It’s going to be a long semester

Tuesdays I have a morning class and an afternoon lab; sandwiched in between was a discipline meeting. I think I’m plum wore out today.

Just to make it more awful, the first genetics assignment is due tomorrow, and I made an awful hash of it, trying to juggle multiple textbook editions, so the students are all confused. So I made an announcement that the assignment is basically cancelled, ignore everything I said, and I’ll come in tomorrow with a whole new problem set that we’ll work on together. What a mess. I’m exhausted just thinking of sorting it all out.

Dishing out ALL the dirt

Oh, this is going to be fun. Mark your calendar and keep the evening of Sunday 23 February open, because we’re doing a grand celebratory hangout, since we’re finally out from under that ridiculous law suit by Richard Carrier.

By now, you may know that Richard Carrier dropped his remaining SLAPP suits in November. If you read the settlement agreement, you’ll see he even explicitly said we are free to talk about the allegations and the suit without incurring more legal hassle from him. So we’re going to do that.

Save the date for the evening of February 23. We’ve rested, we’ve let the news sink in, and we’re ready to talk. We’ll bring you more news soon as we work out technical details for live streaming and confirm special guests. In the meantime, however, just know that our lips are legally unsealed. We can talk. We will talk.

Yes, we will. We are angry at the unjust and self-servingly stupid behavior by Richard Carrier, and we plan to vent. We have unfair debts imposed on us, and oh boy, are we ready to flame that jerk.

Related: Rebecca Watson has a few words to say about these abusive defamation lawsuits…in this case, about Lawrence Lessig. Fuck ’em all.

A weekend of strangeness in the moviehouse

Over the last few days, I’ve seen a couple of horror movies, one new and one old. The new one is The Color Out of Space, which, unfortunately, is indescribable. Nic Cage is raising alpacas on a farm near Arkham; his neighbor is Tommy Chong, who really leans into the deadhead stereotype. There is a family. For a while. They really come together in confronting the nightmare that has landed in their front yard, which is my way of saying there will be some gruesome body horror. Pity the alpacas. Nic Cage’s mannerisms and accents get weirder as the movie progresses. Tommy Chong finds enlightenment, of a kind of purplish pink wavelength. Everyone dies, but it’s OK, they come back. Wait, that’s not OK. The plot is very Lovecraftian, in the sense that the plot really doesn’t matter at all, it’s just a scenario in which an ordinary family, in the sense of a family that chooses to isolate themselves in rural Massachusetts and milk alpacas is ordinary, get confronted with a malignant cosmic reality that cares nothing for them.

If you liked The Thing, you’ll love this movie. If you enjoy watching Nic Cage acting badly, but with verve, you’ll like this movie. If you watch this movie under the influence of drugs, you’ll probably become one with the movie. If you’re a fan of Cronenberg or Lynch, you’ll want to see this movie. If you like alpacas, you may be profoundly disturbed by this movie. You’ll have to decide for yourself whether you want to see it.

By the way, the color is magenta.

The old movie I watched was The People Under the Stairs. I first saw this one when it came out in the theaters, way back in 1991, when there was a theater around the corner from me in Salt Lake City that would show odd arthouse movies that none of the Mormons would ever go see, but that would appeal to the university crowd. There was a lot of dreck, but two stuck with me: Tetsuo: The Iron Man for its bizarre transformations and horrifying body fluidity, and The People Under the Stairs for it’s remarkably prescient class consciousness.

Here’s a review that spells out the story, but really, it’s obvious: psychopathic rich people control a black neighborhood, taking all the money out of the people’s hands and salting it away in the cellar of their escape-proof, booby-trapped house. They also steal children, and if they don’t behave to their standards, mutilate them and stash them in the cellar, where they’re forced to live on the flesh of burglars. The metaphor is laid on pretty thick, to the point where you begin to wonder if Wes Craven was having prophetic dreams about 2020. Unfortunately, you could see this coming quite clearly in the 80s, so I don’t think he had any magic powers.

Goodbye, Facebook friends. Up yours, Facebook.

I am all done with Facebook. As previously announced, I won’t be posting there any more, because it is a corrupt medium, managed by bad people for evil ends. I can no longer support the company with the tacit approval of my presence, so I am shutting down — my account is still there, and I’ve got a few people on an active project that I’ll still engage with on Messenger, but I won’t post anything new there, and as people forget I exist on Facebook, I’ll eventually kill those as well.

