Streamery Alert! (Updated)
My internet alter ego will be doing a unscheduled stream in about 25 minutes To check out the updates to Final Fantasy 14 Online that caused the server downtime that precluded Monday's stream.
This weekend, we'll be doing a long stream Saturday night, beginning at 20:00 EDT/ 00:00 UTC with another silent film watch party, The 1920 German thriller "The Golem"!
After that we will continue pursuing the main quest in Final Fantasy 14 until we drop. Stop by and join us for the thrills and the fun at twitch.tv/brickmuppet.
UPDATE: A power failure caused by a nearby lightning strike delayed the stream, and when we started internet connectivity would not allow streaming more than 20 minutes at a time before the stream dropped. We'll try to do this next week once we are sure everything works.
Dead Internet Theory Gets Another Data Point
The Dead Internet Theory posits that the internet is now mostly 'bots generating anodyne content and pretending to be human.
I'm skeptical because I'm human and as readers are aware I'm fully capable of producing anodyne content.
However, it now comes out that a Whistleblower at Twitter, one very high up in the companies hierarchy, is claiming that Twitter may be as much as 50% bots and ...
...that Twitter violated the terms of an 11-year-old settlement with the Federal Trade Commission by falsely claiming that it had a solid security plan. Zatko’s complaint alleges he had warned colleagues that half the company’s servers were running out-of-date and vulnerable software and that executives withheld dire facts about the number of breaches and lack of protection for user data, instead presenting directors with rosy charts measuring unimportant changes.
If true it means that Elon Musks complaints, based on his own analysis were valid.
It also means that at least in the case of Twitter, "Dead Internet Theory" has some merit.
I have an anecdote related to this. When I stream on Twitch I rarely get more than a few viewers in the course of even a long stream, yet when I look at chat at the very beginning of a stream, even when I'm doing an unscheduled stream, I can have as many as thirty "viewers" at least some of whom are known Twitchbots (like 'ComanderRoot'). This implies that Twitch is at least aware of the bots (as they don't count towards my stream viewership requirements for monetization). I'm one data point and my internet expertise can be summed up as "potato" but in light of these revelations about Twitter, it's food for thought.
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Yeah, of course, not all Twitter bots are actual bots. There are plenty of apparently paid tweeters or even enthusiastic amateurs who repost the same crap (in hopes, perhaps of becoming a paid tweeter).
Posted by: Mauser at Wed Aug 24 23:30:48 2022 (BzEjn)
Notes On Spam
I note that a percentage of spam comments are for a dating site in Sydney.
No doubt they are aimed at the blogs IT administrator.
This leaves me to wonder if all the comments pushing crypto, solar panels, wooden decks, Bangalore whores, or bulk quantities of frozen chicken feet are also misdirected attempts to assist Pixy.
I've tried for several days to put together my thoughts on how bad the Mara Lago raid was and why. I find myself deleting half-written posts in frustration or sitting and staring at the keyboard.
Then I read up on the Spanish Civil War which does not improve my mood.
Two recent op-eds, do sum up the gravity of the situation, though I think both are too sanguine about where we go from here, particularly this one. The other article, I note, while more tempered in its analysis is, like the first essay linked, a call to arms. This is not comforting.
We are on dangerous ground. Half the country, when it acknowledges them at all, looks at the other half with contempt. The other half views them in turn with a mixture of fear and disgust.
This is a state of affairs that cannot stand.
It's not just ignorance and misunderstanding either, both sides have fundamental and irreconcilable differences in their view of the role and function of government, the status and responsibilities of the individual, and the very concept of what is personal space.
I must say that the trend of the last few years is....worrisome.
Polio, a disease that once was a seasonal horror, that killed or paralyzed millions and was only eliminated in North America in 1979 through the genius of Jonas Salk has returned to the U.S.
Inflation, gas shortages domestic terrorism, riots, foreign policy disasters, Weimar-like degeneracy, paranoia and polio. The '70s are here again baby.
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a) links for the citations seem to indicate one actual case, and wastewater tests.
b) xenophobia is a historical response to disease concerns, and as a response has functional elements. One of the unusual things now was the combination of disease concern with xenophilia. Domestic isolation is relatively pointless when you are bringing in foreign potential carriers constantly and ensuring that they expose a broad range of American society.
c) Obviously, wealthy international travelers and illegals over the southern border are relevant. But, it is notable that the universities seem to run on international graduate students, and hence that university provided guidelines on disease control are careful to avoid ruining the business of a university, while fecklessly ruining the businesses of those without close ties to a university.
d) Polio is unsurprising, it is one of the many diseases that we would expect the current regime to have successfully imported.
