As my second cerebral processor was doing whatever it does while my primary one is busy doing work, I was reflecting on The Watchmen. Why? I don’t know. I haven’t been watching or reading anything related to comics or superheroes lately. I read the graphic novel in college, on the advice of a friend. He also told me that it was so complicated, there was a second book that explained all the references. I eventually found a copy of that book at a book store, and thumbed through it, but never bought it. I was astonished at how much lied under the surface, which I hadn’t noticed, and I always felt I was a pretty attentive reader.
I just looked and see now that you can get an “annotated” version of the book with those notes in the margins. I wouldn’t mind getting a full-color hardback version of this, but the point of this post is just the amazement of making a piece of art that is so complex, nuanced, and multi-layered that there’s actual utility in making a book like this. I mean, there are some movies that invite this level of introspection, notably Primer, but I can’t think of a lot of others. (I mean, sure, Tenet, but that’s because it needs to be explained, and then you’re forced to conclude that, no, it really did suck.) I can’t think of any other piece of art that deserves this kind of treatment.
I work in a company within an industry that is figuratively being strangled to death over emissions standards, and I have to sit here and look at this.
Effluence
Comparison
The increases from the East have dwarfed the decreases from the West. I suspect it’s just “off-shoring” the pollution through outsourcing production, while being able to make political hay, and not an actual organic increase.
If you follow the gaming industry, you can’t escape the ideological war that’s being fought about wokeness in modern games. It mirrors the fight about wokeness everywhere, but it’s a much more compact world, and easier to keep tabs on. The wokes have succeeded in education, government, news, and movies, and are moving to the last “safe space” for white males: video games. And, boy, have they done some damage!
Concord’s Online Player Count at Release
Most recently was Concord, a squad-based shooter from Sony, which failed so hard, they forcefully refunded everyone’s money and closed down the servers after just 2 weeks. It’s estimated that development took 8 years and $400M. Almost all of the triple-A releases of the past couple of years have been complete failures, and when you dig around in the credits of these flops, you keep finding one company in common with all of them: Sweet Baby, Inc.
So here’s a GDOC — a game developer of color — who works for Sweet Baby — giving a talk about how to “burn the games industry to the ground.” Now, I get it. Yes, those words are literally on one of his slides, but I understand the larger context. He wants to see the games industry as it has existed to be destroyed, and rebuilt in his image. Which means he wants to see any and all stories about straight, white, male protagonists eliminated in favor of anything and everything else. The forthcoming Assassins Creed Shadows is the picture-perfect example. It features a black, gay samurai in feudal Japan. I don’t think you can get any more removed from context or expectation in favor of an anti-whiteness narrative.
There are plenty of good stories that don’t center on a white male. It’s not even uncommon. Lara Croft in “Tomb Raider” and “Rise” is an amazing character. Pretty and well built, yes, but skilled and clever. Her femininity is never used against her. Her physical attributes are never a plot point. Aloy in the Horizon series is similarly amazing. You can play as Alexandria in Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, and the story is interchangeable. I like FPS games, so these are what I’m familiar with, but there are a lot of other examples.
The difference here is that Sweet Baby have taken a concept centered around straight “white” males — laying aside that Japanese people are not “white” — and they’ve simply substituted the main character with something that’s the antithesis of the concept. For people who are strutting around trying to tell other people that they’re the experts in how to write “engaging” stories, they don’t seem to understand what they’re doing at all.
I watched some of the video, looking for the problem, and found it pretty easily.
Oops! Brooks did not write the jokes to come “at the expense of whiteness.” He didn’t write it to simply offend. He wrote the jokes to come at the expense of racists and racism. This is a massive, critical flaw in reasoning and understanding. Gene Wilder is the co-star. His character is white. He’s “us” in the movie. He’s showing white people how you can be white and not be racist. No one denigrates or humiliates or makes fun of Wilder’s “whiteness.” To say that the jokes took white people to task simply for being white is to miss the entire point of the movie. This logical fallacy presumes all white people are racist. Not only is that wrong — which I’m sure this GDOC would admit — but it’s also being racist yourself.
It’s not an incidental matter that the movie is hilarious. That’s another thing these “woke warriors” seem to miss. It entertained! It succeeded, not because of the message, but because it was well-written, and had talented actors and a talented director. These people think they can just “put a chick in it, and make her lame and gay,” and pat themselves on the back for a job well done. They forget it still has to succeed on its own merits.
