I’m not as smart as everyone said I was. I was a gifted kid, so how do I deal with being an average adult?

I’m smarter than everyone said I was, and even all the people who hated me thought I was pretty smart. But I didn’t need to prove it to anyone and didn’t care about school, so I just did my own thing. Learned a lot more that way and didn’t need external validation to thrive.

Most “gifted” kids get into the program because they are from rich or well-off families. I was not. My partner wasn’t, either. We both got in on natural fucking talent rather than our parents pushing for it or having us tested. I don’t think this makes me better than anyone else; I am very concerned with cognitive inequality reinforcing and exacerbating other inequalities.

Once I got into gifted, though, it was obvious that most people in there were certainly a bit above average, but none of them seemed all that bright to me. Most just had the right parents. None of them could hold much of a conversation with me. (Later on, I realized there was one kid in there who was my equal or greater, but he never spoke up or did much of anything due to extreme shyness, so I didn’t know it at the time.)

If this all sounds very arrogant to you, you’ll get over it — I’m just reporting what happened. Most gifted kids seemed pretty deficient to me and I only kept going to get out of class.

I mean, no evidence aside from then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton supporting a brutal coup in Honduras that led to a proliferation of death squads and the targeted murder of social movement leaders. But no evidence aside from that, I guess… https://t.co/jRUn5JiCvX

— George Ciccariello-Maher (@ciccmaher) October 20, 2018

We didn’t wholly create the refugee situation in Central America, but we and the Democrats (and Republicans) certainly had much to do with its genesis and continuance — Hillary Clinton and the Democrats fully included in that.

It doesn’t mean I support the moronic idea of open borders, but I do recognize culpability for making people’s lives much worse when I see it.

I am now the person I always knew I’d be when I was a kid, and that many in my family and nearly all of my peers told me I had no hope of being.

Pretty cool. I am very lucky that inspiration doesn’t work on me, but derision and spite do — and lord I got plenty of that.

Count on Hillary Clinton running again in 2020.

I think I just threw up a little in my mouth. Ok, not just in my mouth. And not just a little.

Well, the Dems are masterful at bad ideas and this is the worst idea of all, so it makes some sense in that cursed cosmos.

Something I’ve been pondering lately is why kitsch looked kitschy to me even when I was a young kid?

I didn’t go to art museums. I’d never been inside an expensive house. I’d read only a few books about art and interior design, and hadn’t paid all that much attention to them if I’m being honest.

So why did velvet Elvises, chicken-based decor, pink flamingoes, Hummel figurines and the like feel kitschy and schlocky even when I had little to no basis of comparison? I have been struggling to figure this out and I really cannot come up with any answers.

Woo, glad I sold a buncha stocks recently. It’s all down in the sewer now. Thank you, Netflix, for that 311% gain but I don’t trust you long term since you are bleeding money and losing content.

I could be wrong, but 311% is a fuckload of right. I’ll take it and preserve my capital and live to buy when the prices makes sense.

Lena Hall, ya’ll (and did you really have to rub it in our faces how much you work out — ok, I am both impressed and a bit envious).

Radioactive:

Zombie:

The good old days weren’t so good. I don’t think people realize what it was like.

I got my first modem a few years later, and modems at the time were flaky hardware only BARELY supported by single-tasking systems that had never been designed to handle any signal arriving anywhere at a time they did not choose. If your computer didn’t respond fast enough to interrupts, a modem could crash it. If you were running anything that didn’t suspend and resume its business correctly (and most things didn’t because they’d never had to before) or anything that was coded to use the same interrupt, the modem would crash it. If the software on your end ever started taking too long to execute per input character, the modem would fill up the short hardware buffer faster than your software could empty it, and crash it. If you transmitted characters faster than the software running on the remote system could handle them, you’d crash the remote system. There were no error correcting protocols because none of us had the compute power to run them fast enough to avoid a crash at the speeds the modems ran.

That’s why I always laugh when I hear people say things like “Security should’ve been built in from the beginning! That was the mistake!”

Motherfucker, no. Just no. The computers we had back then were so very slow. So slow that you can’t even imagine. I could type significantly faster than my first modem could echo back the characters. I could barely run the one application that I wanted to at the time. There was no CPU or memory for security or for even the application working half the time. If we’d built security in from the beginning, there never would’ve been home computers, BBSes or the internet.

Some games and programs I loaded from cassette tapes (SYSTEM [press enter] – ATOM [press enter] – then press “play” on the cassette deck, wait, then press / then enter) loaded so slowly that I’d start it up, go outside to play for a while, and then 30 minutes later come back — and it still wouldn’t be done.

I think most people under 35ish have no idea just how stupendously slow, balky and resource-limited early home computers were. Then, they seemed like miracles

Now, I can’t believe we ever used them.