Want a new reason to dump Facebook/Google? Yes. You do.

As a quick catch-up, most large scale Internets companies are tracking as much info about you as possible. This is why Google, Facebook, etc, are free. They sell that shit, or use it to sell ads to people (like me!)

That might be OK by you. Trading some weirdly specific ads on other websites is a small cost to pay for a free Gmail account and the ability to use a sub-par search engine to find how how birds fuck. Your searches may be for different stuff, I end up in a lot of weird conversations.

Until lately, I was OK with this too, since all my online profiles are filled with filthy lies, so my ads are for random shit like Muslim singles dating sites and server hardware. But there have been disturbing rumors lately that Facebook is spying on your phone. For example, they're listening to your calls, and stuffing that conversation in a database somewhere to help profile you further. FB denies doing this, sort of. They say they aren't selling that information to any advertisers (I can't tell you how comforting that denial is.)

Which I could almost buy. Until today.

See, today I started seeing ads for diapers. I have purchased diapers precisely one time. Two days ago. I don't use any other social media platforms with any real data at all. I don't have kids, and am not expecting one in the near future. I don't have the FB app on my phone. But my girlfriend does. And we had a baby shower to go to. So I bought some diapers, for the first time in my life.

Today? A shitload of ads for diapers on various sites on the internets.

Sounds like Facebook. Might be Google, or a handful of other jackoffs. Either way, I'm a fucking paranoiac about privacy on the internet, and they made me. Your information is being consumed and distributed to advertisers and who knows else far more than you're aware of. Two days turnaround to fling ads at me after a on a one time purchase from a brick & mortar offline store. Happy browsing.


As an addendum, I believe this is a Thing, because I do not see such ads at work, where I haven't ever logged in to Facebook or other stuff I check at the house. I don't dick around when I'm in the office.

I think, therefore, I am not a Juggalo

For Reasons, I did some reading on ICP over the last day or so. I knew they did a big "reveal" a couple years ago and unveiled the secret message behind their last dozen albums was "god." This was moderately surprising from a band that uses a maniac with an axe and a gun as their logo, and released tracks like "Chicken Huntin", "Bugz on my Nuts", "Dead body man", and "Murder Go-Round".

Full disclosure; I did, briefly, own copies of The Great Milenko, Riddle Box and Ringmaster. This was before YouTube or Pandora, so the only way to find out about new music was to get a CD or know a friend who had a copy.

The thing on my mind is what happened afterwards. Over the course of a couple interviews and since-deleted tweets, Mssrs. J and 2-Dope explicitly stated that they don't go to church, and "We weren't taught about the [Ten] Commandments [... or] what's in the Bible and all that. We just [...] want to see good people hopefully go to heaven, which we refer to as Shangri-La"

Well OK then. They're not claiming to be some type of Christian. I doubt very much that they're secretly Jewish, Muslim, or Scientologists, so now I'm trying to figure out what the fuck they're trying to say here. To me, it looks like we've got two scenarios:
1) ICP are actually new age hippy types with a dream of a happy afterlife available to anyone who "lives right" (whatever the fuck that means, the duo haven't clarified what their deity might require or deem worthy)

or

2) ICP have unintentionally created a new religion. Which their thousands of fans tacitly subscribe to. I'm pretty sure this is the correct interpretation, based on what I've read.

Bear with me. The Wiccan new-age people that I know tend to believe in the threefold law, which basically says that whatever intent you put out into the world will come back on your head three times. Help your cousin move - get rewarded, act like a greedy violent dick and you get colon cancer. ICP seem to live profoundly unexamined lives, thinking about repercussions, or indeed anything at all is antithetical towards being a Juggalo. Here's an excerpt from an interview in the Guardian:

"One of the ICP road crew locates the video on his iPhone, and it is indeed withering: "The [Miracles] video is not only dumb, but enthusiastically dumb, endorsing a ferocious breed of ignorance that can only be described as militant. The entire song is practically a tribute to not knowing things."

