Ogmios

Wait, does that ever actually happen as anything but a joke?

How are they going to break record profits quarter after quarter if your pants don’t wear out weekly?

Back in grade 9 I had trouble showing my work in math because I did it all in my head. My teacher, not believing that was possible, challenged me one day after class to do a tough problem in my head, in front of her. Upon writing a number down, before I could double check myself, she started yelling at me for being a cheat and a fraud… because I “forgot the negative sign.” That was the day that I stopped caring entirely whether or not others gave me validation, because it’s really more about whether or not they like you rather than whether or not you’re actually right about anything. It’s a decision that perhaps made my life harder for a while, but has resulted in the development of talents which I am quite grateful for, and eventually a near perfect score when I re-did grade 12 math later on to get into STEM.

Seeking validation from others can just as easily steer you wrong, as they are anything but an impartial indication of whether or not you’re doing things right. If the person doesn’t like you, there’s nothing at all in the world which will be good enough for them, and if they do like you, they’ll gloss over and sugar coat everything to the point you can’t even tell if they’re being honest with you.

Nope, divining the inner workings of the minds of others is beyond me. I can only tell you about the world that I see.

As someone who has never really cared about validation, from being an outcast since I was a child, the way much of social media is designed in an attempt to seek validation drives me nutts. I just want to see interesting things that people want to share, and engage in discussions with types of people that I wouldn’t normally meet in real life.

I can’t enjoy a good night’s sleep unless I have to force my consciousness into submission with a cocktail of 1937 Glenfiddich, Nyquil, and whatever I managed to steal from the hooker I just kicked out. Waiting until you’re tired is for pussies.

Are you literally going out of your way to deliberately remove any positive connotation from a word in order to try and artificially manufacture a slur?

Pretty weird.

As your body shuts down, everything you try fails to work, one after another, and you learn every lie you ever told yourself about who/what you are. Once your consciousness has broken down to a previous state you can start again with another life, eventually forgetting everything that happened before.

Thanks for buying into our plans, but it seems we won’t actually be capable of delivering what we promised you. We will still be expecting you to deliver what we want from you, of course.

Somebody should do something!

See you again next time

Shirley Fenette from Code Geass, because she deserves so much better.

Because intellectually lazy people want simple ways to decide if something is good/bad without having to actually think about a specific situation themselves.

A small splash of amaretto in macaroni and cheese. Only about a cap full, or one teaspoon, gives it an amazing sweet and salty flavour.

I discovered this incredible recipe one night when I was preparing some mac-n-cheese only to discover I was completely out of milk, and had to substitute the next best liquid I had on hand.

Social media not being the focus of every government, advertising agency and activist organization in existence.

Right, but when we’re talking in the context of regulating broad democratic systems, the potential for deliberate corruption of the systems is vastly greater while employing black cube technology.

I’m talking about hardware though. Even before you get into whether or not software can be trusted you should understand that computer chips have a very large number of undocumented processes that can run on them. Some are actually used only for testing purposes, but there really isn’t any way to verify everything that happens on the physical machine itself. You just have to trust the people who manufactured it (ie. total strangers).

Installing democratic control

Unfortunately the nature of these enterprises makes that prohibitively difficult to accomplish, not only for regulating them, but also for protecting democratic controls elsewhere. One of the big difficulties in tech security is just how much is happening inside black boxes where nobody can actually verify the process.

Occupy scared the shit out of bankers. It’s no mistake that pop culture became obsessed with divisive issues immediately afterwards.

Amazing how much easier it is to motivate yourself when you have the ability to make significant decisions on the fly, based on the immediate feedback you receive from the system, instead of spending half your time hitting your head against a wall attempting to sus out self-contradictory instructions given by people who don’t actually understand how any of it really works.