This is what I mean about nerd-sharming. (Though I only agree with about 50% of the piece.)

I live in a world where feminists throwing weaponized shame at nerds is an obvious and inescapable part of daily life. Whether we’re “mouth-breathers”, “pimpled”, “scrawny”, “blubbery”, “sperglord”, “neckbeard”, “virgins”, “living in our parents’ basements”, “man-children” or whatever the insult du jour is, it’s always, always, ALWAYS a self-identified feminist saying it. Sometimes they say it obliquely, referring to a subgroup like “bronies” or “atheists” or “fedoras” while making sure everyone else in nerddom knows it’s about them too.

Amanda Marcotte is one of the worst, also, for this. She really hates nerdy men. It’s a lot easier and less risky to punch down, I guess.

But since when did it become ok to shit on the downtrodden?

And the idea that there is more harassment committed by nerds — as some feminists now believe — is fucking absurd. Being a member of a frat is associated with something like a 300% increased chance of that person having raped someone. Nope, I ain’t fucking making that statistic up. And I’ve actually seen male lawyers commit sexual harassment right in front of me.  Never have seen a nerd — who is usually too shy to talk to a woman anyway — do that (though I believe it happens, just not as often).

Indeed, harassment is very real and common, but re-defining harassment to include, “Someone I didn’t like because he doesn’t fit my idea of man and was in my general vicinity and might have even looked at me” doesn’t help feminism, doesn’t help women and it ends up hurting a lot of other people.

This is where having no historical knowledge gets you.

At least some people are trying to learn, I guess. More people need to try harder.

To my grandfather, Irish and Welsh people were definitely not white. They were scum, no better than black people. But he didn’t call them black people.

Lorde would not have been white to my grandfather, being Irish and Croatian by heritage. I know this seems really impossible to some (dumb) people, but this was true for roughly ~100 years in the US.

Anyway, over the long term (100-300 years) I suspect that racism towards brown people will also disappear, and instead we’ll have racism against AIs for a while.

It’s conventional wisdom that Mockingjay is inferior to the other two books in the Hunger Games trilogy.

I’ve read the series twice now. I don’t agree. I think people are mostly reacting to the grimness of the book. For that grimness and unflinchingness, Mockingjay is my favorite of the series.

It’s comfortless by necessity. The trilogy as a whole is one of the few — in or out of YA — that grapples seriously with propaganda, responsibility for choices, the limits of one’s power and how best to use it, how even making a good and right choice might condemn others to pain and death.

Mockingjay is the mortar round that has been fired high up into the air and is whistling down on the reader, an inevitable shell of consequence from all the choices the characters made in the prior books.

(Warning: spoilers might follow.)

What’s also odd is that people — and even some of the same people! — complain about the fairy tale ending of Mockingjay. Did these folks even read the books? The denouement is survival, and barely that. It’s implied that the brutality and monstrousness of humanity has not receded, and perhaps never will. In the end, Katniss lost her sister, Gale, and 95% of the people that she grew up with.

If that’s a fairytale ending, then it’s a shitty fucking fairytale.

Mockingjay is in fact disliked because it’s not really exciting or thrilling, but rather a slog through grief and loss and the consequences thereof. (By the way, one of the points that Collins is making with the Hunger Games books is that we all still do find games of death exciting, vivifying, and that is in fact human — but it’s also an implicit criticism, forcing us to look at ourselves and ask, could we, can we be better? This criticism and examination reaches its critical turn in Mockingjay.)

It’s one of the most adult books I’ve ever read.

Most of the prissy supposed better “adult” novels about similar topics shy away; Collins never does. However, in Mockingjay she shines a million watt floodlight on it all and says, This is what we’ve built, and what we’ve built will destroy us.

Humanity’s radio bubble.

Also mostly irrelevant, because at the rate a radio broadcast attenuates, beyond 20 or 30 light-minutes out from earth, unless you know exactly where to point a very large and powerful detector, information theory (a pretty damn hard and fast limit) says that nothing ever made could detect any non-directed normal-power broadcast.

So aliens in Alpha Centauri and beyond aren’t watching Howdy Doody because the energy from that and anything else ever broadcast from earth is utterly and completely subsumed in and by the background noise of the universe.

There’s been nothing we’ve done that anyone not in this solar system could even know about in principle, with any technology.

