...of the moment
Trudging to Alewife through the snow, I saw and heard a small flock of geese fly one way and then the other. They seemed lost.
"Unrestrained randomness would make your games impossible to play, so you need to control it."
--from the Batari BASIC instructions
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...of the moment
Getting through more of "Thinking, Fast and Slow" (took a short break for another quick read, it was getting to be a slog.)
While I think I get the idea of "Regression to the Mean" and in the prevalence of chance across the performances of members of a given population, I think it might be too easy to take away unhelpful life lessons from this, to take on a defeatist "well it's all chance anyway."
A quora right up my objective/subjective alley, What's the biggest difference between your culture and America's?
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...of the moment
"Made a graph of my past relationships. I have an ex axis and a why axis"
--Yik Yak, via tumblr.
Belichick, the comic book villain America needs.
The Road To Armageddon(2004) A point I've made before, but a bit more so recently: in save the world movies, an easy way to know who's the Bad Guys is they're the ones trying to bring about the end of the world. I think the same holds true for real life.
Dispensationalism, especially the "pre-millennialist"/Left-Behind variety ("Get Out Of Revelation Free, man it's gonna suck down here, I pity the rest of you suckas, shoulda repented when you had the chance!") is just horrible. It's one of those stories told to young Christian kids to calm them down when they learn enough about Revelation to freak the hell out ("O, surely God loves US to much to let all this bad stuff happen to US") but when their church isn't sophisticated enough to see Revelation as pretty clearly describing then current-day-Rome, and a metaphorical description of spiritual battle rather than as true life events, but instead say it has just enough poetry to see military helicopters as plagues of locusts or what not.
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...of the moment
Wondering if I should switch back to paper books. Mostly because of the concept of worst retention etc with e-texts. Also paper books are great because you can put them on a shelf and look smart and easily lend them, but terrible because you have to put them on a shelf.
Sometimes I think keeping such close track of my book consumption year after year isn't a great thing, that I'm more biased towards activities I've quantified/gamified that way vs, say, coding (for recreational or self-education purposes)
O jeez is there any way to remove the [Username] button from the top right of the new version of chrome? It's like having your mom sew your name into your underwear.
I do think satire is a good weapon against ISIS propaganda.
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My drummer friend Tom says "Just listen. With your heart."
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...of the moment
"I think probably kindness is my number one attribute in a human being. I'll put it before any of the things like courage or bravery or generosity or anything else."
"Or brains even?"
"Oh gosh, yes, brains is one of the least. You can be a lovely person without brains, absolutely lovely. Kindness - that simple word. To be kind - it covers everything, to my mind. If you're kind that's it."
--Roald Dahl (and Brian Sibley)
I kind of dig "Do Your Job" as this year's Patriots' slogan. (There's also "We're on to [Team City Name]" which is important as well).
It seems like a lot of successful teams have a kind of theme, like "The Idiots" for The Red Sox, which one a year after "Cowboy Up" didn't quite get it done.
I wonder if the Seahawks have something like that this year, besides their usual "12th Man" shtick and this year a lot of talk about God and the usual "everyone doubted us" BS talk.
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