I just found out about this Chinese phone app called Are You Dead?
That’s the actual name of the app, not some translation error or weird, hyper-specific joke that didn’t survive the conversion to English. Are You Dead? has gone viral in China, rapidly climbing the download charts, because it addresses the very specific, very modern, fear that you might die alone in your apartment… and that no one would notice for weeks or months.
Continue readingI’ve been getting a lot of (unsolicited) advice lately about how I need to start embracing AI. I am informed that it can streamline my workflow, optimize my productivity, refine my emotional patterns, and, presumably, align my chakras via Bluetooth. The people telling me this (by which I mean “companies that make AI products”) all swear that handing over various aspects of my life to a swirling cloud of math is the secret to happiness… or at least to remembering where I left my sunglasses.
For my part, I have resisted.
Continue readingI would like to enjoy an occasional baked potato.
Not that I do enjoy them, I merely aspire to. Baked potatoes and I have a complicated relationship, the sort you’d file under “irreconcilable differences” in a divorce court. Everything about making one feels like a high-stakes investment: long cook times, blistering temperatures, and the looming possibility that the only two potatoes I’ve got left will betray me spectacularly. They say you can bake potatoes in a microwave, but I tried that once and what came out of the microwave was more “carbonized neutron star” than it was “potato”.
There might be another way to do it, though.
Continue reading“I want to be intimately involved with a black rhinoceros.”
Remember that sentence. No, really… commit that sentence to memory. We’ll get back to it in a little bit.
Remember back in the early aughts, when the National Rifle Association — led at the time by the late, and ever affable, Charlton “Bright Eyes” Heston — was getting their plus fours collectively bunched up in response to a proposed mandatory background check and two-week waiting period required before purchasing a firearm? The proposed legislation — which I don’t think ever happened, or maybe happened and was later repealed — was being pushed by bits of the government largely in response to things like the Columbine tragedy and the Waco siege.
Back then, in those heady days past before Patrick Roy‘s retirement sent Colorado avalanching to Sucksville, the pro-gun/anti-legislation people were angry because they felt that a two-week waiting period was way too long to have to bide one’s time before getting a gun. They wanted to be able to walk straight into a store, pick out the four nickel that best accentuated their eyes, and walk out that very same day, whistling a merry tune. And don’t even get them started about the background checks. Background checks equated solely with breaking into your bedroom and rifling through your private drawers. How DARE they violate your extra special parts!
I don’t like Pyrex.
I’m not an real big fan of formal “cookware” in general, actually. I prefer those cheap, aluminum foil-based roasting pans you can get at the supermarket for like three bucks. They’re inexpensive, bend rather than break, you don’t have to clean them afterwards, and they have a low carbon footprint.
Wait, those things are recyclable, right?
I just learned that Traci Nobles, an otherwise entirely unremarkable cheerleading coach from Georgia, has published an entire book based upon the fact that she received text messages from Anthony Weiner. I’m not kidding about that, either… an entire book has been contrived around a tweeted message of Anthony Weiner’s, er… Anthony. And this brings me to one conclusion:
I think that I need to get involved in a sex scandal.
Harold Camping is a bit of a crackpot.
For those blissfully unaware (or outside of the United States, where people seem largely immune to this sort of ridiculosity), Harold Camping is an undead, five hundred-year-old Christian fundamentalist preacher who predicted that, on May 21, 2011, some two hundred million people would be “raptured” and rise, hilariously nude, to heaven while most of us would remain, clothed, on Earth to suffer God’s wrath and eventually die horrible (and presumably still clothed) deaths.
Recently, people have been asking me why, specifically, I’ve been boycotting Starbucks for the past two years. I have insofar managed to not tell the story, on the grounds that it gets rather long and winding, is comprised of a nearly unbelievable series of events and, really, doesn’t have all that much to do with Starbucks. With the latest query to be delivered to me, though, I figured I’d set the record straight, or at least less crooked than it was, on my one remaining boycott.
C= 64/128 BBSing in the modern age
writing from the vaults of audrey p. farnsworth
Writings about arthropod ecology, arachnids & academia at McGill University
Life! Some survive, others just live through it!
"If you are resolutely determined to make a lawyer of yourself, the thing is more than half done already" - Abraham Lincoln.
the Story within the Story
Why I oughta . . .
The best things in life aren't things at all
Just West of Hell 