queerlilhayseed

Something that sucks but still helps me is taking caffeine breaks. I feel like ass during them but by the time I get to that point I don’t really feel much from what I think could reasonably be considered an alarming amount of caffeine, after a few to many days I’ll have some again and I get some benefit from it. Or at least don’t feel quite so crappy.

I started smoking to have an excuse to hang out with the theatre kids. It worked.

I really liked nicotine when I first started. I think it affects my ADHD in a way similar to other stimulants, and the effect is very nice. I understand why people say nicotine helps them think; I don’t know if it’s actually helpful for any kind of thinking but it certainly felt like I was thinking more quickly and clearly. After using it for a while though, I stopped feeling it.

It’s an old joke from back when IBM was the dominant player in IT infrastructure. The idea was that IBM was such a known quantity that even non-technical executives knew what it was and knew that other companies also used IBM equipment. If you decide to buy from a lesser known vendor and something breaks, you might be blamed for going off the beaten track and fired (regardless of where the fault actually lay), whereas if you bought IBM gear and it broke, it was simply considered the cost of doing business, so buying IBM became a CYA tactic for sysadmins even if it went against their better technical judgement. AWS is the modern IBM.

cross-region failovers are a thing, but they’re expensive to maintain so not everyone does it. I am kinda surprised one region failure had this much impact though

No one ever got fired for buying IBM.

Something about the circle of life

Fun dinosaur fact: Chickens (and all birds) are direct descendants of theropod dinosaurs, where crocodiles are descended from a distinct branch of Archosaurs (the group that also includes dinosaurs and by extension, birds). So of the two, the chicken is evolutionarily closer to dinosaurs. In fact, technically speaking, chickens are dinosaurs.

To make matters worse, Jurassic Park spliced together dino DNA fragments with frog DNA to make their “dinosaurs”, so your dino meat might taste froggier depending on where you get it from. Non-GMO dino nuggets probably taste indistinguishable from chicken.

One of the things that really excites me about the internet is its impact on the development of language. We’re still at the very beginning of its impact, considering the timescale on which language has traditionally evolved, but I suspect that in time the advent of the internet will be considered a major inflection point in the history of language, maybe the single greatest inflection point in the history of language itself. All of a sudden, billions of people who otherwise would never have had the means to converse directly, are now able to converse directly with billions of other people all over the globe, in near real-time. I can’t really imagine how that doesn’t have a seismic impact on how human language evolves. I would love to jump forward in time a few centuries just to see how the things that are happening right now shake out in the long term.

Because violent revolts elevate violent leaders. Because violence is the last, worst option for influencing the behavior of your fellow humans. Nonviolence isn’t more effective than violent political action if all you want to do is swap out who’s in change, but it is more effective (I would argue necessary) if what you want is a nonviolent society governed by a nonviolent democratic government. Once both sides have devolved into violence, really the only thing that sets policy is which faction is able to inflict the most pain. It also proves the fascist rule of “everyone is ultimately violent, so your best bet is to stick with the violent team that shares your religion / skin color / flag / etc.” and dominate through might, rather than trying to build a genuinely peaceful coalition that could, if empowered, build a genuinely peaceful government that makes its citizens’ lives better.

Or, to put it another way, you can use The One Ring to defeat Sauron, and you may succeed in defeating him, but you will corrupt yourself in the process and become the very thing you sought to destroy.

That’s one of the cool things about stories, IMO. the narrative of the same events can change dramatically depending on the context in which they are being retold. You can tell a lot about why someone retells a story based on what parts stay the same, what parts change (and how), and what parts get dropped in later retellings.

Storytelling is how we build memories. I like to just let em roll and see if I notice anything new. The idea that we can only tell stories exactly once to each audience and then have to seal them away forever is… kinda lonely.