This is so gross! This woman is playing some multi-player virtual reality video game:

In between a wave of zombies and demons to shoot down, I was hanging out next to BigBro442, waiting for our next attack. Suddenly, BigBro442's disembodied helmet faced me dead-on. His floating hand approached my body, and he started to virtually rub my chest.

The whole piece is enraging. It makes me never want to play video games, on top of not really enjoying them very much.

Via E. Messily

Ugh, I'm drawing a blank yet again on something to post. This election is sucking all the oxygen out of the room.

Who wants advice from me? Write your problems in the comments and I'll tell you how to solve them.

Doesn't it feel like all the easily solvable problems have been solved, and all that's left are the intractable ones that don't solve easily? We need an easily solved problem, posed by an irascible person who will argue with the solution (but not too much! Just the right amount of arguing.)

I don't have any interest in watching it myself, but it's another sign of the shittiness of 2016 America that the Cubs game isn't on broadcast TV.

This guy is the exact kind of person I'm worried about, as the Republican party self-destructs.

I really loved this article. You think kids need more freedom? How about toddlers on the roof! But it does such a great job of capturing what's great and nuts about the Silicon Valley "disruption" mindset--he damn well did something about what he saw as a problem; on the other hand, the glib confidence is...well, probably a prerequisite to doing it.

And this paragraph really nailed the dynamic in our family, with me as the worrier.

It was clear that we conceived of risk in entirely different ways. He thinks of risk in terms of probability: How likely is it that any given child will plummet to his death? Google has an answer to that question (about 150 children in the United States die from falls from roofs, windows and balconies annually), but I know we would regard that number quite differently. Mike's decisions aren't curtailed by statistics, anyway. There's a quirky, utopian libertarian quality to Mike's philosophy; he is a man guided above all by his theory of how life should be. For him, low-probability events are very unlikely and therefore dismissible; for me, they are tragedies that befall someone. I think of playing on the roof more like entering a lottery in which, if everyone's kid plays on the roof, someone's kid won't grow up -- and I don't want a ticket. The real question is: Do you believe that the child who falls could be yours?

Although when I told my wife about kids on the roof, she said "that's neglect."

Moby wanted an astronomy post, and periodically I wonder about that crazy space bridge located on the distant planet that Ogged posted about. The one where we were all like, "There you have it, undeniable proof of intelligent extraterrestrial life. Now back to work." I always thought it was weird that it wasn't a major game changer in all of our lives - a "where were you when the challenger blew up?" kind of moment. Now I can't find a single thing about it, including Ogged's original post, and so I'm wondering if I dreamt the whole thing.