Find your gender-swapped persona!

Snapchat has this new gender swap feature, where it will modify your photo by applying filters to fit certain gender stereotypes. I do not use snapchat, and this one feature does not interest me at all, so I haven’t tried it (but I’m sure I’d be lovely if I did).

But then I ran across this: 99 D&D Female Character Art Pieces. They’re fabulous! Some amazing art in there. For a moment, though, I felt that twinge of regret that I, a male, am not represented at all in that collection.

(Pause for a moment to give all the women out there a chance to smirk and say “Oh you poor dear. Now you know how it feels, white man.” Fair enough.)

But then I had an idea: forget Snapchat, can you gentlemen find a gender-swapped version of your ideal D&D self in that collection? Mine was easy to spot — I couldn’t be that lean, grim warrior archetype. This would be me:

Your turn. Link to your fantasy gender-swapped self-image in the comments.

Here’s an equivalent Fantasy Art Males page so the women can play, too!

History can be horrifying

Case in point: that time when human fat was a valuable commodity.

Whether procured from plant, animal, or human sources, in one form or another fat has been an important element in the European pharmacopoeia since ancient times. For reasons that are not quite clear, a medicinal interest in human fat was especially pronounced in the 16th and 17th centuries. In 1543, the physician Andreas Vesalius instructed anatomists who boiled bones for the study of skeletons to carefully collect the layer of fat “for the benefit of the masses, who ascribe to it a considerable efficacy in obliterating scars and fostering the growth of nerves and tendons.” Vesalius knew what he was talking about. At the time, human fat was widely considered—and not just by “the masses”—to be efficacious in healing wounds, and was typically harvested from the recently deceased. In October 1601, after a particularly bloody battle during the Siege of Ostend, Dutch surgeons descended upon the battlefield to return with “bags full of human fat,” presumably to treat their own soldiers’ wounds.

Yikes. Let’s go kill some people, and then smear their bloody greasy bits on any injuries we might receive. I’d normally think that shooting medics was an evil act, but what do you do when you watch their doctors descend on your friendly fallen to rip out their guts?

Once you got home, you’d find there was an active trade in the bodies of executed criminals, and any other dead people they could get their hands on, to sell in the local drugstore.

The wise druggist kept large supplies of human fat (Axungia hominis) on hand alongside numerous other solids and liquids derived from human corpses, a class of materia medica known as “mummy.” If fortune smiled on the fat trade when the rate of executions increased, it would have been positively beaming during the Terror days of the French Revolution. According to some reports, certain Parisian butchers started offering their customers an exciting new item: graisse de guillotiné, supposedly procured from the corpses of the freshly executed.

I wonder if Walgreens has any in stock? In a capitalist economy, creating a demand for graisse de guillotiné might actually make billionaires worth something to humanity.

There’s obviously an alien inside that twitchy skin bag

Back in the early 1990s, I lived in King of Prussia and worked in North Philadelphia, at Temple University. It was a hellishly bad decision to live there, but we had had to find an apartment from a long distance away, and all the information we had to go on was that King of Prussia had excellent schools for our kids, and so we ended up living next door to the biggest mall in the country. That was bad enough, but the killer was the commute. I’d have to get up at 5am, very quietly so as not to disturb the kids, have a light breakfast, and then go catch a bus for my voyage down the River Styx Schuylkill Expressway.

There’d often be some downtime — gosh, I’m ready, but I’ve got 20 minutes to catch the bus. It’s not as if I could get any work done. My eyes would be glazed, I’d be sucking down coffee with trembling hands, I’d sit as one lost in the desolation of hell. So I’d flip on the TV, with the volume down low. There was nothing on at that hour but cheesy infomercials and one thing: Kenneth Copeland, or as I liked to think of it, the Creepy Puppet hour.

It was perfect for my state of mind. I was too tired to manage any kind of coherent thought, but Kenneth didn’t provide any. What he did do, with his beady little eyes and leather skin, was provide a mesmerizing exhibition of weird random facial expressions: smiling by making a huge toothy grimace, glowering by scowling and lowering his eyebrows that his eyes almost disappeared, and changing his expression at a manic pace with almost no association with the point he was making. I thought of him as a creepy puppet because when you’ve watched him a while, you begin to realize that there’s no one there, that there’s an alien persona or personas inside his head trying to mimic human responses, and thinking they’ll be more convincing the more extreme they are.

Years later, I’d get the same impression from Andy Serkis’s performance as Gollum. This is what a psychopath looks like, trying to pass as normal in public.

Now you can watch the same alien in action. A reporter from Inside Edition caught him between flights on his expensive private jet and asked him some questions about his lavish lifestyle. It’s horrific watching the animatronics struggling with limited, but exaggerated, expressions and phrases to talk with a human.

I never watch Kenneth Copeland’s gospel show anymore. I no longer need to get in the right frame of mind for a commute on the Schuylkill. Praise the Lord!

