Year: 2019
Abandon
When Google discontinued Reader is when it truly turned to evil. I didn’t even use Reader, but that’s when the company abandoned all pretense of working for and with an open web and instead attempted to make the web a reflection of Google and its interests. I wrote at the time (on another blog) that it was inevitable after Google went public it’d turn against everyone’s interests but its own. That’s where all incentives point, so it’s a nearly-irresistible attractor.
Just wish their search engine was still worth anything.
Now Lost
Except now someone says, “I’m a vegan” apropos of nothing. A woman says, “I have a boyfriend” in response to “bless you,” and a tech bro goes on about how it’s not rational to say that “bless you” at all. Then an SJW claims they are triggered by someone smiling at them, and a feminist says it’s “anti-manspreading” to not pull her legs in as someone walks down the crowded aisle. The dude in the lifted red pickup with a MAGA sticker runs you over and kills you without stopping. And everyone agrees that saying “I like your hat” is definitely harassment as you never, ever talk to strangers, especially to compliment them.
A Twitter friend just sent me this lovely poem. pic.twitter.com/PaqE4kaIlr
— Nicole Cliffe (@Nicole_Cliffe) July 23, 2019
Lift Lift
Welcome to your forties, where you can step out of a van slightly awkwardly and hobble yourself for weeks. #plantarfasciitis #supersucks
— MadLori (@madlori) July 17, 2019
Lift weights and absent chronic illness of some kind, you won’t have this problem. No one has to age poorly — it’s a choice, like most things people see as inevitable and unalterable. I chose to avoid the “inevitable” decline, and I’m now about as limber and getting back to being as strong again as I was in my early 20s. (And I was very strong in my early 20s.)
Lift weights, eat decent food, walk a bit. It’s amazing the difference it makes if you keep it up.
Control and Grace
Championship Szn 🇺🇸😏💪🏼
•@vallman123
•#ThrowsBySion #Discus #DiscusThrow #USATF #IAAF #Doha2019 #Hautevolée pic.twitter.com/UQLrRsOwni— Zebulon R. Sion (@CoachSion) July 23, 2019
Liber
I guess the new FA phrase is “body liberation.” You know, the best body liberation I’ve experienced is losing weight then getting fit and strong. It seems as if those folks devoted 1/10 the effort to true liberation rather than endless carping they’d be in better stead.
Yes, it’s hard to lose weight and to work out, but many things in the world are difficult. Adults fucking deal and get it done. Children whine and hurt themselves and claim it’s “liberation.”
Wired Up
me: can i get admin access to my workstation so i can install the stuff i need
client: ABSOLUTELY NOT! too dangerous.
me: ok. i wrote that script you wanted, going to deploy it with root permissions to all your computers now?
client: go for it
— Katerina Borodina (@kathyra_) July 9, 2019
Exactly. This has happened to me in at least two jobs:
Me: I really need admin access to my workstation to install the tools I need to do my job daily.
Company: Against IT policy! Impossible! It could destroy everything to let you install Wireshark and the Sysinternals suite!
Me: You realize that I can with a few commands delete all the virtual machines for the entire company, and every customer VM, and all the backups, right? That’s not a threat but just a statement of fact about the rights I have. Letting me install software I need is nothing at all comparatively.
Company: Ok, here’s that admin access.
If 10
If humanity exists in 10,000 years, it’s likely the only event remembered and honored from our era is that we sent humanity to the Moon for the first time. It’s possible that Neil Armstrong’s name is the only one that will be recalled from this time. Perhaps Hitler’s.
Narrowness
3. I heard an interview with Hans Zimmer where he described Apollo as an epic art project. I like that framing a lot.
IMO the project didn’t justify itself _scientifically_. But it was an unparalleled _aesthetic_ achievement.
— Kevin Simler (@KevinSimler) July 19, 2019
I quibble with the lack of scientific value, but the framing of Apollo as an epic art project is one that I also like and agree with. Getting away from the technocrat progressive worship of narrow utilitarianism is an extremely good goal, because just as people cannot live under conditions of absolute realism, they also cannot abide the abridged technocrat conditions of life.
Humans need far more than that, on a far larger scale. The prog technocrat utopia of everyone subsisting in gray concrete boxes eating reprocessed maggots and licking algae out of recycled glass bottles is utterly uninspiring and no future can be created from that, nor will it be. It’s a dead end, just as is unrestrained capitalism.
Rationality, extreme utilitarianism and absolute realism are in fact all dead ends. Let’s not waste time heading in those directions.
Served
This is what it’d be like for men to try to even return a serve against Serena Williams:
To all the non-tennis-playing men who think they can win a point against Serena, watch this… 🙃👸🏾🎾 pic.twitter.com/GEDQb76KHt
— EBC (@ItsBlackCulture) July 19, 2019
Most people have absolutely no idea how much better professional athletes are than even “good” amateur athletes. I’ve had a couple of chances in my life to play a few sports with people who were or had been pros and even in sports I am decent at they were so superior to me I might as well have been a drunk slug. People just have no idea. None at all.
People are saying, “Oh, she could double fault.” Sure, but how often is she going to double fault when she only needs to hit the ball 50% as hard as normal to absolutely smoke every man facing her? (Hint: Never. She would never double fault.)
Idiots, pure idiots. Well, most men mostly are.
From Vega
Some plant-based burgers may not be as healthy as they seem, say nutritionists.
Nutritionally, they are absolute garbage. If you want to eat vegetables, eat fucking vegetables. Don’t eat this crap. You’d be better off eating beef and vegetables, especially if you exercise.
Remember, this is all a scam to push very cheap food marked up to extremely high prices to help a corporation’s bottom line. Don’t let the “progressives” convince you this has anything to do with the environment or your health because it absolutely does not.
DZign
It really is a tragedy that we’ve collectively decided that design should cater to (and only to) the biggest morons and incompetents that anyone can find.
How To Instill Fear
How to make sure your child is a fearful wimp forever.
That kid’ll grow up to be an adult who is afraid of absolutely everything and will also be resentful of his/her parents. Utter loons.
I wasn’t taught to swim perhaps by the kindest teachers but I was taught well. I was told that water was indeed dangerous, but being terrified of it would just lead to panic and death if something went wrong. I was taught how to handle rip currents (very easy to deal with, by the way), what to do if I got too tired to swim (float on back until recovered), how to tread water for a long time, and how to rescue someone drowning without also getting myself killed in the process.
As as result, I am a very confident and very good swimmer who you might be able to drown if you hit me over the head repeatedly with a baseball bat while I was in the water. Even then, I might take the bat from you and drown you instead.
That kid on the other hand, the first time they have a hint of a problem in the water or get into water by accident is going to be just dead. Good work.