Hmm… I’ve got a pretty mild illness right now. Must be the first stages of fatal bird flu. Oh well.

I feel like if you're wealthy enough to make a mistake this costly and foolish then you should have to go in front of a jury of your peers and they should decide to revoke your drivers license for five years.

I'm starting to think the brilliant minds at the Navy built this $320,000,000 pier out of bondo, plywood, cardboard, and duct tape.

How could the terrible might of the sea break our beautiful pier, which was constructed entirely of thrifted porcelain and sugar glass?

I think I've posted about this before, but the Knives Out movies fit within this paradigm of movies that I think exists where the movies are decently fun on the first watch but are largely insubstantial and there's nothing to really think about, movies that if they'd been made 15 or 20 years ago would've been entirely forgotten about after the end of their theatrical run, even if you'd seen them you wouldn't chance to think about them again unless you happened to catch them on cable, but now, because movies seem to be on the whole worse and unhealthy somehow compared to where we were (I assume because of streaming or the slow decline of movie theaters) these sorts of little-to-offer films sit at the center of a permanent discourse as if they are the great films of our time.

Then again, maybe if we'd had Twitter in 2005 we'd still be talking about fucking Wedding Crashers.

Storywise there’ve been better “Jornos are real fucked up sickos” movies. And I felt like, in terms of worldbuilding, Garland based the whole thing on Twitter factions. It’s a movie with Trump brain. There’s a slight scent of like, Resistance-era lib smugness. At the end of the movie

But in terms of like, visual and auditory storytelling, top-notch film. I feel like my issues with the story are balanced out by my appreciation for how it was told, such that I don’t regret seeing it. Though it’s also not worth spending much more thought on than this. A picture that was a good watch but not good to reflect upon.

I suppose it's worth pointing out, having not read even a single word of the book myself, my perception that it's poorly written or racist or islamophobic or anything else comes solely from goodreads reviews and twitter comments. So I suppose those could all be trolls and the book could be great, but what's the chance that Will Smith's faildaughter and someone who willingly works with AI in a creative field would come together to produce a good book?

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So today I went to Target, and whenever I go to a supermarket I always check out the books. I'm rarely interested in the sorts of books carried by supermarkets, but sometimes there'll be a diamond in the rough or they'll be carrying some classics. If nothing else I figure that the books at the supermarket best represent books that are read by mainstream Americans, so it's interesting to see that. Also interesting to see how the books are curated by different store brands.

But today, in amongst the political books and the self-help books and the worst poetry I've ever perused, I saw a book that caught my eye. It was called Black Shield Maiden. Skimmed the blurb, and it seemed like it was historical fantasy about an African woman, presumably from sub-Saharan Africa, who gets caught up in the Islamic slave trade, then taken through the Islamic world and sold to Norsemen, where I have to assume she gains her freedom and becomes a warrior. I thought this sounded like a fun lens to explore contemporary issues, maybe make a point about the attitudes of today are born out of past traditions, that sort of thing.

So I immediately look up the reviews. Online reviews can be a tricky thing to sort through, as I'm sure anyone reading this knows, but in this case almost all the top reviews on Goodreads were calling this book racist, poorly researched, and Islamophobic. Then I find out this book has been "co-written" by Willow Smith (faildaughter of Will Smith) and a seemingly previously unpublished screenwriter named Jess Hendel. I looked Hendel up, not really any information on her website. On Linkedin it looks like she tried to hack it in academia, working on Gender Studies, left that for a series of marketing and copywriter gigs, and has spent the last six years working on Black Shield Maiden while also doing some AI marketing bullshit for Khan Academy. In fact, a lot of AI bullshit terms all over her Linkedin page, which immediately tells me her worth as a working creative.

TL:DR Saw a book about an enslaved African woman in ~800 AD who is sold to the Norse, becomes freed warrior. I still think this is an interesting premise for a historical fantasy book, sadly poisoned by the terrible writing of an AI idiot and Will Smith's faildaughter.

No you don't understand. It's an arms deal, not aid. Israel has to pay for those guns. Which means that, on the US's part, there's no moral quandary whatsoever. The Biden Admin is just acting as a totally neutral arms merchant, and it's definitely not Biden's fault that Israel will use those weapons to massacre an entire people. There's no culpability at all! Vote Blue!

I was gonna chalk it up to neo-pagans not really believing in their religion, but then I realized I don’t know any neo-pagans and that I’m just projecting what I believe about their faith on to them.

So, genuinely, do neo-pagans actually believe? I always took to be more a political exercise, a deliberate use of religious freedom, or else possibly done to mock established religions.

And then the same question but for otherkin. Like my assumption is that people don’t genuinely believe themselves to be not entirely human but instead part deer or elf or what have you. That instead they are making a statement about autonomy, and maybe gender abolition, and respect or lack-thereof for valuing someone else’s social norms and customs.

Can we talk about how much worse Google Drive has gotten at file organization? I swear that ten or twelve years ago you’d open google drive on your computer and there it’d be, with all your files and folders laid out like windows file explorer.

In 2024 google drive that google file explorer is still there, but it’s not the first thing I see when go to the drive. Instead it has me on something called “home” which has all my files there, no folders. You can also switch to folder, but now you can’t see your files. Why? Ah, but you can still click on “My Drive” so all’s well. But you better not click the wrong option or else we’ll take you to an entirely different app called Google Docs, which has all the docs in your drive in it.

