Of course, someone holding a gun to your head like that means they have no training.

Anyone with training would stand at the very least four feet away from their captive – too far away for them to rush or knock their arm aside.

In reality, if someone trained wants to kill you, they will. You will never see the weapon until it is too late. People trained to kill are also trained to never show the weapon until the very last moment.

No one with training goes running around like in movies waving a gun. Or a knife.

Life isn’t a fantasy. If someone trained is targeting you and wants to kill you, they probably will easily. Simple as that.

In every other situation, having a gun only hurts you.

This guy is unbelievably fast.

The problem with pulling a gun on someone is that you might run into someone like him, and then you are dead (and no, people this fast aren’t always the “good” guys).

Ha, yes, this is most literary novels.

She also skewers YA novels pretty effectively, too.

But this is just hilarious.

“It’s complex because parties are where you’re supposed to have good times, but we never do,” I said.

“Yes,” he said.

“Uuuuuuughhhh,” I moaned, and then all of my bones fell out because of alienation, and I flopped to the floor like a fish, and I went “uuuuuuggghhghghghghgh again.”

“Bluuuuughhhhh,” he agreed, and he was so alienated that he disappeared and stopped existing. What even is the self.

You’re read 95% of all litfic right there. Now go write an essay.

Almost all novel and movie plots have to be unrealistic (even the “true” ones) because the world is far more complex than can be portrayed on screen or in text.

Much (most) must be distilled, elided, eliminated, or condensed.

I am far more forgiving of “plot holes” than most as they aren’t usually plot holes, really – I just assume something happened off screen or off page that the work didn’t have time to show.

That doesn’t excuse bad plotting, though.

Really, though, reality is full of “plot holes.” Why did WWI happen? Plot hole. Why did Germany invade Russia in WWII? Plot hole. Why did America elect George W. Bush twice? Plot hole. I could go on.

We are far more forgiving of the plot holes in reality than we are in fiction, for some reason. Perhaps because we have little choice.

Thinking about the Reddit changes, it’s almost certainly prepping for a sale. That’s the only reason to do something so destructive.

I predict Reddit will be acquired/sold within the next 6-9 months.

Reddit – whether you like it, hate it, or just don’t care about it at all, just had its Digg moment. More info on that here.

This will destroy most of the commenting communities there. I think this is being done to please advertisers, but it will just end up nuking the site.

So if you hate Reddit, rejoice! It doesn’t have that long left to live unless this is reversed.

I’ve noticed a large decrease in interpersonal openness in society, even as we’ve gotten more communications technologies.

This is found society-wide, not just in gender relations – for instance, with how kids generally are not permitted any unscheduled time alone without parental supervision these days.

I remember back in the 80s how very often older girls (13-19 age range) would flirt with younger guys like me to give us practice in dealing with women, and probably to boost their own egos too I’d guess. I’d bet this doesn’t happen at all anymore, and if it does it’s much, much less frequent now. Anecdotally, I saw it frequently in the 80s, and I have not ever seen it since.

Then, it was considered utterly normal and was actually really helpful to me and a lot of men to know how to talk to people to which we were attracted, and not to be intimidated.

These days, it’d probably be considered child molestation or some such bullshit.

I’m not nostalgic for the 80s, but people who do not remember that time well have trouble understanding how vastly different society felt then. Things are definitely better now, especially for gay people and other minorities.

But how to quantify how much more open and approachable people were then? It’s nearly impossible. Because to modern people, it just doesn’t make much sense as the world has changed so much.

I don’t have any real idea exactly why it’s happened, but it definitely has. Things that would have been utterly normal for women or men to do in 1984 would now be likely to get one arrested.

Interesting how society can change so quickly, and how people born after 1980 (who are just slightly too young to have more mature memories of what it was really like) deny that it could have ever really been that way.

The most likely denouement for humanity is extinction within ~10,000 years.

The next-most-likely endpoint of sorts is that humanity is subsumed or absorbed by its computing devices, and the vast, vast majority lives in some sort of simulated world.

I’d put the extinction chances at about 90% within 10,000 years and 99.9999% within a million years.

