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I fell in love with Jommy Cross—talk about pulp fiction déjà vu. Fifties Ace paperback flashbacks—nostalgic jump-cuts into the future. The way he talked to me—without moving his pouty lips. He was such a moody kid—it hurt me just looking at him.
He could be in Portland—or Alpha Centauri for all I was concerned. It didn’t make any difference—where we were. He was always there—in the back of my mind. That’s the way—Astounding Science Fiction worked for me.
That’s how the Fabulation of the Fifties—doesn’t die. The pulp fiction reality of Slan love—isn’t that what it was like back then? It’s even better now—let the jouissance flow. The way it was in noir rainy Seattle—back then in the late Sixties.
Let’s face it—I was queer for him. After the first time—I was really fucked. Talk about being— Stranger in a Strange Land. I needed a Mirror for Observers really bad—to get outta that one.
I wasn’t a butchy Heinlein Space Cadet either—I wasn’t particularly Star Trooper material. I checked the box—instead of being drafted. Viet Nam was Forbidden Planet—as far as I was concerned.
I was a lover—not a fighter. I didn’t feel guilty—about being a hippie. Late Capitalism and postcolonial jive—didn’t appeal to me.
Instead I was seriously addicted to Slan love.
—Pugetopolis, “Jommy Cross: A Biography” -
“Property of the Hess Estate which has never been dedicated for public purposes”, Christopher St. & 7th Ave., NY, NY. (Photo by Nick Carr.)
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The conventional wisdom shared by many of today’s software engineers calls for ignoring efficiency in the small; but I believe this is simply an overreaction to the abuses they see being practiced by pennywise-and-pound-foolish programmers, who can’t debug or maintain their “optimized” programs. In established engineering disciplines a 12% improvement, easily obtained, is never considered marginal; and I believe the same viewpoint should prevail in software engineering….
There is no doubt that the grail of efficiency leads to abuse. Programmers waste enormous amounts of time thinking about, or worrying about, the speed of noncritical parts of their programs, and these attempts at efficiency actually have a strong negative impact when debugging and maintenance are considered. We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil.
Yet we should not pass up our opportunities in that critical 3%.
—Donald E. Knuth, “Structured programming with go to statements”, Computing Surveys Vol. 6 No. 4, December 1974, p. 268 -
Palasthotel, East Berlin, 1985. Didn’t look much different when I stayed there, in 1990, about six weeks before German reunification. I don’t think we stayed in one of the heavily monitored Stasi special surveillance rooms, but you never know. Gone now, a casualty of asbestos.
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“Morrison has devoted the last two decades to an increasingly aggressive flirtation with convention regardless of whether his advances were warranted.—Scott Eric Kaufman, “From the Annals of Fauxprundity: THIS STORY IS ABOUT GRANT MORRISON WRITING THIS STORY!”
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“The local foods movement gets a bad bougie rap, but it’s not some crazy utopian project. You can travel to places all over the world where the fruit tastes like sunshine and olives have the ability to make you think that the world is full of love and ponies. We’re the ones living in a partial food dystopia.—Meghan McCarron, “Gluten-Free Istanbul”
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These tools—“writing environments” or whatever else you want to call them—have an inherent problem: they’re designed around the writing workflows and processes of the people who wrote them. The author of Scrivener really only knows one way to write a book: the way he writes a book. The author(s) of another program write differently, and thus their programs operate differently.
They’re all sort of tailored to the way certain people write, and this can be a problem when they don’t really fit the way you write.
—Kevin Lipe, “Markdown is the new Word 5.1.”
N.b.: The opinion of Markdown expressed is not the opinion of Tired Robot and Tired Robot is not responsible for it. See above under ‘write differently’.
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For marmaladechronofile — I used to pass this monster on the way to work every morning. The first church in Switzerland to be built entirely out of concrete! (According to German Wikipedia.) I’m not sure what to call it, architecturally. Swiss Futurism? Art Deco sans l’art? Brutalism avant la lettre?
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(Photo by Toby Buckell.)
…and could some real descendant through the female line be traced out, in the present distracted state of unhappy Greece, their presence at this moment would be hailed with enthusiasm, while, instead of her cruel state of anarchy under a foreigner, the children of Greece would enthusiastically embrace the fortuitous advent of restoration to her legitimate rights and libety, under a descendant of the illustrious Paleologi.
— “Ferdinand Paleologus, the Last of the Greeks”, Henry J. Bradfield, The Gentleman’s Magazine vol. 19 (January 1843), pp. 17-21
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“I think Dungeons & Dragons is a more accessible game than poker, because there are all these weird arbitrary rules about what beats a straight flush, but there are no arbitrary rules about if you take someone’s sword and rape their family. That’s worse than if you don’t.
