Perils of the lady gamer

The steampunk version

Thanx to Roz Kaveney

And so what?

The noosphere is so polluted that we wind up arguing with lies that wouldn't be bad if they were true:

* Obama is a Muslim

* Little boys who play with dolls will turn gay

* Women who take the pill all do it because they want to have sex without pregnancy.

Filling a need

Emotionally repressed valentines

Thanx to andrewducker

Style

As one who makes a living off of apparent semantic nulls like hyphens, spaces, and caps, I welcome the new Internet style guide, though I will hyphenate "e-mail" until they pry my red pencil from my cold, dead fingers. And Cheeses! Now we know which ones to capitalize.

Thanx to andrewducker

The Biggest Gain

This should be a TV show.

I’ve said it before: I want to be enjoying the 20th season of a show called The Biggest Gain. In this week’s episode we meet Ahmina, who is trying to overcome her fear of falling through the water (yes, this is a thing, my husband and I both have it) in order to learn to swim at age 33; Bob, a veteran who is coming out of a long spell of depression after becoming a paraplegic and wants to regain as much as possible of his former physical fitness; Charlene, who is battling agoraphobia; and Darius, a minor-league baseball player who turned down a non-athletic scholarship in order to follow his dream. By the end of this run, Ahmina will be able to float calmly in the deep end of the pool although swimming without a flotation device still activates her panic reflex, Bob will triumphantly lift his entire body weight for 10 reps using the armrests of his chair as braces, Charlene will be filmed reading a book in the local park for the first time since the bullying she experienced as a child drove her indoors, and Darius will have decided to become a machinist’s apprentice due to a job loss in his family. All four will be praised for their courage and relate their new insights in in-depth interviews, and Ahmina’s tears of joy when she realizes that the water really is holding her up will go viral on Youtube. All expenses are paid for the contestants, but viewers will vote on who gets the $250,000 prize for the Biggest Gain.

From Dances with Fat via a post by nancylebov

A comment I made elsewhere about yesterday's 100th-birthday boy

I am extremely ambivalent about Burroughs. A genius of course, but you can't get away from the misogyny. Whatever else The Wild Boys is, it's Kill All the Girls/Kill All the Boys With Girl Cooties on a scale far beyond the Halloween movies. Maybe he's like Marx & Freud: Useful Tools/Disinfect Before Using. But I love Rudy Rucker's slash masterpiece Turing and Burroughs, and maybe Burroughs is right about language being a virus from outer space. If so, I for one welcome our new viral overlords.