"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.

Do people not get that “an eye for an eye” was an argument for proportionality, not for revenge?

Ahistorical motherfuckers.

It’s amazing to me that people can be bored by things like computers, cars, roads/transportation systems and biology, when these things are literally the main determiners of their lives.

Most people are bored, and therefore boring. As the saying goes, the best way to be interesting is to be interested. This is true in many senses.

I am constitutionally incapable of many things that normal people experience such as self-pity, jealousy and depression, among others.

So for that reason I am often puzzled by the things that people do, actions that just seem so counter-productive and avoidable from my perspective.

I realized when I was in the army that most people could make themselves many times more attractive with these few things: losing weight, being more confident, and dressing nicely.

It won’t turn you into Tricia Helfer or George Clooney, but it will take you from The Dude to Mads Mikkelsen on most days. Or for a woman from that little girl who crawls out of the TV in The Ring to Amy Poehler.

People don’t want to hear those hard truths, though. People want to be told, You are perfect just like you are, you special, special snowflake.

No one today wants to be told – and there are whole industries and enclaves of society who stupidly promote avoiding this – that, yeah, you’d be better if you changed everything.

Goddamn, glad I didn’t get that message, or at least did not listen to it. I can’t think of how ghastly and dreadful my life would be if I’d taken that Tumblr SJW bullshit to heart.

One of the things that most surprised me when I learned about it was just how fantastically difficult to produce and how expensive was most clothing before the industrial age.

That even well-off people might have hade only two – or at the most, three – outfits was a bit of a shock.

Most people have no idea that a decent outfit (including shoes) might have cost $5,000 in today’s dollars in 1700. It is just hard to imagine, I’ll grant. All for an ensemble that today might run $150 or less, if one finds a good sale.

That you can still find places that will sell you 5 t-shirts for $10 would absolutely amaze your ancestor from 1800. More than just about anything, I’d wager.

Even though intellectually I know there is nothing “wrong” with uptalk, subconscious disdain is harder to rid oneself of.

To me, anyone who engages in uptalk does and always will sound like a timorous four-year-old. I don’t think that is possible to change.

Whenever I am watching cop shows or the like and someone says, “Does the perp have any priors?” or something similar, all I can think of is, “Oh, he/she was a Bayesian. Cool.”

I’ve always been deeply suspicious of the “10,000 hours/practice” idea of mastery, because in my experience even if I practice for 10 times as long in something in which I have no talent or ability, like operational math, I will still perform far worse than the naturally-talented who practice much less.

This seems to show that this intuition of mine is correct.

Some people have intrinsic gifts. Some people have intrinsic deficits. I know this is hard for liberals to accept – used to be hard for me to accept, even – but it seems to be the case.

When I realized that no matter how hard I studied, no matter what I did, that I’d never be very good at math, it was actually sort of freeing. It liberated me to concentrate on those things I was and am actually good at without wasting all sorts of time in areas that are essentially useless to me.

As an aside, people who are good at math think, Oh, anyone can learn it! Just takes studying. But this doesn’t appear to be the case. Certain brains are probably predisposed to be good at it, and others not so much.

Luckily or unluckily, I am strangely dichotomous. Math and writing/reading usually are fairly correlated, but not so with me; on standardized tests, I usually score in the bottom 10% or below on mathematical ability and in the top 1/10th of 1 percent (depending on how fine-grained the test is) in reading comprehension, analogy analysis and similar skills.

In other words, if you measure my IQ using more math-based assessments, I generally score in the 50-70 range (which is firmly in the mentally retarded category), and if you use a more verbal-based testing regimen, I break the test, scoring off the charts.

Yeah, but of course there is no such thing as natural talent. That wouldn’t be egalitarian.