Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Dark chocolate or vanilla chocolate? Rick Rosner: Dark. Vanilla chocolate isn't even fucking chocolate. Jacobsen: Yes. Yes. Try telling that to a horse girl. Sweet stuff. Rosner: The darker, the better, up to some ridiculous point, like 85%. Jacobsen: Yes. I'm good to comfortably, regularly, 70%. Rosner: Yes. 70 is there. 70 …
Continue reading Ask A Genius 1147: Vanilla or Dark Chocolate?
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So, I am house-sitting. I'm taking care of two dogs. I should specify—I love animals after taking care of these dogs, but I think I prefer being without them, except maybe a cat or two. So, my thought about this is that I like animals. I enjoy living with dogs, but their …
Continue reading Ask A Genius 1146: House-Sitting for a Neighbourino
[Recording Start] Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Masculinity—you get a pair of these giant testicles made out of plastic and hang them from the rear of your truck. So, your truck has testicles. What is another American cultural item, an Americanism that is also like this? Rick Rosner: It used to be barbed wire tattoos that run all the …
Continue reading Ask A Genius 938: Porn, Masculinity, and Virginity
[Recording Start] Rick Rosner: Right, so you just showed me a clip from the roast of Joan Rivers featuring Gilbert Gottfried, where he describes in great, flowery detail what it is like to have sex with Joan Rivers. It was all made up, but it went on for a long time. I've seen him perform …
[Recording Start] Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So, you have had opportunities to gain fame. Rick Rosner: Yes, I have done four pilots centered on either myself as a smart person or involving other people as well. None of these pilots have been successful, which is not unusual, but it is frustrating. I have a significant number …
Continue reading Ask A Genius 936: Opportunities for the Fabled Fame
[Recording Start] Scott Douglas Jacobsen: I wanted to talk about books. Say, four or five thousand years ago, the idea of a book wasn't a thing; you had scrolls. You had 1% of the population who were literate in advanced society at the time, like the Egyptians with the scribes. Print and press came around; you had …
Continue reading Ask A Genius 924: Microfiche is not that much pain, Rick!
[Recording Start] Rick Rosner: So, I'm going through my book and talking, which is set like ten years in the future, about what life might be like then. You said to plug Carole's book, too. I've been working on this thing for years and years; you could argue for decades because I'm taking much stuff from …
[Recording Start] Rick Rosner: I was talking about the square root law of mesh networks, which states that the efficiency of people whose brains are linked is proportional to the square root of the number of people in the network. Black box-ness. So, we see this with AI and Google Translate, where AI can be effective, …
Continue reading Ask A Genius 911: The Square Root Law of Mesh Networks
[Recording Start] Rick Rosner: So, you should know that the main character is a celebrity and, to some extent, an industrialist who has used his celebrity to be the figurehead of a sizeable semi-insidious tech corporation, mainly in the 2030s; that is the period I am writing about. One of the things that he has access to …
Continue reading Ask A Genius 910: Rick’s Book is About a Celebrity
[Recording Start] Rick Rosner: So, we're still talking about notes from my novel in progress. The entertainment industry facilitates sociopaths; I think that's long been apparent, especially sociopaths who either are talented or claim to be gifted. There's the saying nobody knows anything in the entertainment industry, which refers to nobody knows what's going to be …
Continue reading Ask A Genius 909: The Forever-Book In-Progress
Rick Rosner 