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.

I think there has been some cutthroat competition in the grocery business in my small town. When we first moved here, there were two grocery stores: the big supermarket, Willie’s, and a smaller store called Coborn’s. Coborn’s abruptly closed up, to everyone’s surprise — the story was that they were denied a liquor license to allow them to sell beer, and then they packed up and moved out. This town is dominated in some ways by the apostolic church, and they’re pretty strict on the blue law enforcement.

Then a few years ago, a new grocery store, Meadowland, opened up just a few blocks from Willie’s. It’s not a high-end place, it’s got a cheaper esthetic, has a substantial stock, but it’s all a hodge-podge of brands. You’d think it would fold up in the face of competition from the established store, but it’s hanging in there. It’s run by…the apostolic church, so it’s got that advantage.

There’s stuff going on behind the scenes, on the town council, in private meetings, and I know nothing about it. What I do know is that grocery prices have been steadily climbing, and there’s nothing I can do about it, because we’re a small town and competition isn’t much of an option. Buy from the supermarket which basically has a stranglehold on the county, or buy from the fundamentalist church-run business that would probably be even worse if they got a monopoly? What a choice.

Mike the Mad Biologist highlights a brief comment in the Washington Post:

But there is no immediate fix for policymakers. Grocery prices remain elevated due to a mixture of labor shortages tied to the pandemic, ongoing supply chain disruptions, droughts, avian flu and other factors far beyond the administration’s control. Robust consumer demand has also fueled a shift to more expensive groceries, and consolidation in the industry gives large chains the ability to keep prices high, economic policy experts say.

Yes, that’s our situation. We do not live in a food desert, other than the artificially constructed one. We are surrounded by farms — unfortunately, most of them are growing corn for feedstocks and alcohol — but we could do better. In the summer, we subscribed to a local farm service, and every week we got a big box of fresh produce. It was a bit overwhelming, since we’d get this diverse collection of unfamiliar vegetables and had to struggle to figure out what to do with it all, but there’s clearly a better alternative to all the pre-packaged overpriced stuff with get from the overly-familiar store.

I do wonder what Willie’s would do if local farms became a more popular source for groceries. We’d probably also be healthier.

Another social media app has opened up — you can now freely join BlueSky without waiting for an invitation. It was founded by the guy who initially created Twitter, which ought to give us all pause, but they promise to give us customizable control over the algorithm. We’ll see. I’m on most of these new social media apps, so I have opinions…amorphous, poorly formed opinions, because I’ve been distracted by too many apps.

So far, I like Mastodon best. It’s a bit of a tangled mess with the swarms of servers out there, but once you get settled in, it’s nice, especially since you don’t feel like you’re enabling some hidden corporate beast somewhere. I get reasonable engagement, the interface works, there’s a substantial volume of traffic since I’m promiscuous about who I’ll follow.

BlueSky is nice and slick and feels most like the old Twitter. Membership has been throttled for a year, and now that it has opened up, it may turn into the worst of old Twitter as the Nazis rush in. One nice feature is that early adopters included lots of scientists, who have built a lot of beachheads to science content.

You might already be on Threads if you have an Instagram account — they seem to be fusing into an unholy amalgam of text and photos. It is a stepchild of the wicked Zuck, so that’s a strike against it, but on the plus side, I am seeing more writing here — people telling stories over multiple posts, and actually taking care to build a narrative. It’s growing on me for that reason.

Of course, Twitter still exists, but I will look down on you if you continue to use it. Leave now. There are good alternatives available. We’re looking at a ‘Fall of the House of Musk’ scenario over there, and soon enough it’s going to be nothing but a crevasse populated with gibbering lost souls. (Well, it’s always been something like that, but you know what I mean, it’ll get worse.)

My recommendation for the people I used to follow: jump ship to BlueSky. It’ll be most familiar, and you’ll find ready-made groups with similar interests already building communities. Just be prepared to leap away if it becomes another xitter. You can’t make strong attachments in a time of chaos.