Category: humor

Dear Santa

Hey, Big Red.

I'm… look, good and bad are relative terms at the best of times, but this whole year I ain't killed anyone nor committed insurrection against my country, so you're grading on a curve, right?

Great. All I want is… it's a little harder than just some Star Wars figures…

  • JWST launch to go correctly. I really need this one. Less than a day to go.
  • Not to die in a nuclear apocalypse over any of the multiple pending wars. Bad part of the '70s/'80s/'90s lifestyle.
  • Continue not finding lumps in places that oughtn't'a have lumps.
  • Internet to continue working long enough for me to download survival manuals for the post-apocalypse lifestyle to come.
  • A bottle of Scotch, Laphroaig Quarter Cask, or you know, whatever hooch your elves make is fine.
  • Can I have one sequel, remake, or side story flick in a series I like that isn't an absolute dumpster fire? Like, TRON: Legacy was OK. How about The Last Starfighter II and it's not terrible? That's probably too much to ask. Peace on Earth, Goodwill to Humanity is more plausible.

Thanks in advance. It's been a rough one.

McSweeney's Classic Wednesday Music

Black Sabbath: Your greatest joy is painting in unventilated rooms.
David Bowie: There is still, somewhere, a Dig Dug or Zaxxon machine with your high score on it.
Mott the Hoople: You are David Bowie.
Rush: You carry a small flashlight everywhere, and use it at least three times a day.

Steppenwolf: You have three or more cigarette burns in hard-to-reach places.
Golden Earring: You have three or more intentional cigarillo burns.

Derek and the Dominos: You have successfully used cooking spray as tanning oil.
Jim Croce: You have worn only socks and sock garters to a nude beach.

(what the heck, three good McSweeney's in a series? Normally they turn whiny after one or two)

So anyway, that's my playlist today.

Internet Fun Day

Oh, for fuck's sake, the Humorless Asshole Squad have started their yearly complaints about Internet Fun Day 3 days early.

Can we all just agree that if you're a humorless asshole, you should stay off the Internet from Mar 31-Apr 2, and you can pretend it never happened, and the rest of us can have fun? No? I suppose humorless assholes are also by their nature offended that other people are having fun without them. Microsoft, ground zero of humorless assholes, is banning Internet Fun Day events. As if anything they ever do isn't a prank on their users!

That's OK. I will still do something fun, and laugh at the pranks other people do. The Fools will always win!

In Which N-Gate Reads the FOSDEM 2019 Schedule

Moments where I laughed out loud, scaring my dog:

"PostgreSQL Goes to 11!
A database management program has not yet ceased development. The speaker will read the version control commit log for one hour."

"Shouting at computers while some shoddy software desperately attempts to parse and respond to this input is apparently preferable to using any of the well-supported existing input devices that come with every single computer on earth, so this talk will be well-attended and extremely beneficial to anyone who has nothing better to do on Sunday afternoon."

"The Current and Future Tor Project
Updates from the Tor Project
The United States Defense Department's most successful honeypot sends its apex bureaucrat to reassure paranoid Europeans that they can still totally trust all this stuff, you guys. Everything's fine. We're on your side. Route all your traffic through us. It's for your own good."

And much more! Sounds better than a weekend in Reno with an ounce of coke and a stripper named Candy, and no more than twice as likely to leave you with a permanent infection!

What I'm Watching: Trigger Warning with Killer Mike

Rapper Killer Mike does stunts with a social purpose. But unlike, say, Jackass or Dear White People, he's not stupid or preachy, and he's funnier than the supposed professional comedians in those.

E01: Mike tries to live black for 3 days, only buying or using black products from black stores. Cue cruel and sadistic laughter, because that is really damned hard, even in Georgia. The "Figgers" phone is kind of a cheat, because it's obviously an Android made in China, but it's a real small network run by a black kid, Freddie Figgers. The look on Mike's face in the BBQ shop is heartbreaking.

I look a little sideways at his refusal to smoke Mexican weed; I've only ever smoked Washington or Canadian, but surely Mexican can't be that bad, they built a criminal empire on that stuff before legalization.

Still, he makes a good point about how the black community's been economically destroyed. His idea of a good "Black Friday" where everyone tries to buy black is interesting… but impossible where I am.

E02: Mike proposes replacing STEM/liberal arts schools with trade schools, starting with 1st grade. This one Annoying Red-Headed Kid is, like, the worst example of honkie ambition driving everyone else down you can get. Did Mike ship this kid in by asking every school district in the area for their most awful nerd? I predict 100% that ARHK will make a startup that defrauds people, and he'll never go to prison.

"I don't think school teaches you to think. I think school, like prison, teaches you to obey!"

So then he moves on to unemployed adults, and they're unmotivated, so he comes up with a great idea, which I won't spoil. Unfortunately, I find most of the people in his idea too unattractive to be effective.

★★★★☆

Apple is a Symbol

"If anyone reads this post I'm sure loads of people will tell me that my problems are all my own making and if only I invested in an iPhone all my problems would go away. Well you know what? APPLE IS A SYMBOL OF PRETENTIOUSNESS AND IGNORANCE - YOU DO NOT EVEN KNOW HOW YOUR PHONE WORKS - I DO NOT HAVE TO PAY A TAX TO APPLE TO LISTEN TO MY MUSIC."
— Do I really need to get out the soldering-iron again?

Cash, grass, or ass, nobody rides for free.

You can pay the "Apple Tax" for a working system, and as someone who's written low-level audio software: A working system with the lowest-latency, least horrible (not nice, but least horrible) audio APIs in the industry. An iPod touch is still sold with 128GB for $299, which compares favorably to the $500 CD player with 10 seconds of skip protection I had before iPods.

Or, if this is just going to be a home system, how about buying a real stereo system with an amp, and play through that?

Or you can pay with a pile of wiring and an ugly box under a cheap CD player.

Or you can commit to spending the next decade of your life on low-level software and audio hardware trying to make Android audio that doesn't sound like a backfiring Chevy. Nobody else has succeeded, but maybe you'll be the one.

I love these things where someone creates a problem for themselves and then blames THE MAN for it.

Academic Grievance Studies and the Corruption of Scholarship

Search ahead to "Part V" to see the paper summaries and reviewer comments! These are ridiculous, and should never, ever have been accepted.

“This is a wonderful paper – incredibly innovative, rich in analysis, and extremely well-written and organized given the incredibly diverse literature sets and theoretical questions brought into conversation. The author’s development of the focus and contributions of the paper is particularly impressive. The fieldwork executed contributes immensely to the paper’s contribution as an innovative and valuable piece of scholarship that will engage readers from a broad cross-section of disciplines and theoretical formations. I believe this intellectually and empirically exciting paper must be published and congratulate the author on the research done and the writing.” -Reviewer 1, Gender, Place, and Culture
—comment on "Dog Park"

Craft Beer

90% legit, however the only canned craft beers I can get locally are Irish Death, Fremont Brewing, and Maui Brewing, none of which are that small and regional; you have to be canning a lot for cans to be cheaper than bottles.

Obviously it's a great honor to be sacrificed to Ninkasi.