I just gave the first exam of this semester in cell biology. I have a tradition of making the first question of the first exam an easy, obvious gimme…and here’s the first question this year.

I skimmed through the exams and quickly discovered that several students gave the wrong answer.

I’ll assume that they grossly overanalyzed the question — I said it wasn’t a trick question, which obviously means it was, or that there was some subtle twist hinted at in the phrasing, or something. Or that my last name is some arcane mystical phrase that shifts in the eyes and minds of its beholder, and that if any ever perceived its true nature they would go mad.

Milo Yiannopoulos is really getting desperate. He’s looking for an audience, any audience, that will pay attention to him, and he has battened on a peculiar one: right wing furries. What I’ve known of the furry community is that they’re extraordinarily tolerant — these are people who belong to a ridiculed minority, and their reaction has been openness and acceptance. Apparently, there is an even tiny minority of alt-right people within this small minority of fans of furry culture, and Milo wants to make himself king of this tiny sliver.

He announced that he would be attending a furry con.

Yiannopoulos posted an email screenshot to one of the few platforms he has left—his Telegram messaging channel—on Saturday and claimed he registered for Midwest FurFest, a convention “to celebrate the furry fandom” hosted in the suburbs on Chicago this December. “Furries,” as they’re often called, are groups of people who have interest in animal personas with human characteristics; people who participate in the subculture often present themselves as non-human characters via art and costumes.

Yiannopoulos also claimed on Telegram that he had submitted a form to suggest he host a panel called “The Politics of Fur.” He asked his followers who plan to attend Midwest FurFest to message him to arrange “dinner, drinks, photos or anything else.”

I suppose it’s possible that he’s long yearned to be a snow leopard, but more likely he just wants to take advantage of a few people — that’s always been his modus operandi as a professional scammer. Unfortunately for him, conference organizers saw right through him and rejected his application. I don’t think there are many niches left where everyone doesn’t know exactly what kind of hateful slimeball he is.

He has now announced that he is going anyway, despite not being registered. I don’t know what he’s planning to do…get drunk in the bar and dance around in the lobby, mocking the attendees? That is his art, after all. I don’t think it will win him a beachhead in the furry community.

He does have an impressive ego. It must make it hard to cope with his irrelevance.

What should greet my eyes upon looking into the abyss of Twitter this morning but a chittering mob of angry defenders of Pewdiepie, the no-talent vacuous King of YouTube. I’d made some dismissive comment about him, and now the people who love him are all making dismissive comments back. I guess when your hero is a whiny Nazi-friendly twit who does nothing but play video games, you are especially sensitive to criticisms — after all, that calls into question all of your life choices.

But the reality is that he is alt-right. He’s Nazi-adjacent. He panders to whoever will give him on eyeballs on YouTube, which means he whips back and forth in his political stance, because he ultimately lacks one.

In 2017, Disney cut ties with PewDiePie after he posted several videos featuring anti-Semitic images.

These include swastikas drawn by a fan and footage of two Indians he paid to hold up a sign which read “death to all Jews.”

In the wake of the controversy, he said he was simply trying to “show how crazy the modern world is” and that people “would say anything for five dollars” but added that he understood that “these jokes were ultimately offensive”.

He has since distanced himself from the far-right.

He said he was prompted to make a donation after his name was linked to this year’s mass-shooting that took place in Christchurch, New Zealand.

The funny thing is that his fans are not very bright and kind of derivative. Right now I’ve got a mob sending me messages where the most insulting thing they can imagine to call me is “boomer”. It’s about as effective as calling me a Pisces or an INTP or any other meaningless categorization — that they think it’s clever is making me laugh and laugh.

I should call the world’s attention to the fact that I have a new grand-niece, Aria, daughter of Matthew and Audriauna, who was recently eclosed in the vicinity of Tacoma, WA. She’s a little sweetling.

It’s weird how all these people I knew as little kids are now making more little kids.

The version of Stephen King’s It that came out last year wasn’t bad, and in some ways was better than the source material. The young cast was wonderful, I was impressed with the acting, and the monster was weird and creepy and memorable. It ended with these kids beating back the monster that was terrorizing the town, but not killing it, and they knew they’d have to return to finish the job in its next cycle, 27 years later. Chapter Two was therefore inevitable.

Now adults, the same people, played by older, different actors who are still pretty darned good, return to Derry, Maine to reprise their monster-killing efforts and finally finish It off.

It (the movie) is unwatchably bad. It (the monster) is going to be defeated (spoiler? It (the book) is 33 years old and there have been multiple versions of the thing on TV and movies) by…random geegaws and the Power of Belief, none of which makes any kind of logical sense — the whole thing is going to build to a nonsensical conclusion. Which means that the appeal of the movie cannot rely on the ending, or the satisfaction of seeing the plot come together. Which means the movie lives or dies on the quality of the storytelling. This movie dies a grisly death, I’m sorry to say. There were many flaws, but two gigantic ones that made it impossible for me to enjoy the movie.

1. It slimed me with sentimentality.

The primary characters were wise and good and kind, with little flaws of no consequence that they agonized over, just to show how important their self-improvement was. Their difficult childhoods and youthful tragedies did not change their inherent wonderfulness, but only gave them a glow of saintly martyrdom. King has always had this mawkish strain running through his books — it’s a significant tool in his bag of tricks for getting readers to identify with his heroes — but it is indulged to the max in It. Kids are always revered innocents in a Stephen King story, with great potential and power.

But never forget: King slaughters kids in horrible, detailed, bloody ways to keep his stories moving. The little angels get dismembered, disemboweled, and decapitated, because there is some warped element to King’s psychology that he, as an author, bravely exposes for his audience to weep over, but Jesus, man, I really don’t want to see that shit.

2. It killed its momentum with flashbacks.

Oh god, this was the worst. Remember, there was an It, Chapter One that told the story of the heroes’ childhoods…but that was last year. We can’t trust that the audience remembers anything from the prior movie! Therefore, everyone has to be reminded. The movie doesn’t do this with, for instance, a little prelude that recaps the first movie. Oh, no…throughout the movie, we’re going to be fed little fragments from the first for each of the characters, and then some, and they’re going to do it intermittently. There are 6 hero characters, one of whom dies before any action occurs, and they all get multiple flashbacks to tell their back story, even the dead one. There are others, like Henry, who was a villainous switch-blade wielding teen in the first, and is now in a mental institution — even he wins a couple of flashbacks, to remind us of his menacing presence. It was wasted because all he is in this movie is a jump scare who is readily dealt with.

The central action the story is simple. The characters from the previous movie gather in Derry; they separate to gather little mementoes of their childhood that will have magic powers in their encounter; they gather in the sewer to summon and do battle with Pennywise, the evil clown. That’s it. But we get non-stop, fragmentary flashbacks to remind us why this relic from their past has personal meaning to them, and other flashbacks to explain why their lives are damaged, and more flashbacks to reveal Pennywise’s wickedness, and it pads the whole thing out to a miserable 2 hours and 47 minutes. Unlike most horror movies where I might twitch at the jump scares, this one had me cringing at every sudden backflip into 1989.

Goddamn, it ended after their triumph on a flashback to sunny, summery Maine in 1989, with smiling kids on bicycles and a haze of heartwarming sentimentality over everything.

Hated it.