America. Where being really fit and working hard to get that way is being “ill.”

My friends, what a country indeed.

I guarantee that if I could control (and I mean fully control 24 hours a day) anyone’s diet and fitness, I could make them thin and in shape.

The most valuable lesson I learned in the army is that some things might be very hard and uncomfortable, but they are still worth doing.

I said I wouldn’t post about this crap any more, but hey my blog, my rules.

As they say, deal with it. Or don’t. I ain’t care.

This is why I want nothing to do with the conventional left.

Five cartoonists had just been killed by a death squad, and many on the left and the right seemed uncertain about which party had committed the greater offense.

Completely foul. Especially as the vast vast majority of the people — including most of the “educated” Left — didn’t actually understand any of the cartoons!

Political ideology as such is dead. Both sides of it. Something new might coalesce before we go extinct due to global climate change and the shutting down of the oxygen cycle.

But probably not.

Working in customer service must be the most depressing, enervating job in all history.

I’ve never done so but in life I’ve noticed that the dumbest people also tend to be the loudest and most obnoxious on some sort of logarithmic scale.

Don’t know why this tendency is so prevalent in humans but it means that in many customer service jobs the majority of your interactions are likely to be with vociferous dimwits of the very worst kind.

I am glad I don’t really have “soft skills” to speak of. Because my very first job like that my childhood would come back  and I’d be flying over the counter and drop-kicking someone.

Riots are the language of those who do not have the voice to express the loss of what they rightly know has been taken from them.

Are you paying attention to Baltimore now or not?

Then the riots worked.

As I’ve seen more skinny shaming over the years, I’ve always wondered why so many people come up with so many excuses for why they are fat?

Does it seem to most people like something they have no control over?

It never seemed that way to me. It’s not your genetics. It’s not your conditions. No one but you puts the food in your mouth. Simple as that.

I always knew precisely why I was as large as a barge: I ate too goddamn much.

With a few quite minor and overestimated-by-most-people variations, weight is simply calories in, calories out.

I’d be a lot more prone to not smack down the FA movement at every turn if they didn’t constantly engage in anti-scientific skinny-shaming crap. They also promote really unhealthy ideas that directly harm people.

I grew up in a place where 30 years ago obesity was already as bad as it is now in the rest of America. I remember my friends and I would go to Burger King or the rib joint and see people order two plates of food and a “Diet Coke, cuz I’m watching my weight.” Ok then.

I’m almost tempted to gain 100 pounds and lose it again to demonstrate it can be done even by someone who is not a personal trainer.

But I do not like being hefty.

Antidote. Look at those triceps. Good lord that takes a lot of work. (I know just how much thanks to the army.)

(That’s Qimmah Russo, by the way.)

(Also by the way, of course having a body like that is not realistic for most people. It takes working out around two hours a day, bare minimum. I used to work out 2-4 hours every weekday. Did that for five years. So, yeah, I do know.)

Goddamn I did a lot of IT stuff today.

HyperV failover clustering.

Started creating a NetApp vfiler.

Various VMware tasks.

Worked on documentation of said HyperV cluster.

Installed a firewall remotely.

Created an IPSec VPN tunnel, tested it.

Explained how VOIP phone systems work.

Prepped a firewall for a site-to-site VPN connection.

And probably some other things I am forgetting.

It is a true fact (heh) that most of the the men that are “needed” to protect against violence would not be needed if there were no men.

I don’t think violence would be utterly absent in an all-female world.

But I do wonder how it’d be different. It probably would be, especially at first.

That is a singularity though of sorts and after that nothing is predictable.

Is this a good test? I couldn’t do this.

But when the doctor asked him to count backward from 100, subtracting seven from each number — 100, 93, 86, 79 — a look of confusion washed over his face.

I also would count as drunk all the time to most cops as I can’t recite the alphabet backwards. Oh, I can I guess but it takes me about 20 minutes. Maybe more.

My mind just does not work in those ways. And with numbers especially, I am utterly lost. I probably could eventually do the counting backwards by sevens thing but it also would take me a very very long time too.

And yet I can understand very complex systems lickety-split. But ask me to do a math problem more complex than basic algebra, it’ll be an age of the universe before I finish it.

Of all the desktop environments out there, I like XFCE the best.

It is solid, gets out of the way and doesn’t try to hide absolutely everything. It operates like a desktop environment should and not like some phone interface somehow incongruously grafted onto a desktop machine.

I also recently made the mistake of upgrading to WordPress 4.2 which completely changed how the “Press This” tool works. It now has most of its functionality removed, has been optimized for mobile usage and no longer has the features I need to post easily on Epicene Cyborg.

When will I learn? Since 2010 or so the rule has been: never upgrade anything.

I am unsure what I am going to do about my other site as what used to take me a few clicks now takes 10 to 100 times as long to do as it did before (from roughly 2-3 seconds to 20 seconds to 3-5 minutes depending on the complexity). I am not sure I will have time to maintain the site anymore due to the WordPress feature removals.

My partner and I were talking about this and she stated wisely that she was unsure of the wisdom of removing all features that power users depend on to make it simple enough that even your cat could post to your blog.

I don’t know either but designers (and wanna-be designers) seem intent on destroying anything useful. Removing features doesn’t make something easier to use. It just makes it useless.

