Behold the coming of the cyber-baby!

At first, it was cute. Her parents are big ol’ nerds whose idea of fun involves sitting in front of a keyboard (I have no idea where my daughter got this habit), so they got grandbaby Iliana a keyboard of her own. She looks so happy being just like Mommy and Daddy.

But there’s been an alarming progression. Now Iliana has gone all cyberpunky, bathing in the glow of the LEDs and gazing raptly into the digital future. I guess I’m going to have to get her some mirrorshades for Christmas, and before you know it, she’s going to be demanding cybernetic augmentation, an Ono-Sendai deck, and shiny new eyes from Nikon.

She’s a lucky girl…I mean, transhuman.

How I’m spending my day at #cvg2019

Well, how I plan to spend my day. I might get carried away on a whim or stumble across something unexpected.

11:00am-12:00pm @ Hyatt 2 Greenway HI Weird Biology
12:30pm-1:30pm @ Hyatt 4 Great Lakes A2 N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth Trilogy
3:30pm-4:30pm @ Hyatt 2 Greenway HI Books to Read Right Now
5:00pm-6:00pm Magic Schoolbus Party Room (5123) spider salon
7:00pm-8:00pm @ Hyatt 4 Great Lakes A3 AMC’s The Terror
8:30pm-9:30pm @ Hyatt 2 Greenway CDE Paranormal Minnesota
9:00pm-9:45pm @ Hyatt 1 Nicollet Ballroom Pounded in the Tingle
11:30pm-12:30am @ Hyatt 2 Greenway B ASMR

I’m presenting at the ones in bold. I’m bringing Common House Spiders to the Salon, I plan on that being more of an interactive demo.

I have the least confidence about making it to the ASMR panel. I’m curious, but it’s late and I might fall asleep. Actually, if I popped in I wonder if I’d find the entire audience asleep.

Well, this sucks

I’m at Convergence, which definitely does not suck and has been enjoyable so far, but I’m also becoming untethered from the Internet, which sucks horrendously. There are two problems so far.

One: I can’t connect to the hotel internet. Have you ever noticed how even the cheapest little hole in the wall motel will just give you free wireless that works, while every upscale hotel insists that you enroll in their special program to get the slowest possible internet connection, and then offers you faster connections at a price? All the extra layers and attempts to squeeze more money from you reduces reliability. I’m at a Hilton. Hate it.

Two: Fucking Apple. Speaking of high priced screwups, I HATE APPLE’S WEIRD CABLES. The charging cable for my iPhone/iPad, which is an official Apple cable, is disintegrating and has stopped working. Their computing devices will keep going for decades — my laptop is getting up there, and is fine and functional — but you’re going to have to get a new power brick every year, because the thin cable immovably attached to it will crack and fray. The charging cable for my iWidgets is even worse, and woe unto you if you buy a third party cable, because they have to be Apple-certified, and half the time they don’t work.

Their machines have code in them to sense some secret handshake from the cable, because I get messages when I plug them in to the effect that this is not an Apple approved “device”. This one nuisance is about to drive me out of Apple’s ecosystem, after 35 years of loyalty.

Anyway, it all means I have a laptop that won’t connect to the Internet, and a phone and tablet with batteries slowly dying because I can’t recharge them.

My god, I might have to interact with a purely physical world at the biggest SF conference in the upper Midwest. Will there be things to do? How will I survive?

Perverts on the hoof

This is quite a title: Aggressive Goats Addicted to Human Urine Airlifted Out of Olympic National Park, WA.

Hundreds of mountain goats in Olympic National Park, WA have become so addicted to the salt found in human urine and sweat that they are an aggressive menace to national park visitors, charging at hikers and trampling vegetation. They have a taste for salt and minerals in human urine, and sweat on clothes and backpacks, according to officials.

See also:

Park officials urged walkers not to urinate along trails, to avoid turning paths into “long, linear salt licks” and attracting goats.

Now I don’t know which are more disgusting, humans or goats.

Apparently, I missed out on the debate

I think this is a paraphrase. I wish it weren’t.

I totally skipped out on the Democratic debate last night because nowadays my usual reaction to any political event involves daydreaming about beheadings and skulls and ripping out hearts and leveling the senate already, and the visceral loathing makes me uncomfortable. If you want to talk about your takeaway from the ridiculous mob of chattering wannabes, go ahead, distill it down for me.

Trolling the trolls

It’s just too easy. An Instagram model/influencer/whatever named Belle Delphine, who posts lots of self-portraits of herself in cat ears and is apparently popular with the 4chan/anime crowd of gamer boys, posted a photo of herself and said that if it got a million likes, she’d do some videos for PornHub, the explicit porn site. A million keyboards expired in the deluge of drool, and she met her goal. So she made the videos. All innocuous, with one, for example of her playing with a cat. Nothing porny at all.

The ensuing rage was delicious. Here’s my favorite example.

She ruined him. Stabbed him right in the punctuation lobe.