"Fuck you, man," says Violent J. "Shut the fuck up."

"Did you anticipate this kind of reaction?" I ask them.

"No," sighs Violent J. "I figured most people would say, 'Wow, I didn't know Insane Clown Posse could be deep like that.' But instead it's, 'ICP said a giraffe is a miracle. Ha ha ha! What a bunch of idiots.'" He pauses, then adds defiantly, "A giraffe is a fucking miracle. It has a dinosaur-like neck. It's yellow. Yeah, technically an elephant is not a miracle. Technically. They've been here for hundreds of years…"

"Thousands," murmurs Shaggy.

"Have you ever stood next to an elephant, my friend?" asks Violent J. "A fucking elephant is a miracle. If people can't see a fucking miracle in a fucking elephant, then life must suck for them, because an elephant is a fucking miracle. So is a giraffe."

We watch the video for another few seconds: "It becomes apparent that Shaggy and J consider any understanding of the actual workings of these 'miracles' to be corrosive. To them, knowledge is seen as a threat… For ICP a true understanding of 'fucking rainbows' would reduce them to, as Keats put it, 'the dull catalogue of common things'.""

For them, the song Miracles was deep. And they don't know why other people laugh at this. They want an afterlife without the burden of figuring out Ethics, or they think that writing songs about murdering rednecks and beating women is a positive thing to do. Or they're making shit up as they go, and their fans come along for the ride without requiring any explanation. This last bit is all too similar to how various cults, gangs, and fringe groups work, which I find depressing. If you're going to find yourself with the ability to shape the goals and actions of a large population, try to have something with more of an impact in mind than "smoke weed every day."

Well played, Marvel. Well played.

I was lazy looking up the date on this, but it took Marvel less than a month to respond to one of my silly dares way back when: Carol Danvers, the one, the only, Captain Marvel is getting a movie.

I ran across this a little while ago when reading up on the Jessica Jones Netflix series. Carol Danvers was supposed to take the Trish Walker / Hellcat spot in that show, until Marvel apparently told the writers there was other stuff coming down the pipe for that character.

I am giddy for a Ms. Marvel movie. Carol Danvers is rad as hell, and there's a tiny option to throw in Wonder Man in the background. This is absolutely what I like about Marvel stuff. The Superman-level ass-kicker hero is more or less a stay-at-home husband/boyfriend when compared to Captain Motherfucking Marvel. DC has no idea what to do with Wonder Woman or Power Girl (or the Huntress. Or Bat-girl. Or Carol Ferris. Or Harley Quin. Or. Or. Or.)

Ms. Danvers? She will come and fuck your shit up. She is a top tier face smasher and badass, and if we're lucky she'll show up in the next Guardians of the Galaxy movie to instantly solve the plot when Starlord is trying to set up another dance off. There wouldn't be Rogue without Ms. Marvel, and I very much look forward to seeing Carol throw a building through a dude in the upcoming film.

I owe someone a better writing thing than this.

But for now, I am a bitter motherfucker.

It's been a fun summer

I haven't updated this space in a while, mostly because I'm lazy. And it's the all-too-brief summertime here, so I'm taking the opportunity to spend time outside without immediately regretting that decision.
I have been reading a bunch of Stephen King and Harlan Ellison, and am enjoying their stuff a lot. The one distinction that has been jumping out at me is that King is writing a story, and Ellison is writing a story. The difference is subtle, but once you notice what's going on behind the scenes, it seems to shout from every page.

More stuff on my mind, more work to do.

No, I do not respect your viewpoint.

I burned a bridge at work by explaining myself in graphic detail. One of our corporate overlords wandered into a politically tinged conversation, and very gently explored his options. In a normal world, this is fine.
But.
A boss interjected with his viewpoint that he respects people who strongly hold their viewpoints. Which I asked him to clarify. And he Did. Any viewpoint held by someone, that they sincerely believe in, grants that person automatic respect from the boss. He works with people who don't have the same beliefs that he does, and he respects that they have different viewpoints.

