It’s been a rough week. Let me tell you why.

I have bone spurs that occasionally flare up, and this week my right achilles tendon is getting swole and creating strange bulges all over my heel. It hurts! I was having a little pity party for myself when…

My daughter Skatje went skiing and dislocated her knee badly, breaking bits of the bone of the joint while also shredding cartilage and tendon. Her knee looks like a mottled mushy cantaloupe right now, totally upstaging my minor discomfort. But now she’s been upstaged in turn.

My grandson Knut is a big little guy, 6 years old and ready to try out for the Green Bay Packers. He was working out vigorously at a park when he fell. I’m going to put the X-ray below the fold because I cringe when I see it.

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Freethoughtblogs is suddenly and unexpectedly restored! It must be because I refused to pray all week long. Or it could have been about emailing the parent company for Bluehost, Endurance International Group. Or it could have been the result of posting a 1 star review on TrustPilot, which got the attention of their PR flack.

I just got off the phone with them, and that bad review is what finally kicked them into gear. Now I know what corporations dread, at least.

Our hosting company has received a complaint that freethoughtblogs.com has been engaging in fraudulent activities by scamming individuals out of their money and personal information. They provide no specifics.

Also, they name of the complainant is Deathlord Al-Zawahiri. I tremble in fear.

I do not see how Bluehost could possibly take this bullshit seriously, but now I get to try and resolve the potential problem. If we suddenly go offline, blame Deathlord Al-Zawahiri.

It’s easy enough to generate these names, the uncomfortable part is imagining what behaviors are associated with each. I spent the last few minutes inventing all kids of new kinks (kanks, kenks, konks, kunks.)

I am surprised. For those who never encountered him, Nyikos was an obsessive mathematics professor from South Carolina who haunted the usenet group, talk.origins, for at least the last 40 years. He was an oddball who mainly hated all the regulars at the newsgroup, especially if they had legitimate degrees in biology, so he would regularly pop in to spew his contempt for people like Larry Moran and John Harshman and me, and just generally anyone who battled creationists. He wasn’t very good at expressing his position, though — he was mainly just bitter and repetitive. I think he was such an angry authoritarian that he resented anyone who had any authority at all in the subject of evolution. The arguments never ended with him.

Until now. Nyikos is officially deceased. I guess it’s safe to visit talk.origins again.

Except…oh no, Google is killing the usenet archive!

Effective February 22, 2024, Google Groups will no longer support new Usenet content. Posting and subscribing will be disallowed, and new content from Usenet peers will not appear. Viewing and searching of historical data will still be supported as it is done today.

I guess Google decided that there’s no point anymore without Nyikos’ vituperative bile.

I thought maybe it had gotten lost in the mail, but no, that wasn’t it: the organizers of this science-fiction award had apparently gone nuts, disqualifying authors for stupid reasons. Also it probably helped that I didn’t write a science fiction novel last year, but that seems to have been a lesser problem than being at all critical of the Chinese government, or being supportive of gay people. The organizers were a combination of being incompetent, being bigoted, and trying to pander to an oppressive regime.

When the Hugos took place in Chengdu last October, it wasn’t immediately clear that the something was amiss. Shit hit the fan months later, when the awards committee finally released its long-awaited nominating statistics. The volunteer body typically releases the numbers the same evening as the ceremony, or within days of the event, but for this year, the stats didn’t arrive until 91 days after the event, per Esquire. Finally released on January 20, 2024, the reports showed that Kuang’s Babel, an episode of Gaiman’s The Sandman, Iron Widow novelist Xiran Jay Zhao, and fan writer Paul Weimer all received more than enough preliminary votes to be finalists for awards, yet an asterisk denoted each of their works as “ineligible” for award consideration.

McCarty antagonized critics in multiple Facebook comments that day amid a fan uproar over the artists’ apparent disqualification. He first shared last year’s nominating statistics to the public and derisively attempted to shield the Hugos from criticism. “Are you slow?” he responded to a comment asking him why certain works were deemed ineligible based on the World Science Fiction Society’s constitution. “Clearly you can’t understand plain English in our constitution,” he wrote to another, per Esquire.

Speculation that the Chinese government played a role in censoring the votes grew. Comic-book writer Gaiman has previously voiced criticisms of the government for incarcerating writers. Both Kuang and Zhao were born in China and now live in the West, and their books tackle social issues in allegorical fantasy worlds. However, McCarty denied the notion in a Facebook post in the days following the release of the nominating-statistics release. “Nobody has ordered me to do anything …” he wrote per the Guardian on January 24. “There was no communication between the Hugo administration team and the Chinese government in any official manner.”

After reading much of this stuff, I don’t think anybody should believe anything this Dave McCarty says — he’s a liar and all-around nasty person.

There are lots of specific examples and quotes from the organizers’ internal emails on BlueSky. The arrogance of these guys was appalling.

Chris Barkley and Jason Sandford wrote a detailed dissection of the whole mess. Not recommended unless you enjoy lengthy discussions of bad behavior.

So what will they do to untangle this clusterfuck? I’d recommend firing everyone involved and burning their precious constitution to the ground, and rewrite the whole thing. I have no connection to any of it, so ignore me, let’s see what they’re actually doing.

