Atomic Nerds

So I hear that Scott Adams said something stupid on the internet today, but before I bother to comment I figure I’ll at least find out if tomorrow brings “ha ha, you fell for an obvious satire, it was totally meant to be stupid” or “you’re incapable of understanding my nuanced and searing logic because you’re irrational, as evidenced by the fact that you find my conclusions appalling”. We’ll leave him aside until we find out, and talk about more pleasant things.

My morning was spent at the range. First time in awhile on pistols; ever since Spear landed within an easy day’s drive, when we’ve been hauling out to blow a chunk of time and money on the shooty goodness, we’ve almost always been tinkering with various rifle setups. We bring the pistols along too to check for comfort, areas on the gun that could be improved to make shooting it more pleasant, and so forth*, but overall it’s been way too long since we had any real time-on-target with pistol, on paper.

I’m not actually a big fan of pistols, to be honest. I find shooting them less pleasant/fun than I do shotgun or rifle, I’m not that great a pistol shot, and all things being equal I’d prefer to spend a sunny day at the range doing something I like more. I practice with pistols just about enough to be ahead of “bought gun, left in drawer awaiting bad guy”, and just about enough to know what my major weaknesses are. (Mainly, slapping or jerking the trigger.) Don’t get me wrong, I happily take pistol over no shooty goodness at all, but it’s the low bangstick on the totem pole for fun-factor for me.

For a shoot-the-bad-guy pistol, I have a lightweight, compact 1911**. I adore the way the thing fits in my hand and its unobtrusiveness on a belt, but when I first started playing with it, it was a bit dismaying how much less accurate with it- and how much more uncomfortable to shoot it was- than Mama Baer, or other full-sized 1911s I use. I consoled myself with the knowledge that both factors were the price to pay for a gun with nearly identical ergonomics to guns I shoot well that happened to be much lighter, shorter-barreled, and generally more amenable to carrying on a belt under a shirt. I shot it enough to content myself that I could easily pass a concealed-carry qualifier with it, then went back to shooting full-sized 1911s when we wandered out to the pistol range. Not the smartest thing to do, but the thing that got done.

Today Stingray wanted to focus on his new, relatively inexpensive, of-no-sentimental-value-whatsoever 1911 he got to live on his hip while Spear gives his trusty CZ-75 a full spa treatment and makeover. So while the big boy was there, Stingray was tying it up, and for whatever reason we had decided that bringing three 1911s on a range trip meant to take less than all day was overkill, so it was mostly left for me to play with the little gun I ostensibly mean to shoot bad guys with, if I hafta.

Which I then proceeded to shoot as well or better with at 25 yards as I had been at 7-10, surprising the daylights out of myself given how little I’d been practicing with it since. No discomfort from the lighter weight and snappier recoil, either- it’s more noticeable than a heavier gun, but not painful or exhausting. It wasn’t practice, and it wasn’t better coaching***, either- just about everyone along on this particular outing had their own personal bugbear to address and was doing their own thing.

What DID change relative to last time was I was starting to push against my utmost personal motivation to do anything about my own metabolic well-being, which is the prospect of potentially having to buy new clothes****, so I jumped back on the wagon and started beating myself up in the name of self-improvement again. After around two months of hanging onto or from various bars, there was just enough improvement in the strength and stability of my grip to make a several-orders-of-magnitude difference in my experience, and performance, of a pistol.

Practice may make better, if not perfect, but if you’re starting off with bitty paws rather than huge ones there’s other things you can do to make a world of difference as well…

*Including his new favorite game, which he’s not always aware he’s playing, “Can the Nerds break it?” YES WE CAN.

**Yes, yes, it’s a LOLKIMBER. I justify it on the grounds that I like it. Pistols tend to be very black and white “fits” or “doesn’t fit, won’t work at all” for me, and this one fits.

***I am not looking for coaching via the internet either. This is the wrong venue for a huddle- I know the cures to my ills and how to apply them, much as I know what food is good for me and what isn’t, for that matter.

****Like most people under 50 the prospect of heart disease or joint problems are far off and nebulous to me. A pants size up, however, would evidently be the end of the fucking world.

