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Shlomi Fish’s Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) List
This document is a list of questions and answers to common questions I have been asked or have found myself answering or telling about. I don’t mind being asked the same question more than once (even by the same person) because I still enjoy answering it. (See also what Wil Wheaton says about it at the beginning of his FAQ.)
But this document is here just in case, you have a question, or at least so I can link to it.
Some related FAQs I co-maintain:
About Shlomi Fish
Node LinkNextWho are you?
Node LinkNextI am Shlomi Fish, a professional Israeli software developer, and author of articles, essays, presentations, and funny screenplays, stories, aphorisms and bits. I have a Bachelor of Sciences (B.Sc.) from the Technion in Electrical Engineering, but it would be a stretch to call me an Electrical Engineer, at least with my current level of expertise in the field. I’m actually more of a programmer, a software-development geek, and a specialised mathematician.
At the moment, I’m a computer geek, which is a person who is enthusiastic about computers, and a former “dork”/“nerd” which mean a person without a social life, because I recently started to increasingly socialise more. I’m interested in many other fields, including linguistics, history, writing, children and non-children literature, and T.V. and movies.
I should note that I am only one person, and in fact am unaware of any other “Shlomi Fish”’es of significance (at least not according to Internet searches).
Which FAQs do you comaintain?
PrevNode LinkNextAre you a Guy or a Girl?
PrevNode LinkNextI am very much a guy, despite what my first name’s suffix (the “i” of “Shlomi”) may imply to English speakers. I am also (mostly) heterosexual, but I hate being a macho in real-life, and have some other qualities that are considered somewhat feminine. However, I do not think that I’m a woman born in a man’s body. (Or a lesbian born in a man’s body, for that matter.)
Many Israeli masculine names end with an “i”: Avi, Ari, Meni, Beni, Ori, Uri, Udi, Eli, etc. An “i” suffix means “of me” or “mine” in Hebrew, or “having the property-of” (like “-ful” in English). There are also many Israeli Hebrew feminine names that end with “i”. One reason I’m using “Shlomi” instead of “Shlomy” is because “Shlomy” might be pronounced to rhyme with the word “my”.
What can you say about your name?
PrevNode LinkNextWell, “Shlomi” or “שלומי” in Hebrew (see its wikipedia entry) means “my Shalom” in Hebrew, or perhaps “Shalom-ful” (= having the property of Shalom) or “Shalom-Jehovah”. “Shalom” is an ancient Hebrew word, that is derived from proto-Semitic origins meaning something like “completeness”: “well-being”, “welfare”, "harmony", "wholeness", even "prosperity" (but probably not really “excitement”) - not only “peace”/tranquility. It is an ambiguous noun as the nouns of some ancient Semitic languages were. See also what I wrote about it on my blog (and some of the comments I received).
True to my name, I often feel that I have "more luck than brains" (as hard as it is to believe given many smart people consider me very smart) and while enduring some hardships (including physical ones!) was often at the right place at the right time. That was including on a certain Internet/television/etc. forum or resource and came up on top. Moreover, my body remained complete.
Moreover, just like king Solomon [“Shlomo”] in the bible, I wanted to be kind, good hearted, and benevolent as a child by inspiration from fairy tales I read or listened to.
The reason why it is “Shlomi” or “Shelomi” instead of “Shalomi” is due to a certain pronunciation transformation in Hebrew, where certain vowels are shortened into a Shwa when they are distanced too much from the Stress of the word. Quite a few non-Hebrew speakers have issues with pronouncing Hebrew words that start with several Shwas in succession (as this scene from a screenplay I wrote indicates).
Now, most Israelis pronounce this name with the stress on the “lo”. I, however, prefer it to be pronounced with the stress on the “mi”, albeit I also answer to people who pronounce it the other way. My version is the correct Biblical pronunciation. You can hear me pronounce it in Hebrew (Ogg, mp3) and in English (Ogg, mp3).
Please spell the name as starting with “Sh”, similar to the common spelling in English — not with “Sch” (the German spelling).
My last name - “Fish” (“פיש” in the Hebrew alphabet) - naturally means the aquatic organisms in English or (with a different spelling) in German. It was the last name of my late grandfather who was a Polish-born Jew, and I’m still carrying it.
“Fish” is an uncommon name in Israel, but there are also some variations such as “Fisher”, “Fishman”, “Fischer”, “Fishlov”, “Fishelson”, etc.
Note that the last name “Fish” is not meaningful in Hebrew. In fact, in Ancient Hebrew, the only possible pronunciation would be “Pish” (which means “pee” or “urine” in Modern Israeli Hebrew slang). That is because it uses the same letter - פ for both the "P" and the "F" sounds, and it would be "P" in the beginning of the word.
I had not given my last name a lot of thought until relatively recently (= 2022-08-25), but now think it may imply:
“Plenty of fish in the sea” - pluralism, open-mindedness and tolerance.
Progressing carefully, but steadily, possibly despite feeling some fear, like a timid little fish exploring the ocean.
“Fishy” - weird/strange.
A contraction of “finish” and I like to bring projects and tasks to a usable state, and move on (while possibly revisiting them later): Perfection is in imperfection.
“Give a man a fish; you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish; and you have fed him for a lifetime” - I invest time in learning useful technologies, and have little patience for helping people who wish to remain wilfully ignorant of knowledge which I consider essential. ( References: Selling for smart people. )
“Goldfish memory” - I tend-to-have a selective memory, which I dislike overloading with unnecessary details, data, and knowledge.
Is “Shlomi Fish” Your Real Name?
Node LinkDespite what the name may imply to non-Israeli people, “Shlomi Fish” (written as “שלומי פיש” in the Hebrew alphabet) is my real, and legal, name. See the question above for more information about its etymology.
Where are you from? Where do you live currently?
PrevNode LinkNextWell, I was born in Israel in 5 May 1977, and lived in Tel Aviv for a year. Then, when I was 1 year old, my parents moved to Dallas, Texas, USA for my father’s post-Doctorate and later on we moved to Rockville, Maryland, USA and stayed there until I was about 5. Then, we moved back to Tel Aviv and I lived in Ramat Aviv Gimel ever since. This was with some relatively brief trips to other places in Israel, to Europe, to the United States and to Victoria in Canada.
Currently (October 2024), I live with my parents in Hakim Eliyahu St. No. 4, apartment No. 12 (on the Third floor), Tel Aviv, Israel ( Google maps ), and I'm usually at home there, usually either using one of my computers, or sleeping. Note that if you wish to meet me, whoever you may be, you should contact me beforehand because the video intercom is unreliable.
Why are you revealing your home address?
Node LinkNextWhat’s your sign?
PrevNode LinkI am a Taurus, but I don't believe in Astrology, despite the fact that Tauri always do. 😉
Are you straight? Are you gay?
PrevNode LinkNextAs I noted previously, while I am attracted a little to men, I am much more attracted to women. Given I am a non-trans male-by-birth that makes me mostly straight. (References: #web - Lesbianism, heterosexuality, and Sappho.)
I have some relatively-mild (I hope) homosexuality-inspired jokes in my works, given it is a fertile meadow for humour. You may or may not find them funny (like my other jokes).
What did you study in university / college? Did you study computer science?
PrevNode LinkNextI studied in the Technion, completed my Undergraduate studies, and graduated with a Bachelor of Science (B.Sc) in Electrical Engineering (“Proper”, rather than “Computer Engineering” or “Computer & Software Engineering”) diploma. That put aside, my studies involved quite a lot of software development and engineering-related mathematics. I also have not done a lot of EE or electronics work, before or after my degree studies, while doing quite a lot of software development.
Given how I recall my academic studies as being frustrating, vexing, and often not interesting, I am not planning on working on getting another academic degree (whether a B.Sc, an M.A/M.Sc, a Ph.D, or similar) soon. However, I cannot promise that I won't change my mind about that in the future and enrol again.
The funny thing is that while my father and two sisters all have doctorates, I am considered the smartest one. That may have to do with me being more confident and "showy" and more likely to flaunt or utilise my skills.
Which human languages do you know?
PrevNode LinkNextHebrew: Speaking, Reading, and Writing - Mother Tongue.
English: Speaking, Reading, and Writing.
Literary Arabic: rusty, partial, and non-functional knowledge.
French: rusty, partial, and incomplete knowledge.
What is your day job? What do you do for a living? What is your work about?
PrevNode LinkNextCurrently (August 2022) I am happily unemployed, and trying to build esteem, success, recognition, fame, etc. as a writer/entertainer/amateur philosopher. My goal for now is to become the next big author — the next J. K. Rowling if you may. Even if I don’t achieve this goal, it’s going to be a wonderful, exciting, and wonderous, journey, and I’m not going to give up. (“Never Give Up!!”)
You seem very knowledgeable and capable. How come you said you were unemployed?
PrevNode LinkNextFirst of all, thanks for thinking highly of me. Otherwise, note that while I may be a competent software developer, I inhibit some issues that may make me unattractive to employers. See my critique to a post and some replies I received. I won't list my perceived problems here, just note that many employers care about several aspects of an employee's suitability beside raw competency and knowledge, and I feel they are often right.
That put aside, if you are still interested in hiring me, despite whatever faults I may have, then please contact me and we'll see about that.
How else are you known?
PrevNode LinkNextI’m also known as “shlomif” or on the IRC as “rindolf”.
Furthermore, an Englishwoman Internet friend of mine, who can be amusing at times, has nicknamed me "Slimy Fish". I didn't find that offensive, possibly because I was no longer underage, and because I liked her; she also nicknamed the blocky ("Print") Hebrew alphabet "Tetris".
What is the origin of your “rindolf” IRC nickname?
Node LinkFor more information about the name "rindolf", see the dedicated page about my Rindolf nickname.
Rindolf “Woman-hands” [Forgot the last name] was a Dwarven warrior I played on a series of AD&D 2nd edition sessions, and one of my favourite tabletop Role Playing Games characters of all times. I probably picked up the name by analogy with such Germanic-originating names as Randolph or Rudolph. I was told "Rind" means "cattle" in Germanic languages, but what matters is that it has a nice ring.
The first IRC nickname I used was “dori” after one of the dwarves in Tolkien’s The Hobbit. Later on, I decided it was a too common name, so I switched to “gloin”, the name of a different dwarf there. Then I wanted something more original, so I picked up “rindolf” and the name stuck.
If I had been able to change it again, I would have picked “shlomif” for my IRC career, because it is my handle almost everywhere else, but now everyone on IRC know me as “rindolf” so I feel it's too late (not to mention that, in my impression, it is common and acceptable to use a pseudonym on IRC, to show some creativity).
The running joke we have on IRC, is that Rindolf is the evil twin brother of Santa Claus’s goody-two-shoes reindeer, Rudolph and Randolph, who are among his arch-enemies. Rindolf is also one of the cornerstones of the Evil Reindeer Evil World Domination Evil Conspiracy, with the evil aim to spread the Reindeer Evil all over the world. You can find some of the manifestations of this joke in the IRC conversations quoted on my fortune cookies.
How should I address you or refer to you?
PrevNode LinkNextWhen writing a letter to me, you can start it with “Hi Shlomi!”, “Dear Shlomi,”, “Hello Shlomi,” etc. or with “Hi Mr. Fish”, “Dear Mr. Fish”, etc.
Note that using “Hello Fish” is considered disrespectful! I hate it when people call me “Fish” to my face, albeit “Mr. Fish” is acceptable. You can also use my “Rindolf” nickname with or without a “Mr.” honorific. Also see Joel on Software's note:
In most of the English speaking world it is not considered polite to open letters to a Mr. Joel Spolsky by writing “Dear Spolsky.” One might write “Dear Mr. Spolsky,” or “Dear sir,” or perhaps, “Hi Joel!” But “Dear Spolsky” is usually followed by some story about embezzled funds and needing to borrow my bank account.
Some letters begin with “Shlomi,” in a separate paragraph. I personally feel that the person is trying to preach to me in this case, but I was told it is not considered bad form in English-speaking countries, so it may just be a cultural gap.
If you wish to refer to me in third person, you should start with “Shlomi Fish” and continue with “Shlomi”, “Fish”, “Mr. Fish”, etc. Alternatively you can start with “Shlomif”, “shlomif”, or “Rindolf”, which are my common Internet handles which I use everywhere I can.
On the IRC, I usually use the nickname “rindolf”.
May I email you about X?
PrevNode LinkNextWhile the amount of emails that I receive is not overwhelming (yet), I still find that people are sending me some emails that could be written better. Here are a few guidelines for when not to send me emails:
If the email to which you are replying was sent by me to a mailing list, please reply to the list. From my experience, most E-mails that are sent to me in private as replies to mailing list posts, were intended to be public, and were sent in private by mistake or due to a user-interface issue.
If you do want to send me a private E-mail to a mailing list post, please explicitly note that the E-mail was intentionally sent in private, and detail the reason for it, and whether or not I can reply in public.
Please don’t send me a “Can you teach me how to become a hacker?” or “Teach me programming / software development” emails. See my How Can I Start Contributing to Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) essay instead.
Please don’t send me emails, trying to interest me in contributing to an open-source project for free, a pro-bono commission, or anything else that doesn’t involve payment. I follow my own interests and don’t work for free.Reconsidering this: you may opt to interest me in contributing to an open-source project, which you believe I may find of interest.If you have an online or offline publication, and can pay me for the trouble of writing an article, then feel free to inform me about it. Other possible commissions such as book reviews are also appropriate.
Please don’t send me emails with technical questions about open source projects or other general knowledge-and-experience questions that other people may be able to answer. I maintain a document explaining how to get help on the Internet and you should refer to it for general enlightenment.
An exception to this rule, may be questions about projects that I personally created or maintain.
What can you tell about your diet?
PrevNode LinkNextI don’t drink alcoholic beverages, don’t consume caffeinated beverages, have never smoked (e.g.: cigarettes), and have never “done” any of the currently illegal narcotics (e.g.: Marijuana, Cocaine, Heroin). I believe that this way I’m less tired, more energetic, and less moody. I don’t need such negative bio-physical aphrodisiacs to be happy, and probably neither do you.
Most of the people I talk with on the IRC who consume caffeine have become dependent on it and cannot function without their morning/mid-morning/midday/etc. coffee. On the other hand, I’m energetic from the time I wake up until I go to sleep. As for alcohol, it has negative short-term and long-term effects. And I also don’t want to become drunk because it will cause me to lose control of myself, and do silly things and say silly stuff.
I have never smoked or taken drugs, and intend to not do so. People with a drug dependency reduce their happiness and self-esteem like this, and damage their health.
All that put aside, I still believe all these substances should be legal, and should not be regulated in any way.
Note that as of July 2022, I am still taking prescribed psychiatric drugs which I hate and think are harmful but am forced to take.
Regarding food, I eat an omnivorous diet that includes meat (chicken, beef, pork/bacon/ham/etc., fish, seafood, and the occasional mutton) - sorry vegans/vegetarians but I feel like I need to eat meat. I used to avoid consuming sugary foods and beverages, but I now consume them again and am much happier.
So you avoid caffeine? You call yourself a geek?
Node LinkNextYes I do! Geeks come in many shapes and sizes (also see One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish) and they don't always completely match the stigmatic "computer geek" archetype (e.g: A Portrait of J. Random Hacker). I am still a geek because I'm technologically inclined and enjoy contributing to FOSS and open content.
Also note my sentiments about attractive girls (and guys) increasingly being geeky.
Which foods do you hate eating?
PrevNode LinkDo you have any mental illnesses?
PrevNode LinkNextAs a matter of fact, I do. I used to get into Clinical depressions (“MDD”), anxieties and Hypomanias and even a few Manias. The presence of the latter may indicate I have Bipolar Disorder (= “Mania-Depressia”) or Schizoaffective disorder .
I’m no longer getting into depressions or anxieties, which is good, because when I’m in them, I feel that I am a bad person, think the whole world is bad and cannot concentrate on doing anything. I’m still getting some hypomanias, in which I feel quite elevated, while in fact knowing that I feel bad, and where I can still function, and still know that I’m a good person. Most of the time, I am OK.
Note that the opinions I express and what I say are not a consequence of my mental status, but rather of the many philosophical influences, I’ve been exposed to, which I feel made my thinking process straighter and more logical. Some people take many common “truisms” for granted, but I can often demonstrate they are wrong.
