Has it ever occurred to you...

 ... that social media has become, in essence, an entirely new form of subliminal pornography?

— and that, having become such, it might now very well be social media's defining characteristic?

Lolwut? Yeah, me neither. Thinking is tedious, and I can't be bothered to stop scrolling TikTok! 

Some Women: "Why do most guys not talk or make any noise during sex? It's annoying/it pisses me off."

Well, women of the internet - I'm glad you asked. It's really not that complex: it's a YOU-problem, not a them-problem.

It really boils down to a matter of one particular notion that many of the female persuasion seemingly believe shouldn't ever matter in any sexual context: guys who genuinely don't enjoy performing a given arbitrary act for its own sake miiiiiight prefer not to, ever.

... almost like there's a double standard, or something. Huh. Imagine that! On the internet, too, of all places... and regarding sexuality, of all things!

LISTEN UP:

Expression of physical (or any) experience in any socially-compatible medium—e.g. spoken words, noises, language in general—is NOT a fundamental human drive or characteristic, and it is in fact much more common and natural for humans NOT to perform ANY social or otherwise expressive behavior in any given scenario.

For many people, sex that includes ANY expectation/need for them to perform arbitrary socially-adaptive behaviors of any kind is—justifiably—uncomfortable. Due to the way modern social structures and processes have been inversely-molded by the inherently-disparate fundamental sexual dynamics between males and females in nature, that discomfort tends to be more pronounced in men than women - but it's more common than not for everyone. 

 

... do YOU enjoy being uncomfortable when you have sex? Huh. Imagine that!

Accordingly, an intuitive and/or comfortable capacity for verbal articulation/expression during sexual activity is uncommon enough in men that its absence should be an expectation to any reasonable person, not a surprise - and certainly doesn't constitute justifiable cause for criticism or disappointment, any more so than it you'd consider it justifiable for any man to expect any woman to be inherently thrilled to deepthroat, or to receive anal, or to do both in reverse order.

— "BUT WHY," you whine ask?

Because "expression" is a strictly environmentally-acquired, adaptive social behavior (and concept) - and all adaptive behaviors cause physiological stress. This happens to be the underlying psychological mechanism responsible for allowing kinkplay—a deliberate reversal of adaptive roles and/or the consensual discarding/adoption of specific performance expectations which are contrary to them—to be enjoyable under the appropriate circumstances, btw. (And in stark contrast, when you weaponize this concept in an attempt to manipulate any person into serving your own desires for only your benefit, it tends not to be received very well... nor should it be).

Think about ALL of the individual behaviors any person exhibits in the course of a day, including private ones and those they aren't even conscious of doing, and then consider how many of those correspond to a discrete simultaneous example of self-expression: virtually none!

Sex is no exception; some people have ACQUIRED expressive sexual habits, while many (if not most) have not.

Somewhat of a digression here perhaps, but it's also critically important to differentiate between the vastly-disparate concepts of (social) PERFORMANCE vs bonafide EXPRESSION; the latter can potentially be a reasonable expectation of a committed partner under clear, specific, predetermined circumstances - while any expectation of the former can only be reasonable when it is strictly elective behavior, period. In (healthy) kinkplay, for example, what might otherwise be considered a "performance" is usually or mostly fully-derived from expressive drives that have been qualified by an explicit comprehension of both the presence and clear definitions of mutual safety and consent... but that is a (rare) exception providing for an overlap between those two otherwise-contradictory behaviors - not a rule conflating them as being inherently similar or commonplace under normal circumstances. Outside the structure and context of a clear, mutually- AND EQUALLY-beneficial social contract containing an explicit performance-component, "performance" and "expression" normally have little or nothing to do with each other in actual, real, healthy life - and are much more often found to be in opposition not just to each other but also to the practice of productive interpersonal interactivity between individuals in general.

tl;dr:

Whether you're just another passive-aggressive misandrist bandwagoner on reddit or merely another normal, imperfect human being with occasionally-imperfect ego-control, it's never appropriate to expect a sexual partner—yes, ladies, even if that partner is a guy!—to merely PERFORM any arbitrary behavior during sex; the words for that specific behavioral modality are either ACTING or SLAVERY, and both involve an exchange of legal tender for a very good reason.

