This was very enjoyable, thank you posting it.

If others haven't seen this already, they may find it similarly engaging: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/11/23/conversion-via-twitter-westboro-baptist-church-megan-phelps-roper

Actually, I think I know about that because somebody else posted it here last year.

So I ain't a writer by any training, but I was under the impression that quotations of the spoken word followed a separate grammar. That grammar is designed to capture details of how the person said something. For example, "Yes, I feel similarly" (and here I follow @goobster's rule) conveys that the speaker said it in a way that separated "Yes" and "I feel similarly". Two ways that could have happened are with a pause or by raising the pitch of "I". Meanwhile "Yes I feel similarly" conveys that speaker spoke in a monotone, or in a breathless rush of words.

That's worrying. I've been off the pills for two months. Therefore, I think I'll show these posts and some other free-writing examples to my therapist and psychiatrist. Thanks for telling me, I appreciate it.

Thanks for the advice. I don't think I clearly communicated myself, though. I don't want to uncrazy it. I very much want what's crazy to stay definitely and clearly crazy.

But I can see how it looks like something else to you, and I will accept your version as a version worth investigating.

The more time you dwell in "here's why I capsized, no really it makes sense" the more we see you pushing on the mast.

What makes me itchy about this is that it sounds like you're telling me to stop introspecting. I don't want to do that. I don't want to be the person who thinks they're always right, who doesn't monitor their own behavior, and who makes categorical judgements without considering evidence to their contrary. The way I see it, my willingness to question myself and expose my thinking to others' points of view is of bedrock importance. It's what I rely on to keep me kind and intelligent. If I don't try to figure myself out, aren't I becoming less of a good person?

And Python, Algol, Ada, Ruby, Perl, Java, Swift, Scheme, Cobol, Go, Dart, and Lua are somehow better names?

I haven't seen any porn here either, but 10 minutes in the FAQ and the terms of service didn't find me anything involving porn or sex or adult stuff, so it could show up some time.

If it does, you should definitely check out Hubski's filtering features in detail. This place gives you tools to moderate the entire site just for yourself. You can filter (aka block) specific people, tags, and domain names. You can also mute specific people, which prevents them from commenting on your posts (and possibly your comments? not sure).

Well this is going in my library when next my disposable income allows. You don't just sound good, you're easy to play with too! Thank you!

I don't do Spotify. Is there somewhere else I can go to get your music?

Sigh, I need to install Flash to enjoy it. Nope.

My memories need to be updated to HTML5. Might look into that.

Oh yeah, no, it's about a lot more than that. But I do think it's fair to say that it does a little bit more than touch on transhumanism when (spoiler) ɐu ᴉɯdoɹʇɐuʇ dloʇ doᴉuʇ ᴉs ʇɥɐʇ ʇɥǝ dɹoʇɐƃouᴉsʇ nupǝɹƃoǝs ɔouʌǝɹsᴉou ʇo ɐ ɟnllʎ ɯǝɔɥɐuᴉzǝp qopʎ˙

The Dark Science storyline probably has the most right now, but the Hob storyline is also significant.

I once had an acquaintance who was into this. He was planning on embedding small magnets into his fingertips, so he could feel magnetic fields. So far as I am aware, he changed his mind, because it would make working with electronics basically impossible.

Also, here is a beautiful webcomic that deals with transhumanism.

Well this was just an incredible read, thank you kindly. My perspective has been changed a great deal.

|The problem, of course, is that Trump is crazy.

Not that part, though.

The thing is, life is full of these kinds of problems. Advertisements, speeches, statistics, news stories, and so on. And unlike this little bugger, _those_ problems aren't harmless. They _are_ designed to make a real fool out of you, usually to your cost. So there is a lesson to be learned here. It's just not about math.

If only it were common sense that common sense is not a sense of things that are both obvious _and_ correct.

Common sense is only a sense of things that are obvious. It is common sense that the world is flat.

Disclaimer: I know very little about Russia compared to other countries. I'm thinking most of my impressions of Russia are wrong in important ways. If I went on a Wikipedia binge and read up on a lot of news, my opinions would probably change remarkably. And a lot of my observations are comparative, so what I think of my own country will influencing things as well. Different Americans think very different things about America, so I'm not representative.

Speaking as an American, white, male, mid-20s: Russia's government is corrupt, but not nearly as corrupt as many other governments. People there are very stoic, and are more likely to readily get involved in physical disputes. Quality of life is about the same as the U.S. in many respects. They pioneered much of space flight, and continue to maintain the ability to put humans in space, that calls for major respect. They are more prejudiced than people in the U.S., particularly with respect to the LGBT community. But things like Pussy Riot indicate that Russia has passionate individuals who want to make a difference. The language has a pleasing sound. People there care about the same things as people here and everywhere else: Food, shelter, family, friends, self-worth, social status. We're more alike and than we are different.

Regarding Crimea, I think it sucks, but again, I'm not educated near as much as I ought to be.

If you would like to challenge any of my impressions, I am very open to that. Reading materials, news stories, art and culture, events in history, anecdotes, etc.

Before college was more widespread, after high school (and many times before it was completed) was the time to get a job, get married, have kids, and wait to die. Not that time is later and later and I wonder if it's partially due to the effect of continued education without real responsibility. ... As college delays adulthood, you would expect to see similar delays in this development of self and context.

