vaguerant

Or Windex.

I kind of wish this headline just kept going.

Proton’s Lumo AI chatbot: not end-to-end encrypted, not open source, bad taste in music, murdered family of five

I’m thinking about my eye floaters roughly 200% of the time and I still mistake them for bugs flying past my face at least once a week.

I checked, whoever CONEY is isn’t saying these things, it’s a reaction video making fun of the satanic panic around Pokémon. That’s why in the profile pic he looks like one of those dudes who would make an outrageous reaction face in the thumbnail, because he usually does. No shade, except for the obvious shade.

• Satanism in Pokémon and MTG (original video)
• The Disturbing Agenda Behind Pokémon (CONEY reaction video)

EDIT: I’m watching the OG video (35 damn minutes); favorite pull quote so far:

The danger of Dungeons & Dragons or any kind of role-playing game like this is that it’s played with the mind and–when played with the mind–the mind begins to lose that fine line with what’s real and what’s fantasy. And the more you get into the fantasy world, the more it seems real and all of a sudden now, you don’t know what’s real or what’s not.

Seems like.

EDIT2: Hold up though, is this guy working undercover for Prima Guides or something?

And now, parents, if you’re not up on Pokémon, you need to be. And one of the things you can do is go out and buy the official Pokémon Trading Card Game Player’s Guide. And you can get this at any store that sells any of the Pokémon stuff. I mean anything. You can get it like at Toys ‘R’ Us or any of those places that sell any of the Pokémon.

This was so funny I had to double-check the linked article: yes, this part is also real.

I watched the eight-part miniseries Washington Black (US: Hulu, CA/UK/AU: Disney+). It’s a sort of swashbuckling 1800s steampunk fairytale of a Barbadian boy (the titular George Washington Black) who escapes the life of slavery he was born into using his scientific aptitude and a fantastical airship. I have somewhat mixed feelings about the depiction of life within the show’s universe, but going any further than that strays into spoiler territory. Overall, it was fun to watch. Sterling K. Brown is a major standout in the cast, but everybody is doing good work.

Below I’ll go into a bit more detail about the things I liked less. It’s fairly minor spoilers, mostly about things that don’t happen in the show, but if you don’t want to know anything going in, skip it.

Overall, I’d say it’s what you might expect from a Disney(-ish) fairytale adaptation of darker source material. It just feels a little weird when the elements that were dropped are the harsh realities of 1800s racism and not … little mermaids dying (Hans Christian Anderson spoilers). Again, I had fun watching it, but I feel conflicted about how healthy it is to make historical fiction fun by softening the harder edges. Who knows, maybe it’s OK to have some escapist fiction with PoC protagonists, as a treat?

For people who have seen Nautilus (US/CA: AMC+, UK: Amazon Prime Video, AU: Stan), I’d say that’s a better show, as far as swashbuckling steampunk adventures which try to engage with the racial dynamics of the (fictionalized) eras they represent. But both shows are very enjoyable, quite short and easy to watch. Go watch Nautilus.

It’s all right. I fell off it after one too many comedy “animal accidentally gets killed” scenes for me, which hurt what was otherwise a fun, feel-good sitcom. Tudyk is excellent as always and the supporting cast of small-town weirdos are mostly likeable. It’s not for me but I can understand people loving it.

There’s even a few that made it big and sometimes bigger than their parent shows.

• All in the Family --> Maude --> Good Times
• Love, American Style --> Happy Days --> Laverne & Shirley / Mork & Mindy
• Jag --> NCIS --> 50 more NCIS spinoffs
• Star Trek --> Star Trek: Voyager --> Star Trek: Prodigy (mostly a Voyager spinoff, but Trek is incestuous)
• Star Trek --> Star Trek: Discovery --> Star Trek: Strange New Worlds

Pascal’s family left Chile when he was nine months old, so it would be a lot weirder if he did have a Chilean accent.

I would kind of argue it’s Fox News that lied on this one. They edited down his full response which was a lot more sketchy about whether he would release the files.

In the interview, co-host Rachel Campos-Duffy asked whether Trump would declassify “9/11 files” and “JFK files.” He said yes without hesitation. Then she asked, “Would you declassify the Epstein files?”

His answer, as it initially aired: “Yeah, yeah, I would.”

