Yeth, Mithtrethth, I live to therve.

Yesterday, I fed my spiders waxworms, and they went mad for them. Their cages were festooned with dead or paralyzed grubs, and the spiders were sucking out their guts. It was all very charming. Today, though, I come in to find cages littered with blackened corpses, the effects of all that necrotic venom and digestive enzymes. Yuck. All of the spiders were bloated and engorged and had retreated to shadowy corners to digest. Except one, that was eager to use all her energy for a new purpose: Trillian made an egg sac! I just had to record her proud moment.

They’re such sweet little monsters.

Tomorrow, I get to clean out the decaying corpses. I’m feeling a bit like an Igor now.

You’ll have to come and get me, coppers!

I just got an email from the campus police — they want me to come in for questioning. I’m in trouble now!

I am investigating a complaint levied by a student group in which several posters were taken down in the tunnel between the Science Building and Student Center. During this investigation your name has come up as someone with involvement in the incident. I was hoping that you would be willing to come to the police department office to speak with me regarding this matter. This is voluntary and you are under no obligation to answer my questions but I am giving you the opportunity to respond to some of the things that I have found. Thank you for your time.

This is all about the hate signs posted by the College Republicans all over campus. They have been a bone of contention: they’ve been torn down, put back up again, new signs put up, people have been scribbling messages like “Fuck you” on them, it’s been a roller coaster of low key stupidity.

Apparently, the College Republicans/North Star contingent have been telling the police they suspect it’s all my fault — which is silly, there’s a broad consensus among most of the students and faculty that these trolls are posting garbage — and trying to get the police to pester me. I’ve been here before, gone into the campus police station, been questioned, and then released because they had absolutely no grounds for the accusation. That then led to Comma making incessant demands that they release the criminal investigative data for [my] vandalism of a UMM newspaper, so it really wasn’t worth it. My response this time was short and sweet.

Oh, not this nonsense again. These students have no evidence that I’ve done anything, so no, I am not at all interested in giving their claims a moment of my time.

On second thought, maybe I should talk to the police about this ongoing baseless harassment.

HIS EMAILS THO

The latest totally unsurprising scandal: emails from Stephen Miller to Breitbart reveal that he is a flaming racist. He loves confederate flags, Calvin Coolidge, eugenics, and racist novels. He was trying to shape the coverage at Breitbart, which was just fine with the editors there, who are just as racist as Miller.

McHugh told Hatewatch that Breitbart editors introduced her to Miller in 2015 with an understanding he would influence the direction of her reporting. For that reason, and because Miller would have regarded her as a fellow traveler of the anti-immigrant movement, McHugh sometimes starts conversations with Miller in the emails, seeking his opinion on news stories. Other times, Miller directly suggests story ideas to McHugh, or tells her how to shape Breitbart’s coverage. Periodically, Miller asks McHugh if he can speak to her by phone, taking conversations offline.

“What Stephen Miller sent to me in those emails has become policy at the Trump administration,” McHugh told Hatewatch.

Miller still has his job and the support of our president.

Oh, and did you know that Facebook still regards Breitbart as a high quality news source?

Facebook’s launch of a new section on its flagship app dedicated to “deeply-reported and well-sourced” journalism sparked immediate controversy on Friday over the inclusion of Breitbart News, a publication whose former executive chairman explicitly embraced the “alt-right”.

Basically, the KKK is now running the country and major media outlets. Are you OK with this?

Feeding time for the spiders today

Apparently, I’ve been starving my poor babies, because I showed up with a big new menu item for lunch and those spiders were on it, pumping these waxworms full of venom and chowing down on maggoty soup. Yum!

A few details: the spider is named Selena, she’s from San Antonio, Texas, and her species is Steatoda triangulosa. The victim is a waxworm from a bait shop in Alexandria, Minnesota. All was recorded with a Canon t5i and a Tokina 100mm f/2.8 macro lens (hint: don’t use the autofocus on this, it’s slow and noisy, and doesn’t track little spiders well). Selena wasn’t special, all the spiders in my colony reacted with this kind of zeal to the plump bounty dropped in their laps.

