Good interview with Ursula K. LeGuin, and this portion is so true.

And that, of course, is the lingering problem: The maintenance of an arbitrary division between “literature” and “genre,” the refusal to admit that every piece of fiction belongs to a genre, or several of genres.

The only real difference I’ve noticed between genres is that there is a different skew of quality at different time periods in their history.

For instance from what I can tell, something like 98% of literary fiction is utter crap right now, and about 95% of science fiction is also complete garbage.

Used to be, about 90% of science fiction was gutter crud, and about 85% of litfic was. So the ratios shift over time, but never in any genre is there really that much quality work to read.

If you think the current Firefox is terrible, prepare for the future.

A future of bullshit.

If you don’t want to watch all that — and who would? — here’s the gist.

No tabs; no bookmarks; no settings; forced updates that one can’t change; no extensions. Yeah, that’s right, a Firefox with no extensions.

And a UI that no one would understand. My partner’s mother got auto-updated to Australis (Firefox 29) and she was unable to use the browser until my girlfriend assisted her.

Yeah, it’s great for regular users. Just like this surely will be, of course.

That so many of the well-off lack economic knowledge has also puzzled me.

This is one of the reasons I don’t understand why the rich have become so focused on the short term. Their obsession with short-term profits is bad for them long-term. I would think that they would be the most vocal supporters of things like welfare (Food stamps!) and unemployment and education and all those things that allow the middle class to thrive. But in general, they aren’t. Maybe it isn’t that surprising, though. In my experience, people in business are often clueless about how the macroeconomy works.

What is odd is this obsession with the next quarter or the very short term even when it doesn’t benefit them (no bonus, etc.) to think and to behave this way.

Then I realized, though, that people get locked in to certain mindsets and cannot easily deviate from them. Take a poor person and give them a lot of money, they still behave like a poor person. It’s why many lottery winners are broke only a few years after winning millions.

But taking a not-very-smart person and giving them money does not — as we Americans tend to believe — make them smart. It just makes them rich.

There is also of course a certain ideology that is inculcated in various classes in the US, and straying from it is only done in rare cases, and by very exceptional people. Studies show this consistently.

The rich in their way are just as captured by the dominant sentiment as any other group — right now, that dominant disposition consists of rapacious neoliberalism sprinkled with disdain for anyone not obsessed with profit. Evidence against the benefit of this even to them does not matter. That’s how ideologies work, really.

Data caps exist only to preserve current cable monopolies. There is no other reason, technical or otherwise, no matter what you read anywhere.

If you wear pajamas or have ever worn them, you are evil because it is cultural appropriation.

Consider yourself appropriately vilified.

When I say that I am not a libertarian (by any means!) but have libertarian sympathies, this is what I am referring to.

The part about the aristocracy in nearly all times wishing to slow the velocity of money is really trenchant, and correct.

I’ve seen people say when a death occurs, “Why do they need an autopsy for that? It’s so obvious how he/she died!”

Great, you think you know how someone died. Aren’t you special.

But the best way to cover up a murder or other malfeasance is to make it look like some sort of other accident. And that’s the kind of thing you want to be sure about when it does happen.

"Outlander" Is The Feminist Answer To "Game Of Thrones."

I don’t actually think Game of Thrones is unfeminist for the most part, but this show looks interesting. Yeah, unfeminist things happen to the women in GOT, and perhaps we didn’t need another sword and sandals vehicle, but the women in that world are real characters with depth and verisimilitude.

Just because a world is unfeminist – shocker, like the world we live in! – doesn’t mean the work is unfeminist. Subtlety is a mode that many people do not possess, though. (If a world makes a work unfeminist, then by definition every work by anyone in this world – the actual one – would be unfeminist.)

The best food I’ve ever eaten in my life has been in Charleston, SC.

This article explains a bit about why.

Chengdu, Sichuan Province, China comes in a close second, but the food I got in Charleston was more consistent in its quality.

There are more great restaurants in downtown Charleston than there are in many entire states, including in all of Florida (which has absolutely no food culture to speak of).

The idea that humans won’t go extinct is pure hubris. Something like 99.2 percent of every species to ever exist has become extinct.

In 1962, the Soviet Union had about thirty-three hundred nuclear weapons in its arsenal, and the United States had more than twenty-seven thousand.

Twenty-seven thousand nuclear weapons. Merely 100 nuclear weapons detonated in the right places would be enough to set back human civilization a thousand years, or to end it altogether. We had enough nuclear weapons at one point to end the world 270 times over.

And just wait till cheap bio labs that can manufacture airborne rabies or similar become easily obtainable.

This is not surprising.

Rising rents and the difficulty of securing a mortgage on the coasts have proved a boon to inland cities that offer the middle class a firmer footing and an easier life. In the eternal competition among urban centers, the shift has produced some new winners.

We’ve lived in Seattle. Housing there is ridiculous. And in general it was a terrible city for us for many reasons. Finding a place to rent there was nigh impossible unless you responded to the ad in the first few minutes of its posting.

Also, we paid more for less there compared to any other city we’ve ever lived. (That said, the place we had there was pretty nice.)

And buying? Even though we were both fairly-high income earners, we couldn’t have afforded anything there comfortably, not even a shack.

If you live in a major city – and if you can find a job – you will never be able to afford a good life. Or at least this is true for the majority of Americans.

Where we’re considering living next we could work at a convenience store and afford rent. Try that in Seattle or some other similar shithole that we don’t even like. Hint: It will not be possible and you will starve.

All that said, the first photo in that NYT article and the house in the background? That is an ugly fucking thing. It has about 37 different architectural styles going and is about as attractive as a burning carburetor. Why move all the way to Oklahoma and then buy something like that?

Sure, everyone has a dream, but sometimes that dream is stupid.

Environmentally of course cities are far better. But cities are a miserable fucking place to live for many people, including me. I can understand why not everyone wants that, because I don’t want that. It’s nice having a space of one’s own and not having to interact unnecessarily with dolts and noisemakers.

Draws white guy.

Or in the case of movie directors, *casts white person.* Whitewashing characters offends even me, and I am not easily offended.

The PC is dead! Oh wait, the tablet is dead!

No, no, wait, the post-PC PC is too PC!

No, I’ve got it, the post-tablet is post-dead!

No, no, the revenant tablets are rising up and going all Cthulhu on our collective asses!

Ridiculous pronouncements and sloganeering aside, neither the PC nor the tablet is dead; this is merely what maturing markets looks like.

It took the PC market ~30 years to mature. It took the tablet market around five.

We’ll see continued reduced market share for the PC to the tune of probably 20% fewer sold in 2024 as compared to now, and tablet sales will stabilize a bit higher than they are now (in the Western world).

If you basically ignore what nearly all tech pundits claim and predict, wisdom can be found.

Obama Embraces Net Neutrality, Plans to Hire National CTO

by Bryan Chaffin, 5:05 PM EST, November 7th, 2008

Allow me to descend into juvenilia here as I say: LOLOLOLOLOL.

Fucking god, what a terrible lying sack of shit.

Selfies and Instagram presage a near-inevitable future of machine-based memory augmentation and enhancement.

These people – as daft and narcissistic as many of them are – are like the BBS users of the early 80s compared to the internet users of the now, except in this case they are the oracles and stentors for the eventual subsuming of humanity into its machines, or at the least hybridization therewith.