These pages mirror my Facebook status updates.
The rarely discussed downside of cryonics: if everything goes as planned and you get resurrected centuries later, then your contemporaries, the only living people who speak English like you do, will all be the kind of people who bought into cryonics.
Dungeons & Dragons is the Microsoft Windows of tabletop RPGs. Its popularity is due partly to inertia and partly to lack of awareness that alternatives even exist.
Frustrated with the state of WWW search engines in 1964 and their inept handling of stopwords, an up-and-coming rock band called The Detours decided to make a point by renaming themselves The Who.
DID YOU KNOW? The NAP was named when its inventor formulated it as a foundational moral rule after sleeping through a complete semester of an ethics course.
Jew or not Jew, a distinguished website of cultural criticism, discusses the Chanukah episode of Friends: "Look, we're all Jews here. We can admit that Chanukah is a dopey, second-rate, Christmas wannabe. We don't love Chanukah. No one above the age of nine really does. But that doesn't mean you get to take shots at it, Friends. It's like picking on the orphaned fat kid with a speech impediment. It's just too easy. Too cruel." ( http://www.jewornotjew.com/profile.jsp?ID=912 )
After a rare case of unanimous agreement among the editor and all eight reviewers, I regret to announce that my latest article will not, as originally planned, refer to waterfowl's (Anatidae) characteristic corkscrew-shaped penis as a "fun twist".
I was disappointed to learn that the Final Fantasy VII manual lists the main characters' blood types because of a weird Japanese superstition, and not because there's a dramatic scene like the one with Lucy Westenra in Dracula where Red XIII has to get blood transfusions from all his suitors.
A letter published in Nature last week ( https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-03781-0 ) argues that we shouldn't use the term "quantum supremacy" because the word "supremacy" is racist, which is both (a) wrong (white supremacy is not the first nor the only kind of supremacy) and (b) stupid. This is the dumbest thing since Mozilla shelled out a $15,000 grant in part to replace the words "master" and "slave" with "primary" and "replica" in a codebase. There's no shortage of actual racism going on right now (execution without trial by cops, mass incarceration in jails, concentration camps for immigrants, housing discrimination, employment discrimination, etc.)—even in the area of language alone, all sorts of racist epithets and dog whistles are in widespread use—but saying that a computer is superior to other computers is not racist. This has been a public service announcement.
Five proofs of the existence of Santa Claus:
1. Imagine the jolliest being possible. Which is jollier, a being that exists or a being that doesn't exist? The former, obviously. Nonexistence is hardly jolly. Hence, this being exists. By definition, that being must be Santa.
2. Per http://arfer.net/microblog/2018#p291 , you have nothing to lose by believing in Santa. If he doesn't exist, nothing bad will happen. If he does exist, you'll get presents. But if he exists and you fail to believe in him, you'll get coal.
3. The existence of Santa is evident by the jolliness of the season. Asantists believe that Christmas came about through random cultural fluctuations, but Christmas contains irreducible jolliness that can only be explained by Santa.
4. There is a natural human desire for absolute jolliness, and all natural human desires are capable of satisfaction. Only Santa can fulfill this desire.
5. We have thousands of eyewitnesses throughout history testifying to the existence of Santa, and the criterion of embarrassment tells us that they wouldn't lie about a gaudily dressed fat old tramp who sneaks into people's houses through their chimneys in the middle of the night and eats their cookies.
Today on Great Moments in Missed Opportunities for Puns: why isn't the Mediterranean diet called the Imperial Diet?
The most mysterious thing to me about blockchain hype is the use of "blockchain" as a mass noun ("we use blockchain"), as if blockchains were a sort of grimy substance that accumulates in the Internet's series of tubes and needs to be periodically flushed out with Drano.
I'm considering pronouncing all initialisms as if they were words. I'll talk of sitting for the sat (SAT), lying for the fibby (FBI), flying away when I'll birb (BRB), and proudly being part of the us (US). To be clear, the point is to save time, not to be annoying. Being annoying is just a bonus.
Inside each of us are two wolves. This is why your stomach growls when you haven't eaten for a while.
As a highly influential thought leader, I've decided that I should identify and develop the values and story that underlie my personal brand. Here's a sneak peak at the theme phrases for my upcoming vision board:
Wiktionary tells us that "Emacsen" is an anagram of "menaces". Coincidence?
