grue

It's existential in the sense that trans people's existence is being threatened. As in, the US is headed down the same path as the Nazis, with trans people about to be rounded up into concentration camps and mass-murdered.

The blood libel has been going on for a while now. The registrations have already started. Pink triangles and pogroms are the next step.

(I'm saying this as a cis-het white male, BTW. Even I can see the writing on the wall.)

login ceremony

What pretentious asshole came up with that bit of jargon?

Look, I'm not saying I admit anything, but speaking purely hypothetically, if I were to do some naked woodworking, I'd be extra careful about it.

He's a Spaceball.

It’s not his fault that the political landscape shifted on him making his activities now illegal, but the charges aren’t bogus.

In addition to the other reasons others have pointed out why your position is bullshit, imagine actually defending an ex-post-facto law.

From http://catb.org/jargon/html/magic-story.html

Some years ago, I (GLS) was snooping around in the cabinets that housed the MIT AI Lab's PDP-10, and noticed a little switch glued to the frame of one cabinet. It was obviously a homebrew job, added by one of the lab's hardware hackers (no one knows who).

You don't touch an unknown switch on a computer without knowing what it does, because you might crash the computer. The switch was labeled in a most unhelpful way. It had two positions, and scrawled in pencil on the metal switch body were the words ‘magic' and ‘more magic'. The switch was in the ‘more magic' position.

I called another hacker over to look at it. He had never seen the switch before either. Closer examination revealed that the switch had only one wire running to it! The other end of the wire did disappear into the maze of wires inside the computer, but it's a basic fact of electricity that a switch can't do anything unless there are two wires connected to it. This switch had a wire connected on one side and no wire on its other side.

It was clear that this switch was someone's idea of a silly joke. Convinced by our reasoning that the switch was inoperative, we flipped it. The computer instantly crashed.

Imagine our utter astonishment. We wrote it off as coincidence, but nevertheless restored the switch to the ‘more magic’ position before reviving the computer.

A year later, I told this story to yet another hacker, David Moon as I recall. He clearly doubted my sanity, or suspected me of a supernatural belief in the power of this switch, or perhaps thought I was fooling him with a bogus saga. To prove it to him, I showed him the very switch, still glued to the cabinet frame with only one wire connected to it, still in the ‘more magic’ position. We scrutinized the switch and its lone connection, and found that the other end of the wire, though connected to the computer wiring, was connected to a ground pin. That clearly made the switch doubly useless: not only was it electrically nonoperative, but it was connected to a place that couldn't affect anything anyway. So we flipped the switch.

The computer promptly crashed.

This time we ran for Richard Greenblatt, a long-time MIT hacker, who was close at hand. He had never noticed the switch before, either. He inspected it, concluded it was useless, got some diagonal cutters and diked it out. We then revived the computer and it has run fine ever since.

We still don't know how the switch crashed the machine. There is a theory that some circuit near the ground pin was marginal, and flipping the switch changed the electrical capacitance enough to upset the circuit as millionth-of-a-second pulses went through it. But we'll never know for sure; all we can really say is that the switch was magic.

I still have that switch in my basement. Maybe I'm silly, but I usually keep it set on ‘more magic’.

1994: Another explanation of this story has since been offered. Note that the switch body was metal. Suppose that the non-connected side of the switch was connected to the switch body (usually the body is connected to a separate earth lug, but there are exceptions). The body is connected to the computer case, which is, presumably, grounded. Now the circuit ground within the machine isn't necessarily at the same potential as the case ground, so flipping the switch connected the circuit ground to the case ground, causing a voltage drop/jump which reset the machine. This was probably discovered by someone who found out the hard way that there was a potential difference between the two, and who then wired in the switch as a joke.

First immersion circulators, now ultrasonic vibrators? What the Hell are you people doing to these eggs?! Modernist cuisine has gone too far!

Wonderful Christmastime 11 hours

No, but seriously, it's really hard for me to pick a single favorite song (or even worse, single best version of a particular song). I do tend to gravitate to the upbeat/rock kinda ones, though: "Need a Little Christmas", "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen", " Carol of the Bells," "Sleigh Ride" -- stuff like that.

I will say I recently discovered this song, which I was enjoying during November specifically:

Tom Cardy - Not Quite Almost Christmas Time

Izzard is great, don't get me wrong, but this is the best version of 12 Days of Christmas and it's not even close:

Straight No Chaser - The 12 Days of Christmas

How is that a sequel? It's not even by the same author.

WTF? Joining NATO is the security guarantee! It should be 1000% crystal obvious to everybody by now that anything less is inadequate.

The premise makes no fucking sense, aside from being a reflection of negotiating with irrational morons.