Here are a few jokes about it:
Shlomi Fish once defined himself as a “Programmer, Writer, Amateur Mathematician, Wannabe Philosopher, and someone who studied in the Technion in the vain hope of becoming an Electrical Engineer”. He does not consider himself a sane person, but is quite certain that only makes him more interesting.
Also this Freenode chat:
<tyler-> rindolf: you are seriously the craziest fucker I know
<tyler-> and I know some crazy ass people
<mofino> haha
<rindolf> tyler-: I am crazy. And proud of it.
<tyler-> rindolf: you should be
<mofino> haha
<mofino> Ahh man
<rindolf> tyler-: being crazy is hard work. I worked
all my life to becrazy.
<mofino> Normal people aren’t fun.
<rindolf> tyler-: “Craziness is not an action. It’s a process.”
<mofino> heh
<tyler-> rindolf: I see
<rindolf> You need to tend to your insanity.
<rindolf> tyler-: do you want to be crazy?
<tyler-> rindolf: that’s why I feed my leprechaun
at least once a day.
<rindolf> tyler-: I can teach you everything I know.
(and “Ask not what your insanity can do for you - ask what you can do for your insanity.”)
My opinions are subject to change - they have changed in the past, and it’s likely they will change again. Furthermore, reality is dynamic, and Ethics, philosophy and opinions change with time, as technology, culture and education progress.
Which disabilities do you have?
PrevNode LinkNextI have the following disabilities:
Being openly bipolar (also see "Why Openly Bipolar People Should Not Be Medicated")
Note that I have been diagnosed as having Schizoaffective disorder by the Israeli Bureau of Medicine, and receive pension.
Partial fingers and hands paralysis - possibly caused by the psychiatric drugs.
Bad diction.
Stuttering.
A heavy Israeli/Hebrew accent when talking in English (and a touch of a Texan English accent when talking in Hebrew).
See this recording of me singing for evidence.
This has several implications:
It is hard and time-consuming for me to type.
It is hard for me to use voice recognition. When I say "Shlomi Fish" into my Android smartphone, in clear Hebrew, it thinks I meant "Shlomo".
When chatting online, it is easier for me to paste URLs for further discussion.
I may emit what seem to be non-sequiturs.
So please don't be ableist.
What are some of your personality faults/quirks?
Node LinkI am self-centred.
I am narcissistic.
I am ego-maniacal.
I am meglomaniacal.
I often avoid being an early adopter of interesting technologies, practices, or trends. Instead, I wait to see if it was just a fad, or study it only when there is a relevant use-case.
I have preferred to err on naïvety than on cynicism.
I tend to lose my temper.
I often tended to rush through tasks which I didn't care too much about. What Israelis call “Rosh qatan” (= roughly "small-minded").
I can be somewhat overly sexualised, when chatting or blogging online. Reference.
I am sometimes overly blunt in my criticism.
I'm not particularly proud of them, but admit they may often be blessings in disguise.
On-the-other-hand, I am not ashamed to admit their presence.
What is the origin of your IRC part message (“Yay! I’m a Llama again!”)?
PrevNode LinkNextIt’s a quote from the Disney Animated film The Emperor’s New Groove, which is otherwise highly recommended. Here is the clip on YouTube.
Note: for a while I converted to using:
https://www.shlomifish.org/ ; It takes Summer Glau exactly a minute to write a rebuttal like in xkcd: “Venting”, and she would sign it as Chuck Norris. ( Summer Glau “Facts” )
that was part of my activism to promote the Summerschool at the NSA screenplay and Ms. Glau.
Why don’t you obscure/hide your email address? People can spam you!
PrevNode LinkNextFirst of all, in this day and age, it’s unlikely that the spammers will not find my email address. That’s because they also install a lot of malware on vulnerable computers to harvest email addresses from. Since I can’t avoid sending email to users of Microsoft Windows , and would rather not, I can never prevent spam entirely.
I find that manually deleting spam messages is not too time-consuming or errorprone. GMail and other webmail services also do a good job in filtering spam (regardless of their other faults).
All of that put aside, I think that having a convenient “mailto:” link is recommended because people don’t need to go through inconvenient hoops to send you an email. I love receiving (good) email about my site, and I’d rather not throw away the baby along with the water, just because spammers may have an easier time harvesting my already public email address.
For more information, see my post to the “Joel on Software” forum about “Email at the bottom of every page”.
What can you tell about the fish emblem on the top-left corner?
PrevNode LinkNext
This is EvilPHish from the comics’ strip UserFriendly.org by Iliad. I was a big fan of UserFriendly.org when EvilPHish was featured there, and it was so me, so I decided to make it my emblem. After downloading the big version of the comic, and tampering with it a little with GIMP (= the GNU Image Manipulation Program), I was able to produce a transparent PNG file that I could use.
After a while, I realised that most people recognised this emblem and associated it with me, in part because my last name is “Fish”. Therefore, I decided to standardise on it as a user-pic or “avatar” everywhere, and so I did. Note that the image is still copyrighted by Mr. Iliad, but I hope its use by me is acceptable.
As a child and a teenager, I’ve been a bit frustrated by my last name being “Fish”, and was often teased for it. But I feel OK about it now, and it’s good that people can associate my last name with something they are familiar with, and with a memorable emblem such as EvilPHish.
You can also find various versions of the EvilPHish image for download and reuse.
Update: There is now a vector graphics SVG version courtesy of the amazing Marc Jeanmougin (Mc) and Inkscape. It is placed under CC0 but may be a derivative work of the original by Iliad.
Does the fish emblem allude to Christianity?
Node LinkNo, it does not - it is just inspired by my last name: “Fish”. I am in fact an Israeli and a Jewish agnostic, and as Jewish Israelis go, I have some natural aversion towards Christianity.
Why are you revealing incriminating details about yourself? This makes you look bad for potential employers.
PrevNode LinkNextA few people told me that I shouldn't mention the fact that I have been exempt from military service or that I used to get into clinical depressions and still get into hypomanias, because other people may think less of me. My response is that these are real and honest details about myself, that I would rather not keep to myself given the context, and the fact that I had to mention them many times.
While some employers may look down on me for mentioning that, I’d rather work for employers who appreciate honesty, sincerity, and openness. They should eventually realise that keeping non-private details to yourself is a sure recipe to losing your mind.
For more information, see:
“‘Publish or Perish’ → ‘Life or Death’” - blog post.
“Honesty” section - from “Putting all the Cards on the Table (2013)”
I believe that honesty is the best policy, and trying to be who you are not, or keep important details about you not in the open will end up working against you, and cause you a lot of aggravations.
How did you learn English?
PrevNode LinkNextWell, I am Israeli-born, but my parents moved to the United States when I was one year old until I was five years old (first to Dallas, Texas, and then to Rockville, Maryland), where I spoke English with the fellow children. However, after I returned to Israel at the age of five, the children there ridiculed me for my English. As a result, I did not want to speak it, and so forgot most of it, and just spoke Hebrew (which is my mother language). Possibly worse, I lost many of my earliest childhood memories, as I thought about them and remembered them in English.
After that, I had to regain English much more painfully as I learned it at school, and from other sources such as computerised Adventure games, books, films, Television shows, and the Internet.
Shortly after high school, I felt that my English has dramatically improved. Nonetheless, looking back at my English text from a few years back, I cringe at how bad it was, and some native speakers tell me that some of my writing is non-idiomatic.
I'm still trying to improve and not rest on my laurels (like I try with other skills and moral qualities I care about).
Note: I think my English improved after high school, despite the absence of a formal scholastic frame, due to a mixture of reading books, reading Internet texts in English, reading software documentation (I was employed as a software developer), watching some Television shows, and more practice at writing English texts (using computers' keyboards).
How can I improve my English?
PrevNode LinkNextSome of the effective ways I found to improve one's English are:
Write. Write a lot. Start a blog. Write about interesting stories from your past. Ask your readers to point out the issues in your text (and also in your code). Maybe start specialised blogs for writing about topics that interest you.
Read. Read a lot. Especially fine literature, though not too archaic. I really like reading quality Children and Young Adult's Literature in English (e.g: The Hobbit, The Treasure Island, E. Nesbit, Roald Dahl, Mary Poppins, Sherlock Holmes). There are many public domain and freely distributable fiction online in Project Gutenberg.
Pay attention to what you write and how you phrase yourself. Don't write too hastily.
Chat with English speakers on IRC - I like Freenode for that and they have an ##English channel, but other channels accept somewhat off-topicish discussion, especially some #not-channels or channels like #perlcafe , or #perl-cats, which are intended solely for off-topic discussion.
Watch/listen to some films to see how people use the English language in speech. There are many clips on YouTube and similar sites and you can learn a lot from them. There are some larger scale videos available online, offline and on torrents naturally.
Most importantly - remember that improving your language is hard work, but it's also fun, because hard work is often fun and rewarding and makes you happy. The opposite of fun and pleasure in general is not necessarily work. If people did not enjoy hard work for pleasure, then large-scale operating systems that are completely free-and-open-source-software such as GNU/Linux or the *BSDs could not happen.
You can find some other recommended online resources for learning English and improving it in the “Awesome English” curated list of links on GitHub.
Note: please do not use a two way bridge from and to Google Translate or similar services exclusively, because you can improve your English, but cannot easily improve that of Google Translate, because it often emits non-functional translations, and because it will encourage you to learn less.
Google Translate has some legitimate use cases (such as trying to get the gist of a page in a foreign language) but, like most other tools, it has its limitations.
Do you have Asperger syndrome (Asperger’s)?
PrevNode LinkNextSome people on the Internet told me that they believe I have Asperger syndrome or am otherwise on the Autistic spectrum. However, my psychotherapist (who has a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology and whom I met face to face many times), told me I most probably am not on the Autistic spectrum, after I asked him about that.
I do not wish to conclude whether or not that is the case for me, just to detail what I know.
Why are you obsessed with ten-sided dice? (d10) What do you do with them?
PrevNode LinkNextI originally ran into Ten-sided dice (d10s) in tabletop role-playing games, such as Dungeons & Dragons, and I found them remarkable due to the facts that:
They correspond with our decimal system (Base-10) and with the SI / International System of Units / Metric system.
They are the only role-playing-game-die that is not a platonic solid and instead has a man-invented shape.
As a result, the d10 became a symbol of power of mine. Now what I do with them:
After I donated my role-playing games' gear to a local role-playing-games club that my friends ran, I was given a solid brown 1d10 die that my friends at the time (~1997ish) allowed me to take. I carried it in my pencil case, and it became a symbolic object and feel it brought me a lot of good luck and bad luck (which are often two sides of the same coin).Now, however, I decided to give it to Ms. Summer Glau (who is a Hollywood actress, but much more than that for me), and it is now her property, which I intend to officially pass it along to her and see what she will decide to do with it.
I also buy d10s in large quantities (went up to 10 packs of 10 purple translucent d10 dice each from The Dice Shop) and offer to give them away to people I interact with in real life (IRL), such as vendors, clerks and sellers in shops. While not everyone accepts them, many people do.
Following the transition from Selina Mandrake - The Slayer to Summerschool at the NSA, I bought a complete set of Tabletop role-playing games' dice, and use it as a symbolic object. This is its photo after being placed on my NUC computer along with the 1d10 die that I have given to Summer Glau.
Why do you link/quote web pages, posts, etc. from originators I dislike?
PrevNode LinkNextI normally link to such resources which I either agree with, partly agree, or are relevant to the discussion at hand. That does not mean I think everything these originators have published is true, but that does not mean that none of their posts are of merit, either. See ad hominem and similar fallacies.
Do you play Chess?
PrevNode LinkNextI do not play Chess a lot, mainly because I do not like it too much. I'm also not a very good Chess player, but one should hopefully not avoid doing something just because they are bad at it.
Some anecdotes regarding my experience with Chess enthusiasts are:
Someone on IRC told us that he thinks everyone should be forced to play Chess (in a true authoritarian fashion, in my opinion). This is while I recall reading that in South Africa during the Apartheid, people of Black descent were legally forbidden from playing Chess.
I once agreed to play Chess with an online friend online. After the game was over, he analysed my play, which I found annoying and made me reluctant to play again (and felt like beating a dead dog), but perhaps I should have told him that.
Why are you attracted to so many girls?
PrevNode LinkNextAs I noted in an IRC conversation:
Hi all! I noticed many Hollywood marriages and other relationships have been stable ever since Sarah Michelle Gellar (♥!) was interviewed on "why my Hollywood marriage works?". I'm not against divorces / breakups, but I want couples to be happy even if I'm attracted to their female partner (and frankly I'm attracted to a metric ton of celebs, friends, and fictional characters - 😊).
Moreover, to quote a dialogue from Queen Padmé Tales :
Obi-Wan: I did, yes. Wow! And I thought my (one and only, hah!) girlfriend was bad. Do note, however that I kind-of am attracted to the bitching type. One of my many kinks. While my friends are attracted to everything that moves, I see no reason to limit myself ( Reference ).
Do note that there is a difference between being attracted to someone, and being in love with them.
Are you in love with [insert celebrity here]?
Node LinkAs of 2022-03-14, no. I love them as fellow competent geeky hackers and admit that sexual attraction is implied, but I'm not Romantically/intimately in love with them.
Are you a bot [= a chat robot]?
PrevNode LinkNextAs far as I know, I am a flesh-and-blood human who is living in Tel Aviv, Israel. Descartes' "Evil Demon" concept put aside, I doubt a simple chatbot automaton can write the texts of my screenplays, or my essays, with enough coherency.
Also note that you can peruse the history of my online works on the wayback machine and on their version control repositories.
What is your financial status? Are you rich? Are you poor?
PrevNode LinkNextCurrently ( 2022-09-13 ) I strongly suspect I have north of 30 million USD ( $30,000,000 ) in the bank:
In my terresterial hell, the situation is different:
I have some savings in my bank account and live with my parents and am supported by them and also receive national insurance pension. So while I'm not poor, I am not rich either.
I have some aspirations of becoming rich by individuals and organisations pooling enough money to relicense my works under permissive licences. There are other profits models and I welcome, e.g. people setting up merchandise shops for my works and (at their option) giving me parts of the profits.
Nevertheless, I work on my sites and other projects because I enjoy doing that, and find that I'm more productive this way than as a grunt software developer working on a project that I do not think is important.
Note that if you need some money, feel free to contact me and I can see about giving a one time payment (with no strings attached): Sarah Michelle Gellar quote.
What was the secret that you were most afraid will be made public knowledge?
PrevNode LinkNextThat I'm attracted to physically-strong females (and even to muscular ones).
After going public about it, I realised I am in good company as men (and women) find competence and strength, however manifested, sexy.
What is your lucky number?
PrevNode LinkNext24 ("twenty-four"). Some reasons for it:
It is the number of a bus that has been useful for me.
5 + 5 + 7 + 7 = 24 based on my birthdate.
There are 24 hours in a day.
24 is the factorial of 4. That is “1×2×3×4 = 24”. Incidentally “1+2+3+4 = 10”.
What is your favourite colour?
PrevNode LinkNextYellow-green / Chartreuse and especially Lime.
| Lime |
I think one of your works sucks
PrevNode LinkNextWhile I try to encourage criticism and try to get offended and try to grow a thicker skin, I'd appreciate you pinpointing at least one specific, concrete, problem in the work-in-the-question. If you cannot or would rather not, then I'll have to dismiss your criticism as too vague, and go on with the rest of my life:
Josephus: And so did my good Greek friend, Alexander, who started by writing some poems to her which I didn’t like, and told him why. So he ended up improving slowly but surely, until he wrote a truly great poem about her, and people loved it.
Josephus: Then Phoebe — that’s her name — told him, while crying, that she loved the song, but that she still is not going to marry him.
Alexis: The Bitch!
Josephus: My thoughts exactly. Anyway, he felt very down for a long while, so I decided to introduce him to my redhead cousin - her name’s Elishevah - hoping it’ll cheer him up. He ended up liking her and he wrote a hack of that song as a love song to her, and she ended up falling in love with him, and he converted to Judaism and married her, and she’s now pregnant with their first born, and he writes more songs about her. Very good ones.
( “So, who the Hell is Qoheleth?” by Shlomi Fish (= me) )
Note that I employed this strategy, in real life, with an Internet friend of mine who is a retired Finnish software developer in his 40s, who lives in a small Finnish town. He shared some poems he wrote and I and other chat participants commented what we liked or disliked about them. His poetry did improve mostly consistently and… he now has a young woman living with him. I do not know what she thinks about his poems, but he's a cool guy regardless.
