Category: Uncategorized

The Other Side

~ Clarissa ~ 12 Comments

In 2020, back when we still had a faculty discussion board, an older colleague who was a professor of biology, posted something about COVID that today has been accepted as common knowledge. I don’t remember what specifically it was but it definitely wasn’t about the origins. I think it was something about how social distancing wasn’t going to stop the spread of a viral infection. In short, something very anodyne.

Immediately, a very left-wing professor said that the biologist had made a typo in his post which was identical to a typo that appeared in this same kind of information on some “far-right website.” Which must mean, the left-wing colleague concluded, that the biologist was reading far-right websites.

Weeks of humiliating grievance sessions ensued where the biologist had to prove he wasn’t reading far-right websites. He was an older colleague and chose to retire at the end of that year. The discussion board was shut down to “prevent the spread of misinformation.” I feel mega guilty for all this because I had started the whole discussion by posting that COVID was not dangerous to children. Thankfully, I didn’t make any typos.

I miss the biologist colleague and I still have no idea why it was OK for the left-wing professor to read far-right websites with such minute attention that he’d remember a typo on one of them and have a screenshot readily available to accuse others.

We Win

~ Clarissa ~ 17 Comments

This is why China is not a threat:

The Fordist economy is long dead. The economy of quirky, deep, multilayered, original personalities has triumphed. Mass produced plastic crap is out of fashion as a human resource. Artisanal work is in vogue.

Don’t tell me I’m wrong because if you are reading this, you are so different from those drummers, you might just as well be from a different species.

Can’t Buy Me Brains

~ Clarissa ~ 5 Comments

Yes, $333 can’t buy IQ. Stop the presses, not everything is for sale. What a great discovery!

People literally think that humans are a collection of parts that you can swap out for a better model if you pay money for the service.

Theory of Mind

~ Clarissa ~ 16 Comments

How does this guy think we all kept our jobs throughout the George Floyd era?

I’m a great pleasure to have over even though the best part of any social occasion for me is the knowledge that it eventually ends. But turning every gathering into an opportunity to rant about how you despise everybody who departs from your political beliefs even by a tiny bit isn’t a conservative hobby. It’s what the left always does.

Q&A: How I Met My Husband

~ Clarissa ~ 10 Comments

I’m grateful for the opportunity to share this story (again) but I’m not sure it will be helpful since I’m somewhat eccentric.

N was a long-time reader on a forum where I posted a lot. He loved what I had to say, and when he ended up in the same town for an internship, he suggested that we meet so that I can share my insights into professional realization. I almost didn’t go because I don’t like Russian people. But in the end I did go and the moment I saw him through the window of a Starbucks, I knew that my train had arrived. I had a group of admirers back then, and when I got home after that meeting at Starbucks, I called all of them and explained that I was no longer available for anything.

N and I went on an official date a couple of days later. It was our first and last date. At the beginning of the date, he declared that he was interested in pursuing a romantic relationship with me. At the end of the date, I invited him to come over, which is unheard of for me. I detest having people in my space. He came to my place, and we started living together. There was no actual dating after that. We lived together first at my place, then at his, and so on, until we got married 1,5 years later.

This is all mega cute but not helpful to anybody else because he and I are both very strange people and clearly made for each other in our strangeness.

Robotic Lamp

~ Clarissa ~ 11 Comments

First of all, this is mega ugly. Also, yes, it’s a brilliant idea to have a robot spy on you in bed. In addition, I don’t want anyone who isn’t legally married to me to touch my underwear and have any interaction with it at all.

Are people that lazy that they’d sacrifice privacy and beauty to … this?

Q&A about Pedophilia

~ Clarissa ~ 9 Comments

With all due respect, I read your question right after seeing this:

The dude isn’t just any sex offender. His offense is specifically sexual abuse of children.

I find it hard to muster much enthusiasm for a discussion of wiggle room in rare, marginal cases when we haven’t found a mechanism to prevent convicted pedos from adopting babies.

Dating Fraud

~ Clarissa ~ 4 Comments

The conjunction of dating apps and Vemno created a new form of dating fraud. Two people connect on a dating app, they really hit it off, things are going fantastic, and they finally decide to meet. The dude says, “Look, there’s this really cool musical / opera / ballet / museum exhibit / contemporary dance performance, etc. What a great venue for our first date since we both love musicals / opera / ballet / museum exhibits / contemporary dance performances. Only, do you mind, because it’s our first date, and the tickets are kind of expensive, do you mind if we split the cost?”

The woman feels too shy to say she wants the dude to pay, so she agrees.

“That’s great,” says the dude. “OK, I bought the tickets! You can Venmo me your half of the price right now.”

With the use of AI, this gets mass-marketed in a major way.

Hacker Humor

~ Clarissa ~ Leave a comment

Ukrainian hackers have conducted the largest (so far) cyber attack on the Russian passenger airline Aeroflot. This is the message they left:

The words on top mean, “Good morning, Russcist [as in, Russo-fascist] Pederation [as in Federation of Pederasty].”

Sublime Experiences

~ Clarissa ~ 4 Comments

This is true in the sense that the Humanities train and organize the brain so that it can have sublime experiences.

A sublime experience is when you derive non-physical pleasure from things that do not involve your self. When you enjoy the fan because it makes you cooler, that’s not sublime. It’s self-referential and also physical. But when you experience intense pleasure from observing the simple geometric lines against the white ceiling, that’s sublime.

However, the Humanities education alone isn’t enough to fill your life with sublime experiences derived from all sorts of things, from complex, like art, to simple, like the one in the photo. You also need what is clumsily called mental health. You need a mind that is not chaotic and not filled with suppurating pustules that make it impossible to leave aside the preoccupation with the self and get libidinally invested into things that are completely outside yourself.

One of the clearest symptoms of your mental health improving is that all of a sudden you start noticing the beauty of the things around you and you gasp with intense physical pleasure derived from often seemingly insignificant things like the view of the ceiling fan from a certain angle. But yes, you also need to have your brain trained on aesthetic experiences.