[H]owever much all this soothes my vanity, and however much I appreciate being vice-president of Mensa, an organization which bases admission to its membership on IQ, I must, in all honesty, maintain that it means nothing.

What, after all, does such an intelligence test measure but those skills that are associated with intelligence by the individuals designing the test? And those individuals are subject to the cultural pressures and prejudices that force a subjective definition of intelligence. […]

The whole thing is a self-perpetuating device. Men in intellectual control of a dominating section of society define themselves as intelligent, then design tests that are a series of clever little doors that can let through only minds like their own, thus giving them more evidence of “intelligence” and more examples of “intelligent people” and therefore more reason to devise additional tests of the same kind. More circular reasoning!

–Isaac Asimov, “Thinking About Thinking,” 1975

“Plague.”

Might get stuck with a small payout.

“What are the winning numbers for the next lottery drawing with a payout of over $500 million?”

“Can you get this thing out of me… because the batteries ran out and I need to replace them ASAP! HIYOOOOOOO!!!”

Trump Only Fucks Up

She forgot that butts exist. And feet.

And cliffs! Sheer cliffs seem to be much less geologically common than my childhood led me to believe.

At first I thought the American just couldn’t recognize short-haired flat-chested Scandinavian moms as women.

I became a knife guy. It started when I was visiting a government surplus store and I realized that I could buy knives that had been confiscated at security checkpoints at a steep discount. Then I started developing opinions about grips and blade geometries.

Now I’m wearing a neck knife every day, and I tell people that once you start carrying a knife, you’re amazed to find all the convenient uses you can find for the thing in a given day.

I’ll be honest, I’ve given real thought to the idea of trying to leverage toxic masculinity to get men to take on more domestic responsibilities.

“What kind of real man needs a woman to cook for him?!”

“Bro, are you telling me that a woman can change a diaper but you can’t?!”

“Dude, if you can’t braid your daughter’s hair and get her to dance lessons on time, are you even a real man?!”

Don’t worry, any stuff that doesn’t fit into the universe probably doesn’t matter.

Let this empire burn and 50+ flags fly freely

Later, in the smoldering ruins:

“I meant 🌹 🌺 ❤️ Balkanization🌈 🎂 🦄, not 🔫 💥 🔥 Balkanization 💀 🪦 💣!”

If the votes had been even a fraction of a percent in either direction, the Supreme Court wouldn’t have had a role to play.

If less than one percent of Nader voters (not all Florida voters, just Nader voters) had voted for Gore instead, the margin in Florida would have been wide enough for Gore to unquestionably take the state, and he’d have become president.

Card is confounding because those first few Ender books are unequivocally about the importance of empathy and recognition of common personhood, even across seeming-impenetrable species boundaries, and how mutual respect and love are the most important quality a person can have. And then… yadda yadda yadda, OSC is a gigantic bigot. The. Fuck?

I still can’t get over how they stretched that short of a book over that long of a trilogy of movies and still managed to not show enough of Beorn. All of the party arriving at Beorn’s house is one of my favorite chapters and it’s just… not there. The. Fuck.

“Surely all those other people who tried to beat this carnival games were simple country rubes, whereas I have finally figured out the winning strategy that will surely allow me to beat this definitely not-rigged game!”

They are so grateful!!

See also: Sears pioneering the concept of ordering things through the mail from a catalogue, and then getting demolished by Amazon’s online ordering system. Way to go guys, you got destroyed by some upstart punk doing what you got started doing, but doing it better and cheaper than you could.

The podcast “You Made It Weird,” with Pete Holmes is great. He has a lot of smart and funny people on, and the pattern is usually to start with “What’s going on with you? What are you working on? What makes you laugh?” for the first two thirds of a given episode, and then the last third is stuff like “Do you believe there is a purpose to life? Have you ever seen a ghost? Have you ever tried psychedelics?” Pete is clearly on his own spiritual journey and has a lot of heavy stuff to talk about and share, and he makes for a great conversation.

Two highlights were when Reggie Watts talked about going on a trip in a bathroom where he traveled to a parallel universe and met with a sentient planet, and when Judd Apatow talked about how ayahuasca brought him into a meeting with the embodiment of his childhood self.

I don’t necessarily want to get into psychedelics, but it’s a very interesting topic of conversation, if the person is smart enough to ask and answer intelligent questions.