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?

Venting!

This year is trying to kill my interest in teaching. My work load has basically doubled, since I’m splitting up all my labs into multiple sub-sections to meet the isolation guidelines, and I’m also struggling to provide accommodations to all the students in difficult circumstances (which I need to do, and is part of the job), and my reward is that a) teaching involves trying to engage mute little black squares on a computer screen, and b) the administration occasionally mumbles about trying to find a way to cut my pay, while telling me gosh, what a wonderful job I’m doing. And then telling me we should prepare to continue the pandemic protocols next fall, and that we don’t have any access to a vaccine, and aren’t even remotely in the queue. Right now I’m staring into a growing bleak darkness that is my future. I don’t even have the joy of spidering right now — it’s -35 degrees C out there!

If my first year as a full time teaching professor (1990, but who is counting) had been like this, I’d be working in a software company right now, coding. I coulda been, but I liked students…you know, those entities who are now little black squares on a screen.

At least I can still scream into the glowing pixels of the void before me.