A weblog by Hao Lian.
A terrible secret guarded by golems.
A note that thanks you for being born, all those years ago.
From shinynew:
My sister did this to me when I was younger, but not quite as hard.
“If you rub your hands together it will smell like raspberries.” (Easily testable and not completely unbelivable.)
Does it and is hit.
“Why did you hit me?
“Why did you put your hand to your face?
“I … I trusted you.…”
She felt pretty bad about it.
A woman, on the internet, posts about her anencephalic baby online [link omitted] and how she comes to understand it through her fundamentalist Christian faith. Anencephaly is a heartbreaking condition; anencephalic babies are born without “a major portion of brain, skull, and scalp” (Neurology Channel, no pictures). The link makes its way to MetaFilter and atheism.reddit [link omitted]. Both threads turn into disasters.
The mark of a strong community is a common sense of ethics. The ability for MetaFilter to self-police is unparalleled. And, while MetaTalk and the human moderator system seem suspiciously formal and un-internet, their existence prevent the unreadable, repulsive train wreck on reddit where the shit about sex dolls, atheism, and reddit’s own sense of smugness continues even after the woman asks the people to stop.
“I think this is the saddest thing I’ve read today.”
That there’s nobody to moderate reddit, that having comments like those exist on your website with a negative number standing next to it with your tacit approval, betrays a deep misunderstanding about how communities work and how much the people behind reddit are responsible for the monsters they’ve created at the feet of their indulgent, selflish, bullshit laziness.
Well-put:
mr_chromatic, redditI tried to use a word processor to edit a 14-page interview a couple of weeks ago. I can’t believe anyone puts up with that. You have to position the mouse cursor just so to select a region of text, then cut it, then position the mouse cursor just so and then paste it.
Pick Emacs or vim; learn it. Text editing without them is a bleary swamp land surrounding these two bastions of freedom.
This is a retort—the best kind of retort—to Jeff Bone’s “Haskell is like ‘that girl’,” as seen first on reddit.
She knew there were girls before her. Flashy girls—flashy for their time anyway—who were all pizazz and flesh, possessing neither substance nor soul. To her credit, C forgave you, which was more than anybody in the world had done. You quit those popular girls that got around with everybody sooner or later, the ones whose names were written in all capital letters. Some even remembered your name as you broke up with them.
As you replaced the receiver for that last entry in your little black database table, you felt the click in your soul. The one of loneliness, crazy regret, and echoes. Echoes of “Did I do the right thing?” “Am I with the right person?” Penniless and broke, you ran on the pure fuel C’s forgiveness. You lived because she was there when nobody else was. You beat those demons back. With a tempest and a hiss, they capitulated and went away in some dark recess of your soul.
A decade went by and then another. It was the 90s. Girls dressed more provocatively than ever before. Those demons, always prodding your conscience for ever-beautiful hairline cracks, came back. When you got home to kiss your wife C and she kissed back, you started flinching. She realized that you changed first, and it broke her in a way she never showed it for fear they would break her. She believed in you, and sadly she thought belief was all you needed. She knew you would do the right thing.
But you broke, and her forgiveness and patience followed her heart and broke too. “New problems require new solutions,” you told yourself before drowning in the liquor, the excess, the automated memory management, and the string of never-ending girls willing to turn a trick for a cheap buck—Perl, Python, Ruby, PHP, Java, D, Erlang. Or if you were short on cash, you’d flag down a shell language and have your way. You stopped looking at your wife in the eyes; it was the only way to ignore her gentle, silent pleas. You ignored the ways she tried to change: C89, C90, C99, C1x. So you packed your briefcases and one day you never came home from work. If you had, you would’ve seen C sitting at the kitchen table waiting for the kiss on the cheek that would never come …
… a strange scene lit by the fluorescent light that would never drive away the darkness.
I spend too much time on Reddit.
from eukaryota.animalia.chordata.mammalia.primates.hominidae.homo import sapiens
from song.objects import *
import __main__
class Me(sapiens.Sapiens):
def __init__(self):
self.made_for = You()
def love(self, receiver): ...
def find(self, receiver): ...
def adore(self, receiver): ...
def receive_love(self, giver):
if not given == self.made_for: raise Exception()
...
def stare_at(self, object): ...
def feet_hit(self, object): ...
def check(self, object): ...
I = Me()
I.stare_at(Door())
I.feet_hit(Floor(cold = True))
I.check(Reflection(I))
mystery = False
for var in dir(__main__):
if type(var) == Passion: print 'Found passion'
if type(var) == Flame:
if var.creates_more_feeling(I): print 'Found flame'
assert type(I.made_for) == You
I.love(I.made_for)
I.find(I.made_for)
I.adore(I.made_for)
I.receive_love(I.made_for)
"Stephen Colbert/Rain Dance-off", reddit
- reqqit: I love how Colbert gets onto the dance machine, but … shouldn’t they be looking at the screen? Anyway, Rain is like, “look at me, I am Michael Jackson, I’ll stick my thumb up a kids ass if you don’t believe me!” and Colbert is like “I play like I can’t dance but my moves are like liquid dynamite.” You know he scores heavily after each show.
- smackywentz: I think I speak for everyone when I say, “What the fuck are you talking about?”
“I have no sense of smell,” reddit
- cod_mate: My dog’s got no nose.
- toru: How does he smell?
- Philluminati: Awful!
- toru: My dog’s got no pancreas.
- brokenearth02: How does he … pancreate?
“Source Force,” reddit
- Microsoft: She also likes Sex in the City—what young, single, genius inventor gal doesn’t like Sex in the City?
- bcompton: Cheeky. At first I thought ISV Super Gal liked the TV show, but then I remembered it was called Sex and the City.
- Poromenos: By “city” they mean “anus”.
So I just discovered, via reddit, Look Around You, the most delicious and spot-on parody (of educational films) television series. It’s absolutely velvety: “What are birds? We just don’t know. / Thanks, ants. Thants. / Water, what hast thou done?” For a start, view the Maths module or, better yet, the Music module. In summary, not having BBC is like not holding hands: You miss out on a lot of good stuff.
(On “Family finds secret room full of toxic mold (and note) in newly purchased house”)
boredzo, RedditThat had to be a disappointment.
“Holy shit, a secret room! Awesome!”
picks up note
“Aw, crap.”
(On a photograph of a kid mourning his brother’s death. This whole thread was severely downmodded.)
- Etropal: The first thought that came into my mind was “Damn, that kid ugly!”
- TurtleEater: Shut the hell up.
- KiddieFiddler: I think his ugliness makes it all the more tragic.
- TurtleEater: Shut the hell up.
(People discussing alternatives to glasses.)
- randomb0y: You could just squint. Or get Lasik.
- akdas: Yes. Both of those are cheap, quick solutions with no risks.