Sure, "Captain" is a cool nickname, but why would you accept any nickname when your real name is as cool as "Daryl Dragon"?
The new hotness in e-commerce is to pop open a chat window on your store's web page greeting each visitor and offering help. Presumably, given the name and photograph attributed to the helper and the emoji, the idea is to provide the illusion of emotionally and practically available live help, of the kind you'd get in a brick-and-mortar store. But the illusion is shattered when you say something, and get a reply six hours later, if ever, by a different person. So, who's fooled? Only the executive who decided to spend money on this feature.
!important is the sudo of CSS.
Christians often compare themselves to sheep; for example, they may describe a cleric as a "pastor" who tends to his "flock", and refer to Jesus himself as the "Lamb of God". To outsiders, sheep may seem an odd choice of fursona, but consider that like sheep, many Christians
DID YOU KNOW? Coffee tables were popularized by an international conspiracy of dogs in order to convince humans to put food at canine height.
How the four Hogwarts houses react to a flying saucer landing in front of them:
I'm glad that people are interested in automated detection of fake news, but why bother with natural-language processing and network analysis? It suffices to count JPEG artifacts.
Jokes in the vein of "take my wife… please!" are now derided as "boomer humor". I may be 30, but those jokes have always agreed with me, if only because I know that if I had a spouse, I'd hate them, too. At least I have the sense not to get one.
"As an adolescent I aspired to lasting fame, I craved factual certainty, and I thirsted for a meaningful vision of human life—so I became a scientist. This is like becoming an archbishop so you can meet girls." —Matt Cartmill
Judah: "Generous, but you're making up the projected loss by excising office birthday cakes. That's unacceptable."
Princess Carolyn: "Everybody hates office parties."
Judah: "Everyone hates the mysterious dried fruit cubes in trail mix, but we still eat them after the other nuts and seeds are gone, because in our undervalued, overworked existence, we're [Hollywoo production assistants] desperate for any morsel of satisfaction, whether that be cake, unidentifiable orange fruit shards, or the occasional kind word from our boss."
DID YOU KNOW? Gaet'ale Pond, a small body of water in Ethiopia, has a salinity above 43%, making it the saltiest thing on Earth after the Game of Thrones fandom.
Lots of people take lewd pictures of themselves these days. I have a grudging respect for those who accept the risk of such pictures being widely distributed and recognized, but if the thought of your mom seeing your nudes terrifies you, that should be a hint not to take them in the first place. Privacy has been dead for over a decade and the corpse is starting to smell. Give it a proper burial and move on.
I prefer to interpret all generic motivational advice ("Never give up"; "Just do it!"; "Every great journey must begin with a single step") as egging me on when I'm gorging myself on junk food.
Fictional characters ranked by how disturbed you should be by somebody who says they strongly identify with the character:
5. Rorschach
4. "Dirty" Harry Callahan
3. Mister Gone (pre-redemption; post-redemption is probably a good sign, provided the person in question is a sex offender on parole)
2. Kefka Palazzo
1. Cozy Glow
In a breakthrough for eschatology, a team of experimental theologists has discovered God's plan for the universe, which reads, in its entirety, "just wing it lol". What do you think?
Bessel's correction—the infamous n - 1 in the denominator—does not result in an unbiased estimate of the standard deviation, only the variance; and any decrease in bias may very well be outweighed in the MSE by an increase in variance. If I taught introductory statistics, I'd cover Bessel's correction in the uncomfortably large "Things That Would Be Too Esoteric or Useless to Be Worth Covering, But I Have to Keep You From Being Led Astray by Widespread Misconceptions About Them; Now Let's Just Get Through This, So Help Me God" section of the course.
More famous quotes:
Some people think that children are innocent. Apparently, they've never met one. Or been one.
Windows is a great, long, sleeptalking dream of a great, sleeping bug, buried deep beneath ancient layers of hotfixes, slumbering till the day of reckoning, when the thin shreds of POSIX compatibility will be torn away and something yet more terrible, and unknowable, and 32-bit, will be revealed.