The biggest miss, however, is that the movie shows that people can change! That’s the brilliant subtext: the moral arc of the townsfolk, wherein they throw off their racism and embrace the sheriff. The jokes that come at the expense of the townspeople attack ignorance, and ask the viewer to reflect on historical attitudes and the things they have been raised to believe that need to be abandoned. The movie doesn’t just beat people up for being white. It demonstrates growth. This is how you persuade with art, whether it’s a movie or a video game. You give people a shovel, and show them where to dig. You don’t just hit them over the head with it to make them feel bad, and make yourself feel superior.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone be so blithely ignorant while presuming to be taken seriously as an expert before.
The bottom line is that 73% of the US is still white. I know George Soros and his NGO’s are working overtime to bring as many non-whites as possible over the border in as little time as possible, but we’re still a majority-white country for now. Also, current estimates are that 90% of the population is straight. If you want to make any money in popular entertainment, you’re going to have to at least make it palatable to straight white people. That’s the majority of the market. That’s where the money is. You can’t just insult people for the sin of having been born white and straight, and then expect them to grovel in penance, and give you money. Well, I mean, you can, but then you don’t get to act surprised when your projects fail, and you and all of your friends get laid off. If you want to succeed, use your art to illuminate the future you envision. Show how it’s better. For everyone. Don’t condemn people. Give people a way out of the sins you are accusing them of; a path of redemption. That’s the lesson of Blazing Saddles.
Look no further than the past couple of years of Star Wars and Marvel programming from Disney to see how well Sweet Baby’s approach works. They’ve desecrated the canon of both of these universes, and changed the fundamental elements that made them popular to begin with. Both of these billion-dollar franchises are circling the drain thanks to these kinds of ham-fisted efforts to force all characters and story lines to come “at the expense of whiteness.” They’ve spent loads of extra money on expert advisors and a small army of the “right” writers, and they still can’t even manage to make new installments entertaining!
Blackrock, Vanguard, and State Street are leading all of this charge to eliminate “whiteness.” (Which is kind of funny, since the CEO of Blackrock is an old white guy, but I digress.) These three own controlling interest in every media company. They’re destroying the very vehicles that give them an audience in the name of trying to eliminate “whiteness.” Many customers have fled to “the long tail” for their entertainment. Soon, there will be no more worldwide franchises left to continue to preach the message with. (Mark my words: they’re coming for Harry Potter next.) Critics of this multi-media, multi-company scorched Earth campaign seem to always want to talk about how much money new, woke projects lose (as I admit that I did, above) But it’s alright; they have the money. They’re extracting it from the US economy, and will continue to burn it to reprogram society.
It’s not about money. It’s about sending a message.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: “You know, I do think that several members of Congress in some of my discussions have brought up media literacy, because that is a part of what happened here. And we’re going to have to figure out how we rein in our media environment so that you can’t just spew disinformation and misinformation. It’s one thing to have differing opinions, but it’s another thing entirely to just say things that are false. And so that’s something that we’re looking into.”
“It’s another thing entirely…” Is it really, though? Remember that the government-permitted, medical-community-approved, corporate advertising about tobacco used to be this:
Keep this in mind while you ponder the past 40 years of messaging from the incestuous government-corporate relationship about what our diet should consist of, and the products that fill our grocery store shelves. Think about how the tide is turning against highly-processed foods and seed oils as more and more data about how harmful they are escapes the clutches of the 7 “food” companies that make up 95% of our supply chain, and the FDA. In another 10 or 20 years, we will be looking back on what they have collectively done to the US and the epidemic of chronic disease that has happened as the result, and wonder why we let them get away with it. Again.
JUST NOW – JILLIAN MICHAELS GETS A STANDING OVATION, for this EPIC PRESENTATION about the Chronic Disease Epidemic, one she describes as "an extinction level event". THIS IS A MUST WATCH
"What has happened to us? I'm here to tell you, in the late 70's and the early 80's, a… pic.twitter.com/gRVRQxJT3f
Jillian Michaels: People are being “sacrificed on the altar of unchecked corporate greed.”