If you do not like a work, please try to comment on why you think it is lacking, rather than completely dismissing it or vaguely criticising it. Some examples for such non-helpful criticism are:
"It sucks."
"You cannot write."
"It’s a waste of space."
"Try to write it as if you were there."
People are often amazed by food reviewers in the recently trendy cooking competition ("reality") shows being very pedantic and pinpointing small and large problems, but it comes with experience and "with the territory". So I applaud these reviewers.
One tip I can offer for dealing with critics who only provide vague criticism is to ask them to point out one specific issue.
Telling a contributor why you dislike their work will make reworked and future works better, and your own future job easier. Reportedly, film studios often silently dismissed screenplays that they received. I recently submitted my Sesame Street / "Harry Potter" crossover screenplay to the Sesame Workshop and received no reply.
Another different approach is the canned response. While sometimes useful, it is often indicative that the problem needs to be fixed more permanently. I also recall being given a list of reasons by a web ad service for why my site was unacceptable, and they were far too vague.
( From "Be communicative" )
I find one of your works blasphemous / sacriligious / “unspeakable” / taboo-breaking
PrevNode LinkNextI've been told that about:
claiming that holocaust denial should be legal due to the freedom of speech.
About a page parodying modern programming languages' advocacy sites (“NASA Uses COBOL”).
and now I think that magic is real and that I've lived in a fake hell, and that there was a conspiracy ( Reference ), even if I follow Occam’s razor.
Any way, complaining that I am/was saying something that was seemingly unthinkable or blasphemous will not put the cat back-into-the-bag or the Djinny-back-into-the-bottle. I also think War is good for business
to quote the Ferengi Rules of Acquisition, and that many great truths started as blasphemes
; Encourage criticism and try to get offended and try to grow a thicker skin.
I hate you. I think you suck!
PrevNode LinkNextYou may be right. Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer.
( Reference. ) I still will appreciate you pinpointing one-or-more-concrete-problems in my words-or-deeds. ( Reference. )
How can I gift you?
PrevNode LinkSee this page.
Questions about my philosophy / ideology / religion
PrevNode LinkNextWhat is your religious belief or inclination?
Node LinkNextFirst of all, I should note that one’s general classification of a religious inclination (e.g: Jewish, Atheist, Agnostic, Deist, Muslim, Christian, Buddhist, etc.) is not always indicative of their idea system or philosophy. Also note that, despite the fact that I am Jewish by ethnicity and heritage, and studied (or was forced to study, although I often enjoyed it) some of the Jewish writings, and incorporated influences from Judaism in my writing, I am not a religious or observant Jew.
All that put aside, I consider myself a self-sufficient, optimistic, idealistic and anti-cynical, pluralistic, anti-Fatalist, agnostic. Now let me explain what all those mean:
I’m agnostic because I’m not sure whether God — however he/she/they/it are manifested — exists or not. I suspect they do, but don’t take chances and don’t wish to risk dying - now or ever.
I’m self-sufficient because I believe that “The gods help those that help themselves”, that “reality to be commanded must be obeyed” and all that Jazz.
I am optimistic, idealistic and anti-cynical, because I believe that people are inherently good, can be trusted and that humanity is going forward instead of backward. I feel like my life is gradually improving and that almost every day is the best day of my life so far, and that 2014 (when these lines were written) is the best year I can remember (and I’m 1977-born).
I am pluralistic, because I constantly have derived and will derive inspiration from many sources and also try to not dismiss an insight based on its source - see Ad-hominem, and Reductio ad Hitlerum for more information about why this is fallacious.
Also see:
this quote by Larry Wall about
All Truth is God's Truth
.
I am anti-Fatalistic because I believe that humans’ survival mechanism - reason - operates by choice, and not automatically, and that we have free will. This is as opposed to the new age crop of neo-Deterministic materialistic atheists who believe that the laws of physics dictate exactly what a person will think and do.
Note: I was told that Fatalism vs. free will is a much older debate than Ayn Rand (reason operates by choice) vs. Sam Harris (who reportedly used to advocate Fatalism).
Also see Universalism (thanks to Emma Watson's Wikipedia page for the insight).
What is your ethnicity? What is your lineage?
PrevNode LinkNextI am a Jew by birth and almost all of my known ancestors were or are Jewish.
That put aside, my mother was born in Baghdad, Iraq and lived there for some years as a child before her parents and she made aliyah (or immigrated) to Israel. My father, on the other hand, was born in Israel to a mother from Vilnius (a.k.a “The Jerusalem of Lithuania”) who immigrated to the British mandate of Palestine, along with most of her family, during the 1930s, and to a father who was born and raised in Warsaw, Poland, and who escaped from the Nazis during World War II through the USSR, and Persia/Iran.
As such, I look (see photo) like a kind of a Iraqi/Persian version of my father, who looks East European.
A conversation in which I took part during the evening during a hiking trip, went something like that:
Girl to Shlomif: "Which Jewry do you belong to?"
Shlomif: "I am half-Polish / half-Iraqi."
Girl to her male friend with me (= "Shlomif") overhearing it: "You know what is the only thing that is worse than a Polish Jew? A half-Polish / half-Iraqi!"
I found it amusing, and kind-of have taken it to my advantage.
How come you say you are a secular Jew? Isn't Judaism a religion?
PrevNode LinkNextJudaism is much more than just a religion, and it is also an ethnicity (or "peopleship" as I used to call it), a culture, a heritage, and possibly many other things. There are many secular Jews, who do not completely adhere to the Jewish religion, and are instead deist, agnostic or even atheist. This is the case for me, but note that I am still aware of Jewish holidays, and join the family feast or reflect upon them in a way. (I also commemorate April Fools' Day, International Talk Like a Pirate Day and some other secular holidays.)
Despite all that, my studies of the Jewish religious scripture, have a large influence on my personal philosophy, “Rindolfism”, and my works of fiction. However, they have many other influences. As much as I like parts of the Hebrew Bible, I do not hold it as gospel, or as “The Word of God”, and I think Sturgeon's law (= 90% of everything is crap
) might apply to it as well.
I think secular jews are not real jews
Node LinkPerson A: “No Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge.”
Person B: “But my uncle Angus is a Scotsman and he puts sugar on his porridge.”
Person A: “But no true Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge.”
( No true Scotsman )
Also note that I do not care so much about whether or not I am a 100%-authentic-Jew or not. I define myself as “Shlomi Fish”.
How do you define yourself? Are you a Jew, an Israeli, an agnostic, an Objectivist, a brony, a furry, a muppets' aficciando, a Perler, a Linuxer, a FOSS enthusiast, an optimist, a Pythoneer, …?
PrevNode LinkNextI am currently many of these and more. As I noted in an essay, I define myself as "Shlomi Fish". I have my own hybrid school of philosophy titled "Rindolfism" and it changes almost every day.
Does the fact that you are/were an Objectivist (= an advocate of Ayn Rand’s philosophy) make you selfish?
PrevNode LinkNextThis quote from the Neo-Tech literature summarises the issues that led to this confusion:
Although the contents of her book, The Virtue of Selfishness, are precisely accurate and widely integrated, Ayn Rand committed an error by distorting the word “selfishness” in fashioning a dramatic statement. The word “selfishness” does have valuable, precise denotations of "an irrational, harmful disregard for others". Rand could have strengthened her work by selecting accurate wording such as rational self-growth. Instead, she unnecessarily bent and undermined the precise, valuable meaning of selfishness. …As with selflessness, selfishness is a form of immature, destructive, irrational behavior -- a form of stupid behavior.
( There are similar sentiments by other commentators referenced on the book's Wikipedia page. )
While I’m no longer a Neo-Tech purist, I still agree with them that both selfish and selfless (= having an irrational disregard for one’s self) behaviours should be avoided as much as possible, and that one should strive for “Rational Self-Growth” and that often “selfish vs. selfless” is presented as a false dichotomy.
Does the fact that you were influenced by Objectivism (= Ayn Rand’s philosophy) make you a “Randroid”?
PrevNode LinkNextThe way I see it, a “Randroid”, which is a portmanteau of "Rand" and "Android", is an overzealous believer in Randianism, who mindlessly parrots Rand's works. On the other hand, my school of philosophy, “Rindolfism”, is a crossover one with many influences, and dynamic. Moreover, I don't take Randianism as gospel, often deviate from it, and am critical of it. For example, I wrote a parody and modernisation of The Fountainhead, and also wrote Summerschool at the NSA, which I feel is, partly, a modernisation of Atlas Shrugged.
If you still want to label me as a “Randroid”, go ahead - I won't care that much. Just note that it is you who are being stupid, prejudiced and labelling.
What makes you “The Messiah”? Why do you think everyone should be one?
PrevNode LinkNextSee:
What I meant is that every adult or child, male or female, should believe they are the most powerful individual on Earth (and that the only ones who are not as powerful as them, are those who think someone else is). Furthermore, I recommend thinking that you can “save the world” or at least change or improve it. Moreover, you can enjoy the world, and improve yourself and everyone else - all at the same time.
Note that there are still real command structures: your family, your superiors or bosses, your military commanders, your government, your customers and/or users (or your service providers), your friends, etc. If what they request you to do seems reasonable and beneficial, you should dedicate time to perform it in the best, “Rosh Gadol”-manner.
That put aside, blindly following superior orders is wrong, and you may wish to refuse an order, if it seems immoral or unethical. Moreover, like the film The Quick and the Dead notes, one should not be “afraid to live”: voice your opinion, whether approving or disapproving, offline or online. HR (= “Human resource management”) drones who try to find faults in your online presence are going to be unhappy anyway, and from my impression, they are usually wilfully stupid and thus quite evil and misguided.
Are you aware that most of the stories in the Jewish Bible are believed to be fictional, and there is no historical record that attests to them ever taking place?
PrevNode LinkNextYes, I'm fully aware of that, and I think it does not matter too much. Quoting from an essay I wrote:
A great hacker is an action hero that is aware enough of the essence of hacking to become a greater and greater hacker, despite whatever limitations he or she may have, and despite whatever setbacks they may run into.
Note that some great hackers were clearly fictional (e.g: Yoda, Darth Vader, Milady de-Winter, Miss Piggy, or even Fluttershy ), some were female (e.g: Sarah Bernhardt, Ayn Rand, and Taylor Swift) and some were underage (most notably Samantha Smith, Shirley Temple, and Macaulay Culkin ).
So don't let anything stop you.
Just because a story or a saga are fictional, it does not invalidate the fact that we can enjoy them, learn from them, use them for inspiration, and analyse them.
I don't take the Bible as gospel and still enjoy it. On the other hand, some religious "atheists" take it as "counter-gospel" which I find is as philosophically immature as taking it as gospel.
Why do you say that Atheism can be a religion? Atheism is the lack of religion!
PrevNode LinkNextFirst of all, note that in this tweet, I commented that:
Following on a reply I wrote to a mailing list post, I decided that I'll try avoiding the "X is a religion" argument. Many useful or insightful products/trends/movements have some zealots, including atheism, but they are still useful.
For the scope of this section, I shall restrict the discussion of Atheists to those who believe or have a strong suspicion that God/the gods, however he/she/they/it are manifested do not exist. There may be other kinds of belief categories that fall under the umbrella of atheism or irreligion, but this subset of atheists does exist.
Anyway, from my experience, some Atheists can be overzealous and even very pushy about it, fanatical, or even have a cult of followers and sycophants. The original Nazis and Communists were ostensibly atheists but were destructive, and had their share of dogma, which other people and I find irrational. Note however that by the time of Samantha Smith many communist regimes were far more relaxed and rational in practice, and I suspect that following the popularity of The Colbert Report, most of the best "AltRight" neo-Nazi bloggers are parody ones.
I do not wish to imply all fanatics, whether atheists or otherwise, were as destructive as them, just to note that believing or suspecting God does not exist, does not automatically make you free of faith or pseudo-faith.
Note that currently I am an agnostic, and try not to be overzealous and pushy about it, but I do not rule out that there were or are or can be religious agnostics. Furthermore, I do not rule out that I may have my share of irrationalities, fanaticism, or stubbornness, in other realms of my life.
Just for the record, I recall reading on an Internet site, an excerpt from an interview with one of the creators of South Park (which I admit I have not watched substantially) which was known for ridiculing various religions. That excerpt noted that they thought that despite all that, they found atheism to be the funniest religion, because the contemporary astronomical/astrophysical model expects time to run out and end. This proved as one of the catalysts from my transition from a dogmatic atheist, to an open-minded and pluralistic agnostic.
Why won't you watch this (long) “must see” video?
PrevNode LinkNextLike Paul Graham, I judge books by their covers. Also note that from my experience, most resources that are described as “must watch/read/listen” are not really.
What do you think about Perfectionism?
PrevNode LinkNextI agree with Vanini that perfection is in imperfection. I try to bring the works I care about to usable states, while possibly revisiting or amending them later. The Internet, the web, and modern version control systems (e.g: git-scm), are great for that.
I am offended by what you said
PrevNode LinkNextFrom my experience, that probably means that I have uncovered a previously-blasphemous truth, which you refuse to acknowledge. See “Encourage criticism and try to get offended and try to grow a thicker skin”.
Which superstitions do you have?
PrevNode LinkNextI try to avoid opening my mouth to the devil ("jinxing"): saying I or others will surely succeed in a task.
I have a taboo against trying to separate couples. As a result, I do not hit on women in relationships.
Do note that I still flirt with such women (and men) on online forums, and in real life - often without at-first noticing that I do.
Furthermore, like Ayn Rand in The Fountainhead I believe in karma, and that being nasty, dishonest, unkind, and not generous, to people can bite you further down the road. This is while being kind, honest, respectful, and generous, returns seven folds. buu almost got himself killed due to frequent online chat hostility and use of IRC force (kicks, devoices, or bans). In addition, a former boss of mine who used to walk in the middle of the roads (hubris) in Gush Dan, got badly injured in a car accident.
(Note that I generally don't need the fear of retaliation to try to be honest and noble to my fellow men. This is because I enjoy being noble. )
I would prefer to avoid eating "חמץ" (= "chametz") during Passover. However, it wasn't doable for many years, due to poor physical health.
I try to avoid saying I am 100% certain of a claim.
So you support and advocate distributing copyrighted works, and commercial fan-fiction / fan-art? That is theft! How would you feel if your own intellectual property were stolen?
PrevNode LinkNextFirst of all note that IANAL/etc. Anyway:
Ecclesiastes wrote that "reputation is better than fine oil". Around ~2000 Tim O'Reilly noted:
The greatest threat to authors and creative artists is not piracy — it’s obscurity.
.I encourage redistributing my works and creating derivatives of them.
(Also see this E-mail message I wrote.)
I will be happier with many copies of my works floating on the Web, than I was when living in my hell, when I was misled to believe I was obscure.
Also see:
Do you believe in God?
PrevNode LinkNext“God” (with no "a/an/some" grammatical articulation, preferably with an uppercase "G", and commonly called "Elohim" in idiomatic modern Hebrew) often means different things in different contexts, and to different people. See my latest thoughts about it.
Do you know everything? Is there anything you don't know?
PrevNode LinkNextThere are many details, facts, numbers, etc. that I don't keep inside my resident memory, and have to look up. Moreover, there are many skills that I cannot perform well — at least not yet. There is also a lot of enlightening wisdom and insights, that I am still oblivious to. I also often learned new (at least for me) tools, technologies, and paradigms that became part of my toolset, and which I depended on or often still do, and even often advocate and recommend.
They included ones related to software development, blogging, and writing, which are my current professional fortés.
For the record, as of 2024, there are several open problems in mathematics, including Goldbach’s conjecture ( = "Every 2*n for n ≥ 2 can be written as p + q where p and q are primes" ), the Collatz conjecture, and the notorious whether "P = NP"?.
Moreover, there is Descartes' Evil demon thought experiment and "I think therefore I am", and my For all you know, you may not exist and Chuck Norris convinced you that you do
parody of it ( Link ).
As humans, we rely on such mental mechanisms as:
Reason (= which Julian Jaynes defined as "the mind's automatic inference mechanism" in his book).
Aristotlean/Principa-Mathematica/etc. logic (which Jaynes defined as a formalisation of reason).