Unless you're the kind of lunatic who wants to allow shouting "fire" in a crowded movie theater, you don't believe in an absolute right to free speech. You just disagree with some other people about what sort of speech should be allowed where, and how restrictions should be enforced. So, for example, if you get banned from Twitter for being a giant racist, you have nothing to be indignant about beyond the fact that civilized people think racism is beyond the pale. (Also, David Duke has managed to not get banned yet, and if you've managed to be more racist than David Duke, that should be a cue for self-reflection.)
An /r/oldpeoplefacebook classic is when a woman complained on Green Giant's Facebook page about their celery, and they replied "Hi Jo Ann - I'm sorry to hear that! We appreciate the comment and I'll be sure to pass your feedback along to the rest of our team. -Ashley." So Jo Ann said "WHUP TEE DOO!!!!!". I've yet to see a more appropriate and cathartic response to corporate public relations. Someday I hope to have the courage to bellow it at a jobsworth myself.
Words that I hope don't end up as my last words:
I keep seeing ads on Facebook about Peyronie's disease, a disorder of the penis that causes it to deform due to the accumulation of scar tissue. This is discombobulating, but really, I should be thankful that Facebook's advertising database doesn't have accurate information about my genitals.
Follow-up to http://arfer.net/microblog/2018#p33: Hilariously, I forgot to pluralize "plurale tantum". (It's "pluralia tantum".)
People sometimes say things like "It's fine to believe whatever you want so long as you don't try to force your beliefs on others". This attitude makes no sense. If a person believes you're going to hell if you don't tithe to a televangelist, feed your children to Moloch, and use the word "enormity" to mean "enormousness", then it's entirely logical for them to try to convert you. The problem is with the belief in the first place. So, if you think believing crazy things is perfectly okay, then you have no basis to criticize people for acting crazy.
The good news is, you can reap a great harvest of smugness by pointing out when people fail to act as crazily as their beliefs imply they ought to. Trust me: I'm an academic, so when it comes to smugness, I'm a professional.
MRW pony ends today. https://derpibooru.org/1047022
Conspiracy theory: Reviewer 2 is a foreign agent trying to undermine our country's scientific productivity by giving scientists as much soul-crushing make-work as possible, and thus driving them out of the profession.
I read a textbook that quoted a mathematician as saying that her favorite part of being a mathematician is proving theorems. Sure, but that's like saying your favorite part of being an architect is designing buildings, or your favorite part of being a programmer is writing code.
BREAKING: The House impeachment inquiry is in tatters after new evidence that President Trump recited the oath of office with his fingers crossed. "He's got us there." Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California said in a statement.
In the spirit of "It is what it is" and "Wherever you go, there you are", here are some more profound, thought-provoking tautologies:
Free food favors the bold.
Hbrw dd th rght thng by jst mttng vwls. Chng my mnd.
It is said that getting there is half the fun, but Zeno proved that it's actually an infinite multiple of the fun.
If computers ever get smart enough to gain total power over us and use us for fuel or draft animals or zoo attractions, then I think they've earned it. The hamburger, as the product of our domination of animals, is the ultimate expression of might-makes-right as the key moral principle in relations between species of incomparable intelligence. I guess that what I'm saying is, I'm going to be sad when future robot societies finally decide that human flesh is an unsustainable luxury, and the last human to ever live is finished off by an ultra-wealthy robot gourmand.
For every female character in video games or animation who isn't hypersexualized, I bet there was an artist who had to beg and plead with a mouth-breathing executive to let the character stay that way. I appreciate it, artist. Well done. At least until the inevitable sequel with cup-size inflation and an unlockable swimsuit.
CYBER-TIP! Microwave ovens can interfere with Wi-Fi signals, even those exchanged while connecting to a network. So, make sure to cook before you PEAP.
The article on child pornography in today's New York Times comes to show the interesting role of privacy in the modern world, where Google, Facebook, and the feds have little difficulty inundating you with precisely targeted ads or collecting whatever evidence they need to persuade a judge in a secret court that they should be able to ship you to a foreign prison where they can torture you, and yet they lack the resources and motivation to follow up on tips of sex slavery in a halfway timely manner. Isn't the Internet great?
Famous quotes from the great thinkers:
The bruh momentum scale for programmers, in decibruhs (dB).
