Building a digital music collection in 2023.

LOL at using fucking Git for this. What a crappy way to do it. Use Syncthing instead. It’s built for purpose instead of some dirty hack.

I did 26 dips for 3 sets on the dip bars earlier. First time getting 26×3.

I don’t even feel that dip-leted.

The shit-for-brains Ian Welsh take on weightlifting is that it doesn’t really help with anything and that it’s some form of showing off.

The reality is that getting stronger makes every area of your life better, even minor ones that you might not even consciously think about. For instance I was carrying a plate downstairs earlier and I bumped it on the edge of the bannister accidentally. Five years ago, when I was weak as a kitten, I 100% know I would’ve dropped it. Would’ve been gone.

But now that my grip strength is ridiculous I was able to hold onto it so it didn’t escape my grasp and shatter into a thousand bits. It’s minor I know, but these things add up.

A lot of the “weightlifting is bad and doesn’t even do anything” on the left in general comes from Tall Poppy Syndrome and the belief that it’s somehow cheating to improve yourself.

Fuck all that noise. And my still-whole plate agrees.

Not a real survey of course, but correct in spirit:

Jackie Brown is my favorite Tarantino movie, by the way. I am sure all y’all wanted to know. This is why (from a Roger Ebert review).

This is the movie that proves Tarantino is the real thing, and not just a two-film wonder boy. It’s not a retread of “Reservoir Dogs” or “Pulp Fiction,” but a new film in a new style, and it evokes the particular magic of Elmore Leonard–who elevates the crime novel to a form of sociological comedy. There is a scene here that involves the ex-con Louis (Robert De Niro) and Ordell’s druggie mistress (Bridget Fonda) discussing a photograph pinned to the wall, and it’s so perfectly written, timed and played that I applauded it.

Indeed, that is a truly great fucking scene. I watched it 10 times when I got that movie on VHS back in the day.

It was also Bridget Fonda’s best performance. She drips disdain and sex like a discount-carnival succubus and damn is she ever fun to watch. Such a fantastic, underappreciated film.

Of all the common fetishes, I think I understand feet the least. Just…feet? Boring-ass feet? I get the weirdo tentacle crap better than the whole feet thing.

Years ago, my girlfriend came home and said, “A guy offered me $200 at the gas station to lick my toes today.”

I said, “And you’re sitting here talking to me when you could’ve been $200 richer.”

Other than cashing in on it, I don’t think I will ever understand the deal with feet as a sexual object.

Got fired for “no reason given”. This has to stop.

No company cares about you and even the best one will throw you out like yesterday’s trash the moment they think it’ll make them more money or that you become a liability — or just that some manager dislikes you. This is why it’s insane to make friends at work and it’s also very unhealthy to give your all to a job thinking anyone will give a crap.

They won’t.

I’m not saying don’t work hard. I’m talking about devoting your entire life to a job and expecting that it’ll make a lick of difference to a corporation. It absolutely will not. Treat a corporation exactly as it treats you: a means to an end. Nothing else.

What is your honest personal opinion of Olive Garden?

It’s better than most food most people can make at home but it’s not better than what I can make at home. There are of course far superior Italian restaurants, but they are not as consistent. Olive Garden will be predictably mediocre.

The Five Cheese Ziti al Forno is their best dish. Their worst dish is anything that has meat in it as they don’t know how to cook it across any location I’ve ever tried.

Olive Garden is a very American experience because it’s consistently meh — the “cheap slop piled high” model applied to Italian cuisine.

If I had to sum up the average man’s accurate perception of being part of society, it’s this from an old tweet: “The most core, fundamental male experience is society completely not giving a fuck about you.”

Women complain that society only values them for their beauty or their ability to produce babies or whatever…but at least you’re valued for something. Unless you’re very rich or very, very attractive (top 0.0001% of men or so), as a man society thinks you are worth absolutely nothing.

Try that on for size.

When people talk about they were “just figuring out who I was” in their late 20s and such, that seems crazy to me.

