May 22, 2017

Geek news, very glad that a recent Supreme Court judgement means East Texas should no longer be a Patent Troll Haven.
Melania slapping Trump's hand away... I mean no wonder, she's wearing white, getting Cheetos dust all over your hands would be pretty dangerous...

"Say you're driving down the road and see a car crash. Of course you look. Everyone looks. The internet interprets behavior like this to mean everyone is asking for car crashes, so it tries to supply them."
--NY Times paraphrase of Twitter co-founder Evan Williams

May 21, 2017

Via Lamebook--

I'm not sure if it's bad for me to enjoy his cheerful acceptance of clueness white folks intersectionality as much as I do

May 20, 2017

Really cool thing where you can doodle help a bot learn how to recognize basic drawings... how to be a guesser at Pictionary, I'd say! The pile of image reminds me of some stuff I did http://kirk.is/2004/07/17/ http://kirk.is/2009/11/13/ and then in color http://kirk.is/2010/07/10/

May 19, 2017

Excerpts from "Selfish, Shallow, an Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on the Decision Not to Have Kids"

To be ridiculously sweeping : baby boomers and their offspring have shifted emphasis from the communal to the individual, from the future to the present, from virtue to personal satisfaction. Increasingly secular, we pledge allegiance to lowercase gods of our private devising. We are concerned with leading less a good life than the good life. In contrast to our predecessors, we seldom ask ourselves whether we serve a greater social purpose ; we are more likely to ask ourselves if we are happy. We shun self - sacrifice and duty as the soft spots of suckers. We give little thought to the perpetuation of lineage, culture, or nation; we take our heritage for granted. We are ahistorical. We measure the value of our lives within the brackets of our own births and deaths, and we're not especially bothered with what happens once we're dead. As we age -- oh, so reluctantly ! -- we are apt to look back on our pasts and question not did I serve family, God, and country, but did I ever get to Cuba, or run a marathon? Did I take up landscape painting? Was I fat? We will assess the success of our lives in accordance not with whether they were righteous, but with whether they were interesting and fun.
--Lionel Shriver, from"Be Here Now Means Be Gone Later"

I stress this because it's often claimed that having kids makes people more conscious of the kind of world they're creating or leaving for their offspring. That would be why, in London, a city with excellent public transportation, parents have to make sure they have cars. Many of these cars come speeding along my street on their way to the extremely expensive private school on the corner. You can see, from the looks on these mums ' faces as they drop off their kids at this little nest of privilege, that the larger world -- as represented by me, some loser on his bike -- doesn't exist, is no more than an impediment to finding a parking space. Parenthood, far from enlarging one's worldview, results in an appalling form of myopia. Hence André Gide's verdict on families, "those misers of love."
--Geoff Dyler, from "Over and Out"

Of all the arguments for having children, the suggestion that it gives life "meaning" is the one to which I am most hostile -- apart from all the others. The assumption that life needs a meaning or purpose ! I'm totally cool with the idea of life being utterly meaningless and devoid of purpose. It would be a lot less fun if it did have a purpose -- then we would all be obliged ( and foolish not ) to pursue that purpose.
--Geoff Dyler, from "Over and Out"

Who could blame anyone, child or adult, for wanting to enrich his experience by sharing it with a friend, a caring witness? We all want that. We all want someone to say, "That thing you love is so interesting and worthy that I have to love it, too." Children's needs and desires are not so different from adults ' needs and desires; the only real difference is that, unlike adults, children are not yet bridled.
--Rosemary Mahoney, "The Hardest Art"

Reproduction as raison d'être has always seemed to me to beg the whole question of existence. If the ultimate purpose of your life is your children, what's the purpose of your children's lives? To have your grandchildren? Isn't anyone's life ultimately meaningful in itself? If not, what's the point of propagating it ad infinitum? After all, 0 × ∞ = 0. It would seem a pretty low - rent ultimate purpose that's shared with viruses and bacteria. The current human population is descended from a relatively low number of ancestors after a series of population bottlenecks in the late Pleistocene. Most human beings back then presumably felt their lives to be just as important and meaningful as we do ours. Is their existence negated just because they left no descendants?
--Tim Kreider, "The End of the Line"

Yeah i know the animals were problematic but I am straight up bummed Ringeling Bros Barnum and Bailey is hanging it up, glad I got to see The Greatest Show on Earth

May 18, 2017

I forget if I knew Thomas "Biff Tannen" Wilson played tuba:

Also if you have any questions for Tom Wilson:

May 17, 2017

I used to (still do I guess) dig guidebooks to tabletop wargames, even if I never got around to doing the miniatures or actually playing the dang things. Probably the best was the old Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader - the amount of world building and menacing flavor text was immense. Humanity is a dispersed galactic empire, and while the tech can make ours looks stone-age, most of it is surrounded with gothic religious trappings, leading to sidenotes like this:
Strike the first rune upon the engine's casing employing the chosen wrench. Its tip should be anointed with the oil of engineering using the proper incantation when the auspices are correct. Strike the second rune upon the engine's casing employing the arc-tip of the power-driver. If the second rune is not good, a third rune may be struck in like manner to the first. This is done according to the true ritual laid down by Scotti the Enginseer. A libation should be offered. If this sequence is properly observed the engines may be brought to full activation by depressing the large panel marked "ON".
That lept to mind when I saw this photo and caption:

Russian Orthodox leader sprays holy water on government computers to stop WannaCry virus
"The occupational hazard of making a spectacle of yourself, over the long haul, is that at some point you buy a ticket too."
--Thomas McGuane
Dean be like, it so hot im ded

May 16, 2017

what doesnt kill us make us stronger. except polio, maybe. but i don't think this fever is that.

At least I had half a good day :-/