Perfectly on point for Wenatchee

Every state has a little Florida Man in it. In Wenatchee, Washington, Cameron Wilson was carrying a gun in his front pocket — we’re already in the territory of Bad Ideas — when it went off and sent a bullet ripping through his testicles.

Upon arriving at the hospital, a doctor was operating on the gunshot wound when a balloon of marijuana slipped out of Wilson’s anus, court records show, according to the report.

So he was smuggling marijuna in his rectum, in a state where marijuana is a legal drug. That’s just brilliant.

I grew up in the lush, cosmopolitan, progressive Western side of Washington, and it’s terrible to say, but Mr Wilson is representative of how we saw the Eastern half of the state, which was the domain of conservative ranchers, feral teenagers, and a thriving drug trade. And now, there’s a proposal to split Washington in two! It makes sense at a cultural level — East and West are very different places — but it makes no sense at all that Eastern Washington would want it. They’d lose all the economic benefits of sharing resources with the wealthy Puget Sound region, and they’d no longer be able to check the more progressive policies that come out of Seattle. They’d be a poor, arid, politically weak rump of a state.

Worse, the proposal is coming from Matt Shea, a Christian Identitarian who wants to wage Biblical war on sodomites, atheists, communists, and heretical Christians (“Biblical war” means, to him, killing any man who resists and taking their women and children as slaves), and who was divorced for spousal abuse, and who organized and led a hate group in Spokane. He’s completely wackaloony.

Shea claims his breakaway state of Liberty would rival Texas in prosperity. Except, or course, that Eastern Washington lacks oil or a seaport or much of anything in the way of industry or trade. They do have cows. And sagebrush. Pretty scenery. Rocks.

Oh, and real estate and a massive nuclear waste site.

And though Liberty would have far fewer people, it would gain national political clout and rival or surpass many other Western states in population and wealth. It would be larger than Montana, Wyoming and the Dakotas. It would continue to capture billions of federal dollars to clean up the Hanford nuclear site.

It’s also populated with people who shoot their balls off. The kind of people who would vote for Matt Shea.

Comrades! To the barricades…errm, the Dairy Queen!

When Black Lives Matter took to the streets and inconvenienced white folks trying to get to the mall or cost truckers time and money, people complained that this was an inappropriate way to protest. They never seemed to realize that that was the point.

“Our purpose is to disrupt people’s routine, and disrupt their peace,” coalition leader Brandi Grayson said. “Because racism is very inconvenient for people who have to live with it in their day-to-day life, whether in school or in work. It’s very inconvenient. And it’s very disruptive. So we, in a sense, want to give people a glimpse of that.”

When teachers demonstrate and strike to protest salaries and working conditions, you can rely on a Betsy DeVos to complain that they shouldn’t strike during school hours.

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos suggested Monday that teachers hold demonstrations over issues such as compensation during “adult time” so they don’t cause harm to students by disrupting educational hours.

“I think it’s important that adults have adult disagreements on adult time, and that they not ultimately hurt kids in the process,” DeVos said when asked if she supported teacher strikes at the Education Writers Association national seminar in Baltimore, according to The Associated Press.

Well, you see, Betsy, if they don’t disrupt the work you are paying them poorly to do, you won’t feel any incentive to change their working conditions…ah, Christ. No one’s going to get through to that dimbulb. But the point is to wake people up to the vital work they’re doing, not to make continued neglect easy.

There are two kinds of people out there. The ones who won’t cross a picket line, or will get out of their car to join a Black Lives Matter protest, and the complacent ones who are more outraged at a 15 minute delay in getting to The Gap or having to make arrangements to accommodate keeping the kids at home (which can be a difficult sacrifice, I will admit), then they are at endemic racism or that teachers have to pay out of pocket to buy supplies to teach their kids.

Now the complacent ones have got a new complaint. People are throwing milkshakes at fascists, bigots, white ethnostate advocates, neo-Nazis, and preening political assholes. Oh, dear. Suddenly they have discovered a sense of empathy for white fascists that they never had for their victims.

Seth Andrews is unhappy with this development. It’s childish to act against scum.

The guy who is really over the top is Sam Harris, who sees these as practice runs for assassinations.

Harris, of course, is the guy who wouldn’t go anywhere without a security team, who’d show up for conferences with armed burly guys in the wings; even when he flew to Australia, he had a security guard escort him on the plane. It was comical. That was at a time when I was getting daily death threats in my mail, was showing up for events without fear, and Mr Paranoid needed a big man with a gun to keep him safe. You know, Richard Dawkins was showing up at these conferences sans bullet-proof vest and a SWAT team, and he was always a far bigger target than Harris.

But the important point is that people of principle are beginning to escalate, still not doing real physical harm against opponents who have shot people, murdered them with cars, or dispatched roving gangs to assault people on the street. They are throwing dairy products or eggs.