And what about examples of other kinds of corporate harm? The movies Erin Brockovich, A Civil Action, and Dark Waters all document cases where huge companies knowingly caused harm to people, their communities, and even their own workers. When cornered by inescapable evidence, they deny, deny, deny, and have the press write favorable articles. When finally convicted in court, they either declare bankruptcy or continue to fight the ordered payments. All the while, the board and the executives continue to get paid extravagantly as the legal proceedings drag on for decades. And every time we find a public-safety atrocity being knowingly committed in the name of corporate profits, we discover that it was a collusion between the senior officials of the company and the governmental departments that were supposed to be regulating them. It’s not the exception. It’s the rule. Our corporations are literally killing us in the name of profit, and the government and the media are all in on the grift.
So now, because of the “dangers” of “misinformation,” we’re supposed to ignore this history of “science” and “safety”-based “standards” from the government and the media and corporations, hand over the keys of our national public discourse to the likes of AOC — or, rather, some faceless, unaccountable, unelected governmental agency she intends to create — and trust that they are going to correctly separate fact from fiction, and keep everyone honest? Really? After all of this? That’s the plan? And there are actual, living people who are in favor of this? People smart enough to tie their shoes believe this is a good thing?
The government has been wrong about so, so many things, and more are coming to light all the time: tobacco, a new “ice age,” “peak oil,” weapons of mass destruction, vaccines, climate “change,” COVID, seed-oils… the list goes on. I’m not trying to go full conspiracy theorist here. These are complicated topics that defy one-line answers about how we should deal with them. But it’s been shown very clearly over the past few years that our government doesn’t have a special dispensation of understanding. They’re bureaucrats who hire experts, and experts are all over the place. The only way to get to the truth is to talk about it, even if that includes people saying things that are wrong. And, yes, even if it includes people saying things they know are wrong.
Besides the realm of pure conspiracy theory (9/11? Las Vegas shooter? Trump assassin(s)?), the government has been telling us things that have been proven they knew were wrong since WWII. Given all we know now, why should we grant them a monopoly on purposely saying wrong things? What could it possibly take for you to be distrustful of the government, if you’re not already? I’m not saying you have to completely disbelieve anyone in government ever says, but at this point, how could anyone believe that the truth isn’t at least somewhere between the three-headed government/corporations/media monster, and knowledgable people in the public? Besides the complete abrogation of the First Amendment, this alone precludes any notion of creating a governmental bureaucracy to police information.
As we approach another US Presidential election, my only question is: Will these sudden vote surges for the Democratic candidate happen this time around? It’s confusing to try to sift through everything individually, so I asked ChatGPT to summarize the voting irregularities from the 2020 election. It pointed out significant jumps in 5 battleground states, all from mail-in ballots, that almost entirely went for Biden.
I know that many of these have been recounted and investigated, and still stand, but the situation still doesn’t pass the “smell test.” If this data is true, then almost 100% of people who use mail-in ballots is a Democrat, and that just “feels” statistically impossible. On the other hand, ChatGPT pointed out that this didn’t happen in 2016. At first, that’s pretty damning, but if you consider that COVID was in play, and liberals (in general, as a group) were much more averse to getting out of the house than conservatives, it couple explain a lot of the statistical disparity.
Either way, it’s noteworthy that every other first-world country has gotten rid of mail-in ballots already.
The senior Lebanese security source said the group had ordered 5,000 beepers made by Taiwan-based Gold Apollo, which several sources say were brought into the country earlier this year.
Gold Apollo founder Hsu Ching-Kuang said the pagers used in the explosion were made by a company in Europe that had the right to use the Taipei-based firm’s brand, the name of which he could not immediately confirm.”
The product was not ours. It was only that it had our brand on it,” he told reporters on Wednesday, without naming the company which did make the devices.
Focusing on the branding is missing the point. The CIA was caught intercepting shipments of Cisco and Juniper networking gear and installing backdoors into them before letting them continuing on their way to customers. The Mossad could have done the same here. The lesson here, to “high interest targets,” is not to trust the supply chain. This is a trick that only works once. So why did they choose to do it now, and to this group of people? That’s the real question here.
After 15 years of doing Rails applications, I finally had a serious need of utilizing long-running background jobs to get things done, and setup Sidekiq. My jobs are database-bound, but my database was being underutilized, so I opened up the connection count, and let it “breathe.” In production, I can easily run 20 threads on a single, small VM, and wind up getting 20x the throughput.