Non-consensual PvP in Gaming: a Sure Path to Long-Term Underperformance

Most people frame their analysis of PvP vs PvE in games based on a common major error in reasoning: that any particular example of a "risk vs. reward" scenario is either uniquely or particularly special, meaningful, or even unusual. In fact, in all cases... it is none of those things, ever.

Gaming (or any form of entertainment), on its own, is ALWAYS an inherent risk vs. reward interaction at all times; you are always wagering your TIME against the possibility that you can find a justifiably-valuable degree of enjoyment in doing so; if you do not enjoy that investment, you outright lose it then and there - and if you continue to invest at that point, well... you know how sunk-cost fallacies work, right? Simply changing this dynamic's degree or appearance or venue does not—and cannot—significantly influence the already-fundamentally-binary reality of its possible outcomes, i.e. "it's either enough fun, or it's not."

THAT right there is the meat and potatoes of reasoned argument against—in general, regardless of source or bias—any form of PvP that is not explicitly opt-in at all times. Accordingly, the only correct way to quantify that sort of interaction in an entertainment context would be to refer to it as one with an "arbitrarily-inflated risk requirement, regardless of outcome."

Please, consider, the following:

A) most enjoyment from any form of entertainment, including gaming, effectively boils down to its various constituent analogs to otherwise real-life psychological processes;
B) in real life, while consent is OFTEN missing from many interpersonal interactions, in such cases it is (almost universally) not only missing but in fact ACTIVELY MISSED - with the realization of that absence being a potential—and likely—source of almost every possible negative and/or harmful human emotion/experience imagineable.

The human brain's reactions to this mechanic over time are, in fact, at the root of the origins of most if not all environmentally-precipitated antisocial behavior, i.e. "crime."

In short, people overwhelmingly dislike being taken unfair advantage of by other people, regardless of format or context - and no matter how effectively such proceedings might be obscured behind the fourth-wall.

Just as there exists a relatively small—but widely impactful—demographic of devoted criminals in real life who will reliably target the most-vulnerable members of society within whatever environment is most advantageous for such a pursuit, there are a roughly-equivalent proportion of individuals who will actively seek to exercise that same pathological aspect of their psychology in any (interactive) fantasy environment that can offer a greater inherent advantage to them; non-consensual pvp is then one of the most obvious choices of outlet for these individuals in a gaming context, specifically.

Not surprisingly, MOST people with an active desire to partake in such antisocial behavior are exactly the sort that are also the MOST harmful to any gaming community over time, and—biscuits to baskets, at the end of the day—the amount of enjoyment inherent in participation within a game's community is what ultimately makes or breaks its long-term prospects.

Shrewd, forward-thinking developers know all of these things, and THAT fact—that wisdom-driven desire to safeguard the possibility of a long-lasting healthy community by cultivating the lowest-possible concentration of pathologically-antisocial and/or otherwise toxic individuals within it—is the ACTUAL reason that open/free/unrestricted/non-consensual (inflated risk) PVP is as rare as it is in (successful) games...

... and it's the reason it should absolutely always stay that way in any game that hopes to be successful in the long term.

Just chewin' the Americud

As proud capitalists, we must never neglect to totally-non-ironically pay homage to the three worst and most popular on-the-dl scams (in no particular order) in modern human civilization, without which our glorious way of life would simply not exist:

• Insurance.
• Credit (not just consumer credit but also stocks and loans of state, etc).
• Democracy.

In combination, the insurance and credit industries are almost solely responsible for inflating the cost of (everything) so absurdly high that both are now required to be able to "afford" anything. Each of them is a giant economic ouroboros constantly swallowing up people's livelihoods, shitting out the impoverished husks, and then feeding on those perpetual-debt-turds in turn - and growing larger and hungrier with every single bite. Mmmmmmmm. Freedom!

