I grew up as most people who read this blog know in rural North Florida, about 60 miles from the Georgia border.

Therefore I grew up speaking with a strong Southern accent, and using all the Southernisms you’ve probably heard in movies – and many you probably have not.

I no longer do any of those things, for just this reason.

Camille Hooker, a graduate student from Clay County, recalls going to school at the University of Kentucky, 90 minutes from home, and being told she talked funny and asked if she were intimate with her cousin.

Anne Shelby still remembers decades ago as a college freshman in Louisville when she excitedly spoke up in class about a Chekhov play only to have everyone break out laughing over her hill country accent. It felt, she says now, “like I had been sledged in the face.”

When I first joined the Army and had been assigned to a group that consisted mostly of Northerners, I made the mistake of using the phrase “fixing to,” as in “I am fixing to go to the store.”

Perfectly natural to me – I’d said it my whole life. So had everyone I knew.

I was made fun of for weeks for that. I never used it in public again.

I’d lost 99% of my Southern accent already, but after that I carefully monitored my speech to make sure that I never uttered any Southernism in mixed company again.

This is great advice from Grimes. Really all of it, but particularly this.

You will never hear more people tell you that you’re wrong than when you’re succeeding.

Dead on. When you are failing and flailing other than the few who enjoy kicking someone when they are down, no one much cares about you.

When you start to succeed and then you actually do succeed, the jealous, envious, hateful and demented will emerge like vermin from the woodpile to claw, gnaw, vex and obstruct you.

It’s strange. When you succeed, it can actually feel like you’re failing because so many – vastly more – people will turn out to tear you down and diminish you.

I am sure this is 10x as true for a woman.

I am so tired of socially and otherwise completely clueless geeks telling me that Windows 8 was good “in all the ways that matter for an OS.”

I don’t care how lean it ran. I don’t care how fast it opens a window. I don’t care how much-improved the invisible internals are.

To me – and to most people – if the experience of using an OS is crap, the OS itself is crap.

Why is this so hard for many geeks to understand?

I am a geek –- and have been actively using computers since I was four and am very comfortable at the command line – but I care about the interface far more than I care about some hidden system that makes something 0.02% faster.

Things I’ve learned from Tumblr:

1) It’s impossible for a man to write a believable female character, no matter what. Strangely, the converse is not true.

2) If someone feels more oppressed than someone else, that gives the more-oppressed person the right to declare that someone else is not of the race that they say they are, never mind that both of their parents and all of their ancestors were part of that race for the past 10,00 years or so.

3) Violence is wrong and reprehensible, except when the people that I hate or that my “non-violent” group hates gets maimed or killed.

4) Science is a white male plot to…do something. I’m not sure. Anyway, science is fake.

5) If you are oppressed (in reality or in your imagination) this gives you the right to be the biggest prat asshole the world has ever seen.

Well, it is true that a lot of the people are on Tumblr are like 12, so I guess some of this is understandable.

But before the internet, I thought that my side – liberals and the Left – couldn’t possibly be as dim-witted as the average conservative.

I was SO WRONG.

It would be far better for the entire country and world if we could just expatriate all members of the #gamergate mob to, say, Jupiter.

Or straight into the sun, just to be sure.

While I agree with the sentiment of most of this, this line made a made procession of LOLs stream across my brain.

You cannot ever separate a character with their creator.

That the statement is not grammatically sensible isn’t what did it, but rather of course you fucking can separate a character from its creator. This statement is facile and not supported by reason, all to jam a narrative into a place where it does not fit.

If written well enough, a character is its own entity, with little to do with a creator – all the fan fiction in the world would attest to that. But it’s more than that.

How many people have written Wonder Woman, Batman, etc., over the years? Does Scout from To Kill a Mockingbird or Celie from the The Color Purple exist outside of each of their respective works? I’d posit that they do.

A well-written character can have – does often have – more of a life, can feel more real, and seem to exist more than the (often-boring) author or creator.

For instance, the character Johanna Mason –- mainly due to Jena Malone’s* astounding performance — feels more real to me and I can imagine her (sad) life far better than I can imagine or even know anything about the lives of those who nominally created her.

She lives for me apart from them, and really has nothing at all to do with them.

Tumblr is a hive of dumbassery, admittedly, so I shouldn’t have bothered to write so much about this, or perhaps I should have made it a bit more intellectually focused, but too much already in life is obscurantist just to make oafish people who happened to learn some long words in college look smart.

I’m tired of that, really.

