Five Questions June 2026

Answer as many questions as you like in your gopher phlog or gemini log
Email me at either:
christina@zaibatsu.circumlunar.space (fellow Zaibatsu folk)
or
christyotwisty@sdf.org
or
msg me at christyotwisty@jabber.sdf.org
with the URL to your five answers. I post the URLs below.


1. Do you have a favourite (fiction, nonfiction) book series?
2. What is an unnerving display of intelligence you've seen in another human?
3. Can charisma or charm be learned or cultivated?
4. 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?

5. 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?