-
Recent Posts
Archives
- October 2018
- May 2018
- October 2017
- May 2017
- April 2017
- January 2017
- December 2016
- September 2016
- August 2016
- June 2016
- May 2016
- April 2016
- February 2016
- December 2015
- October 2015
- September 2015
- August 2015
- July 2015
- May 2015
- March 2015
- February 2015
- January 2015
- December 2014
- October 2014
- September 2014
- November 2012
- October 2012
- September 2012
Author Archives: acorwin
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
Leave a comment
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
Posted in Uncategorized
Leave a comment
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
Leave a comment
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
Leave a comment
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
Leave a comment
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
Leave a comment
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
1 Comment
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
Posted in Uncategorized
Leave a comment
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
Leave a comment
On Trolley Problems
If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice There’s a philosophical question that people seem to struggle with, commonly called the trolley problem, that I never really got the difficulty of until fairly recently. The original … Continue reading
Posted in morality, philosophy
Leave a comment
