Miscellaneous Cruel Truths

Cutting off all your hair does not make you look less fat. Ever.

I say, "I kind of feel sorry for people who [make some small-minded and easily improved decision]".
Someone invariably chimes in with, "I do/would do that too," and goes on to explain the reasons said easy road was chosen, all of which every reader already knew.
Well, that just means I feel sorry for you too, now.

Holy crap. Someone described how I think, and why I have trouble with the linear ways of sentences, at least as well as I ever have:

Thought is an instantaneous explosion of branching worldlines, and the non-viable ones are immediately apparent. It takes almost no effort to understand why a worldline fails, but it takes immense effort rigorously to explain that, even to myself.

Writing about anything that comes from that direction is difficult for me. Partly because those thoughts aren't represented in words. Those thoughts use densely interconnected graphs of ideas, which may themselves be graphs. No idea what the primitive graph nodes are.

Writing is also hard because there are just so many possible ways to approach expressing complex ideas that I get choice paralysis at every word, abandoning sentences half-written.

For me, ideas and, usually, perceptions occur as either a pattern (or worldline as he says, borrowing from physics) or object (as in the programming paradigm). They are as essential and primitive as anything, but as hard to describe as precisely why seeing a thrown ball's early trajectory will tell you almost intuitively where it will land.

Why that is listed with "cruel truths" is something I should maybe give its own article.

Rabbits. They tend to destroy your garden, but taste good when served alongside their intended prey. This is a widely useful metaphor.

A "misquote" of something that can be more easily copied and pasted than typed out again is no accident; but when challenged, that will always, always be the defense. Only idiots whose egos need the altered version to be true will be fooled by it.

Why is the assumption always that I don't know? When it's perfectly out there, and I'm well experienced with the subject, have been burned before, and have functioning senses and a once-bitten mindset? Some's what learns, and some's what wishes they did. Ah, well.

Journalists who comment on culture without any understanding of what culture is completely crack me up. They're so desperate to force reality into what they want it to be - which is to say, reordered so that they're on top. It's kind of cute.

It turns out that "Well, nuh uh!" doesn't carry much weight as an argument.

Sarah: That's not fair!
Jareth: You say that so often. I wonder what your basis for comparison is?