Mickey Mullin

I can at least understand an argument capping the number of incoming students, even if 2 is rather low. Allowing 0 to leave? They're students, not inmates! School districts should earn parents' choice and trust, rather than rent-seeking on the backs of children.

I get email. I respond.

To be an interesting writer, you have to go live an interesting life. —Earnest Hemingway —via Colin and Samir —from the desk chair of my uninteresting life Damn it, I need to get out more.

Reading "Constance" by Matthew FitzSimmons. Sci-Fi-wise, intriguing take on cloning and humanity. World-building: holy mandatory training, Batman. Global warming, white people, and wealth are bad—also everyone is racist. I like the premise, but I'll pass on the second book.

@travis4nh Taxes are the price we pay for living in an uncivilized society. We can lament the injustice of taxes or acknowledge their incivility, but to deny their existence is absurdity. The best course, then, is to reduce the burden of government to as near to zero as is possible.

Property taxes are just a tax. Civilization has had taxes for as long as civilization has existed. I hate taxes and want to reduce them to near zero ...but there is no way that taxes mean that your property is a "commons". Car registration tax doesn't mean your car is public etc.

@travis4nh It's not just rhythm, it's also diarrhetic: Something that might otherwise be useful information now uses five times as many words. They're free for AI to write, but they're sure not free to read. (Plus, I now rethink every binary contrast I write. "Does that sound AI-y?")

I don't find it amazing that people use LLMs to write garbage tweets for them. I find it amazing that some people's sense of rhythm and flow in writing is so bad that they don't understand how bad LLM slop sounds and are happy to hit "post". Dunning Klanker

@jeremykauffman X favors iOS. Features, like improved external link handling, go there first, and it often takes a very long time till they trickle down to Android.

X punishes links. This is indisputable, open knowledge. X is better under Elon, but punishing links is one of the absolute stupidest moves X has made.

@47fucb4r8c69323 @pmarca Andreessen quoted you (ensuring you're cited) and framed his quote about your position positively. Why is this cause for such a vitriol response? It reads like you're getting enraged at someone for agreeing with you.

@pmarca Fuck you you fucking retarded piece of shit. do you know how I came up with the Silly Business Theory? by introspection. You're a piece of shit.

Silly Business Theory is right: in the future the best work, greatest progress, most valuable innovations won't come from laboring under the false consciousness that work must be hard and serious to produce value. The best work is going to come from people playing and having fun.

The concept of "teenager" is a modern invention. For most of human history, a boy of 13 was already a man, apprenticed in a trade or fighting in a war. George Washington was a professional surveyor at 16. Alexander Hamilton managed a trading company at 14. In medieval Europe, noble boys could be pages at 7 and squires by 14. In Rome, a boy put on the "toga of manhood" at 14. The idea that an 18 year-old is "still figuring things out" would have been incomprehensible to our ancestors. I believe this is why we think teenagers are so troubled. They are men and women stuck in a society that treats them as children. Of course they are going to "rebel". We should give them more responsibility and expect much more of them.

@travis4nh Both the Senate and the House rejected War Powers resolutions. I don't want American blood and treasure spilt overseas for NextGen WMDs, but it's not a king if the legislature is in on it! They're oligarchs, not kings. Not that they complained when it was a (D) "king," anyway.

Dems are SOOO MAD that Trump won both the electoral college AND the popular vote

Mostly agree about the IT guy, and I hope it turned into a learning experience in customer management. A judge is expected to be the adult in the room, especially when things are tense. There would have been no follow-up joke to fall flat if the judge had behaved appropriately.

IT guy here, and I side with the judge mostly. Yes, he was an asshole. Yes the problem was happening, and it wasn’t a false alarm. IT guy made a poor choice of words, making it sound like the judge didn’t know what he was talking about in court. You can’t make a judge look bad like that when court is in session. Then his follow up joke fell flat too. The correct response would have been to say “I’m sorry judge, I misspoke, what I meant is that it was a quick fix, not that it wasn’t happening. Please let me know if you run into the problem again so I can quickly fix it for you.” The chat with IT guy’s supervisor is warranted so he knows how to conduct himself properly in a courtroom. Firing him, or writing him up would be a step too far.

Watch this IT guy handle a tech issue for an arrogant judge. Then watch Karen the judge turn on him and threaten his job. 🤡:"Thanks. Get out of my courtroom..." 🤡: "Find his supervisor!" *torrent of profanity* I wonder if he takes his bad day out on the public, too?

@levelsio The only time a ratio is a win.

Okay let's see who can reply to this

"Make it more concise." It's fine that people are using AI to help craft informative posts on X. However, while it is effortless to generate ever more words, readers' time and attention remain finite. It's inflationary. Ask your AI to cut the fat. You'll have far more impact.

There's an important historic lesson here about modern AI usage.

@Mr_Husky1 There's an important historic lesson here about modern AI usage.

