Batman doesn’t smile enough

It’s true. Read the comics, watch the multitude of movies about him, and Batman almost never smiles. He’s grim. He’s all dressed in dark clothes. He tries to instill fear in his foes.

Apparently, that just wouldn’t work if he were Batwoman. She’d be told to smile all the time.

It’s ridiculous, but that’s the latest controversy over the upcoming Captain Marvel movie — she’s a serious superhero who doesn’t smile enough.

Look at that. Maybe he’d find out where he is if he smiled more, or offered the snitch some cookies.

Now look at this Captain Marvel person. Terrifying.

Don’t get me started on that Wonder Woman movie. She seems to take the whole World War I scenario way too seriously. No wonder that movie totally bombed.

Atheist “comedians” joining the ranks of conservative “comedians” — not so funny any more

There is a new Contrapoints video, and it’s about comedy, as you can tell from the title, “The Darkness”. I think there were some insightful ideas in there, in particular the argument that edgy humor comes from exploring ones own place of darkness with familiarity and detail, and that one way that “edgy” comics fail is that they try to describe someone else’s darkness, while being completely unfamiliar with the terrain. She uses as an example Ricky Gervais, who made a Netflix comedy special where the opening was about mocking trans people. He identifies as a chimp rather than an attack helicopter, and there — I’ve just revealed the sole scrap of originality and creativity in the whole routine.

It’s a good point, and a different way of looking at the whole “punching up” vs. “punching down” distinction. In part the problem is comedians who babble on promoting their audiences’ prejudices rather than using humor to expose a truth.

Anyway, she also briefly expresses scorn at the privileged, white, atheist male comedian who can’t even see the place of pain they are invested in scoring points against. Ricky Gervais is a great example — there’s a loud and proud atheist who has become a terrible scab marring the movement. I thought of another example, too: a prominent cringe-beast whose flaws were obvious from the very beginning. I speak of Bill Maher, the unwatchable one, the Friday night affliction on HBO. And just by coincidence, I ran across an entertaining criticism of Maher.

Bill Maher, like Kevin Smith movies, was a vice that I could excuse in my teens and 20s but now seems extremely dated, disconcertingly bro-ish, and just all-around embarrassing. As Maher himself would surely explain, in a gratingly patronizing tone, the whole point of Politically Incorrect was to push the envelope. Though much of the time the show was actually pretty tame, unless you consider Carrot Top and Tom Arnold making jokes about home-schooled kids to be the height of edgy television. But there were other moments from Politically Incorrect that remain genuinely provocative, and not in a good way — like when Maher explained to a black woman that the n-word was acceptable for white people to use because you hear it so much in rap songs. Now there’s an argument you could imagine Rush Limbaugh making today.

When you watch that clip, it seems clear that Maher was always a jerk, rather than evolving into a jerk later on. Now I’m wondering, was he ever funny? As a stand-up comic, Maher is generally respected as a legacy act. But on Real Time, he can be painfully, excruciatingly unfunny. Maher might want to believe that people object to his jokes because they’re social justice warriors who can’t take a shot of unvarnished truth. But the actual substance of his humor doesn’t support that belief.

There are still some great atheist comedians out there — George Carlin was mostly hilarious, Eddie Izzard is still worth listening to. But I think we’re beginning to see the genre eroding into the Dennis Miller swamp.

Related:

How do you quantify “artistic standards” like that?

So much missing the point

I like this little comic.

Don’t read the comments though, unless you like to watch target shooting where everyone misses. Lots of people nitpicking and arguing that “But Movie X was a bad movie” — which doesn’t matter. Most of the stuff churned out by Hollywood is objectively bad, a lot of bad movies may be subjectively enjoyable, and the point of this comic is that the gatekeepers who want to tell you what you should like should be ignored. Like what you like, let other people like what they like.

I feel for my students now

Today was the day I set for myself to complete all the online coursework required to qualify for IRB certification, since I’m concerned that some of my proposed spider research might require approval. The fact that the work is on spiders isn’t a problem (it was weird discovering that invertebrates don’t seem to count as “animals”), but that I’m planning to survey people’s — you know, human beings’ — homes might be of some concern. I’m dotting those i’s and crossing those t’s to make sure.

Anyway, I hadn’t realized what a painful slog it was going to be. Lots of the modules have these little staged videos illustrating cases of problematic behavior. I’ve already decided that I hate Smarmy Grad Student and Smug PI so much. I have to take a little quiz after each module, too, which are usually easy, but the ones on financial reporting put me to sleep, and jeez, I had to take an online cours in Export Controls and Economic Sanctions which was 90% acronyms, I think. For instance, my work has to comply with the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR), which is going to put a real crimp into my nefarious plans for spiders.

Now it’s done, at least, and my brain is only bleeding a little bit.

Did you expect brand loyalty from a spider?

No one is surprised, instead all the arachnologists are thinking “Cool!” Scientists in the Amazon captured a video of a mygalomorph spider chowing down on a young mammal. Mygalomorphs (tarantulas, funnel web spiders, trap door spiders) are big arthropods that will kill and eat anything about their size that they can ambush, so they’ll eat other arthropods, small birds, reptiles, and yes, mammals.

You probably shouldn’t eat ET

Charlie Jane Anders says that if we meet intelligent Space Aliens, we’d probably try to eat them (and we shouldn’t). I agree, because people are horrible, but I also think we shouldn’t because at the least we’re going to get Space Diarrhea, but we’re probably just going to get Space Death.

Anyway, I made a video. Unfortunately, I didn’t script it, but just charged off extemporaneously, which means it ended up about an hour long. Sorry. College professor. Wind me up, I talk for an hour about anything.

The summary: earth life maintains mutual compatibility (more or less) because of its common origin, 4 billion years of co-evolution, and because specialization and cooperation maximizes efficient extraction of resources. Aliens have none of that, and are quite likely to have diverged biochemically in ways that are inherently inimical to our biochemistry, and we have not had any opportunity to adapt to their differences. I also suggest that one hypothesis to explain the so-called Fermi Paradox is that habitable worlds evolve such different detailed chemistries that they are basically tainted toxic soups to other species, and that any sensible starfaring species would flag stellar systems with living biospheres with a great big biohazard symbol. Mars-like worlds which lack any native life (presumably) but are terraformable might be the optimal target for human colonization.

I’ve got to stop paying any attention to the news, for my health

This has been a week of despair, mostly.

And you all wonder why I’ve found enjoyment in studying the lives of spiders this year. There’s a reason: I’d rather immerse myself in the study of a species that isn’t full of stupid evil assholes.

Hey! It’s March!

February is over! Winter is dead!

We’re supposed to get 3-7cm of snow today, and it’s -14°C. Nature does not care about our artificial boundaries or categories, so the lesson you should learn is that you are meaningless and the universe does not align itself to your desires. You can clear that path today, and it will be buried again tomorrow.

All is futility and purposelessness.