The Peano axioms of arithmetics. (Which a Technion lecturer of mine noted “summarise everything an elementary school pupil knows, and everything the world's greatest Number theory expert knows.”)
Our senses.
Our memory banks
Even on our imagination, centres-of-consciousness ("I-ness"es, "soul"s), time dedicated for education and/or entertainment (= "love and knowledge"), and more.
Somewhat less mock-paranoidly, here are some facts and skills I don't currently care-enough to remember or acquire, and not ashamed to admit:
I don't know how to cook well. I either depend on my family (actually my team of watchers), eat something I find in the house as a snack or a meal, or can afford to buy or order food from outside restaurants, kiosks or supermarkets.
I don't have a driver's licence, despite having taken many driving lessons (and not passing the tests). I think I won't be a good driver, and can get rides from co-workers/family/friends , buses, or "special" taxicabs as a last resort. I also suspect Star Gate-like cross-distance portals/vortexes are real.
While I remember the names of my cousins (all on my mother's side), and of some of their wives or husbands, I only registered the names and general personalities of their two oldest children.
I'm a versed reader/writer only of Hebrew (both modern, Israeli, Hebrew, and, to an extent, some stages of Biblical Hebrew), and modern English. I studied French for 3 years and Literary Arabic for 6 years during my 7th-to-12th grades, but has since lost most of my vocabularies of them.
I am a passive learner/recipient of Ancient Greek, Ancient Latin, Castilian Spanish, modern French, German, Yiddish, Aramaic, and other languages given their past or present cultural influence and importance. However, I dislike formally studying new human languages because I feel memorising their vocabulary clutters my memory. Some people may have better affinity for that than I do.
I forgot many names, especially family names of my old classmates, co workers, etc.
I didn't yet read, much less memorise, the whole Hebrew/Jewish Bible (“Tanakh”). I read many parts either due to my (often fun) secular Jewish Israeli mandatory education lessons, or voluntarily. I have no short-term plans of reading the terresterial Complete Shakespeare, Plato’s Republic, the complete Mishnah and Talmud, the Quran, etc.
Note that I enjoyed reading some relatively long novels. Those included Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy in its original English version, which has over 1,000 pages.
You gave a link to an old resource (such as a web-page). How is it still relevant?
PrevNode LinkI think most of the messages conveyed by the resources in my links, are still applicable to the present (during which I gave the link). I usually try to skim the contents in the linked pages to check that. Also see “two kinds of fools”.
Questions Related to Me and to Israel
PrevNode LinkNextDid you serve in the Israeli Military (= the IDF)?
Node LinkNextNo, I did not. I’m exempt from service, due to the various depressions I got into during High School. Please don’t accuse me of being a “Mishtamet” (“משתמט”), who is a person who deliberately avoided a military service, while being fully capable of it. That’s not the case for me, as back at the time, I wanted to join the military.
That put aside, I oppose the draft in Israel or anywhere else.
One of my Facebook friends, who is an Israeli citizen and was raised up there, told me she has been exempt from IDF service due to "excess of personnel". She is likely one of many, and so accusing people of purposely avoiding military service is becoming more and more anachronistic.
Are you a “Zionist”? Are you an “anti-Zionist”?
PrevNode LinkNextSee this tweet which largely relies on an older essay titled “Define ‘Zionism’”. Reading from it:
Seems like "anti-Zionism" is broadly defined (see Anti-Zionism ) just as "Zionism" is poorly defined. I'm Jewish and live in Israel and oppose the by-laws discrimination against non-Jews/Jews/whatever. What does that make me?
Can speakers of Modern Hebrew understand Spoken Arabic and vice versa?
PrevNode LinkNextWhile both Arabic and Hebrew are Semitic languages, they are relatively distant from one another and not mutually understandable. I am a Hebrew speaker and reader/writer, but cannot understand the spoken Arabic dialect spoken by some of the local Arabic speakers, except for a few words. Note that there are many spoken Arabic dialects as well as Literary Arabic which is common among all speakers but not normally used in speech. Many Arabic speakers in Israel also know Hebrew, but native Hebrew speakers (Jews/etc.) usually do not have the motivation to learn Arabic or retain their knowledge of it.
Some other notes:
I studied Literary Arabic for 6 years in junior high and high school and passed the 5 points matriculation exam in it. However, I lost most of my vocabulary due to lack of use, and also do not readily remember some of the grammar.
A few Arab Israelis I spoke with told me it was easier for them to learn to read and write Hebrew than it was to learn Literary Arabic, despite the fact that the local Palestinian Arabic was their mother language. This is due to the diglossia present there.
If you know both English and Arabic, I can highly recommend listening to Shaike Ophir’s "The English Teacher" skit.
Are you aware of any Jewish “Elders of Zion” / Illuminati / “Zionist” conspiracy?
PrevNode LinkNextDespite being Jewish by blood and an Israeli resident and citizen, who received secular Israeli education, I can testify that I am unaware of such a sinister conspiracy that cannot be refuted by Occam’s Razor. Moreover, some of my teachers at high school criticised the book as deceitful anti-Semitic material. You may, however, opt to believe I'm being kept out of the loop, or that I’m lying. (Fnord!. You didn't see that, right? 😉)
It is true that in some of my stories I featured a conspiracy of “vampires” (= "hackers" or "geeks"), who were in fact the good guys in history, and not limited to bona-fide Jews, which was inspired by this and other sources. Nonetheless, these stories are fictional, I do not take them at face value myself, and recommend others to not take them literally, either (even though they may have implications about the real world and convey some lessons about it).
Are you a Mossad / Shin Bet / Unit 8200 / NSA / Hizbullah / CIA / etc. agent?
PrevNode LinkNextI can testify that I am just an unemployed Israeli and secular Jewish web-writer and software developer. Back at the time (when I was in the 11th grade), I was interviewed for whom I believe were Unit 8,200 who asked me some questions about software engineering and cryptological questions. I am a sloppy software developer and was far sloppier back then, but they still wanted to hire me. They could not at the time due to a policy of hiring only graduates of technical high schools, and I ended up being exempt from the IDF service anyway.
There is a tongue-in-cheek conspiracy theory that all Israeli citizens are Mossad agents, which is headed by a secret cabal headed by My Little Pony’s fictional Pegasus pony Fluttershy. Furthermore, it is commonly acknowledged that Natalie Portman is a quadruple Mossad → FBI → Shin Bet → CIA agent. This is while Sarah Michelle Gellar, Summer Glau, and I are the NSA's agents no. 1, 2 and 3 respectively. Furthermore, I head the secret cabal of the Hizbullah.
(I am just kidding about all that!).
Seriously now, if you meet such an agent online, they will likely admit it. If they approach you in the outside world, they will likely admit it, and even invite you for a meal or a drink and are not going to torture you. If you're not paranoid or get into too much trouble (e.g: by being a grey hat Internet intruder), you likely won't ever be approached by them.
Is it true that Israel has been genociding the Palestinians?
PrevNode LinkNot at all. As of February 2021, the number of Palestinian residents in the west bank and the Gaza strip, exceeds the number of Israeli citizens (including Arab Israelis who identify as Palestinians). While there have been some acts of murder by either side towards the other (sometimes as self-defence), they usually were at most a few hundred deaths per year, and a far cry from exceeding the natural population growths.
Moreover, given the bad reputation that Superior orders (a.k.a. "The Nuremberg Defense") have received in the media, and popular art and education, I presume most Israeli soldiers and other government workers will refuse unethical orders (which likely won't be given in the first place).
Note: I am not condoning such deaths, just trying to put their numbers into proportion.
Ironically, the worst Sadism I experienced was by "mental health" (read "Conformism") workers in a psychiatric ward, and they included both Hebrew speakers and Arabic speaker Israelis. However, being a hacker king (= "messiah") I used the opportunity to play the “Fox in the Chickens Coop” motif and make all patients and workers there hacker monarchs.
Questions About Art & Culture
PrevNode LinkNextWhat kind of Music do you like to listen to?
Node LinkNextI mostly listen to Rock and Pop, but have some favourite songs of many genres including Dance, Rap/Hip Hop, Soft Music, Classical Music (especially Crossover Classic, which I often find very fun), Instrumental Music, Country, Rhythm and Blues and Soul, and Ethnic Rock. I also like many songs that mash-up genres, such as Kid Rock’s “Cowboy” or some of the fairly common Pop Rock, or Pop Country, songs.
My favourite Israeli artist is Yehuda Poliker, and my favourite International artist are the Beatles. My favourite Israeli song is “Shlal Sharav” (or “Heat Booty” in English); it is sang by Gidi Gov, but it was composed by Poliker with words written by Meir Ariel. My favourite song in English is “You Gotta Be” by Des’ree.
What is the most freaky TV Show you ever saw?
PrevNode LinkNextThe Prisoner is my epitome of freakiness. I watched it in the summer vacations on Israeli television during the 80s. It was still infested with 1960s pre- Sesame Street paranoia, but is otherwise very cool.
What do you consider the funniest thing on TV?
PrevNode LinkNextHatzi Hamenasheh (= the half of Menasheh).
Who was your biggest celebrity crush?
PrevNode LinkNextSarah Michelle Gellar. She played Buffy Summers on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and I was 20 (and not forced-to-be-medicated-by-psychiatric-drugs) at the time. She is about my age, and I recall that her reported avoidance of consuming caffeine, alcohol, tobacco, and harder drugs, partly convinced me to avoid them as well. That was along with a recommendation for that in Neo-Tech (= an idea system which I can no longer recommend perusing).
After I became maniacal, I imagined her as a wild and polyamorous girl who duplicated herself several times using Star Trek transporters and "all of her duplicates came out more normal than her".
As this 1998 email exchange indicates we still held her in some contempt, which is not unusual historically for entertainers.
Some of my favourite performances of her:
Sarah Michelle Gellar Monologue: Hit on the Host - Saturday Night Live
Sarah Michelle Gellar Monologue: Vampires - Saturday Night Live - YouTube
And some favourite quotes:
Note that I later found the Buffy the Vampire Slayer characters Cordelia and especially Faith more attractive than Buffy Summers.
Also note that I have created a lot of crossover fan fiction about her and Buffy.
Who is your favourite painter?
PrevNode LinkNextKeith Parkinson who drew fantasy art (see his DuckDuckGo images' search).
Fiction Books (Literature)
PrevNode LinkNextWhat are your favourite fiction books?
Node LinkNextMy favourite children-oriented book is The Hobbit by Tolkien, which I read first in a translation to Hebrew and then several times in English. Aside from high adventure, I now realise it contained a lot of criticism of the contemporary English society.
My favourite adult-oriented book is The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand which I bought and read once, and shortly afterwards my sister confiscated my copy because she too enjoyed reading it. Despite loving it, I found it necessary to parody and modernise it, and it is likely that I had had, even back then and at least sub-consciously, a lot of contempt for the original work.
Do note that I threw away my only physical copy of The Hobbit due to my anti-"stuff" policy. It was a cheap one that featured this image of Rivendell on its cover, and which we bought in London.
What do you think about the other books/films by Tolkien?
PrevNode LinkNextI read the book The Lord of the Rings in its Hebrew translation, and found it boring and not memorable. By some peer pressure, I tried reading it again in high school, and stopped in the middle of the first volume.
I strongly suspect that if it were written using fan fiction characters (e.g: Sauron → Ashurbanipal ; Gandalf → Moses ; Frodo → David ), it would be better in many ways: more memorable, shorter, funnier, more fun, and with a more effective message.
The Silmarillion - was OK but I do not remember most of the plot (and do not care enough to).
Farmer Giles of Ham was incredibly funny, succinct, and memorable. I may gladly read it again sometimes.
The film The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring could have been more enjoyable if the cinema my father and I watched it on would have provided an intermission, because by the end of its 3 hours we really had to pee. (Re Alfred Hitchcock's quote.)
My father and other family (but not I) have watched the other two films on DVD at home, which was easily capable of being paused and sought. I do enjoy the "One does not simply" snowclone, however.
What do you think about Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment?
PrevNode LinkNextI spent large parts of a high school summer vacation forcing myself to read a paper copy of a Hebrew translation of Crime and Punishment. It was boring and I'd have stopped much earlier, if I didn't want to prepare for the next year's literature classes.
For the record, I read and completed some long books in both Hebrew and English which I found more interesting and captivating, and which I wasn't forced to read for class. I also struggled less with some other assigned texts (e.g. Kafka’s The Metamorphosis or J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye ).
That put aside - analysing it in class, after the summer vacation, was fun.
In retrospect, I could tell that Raskolnikov is described as having clinical depression.
At least one friend of mine did enjoy reading it, and found it captivating.
On a different page, I compare Crime and Punishment to Little Red Riding Hood and conclude that the latter was far more influential, successful, and better written. (Even though I have some reservations about its message.)
I'm not going to read Crime and Punishment again willingly.
Zehu Zeh's reflection on Dostoevsky's "Crime and Punishment" - (from the Israeli Educational Television; in Hebrew) was incredibly funny and true.
So: should you read it? On one hand, this is the kind of book that every modern intellectual is expected to read. On the other hand, its Signal to noise ratio is extremely low and it is not compliant with TL;DR / TL;DW / TL;DL. It is possible that reading the wikipedia page or a different summary will be adequate (assuming you are not forced to read it in class).
And take my advice at your own risk. If it breaks, you get to keep both pieces. 😉
Have you read the Harry Potter books (by J. K. Rowling)? What do you think of them?
PrevNode LinkI read the first four installments. My favourite was the first because it didn't take itself as seriously as the next three. I stopped after reading the fourth book, because I noticed that, except for the first one, they all ended up making me ecstatic (see "hypomania" (= "below-mania")), which I preferred to avoid.
The books I read were captivating enough for me to persist in (although they seemed to have a slow start), often funny, contained interesting supernatural elements, and appear to have been written in an English register that was accessible enough for a foreign speaker like me (with a few unrecognised words that I looked up) yet not too dumbed down to be annoying (like e.g: the Simple Wikipedia).
What are your favourite poems?
PrevNode LinkNextIf— by Rudyard Kipling ( Wikipedia page )
"Walk to Caesarea" - by Hanah Senesh.
"The Road Not Taken" - by Robert Frost.
David’s Lament - from the Bible.
"Burning Love [mod]" by Will Smith and Jazz ( Reference ; "Jazz as a pickup artist" ; "how to approach a MOTAS" )
Who are your favourite muppets?
PrevNode LinkNext
(Photo taken from the Wikia page. Thanks.)
In addition, I find Sam the Eagle’s conscientious obsession with maintaining a high standard of “morality” cute, in a pitiful way. Sam was likely, in part, a parody of Samantha Smith. Nevertheless, in my fics (and elsewhere), he still sometime exhibits a “bad-ass” side.
Who are your favourite My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic characters? (+ “Who is best pony?”)
PrevNode LinkNextDiscord is a natural favourite. He is mischievous, but kind. I like his Cassandra Syndrome, and the fact that he is narrated by John de Lancie who played Q in Star Trek. Discord also plays Christina Grimmie in Equestria's "Advanced Selinaverse Geeks" franchise.
Pony-wise, I am partial to Fluttershy (who plays Tiffany Alvord) and to Rainbow Dash.
Are you someone/something's biggest fan?
PrevNode LinkI hate saying things along the line of “my fandom/fanhood of [creator] is bigger than yours”. Thus, I can be a fan, a big fan, or a very big fan of something. Hoewever, I will try to not claim that "I am a bigger fan of [something] than [someone else]" ( called "superiority" I think ) or “I am [something]’s biggest fan” ( called “superlative” ).
Also note that I try to be a non-fanatic, sincere, and critical, fan. If I am unhappy with a work of a creator, of whom I am a fan, I may likely inform the creator that I feel this way about it. See “Encourage criticism and try to get offended and try to grow a thicker skin”.
About this Site
PrevNode LinkNextWhy did you get the www.shlomifish.org domain?
Node LinkNextWell, I originally set up my home-site on shlomif.il.eu.org, which is a free DNS service, but it had a lot of DNS problems. Thus, I set up https://www.shlomifish.org/. I didn’t take shlomifish.org.il because .il domains used to cost a lot of money, and also required co-ordination by a fax message (how low-tech!) upon every change. I also didn’t want a .com domain because I feel I’m a private individual rather than a company.
http://shlomifish.org/ used to be a parked hostname of my DNS registrar, but now redirects to www.shlomifish.org. This is also the case for shlomifish.com, which I bought later.
