There’s this idea that every major shift in media technology produces political instability, and that’s absolutely true. But the people who say this (ex., KK) don’t talk about why and how the form of the medium influences the nature of the political formations. The most obvious ramification is actually related…

Whenever I complain about dating, there’s a certain kind of guy who sees it, fails to process what I’m actually saying, and criticizes me for insufficient alpha posturing bullshit. And they all feel entitled to flood my notifications with it, too. Fucking jerks. i know intellectually that my ability to…

People who think Torvalds won the Tanenbaum/Torvalds debate & therefore monolithic kernels are “better” forget that Torvalds’ entire argument was “Linux is a toy project that should never ever be used for anything important”, or they remember but don’t care. Worse-is-better is one of the most damaging infohazards in tech. …

Opsec is hard. When making opsec decisions, you must decide whether it is safe for you to let some second party know something about you — a decision that depends on who you are, who the second party is, and the resources, incentives, and material circumstances of both. This calculation…

A lot of NFT discourse involves people who understand neither intellectual property nor regular property arguing about whether or not it’s good to reimplement both without any kind of enforcement mechanism. I work in IP and let me tell you: property is fucked. Intellectual property is fucked in several very…

What does it say about society that Seinfeld ended up being much more popular than Mad About You? These two shows about neurotic new yorkers stumbling into elaborate schemes to avoid discomfort and inconvenience began around the same time, ended around the same time, and canonically took place in the…

When you have a monster you’re supposed to empathize with, the charisma of the actor is vital. That’s why Dracula’s Daughter is so much better than Son of Dracula. Case in point: Deadly Friend. It’s two great tastes that taste great together: 80s wacky robot movie meets Gothic ghost story…

The second law of thermodynamics tells us that entropy always increases: even if some arrangement of matter temporarily produces order in one part of the world, it will leak disorder elsewhere, and the house always wins. Stand against the second law and not only can’t you win, but you can’t…

In some states, the only thing necessary to qualify as a town is to have a general store. As a result, many small towns have sprung up around general stores — much as they used to around greens, churchyards, train stations, and harbors. Most cities that appear like this do…