in which our heroine weighs in

The internet's schadenfreude reflex landed squarely on this girl today, and I can't say I disapprove. Of particular note is this little gem, which still exists in the Australian edition of Gizmodo, unaffected by the author's post hoc, face-saving edit:

"Also, for all you world famous nerds out there: Don’t go after two Gawker Media employees and not expect to have a post written about you. We live for this kind of stuff."

Are you kidding me?

On behalf of all the serious professional women out there, let me say this: gentleman, you absolutely can, you absolutely should go out on dates with women and not just assume that they are going to use you to their professional advantage. Women who do that are evil. Don't touch them; you don't know where they've been.

As I've said elsewhere, there's a word for women who go out on dates for professional, rather than personal reasons.

....

"Whore." The word is "whore."

in which our heroine wishes she were silicon-based

When people ask if some food is "organic," I usually tell them, "Well, it's not inorganic....", 'cause I'm a smart-ass like that. At the airport this week, though, I was listening an episode of This American Life, and I heard maybe the dumbest thing I've heard about organics ever. I don't know if the reporter was trying to seem balanced for the sake of professionalism or if she actually sympathized with the vaccine-o-phile parents in this story, but she actually said there's no such thing as an organic vaccine. No, lady. Just no. There's no such thing as an inorganic vaccine! You know what is organic, though? Whooping cough. Also, polio. Maybe give your kid some of that, instead. All natural, 100%, nature's best.

in which our heroine cuts herself with occam's razor

England is on fire, and no one can explain why. In the absence of any other explanation, I'm gonna look to historical precedent and just assume that Vikings are responsible.

rosencrantz and guildenstern are wizards

Thank MR for this one, since he introduced me to WTF D&D, with which I have been wasting a great deal of my employer's time lately. Hey, state labor law requires that I take at least one break during the day. It would be a dishonor to the memory of all those Pullman Strike people if I didn't goof off for a half-hour every day.

Now, granted, a lot of these monsters logically could not exist. But it's magic, right? Wizards did it. This monster, though, is special, and by special, I mean enraging. It offends me not as a gamer, but as a sentient being. This monster ontologically could not exist, which is a little, you know, beyond. It has roughly human intelligence but no conception of death? WTF, indeed! How can you have self-awareness and not have a conception of death? If you understand that you exist, how does that not also imply the opposite possibility, that you don't necessarily have to exist? You exist, and unless you're YHWH (and if you're reading this and You're YHWH, well, I'm either incredibly flattered or utterly unsurprised), you know you haven't always existed, and so one day a little later maybe you won't exist, and BAM, conception of death, embedded in the conception of life. As far as basic concepts go, you don't get much more basic than that. It's as if you said "this monster is capable of learning to add, but not subtract." Eff you, monster. Eff you and your impossible thoughts. You don't understand death? Here, my +1 scimitar of intellectual fury will teach you....