I find this to be retarded. Just because someone strongly believes in something doesn't make it worthwhile. Nor does it mean that this person deserves respect.
I was in a shitty mood, so I brought up examples up to and including Nazis, homophobes, and racists. He seemed OK with this. And seemed confused that I didn't respect that individuals in those groups held their beliefs.

Well. Here's a Hint. Those people are assholes. I know a lot of fucking stupid people, and just because they think something is true, Does Not Make It So.
Fuck them. Fuck Racists. Fuck Homophobes. Fuck Nazis. (I really didn't think I'd ever need to type that in 2015) They can all be burned on a pile of tires, because the things they believe in are odious and disgusting. I try to be a pacifist these days, but I will, at any point, gladly sucker-punch one of those douchebags, even if I'm just trying to grab a couple tacos 'cause it's lunch time.

For what it's worth, I hold the same viewpoint about flat-earthers and young-earth creationists. I'm real sorry you sincerely believe in something objectively wrong, but you will get no respect from me for your strongly held convictions. This is the difference between having an open mind, and having a mind so open your god damned brain falls out.

I made this!

I spent the week or so building out a sandbox site for the day job. This is NOT normally something that takes this long, but since I didn't have an available backup server, or budget, or any tools to automate any part of this, it did.

So, I had to cobble the fucking thing together using a spare hosting account I had laying around, and glue all of the frameworks, databases, and plug-in modules by hand. While doing other "useful" stuff, obviously.

Today, I got it finished to the point where bugs we started seeing on the production site were also being replicated on the sandbox. Success! I was also able to find fixes for a few of these, and apply them to the company site.
I took a minute to grab the boss and explain what a neat thing we now had: here's a place where I can test out patches to things without fucking up the company website! This is a Good Thing because I don't pull my hair out trying to test things in production when our customers are, you know, using the site.

Naturally, 20 minutes after I showed him this, I nuked the thing into oblivion when an update patch went off the rails, and spent a half-hour restoring the damn thing.
But! That's what it's there for. If this thing blows up in the middle of the day, I don't have an office full of screaming lunatics and pissed off customers. We get to keep making money and everyone else can keep working.

I've been doing web stuff for over a decade, and this is only the second time I've worked with a development sandbox. If you ever wonder why most of the stuff on the internet sucks, this should be a big clue.

I grabbed a fresh beer and stopped playing Red Faction to write this

So, since it seems to have died down a bunch by now, I feel OK about writing about gamergate.
No, I ain't capitalizing or "hash-tagging" any of that.

From the distance where I'm viewing it, the whole thing is the natural fallout of a bunch of internet shitbags getting clobbered for being the same horrible fuckjobs they always have been online.

I'm a gamer. I've been doing this since the NES came out, I hacked my way into E3 back when it was still cool, and I've written for more gaming publications than you. I still hold world record scores on a few games. I also absolutely hate gamers. I play everything offline, because the online community has ALWAYS sucked. Every goddamned minute being exposed to those fucking goblins drives me up a wall. By now, I have been called a faggot in game chats about four hundred thousand times, and again: I Very Rarely play anything online.

So. My initial response when hearing about this garbage was "Oh? Well, yeah. That's what they do. They're assholes." At this point, I imagine that I feel a lot like a Log Cabin Republican. I really like this one thing, and everyone else involved with it is an overstuffed dumpster of cocks that I wouldn't piss on if they were on fire.

There ain't shit going on here about "games journalism", it's just doxxing, slut-shaming, and the bog-standard violent stupidity of the entire fucking community. People online are monsters, gamers are not exempt, and we've been doing this for a long time. Except now, it's all about death and rape threats with directions to people's homes. Progress!

