Monthly Archives: December 2018
At work, more than a decade ago, Wi-Fi let us take our laptops to meetings or the cafeteria or even nearby outside. At home, while the old laptop couldn’t hold a connection, so remained tethered to the DSL modem, the new laptop does just fine. So does the iPad, going on two years now.
The new laptop uses a wireless keyboard and mouse. And I’ve been using wireless headphones to watch TV for a year or so. It’s really nice having no wires for devices I’ve used for so long in tethered form. Of course cell phones started it quite a few years ago.
It all does seem to come with a new set of (minor) headaches, though!
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8 Comments | tags: Bluetooth, electro-magnetic, local loop, photons, Wi-Fi, wireless | posted in Computers, Life
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One of those changes was finally getting a new laptop. The old Sony Vaio (running Windows Vista!) I’ve had since 2011 worked well enough (even with the squished bug) that I never pursued getting something else, although I always meant to. As I’ve said before, sometimes “well enough” works well enough for me.
This fall I bought a new (Dell XPS 15; Windows 10) laptop, and as part of the whole “changes” thing I’ve been trying DuckDuckGo for my searches rather than good ol’ Google…
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8 Comments | tags: DuckDuckGo, Google+, search engine, solipsism, Solipsist, solipsistic, sophism, sophist, sophistry | posted in Computers
Last week I did a little jazz riff on the idea of “story space” — where all the stories live — and how the interesting stories we want to hear are all improbable to the point of having zero chance of actually happening (unless, gasp, statistics can lie).
I thought I’d return to that basic story space idea and, in the process, finally deal with a note that’s been on my idea board for years. My problem has been that, while the idea the note expresses seemed interesting enough, I’ve never quite seen how to turn it into a post. I’m not even sure the idea makes any real sense, let alone is worth trying to write about.
However that’s never stopped me before, and it’s (almost) Chillaxmus, so cue the music, it’s riff time again…
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7 Comments | tags: Chillaxmas, googol, Jorge Luis Borges, Kurt Gödel, Max Tegmark, Mind Tools, Rudy Rucker, storytelling, The Library of Babel, The Simpsons | posted in Writing
Good news, everyone! The star dragon that’s been munching on our local star has finally gotten tired of chasing its food across the sky and will be moving on at last.
(We’re apparently in a migration path, because we seem to get one nearly every year. Every year I can remember, anyway. Good thing they only feed during the day, so the sun as a little time to recover.)
I’m glad it finally left; I was a little worried it might see Parker as a tasty hors d’oeuvre. Or a toothpick. You never can tell with dragons.
And now our star can start to heal and grow back to its lovely warm summer fullness. (Only problem with that is, it attracts hungry star dragons!)
1 Comment | tags: humor, Solstice, Sun, Winter Solstice | posted in Life
Yesterday I was re-watching Arachnids in the UK, the fourth episode of the latest season of Doctor Who, and a somewhat goofy idea popped into my head about how to respond to the charge that sometimes stories are just ‘too improbable’ to enjoy — or to have happened at all.
That certainly is an accusation that seems to apply in many cases. In order for some story to have happened at all, certain events had to happen just so and in the right order. It’s easy to shake your head and think, “Yeah, right. As if that could actually ever happen.”
For many years I’ve had a generic response to that accusation, but yesterday I realized it can be justified mathematically!
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4 Comments | tags: Doctor Who, Hilbert Hotel, infinity, story plots, storytelling | posted in Writing
Nope. Never liked’m.
Watching the Thanksgiving episode of the rebooted Murphy Brown on CBS, where Murphy decides to cook dinner with easily anticipated and well-worn results, it struck me exactly why I don’t find the show very funny. And why I really don’t find any of the CBS comedies since the 1990s very funny: Idiot Clowns.
In general, it’s why I don’t find a lot of comedy very funny. Idiot Clown comedy requires an idiot clown — someone so stupid they are unaware of basic reality, a blindness forced on them to enable a (typically) lame joke. I find it cheap and easy and without much value.
More to the point, I just don’t like idiots or clowns in my entertainment.
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13 Comments | tags: Adam Sandler, clowns, Dave Chappelle, George Carlin, idiots, LA Story, Melissa McCarthy, Northern Exposure, Robin Williams, Sarah Silverman, Seth MacFarlane, Steve Martin, Tracy Morgan, Will Ferrell | posted in Movies, Opinion, TV
Star Trek wasn’t hugely popular right off the bat, or even for a long time. The first series, after all, lasted only three years and had to fight for survival for most of that time. But it did catch on hugely with us fans; many of us fell in love right away.
From an early point even within the fan community, let alone to mundanes, some of us were careful to identify as Trekkers rather than Trekkies. As I used to put it, “Trekkers are grown ups who love science fiction. Trekkies own a pair of Spock ears.”
Then, because of a little movie, named Star Wars, science fiction went mainstream. And so did the divide between two rather different kinds of fans…
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28 Comments | tags: Bill Maher, Doctor Who, Gamergate, Ghostbusters, Leslie Jones, Marvel comics, SJW, social justice warrior, Stan Lee, Star Trek, Star Wars, The Doctor | posted in Rant, Sci-Fi Saturday, Society
I am offended by people who are offended! It’s like how I am intolerant of people who are intolerant. It’s a challenge. Somehow I have to ignore the self-referential self loathing, but life is paradoxical and ironical, and I’ve always embraced both (and chaos) as personal philosophies.
Irony and paradox aside the whole idea of being offended has become an aspect of society today. We’ve turned it into a cottage industry, and both sides of politics have heavy weaponized it into a WMD.
The problem is often the legitimacy of being offended. When is it right to take offense, and when might the real issue be our own perceptions (and we should just STFU).
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9 Comments | tags: Hanlon's Razor, offended, offense, people, politically correct, Stephen Fry, things people say | posted in Rant, Society
As someone whose high school and college education focused on writing and storytelling (through stage, film, and video), I’ve long been askance at how much culture reveres actors while not paying as much attention to the writers who provide their words or the directors who control much of what they do.
I do not at all mean to suggest actors aren’t also artists who bring important skills to the table. In college, I had to find people willing to act (for free!) in my productions — I couldn’t tell my stories without them — so I’m well acquainted with their importance and skills.
My point is only that the stories we love owe as much, if not more, to the writers and directors who create them in the first place.
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Leave a comment | tags: actors, Atomic Blonde, Bebe Neuwirth, Bilbo Baggins, Charlize Theron, directors, Doctor Who, Eddie Murphy, Elijah Wood, Frodo Baggins, George Burns, Idris Elba, James Bond, Johnny Carson, Loretta Swit, Martin Freeman, Racisim, The Doctor, writers | posted in Movies, Rant, TV
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