Someone today mentioned that they discovered my website and found it interesting, or something. Flattery is heroin to my ears.

I’ve all but abandoned pretensions to philosophy. It’s lost its lustre and besides, it’s a pointless exercise unless it keeps you distracted. You can’t prove anything with words.

But you can sometimes amuse yourself with them. I think about what to write and how. I write snippets and snatches. A little fantasy, a little science fiction, a little analysis and criticism, and lots of ideas about times and places and plots and characters.

I’ve convinced myself that the key to telling good lies (sorry, stories) is to imagine characters who believe in something, even if it’s not something in which I personally believe. I suppose it would even suffice to imagine characters who merely want something bad enough to do something about it, as long as it’s something entertaining. Subconscious drive is like the belief of the blood. As to what is entertaining, I’ll only know that after the attempt is made. There’s no accounting and all that.

I will say that I’ve almost completely abandoned all hope for the human race amounting to anything worth a damn. And we’ll be lucky to survive our own success in the coming decades. But I’ll be a rich old man or a guttersnipe, so why worry on’t?

They removed the annoying cloud over my apartment building. Kitchener/Waterloo also updated. Here’s a list of changes. I have no idea how official it is. Link courtesy this page (Google Maps Mania).

The site I got the link from links to Hong Kong, China. I’ve never looked at it before. It’s astounding. The uniformity of the construction; so many high-rises that are the same! The area of the city appears much smaller than the outrageous sprawl of Toronto, but it’s much higher density (6,352 /km² versus 2,718.29/km² for Toronto’s urban region—figures from Wikipedia).

Are you my enemy, or my nemesis? Who are they? I’m dismayed not to know with any reliability, though I can think of some candidates. [This post has been edited to be less nonsensical.]

The Orion Nebula (including link to original image).

Don’t be a fsckhead, read this page. (Non-nerds: “fsck” means “file system check”, but it’s a great typo for “fuck”).

I got there from here, and got there from here, and got there from random googling. Bored bored bored.