The cost of entry for the new media is zero, ya'll want a better "games journalism" platform? Fucking start one. But, because it's more fun to move the goalposts and harass women online, we get gamergate. Going back to my offline games now, where I don't have to be associated with any of those idiots.

Yet another reason I hate everyone in my profession

Because, truly, programmers are awful, awful people. Web developers are the worst, but I could be biased here, since I get exposed to more of them.

Anyhow. This article recently went up on Model View Culture. It's penned by a recent college grad whining that technical interviews are "bullshit." They are bullshit because they are confrontational, and they make women uncomfortable, and "There are so many questions that technical interviews can’t answer: Are they able to work on a diverse team? Are they passionate about the job they’re interviewing for? Can they read and debug pre-existing code? How quickly are they able to learn new technologies? Are they a jerk?"

Technical interviews, you see, require you to write code on a whiteboard, in front of people.
As a Crotchety Industry Veteran, if I was interviewing someone that struggled with the concept of writing code, they would be out the door so fucking fast their own personal universe would red-shift. I don't give two tugs of a dead dog's cock if you're a really nice person or get along well with others, or have a super-cute kitten calender for your office if you can't write code: You Do Not Get to be a Programmer.

These interviews exist because so many people can't fucking code. I have worked with these people. I have fired these people. They keep fucking applying to jobs that they cannot do. So Now: we have to check. If I hurt someone's feelings by expecting them to demonstrate the core skill for their job, I get warm fuzzy feelings all day long. You're a shitty test taker? The test is called Employment, and you just got an(other) F.

All code is awful. I don't care if someone writes a really ugly function on the spot, or if they forgot a semi-colon, I just need to know that this person does, in fact, know how to write code at all.
I know that this will sound insane to anyone in a real profession, but this is actually a serious problem that our young graduate above appears unaware of.  Go read that article, it is short, and it's about a very simple programming problem frequently used in "technical interviews." The interview-ee manages about 2 pages of crazy person scrawl before crashing and burning.

For reference, here's a solution in C#:

for(int x = 1; x <= 100; x++) {
 string output = "";
 if(x%3 == 0) output += "Fizz";
 if(x%5 == 0) output += "Buzz";
 if(output == "") output = x.ToString?();
 Console.WriteLine?(output);
}

For all I know, that interview-ee was a super-duper guy, and always buys a round for the team at the bar. The next time your computer crashes or app freezes? Think of that guy. Technical interviews are a Good Thing.

Internets browser stuff

A side effect of doing a lot of work on the Inter-Tubes is that I tend to have a lot of browsers installed and use them all frequently, just to make sure things are behaving. I do a lot of dev-type stuff, so the built-in tools and available extensions are also pretty important to me, although admittedly most people aren't going to care much.

Since I'm a few drinks into the evening, here's where I give my picks along with why. I do realize that with the uber-frequent release cycle on Chrome and FireFox, this is all going to be irrelevant in a month, forward your hatemail to Google and Mozilla if none of this makes sense by the time you read it.

The Duke of New York, A #1 is still Opera. I am not a patient man, when I click a browser icon, it's because I have Shit to Do. Opera starts up a hell of a lot faster than anything else, and hauls screaming ass when loading sites and pages that aren't written by morons. Right-clicking and hitting Inspect Element on anything on a web page gets you access to the fantastic Dragonfly tool, and if you've ever needed to debug some CSS, JavaScript or network issue, this thing is indispensable.
There are a good chunk of sites that don't work quite right, but the keyboard shortcuts and overwhelmingly awesome performance keep Opera as my favorite day to day thing I use.

The number 2 spot is a tie. Chrome and Internet Explorer 11, to be exact. If anyone wants to talk shit about I.E., go get a modern version first. I started using the thing back when Netscape Navigator was the new hotness, and fucking Lynx was the installed browser on the terminals at my college's C.S. lab. The latest version of I.E. is robust, and has an overhauled and surprisingly sexy set of onboard tools for the dev kids out there. The current team working on I.E. knows all the cool kids hate them, and they're kicking some serious ass to make all those people look pants-on-head retarded.

