Month: May 2020

Didn’t Become

Chill Uncategorized

I hear you. I started to read N.K. Jemisin’s The City We Became and it features a done-to-death “city becoming sentient/monstrous” theme and an extremely annoying first-person narrator. Also, the prose itself reads like something copied and pasted from a multitude of early 2000s urban fantasy books (none of which were good, either).

I read about twenty pages and vowed not to continue. No thanks.

Le bavardage

Chill Uncategorized

I can understand spoken French quite well now but can’t really speak it. I no longer need subtitles at all. That’s what happens when you watch a lot of French TV shows, listen to radio shows, YouTube stuff, but practice with no one.

Ah well. I don’t generally like talking to people anyway.

Danger Jill Robinson

Chill Regular-ass Post

18-Year-Old Woman Masquerades As A Man On Tinder To Better Understand Their Dating Struggles.

Dating is much harder for most men, but much more dangerous for some women. No one has a good deal but the average man has it far worse than the average woman. But the extreme woman has it far worse than the average man, because someone abuses or kills her.

Anyway, women mostly use dating apps like that to boost their egos while men actually use them to find dates. Thus, a huge mismatch of intent.

Obeastity

Chill Regular-ass Post

We were tougher back then, in the 1980s and 1990s. It really kept obesity down, having to fight a bug-eyed, gremlin-like monster every time you wanted, like, a slice of cheese or some cereal.

Of Creation

Chill Regular-ass Post

Dipshits, that’s who. Total disphits.

Paraphrasing Neal Stephenson, every lifeform on earth is a huge badass because each one contains genes that have survived more than 3 billion years.

Except that Slate mook, who contains mostly sludge.

Vaccinot

Chill Regular-ass Post

It’s been a long time since I’ve read my virology and epidemiology textbooks and I am certainly no expert, but if the drug companies can be convinced to keep working on a SARS-CoV-2 vaccine, the chances we can develop one is about 95% from what I can tell.

If we do fail to develop one, the most likely reason for that is not that it’s technologically impossible but that it’s not profitable.

In a Dryer

Chill Regular-ass Post

Not me. These days I listen to a lot of Russian witch house and weirdo dubstep robots-having-sex-in-a-dryer type of stuff that didn’t even exist when I grew up.

Arc Welding

Chill Regular-ass Post

There is no arc of history. There is what you make happen and what you forego, chanting the centrist mantra of “nothing is possible.” The whole “arc of history” idea is just a high-minded gloss on the “nothing is possible” philosophy because it implies actions without actors, events without causes, and that justice occurs because it is moral.

This is not the way history bends and not what moves the world. Power and action mobilize change. Nothing else does.