Sperate

February 23, 2025, 6:40 PM Chill Annoying

Starting to think the thing where when you're single you're supposed to pretend to be totally fine with it is counterproductive

— Misha, Photographer, Eligible Bachelor (@drethelin) February 23, 2025

I don’t know about women, but the reason men do this is that women are extremely allergic to anything with even the slightest hint of desperation. I swear, they can smell it upwind at 10,000 meters.

So if you’re a man, you have to pretend as hard as you can that you don’t really want a relationship, you’re absolutely perfect like you are, that no, you don’t even know what the word “lonely” means, thank you. And you must do that to even have a shot.

Too Much Mem

February 23, 2025, 6:04 PM Chill Annoying

Safari, what the fuckkkkkkk.

B&B

February 23, 2025, 5:19 PMFebruary 23, 2025, 5:21 PM Chill Clowns, Evil

Why did I have to live in the stupidest timeline?

Beavis and Butthead are co-president, the most destructive organization in the world is named after a memecoin, and the anti-vaxxers have effectively won the discourse.

Also, people like Ian Welsh worship Putin, a two-bit thug who still might take over most of Europe.

Get me outta here.

Nigh Bye

February 23, 2025, 9:42 AM Chill Regular-ass Post

Both evil winter and evil Standard Time are nigh on being gone for a long while.

Good riddance.

Pod People

February 23, 2025, 2:51 AMFebruary 23, 2025, 7:16 AM Chill Annoying

I really hate podcasts. So much information locked up unusably in a format that demands for-fucking-ever to take anything away from.

Just totally antithetical to the way I think and learn.

Blame Canada

February 23, 2025, 1:45 AM Chill Regular-ass Post

I am not in favor of annexing Canada because then we’d have to deal with their massive problems as well as our own.

No thanks.

Also, it’s hugely morally wrong.

Bad Books

February 23, 2025, 1:20 AMFebruary 23, 2025, 1:24 AM Chill Books

Fun question from @Sam__Enright: What’s the “anti-reading list” in your field of expertise?

I have many fields of expertise.

Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid is an atrocious book that teaches you nothing, or if it manages more than that is completely wrong. A book designed to make stupid people feel smart. Read specialist books or textbooks in this and related fields instead. Do not fall prey to this utter piece of shit or you will become much dumber than you were before.

Helogland by Carlo Rovelli. Full of wrong information. I don’t mean that it’s my opinion that it’s wrong. A lot of the most important parts of the book are directly contradicted by actual experiments conducted in the real world, including some Nobel-prize-winning ones.

Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens our Future. Just a clueless work that marshals poor evidence in service of murky points. Avoid.

There are other books in the thread, but these are ones I did not see mentioned that are also atrocious and cause you to know less than you did than when you started. And all are in fields I know enough about to say that yes, they are 100% full of bullcrap.

Read Up

February 23, 2025, 12:10 AMFebruary 23, 2025, 12:21 AM Chill Annoying, Clowns

Happy Anniversary. You Suck!

From being a photojournalist and then a blogger for many years, I know that only about 10% of people will read your entire article and of those maybe 5% will understand it. And that is no matter how clearly you write or how much you stress your thesis.

So I don’t really care that much about those who “hate” me as they are hating some version of me that doesn’t exist based on an article or post they did not read fully and if they did, they did not understand.

Not my problem.

Giant Problem

February 23, 2025, 12:05 AM Chill Regular-ass Post

My hot take that everyone will hate is the fact that so many women read crap like Twilight and whatever this nonsense might be is just as harmful (and perhaps more so) to women’s psyche and ability form relationships as men watching porn.

Yes, I know women watch porn as well. I worked with a woman porn addict who got fired for storing gigabytes of it on her work machine. But men watch more of it.

I think the difference is that for men, porn is mostly instrumental. It’s for getting off and then is quickly forgotten. But for women, Twilight and the like is aspirational — they really believe deep in their hearts that they will find someone like Edward or whatever the hell is happening in that Mountain Bullman book. I don’t mean a sparkly vampire, but just someone that unreservedly devoted and uncaring of your flaws or that you’re the size of grain silo and about as capable of walking up a mountain.

Women’s expectations have increased greatly while men’s prospects have declined. These two factors are partly (but not wholly) responsible for the loneliness epidemic. And that so many women are into “literature” like Twilight and the Fifty Shades series certainly has a lot to do with that epidemic too.