What fictional death emotionally destroyed you?

When the character Ekaterina Golovkina in Life (2017) slowly and agonizingly drowns in her spacesuit. What makes it so much worse was her colleague being literal inches away from her but unable to help and just having to watch her die face to face.

Fuck, man, that scene was brutal. No gore. Not even a drop of blood. But horrifying. Especially the sounds of her drowning and how she held it together with just steel will till the end.

I’m a good swimmer. I’ve always wanted a house you had to do something like dive 40 feet down to get into.

Ain’t no one ever robbing that place. Note that the house itself wouldn’t be underwater. Just the entrance.

Because I did not know a single Jewish person when I was really little, I thought a Bar Mitzvah was a celebration that occurred when you were officially allowed to drink (I thought Jews had different drinking laws than gentiles).

But I was five or six. And no internet. It was hard to find out stuff back then, and no adults knew or would give straight answers on anything.

I’m just so tired of being the guy with his eye on the details.

Brother, I am right there with you.

I solve 70% of problems even for those in my own field by just reading the error message and doing what it says. That’s it, that’s all. And that’s ridiculous. How can people not do this? Doing so doesn’t make me some mega-genius. IMO it just makes me minimally competent to perform my role. But apparently that’s a lot to ask.

I’m reading Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment again. I read it for the first time when I was 12 or 13. I am getting more out of it this time because then I had only about the equivalent of an undergrad in philosophy and now I have far more.

It’s dense, it makes a lot of claims, and it was written towards the middle and end of WWII. Some of it is anachronistic but most of it holds up pretty well. When you consider that Dialectic was being completed at the end of the largest example of rationalized mass slaughter in human history, their critique of enlightenment makes a lot more sense.

Would I recommend the book to most people? Or even people who read this blog? No. It’s for someone who has time to kill or is deeply interested in this sort of philosophy and its development. And it’s a hard book. Not Heidegger hard, but difficult enough that parts of it slow me down — and almost nothing written in English does that.

It’s worth it for me to re-read. For most people? Skip it.

When people mention sites having paywalls, I have no idea what they are talking about. I haven’t hit a paywall in years.

I have the deep magic old extensions still working and they is supa dupa fly.

I know I’m supposed to hate Pulp Fiction, but damn that’s such a tight movie with just perfect tone and so much panache.

Pulp Fiction is not my favorite movie — hell, it ain’t even my favorite Tarantino movie for that matter. But what it tries to do, it does it so very fucking well. It never hits a false note and it’s so incredibly quotable. I mean:

Vincent: Jules, did you ever hear the philosophy that once a man admits that he’s wrong that he is immediately forgiven for all wrongdoings? Have you ever heard that?

Jules: Get the fuck out my face with that shit! The motherfucker that said that shit never had to pick up itty-bitty pieces of skull on account of your dumb ass.

Come on, that dialogue is just spotless. It’s how you should do it — as close as you can get to how actual people talk while punching it up enough to make it engaging and funny. That whole cleaning-out-the-blood-spattered-car scene is just so much fun.

I know the conventional wisdom is that you’re on some inevitable and extremely steep decline path when you hit 40, but it’s mostly Fat Acceptance (et al.) lies.

I’m nearly as strong and fit now at 47 as I was when I was 22, and I was very strong and fit then. Also, I’ve achieved that with much less effort and time spent because I have done it more intelligently and efficiently. The main difference I’ve noticed is that I take longer to recover now. If I work out really hard, I need 2-3 days to fully get over soreness and when I was 20 I needed around one full day.

And to reiterate something I’ve said in other posts, I’m not particularly athletic and I also have pretty bad genetics. I am, however, extremely fucking stubborn.

But if I can do it, nearly anyone could if they wanted to.

It’s not much progress, but at least Lizzo got her “creepy woman pass” revoked.

Needs to happen more. Men definitely commit more abuse, but most often the also fairly-common abuse women perpetrate gets completely glossed over and ignored. True equality means that neither gender should get away with it.

I was thinking about my post here on Slack and the Manhattan Project, since I just watched Oppenheimer.

Would that project been more productive, have been accelerated, have been bettered through use of Slack? I’d argue that no, it would not have. Most likely — by far the most probable outcome — is that it would’ve fueled endless diversions, bickering and useless digressions that would’ve made that effort take years longer. Or perhaps have caused it to fail altogether.

Of course, the Manhattan Project is something nearly sui generis in human history but like many things at the asymptote, it provides a good playground for thought experiments.

A brief digression myself: Slack is a class of tools that don’t have a real name (at least that I know of), so for now I will call them “productivity pretenders.” They make one feel like one is on top of things, getting a lot done, there’s a lot of sound and fury, so stuff must be flying along, right? Well, no. Just because you can discuss with your co-worker for 10 hours over two days whether the period should go inside or outside the quote mark on the document you’ll be sending to management does not make anything more productive. Quite the opposite! In fact, the old days where you just would have had the secretary pool type the doc up in 15 minutes and send it out was vastly, vastly more productive.

