The Seven Deadly Sins (pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath and sloth) are emotionally based where the Seven Holy Virtues (the four classical cardinal virtues of prudence, justice, temperance and courage (or fortitude) with the three theological virtues of faith, hope and charity) are all based in rational self discipline.

This is the ONLY religion on the planet that Spock the Vulcan would be happy with.

Inventing fake news again.

A very interesting video on the role that intelligence played in the 2016 election.

I have no hope left for progress. Every time somebody uses the word progress, hidden in it is "how can I hurt my neighbor today".
It is just as bad within the Church. Every time I turn around, people are using "prudence", "Pastoral", "discernment" and "conscience" in very thinly disguised excuses for abuse. I do not think we should be fooled by such claims.

Of course, part of my impression MIGHT be because I live in a state where "progress" is defined as kill the unborn and the old human beings to save the salmon and fund windmills. And that whenever I argue against the genocide of the unwanted at church, I'm sure to run across some "Jesuit trained" person who thinks homosexual rape of boys builds character and that abortion and contraception are necessary to keep those awful poor people from breeding too much.
The latest expansion on the Death With Dignity act seems very undignified to me. If you have no use of your arms, the attendants can now choose to just stop feeding you. Was signed into law last week. Thus we now have two forms of euthanasia in Oregon- voluntarily chocking down 9 grams of barbiturates ground into your applesauce, or involuntarily starving to death.

Next up according to the man who wrote the latest bill: Removal of the six month terminal illness limit and requirement for depression testing for dementia patients.

Technological progress is wonderful, but can we achieve it without losing our humanity entirely?

And the main question in my mind is this:

Why did they decide to gratuitously insert a useless sub-story line about homosexuality that doesn't even fit what a slave owning race would allow slaves to do?

has left me with a pseudonym on slashdot that confuses people. I'm now collecting foes because of it.

I don't post here often, but I consider the people in my friends and foe list here to be the most intelligent technologists of our age.

Due to a recent forced cleanup, I have regained my home office, and with newer, lighter flat panels rather than old heavy big desk monitors, I wish to create a real home office with as many wall mounted monitors as possible and room for 3-4 laptops, in addition to my keyboard and mouse. Due to carpal Tunnel, I now use two keyboards and a nice trackball, as well as a USB3 based docking station for maximum compatibility and additional video outputs.

What I really need is a 4x3 USB switch. Additional video switching optional. Ability to direct any of the 4 inputs to any of the three outputs, in any combination, allowing me to switch keyboards, mouse, and USB Hub separately.

Anybody have any recommendations for such a beast?

When "GivingTuesday" and "ShortPaycheckFriday" coincide.

A really crazy idea. How about a combination savings account/ line of equity credit account that automatically brings in whatever paychecks you get in your life, for autodeposit, and then in turn automatically deposits a certain amount less than your paycheck into a given account every month- but continues to do so whether the automatic deposits happen or not.

Sometimes the account is ahead, sometimes it is behind, but in the long run, you'd probably end up building a significant savings account.

For people whose brains run more to the artsy than the financial, and who face careers full of periodic unemployment.

Next time I'm debt free and going into a job that pays as much as my current one, I think I'll try to use my credit union's computer to program one for myself. I already have the three accounts necessary for this.....

Two rarities in a row. After many years of no moderator points, I've now received moderator points twice in a row.

And one of my more right-wing Catholic websites today http://www.crisismagazine.com/2017/left-hate-women-much has an excellent article on the misogynistic tendencies of liberalism. I almost never crosspost from Crisis to here because despite the degradation over the years, slashdot is a significantly more intelligent population, but I believe this article is worthy of your time.

TL;DR version: 20 years ago today I started writing an enormous story, this year I finally started putting actual effort into it, and now it's almost kinda-sorta readable and I'd love it if anyone would acknowledge the fact that it even exists. It's called The Chronicles of Quelouva.

