I grew up with people of my parents' generation making tired jokes about how these crazy kids nowadays are using "bad" to mean "good" and who the heck can understand them, anyway? And yet I was still surprised when it happened to me. In the past year or two that I've started hearing people use "sick" as an all-purpose term of approval, and even ( Read more... )

I spent a week with my parents in Houston. It's certainly the best parental visit I've made since I moved out in 1996. I was less confrontational, less easily annoyed, and more responsive to them than I've ever been (at least as a teenager or adult). Who knows why? Probably some combination of time, getting back into cognitive-behavioral therapy ( Read more... )

Just last night I was saying I was eager to see the purple map for this election -- remember that? It was a US map that showed election returns on a county level, coloring each county a shade between red and blue depending on how republican or democratic its vote total was. Well, here it is.


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A lot of friends are posting to ask "California, how could you?!" Prop 8, which takes away gay people's constitutional right to marriage, passed 52-48. I'm not an expert on it, but here's a little more of the picture ( Read more... )

Every once in a while, I'll be thinking about some crazy thing that other people believe, and all of a sudden I'll feel something smack me in the head, the pressure wave of a new perspective slamming into me. I'll see what they must be seeing and instead of thinking about how they're wrong, I'll desperately, voraciously want to understand how they' ( Read more... )

Hypothesis: The degree of annoyance a person experiences upon being rickrolled* is inversely proportional to the length of time they were on the internet during the heyday of goatse.cx.

* For those not familiar with the phenomenon, there's a very thorough wikipedia article on it.