Odd rock 4.1 billion miles away

Another robot beyond the outer reaches of the solar system finds a funny-looking rock, and sends back pictures.

It zipped by at high speed and quickly gathered 50 gigabits of data, which is slowly trickling back to us — it’ll take two years to transmit the whole data set. I guess they’re still using AOL dialup out there in the Kuiper belt.

This rock is so distant and in such an empty part of interstellar space that we’ll have no reason and no opportunity to ever visit it again — so look while you can, this is probably the last time human beings will ever see it.

Attitude readjustment

This has not been a good day. I could not take a shower, because our pipes froze (but only the hot water pipe to the bathroom; it was something like -20°C when I got up). Then I discovered the snowplows had sealed off my driveway and the sidewalk with a dense wall of snow, so I had to go out and clear that in the frigid weather. I went in to work for a few hours, and when I came back, the whole house reeked of gas — to be on the safe side, we called the gas company to check it out, but then it turned out that something had cracked in our snowblower, and it had dumped a whole tank of gas in our garage. That’s going to need repair before the next storm.

Everything sucked, basically.

Clearly, the problem is that I posted something cynical and grumpy about this stupid New Year thing, so the calendrical deities are smiting me for dissing the whole concept of “resolutions”. My attitude is the problem. I have to appease the gods of karma now. I must…

OK, I resolve to be more cheerful and less negative. I shall fantasize that Trump and Stephen Miller will start by nibbling each others toes, and choke to death by playing Ouroboros ending in ass-ophagy. This will be the year that global climate change ends, Pewdiepie, Milo, and the Kardashians are forgotten and ignored, the Catholic church goes bankrupt, and everyone realizes that video games are more entertaining than church. I will smile now and then.

Good enough, O Inimical Universe? Curse lifted?

2019

Do you really believe that one arbitrary moment in an arbitrary day of the year represents a kind of metamorphic transition in the state of reality? Because it doesn’t. Changing a digit on your calendar doesn’t do a single significant thing. The chaos of yesterday continues unchanged into the chaos of today. If you were fucked in 2018, you’re still fucked in 2019.

Only difference is that now you might have a hangover.

I find it helpful to go into a new year with the most dismal expectations — just assume the trajectory we’re on will continue, unless we do something. And a “resolution” is not an accomplishment.

End-of-year spider report

Quick update, nothing exciting. The colony has been cleaned up and fed, I’ve got an egg case made on 27 December that I am not touching at all, other than to move it to chamber that I’m maintaining at a constant temperature and moderate humidity. With any luck, I’ll have spiderlings by the end of the week.

I’m still hanging on tenterhooks, though. I’m down to ONE (1) male, who gets rotated around to each of the vials (except to Vera’s — she’s a male-eater). I’m hoping a) he doesn’t get eaten, and b) I get a viable egg sac, otherwise I’m not going to have any embryos until the weather warms up and I can find new spiders around town. To get a sustainable colony, I’m thinking I have to get up to around 50ish adults, which is easily doable.

Cannibalism: the thought experiment

This guy was in a terrible motorcycle accident that mangled his foot so terribly that it had to be amputated. So he took it home and made tacos from the meat, and served it (with their knowledge and consent) to ten of his friends.

Huh. Interesting.

I wondered what I would do if a friend offered to serve me a meal made with bits of himself. I think I’d be willing, and most of my reservation would be from the practice of ethical vegetarianism. But then I’d think that much of my reason for cutting back on meat is to reduce the load humans place on the environment, and what could be more environmentally-minded than eating people? So I’d probably go along with it for the novelty.

If it was my own limb…no, I wouldn’t go this route. I’d be disappointed if I didn’t taste good, especially since I expect some exquisite marbling of my flesh, and I think I’d be tender. I don’t need one more thing to be held in judgment over me, though.

No, I know exactly what I’d do in this situation that I would hope I never experience. Dermestid beetles would get a good meal. Then degreasing and bleaching. Then I’d rearticulate it and mount it on a tasteful frame and hang it on my office wall.

What else would you do with a piece of you? Bury it and let it rot? Burn it?

What do you think of Elizabeth Warren announcing her candidacy?