DID YOU KNOW? Scholars of comparative mythology have found that the most commonly attested genre of story comprises four acts:
1. After a long journey, a hero arrives at a new place.
2. The hero meets an unfamiliar person.
3. The hero meets another person who is more directly relevant to his quest.
4. The hero finds his beloved, but just as he does, tragedy strikes.
Follow-up to http://arfer.net/microblog/2018#p108: Well, this post aged like a binary-only kernel module. I think we've all learned an important lesson about idolizing people who eat their own toe jam in public while being videorecorded.
Why waste time say lot word when few word do trick?
Alternatively, I implore you to cogitate upon the rhetorical question of whether, taking into mature consideration human capabilities of longevity and patience, it is necessary to restrict oneself, in the expression of one's utterances, to the most abbreviated form that yet remains intelligible to one's interlocutor, particularly when one also retains in one's awareness a fact salient to all social discourse that notwithstanding the foregoing still remains true: namely, that there are multitudinous communicative forms in which any conceivable message might be conveyed, and thus it follows logically that there exists the possibility of speaking one's mind in a fashion that is to a greater degree prolix than other approaches that one might utilize and could perchance be more obvious or otherwise preferred in some circumstances.
Appropriately enough, Gorgias's "On Non-Existence" is a lost work.
There's an ASPCA Mobile Spay/Neuter Clinic outside my work, but it's a total scam. I went there and all they did was tell me to "get out" and call me "a sick person" and talk about how "we only operate on animals".
Artists these days like to call themselves "content creators", because advertising has taken over the world. But I prefer to think of myself as more of a "filler creator".
The five love languages:
1. Sharing passwords
2. Farting in your signifcant other's presence
3. Emptying the dishwasher without being asked
4. Reach-arounds
5. Pig Latin
DID YOU KNOW? Hurricanes can smell fear.
Not to be outdone by Australia's "dollarydoos", Canada is now printing "CanuckBux®".
Compared to published fiction, fan fiction is notable for big word counts, lots of purple-prose scene descriptions, and elaborate avoidance of the word "said". In other words, fan fiction is more like 19th-century novels than 21st-century novels. Maybe the fact that English classes all over the country are constantly assigning Melville, Hawthorne, George Eliot, Dickens, and the Brontës to teenagers is affecting how teenagers write, after all.
I'm raising funds for an ex-ex-gay camp where troubled teenage boys who've been convinced that they're actually straight get kidnapped from their beds at 3 AM to be glitter-bombed and forced to listen to Cher songs until they talk like David Sedaris.
Canadians are so polite because they channeled all their aggression into geese, moose, wolverines, and Wolverine.
Eliot Moore tells me that the ultimate source of all modern-day memes is a handful of elite users of iFunny, whose posts go to /r/okbuddyretard and thence the rest of the memeosphere. The scary part is that he might be telling the truth.
I'm working on a political analysis of Back to the Future based on the thesis that a lot of people's political thinking from the 80s through today is based on 50s nostalgia, to be titled "Ronald Reagan? The Actor!?".
All the cool kids (by which I mean Patti Moss Vernam) have been listing off seven books they liked, so let's take a break from dumb jokes to talk books, if only so I can fondly reminisce about a medium I've mostly abandoned in preference to dank memes and roguelikes.
1. Uncle Tom's Cabin. Nowadays people only know this book from jokes about reviews of minstrel shows loosely inspired by stage shows based on pamphlets about the book. "Uncle Tom" has become an insult. But the book is a wonderful combination of adventure, melodrama, and unabashed political advocacy that I haven't seen anywhere else. It was a best-seller in its time, and it's easy to see why. That Charles Dickens's much less interesting books got rehabilitated from cheap popular fare to Literature™ whereas Uncle Tom's reputation has only gotten worse is one of the great injustices.
2. The Turn of the Screw. This concise ghost story keeps you on your toes and has the most shocking ending I've ever seen in a work of fiction.
3. The Power Broker. It's absolutely massive and yet it's a real page-turner. It can teach you a lot about the history of the early 20th century, especially the history of New York, but the biggest impression it made on me was its message that powerful people tend to become powerful by shaving off all their extraneous ideals and moral inhibitions in favor of the pursuit of power for its own sake.