It’d require a exawatt or maybe zettawatt laser to send a message to any place likely to harbor life, and then we’d have to know exactly where to point the device.

Kind of casts a new light on the likelihood of SETI detecting alien life, really.

Why are all the liberals coming out of the woodwork to insist that the Islamic-inspired terror attack in Paris has nothing at all to do with Islam?

How fucking daft can you be? Apparently so daft your brain has a draft.

What inspired my rant below was this, which I found here.

As someone who is self-employed, insurance for me and my family is absurdly expensive. After the ACA was enacted, my insurance cost went up and the level of coverage went down.

What? You mean all the things good little liberals like Amanda Marcotte said about how those meanie Obama-haters were all lying when they said their premiums shot up under ACA – you mean that wasn’t true?*

How COULD IT BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE?

So yes kids, many people’s coverage has both worsened and gotten much more expensive under the ACA, despite the deranged shit Marcotte and people like her routinely spew.

*Note: I am not a Tea Partier or a conservative (quite, quite the opposite), but I will gladly link to a conservative site when it’s correct.

Dear Obama Hater – You Just Wasted A Decade Of Your Life.

No. I hate Obama and I find it pretty satisfying.

I wrote back in 2009 on my old blog after Larry Summers was installed as a conquering king in the Obama administration that nothing would be different in the Obama presidency.

I wish I had been fucking wrong.

What’d we get? The ACA, that giveaway to insurance companies? More killing of innocent brown people? Guantanamo still open and inequality rising, with no end in sight. Nothing done about climate change, and no real attempt to do so.

Sounds great, where do I sign up?

Obama is a drone-murdering lapdog of Wall Street whose defenders should be laughed at. He had an ineffective passive presidency during the most opportunity for possible real change in history during the financial crisis that he completely and utterly fucking squandered. A dead cat could’ve done better. Majority Dems in Congress, and no real change. (In fact, the old order was fortified and enlarged.)

I see little baby pseudo-liberals pitching fits like three-year-olds on the floor in Wal-Mart, about those meanies just won’t worship poor Obama like they should.

No sympathy here for such deficient thought. If you can’t evaluate evidence, got no use for you and haven’t got a thing to say.

(And no, “It could have been worse” is not a valid defense.)

Reminds me of something that happened to me.

Some amount of hissy background noise, you see, is unavoidable for analogue audio links. Analogue broadcast radio, landline phones, pre-digital mobile phones. But digital systems don’t work like that. They pretty much work perfectly, or not at all. There may still be background noise because microphones pick up environmental sounds from traffic or weather or the users’ heavy breathing or what-have-you, and mobile phones can have drop-outs in the signal when one or both handsets in a call just can’t hear a cell base-station, but nothing in the transmission system creates its own hiss.

Yep, a little tiny bit of background hiss is artificially inserted into 99%+ of phone systems today so that people realize they are still working (and they are used to hearing it).

A few years ago, we put in a new VOIP phone system at work. Since bandwidth on the network was plentiful, I changed the codec to be much better and to produce much higher quality calls. I basically took the quality from standard analog phone quality (bad) to a decent-quality MP3.

Oh, the complaints were epic.

It didn’t “sound natural” or it sounded “too natural” (yeah, I know – contradictory). It “made voices sound weird.” And more.

Note that there no technical problems at all. It worked perfectly. People were just not used to hearing very high-quality voice over the phone.

I had to change it back in less than four hours. People couldn’t take it.

I learned that people mostly actually prefer very low-quality audio over the phone, at least with colleagues and acquaintances. My guess is that because it feels less intimate.

Wow, people are really uncreative.

A long time ago, I tried to convince an ex-girlfriend to name the new cat Cat R. Pillar, but she’d have none of that. I figured we could call her “Pill” for short which I think is a good name for a cat.

No wonder we broke up.

This is one of the reasons I don’t consider myself a liberal.

Humor is one of the best ways to deal with trauma, both as an individual and as a culture.

I’ve been in life and death situations a few times in my life.

Strangely enough ( to idiots like the above), humor did not vacate the premises.

When I was almost shot in the head by ricochets, one of the first things the dude standing next to me (who was also almost shot) said after the bullets went screaming by was, “Guess it’s too late to say ‘duck.’”

