commonplace book

January 2022

I really ought to limit my time on the Fediverse, r/AmITheAsshole and certain Discord forums lest I end up being this guy again.

Mine is a most peaceable disposition. My wishes are: a humble cottage with a thatched roof, but a good bed, good food, the freshest milk and butter, flowers before my window, and a few fine trees before my door; and if God wants to make my happiness complete, he will grant me the joy of seeing some six or seven of my enemies hanging from those trees. Before death I shall, moved in my heart, forgive them all the wrong they did me in their lifetime. One must, it is true, forgive one’s enemies — but not before they have been hanged.

Heinrich Heine

As far as I’m concerned, vegans are just evangelical vegetarians. They aren’t content to quietly enjoy a herbivorous diet; they want to persuade, cajole, or outright bully as many people as possible into joining them as if their diet were some kind of multilevel marketing scheme.

Eat what you want and leave me alone. If a sufficient number of people decide to join you, then market forces will end up making meat inconvenient — if not outright unobtainable without hunting — without you having to get in my face. In the meantime, I’m putting beans and meat in my chili.

Representation in fiction doesn’t really mean anything to me. If it means something to you, that’s fine, but I don’t want to be represented. I also suspect that people who demand representation in novels they haven’t written themselves have no notion of what they’re demanding of others, or how they come across when they do so.

If I was ever at the stage where I only want to read a novel if I can personally identify with the protagonist, I’d like to think I’m long past it. Otherwise, I’d have had a great deal of trouble with some of my favorite novels. Furthermore, I don’t think any other author can represent me. I can only speak for myself, and nobody else can speak for me. Besides, literature ain’t Burger King. You don’t get to have it your way unless you write it yourself.

I have a longer rant on this subject somewhere; I ought to dig it up and post it.

Disillusion is always possible but we’ve got propaganda
Mass confusion is always better than the threat of understanding
We’ll deceive you we’ve got so many ways to make you stand behind us
If we need to we’ll use them on ourselves to constantly remind us

Threshold, Mission Profile (Subsurface, 2004)

Hacker News: because College Republicans who majored in computer science need a safe space, too, even if they are overprivileged nerds with delusions of erudition.

What if microblogging platforms like Twitter and the Fediverse were never really necessary? What if you could shitpost on your own website, just like this? Who’s going to moderate me on my own website? What do I care if somebody unsubscribes from my feed? I can just go off with no meaningful consequences.

Here I sit, broken-hearted / I came to shit and only farted — I bet the existential despair expressed by this couplet dates back at least as far as Homer; it’s a human universal.

I can’t help but suspect that a lot of right-wing people who pollute the internet with their bullshit simply weren’t bullied enough as children. It’s a terrible thought, but I have them sometimes — just like everybody else. Including you, whoever you are.

You tell me that facts don’t care about my feelings as if I didn’t already know that. What I have yet to understand is why my feelings should give a damn about your facts — especially when I have neither the time nor the inclination to verify that your facts are indeed factual.

If somebody tells you to do your own research when you ask them to back a claim with evidence, that’s your sign that they are not arguing with you in good faith. Instead, they are just using you as the stooge in a farce staged for the entertainment of others.

To love someone long-term is to attend a thousand funerals of the people they used to be.

The people they’re too exhausted to be any longer. The people they don’t recognise inside themselves anymore. The people they grew out of, the people they never ended up growing into. We so badly want the people we love to get their spark back when it burns out; to become speedily found when they are lost.

But it is not our job to hold anyone accountable to the people they used to be. It is our job to travel with them between each version and to honour what emerges along the way. Sometimes it will be an even more luminescent flame. Sometimes it will be a flicker that disappears and temporarily floods the room with a perfect and necessary darkness.

Heidi Priebe

I may have found a real-life version of Claire Ashecroft: Searching for Susy Thunder.

A brief summary of my politics:

• Fuck the church.
• Fuck the state.
• Fuck the rich.
• Fuck the community.

What have the church, the state, the rich, or the community done for me that I should concern myself with their interests?

Especially self-appointed cops who police speech, associations, and gender expression.

You’re not free when the invisible hand of the market is holding a gun to your head.

There are no legitimate authorities anywhere.