Why are you using the “www.” domain prefix for your site?
Node LinkThere is no clear consensus whether “www.” or plain "shlomifish.org" should be used. It makes the URLs somewhat longer but I also have the “shlom.in” domain which may likely allow for even shorter URLs. Also see colour of the bikeshed arguments.
How should I refer to this site?
PrevNode LinkNextYou can call it “Shlomi Fish’s Homepage”, “Shlomi Fish’s Homesite”, “Shlomi Fish’s personal web site”, or “shlomifish.org”. Some wrong ways to refer to it are:
“Your blog” - it is not a blog and I have more than one blog and site.
“shlomifish” or “ShlomiFish” - Shlomi Fish (with capital letters and a space) happens to be my name as written in Latin letters, and I’m a flesh-and-blood individual and more than just this site. It just happens that I picked the appropriate domain for that.
Do you want any new Internet/DNS domains?
PrevNode LinkNextCurrently no, given "he who proliferates possessions, proliferates worries". I have already bought several domains that have become under-used, and newer domains may confuse the visitors of my sites.
Why is this website in English? Why is it not in Hebrew?
PrevNode LinkNextFor several reasons:
There are many more English speakers (either as their mother tongue or as a secondary language) than Hebrew speakers. So I’m reaching a bigger target audience by writing in English.
Most native Hebrew speakers (i.e: Israelis) can read English well enough to understand my English writing. So most of the target audience for writing stuff in Hebrew will benefit from it very little.
I find it more comfortable and faster to type in English and express myself in writing using English for most types of writing (some stories I’m writing being an exception).
I often use a lot of tech jargon or slang, which is more difficult to translate to Hebrew.
That put aside, if you wish to translate a piece I wrote to any other language (including Hebrew), feel free to do so. I contributed some Hebrew translations to some English articles that other people originated, and also translated some texts I wrote in Hebrew to English.
Note that I’m using Commonwealth English on this site. Partly because I think that’s what Israelis are supposed to use, partly because I have been somewhat British-oriented, and partly because it feels nicer to use an uncommon spelling. I am still using US English spelling for source code and for technical documents, though.
My thoughts are that both the British spelling and the American spelling (and their common subset), are inconsistent and confusing, but I have to make a choice of some sort.
How much time do you spend on this site?
PrevNode LinkNextA lot. I spent several hundreds of hours on the site, possibly several thousands. While the pages of this site were originally just a collection of hand-maintained HTML pages, they were then converted to use Website Meta Language, and converted to have a common look and feel, a style that’s hopefully semantic, converted to use valid XHTML markup (XHTML 1.1 for the while); some navigation aids were added, etc.
All of the source code for the site is available online in various places. I’ve prepared a top-to-bottom document on how to compile the site from scratch, but the CI scripts lie less. Some of the hand-crafted code was released as the Latemp static site generator or various assisting CPAN modules under an open-source license.
I am still working on the site, both by adding new content and attractions, by revising or correcting existing ones, by making it more usable, or by trying to publicise new attractions in various online resources.
Recently (November 2019) I converted the main pages of the site from Website Meta Language to Template Toolkit, which is faster and less quirky, and also implemented better caching for the talks' slides.
What can you tell me about this site’s history?
PrevNode LinkNextWell, a journey of a thousand miles begins with one small step and continues with many subsequent small steps.
My homesite started from a small number of static HTML pages kept on the server of my workplace back then (Smart Link - smlink.com). It had the address http://www.smlink.com/~shlomif/, now inactive, where shlomif was my username on ibm.net back then (which ended up becoming my general unofficial ID). We hosted the server behind our Point-to-Point connection, which I can retrospectively tell was not a very good idea. Moreover, we had to create the alias in IIS specifically for me to put stuff there.
I recall that I had the Aphorisms collection with a few jokes I originated, as well as the report about the algorithmic solution to the Toggle Squares puzzle which I had sent to its originator (with whom I was corresponding at the time). And it also had a rudimentary pageful of links, and a bio.
When I became a student in the Technion, I moved my site to its undergraduate server at the address http://t2.technion.ac.il/~shlomif/ . There I added more and more resources to the site. Here is the site as of 1998. I had a limited quota there, and when I got an account on “vipe”, a server managed by the students, I hosted part of my home site there as well, as http://vipe.technion.ac.il/~shlomif/ . The two parts of the site had cross-links to one another.
Eventually, I was about to graduate and so moved the t2.technion.ac.il part of my homesite, first to shlomif.il.eu.org (a free hostname, which ended up causing too many DNS problems), and then to www.shlomifish.org which is where it has been residing until now. In the process, I converted all of the main pages to use Website Meta Language and what would eventually become Latemp. This has enabled the site to have a common look and feel, a nice CSS stylesheet, a navigation menu and other navigation aids and other nice features.
Eventually I realised that the vipe server has too much down time (due to problems at the Technion’s network) and moved all of its content over to the www.shlomifish.org domain.
Throughout all this time, many resources were added to the homesite: software, essays, stories, artwork, presentations, puzzles, and more information about myself. I also now maintain a large number of blogs and sites for my projects, as well as sites I volunteered to maintain. I really like the way the web allows me to express myself, and to communicate using text, hypertext, and other types of media.
Even more recently, I've been writing more and more on social media outlets. There’s a list of my accounts for many social media and user-generated-content sites on every page of my home site.
In case you’re interested in setting up a personal web site of your own, I wrote an essay about it, which you can read.
Is www.shlomifish.org a blog?
PrevNode LinkNextThe short answer is that www.shlomifish.org is a good, old-fashioned, Web 1.0-style, home site - not a weblog/blog/online journal. Despite all that, my web site is fairly modern in its client-side technology and its look-and-feel should be usable and attractive enough. I have several blogs and am not opposed to the concept, but a classic web site has many advantages. For more information, see:
Update: (February 2021) I recently decided that it is not a worthwhile battle to insist that it is not a blog.
Why are you using XHTML (including XHTML5)? XHTML was depracated!
PrevNode LinkNextIt was/is not. XHTML5 is supported by all major web-browsers, including recent versions of MSIE. Please get your facts straight, and don't be provocative.
Also see:
Why are you using XHTML 1.1 for many pages on your site while serving them as “text/html”?
PrevNode LinkNextUpdate: (November 2019) I am now serving mostly XHTML5 pages and also serving them as application/xml+xhtml.
I feel that validating against an XHTML schema makes my code cleaner and less buggy, because I need to have closing tags, as well as use a trailing “/” for standalone tags, etc. I also find the additional XHTML 1.1 restrictions to be a good idea.
Therefore I decided to make XHTML 1.1 the default doctype for the pages on my site. The reason I’m serving them as
text/htmlis because Microsoft Internet Explorer does not handleapplication/xml+xhtmlproperly, and I’d rather not needlessly discriminate against people who still use it (possibly against their will).I realise that it stands against the XHTML standard, but I’m not a standards purist, and want to be a bit pragmatic in still supporting Explorer. Note that some pages in the Math-Ventures section end with the
.xhtmlsuffix and are served as XHTML because they contain MathML.
Is everything you say here true? Should I take it seriously?
PrevNode LinkNextThe answer is that not everything that I wrote, quoted and/or placed on my homepage and on other kinds of Internet and World Wide Web (WWW) mediums is still something I agree with (i.e: I changed my mind since then), or should be taken too seriously (i.e: may be amusing or thought provoking but isn’t really something I agree with), or that should be taken as an unbreakable rule (i.e: because such works are usually guidelines rather than something that should be taken as gospel). So please take them with a grain of salt, and apply your judgement.
Naturally, it does not help that I often omit the dates of creation and last update from a resource, and that I sometimes neglect to add a “Recent Update” note at the top of the page when it becomes irrelevant. If you have the necessary technical skills, you can peruse the pages’ history in the version control repository.
Bill Gates admitted that he said some stupid things and some wrong things
too. Also note the Hegelian dialectic (= Thesis → anti-thesis → synthesis).
Are the historical descriptions accurate?
Node LinkFirst of all, note that I often base my conclusions on limited data and gut feeling. Furthermore, I often find it necessary to modernise and idealise the historical or imaginary (or real-life) people or events, due to our world's values and mine progressing.
Otherwise, note that per the classic film Rashomon and my own experience, different people remember past events differently.
How many visitors/hits/uniques/etc. does this site get per month?
PrevNode LinkNextPlease don't ask me that, and that's not because I can't tell you that - it's because I don't think it matters too much. This is the same kind of penis envy (= “my $THINGY is bigger than yours”) and false machoflops/etc. competitions, and I care little for stuff like that. I'm now trying to work on creating more and more good content, enhancing the site usability better, and working on better publicity - both using Internet-based media and using real-world networking - and don't have the energy to spend time on silly statistics.
Why isn’t this site hosted using HTTPS/SSL?
PrevNode LinkNextUpdate: (November 2019) This site now uses HTTPS.
For several reasons:
The site does not require registration, and nothing here can be modified using a web interface. As a result, HTTPS is unnecessary.
HTTPS incurs some bandwidth and roundtrip overhead.
HTTPS prevents pages from being cached.
HTTPS requires a more capable hosting account than what I need or can afford to actively maintain.
You can mirror the site using
wget --mirrorif you care about "privacy".
Can you please delete offensive/blasphemous/derogatory stuff that appears on your site?
PrevNode LinkNextThe simple answer to that question is: no. I speak my mind and express myself using the words in the English language that I find appropriate. Moreover, I think that deliberately removing text and other content from Web sites is the modern-day equivalent to burning books, which as Heinrich Heine predicted, eventually leads to burning people (which in modern times usually only amounts to blocking them from speaking on an Internet subforum). So I'm not going to do it unless absolutely necessary.
As noted elsewhere on this F.A.Q., I have a strong stance against political correctness fanaticism. Furthermore, as the old tale of “The miller, his son, and the donkey” demonstrates, trying to comply with everyone's whims regarding what they disapprove of in this site, is a slippery slope, that will lead to a lot of content removed.
For more information, see:
Note that I’m open to adding visible notes at the tops of individual pages with updates, corrections, or saying that I no longer approve of their content. But this is assuming I agree with the criticism.
Do you link to your site to drive in traffic?
PrevNode LinkNextMany people to whom I gave links to the various resources on my site, accused me of linking to them in order to drive in traffic for my site. First of all, I should note that it sounds like what I call a “conspiracy hypothesis” where one tries to formulate an ulterior motive explanation instead of assuming purity of intents.
That put aside - what will driving traffic to my site, buy me exactly? I don't get paid for each visitor or "unique hit" or whatever. Moreover, the Project Wonderful ads that used to be on my site were not pay-per-click, but rather pay-per-time (and now are no longer present after Project Wonderful announced that they will stop operating). While I admit I’d like my site to be as popular as possible, the real reason why I link to pages there is because they are relevant to the discussion at hand. If you’re too envious of me linking to my site, then please stop and get your own site which you can start populating with interesting content to your heart’s content. Moreover, you can use my site as a starting-point by forking its public version-control repository.
Why do you advertise/“spam”/“self-promote” pages from your sites?
Node LinkNextFirst of all, note that it is "ableism" as I tend to link to my sites/blogs/domain a lot due to a combination of hypomania and slow typing due to hand paralysis. A lot of people think of blindness or deafness as the only disabilities, but there are many more, including bipolar disorder, Schizophrenia, and even lacking or non-native knowledge of English and other languages. Some Haredi Jews locally block YouTube, due to a Jewish Law prohibition on men hearing female vocalists.
I believe "anti-self-promotion" is a moral fashion popularised by reddit that was not present on Slashdot, or Freecode / Freshmeat, (and still isn't) and which I'll do as much as I can to kill:
Chuck Norris was challenged to fight the world, and accepted. He bet on himself, won, and collected the bet money.
Moreover, some subreddits do not enforce it either, and it makes even much less sense on interactive, real-time, chats.
Also note that the pages on my sites usually do not require registration or login, whitelisting client-side JavaScript or web ads, and they are friendly to lynx, and wget/etc. users. This tweet by me reads:
Dear Mr. Fear, go to hell! You have both crippled my body ( reference ) and made anti-"self-promotion" a trend to stifle my online forum presence. Well, I disbelieve all your lies and am not afraid of being banned.
The verb "to spam" has several meanings, and many people equivocate them in order to censor me.
Furthermore, like Ayn Rand in The Fountainhead I believe in karma, and that being nasty, dishonest, unkind, and not generous, to people can bite you further down the road. This is while being kind, honest, respectful, and generous, returns seven folds. buu almost got himself killed due to frequent online chat hostility and use of IRC force (kicks, devoices, or bans). In addition, a former boss of mine who used to walk in the middle of the roads (hubris) in Gush Dan, got badly injured in a car accident.
(Note that I generally don't need the fear of retaliation to try to be honest and noble to my fellow men. This is because I enjoy being noble. )
Do you use your sites to collect IP addresses?
PrevNode LinkNextI go over the monthly reports of the log analysers only rarely, to say nothing of reading the raw web server logs. If you still don't believe me, you can try using Tor or similar, in order to browse them.
And, frankly, these conspiracy hypotheses are ridiculous.
Do you use your sites to serve malware?
PrevNode LinkNextWorse: my pure-ASCII URLs consist of 100% magnetic monopoles! 😉
Seriously now: the pages on my sites usually do not require registration or login, whitelisting client-side JavaScript or web ads, and they are friendly to lynx, and wget/etc. users.
Why do you quote yourself e.g.: on IRC and on E-mail signatures?
PrevNode LinkNextWell, Peter Ustinov expresses having had a resistance to quote what he previously has uttered or wrote in the preface to a book where he compiled some of his most memorable quotes. Many people think I'm narcisstic. I think I'm narcisstic. Even very narcissistic. I am trying to curb my narcissism, but there is a limit to what I can do.
While I agree that you should be critical of yours and other older works, often "old (for some value of old)", text [and source code] is still good enough. And then there are "retro" jokes/technologies that people can find funny again.
I don’t follow links / URLs
PrevNode LinkNextThen what do you intend to do with URLs? Compress them under several million tonnes of rock for a few eons? 😉
If you are worried about security, you can try using lynx, wget, curl or similar. You should be able to read a lot of the ASCII-subset-of-UTF-8 content using a text editor or a hex-editor.
Given Google Chromium Browser’s compressed sources were 531 megabytes in 2016 and over 4,000 megabytes in 2024, and they contained many bugs and security vulnerabilities, I think downloading raw XTHML5 sources from static-sites like shlomifish.org is unlikely to be the weakest link.
Why the links to start with?
PrevNode LinkFirst-of-all, note that providing hyperlinks is not a new trend:
Furthermore, a fellow writer, who was less techsavvy than I was at the time (and wished to remain ignorant of software development) told me that "[hyper-]linking is not writing". However, not only did the Hebrew Bible had hyperlinks of sorts (references to other works), but many are currently broken. There are also known-but-lost works among the Works of Aristotle and those of many other classical philosophers.
Otherwise, I think of the function of hyperlinks like I think of using fan-fiction or real-person-fiction ( RPF ) characters: more useful if the reader is familiar with the referenced names (or follows the hyperlinks), but relatively harmless if the reader does not. Moreover, some Internet services, for example IRC, have an effective limit for a paste’s length.
How is this site generated? Which CMS (Content Management System) are you using?
PrevNode LinkNextMost of the site is comprised of static HTML web pages, which are uploaded to the web-site as they are, after being generated using templates, data, and programs. The site’s sources are public and kept in a public version control repository, which also contains some automated tests and makes use of a continuous integration service.
In modern web developer jargon, one can say I use a custom static site generator (SSG). The blanket licence for the sources is CC-by-nc-sa for texts, and the ASL 2.0 for code.
While I am not ashamed of the site’s sources, they have gone through a long history and legacy. I remain a big fan of static site generation, but there are probably some better approaches out there for that. Furthermore, often it is simpler to just write something of your own using a good preprocessor or a template system, a good build system and some code glue. However, for me, converting to something else would be too time-consuming, and I've already found some faults in some existing popular-and-open-source static site generators that I tried.
You can find a partial list of technologies that have been used for it.
Some people asked if I am running a content management system ("CMS") on my hosting's web-service, and the answer is "no". I am not running WordPress, MovableType, Drupal, Joomla, MediaWiki, or whatever. As far as the web-server is concerned, my site is static files that are served directly from the filesystem. Moreover, these files contain substantial amounts of repetitive markup and code.
