God people really really hate hate hate that Haidt is right. There must be just a fucking mountain of propaganda money spewing now to “disprove” him (and Twenge). It’s probably in the hundreds of millions if not billions.

What is your favorite “most 90s song” ever? Mine will always be Spacehog – In the Meantime.

Damn the 90s seem like such a different world now. I’m not going to bang on about it yet again, but the optimism of the time felt so great in retrospect. There is no going back, though. Only forward; nostalgia is a trap. But it’s impossible to describe to someone not there the experience of that glowing hopefulness.

Now with all that preamble, let’s get to the postamble. There is no way to choose the “most 90s” song ever as the era contained too many currents and trends and what existed in 1990 was quite different than what 1999 brought. So I am going to go a different direction and choose not a favorite song of the era, but rather a work that best represents all the crosscurrents of the 90s, all the optimism, all the zaniness, all the meta-textuality and the gonzo creativity of that time.

And that’d be Weezer’s “Undone (The Sweater Song).” As I said, this is not my favorite song of the 1990s. It’s not even in my top 50. But it holds all the 90s in a five minute package and that makes it my pick. The video was directed by Spike Jonze, the darling auteur of the 1990s, which certainly contributes to my choosing it.

(If I absolutely had to choose a favorite song of the 1990s personally, it’d probably be “Bells Ring” (Acoustic Version) by Mazzy Star. Hope sounds so amazing in that version.)

Yeah, that was always gonna be a failure. Women 100% cannot handle rejection and would do fucking anything to avoid it. They expect men to be the ones taking all the rejection and the chances in life.

I’ve had a variant of this conversation with more than one female friend:

Her: I like him but he just never seems to notice.

Me: Notice? He won’t notice. Good guys don’t presume anymore. You have to tell him. So why don’t you?

Her: What if he doesn’t like me and says no?

Me: That’s the risk a guy takes a million times in his life. And a lot of women attempt to ruin your life if you express any interest. That’s just how it goes.

Her: I’m not going to say anything.

Me: Then you’ll end up with nothing. Welcome to guy world.

Feminism for thee but not for me is all the rage the past decade and more. It is funny that women believe men have trouble with rejection when it’s pretty much our whole lives, but if an attractive woman experiences rejection even once it’s the end of the world.

Gen Z be like: There’s a woman in this photo! That’s sexualization!

They are like some weird combo of Islamic fundamentalism and Victorian prudishness. And that is very, very bad.

The future is terrible:

What are your top 3 favorite horror movies?

Three is very difficult. There are so many great horror films out there, many of them underappreciated. My three:

1) Let The Right One In

2) Trick ‘r Treat

3) The Witch

I was debating between Trick ‘r Treat and The Cabin the Woods. Both have a similar tone, though dissimilar themes.

This is accurate, especially if you were in the middle or lower class (me). Most of what we had in the 1980s was stuff from the 1950s-1970s and it all looked about like that. I slept on the 1950s pillows with the horizontal lines on them, for instance. Everything was cheap wood paneling and lots or orange and umber and blah.

A surprising amount of the RTO push is because some dumbass extrovert* is lonely. Usually a Boomer.

*Not all extroverts are dumbasses; some of my closest friends are extroverts. But any extrovert who does this is definitionally a dumbass.

The US is actually pretty good at immigration. For the most part, we don’t admit people who want to destroy the country. Sweden, Germany, and others do, however. So that’s going to be a big problem there in 20-50 years (and a lot of the rest of the EU, due to Schengen).

Sweden is so, so fucked due to immigration. Like damn.

What is your favorite ‘unskippable’ album?

I don’t listen to entire albums and barely ever have, so the only album I used to repeatedly listen to all the way through was Belly’s Star in 1993-1994. It’s one of the few albums where every song is good and that does not get repetitive.

However, I’m not an album listener and have not listened to a full album in 20+ years. I probably never will again.

Is it normal for sys admin tasks to be put on helpdesk?

It’s not that abnormal, and it’s a good way to learn (it’s how I did, I was doing high-level sysadmin tasks while technically a level 1 helpdesk tech), but it’s also dangerous. Most helpdesk folks don’t have the knowledge and experience to understand when they’re doing something harmful or insecure or both. I’ve seen a lot of helpdesk-led migrations, server decoms and network changes go really, really wrong. And that’s because having someone with a year or two of experience do sysadmin-level tasks is like asking someone who has played Call of Duty a couple of times to lead an SF raid in Somalia.

As someone points out in the comments, these sort of tasks should only be worked by helpdesk with the close guidance of those more experienced. Otherwise, disaster is not just likely but certain.