My pronouns for today are “Everybody Wang Chung Tonight” and “Verschlimmbesserung.”

Your xkcd passwords are pwned.

This was always a terrible idea, and Randall Munroe gets way too much credit…for everything. His comics are barely funny. His ideas are generally execrable.

A good password: ?q}UEW8'&a6k0E{V^M%n'9T!SKHS=bkP

A bad password: Anything in the dictionary, anyone’s name, anything shorter than 12 characters, any combination of anything in the dictionary, anything found in any book anywhere, and anything Randall Munroe thinks is a good password.

Angie Schmitt is odd to read because she whipsaws between some truly insightful ideas to just awful, intelligence-deficient takes such as this:

I think traveling is a little bit overrated/overcelebrated, especially in the age of Instagram.

We might be able to learn more by reading a book sometimes than dropping into some unrepresentative tourist spot in some other country that's culturally similar to our own.

— Angie Schmitt 🚶‍♀️🚴‍♀️ 🚌 (@schmangee) December 9, 2019

Traveling is probably the best thing I’ve ever done, whether it was on my own or state-sponsored. I would not trade it for anything. This person said it best:

I can’t possibly disagree with this more. Traveling gives people perspective and appreciation for other cultures. Social media pictures -edited by an “influencer”- can not replace an actual experience.

— Allison Brooks (@AllisonMetro) December 9, 2019

Schmitt’s example just shows that for the vast majority of people, real competence and insight can only be had in the very, very narrow area they study intensely. Outside of that, they are no better than GPT-2, just spewing word salad everywhere. (That said, I think Allison Brooks who replied to her misunderstood Schmitt’s message a bit, too.)

Looking for a martial arts school (Krav Maga, Systema, or similar) that emphasizes real fighting ability, not pretend kung fu shit, but where I don’t get hit in the head a lot. Got hit in the head, hard and frequently, as a kid and it did not result in good things. Don’t think I got it as bad as football players do, but then again I had no helmet and little to no warning. Need to preserve my brainpower.

Will see what I can find….

It’s the most fucked up, shitbiscuit argument that because people have been wrong about apocalyptic predictions in the past (although sometimes only narrowly so), that we should not do anything about climate change.

That’s like saying that because you didn’t get in a car accident the last time you drove 140mph down city streets, you should therefore always drive 140mph everywhere.

In other words, total dipshit stuff. A slow toddler wouldn’t buy such arguments, so it’s mystifying that grown-ass adults do.

I know I am behind the times and all that, but it amazes me that anyone can do or wants to do anything on their phone. Like, how? Even the big phones still have unusably-small screens, and the multitasking is so utter shit. And no file system access!

And then I think that tiny brains makes using tiny phones probably a lot better, and I am enlightened.

Gen Xers were also raised with a staggering amount of nihilism because we were taught as children that we were GOING to die in a horrific nuclear war. The survivors were the unlucky ones. Imagine an entire generation taught that they would be lucky to die.

— Jennifer Goodland (@BigYearColo) December 8, 2019

Gen Xer here, and this is absolutely accurate. I think that’s why we feel so much in common with millennials and Gen Z — though the cause of the hopelessness is different, the base feeling is the same.

I remember being told by a teacher, after asking about the nuclear sigils I’d seen on a building, that it was pointless to evacuate to the nuclear shelter they symbolized because we’d all die anyway, being so close to important military targets. Yep, a teacher, in 3rd grade, telling students that they’d die in a nuclear conflagration — and this was not unusual at all during that time in the mid-1980s.

But I wouldn’t blame her — this was in the air everywhere during that time. It was just assumed we’d all die in nuclear fire, by nearly everyone. It’s amazing society continued at all. It really is.