ACAB = Assigned Christian At Birth (Get ’em indoctrinated into the cult before they learn to distinguish fantasy from reality.)

I no longer consider myself obligated to tolerate anybody else’s anger.
Not unless they’re prepared to tolerate mine.

Accepting that life has no inherent meaning is the easy part. The hard part is making your own life meaningful.

I’ve been watching Hellbound on Netflix. It feels like an existential horror show, an exploration of how people cope with an arbitrary and indifferent universe where people who have apparently done nothing wrong can be condemned to a hideous death (and quite possibly eternal torment afterward).

It also reminds me of a sf novel I first read a couple of decades ago.

After fifty-five years of dedicating his life and work to the study of ethical systems, Sol Weintraub had come to a single, unshakable conclusion: any allegiance to a deity or concept or universal principal which put obedience above decent behavior toward an innocent human being was evil.

Dan Simmons, Hyperion

Think about it: if an ideal leads you to be cruel to the innocent, then that ideal is evil and you should discard it. It doesn’t matter what the ideal is, whether it’s democracy, freedom of speech, social justice, or obedience to God. If it becomes an excuse for cruelty, you need to discard it.

And yet many of the people in Hellbound do not do this. When a single mother receives the decree, people start digging into her private life, slut-shaming her, and accusing her of child abuse. Why? Because they need a reason for this woman to be condemned to death and damnation instead of accepting that her situation is fundamentally unjust and that a God who allows things like this to happen is no god at all, but a demon.

The police officers and attorneys who help the woman’s children escape to Canada rather than be taken and used as pawns by the New Truth cult are likewise targeted. Why? Because they are presumably thwarting the will of God by ensuring the safety and liberty of two innocent children.

Likewise with cancer. It doesn’t care how good a person you are. You could do everything right, eat all the right things, get enough sleep and exercise, and still get cancer. Some people will find a way to justify blaming you for getting it. And if you survive, people will give God the credit instead of the doctors who treated you. Never mind that this is the same God that created a world in which people can get cancer in the first place.

I form the light, and create darkness, I make peace, and create evil: I the Lord that do all these things.

Isaiah 45:7 (Douay-Rheims 1899 American Edition)

Maybe it’s time we put our gods to the sword. They’re more trouble than they’re worth. Then again, it’s not like they were ever real in the first place. Every god is a God of the Gaps, but the gaps they fill are not those left by the limits of human science. Instead, they inhabit our inability to accept that the universe is arbitrary and insouciant, and that our morals and feelings don’t matter to anybody but us.

Human concerns are no concern of God’s, so curse God and live. If he doesn’t like it, then to Hell with him.

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February 2022

Looking forward to the new Ghost album in March. I’ve already got Call Me Little Sunshine wearing a groove in my head. Also, Ruby Modine is scorching hot in this video. Damn.

Terry Goodkind deserves all the abuse he gets for writing like the unholy bastard love child of John Norman and Ayn Rand, but give him credit for making motivated reasoning central to the plot of Wizard’s First Rule. He might only have had one good idea in his entire career, but it was a doozy.

Being on Mastodon still feels like a waste of time. Not sure why I bothered going back.

Why make art that nobody wants? Because I want it. And since I have a day job everybody else can take a number, have a seat, and wait their turn to kiss my ass. You see, I’m not here to make the world a better place. I’m here for two reasons: my father just had to have some pussy, and my mother just had to have some dick. That’s all there is to it. I’m the consequence of two boomers’ selfishness.

Douglas Crockford is my favorite author of fantasy fiction. His masterpiece is JavaScript: the Good Parts. JavaScript doesn’t have any good parts.

Been a while since I listened to The Fun Palace by Annihilator. The song’s a damn masterpiece.

Yeah, the background color for my site is misty rose. If you want to impugn my masculinity or my heterosexuality, I ought to warn you up front that that’s no way to flirt.

Some schmuck on Hacker News asks if React will die if Facebook/Meta goes out of business. Man, I certainly hope so. Fuck React. Nobody gets paid enough to deal with that shit.

If we demand a man must succeed to be regarded as good, how difficult do we dare to make that success without running the risk of breaking the hearts and minds of the many who fail?