Chrome is a solid piece of work, and I don't really hate anything about it, but there's nothing that makes me love the thing. It performs well, shit generally "just works", and there's not a lot I have to complain about. On the other hand, I loathe most Google stuff, and the UI never, ever fucking puts stuff where I can find it quickly since Google Knows Better. I imagine Apple kids would be right at home with this one, it's just not a great fit for me.

#4 is FireFox. When I installed FireFox 1 point something-or-other, I thought it was the coolest fucking thing ever. 2 was good as well. When 3 came out, it started feeling sluggish and bloated, and by then tabbed browsing was no longer the shiny new reason to lose 3 hours on wikipedia. For the last couple years, FireFox has limped along by having a kick-ass set of extensions (Greasemonkey! Firebug!) to let me get shit done, but the UI changes in the last few versions have started to hobble even those benefits. Mozilla, if I wanted a shitty version of Chrome, I would use Chrome. If I wanted to be a hard-core open source hippy, I would use Konqueror or Ice Monkey or any of the dozen other shitty versions floating out in Linux-land. These days, I ain't got much time for FireFox.

Everything else? I don't care. Safari is hot garbage. Lynx is old and busted. wget is used by Stallman and like 5 other people. I kinda miss Off By One, but only after a lot of drinks and I can't configure Opera to do the same stuff even better.

It has been below freezing all week. I am still glad that I do not live in the South.

I dunno if there's something in the water cooler over at rawstory, but jesus christ the feed today reminded me how much I hate the idea of living anywhere below the Mason-Dixon.

First up: A bunch of Missouri high school girls played a game in blackface! We are assured that "they didn't mean anything by it" and "they just weren't thinking".
By the time you make it to high school, if you still think that there's a time and place for blackface, this isn't an "oversight" issue anymore. It means that your parents and community did a shitty job, and that you are a piece of human garbage.

Next! Kentucky fire chief tells a deputy "We ain't takin no niggers here." Seeing how they'd just been in a car accident, and that the deputy and crew changed a tire for the other (white) person involved in the accident, and gave him an escort to the fire station, this gets bonus points for being racist and also a total dick move.
When questioned about being a racist dickhead, the chief then asked an asian reporter if she spoke English. Multiple times.
Stay classy, Kentucky! Also, die in a fire, you sorry cumbags.

Next! In Houston, a customer wrote "Don't want to listen to a faggot through my whole meal" on their receipt to complain about having a gay server. Wisely, the restaurant manager chose to apologize to the customer, and the server was fired/quit. He also came out to his parents, so they could at least hear it from him before seeing in on the 9 o'clock news.
I'm sure that went splendidly.
That something like this went down at a place as high-class as "Kelley's Country Cookin'" will be a shock to you all, I am sure. But it's comforting to know that Houston homophobes have a place where they can have a meal without being exposed to the queers. If I had a way to create salmonella outbreaks using the internet, I would have a busier weekend ahead of me.

Last for now: Virginia school officials tweet that interracial dating is every father's worst nightmare. This one I have some experience of, in a reverse kind of way. On multiple occasions, parents of various girls I have dated have accused me directly of being the anti-christ. I also have a bunch of racist shithead family members, that, while they hate the blacks, didn't have any problem with me dating asian, mexican, or indian women.
Attention Virginian stumble-fuck school officials, there are plenty of good reasons to hate people you god-damned troglodytes. Spend 10 minutes talking to someone, and you can probably come up with something. You're just being shiftless lazy stupid assholes by continuing with the skin color thing.

Bobbing for apples in a latrine

I've been busy having a very relaxing and pleasant weekend before moving to the new employment-place, so naturally, something had to come along and rectify that situation.
Recently reported by CNN and others there's a slew of rape allegations towards Bill Cosby for many, many incidents going back for the last 20 or so years. A couple of these have been 'settled', but that's a whole mess 'o rape to be accused of.