I can’t say it was straightforward getting it all running on Ubuntu. The “new” systemd subsystem seems like a regression from the old ways of setting up services with plain init.d and update-rc.d. I also don’t like snap, and I’m starting to think that I should switch to Fedora, but that’s another discussion.
There were a handful of websites I found way back in the 2000’s that I liked, and kept on a short list to check every few days. This one stuck in my head because of the domain name, which I thought was terribly clever. I dug it up in the Internet Archive. It’s been taken over by some film company? Or something? I’m not clear if it’s run by the same people or not.
Another one was called “The Bassment” (sic), made by a guy who worked at SGI. It was named that way because he played bass, too. I can’t find it in the archive. It was run out of an Indy he had at his house, which inspired me to run my own web and email servers out of my house for 15 years.
There were others, like “Ze Frank,” who has moved to TikTok and YouTube (and probably others).
Anyway, I just wanted to capture the kind of free design that used to be prevalent on the internet before everyone started using “engines” and “templates” and “front ends.” And, no, the irony is not lost on me, sitting here using WordPress with a stock theme. And, sure, I started to rewrite another custom web site for my personal use, but I was using Bootstrap anyway. I readily admit that I’m not creative, but I used to at least try.
Graphics by FrontPage 97 and Image Composer
The web used to be a wild frontier of programmers and artists and writers who were exploring the new medium. Now, it’s just YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, et. al., etc. There are very few personal sites left. It all got so boring. And for all the “AI” that’s supposed to be in “the algorithms,” TikTok and YouTube offer me 20 pieces of crap for every 1 thing I might have been interested in.
Last month, I was talking about how I didn’t understand what my bluechip Fortune 250 is doing with AI. From AI for all the Corporate IT Things:
Well, it’s a good thing I don’t understand, because he’s not talking about using AI to fix IT. He wants to use “technology” to improve our “safety-ness.” Say wha..? Like, he wants to use AI to improve safety on the factory floor. Huh?! Are we going to buy Tesla robots to pull people’s fingers out of the way of presses?! I’m confused.
I sat in a Zoom call where someone discussed the first pilot program for our official corporate AI efforts. On the one hand, they’ve done exactly what they said they were going to do. They’re trying to use AI to try to reduce OSHA incidents. Surely that’s a noble effort, right? But on the other hand, I have trouble imagining a real-world scenario that would be less applicable to AI. I mean, first of all, safety incidents are already scrutinized with a microscope. Second of all, there are so relatively few, I don’t believe you can use AI to analyze them. There’s not enough data to establish patterns. On top of that, every incident is an outlier, and gets dealt with immediately, and not in a performative way, but, like, for real. New rules are put in place, guard rails are installed, etc. So these outliers are very, very unlikely to happen again. Ergo, the data is not statistically significant, and whatever else you know about AI, it’s ALL based on statistics. So I don’t get it.
The other thing that strikes me is that we’re using — er, “renting,” I’m quite certain, and at an exorbitant rate — an off-the-shelf AI product called GenAI by Palantir. You know, the love child of the so-called Five Eyes multinational intelligence conglomerate, and the company that spies on everyone, everywhere, all of the time. So we’re not using our company’s vast resources to invest in creating our own AI models. We’re just paying our contractors to learn how to operate someone else’s machine. In this golden age where instructions on how to create models are readily accessible, and the coding libraries to implement them proliferate, we’re eschewing the opportunity to create custom models that could help our specific business problems.
Over a year ago, I talked with people about what I think we could do with AI, but I didn’t get anywhere. In the past months, several other engineers have spoken to me about similar ideas. In the part of the company I inhabit, there is a glaringly obvious use for AI staring us in the face. The problem is that we don’t have all the data we need to make it work, and getting the owners of the systems we would need to tie together with our data to open up their databases to us is simply impossible from where we sit. That sort of thing is simply never going to happen without a strong, direct proclamation from the CEO, and, even then, getting those people to give up some of their “power” in the company so that someone else can have more is going to be fought up and down the org chart. So we seem stuck. The only things we can use AI for won’t matter, and the things that would make a difference will never be done.
I was born at the perfect time to pursue a career in full-stack software development. I grew up programming 8-bit computers, then learned Unix in college. I entered the workforce at the emergence of Windows for Workgroups and Linux, and I'll be retiring right about the time the AI's make me redundant. Also, the year Social Security goes broke.