Good.

For years, people who write about the dangers of the right have been belittled as “keyboard warriors”, myself included. I could easily write ten thousand words about the villainy of fascism, and be mocked for not actually doing anything that these vermin would care about — they’ll continue on their merry, vicious way no matter how many pleading op-eds beg them to stop, or exhort opponents to vote. But let a few people rise up and actually piss off a bigot, let them act to express their righteous anger, and suddenly a subset of the people who profess sentiments in favor of the Left are whining, piously deploring that matters have escalated and decrying action.

Too late. The escalation occurred when Nazis marched, chanting anti-semitic slogans and appearing on the news calmly calling for genocide, and when they used clubs, guns, and vehicles to injure and kill protesters. That was when we needed violence to be stopped. Now is when public condemnation has to be loud and undeniable, when those who foster violence need to be shamed and exposed, by people who also reject the use of violence. A thrown milkshake is an effective tool to denounce the monsters in our midst.

What these critiques misunderstand is why milkshaking is so potent against Farage and his brethren: It humiliates them. Nothing animates the far right or shapes its worldview quite so much as the desire to humiliate others—and the fear of being humiliated themselves. It’s why alt-right trolls, projecting their own sexual insecurities, enjoy calling their opponents “cucks.” It’s why they rally around blustery authoritarian figures like Donald Trump who cast themselves as beyond embarrassment, shame, or ridicule. They brandish humiliation like a weapon while craving release from it.

Getting doused in a milkshake robs far-right figures of the air of chauvinistic invulnerability that they spend so much time cultivating. They hunger to be taken seriously despite their racist views. They want to be described as dapper, to be interviewed on evening news broadcasts and weekend talk-show panels, and to be seen as a legitimate participant in the democratic process. Most politicians to the left of Enoch Powell would brush off milkshaking as a harmless stunt. For those seeking mainstream legitimacy, it’s another searing reminder that they don’t belong.

It’s also not dismissable as mere virtue signaling, because smearing bad people with dairy products has a cost: the fascists come with thugs who will beat you bloody, and it does have legal repercussions. The people who stand up and embarrass these dangerous extremists are goddamn heroes, as are the protesters who walk out and block freeway traffic for a cause, or the union members who sacrifice their livelihood to better the lives of their comrades.

The people who clutch their pearls and whimper at the effrontery of defying the status quo, on the other hand, are goddamn useless cowards.

Has everyone figured out that Musk is charlatan yet?

Elon Musk proudly announced the great achievement of his Boring Company.

The video compares one car driving in traffic to a specific destination, with a Tesla driving through a specially built tunnel with no traffic to the same destination. We are supposed to be impressed that the car on a solitary dedicated path won.

Yes, for those keeping score, in a mere two years we’ve gone from a futuristic vision of electric skates zooming around a variety of vehicles in a network of underground tunnels to—and I cannot stress this enough—a very small, paved tunnel that can fit one (1) car.

The video’s marketing conceit is that the car in the tunnel beats a car trying to go the same distance on roads. You’ll never believe this, but the car that has a dedicated right of way wins. Congratulations to The Boring Company for proving dedicated rights of way are important for speedy transportation, something transportation planners figured out roughly two centuries ago. I’m afraid for how many tunnels they’ll have to dig before they likewise acknowledge the validity of induced demand.

He has apparently scaled down his vision of a high speed “hyperloop” to just this, a car in a fixed, unidirectional tube. It’s kind of like mass transit, except they’ve dropped the “mass” part — everyone gets their own personal subway tunnel.

Man, he’s like a super-duper megagenius or something.

Project for the day

We’re getting close. This week I’m training some students (and myself) in spider classification, and then the week after we’re going to start charging into local residences to sample spider populations, with the goal of getting an estimate of the distribution of synanthropic species and making a baseline measurement of how their numbers change over the summer. So today I’m making signs that we’ll hang up around town to get volunteers.

I’ll be curious to see if my phone starts ringing madly or if I get nothing but silence — I don’t expect a lot of enthusiasm in the community for someone finding spiders in their homes, but maybe they’ll be curious. If I get no response, my backup plan is to show up in some neighborhoods and do some good old-fashioned door knocking.

This isn’t the only project I’ll have going this summer — we’re also going to do some laboratory work with developing P. tepidariorum. Anyway, I’m about to get busy.

The last thing an ark-builder would think about is rain damage

Hah. Answers in Genesis is pissed off because their insurance didn’t cover rain damage.

Ark Encounter, which unveiled the 510-foot-long model in 2016, says that heavy rains in 2017 and 2018 caused a landslide on its access road, and its five insurance carriers refused to cover nearly $1 million in damages.

In a 77-page lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court, Ark Encounter asks for compensatory and punitive damages.

A million dollars in damages…I think maybe God was sending them a warning.