Worldcon Intellectual Property, the nonprofit that runs the World Science Fiction Society, announced resignations in the immediate aftermath to the scandal on January 30, Publishers Weekly reported. Dave McCarty and board chair Kevin Standlee resigned from their respective positions, with the former censured for his public Facebook comments. Chengdu Worldcon administration member Ben Yalow, who co-chaired the 2023 event and was set to work on this year’s event in Glasgow, is no longer listed on the 2024 Glasgow staff page. He and his fellow co-chair Chen Shi were censured for their actions.

“I acknowledge the deep grief and anger of the community and I share this distress,” the current chair of Glasgow 2024, Esther MacCallum-Stewart, said in a statement on February 14. She added that the committee would be taking steps “to ensure transparency and to attempt to redress the grievous loss of trust in the administration of the awards.” While the upcoming Worldcon has apologized for the failings of the previous year’s convention, the 2023 iteration of the event has not directly apologized for its handling of the awards. Vulture reached out to the Hugos for comment.

Maybe also never hold the event in a country with an ugly repressive government, too? (Never again in the US if Trump gets elected…maybe not even if he isn’t.) I hope this is all fixed by the time my science fiction novel is done, which presumes that I ever start writing one.

Matt Taibbi has learned that you can’t be friends with Elon Musk. He has posted some of the exchanges that he and Musk had after the failure of the #TwitterFiles nonsense. They are pretty much totally alienated from each other now.

“Elon, am I being shadowbanned?” the exchange begins. “We went on lockdown after discovering that Substack had stolen a massive amount of our data to prepopulate their Twitter rip-off,” Musk replied.

“Looks like there is still a blanket search ban. Should be fixed by tomorrow.” Musk added: “Going forward, tweets with Substack will not appear in For You unless it is paid advertising, just like FB/Insta/etc. They will appear in ‘Following.’”

Taibbi shot back with an exasperated response. “Elon, I’ve repeatedly declined to criticize you and have nothing to do with your beef with Substack,” he wrote. “Is there a reason why I’m being put in the middle of things? This really seems crazy.”

“You are dead to me,” Musk answered. “Please get off Twitter and just stay on Substack.”

Those two deserve each other.

You know that millionaire who has been posting regular updates for the press, claiming that his physical age is going backwards thanks to his bizarre health regime? He’s had a little setback.

This is a guy that tweets about every other health gain he says he is making. Most recently he has boasted he reduced his sperm age from 57 to 42.

Last summer he said he had reduced his epigenetic age by 5 years and that he has the heart of a 37-year-old, the skin of a 28-year-old and the lung capacity of an 18-year-old (which doesn’t appear to square with a 15% capacity reduction).

All those claims he makes? Self-serving lies. Their purpose is to get attention from the press, nothing more.

The sad thing is that he’s putting himself through all this:

“He rises at 4.30am, eats all his meals before 11am, and goes to bed – alone – at 8.30pm, without exception. He ingests more than 100 supplement pills daily and bathes his body in LED light. Two of the three meals he eats every day are exactly the same: boiled broccoli, cauliflower, mushrooms and garlic, nuts and seeds. He takes 54 pills in the morning, and the rest in between skin treatments and red-light therapy. He doesn’t drink alcohol, and doesn’t go out in the evening. He experimented with injecting himself with blood plasma from his 18-year-old son Talmage.”

And for what? Ego. He’s draining the blood of his own son to feed his delusion.

An attempted mass shooting in a megachurch failed.

A woman in a trenchcoat opened fire with a long gun inside celebrity pastor Joel Osteen’s megachurch in Texas before being gunned down by two off-duty officers who confronted her and sending worshippers rushing out of the building between busy Sunday services, authorities said.

The woman, who entered the Houston church shortly before 2 p.m. local time, was accompanied by a five-year-old boy, who was shot and taken to hospital in critical condition.

The woman is dead. A bystander was wounded. The kid is in critical condition. Joel Osteen is devastated.

Osteen joined police at a news conference and said the church is “devastated.” But he added that the shooting could have been much worse if it had happened during the larger 11 a.m. service.

In case you’ve ever been curious about what a devastated, grieving Osteen would look like, here he is.

I think he has this reflex where whenever a camera points his way, he’s got to flash those choppers. It’s creepy and weird. The grim old guys surrounding him clearly lack the Osteen face.

Here he goes, again:

Nice words…but then I noticed the truck behind him. He’s just reading slogans off the signs around his megachurch!

I only realized after he got away…Joel Osteen is Keyser Söze! It all makes sense now.

Admittedly, playing the game in Las Vegas did give Satan an edge, so the Kansas City Chiefs beat the San Francisco 49ers, 25-22, and obviously God just threw up His hands at the galaxy of sin and pride beneath Him in overtime. See you all in Hell, He figured.

I could care less. However, I admit to favoring the 49ers a little bit, but only because my late Uncle Ed was a dedicated partisan of that team. He was always complaining about how they let him down, so nothing has changed.

I didn’t watch the game, so I don’t know…did Taylor Swift rise up in all her glory at the end and usher in a new millennium of Democratic tyranny by endorsing Joe Biden? Did CIA snipers take out a few San Francisco players to rig the game? I might have missed some epochal events.