Way back in 1997, teenaged me and some internet friends set out to start a new video game company. Our founder had one game already in mind that we were going to start developing, but we all foolishly got ahead of our teenaged selves thinking about all the other games that we would make next. To that effect, I started writing a story for one of my game proposals... and then other stories for other, then-unrelated game proposals... and so on before we even had the first game barely begun.

That group of teenage wannabes quickly fell apart, of course, but different members of it kept reforming it with slightly different membership over the years that would follow, one attempt after another under different names. Within about five years the last of them fell apart as well and at that point I basically gave up on all dreams of ever doing any video game development.

But all the while I had continued developing all of those stories from what had once been unrelated game proposals, mutating them drastically over the years, tying them together with each other and with basically every other story idea that occurred to me into an extensive fictional universe.

After the last attempt at a game company died I didn't know what I was ever going to do with all of those ideas, and they mostly languished for about half a decade while I focused on other things, occasionally writing myself notes about further ideas for them. Eventually I started telling myself that some day, when life was all sorted out, I would spend my free time writing a series of books based on the stories, slowly over the course of my entire life. As soon as all of my real problems got fixed, I'd get right on that. It would be my life's work. Something small that I had done besides just struggling to barely survive.

Around 2008, after finally graduating university and subsequently having my entire life fall apart in every facet, I decided that I was going to start writing the basic story ideas down in a readable format because that mythic time of getting life sorted out was never going to come. I came up with a tentative name, "The Chronicles" of... something, eventually settling on "The Chronicles of Quelouva". I put up the bare-bones structure of an outline on my personal website, filled it out with tiny little unreadable scraps of story serving basically just as notes to myself to write more there later, and then started with the first story chronologically and tried to actually write something worth reading about it.

I barely got through one rough draft of that first story. Life kept getting harder and I just couldn't think clearly enough to write anything that sounded good. It was too much, I was too exhausted, I couldn't force myself to be creative enough after every long day of shit. At least that's what I told myself. Whenever I actually feel good for long enough, I told myself, I'll get back to it. Just start writing the next story. And keep going and eventually it will all be done. But of course I never felt good enough, and that never happened, and almost another decade went by with no progress besides the occasional further notes to myself to write something more later about an idea I'd just had whenever I could get around to it.

Around the end of 2016 and the start of this year, I ended up writing myself surprisingly many neat ideas to write more about later, and I was subsequently reflecting on how what I had online was such an unreadable mess that nobody could even just take in the big picture of what it was I was aiming to create without wading through the crap excuse for an outline I had managed to create so far. If I were to just die right then, nobody would even have the vaguest idea what it was in my head that I had once dreamt of "spending my life creating". So despite being busier and more beat down by life than ever, I forced myself to find some time to write at least a highest-level summary of the big picture, all on one (albeit long) page.

And then I thought, you know what, I'll write some little three-paragraph summaries of each of the three sagas that the whole project is divided into, just writing like a paragraph a night every other night (ish), over the course of less than a month. Something slow, and manageable, just so that people can see on a high level what it was that I once dreamt of making -- so that like, maybe, if I died and people found all of my notes to myself, someone might find it worth sorting through them and assembling it all into what the summary painted a rough picture of.

But then after that month of fairly easy slow high-level summarizing was past, I thought to myself, this is easy enough, maybe I can expand each of those three paragraphs per saga into three paragraphs of its own, so that each of the 27 core stories (nine trilogies across the three sagas) has its own one-paragraph summary. I can keep up this pace for a few more months and do that, and that would be a better summary than what I have so far. So I did that.

And then, after that wasn't too hard either, I did the math and realized that if I split each of those paragraphs into three again, working at the same slow pace, I could flesh out each story into its own full page, three-paragraph summary by the end of the year. As kind of a challenge to myself, I decided to try that. And so far, I've been keeping it up. I'm about two thirds of the way done (almost 40,000 words in), right about to begin the climactic final stretch of it, and on schedule to have these summaries finished by the end of the year.