Innocent until proven guilty and all that, but given how under-reported rape is, things ain't looking great for the Coz.
Rape is generally considered a fucking horrible thing, so let's check in with the Republican mouthpiece of record to see their take on things. You know, what with their "tough on crime" plank as a party.




This goes about as well as you'd expect. If you don't have 3 minutes, skip to the 2:30 piece in that video. "It's not like he did it yesterday."

Yeah. That isn't some quote mining either, that means exactly what you think it does IN context.

At first, I thought "What the unlubricated fuck? Is Rush seriously declaring that there's a statue of limitations on sexual assault? Is he OK with sodomizing kids if you can keep it on the down low for a couple decades?"

And then I remembered that he is a Republican, so shit's all good if you're wealthy and/or famous.
Lest we forget, Rush got picked up for a (minimum) class 3 felony, and ended up doing a stint in rehab rather than spending the mandatory minimum 15 years in Federal Pound Me In The Ass Prison.
2,000 fucking pills is only worth rehab? I have regular migraine headaches, and I'll say that 2,000 pills is more than I've taken in the last 20 years. If I get picked up tomorrow with 2,000 pills, I'm sure as shit not going to keep MY job since, you know, I'll be in fucking jail for the next couple election cycles.

Tough on crime my black ass. Y'all want to be tough on crime, then start sending criminals to fucking jail.

The process and the procedure

This is the place where I dash off short pieces on whatever is currently on my mind that seems fun to talk about. I don't take what I do here too seriously, which means I agonize over word choice about 15% less than when I'm doing Professional Stuff.

Since I'm making an effort to come up with posts more often, I usually bug people around me for a topic. Any Topic. I absolutely suck at that part, but I'll be damned if I can't take a subject and ejaculate 500 words all over it.

That got . . . weird . . . faster than I'd intended. Tonight, no good ideas were available, so I was instructed to visit Reddit and scan their 'writing prompts', which is something I have specifically been avoiding. If anyone asked me why, I would have been forced to admit that I think random people have shitty ideas, and the internet in general is a cesspool, but no aversion more specific than that.

I went, I saw, I recoiled in horror. Now I have specific complaints. To wit: the posters there are just trying too fucking hard. The stuff I saw on Reddit is the polar opposite of what I like to see in writing, stories, and things in general - flash over substance and technique. One topic was "Imagine you survived a near-death experience, and later received a letter from God that this was an administrative mistake, so please commit suicide within the next few days."

Standing on it's own, this isn't a horrible idea. My gripe is that it's very, very specific. I understand that's what some people may need to get that kick in the ass and start hammering out words. Kudos to them. Their stuff is probably dreck. I don't really need or want someone else to nail down a whole story chunk, I just like hearing different things of interest, that's enough for me to get going. The prompt "Janitors" is enough to get the wheels churning. The rest I can come up with, and will hopefully sound like me (e.g. "Conversations between drunken Janitors cleaning up the cum stains after the DNC and Republic National Conventions", "Janitors as a new priestly order in a post-apocalyptic society after antibiotic resistant bacteria wipe out humanity")

The goofballs on Reddit are trying to come up with an amazing hook so other people can put their stamp on it. To me, writing like that is about as much fun as being in a cover band. As always, I'm a target market of one, so take this with a grain of salt or whatever.

My stuff (here and elsewhere) ain't winning any awards, but it's mine.

Language porn

I am going to be moving to a more programming-heavy job soon, so I've been warming up those parts of my brain that have lain more-or-less dormant for the last few years. Getting back to full time programming is a drastic departure from what I've been doing, but after doing a mental inventory, I'm happy to report that the lights all still work, the plumbing isn't leaking all over the place, and the walls are still standing in those particular areas of my mind.

If this sounds dramatic, or like I'm shifting paradigms without a clutch, then this is the post for you.