Margaret Mead

I’m not worried about Joe Rogan. I’m not interested in his schtick so I don’t listen to him. Therefore he can’t directly affect me. Nor am I particularly worried about his listeners. I’m already vaccinated and they can’t stop me from getting boosters short of violence. If they take his bullshit too seriously, refuse vaccination, and die of COVID-19 then they aren’t a problem for anybody but gravediggers and crematorium operators. If they don’t get COVID-19, no harm done.

So why censor him? Hell, why does Spotify bother with podcasts at all? They were doing fine with legalized music piracy.

Persecute conservatives. Win valuable prizes.

Liberty, equality, fraternity: pick two. You’ll be lucky to get one.

There’s nothing wrong with being queer. There’s all kinds of shit wrong with being queer and using your billions to support an agenda inimical to queer people who aren’t as rich as you. Yes, Peter Thiel, I’m talking about you.

If you think you have nothing to hide, then post your nudes.

I think Paloma Medina is full of shit regarding core needs at work. I think we only have one core need at work: getting paid. Everything else is fringe benefits.

I have scant patience for people who think I should bring my whole self or my passion to work. I’m there to do a job and get paid. My intellect might be for rent, but my heart and soul are not. I never kiss the johns.

Can we just assassinate Vladimir Putin already? And his supporters in the Russian government? Just don’t let the CIA handle it, since they couldn’t even manage to whack Fidel Castro.

Instead of helping transgender teens escape Texas, what if we drove Republicans out of power and overturned their tyrannical legislation?

It’s generally bad form to blame the victim, but for the Religious Right I’m happy to make an exception.

Gmail has gotten really bad about letting blatant spam past their filters. Might be time to archive my mail from my wife and delete my account.

Must I bend the sky to realize...

Why do we uncritically accept the premise that parents have rights that supersede those of their children? Are children not human beings with thoughts, emotions, needs, desires, and rights of their own? At most, a parent should be a child’s caretaker and protector, but conservatives seem to think that parents should have ownership over their children. This doesn’t surprise me since these are the same people who seem to think that children ought to be the only retirement plan anybody needs.

PA Republicans who are annoyed that judges did their jobs and overturned their latest unconstitutional gerrymandering attempt ought to call a suicide encouragement hotline.

Black men still get enslaved in the US. It’s just that nobody seems to give a shit because the black men being enslaved have all been convicted of crimes (often in rigged trials where justice is impossible because of bias or because the accused do not have effective legal representation), have been branded criminals, and thus deserve to be enslaved. Never mind that many of the crimes for which black men are convicted are the sort of thing rich white men routinely get away with without a moment’s hassle from the police.

Attempting to hold somebody accountable when you do not hold a legitimate position of authority is an attempt at a power play and should be met with unyielding defiance.

March 2022

We should have assassinated Vladimir Putin the second he started making trouble outside of Russia. Sniper, polonium in his morning vodka, whatever. If we had whacked him and his supporters we might not be seeing a fucking war in the Ukraine, let alone the seizure of the Crimea back in 2014.

Hell, authoritarian leaders should be assassinated on principle. Vladimir Putin, Narendra Modi, Rodrigo Duterte, Jair Bolsonaro, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Viktor Orbán — it doesn’t matter who they are, authoritarians should be living in fear.

And why not? What is a state but a protection racket with a monopoly on a given territory recognized by other protection rackets? State sovereignty is not the national order of things, and tyrannicide is not necessarily murder.

I honestly had no intention of buying Elden Ring until I had a PS5, but I ended up buying it for PS4 since it came with a free upgrade to PS5. The longsword is still the best sword. Anybody who disagrees is welcome to touch my red summon sign. I’ll see if I can make them die on that hill.

Derek Sivers has a great point about using plain text. I’m got stuff I wrote twenty years ago that I can still read because I refused to use proprietary formats.

Peter Gibbons had the right idea: I'd say in a given week I probably only do about fifteen minutes of real, actual, work. Other people catching on. Why go through the hassle of a job search if your current job’s only real flaw is that you put in too many hours?

I don’t care if you call it tang ping or quitting in place. If you’re a salaried worker, getting your work done as quickly and efficiently as possible and then discreetly slacking off at work until you’ve put in your weekly forty hours is justice. I say this because, as an atheist, workism is just another bullshit religion.

