Month: September 2019

Mirror World

Chill Regular-ass Post

After His Mother Died, Adam Smith Found The Secret in the Freezer.

This woman sounds exactly like my mom. I’m pretty sure my mother didn’t have a dead baby in the freezer, but all Barbara’s behaviors, her drinking, her berating of people around her, unwillingness to deal with her own problems — it’s all the same.

My mom also often claimed to be pregnant to worry me and my sister, or to try to disturb us. Why she thought this would disturb us I don’t know. I wonder if she ever really was? I suspect not, but as with Barbara it was impossible to tell which of my mother’s claims were lies and which had any sort of veracity.

Sad Times at Ridgemont Low

Chill Uncategorized

Sad fucking times we live in when the only capable systems thinkers are literal children, meanwhile the adults mince about puling that the kids aren’t being polite enough about the destruction of the world they’ll have to inherit.

It might be too little too late, but at least Greta Thunberg and her myrmidons are fighting the long defeat. If there had been 10 million of her 20 years ago, we wouldn’t need her now.

Groveling

Chill Regular-ass Post

What bothers me most about the call-out and cancel culture (which supposedly doesn’t exist, but very much does) is the groveling that’s expected afterward. If you don’t grovel, you are truly done for.

Well, folks, I do not grovel. I might apologize. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s what an honorable person does when they wrong someone else.

But groveling? Hell to the no. I will never NEVER grovel. Not unless you torture me so much that I break. But of my own free will? Absolutely not.

Cloudiness

Chill Regular-ass Post

Why do cloud leaks keep happening? Because no one has a clue how their instances are configured.

Huh! You know, when the propaganda for this whole cloud craze was spooling up, I was told that it’d all be so simple you wouldn’t even need an IT department anymore, that it’d save vast amounts of money with no risk at all.

Of course, I pushed back, saying that if anything it’d get more complex, there’d be more moving parts and while you might save money in some areas, it’d not be this elysian vision of no IT department with perfectly-behaved systems requiring no maintenance at all.

Turns out I was right. Just as I predicted, and as any competent IT person knew, the cloud would not obviate the need for systems management and understanding, and plenty of systems administrators (and related positions, some now re-named but basically the same) would be just as needed.

Funny how that worked out.

Pure Hatred

Chill Uncategorized

I write a lot about how much I loathe the Mozilla organization and its vast hypocrisy. I do hate them. And they deserve it.

People like me as long as as six years ago were calling them out on their conspicuous lies, the largest one of which is the claim that they wouldn’t remove the ability to customize the browser and how it functions. It was an obvious goal all along, this goal of limitation, but they simply could not claim it as their ambition as all their users and proselytizers would immediately abandon ship.

Of course, most did anyway due to that and other poor Mozilla decisions.

They made a calculation that was clearly foolish even at the time and as many (including me) predicted it would, they completely failed, all the while alienating their most ardent users while picking up no new converts to their browser.

They made toddler-level mistakes, harming their product greatly, all for nothing.

Therefore, they deserve all my derision and more.

Realizing Nothing

Chill Regular-ass Post

Realizing that the average computer user is incapable of unzipping a file and locating the documents after doing so boggles my fucking mind. How do people use computers for 10 years and not know the first thing about how to do anything?

This is like getting in a car after driving for years and not knowing what the steering wheel is or does.

Enemine

Chill Uncategorized

The only living person saying much that makes sense is Greta Thunberg. Those who survive will look back on her as remarkably prescient as the rest of us failed to heed her stern admonishment while the world burned.

We were warned; we didn’t listen. Those who deserve it the least will be harmed the most.

No, I don’t know how bad it’ll be in the developed world. I’d guess only about 20% of those in the 0-16 demographic will die of direct climate-related causes (including war). I’d guess no less than 10% will. But the tail risks are unfathomably large and old people just don’t give a fuck.

Thus, I love that old people hate Greta because she exposes their hypocrisy, their myopia, their malfeasance. They know she’s telling the truth about what climate change will do, and to whom, and they cannot handle it. It drives them mad with rage.

Port Knight

Chill Uncategorized

And the even funnier thing is that this screenshot actually shows Kiera Knightley as Queen Amidala, as one of her handmaidens (Knightley as Sabé) was pretending to be her for security reasons. Natalie Portman is the handmaiden on the right with her eyes looking to her own right (our left).

Knightley and Portman look very much alike, so it’s extremely hard to tell, but Knightley has eyes that are somewhat farther apart than Portman (easiest way to distinguish them in this shot).