Why are some of your sites static (and generated by static site generators) rather than use server-side scripting (e.g.: PHP)?
Node LinkStatic sites require less maintenance than sites with Server-side scripting given the latter are potentially more prone to security exploits.
I can afford to spend more computer time of my local workstation to minify the served data, or otherwise improve the user-experience.
From my experience, source codes of generated static sites, that are typically kept in version-control repositories (e.g: git ones), tend to get misplaced less frequently than those of sites using content-management systems, which are usually kept in SQL databases.
Tom Hummel’s Four Ways to Build Web Apps is a useful overview.
Is this site written in Perl?
PrevNode LinkNextSee above - most of the site is generated using code and data and is served as static content on the server. There are about three CGI scripts written in Perl 5 using CGI-Minimal, or in Python using Bottle.py but they do not serve most of the content.
It is true that I make use of a lot of Perl code to generate the site's content, but the site's source code is not limited to Perl, and this code does not run on the web server, nor is required to serve most of it.
I believe the CGI scripts are:
Why do some of the server-side scripts have a “.cgi” extension?
PrevNode LinkNextI picked it as an implementation language-agnostic extension, to make the web-server's configuration easier. I don't know whether they are being run as CGI or a different technology in practice. I also do not care too much, as long as they run quickly enough, which seems to usually be the case so far.
I found some broken links on one of your sites. Should I report them to you?
PrevNode LinkNextPlease do not report broken links. It is the nature of the web that links get broken and it is part of what makes it work. Moreover, I've had this site for many years, and it is natural that some of the links have become stale. Sometimes, the best I can do about is wait. As a result, dealing with these broken-hyperlinks-reports has become quite frustrating due to their frequency.
Please don't waste my time E-mailing me about them.
This site loads so quickly. What is your secret?
PrevNode LinkNextFirst of all, note that I do not consider myself an expert on load time optimisations, and you may be able to find better advice elsewhere using web searches.
That put aside, here are some factors that may contribute to this:
Some of it has to do with my web hosting, currently HostGator. While not perfect, I am quite happy with them, and can recommend them for shared hosting.
It is possible the site does not receive a lot of traffic for a variety of reasons. (I'm not sure.)
The website is mostly static and served from the server's hard disk directly without potentially costly server-side scripting.
I avoid loading unnecessary JavaScript codes and other resources from other sites (with some possible exceptions.).
I enabled server-side gzip/deflate/etc. compression.
XHTML/HTML, CSS, and JavaScript are all being minified. See HTML minifier for HTML, Go minifiers for SVG, and UglifyJS for JavaScript.
I use common external stylesheets, script files, and images, instead of embedding them on every page.
PNG images are compressed using OptiPNG ; SVG images are used as well.
Moreover, I recently started to increasingly make use of the WebP format, whose files tend to be smaller than PNG and JPEG ones, and look better and crispier than JPEG.
I sometimes remove various embellishments of the site, that, while seemed a good idea, or even were one in the past, are no longer needed.
The navigation menu is partly populated after the page load by using an XMLHttpRequest (or so-called "AJAX") call to a static JSON file.
I sometimes reduce the size of the HTML markup by using wrapper tags and child or descendent CSS combinators. Moreover, adding CSS classes or
id="…"attributes to existing tags can help even more.I use webpack to remaster jQuery-UI’s distribution, and reduce its size.
Are all these techniques useful on each-and-every WWW request? Probably not. Someone told me many pages of my site do not have too many images, whether .webp or otherwise. ( Reference . ) But I still prefer to leave no stone unturned and not rest-on-my-laurels. ( Reference: “Factor Optimisations” )
Some constraints may play against the site's responsiveness. For example:
Use of XHTML instead of HTML.
Use of valid markup.
Use of jQuery and jQuery-UI. I see them as desirable Evils out of convenience.
My policy for my sites to be as usable as possible with JavaScript/etc. unavailable.
Also see:
Wired feature about the average web page size:
The Average Webpage Is Now the Size of the Original Doom | WIRED
.
Why does the site look old?
PrevNode LinkNextWell, the site's old fashioned look may be part of its charm, and kind-of lets it stand out from every Bootstrap Website ever. That put aside, feel free to submit pull-requests, patches, or CSS fragments if you think they will improve matters.
Why is the site’s markup not formatted nicely?
PrevNode LinkNextSome web developers told me they like to keep the markup they emit properly formatted and indented. I dislike doing that because:
It may harm its load time.
It may provide users who look at it the illusion that it is the ultimate, editable/patch-able source code. I already received one patch written directly against the generated page of one of my sites, which was not immediately usable for me.
People are unlikely to use my site's markup to learn web technologies. For this, I recommend other resources.
The ultimate sources used to generate the markups are kept properly formatted, and are human-readable and editable, in public version-control repositories, so it's not as if I keep my code non-indented.
Keeping the served markup properly formatted may be harder than simply minifying it, and the proper formatting may vary according to taste.
Just like we often compile and link source codes to binary executables and libraries, (even if the source code is publicly available), so we can think of minifying web markups as compiling them in order to improve the user experience. That does not imply I do that in order to obscure the inner mechanisms of the software.
Also see:
"Perfectionism" post on Joel on Software - cites formatted HTML as an example.
Does this site have a public Git repository (on GitHub / GitLab / etc.)?
PrevNode LinkNextYes, it does. See:
The main GitHub repository (the build process clones some sub-repositories).
Where is this site hosted?
PrevNode LinkNextMy web hosting is currently HostGator. I use their shared hosting offering in order to ease the maintenance burden. "Shared hosting" is as opposed to a VPS or a dedicated server. That is: I am given ssh/rsync/.htaccess/CGI/PHP/perl5, but no root (= the UNIX "superuser").
What can you tell about the “Back to my Homepage” link’s image?
PrevNode LinkNext
Why do the pages of your site have so few images?
PrevNode LinkNextI agree that having attractive images can envigorate web pages. However, the processes of finding images, resizing them, cropping them, adjusting their CSS styles, giving attributions, etc. are time-consuming. Merge-requests that either add images, or streamline parts-of-the-processes, are welcome, and will be reviewed.
Why is the XHTML5/etc. markup not too semantic?
PrevNode LinkI admit it is an issue, but given I am a bottom-up learner, who also has somewhat selective memory, I'd rather become familiar with more tags incrementally. In the meantime, I suspect neither Web-search engines, nor most human visitors, care about that or penalise that.
About my works of fiction.
PrevNode LinkNextWhy do you write mostly fan-fiction and crossovers?
Node LinkNextLawrence Lessig gives many good reasons for remixing in his book Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy, which I have read and enjoyed. Writing fan-fiction and crossovers, whether in fiction or in non-fiction (see some of my crossover essays), is the writing equivalent of what he describes being primarily done with music and videos.
Our aversion towards fan fiction and an insistence on "originality" is mostly a 20th century fad, that is slowly (for some values of "slowly") diminishing.
Anyway, the various fiction franchises and idea systems that influenced me are a large part of me, and I cannot throw them away when writing my own works. I don’t have a lot of control of the ideas I come up with, but I know I must materialise them eventually.
What about your real person fiction?
PrevNode LinkNextI feature or reference several celebrities in my stories (whether past or present) as a way of Real person fiction. According to the wikipedia page, such fiction is likely to be legal if it is done in mostly good taste, which I believe and hope is the case for me.
The general consensus is that a celebrity generally allows himself or herself to be a subject of reuse in literature, and that includes me, Shlomi Fish.
Update (02 November 2019): I have now written a more comprehensive essay about why writing real person fan fiction is good.
Update (26 November 2019): I now realise that fan fiction and especially real person fiction can be used to help combat the flood of new characters and names that plagues many more-"original" stories. People generally have a rough concept of what characters such as Chuck Norris, Emma Watson, Richard Stallman, Moses, or Miss Piggy, are like and generally can better remember them because they thought about them a lot.
Update (06 September 2022): commercial real person fiction is common and encouraged:
You feature sexy women and girls in your works. Are you a pervert?
PrevNode LinkNextWell, I don’t know about you, but I feel that a man who is attracted to women displaying competence, sexiness, strength, etc. - however manifested - has a healthy libido (or “sex drive”) rather than is a pervert, whose sexual preferences prevent him from functioning.
Anyway, do you really believe that when Taylor Swift depicted her friends and herself laying waste to a whole city in the videoclip for her song "Bad Blood" (and Chuck Norris, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and similar, likely showed it more than once) that they actually are so violent in real life? While sometimes I felt a little like going on a mayhem rage when there was a lot of commotion outside when I was trying to sleep or concentrate, I didn't actually try to do that, and at most only ranted about it on online chat services or called the police. I believe no great action hero will ever deliberately kick a friendly cat or dog.
Furthermore, just because I write about stuff like that, does not mean I do not have enough self-control, or that I have sex with, sexually assault, or sexually harass, everything that moves.
Moreover, my fiction tends to be mild and hopefully in good taste. If you think it is bad, then you should try:
The Hebrew Bible, which many people have traditionally considered holy, and which features such texts as:
Song of Songs - I started reading it in Hebrew, and while I found it beautiful, it was too erotic for me to finish reading. Update: I was eventually able to complete reading it in the third or fourth or so reading.
Or, to a lesser extent, some of the modern slash fiction and other incest fiction that exist, and which:
Many gay, lesbian, bisexual, and even trans, people dislike.
Its authors are often otherwise sexually-healthy-functioning adults.
Now regarding their age: yes, I'm aware that some of them are underage. However, it may seem farfetched, but I think that underage girls and boys can still be competent, both in their tangible endeavours, but also in their sexual/romantic orientation. Expecting them to remain disadvantaged is detrimental.
Back at the time, Macaulay Culkin, who was the “alpha male” of a large part of the 1990s (despite his youth), raised a few eyebrows, when marrying at the age of 18 shortly after high school graduation. However, I recently heard of a Jewish couple of a husband and wife who were 15 years old then (with the girl pregnant), and as scary as it sounded, it didn’t seem too horrid of a thought. Some people learn faster than others.
Just another note about Culkin: some people also criticised him for possessing Marijuana and for its use. However, many young and not-so-young people I talked with have had a history of Marijuana use, or even Marijuana addiction. So I do not hold it against him. See my essay, “The Case for Drug Legalisation”, for why I think Marijuana, and all other illegal narcotics, should be made legal globally.
I also have a hypothesis that pleasure, education (learning and teaching), and creativity / conception, are closely intertwined. Since we cannot expect children to avoid having fun, or not to learn, we must accept the fact that they'll have sexual/conceptual experiences.
Moreover, note that E Nesbit, JK Rowling, Sesame Street, and Disney, all featured underage children in their works.
When PETA's twitter spoke against the sexualisation of catgirls in Anime, it was criticised for not going against Sesame Street, or My Little Pony, or Disney and being bullies.
So please pick on someone your size, or just admit you were wrong, and choose a more worthwhile battle.
Am I attracted to attractive underage girls? I admit I am, but no more than I am to those who are well above the age of consent (and usually much less). I suspect most other men do too (and women are attracted a little to underage boys), and repressing these emotions won't make the situation better. (One may still opt to suppress them instead, i.e.: acknowledge their presence but not act in accordance to them.) These feelings are automatic, harmless, and no amount of psycho-"therapy" will prevent them.
Moreover, as of 2023-09-24 the first and only time I recall "getting physical" with a MOTAS was when a girl who looked in her early 20s rapekissed me. 1st base? ½ base? Hardly a case of sexual assault, and it also wasn't my initiative, and the initiator seemed above the age of consent.
Do you idolise the celebrities or fictional characters that you feature in your fan fiction?
PrevNode LinkNextAs a matter of fact, it may be considered this way. My fan fiction may be thought of as a modern age way of having polytheistic gods or otherwise heroes, that can be used for guidance and for shifting the blame away from you, similar to the way that Plato used dialogues with Socrates for that, or the Greek used Aesop.
Note that even if I idolise (or perhaps just idealise) a person or a fictional character like that, it does not mean I actively worship them using pagan rituals. Nor do I believe they have supernatural superpowers, or see them as a supreme authority of telling me what to do. So I believe it does not go against the Jewish ethos. Moreover, the Jewish canon, sported some similar idols/"gods"/heroes besides "Jehovah" / "God" / the "King of the kings of the kings" / "haqadosh barukh hu" however they/he/she/it are manifested. For example: Moses, [King] David, and Deborah, are all such heroic figures, and I featured my own takes on some of them in some of my screenplays and stories.
Why are some of the source works or franchises of your fan-fiction works so old? Why don't you use only the Jewish canonical Torah? Why do you reference software world / computer geek / open source details?
PrevNode LinkNextWell, as you can tell, it is futile to try to please everyone and some people are bound to complain, and to opposite extremes. I try to take the advice to "make your own kind of music" and use my own cultural background and interests as inspiration for my creative works. Also note that I tend to agree with Larry Wall that “All Truth is God’s Truth”.
Often, people still enjoy my works without being intimately familiar with all the sources of inspiration.
Now, regarding the Mishnah and the Talmud, to paraphrase on Sturgeon's Law, I feel that 99.95% of the Mishnah and the Talmud are crap
, and while they contain many gems, they are mostly redundant.
There is no way one can expect them (or me) to only use sources earlier than 1900, because technology as well as art, culture, & entertainment / education / amateur philosophy, did not stand still since then, despite being increasingly based on Copyrights’ maximalism.
You can never truly appreciate Hamlet until you've read it in the original Klingon.
But all the mightiest Klingon warriors have watched Disney's The Lion King instead (or in addition), possibly with Klingon subtitles.
In my screenplay Selina Mandrake - The Slayer, the protagonist (Selina) runs into three vampire warriors (“The Three”) dressed as Klingons, who tell her that “Every mighty Klingon warrior has watched Sesame Street”.
As a retort, she exclaims: “Mighty Klingon vampire warriors who have watched Sesame Street… this decade royally sucks!!”. However, most of the best American warriors of the relatively recent past (of all kinds) have watched Sesame Street, because they loved it as happy children (and later as adults).
Why aren't you faithful to the original franchises and characters?
PrevNode LinkNextWhen I hack on my fan-fiction works I apply my education and entertainment creative filters, just like Disney's films or The Muppets have been doing for similar sources.
As I noted:
Note: many of my stories are not too realistic, and aim to reflect a better and more idealistic reality than the one many people would perceive. This is in part because, I am an idealist, and plan to remain so (and my idealism is dynamic and constantly changes), and wish that my words and deeds will carry reality forward instead of preserving the status quo.
In their "Poetics", Aristotle notes:
Homer, for example, makes men better than they are.. Similarly, the characters in my fics are competent: confident, open, forgiving, funny [I hope], greedy and ambitious, resourceful, generous, passionate, socially capable, sexually assertive, and sexy.
Why are you so obsessed with “facts”/factoids about Chuck Norris/etc.?
PrevNode LinkNextI note the significance of the factoids trend in this 2013 mini-essay about them and continued in 2019 here. One should also note that there has been mutual influence on the factoids, and by them, with my longer stories / screenplays. Often such facts are being made up about celebrities or fictional characters on social media without being immediately recognised as such.
These "facts" are a natural evolution of attributing fables to Aesop (often ones thought about on the spot) or telling stories about idols (whether real, fictional, human, immortal, etc.).
( I have similarly had Gowron attribute a quote to the iconic Klingon philosopher “Kahless the Unforgettable” which I came up with. )
Note that if you do not find these factoids funny, that is OK - I still love you! 💟 😉! But "live and let live and do and let do" and, like my psychotherapist advised me: please don't be too domineering/"pushy". Different people are different and like or dislike different things.
Why don't you cut out contact with the outside world for several years and release a perfect screenplay?
PrevNode LinkNextThis was popularised by Hollywood, but from my experience, is detrimental in this day and age (~January 2021). I find that releasing screenplays (or essays or software) in an "imperfect" or often even incomplete state, helps getting input from readers, reviewers, and collaborators, which even if negative and "destructive", helps in the thought process.
For example, after writing the first three stanzas of "Terminator: Liberation", it took me close to a year to come up with a better (and shorter) plot. Moreover, subsequent readers' input was instrumental in further enhancing it.
