Predominantly Erroneous (Exohedron nonsense blog)

And now the nightlights are fading in and out, never getting very bright, though.

 

And we're back to full power again.

 

Okay, this is ridiculous. Maybe I should just go to bed.

 

Ideas for places to put the one "fuck" allowed in the movie before they have to up the rating:

1: the digital time display on the main character's bedside clock when they hit it to shut off the alarm.

 

Spotted in the wild: a Wikipedia article complaining about excessive citations, in the page about the Goryeo-Khitan War

 

The more I hear about the Rings of Power the more happy I am that I can feel smug disdain for a piece of media without hate-watching it.

 

Guy goes back in time and pretends to be a prophet, but manages to screw up the timeline enough that even his predictions of eclipses are off.

 

It definitely means something about me that every time I encounter any algebraic geometry my first and only instinct is to ask "what does this look like if you replaced CP¹ with the projective line over the octonions?"

 

I think the real issue for me is that by being so cagey about it, he's significantly increased my prior that in the cases where the obviously correct, cheaper, faster, easier, safer solution "didn't work", the reason for the failure was deliberate stonewalling rather than anything wrong with the solution itself. Like, I know a good part of the issue was that he doesn't actually understand the problem, or either the obviously good or the obviously bad solutions, but he told me up front that the good solution "didn't work", and only after twenty loud minutes of trying to explain the good solution was he willing to admit that "didn't work" actually meant "we asked someone to test it and they refused". Which now means that next time he doesn't understand why one proposal is significantly worse than another by all conceivable metrics, I'm going to have to figure out if we're in the same situation, or if he actually genuinely doesn't know what we're talking about.

 

Part of my problem with a lot of sci-fi is that most of the time they eventually run out of worldbuilding and have to resort to characters. Which is not to say that they do well at characters; you can have characters doing things without being written well or interestingly and without them doing anything interesting, just as you can spend pages and pages on bad worldbuilding.

But I am generally less interested in characters.

Which is funny, because of course I read fanfiction, and of course one of the main things about fanfiction is that they can focus on characters because the worldbuilding is largely handled by the source work, or by being set in some pastiche of New York, London and Seattle. But I guess fanfiction authors deliberately writing character-focused stories are usually better at characters than sci-fi authors who have run out of worldbuilding and are forced to write outside of their chosen forte.

 

Realizing that I can honestly tell people that my parents never named me.

 

So there's a commonly given example of an Escher sentence:

"More people have been to Berlin than I have."

which looks okay at first glance but supposedly has no well-formed meaning upon further scrutiny.

Except! It does have a well formed meaning, in that you have some number of people, and more than that number of people have been to Berlin.

Actually finding that interpretation takes a bit of work for most people, since this is probably not how you'd communicate that meaning if you intended to from the beginning.

 

Few memes have hit me as hard as "It's me boy, I'm the PS5" has.

 

Telling people that Evangelion is a form of Eevee.

 

It makes me so happy when running "cargo test" returns all "ok"s. I've managed to get both correct compile time and runtime behavior! It's almost as if I understand the borrow checker!

Also I love Rust's willingness to just delete data that doesn't get explicitly kept, and I hate Rust's insistence on just deleting data that doesn't get explicitly kept.

 

Music that appears to be diegetic but can't be.
Example: recorded music where the singer is yet to be born in a world without time-travel.
Example: music that is played live in one scene but remains following a scene change.
Example: music played on instruments that definitely don't make those sounds.

 

Should I start making OVID-19 jokes to my Classics major friends?

 

Yesterday I got to meet a horse.

 

Surprisingly haven't seen any "Down with CIS" jokes. Tumblr is, as always, a disappointment.

 

Every once in a while I think to myself "I want some jellybeans." But really I want, like, five jellybeans, and then I very much stop wanting jellybeans. Except you don't buy five hellybeans, you buy a hundred of them, and then you eat them all.

Maybe if I hide the package in the pantry I'll not eat all of them at once.