(This is even ignoring all the pointless extrovert spew in Slack — we’re just dealing with the actual use case of the tool here.)

These “productivity pretenders” cause actual harm to getting things done in the real world but make one feel like a whole lot is happening. What are some others of these? They are bounteous: most word processing software, most ERP applications, most photo editing tools (and how they are used) — in fact, most things we actually do with computers, including having them replace human assistants (which was a huge blow to productivity, but looks better on MBA spreadsheets).

So, back to my main thesis. It can be easily demonstrated that tools like Slack are “productivity pretenders” by inserting them into a scenario like the Manhattan Project and asking, “Would it have made this effort work better, or worse?” And the answer is clearly it would’ve been much worse, and might have caused the project to fail altogether.

The same cannot be said if they’d had something like a 10-GPU mini-supercomputer setup from this year, etc., to do simulations on.

Thus, “productivity pretenders” are those tools where one feels like one is really just doing so much, but really very little of import is happening, and nothing at all that actually matters.

And Slack is clearly one of those pretenders.

What things were you told growing up that were just plain lies?

Many lies:

1) That we’d use math everywhere all the time as an adult.

2) That adults really had much of an idea what was going on.

3) That the best way to stop bullies was to ignore them. (No, it was to get better at fighting and then beat them so hard they probably had brain damage after.)

4) That I’d understand when I was older. Nope, just adults attempting to gaslight me about their bullshit decisions.

5) “This is for your own good.” Very fucking similar to the above.

In fact, most of what adults told me was lies where I grew up. It’s one of the reasons I’m such a reflexive contrarian now. Or at least I tend to be.

This is just a reminder of how really different people are. There are folks who really do want their Slack to be blowing up all the time, while I cannot imagine anything more hellish and productivity-destroying.

If nothing were in Slack all week, I’d love it. That’d never happen, but it’s a damn beautiful dream. When someone messages me in Slack I delay responding for as long as possible (sometimes even if it’s my boss) as I hate that useless chatter channel so much. Any other medium to contact me is better and more trackable. Slack is a huge productivity destroyer and concentration conflagrator.

I’d bet $100K (if there were any definitive way to prove it) that one reason productivity numbers have stagnated is due to use of Slack and other Slack-like tools. They are just a playground for extroverts who prevent others from getting work done.

Sometimes, I don’t respond to Slack messages for 2-3 days and then say, “Oh! You should’ve put a ticket in. My team would’ve taken care of it nearly immediately.” This has been working fairly well.

Watched Oppenheimer today in 70mm IMAX. Was worth it to see in that format. It’s a bigger than life tale so seeing it six stories tall only makes sense.

At one point Oppenheimer says/implies that even though the atom bomb didn’t end up literally starting an uncontrolled ignition of the atmosphere that destroyed the planet, the advent of the nuclear weapon would nevertheless likely conclude in the annihilation of the world anyway.

With smartphones, though people are loathe to admit, we’ve also managed to accidentally arrive at an event of nearly the same import. And we’re just as poorly-prepared for it as when nuclear inferno bloomed in the New Mexico desert in 1945. Just as we were not ready for the implications of nuclear weapons, we are not at all savvy at evaluating at Level 1 cognitohazards as we have no framework for thinking about them outside of science fiction (which is why I very intentionally used the term “cognitohazard”).

But we live in a science-fictional world now is the thing. Smartphones compress the world in a way that is novel in human history and transform the entirety of the human collective meta-nous into a very different place than even the internet did. The effects of this — though Ian Welshian type idiots deny it — are absolutely enormous. We’ve set off an uncontrolled chain reaction in each human’s mind and that is going about as well as you’d expect.

We live in apocalyptic times, in the ancient Greek sense. That is, a malign revelation is occurring as our minds are tampered with by unaccountable and unknowable techno-deific entities that we have no defense against. Denial of this only increases their power. Their agent is smartphones and their method is subjugating, hegemonizing and homogenizing the human mind with the false idols of convenience, simple answers, and puerile propaganda.

Our cognizance is ashes before these forces, a new nuclear fire obliterating minds screen by screen.

Is good posture overrated? Back to first principles on back pain.

Good posture advice is mostly nonsense. The keys to avoid back pain:

1) Don’t be obese or overweight.

2) Work out frequently and correctly.

Tada, chance of back pain much decreased!

(Spoilers) Does ‘Pet Sematary’ have the deepest bag of true scares?

Pet Sematary is the only King book that is written as a true Greek-style tragedy. It’s also some of his best writing and is one of the tightest novels ever penned. Unlike a lot of King’s works there are no pointless scenes, nothing is wasted and it all connects in a devious web of despair.

And that last line…damn, friends, that is some deep fuckedness there.

If you’re contemplating suicide, don’t read Pet Sematary. If you’re not contemplating suicide, you will be after you read Pet Sematary.