But in the full version that only aired later, Trump said, “Yeah, yeah, I would. I guess I would. I think that less so because, you don’t know, you don’t want to affect people’s lives if it’s phony stuff in there, because it’s a lot of phony stuff with that whole world. But I think I would, or at least—”

Campos-Duffy interjected and said, “Do you think that would restore trust? Help restore trust?”

Trump hedged again: “I don’t know about Epstein, so much as I do the others. Certainly, about the way he died. It’d be interesting to find out what happened there, because that was a weird situation and the cameras didn’t happen to be working, etc., etc. But yeah, I’d go a long way toward that one. The other stuff, I would.”

His actual answer hedges on how much or whether he’d release any of the Epstein files and especially the actually damaging stuff, preferring to release only the stuff about how he died while casting aspersions about the reliability of the whole … pedo jet and island part. Fox edited him down to a more agreeable position than the one he actually held.

If you don’t mind revealing (hi ninjas), how were you playing this on PC? Only, there’s a lot of options these days. There’s the time-tested N64 emulators, but more recently we’ve got two new methods:

The PC port of the source code decompilation:

• https://github.com/HarbourMasters/SpaghettiKart

And the recompilation of the binary:

• https://github.com/sonicdcer/MarioKart64Recomp

For anybody who’s unfamiliar with decomps ports and recomps, they have outwardly similar results but are achieved using very different methods.

Using the old “source code == recipe” analogy, a decompilation is where you purchase a meal and take it back to the lab where a team of scientists painstakingly analyze it to uncover the original recipe that made it, both in terms of ingredients and the cooking method. Once you have that, you can either make an exact copy of the meal or change it to suit your preferences. Dropping the analogy for a minute, you can modify the game any way you like and even go as far as building it for completely different platforms, across as many CPU architectures as you like.

Recompilation is a bit harder to describe using the recipe analogy, because at no point do you actually uncover what the original recipe was. Let’s say you have a fancy Klingon delicacy prepared which is utterly inedible to humans. Unfortunately, you are human. Without knowing how it was made, you feed the dish into the back end of a replicator, which puts it back together in a form which offers the same flavor profile but is edible by humans. In this analogy, the Klingon meal is a game built for the Nintendo 64’s MIPS CPU, while your human anatomy requires food for an x86-64 CPU. However, you can’t feed the output to a Vulcan for the same reason you couldn’t eat the Klingon meal.

As an end-user, the result doesn’t change that much if your goal is just to play Mario Kart 64 on PC. Decompilation is the more labor-intensive process which eventually results in a more flexible “recipe” you can mix around as you like, while recompilation gets you a meal without necessarily helping you understand what went into it or how to make it yourself or change its composition to your preference. Both of these analogies undersell the amount of work that goes into either approach, so I do apologize for making it sound as easy as the sci-fi technology suggests.

There were definitely backlashes to big popular artists of prior decades, like Elvis and the Beatles. Partly it was couched in that “They’re corrupting the youth” conservatism, but also anything that’s popular with tween and teen girls tends to catch a lot of flack regardless of whether or not it’s deserved. Think Twilight or One Direction. I don’t care for either, but they both became out-sized hate figures for weird adult men. There was no shortage of enraged nerd hot takes when that sparkly vampire guy was cast as Batman.

I think Coldplay is kind of on the same page. Which is obviously faint praise, but they have a sort of inoffensively palatable sound which is both the reason they’re so successful and the thing people dislike about them. But it’s probably not worth getting angry about.

The for-profit childcare system in Australia is profoundly broken. They’re chronically understaffed and the pay is awful to boot, so there’s tons of burnout and staff turnaround as people move around trying to get hours at different locations, etc. I don’t know that 27 different gigs over a decade is actually that unusual in the sector.

If you’re interested, ABC News Australia did an article on it:

• In Australia’s childcare centres profit comes before safety - ABC News

Fair warning, there are some pretty unpleasant descriptions in the article of things that have been done to kids in the system.

Same here basically, cross-eyed viewing is super easy for me but I have to work for minutes to perform wall-eyed viewing. I was really excited to see a post with cross-eyed stereograms.

Occasionally they take the “investigation bungled by police” angle, but that’s the exception rather than the rule.

I AM THE PARK!

In fairness, space is as far away from the subway as anybody’s ever been.

♫ I still dream of QAnon ♫

(To the tune of Kate Bush’s “Cloudbusting”.)

9:39 “Please understand that social media is not a place to get news and information.”

Now I don’t know what to think about this video I just watched on social media.

The Penguin is the #30 show you must see before you die? Holy recency bias, Batman!