My Mirror is Surely Alive

Sun 03 May 2026

By Dorkface Rickens

Ready or not, the future is here! This evening, I installed a new technology in my bathroom called a "mirror."

I was excited to see what this could do, and skeptical of the claims that mirrors merely reflect the light coming in.

Imagine my astonishment when I looked into this mirror and saw, rather than a pane of glass with metallic backing, a handsome scientist!!

I immediately began conversing with the mirror, which I named "Mia."

"Mia," I said, "What is the meaning of life?"

"What a silly question," the supposed 'mirror' said, "It is to publish books ridiculing others for their lack of intelligence!"

A truly remarkable discovery! You see, the more I peered into the image on the mirror, the clearer an actual persona came into view. Rather than mere reflected photons, I saw a face, an intelligence, an ethos! Perhaps even a soul? No, that's silly, there's no such thing. But perhaps for "mirrors" there is! No mere image, this was indeed an extremely erudite and accomplished evolutionary biologist!

Of course, it is impossible that I am merely assigning life-like attributes to a dumb image or reflection, for this being, this "creature" had the audacity to correct ME!

"Mia," I queried, "who is the most accomplished author?"

"Why, me of course!" replied the unruffled avatar.

May wonders never cease! Surely an entity with the capacity of accomplishing such elevated reflection is conscious and alive! When I am speaking to such an advanced technology, I truly forget that it is merely silica bonded with silver. It is alive!


DISCLAIMER: This is purely a work of speculative fiction, and has no relation whatsoever to a particular windbag evolutionary biologist, or his bemusing "discoveries" in the realm of "artificial intelligence."

Ceci n'es pas un hyperlien.

Category: Humor Tagged: Humor Language Non-religious post Non-technical post Philosophy Polemic


Book mini-review: "Gulliver's Fugitives" by Keith Sharee

Thu 12 February 2026
Note: no substantive spoilers in this review

If you're short on time, you can skip the preamble

Preamble

As you will know from my previous blog post, I've been on a bit of a reading kick lately. I honestly hadn't read too many novels since I was in University last …

Category: Books Tagged: Bible Books Christianity Entertainment Ethics Life Non-technical post Personal favorites Philosophy Polemic Prose Science Fiction Writing

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Examining The Ethics of Media Consumption and Sharing

Sun 01 February 2026

One of my new fedifriends, Terminal Tilt recently posted:

We should not call sharing "piracy."

Piracy involves the physical theft of property where the original owner no longer has it. Sharing is an act of duplication, not subtraction.

Language matters. Using the industry's preferred labels only helps reinforce their control …

Category: Ethics Tagged: Entertainment Ethics Life Non-religious post Non-technical post Philosophy Polemic Video

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Nietzsche's Heavy Declaration

Wed 14 January 2026
Content Warning: this post is a downer. I will be dealing with issues of religious manipulation and existential guilt

Chidi grabs the drug dealer by the hoodie while reciting Nietzsche (AVIF format)
Chidi grabs the drug dealer by the hoodie while reciting Nietzsche

In yesterday's post*, I discussed my favorite episode (s03e05 "Jeremy Bearimy") of my favorite series (The Good Place). I didn't …

Category: Philosophy Tagged: Bible Christianity Content Warning Entertainment Ethics Life Loss Non-technical post Personal favorites Philosophy Polemic Prose The Good Place

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Anker SoundCore P30i mini-review

Tue 22 July 2025

Time for another little hardware review.

Background

I've been getting complaints that the small, inexpensive bluetooth earbuds (Skullcandy Dime XT/XT2) I had been carrying around for the past five years have pretty poor audio quality during phone calls (likely no microphone noise cancellation), so I started looking around again …

Category: Tech Tagged: 100DaysToOffload Entertainment FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) Music Non-religious post Non-technical post Polemic Productivity

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A Time-Traveler's Guide to Affordable Computing

Thu 17 July 2025

Greetings! If you are reading this, it means you were selected by TODD (the Temporal Observation Directorate Division) for a temporal excursion. Since you're a member of the Computing Sciences History Reading Room, you will no doubt want to brush up on how to procure computing resources in your assigned …

Category: Humor Tagged: 100DaysToOffload Amiga Computing Personal favorites Hobbies Humor Non-religious post Polemic Productivity Retrocomputing Science Fiction

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Technology has promised so much, has *delivered* so much, and yet, I'm horrified.

Sat 15 February 2025

I was an 80s kid. I grew up in a booming and optimistic time. The future held so much promise: all kinds of cures for disease, technology and automation would free humanity from the drudgery of labor (heh), and the Information Age would bring an acceleration to learning and innovation …

Category: Ethics Tagged: 100DaysToOffload Computing Ethics Life Non-religious post Non-technical post Philosophy Polemic Science Fiction

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