This post was inspired in part by the passing of Ric Ocasek, of the Cars.I absolutlely loved their first album, and it is still my favorite despite being introduced to the band via the album Hello Again, my other favorite. While there are good songs on Shake it Up, Candy-O, etc., none of them gelled for me. What really stuck out for me for the Cars was the not just the way they used rhythm, but the way in which they managed to sound simultaneously spare and yet full. There is one other band, or more accurately album, that…
I'd mentioned before that, despite my respect for the achievements of Thor Hyerdahl and his expedition on the Kon-Tiki, that the quote they chose to showcase in the Kon-Tiki museum, especially as presented, was vapid and stupid beyond belief. Boundaries exist. For that matter, despite the overwhelming leftism of the profession, you'll still find a lot of psychologists and counselors telling their patients that they need to establish boundaries. Mostly these are the ones who realize that women can be batshit-crazy BPD, and one of the overwhelming traits of BPD is an utter and total lack of personal boundaries.I'm…
Have a good weekend, guys.…
Courtesy of a Mewe post by Larry Correia - looks like, in addition to being one of the few SF writers who can write "literary" in the same general neighborhood as Gene Wolfe and unlike many literary wannabes, tell a story, Dan Simmons has some balls. Of course, vile 770 took him to task for it. What did he write?Yeah, he said rude things about a child being used as a human shield to hector and shame adults. Recall - civil rules are for those who act civilized, and people morally guilt-tripping you like this to manipulate you are…
Adam over at Pushing Rubber Downhill had noted in a recent podcast how much more fit and hotter the girls in Europe are than the states. People in general, actually. Generally speaking, he's correct. Here, in the states, it depends on the city. Some have reasonably attractive women, some don't have attractive people at all no matter how photogenic they may otherwise be (Seattle comes to mind). The problem is that the girls in the city are usually infested with the feminist mind-virus to a truly hideous degree, and while that recedes as you get away from town, you get…
This is a week that perfectly fits under "improved user expereience," aka "it's a feature, not a bug."I cannot go into details, but the short version is that the week was supposed to start with a server migration, and then go on from there. As it turned out, the week was the server migration, struggling to find time to get other things that needed to be done while assisting the people actually responsible for said migration in troubleshooting, etc.Filed under things that did not work - the mysterious ability of the new server to access SMBv2/3 shares.…
It's the weekend....…
John C Wright recently reviewed The Hidden Truth by Hans Schantz, describing it as "part alternate history, part coming-of-age story, and part techno-thriller, peppered with wry observations about the nature of people, politics and power as seen through the eyes of a youth learning a hard lesson about the evils men hide."He is entirely correct.I found the first book engaging enough to go ahead and buy the second and third while I was on what, at the time, started as a vacation of sorts, and ended with a very difficult time in my life almost precisely one year…