I don’t have guilty pleasures. I read, listen to and watch what I want. Don’t give a fuck if anyone knows or not. Guilty pleasures are for the weak and submissive. I am neither.

But I definitely watch some movies that are just bad. And some of these I like a great deal even though I recognize their atrocious qualities. The best bad movie that I know of is The Host (2013). Nothing in the movie makes really any sense. However, Saoirse Ronan is in it and that makes it much better than it has any right to be. She’s great in just about everything and it’s true in this movie as well. Also, Diane Kruger enjoyably chews more scenery in this film than Sagittarius A*.

But the movie, oh the movie. First, the world is so implausible as to beggar the imagination — and I have a big imagination. Second, it’s really convenient that when the main character (played by Ronan) gets the alien evicted from her body, these barely-surviving resistance fighters just happen to have another hot young woman’s braindead body lying around to toss the alien into that Ian can love. It’d have been much more interesting if that weren’t the case, say it were a male body, etc. But no. They somehow manage to find someone even prettier than Ronan who just conveniently died.

Like I said, the movie is a mess. But it’s a glorious mess.

Someone needs to write a well-researched book on the 1980s home computer revolution, how that presaged a lot of the changes now occurring, and how it so much less top-down than what’s happening now. In some ways it was the last refuge of the tinkerer and the dilettante — now all has been professionalized and is much more boring. Sure, the technology is much better but the possibilities have been radically foreshortened.

I’m not so much interested in the technology — I was there. I used most of it. I don’t need to be told about it again. I’m more interested in the sociological shifts that occurred as shareware and freeware altered how people thought of software, how this changed people’s relationships to information, how BBSes and other early online services played into this, and how these people were all shoved aside and told they were worthless amateurs as the suits and “professionals” moved in.

That’s the history I want to read.

You:

-zero sunlight
-overly fat
-processed diet
-multiple nutrient deficiencies
-no exercise
-lack of sleep
-victim mindset
-excess estrogen
-insulin resistant

Also You: “I have depression because of brain chemicals and it’s not my fault”

— Alexander J.A Cortes (@AJA_Cortes) August 1, 2018

I think this is all true, but aims too much blame at the individual alone. In a sick society people will by nature also become mentally ill. It’s a reasonable response. As opposed to human flourishing as so much of our society has become, it’s amazing more people aren’t experiencing depression and psychotic breaks.

This history of the future of work is interesting, but contains some significant errors. Among them, this one:

The first 8-inch floppy could hold only 80KB of data, and was read-only. It was not until 1987 — 16 years later — that a disk that could hold 1.44MB was commercially available.

Need more fact checkers.