2026-03-16 20:57:00
Sixteen days in and Iran is waging asymmetric warfare exactly the way one would expect: decentralized resistance, with military units operating independently to inflict economic pain on the US and allies. The US military is extremely effective at destroying targets - but it does not take much to shut down shipping through the Strait of Hormuz.
This was entirely predictable, which is why several smarter Presidents did not launch an attack on Iran.
Iran has a strategy. Meanwhile, on our side, no one can articulate a plausible strategic goal. Is it regime change, disarmament, or denuclearization? Unconditional surrender, or an diplomatic agreement? It changes every day. No one seems to know what we are trying to accomplish, or how to get there.
The idea that the US will entirely degrade Iran's missile and drone capacity from the air is laughable - it is a nation of 90 million, comparable to Alaska in terms of land area, and has been preparing for this scenario for years. Israel struggled to eliminate (admittedly simpler) projectiles from Gaza and southern Lebanon, so how likely is the US going to be able to accomplish such a mission in the much larger and well-resourced territory of Iran?
And again: it does not take much to close the Strait. The problem is less about Iran's ability to sink ships as it is about insurance and risk management. The big shipping giants are literally not paid enough to take on the risk, and no amount of tweeting from the White House or chest beating from Whiskey Pete is going to change that.
The White House has, petulantly, demanded that the US' historic allies participate in a naval operation to open the Strait. But they are understandably reluctant to risk their own troops for Donald Trump's epic vanity. And in any case the Administration has spent the entirety of the last year insulting each and every one of them (and in the case of Denmark and Canada, threatening them with war).
I doubt the US can eliminate this threat without a political agreement, or turning Iran into a failed state - one imagines an endless series of "mowing the lawn" operations not unlike Israeli incursions into Gaza in the era prior to October 7. This would be a moral catastrophe, a strategic failure, and a political disaster. Maybe Netanyahu would like that but it isn't what Americans want.
Meanwhile GOP messaging on the war becomes more Orwellian every day. Two years ago: vote Trump to avoid a war with Iran. Then, days ago: it's not a war. And now: Iran has been "at war" with us for 47 years (including, apparently, the brief period in the '80s when the Reagan administration sold weapons to them). We have always been at war with Eurasia, indeed.
All this and I've said nothing of the moral implications here. One does not have to defend the Iranian regime or the IRGC to recognize that thousands are going to die and millions are going to suffer for what will likely amount to a strategic mistake.
This is what electing an unfit President gets you.
This is the disaster we always feared.
2026-03-16 18:09:10
You will probably want to read re: chunk of coal's re: Your Score, Please to understand what I am on about.
...
Stares confused at screen for several seconds
Sorry what? People use the discovery feed and the trending page? What am I on about of course they do. But I don't. I think I have opened the trending page about 3 times this year - and the recent posts page even less. I discover most of the blogs I read from hyperlinks from others blogs, things like my human room. And also a big one is my analytics page; Here, ill make a list of every person that has linked to my blog in one of their posts(excluding the bearblog carnival).
That list is actually a lot shorter than I thought it was - But my point remains, because I read all of these guys posts.
Is that not the philosophy of personal blogging? I am sure I have read a post on bearblog at some point that the essence of this hobby is community.
Bearblog, the service, is a tool. A tool we get to choose how to use. I choose to click 'dashboard' and then 'thoughts of a guy named mason' everytime I open the home page. How do you use the tool?
2026-03-16 14:02:00
I've been researching how to do that whole V-tuber animated character modeling thing. Given most of my work is done in vector format in Illustrator I think I can get a decent animation from the process. But first I needed something to animate so I took Yuki, the mascot I made for my Noodlist website and went back into Illustrator to draw the rest of him.
The original you can see in earlier posts and on the website. Most of his body is covered up by the noodle cup. At one point I had a tail on him but it was too distracting so I took it off, etc.
But tonight I spent a good three hours with the pen tool drawing up the rest of his body. The goal was to do it in a way that was somewhat symmetrical so that the live2d software could do its keyframe magic better.
Anyway, here is Yuki with the rest of his arms and legs and tail. I also drew up an open mouth and closed eyes. I think I need a halfway shut version for the animation and a not 100% open mouth as well. Maybe tomorrow I'll get around to it.
