Good news from the progeny

#2 Son, Connlann, is going to be promoted — he is now a Captain (Promotable), soon to be a Major. Even better, he’s been assigned to a new base. He’s getting out of Texas, yay! And he’s going to be stationed at Fort Lewis, in Washington State.

Now Mary and I have another excuse to visit the Pacific Northwest, once we get vaccinated…which is not imminent. Last date I heard was SEPTEMBER. Yeesh. I guess we’re down near the bottom of some list.

Minnesota disappoints me

The state had a contest to name our fleet of snowplows, and the results demonstrated no creativity at all.

I’m sorry. We should be ashamed and embarrassed. Have you seen the list of Scottish snowplow names?

Amber Snowy
Arctic Angel
BFG Big Friendly Gritter
Blizzard Bear
Chilly Connolly
Darth Spreader
David Plowie
For Your Ice Only
Fred
Gangsta Granny Gritter
Grit A Bit
Grit Expectations
Gritallica
Gritney Spears
Gritter Bug
Grittest Hits
Grittie McVittie
Grittle Mix
Gritty Gonzales
Gritty Gritty Bang Bang
Han Snow-lo
I Want To Break Freeze
Ice Breaker
Ice Destroyer
Ice Queen
Jeremy Brine
Lew-Ice Capaldi
Licence To Chill
Luke Snowalker
Meltin’ John
Mr Plow
Mrs Gritter
My Name’5 Doddie
Nitty McGritty
Penelope Gritstop
Plougher O’Scotland
Polar Bear Explorer
Polar Patroller
Ready Spready Go
Rumble
Salty
Sandy The Solway Salter
Scotland’s Bravest Gritter
Sir Andy Flurry
Sir Grits A Lot
Sir Salter Scott
Slippy McGritty
Snow Bother
Snow Destroyer
Snow Dozer
Snow Trooper
Snowball
Snowbegone Kenobi
Snowkemon Go
Sophie Salt
Spready Mercury
Sprinklebell
Sprinkles
The Golden Great Gritter
The Grittiest Snowman
The Incredible Ice Bear
The Snow Buster
The Snow Solution
The Winter Explorer
True Gritter
Yes Sir Ice Can Boogie

Go back to the drawing board, MNDOT.

Spam filter powers activate!

Got this in my email this morning. Now I’m triggered.

No. I don’t believe a bowl of gummy bears will change my life. I’m going to guess these contain cannabis, but I don’t care enough about my hypothesis to click and check.

The Fox News logo immediately alerted me that this is garbage marketed at old gomers, and I’m not there yet.

Then there’s “AND SO DO THE THE SHARK’S”. Double “the”, inappropriate possessive, and citing Shark Tank, that show about a group of arrogant capitalists? No thank you.

Yikes, another blowup in the SF community

Oh boy, the bad boys are at it again. There was an online forum at Baen Books where, as such things happen, there was a wide-ranging and diverse discussion, which is usually a good thing…except that if the management of the forum is slack, it tends to slide into shabbier and shabbier conversation, and soon enough, it’s overwhelmed with shitposters. Honestly, have we learned nothing in the past couple of decades? If you don’t have rules, if you don’t have active management of the discussion, you inevitably end up with 4chan. And no one wants another 4chan.

A writer, Jason Sanford, blew the whistle on the shenanigans going on there. Remember, this is a site run by a professional publishing house; you’d expect some minimal level of decorum. Instead, they got this:

Baen’s Bar has also become well-known in the genre community as a place where racism, sexism, homophobia and general fascism continually pop up. For example, a Baen’s Bar user from India was nicknamed “The Swarthy Menace” on the forum by author Tom Kratman. People on the forum thought that was the height of clever humor.

Racist comments and innuendos frequently appear in many forum discussions. In a thread last year titled “Soft Civil War & Trump’s Army,” user Captrandy wrote that political conflicts in the USA could be solved if “all the angry and non angry white males should stop going to work for a month or so.” In another political thread, user Pugmak wrote “Simple competence has been declared white supremacy. Knowing how to do your job and expecting others to do likewise is now white supremacy and workplace oppression.”

And that’s just the beginning. Baen Books publishes a number of conservative writers, who have conservative fans, who were all fired up about the events on 6 January and started posting calls to political violence. They were the usual idiots, the usual gun-fondling fantasy warriors.

Returning to discussions on the pending second American Civil War, which appears to a favorite topic on the Bar, user Peke wrote on January 8, 2021, that “I can see a smallish force with good skills at explosive handling, bringing a large city to its knees just through a few well-placed booms at some of the points I mentioned.”

Fortunately, that topic caught the attention of moderators. That’s sarcasm on my part because a few posts after Peke’s comment a moderator named James S Cochrane responded to the pending civil war thread by saying “You aren’t seeing a lot of public commentary because all communications are insecure. But most of the former SpecOps people I know have gone quiet. People who trained for twenty years to lead insurgencies or put rounds on target at a mile plus. The Left has also driven off a lot of cops who couldn’t stomach their behavior, most major cities are seriously understaffed at this point.”