Is this really a bad thing, though? Our lives are longer now than they used to be, so why shouldn't childhood be longer as well? And we know now that most people's brains aren't finished maturing until their mid-20s, however much we might like to pretend that an 18 year old person can consent to participating in war. So why should we not push back the time when a person has to "get a job, get married, have kids, and wait to die"?

I've tried lots of social networks over the years. The big ones today, as well as older ones like MySpace and LiveJournal, and some others whose names I forget.

The only ones I've stuck to are Digg, Reddit, and now Hubski. I expect Slashdot would have attracted me too, if I were old enough for it. Thing is, I've never really used those three for social networking. I made plenty of comments here and there, but I was never paying attention to who I was talking to. Still don't. That doesn't strike me a very social. Best I can think of that fits that is the occasional debate I might get involved in, but that only created a relationship that lasted for the duration of that debate, and then was gone from my mind.

As for Facebook, I don't like the company, for all the usual reasons. And beyond that, it's not useful or fun for me. Everything that Facebook offers me I can have more fun doing IRL. Everything I can't do IRL I can do with email or some IM service or another.

And as for Twitter, I have nothing to tweet about, and no one's tweets interest me. The one thing that I have found Twitter useful for is getting up to the minute accounts of some event going on somewhere, but that only happens rarely and I don't need an account for that.

I also have two. First, there are people who care about me, and my death would cause them a very great deal of very real harm. Some of them are suicidal themselves, and the loss of me could cause a chain reaction. The ones who aren't, well, they don't deserve a good reason to go into a deep depression. I have a choice in this matter, and I choose to endure my pain rather than create a far larger amount in other people. I can hold myself to this choice because it is a direct result of one of the things which makes up the core of who I am: my refusal to knowingly cause direct harm to other people. Not that I'm perfect in adhering to who I am, but when it comes to suicide, I am.

Second, failure does not preclude future success. Whatever it is I failed or succeeded at. Violin, programming, school, love. "You may not try again" is not built into the universe, which is always changing. And so am I, for that matter. Each year, I come upon big ideas in my head that I didn't have in the previous year, and they make a difference. I can see my attitudes and behaviors change over time. Generally subtly, but they do. I'm interested in and hopeful about who I might become.

And the pills help too, but that's much the same as saying I'm lucky.

And to suggest that the Left is in any sense less prone to this instrumentalist bullshit is pure fantasy.

Where did I, or anyone else, suggest that? The only person to mention right or left wing politics is you, just now.

I'm not interested in either of those. I just want to know how you formed your idea of what white privilege is, for it differs from mine own. I have no particular preference for one definition or another, but, presumably, one of us has a more widely accepted definition than the other, and I'd like to make a judgement so that I may either adopt yours, incorporate parts of it into my own, or reject it. With that resolved, I could better communicate with you now and others in the future.

Who exactly are you talking about anyway?

The mainstream. The people who, if they don't dominate the conversation at least in the beginning, just leave and strengthen their own beliefs while they do it. They already understand the world in X way. We want to replace it with Y way. Before we get to do that, we have to convince them to doubt that X way is the best way. Only when we've done that do we have room at all to start talking about Y way.

We shouldn't care what race or gender or sexual orientation someone is, we should only care whether or not they need our help.

That's true, but that's the end goal. Right now, there are a lot of people who disagree with that, and not only do they vote but they also have an influence upon society. We need to persuade them. Right now, they think of things in terms of social stratification, and so we have to play in that ballpark, because they refuse to play in ours.

We have lots of anti-discrimination laws, and that's good. I think any worthwhile civilization should have those, without exception. But there is still the cultural and social battle to be had, a battle of ideas.

Thinking about the broke-ass white person, I can't see any word that describes what we call white privilege that wouldn't stumble on the problem you note.

The idea is that all other things equal, your skin color made what would have been a hard life a very hard life. Yeah, you might be broke and have a shitty job, but you're not in prison because a cop planted evidence when they "didn't like your attitude" at a traffic stop for your burned out tail light.

Perhaps the problem is that the nature of this concept requires a person to look past their natural reaction and engage in critical thinking. Maybe there's no way to dress it up without substantially warping the meaning.

It does more than that by assigning blame for such disparities to individuals of the advantaged group based not on individual circumstances but on group characteristics over which they had no choice or control.

I have never seen white privilege defined this way. Can you show me where you got that from?

Care to elaborate with a thorough and well-reasoned argument?

I wonder what might be a better word, then? Let's try.

There's a lot of confusion, as you say, about what is meant by "privilege". What is your definition of that word in this context?

Mhm, not necessarily. It seems plausible to me that a person may have ideals of information accessibility and a neutral or unformed view of information ownership. Such a person might digitize and distribute the book with the belief they are performing a service, both to readers who prefer or cannot use a printed book, and to the original authors, who did not have the time or skill to produce a market-ready electronic version.

I admit, such a person is likely a rare occurrence. And the scenario I describe makes the assumption that that person was operating under the belief that an electronic copy did not yet exist. Creativity's post implies this is not the case form them, but does not make it explicitly clear, which is precisely why I do not pass judgement.

Meanwhile, I'm starting to move in a liking Key and Peele bent.

Oh. Actually, it sounds more like just a poor encoding quality, compared to the demo tracks on Pianoteq's website. What settings did you use for export?

I think it deserves a better piano. Would be very interested to hear an upgrade!