Most TV is on the package model- you pay to have access to it, and you either watch it when it’s on or Tivo the bits you actually want to watch, and either way you don’t bother with 90% if not more of what you have, technically, paid to watch. In part this is because content is itself so hit-or-miss that many properties simply wouldn’t be worth what they cost to produce if people were allowed to pick and choose according to their interest; neither HGTV nor the Military Channel could likely survive without the other. Your monomania, or quirky sense of humor, or need to watch something at three in the morning while stoned, subsidizes mine.

Pay-Per-View is mostly occupied by two things: recent movies, especially those that haven’t had a DVD release yet, and blood sports. It’s reasonable to buy screening privileges, or set up the spectacle of two very well-known and very angry large men beating the snot out of each other, on the assumption that a sufficient number of people would pay specifically to see that, and have this work as a business model.

Unfortunately, it leaves us out. We’re patient enough to prefer to just wait for DVDs if the movie wasn’t so standout as to be worth seeing in a theater, as well as getting our dose of bloodsport when it hits ESPN or Spike rather than needing to find out which of two guys we barely recognize will still be standing the night they actually do it on.

Not only are we- and many other viewers- effectively left out of this business model as a potential market, so are many networks, stars, and models of content production. How much more interesting would the Travel Channel be if part of its revenue model was pay-per-view events designed specifically along the blood-sport model? I can think of quite a few things I’d pay a chunk of change out of pocket to watch, though some of them might require a bit of wrangling and negotiation on the part of networks. I’m sure money would be sufficient motivation for many to smooth those paths, however.

- Jeremy Clarkson and Anthony Bourdain, locked in a room together, for no less than one hour and potentially up to three depending on how long it takes either of their voices to give out. I’m not sure if this would be more entertaining with no alcohol permitted whatsoever or unlimited alcohol.

- Adam Richman of Man vs. Food and the anorexics from TLC. You can take the anorexics to the big-eater challenges or Richman to the eating disorder clinic, I’m not fussy, just as long is neither is allowed to escape until all the carnage is over.

- Martha Stewart Living, with special guest Rob Zombie. If anyone can teach me how to make a rat-fountain with tools available from local craft shops, it’s these two.

- F1 Pinewood Derby. We’ve seen what happens when ferociously competitive suburban fathers make racers for their kids, occasionally on their lunch break from Lockheed. Now I want to see what happens when we drop all pretense and give each Scout their own F1-level funding, technology, and team.

- Pimp My Hoard. If they can’t be persuaded to throw it out, let’s make it awesome. Potential companion event: Queer Eye For The Meth Mouth.

- Steve Irwin is no longer available, but whoever his current spiritual successor is- possibly that guy from the hot-reptiles show- I want to see them take on the Playboy mansion. Let’s study those habits of these elusive creatures and find out what happens when you stick a dart in Charlie Sheen’s ass and put a tag in his ear.

- Mixed Martial Iron Chef. The competition is neat, but it’s getting a bit stale. Right now we’ve got a chef and two sous chefs; let each team bring a chef, two sous, and a fighter from the discipline of their choice to steal ingredients, sabotage, and achieve dominance in Kitchen Stadium for access to resources.

- Special edition of Semi-Homemade With Sandra Lee, filmed in any current or former Communist country.

- Blizzard Underwater Demolition School, to coincide with Blizzcon and the beginning of SEAL training for a season. Several-episode event. First the PvP Arena champs have to survive two weeks of BUDS, then the in-training SEALS have to go through the Arena tournament. I’m not sure which phase would be more entertaining.

- All-Commentator League Sports. We’ve seen them breaking down everything done right or wrong on the field, now it’s their turn to do the running around in polyester. Former commentators permitted: who doesn’t want to see John Madden and Dennis Miller settle it on the gridiron?

- On a special season of Survivor, we have two new teams: TSA agents and Libertarian Party members.

Went to see X-Men: First Class last night. We liked it; it had its rough spots, but overall it was a major improvement over the last abortion of an X-Men movie, and that’s not even touching the Wolverine movie with a ten-meter cattle prod. At the time I concluded that the key ingredient for a successful X movie was including Bryan Singer on the project, but that’s a little limited.

