Like the Starship Enterprise! Peaceful, diverse, accepting, curious, loving… and armed to the FUCKING teeth in case some motherfucker has just got to find out.

Someone sent this shape in an email.

Oops.

I’ve joked about how normalized it is that we use caffeine as a drug to feed an almost civilizational addiction.

Imagine checking into a motel room and saying “Oh, man, this motel doesn’t even have a spoon and a lighter to cook my heroin in! What a cheap joint this place is!” or going to a social gathering and wondering “I wonder when someone is going to offer me some meth. It’s only polite!”

And yet, here we are, a world of addicts.

“You see? Best to carry two knives — but get him you must, even barehanded.”

"Uh — "

“Something still troubling you? Speak up. That’s what I’m here for, to answer your questions.”

“Uh, yes, sir. You said the sentry didn’t have any H-bomb. But he does have an H-bomb; that’s just the point. Well, at least we have, if we’re the sentry . . . and any sentry we’re up against is likely to have them, too. I don’t mean the sentry, I mean the side he’s on.”

“I understood you.”

“Well… you see, sir? If we can use an H-bomb — and, as you said, it’s no checker game; it’s real, it’s war and nobody is fooling around — isn’t it sort of ridiculous to go crawling around in the weeds, throwing knives and maybe getting yourself killed… and even losing the war… when you’ve got a real weapon you can use to win? What’s the point in a whole lot of men risking their lives with obsolete weapons when one professor type can do so much more just by pushing a button?”

Zim didn’t answer at once, which wasn’t like him at all. Then he said softly, “Are you happy in the Infantry, Hendrick? You can resign, you know.” Hendrick muttered something; Zim said, “Speak up!”

“I’m not itching to resign, sir. I’m going to sweat out my term.”

“I see. Well, the question you asked is one that a sergeant isn’t really qualified to answer… and one that you shouldn’t ask me. You’re supposed to know the answer before you join up. Or you should. Did your school have a course in History and Moral Philosophy?”

“What? Sure — yes, sir.”

“Then you’ve heard the answer. But I’ll give you my own — unofficial — views on it. If you wanted to teach a baby a lesson, would you cut its head off?”

“Why… no, sir!”

"Of course not. You’d paddle it. There can be circumstances when it’s just as foolish to hit an enemy city with an H-bomb as it would be to spank a baby with an ax. War is not violence and killing, pure and simple; war is controlled violence, for a purpose. The purpose of war is to support your government’s decisions by force. The purpose is never to kill the enemy just to be killing him… but to make him do what you want him to do. Not killing… but controlled and purposeful violence. But it’s not your business or mine to decide the purpose or the control. It’s never a soldier’s business to decide when or where or how — or why — he fights; that belongs to the statesmen and the generals. The statesmen decide why and how much; the generals take it from there and tell us where and when and how. We supply the violence; other people — ‘older and wiser heads,’ as they say — supply the control. Which is as it should be. That’s the best answer I can give you. If it doesn’t satisfy you, I’ll get you a chit to go talk to the regimental commander. If he can’t convince you — then go home and be a civilian! Because in that case you will certainly never make a soldier.

That’s the scene in the book that the movie gets shortened to a guy getting a knife thrown through his hand. It bums me out that the movie gets called smart. Robocop was smart. Starship Troopers was… something else.

Man, Mike Stoklasa’s life has really taken an unexpected turn.

I’m not qualified to make arcane decisions about my health coverage, any more than I am to determine which food preservatives are safe and which should be kept far away from human consumption. There are some people qualified to make such distinctions, but we generally want them employed at a level where they determine what works, and then ban the preservatives that cause flipper babies, and the coverage plans that will leave you dead or bankrupt or both at once.

Everyone should have the healthcare they need, and nobody outside of a very few particular cases should ever have to think about it.

The designers wanted it to be comfortable

I think it’s funny when people criticize the D for looking like a luxury hotel in space. You’ve got crew deployed on this ship potentially for years at a time. Of course you’re going to put some wood paneling, beige and pastel colors, and potted plants in there. Would you want to spend every waking hour looking at gunmetal grey deck plating? Spruce the place up a bit! Saves money time and effort on dealing with all the mental breakdowns.

Sometimes my brain doesn’t take care of its flesh vehicle for a while; typical situation is I don’t get a shower or shave for a little too long. And then my brain becomes convinced that it doesn’t like itself very much. Then another part of my brain realizes what’s going on, but has learned that my brain isn’t very reliable, and is also fairly open to suggestion. So my brain takes a shower and shaves and puts on clean clothes, and then my brain is tricked into liking itself again.

It’s literally like playing peekaboo with your own self-esteem in the mirror.

It’s got to sleep sometime. Dig a hole while it’s sleeping. Doesn’t have to be a hole that the whole dinosaur can fall into, just deep enough to step on a punji stick:

ONE OF US. ONE OF US.

Let me guess: ignore Congress, let billionaires do whatever the fuck they want, rule by executive order, and hope that the other two branches of government don’t grow a spine and do something about it. So, basically the same thing they’ve been doing all along?

I broke down the overlap of various dystopias a while back. IIRC, the vertical dichotomy is between order and chaos, and the horizontal is starvation vs. abundance.

The parental experience of trying to not live in this house.

Pornography is either fraud (nobody looks like that, nobody fucks like that, etc.) or gambling (you’re looking at something hot and sexy until, catastrophically, you aren’t).

Chess?

It’s made a lot easier when the shitty artist is dead. It’s appropriate to talk about H. P. Lovecraft’s racism and xenophobia, hell it even informs understanding of his work a bit better, but buying his work doesn’t fund ongoing bad acts because he’s been dead for almost a century. If you’re going to be a terrible person, the least you can do is also be dead.

H. P. Lovecraft wrote about ghouls, canine-human hybrid creatures that lived in tunnels underneath Providence and raided graves to devour dead human flesh and bones.

When I visited my uncle in Providence, he casually mentioned the native coyote population, which lives in burrows in the side of the hill under the old cemetery.

So there are literally dog creatures tunnelling under the graves in Providence, and I wouldn’t be the slightest bit surprised if old Howard Phillips once saw one with a bone in its mouth, and immediately ran to his typewriter to write about the unspeakable horror of it all.