Not only that, but I realized I was having difficulty keeping most "paragraphs" down under a full screen of text, so I started automatically splitting them into threes again (and went back and split up the ones I'd already done), giving each part of each tripartite story its own page with its own three-paragraph summary. And then my English-major girlfriend pointed out to me that the figure I had looked up for an average paragraph was actually about a full page of double spaced text, and I could do well to split each of them in turn into three smaller, more readable paragraphs.

So now the whole thing is structured into "Episodes" (summed up in this phase into three short paragraphs each), three of them per "Part" of each tripartite "Story" of each trilogy "Series", of which there are three per each of the three "Sagas" of the overall Chronicles. That adds up to about the equivalent of nine full-length (27-episode) television seasons' worth of story, with a word count for just these summaries approximating what Google tells me is about that of a small novel (almost 60,000 words), once it's done by the end of the year.

Of course these are only summaries, not full scripts, and I've basically put no effort at all into making them look or sound pretty, just putting the ideas down in a minimally coherent form. But I've already done more to bring this thing that was once going to be my "life's work" into some kind of readable form this year than in all the twenty years that I was "working" on it before.

And that's why I'm telling you about it now. A month or two ago I realized, thinking that maybe I would remember this as the year I finally did something about the Chronicles, that I've been sitting on all of this for about twenty years now. And because I'm a digital pack rat, I still have the original text document in which I wrote the first draft of the very first game proposal that eventually grew into this project, with a creation date of August 25th, 1997 -- exactly a month after my fifteenth birthday, and twenty years ago today.

I just wanted to commemorate that anniversary somewhere.

If you want to see the very rough work still in progress, I'm posting it to my personal website as I go. If anyone wants to ask questions or point out typos or anything like that, I'd love just to know that anyone at all even looked at it:

The Chronicles of Quelouva.

Warning- nonCatholics and progressives may be insulted by this Awesome parody of a modern corporation applying political correctness

Just got an e-mail from Amazon Talent Acquisition:
-------------------------------
Amazon has launched a Part-Time Tech Program and is currently looking to hire Software Development Engineers to join a very exciting, growing team: Amazonâ(TM)s People Technology. We are hosting an invitation only hiring event in Seattle to meet talented Software Development Engineers such as yourself! These positions are located in Seattle.

With the People Technology team, your customers are essentially the entire Amazon organization, from line HR to managers to employees (current, former, and future). This is a rapidly growing mission critical team for all of Amazon with intriguing work with high visibility and impact.

Part-Time Tech Highlights:
 30 hours per week
 Same benefits as full-time
 Prorated salary
 Seattle based
 Teams are entirely part-time, including the managers!

If youâ(TM)re interested in being considered for this opportunity, please reply back with your updated resume by Thursday, June 8th, 2017. This opportunity may require relocation to Seattle; Amazon will provide relocation assistance if made an offer. We will also provide travel and accommodations to the event if invited and necessary.

Thank you and once I receive your response, I will follow up with next steps.

Best regards,

David

David Tisdale, MBA, SPHR | Sr. Technical Talent Acquisition | Amazon
E: tisdavid@amazon.com

-----------------------------

First of all, I don't want to live in Seattle. Second, what kind of idiot would take this deal?

1. Plant native, drought resistant, edible plants on every available surface with sun. They need to be native and drought resistant because they will only be watered with rain.
2. Have lots of babies. At least 10 children per family, whenever possible.
3. Encourage the mortal sin of gluttony. Ideally everybody should die of an obesity related illness and should weigh in at over 200 lbs at death.
4. Discourage cremation at death, encourage full body ground burial in metal caskets encased in concrete to prevent accumulated carbon from escaping back into the atmosphere.
5. Close sections of graveyards when full, and plant native drought resistant edible plants on top of the graves, to accumulate more carbon for sequestration.

Is always and forever the enemy of science. One lie leads to another leads to another and soon, you have draconian censorship against dissent.