I’m not totally disappearing. I’ll still have an active presence in these places:

Pharyngula on Freethoughtblogs
@PZMyers on Twitter
@[email protected] on Mastodon
PZMyers on MeWe
The Freethoughtblogs server on Discord
PZMyers on Instagram
The Pharyngula IRC channel

Before you tell me that those are flawed, imperfect media too, I agree — I’m just shedding the worst of the worst to start. Maybe eventually I’ll end up in a remote mountain cave, disconnected and unshackled from the bonds of the material world. But not yet!

Picard

I watched the first episode of Star Trek: Picard, and I have mixed feelings.

On the positive side, the humanism is just drooling out of the side of the box. He argues for saving all lives after the enemy’s star went nova, pushes for rescuing even the enemies of the federation, the Romulans, and there’s even some bit about synthetic humans (like Data) and their rights. I like the idea of a show that digs deep into ethical concerns.

On the negative side, there was the usual pointless Trekkie pseudoscience contrived on the spot. Data had a daughter? Who was synthetic, but biological? And the process always creates twins? And Data’s knowledge can be reconstructed from a single neuron? There are teleporting Romulans who want to kill one daughter, but there’s another on a Borg ship? It was too much. Now Picard is somehow getting back on a ship and soaring off to right some wrongs or something, or contrive excuses to bring back old Star Trek actors for guest spots. It’s the first episode, and it’s already too artificial and complicated.

I’ll probably check out a future episode to see how it shakes out, but it looks to me like the stuff I like about Star Trek is going to be overwhelmed by the stuff I detest about Star Trek.

Thursdays will not be my fun days this semester

I am booked up all day long. This is the price I pay for arranging my schedule so my Fridays are free.

Friday will be my fun day, if you can call washing glassware fun. But I do have spiders to feed, and also an assortment of second generation juveniles that will be upgraded to the breeding cages, so there is that. I’ll probably spend most of tomorrow cackling over my empire of arachnids and expanding their domain.

Brings back old memories

There was a shooting in Seattle yesterday, at 3rd & Pine, and I said to myself, “I know that place — that’s where I was shot at!” This was around 1978, and I was often catching a late night bus at 3rd & Pike. This one evening, there was an altercation on Pine; a sex worker (I was there so often I recognized many of the ladies working those corners) was screaming angrily at someone in a car, and I could hear it a block away. Then she pulled out a handgun and started firing away.

She didn’t hit the guy, she didn’t even hit the car. The bullets were coming my way — I’d see a flash and hear a little “tch” sound as they struck the sidewalk near me, followed by a faint “pop” from the gun. I scrambled to hide behind a lamp post, thinking this would be a really stupid way to die, as an unintentional target of an angry woman who couldn’t hit a car ten feet away from her. Honestly, though, it was some small caliber pistol, shots were all over the place — one did make a little “pok” sound when it punched through a store window — even if one hit me by chance, it was unlikely to be lethal. I don’t think her target was hit at all, and he just drove away.

So just like the shooting yesterday, in the same place at least. Except this time the shooter was a bit more heavily armed and went on a far more determined shooting spree: one dead, seven injured, including a 9 year old boy.

We can’t change human nature easily — there will always be angry incidents and violent responses, just as there were in 1978 and 2020. What we could control, if we had the will, was the availability of lethal technology. The shooting yesterday was a product of human nature amplified by deadly weapons that had no place on a civilized city street.

Never cross the streams

I have been sent an attempt to unify my two obsessions: an octopus is just a wet spider.

No. No. NO. I was surprised at how strongly my brain rejected this proposition — my first reaction was to want to scream at the screen, that this is not correct, don’t you know anything about arachnids and cephalopods, my god, you fool, I need to set everything on fire, this is going to simmer in my brain like acid, aaaargh, do I have to write a whole book on this ridiculous idea, how dare you, now I’m going to have counter-arguments reverberating through my skull for at least a week!

It was objectively interesting how being close to something can trigger such a strong reaction to counter-factual nonsense. Sure, you can tell me that baseball is just football with sticks, and I’ll chuckle and move on and forget about it in minutes, but an inappropriate comparison of my two totally independent, incomparable, glorious organisms feels like you just stuck a hand-grenade in my eye socket. I am totally discombobulated.

I’m better now, though. I’ve calmed down. Just don’t say that phrase to me ever again, I might cry.