The Book of PF
Peter N.M. Hansteen
It can’t all be fun and games. I need to circumvent rate limiting for a certain provider of certain types of data, and doing it through tor is the only way I can think. I have a little program that starts up a tor instance, sends a request, and closes down tor, and repeats. For this, do you need packet filtering, in order to redirect things and treat tor as a VPN.
Thank you NSA.
Atlas Shrugged and then I’ll be reading A Long Trip To A Small Angry Planet.
The title of your post.
Have you read it before? Any thoughts?
This is at least my 30th reading. Actually, I’m listening. I finally understand it and am experiencing what Rand wanted people to experience. Funny, I just realized that James Taggart isn’t the villain of the book. It’s not a book about politics, economics, or even philosophy. It is a book about the psychology of a hero versus that of an evil person. It’s about the stance toward life that each has.
It’s the greatest book I’ve ever read. There’s no other book like it.
I’m an inch closer to reading it now.
I have this image that it’s very dense and life is just dense enough already.
It’s on my list.
I wouldn’t say it is dense, but multi-layered. Most people only read it at the surface level.
never flinch by stephen king lol. it’s well received i think though i’ve seen so many highly critical reviews of it. also i’m probably just paranoid but the fact that it was published in 2025 AND has a lot of prose commonly associated with ai… it takes me out of the immersion completely lol.
Stephen King is almost more of a poet than a novelist. You get engrossed in his writing by the sheer musicality of it. But when you step back after reading, you go “this guy is a complete dick.”
He has musical writing and a musical imagination. But, like all socialists, he is scared of himself. It is this fear of self that gets sublimated into fear, then hate, of others, and finally the world.
Would he use autogenerated text? I guess I wouldn’t put it beyond him, specially considering that he’s getting on in years, and may feel frustrated at not being able to produce the same quality he once used to. Or maybe, like all old farts, he spends most of his time chatting with the chatbots and the writing style has percolated into his subconscious.
Maybe I can put it this way: he has a religious imagination, but he is scared of the dimension in himself (which everybody has, that profounder dimension) that is religious. That means, simplifying the equation, that he is scared of himself. It is scary, granted, to walk down those halls, where no maps exist and anything is possible (if you ever read the Narnia books, consider the Prince Caspian book where they come across the island where literal dreams come true). That anything is probably the singluar scary thing that has shaped humanity, and gave birth to philosophy. You have to have a pretty heavy amount of trust in yourself to open yourself up to the possibility of anything. Stephen King just hangs a sign there that says evil and cordons off the area.
What is religion, anyway?
Then you walk back from that transdimensional gate and go “oh fuck not a single person can understand me now.” But that’s a subject for another day.
There is no such thing as evil, Stephen King, you supersticious old fuck.
what makes you say that? about socialists?
yes but at that point, what would the incentive be? surely as a millionaire, he can afford to write simply for self expression?
Your identity gets tied up with a thing. You try to write a book like you used to and you can’t, and you want to jank reality into what you want it to look like. Why do women get botox?
It’s a phenomenon that has affected me personally, and generally has shaped the modern world. It was important for me to understand it.
can i ask how it has affected you?
I have seen it take hold of both countries I have lived.
Then I looked at the wider world and saw it was not an isolated thing.
To be fair, it could also be that he fell in love with the thing, that the cadence and fullness of it captured him like it has millions.
I don’t mean to be that guy but maybe also it was designed to do that.
Or a mix of the two. The latter convinced him it was alright to indulge in the former.
Like, again, millions of others.