This is an essay that I wrote a while back about postmodernism in America. It's had about a month to, as Natalie Goldberg puts it, compost, so I think I'm going to splatter it onto the Internet here and solicit some feedback. It stings a bit to see it with less involvement, but I do need a critique. Longish, but breaks up into chunks nicely ( ( Read more... )

Most of us have heard about the Milgram Experiment, an experiment on obedience. It's been pretty integrated into pop culture even though the name isn't always attached: in summary, the experiment concluded that people tend to obey authority figures even if this requires them to do immoral things. That's an oversimplification, of course, but ( Read more... )

Another prompted free write.

( it's one of those butterfly dream things )

So, I have some New Friends.  Hello, New Friends!   The spark of new friendship springs from a shared interest in transhumanism, so I suppose I should put on my pontificating hat and scratch out a few words about it.

I like to sum up transhumanism as the philosophy of "you know what?  we could all be really awesome."   It's a philosophical- ( Read more... )

"The era of procrastination, of half-measures, of soothing and baffling expedients, of delays, is coming to a close. In its place we are entering a period of consequences."

One of the things that moved me about An Inconvenient Truth was the use of the much-borrowed Churchill quote about a "period of consequences."  It's a great quote for a montage, ( Read more... )

"Nihil tam munitum quod non expugnari pecuna possit."
- Cicero

"No castle is so strongly fortified that money cannot capture it."

There's an essay going around on the Intertrons regarding The Costs Of Windows Vista's Design by programmer, scientist and cryptographer Peter Gutmann. It is an excellent essay, if not as easily digested as a nontechnical ( Read more... )

Alongside the Richard Dawkins fannishness, unsurprisingly, comes my attention to PZ Myers. That said, if I ever declare my Famous Atheist OTP or declare myself to be a Crick/Watson shipper, please do me a favor and focus the nearest orbital laser on my house.

That's my excuse for blockquoting P-Zed, and I'm sticking to it:
The job of the blogger is ( Read more... )

Steampunk has always been a thing that gives me a pleasant tickle.  Some architects - wild and crazy outlaw geniuses of the spires ! - have come up with an idea that does more than tickle: it siezes me by the shoulders and shouts "Write about me!  Write about me, or perish!"

Here is the Helicopter Archipelago:

A kind of flying Hawaii, or anti- ( Read more... )

It's World Mental Health Day.  There's also (reminds me I should keep up with Adbusters) a little reading about the state of schizophrenia (calling it the last great civil rights movement rankles, though - there are plenty of civil rights movements still going and still trying to fully attain their goals, including the one we usually think about, ( Read more... )

I'll eventually write about furriness on here, but frankly that's less important than my day-to-day life than being conscious of politics and patriarchy.  There are a lot of things that I'd like to give voice to - my writing habit needs a lot of development, and I'm probably more hesitant than I should be to use this as a free-writing platform.  ( Read more... )