May 16, 1963. Gordon Cooper was orbiting Earth alone inside a capsule barely big enough to turn around in, moving at 17,500 miles per hour. He had been up there for over a day. Then the warnings started. First a faulty sensor screaming that the ship was falling — it wasn't. He switched it off. Then something far worse: a short circuit knocked out the entire automated guidance system. The one that kept the capsule steady. The one that was supposed to bring him home. Without it, reentry was nearly impossible. Too shallow an angle and the capsule would bounce off the atmosphere back into space. Too steep and it would incinerate. The margin for error was razor thin — and every computer that was supposed to hit that margin was dead. Down on the ground, NASA engineers watched the telemetry in silence. They could see everything going wrong. They could fix nothing. Cooper didn't panic. He uncapped a grease pencil and drew lines directly on the inside of his window to track the horizon. He looked up at the stars he had spent months memorizing and used their positions to orient the ship by eye. Then he set his wristwatch. Because when you have no computers left, you become the computer. At exactly the right moment — calculated in his head, confirmed by the stars outside — he fired the retrorockets. The capsule shook. The sky turned to fire. For several minutes, no one on Earth could reach him as plasma swallowed the ship whole. Then the parachutes opened. Faith 7 hit the water just four miles from the recovery ship — the single most accurate splashdown in the entire Mercury program. The man with a wristwatch and a few pencil marks on a window had outperformed every automated system NASA had. We talk a lot about technology saving us. And it often does. But Cooper's story is a quiet reminder that behind every machine, there still has to be a human being who can look out the window, think clearly under pressure, and decide what to do next. The final backup was never the software. It was him.

@poorlemming @Chizitere_xyz I may disagree on specific terms, but I agree with your underlying premise. Luxury and gifts wouldn't make my wife happy, anyway. They're appreciated when they occur, but only because we have a foundation of love, respect, and trust. And you're right: I am definitely grateful.

I think you’re confusing being a real person and doing the right thing with ensuring happiness. True happiness comes from within yourself not from the actions of someone else. If someone relies on the actions of someone else to be happy in order to treat that person correctly that is the very definition of a transactional relationship. For instance, showering your wife with luxury and gifts so you’re not treated like a monster, doing everything she says to avoid her wrath, etc. Be thankful you’re not in one

The most ridiculous, universally accepted piece of relationship lore is the phrase: "Happy Wife, Happy Life." ​Society paints this as a cute, romantic mantra for men to live by. The unfiltered reality is that it is a psychological extortion racket. It conditions a man to believe that his own emotional baseline, his exhaustion, and his boundaries are entirely irrelevant. His only job is to constantly suppress his own reality just to keep his partner’s fluctuating moods stabilized. ​You are taught that if she is unhappy, you have failed as a man. The brutal truth? You cannot regulate the nervous system of an adult who is committed to chaos. A household built on "Happy Wife, Happy Life" almost always ends with a completely hollow, burnt-out husband.

@poorlemming @Chizitere_xyz When I'm sick, she takes care of me. I can be a more effective husband and provider when I'm well. Neither of us *withhold* things when we're not at our best; we're simply less capable at those times. I see those as mutual support, not relationship transactions.

@MickeyMullin @Chizitere_xyz Ensure she’s happy? Everyone is responsible for their own happiness. Sounds more like a transactional relationship. “I’ll only do X if you do Y”

Don't let George R.R. Definitely-Not-Tolkien get you down, even though he's burned readers and aspiring authors alike: You don't have a responsibility to your readers; you have only a responsibility to your own commitments, and acknowledging when they must be renegotiated is part of sucking it up. Anger, grief, bitterness, lashing out, and of course regret. They all eat at you and your ability like a wholly different kind of disease. I also pushed myself because I had to, and it took far, far too long to admit that forcing it was exactly what wouldn't work, no matter how much I needed it to. Different challenges, different commitments, yet I feel the echo of my own when reading about yours. Being vulnerable in public is tough as hell. Kudos. And thank you.

