Answers to Christina's Five Questions for June 2026

 Do you have a favourite (fiction, nonfiction) book series?

I read very little fiction, and should probably correct that, although I greatly enjoyed reading the
``Redwall'' series of books as a child.  My schools' libraries had but haphazard selections, but the
stories usually take place decades or centuries apart, making them suited to such haphazard reading;
it was fun to see characters and events pop up in other stories from a named object, or account in a
scroll sequestered somewhere.  The series is about anthropomorphic animals living behind the titular
walled abbey, for the most part, with some books diverting to other settings such as Salamandastron,
the mountain fortress staffed by fighting hares ruled by a badger.  A hard line is drawn between the
various animal races in the world: rabbits, mice, moles, voles, badgers, otters, and more others are
generally good; rats, weasels, ferrets, stoats, large cats, foxes, and also more are generally evil.
I learned a great many words from these books, such as ``pasties'' which had my parents aghast until
I showed them what it meant in a dictionary.  I suppose they'd be good reading for adults also, say.
I recall little about the quality of the writing by now, but remember this series as dialogue-heavy.

While not a series, ``The Last Unicorn'' holds a special place in my heart and I still fondly recall
the excellent quality of its writing; mentioning this book reminds me of that other series about one
unicorn, ``Phoebe and Her Unicorn'', holding a far lesser spot but still an easily-recommended read.

As for nonfiction, most of what I read couldn't be classified as a series in any reasonable way, but
I've enjoyed reading MIT's ``Platform Studies'' series that covers the interactions between hardware
and software, how a medium influences its messages.  As of writing, I've read only two of its books,
about the NES and Atari VCS respectively, but this is a good set from which to make the call: entire
genres of games were impossible on that latter console due purely to its hardware, and both systems'
catalogs have games displaying recurring meta-themes based on what they made easy.  NES games reused
sprites with palettes swapped to signify weaker and stronger versions of enemies, since the hardware
made that trivial; VCS games tended to use rainbow effects during transitions and to have a vertical
orientation for the same base reason, hardware, and the small memory put some games out of question.

 What is an unnerving display of intelligence you've seen in another human?

In person, nothing comes to mind.  Even viewed online, nothing currently comes to mind.

 Can charisma or charm be learned or cultivated?

I'm inclined to claim yes, but still feel a force speaking contrarily.  A lot of charisma comes from
genetics, which can't be taught; as for cultivation, this is how human trash can become celebrities.

 Is a person who tries to pay for a food takeaway order in cash, without giving their email address,
 asking for a print receipt an unreasonable archaism? If someone has four encounters in a week where
 the cashier is giving static or has a workflow more minimal than that the customer's witnessed over
 the half-century they've been on the planet (e.g. "tap, swipe, or insert" -- presented with a $10
 bill -- stunned silence; charging a takeaway bag fee when the customer has presented its own
 takeaway bag; refusing to honour a 10% discount touted on the company web page when the website
 content manager does not add 'online orders only' to the promotion text) is that a sign the person
 should stop going to food takeaway shops?

 Assume both counter staff and customer have a shared language, and customer is polite, sober and
 clean and merely wants food, and has visited the outlet before, but no more than twice over three
 years.

 The employer pays the counter staff, the customer gives money to the counter staff, should the
 customer understand they are perpetuating antagonistic social relations when the customer presents
 cash from the wallet? Should the counter staff understand that Management/HQ is damaging their
 psyche to the point of deep alienation — the perpetual feeling of being a minor human cog in a vast
 unknowable machine? Or is it the customer's fault for not understanding that businesses raising
 their prices annually needn't continue providing the intangible goodwill and brand name reputation
 to attract and retain customers?

Ah, one of these questions is unlike the others.  No, it's not an anachronism, naught like one; it's
perfectly reasonable.  I'm similarly disgusted with the state of the world around me in this respect
and yet even my close acquaintances use their fucking credit cards for all of their purchases.  I've
warned people about the tracking of purchases, how certain foods bought will eventually be used as a
mark against them in things such as healthcare prices, but few listen.  I always use cash wherever I
can.  When buying alcohol, I'd rather that be private, but my drivers' license is scanned anyway, so
there's not much point in paying with cash at that point; I similarly use my debit card when I carry
not enough cash for my purchase, but that's of course a reasonable reason for the card's very being.

There's a Domino's Pizza store near my location, and I've a dearth of other good options.  I used to
use an obviously fake name such as ``Not My Real Name'' when ordering online to get a discount; such
names once made the black woman at the counter laugh when she finally understood the name wasn't one
true.  I stopped visiting this store for several years, after one night when I pulled up to find the
manager was working and had cancelled the order.  There's no reason I should have to list a name, e-
mail address, phone number, and a litany of other private things just to order a fucking pizza.  The
so-called discount is actually an increase in price, another fucking in the ass on top of the Jewish
bankers destroying my nation with ``inflation'' that's supposedly so much better than ``deflation''.
Regardless, years later, I chose to frequent the store again, and nowadays I always use a fake name;
fake phone number; fake e-mail address, from that largest provider who accepts anything while hiding
whether or not it was received, in violation of the protocol; and I pay in cash once I arrive.  Many
times, my receipt has a ``new customer'' notice, which makes me smile.  Though I use the same system
each time, I checked the DNS for the DOMINOS.COM domain name, which has an A record but no AAAA, and
this means NAT likely works well enough to hide this fact.  When I shop at a grocery store employing
a ``loyalty'' program, I normally use someone else's phone number I've memorized as a permutation of
mine; on one occasion I briefly memorized the phone number the person before me used, which made for
an amusing conversation with the employee.  When I shop at a store for which I've no such numbers, I
occasionally guess until the employee scans a card with a valid number and lets me use that instead.

 Do you know of anyone who is actively battling or resisting conditioning to despair, alienation,
 automatonism, unnecessary data capture, and problematic technology intermediation? Are they part of
 a plural, conscious, radical attention recapture and privacy protection movement?

I'm once again compelled to reference an article I referenced too when answering those questions for
January.  I'm the only man around myself who bothers with this, and I've long surpassed both despair
and alienation; there's really no point in trying.  I write this with a ``smart phone'' close to me,
given by a family member.  I realized years ago how it hardly matters, because every human around me
has carried one.  Whenever flying, I'm subjected to inhuman treatment because of some stupid fuckers
from the 1970s.  I'm part of no such movements; the one action that'll affect any of this is murder.
.