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My stupid life

Around these parts we know how to deal with Blizzards

You call up the Iron Man of the future (the, er, not too distant future of 2020), and he blasts them away.

The above from Amazing Spider-Man annual #20, from 1986 when 2020 did seem a little further away.


By fnord12 | January 26, 2015, 12:35 PM | Comics & My stupid life | Comments (3)| Link



Cheap and fast internet access is not a technical problem

Matthew Yglesias has some sad facts that are particularly relevant to the SuperMegaHousehold as we watch our internet-only Comcast bill start creeping up again.


By fnord12 | January 15, 2015, 10:02 AM | Liberal Outrage & My stupid life | Link



But then why leave home at all?

Having just come off a two week staycation that was pretty awesome at least until the flu bug bit, i can kind of get behind the conclusion of this Why Americans Are Terrible at Vacation article:

But the Americans passed through almost exclusively by way of large tour buses, usually for just a few hours before venturing somewhere else on the coast. They walked through the one-road town in sensible walking shoes; strapped large, imposing cameras around their necks; missioned up the ancient steps to see the cathedral; and then paid small boat operators to ferry them to the Orthodox church to take a picture there, too. I can only imagine when they found time to actually be on holiday after they were done documenting it...

...when visiting Paris, for example... skip the Eiffel Tower (most Parisians haven't been since they were five years old) and instead... [try] mirroring locally relevant activities like having sex, drinking wine before noon, reading a weighty philosophy book, and taking a nap.

I definitely find the tour style vacation to be exhausting, and love the idea of just going somewhere to relax. But i can actually relax just fine at home, and home is where i keep all my stuff, so i can take the occasional break from relaxing to paint some miniatures or work on my comics timeline. And if i'm just going to hang out somewhere, i'm not really going to see anything, so what's the point?

Any way you look at it, though, i think it's time to go back on vacation.


By fnord12 | January 14, 2015, 1:39 PM | My stupid life | Link



Boring Auntie had better start spicing up her stories

From the September 2014 Scientific American, in an interview article fretting about our growing inability to turn off the technology around us:

This disrupts the family, too. When Boring Auntie starts to talk at the family dinner table, her little niece pulls out her phone and goes on Facebook. All of a sudden her world is populated with snowball fights and ballerinas. And dinner is destroyed. Dinner used to be the utopian ideal of the American family having a canonical three-generation gathering. Facebook is what's utopian now.

And...

There's no authentic exchange. You're saying empathy is not important to the feeling of being understood. And yet I interviewed a woman who said to me that she's okay with a robot boyfriend. She wants one of those sophisticated Japanese robots. I looked at her and said, "You know that it doesn't understand you." She said, "Look, I just want civility in the house. I just want something that will make me feel not alone."

People are also good with a robot that could stand in as a companion for an older person. But I take a moral position here because older people deserve to tell the story of their life to someone who understands what a life is. They've lost spouses; they've lost children. We're suggesting they tell the story of their life to something that has no idea was a life is or what a loss is.

I never had these utopian family dinners and i never had Facebook, so a lot of what this article is saying sounds crazy to me. But i do know that one day me and Min are going to be old, and we don't have any kids, so we're going to need that robot companion. We were thinking it could be dog shaped.


By fnord12 | January 13, 2015, 2:28 PM | My stupid life & Science | Comments (2)| Link



Hello Kitty Cupcakes and Play-Doh Abominations


By fnord12 | January 4, 2015, 4:47 PM | My stupid life | Link



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