I've been stressed out for months about Trump's 15 to 30% chance of winning this nightmarish election, and my first reaction toward the end was that it was like waking up to find the nightmare was real.  I'm hoping the reality is much easier to deal with than what we were imagining ( Read more... )

This comes from an actual financial blog entry today, but it looks like something out of a late-20th-century satirical SF dystopia about what communications will devolve into by the 21st century.  Something Philip K. Dick might have written.  This might also be a preview of how Cabinet meetings will run in 2017, depending on the outcome of the ( Read more... )

It's the last day of Sasquan, and I'm leaving relatively early on the last day. In this case, because it's a Wednesday-Sunday con and the all-night filk turned out to still be Saturday, I headed almost directly from the after-filk breakfast to the airport ( Read more... )

… but over the course of several years, a pint at a time.  I started at around 17, when I became eligible, and continued throughout college until they changed the rules.  Few things in life repeatedly make me as angry as when I’m reminded about blood donation and think about all the additional gallons I would probably have donated since college if ( Read more... )

Welcome to Night Vale did a very clever and subtle bit of humor in the episode I just listened to, #33( Read more... )

I enjoyed Sparrow Hill Road( Read more... )

Recently, I've started going to plays (at various venues that are pleasant to bike to), and have probably seen more these past couple of years than my entire life before.  Something struck me about the production I saw on Friday of Sondheim's "Company" on the Los Altos stage:  like several others plays, they decided to modernize it in a somewhat ( Read more... )

I was just playing with some of the obscure unicode characters I found I could text to a friend's iPhone -- for example, "It will be nice tomorrow but it's cold tonight", accompanied by a snowman glyph.   That led to a technical conversation about how I was only sending the Unicode character code for it and it was up to his phone to find a font ( Read more... )

Someone recently told me that the Pegasus (the award voted on by the filk community and presented each year at the Ohio Valley Filk Fest) has rarely if ever been awarded to a parody.  I just looked through the list, and it's true, as far as I can tell.  ( Read more... )

Like many Americans, I've sometimes thought about how much progress has been made since Martin Luther King Jr.'s famous "I Have a Dream" speech, half a century ago this August, in which he envisioned that people in the future might "not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character". While this is easy for me to say, ( Read more... )