I’m starting to wonder if my culture has turned a vice into a virtue. We are inundated constantly by the industries that profit off of vanity. Imaginary new “problems” are invented for perfect people – do you have thigh gap? Are your teeth white enough? Are your eyebrows the right Read more
Did you know there are towns in China that become hellscapes every fall to churn out products for American Christmas? I read a frightening article about it. Imagine forests choked by smoke churned out to create plastic trees with an estimated use span of one month. Imagine beating the planet Read more
We’re re-watching Gargoyles, a favorite cartoon from my childhood. In the most recent episode, Demona, the Bad Girl Gargoyle, is trying to show how humanity is evil, and one things she shows is a purse-snatching, and she stops her friend from going after the purse snatcher, telling him, “With human Read more
A friend of mine had recently gotten into cycling, and asked me, “I’m confused. Isn’t it that the lower a gear is, the more you have to pedal to move forward?” “Yes,” I said. “And higher gears allow you to go faster because each pedal push will turn the wheels Read more
We have a salad vending machine at work. It was the cause of some excitement. “It’s like magic!” a co-worker said. “Robots making salad!” Except, every morning, a cafeteria worker was dicing up the ingredients to the machine’s specifications, and another worker came and filled the machine and cleaned it. Read more
Expletives are a shorthand for emotion, and modern American speech is peppered with them. I tried to remove “god” from my vocabulary a few years ago, since, as an atheist, I felt I was being disingenuous. I started saying “Gort” because I thought it was funny. You know, the super-powerful Read more
Blog topic suggested by Zac Crofford. This isn’t entirely a rant. An anti-rant? This is a happy rant. I frickin’ love fonts, and I love when I open a book and the typeface is pleasing to my eyes. Unlike many of my colleagues, I am not pained by the existence Read more