You work your life away and what do they give?
You’re only killing yourself to live.

Black Sabbath, Sabbath Bloody Sabbath (1973)

I find rants about Elden Ring by butt-hurt gamers low-key hilarious. By their own admission they approach the game like it was a more fast-paced action game like Devil May Cry and end up having a bad time. Rather than learn from the experience and improve their tactics, they blame FromSoftware for not accommodating their preferred playstyle. Maybe they should play Nier: Automata instead.

Been listening to The Oubliette by The Reticent. It’s a concept album, a harrowing musical journey through the seven stages of Alzheimer’ disease.

Catherine will have kittens if one of these fuckers lands on her. I wonder if they’re edible and can be made palatable.

Using a commercial social media platform and griping about the UI and cookie warnings is the epitome of self-inflicted First World Problems.

Lonely, extroverted managers and CEOs who miss having people who secretly look forward to reading their obituaries would rather force people to go back to driving to the office than get therapy.

Most white-collar workers aren't returning to the office. They aren't even returning to the cubicle. They're returning to a shared desk in an open plan hellscape.

This is one reason why “nobody wants to work anymore”.

Adding a mostly hand-made feed. I’m using BBEdit includes and templates to make it easier to generate a full text Atom feed. Rather than do a blog or post on a micro-blogging service like Twitter or use a federated microblogging service like Mastodon, I figure I can just do a full-text Atom feed. If you have the URL you can follow me using any client software you like. My email address is in the feed header if you want to get in touch. I’ll never know if you subscribe or unsubscribe unless you tell me. It’s really chill, and if since I’m used to writing HTML by hand doing XML is hardly a stretch.

But for some reason I feel obligated to backtrack through my commonplace and add in old entries. Might as well create a two-way link.

I’m testing this feed using newsboat, a command-line feed reader for Unix-like operating systems.

You can install it on macOS if you’ve got Homebrew with brew install newsboat.

Then, from the shell, type mkdir ~/.newsboat and touch ~/.newsboat/urls. You can add feeds by typing echo "$URL" >> ~/.newsboat/urls in the shell.

This blog in an Atom feed will never acknowledge Daylight Savings Time. I cannot be bothered to adjust the offset from UTC in my feed entry template.

Just got a scam call from somebody saying they have my daughter.

I couldn’t resist laughing at them.

It’s not like I actually have a daughter.

This clown was trying to use the Wizard’s First Rule on me, hoping I’ll believe the lie not because I want to believe but because I fear the consequences of disbelief.

The problem is that even if I had a daughter I might just be heartless enough to call a scammer’s bluff and say they’re welcome to keep whomever they’ve claimed to have kidnapped.

Then again, the call only got through in the first place because I was allowing calls from unknown numbers. That is not a mistake I mean to repeat often.

I am not grateful to have a job. I will never be grateful for the opportunity to make you richer in exchange for a cut of the action that amounts to pennies on the dollar. You can go straight to hell and give big gay Satan a sloppy rimjob for even thinking I should be grateful; you should be grateful that anybody is willing to put up with your bullshit.

You’re not my friend. You sure as hell ain’t family. The deal is simple: I do the job and then I get paid. Love doesn’t come into it. Keep the relationship transactional and nobody will get hurt.

If I had ten bucks for every time some ignorant shitfountain of a manager asked me if I had tested my code locally I wouldn’t have to code for a living.

I ought to strap a fucking camera to my head and record what I actually do at work. Livestream that shit in case my boss thinks I spend my days smoking pot and playing Pokémon. Only reason I don’t is that at least half the shit I do at work is confidential or involves confidential shit, and it’s only basic professionalism to be discreet about it.

Never mind that such discretion is also mandated by law. You think HIPAA compliance is just for people working in healthcare?

I didn’t know Powerwolf had a new album out. Not that 2021 is really new, but it’s new to me. Time for my epic Roman Catholic werewolf metal fix.

Incidentally, I’m low-key impressed that this band actually has a website and isn’t dependent on Twitter or Facebook for their online presence. It seems a rarity nowadays.