Also for fun, here is what all the paths look like in Illustrator with everything turned off lol.
2026-03-16 12:24:00
I spent my whole weekend at the hospital and running errands.
On Saturday, my best friend who is like a sister to me had a seizure for the first time. It is currently attributed to an acute ischemic stroke. She is 29 years old.
She seems to be bouncing back pretty quickly and shows zero signs of stroke, only recovery symptoms from the seizure. That's why this is doubly shocking.
For years she has driven me around a lot. She has always felt bad because I don't have a car and begrudgingly tolerate mediocre public transit. She worries about my safety.
The situation has flipped. Now she is not allowed to drive for six months. Soon I will have to start driving her car to take her places and run errands for the foreseeable future.
I'm so glad she's (seemingly) okay right now. I'm still terrified though. I don't know what else to say. I love her so much.
2026-03-16 11:54:00
I have not done a lot of novel reading in the last decade. I can think of a variety of reasons why this may have happened. Having a cell phone is I think the biggest one, since it fills up my time with a lot of chopped-up, calorie-free writing.
The other major reason I quit reading novels is that I started reading a lot more screenplays and comic books. I found this extremely useful as a working games writer. The actual text you write when you are writing for a videogame is structurally and stylistically very similar to the actual text in film and comic book scripts. Comic books in particular, I think, teach you how to write good game dialogue. You really gotta learn how to share attention with visual art, and comic books are absolutely the best example of that kind of thing. And there are so many complex and even "literary" comic books to read! I've written about several of them on this blog in the last few months.
Turning away from novels so that you can slurp down tons of fancy graphic novels does make it difficult to answer certain types of job interview questions, though. There's a certain type of games interviewer who really wants you to be reading novels! I've definitely made some people, both narrative hiring managers and people in other disciplines, majorly uncomfortable when I told them I had a giant pile of screenplay PDFs at home, and a comic book coming to me in the mail, and maybe a short story or two that I could remember... but I hadn't read a novel in over a year. I think they want me to demonstrate some kind of soulful, passionate interest in writing, which they epitomize in the craft of novel-writing specifically. So when you say, "Oh, I read A Garden of Spheres recently," not only do they have no idea what that is, they just don't respect it!
This isn't the main reason I decided to start reading more novels again, but it's certainly a reason. The other reason is that I've got a list of popular stuff from the last several years and I wanted to chew through it. I started with Piranesi.
It's extremely good!! I probably should have read it earlier. I quite liked its mix of old-school survival adventure-writing and almost narrative-deduction-game-ass document-sleuthing. It draws inspiration very self-consciously [laudatory] from a variety of literary and philosophical inspirations and it was quite a lot of fun to see the 19th century shipwrecked-sailor stuff in its most surreal form here.
It's maybe too cautious about overstaying its welcome. I found that the mystery resolved very quickly, because the protagonist spends quite a lot of the story trying hard to not solve it. Instead, you watch him do a lot of anxious self-soothing and rationalization and denial. The last third of the story gets a bit crowded with this stuff, and it has to very suddenly come together. I was at peace with it, though - watching the protagonist rationalize what's happening to him is one of the core pleasures of the story, so it's not a bad trade-off.
One of the reasons I'm reading novels again is that I bought a very cheap e-ink reader and, lo and behold, I really do read a lot faster with it. I should have gotten one a long time ago!! I'll write about it in a bit, but I have to read a bit more with it before I'm sure about what I want to say.
Anyway: Piranesi by Susanna Clarke is very good! Everyone's already known this for years, and I just figured it out!
2026-03-16 08:29:00
Gen Z slang does exist. Those who hate it, I feel, can’t come to terms with becoming out of touch with the side of the internet dominated by minors and college-age users. Nothing to be ashamed of, really. Language changes constantly, and slang is one of the fastest-moving parts of language.
Gen Z slang also exists in every language, not just English. Denial of that fact is just ignorant and anglocentric. Younger speakers always develop new vocabulary and inside jokes.
What I take issue with is mischaracterizing a real dialect of English as “Gen Z slang.”
Words like:
These are not inventions of Gen Z. Many of these words come from African American English (AAE), Ballroom English, or a mixture of both. Long before the internet.