I think it’s good. I don’t know if I want her as president yet, but declaring an intent to run means we can discuss what a Democratic presidency should mean, and that other candidates will be jockeying for policy positions relative to hers, and maybe a compelling vision will gel by the time of the primaries. A battle over what our government should do should sharpen the field…as long as it doesn’t descend into a contest over who hates Trump more.

Because I think I’d be a contender in that contest, and I’d be a terrible president.

Louis CK is attempting a comeback

And he’s getting worse, taking a big fat dump on his former fans. He’s gone full on Dennis Miller, throwing out bullying conservative crap.

He bemoans how younger people will tell him, in relation to gender identification, that he has to use specific pronouns preferred by the person. They’re like royalty! he said. They tell you what to call them. ‘You should address me as they/them, because I identify as gender-neutral.’ Oh, OK. You should address me as ‘there’ because I identify as a location. And the location is your mother’s cunt.

I listened to a chunk of it, and seeing it written down does not communicate the full awfulness of it. He affects a stereotypical ‘effeminate’ gay voice when he’s stating what those terrible young people are saying. It’s cheesy, low humor that isn’t even creative — people have been making these same stupid pronoun jokes for decades.

The closest he comes to topicality is to complain about the Parkland shooting survivors. How dare they complain about getting shot at? They’re supposed to be in a basement fingering each other and doing jello shots like he did as a teenager.

They testify in front of Congress, these kids? What are they doing?, he said. You’re young, you should be crazy, you should be unhinged, not in a suit… you’re not interesting. Because you went to a high school where kids got shot? Why does that mean I have to listen to you?… You didn’t got shot, you pushed some fat kid in the way, and now I’ve gotta listen to you talking?

Fortunately, I don’t have to listen to Louis CK talking — he’s dead to me. Even if he were to reverse course on this ugly trajectory he’s taking, this trash won’t be forgotten. He’s a conniving opportunist looking for an ever uglier audience to give him money. If you do track down the recording of this set, be prepared to be appalled at the audience — they’re shrieking like happy hyenas at the cheap shots and bigotry.

He might actually succeed, in other words.

It’s sad, too. He had the choice of the hard, slow, slog towards earning redemption, or the fast, cheap, easy path of pandering to deplorables. It’s clear what he has chosen to do.

The truth is, and we’re self-aware enough to admit it, that in the conversation about the paths to a comeback we’re talking about with so many male celebrities, Louis C.K. may have had the easiest one. The work he has created, be it Louie or his stand-up, is so celebrated by liberal, progressive critics that there would likely have been an eager leap to forgiveness had he handled the aftermath with any sort of contrition, education, campaigning or awareness.

Instead, we’ve been greeted by smugness, pettiness, offensiveness, and frustration, the kind that signals nothing learned—when the base level for some of our forgiveness is anything learned—and a pandering to the kind of community that will cheer his ignorance and amplify his message.

He’s had the opportunity to champion a lesson that leads us forward in this conversation. It may not be an opportunity he volunteered for, but he’s now obligated to perform the community service. And he’s not just ditching it. He’s rejecting it completely.

Another harm he has done is that at least some comedians have worked hard to do the respectable work of afflicting the comfortable — of satire as a tool to put authoritarians in their place. He has joined the well-populated ranks of comedians who blame “PC culture” for killing their acts, rather than that punching down is cowardly. We live in an ugly oligarchy/kleptocracy where inequities are everywhere, where there’s no shortage of targets for good satire, where the wealthy are investing in anti-science demagoguery and race-baiting, and if you choose to avoid the obvious and take nothing but cheap shots against oppressed minorities and helpless kids, then you are bringing all of comedy into disrepute.

If you do listen to that Louis CK set, that’s what you’ll hear: he’s “getting paid to make a bunch of drunk people laugh”, like the guy in the audience who, when Louis CK says he’s going to mock the Parkland survivors, yells “FUCK THEM!”

If stand-up comedy is nothing but bigots shilling for homophobia, transphobia, and racism, well then…fuck them.

Someone actually gets it

I’ve had people describe me as a far-left radical, which makes me blush…I’m honestly not that far our there. And I know a lot of university people, they tend not to be extremists. This comment is accurate.

You have to have drunk deeply of the wackaloon-right kool-aid to think university faculties are hot-beds of radicalism. Our students tend to be more pissed off at the system than we are.