Call of the Wild is available on Apple Music and Spotify, but I recommend buying a copy on CD because you should own your music instead of renting it.

Oh, and Undress to Confess is hilarious. Sex, Christ, and rock & roll. Kinda reminds me of Christian Woman by Type O Negative.

a little parody of Bon Jovi’s “You Give Love a Bad Name”.

Shattered my faith
And you’re to blame
You give God a bad name
I prayed with you
And you preyed on me
Rev’rend, you give God a bad name

I haven’t bothered watching the Academy Awards in over two decades, but if I started watching again next year I’d do so with the TV muted. I just want to ogle the Beautiful People as they strut about in finery I don’t have the money, figure, or inclination to wear myself; their speeches are generally content-free and not worth listening to (transcript or GTFO).

Besides, nobody in Hollywood does method acting better than an autistic person who spends all day masking in order to survive in a society made by and for the neurotypical.

I don’t have a sense of community. I am a superfluous man; I do not belong anywhere and am only a part of your society in the most tangential senses. This tends to bother other people more than it does me.

Feeling a bit pissy and self-destructive today. I know I should go to therapy, but good luck finding a shrink approved by whatever capitalist death panel provides your health insurance. So...

Anybody can be born a bastard, but I worked hard to become the asshole I am today, and I’m proud of it.

Whatever your cause or ideology, I oppose it. Most the time I hate almost everybody.

Not sure why I should be obliged to label my gender identity and sexuality for the convenience of people I wouldn’t fuck with Zeus’ dick even if they would have given me the time of day in the first place. You shouldn’t have to put up with that shit either.

It occurred to me that atomic blog might be a weak pun on atomic blonde. Good fuckin’ movie; it’s got sex, violence, and rock ’n roll: everything a growing boy needs.

Is Max Stirner the original edgelord? It is certainly tempting to think so even though the following resonates hard with me.

What is not supposed to be my affair! Above all, the good cause, then God’s cause, the cause of humanity, of truth, of freedom, of humaneness, of justice; furthermore, the cause of my people, my prince, my fatherland; finally even the cause of mind and a thousand other causes. Only my own cause is never supposed to be my affair. “Down with the egoist who only thinks of himself!”

Let’s see then how they deal with their cause, those for whose cause we are supposed to work, sacrifice ourselves, and be filled with enthusiasm.

You are able to report thoroughly on God, since you have investigated “the depths of divinity” for thousands of years, and have seen into its heart, so that you can probably tell us how God himself deals with “God’s cause,” which we are called to serve. Nor do you conceal the Lord’s activities. Now what is his cause? Does he make an alien cause, the cause of truth or love, his own, as he expects us to do? You are outraged at this misunderstanding, and you inform us that God’s cause is indeed the cause of truth and love, but this cause cannot be called alien to him, because God himself is truth and love; you are outraged at the assumption that God might resemble us poor worms by promoting an alien cause as his own. “Should God promote the cause of truth, if he is not himself truth?” He cares only for his own cause, but since he is all in all, therefore all is his affair! But we, we are not all in all, and our affair is utterly small and contemptible; therefore, we must “serve a higher cause.” —Now it is clear, God cares only for what is his, deals only with himself, thinks only of himself and looks out only for himself; woe to all that is not well-pleasing to him. He serves nothing higher and satisfies only himself. His cause is—a purely egoistic affair.

How does it stand with humanity, whose cause we should make ours? Is its cause perhaps that of another, and does humanity serve a higher cause? No, humanity sees only itself, humanity wants to promote only humanity, humanity itself is its own cause. So that it develops, it lets people struggle away in its service, and when they have accomplished what humanity needs, it throws them on the dung-heap of history in its gratitude. Isn’t humanity’s cause—a purely egoistic affair?

I don’t at all need to show that everything that tries to push its cause over on us is concerned only with itself, and not with us, only with its well-being, and not with ours. Just have a look for yourselves at the rest. Do truth, freedom, humaneness, justice want anything else than that you get enthusiastic about them and serve them?

They all do exceptionally well when they are zealously revered. Take a look at the nation, which is defended by devoted patriots. The patriots fall in bloody battle or in the fight against hunger and need; what does the nation say about that? With the manure of these corpses, the nation becomes a “blossoming nation.” Individuals have died for “the great cause of the nation,” and the nation sends some words of thanks after them—and profits from it. I would call this lucrative egoism.