It would be nice if Hollywood made more original projects instead of defaulting to sequel-animated-comic book movie-mindless action with big-name action star-lather-rinse-repeat, but as a comics fan, if they’re going to do a boatload of comic movies anyway they may as well be enjoyable. Iron Man and to an only slighter lesser extent its sequel were some of the movies I’ve had the most fun at in years, and in general Hollywood seems to have been recently perfecting the art of putting comics on film and having the results be better than the summertime joke they used to be*.

Here are some of the things the movies that have been working seem to have in common- or a lack common to the ones that don’t.

1. If you’re doing a comic book movie, you’re doing a movie centered around a character whose existence long predates your movie and the current stable of fashionable stars. In some cases, the character has been around since the birth of comics themselves- up to eighty years. Moviegoers may well have grown up with this character as part of their cultural mythology, and often they have some very definite ideas about the character. You aren’t going to gain any benefit from putting a popular star in the role because they’re popular, you’d be better off putting someone in the role who is unknown but especially suited to play that particular kind of character. If you have a popular star who happens to fit that criteria, hey, bonus- but remember that the movie is a vehicle for the character, not for the stars.

2. What works over months or years of plot arcing with a monthly book will not necessarily work for a two-hour movie. Do try to keep the comic canon as your touchstone, as there would be no point to using the name and the imagery of a character but none of what was built around it, but prioritize pacing and logical character development over comic continuity. Sometimes the things that make a comic book work well and add richness to it simply wouldn’t translate to film- the Tales of the Black Freighter subplot in Watchmen being an excellent case in point.

3. You are not actually obligated to do the origin story for your first movie in a particular comics canon. Chances are, especially for the most established characters, the audience either knows the hero(es) origin, or they don’t care that much. If the origin story would make a kickass story that can be easily paced for film length, then go for it, but don’t assume that you NEED to do it in order for your audience to swallow the costumed hero. Also bear in mind that if you’re working on a property that has already been approached several times, such as Batman or Superman, that much of the audience has seen, say, Bruce Wayne’s parents murdered many different times and unless you can do it better than all previous attempts, it’s probably not necessary. Also bear in mind that most of the classic superheroes were created in a new field that had somewhat low standards for writing at the time, and some origins are frankly stupid.

4. When using a character with origins relatively far back in time and culture, consider what it is about the character that makes that character work- and what traits are essential to recognizability beyond the costume- before you decide how much, if at all, to “update” the character. It is probably not a good idea to attempt to globalize Captain America, for example, and if you’re using Superman, you probably want to consider that Clark Kent exists to embody a purity of relatively simple values regardless of which decade you want to have him born in. Consider the themes a character is built around before you decide how to update him or her- or to set the entire thing in the past. Consider themes in general- if comic-book Catwoman is a bored, rich, reclusive thief who goes back and forth between being an anti-villain and an anti-hero and everything is in blacks and greys, making your movie Catwoman a plucky working girl in a brightly-colored world who gets mystical cat powers and fights corporate corruption is probably a bad idea.

5. Putting a fan in charge of the project is better than putting someone in charge who is totally unfamiliar with the characters in question. Putting someone who has less investment than a real fan but is willing to do their homework is probably a better idea yet- they’re more likely to prioritize basic principles of good storytelling over whatever it is they’d personally love to do with that character. They’re also less likely to try to shove all their favorite characters into the movie whether they fit or not.

6. If you want the flashiness and drawing power of a comic book movie but are bent on having a lot of creative freedom in character flexibility and storytelling, don’t insert your own character into a well-known mask, consider researching characters and properties that were either never big or have gone unused for a long time, then put your own spin on them. Neil Gaiman made an extremely successful comics career doing this, and Watchmen was originally based on use of characters DC had recently bought from Charlton Comics before DC decided Watchmen was too radical and they might want to USE those characters again. There is no reason whatsoever this basic idea cannot be used with a film, and is certainly a better option than inserting whatever kind of character you want into the same well-known costume. Men In Black is an excellent example of taking a little-known indie title and characters and adding a lot of director imagination.

7. Consider the basics of what you’re working with when choosing how to adapt them. Batman is based around a lone hero and a stable of interesting villains. X-Men is an ensemble in which the villains are less important but interactions among the team members are. Trying to highlight a single star in what was an originally an ensemble piece probably won’t go much better than trying to add more teammates to a loner.