e) The wastewater tests are suspicious, because of the implication that it is a novel test, that there is some sort of statistical inference carried out, and because the CDC is involved. Public Health bureaucracies, including the CDC, now have a proven track record of apparent malice when it comes to misconduct regarding statistical models of disease, and regarding tests, especially novel tests.
e) Any of these disease tests is basically an instrument, meaning that if you have good quality control on the individual tests, you need a large number of measurements to calibrate. Right now, something seems to have happened to cause a broad range of issues with quality control. Very likely, the calibration measurements have been few, and not run independently through outside statistical analysis.
f) It is possibly relevant that the opposition leadership appears to be driven heavily by leadership in their eighties, and estimating the effectiveness of talking points off of what would have been effective sixty years ago. Forex, presuming a familiarity with statistical numeracy and with electronic security that would have been true in the 1960s, but is very untrue today. Polio is precisely what such people would choose to fraud in order to try to panic people into another round of lockdowns, forced vaccines, and compelled acceptance of electoral irregularities.
g) Nuking New York City to sterilize the imported diseases there is as reasonable as anything else that people are proposing.
Posted by: PatBuckman at Sun Aug 7 10:43:52 2022 (r9O5h)
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I support option G, preferably while their federal delegation is home on recess....
Posted by: Mauser at Sun Aug 7 13:43:39 2022 (BzEjn)
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Once the existing policy is costly enough, consideration of alternatives can be batshit crazy, and still be as sane.
Monkeypox starts to make an extreme criminalization of sexual promiscuity look reasonable. Maybe NYC's population density is too high. Maybe Boulder, CO, has a population density that is too high, or just a population that is too high.
It seems like that now we only have factions that are stressed to the point of insanity. We will /not/ be calming down for a while, unless something that is specifically unpredictable happens.
Many of the remedies easy to hand have costs that would also be pretty bad.
Not under my control, and that is most likely a very good thing in a lot of ways. One thing that may be under my control, I can try to calm down, do something productive, and realize that some of my immediate impulses would actually probably be more costly than what I want to fix.
I don't know. That is a useful statement.
Posted by: Pat Buckman at Sun Aug 7 16:48:13 2022 (r9O5h)
4
Pakistan is having polio outbreaks, and that is right next door to Afghanistan, and the Taliban was suspicious of polio vaccine so a lot of kids never got it as kids.
Posted by: Suburbanbanshee at Thu Aug 11 19:15:43 2022 (sF8WE)
I am ASSUMING that something in this video activated a Twittermob, but I cannot for the life of me figure out what was concerning enough to pull it.
If any of you know, please, in the comments, let me know exactly what special group of snowflakes this cute little video is theoretically disrespecting.
Posted by: Mauser at Sat Aug 6 21:06:51 2022 (BzEjn)
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Thanks to the unknown (cough) benefactor who uploaded it to Bitchute. I did catch it before it was privatized, but good to see it still around in some form.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sun Aug 7 20:04:27 2022 (PiXy!)
4
"also some people said that her chasing an indonesian on horseback while wielding a gun was a slavery mention"
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at Mon Aug 8 11:06:43 2022 (LZ7Bg)
Wonderduck
Wonderduck suffered a blood clot 18 months ago and has been bedridden since. He was dealt a terrible hand when his hospitalization, but not his physical therapy was covered by insurance.
He has been struggling to literally get back on his feet since that time.
Today, for the first time in 18 months he got up and walked unassisted aside from touching one of a set of parrallel bars for balance.
Achievement Unlocked
Today marks one year since I flopped around on the floor like a dying fish to reach under the bed to get my phone to call the ambulance to take me to the hospital where I was diagnosed with a stroke.
I woke up this morning.
A small act of defiance to be sure, but one that pleases me quite a bit.
In celebration of having written a long post that did not evaporate when I hit publish, I'm going south for a few days to visit my 80 year old parents who have no computer and no internet beyond the potential for dial-up offered by their land line.
Blogging will resume this weekend and the next stream on the Twitch channel will be Friday night.
We'll begin by watching some silent DINOSAUR movies! The short surviving clip from The Ghost of Slumber Mountain ( 1918 )...(the very first live-action film featuring dinosaurs!) will be followed by the classic 1925 adaptation of Arthur Conan Doyle's novel The Lost World!
Since those films together are less than 2 hours long, and our Friday streams are scheduled to be at least 4 hours, we will follow the thunder lizards with a few hours of adventuring in Eorzea with the superbly entertaining MMORPG Final Fantasy 14 Online.
Come by and join us for the fun this Friday, August 5th, at 9:00PM EDT / 1:00AM UTC at twitch.tv/brickmuppet !
************
Next Monday at 6:00pm EDT / 10:00pm UTC we will continue last night's fighting and grilling with the quirky Metroidvania cooking game Dungeon Munchies.
There are other games in prospect, pending the arrival of some equipment so stay tuned!
