When Demons Dream
In the two month interim since I last wrote on here, much has taken place in my own life in the meantime. In brief, I no longer reside in San Francisco. This seems to have been a trend that was starting to manifest widely around the time I made the decision to move away. Just about everyone that I knew in San Francisco has, by this point, moved out of the city, since all of...
Whence Cometh Evil? Part 2
At the inception of my senior year of college, in the fall of 2003, I had one last empty class slot that I needed to fulfill in order to get my degree. I had attempted to enroll in a course directed at ROTC Army students called "Small Unit Tactics", which taught how to lead a small platoon of soldiers into combat situations. When I showed up to the class on the first day, the panel...
Psychologically Speaking
I broke shelter-in-place yesterday and went walking up to Coit tower, atop Telegraph Hill, later in the evening. It felt good to plow up the Greenwich steps, which left me winded and exhausted, since it was the first real outdoor exercise I have done in over two months. Then I was left to overlook the night lights of the Bay and the city from one of its premiere vantage points. I forgot how great it...
I'm Doing a Podcast
During the pandemic situation, I've actually sat down to write a blog post on here multiple times. My objective is just to get the ideas I have in my head out, in any form, and in a way that doesn't necessarily require structure. When it comes to writing, though, I make some effort to give what I write structure so that each post is somewhat well-formed. This is at odds with the overall objective: to...
Teasing the Narrative
I live in San Francisco. Everyone seems to have something that they don't like about San Francisco, and that something is usually "everything". I've grown tired of hearing this story. The Internet seems to be lousy with posts with titles like "Why I Left San Francisco and Good Riddance" or "How Bay Area Tech is Destroying the City". And so on. To be fair, there is plenty of validity behind most of these complaints. Yes,...
Everything's Better with Bacon
Science gets a bad rap in many circles these days. I spend a lot of time wondering exactly why that is. Most disconcerting is the trend of anti-science sentiment that pervades American culture. My brother's wife is a Nurse Practitioner who is endlessly frustrated by the anti-vaxxer movement and the danger it poses to health in the United States. She tends to get annoyed with me when I take the conversation to a meta place....
Origin and Beauty
I spent some time reflecting on the ideas of creationism and evolution this past week, and I had a thought which was more rooted in aesthetics that is worth drawing out here. The debate between these two camps tends to center around ad hominem attacks based on intelligence. You know how this goes. If the creationists had any brains, they'd believe in evolution, so say the evolutionists, and vice versa. It's worth re-emphasizing that I...
What Happens in Tech...
I arrived in the Bay Area around 3 and half years ago. I wish I had arrived under better circumstances. It's a story that is familiar to my recurring readers, but I ended up newly single and needing a change of scenery from that of Southern California, where I had lived for the better part of a decade. After traveling up and down the west coast, I realized that, if I wanted to get a...
Digging for Why
Of the more common mythos that permeate our culture, there are few I'd rather kill more than the concept of a "soulmate". The harm that this has wrought up people is difficult to quantify, but I'd wager it has caused irreparable harm to countless people, either in the form of emotional anguish or in the opportunity cost of time wasted chasing after what are ultimately fruitless pursuits. It probably stems from an unhealthy fascination with...
Collapse
It seems like people are always sitting around waiting for The End. This might be what we have inherited from Judaism. Jesus himself speaks many times of the coming end of the world in the Gospels, insisting that an intervention will take place, life as we know it will come to a halt, and there will be a Good Kingdom set up on earth. This was common of apocalyptic Jews of the day, and, despite...