We both laughed.

And if you’ve read anything at all about the people who actually suffered from and survived the holocaust, humor was present – shockingly to fucktards, I know – in the very death camps themselves.

Liberals are mostly self-serious assclowns who mistake ideology for morality, pseudo-intellectuall faffing about for ethics, and making the right faces at the right moments for caring.

Another thing I won’t have any goddamn part in.

The problem I have with some of the hating “Nice Guys” – even though I agree with much of it – is that all too often, perhaps most of the time, it becomes an exercise in bullying and nerd-shaming.

For most people, especially people who are used to being underdogs, there is nothing more satisfying than being able to bully someone who can’t fight back.

This is why I hate most people, by the way – the bullied are often just as content to become the bullies when they can get away with it.

And shaming socially awkward people (mostly men) is one way that some (most?) feminists and others can get away with it at the moment, in the guise of shaming Nice Guys.

Look, I hate the whole Nice Guy shtick, too. It’s vile. But just like with the concept of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, the concept – while useful at first – morphed into something that came to encompass anyone who is socially awkward and male at the same time. And lately, I’ve even seen socially awkward women shamed by these idiots.

There is no one easier to shame than unattractive, socially-awkward people. That’s why it’s done so much!

Rarely do I see anyone but the rare few like Edward Snowden attempt to shame the truly powerful.

Fuck, that shit is dangerous! That’s why aint’ nearly nobody doing it.

But denigrating those too weak or awkward to fight back, now that’s pure fun!

When I first started seeing talk of Nice Guys it was an honest critique of a genuine phenomenon, of clueless and entitled young men attempting to parley (usually disingenuous) friendship into sex and then being grossly offended that this transaction did not ring up at the register.

Lately, this idea of the “Nice Guy” has more become a method to attack and shame those who are usually physically and/or socially unattractive (usually both) who express the shocking desire that they might one day want to be in a relationship.

And that’s bullying, and I won’t have any part in it no matter what it costs me.

I love technology, but I don’t really fit in the modern era in most ways. Social media is just lost on me. It’s a mental trap that sucks you in and makes you dumber.

“The volume is much greater,” Reichelt says. “Now, keeping up with people non-stop on social media is mundane, not a novelty.”

The idea of keeping up with social media makes me feel nauseous.

This was one of the dumbest decisions Microsoft has ever made.

It’s the main reason that any home lab I make in the future will be running on CentOS (clone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux) and one of the reasons I decided to obtain my RHCE – if Microsoft like Mozilla decides to alienate its core evangelists, then its future might be limited.

I had to set up a Microsoft lab to obtain my MCSE, but when I rebuild it, it’ll be with CentOS.

Good work, Microsoft. See you’ve learned well from Mozilla.

Upstream Color is the worst film I’ve seen in the past few years.

I watched it over a year ago now and it stuck with me like a case of antibiotic-resistant staph.

All style and no substance, all gimcrackery and hackery with so much pretension that it even appeals to people who apparently don’t even like movies.

The first 10 minutes are actually pretty decent. It had the base of a good story, perhaps.

But then it went oh so very wrong.

It’s probably not the worst film I’ve ever seen – I’ve seen thousands of movies – but it’s certainly in the top 20 or 30 or so.

I need to build a fucking robot that follows around and punches all Firefox developers in the face every 30 seconds. For infinity.

For the first time today, I got bit in the wild by the ridiculously fucking idiotic decision to drop support for a type of encryption that millions of devices that use a web interface (even in the enterprise these days, that’s most of them) use for config.

Yeah, that’s right. No way to log in. None. This isn’t some software from ancient times. Nope. It’s a NetApp SAN simulator from 2013. There is no newer release. This is current software. I am learning NetApp SANs and since I don’t want to spend $50,000 on one of their SANs…yeah, you get the idea.

And Firefox doesn’t support it at all.

Whoever the assclown ignoramus who made this fucking decision should have my infinity-punching robot set to initiate walloping every second.

When I am in an enterprise environment again, I will make every effort to eradicate all installs of Firefox on the network — both with corporate policy and with scripting — with extreme prejudice.

I no longer recommend anyone use Firefox under any circumstances.

By the way, I was able to use Chrome to log in.

(Note: I actually use PaleMoon, but this code is also present in PaleMoon.)