8. Comics are a visual medium. Aesthetics count. A lot. However, given the sheer weight of suspension of disbelief that goes into costumed heroes, you still have to provide story and character- otherwise it’s more “light acid trip” than “movie”.

9. Consider some of the story choices made by writers in the property you’re trying to work with and why they were made, especially if you think you’re going to add appeal by doing something they didn’t. Especially if the character has existed for many decades, there’s highly likely to be an excellent reason why writers never took the story in certain directions- like giving Batman a girlfriend.

10. The thing that makes comics books work is a combination of Rule of Cool, making everything larger than life, and making the previous two things work by doing them with relatable characters with understandable motives and conflicts. If you de-prioritize motivation and create conflicts out of thin air or just because it would be neat to have these two people fight, you wind up with an extremely expensive mess. If you’re going to have someone dress up in a ridiculous costume to commit themed acts of evil, you had better give them a really good reason to be doing that rather than a stock of one-liners.

11. Try to accomplish some means of developing this character and sound story underpinnings other than having the characters sitting around and talking for the first hour of your movie. It’s a comic book; stuff that would be interesting to draw is supposed to happen, and happen often. Happily, they are both visual mediums. These two points are not mutually exclusive.

*For the record I wasn’t impressed by the Burton Batmans except for bits and pieces I thought worked excellently, disliked the Spider-Man movies with greater intensity by order of sequel, and am not such a huge fan of the Nolan Batmans either, though I think he did better than Burton did. (Possibly 80% of my objections there can be condensed to “Christian Bale… just Christian Bale”, too.) I don’t think a really well-done Superman movie has ever been made… etc.

The reality of the internet allowing you to participate in multiple different cultures at once without going anywhere or changing your outfit is fantastic, but it does produce some odd effects time from time when you slide from one set of mores and assumptions to another.

Google ads that tailor themselves to what they think the purveyors of the content on the site they live on want to see are a case in point. When the ad on the sidebar or popping up from the text offers to help me BUY GOLD, I need to check the site I’m at and determine if it’s a geek site or a Wookie-suiter site before I can determine whether the gold in question is virtual and farmed by Chinese political dissidents, or metallic and farmed from retirees with low-appraising jewelry.

It’s when the site in question has a foot in both that I may as well just flip a coin, because hell if I’m clicking an ad like that either way. I don’t need a keylogger.

In light of recent nervousness on the part of other lawmakers who aren’t Congressman Penisjoke, as well as wild allegations that Twitter’s madcap policy of publishing things you hit the button to publish will cause men to self-destruct because there are women on the internet, a simple user’s guide to Twitter, Facebook, and probably Tumblr and pretty much any other internet software that allows you to put words and pictures where people can reach them via a series of tubes.

1. Create your account. If you wish to use Social Media ™ to interact with constituents, it will probably be a good marketing decision to use your actual name.

2. Think of things to post on your account. These should be short and pithy and hopefully relevant. If you are an internet shock comedian, posting about contents of your digestive system is valid material, but if you are a politician, you should probably post about the stuff that’s going on that directly relates to your current office held. Extra points for posting about stuff as it actually happens ahead of reporting, as this is just about the only circumstance under which the public at large could possibly care. If you want to seem “human”, you can also try commenting about current sporting events. Anything more controversial than the NCAA final four, that is not directly relevant to politics and is not directly relevant to your job, is likely to be fraught with risk.

3. Post some stuff. If you have a choice between being boring, being quiet, or posting that thing that seems like a really good idea that you haven’t run past the people responsible for keeping your cage clean, choose boring or quiet.

4. If you’re feeling really comfortable with the technology now, try posting some stuff in response to other people you have “Friended” or “followed” or on your “feed”. See rule three regarding maintaining both dullness and topicality.

5. REMEMBER NOT TO PUT ANY PICTURES OF YOUR GENITALS OR ANY OVERT SEXUAL INVITATIONS ON YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA.

6. Repeat rule 5. This is the secret black magic that Sarah Palin uses in order not to be devoured by the merciless maw that is Social Media.

