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.

I don’t know whether I’m mad or stupid

A while back, I volunteered to participate in a university forum on designer babies. It’s happening tonight via Zoom. So I teach a class this morning, have a student doing her capstone experience, a senior seminar, at 1, go in to teach an in-person lab at 2, come home at 5 to have dinner, and then hop online at 7 to experience two philosophers ganging up on one biologist, and when that’s over, prepare for tomorrow’s class.

I’m at least one of those two things in the title, but maybe you can think of a third. Yeah, I’m inviting you to diagnose me and call me names. I need the flagellation.

My day begins again, darn it!

I went to bed last night with bees in my ears. My tinnitus is acting up something fierce, which usually happens when I’m feeling stress, and I regard as a kind of built-in siren telling me things are getting bad and maybe I should slack off a little bit. It’s also a bad sign when you go to sleep half-hoping you don’t wake up again. But I did, and here I am, and there’s all the work I have to do. I would actually have preferred if all of that had died, rather than myself, but we both survived, me and my nemesis.

Anyway, what’s up is that I typically teach what is called a 3-2 load, where one semester is a little heavier than the other. I guess I should say 2-3 in my case, because this spring is my killer, with an extra course to be taught. Further complications: stupid goddamn pandemic. I’m teaching everything online, which involves rethinking everything as I go, basically throwing out 20 years of material or re-writing it. Second complication: we were hit with pandemic rules in the middle of spring term last year, making a hash of this course then, and I’ve been wrestling with how to do it right this time around. So I’m second guessing everything I guessed at last time, and hoping it works better. Third complication: last spring, we just threw up our hands and gave up on the lab, sent all the students home with some sample data, and had them work through the theory. This year, while absolutely nothing has changed vis-à-vis COVID-19 (we’re worse off, if anything), we’ve gone ahead and implemented the lab, with the difference being that each section has been split into three sections to allow social distancing for the students, while greatly expanding my lab load.

I’m feeling it. Boy am I feeling it. We’re only about a quarter of the way through the semester, but I think I aged a decade this past year, so I’m not quite the agile, youthful, enthusiastic teacher I was in 2019.

I think, though, I can get a break by turning play time into a scheduled obligation. That’s my plan for today, anyway. Work all morning on grading, then take an hour or so off at noon to play a video game, then back to the salt mines to finish grading and write a shiny new lecture for class tomorrow. Yeah, that’s all.

At noon today I’ll live-stream a little more No Man’s Sky. I’ve taken advantage of a little loophole in the game’s mechanics (actually, the fabric of the universe in the game is totally broken, and the conservation of mass and energy no longer applies) to make myself a multi-millionaire with no effort at all — it’s not cheating if violations of the laws of thermodynamics are explicitly written into the game rules — and have decided to lounge about in a busy spaceport, watch the pretty starships fly in, waiting for that perfect space truck or space yacht to land, and then muscle in and wave mega-millions under the pilot’s nose and buy it. Standing around doing next to nothing for an hour? I’ll host a little Q&A and talk nerdy while I’m doing it, and y’all can weigh in on which starships you like best. It’ll be relaxing. I need relaxing for a bit.

The plan is to buy a big space truck to hold all my stuff, and maybe a vicious sleek little fighter. Later, like the typical space billionaire I’ve become, I’ll turn to piracy. That’s what all rich people do, right?

Now — back to work. I can get a few dozen exams graded before noon, right?