There There by Tommy Orange is an objectively brilliant and subjectively shitty book.

Brilliant because it’s about as refined and politically correct as a bucketful of human flesh splattering against your face. Most chapters cut the reader’s soul open, shove a fist inside, grab something valuable and squeeze. The characters are different yet connected, and every story is sincere.

It’s shitty, at least for me, because it’s completely focused on what reality is without room for what it can be and how we get there. Tommy succeeded in letting me feel what life is like for a Native Indian in urban USA, but to me all art must be life-affirming. A book must show that there is more to gain by living, more to lose by dying. There must be a celebration of life, and this book didn’t provide any hope for me. It is an outcry of a people who had everything taken from them and who are mostly without voice, but it’s also distilled pain in literary form, and I have to ask what I gain from reading it. I hurt plenty without it and it doesn’t give me any new information. And I try to live by a simple rule: do only things that make me happy or help me learn. This book, at best, can make Native Indians happy because of their voice finally reaching ears. It can also make those Americans who have preferred to completely forget that Native Indians remember.

There are website fixes and changes incoming! For one, I'm going to set up a functioning search function in two weeks based on the wonderful magic of Google Custom Search JSON API. I want results to display in the same format as ordinary entries, and other tools I've looked into don't do a very good job at this: they cling to their own style or inject ads. So it's time to dust off my JavaScript coat and work some magic.

And just in case you are wondering why I haven't fixed it before . . .

In all honesty, I simply didn't notice that search wasn't working. I intended to set the function up when I first brought my website online, but since I used the site rarely, I never tried to search anything until now.

Frankly, I think we have too much power over our own bodies. Or at least I feel this way after messing up my sleep, messing up my food, doing little exercise, and overall behaving as if I’m fifteen and on a Naruto bender.

But despite the cotton candy in my head and the fact that I almost dislocated a foot yesterday simply by stepping on it wrong, it’s good to stress-test myself once in a while. I used to be absolutely horrible when in bad physical shape.

Now, if I say something hurtful, it's mostly because I'm simply an ass and only somewhat because of health or exhaustion.

Finished my first ever campaign of DnD yesterday–Tomb of Annihilation. We even survived after completing the objective and, more importantly, had a ton of fun while exploring the module and solving or bypassing the many puzzles in it.

So I wanted to give a bit of advice to people who thought of playing DnD but think it's too hard or expensive. Obviously, all that's below is my opinion, and if you think of adopting the hobby, you should consider watching a few games on YouTube or listening to more people who have just started out.

Option number zero is probably unavailable to you, but it's still worth mentioning. If your friends or acquaintances play, simply ask them if you can join. Normally, role-players are happy to help out people trying DnD or other tabletops.

I saw a thought-provoking post on Twitter about a week ago. It got something like 700 000 likes, and it's about one of my favorite topics: forcing people in a weaker position into doing the right thing.

The tweet's author has a younger sister. The sister is fourteen, and she wants to date a seventeen-year-old guy (the exact age difference is somewhere between three and a half years and four years). The author is polling the Internet to find out how many people think this kind of relationship is okay or not. She already knows the answer, I suspect; it's just that her and her mother's protests aren't working on her younger sister and she wants to use public opinion to reinforce the point. Of course, the overwhelming majority of people say that such a relationship will bring only pain to the younger girl, and, satisfied, the author walks away to presumably force her sister to stay away from that trainwreck.

She is asking the wrong question.