links

Yeah, I should do a real post, but in the meantime...

Things that piss geeks off. (Link farked, copied here.) Not the list I expected. I especially liked the reference to irresponsibility - if you get yourself into a jam by being dumb and greedy, the sympathy is hard to generate.

Huge wind farm planned for South Dakota. Lots of empty prairie, now with purpose :)

Next is an essay on cheating, by theferrett. The part I found cool was his discussion of how he'd inadvertently shut down communication in past relationships - by asking several times a day (or an hour), "Are we okay?"

[W]e had to be okay. If my partner was upset or just irritated, telling me that they weren’t okay would lead to an instant Serious Discussion of What Was Wrong, which would not end until we were okay once again. Basically, any conflict, no matter how slight, had to be ironed out immediately for my convenience [...] In order to live with me, any girlfriend had to quietly redefine “trivial, but not worth discussing now” as “Okay.”

In this fashion, I taught them to lie to me. I was practically asking for it.

But wait! There’s more! If they didn’t want to discuss it right then, they couldn’t argue about it later – because then I’d realize that they had lied to me when they’d told me we were fine half an hour ago, and how could I know whether they had really meant that okay? The argument now would be that much bigger. So if they didn’t bring up the trivial stuff instantly, on my terms, they couldn’t bring it up at all without a huge fight that questioned their honesty.

They stopped talking to me about the trivial stuff. And the funny thing about trivial stuff is that it almost invariably chains into major stuff… But how could they discuss the major stuff that had sprung from the trivial stuff without having to justify all the quiet lies they’d told to me along the way?

In fact, they couldn’t talk to me at all.

Finally, from Raymond: The King County Council race gets even stranger.