"Where's the sequel?" Any time this question gets asked nowdays, we are conversing by the flickering light of George Martin's spectacular self-immolation.   George Martin is an asshole. We can't just brush off the question like he does. Authors might not owe you another book, as Neil Gaiman pointed out while he wasn't busy being a sex pest, but... so what? I don't conduct relationships with my fans via double entry bookkeeping, in the same way that if I have a headache, Sara doesn't check the balance sheet before giving me a scalp massage. Readers pay my bills, they want a sequel, I want to deliver one, or least a transparent explanation of why it's taking a while. It's the obfuscations, false promises, and outright lies that make fans so angry. So here's what happened. I never expected Theft of Fire to hit as hard as it did. Debut novels don't do this, and if you think they do, that's not the first novel, just the first one that you heard of. I also never expected to take off on Twitter like I did. So, there were a lot of demands for attention. Appearing on podcasts, at conventions, that sort of thing. And that was, indeed, slowing down the writing. Handling a public presence was new to me. But had it been that alone, you'd have Box Of Trouble in your hands right now. It would have been later than a year, but not this late. But then I had to drive Sara to the ER at 5am in the morning, with the worst headache of her life, probably a fair description of what it feels like when you have a 5cm  stage 4 cancer bleeding into your brain. The next day, I read her the comments from people hoping and praying for her, as they wheeled her for brain surgery. That was the beginning of a very long year, full of more surgeries, radiation therapy, immunological infusions that made her sicker than the cancer itself, two hour drives to the treatment center, sometimes every other day. I tried to write. I tried. Not just because I was later than I wanted to be. Not because you asked me where the sequel was. Because I needed something I could do. Something I had control over. Something that felt like progress, instead of sitting around waiting to see if I was going to lose... Well, you know what it's like to love someone. We give hostages to fate when we love. Trying to work was a mistake. Brains work by association. For the meager payoff of what little progress I could make, I cross-linked my writing process with hospital waiting rooms, infusion centers, and that soft, empty feeling of waiting for death in blank rooms with old magazines and inoffensive white walls. When we were luckier than most, when our battle with cancer ended in triumph, I didn't feel triumphant. I didn't even feel relieved. I didn't feel anything. Something quiet and vital and nameless had switched off inside me, and because of that, I could keep marching forward. But the color had drained out of the world. I could rest now. Sleep. Sort of. A little bit. But I couldn't write. Whatever part of me had juggled ideas, tossing them up in the air with a laugh to see what came down, or whether they turned into birds and flew off and didn't down at all, well... that part wasn't laughing. It was curled up in the corner, tucked in a little ball with its arms around its knees, tunelessly humming a song I didn't like the lyrics of. I tried. So many authors, successful authors, far more experienced than I, talk about discipline and forming good habits and not waiting for inspiration. So I tried. I was late already, and it was eating at me. People were understanding, but I understand all too well that even a good excuse is not a result. I was... different. Angry. Snapping at people. Using my writing gifts to snarl at people over politics instead of play with fun ideas, saying things that were just expressions of frustration rather than insight. I lost some friends. I don't think I'll get all of them back. There are treatments for cancer. There aren't any treatments for the people in the splash zone. At the end of last November, the two-year mark since I published Theft of Fire, I realized I wasn't going to finish. Not like this. I had 85% of a complete manuscript, but you can't crawl across the finish line if you can't crawl. I had to stop and fix... everything. I sat down, stared at a wall, and thought about what I needed to do. Since I wasn't stupid enough to involve anyone who calls herself a "therapist", there were no lectures about intersectional feminism and toxic masculinity. Then I played video games for a month. And not much else. That doesn't sound like a great vacation. It sounds like laziness. But that's what it needed to be. I needed to not be responsible. If it were my job to build walls or dig ditches or fight wars or design aircraft parts or write software, I could have knuckled up and just done it. But telling stories isn't something that you can just work at. You have to play at it, too. And to do that, you have to remember what it feels like to play. So I had to ignore the advice that I'm sure was great for other people who aren't me, and I had to be lazy and play video games for a month, and then go scuba diving in the Florida keys, and then get sick and attend a convention as guest of honor while so drugged up that I barely remember anything I said. I had to realize that I was injured. And I had to put myself on the injured list. What do you do with a lifting injury? How do you rehab a damaged muscle? Well, you rest it until you can move it through the full range of motion, weakly. And then you lift weights again, but light ones. Only as much as you can handle without pain. So I sat down each day and wrote, just a little. A sentence or two, sometimes, if I couldn't get more. Never pushing myself, quitting when there wasn't any more in the tank, not nagging myself over deadlines long vanished in my rearview mirror. It started out as just 100 or 200 words, here and there. Then it started to feel okay again. Well, okayish. It wasn't enough. It wasn't the pace of a man trying to finish a race, or deliver on a delayed promise. But it was all I had to give. But yesterday, I wrote 1000 words. Today, 1100. And I didn't hate them. I'm still not 100%. I'm... diminished. Mentally and emotionally. Angry a lot of the time. Sometimes ashamed of myself over all this. A lot of things that used to bring me joy now bring... nothing. But I know what I have to do for myself so I can do this at all. And it's working enough to let me move forward. I have 132,000 words now. They're good. I don't hate them. They're better than Theft of Fire. I don't know where the finish line is, but I know it's somewhere out there. It feels closer now. I can't promise a date. I'm sorry. Things are still bad, even if they're better now, and I have to just do what I can, and not hate myself for it. There's a printed page taped to my wall. Above the monitors. Something I said to someone else once. Sometimes you have to be the person you wish you had. Cast your eyes down. You cannot see Samarkand from here, but the road is before you. Look to the road, see the footprints in the dust. Others have walked  this way. Take one step, and then another, and then a third. Rest in the  cool of the evening, and walk when the sun rises, when the muezzin  calls the faithful at dawn. Take one step, and then another, and then a  third. Others have walked this way. Look to the road, see the footprints  in the dust. The road is before you, though you cannot see Samarkand from here. Cast your eyes down. And walk.

@travis4nh Rayman blocked me years ago for pointing out his anti-Free Stater policy, by merit of his family being here for generations, directly contradicted with his stolen land rhetoric. He is an unserious person.

@X My wife's account was hacked to post this crypto shill garbage and your help site is stonewalling our request to remove the hacker's 2fa. A review of her post history will show you that I am her husband. x.com/search?q=from%… Please someone help us out.