7. GODDAMMIT PUT THAT AWAY AND ZIP BACK UP.

8. When you drink, turn off your Social Media.

9. I SEE THAT.

10. Maybe you ought to let your wife ghost-write your Social Media.

I could say I’ve spent the bulk of the day chasing down various things in a way that doesn’t make for neat posting material, and that would be correct, though it also far from rules out the possibility that I would have otherwise spent the day slowly going mad looking for something that fit within 5,000 words and one hour and come up with nothing instead. So here’s a sampling of what I’ve been looking at.

Via Popehat, a very rich and thorough- and maddening and saddening- dissection of the study that made George Rekers’s psychology career, and also seems to have destroyed the life of one of its most cited subjects. Rekers is mostly famous now as the ex-gay movement leader who was caught taking a rentboy on vaction to Europe with him. That’s fairly garden-variety “career anti-gay activist turns out to be closeted” tawdry stuff, but the tale of how he made his bones in “gender therapy”, and the other researchers involved, is neither tame nor funny.

What stood out particularly to me- and I have not yet finished the story- is that how all of it was about, for the boy, conforming to a rigidly masculine role and how it’s simply taken for granted that if he wasn’t, he was, therefore, gay or in immediate danger of becoming gay. Whatever the poor kid’s actual or eventual orientation was likely to be, what he was “treated” for wasn’t it, it was fitting into the blue box by any number of completely arbitrary measures. What interests me more is how later reporting treats it the same way- taken for granted that it’s “non-straight” kids, far before sexual interest is anywhere on their radar, who are most likely to be at risk for this kind of treatment.

The assumption that if someone isn’t on one direct pole, they’re on the other, up to and including transgenderism or homosexuality, is a hell of a thing to take so deeply for granted- especially given the far greater license little girls are given to experiment with “male” roles without anyone leaping to the same conclusion. I know my own “non-gender-conforming” behavior was far more, uh, “extreme” as a kid than anything this boy’s parents describe, and not a single person ever took it as an indication I was going to wind up a transman or a lesbian. I’m sure it wouldn’t have been taken so readily if I had been born in 1966, but I wasn’t born all THAT much later and “sissy” has always been a more profound threat/insult than “tomboy”.

Via Southern Rockies Nature Blog, an essay/rant about the fetishization of birds in current pop culture, especially by women. It starts by pointing out that the bird imagery is beloved by the pro-ana (read: people who have convinced themselves anorexia is a valid lifestyle choice) people and seems to be selected specifically for images of frailty and delicacy, and doesn’t let up from there. Recommended reading. I’ll cop to having a bird tattooed on me, but it’s of the heavily-built seed-and-fruit eating, talking, pain-in-the-ass variety rather than a little songbird… Then again, given almost all the other critters represented are reptiles or amphibians, perhaps the author would be less willing to hand me a pass.

Kirsten Powers unloads. Evidently she marched to defend Congressman Penisjoke, an ex of hers, and is now INCREDIBLY PISSED to discover what a pathological, hateful liar he is. Mostly interesting in that not only did she admit her deception and lash back, but it’s a pretty cutting analysis of his issues- especially pointing out how predatory his behavior really was, rather than just being confined to an equally inviting and participating mistress.

EU Tries Frantically To Determine Which Organic Vegetable Is Killing Europeans.

Or, not organic necessarily, but “which vegetable” at any rate. The upshot is a particularly nasty strain of E. coli is knocking people down in Europe, and they’re frantic to figure out where it’s coming from and have just had to back off organic German sprouts. The article comes close to but just barely skates off pointing out that the confusion- and economic losses to various growers- is necessary because tracking down food-borne outbreaks is hard and the longer you delay to make sure you have it right, the more people get sick.

This is being used a bit as a taunt against the “organic is so much better for you” meme, which to an extent is deserved- especially because vegans so often use the potential for food-borne illness to knock meat as obviously terrifying and awful for you.

Fact of it is, though, E. coli is equal-opportunity whether you eat fast food, gourmet, locavore, carnivore, omnivore, or vegan. The reason for this is also part and parcel of why it’s such a bitch to track when there’s an outbreak.

Eschericia coli, the species, is ubiquitous, normal flora in your gut and the guts of pretty much all warm-blooded animals. It’s a normal and unremarkable microbe, and ordinarily plays happily with everything else in your system and does you no more harm than the mites on your skin. Normally, what finding E. coli somewhere outside a toilet or inside someone is that there’s been some kind of cross-contamination and a general failure of sanitation- it isn’t inherently harmful, but it does tell you the situation could be hazardous because some other bug that lives in the gut and isn’t as good-natured could be getting in the same way.

