metahacker

"What'cha doin'?"

"Oh, just watching B5."

"Old Darrin, or new Darrin?"

(Reminder: I *like* being proven wrong...)

We now have small data, better than anecdata: "An analysis of Veterans Health Administration (VA) data found that 28% of 97 patients given hydroxychloroquine along with standard care died, compared with a death rate of 11% for the 158 patients that did not receive the drug. The death rate was 22% for the 113 patients given hydroxychloroquine plus the antibiotic azithromycin."

After taking into account individual health arcs, taking the drug doubled the chance of death. So maybe not that one, then. Ah well.

(*if you write it down, counting is a form of Science!)

Listen: the world is made of rituals.

I know; you're tired. You're tired, and doing ordinary things is difficult, and you're not entirely sure why. It feels like the commonplace has become difficult, the difficult insurmountable, and even the routine things...well.

The world runs on ritual magic. It's the oldest form of technology, older than writing or the lever or wheel. Going to the river at dawn before the day predators are awake. Sleeping in a circle, to watch each others' backs. The ritual of greeting, of grooming, of recognizing each other, is older than mankind.

Right now, our rituals are disrupted.

Doing things a particular way, over and over again--the way that works, the way that has the side effects we want--is a kind of cost-efficiency. It's a way to budget our energies for the out-of-place, for the unfamiliar, for the exceptional. We make rituals for nearly everything in our life, from the simple (I get _this_ order of coffee) to the complex (I take _this_ route to work, I attend these social gatherings on these nights, I say good morning to the doorman at the office building in _this_ way...).

Ritual magic is strong and familiar--strong because it is familiar--and we are in the unfamiliar now.

Be kind to yourself; be kind to others. You are a de-technologized version of yourself right now, and that's exhausting.

A few years ago, touch keyboards started watching what we type and predicting words based on that.

A shorter time ago, the major manufacturers realized it was cheaper in battery life to pre-train a system based on the zillions of data points they could gather, and just plug in some local variations like "names in _this_ phone's contacts".

This changeover is when predictive keyboards totally stopped working as well for me. I don't seem to write English the way normal people do, which I consider a feature. Also, I talk about people and places in my life way less than "average", given how much the keyboard offers to insert, e.g., the town name of a friend I haven't seen in a decade (but is still in my rolodex).

First-world problems, indeed.

Are there ANY movies about a lonely middle-aged woman looking for love who hits it off with a driftless barely-adult young man who just needs some direction in their life? Or is it _always_ the creepy direction?

What are the four largest companies in the world?

Microsoft, Apple, Google*, and Amazon. MAGA! That's the real meaning of the acronym!!1! Wake up sheeple!!1eleventy!1

* they tried to tricks us by becoming "Alphabet" but we knows the truths...

This was funny five six years ago, and it's still funny:

http://www.collegehumor.com/post/6963479/the-13-gods-of-the-internet-pantheon

and overly accurate.

Welcome to Boston, where we don't call streets by their full name unless they did something really stupid.

"Commonwealth Avenue, what the hell do you have in your mouth!?"

"S'just a moving truck. Storrow is always eating them..."

Feel like there's something I'm supposed to be remembering today. Dunno. Maybe it'll come to me.

The more Supernatural I watch, the more I'm convinced it's written by a rogue In Nomine player/GM.

I mean, I have the internets, I could _check_, but it's better to have faith. Or something.

(Also, it means that if I do ever get around to writing INe fanfic it'll have to pay homage or put a slight crowbar difference between itself and SN.)