4. The Origin of Species. Sure it's not exactly an up-to-date presentation of evolutionary biology, but it's brief and charmingly written (I hold that Darwin was the ultimate Victorian gentleman and I will fight you on this) and it makes its case well. It still feels relevant because most of the objections of modern-day young-earth creationists are described and answered in detail. Maybe that says more about creationism than the quality of this book, but there you have it.
5. The Wayside School books. This series of kids' chapter books from three decades is a rich vein of absurd humor with dozens of characters. I've gone back to these books many times and every time I've found a new joke I'd missed. The first one's the weakest, but there's a fourth one coming out in March 2020 and I'm totally pumped.
6. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. Mark Twain's most underrated novel offers a combination of humor, fantasy fiction, and adventures that range from thrilling to terrifying, plus some familiar social commentary. Sure T. H. White's Once and Future King has its strong points (and got the Disney adaptation), but Connecticut Yankee is more interesting than all four of those put together.
7. Driving Your Own Karma: Swami Beyondananda's Tour Guide to Enlightenment. This guy does a parody of contemporary mysticism that is no less effective for being written 30 years ago, and he has an almost supernatural talent for puns. Like, you read a bit and notice a lot of puns, and then you look closer and there's even more puns. It's puns all the way down.
I now arbitrarily decree that Randy Layne must do the same thing.
★☆☆☆☆ Ridiculously pay-to-win. Overcomplicated, confusing mechanics. The Trump storyline jumped the shark years ago.
(My overall review of Earth.)
I'm going to Cape May today, so I'm gonna spend the afternoon pouring trash on the beach and then I'll switch the "before" and "after" pictures for TrashTag.
"Women only think they want us to be ourselves, because they don't know how wretched we actually are." —Richard Watterson
Hey guys, quick question. If you accidentally stowed away on a nuclear submarine and you woke up to find that all the crew was being transformed into horrible monsters by exposure to an ancient evil lurking deep in an ocean trench, and a bit of a scuffle with what was left of the first mate led to an ICBM accidentally being armed and aimed for Tokyo, and a foul whispering of long-dead voices started up in your ears whenever you tried to read the ship manuals, what would you do? Asking for a friend. Please respond quickly.
EDIT: My friend would also like to know if there are any easily removable parts of a Typhoon-class's interior that are made out of high-purity silver. It's for a book.
The older I get, the more I appreciate video games not as a fantasy of power, but as a fantasy of clearly stated goals, direct solutions to problems, and unambiguously being the good guy.
Yesterday, I got called a "fag" unironically for the first time. It was from a 17-year-old boy on Omegle… who I had just turned down. I don't think that word means what he thinks it means.
Why bother with conversion therapy and ex-gay camps? Just say "no homo" and you're good.
If all this so-called "science" is "real", then why did I get an ache in my right arm today after I got a tuberculin injection in my left arm? Checkmate, Western medicine.
The most private thing I'm willing to admit: I think that one-ply toilet paper is fine.
I'm proud to introduce my entry into the rapidly emerging bathroom-security market, Genderfyr, which will produce a robot arm that automatically genotypes you upon entry into a bathroom and then reuses the needle to stab you in the face if you have the wrong chromosomes. We are currently seeking additional capital to cover attorneys' fees for a class-action lawsuit brought against us by people with Swyer syndrome.
I'm hard at work on my new Penguins of Madagascar fan fiction, "Kowalski Anal-yzes Private's Privates".
Firefox is just Netscape Navigator's fursona.
What will KODI do?
▶ MANSPLAIN
SEALION
HAMSTER
DENY GOD
To clarify: yes, my middle initial is "B". Yes, it stands for "Bruh".
You can often see old political cartoons in history textbooks. Therefore, the history textbooks of the future will have political SpongeBob memes. Our grandchildren will be so excited when they hear that we were alive in those heady days.
I aspire to someday be the reason for a bizarre warning label on a commercial product. Like, on a pair of cargo shorts, "For external use only."
I only "like" things on Facebook, instead of using the other reaction buttons, because I am a man, and expressing anything more nuanced than the most basic emotions would threaten my fragile machismo.
I bought some Hot Pockets, but they were all frozen. What a rip-off.
I shouldn't be a psychotherapist, because I wouldn't be able to stop myself from saying things like:
DID YOU KNOW? Belle Delphine's bath water is one of Richard Spencer's Horcruxes.
