fool @fool@mastodon.technology

I hereby declare myself this instance's foremost Star Wars Prequel Defender.

Being a programmer is turning me into an anarchist: I always seem to want to eliminate state.

Say "ten-four, good buddy" to someone tomorrow.

The wind blows seaward, with no clouds lingering to rain upon the sun-scorched land. As the hot air blows to the cold sea, it forms a thick and treacherous fog over a pounding surf. A ship can land there but cannot set out to sea from the coast, leaving anyone stranded there with no recourse but to cross the desert on foot and then trek through a marsh to reach more welcoming tides. This has been happening for centuries.

Some people like to go surfing there at a place called "Skeleton Bay"

Thinking about the most intense toponym I ever heard of: the northern Atlantic coast of Namibia, an inhospitable desert dotted with shipwrecks known as "The Land God Made in Anger"

I'm starting to realize that if I don't start accumulating mugs with weird things written on them, people are going to gift me a bunch of mugs with normal things written on them instead.

Consider: it is impossible to pretend falsely to be an actor

a character developed for use when roleplaying a criminal in a detective-procedural narrative setting: perpsona

I think that with media executives, what they think they want is a hard-nosed decider, keeping the ship afloat by using prudence to tame muses; but in trying to recruit such a person, all they get is a simple philistine.

They don't know what they don't know, but at least they know that they don't know what they don't know.

getting a priest, a theologian, and a topologist to figure out which of several objects is holier

I can't tell if this guy is unresponsive or just not working.

It's no skin off my nose if he's just chilling on the clock - I ain't this guy's fuckin' truant officer - but if the work isn't getting done I need to know about it so I can do it instead.

Information security systems are very concerned with excluding bad actors, but I don't think that's something a computer can do. You need human judgment, to do things like assessing the actors' auditions

Remember that language is not congruent with taxonomy.

A decade ago I resolved to focus on my career and on the establishment of a stable material situation for myself. It was rough going at times but I have succeeded.

I'm tired all the time, because my leisure spills over too late into the night. I could make it more efficient, but I am resistant to doing this. Perhaps I feel that I would be letting work dictate all of my life again, breaking the promise I made myself to stop neglecting everything else I had deferred.

I've been saying it for years: Some people make webcomics instead of going to therapy.

I'm going to celebrate the end of the workweek by walking a mile and a half and back for some doughnuts.

sowing chaos by persuading Frankenstein's Monster to get a doctorate degree

Not everything in the world deserves, needs, or even can have that kind of sincere effort. Apart from the work of thinking thoroughly, there's the harrowing experience of trying to communicate something subjective on top of it. But if you're gonna ride that bull, it's bad manners not to expect it to try to throw you, and it's poor form to try to appeal to consensus (somebody else's opinion) as a refutation of something you hear. The one discussing it is you, not an avatar of that consensus.

In this process, it's common that a consensus will be established, simply because everybody approaching the work probably have more than a few things in common and will find many of each other's feelings persuasive. And you will find in many cases that your own interpretation begins strongly influenced by someone else's. That's all fine. But that consensus is only the beginning of the conversation, not the end.

But that's not so. Criticism is the act of attempting to articulate the relation between the work and the feelings you associate with it. No two people see art the same way, so there's inevitably disagreement. In hearing what others think, you can come to a richer appreciation of the work, and help bring others to one as well. It's good to approach any discussion of art hoping to be proven wrong.

To me, the essence of criticism is taking responsibility for your own opinions.