Sunday, June 27, 2010
Friday, June 25, 2010
Wednesday, June 23, 2010
Monday, June 21, 2010
Saturday, June 19, 2010
Thursday, June 17, 2010
Tuesday, June 1, 2010
A few things I hate
Happy young people. I do whatever I can to bring them down. Usually they are satisfactorily numb to the joys in life by the time I have explained how the universe is a hostile, uncaring, amoral, cold place in which there is indeed nothing that can be said to care about their feelings or hopes. If they still persist in youthful exuberance, my extensive collection of genocide statistics and documents comes out. If that doesn't work, I recite T.S. Eliot at them until they begin crying.
Incompetence. Holy fuck. I can stand being viciously insulted, being one-upped in an intellectual dick-comparison contest, and being poked in the kidney with a sharp stick. But incompetence drives me into a white-hot shaking fury. If you really want to piss me off, do a shitty job. Seriously: I am more likely to stab you with a plastic spork if you get my order wrong or otherwise screw up, than if you purposely go out of your way to annoy me. Hanlon's Law is my psalm, my Ezekiel 25:17. If you hear me mumbling "do not attribute to malice what can more easily be attributed to stupidity," get the hell away from me.
People given a modicum of power over others. You know these people. The clerk who positively revels in her minimum-wage job, gloating over the sheer power of making people wait while she taps her grotesquely long fingernails ever so slowly over the keyboard. She has the power to delay you, and will use every goddamn millimeter of it. This combines my disgust at incompetence with my sheer hatred of unjustified authority. I fill in nonsensical answers on the Census and at the DMV only because I know deep down in the cockles of my heart that these people will never be missed if they disappeared. Somehow it isn't as fun imagining them being awoken by a horde of angry ferrets being pushed through their window, when you realize that in all probability the gruesome ferret feast will actually do them a favor.
Belgium. They're hiding something behind their suspiciously delicious desserts. Sneaky bastards.
Canada. If you have never fought against the British, you're not a real country. Period.
Japan. Japan went through its first national nervous breakdown with Commodore Perry. They realized their technology was shit, and hoped that western technology plus ancient Oriental wisdom would inflate their egos. This illusion died in a nuclear fireball. The Japanese immediately abandoned their ancient culture in exchange for pop music, pedophilia, horrific fetishes, tentacle rape, and psychosis. Hey, Mr. Miyagi: if your ancient culture of bushido honor and familial piety and zen was so good, why did you drop it instantly for gameshows in which women weigh their breasts? Yeah. Your school-girl-panty vending machines are proof that you have no culture nowadays, and that your old culture was a piece of shit if it was so easily dumped.
Quantum mystics. This is incompetence combined with the smug arrogance of mock wisdom: something that has on many occasions brought me close to enacting the Schrodinger's Cat gedankenexperiment. I have a litmus test for these drooling Bohrs: if they can write Schrodinger's Equation, I don't pummel them with Feynman's Lectures on Physics.
Men who talk like retards. When I use the word "retard," here it means zero-information content cached idioms used with Tourette's frequency. "yaknowwhatisaying... yaknowwhatisaying... I mean yo, nigga, them the funniest white boys I ever seen yaknowwhatisaying." CTHULHU FHTAGN. I have the urge to punch them, hard, in the face to see if it'll knock them out of it a la classic Tex Avery cartoons:
Idiot: yaknowwhatisaying, it's like... DAY-UM, yaknowhatisaying, like-
Me: [falconpunch]
Idiot: Why did you have to do that? That really hurts, and has embarassed me among my peers.
It is even more offensive and utterly enraging when, inevitably, the worst offenders are white upper-middle-class suburbanites. Damn it, if they tried an Amos n Andy minstrel show they'd be nutpunched, but apparently this blatant goddamn insulting caricature goes unpunished. Do Martin Luther King a favor and castrate the next white person you see who thinks subliterate idiocy is a sign of solidarity with his favorite rapper.
Incompetence. Holy fuck. I can stand being viciously insulted, being one-upped in an intellectual dick-comparison contest, and being poked in the kidney with a sharp stick. But incompetence drives me into a white-hot shaking fury. If you really want to piss me off, do a shitty job. Seriously: I am more likely to stab you with a plastic spork if you get my order wrong or otherwise screw up, than if you purposely go out of your way to annoy me. Hanlon's Law is my psalm, my Ezekiel 25:17. If you hear me mumbling "do not attribute to malice what can more easily be attributed to stupidity," get the hell away from me.
People given a modicum of power over others. You know these people. The clerk who positively revels in her minimum-wage job, gloating over the sheer power of making people wait while she taps her grotesquely long fingernails ever so slowly over the keyboard. She has the power to delay you, and will use every goddamn millimeter of it. This combines my disgust at incompetence with my sheer hatred of unjustified authority. I fill in nonsensical answers on the Census and at the DMV only because I know deep down in the cockles of my heart that these people will never be missed if they disappeared. Somehow it isn't as fun imagining them being awoken by a horde of angry ferrets being pushed through their window, when you realize that in all probability the gruesome ferret feast will actually do them a favor.
Belgium. They're hiding something behind their suspiciously delicious desserts. Sneaky bastards.
Canada. If you have never fought against the British, you're not a real country. Period.
