It has been a long, long time, and I don’t think my brain can process it. I was a quiet little lump all night, like usual, but the sensory overload of a half dozen conversations going on at once always leaves me dizzy. I also stayed up later than usual, and slept in until 7:30. So this is what sybaritic decadence feels like…

I had made a big pot of jambalaya for the party, using my usual method. Oh, this requires peppers? Chop up every pepper in the house and throw it in. Onions? Same approach. Add two teaspoons of Cajun spice…are you mad? Heaping tablespoons. That’s not much, so double it.Then the usual Law of Garlic, you can’t add too much. Cooked it all up with a pound of rice and some Impossible Sausage (so it’s still vegetarian). Don’t forget the red pepper flakes and cayenne!

It came out pretty well — good flavor, a little bit of a kick but still mostly acceptable to a room full of Minnesotans. Not too acceptable, I guess, because there were plenty of leftovers, but that’s OK. Guess what I’m having for breakfast this morning? It’s mighty fine, and it will wake a fellow up.

It better wake me up good, because I have an exam to grade, a problem set to assemble, one lecture to write and another to figure out what it’s talking about, spiders to feed and snuggle, and lots of dishes to do, both at home and in the lab. I’m home alone while Mary gets to frolic with a four-year-old, so it’s all on me.

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Totally random, but I found this excellent summary of social media this morning.

This morning was my yearly checkup, and I’m afraid everything was normal. Cholesterol was down, blood pressure 120/70, not a hint of prostate cancer, probably going to live for a little while longer.

There was some funny business with my thyroid, so I have to go in next week for an ultrasound. Also I get to get another colonoscopy in the summer of 2024.

I’m home briefly, but I have to go teach a new class. Oh boy. And then I’m coming home again to cook for a potluck this evening.

The true reason I pursued evolutionary biology:

Although, to be accurate, I didn’t see it until I was in middle school, and it was so obviously bad that if I had any reason to get into evolution it was to debunk it.

Still, Raquel Welch was magnificent. RIP.

We had an abrupt drop in temperature last night, along with some snow and 80kph winds. It was a blizzard! Howling all night long!

This morning, I get up and see the snow drifts everywhere.

I think that’s elegant and beautiful. For a sense of scale, though, that’s just my driveway, and the drift is about knee deep.

I also liked this snow sculpture.

The wind just carved a thin straight line of snow from the signpost. There are these interesting shapes all over the place.

Not so interesting, though, was walking to work through the knee-deep drifts.

My kind of Valentine’s Day.

My wife gave me three spiders she caught around the house. Did you get any signs of affection today?

Today’s Oglaf is appropriate and entirely work-safe!

It makes a good point, that magic isn’t an explanation for much of anything — you need some chain of causality and evidence, with some mechanism at each step. You don’t just get to say “it’s magic” or “it’s a miracle.”

Bonus, the comic pokes fun at that absurd ad hoc magic system in the Harry Potter books that is nothing but lazy plot gimmicks.

I would be the worst person in the world to review this new video game, Hogwarts Legacy. I don’t play many video games, and I dislike all the Harry Potter stuff — I got the books to encourage my kids to read, but found them boring and repetitive and full of plot holes myself. And ever since JK Rowling has demonstrated that she’s a revolting bigot. I’m not going to touch this game, let alone play it or review it.

The person you want to review it is someone who loved Harry Potter, who was a deep Rowling fan (at least once upon a time), and an experienced game reviewer. Something like this review in Wired. You can tell it’s driven by the disappointment the author feels.

When I was a kid, every word that flowed from J. K. Rowling’s pen wrote magic into my world, but now every word she puts out just hurts my heart. Every homophobic or transphobic thing queer kids hear growing up becomes a voice that follows them for a long time. We hear relatives, friends, and parents say awful things about us and to us. For a lot of us, we fight those voices every day. When one of those voices comes from the author who taught you about accepting yourself, a person you thought truly saw you and kids like you, it hurts in a way I honestly hope she never understands. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.

The final assessment:

The story is rooted in anti-Semitic tropes. The gameplay feels dated. The graphics feel like they’re a couple generations behind. All the characters are one-dimensional. It doesn’t stay true to the established lore. Every character feels like an off-brand version of the characters we know and love. There’s no sense of place. No magic, no heart.

Yeah, I don’t think there’s any way I’d ever play this game.

I have a confession to make: I’m a heterosexual male. I find women’s bodies attractive. I’ve looked at porn, and even found some of it titillating.

That fact does not overwhelm my interactions with women, and isn’t even a minor factor in how I regard them. I don’t “rate” women, and I don’t collect pornography — it’s not that interesting. Collecting photos of random naked women is more than a little creepy.

So there are a lot of things I don’t understand about this.

A former deacon for Moscow’s Christ Church has been sentenced to two years in federal prison for possessing child pornography.

