I find that I don’t understand the desire or willingness to be offended. It’s not that things aren’t offensive; they certainly can be. S*hole countries! God and guns! Binders full of women! Baskets of deplorables! (… the latter two of which weren’t actually all that offensive, but were purposefully taken out of context for political [...]
Needs are often subjective, even if we don’t recognize that
How much pain could be forgotten if we remembered that many of our needs are subjective? They’re not all subjective, of course… if you take something from the base of Maslow’s pyramid from a person, that person will logically and realistically suffer. Air, food, water, shelter… all critical to human survival. But love? Self-esteem? The [...]
Rush’ signature song
One of the Rush groups on Facebook had an interesting question: “What is Rush’ signature song?” Naturally, I couldn’t just comment on the thread and say “Dog Years, obviously” – I had to write something up. So here it is. The way I see it, Rush’ signature song got to be one of a fairly [...]
2017: The Year of Reconnection
2017 has been an interesting year for me. It’s been a hard year, a difficult year indeed. There have been some challenges that I have not been able to meet head-on yet; there have been choices and events that have been or could still be devastating. This post is not about those challenges. There will [...]
Roy Moore
The Republican Party has decided to back Roy Moore for Congress in Alabama. I am very conflicted by this, for a few different reasons. I’m conflicted because I can understand why the support has been granted – in a few different ways – and yet I also struggle with the idea that such a person [...]
About “Two Wishes”
This is a post of liner notes, sort of, about “Two Wishes,” a story I posted a couple of months ago. I normally enjoy such author’s notes myself, but I also understand that they sometimes erode what magic a story has, so I wanted to keep these in a separate post. “Two Wishes” is basically [...]
I have a podcast now.
A few weeks ago, I started a Java-oriented podcast. It’s not actually solely my content – it’s actually based on user-submitted data from an channel on the Freenode IRC network. If you’re wondering, IRC is what Slack and Hipchat were before they decided to spawn clients that looked pretty and took up four gigabytes of [...]
Multidimensional
I was thinking fairly shallow thoughts about perception this morning, in the context of an old friend and how our relationship has changed over the years, and a pattern occurred to me about how I see people. I see individuals as a sort of web of relationships to other people and concepts, such that every [...]
Alabama-FSU, 24-7
Disappointed that FSU lost against Alabama. Alabama played a good game, and FSU obviously struggled mightily on special teams – shades of the nightmares of the 80s there. I hope Deondre Francois is okay – and I also hope ALL of the injured players are okay. (Alabama had four players injured, none of them as [...]
Journalists: No adverbs, no adjectives, please
I’m not a journalist; I’ve never taken journalism classes. I’m sure there’s a world of journalism out there about which I am completely ignorant. But if I had one piece of advice for journalists, it would be this: please avoid adverbs and adjectives. Please. I don’t want to hear how Trump went to Texas. I [...]