Such a great song.

I really am completely fascinated how with at every turn, Mozilla managed to make the worst possible decisions regarding Firefox. They would’ve done better with coin flips or entrail reading.

Partially my fascination is due to my witnessing it in real time over a decade — it’s rare to watch an implosion where there were so many warnings combined with so little meaningful action and to be able to have a front-row seat to it all, with most of it out in the open (as Mozilla was a fairly open organization). Most failures are hidden; this one was right there in front of you in all its ugliness.

Still, too bad. They had every chance and threw it all away.

Corporations ruin everything.

This, of course, will be used to mainly clamp down on already-marginalized communities as it always is, and just the threat of banning will make the platform less vital and interesting. I don’t consume porn blogs, but many of the blogs I did visit on Tumblr had nsfw content often or occasionally. Those will all be banned now.

Time to abandon that platform altogether.

I want to highlight something Staci said about deadlifting at Nerd Fitness.

Whenever anyone asks me where I got my shoulders/abs/etc, I answer the same: deadlifts. Why do a million crunches when I can just do deadlifts instead? Way more fun! Plus, deadlifting is actually more effective.

Yes. You can do literally a million crunches over many years or a few months of deadlifting and get exactly the same effect. Deadlfiting is the single most effective weightlifting exercise there is, bar none, not even a contest and none other is even a remotely close second, especially when safety and ease is considered. That’s why it’s my favorite; it has the most bang for the buck.

A deadlift is a system shock, in a good way: it works nearly every muscle you have, and it doesn’t take all that many reps to do it, either.

If I could only do one weightlifting exercise ever again, it’d be deadlift because I’d still meet 65%+ of my fitness goals without doing anything else.

Deadlifting two hours a week or so will be more effective than any 50 hours of other exercises you might do, so if you aren’t doing that one, you’re probably spending a lot of unnecessary time that you don’t have to spend.

If we ever do detect an extraterrestrial presence approaching or landing on earth, we are probably doomed if it’s not robotic.

The only conceivable reasons to traverse interstellar space would be colonization or religion. Either one would be very bad news. There are no economic reasons to do so under any easy-to-imagine energy regime in this universe.

Why are Americans absolutely obsessed with driving the very largest vehicle they can buy? I cannot understand it. These vehicles are not pleasant to drive — they are impossible to park, don’t drive all that well, and put everyone else at risk.

My car is not small (was one of the largest sedans you can buy) and it’s increasingly dwarfed by the absolute behemoths on the road on all sides. I swear people would buy even larger vehicles if they knew how to drive them. Soccer moms in 18 wheelers would be terrifying.

Lately, there is a tactic in the FA and anti-fitness community of talking about someone who is skinny and fit (particularly if they are a woman) as “unnatural.” This is insanity. This is harmful to everyone.

If being fit and and thin is unnatural, I’m proud to be unnatural and some human perversion (who can still climb a flight of stairs without dying). I’m also glad to be with my sublime and awesome “unnatural” partner.

And now I can finally do overhand pull-ups reliably again for the first time in 18 years and I’ll keep doing those while other people cry about my unnaturalness and huff across parking lots chasing me, throwing tater tots ineffectually.

This has always confused me.

Ever seen a non-technical user move the mouse with the same dexterity as you or I? I haven’t. The mouse always roams around for a month of Sundays before it eventually arrives in the right place.

It took me a week or two to master the mouse. I haven’t gotten significantly better at it since I started using a mouse in 1994 or so. It’s not hard. So it always makes me wonder what the hell is going on when someone (not old, not disabled, just non-technical) who has been using a computer for 20+ years has difficultly being at all accurate with a mouse.

I guess I just cannot understand why people don’t get better at tasks like this, even in areas that involve basic dexterity only, when it has to do with a computer. It’s like if I attempted to play the piano for 20 years but couldn’t even muddle through “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” at the end of all that time.

I can’t explain it. I don’t even know how to think about it, which bothers me.

My tolerance for existing in crowded urban spaces has decreased markedly as I’ve gotten older. After only about 15 minutes in downtown Asheville a few months ago, I was just done. I couldn’t take any more. I wasn’t nervous, anxious, etc. Just imagine “annoyed” except if you turned up annoyed to the level of irked you’d be if a million bees kept flying at top speed into your face one after another — not stinging you, but dive-bombing you over and over again.

I was always more at home in the country, near a quiet river, and my predisposition to that environment only increases every year. Urban spaces are certainly better for the planet and probably just fine for most people (as a friend points out) but for me, they are hell — a particularly annoying type of hell that is in some ways worse than just being anxious or in pain.

Urban spaces, no matter how pleasant, just aren’t for me. Give me emptiness and solitude.