Alex Lloyd was sentenced in U.S. District Court in Coeur d’Alene this week. Judge Lynn Winmill handed down the sentence and ordered Lloyd to pay $5,000 in restitution and placed him on probation for 20 years.

Lloyd pleaded guilty in federal court in August.

Adult pornography isn’t criminalized, but if it were, I’d be safe, even after confessing that I like women’s bodies. I don’t find the idea of collecting computer images of sexy people at all appealing. Don’t they know that real relationships are much more satisfying? What is going on in the heads of these fools? They’re obsessed with some of the most vile pornography I can imagine!

And then there’s this recent bust.

A Chicago man faces several child pornography charges in Cook County after a federal investigation infiltrated the encrypted media app Telegram and found a cross-country network of people sexually exploiting children, the Sun-Times has learned.

The work of Homeland Security Investigations in Arizona, dubbed Operation Swipe Left, led agents to Norris “Nick” Stauffer, 27, who is charged here with disseminating child pornography, records show.

It also resulted in criminal charges against more than a dozen people elsewhere — including at least two with political ties — amid allegations of livestreamed abuse, kidnapping threats and the production and distribution of child pornography.

A federal judge called some of the allegations “horrific.” When agents raided one suspect’s home, video depicting the sexual abuse of an infant was allegedly playing on a screen. And Cook County Circuit Judge Mary Marubio stressed to Stauffer in February 2022 that “this is not a victimless crime.”

“This is a crime that preys on children and exploits children,” the judge said, according to a court transcript.

At least 17 people have been charged in all, including in Arizona, Wisconsin, Washington, D.C., California and South Africa, authorities say. Judges have handed significant prison time to nine of them. Ages of the group’s victims ranged from 6 months to 17 years old, according to a Homeland Security Investigations official.

Yeesh. It’s like trying to understand serial killers — it makes no sense, but somehow the culprits find gratification in it. The investigators can’t find any thread of a connection between all these wicked people.

Eric McLoughlin, deputy special-agent-in-charge of Homeland Security Investigations in Phoenix, Arizona, said most of the defendants charged come from more varied backgrounds than Hageman and Verastigui. They included a youth soccer coach, an amusement park employee and the son of a police officer, McLoughlin said.

Records show Stauffer worked for a grocery chain.

“We often see that the types of individuals involved in these horrific acts, really, they come from all different walks of life,” McLoughlin said.

Except, maybe, one thing they’re overlooking. One of the scumbags worked for the Republican party, another for Turning Point USA. All of them were using Telegram, a service popular among conservatives. They were happily chatting with one another, thinking they were protected by encryption, and reinforcing their sickness with extreme comments.

Separately, federal prosecutors in Washington, D.C., filed charges in February 2021 against Verastigui, who has been identified as a former Republican National Committee staffer in multiple news reports. Prosecutors alleged Verastigui told a group he “can’t stop thinking about touching, raping and killing a newborn baby.”

All of them conservative. Alex Lloyd was a member of a notoriously conservative church. Also, all of them men. These are the kind of men who protest loudly about “groomers” and think drag queens reading books to children is somehow nefarious. There’s got to be a connection in there, somewhere.

He’s just a horrible man, and he’ll fire you for telling the truth.

On Tuesday, Musk gathered a group of engineers and advisors into a room at Twitter’s headquarters looking for answers. Why are his engagement numbers tanking?

This is ridiculous, he said, according to multiple sources with direct knowledge of the meeting. I have more than 100 million followers, and I’m only getting tens of thousands of impressions.

Uh-oh. He’s got socialmediaitis. The first sign of the problem is when you get obsessed with your numbers, and then you start believing that the number of people who look at you is a measure of your personal worth, and then your head starts to swell and you begin to believe you deserve every bit of attention. Musk is exhibiting ‘influencer’ ego.

One of the company’s two remaining principal engineers offered a possible explanation for Musk’s declining reach: just under a year after the Tesla CEO made his surprise offer to buy Twitter for $44 billion, public interest in his antics is waning.

Employees showed Musk internal data regarding engagement with his account along with a Google Trends chart. Last April, they told him, Musk was at “peak” popularity in search rankings, indicated by a score of “100.” Today, he’s at a score of nine. Engineers had previously investigated whether Musk’s reach had somehow been artificially restricted but found no evidence that the algorithm was biased against him.

Yes. He’s demonstrated beyond any doubt that he’s a hardcore twit, and has become much less interesting. His critics (like me) are realizing that he’s substanceless, and I suspect many of his fans are becoming uncomfortable at seeing their hero’s frequent gaffes. All the news about Musk is bad news nowadays.

Musk did not take the news well.

You’re fired, you’re fired, Musk told the engineer.

And that’s how an incompetent boss drives his company into a crater.