I thought I was wearing a magical cursed ring, but it turns out that the real curse was in me all along.
Francis Grose's 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue defines "gap stopper" as "a whoremaster". To paraphrase Ice-T, whoremastery is nontrivial.
My most exotic political opinion is my support for children's suffrage. A common objection I've heard is that children will always vote the same as their parents. This makes sense, because, as we all know, children always do what their parents tell them to do, and never lie about it.
Monkey Island 2 (1991) discusses zombies:
Voodoo Lady: If they have any animated tissue, they can re-animate his whole body.
Guybrush: But I blew his body into a zillion gooey pieces!
Voodoo Lady: Not his body, Guybrush. You destroyed his spirit form. His body was safely buried far away.
Guybrush: But by now it must be…
Voodoo Lady: Rotten? Partially decomposed? Yes. And I don't think that's going to make him any more pleasant to deal with.
My self-summary: Albino and ready to hunt rhino. You bring the crossbows and fake IDs. I'll bring the snacks.
What I'm doing with my life: I'm a consultant. I help mid-level managers increase their expectations of their employees, so the employees don't exceed expectations and can be denied a raise. In my spare time, I work on neural networks to optimize speedrunning routes for Bubsy 3D.
The first thing people usually notice about me: My facial tattoos proclaiming my initiation into two different Linux user groups that turned out to be cults, and also Ponzi schemes.
The six things I could never live without: Riven: The Sequel to Myst (disc 1); Riven: The Sequel to Myst (disc 2); Riven: The Sequel to Myst (disc 3); Riven: The Sequel to Myst (disc 4); Riven: The Sequel to Myst (disc 5); a good nonstick frying pan.
On a typical Friday night I am: Sitting quietly at home working on a cross-stitch of bunnies. Or at least, that's what I tell my parole officer.
You should message me if: You're type-O, eligible for a US federal security clearance of Secret or Top Secret, and physically incapable of experiencing fear.
"…I'd about as soon be alive as dead. It does not seem quite so monotonous, you know." —Anko (The Sea Fairies, by L. Frank Baum, 1911)
There's an ad for a grocery store that says "Bread and you should be a thing again", as if I ever haven't been a total slut for bread.
Follow-up to http://arfer.net/microblog/2018#p153: As it happens, I was at a restaurant today whose bathrooms were labeled "yes" and "please". At least they were single-occupancy.
Everybody tells me to read the Mueller report, but I'm still waiting for the Wishbone adaptation.
Radicalism should not be an end unto itself. As the old saying goes, "you don't need a rectal thermometer to know who the assholes are".
People have described Paris Hilton as "famous for being famous", but I think she deserves recognition for killing Achilles.
I have seen men's attraction to women's breasts explained in terms of breasts looking like butts, but I've also seen attraction to butts explains in terms of butts looking like breasts. This is a fine example of the throw-everything-against-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks school of psychology.
DID YOU KNOW? The artist known as "Banksy" is actually John McAfee.
Mixed metaphors are funny. There's a passage in the Spanish play Blood Wedding where a character is trying to mean "some great sex" and says "una cama relumbrante" (translated literally by Lillian Groag as "a dazzling bed"), which sounds like something a very tacky rich person would sleep on.
The famous Cloud-to-Butt extension not only helps to ease the pain of hyperbolic computer marketing. It will also introduce you to such wonders as:
The secret to success is to appear thoughtful and attentive when you're spacing out and falling asleep.
Hey sports fans, we're back! Stay tuned for more masturbation jokes at a new and worsened ill-defined schedule. In the meantime, here's a highly advanced Facebook substitute: http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=2906
After 305 daily posts, I have to admit that I'm running out of jokes. I'd rather end on a high note than torment you all with increasingly lame filler, so I'm going off the air for now. Smell ya later, chumps.
Newton's third law states that for each yeet, there is an equal and opposite yoink.
Don't call yourself a rock fan if you don't know who this is. http://arfer.net/microblog/img/rock2.png
Don't call yourself a rock fan if you don't know who this is. http://arfer.net/microblog/img/rock1.png
They say you are what you eat, but I don't remember eating a scientific genius. Then again, the whole of last night is a blur. If any obituaries of Nobel laureates come out today, forget I said anything.