But just look at the Sultan who so lovingly cares for “his own.” Isn’t he pure selflessness itself, and doesn’t he sacrifice himself hour after hour for his own? Yes, of course, for “his own.” Try just once to show yourself not as his own, but as your own; for escaping his egoism, you will take a trip to his jail. The sultan has based his affair on nothing but himself; he is for himself the all in all and the only one, and tolerates no one who dares not to be his own.

And won’t you learn from these shining examples that the egoist gets on best? I, for my part, take a lesson from them, and instead of serving those great egoists unselfishly anymore, I would prefer to be the egoist myself.

God and humanity have based their affair on nothing, on nothing but themselves. I likewise base my affair on myself, this I who just like God am the nothing of all others, this I who am my all, this I who am the Unique.

If God, if humanity, as you affirm, have enough content in themselves to be all in all to themselves, then I feel that I would lack it even less, and that I would have no complaint to make about my “emptiness.” I am not nothing in the sense of emptiness, but am the creative nothing, the nothing out of which I myself create everything as creator.

Away, then, with every cause that is not completely my affair. You think that at least the “good cause” must be my affair? Which good, which bad? I am myself my own affair, and I am neither good nor bad. Neither makes any sense to me.

The divine is God’s affair; the human cause is “humanity’s.” My affair is neither the divine nor the human; it is not the good, the true, the just, the free, etc., but only my own, and it is not general, but is—unique, as I am unique.

For me, there is nothing greater than me!

Max Stirner, The Unique and Its Property, 1845 (translated by Apio Ludd aka Wolfi Landstreicher, 2017)

He certainly makes Ayn Rand look like a weak sister. No half-assed justification of egoism as a half-assed neo-Aristotlean virtue ethic here. It’s actually rather refreshing. I grow sick unto death of the piety and sanctimony of those who would demand that I devote my efforts and enthusiasm to their causes at the expense of my own concerns and interests.

Whether it’s a middle manager who expects me to work unpaid overtime because they have mistaken their job for a holy crusade, some activist who expects me to work for free to remedy injustices I had no part in creating, or an indignant parent who didn’t think to read my fiction before giving it to their kids and is now upset with me because my fiction is full of consensual sex, ultraviolence, and heavy metal instead of “traditional Christian values” — I detest them all and wish pain and misery upon them.

Black lives matter. Trans lives matter. I do not object to this. Nevertheless, my life matters most to me. Likewise, your life should matter most to you. It is likely to be the only one either of us will ever get.

My life is my own; for whom should I live if not for myself? Fuck altruism, fuck all of your ideals and causes, and fuck you if any of the above offends you. It’s not like I held a knife to your throat and forced you to visit my website.

If the field in which I grow my fucks looks barren to you, it is because I already harvested the crop for my own consumption and left none for you. Grow your own fucks and devote them likewise to your own use.

Your cause is nothing to me until I choose for my own reasons to make it my own. You will not persuade me to do so by browbeating me. If I were so easily swayed by bullies I would have died a teen suicide.

Am I playing the iconoclast here? Perhaps a little. Nevertheless, the impulse to do so stems from a genuine psychological need within me. I’ve spent my entire adult life trying to be a “good person”, whatever that means. I have tried to be smart, erudite, a good worker, husband, son, and citizen who cares about others, keeps up with current events, and engages with the world. But in my middle age I have come to suspect that I was merely doing what the kyriarchy wanted of me.

As a man I have no intrinsic value; my only value appears to lie in my utility to others. If I willingly devote physical, intellectual and emotional labor to others; if I circumcise my own soul for the convenience and comfort of others and never express my own needs and desires; if I am willing to go to war and kill and die for the greater good — then that makes me a “good man”. I have come to reject this, and to reclaim my own inherent value.

I am no longer interested in being a “good man”. I want to become more fully my own man in what time remains to me in this life. The world might not owe anything because it was here first, but I was thrown into existence without any say in the matter so I in turn owe the world nothing.