That’s right, it’s a moderated discussion board, but the moderators are also playing with their weaponry with one hand, while typing with the other.

The fallout from this unregulated keyboard militia running amok is that Toni Weisskopf, publisher at Baen Books, and nominal grown-up in charge of the circus, has had her Guest of Honor invitation to Worldcon retracted, and the forum has been shut down, at least temporarily. Sanford is getting harassed with death threats. The usual suspects — the various flavors of puppies — are outraged.

It seems to me that a reasonable action has been taken against irresponsible speech, though. It’s entirely fair to refuse to honor someone who is supposed to be in charge who has not been doing her duty, and has allowed a public space to turn into a cesspit. I haven’t seen any sensible defenses of the behavior that was allowed to flourish on Baen’s forum. I tried; here’s an author named Eric Flint who pointed out (probably correctly) that it was only a few bad actors who were saying the stupid stuff.

This is the “great menace of Baen’s Bar” that Sanford yaps about. A handful of people—okay, two handfuls, tops—most of whom you have never heard of, who spout absolute twaddle. Yes, a fair amount of it is violent-sounding twaddle, but the violence is of a masturbatory nature.

Then he goes on to say that Baen Books publishes stuff by some liberal, left wing authors. Again, I believe him. But no one has been claiming anything different. The problem is that you’ve got this double handful of people posting violent masturbatory twaddle, as he admits, and no one was doing anything about it. It’s a moderated board! Why not kick out the violently masturbating twaddlers and make the whole experience more pleasant and productive for everyone else? That’s the objection, that such garbage was allowed to fester, and whoever was supposed to be running the show wasn’t running the show. The argument that it was a tiny minority of troublemakers is irrelevant if the troublemakers were given free rein.

Imagine a bakery that is shut down by a health inspector who finds rats frolicking in the kitchen. Mr Flint is like the dedicated customer who argues that he really liked their croissants, they used the best ingredients, and there weren’t that many rat droppings in his food. Only a handful, OK, maybe two handfuls of rat turds in his flaky, buttery, delicious croissant, so why are you closing his favorite bakery and fining the owner? I’m not only going to question his reasoning, but his taste, when I suggest that maybe they’d be even better without all the rat poop.

I might be tempted to vote for a Republican who wore one of these

I don’t understand why, but the George HW Bush Presidential Library Gift Shop sells a Wiggle Spider Top Hat for $36.

For some reason, I want one. If I see a $36 donation to my paypal account, I’m going to see that as a sign from the gods that I must order one.

You people! Someone immediately donate $36, so yes, I’ve ordered the Wiggle Spider Top Hat. I guess I’ll have to model it for you all, next week when it arrives.

By the way, my paypal account is currently dedicated to paying off our legal debt, so my generous donor has effectively made a donation to the legal fund, and compelled me to use my credit card to buy a Wiggle Spider Top Hat. That’s just the way it works.

Uh-oh. Now I’m getting the really weeeeird spam

Yesterday, I started getting a small trickle of spam from someone asking desperately if I was the “PZ Leader of Project Zorgo”. They were quite insistent — they sent multiple links to a questionnaire I’m supposed to fill out (I didn’t).

They have a YouTube channel that looks like kids’ game channel — lots of short videos, stylized and phony, but the latest one has a million views, and they have 1.75 million subscribers. Here’s their “about” description.

We are the YouTube Hacker group Project Zorgo. We believe YouTube has become too powerful and is a threat to traditional media. Phase one of our plan is to hack the YouTube trending page and promote unpopular videos from television networks. Phase two is to hack popular YouTuber channels and prevent them gaining more subscribers.

I fear someone may have noticed my initials, and also that I seem to fit the description from phase one perfectly. I have noticed that whenever I post a video featuring spiders my YouTube analytics immediately turn red and the numbers rocket downward, as if I’m self-destructively and intentionally destroying my channel. It’s almost amusing.

Sorry, gang, I never even heard of Project Zorgo until yesterday.

But then, that’s exactly what the “PZ Leader of Project Zorgo” would say.

YouTube, your ads suck

I checked in on my latest video, and the first thing I see is an ad stuck on the beginning, an ad for this nonsense:

It was cheaply made and cheesy, with bad audio and bad lighting and bad video, of a guy going on and on about how this beanie will block 3G, 4G, and 5G electromagnetic waves because it has silver threads woven into it, and how those waves will fry your brain and make you nauseous and sick and cause cancer and who knows what else. It’s pure quackery. Google must be desperate if they’ll sell ads to these kinds of cheap charlatans, and market snake oil to the kind of audience that would watch my cheap & cheesy videos.