There are a handful of strains of the critter, though, that AREN’T harmless and that pump out big volumes of toxins that will hit you hard. This is why tracking outbreaks of the hostile strains is such a difficult task and general pain in the rear; it’s like looking, in a field of mice, for the one that’s gone rabid. News articles usually don’t draw the distinction, although I’m sure the CDC and equivalent agencies wish they would, both to reduce panic and to give a more realistic picture of what’s necessary to find the origin of outbreaks.

Are organic vegetables any more dangerous than normal vegetables? Not unless the farmer’s being stupid. Organic crops do use more manure-based fertilizers, but normally such things are sterilized before sale. Most likely outbreaks involving organic vegetables happen the same way they do with other vegetables- contaminated water or a worker with dirty habits.

Avoiding meat, organic produce, or normal agribusiness produce won’t protect you. Wash your food, thoroughly, and don’t cross-contaminate- and hope that the restaurants you eat at do as well. That boringly simple, and the risk level is always there no matter what you do.

Sorry about forgetting to hang the gone fishin’ sign, but in case you hadn’t guessed through the grapevine, we’ve been at Phlegmfest getting about six months’ worth of socializing packed into four days. As usual we fit in extra funtime by cutting off the sleeptime at both ends, so we’re a mite tired. Add in smoke from two or perhaps three wildfires in adjacent states blanketing our fair town and we are retreating, shutting up the house, turning on the air conditioning, and seeing how long it takes us to pass out with dogs at our feet and cat in lap.

Content… later. Yes. Later.

Humanity in general has been trying to sort people into cleanly identifiable personality types for pretty much as long as there’s been a humanity froggy enough to do that sort of thing. The most popular sorting method has been the zodiac, but everything from the contours of one’s skull to blood type has been used to try and draw the lines between the different temperaments we can observe and interact with. As time and rationality have marched on and it’s become readily apparent that time of birth and blood antigens don’t have buggerall to do with one’s personality, we’ve mostly moved on to the attempts of psychology to untangle personality and identify its underlying factors. While psychology these days perhaps most favors the five-factor inventory, which attempts to break personality down into five broad traits and map them along these axes rather than sorting them into types, one of the most popular and generally respected typing inventories is the Meyers-Briggs, which groups people according to combinations of opposed approaches to the world in general.

In terms of how psychology views Meyers-Briggs (originally based on Carl Jung’s ideas), it’s well above astrology* and fairly below the five-factor inventory. It’s not exactly inaccurate, but it suffers from pretty much the same problems as any hard-sorting typing- namely, that everyone has far too many shades of grey, individual quirks, and situational differences to actually sort into types, no matter how many there are.

Either way, it’s a fun way to spend a chunk of time, reasonably descriptive, and nowadays just about everyone that has an internet knows their MBTI type. Given that personality typing is always given with a description of the subject’s strengths, which is a more fun sell, in the spirit of other discussions I’ll offer the other kind of fair description of each type.

ISTJ- Introverted Sensing Thinking Judging

Rock-headed loners who achieve any goal by beating a horse regardless of its current state of life. Will relentlessly order every aspect of their lives and that of those near them into something most closely matching their deeply felt beliefs of what reality ought to be. The older the idea or bond, the better.

ISFJ- Introverted Sensing Feeling Judging

Quiet, cooperative, and dull as paste. Equally concerned with order as the ISTJs, but far more concerned with creating harmony and conformity within a group rather than with their own internal picture of The Way The World Is. Nice, responsible people and therefore absolutely unmatched as doormats.

INFJ- Introverted iNtuiting Feeling Judging

Seek meaning and connection among ideas, relationships, and possessions regardless of whether there is any whatsoever or not. Interested in people, prone to visions of better realities, and interested in inflicting their visions upon people. If you see one of these people coming up your front walk holding any kind of written material, lock the door.

INTJ- Introverted iNtuiting Thinking Judging

Seek meaning and connection between a broad range of ideas and outcome and will explain them to you until you can find some means of escape. Determined to apply and test their ideas no matter how dubious, and profoundly skeptical of all of yours. These people are hugely disproportionately represented among bloggers and blog commenters, and generally tend to regard this as evidence of their superior reasoning skills.