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No kingdom shall come
Let my will be done on Earth
To Hell with Heaven

I think I need a mantra to help me start writing fiction again. “Fuck Literary Merit” will do for now. Or maybe just, “Fuck Literature”? How about, “literary merit be damned”?

I just want to write about soul-searching androids and swashbuckling sopranos doing epic shit in a near-future post-apocalypse that still has room for wizardry and wild romance. Just fuckin’ Hawkmoon on a Harley, you know? Or maybe Morgaine and Vanye if Morgaine had had a happy childhood and gotten music lessons from Keith Emerson and Annie Haslam.

I don’t know how it is that my wife can still excite me with the slightest brush of a kiss after over twenty years, but I’m not complaining.

There’s an interesting article about Roman emperors in heavy metal (mainly Nero and Caligula) and the genre’s celebration of non-theistic Satanism and Roman anti-Christian persecution in Lapham’s Quarterly. Wonder if it’s worth my while to subscribe...

Apparently 37% of all jobs in the US can be done from home. Mine is one of them, and I think that any job that can be done remotely should be done remotely. Others will disagree because they like going to the office and seeing other people there, but I think that people who use their jobs as a substitute for a social life can go fuck themselves. Try making friends outside your job.

Just don’t try making friends with me. I’m not friendly. At all.

iFarted, by Apple. Stink Different™️.

If you leave an online space without explaining yourself, you’re ghosting.

If you say goodbye, at least one asshole will accuse you of flouncing.

So just do whatever the hell you want. Haters gonna hate.

I keep getting popups that say “we need to talk” about my ad blocker. This is bullshit because there is no “we” here. The fact that I chose to visit your website doesn't make you and me a “we”. At least not enough of a “we” for me to value your opinion about my use of ad blockers.

Therefore, we don’t actually need to talk about my ad blocker. I already know what you want — for me to disable my ad blocker — and it isn’t going to happen.

Yes, I know. You depend on ad revenue to meet payroll or to pay your operating expenses. That is not my problem. Get a better business model or get the fuck off of the internet. Advertising is a 20th century business model and it only worked for television and print media. It has never worked on the internet and it never will because people know they have the right to ignore or block ads, even if they don’t have the tools or knowledge to do so. Nobody wants ads. Nobody likes them. Nobody wants to hear about your partners’ products.

And, no, I’m not a hypocrite because I have my own website. I don’t run ads. Hell, I don’t even solicit or accept donations. I pay my hosting and domain registration bills out of my salary from my day job.

When you stop using adtech I will consider turning off my ad blocker. But as long as every ad you try to serve uses cookies and javascript to target and track me, I will treat your ads as malware and block them without remorse as a matter of self-defense. I never fuck strangers without a condom, and I never visit other people’s websites without an ad blocker.

You don’t have my best interests in mind; thus your interests are no concern of mine. If you can’t find a way to make money on the internet that doesn’t violate other people’s privacy or compromise their security you need to get the hell off of the net. You don’t belong here, you aren’t welcome, and you overestimate the value of your “news” and opinion, both of which are nothing but propaganda.

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The College Republicans Who Majored in Computer Science are going on about how most people don’t seem to allow comments on their blogs any longer.

You won’t find a comments form here, either, for the following reasons:

• This is a static website and self-hosting comments isn’t worth the effort or expense.
• I can’t be bothered to moderate a public forum and deal with spammers and trolls
• I would rather get email if you aren’t willing or able to link, quote, and comment on your own website.
• This is my soapbox. Get your own.

I’ll admit to a bit of hypocrisy here; I have left comments on other people’s blogs through their comment forms so one might argue I should have one of my own, but I honestly can’t be bothered. Hell, I don’t even do social media and you think I’m going to open a public forum on my own website? Not fuckin’ likely.

Is it rude if I put an email address for complaints on my website that's actually a rickroll? Fuck it; I’m doing it. And I’ve set up the address to redirect all messages to /dev/null. Because I can. 🖤

I added some new stuff last night:

• “The Milgram Battery”: a Starbreaker story
• my notebook

I'm syndicating selections from my site to Schlubstack because some people can’t or won’t use RSS/Atom feeds. It will always be free because I don’t feel obligated to help these assholes earn revenues they’ll use to pay TERFs and fascists.

April 2022