I have good friends who are drinkers. I have good friends who are social drinkers, but aren't really drinkers. I have good friends who aren't drinkers. I have good friends who are drinkers, and also want all the non-drinkers to drink too. I have good friends who aren't drinkers and want to eradicate drinking, and maybe the drinkers too. For ...

The mind is a fascinating thing that is little understood and often ignored. We believe we have mastered it like we've mastered walking, or playing an instrument, or typing, or speech. But it is fundamentally uncontrollable and has a "mind of its own". Har har. Making the fundamental error of announcing your plans before you implement them can cause your ...

It begins tomorrow, and I'm really excited because I've been FUP'd by SLT for the last few days. It's been painful going, as vnstat attests: day rx | tx | total | avg. rate ------------------------+-------------+-------------+--------------- 07/22/2016 410.55 MiB | 54.48 MiB | 465.03 MiB | 44.09 kbit/s 07/23/2016 231.05 MiB | 36.32 MiB | 267.37 MiB | 25.35 kbit/s 07/24/2016 ...

Yesterday, there I was, minding my own business, when Facebook "memories" or whatever threw this curveball at me: Turns out it was exactly 5 years ago that I hacked together a small piece of PHP, with a liberal amount of SQL logic thrown in, and it became sort of popular. We're talking a codebase like this: <?php function find3Bus($from, $to) ...

Todoist reminding me that my Last.fm analysis is overdue I downloaded my Last.fm scrobble data a week or so back using this excellent online tool. It contains almost every song I listened to on my PC (and some from my phone and iPod) between March 2011 and November 2014, 12784 scrobbles in total. I will do a proper analysis ...

Boy oh boy, this is something I deal with quite often. I rarely have problems with people in my life, because I've learned to respect boundaries and not get involved in other people's shit. But I hopelessly fail sometimes at keeping myself detached from people, and it leads to endless suffering. I found this amazing /r/Buddhism thread this morning that ...

I've been meaning to write something cohesive about my thoughts post-attempted coup in Turkey, instead of having a half-dozen status updates with cryptic captions that, when analysed together, gives someone an idea of where I stand on the issue. Writing for Foreign Policy, retired American 4-star admiral and supreme NATO commander James Stavridis says: The highly unstable geopolitics of the ...

Camouflaged Love by Prasad Aluthwattha Nothing I write can do justice to the artwork above. This probably pisses off so many radicals on all sides of Sri Lankan society, with their (very similar) views on sexuality and propriety. "Hoo!", I say to them, "Hoo!". Roll your morals and your bigotry and stuff it up your arse.

All alone, I have cried Silent tears full of pride In a world made of steel Made of stone Saturdays are spent at uni, and whenever I'm at uni I think of a particular person who has nothing whatsoever to even do with uni. At one critical 3 hour paper last semester, I spent maybe one and a half hours ...

Though I know I'll never lose affection For people and things that went before Drift is only natural in human relationships, and you shouldn't really feel bad about the inevitable. People change, relationships change, you meet new people, you move to greener pastures. It's perfectly normal to be mobile in a modern society. I mean, what are we? Serfs? There ...

'Cause I am hanging on every word you say And even if you don't want to speak tonight That's alright, alright with me... Today's been a bit of an off-day. In the last few days I've a couple of interesting Medium posts. Highlights: A healthy product company is, confusingly, one at odds with itself. There is a healthy part which ...

Why her though? She's... Not your type? At all? And what is my type, again? Not her Right. Come on, dude. I've known you since we had other people wash our bums for us. She's so not your type Well, we're grown-ups now. Shouldn't we look past "types" and all those primitive constructs. I like her for who she is. ...

I was watching one of the talks Casey Neistat gave at Vidcon this year, and he talks about his love for the 'act of creation', and how he loves his job just like he loves his family. The drive he has to wake up early to edit a video and put it out, 365 days a year. It's crazy, and ...

It's July, I'm on a twelve week break from jeewanopaya, it's almost midnight and I'm slacking off from doing actual productive work by checking out static site generators. Pelican seems nice, and I've always wanted a hacky, markdown-powered thing for my github.io page.

Is it safe to assume that no one reads these anymore? That Kottu has finally moved on to the netherworld. That the old blogger crowd, now probably married and old enough to have multiple grandkids, no longer cares?Good.I love being busy, because it keeps the mind occupied, but I recently had quite a long exam season (abridged with Avurudu) and ...

The recent tear-gassing of a student protest has been the topic of much conversation, especially since the newly appointed government was seen as being much more student-friendly than the previous one.Protests by students enrolled at state universities and higher education institutes are nothing new. Every year, these students cumulatively spend thousands of hours sitting/standing/walking/running from charging riot police in congested ...

The premise outlined in the title is all kinds of inexplicable. While trying to grasp the whole wtf aspect of it, this old quote from George Orwell's 1940 review of Mein Kampf stood out:Also he has grasped the falsity of the hedonistic attitude to life. Nearly all western thought since the last war, certainly all "progressive" thought, has assumed tacitly ...

The vessel is fragile.It carries water, the only water you'll ever find. Without the water you cannot survive. No tea, no cooking, nothing doing.The vessel is fragile.You've wondered about the nature of the vessel and sometimes mused what would happen if you were to throw it away. You'd never have the guts though.The vessel is fragile.One of these days you'll ...

You know how these things happen when you least expect, right?You return from a horrible and drawn out campaign of terror to put down that insurgency in the Caucasus to find out that her heart has turned colder than the Siberian winter.Your first instinct is to call the Okhrana on all your bastard ministers and torture them till they confess. ...

I had been a dog person for as long as I can remember. There was a cat sometime in my early teens or something, but I don't even remember where we buried it after it died.Then, everything changed when the fire nation attacked.Cats—and I can't stress this enough—are selfish bastards. This makes them immediately relatable. They will naturally gravitate towards ...