I guess it has to do with where I’m from and how I grew up. There, if you’re like me, you’re forced to figure out who you are far, far earlier than that. That’s why this thing that mostly (some) women claim — the “Oh, I was just a tiny little baby until I was 30, I can’t be held responsible for anything I did” — is not solely an attempt to evade culpability for mistakes in life but might be somewhat true.

Wacky. I can’t understand it but I guess it could be the case. Me, I knew who I was by the time I was 10. Had no choice, really.

Even though it doesn’t really have much effect on or for me, I’m glad lately that there has been some pushback on the idea that women get to have many almost-inconceivably high standards in dating and love, while men should just settle for anything.

To be clear, I think that both men and women have tended to believe that men should just deal with whatever — because men have felt they can’t demand better, and because it benefits many women if men internalize that they have no choice but to be saddled with a jobless, talentless 300 pound clown show. (Intuitive living, I guess.)

I developed high standards due to several terrible girlfriends and now have an amazing one. So it does work. But it means awful women get pissed at you.

So be it. Loser anger is fuel for excellence.

My Generation, by Justin E. H. Smith.

This is the best essay I’ve read in a while. I wanted to write something similar for a long time, and I think he did it better than I would’ve. So thanks — saved me a lot of work.

As a Gen Xer as well, the piece captures perfectly what a lot of people in my generation feel and believe. What I feel bone-deep. Most of my friends are millennials or the first year or two of the Gen Zers, and the world they experienced as they grew up was very different from the one I did as a child and young adult: my world is one which the last of the experimentation of the 1960s was still hanging on, but was being extirpated slowly, surely, and very resolutely by the new progressive church ladies (not all of whom were ladies, of course) and resurgent conservatives. By the time the millennials and especially Gen Z got old enough to pay attention, that world of true liberalism was gone, replaced with something far more baleful to human thought and flourishing. It was a new authoritarianism, dressed up in gayer clothes, but with a sort of revulsion at the insuperable vagariousness of humanity and an obsession with purity that was perfectly in line with that of the most fervid evangelicals.

Thus, the world shifted quite quickly, but there were lines around the block telling you that it was all just the same. But no, it was all changed.

80% of bosses say they regret earlier return-to-office plans: ‘A lot of executives have egg on their faces.’

Good. Because it’s an idiotic fucking idea that greatly increases employee stress and reduces productivity enormously, especially since a lot of people have one hour commutes each way and then go into a terrible and noisy open plan office to pretend to work. Then still do their real work at home.

By the way, I am an executive and I told my direct manager I’d quit immediately if there were any return to office forced, and I told my direct reports I’d fight it if it were ever mandated.

This story frames RTO as inevitable, though. And for most it probably is. But I can tell you: I will never work full time in an office again. Never.

Do most skinny people over 30 have to think about what they eat literally all the time?

Nope! And I used to be fat so this isn’t an always-skinny person giving advice here. Also, I have an extremely slow metabolism so it’s very easy for me to gain weight.

But the best way to do it is to make eating well a routine, a habit. Also, be sure to eat higher-quality food. It’s far more satiating. And for me it’s important to have one day a week that I can (within reason) consume whatever I want to. If needed, measure portions. I have not needed to because I have ridiculous self control but I believe portion control can help if you do not.

And no, I am not hungry all the time and after the first few weeks I just got used to eating a lot less. (Again, I want to reiterate that it really, really helps to eat higher quality food, the best within reason you can afford.)

It’s certainly easier to intuitively eat your way to a miserable existence and early death, but that ain’t how I’d play it.

A month ago we had an all hands meeting where our CEO said “we will not be doing layoffs” when asked. Today I was laid off.

The general rule is that when a CEO or other high-level executive says anything like, “There will not be layoffs” or “We have no plan for laying off people,” it’s time to update the ol’ resume. This means layoffs are imminent 100% of the time.

This has happened a few times in my career and I’ve never been wrong.

The reason they do is that they are attempting to not lose people in a rush out the door — but they do anyway. The very second I hear anything like this, there is a sonic boom of my ass scooting. So they end up losing their best people quickly.