A Martian Odyssey, part 1 (fiction)

As we’ve mentioned a few times, we’re having another casual fundraiser this month, and as part of that, we’re doing another fictional story chain. Last time, I got stuck with the chore of providing the concluding chapter of A Dark Web, which involved wrapping up a complicated storyline with gory violent murder and hybrid human-spiders. This time around, I get revenge by starting the thread with a complicated science fiction story about transhumans living on a partially terraformed Mars, and now I get to watch everyone else try to steer the story in unexpected directions (next up: Iris, followed by Abe) and William Brinkman gets to bat clean-up. We’ll have to try a different order in future story threads.

Jump below the fold and get started! Don’t worry, there are far fewer spiders in this one, so far.


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Why do we even have a football program this year?

None of this makes any sense. Our university administration keeps flapping their lips about caution and respect for faculty, staff, and students, while enforcing rules about social distancing and masking in the classroom, and then…oh, we have to keep the football games going! So now disease is sweeping through the football program.

The Minnesota football Gophers have canceled a second consecutive game due to an ongoing COVID-19 outbreak in the program.

U of M Director of Athletics Mark Coyle, University President Joan Gabel and Gophers Medical Director Dr. Brad Nelson made the decision to scrap the Dec. 5 game with Northwestern after consulting with the Big Ten Conference.

The game will not be rescheduled, and is considered a “no contest” as per Big Ten policy.

Since Nov. 19, the football program has experienced 47 positive cases of coronavirus in players and staffers [!!!], the most recent group of 15 diagnosed just Saturday.

Remarkable. We are an educational institution, we’ve compromised on everything to keep the academic mission limping along, and yet we’re risking it all by giving the goddamned athletics department free rein, on top of paying the coaches and AD staff far more money than they do the instructors. We should have just put the whole athletics program on hiatus at the start of the year, and saved money by putting the coaches on half pay for the year (they’d still make more money than I do.)

“The health and safety of our student-athletes, coaches and staff continues to be our main priority,” said Coyle.

Oh, BULLSHIT.

I hope Farhad Manjoo’s family survives the holidays

The NY Times published a dangerously goofy piece by Manjoo that went through the scientific advice that said you should stay home to avoid spreading the pandemic, and then concluded with a mind-boggling declaration that he was going to ignore the evidence and go visit his elderly parents anyway. It’s a bizarre article that starts off informative and smart, and then falls off a cliff into wishful self-delusion. I thought about writing a bit about it, since it’s an incredibly vivid example of smart-stupid.

I’m saved some effort, though, because Rebecca Watson has already dealt with it.

I do hope his family is OK, but I also hope he is now locked down in quarantine before he goes casually gallivanting off to spread his viruses blithely with anyone because he wants to.

What about an online winter celebration?

Freethoughtblogs is doing it again — we’re have another fundraiser, scheduled for 5 December, with various events with the wealth of talent here on our blog network scheduled. Take a look! We’ll be filling in that page with links and YouTube videos as we assemble the various pieces of our day.

One of the events scheduled is an anniversary celebration: it will have been a year since that ridiculous SLAPP suit by Richard Carrier against Amy Frank-Skiba, Stephanie Zvan, me, Freethoughtblogs, and the Orbit collapsed in a cloud of petty stinking pity from that defeated troll, and also a nasty burden of legal debt for us. That’s why we have these fundraisers, so that maybe can all get out from under that, eventually.

Donations are greatly appreciated! You can make PayPal donations to our Freethoughtblogs account or to my personal account — they all go straight to paying off our debt. You can also join my Patreon, and chip in as little as a dollar a month; that’s also being applied entirely to our legal fund.

Happy Mediocre Thanksgiving Grading Day, or whatever

I hope you’re all celebrating by staying in place and not seeing friends and family, and may your holiday be quiet and boring and just like every other day in this endless dreary pandemic. Get used to it. You can use today to practice for the upcoming Dreary Christmas holiday.

My plan is to stay home, plod through a lot of grading, and then this evening fix a nice dinner for my wife and me. That’s kind of it. Black Friday: more grading, although I will be going into the lab to feed the spiders. This weekend: grading. Next week: I’ve opened myself up to my class for Zoom Q&As about their grades while I’m waiting for the final exams to come pouring in next Friday, when the torture grading will resume.

After that, I’ll party! At home, alone.

