I think Stephenson is a genius but honestly I slog through large parts of his books. He always creates a dozen threads, over hundreds and hundreds of pages, and on the last three pages they tie together beautifully and you end the book with an ache in your heart because of how beautiful it was. Even when I know that’s coming I sometimes can’t make it. He’s like the anti-Stephen King: the middle drags but the ending is wonderful.

Anathem is the exception. I couldn’t put it down. It’s one of those books that infected the way I think and little things remind me of it all the time.

This happened to a friend of mine in the 90s. He was checking his email with pine. The lady who ran the school computer lab called the terminal “the black program with the blinking thing.”

Stories from the USA. My mom said that when she was a little girl my grandparents used to take the kids on road trips and they would do this thing where when they got to the destination they wouldn’t leave the car. Like, they would drive hours to see the monument (or whatever) and when they got there they would roll down the windows, slowly pass by the object going, “wow! Look there it is!”, then they would roll up the window and drive away. This happened multiple times.

It’s a fucking mystery to us. Didn’t want to pay for a ticket? Savage, unmedicated ADHD? Just fucking with your children? All are totally plausible. She didn’t realize it was weird until later in life.

No part of executions in the USA make sense until you realize all the kayfabe about humane execution is to assuage the conscience of the executioners and has nothing to do with the condemned. If you actually start looking for cruel and unusual punishment in practice you see it literally everywhere, and if you point this out then all notions of prisoner dignity disappear in a flash and suddenly wanton suffering is “the point”. That is actually the truth, but it can’t be squared with the pomp and dignity our civilization loves to assign itself. Trying to square the state’s highfalutin morality with the reality of the its actions just leads to contradictions because its simply not consistent or logical.

Learning to ID plants is a curse too because you see so many invasive monocultures everywhere.

If we want to truly honor the 18th century craftsmen we wouldn’t use L brackets at all. Maybe some nice wedged through-tenons and dovetails and stuff. I guess it depends on the aesthetic. Like are we going for historic, or can we 3d-print the little decorative swirly bits?

Yeah, it’s impossible to develop a greenfield site without scraping everything off. You have to create and get approval on water runoff management plan for any new development. That means grading everything and often these days it also means managing and impounding water on-site without dumping it all into the (overloaded) storm drain system. When there’s no grass you have to install silt fences to keep silt out of nearby streams while building. You can’t get final approval, and remove the silt fence, until there is some kind of ground cover and that basically means grass since it grows fast and is easy to apply. Even if you somehow left the trees there’s no way they’d survive the process.

Fuck McMansion developers, and fuck lawns, don’t get me wrong. But it’s a reflection of an entire system of land-use policy and not just stupidity, or whatever.

Like this: https://forgejo.org/faq/#where-does-the-name-come-from

It’s from this clip. Like ByteOnBikes mentioned, this is burned into everyone’s brain who watched this show I think.

https://yewtu.be/watch?v=6vxQqdFOeoM

The rampant mental illness in the USA really does make this a negative feedback loop. I’d say a quarter of the roommates I’ve had over the years had some serious mental issues. I’ve had a knife pulled on me, a friend of mine was murdered by his roommate.

After you have a few bad experiences like that the goal becomes to get a small family together and isolate as soon as possible. Any commune here is basically assumed to be a religious cult because nothing else makes sense.

I honestly find those sections of his books kind of comfy. If I “wrote what I know” about those days in my life the protagonist would wolf down a boiled chicken breast over the sink in complete silence.

I liked the four or five books I read, but I did laugh out loud the third time a bachelor character cracked a beer, put on a jazz record, and prepared an elaborate dinner for one.