I can no longer recommend WordPress as a blogging platform. It has been getting worse over the years and is now completely broken in most ways I care about.

Be aware that when people inveigh against and call for Reddit to be shut down that they (and perhaps you) are doing the dirty work of the class of (mostly) corporate types who want all such bastions of relatively free expression and thought to disappear from the internet.

This is who really wants Reddit shut down. It’s the same people who want university humanities departments to disappear. The same who want to turn public schools into corporate cloisters churning out rubber-stamping drones. The same who opposed the ACA (which I did as well, but for different reasons) and would prefer that people are chained to a corporation for their health care.

The truth is Reddit is as diverse as any site with millions and millions of members.

In true diversity one is going to encounter some unpleasantness.

It’s interesting that the neoliberals, corporatists and neoconservatives have successfully and quite intelligently adopted so much of the language, practices and even doctrine of leftist activists and social justice warriors — so much so that many of those types foolishly agree with them — to destroy so many humanistic and diverse enterprises.

Scars I’ve got. I don’t have many I guess considering the crazy shit I’ve done:

§Scar on my right ring and pinky finger from punching some guy in the face, before I had fighting training. (He attempted to steal my rucksack in basic training and then pushed me over a stack of rucksacks when I grabbed it back. Then I punched him.)

§Scar on my chin from some older kid with a ring punching me when I was 12 or 13.

§Nose out of alignment/lumpy from having it broken when I was 15. Beat up by a group of 3 older kids after not backing down over sitting at “their” lunch table. I did not go to the hospital because no health insurance and poor. My mom attempted to “fix” it. Did not do a very good job.

§Scar on my left hand from gouging a hole in my hand somehow during a jump into Kazakhstan.

§Scar on my right hand from catching some feral cats for a friend.

§An internal scar I guess? A poorly-healed broken bone in my right foot, probably broken during a jump. I didn’t notice it at the time and it doesn’t bother me now other than looking knobby.

That’s all. You?

I’ve never much cared for Dooce (Heather Armstrong) or her writing. It all seemed too manufactured, too curated specifically to appear un-curated. And it all seemed completely faux-spontaneous to me. It was like reading about someone’s life with anything interesting sanitized out. Why people found it fascinating I can’t guess. Mundanity appeals to the mundane. Or perhaps it’s just not my thing.

However what she writes here is I think true.

Attentions spans are now 140 characters long, sometimes as short as a video or a picture that self destructs in a few seconds. I have stood in a line at a coffee shop and watched as seven people in a row ordered something without looking up from their phone.

On balance — and notice please that I am saying on balance — Twitter and smart phones are negatives for society. Yes, they provide many valuable things and would seem absolutely science-fictional to someone from 1970.

However like Facebook they are a further method of disengagement while appearing to be engaged.

For all of Armstrong’s faults, at least her writing was actual writing and not a 140-character stream of garbled discontinuous bullshit.

The internet as a useful and positive and non-corporate-captured boon for society peaked around 1999-2002.

After that it has become a tool of control and a place for increasingly witless people to spout nonsense and ignore their own lives.

The fat acceptance movement, the Sad Puppies Hugo debacle, the Tea Party entire, the complete disregard for global climate change — all these demonstrate that the American mind is mainly used for self-delusion.

We could power entire nations with all the delusional thinking that we have.

I wish evolutionary psychology were a better science so it could possibly definitively explain this.

This is actually a more interesting discussion than I was expecting on Tumblr.

I’ve been to a strip club once to see what it was like when I was 18 or 19. It was not really fun. I don’t enjoy social interaction normally, so paying for it seems even worse to me.

Luckily the club was very not busy so one of the women sat down with us at our table and talked with us for an hour. (Yes, I did tip her.) She was a student at UF. I told an older female friend later on that I’d gone and what had happened and she said, “That was me 15 years ago.” She’d put herself through the very same school partially with sex work.

About the club, I don’t expect I’d enjoy it any more now. Probably less. I am more curmudgeonly and anti-social than I was then, though more socially capable.

And as expected even though it wasn’t very busy, there were a lot of creepy and rude men in there (which is why I suspect that woman spent so much time at our table).

Not my scene at all.

I hadn’t looked at the byline and I was only a few paragraphs into this article when I thought, Wait, is this article written by Natalie Angier? It’s annoying me greatly so I bet it’s written by Natalie Angier.

And it was.

I don’t mean to pick on Angier particularly. Her writing just grates on me, sort of like some people react to fingernails on a chalkboard (which doesn’t bother me at all, by the way).

Kind of an amazing feat that someone’s writing can be recognized so easily.

As much as I’ve tried, I’ve not yet sussed out what makes Angier’s writing nettle me so much — perhaps its cloying cutesiness combined with sophomoric flourishes best left in the first draft.

Douglas Hofstadter is another one whose writing just alternately bores me and makes me want to hurl the book across the room, and for many of the same reasons.

He’s the only person I know who can expand a fifty-page essay into a thousand-page doorstop.

Yeah, that’d be Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid.

The tagline for that book was, “A metaphorical fugue on minds and machines in the spirit of Lewis Carroll.”

The tag line of course should’ve been, “One boring over-hyped idea per 200 pages that only those under four years old have any trouble understanding in two seconds or less.”