And that means I have to go into work — a bit later than usual, but that’s my only benefit. I have to go in and feed the animals, autoclave a bunch of fly bottles, and also, because we had a safety audit last week, I have to rearrange some boxes cluttering up the place to provide better access to the fire extinguisher and first aid kit. Today’s the day for doing mundane stuff that I put off because my teaching obligations come first.

The rest of this “vacation” week I plan to use getting one step ahead of lecture prep. It’s not so much a vacation as it is a temporary reprieve.

The photo is not an accurate representation of what spring break looks like in Minnesota. We have no snow, but we do have brisk temperatures and wind. I’ll leave my bikini at home when I walk over to the lab.

Joe Rogan needs to do a better job screening guests on his show. Here’s one of his interesting guests.

Sheldon Johnson – a 48-year-old youth counselor for the Queens Defenders who spent 25 years in prison for attempted murder and robbery – was introduced on the Joe Rogan Experience in February by his friend, Perlmutter Center for Legal Justice executive director Josh Dubin, as “a marvelous human being” who was wronged by “the system.”

Johnson was also photographed shaking hands with Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg.

He sounds better than Jordan Peterson or Alex Jones or Elon Musk or Gavin McInnes. Except…

However, less than a year after his release from prison, Johnson was arrested in New York on Thursday after police found a severed head in an apartment freezer and a torso stashed in a bin.

What kind of life puts you on a trajectory that leads to stuffing decapitated heads in a freezer?

Oh, wait. Never mind.

Last week, everyone was talking about this scammy entertainment fiasco in Glasgow — someone had thrown together an event built around the Willy Wonka IP called Willy’s Chocolate Experience, charged $45 admission, and then thought they’d sit back and rake in the money. Instead, they were laughed at and despised. It was such an obvious failure — they rented a warehouse, put up a few plastic props, and hired a couple of actors with no script and no plan to stand around and improvise. Where they figured they could really cut costs even further was to use AI to generate the advertising and some of the displays in the warehouse.

They didn’t even copy-edit their ads. It was a zero-effort effort that they thought they could mask with some garishly colored AI art. The appalling thing was how little substance there was behind the glitzy facade — kids showed up and instead of smorgasbord of chocolate they got one jelly bean and a cup of lemonade. That’s how I’ve felt about all the AI stuff being churned out right now. It’s mostly empty hyper-stimulus where the fantasy gets dressed up in an excess of colorful noise. The Glasgow thing was just an example of a few profiteers thinking that was sufficient. It’s not.

Then I encountered another illuminating example. Product photography is a whole genre unto itself, where you have to take photographs of things that are being sold in a way that makes them revealing and enticing. Food photography is a difficult art, because you have to take something that is kind of gross and drab if you think about — a lump of meat with sauces gooped over it, for instance — and make it look crisp and shiny and delicious and colorful (but not too colorful). The food photographed for menus and ads is already mostly fake, with condensation made of glycerin, foamy heads made with soap, cardboard padding to make a stack stand up, and ice cream made out of mashed potatoes.

Commercial food photography is actually pretty hard to do well, as you can discover on Instagram where amateurs are constantly taking photos of their luxury meals, and making them look generally ick. It’s expensive because that photograph of a plump hamburger covered in slightly melting cheese and bright red tomatoes and crisp green lettuce actually takes a team of designers and lighting experts and good photographers to shoot. So why not cut out that expense by using AI to assemble an image from all the hard work of real artists? It’s mostly fake anyway.

These mass market ghost kitchens are doing exactly that.

Dozens of Ghost kitchens, restaurants that serve food exclusively by delivery on apps like DoorDash and Grubhub, are selling food that they promote to customers with AI-generated images. It’s common for advertisements to stage or edit pictures of food to make it look more enticing, but in these cases the ghost kitchens are showing people pictures of food that literally doesn’t exist, and looks nothing like the actual items they’re selling, sometimes because the faulty AI is producing physically impossible food items.

In a way, it’s kind of cool. I look at their products with the eye of a biologist, and their crustaceans and molluscs definitely seem to be alien.

The more I look at those things, the weirder they are. What’s going on with that shrimp’s terminal segment? Those telsons don’t make any sense. Would you eat meat that looked like it had been recently imported from Arcturus, or came from animals cultured downstream from a nuclear power plant?

I guess it may not matter, because we don’t generally scrutinize the photographs in a menu that carefully. They’ve got the color and shininess and appearance of an expected plate of food, so that’s good enough. I might be the only person who’d send the meal back, complaining that these are mundane terrestrial bits of cooked animal flesh.

They better not disappoint me with the beverage, though. I really want my glass of radioactive diet Sprite.

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.

[Read more…]

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.)

SMBC

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.

These Hugo dossiers are disgusting.
“Author openly describes themselves as queer, nonbibary, trans… I don’t know how that will play in China (I suspect less than well)”
They wrote that in writing.
…
The gaslighting the Hugos organizers did, telling everyone they were stupid for not getting that the works were i eligible due to “the rules” and it turns out the authors criticized a human right violation once, or ate Tibetan food, or said a Taiwanese Batman hotel looked cool.

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.