As far as democracy goes, there are only two kinds of people in the world: those folks who are intelligent enough to have studied a modicum of history and who have thus learned better... and those who fail to see that they're the reason it can never succeed.

Darmok and Jalad at the Merriam-Webster Annual

Tamarian-isms. STAT!

We desperately need Tamarian-isms in the English language. Better yet, we need CELEBRITY Tamarian-isms! Just THINK of the potential to obtain otherwise unimaginable densities of nuance via references to the impossibly-obtuse lives of celebrity icons.

Here are just a few suggestions off the top of my head (yw M&W, ya old coots!):


"Will Smith, his fist open" = A person so incapable of taking a joke that they have unwittingly made themselves into an even funnier joke.


"Miley Cyrus, her smile spread wide as her legs" = Any grossly-superficial but seemingly-harmless je ne sais quoi from which incalculable human suffering will nevertheless inevitably be derived.


"Kanye, his mouth moving" = Egregious narcissism, vanity or self-aggrandizement; less commonly, any person who gives their child a name that warrants court-mandated therapy for all involved.


"Beyoncé, her fans ravenous" = Anyone sycophantically-lauded for their vague, nonspecific advancements of and/or contributions to society that have never actually occurred.


"Morgan Freeman, his chords resonant" = Any sound that is at once universally and simultaneously soothing and arousing; the antonym of 'misophonia.'

Who is Ron Swanson, Ye Ask?

Ron Swanson, the silver duke of saxophony & hand of The Tammy: first of his name, slaughterer of snowflakes, breaker of hipsters, builder of pyramids, master of chairs & high lord of lumber - long may he reign.

The Anti-Vax Bandwagon is STILL Going!?

 "Harvard Immunologist to Legislators: Unvaccinated Children Pose ZERO Risk to Anyone"

Errm, no. Yiiiikes.

That article is swimming in fallacies of rhetoric and context. There's a huge difference between longstanding herd-safety vaccinations and those specific edge-case vaccines which are (or were) on the forefront of vaccine research (i.e. very much works in progress) - yet this article only discusses the latter despite making sweeping assertions about the former.

I've read a lot of Obukhanych's research, and—her more infamous public appearances notwithstanding—the actual science underlying most of her "outreach" amounts to a couple of distinct points which are almost universally, if not always deliberately, misinterpreted and/or misrepresented. Most notably, none of them actually support or otherwise provide evidence for the anti-vax rhetoric stirred up by/in the (often for-profit) media in which she is often cited. Those points being:

— First, synthetic vaccination, in general, is an imperfect substitute for naturally-acquired immunity. This is factual common knowledge and generally uncontested in medical science.

— Second, because any given infectious disease evolves parallel to its hosts' immunity over time (but almost always evolves more efficiently than its hosts'), iterative, short-term vaccination is likely to lead to more severe long-term problems as disease evolution steadily outpaces the cutting edge of human disease science. This is also factual common knowledge.

Note, too, that with the exception of the now well-known flaws in the aP vaccine (which, despite that, is still better than nothing), the vaccines cited in this article are conspicuously absent their corresponding real-world data and context, such as: why a vaccine for a disease exists in the first place (referring to once-fatal and relatively commonplace diseases which, thanks to vaccines for them, now are not); why non-mandatory vaccines (particularly for cancer-comorbid viruses) might still be wise in populations demonstrating an above 50% rate of early-life infection; etc. There's a reason that those largely edge-case vaccines in particular are cited here, while the rest are not:

If one takes the aforementioned points completely out of context, it's easy to distort them into alleged or perceived "evidence" against vaccination - but that critical qualification obfuscates the real meat and potatoes of the issue (as is generally the intention). Here's the bulk of the important context, then, that's again-conspicuously absent from media employing that strategy to prop up that sort of rhetoric: when vaccinated individuals are exposed to a dangerous disease, they are demonstrably much, much, MUCH more likely to survive it, much more likely to avoid ever contracting it in the first place, and, if they do, their symptoms are almost always much less compromising to their short- and long-term health. Additionally, if infected, the body is able to fight off the disease much more quickly - which means everyone else in proximity is also much safer as a function of reduced exposure. Of course no solution is 100% consistent - but when the median rate of desirable outcomes within the expected range of possible outcomes is in the very high 90th percentile, that's clearly a success in big-picture terms.

