Discorsi da letto

Me: This is blanket gluttony!
Her: There is no such thing. Gluttony is not on the list.

Me: Of course it is. Like fornication.
Her: Fornication is not on the list either.

Me: Lust, whatever.
Her: Oh... blanket lust. How great blankets are... Oooohhh... Hey! Why's there a dark spot on the ceiling ?

Me: A what ?
Her: Over there, like a blur. Above the TV. O no, has the TV been struck down by God for being blanket gluttonous ?

Me: Do you know how inkjet printers work ?
Her: No. Maybe its punishment is to wear ugly braces and have no VCR in its cunt.ⁱ But it's right next to the window! Why shouldn't a TV have a little cozy...

Me: Lol. See the way it works, TVs need very high voltage to make the electrons smash against the glass. This very high voltage also creates a magnetic field, which ends up shooting various unrelated particles straight into the ceiling. It's mostly a carnival ride for specs of dust up there.
Her: Are there any cleaning applications for this ?!

Me: Not really cleaning, more like dirtying. That's how inkjet printers print.
Her: Hm.

Me: Actually, it's used for air purification too. Do you remember acid rain ?
Her: I remember it was a thing...

Me: Yes, here's what that thing was : coal contains some sulphur. Powerplants that burn coal release that sulphur, as sulphur dioxide, which is a very reactive gas, which actually does suck bits out of atmospheric water to recreate sulphuric acid which is then too heavy and falls down, which is a serious problem for some types of vegetation - trees mostly.ⁱⁱ This was a significant but localised problem, in the immediate downdraft of said power plants. Nevertheless the ecofreak party misrepresented it into some sort of global issue, which it was not, and started pounding schoolkids, who have no business with any of this, about the Amazon forests, which were at no point involved - no power plants there. Meanwhile the people that actually do things, as opposed to these fucktards interested in whatever Internet fame and other "social" goals found the perfect solution : add specially designed charged conductors inside the smokestacks. The very property that makes SO₂ dangerous is that it's highly electrically charged - because that's what acids are, substances that can readily donate a proton - also makes it highly susceptible to the field treatment, and so this application completely neutralised the problem, and that's why it was a big ecofreakⁱⁱⁱ talking point in the 90s and hasn't been heard from since. Of course this'd have been moot anyway, because meanwhile they came up with this liquefaction of coal process that's much more effective anyway and also in passing resolves that problem, so all the ruckus did, outside of creating a generation of kids with a heartbleed^iv in their head (one that's now readily exploited with all the global warming/climate change/anthropo-hate club for free meals and airplane fare all over the world + a decent chunk of cash) is maybe saving a few trees over the 1990 - 2010 interval.
Her: Well, that's something.

Me: Yeah, it's something. You know what sort of something it is ? Like, imagine a woman. She's working, she's got kids, she's not poor but definitely money's still a limit of her world. The kids had breakfast around eight, it's now eleven, she's got a list of stuff to do and it's all crammed full. They're going to have lunch at the inlaws at one, it's going to be a major meal, but the kids are whining that they're hungry. Which sure, whatever, they're hungry. If they just fucking waited for two hours which positively won't kill them it'd be just perfect because gran'mama always loves it when the kids "have a healthy appetite" and then, irrational old woman that she is, likes the poor woman for a week or two, irrespective of her actual merits or dismerits. But no, the kids are hungry. And they want Chuck e Cheese because it's on TV all the damned time. Which is why I despise these people, and have, for as long as I can remember, aged fifteen or something : because I love that woman, and they're obnoxious shits getting in her way and making her day a lot worse than it needs to be for absolutely no fucking reason. Well, except that they heard it on TV.
Her: I see.

PS. Please note that I'm not nearly as awkward as that guy. This I suspect comes from habituation.

1. They, like sane people, don't do the whole "TV perched on furniture" thing here. Instead, they do the whole "TV suspended from metalwork" thing. Like sane fucking people, did I mention that part ?

   The armatures usually have adjustable holders to accomodate various receptor sizes, which sort-of look like braces, and usually a little holder underneath for perhaps a VCR. [↩]

2. Ecosystems are ecosystems. All naturally occuring conditions favour some species and disfavour others, there's no such thing as a universally harmful development. If we nuke the place cockroaches will take over, if we simulate active volcanoes through acidic ash then volcanic flora will take over that place and so on and so forth. Nature is not so stupid as to depend on human agency, unreliable as that is. Instead, nature's already explored the totality of possibilities, and consequently there is no end. Not for it, at any rate. [↩]
3. An ecofreak is, like any sort of religious zealot, one who expends a lot of verbal energy to staunchly put forth views that he doesn't either understand or upon examination actually hold. Fortunately for the ecofreak, like in the case of any other religious zealot, examination is not a skill within his repertoire. Obstructing examination however is. [↩]
4. Heartbleed was a very painful, very loud and very far reaching warning shot that the Bitcoin community (the actual Bitcoin community) fired at the NSA, and generally the wanna-be republic. It consisted of publication of that group's most valuable secret, which was a hole that allowed it to expose the ssl protocol, giving it cleartext access to all traffic and all passwords going through https and ssh, as well as a decent shot at exposing the RAM of any networking computer.

   I believe the time is ripe for it to become a proper noun, denoting exactly this : a major vulnerability deliberately planted by fraudulent aspirants to political power. Which is what the USG is, in its attempts to usurp the rightful dominions of La Serenissima, which is what "ecologists" are, in their misguided attempts to meddle in science and industry. [↩]