-
Debate Debacle
Full disclosure: I’m writing this coming off of the unmitigated dumpster fire that was the presidential debate held earlier tonight. The imbibing of spirits may be a contributing factor. This debate was intended to be something different. Changed rules, a focus on the candidates, no nonsense cheering and impotent moderators. I was cautiously excited about…
-
A Prism of Political Debasement
Today, my esteemed governor Jeff Landry decided to all but destroy the separation of church and state in Louisiana. That is no exaggeration; there’s little other ways that you can construe HB71 as anything but equating the importance of the Ten Commandments with the most core of foundational American documents, to be enforced in a…
-
Persistence
Or, as it feels to me right now, the art of defined insanity. Referring, of course, to that oft-misattributed definition of the term as repeating the same thing and expecting different results. I’ve been on the job hunt for over a year now, doing what I can to scrape by (I’ve gotten very good at…
-
Why I Like Goth
Black is pretty hot. That’s the short. The long has a bit more to it than that. Ever since reading Edgar Allen Poe’s work for the first time sometime before I was 10, I felt an affinity to that nebulous and yet unmistakable subculture. What drew me in? At the time, the imagery. Poe’s writing…
-
The Real World
It’s the last (visual, non-quoted) line in the movie Cowboy Bebop: Knockin’ at Heaven’s Door. One of the recurring themes in the movie (and greater show arguably) is how someone can be trapped in a state where reality is more than subjective, but distorted. They see different, they hear different. Maybe to them it’s all…
-
A Night to Remember
This is probably going to be the most self-indulgent post I’ll write here—and if you’ve done yourself the misfortune of reading all that I’ve written, all I can say is you have my appreciation, and my sympathies. Please at least read things better than the drivel I put out in this blog. With that said,…
-
Thoughts – Civil War (2024)
I had initially assumed this movie was going to be what it felt like: a somewhat realistic, somewhat dramatized presentation of a fracturing America that uses our current sociopolitical flashpoints to frame the action. Instead, what I watched was a thriller as much as a disaster movie, focusing on the trials of war reporting and…
-
Thoughts – The Whale
When I first heard about The Whale, it was in the context of it being Brendan Fraser’s comeback role. I loved The Mummy growing up and still think it’s a great series, and somewhere along the way I learned that Fraser had unfortunate circumstances abound surrounding his (now thankfully temporary) decline. It was nice to…
-
UBI Needs Stability
Universal Basic Income’s still a hot topic, even if it isn’t a major talking point of presidential candidates this cycle. It’s widely seen as the natural future of an economy that produces too much to charge, and a tool to help raise the floor of the average person’s quality of life. It’s not a quick-fix,…
-
The Future of Company Towns
Earlier, I was listening to the March 21st episode of Preet Bahara’s Stay Tuned podcast. In it, he interviewed the founder of Sun Microsystems—spawn of Java, the Scourge of Programming—and current venture capitalist Vinod Khosla. Among many things discussed was a prediction made by Khosla: that in the next fifty to sixty years, we would…