Furthermore, when the alternative to even the most imperfect and inelegant solution is... a very high (or even simply non-negligible) risk of death... one can argue that there's not really much of a choice. Sure, human immunity as a whole might be better served in the long run if we were to simply allow ourselves to become infected with as many full-blown deadly diseases as possible - but in that case, "humanity as a whole" will only include the survivors, and the difference between that result and what we have now is far from negligible. Understandably and, in my opinion, justifiably, giving that up is not a price that most are willing to pay - and that pragmatism is the compromise that is vaccines.

Hopeless Romantic Seeks Filthy Star Trek Playmate

I'm not Borg, but I want to add your biological distinctiveness to my own.


fingerguns
 

Turtles All the Way Down

I'm glad that some of yesterday's authors are still writing with today's youth in mind. Even if his presentation is sometimes a bit cliche, there are always sufficient pangs of reality in John Green's writing to justify the concession to his target audience. I need to complete my collection of his books before I'm too old to read.

"Most adults are just hollowed out. You watch them try to fill themselves up with booze or money or God or fame or whatever they worship, and it all rots them from the inside until nothing is left but the money or the booze or God they thought would save them. Adults think they are wielding power, but really power is wielding them."

Be lazy

Today I learned that

"Some seven-syllable sound"
Works every time

7 hours since "I just need to find a high-quality version of one song," and...

... now I've found this. Not only does it fit right in with classic Ministry, but it might be the most entertaining video on Youtube.

Wordsagne

tarseirdinuddlis

[tahr-seer-din-youd-lihs]

noun

1. the familiar, comfortable, distinctly erotic, vaguely filthy feeling-cum-sensation of a person's warm underwear sliding down their naked legs and coming to rest upon and around the exposed heels and dorsa (topsides) of their feet.
   
   

Origin of tarseirdinuddlis

2018; early Middle Jamesage < English: a loose portmanteau of the words 'weird,' 'nude,' 'pubic,' 'libidinous,' 'tarsus' and 'cuddle.'
 

Related forms

• tar·seir·din·udd·lic,  adjective
• tar·seir·din·udd·li·ty,  noun
• tar·seir·din·udd·lic·al·ly,  adverb

  

The Meaning of My Beard

I often wonder.

At times, my wonder wanders toward the undeniable peculiarity that is my beard. Why do I care about it? I might as easily just cut it off, and for all the social lubrication that doing so would afford me, a clean shave would undoubtedly find me on the "net gain" side of the energy ledger. It's not procrastination, laziness, apathy, or fetish that keeps it firmly attached to my chin and jowl, either; I am possessed of some sort of intuitive understanding that my beard is more than simply a vestigial biological element of my face, and I can't shake it - but I also don't yet understand it. Most paragraphs abutting any arbitrary anecdote of mine are destined to arrive at similar ends on the way to their beginning, I suppose. Why should the truth about my beard be any different?

Perhaps hair is a sentient organism with its own life goals, and I am tenuously attuned to the tune of its gentle Zen.

Ramblings on the meaning of art

Perhaps one reason everyone can find their own way to appreciate art is that everyone understands—in their own way—that the human condition's problems have solutions, but that many such problems have only ever been described in a language too complex, too vacuous, or too nonexistent for us to decipher efficiently enough to accommodate any measure of useful comprehension. Every instance of art represents an individual's attempt to write a sentence in a new language, and to preserve its memory and meaning before continuing to the next. Some artists are tragically bad at their own homemade grammar, of course, but some apparently grow to be less-bad.

As our numbers grow, so do our problems, but at least our capacity to cooperate for the benefit of humanity's collective interests remains strong. Maybe art is also fundamentally about frustration, then; an expression of one person's realization that certain work must be done, and perhaps at times alone even if not with that intent - or it'll never get done at all.

