Rants, essays, and diatribes.
The literary novel, as far as genres go, is not old: novels have existed in our culture for about three hundred years. If you had a time machine, you could spin the wheel and, upon landing anywhen in that span, utter the sentence, The novel is dead, and find as much agreement as dissension. As [ ]
I will soon be migrating to an alternative site, because WordPress is garbage for running garbage ads without my say; stay tuned. Eight years ago, I wrote an essay on the three social class ladders that existed in pre-2016 American society. That essay disappeared due to a confluence of factors not really worth getting into, [ ]
Also posted on my Substack page. The d8 System is a role-playing game system designed to be mechanically lightweight, so as not to break immersion, and to be modular. It enables experienced GMs (in Dungeons Dragons parlance, DMs) to run campaigns in a manner similar to what they would use in other systems, but it also [ ]
I’m still trying to figure out the matter of my online presence (including, to be frank, whether I want to have one at all). For now, I’m still on Substack. I’ll be mirroring these posts on WordPress; as much as I’ve lost faith in the platform, I don’t see any harm in keeping the blog [ ]
We ll see how this goes
I ve gotten several complaints about ads on my blog. When I set this thing up in 2009, I didn t know much about the web— I m an AI programmer; web stuff I do when there s a reason to do it— and I used WordPress s free offering, and it worked. At the time, you published a blog [ ]
Political leaders like Donald Trump and Congressional Republicans are trying to force the American people to choose one of two unacceptable alternatives: Fast Kill: do nothing about the virus s spread, causing millions of preventable deaths due to the catastrophe of large numbers of people— orders of magnitude beyond what our hospital system is designed to [ ]
Societies around the world face a horrible decision, as a deadly coronavirus rages through the population. Do they continue with economic business-as-usual, and allow tens of millions of preventable deaths? Or, do they take drastic measures to slow the spread of disease ( flattening the curve ) that endanger our economy? Let s consider one extreme. What is likely [ ]
An assertion I have made recently has drawn controversy. I have said that, in the wake of COVID–19, we ll likely see 8 million American workers become unemployably disabled for a long period of time–– years; possibly, for life. This is an extreme prediction, and I hope I m wrong. I ve made predictions that were wrong and [ ]
I had a mild bout of flu in February 2008. I d had worse flus, and I have had worse since then. I was a 24-year-old with no health issues; I recovered quickly. What made this infection notable was that, a month later, I experienced intense pain in my throat that radiated through my chest and [ ]