While the channel still isn't monetized and thus we can't use our emotes in the channel just yet, we are prepared for that eventual contingency as the channel has just acquired a fully operational...wiggly!
Some Damn Fool Thing About an Old Property LeaseThe Diplomat reports on a strange international legal situation that could add yet another complication to the Balkans-in-1914-like conglomeration of conflicting interests, unclear jurisdictions, centuries old grievances, ethic hatreds, overlapping/contradictory treaties and great power intrigue that is Southeast Asia.
The issue has its origins in a 1658 agreement by the
">Sultanate of Brunei to cede the province of Sabah to the Sultanate of Sulu as compensation for Sulu's assistance in putting down a Bruneian revolt.
This was somewhat complicated by an 1878 agreement with the British Empire to lease the province... a contract which was continued by the Malaysian government who continued to pay the modest stipend to the heirs of the long defunct Sultanate of Sulu after the country gained independence from the Brits.
The Sultanate of Sulu covered northern Borneo, islands in the Sulu Sea and the southern end of Mindanao, today the southernmost big island of the Philippines.
The Sultanate of Sulu was the focus of considerable ire from the Spanish who, having claimed the Philippines, did not recognize their territorial claim over those islands. Sulu never actually signed a treaty of surrender however and when the U.S. acquired the Philippines in 1898 the centuries old conflict was still going on in the region known as Morro. The U.S. DID get a treaty from the last Sultan of Sulu in 1915, ending the bloody 'Morro Rebellion' and the last reigning Sultan retreated to Northern Borneo where his remaining lands were subsequently incorporated into British possessions there.
The area became part of Malaysia when that country gained independence but the lease continued to be paid to the heirs of the Sultanate....
Well...until 2013 when the heirs of the Sultanate of Sulu started an insurgency that killed at least 60 people in the province of Sabah. Given that this was an attempt by terrorists to re-establish a defunct Sultanate the Malaysian government put a stop to the payments to the family.
From here it gets....complicated.
Because the Sultanate of Sulu had a large par of their historical territories in the Philippines, the Philippines, for most of their existence as an independent country laid claim to Sulu's historical territories in what is now Malaysia including Malaysian islands in the Sulu Sea and northern Borneo. (Note that the U.S. never made this claim)
The Sultanate of Sulu was somewhat at odds with the other Islamic Kingdoms in the area because their interpretation of the Koran was....less nuanced... than the other, comparatively moderate Sultanates in the Southeast Asian archipelago. Their beliefs seem to be somewhat similar to the Whahabists of the middle east. Note that at least one of the Morro factions in the Philippines (which even today are waging a nasty insurgency there) aligned themselves with ISIS a few years ago. The Morro themselves, as mentioned earlier are a Sulu remnant who never accepted the peace treaty.
The heirs to the Sultanate of Sulu consider the Government of Malaysia, to be too moderate to be a legitimate ruler of Muslims.
Thus, when the heirs to the old Sultanate made their putch in Malaysia in 2013 the Malaysian government naturally cut off payments to them.
Which is where Luxembourg gets involved.
The Petronas corporation, Malaysia's big oil conglomerate (you may have heard about a couple of their buildings) holds the actual lease at the crux of all this. Well, the company was just taken to court by the remnants of the Sultanate of Sulu...in, uh, France. There it was found that was found that, Petronas Corporation, by complying with Malaysian government, had unjustly denied the heirs to the Sultanate of Sulu the approximately $5,300 annual stipend that had been promised them by the British in 1878 and grandfathered in upon Malaysian Independence. Thus they were awarded 14.9 B...B...Billion and their subsidiaries (which were registered in Luxembourg) have been seized.
So:
Let us review:
A group of heirs to a defunct kingdom with territorial claims that overlap two countries and known ties to Islamic extremists as been awarded almost 15 billion dollars because a company stopped paying a $5,300/yr lease the company inherited from the British after the government asked the company to please not fund terrorists.
15 billion will buy a lot of suicide vests and other kit, but there are more troubling implications. It appears that the remnants of the Sultanate of Sulu, in addition to insurgents and suicide bombers, possess a weapon that is singularly formidable and heretofore not thought of as a large part of their arsenal.
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While the things are hear about are undoubtedly a filtered sample, I can't recall a single instance where a French court has made a newsworthy decision that didn't fall into the "what alternate reality are they living in" territory. I'd love to hear the reasoning on this one. Starting with why a French court is involved in the first place. I assume it's just a "universal jurisudiction" thing.
Posted by: David at Tue Aug 2 20:01:14 2022 (D6Mju)
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Lessons learned children? When dealing with conquered Muslims, do unto them as they do unto those they conquer: No Muslims, no problems.
Posted by: jabrwok at Thu Aug 4 13:43:00 2022 (T4WaI)
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