It’s just as bad on IOS. If I open my google drive it opens to home, and I’ve got to actually tap files to see my files arrayed in a way that makes sense. Then if I actually open a doc it has to open the Google Docs app. On the main screen of the google docs IOS app I can see all the docs from my drive, arrayed in a completely different way from how I’d like. I hate it all. On IOS why isn’t the word processor built into the google drive app? Why does google insist on showing me a big list with literally all my files on it, that’s not helpful.

I'd never actually visited J.K. Rowling's twitter page and so I was surprised to see that her entire page there is just transphobia. I thought there'd be a bunch of other stuff with transphobia sprinkled in between. But she's posting like somebody with nothing else going on.

I heard somewhere that, supposedly, George Lucas is using his billions to make and screen films just for him and his buddies. Don't know if that's actually true, but that is how a person should use such an immense fortune (well, that and also funding public works, like building and staffing libraries and schools, and then using those schools to disseminate revolutionary thought). I can't imagine how miserable Joanne must be, as a person, to post like that.

Why the children seem to be demonstrating against the mass murder of innocent civilians. Could I be so out of touch? No, it's the children who are wrong. :Principal-Skinner:

I don't know about this one chapos. I mean, can you imagine what it would be like to live under a dictatorship? They'd probably do crazy shit like ban bodily autonomy, ban protesting, make it illegal to criticize regimes that are in league with the dictator, ban mass communication platforms, crack down on immigration, allow friendly corporations to operate their own mafias they'd use to kill whistleblowers, and just generally crush poor and working people. I wouldn't want to live under a rule like that.

I think my favorite narrative I've been hearing regarding these protests, and you heard this a lot in 2020 too, is that all these protestors willing to engage in property violence and physically clash with the police are actually outside agitators. And in this case they're outside agitators occupying a privately owned building, which the media is happy to compare to a private single family home. That's right, protestors occupying a private university building is exactly the same as them occupying your home, you braindead TV consumer you.

Sometimes the 'outside agitator' narrative has merit. I imagine we've all seen videos of obvious police plants trying to rile up people in order to get them arrested. Maybe some of you have witnessed such things in person. I vaguely remember reading that the guy who started the fire that burned down that Minneapolis Police station was actually a chud trying to make things worse. That sort of thing, I guess, really does happen. But it's also such a convenient narrative. "Oh, it wasn't concerned student activists and professors and ordinary people trying to stand against a genocide. It was wild-eyed barbarians, outsiders from outside, and thus all the police violence wielded against these people protesting a genocide was wholly justified."

Stephen King has just started spinning rapidly and even he doesn't know why.

So for years I thought I just didn't like anime as a form. All my friends watch anime. But I tried some of the more popular ones and didn't like any of them. I tried Death Note, and Monster, and Dragon Ball Z. On Brandon Sanderson's recommendation I tried Maria the Virgin Witch. I tried Attack on Titan. I watched some episodes of a random slice of life anime I've never been able to remember the name of. None of them were doing it for me.

Then I found the original GiTS movie. Then Standalone Complex, and the concluding SAC movie. I absolutely loved those. So I googled it to see where I could find more anime like these, and the result I found basically said "the feeble western mind only likes serial cop shows, so we made one and they flocked to it. But it wasn't super popular in Japan so we're not bothering to make more like it." I might have that wrong, but the gist of it was there wasn't anything else out there like SAC.

In the years since of course Netflix has begun releasing their own anime. Though I don't know if it's right to call them anime, really. I guess the look and the animation styles take a lot of cues from anime but as I understand it all those shows are written and created in the West, then they get Korean animation studios to actually make the shows. If that counts as anime then isn't The Simpsons also anime? But you know, Castlevania, DOTA: Dragon's Blood, Cyberpunk: Edgerunners, Blue-Eye Samurai.

All good shows, or at least I think so, but all written by Westerners aimed at Westerners. So even though I like those anime, or maybe anime-adjacent Western animation depending on how you look at it, I still feel like I don't really like anime. Before those shows started being made the only anime I'd found that I'd liked was GiTS and the original Full-Metal Alchemist. Kinda interested in trying out older stuff like Bubblegum Crisis or Legend of the Galactic Heroes. And on paper I should like Berserk, though I haven't tried it yet. Been meaning to read the manga and haven't gotten around to it yet.

But I have been watching Delicious in Dungeon and really liking it.

I don't play games. I just plow.

To make the joke work I'd have to play some sort of online farming sim, and I don't even know if there is such a game. I play Medieval Dynasty sometimes, which has farming in it, and it has a co-op mode, so it's an online game. See, perfect joke.

I still go back and watch the cinematic trailer for Wrath of the Lich King sometimes. I've never even played the old RTS warcraft games, but when I saw that trailer on our satellite TV back in 2008 I thought it was the most incredible thing I'd ever seen and had to play the game. Because of the strength of that ad I've given blizzard hundreds of dollars over the years. I even bought some the ancillary media. I saw the movie they put out like five times. I didn't even like it that much. When they put out lorebooks a few years ago I bought those even though I hadn't been a regular WoW player for a number of years and even though I've come to despise WoW's approach to lore and storytelling. And all of that off the back of one incredible advertisement.

Hell, even as a long time D&D player there's an alternate world where BG3 just isn't on my radar if they never release a cinematic trailer. It'd just be a game that the slightly annoying gays, tumblr users, and the people who are too into Critical Role won't stop talking about.

In the good old days people like this would've been driven from the tribe and left to starve come winter.