Not only is this whole damn thing stupid, but the grammar – the attempted use of medieval forms of English – could not be more wrong.

All of the faux-Medieval grammar is atrocious, but what the hell is up with number 4? “Thy” is always a possessive.

Also, “thou” at the time was used informally though unlearned idiots insist on using it formally today. “Ye” or “you” was the formal usage. “Thou” was reserved for friends or as an insult.

What’s weird is that sometimes, some anachronistic words are used correctly.

I know that it’s a terrible attempt to riff off the King James bible version of the 10 Commandments, but that does not excuse the atrocious grammar or the misogynist content.

World Cup. What a bore. Any game that allows a 0-0 draw as something that happens regularly is the biggest snoozefest since recreational sedimentation and cementation watching.

Do not read Robogenesis by Daniel H. Wilson.

I thought it would be an easy, effortless read and it was. Unfortunately, it also read like a newspaper report of some other novel, by a better writer.

It seems to have been written solely to capitalize on the success of the preceding novel, and is a rehash of sorts of that work with none of the original’s charm or plotting. The viewpoint jumps from character to character, but all of the character’s internal voices seem nearly the same.

And in a novel that could’ve been filled with interesting ideas about how cybernetically modified humans might fit into society and what that means, there are many explosions and poor descriptions of military maneuvers that would never occur the way they did in the novel.

I cannot un-recommend this work enough. The author might know something about robots, but he doesn’t know a thing about military strategy, humans, or plot.

The fat acceptance culture which seems to get more zany all the time would do better to spend its time and money investigating and resisting why obesity has soared so incredibly much in the past 30 years rather than becoming some sort of ridiculous parody of itself.

I realize that since I’ve been able to successfully and relatively easily lose a lot of weight myself that I have less sympathy for that whole movement now, but it seems rooted in failure to me.

I don’t think shaming or discriminating against obese people is right, though, and I don’t do it.

And the fact is that obese people don’t tend to make it to advanced old age, so don’t actually cost the medical system much extra (because they die earlier and more quickly due to obesity-related issues).

So whatever, not sure why I am even posting this as it’s boring even me. I’ll stop now.

Before the horrible treatment of Sarah Kendzior, I’d discussed with my partner the fact that the left had nearly as much sexism inherent in it as the right, even if were often expressed differently and more subtly.

Then they went and unfortunately proved my point for me.

The fact is, so-called radicals and progressives are no less likely than others to use rape threats and other threats of violence to police, discipline, and silence women who write political commentary in the public sphere, especially if they depart from “approved” ideological party lines. 

The threats come about of course because Kendzior is adept at fighting hard against existing power structures rather than attempting to accommodate them as most of the left does. She is attacked because she is powerful and persuasive, and her gender is seen as a way for those with patriarchal power to seize the initiative back from someone who is making them all look like irresolute fools.

In Lorde’s song “Ribs” she has a line that is “It feels so scary getting old.” I’d seen people making fun of her for that line as when it was written she was only 16.

But it is in fact such a great line, and those who asperse it are those same people who dismiss any thoughts and experiences of anyone young.

Introspective, thoughtful young people are often extremely aware of the life changes they are going through, usually more so than the normals around them were or ever will be. (It’s my opinion that wisdom doesn’t really have much to do with age. It certainly didn’t with me. In other words, a dumbass is still a dumbass when they are 15 or 50.)

The song reminds me of standing in the doorway of my room at my mom’s house and looking back as I was about to leave for the army. I remember thinking, This is the last time that I will ever look at this room this way again, with these eyes…this is it.

And then striding out, never to return.

That’s what the song is about. Those transitions, those barriers that are destroyed by the mere act of moving past them. And the fact that there is no going back.

Engineeritis sufferers always insist on spouting off about how social scientists don’t produce any predictive results.

Wrong.

By observing these types of interactions, Gottman can predict with up to 94 percent certainty whether couples—straight or gay, rich or poor, childless or not—will be broken up, together and unhappy, or together and happy several years later.

Of course in reality, social scientists have many, many valid findings and produce scads of predictive results. But I just wanted to highlight one in particular since I noticed it.