…which is all well and good, but it still rankles just a bit. I can usually make it through days ending in ‘y’ without having to come out to somebody, but it definitely happens more than once a year. As a cis white man with no behaviors that scream ‘gay!’ to the uninitiated, I’m not …
Recommended Reading #6: Audio Drama Edition
I’ve been a sucker for a good audio drama ever since middle school, when my dad introduced me to the old classics. He’d bought some sort of anthology collection on tape, and took to playing it during long drives. I have a fond memory where we were driving through the mountains at night listening to Suspense …
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Respite Open Thread: A Crack In Everything
I spent a couple weeks in Montreal last month as a half-working half-vacation. I’d never been, but I’d heard such good things, and we got a very good deal on a sublet. Lovely city; I’d happily settle down there, though I’d have to learn French for real, which isn’t la fin du monde. Anyway–they seem …
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Panopticon Creep: UK Edition
Once upon a time, London was the world’s most-surveilled city. This position has since been usurped by Chongqing, a city in the Sichuan province which boasts one hundred sixty-eight cameras per one thousand people. Perhaps upset over the loss of their title, Boris Johnson has decided it’s high time that the UK began compiling records of …
Byzantine Solutions to Trivial Problems
I’m sure this is true in many fields, but in software engineering, you’ll often see an engineer or team become very attached to an inferior implementation of some feature. As the problems with this implementation pile up, their attempts to solve them become increasingly bizarre in their desperation to keep their darling. You can only …
Afternoon Open Thread with More Mountain Goats Content
The Mountain Goats (who you may remember from such posts as this one) played a free show in East River Park yesterday. This was great for me, since none of the other tour dates worked out. It was a beautiful day with lovely weather. The concert was very good, as well. Really just a perfect …
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Open Thread: Time Travel As Cultural Barometer
Leon Trotsky once wrote, “Art, it is said, is not a mirror, but a hammer: it does not reflect, it shapes.” I suspect that this phenomenon is more intense in works of speculative fiction* than, say, spy thrillers. These stories are well-positioned to plumb and amplify the pressing issues and paranoias of their times; more …
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