Hemingways_Shotgun

My impression as an atheist is that there is no special sauce that makes human intelligence impossible to achieve. It will happen eventually.

Our brains are computers made of meat. Nothing more. Our thoughts, our dreams, our consciousness itself is quite literally just chemicals, hormones and synapses instead of circuits, binary code and wiring. There is no soul that would prevent true life from arising once the computing becomes powerful enough for it.

So this is half on me, and half on my father. (I inherited my “stupid idea” gene.

When I was 16 my dad was building a greenhouse on our small acreage. Frame was up, everything was ready and it became time to lay down the heavy clear plastic sheeting that would form the surface.

As he was up in the top nailing down each corner, it was my job to hold each corner down as tight as I could from the ground by using a rope attached to the corner of the sheet. (I don’t know if i’m describing this properly).

Any way, my father’s fault in the story is this: The only “rope” we could find was baler twine. It’s thin, coarse, and can easily slice like a saw. We secured a long piece of it to the corner of the sheeting and my job was to basically “tug of war” the corner in order to keep it taut for my father to secure.

Anyone raised in the country already sees exactly where I’m going with this…

MY stupid part in this story is this…

In an attempt to get a better purchase on the baler twine, I wrapped it a few times around my hand, through my fingers, etc…

Did I mention it was a bit windy that day? So a guest of wind took the corner and ripped it out of my hands, with the twine literally zipping through my fingers, slicing them nearly to the bone because friction + baler twine = weirdly effective saw.

Four fingers on my right hand were left with ring scars from where the twine zipped through them and my right hand was out of action for about a week

That is essentially the vibe I got from that argument. We didn’t last much longer after that.

The moment I knew that I had to break it off with my ex was when a comment about tea-cup saucers turned into an accusation that I “always had to be right”.

We were having cake for dessert:

Her: “Can you grab plates?”

Me: Grabs a couple of small plates.

Her: “No, those aren’t for cake. It’s the really small ones.”

Me: “Okay, but FYI the small ones are actually teacup saucers. You can tell the difference because they have the indent in the middle so the teacup doesn’t slip around.”

Her: “You just always have to be right, don’t you?”

What followed was a truly bonkers argument where I found myself accused of “lording my intelligence” and told that I had to be right in everything.

For the record, I told her I literally didn’t give a shit what she wants to eat cake off of. I’m the guy that would happily use a Tupperware lid as a plate if it was the closest thing to hand. I was just pointing out an “interesting fact” (in my mind at least).

Not in a million years.

There is no such thing as a perfectly accurate touch pad “click”. Most people (myself included) tend to see their finger slip (even just a millimeter) to the right or the left when pressing down to click on a touchpad. It leads to go knows how many times that my cursor in the middle of typing has suddenly jumped to a completely different line. In fact, it’s why they implemented the option to turn off the touchpad when typing.

So now let’s introduce ANOTHER use to that part of the keyboard. Not only do we have to deal with a wandering cursor, but we have to deal with random spaces popping into existence every time we try to scroll.

Screw that.

I haven’t tried the 60s yet, but I’ve heard good things about Westlake. My entire reading world changed when I discovered the original hard-boiled works of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler.

Moved my youtube habits away from doom and gloom news channels and instead to history documentaries and old episodes of Best of the Worst.

Similar to that, spend more time on Pluto TV/Roku/Tubi watching terrible low budget sci-fi and old comfort episodes of Quantum Leap and TNG.

Supporting ActivityPub doesn’t excuse being owned and operated by META.

Will Bsky eventually shit itself like Twitter did? Sure, maybe. That seems to be the normal path nowadays. And when it does, I’ve still got my Masto account that I try to keep active as well. But at the very least, Bsky is a different company. I can have a bsky account without being dragged into an entire META ecosystem designed to put their chosen content in front of my eyes.

Even at it’s worst, the fact that Bsky is it’s own thing and not owned by a mega corporation puts it automatically about Threads, regardless of ActivityPub.

I’d argue that the wheel was invented not because “walking” was inefficient, but because flesh is weak and gets tired.

A robot doesn’t have that weakness. It thinks nothing of running five hours at high speed if necessary. It has no need of wheels if it can just Gump it cross country with cargo on his back a la Death Stranding.