Someday, I’ll learn to ignore Marvel movies

I had hopes. Deadpool is notorious for breaking the fourth wall and making sarcastic asides about the whole premise of comic book superheroes, so I thought maybe it would be funny. Maybe it was, but it was buried in over-the-top, nonstop violence — limbs lopped off, decapitations, multiple stabbings, and that was just in first ten minutes. The whole premise of the entire movie is that Deadpool has the superpower of instant healing, Wolverine is also able to heal any damage, and they didn’t like each other…so there were multiple overlong scenes which consisted of nothing but the two of them stabbing and chopping at each other in gruesome ways. I was bored.

Also, it’s a multiverse movie. I hate the multiverse concept. It erases the possibility of tragic mistakes, because you can just hop to a different timeline, or go back in time and fix an error, and it lowers the stakes. It also opens up the possibility of all kinds of cameos from other Marvel movies — even dead characters can pop in for a visit — and this movie worked that angle thoroughly and repeatedly to the point that I just stopped caring that so-and-so from an old superhero movie showed up.

It was not amusing when the culminating battle (it’s always a battle nowadays) was bringing in hundreds of alternate universe superheroes in a climax of pointless hacking and slashing. I was ready to fall asleep. The plot was also a mess, with two villains, neither of whom cared about the knifings and choppings going on, they were operating on a different plane of existence, apparently.

Skip it, unless you’re really into fan service.

I’m missing Skepticon!

I’m sad, but the good news is that I watched Debbie Goddard on YouTube last night, and I assume the rest of the talks will be on the Skepticon YouTube channel today. Check out the schedule:

10am: Panel – Planned Parenthood Great Rivers
2:30pm: Main Stage Speaker: Greg Gbur. I don’t know what he’ll be talking about: throwing invisible cats off the roof?
3:30pm: Main Stage Speaker: Kavin Senapathy. She has a new book: The Progressive Parent: Harnessing the Power of Science and Social Justice to Raise Awesome Kids.
4:45pm: Panel – The Fourth City Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence

Tune in and check it out, and don’t forget to leave a like on the videos!

We’re talking big money here, Sam

You may have noticed I left something out in that last post about Andreesen and Horowitz — their political vision is focused on crypto, AI, and a tax policy they like better. I said nothing about AI! You may praise me for my restraint.

I shall now correct my omission. Here’s the breakdown of the money OpenAI is spending on this boondoggle:

Total revenue has been $283 million per month, or $3.5 to $4.5 billion a year. This would leave a $5 billion shortfall.

Training the AI models will cost OpenAI about $7 billion in 2024. For ChatGPT alone, the cost will be $4 billion. New models may add $3 billion to that cost — OpenAI has had to train new AI models faster than it had anticipated.

Microsoft’s OpenAI “funding” is largely in the form of Azure compute credits. OpenAI gets a heavily discounted rate of $1.30 per A100 server per hour. OpenAI has 350,000 such servers, with 290,000 of those used just for ChatGPT. This cloud estate is apparently running near full capacity.

Staffing costs for 2024 are likely to be $1.5 billion, up from $500 million for 2023. The median OpenAI engineer salary in 2023 was a $300,000 base salary and $625,000 of stock-equivalent compensation. [Bay Area Inno, 2023; Levels.fyi]

They’re spending roughly twice what they’re making. Almost all their servers are chewing away on ChatGPT. And personally, the worst of all as far as I’m concerned is that software engineers are getting paid $300,000 base salary and $625,000 of stock-equivalent compensation. If my employer paid me half that amount of base salary, rather than a quarter, and never mind the big stock bonus, I’d be coasting on easy street and could hire a live-in masseuse and, I don’t know, go crazy and buy a second car? I struggle to imagine that much money.

I suppose my daughter would have the qualifications to get into that kind of business, but I’d encourage her to keep her soul intact.

Out-of-touch billionaires showing their whole asses to the world

You’ll never believe why Marc Andreesen and Ben Horowitz are supporting Donald Trump. It has nothing to do with the petty concerns of mere peasants.

The podcast itself is an extraordinary performance. At one point, Andreessen concedes that their major problems with President Joe Biden — the ones that led them to support Trump — are what most voters would consider “subsidiary” issues. “It doesn’t have anything to do with the big issues that people care about,” he says. If we take this podcast at face value, we are to believe that these subsidiary issues are the only reason they’ve chosen to endorse and donate to Trump.

These subsidiary issues take precedence for Andreessen and Horowitz over, say, mass deportations and Project 2025’s attempt to end no-fault divorce.

“Subsidiary issues” also include trivialities like abortion or Ukraine or Palestine or the rule of law or democracy. Only peons care about that stuff! Obscenely wealthy dumb-ass venture capitalists like those two have much grander concerns. Like…lowering their taxes and crypto.

We are looking at a simple trade against personal liberty — abortion, the rights of gay and trans people, and possibly democracy itself — in favor of crypto, AI, and a tax policy they like better.

For Horowitz, “probably the most emotional topic” is crypto — a16z started a $4.5 billion crypto fund in 2022, and the pair believe that the Biden administration has been deeply unfair to crypto. In Horowitz’s view, the Biden administration “basically subverted the rule of law to attack the crypto industry.”

