About Wyrd Smythe
The canonical fool on the hill watching the sunset and the rotation of the planet and thinking what he imagines are large thoughts.
It’s that time for a reflective reviewing the previous year. On a personal level, it’s been an interesting year, a year of some changes with more ahead. I may (or may not) talk about that more down the road. I’ve already shared some of the more mundane ones. I’m still chewing on some of the more personal ones.
As a blog post, it makes sense to do a blog review, as self-indulgent as they are. This is more a milepost for me; a sort of year-end report to the board — see if it’s worth funding another year. (Technically, the Blog Year starts on July 4, with year zero being 2011. The blog is now seven-and-a-half; 741 posts tall. And it just grew one more.)
Stick around if you want, but it’s gonna be long, dry, and narcissistic…
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23 Comments | tags: 2018, blog, blogging, charts | posted in Basics
Congrats to NASA and the New Horizons team! Their brave space robot reached (the planet) Pluto, delivered awesome goods, and went on to explore a much more distant Kuiper belt object: 2014 MU69 (fondly nicknamed Ultima Thule).
It made the journey safely and sped past its destination (at 14 kilometers per second!) on New Year’s Day. We’ve gotten the first close pictures back of the most distant object ever seen by us denizens of the third big rock out.
It looks like a snowman. A red snowman.
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2 Comments | tags: 2014 MU69, Kuiper belt, NASA, New Horizons, Pluto, Pluto is a planet, snowman, Ultima Thule | posted in Science
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9 Comments | tags: random | posted in Computers
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.
But that’s never stopped me before, and it’s (almost) Chillaxmus, so cue the music, it’s riff time again…
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8 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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5 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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18 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
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