Ballroom culture is an LGBTQ+ subculture often centered in cities like New York. It is a very diverse community with folks of all races, but founded by Black and Latino folks back in the 70s.
Black Americans have produced a huge amount of mainstream viral video content. That is how these words spread to populations that would otherwise not acquire them naturally through face-to-face interaction.
You CAN use these words, anyone can! But using them incorrectly in front of the communities that use these dialects natively might get you a side eye.
Modern slang.
Here is the breakdown of the word:
[LOWKEY] + [KIRK] + [GENUINE] + [LY]
Lowkey (adverb) — originally meaning “subtly or quietly,”
now often used online to mean “kinda.”
Kirk (noun) — from Charlie Kirk, an American
right-wing political "debater".
Genuine (adj.) — “truly what something is said to be;
authentic.”
-ly (affix) — suffix meaning “in a certain manner”.
Lowkenuinely is already a slang word. The [-kirk-] was added afterwards.
In morphology (the study of how words are built from smaller parts), we call this type of insertion an infix.
An infix is a morpheme (the smallest meaningful unit within a word) placed inside a word instead of at the beginning or end. It is a type of affix (suffix, prefix, infix). In this case, it's specifically an expletive infix.
The root word here is:Lowkenuinely (no kirk)
Why isn’t [KIRK] the root even though it's in the middle?
Because the base meaning of the word is not “Kirk.” The meaning comes from lowkey + genuinely. The inserted word only adds emphasis.
Lowkenuinely itself is a portmanteau. A portmanteau is a word formed by blending two existing words together.
Examples of portmanteaus include:
Portmanteaus become words on their own once people start using them.
You have probably heard of infixes in English before:
Fan-fucking-tastic! (USA)
or
Abso-bloody-lutely! (UK)
The inserted word acts as an intensifier. It increases emphasis without changing the core meaning.
The insertion of Kirk works the same way:
Low-kirk-enuinely
Here “kirk” functions as the expletive element. It intensifies the meaning of the root, the same way “fucking” does in the earlier example.
Why was Charlie Kirk used as an expletive?
The answer is simple: Because many people didn't like him, especially young people. Or didn't care about him. This is not new or unique to the younger generations. However, Kirk was not nearly as influential as actual politicians who've had things named after them, like Joseph R. McCarthy.
Also, his last name fits perfectly as the K in ['k]irk is the same K sound in low['k]ey. It rolls off the tongue better than "low-charl-enuinely"
Another example of this kind of formation is the word "Joever / jover."
[JOE] + [OVER]
“Joe” refers to Joe Biden, while “over” comes from the phrase it's over.
The word is used when something has gone completely wrong.
It originated on 4chan (ew) and later spread through Twitter. This is a bit special as the meaning of the word/phrase has to do with people's perception of him as a politician. Kirk was just a guy with a mic, so no special meaning associated with his name.
Note: I use "joever" all the time. It's fun to say.
What Gen Z loves to do is take something that already looks messy and push it to absurd levels for humor.
They stack multiple blends and affixes together until the result is barely understandable. This is the most entertaining time to be a linguist.
Anything beyond lowkenuinely is mostly used as a joke rather than natural speech.
Here's an example from instagram:
[UN] + [IRONIC] + [ACTUAL] + [LOWKEY] + [GENUINE] + [LY]
(I mean, he was close...)
un and ly are affixes with their own meanings:
[un-] → “not” [-ly] → “in a certain manner”
These are morphemes as they hold meaning, but they're the subtype that cannot be used alone without a root.
Suffice to say that modern memes are odd.
There are no specific sources cited so I'll say it's all "theoretical" because I'm lazy. However, this is basic linguistics. I can give credit to my favorite linguistics textbook back in college for introducing morphology and sociolinguistics. The Language Files from Ohio State University which is on its 13th edition. I used the 12th edition, and still have it in my room.
Further reading if you're curious:
Wikipedia is a good resource for linguistics, surprisingly.
Video by Tom Scott on infix expletives
Davis, Chloe O. "The Language of Ballroom." The Gay & Lesbian Review, 9 Mar. 2021, glreview.org/the-language-of-ballroom/.