Almost over…

I’m about to give my last lecture of Fall 2020, so it seems only fitting to share a picture of dinosaurs at their last supper.

I AM DONE. With lecturing, anyway. Still have lots of grading. Also, I told my students I’d continue to log onto Zoom next week at regular class time in case anyone had questions about the take-home final.

Deadly sequels

I was horrified to learn that Ernest Cline had written a sequel to Ready Player One, creatively titled Ready Player Two. The original was one of those books I could not believe got published, it was so badly written and was such a weaponized pile of 80s nostalgia trash, but then Steven Spielberg went and turned into a big budget CGI-rich movie (I have not been able to read the whole novel, or watch more than a few minutes of the movie), and I was shocked yet again. But now Cline has spewed out another. He’s like the Dan Brown of our decade, an inexplicable popular phenomenon that provides a constant stream of bad quotations on the internet.

But there’s an even worse prospect ahead of us: Jordan Peterson is trying to publish Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life..

Jebus. Who knew there was such a large market for shit? And that publishing houses would be so eager to line up and shell out cash for it, in spite of the fact that their employees are up in arms about it?

Four Penguin Random House Canada employees, who did not want to be named due to concerns over their employment, said the company held a town hall about the book Monday, during which executives defended the decision to publish Peterson while employees cited their concerns about platforming someone who is popular in far-right circles.

“He is an icon of hate speech and transphobia and the fact that he’s an icon of white supremacy, regardless of the content of his book, I’m not proud to work for a company that publishes him,” a junior employee who is a member of the LGBTQ community and who attended the town hall told VICE World News.

Another employee said “people were crying in the meeting about how Jordan Peterson has affected their lives.” They said one co-worker discussed how Peterson had radicalized their father and another talked about how publishing the book will negatively affect their non-binary friend.

“The company since June has been doing all these anti-racist and allyship things and them publishing Peterson’s book completely goes against this. It just makes all of their previous efforts seem completely performative,” the employee added.

Of course executives defended the publication! It’s capitalism, it’s all about the money! And of course the employees, who won’t see a penny over their fixed salaries and hourly wages, have the luxury of principles and can protest the unscrupulous decision.

It’s a self-help book by a guy who published an earlier self-help book, and then went on a self-destructive binge of drugs and weird, destructive dieting and ended up in a coma in a Russian clinic trying to cure his own self-harm with radical, expensive treatments. The only question is, did he end up in such a state because he followed his own stupid “rules for life”, or because he’s such a bad guru that he didn’t follow them? Either way, he shouldn’t be paid to dispense advice, and only a fool would listen to him.

It’s too bad that we have tens of millions of fools in 2020 America eager to lap up the corrupt drippings of bad writers.

What color is your engine check light?

I’ve been ambling along, telling myself that I’m OK, I’ve got a plan to get through all this, I’m fine, go away, leave me alone, I’ve got work to do. Maybe I’ve been wrong, though. Maybe I’m just really good at burying my worries. Then I ran into this simple illustration that brought my situation into focus.

I’m looking at my dashboard, and seeing that my engine status is not a solid green at all. It’s more like a solid yellow that occasionally flutters orange as my engine stutters sporadically. If I were a car, I’d be saying we ought to get this thing into the shop to be checked out (and honestly, if I were a car, I’d more likely be saying that we can coax a few more miles out of it and put off the bother of maintenance a little longer.)

I’m also thinking that there are just two things preventing me from crashing into the red.

  • The election was not totally disastrous. If the orange disaster had been re-elected, I’d be panicking that the starboard engine was on fire and the hydraulics have been cut and there’s no way to lower the landing gear — we’re going in for a belly landing in rugged terrain (yes, I’m aware that my metaphor has become airborne, but that’s to make the catastrophe more clear). Putting Biden in office just means I can sputter along in the yellow, not that everything is fixed.
  • The nature of my job is such that I have semesters of overwork separated by longish breaks. Everything is coming to a head in my classes right now, but by next weekend I’ll have the grading all done and can unwind with a lab full of spiders for a month and a half. It’s not quite enough to push my status into the green, because another semester looms beyond that, but it will help stabilize me in the yellow. I don’t think the surges in stress are the best way to teach or the best way to learn, but it’s the system we’ve got.

It does not escape my notice that yellow is not a good condition to be in.

What about you? Is your engine purring, grinding, or bursting into flames?