Seriously, my dudes? You’re defining your political choices entirely on a foundation of cryptocurrency? They threw $4.5 billion down that rathole — speaking of a mega sunk cost fallacy — and now the primary concern for American citizens should be about salvaging your idiotic losses in a stupid scam?

Those two guys have totally lost the plot.

Vivian Wilson strikes back!

After Elon Musk declared his daughter dead because she was trans, I was just waiting for the other shoe to drop. It has. Vivian Wilson has delivered an interview that is pure fire.

“I think he was under the assumption that I wasn’t going to say anything and I would just let this go unchallenged,” Wilson said in a phone interview. “Which I’m not going to do, because if you’re going to lie about me, like, blatantly to an audience of millions, I’m not just gonna let that slide.”

Wilson said that, for as long as she could remember, Musk hasn’t been a supportive father. She said he was rarely present in her life, leaving her and her siblings to be cared for by their mother or by nannies even though Musk had joint custody, and she said Musk berated her when he was present.

“He was cold,” she said. “He’s very quick to anger. He is uncaring and narcissistic.”

Wilson said that, when she was a child, Musk would harass her for exhibiting feminine traits and pressure her to appear more masculine, including by pushing her to deepen her voice as early as elementary school.

“I was in fourth grade. We went on this road trip that I didn’t know was actually just an advertisement for one of the cars — I don’t remember which one — and he was constantly yelling at me viciously because my voice was too high,” she said. “It was cruel.”

I know how some of that felt — my father was a high school football jock, and he did accuse me of being weak and effeminate because I took after my mother, being bookish and quiet, but he grew as a person as he got older and he was also caring and supportive. Musk was a monster. He is still monstrous. He doubled down on Twitter.

And in a post on X, Musk said Monday that Wilson was “born gay and slightly autistic” and that, at age 4, she fit certain gay stereotypes, such as loving musicals and using the exclamation “fabulous!” to describe certain clothing. Wilson told NBC News that the anecdotes aren’t true, though she said she did act stereotypically feminine in other ways as a child.

Wilson also addressed Musk’s recent comments in a series of posts Thursday on the social media app Threads.

“He doesn’t know what I was like as a child because he quite simply wasn’t there,” she wrote. “And in the little time that he was I was relentlessly harassed for my femininity and queerness.”

“I’ve been reduced to a happy little stereotype,” she continued. “I think that says alot about how he views queer people and children in general.”

Jesus Christ. Using three-syllable words and liking Rodgers and Hammerstein are not diagnostic of sexual orientation. How shallow and inane can he get? And he used that as an excuse to abuse his hown child!

Fortunately, Vivian had one supportive parent.

Wilson said she came out twice in life: once as gay in eighth grade and a second time as transgender when she was 16. She said that she doesn’t recall Musk’s response the first time and that she wasn’t present when Musk heard from others that she was transgender, because by then the pandemic had started and she was living full-time with her mother.

“She’s very supportive. I love her a lot,” Wilson said of her mom.

Maybe, instead of working to cure the non-existent “woke mind virus,” Musk should refocus his efforts on treating the “bad dad virus.” He could be the first patient!

Practicing my fan dance, just in case

Today is the first day of Skepticon. I was supposed to be there. I wanted to be there. But instead, I’m at home.

What happened is that on Tuesday I had my second encounter with a transient ischemic attack — the first was about a year and a half ago. I was just sitting at the computer, typing away, when suddenly I couldn’t remember how to spell anything, and the letters and words were swimming about on the computer screen. It was disconcerting. After a short while, everything went back to normal, but I called my doctor anyway — I got a CT scan yesterday (alles klar, no gross observable bleeds or anything like that), and I feel perfectly fine now. I’ll be visiting a neurologist in the near future for a more thorough checkup.

I suspect it was recent grief and sleeplessness and exhaustion and too damn much travel recently that brought it on, so I’m treating it by getting enough sleep. I woke up at 4am this morning, and often I’d just get up and start my day, but this time I got up, walked to the bathroom, and came back to bed and got an additional 2 hours of sleep. No more absurdly early bird for me.

Unfortunately, one thing I cannot trust my brain to do is to hop into a car and drive for 11 hours to St Louis. Once upon a time, yes, no problem, but now I picture suddenly becoming disoriented and confused on I35 because I’d pushed myself too far. Of course, my other nightmare is that happening in the middle of a class, which would be a bit awkward. What good is a professor who loses the ability to read and write?

At least I’ve still got my fall-back profession of exotic dancer to rely on…unless there’s also motor involvement. I’d better take care of myself and stay rested for my own good.

JD Vance probably does love a comfy couch, though

I think it’s important to check the flow of misinformation. According to the Associated Press, JD Vance did not, I repeat, did not fuck a sofa.

This scurrilous accusation does warrant a thorough investigation.

The wild assertions sprang from people on X (formerly Twitter) writing that Vance, now the running mate for Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, wrote in his memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy,” that he simulated the act with a rubber glove anchored between the cushions as a young man.