Japan. Japan went through its first national nervous breakdown with Commodore Perry. They realized their technology was shit, and hoped that western technology plus ancient Oriental wisdom would inflate their egos. This illusion died in a nuclear fireball. The Japanese immediately abandoned their ancient culture in exchange for pop music, pedophilia, horrific fetishes, tentacle rape, and psychosis. Hey, Mr. Miyagi: if your ancient culture of bushido honor and familial piety and zen was so good, why did you drop it instantly for gameshows in which women weigh their breasts? Yeah. Your school-girl-panty vending machines are proof that you have no culture nowadays, and that your old culture was a piece of shit if it was so easily dumped.
Quantum mystics. This is incompetence combined with the smug arrogance of mock wisdom: something that has on many occasions brought me close to enacting the Schrodinger's Cat gedankenexperiment. I have a litmus test for these drooling Bohrs: if they can write Schrodinger's Equation, I don't pummel them with Feynman's Lectures on Physics.
Men who talk like retards. When I use the word "retard," here it means zero-information content cached idioms used with Tourette's frequency. "yaknowwhatisaying... yaknowwhatisaying... I mean yo, nigga, them the funniest white boys I ever seen yaknowwhatisaying." CTHULHU FHTAGN. I have the urge to punch them, hard, in the face to see if it'll knock them out of it a la classic Tex Avery cartoons:
Idiot: yaknowwhatisaying, it's like... DAY-UM, yaknowhatisaying, like-
Me: [falconpunch]
Idiot: Why did you have to do that? That really hurts, and has embarassed me among my peers.
It is even more offensive and utterly enraging when, inevitably, the worst offenders are white upper-middle-class suburbanites. Damn it, if they tried an Amos n Andy minstrel show they'd be nutpunched, but apparently this blatant goddamn insulting caricature goes unpunished. Do Martin Luther King a favor and castrate the next white person you see who thinks subliterate idiocy is a sign of solidarity with his favorite rapper.
Monday, May 31, 2010
Screw Facebook
http://www.quitfacebookday.com/
http://youropenbook.org/
I held off deleting my never-used account just so I can do it today. I have to say, even though I didn't use it, it feels great to fuck over Facebook even if it's only 2.5 × 10^-9 of their userbase.
Sticking it to the assholes even when your impact is negligible. That's freedom.
http://youropenbook.org/
I held off deleting my never-used account just so I can do it today. I have to say, even though I didn't use it, it feels great to fuck over Facebook even if it's only 2.5 × 10^-9 of their userbase.
Sticking it to the assholes even when your impact is negligible. That's freedom.
Thursday, May 20, 2010
What you will not see here
Politics is the mindkiller.
I've long ago completely given up on pretending to take politics seriously. I don't want to hear your unique contribution to political science, I don't care what special interest group you represent, and I have no damn interest in re-enacting a word for word argument older than writing.
Yes, I do have political beliefs. But no, you won't hear about them directly.
See, for me politics is an $ENV variable that I only care about when it completely screws something up. It's something I believe you can and should be able to safely ignore if you have actually have a life.
Programmers are known for having political opinions that would get us tarred and feathered if made publicly known. This is because, after bashing your head against the wall of complexity the human brain was simply not evolved to handle, you tend to regard political beliefs as the amateurish moves of people who couldn't debug a loop if their lives depended on it. We are not interested in Position X for the same reason actual physicists are too fascinated studying real mysteries to devote much interest in your pet mysticism.
People who devote their time to figuring out how complex systems will bite them in the ass, have no time for people who don't understand Murphy's Law.
So, no glorified ape dominance hierarchy gossip. I will delete any comments containing needless political snark. You know what I mean: if my post is about the Y Combinator and you just have to make a witty comment about that damn Foo party, kill yourself. Please.
I've long ago completely given up on pretending to take politics seriously. I don't want to hear your unique contribution to political science, I don't care what special interest group you represent, and I have no damn interest in re-enacting a word for word argument older than writing.
Yes, I do have political beliefs. But no, you won't hear about them directly.
See, for me politics is an $ENV variable that I only care about when it completely screws something up. It's something I believe you can and should be able to safely ignore if you have actually have a life.
Programmers are known for having political opinions that would get us tarred and feathered if made publicly known. This is because, after bashing your head against the wall of complexity the human brain was simply not evolved to handle, you tend to regard political beliefs as the amateurish moves of people who couldn't debug a loop if their lives depended on it. We are not interested in Position X for the same reason actual physicists are too fascinated studying real mysteries to devote much interest in your pet mysticism.
People who devote their time to figuring out how complex systems will bite them in the ass, have no time for people who don't understand Murphy's Law.
So, no glorified ape dominance hierarchy gossip. I will delete any comments containing needless political snark. You know what I mean: if my post is about the Y Combinator and you just have to make a witty comment about that damn Foo party, kill yourself. Please.
This is not a rant
Zed Shaw is one of my heroes. He's a Formidable Asshole: not only is he usually right, but he'll make damn sure you know it. The internet is built on the backs of these guys, and they'll slap you if you ever forget it.
He recently came up with the idea of compartmentalizing his blog into rants and nonrants. This makes sense on many levels, so I'm trying the same thing.
Pookrants will contain my frequently illucid rants, while Zipwith will contain nonrantish material.
In an unrelated note, I am returning to blogging somewhat seriously after a few years. I've got plenty of rants festering, and a fully functional bullshit detector. This will be fun.
He recently came up with the idea of compartmentalizing his blog into rants and nonrants. This makes sense on many levels, so I'm trying the same thing.
Pookrants will contain my frequently illucid rants, while Zipwith will contain nonrantish material.
In an unrelated note, I am returning to blogging somewhat seriously after a few years. I've got plenty of rants festering, and a fully functional bullshit detector. This will be fun.
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