As a brief aside, I take a large amount of professional pride in programming. I really do try to do the best I possibly can, even when writing shitty little web apps or simple features. I like it when people see something I've done and say: "Oh! Neat, that is going to make my life a lot easier!" and the code doesn't look like shit to the point where I fear touching it again in the future.

But. Because I was taught by scary hardasses, I have a working industry-specific vocabulary that compares to the MIT hackers of olden tymes. And to me, this is a Good Thing. Programmers have to work with computer languages to get stuff done, which means that begging, crying, and pleading don't do much. You have to hammer raw math into some type of functionality described by a user, and there is very little overlap between the two domains. xkcd has things to say about this. Being very, very specific is important to solving the problem.

One of the things I enjoy is that programmers have a very rich vocabulary to talk about and describe the problems that occur because of the disconnect between code and desired features. Seriously, programmers have more words for "failure" than Eskimos apocryphally had for "snow."

For example, the words "bad" and "wrong" have two very different connotations. "Wrong" means that you fucked up. Someone types in "cat" and your program outputs "dog". "Bad" means that a user types in "cat" and your program takes 3 hours to run, crashes a server somewhere, deletes a couple random files, and then prints out "cat". Either of those cases can occur when the programmer makes an honest mistake. There is an entirely different set of words to use when the programmer is just being a bastard.

Logic errors have their own phrases and classes. Software and Hardware do too. There are modifiers for severity.

What we end up with at the end of the day, is a very expressive set of jargon to describe exactly what is going on with enough detail to figure out the real problem and solve it. Of course, there are a lot of ways to say that the user is obviously the problem.

The link in that last sentence has always been one of my favorite replies to use, so feel free to swipe that for your own, lesser, industries.

I get to be a programmer again. Even though I know that the Web is a shitshow, I am looking forward to it. Because we can talk our way through this.

A conversation regarding the HBO show OZ

"So, you've been talking about OZ lately."

Yup.

"I wonder if the violence is realistic in that show."

Well. I worked at a juvenile detention center for a year and change, and I got shanked in the neck by a kid, so I'd say that yeah, it probably is.

"Oh. Uh. Wow."

And this is why most of my co-workers don't talk to me when I'm on a smoke break.

I am going to be a nitpicky asshole about programming

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Old people, please stop being awful

This evening, I got a Clerks 2 style wakeup call after doing my regular readings on the Internets. I've known for a while that H.P. Lovecraft, like many old people, had a dim view of native Americans, women, and Minorities in General. And I was more or less able to disassociate that from his writing. I am a huge whore for HPL, I've got most or all of his printed Mythos stuff, and a ton of related movies, books, CDs, etc.

In Clerks 2, one of the characters finds out the etymology of the phrase "porch monkey", a favorite phrase of a much beloved relative. Today, I found out about this poem.

That, ladies, gentlemen, and readers, is a full-on poem by HPL using "nigger" not in the Mark Twain 'this is what uneducated dudes called black people' sense, but the more general 'black people are an inferior sub-species' sense.

At this point, I am going to exercise my White Male Privilege (because I can!), and say "Can people who wrote stuff I find interesting stop being Assholes?" Stranger in a Strange Land was pretty good. Heinlein was a dickhead. Ender's Game was a lot of fun, as far as space books written about child warriors go. Orson Scott Card is an enormous piece of shit. I still re-read One Hundred Years of Solitude every so often, but Gabriel Marquez has some serious fuckin-related issues that need to be addressed, cancer and death notwithstanding. Do Not get me started on Piers Anthony, his books aren't even good.

So, am I supposed to chuck out my Lovecraft stuff? I really like At the Mountains of Madness, and Dreams in the Witch House, and Rats in the Walls, and and and. I also live in a city where we have ongoing race related issues. Some People would assume that since we have Solved Racism, this is probably not a thing I need to think about. They . . . do not live here.