Swedish "vaccine ban" social media BS

Oh man, just... no. First of all, this "news" was almost exclusively reported by fringe clickbait media outlets - such as redice. There's a reason for that: the actual news in Sweden is that the government simply decided not to enforce the compulsory vaccination of its citizens, on the grounds that it conflicted with pre-existing constitutional rights. There's no "ban." The mandate to vaccinate still exists in law, because it's still totally sensible; they just aren't enforcing it. It's very likely that the language will be rewritten in the coming years to implement sensible penalties for abstainers, because abstainers are ignorant, and because perpetuating ignorance about critical social healthcare tends to lead to a lot of people becoming unhealthy and/or dying for absolutely no good reason. Not nearly as sensational when you put it like that. There was no citing of health concerns, etc., only acknowledgement that side effects to vaccines exist and that that their citizens should have the option of over-reacting to them because of something false they saw on Facebook. (They're progressive like that). That particular blatant falsehood can be chocked up to "creative embellishment" by the apparently exclusively non-journalistic entities that came out of the woodwork to "report" it - along with other examples of comic anti-brilliance, such as citing "sodium chloride" (aka COMMON SALT) as a "toxic, unhealthy chemical" additive.

The entire theoretical purpose of any society is to mandate sensible minor compromises for the objectively greater benefit of the majority. That aforementioned free—useful—education to which Swedes have access is also an important contextual omission from the headlines and stories circulating. History, science, and common sense are actually taught in schools there. So, while they may now officially not be legally required to do so, I strongly suspect they're generally extremely likely to continue to vaccinate their children... ya know, so their children can continue to NOT die from/be-maimed-by/end-up-horribly-disfigured-by some truly fucking awful, completely preventable diseases. Here in the states, on the other hand, we're "free" to let measles and mumps outbreaks run rampant thanks in no small part to a not nearly small-enough minority of anti-vaxxers - who are still numerous enough to put a significant dent in herd immunity, putting not only their own kids at risk, but everyone else's, too.

There should be fewer/better additives developed to stabilize and preserve vaccines, sure - but even the oldest, most toxic vaccine to ever see widespread use would still do far less damage even in its outlying worse-cases than would a minute or two of inhaling secondhand cigarette smoke. This entire issue is sensationalist bullshit. Nobody is entitled to an unchallenged public opinion when said opinion contradicts fact, reason, and even common-fucking-sense!

There, I'm done. A tall glass of reason with a thick tmesis sandwich is a balm in this age of insanity.

Well... apparently I don't sleep any more

So that's a thing.

On the mental torsion of the subject of abortion

Ahh, abortion.

There are a few popular questions and observations that often crop up when discussing this issue. For instance, while most rational people will agree with the idea that it shouldn’t generally just be up to the woman, a common obstacle to productive discourse is the often (apparently) inarguable notion that "it’s their body." Furthermore, what’s the end all be all if there’s a stalemate in the parental decision-making process? Does anyone have the right to "force" a woman to carry a life inside of her for 10 months and give birth to it? Just as strange as a woman being able to wake up one day and decide—on a whim—to have an abortion, wouldn’t it also be strange that a man could just wake up one day and decide she's keeping the baby and carrying it to term? As always, these questions are overly-simplified to the point of irrelevance—by idiots—and must be re-evaluated and refined.

To begin with, those questions aren't even the right questions. There's a tremendous amount of emotional pressure pushing a lot of rhetoric, powered by a lot of tangible agenda, all driving nearly all of the discussion about this issue. For instance, the basic premise of the whole shapiel was predicated on the condition of a mutual decision before it even became a conversation: people (plural) decided (emphatically) to have sex. (Unless they didn't, but that endlessly-slippery slope requires delving even deeper into the behavioral chain of custody and determining what, exactly, constitutes "decision," what defines—and what mutators can affect—bonafide agency, etc., but not even those basic attributes of human existence are generally agreed upon - by those few with the capacity to comprehend them!) But, hell, even that seemingly-initial decision itself could be reasonably considered a heavily-derivative mid-chain event, just flowing on downstream from the social contracts and other, varying, tiers of  conscious and subconscious—hopefully not unconscious— transactions from which it sprouted.

