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Author Archives: acorwin
Middlemarch: Thoughts and Quotes
Middlemarch, by George Eliot, is a sprawling portrait of a number of persons of varying degrees of wealthiness, set in a fictional 1830s British town not very far outside of London. It’s a wonderful book of rich characters, broadly concerned … Continue reading
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Flash Fiction Responses To A Quiz On A Book I Haven’t Read
1. How do Bill and Josella meet for the first time? “Ah shit,” Bill said to himself. This wasn’t the first time, he should know better by now. Engine oil gets everything all messy, and he shouldn’t have thought he … Continue reading
Posted in fanfic, jokes
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Negotiation
“Even here in the north, the Children of Yisrael pass tales from mouth to ear. Pilgrims come bearing them. Some years ago, one came to my ears. I have heard the tale of how the angel known as Pride was … Continue reading
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Sexism Against Men And Other Word Overloading
There’s a great tumblr post that does the rounds occasionally. It’s a powerful and pithy explanation of how authority figures exploit words with multiple but related meanings to sound reasonable while saying unreasonable things. Sometimes people use “respect” to mean … Continue reading
Posted in language, pedantry, politics, social justice, things i will regret
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Corwin’s Tenth Law
Any sufficiently complicated distributed system program contains an ad-hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Raft. With apologies to Philip Greenspun.
Posted in computer science, jokes, software
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Against Flowers
One of my deepest, oldest, most cherished and firmly-held feminist beliefs is that flowers are fucking bullshit. Flowers are a tool of the patriarchy, to render men bumbling, useless fools and women placid receivers of meaningless tokens. Consider the transaction … Continue reading
Posted in dating
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You Are Extremely Bad At Thinking About Tragedy
Today, some asshole killed a shitton of people in Las Vegas. Fifty eight deaths, at time of writing. This sucks. Like, 58 deaths is a lot, and this is a horrifying tragedy worthy of news coverage. Let’s talk about some … Continue reading
Posted in morality, politics, things i will regret
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Creating a Sentient Mind Can’t Be That Hard
It just can’t. A conscious mind might be harder, but sentience is just a very low bar. It seems to me that there has to be some insight we’re missing, because, empirically, the problem cannot be particularly hard. What’s the … Continue reading
Posted in computer science
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Why The Forum Was Better In The Old Days
You may have noticed, if you’ve participated in online communities or forums*, that the old guard always thinks the forum used to be better, and simultaneously the newer members often think that it’s pretty great as it is now. I … Continue reading
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Rap Quines
A Quine is a form of poetry in which a poem, through formalism or sometimes more literally, states that it is going to state part of itself, and then does so. This is related to the modern programming art form … Continue reading
Posted in jokes
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