Still the one

This evening, my wife plunked a big box of old papers and junk in front of me and told me it was my job to sort it out and clean it up. I went through it obediently, even though I quickly discovered that it was mostly her old trash. There were a few gems scattered in there, though, and I pulled them out before tossing the rest into the recycling bin. It seems only fair that I get to post some of them.

Like her school photo from when she was in 4th or 5th grade.

Ah, yes. The Summer of Love, 1967. We were going to school together then. She’s still just as pretty, just a bit more mature, fortunately.

I guess it should be no surprise what happened 13 years later.

Now see what she’s done? She not only made me clean up her stuff, she sent me on a nostalgia trip.

Wily grandparents set cunning traps

We have a plan. First thing we’ve done is install a baby trap inside of our baby transport vehicle.

Once captured, the baby will be transported to our baby cage.

It’s a foolproof plan. Here’s the baby.

She arrives by plane tomorrow afternoon, we snare her upon arrival, and then race back to Morris. It’s going to work.

Unfortunately, this is a catch-and-release program, so we’ll send her back to Colorado early next week. That’s OK, though, this is kind of proof of concept, and we have a second grandbaby we can try and capture sometime.

That one may be more of a challenge, since he seems to be fully mobile and more capable of evasive maneuvers.

It’s either part of a nefarious plan, or mental illness, or both

Police raided a home near Los Angeles and uncovered a stash of thousands of guns. They’re currently sorting through them trying to figure out why this house needed that kind of armament.

My first thought: cat ladies. There is a kind of well known obsession where individuals collect cats, they overrun their homes, the person is unable to keep up with the filth they produce, and the animals are neglected and suffer, while the person insists that they love their animals and don’t want to be parted with them, all while their home becomes an unliveable hazard. This is not to imply that having cats is a mental health issue, but compulsive and excessive hoarding might be.

Maybe there should be a recognized problem like “crazy gun hoarder syndrome”. Affects mainly older men. Leads to houses cluttered with rifles and handguns everywhere, so many that they aren’t properly maintained and constitute a danger to the resident and the neighborhood. Makes everyone wonder why they can’t control their obsessions. Needs to be dealt with with sympathy and social treatment.

What reinforces that idea are some of the comments on that video.

‘Adam & Ramona’ are clearly in the early stages of the syndrome. No, you don’t need 20 rifles and 10 handguns. You certainly are within the allowed limits of the law, but you’ve got a problem. Before you defend yourself by saying you’re a “collector”, well, that’s not an escape clause. Collect things that don’t kill people, OK? Or maybe he removes the firing pins from his historical archive of period self-defense tools, which are all neatly stored with labels in locked cabinets.

‘P G’ might have a problem, too. The police find a house packed to the rafters with murder sticks, and you’re concerned that the murder sticks might get scratched? Your priorities are kind of messed up, guy.

They don’t even have feline toxoplasmosis to blame.

Alternatively, of course, maybe the house owner will turn out to be a far-right wannabe terrorist with grand plans to take over LA with a hodge-podge of guns. That’s not good either. Or he was a petty crook running an illegal gun store to sell to people who couldn’t even pass the minimal gun checks in our law. Also bad.

There’s nothing good about any of this!

What? Even in Morris?

This “Beyond Meat” stuff must be booming if it’s showing up on grocery store shelves even in remote, barren backwaters like rural Minnesota.

But OK, I’ll give it a try this evening, despite the fact that marketing something as just like meat isn’t exactly a great way to reach vegetarians.

Hey, kind of like how Joe Biden is a fake progressive who’ll appeal more to neo-liberals and centrists, but not so much to people who want real change in the system.

Bye bye, Alex Jones, Infowars, Milo Yiannopoulos, Paul Joseph Watson, Laura Loomer, Paul Nehlen, and Louis Farrakhan

Facebook and Instagram have finally had enough bad PR from those wackaloons and has outright banned a host of bad actors. It’s a start. However, it doesn’t affect the structural problems in social media algorithms — they’re built around simple-minded mechanisms that don’t consider the quality of the content, but rely on who is linking to who, and counting the number of references as an indication of popularity. It’s an extravagant version of a sneaky online poll. So you still get fed bad information, even if they retroactively cut out the original source of the lies.

Simply by following Instagram’s suggestions, Russell was recommended 240 Instagram pages posting misinformation. Looking at one QAnon page resulted in suggestions for 12 more. Liking and engaging with even borderline-extremist content on the platform results in recommendations for more extreme content. Just last week, Instagram recommended that I follow Yiannopoulos and Jones after I liked and followed many right-wing meme pages. Russell also noted that more than 30 white-nationalist pages flagged to Facebook and Instagram last month are still up. “One would think that Instagram would bother to halfway try to clean this stuff up,” he tweeted, “but it’s all still there.”

Banning these extremist figures is a step toward stricter moderation of extremist views, but time and again, we’ve seen that the internet’s worst actors always find new ways to exploit platforms. For instance, after Instagram promised to ban anti-vaccine hashtags such as #vaccinescauseautism, anti-vaxxers simply developed new hashtags by changing a letter or adding a word.

The one good thing about cutting off these phonies at the knees is that it makes it far more difficult for them to directly profit from their lies — the lies still get out there, but InfoWars, for instance, has just lost a big chunk of advertising revenue, which we can hope will reduce their effectiveness at poisoning the discourse. It might also discourage the next guy with a get-rich-quick scheme based on selling conspiracy theories.

Microbiology scares me

They actually do a simple experiment in this video to show the effectiveness of washing your hands after handling meat (but where was the control of sampling the bacterial load before handling?), but still, this is one of the reasons we’ve been going vegetarian at my house.

Of course, another control that should have been done: what kind of bacterial smear is on your hands after handling lettuce? I demand a new video with more rigorous quantitative comparisons.