Referring to the notion of it being a woman's body... well, sure, after the fact, it technically "is" - but that's after the fact, so at that point, discourse has already devolved to rhetorical semantics. It wasn't just a woman's body that led to that scenario, or even to the prior scenarios which in turn led to that scenario; someone else's body was more than just involved. Someone else's body was, in fact, required. (Barring the obviously vastly more complicated issue of artificial insemination, which I'm not touching), a pregnant woman's body being pregnant is the direct result of hers AND someone else's body having a mutually-significant interaction. Arguing about the extent of that significance is, again, just superficial semantics at this point. Perhaps more importantly even than the physical transaction, though, there would have also been an investment of intent—and by extension, agency... and by extension, self, identity, and purpose, and so on—both required, and in turn provided, and in turn accepted and acknowledged, in two directions. To change the woman's body at that point isn't just changing "her body" - it's altering the course of multiple complex processes, all but one of which still involve another person at that point. There's a LOT more going on there. All of it is relevant.

To reasonably ask the question, "What gives a man the right to aspire to affect what a woman should do with her body," you'd also have to ask, "What gives a woman—or anyone—the right to aspire to control the value or meaning of a choice that a man—or anyone else—already made WITH his body?" I suppose they're either equally ridiculous, or equally worthy of consideration. These questions have actually already been converted into relevant scientific notation, so to speak, in the form of, "What objective fact should be interpreted as proof that a woman's pregnancy—a natural, normal physiological state—is, or should be, more objectively significant than the significantly-offset physiological state of an expectant—or simply hopeful—father?" To date, there is no such fact, nor evidence of one, nor even reasonable suspicion of the existence of one. Human physiology being what it is, even as primitive as we are now, we know better than to even suggest that state of mind is anything less than a critical component of net state of being - or of a person's overall health. Perhaps a man's investment in a pregnancy is, in a strictly mechanical sense, "less" - but if mechanics were the deciding factor in, or even particularly important or reasonably relevant to, matters of such fundamental—and fundamentally subjective—scope as this, then human rights in general make for pretty ridiculous concepts. In any case, by the time this particular conversation is born, it always seems that nearly everything on the table is just latent consequence of no immediate (or clear) relevance or provenance, all of which mostly just obfuscates the root and prevents a productive discourse on the topic at a low enough level. The real seed (pun intended) of the algorithm is barely even a comprehensible concept to most people, much less the opaque and high-resolution image that it would need to be in order to hope to grow a productive—or accurate—discourse about itself. That could change, someday... but I think the median IQ of the world has to change first. ;)

So I suppose, ultimately, it's kind of a losing argument no matter who makes it or which direction anyone takes it, at least at this point in time - because it eventually boils down to some more fundamental decisions about the "meaning" of various aspects of human existence (or lack thereof, or ignorance of such options entirely, etc). Do men have reproductive rights? Should they? Should women? Should anyone? Should babies? What IS a baby? What are and/or what should be the rational boundaries of subjective interpretation of the differences between a single cell, a zygote, a fetus, a baby, a human...? What is a human, anyway? What's the difference between a cell and a machine? What rational reason is there to make arbitrary philosophical distinctions between humans made entirely of machine-like cells, and similarly-complex objects that humans arbitrarily think of as "just" machines? What ARE rights? How should we choose them? Are human rights even a reasonable concept given the pragmatic compromises necessary for and inherent in social structures? If so, should there be a distinction between biological imperatives and human rights - and if so, where, and why? Are large scale social structures even sustainable when human psychology is factored into the equation? What is that equation? I really don't think enough humans are ready to ask the questions necessary to even begin to participate in those kinds of conversations.

I have reasonably well-formed opinions on all of those matters, because I've spent an enormous amount of time and energy trying to distill and cultivate and reduce them - but even after all of that, there's just not enough opportunity for productive iteration in so many of those interesting directions given the current, uhh, human climate. And, naturally, all of these issues far precede any potentially-useful discussions about such comparatively high-level concepts as abortion. (That's also the same reason I don't generally discuss politics).

