lunatechian (lunatech-ian)

You get what anybody gets - you get a lifetime.

Neil Gaiman, The Sandman, Vol. 1

If you are someone like me,  who enjoys both beer and coffee, know that paying to use a public toilet is a European custom.  The usual charge is the local equivalent of about 50 cents. Some restaurant have a tip dish by the entry — again 50 cents is plenty for this.

In 1938, a London stage play told the story of a husband who drove his wife insane. In order to convince the wife that her own brain had become an unreliable narrator, the husband dimmed the gaslights in their home and told the wife she imagined the change. The play gave rise to the term “gaslighting,” : "a form of psychological abuse in which false information is presented to the victim with the intent of making him/her doubt his/her own memory and perception". The name of the play was Gas Light

A police officer arrives on the scene of an accident in which a BMW traveling at high speed lost control and crashed in to a guard rail along the median. The car obviously ground along the guard rail for quite a distance because the driver's side of the car was just annihilated and the driver's left arm must have been hanging out of the window during the crash, because it was severed at the elbow! As the officer approached he could hear the driver in shock, repeating, "Oh, my God - My Bimmer! Oh, my God, my poor Bimmer."
"Hey, buddy, I think you've got bigger problems that your car! Take a look at your left arm!"
The driver looks down at his severed arm, his eyes get as big as saucers and he yells, "OH MY GOD, MY ROLEX!"

On hipsters

The difference between a hipster and a geek

This is the major difference between a hipster and a geek: When a hipster sees someone else grooving on the thing they love, their reaction is to say “Oh, crap, now the wrong people like the thing I love.” When a geek sees someone else grooving on the thing they love, their reaction is to say “ZOMG YOU LOVE WHAT I LOVE COME WITH ME AND LET US LOVE IT TOGETHER.”

Hipsters On Food Stamps, Part 1 has a line that precisely captures what I think about obsessively posting pictures of food

There's plenty of attention to style, to identity, and regression to our most primitive instinct: eating, fetishized.

On buying

An Interview With Craigslist's Notorious Google Glass Hater

I hate commodity fetishization. I don't mean that in the Marxist sense. I mean the process of deriving of pleasure from the purchase of commercial goods above and beyond the actual value or utility of the product.

"You can see that our real problem is another thing entirely. The machines only do figuring for us in a few minutes that eventually we could do for our own selves. They’re our servants, tools. Not some sort of gods in a temple which we go and pray to. Not oracles who can see into the future for us. They don’t see into the future. They only make statistical predictions—not prophecies. There’s a big difference there, but Reinhart doesn’t understand it. Reinhart and his kind have made such things as the SRB machines into gods. But I have no gods. At least, not any I can see."

— The Variable Man, by Philip K. Dick