That’s especially since my new dietary regime I’ve imposed on myself and my wife is salads, and nothing else, for dinner every other night. We get our protein dose every other day. Tonight it’s fake pulled pork (seitan) sandwiches, we’ll see how this stuff tastes.

Got any white walkers you need to deal with?

I’m pretty sure these are equivalent to Valerian steel and would be exceptionally effective. Marcus is auctioning off a pair of beautifully wicked handmade knives to benefit our legal fund. I would bid on both if said legal fund hadn’t drained my bank account rather severely already. I’ve always wanted a tactical chef’s knife, just in case.

Get ’em while you can. Marcus has set up a fair system to manage the auction, and you can both help us out and get a totally appropriate weapon out of it.

The Avengers: Endgame is Peak Genre (no spoilers, relax)

That’s not a bad thing. I saw it last night, and overall, it was fun, but there was so much to criticize.

First, a few of my problems with the movie.

It’s a time-travel movie. Hollywood cannot make those — they screw them up everytime. It’s a plot device that they can’t use consistently, where they have to first point out the dangers and consequences of time travel and impose limitations on it, but you know at the first opportunity all of that will be thrown out. Endgame is no exception. It doesn’t have to be that way: Tim Powers’ novel, The Anubis Gates (the best time travel story ever) revels in the consequences and causality and the story is actually driven by the implications of time travel.

It’s too much to digest. This movie is the culmination of 22 other movies, and every character has to have a cameo. The first half it focuses on a manageable subset of the characters, but near the end, it has to pack them in. There are a couple of scenes where the action comes to a halt, and the camera wanders through the good guy army taking care to give everyone a moment. For example, Shuri gets a static shot standing there — she doesn’t do anything in this movie, but she gets a few seconds to be applauded. Sometimes it was too painfully obvious.

Every problem is solved with a fight. My wife got confused about who was who, but it wasn’t a concern, because every character’s main attribute was their ability to thump bad guys. And speaking of bad guys, Thanos is a terrible villain. He’s big, purple, and muscular, and his superpower is hand-to-hand combat. That’s it. He’s physically stronger than everyone, which somehow leads to him having an alien fleet and hordes of four-armed monsters fighting for him. It is not a spoiler to tell you that the culmination of the movie is a gigantic super-brawl.

Disposable ethics. Just as an example, Hawkeye (the bow and arrow guy) is so wrecked by grief by the conclusion of the previous movie that at the beginning of this movie, he’s rampaging through the criminal underworld, leaving warehouses full of dead bodies, that sort of thing. This horrifying behavior will never be addressed. He has demonstrated super bad-guy-thumping ability, so he’s embraced as a hero. It’s a conflict that would require an entire solo movie to explore and resolve, but this movie is so sprawling and over-full that it’s treated as an ignorable bump in the road.

Death is weightless. Several well-known superheroes die in this movie. Their deaths have relatively little impact, because, well, the whole movie is about reversing the deaths of trillions of intelligent beings with a time-travel plot contrivance, so why couldn’t there be another magic trick in a later movie to resurrect them? Nothing is final if we can just make a continuity adjustment in a sequel.

OK, those were my major complaints, but there’s something that unifies them all: they’re entirely genre complaints. This is what comic-book super-hero movies do. To see them as flaws is like complaining that cowboy movies will have a gunfight, or that a rom-com will have a moment where the protagonists love each other, or that a Christian cult movie will revolve around a really stupid argument that somehow brings people to Jesus. It’s like being pissed off at the hamburger you ordered at a restaurant because it contains ground beef. It is the nature of the medium.

That said, then, The Avengers: Endgame is a superbly well done genre movie. We have reached Peak Superhero. The MCU is a complex, experienced organization that is a sleek machine for pumping out movies that fulfill a social role for a huge community of nerds, and it is a master at meeting expectations professionally and with a nice shiny gloss, and it has also built up a phenomenal roster of personalities that it can slot into roles. It’s a powerhouse.

It works well.

I live in a tiny college town of 5000 people. I never have problems getting into movies — we have a limited number of screens so there are those constraints — but I’ll usually pop into the theater 5 or 10 minutes before show time, and I only show up that early so I can get the best seat. Even that’s not usually necessary because some times I’ll get there and there are only a handful of people present. This one, we got there a half hour early and there was a line half a block long. Unbelievable, for Morris.

It was a crowded theater. Half the fun of the movie were the crowd reactions. There were gasps and cheers, the audience was really into it all. That brief shot of Shuri that I saw as a pointless cameo? People applauded. Those weightless deaths of beloved characters? People moaned and wept.

The Avengers: Endgame was effective, skillful movie-making.

What it excelled at was two things that communicators of any kind ought to respect. It was all about narrative, masterful story-telling that made it easy to leap over gaps in the logic. Stupid time travel logic doesn’t matter when what you’re trying to do is sweep viewers along in a series of challenging events. The second piece of the genre is emotion. Those 22 preceding movies were all about building personal connections with characters, and this movie was about intensifying those relationships and running them through a wringer to draw out the feelings of the audience. It does that so well.

If you’re one of those horrible movie viewers who hates genre conventions and wants accurate science and rational plotting (I don’t know anyone like that, do you?), you should attend one of these showings and pay close attention to how it fosters audience engagement, as does the whole Marvel PR machine. You’ll learn things even if you are expert at maintaining objective distance.

I’ll be curious to see what happens next, though. This movie wraps up a huge multi-movie narrative arc, but Marvel is not shutting down, there are more movies in the pipeline, they’re going to make billions of dollars out of this one, and you know some executives somewhere are scheming about how to get the steamroller going again. I can’t believe this was just an accident, and I’m sure there are plans afoot to fire up another mega-blockbuster.