I pretty much just accept that there are undoubtedly a countless number of better solutions—and among those, at least one that is both knowable and as close to "correct" as can be—to the problems that exist now, including this one... but also, I accept that better solutions to much of the stuff that I find most interesting will probably remain irrelevant for at least as long as I'm alive. I mostly just like to periodically kick around a reminder that these problems still exist, juuust in case somebody who hasn't thought about it before, and might never, could end up doing just that. The pot needs stirring, right?

I think the strongest (clear) opinion I can genuinely offer on abortion is that it's clearly a supernova-powerful concept that, in practice, affects one of, (if not the most), fundamental of human existential directives in both women AND men, with the potential to affect not just the lives but the outright present and future—and permanent!—identities of both parents—completely irrespective of their personal relationships with each other—in such a tremendous manner that it can shape the direction of the rest of their lives, potentially in diametrically-opposite ways... and, that it wouldn't even be a topic of interest if not for the explicit involvement and overwhelmingly-substantial investment of BOTH parties. Men and women alike are being diagnosed with crippling PTSD following abortions in ever-increasing numbers. Regardless of anyone's stance on anything involving women's bodies, abortions can and DO affect men just as fundamentally as women, and do so with enough permanent consequence that they rationally must be considered effectively-equal participants. Following that, I definitely think that anything so influential, and particularly anything so potentially cataclysmic, is so far beyond even the theoretical best-case scope of any modern human society's capacity to responsibly manage... that to do so may be—and perhaps always should be—entirely beyond its permissible purview.

At the very least, attempting to simplify a multi-variable system by expressing it as a function of only one of its variables is rarely even useful - and in any case, is never a valid solution.

Oh, just shoot me

VIDEO: Bulletproof / Stormproof safe rooms for schools  

The unfortunate reality is that security gimmicks won't keep children safe at school. It would simply accelerate the evolution of this society's school-massacre paradigm. Realistically, the net result would be to make more children less-safe, faster. Anyone can break through bulletproofing (especially, but not just glass) with $30 and a visit to a hardware store - or, with the same budget, cook up a nice IED, or enough poison gas to fill a school, etc etc.

A fundamental truth of security is that preparation supersedes the incidental. Anyone who resolves to kill a ton of people can find a way around incidental obstacles just by knowing they exist ahead of time. The bottom line is that there's no way to keep anyone safe as long as there are people willing to do whatever it takes to kill them, and that's regardless of how many easy options are or aren't available to do so. Guns, for instance, aren't even close to the most efficient way of killing a lot of people right now - they're just one of the most visible thanks to popular media, and thus the most immediate option given the general population's non-existent attention span. We are lucky that murderers are still using guns, frankly. When that changes—and it will, if social trends continue—so will the methodology, along with the scale of the body count.

No matter how much or how comprehensive physical and technological security is or becomes, the only way to truly prevent crime is to balance the social expression whose inevitable remainder is always crime. Crime is just a social waste product that a majority of people are either too dumb or too greedy to recycle properly before it gets out of hand.

... But that process is neither simple, nor profitable. So. *shrug*

Happy Thanksgiving 2017

I'm thankful that Synth is coming back, and that it hasn't yet been completely corrupted by modern influences.

Sarcasm à la carte

Oh, maaaaan. What is the world coming to?

If we can't even collectively agree that it's fine to kill unwanted babies just for funsies, how the hell are we supposed to eventually achieve the ultimate consensus that it's fine to kill unwanted adults - including quite a few for potentially-legitimate reasons!? We need legalized distant-post-term abortion, yesterday!

— No amount of Las Vegas country music festival hijinks will suffice!

And—this is just a nitpick, but—this also puts a serious damper on our plans to selectively breed out human flaws in lieu of leaving it to "natural selection" - which, bear in mind, is, like, tooooootally composed of an inordinate overpopulation of frat boiz and club gurrrrrls-zah.