Also note that in a true "open" fashion, I encourage people to fork, or (licence-permitting) even change the licence of derivatives. I can never please everyone but feel free to take my work in your own direction.
Cookie Monster agrees with me.
May I prepare a derivative of a work (or of several works) of yours? (E.g: a computer game, a tabletop game, a parody, a video, an animation, an audio file, a picture, a version with some amendments or corrections, a translation to a different language?)
PrevNode LinkNextSure! Go ahead, as I encourage derivatives, and I believe most of my works are under licences that allow derivatives given respecting certain conditions. Even if you violate the conditions, I will likely lack the time and energy to start a law suit, and instead just gently “shame” you on Internet social media or other sites.
Also see some relicensing options.
Do note that I try to provide sources for most of my works - usually on my GitHub account or other code sharing sites (where "code" can be markup or a different file format). As a result, I recommend you peruse them if you wish to keep the best quality.
How do you expect to afford paying the [big name] actors that you sport in your screenplays?
PrevNode LinkNextFirst of all, note that I believe by observation that most of them are modern-day geeks and “amateurs” (= workers who work for fun) and often agreed to act in films they liked for a relatively small pay. For instance, according to the wikipedia article about Emma Watson the one about Kirsten Dunst, and the one about Keira Knightley they all played in some independent films, which I presume paid less than "major motion pictures".
Secondly, my cast pages (e.g: 1; 2; ) are merely guidelines. Film makers are welcome to take them in their own direction (or the screenplays themselves).
If you are the “2nd worst vocalist on YouTube”, who is the first?
PrevNode LinkNextMy future successor. Not unlike Deep Thought being "the second greatest computer in the Universe of Time and Space". This successor may be the future me ( 😉 ).
Also see:
Christina Grimmie - she tended to sing off-key and amateurilly in some early videos, but improved a lot. I still think some of my recordings are worse than all of hers.
“Miranda Sings” - most probably sings badly on purpose, and still much better than I do now.
Are there audio-book versions of your texts?
PrevNode LinkYou should be able to find ones using web searches. I originate them as text due to usability and accessibility considerations, both of mine and of my users.
About computing and software development
PrevNode LinkNextAre you a programmer?
Node LinkNextYes, I am. For some of the publicly available source code I wrote (usually FOSS) see:
(I'm answering this question here, because I got asked that a lot.)
Note that software development often involves other activities than programming (e.g: QA, writing documentation, or system administration). Moreover, I believe that, despite common belief, writing HTML, or many other languages which are not Turing complete, is programming because it requires similar discipline.
What are your Computers’ Specifications?
PrevNode LinkNextMy primary machine is a desktop machine with a:
System:
Host: fedora arch: x86_64 bits: 64
Desktop: Xfce Distro: Fedora Linux (Workstation Edition)
Machine:
Type: Desktop Mobo: Micro-Star model: MPG B760I EDGE WIFI DDR4 (MS-7D40)
v: 1.0 UEFI: American Megatrends LLC. v: 1.90
date: 03/22/2024
CPU:
Info: 6-core model: 12th Gen Intel Core i5-12400 bits: 64 type: MT MCP
cache: L2: 7.5 MiB
Speed (MHz): avg: 800 min/max: 800/4400 cores: 1: 800 2: 800 3: 800 4: 800
5: 800 6: 800 7: 800 8: 800 9: 800 10: 800 11: 800 12: 800
Graphics:
Device-1: Intel Alder Lake-S GT1 [UHD Graphics 730] driver: i915 v: kernel
Display: x11 server: driver: X:
loaded: modesetting unloaded: fbdev,vesa dri: iris gpu: i915
resolution: 1920x1080~60Hz
API: EGL Message: EGL data requires eglinfo. Check --recommends.
Audio:
Device-1: Intel Raptor Lake High Definition Audio driver: snd_hda_intel
API: ALSA status: kernel-api
Server-1: PipeWire status: active
Network:
Device-1: Intel Raptor Lake-S PCH CNVi WiFi driver: iwlwifi
IF: wlo1 state: down
Device-2: Realtek RTL8125 2.5GbE driver:
IF: enp2s0 state: up speed: 1000 Mbps duplex: full
Bluetooth:
Device-1: Intel AX211 Bluetooth driver: btusb type: USB
Report: btmgmt ID: hci0 state: up
Drives:
Local Storage: total: 1.82 TiB used: 583.12 GiB (31.3%)
ID-1: /dev/nvme0n1 vendor: Kingston model: SFYRD2000G size: 1.82 TiB
Partition:
ID-1: / size: 195.8 GiB fs: ext4 dev: /dev/nvme0n1p2
ID-2: /boot/efi size: 19.99 GiB fs: vfat
dev: /dev/nvme0n1p1
ID-3: /home size: 1.08 TiB fs: ext4
dev: /dev/nvme0n1p3
Swap:
ID-1: swap-1 type: zram size: 8 GiB used: 0 KiB (0.0%) dev: /dev/zram0
Sensors:
System Temperatures: cpu: 33.0 C mobo: N/A
Fan Speeds (rpm): N/A
Info:
Memory: total: 32 GiB
( Based on a reworked output of inxi -F -c 0 . Thanks! )
I run Fedora Linux on it. That desktop computer replaced my older computer which was a:
- An Intel Core i3 CPU (x86-64).
- 8 GB of RAM.
- Intel Corporation Sandy Bridge Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 09)
- A 2 TB hard-disk.
- A 21″ Wide LCD Screen by LG.
- Intel Corporation Cougar Point High Definition Audio Controller.
- Intel Corporation 82579V Gigabit Network Connection.
I ran Fedora Linux and Debian GNU/Linux on it. That desktop computer replaced my older computer which was a:
- Pentium 4, 2.4 GHz CPU.
- 2.5 GB of RAM.
- An ATI Radeon HD 2600 card.
- One 160 GB Hard-disk and two smaller ones of 80 GB or so.
- A 19″ LCD Screen by ViewSonic.
- A standard built-in AC’97 sound-card.
I’m using mostly FOSS on it, and try not to depend on non-FOSS software. I documented the reason why I no longer trust non-FOSS software on my technical weblog.
Which Programming Language did you start with? Which programming languages do you know now?
PrevNode LinkNextWhen I was in the 4th grade (back around 1987), my father bought my family a PC XT machine, with 640 KB of memory, and a colour CGA screen. Using this, my friends and I started learning how to program, first using the BASIC interpreter that was installed on the BIOS and was invoked if you didn’t put a diskette inside, and then using some of the BASIC variants that ran on DOS such as BASIC.COM, GWBASIC and BASICA. So for better or for worse, BASIC was my first language.
I’ve neglected programming for a long while and just played games on the computer, and possibly did some work on it. However, I returned to programming when I was in the 9th grade, this time on a 386 SX with QBasic which came with some later versions of DOS, and later on with Borland Turbo C++ 3.0, which used a much more primitive variant of C++ compared to today’s flavours. Despite knowing C and C/C++, I still found QBasic useful, due to my ability to rapidly develop code in it (what Larry Wall later called “whipuptitude” in some of his talks.). I also may have dabbled with Excel’s Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) before I graduated from high school, and during my 10th grade, I learned some Pascal using Microsoft QuickPascal on DOS.
After I graduated from high school, I worked at three firms. In some of them I've done C or C++ development on Windows, but I also studied some SQL, and became familiar with some UNIX flavours and with Perl 5 and the UNIX shells. UNIX has been an epiphany for me: until then I used DOS and Windows, and considered them bad, but did not know what a good system is. UNIX was the first genuinely good system that I have encountered. I also fell in love with Perl, and it became my favourite language.
By the time I started studying in the Technion, I had a relatively early distribution of Linux installed on my computer, and started playing with various languages available there.
You can find a list of languages that I currently know on one of my résumés.
Which text editors are you using? What is your favourite text editor?
PrevNode LinkNextWell, I'm usually using gvim (the Gtk+/GUI version of the Vim programmer’s editor) for coding and for writing purely-Latin texts. For bidirectional (mixed Hebrew+Latin / etc.) texts, I sometimes use Kate instead, with a fallback on gedit. Sometimes, I use “vim” (the console version) or neovim's nvim for quick edits or when I cannot or would prefer not to use a GUI editor.
The reasons I am using gvim instead of vim, are:
Because many terminal emulators on Linux, including Konsole which is my preferred one, mess up with the Hebrew/Latin bidirectionality too much (enough to confuse vim).
Because the syntax highlighting looks nicer there.
Because the mouse support is better.
Because I like and use the menubar.
Because Unicode characters are often displayed better.
Because it does not start much slower than Vim.
If the console-based Vim works for you - feel free to use it.
Regarding Emacs: from what I know, it should be a fine text editor, but I could never get used to it, so that’s not what I’m using. I was told about the Evil mode which provides partial Vim compatibility, but I didn’t try it, in part because I’m now using quite a lot of Vim extensions written in vimscript and in Vim’s extension languages, which are not supported by Evil.
Which text editors have you used in the past?
Node LinkWhen developing on Windows, I used IDEs such as Borland C++, or Microsoft Visual Studio.
I used Joe extensively on Unix-like OSes.
I also used NEdit on them.
I used FTE on Unixes and Windows as well (by the originator of IceWM).
I used Cooledit in the Technion due to lacking conditions, and was frustrated by its lack of Windows-like copy/paste keyboard bindings.
Why are you using your choice of an operating system (= Fedora Linux)?
PrevNode LinkNextFedora has up-to-date software.
Fedora has regular releases.
(From my experience, installations of Arch Linux, which is a rolling-release distribution, tend to become un-updatable / un-upgradable if left unattended for long.)
Fedora has relatively little contributors' redtape.
Its desktop experience is good.
Fedora is popular enough, so it has enough (paid or pro-bono) contributors so most of the critical usability and reliability issues are handled fairly quickly.
I find the RPM / DNF / etc. stack easier to use than dpkg and apt. I also am more versed in hacking *.src.rpm packages than in debian's toolchain.
Fedora's online community is, as a general rule, friendly, patient, and helpful.
That put aside, I still willingly try to help people, who are using other Linux distributions, or even non-Linux (and sometimes non-Unix-like) operating systems, with their technical problems. Part of my motivation is this quote from “The Cathedral and the Bazaar”.
Also note that your experience and preferences may vary.
Why do you try to avoid using Microsoft Windows as a desktop operating system, and recommend against that?
PrevNode LinkNextWindows Update being the horribly slow and unreliable service that it is.
The prevalence of malware on Windows, and the need to use anti-malware software, which often are quite harmful themselves [e.g: by blocking shlomifish.org].
The sources of the operating system’s components are much more accessible on GNU / Linux / FreeBSD so I can read the source (or often also debug it using a debugger).
Most applications tend to run faster on GNU than on Windows ( References: Samba vs. SMB on MS Windows )
A common argument for using Microsoft Windows is that many AAA/etc. computer games run only there or run better there. As I noted on Twitter:
A lot, but not all of my FOSS is puzzle/cards game related and working on it has been fun, but I often prefer text/XML/HTML/etc. processing and generation. If you enjoy playing MMORPG/AAA/etc. games, then all the power to you (and @feliciaday / etc. jumpstarted her career from World-of-WarCraft)
While I play computer games (a little I believe), most of the games I play run fine on desktop Linux. If you are a serious "gamer", then your experience may be different.
( Also note that I have been playing “The role-playing game of Greater Fantasia” by writing screenplays and other stories. )
What were your B.Sc.'s Final Projects?
PrevNode LinkNextThey were:
The IP Noise Simulator. The user-land version should still work and may be of interest.
Zavitan - a web-based seminars manager written in Perl 5.
Why are you using DuckDuckGo? (Instead of Google?)
PrevNode LinkNextTo prevent Filter bubble.
I like their keyboard navigation (left/right/up/down keys).
Their search URLs have less junk than Google's.
I like the bang commands ("!g" for a Google search; "!gh" for a GitHub search; "!mdn" for mdn; etc.).
Also note that DuckDuckGo claims to avoid tracking the users, but I personally do not care too much about that.
Why are you still using XML?
PrevNode LinkNextWith the advent of JSON, and similar formats such as YAML, some hipster geeks have proclaimed that XML-based grammars no longer have any legitimate use. However, while I use JSON and YAML for many tasks, I still find XML (and some related technologies such as DocBook 5, XPath, RELAX NG, and XSLT) of use. Part of the reason for that is that XML can be used to add markup to a substring of the text, e.g.: like the <a> element:
<p> I like <a href="http://example.com/" title="site">hyperlinks</a> in my XML. </p>
I recall that some Lisp fans argued that XML is syntactic sugar for S-expressions. However, I think it is a moot point, because we can encode and decode them both to/from a binary stream of 0s and 1s, JSON, or most other syntaxes. Syntax, while often considered marginal, is nevertheless important, and I don't think I'll enjoy writing text documents completely using S-expressions. I also recall reading about a new programming language that allows mixing and matching both lisp-like code and XML code.
In addition, note that I sometimes use template systems or similar tools to generate XML documents, and documents in other formats.
Now, with respect to HTML 5, the Markdowns and AsciiDoc, while I use them sometimes, they are less structured and more errorprone than many XML grammars, and often are not semantic enough for all my use cases. I can use XSLT, Python, or similar, to convert XML to XHTML5 anyway, whether directly or indirectly. And I often do.
Finally, note that I also use some custom formats such as the one I defined for whitelists of spell-checkers or the so-called Screenplay-Text format.
Relevant links:
Why are you using YAML?
PrevNode LinkNextWhile YAML has many extraneous features, it is also more user-friendly than JSON.
With respect to the many security vulnerabilities that YAML implementations had in the past: I try to not be paranoid, and most of my YAML files are under my control anyway.
Why are you still using jQuery?
PrevNode LinkNextWhy I’m still using jQuery in 2019? - by Martin Tournoij.
In my impression, the browser-side JavaScript frameworks are often more trouble than they are worth:
Do people still use IRC?
PrevNode LinkNextYes, they/we do. Old ≠ bad.
Some advantages of IRC are:
The protocol is simple enough to allow implementing mostly reliable and secure IRC servers.
The protocol has open specifications, and some FOSS servers and clients.
IRC chatrooms, which are known as "channels", are more discoverable than those of many newer services which have paranoid "privacy" measurements in place. E.g.: Python's channel is usually called "#python" or "##python".
See my mini-essay about paranoia.
Moreover, a new channel can be allocated fairly easily.
There are several separated IRC networks, so if one exhibits an issue, others are often unaffected by it.
The IRC protocol is fairly lightweight, fast, and responsive.
Also see:
Freenode - a popular IRC network plays an April Fool's joke about moving to Discord and makes a point - discord-dot-gg is clearly and visibly bloated, insecure, and proprietary.
Why are some of your E-mail signatures longer than 4 lines?
PrevNode LinkNextThe McQuary-limit is just a guideline.
They are more accessible this way.
The sizes of many emails written using top-posting can get north of 70 kilo-Bytes, and most such emails are at least 12 kilo-Bytes, while having 5-or-fewer meaningful lines. Given that, slightly longer signatures are a drop-in-the-bucket.
Where can I find your E-mail signatures’ generator?
PrevNode LinkNextAbout Free and Open Source Software (FOSS)
PrevNode LinkHow can I become an open-source contributor?
Node LinkNextSee what I wrote about it on my homepage. I’m giving instructions there. You may also wish to read my “Advice for the Young” essay.
Can you help me intrude into/exploit (so-called “crack” or “hack”) someone’s server/instagram account/IRC account/Twitter/Facebook/etc.?
PrevNode LinkNextNo, and that is because I am not a computer intruder or a “cracker”, and even if I were versed in that, I wouldn't try to get myself and other people in trouble by trying to exploit vulnerabilities on useful, ethical, services.
There are better ways to handle your online problems than to try to do cracking. For more insights, see:
“Master Foo and the Script Kiddie” - a modern UNIX koan by Eric Raymond.
Q: Would you help me to crack a system, or teach me how to crack?
A: No. Anyone who can still ask such a question after reading this FAQ is too stupid to be educable even if I had the time for tutoring. Any emailed requests of this kind that I get will be ignored or answered with extreme rudeness.
Q: How can I get the password for someone else's account?
A: This is cracking. Go away, idiot.
Q: How can I break into/read/monitor someone else's email?
A: This is cracking. Get lost, moron.
Q: How can I steal channel op privileges on IRC?
A: This is cracking. Begone, cretin.
Are you a hacker?
