with Software.

I frickin’ hate hardware load balancers. Every time I’ve used them, they have caused problems. Will have to look into this; looks really useful.

Yes, this comment perfectly describes my level of obliviousness from the age of 13-25 or so. Something very near that happened to me, and of course I missed the signs.

I was staying over at the house of a girl I used to date, but we’d broken up very amicably about six months before. Her sister was single, very bright and absolutely gorgeous.

On that night as I was about to sleep, the sister came out to the couch where I was about to lie down and said to me, “You don’t have to sleep on the couch. You can sleep in my bed.”

I said, “Oh, no, the couch is fine. Why should you have to sleep on the couch? It’s your house.”

She replied, “Oh, no, I plan to be there, too.”

“Your bed is really small,” I said, completely fucking clueless. “I’ll be fine out here.” Her face looked strangely disappointed as she walked away.

About two weeks later, I nearly crashed my car when I realized she had wanted to sleep with me in the sense of not actually doing much sleeping, and probably thought I was rejecting her.

*facepalm*

In fact, this whole Reddit thread reminds me of myself.

I am almost certain that there are more subtle hints I’ve also missed in the past and never realized.

From talking to other guys over the years, I’d say about 20-40% of them will be nearly completely oblivious to almost all hints; we are just not socialized that way. It’s not on purpose, truly. Fucking trust me on that.

I see that the ever-awesome Sarah Kendzior feels the same way about the tabletization and dumbing down of every piece of software out there.

Go to her main profile page to see what she’s talking about. Twitter is basically unusable now from a content consumption perspective for anyone with an IQ above that of a turnip.

If the idiotic fuck-up misogynist Elliott Rodger hadn’t killed a bunch of people, we’d be better off.

But that’s not what happened. So at least we got the #yesallwomen movement out of it.

Should be required reading in all schools across the land.

Tolkien’s translation of Beowulf is better than Heaney’s as it is more like the original poem; which is also why people claim that Tolkien is a bad writer. That is to say, that Tolkien mostly wrote even his original works as if they were Old English literature translated as faithfully as possible into modern English.

I’ve read all of Heaney’s translation, and some of Tolkien’s, and Tolkien’s feels foreign, meaning that it feels spawned by far different consciousnesses, living in a different world. Which of course is exactly how in my view it should feel. Those who wrote Beowulf were very, very different from us.

How much have white Americans benefited from slavery and its legacy?

Note: I am not endorsing this post. Not everything I post here is an endorsement. But I unlike most people do like examining things from all angles.

But, not quite on the same tack as Cowen, some other thoughts.

Sometimes there is a difference between what is morally correct and what makes economic sense, or even what would actually help. Understanding that is important, even (and especially) if one decides to do something immediately harmful for some hoped future gain, or just for the perception of righting past wrongs.

Personally, I think dismantling institutional racism is far, far more important than reparations, which would utterly divide the country.

Reparations are likely only to reinforce racism among those already prone to its worst manifestations, and would not have any lasting positive effect among black Americans. It’d be better that money were given to all poor people, white, black, or other, or even just $100,000 (for example) given to every person in America regardless of color or wealth (probably the most ideal solution most likely not to promote deranged animosity).

Anyway, arguing about reparations is about like arguing about meeting Albus Dumbledore, in that it’s about as likely to occur.

Why is it that literary writers rarely can write a good story – some of them being so idiotically preposterous or non-existent that the whole work is unreadable – and “genre” writers often have such terrible writing?

Do good ideas make for terrible writing? And does decent writing somehow make one have no ideas?

That’s not universally true, but it’s 98% true. Most literary writers can barely write a story that a 3-year-old would find plausible or interesting, and most genre writers don’t do much better at writing than a semi-talented 10th grader.

But I can’t understand why.

Here I stand and here I’ll stay.

This reminds me of my childhood and being told that I couldn’t possibly understand things that I very much did understand, often better than the adults pillorying me did. Children – even ones not as wildly precocious as I was – understand and realize far more than most adults give them credit for.

Even if you aren’t reading Moby Dick when you’re eight, most kids are extremely perceptive about their social milieu and what’s expected of them. Girls especially get told how they should be, and who they should be, more often and more forcefully than boys do.

I suspect that girls of the age 7-13 understand a lot of the messages in Frozen better than adults watching it do (if many of the adults understood it, they probably wouldn’t let girls watch it).

When I hear that people miss living in NYC, I can’t believe it. It’s like my brain really hears, “I miss living in Port-a-Potty.”

There are some things so foreign to me that it’s like I can’t process them. I mean, I believe them, but it’s also like a part of me that says, “Surely they must be talking about something different, or they’ve misspoken.”

It is amazing how different people can be.

I was aware that Google provided something like 70% of the funding to the Mozilla foundation which builds Firefox.

The more I think about it, the more it seems plausible that “Australis” is an instance of deliberate sabotage to drive users to Chrome, at the behest of Google.

What other explanation for such an interface apocalypse could there be? It’s like a poor copy of Chrome, which of course means that users will then just use Chrome.