“You have only been a Senator for 18 months, you are NOT qualified to be @VP plus you depravely humped a couch and wrote about it in your book!” a Kamala Harris supporter wrote.
Even comedian Kathy Griffin chimed in, declaring the country should not have a “couchf*cker” as vice president.

At one point AP appeared to have another headline, “Posts spread baseless rumors about GOP vice presidential pick JD Vance having sex with a couch,” but the article has seemed to disappear. We’re checking with AP on that.

Why waste all that journalistic effort? According to Mediate, AP did a PDF search of the book that produced 10 references of “couch” or “couches” but in none of them did Vance take liberties. “Sofa” and “glove” did not appear anywhere in the memoir, AP wrote.

I am mostly satisfied at this point, but I wouldn’t rule out the appointment of a Senate committee to investigate further. And I think that Vance needs to make a public disavowal.

The problem with kaiju

I’m sorry, but I’m a cliche. I was lying in bed half asleep last night when my wife came to bed, and I’m fortunate that she didn’t ask what I was thinking.

Because my brain was whirling like a hamster in a cage about…kaiju. This past summer, I have watched Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire (big meh, Hollywood exploding the whole premise) and Godzilla Minus One (really good), and of course I’ve watched the original King Kong, which is the only one to get even close to handling this problem properly.

Here’s the problem: energy defeats flesh. People successfully hunted elephants with sharpened sticks and bows and arrows. They hunted whales with harpoons tipped with flint or copper. Thick skin and scales are hard to penetrate, but apply enough force and you can punch through them. In an animal of vast bulk, it is going to be difficult to get through to a vital organ, but if nothing else, make enough holes and it will eventually bleed out. It’s probably going to be enraged first, and try to kill you, but that’s why you don’t pick on an elephant or a whale — it’s the risk, not the invulnerability.

It bugs me in a kaiju movie that everything just explodes on the surface or bounces off Godzilla. He can’t be denser or tougher than the steel and concrete buildings he smashes with nary a scuff or a scratch — there is no armor thick enough in a mobile animal to resist heavy arms fire. Yet the movies just show modern tanks firing at him, and he isn’t even set back, let alone scored with damage. Good ol’ King Kong gets it right, since [spoiler!] they killed him with repeated machine gun fire that caused enough accumulated damage that he fell down dead.

Don’t get me started on Pacific Rim. Why are they building elaborate, complex, giant robots to grapple with the huge biological horrors rising from the deep? One GBU 12 Paveway launched from an F-15, and it’s splattered. I don’t care what it’s made of, if it can’t survive getting punched in the face by a robot, it’s not going to cope with being torn apart by a 500lb bomb and falling back into the sea as a rain of gibs.

So that took care of my concerns about kaiju, and I could get back to sleep.

But then I thought of other problems. What does Mothra eat? Is she denuding entire forests to grow to tremendous size? And possibly, she doesn’t eat as an imago — all she might have on her mind is sex!

I’ll think about that some other night.

This is not a super-villain origin story

Although it sounds like it, its roots have to be much deeper. Elon Musk sees his children as props that he spends little time with, pumping gametes into his serial wives and throwing money at them, and it’s unsurprising that at least one of them wants nothing to do with him. Musk has disowned Vivian Wilson, his transgender daughter, for betraying him by not being the person he wanted her to be.

In a controversial interview with Daily Wire on Monday, the Tesla CEO said that his transgender daughter Vivian, who transitioned in 2022, was killed by the woke-mind virus.

I was essentially tricked into signing documents for one of my older boys, Xavier, the billionaire told psychologist Dr. Jordan Peterson, using the 20-year-old’s deadname and incorrect gender, per Page Six. Musk claims that he was essentially deceived into signing documents to allow for the child’s medical gender reassignment.

This is before I had any understanding of what was going on. COVID was going on, so there was a lot of confusion, and I was told Xavier might commit suicide if he doesn’t [make the change], Musk continued, again insensitively referring to his daughter by her deadname.

Elsewhere in the interview, he said he lost his child and said again that he had been tricked.

They call it ‘deadnaming’ for a reason, he added. The reason they call it ‘deadnaming’ is because your son is dead. My son Xavier is dead — killed by the woke-mind virus.

The SpaceX founder added, I vowed to destroy the woke-mind virus after that. And we’re making some progress.

Now Jordan Peterson…that guy belongs in a comic book, he’s even got the costume already. Musk is just a terrible father.

There’s this awful patriarchal belief that children are extensions of yourself, rather than autonomous, independent people who will follow their own unique paths and become something other than your puppet. Musk has it bad. Vivian Wilson is her own self, and that offends Elon Musk.

I grew up as one of six kids, all different, all complicated, and while we all loved our father, we were not him at all…and he respected that, helped us as much as he could, but let us go our own way. That’s how I feel about my own kids: they are good people, but they are not me, and I wouldn’t want them to be.

Vivian looks pretty alive to me. She’d probably be more interesting to talk to than Elon Musk.

Hey, how is he planning to destroy his imaginary woke-mind virus? Since it doesn’t exist, and is nothing but the reification of his own fears and misconceptions, the only way to defeat it is by waking up himself.