PrevNode LinkNextThe word "Hacker" can mean several things. It can mean a computer intruder, in which case, see the question above - I am certainly not one. Otherwise, it can mean a clever and competent enthusiast of a certain field of endeavour, primarily used by and for computer workers, but not limited to them. As I note, by inspiration from other sources, hacking is at least several millennia old.
Anyway, a "hacker" is something that normally other people call you rather than something you call yourself. I aspire for excellence and continuous improvement in several fields of endeavour (including software development), but only other people can judge whether I am indeed a hacker of them. And my policy is to encourage criticism rather than fanboy/fangirl-ism.
Update: based on this reference, a "hacker" is any fairy in our multiverse, where fairies are entities that have a soul and a mind.
You’re using Mercurial (on Bitbucket.org/etc.) for some of your projects. How can I learn how to use it?
PrevNode LinkNextThere are some links to tutorials on the Mercurial page of the Better-SCM site. More can be found in a web search for “mercurial tutorial”. Mercurial is not too hard to learn.
When building some of your CMake-based projects, I am getting an error for a missing “Shlomif_Common.cmake” file
PrevNode LinkNextYes, you can find it in this repository. Just put it in the source directory. Such a problem should not be encountered when building a source release from the source archive downloads.
How many Projects are you Working on?
PrevNode LinkNextI have originated, maintain, or contribute to more than one project and keep switch-tasking between them. Some of them have sub-projects or individual tasks. You can find some lists and activity logs on this page.
Do you have a GitHub account?
PrevNode LinkNextYes, see this link for more information.
Why are you using GitHub? What can I do about it if I don’t?
PrevNode LinkNextI like the overall GitHub user-interface and user-experience (“UI / UX”). When I used Bitbucket more, some people told me they prefer GitHub, and one of them also took the liberty to set-up a GitHub organisation with clones of the repositories and sub-repositories of a certain project. I can never please everyone.
If you cannot submit GitHub pull-requests or file GitHub issues, then contact me and send patches or text bug-reports and enhancement requests. I can also try pulling changes from remote-and-public git repositories, or set-up clones of my GitHub repositories on other software-development forges (such as GitLab or SourceForge).
Why are you working on this non-Perl 5/6 project? I thought you were a Perl guy!
PrevNode LinkNextWhile I have written a lot of Perl 5 code, and often still maintain it because it cannot be all reimplemented in something else overnight, Perl is not the only language I know and use. Perl is not exactly a religion that requires full devotion to its belief, and I actually met a woman who considers herself both a Christian as well as a Buddhist so…
For more information, see:
Why I Hate Advocacy - by Mark-Jason Dominus.
Why did you publicly share your solutions to Project Euler problems despite their request to avoid doing that?
PrevNode LinkNextFor several reasons:
Making the GitHub project public allows me to use Travis-CI and other CI services free of charge.
I enjoy sharing my work with others.
I think that Linus Torvalds’ quote that
Only wimps use tape backup: real men just upload their important stuff on FTP, and let the rest of the world mirror it ;)
has a grain of truth in it.It may be useful as evidence of the fact I solved these for prospective employers and other interested parties.
Do you solve the Project Euler problems in their order?
PrevNode LinkNextNo, I don't. I often skip problems which I find too difficult or not interesting enough. I did solve 149 out of the first 150 problems (excluding No. 143).
How do you keep organised? What do you use for To-Do lists?
PrevNode LinkNextFirst of all, see this post I wrote about why E-mail is not only a to-do list, and about the fact that other resources serve as virtual to-do lists. For my proper to-do lists, I use gvim/vim, either using plaintext or using the vim-quicktask plugin.
Why do you mention that a certain work or post is copyrighted by you and under a certain licence?
PrevNode LinkNextFirst of all note that IANAL/etc. Anyway, I try to give explicit and more permissive licences (e.g: Creative Commons ones) to all my posts and works because otherwise they are “All Rights Reserved” by default and so under much more restrictive implicit licensing conditions. I know that Ashleigh Brilliant got copyright to apply to relatively short sentences (which most of my posts are longer than them), and that there was a court decision that made it a violation to sample and reuse even a single chord of a copyrighted song. So there may not be a minimal limit to how substantial a copyrightable work can be.
Most of the licences I use permit some use that will be normally be forbidden by default, so you are better off, and it is better to be safe than sorry.
Also see:
What is the “Expat License”?
PrevNode LinkNextIt is what the FSF calls the so-called MIT License (or SPDX: MIT ). The original X11 licence has an extra clause.
Why do you have so many GitHub repositories?
PrevNode LinkNextMany of my GitHub repositories were one-off clones for correcting some typos, or fixing a bug followed by a pull request. Deleting them all will require some time, and also requires entering the password again.
Another factor that makes my repositories more numerous is the fact that I use individual repositories for some image macros, for some stories and screenplays, and for some essays. I am not a purist of the "monorepo" strategy.
Why are you still using Perl? Can't you rewrite all your Perl code in Python / JavaScript / TypeScript / Erlang / Intercal / etc.?
PrevNode LinkNextIt is true that Perl 5 seems to have somewhat fallen out of favour, but as much as I like Python (and I do), I still also like Perl. One cannot rewrite their entire codebase in [insert hyped language/stack/framework/technology of the present] every 6 months or so. Back when I was interested in learning the Ruby programming language, some of its enthusiasts implied I should use Rails for my sites. And guess what? The Rails and Ruby craze and hype are gone, and Rails has its share of issues, and I'm glad my site was not converted to be a Rails application. It can also happen to node.js, Python, PHP, or WordPress.
Currently, perl5 is quite actively developed with annual major releases, and with as little backward compatibility broken as possible. The CPAN ecosystem is not quite as active as PyPI or npm, but still proves useful often, and also avoids breaking backward compatibility as much as possible. Moreover, I can often make use of modules and libraries in other languages using the Inline::* family of CPAN modules and other FFIs.
Note that I also write some new code in Python, Julia, bash, C, C++, and other languages.
Shlomi Fish on Twitter: "From #IRC : One thing we appreciate about #perl #CPAN, is that there is often a "category killer", which while not always perfect, is used. On PyPI and npm, many use cases have many alternatives (re https://t.co/xCbM7jfC2t ; https://t.co/Nx8Uu3JvAw) without a clear winner."
( Tweet )
Shlomi Fish on Twitter: via @nixsanctuary : “My 20 Year Career is Technical Debt or Deprecated”.
I can emphatise, but as opposed to him, large amounts of my FOSS / Creative Commons / etc. code+content are still functional (after many transitions) .
Avoiding being an early adopter has advantages.
( Tweet )
Note: please do not interpret this FAQ answer as a challenge to tell me how to convert my site to be a Ruby-on-Rails app or whatever. Ruby is post-hip / post-hype, seems to have become unpopular, and I don't like it, while I still like Perl 5 and Python 3. Any merge-request that introduces new Ruby code will likely be rejected (with a possible exception for ruby gems which provide functionality which is not found elsewhere).
Why did you quit using and contributing to Mageia Linux?
PrevNode LinkNextContributing to Mageia was too time consuming, and Mageia is too obscure, unpopular, and mismanaged. I like Fedora and Debian better. I told Atlas to shrug given an overworked and miserable contributor (whether paid or not) likely accomplishes little. This is regardless of how much important the project is.
Why are you using VLC? (Instead of mpv?)
PrevNode LinkNextFirst of all note that I use mpv for quickly playing media files from the command-line. Otherwise, I prefer VLC's user-interface and its overall user-experience. They are not perfect, but are generally better than mpv's spartan ones.
Why do your projects’ releases skip odd minor version numbers?
PrevNode LinkNextThis is what the "Producing OSS" book calls "The Even/Odd Strategy". Quoting from it ( under CC-by-sa ):
Some projects use the parity of the minor number component to indicate the stability of the software: even means stable, odd means unstable. This applies only to the minor number, not the major or micro numbers. Increments in the micro number still indicate bug fixes (no new features), and increments in the major number still indicate big changes, new feature sets, etc.
The advantage of the even/odd system, which has been used by the Linux kernel project[78] among others, is that it offers a way to release new functionality for testing without subjecting production users to potentially unstable code. People can see from the numbers that "2.4.21" is okay to install on their live web server, but that "2.5.1" should probably stay confined to home workstation experiments. The development team handles the bug reports that come in from the unstable (odd-minor-numbered) series, and when things start to settle down after some number of micro releases in that series, they increment the minor number (thus making it even), reset the micro number back to "0", and release a presumably stable package.
This system preserves, or at least, does not conflict with, the compatibility guidelines given earlier. It simply overloads the minor number with some extra information. This forces the minor number to be incremented about twice as often as would otherwise be necessary, but there's no real harm in that. The even/odd system is probably best for projects that have very long release cycles, and which by their nature have a high proportion of conservative users who value stability above new features. It is not the only way to get new functionality tested in the wild, however. In the section called “Stabilizing a Release” we will examine another, perhaps more common, method of releasing potentially unstable code to the public, in which the release number is further marked so that people have an idea of the risk/benefit trade-offs immediately on seeing the release's name.
For what are you using Inkscape?
PrevNode LinkNextLately, I've been mostly using it for captioned images. Traditionally, I have used it for relatively simple and non-skillful logos and other designs.
Why is your uptime so low?
PrevNode LinkReading from my Facebook post:
Today I'd like to share a story told by a friend. At his workplace, they had a computer running Gentoo Linux which wasn't rebooted for a while and accumulated a large uptime. Then one day they had to reboot it for some reason. This friend gave me one guess to guess what happened then. I guessed that "it didn't work". I was right.
While mainframe computers tend to accumulate years of uptime, I suspect their software and hardware made some design compromises to accommodate for that.
My uptime record was 34 days:
I try to reboot every kernel update.
I do enjoy “Uptime Funk - A SUSE Music Parody” though.
Political Correctness (or Lack of it)
PrevNode LinkWhat is the Approximate Maturity Rating of this Site?
Node LinkNextMost of it should be either U (Universal) or PG-Something (Parent Guidance). I’m not a blatantly pornographic person.
Why are you using the terms “girl”, “chick”, etc.?
PrevNode LinkNextI’m using the term “girl” for lack of a better term for “a female guy”. I was told that some overly strict feminists consider it derogatory, but until a better word emerges, that’s what I’m going to use. (And I don’t find it particularly derogatory).
Are you a sexist? Are you a Feminist?
PrevNode LinkNextIn general, I support gender equality, lack of double standards, equal opportunities, and liberation of all genders, and all people (of any age) exhibiting competence, confidence, and sexual assertiveness, while trying to be "excellent to each other", and to not be jerks ("Wheaton's Law").
I do admit I have sexist sides, or at least am fond of describing sexualised situations, where one gender ends-up on top. Either pro-female:
or pro-male:
But this kind of humour is hopefully in good taste and is appreciated by both genders. Furthermore, to quote the Ferengi Rules of Acquisition: War is good for business
.
I have many other conflicting sides, including a sadistic side, which Taylor Swift has one too, and a parodying Judaism side.
I use these elements in my writing because they are entertaining and seem fun and are good for business. I do not encourage being destructive in real life, and anticipate that both children and adults will know better.
Do note that I could have been too sexualised or otherwise tactless in my online communications in the past. Even though I was honest, I often lacked delivery, which brought me some bad reputation and trouble.
I've been trying to improve, though. mst joked that every time I level, I put all my XP (= experience points) into "being right" rather than boring things like "tact"
. However, he has been increasingly more tactful and restrained lately, and hopefully so have I.
Why are you using the term “nazi” to refer to people who are “needlessly strict”?
PrevNode LinkNextBecause it is an acceptable use for such a word. You can find the fallout from one of my uses of it on this linmagazine.co.il page (in Hebrew) (“And what does it have to do with anything? Did Hitler use Linux?”). I didn’t stop using the word “nazi” afterwards, and also see the post “The Grammar Nazis Conspiracy” on my personal/philosophical blog.
Many people treat the Nazis/Hitler/Holocaust/World War II issue with too much “holiness”.
Another recent use of this in my works is in featuring Chuck Norris and Summer Glau on The Muppet Show as Grammar Nazis (with a capital “N”) who undergo a gradual Catharsis and become benevolent people.
The quoted text below was written many years ago. See my latest thoughts.
Furthermore I should note that using "nazi" like that actually underlines the main reason which caused the deterioration of the Nazis in Nazi Germany. It was the fact that they were too insistent on being strict and avoid breaking or bending the rules, or voicing any antagonism towards Nazism there. This made them into tragic victims who accepted their fate of death and stagnation instead of being action heroes or “hackers” who constantly bend the rules, challenge norms, and don’t accept their fate:
Reflection on the David and Goliath myth and why David there was an action hero and a hacker (and — no! Samson was far from being the only action hero in the Jewish Bible).
Also see "just following orders" or the Nuremberg defence, with which the "I just work here" attitude is not different.
Why do you mention Hitler, the Nazis, etc. in some of Your Writings?
Node LinkI found it suitable to use it for them, so I did. For the record, my grandfather lost most of his family during the Holocaust, and so I cannot be accused of misusing such facts. Steven Spielberg, whose parents are Jewish Holocaust survivors, also featured the Nazis or Hitler in many films (notably the Indiana Jones trilogy). So if a fire has caught the firs, what will the moss on the wall say?
Why do you write the 'sacred name': “Jehovah” / “יהוה”?
PrevNode LinkNextSee "Multiverse cosmology". I am almost sure that writing "Jehovah" or "God" (rather than "G-d") won't get me or you struck by a lightning bolt.
What do you think about Porn?
PrevNode LinkEvery person has an inalienable right to expose his or her body in private, and to allow people to photograph it, paint it, describe it, etc. Sexual activity is also similarly acceptable. Claiming that porn should be illegal or illegitimate undermines both the right of free expression, and the right of a man or a woman to their body.
Furthermore, the choice of artwork that a person decides to experience in his free time, is of no concern to the Peace and Justice in a Liberal country, and should not be enforced. Only when a person exhibits destructive, harmful, or unethical actions, then he may be prosecuted.
Nevertheless, I find most 'hardcore' porn disgusting and disturbing, but still think one should be allowed to produce it, distribute it, and experience it. Some of the greatest artists in history produced pornographic or erotic artworks.
Finally note that what constitutes pornography is a matter of taste: having sex, nudity, topless, scantily clad (bikini/etc.). I recall that one day I visited a local (Ramat Aviv Gimel) restaurant, whose co-owner is/was a religious Jew. A woman approached us and told us that she publishes an independent magazine and brought a sampler. Anyway, the co-owner objected to a photo of a fully-clothed woman, which the two of us saw there, and which although attractive, I didn't find too sexualised.
I don't look down on people like that, because you have to draw the line somewhere. As a possible analogy, the github-markdown-toc project requires the contributed code to only use POSIX-defined features. So when I submitted a pull-request, I used POSIX-compatible awk code rather than /usr/bin/perl5 or python3.
In addition, some Haredi Jews locally block YouTube, due to a Jewish Law prohibition on men hearing female vocalists.
Are there any Links to Porn on your Site?
Node LinkNextThere may be some links to soft porn, etc. Or to individual pornographic pages that illustrate a certain point.
Where do you draw the line?
PrevNode LinkAs a general rule, while I often enjoy viewing photos of women in bikinis, or lingerie, I dislike those of topless or naked women. Or at least those with visible private parts. A friend of mine and I once discussed what he called "hetero-phobia" where people dislike seeing members of the same sex naked/etc. He noted that it was prevalent among Jewish men. Later on, Alex Blue (who I think was a female Christian at the time) tweeted::
I just genuinely don't understand the need for complete and utter 100% nakedness in the women's locker room at the gym. Ahhhhhh #help
For one exception, where I liked a painting of a topless woman, and not the only one, see (the Not-safe-for work / NSFW) John Collier’s painting, “Lilith”.
.jpg){kind=link}
After I told that to someone on Freenode, and also told him that I found "3rd base" and "4th base" disgusting, he asked me if I am asexual, which is having low or absent interest in sexual activity. I suspect that isn't the case for me given I am sexually aroused fairly often, and I can give the sexualised nature of many of my works as evidence to that.
Seems like I am not the only man who, as a general rule, dislike seeing women naked, and rather see them in bikini/lingerie (“scantily-clad”) “women look way better in a bikini/lingerie than completely naked. : r/unpopular opinion” .