Today on the Twitters…

You might want to look in on the official University of Minnesota Morris twitter account today, where Rob Denton is describing a day in the life of a new biology professor and discussing his weirdly sexual salamanders. Also a good idea: check out the Denton Lab instagram account to see pretty pictures of charismatic animals. I’m not talking about his students, although they are lovely, but all the cuddly slimy vertebrates.

There’s also a PZ Myers instagram account, but it’s just full of spiders. Somehow, people aren’t very appreciative of anything that can be described as “full of spiders”. It’s an injustice.

What killed World of Warcraft for you?

I used to play World of Warcraft. I thought it was great fun, but something drove me away, and this article on WoW addiction helped me see what it was.

It really is a rich, well-made, enjoyable game, with lots of challenging stuff and fun stuff. I’d probably still be subscribed and playing it if it were tailored to what they called “casuals”, and if that elitist distinction between “casual” and “hardcore” players hadn’t emerged. I would be rolling my eyes at the accusation that Warcrack was addictive — just manage your life, people! — except that I was seeing more and more artificial goal-setting that was intended to suck players into an addictive vortex.

“I don’t particularly harbor any strong feelings of resentment towards the game itself,” said Nick Peake, who dropped out of college while addicted. “Obviously it is acknowledged to a certain extent as an ‘addictive’ piece of entertainment, but I think to view it purely in those terms belies what an extraordinarily immersive and lovingly crafted game it really is, and risks it being viewed as entirely analogous with other aspects of addiction and gaming, such as the ongoing lootbox/microtransactions debate within the industry in recent years.”

There are parts of World of Warcraft, then and now, that seem, at best, irresponsible. Achievements that could only be earned by spending spectacular amounts of hours playing, designed knowing it would force players to stretch and contort their lives, day in and day out.

But it’s also true that many of the people I talked to who became addicted to World of Warcraft also had trouble with other addictions. The game’s impact wasn’t unique.

Making a great game would mean, to me, that I could log on on a weekend evening and play happily for a few hours. I would still be subscribed if that were a possibility, and Blizzard would be making just as much money from me. It’s a subscription service, so they get the same amount of cash whether I log in once or twice a month, vs. whether I log in daily and grind for 18 hours straight.

I gave up on it when I realized it was catering to the latter crowd, for some unfathomable reason. There were all these setups where you were expected to jump through a bunch of hoops — and it was pretty much the same hoops every day — in order to get some meaningless title or a fancy geegaw or even some indispensable gear that would allow you to keep up with the Joneses.

I even remember the precise moment the game died for me. There was some widget I learned about that I could win by following some mission some panda bear would give me, and all I had to do was talk to it every day for months and months, and it would be mine. I realized that that wasn’t exciting, or fun, or challenging — it was just tedious and repetitive. It sunk in that a lot of the game at that point was just repetition and boring grinds, so I said “Fuck you, panda bear” and unsubscribed instead.

I guess some people get a sense of accomplishment from doing the same thing over and over for tiny rewards, so good for them, they’re well prepared for a life under capitalism. It wasn’t what I was looking for in a fantasy role playing game, though.

What happens when capitalists get their hands on innovation?

Does someone else recall how detested Bill Gates was in the 1970s and 80s? He really didn’t contribute anything to the home computing community other than avarice, trying to claim ownership of BASIC, for instance.

I watched it all happen, as computing got taken over by college dropouts whose goal was to snatch up and lock down and own all the potential that was emerging. Those guys aren’t legends of computer history, more like mediocre businessmen who got lucky and stole ownership. The real contrast is with Jobs, who was all flash and no substance, and Woz, who really is admirable and brilliant (seriously: his code for the drive controller was beautiful and elegant and clean, and blew me away when I started taking it apart).