Yeah. Well. For a goofy looking fucker who wrote about indescribable cosmic horrors, HPL is now part of the problem, in my book. I want to respect the writing, I can no longer tolerate the man.

Quick thoughts on Apple Pay

This is a terrible fucking idea.
.
.
.
.
.
Oh, OK, I suppose I can give it more time than that. Apple Pay is Apple's new thing to use your iDevice to pay for stuff without the hassle of things like cash or credit cards. So, it's like PayPal or Google Wallet, or a prepaid VISA card, or, well, you get the point.
Except!
It's revolutionary, because Apple.
I realize that I have a long history of hating all over Apple's stuff, so I'm going to try to be as objective as possible with this.
Security is Hard. Let's repeat for the slow kids in the class: Security is Hard. For anyone who's been paying attention to this topic for a while, there's been a recent rash of well known brands getting knocked over. All those links in the last sentence? Different incidents. And that is by no means an exhaustive list.

Even companies that are good at security have a hard time with it. Apple on the other hand, has a terrible history with doing things in a secure fashion. Remember GoTo Fail? All those iPad accounts getting cracked? The Fappening? All that stuff is recent. And analysis of stuff like the GoTo Fail bug shows that this is the kind of error that will be caught by common, standard tools when you're writing code. Which implies that Apple is writing their stuff without any safety measures, code review, or standards.

So, do you think it is a good idea to trust your money with a company that has a history of doing security poorly, when the evidence indicates that there are many more exploits coming in the future?

If you still think Apple's stuff is secure, go review the results of the Pwn2Own contest in the link above. Apple's devices and software gets knocked over as an afterthought once someone provides a financial incentive.
Kids, don't put your money in Apple Pay right away.

Peak Fox News!

I have held off from posting about the Ray Rice shenanigans. Partly, because I am busy enjoying a schadenfreude high from all the dumb shit said by news anchors and NFL personalities after the Elevator Cage Match video was released, and many people got to look retroactively abhorrent due to the dumb shit they said.

Fox "News" has forced me to break down and write some words. Obviously, I hope that I will never again have to type that sentence.

If you haven't been exposed, the short version is that a video was leaked showing NFL player Ray Rice dragging his unconscious girlfriend / fiancé out of an elevator. The NFL decided that he wasn't looking good, and suspended him briefly. Then, an extended version of that video was shown where his girlfriend spat on him and yelled at the man, so he punched her in the face and bounced her head off a railing in said elevator, knocking her unconscious.

Ah. Well. Now This Is A Problem. This is where the apologists started looking like assholes. But! Thanks to Fox "News", we get the best possible defense of the stupid! It was her fault, because Ray Rice is the Real Victim!



Money Quote: "... that video makes him look better than before."
This is out of context, but I am not a Republican, so I will explain. The video shows an argument between Ray Rice and Janay Palmer arguing in an elevator. She is yelling at him, and spits on him. He then punches her in the head hard enough to bounce her head off the wall, knocking her unconscious, and drags her from the elevator. Please listen to the whole thing if you think I am quote mining or misinterpreting.

To Fox "News", this makes him look "better than before." You know, when we just saw him dragging a woman from an elevator.

My brain is melting trying to process this, so I am going to bring up the point that even in the UFC, they have weight classes. Yes, the arena where dudes are paid to commit felony assault on each other makes sure you are having a fair fight. Ray Rice is an NFL running back, he weighs north of 250 lbs., and is punching an unarmed woman in the head. Fox "News" chooses to interpret this as a valid response or somesuch nonsense.

Seriously, A.J. Delgado paints Ray Rice as the real victim here. Because he is in trouble for beating up a girl. Apparently, domestic violence is a complete myth, and when a huge dude pounds on some broad for annoying him, she should have just shut her whore mouth and "Taken the Stairs".


Christ Fox "News". I can't even parody this shit.

For the hard working man

I now have the exact thing to buy next time I have the opportunity to fuck an entire town.