ISTP- Introverted Sensing Thinking Percieving

Quiet, flexible problem-solvers generally unnoticeable until one of them is using forty slides of Power Point to explain something to you you never knew was a problem and don’t care about. Tireless combers of data and analyzers of cause-effect relationship with a powerful wish to make both processes more efficient if not more desirable. Rumor has it all of them work for corporations, agencies, and institutions usually abbreviated into some alphabetical combination.

ISFP- Introverted Sensing Feeling Perceiving

Good-natured people who like to live in the moment and are utterly allergic to conflict. Loyal and sensitive, they make excellent greeters, cruise directors, and cocker spaniels. Give them their own space, don’t demand deadlines, and possibly a set of finger-paints would go over well.

INFP- Introverted iNtuiting Feeling Perceiving

Idealists with a ridiculously concrete set of values and equally strong belief that these values and external reality should match at all times. They look to understand people and what motivates them within this context, so as better to motivate them into compliance. Most harmless manifestation is as a life coach. Most likely to vote to ban gay sex, smoking, trans-fats, adultery, motorcycles, or anything else that sinners get fun out of.

INTP- Introverted iNtuiting Thinking Perceiving

Interested in explaining the entire universe or at least those bits of it that they consider to be relevant to them. People are largely not relevant, and mostly exist to ruin ideas that were perfectly good when they remained in the abstract. Can eventually analyze and unpack anything with the notable exception of why technocratic solutions persistently fail.

ESTP- Extroverted Sensing Thinking Perceiving

Energetic, disinterested in the abstract and conceptual, determined to act immediately and boldly to solve problems. Learn by doing, and will try to do it in style. Do not ever let these people try to fix your car unless the insurance company has already declared it totaled.

ESFP- Extroverted Sensing Feeling Perceiving

Outgoing, interested in trying new things and meeting new people. Anything you sign up for at any community center on earth will be primarily occupied by ESFPs. The rest of them are too busy writing books whose title contains the words “chicken soup”.

ENFP- Extroverted iNtuiting Feeling Perceiving

Warm, enthusiastic, imaginative, seeking patterns and connections constantly. These people are the biggest suckers on earth. They will warmly applaud you whether you’re talking about being fourteen days sober, your coffee enemas, chi, aura, autistic child’s progress with chelation therapy, or sexual stamina.

ENTP- Extroverted iNtuiting Thinking Perceiving

The outwardly-focused cousin of the INTP, these people are more likely to be in a meeting with you exhorting you to synergize and leverage your problems rather than explain to you that you are the problem. Likely to be in junior management. Less likely to be in senior management as something shiny will have distracted them by then.

ESTJ- Extroverted Sensing Thinking Judging

These people exist to find problems, improve efficiency, and herd people into being more efficient and less problematic. They’ve made a list and are checking it twice, and somewhere at the top are the words “quality”, “process”, and “time”. If you see one of these people coming toward you with a cup of coffee and a clipboard, run and don’t stop until you’re out of the zip code.

ESFJ- Extroverted Sensing Feeling Judging

Warm-hearted, cooperative, conscientous, and interested in organizing everyone else for their own good. Enjoys working with others, notices needs and potentials. Likely to have a martyr complex the size of the sun. Never, ever forget to send them a Christmas card, as the slight will be remembered until the Second Coming.

ENFJ- Extroverted iNtuiting Feeling Judging

Empathetic, cooperative, responsive, and group-oriented. These people pick up every emotion and ripple in their social circle and will reflect it back at you twice as large. Good at group workshops. Less good at working in prisons.

ENTJ- Extroverted iNtuiting Thinking Judging

If you thought INTJs were insufferable, these people believe themselves to be natural leaders in the bargain. These peoples’ to-do lists include you, and come in day, week, month, year, and five-year-plan iterations. They DO have a rationale for their plan, and it will take at least three hours or a book or two to explain them. They enjoy procedures. If you have ever read a military protocol manual, you probably have an ENTJ to thank for the experience.

*Remember, astrology persisted then and does now because its practicioners are skilled amateur psychologists and cold-readers. Accurately describing and interacting with varying temperaments is not a modern skill.