*In fact when I was writing that paragraph, I originally wrote, “mainly due to Johanna Mason’s astounding performance.” She seems more real to me than the woman who portrayed her in many ways, subconsciously. Because I don’t know Jena Malone. But now I do know Johanna Mason.

This happens a lot.

My grandfather had the cops show up to “take a look” at his garden that had okra growing in it.

That was when I was eight or nine.

My grandfather was one of the few people in my extended family who was actually not a criminal of some sort.

This part of the linked article made me laugh.

The Dunbar number is actually a series of them. The best known, a hundred and fifty, is the number of people we call casual friends—the people, say, you’d invite to a large party. (In reality, it’s a range: a hundred at the low end and two hundred for the more social of us.)

My Dunbar number is like two. Maybe three. Social I am not. It has been as high as seven or eight in my life, but that’s it.

How do people know so many people?

Poltergeist – the 1982 Tobe Hooper film – had some of the best cinematography I remember.

All those anamorphic lenses that just aren’t used anymore give a film a whole different quality.

I do agree with the traditionalists that despite the advantages of digital, the results of digital filming do not usually look as pleasing, partially because the lenses used and the sensor size, even ignoring the CGI mess that many movies have become. Digital just looks flatter and plainer.

I miss anamorphic lenses on 35mm film.

What the heck happened to Mental Floss?

The once-great website with thoughtful articles has become Buzzfeed Lite, with lists of worthless (and often wrong, from my brief perusal) trivia and a complete lack of worthwhile content.

Probably not going back. If that’s what it takes to make money on the web,  we need to re-think this whole thing.

I’m always surprised when people – even people who seemingly should know  better – are surprised when artists and entertainers steal/borrow ideas and moves from other artists and entertainers.

Michael Jackson didn’t invent the moonwalk? No!?!??! Tell me more!

Picasso didn’t invent cubism? OH MY GOD!

Bill Haley and the Comets didn’t invent rock and roll? NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

All culture is “appropriation.” All art is evolutionary, and involves borrowing/stealing. Else, nothing gets made.

Damn, I wish people would read some history.

Switched back to Pale Moon x64 (went from Pale Moon to Waterfox to Firefox now to Pale Moon again) from regular Firefox. Too many compromises in Firefox even after extensive modding. (Yes, I know that Firefox code is Pale Moon.)

Might as well use something decent before it all gets taken away.

“Brother in the Morning Light”

Anyone can get me that Nord Elecro 3 Stephanie Lauren’s playing at the end, if they wanna.

I don’t actually like agreeing with Bill Maher because he is a misogynist ant-vaxer putz, but when a person’s right, they’re right. (Update: It was Sam Harris who said the below, not Maher. I misread.)

The crucial point of confusion is that we have been sold this meme of Islamophobia where every criticism of the doctrine of Islam gets conflated with bigotry towards Muslims as people. That is intellectually ridiculous.

The quote is from this really good column about how liberalism is so blinded by their inability to criticize other cultures.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what I am politically and ideologically. I don’t like defining myself in such limiting terms, but a liberal I definitely am not. I’m obviously not a conservative, though – I support feminism, welfare, etc., so that moniker doesn’t really fit me at all and really never did.

I’m not sure what I am. Mostly, I care about evidence, truth and giving the most freedom to the largest number of people. Secular humanism is an ok term, but I am more militant than that philosophy allows.

I used to call myself a “militant liberal,” but I don’t really want to be associated with mainstream liberals at all at this point since like the conservatives, their entire philosophy is ideologically hollow and epistemologically bankrupt.

What no one ever suggests when debates like this come up – at least no one in a serious policy position – is that we should be working to reduce the human population.

The Left is of course and as usual full of cowards on this.

As a commenter points out reducing the human population to two billion would not exactly solve these problems but would make them much, much easier to work on.

I suspect the maximum long-term sustainable human population of the planet assuming any decent standard of living is ~500 million or so, but technology could probably improve that a bit.

Anyway, the best suggestion isn’t even mentionable in polite society. This and other reasons is why humanity long-term is doomed.

The Left would rather have us all huddling in tents starving to death at a population of 12 billion rather than to tell or to force people to stop dispensing kids into the world like Pez, and the Right is no better. Actually, they are worse, because they only want white women to procreate.

Paul Ehrlich will turn out to be right, just right a little too early.

A population of 5 billion people on this planet is unsustainable, much less 11 or 12. It’s only wishful thinking to believe anything else.

I don’t do wishful thinking.

But I am glad I’ll be dead by 2070 or so. After that time, things on this planet are going to get really desperate.

That people who have kids aren’t putting every ounce of effort into fighting the future sort of mystifies me, though.