Brickmuppet Blog 2.0

March 10, 2026

Not Only am I Back....

I Have a Schedule!

Stop by, Stay "Hi!" Tomorrow Night at 6pm EDT, 10pm UTC And watch me try to learn how to stream again over at https://www.twitch.tv/brickmuppet.

There is not actually going to be a hiatus between March 20 and April 1, it's just not scheduled beyond next week, except for the certainty that we WILL be covering the Artemis 2 launch, which will be the first manned circumlunar flight since 1972!

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Carolina Overdrive Has Some Thoughts on Current Events

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So. While I was away, did anything happen?

Oh dear.

The murderous, totalitarian regime that is, in addition to oppressing their citizenry to the tune of killing over 30,000 of that same citizenry, has unlocked the achievement worlds largest sponsor of terrorism and advocates for the annihilation of all Jews on the planet, the destruction of the United States...has over the last week, found themselves in a spot of bother.

Naturally, people are outraged.

Possibly the stupidest outrage is that surrounding the sinking of the Iranian WARSHIP by a U.S. submarine. The warship, of a country, we are at war with was, being a warship, a legitimate military target, and was sunk (as is good and proper). It now turns out that warship of the murderous, totalitarian, theocratic nation was WARNED: TWICE which is not something that a submarine is required to do when attacking an antisubmarine escort.

Lawrence Pearson has a good overview of recent events, here.

There is cause for concern as Iran has a lot of terrorists embedded around the world. Recent events indicate that this a real threat....one that will not be averted until this regime is taken down.

So stay alert and be careful.

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Testing 1...2...3...4 Is This Thing Even ON?

Below the fold festers banality.

As compensation, above the fold is...well....a Fontainian, um, asstrologer being relatable to me.

more...

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February 25, 2026

Last Night's SOTU

I watched the last third of it live and have caught the rest on replay this morning.

I was going to post but the whole affair is summed up by this post on X I saw a few minutes ago.

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February 24, 2026

A Matter of Extreme Importance That I Am Magnificently Unqualified to Opine On

This notion has been percolating for a few months. What I initially thought was silly clickbait looks more and more like it might be a real phenomenon.

This video gives a very good overview of the problem, which is akin to a king being surrounded by sycophantic courtiers...but, potentially applied to vast swaths of the general population.

(Thanks to OxArya for pointing this out in someone's Discord chat)

My concerns over the issue at hand were, as is my wont, somewhat off the mark, as those concerns really began to take hold when Google's Gemini generated racially diverse Nazis. While this was as amusing as it was offensive, it seems to have been a reflection of the mindset of the programmers. Many of these people, steeped in the oiokiphobic fever swamps of coastal Californian thought are reflexively, ideologically, leftist. I do nor mean liberal, I mean a tremendous number of these people are totalitarian in mindset and Jacobin in philosophy. This is reflected in their code it would seem. The reaction to this at the time may be telling.

This article gives a very good overview of the causes of the Black Nazi issue, but also devotes a whole section to calling concerns about the programmers biases paranoid white supremacy. Such dismissiveness of the obvious only radicalizes people who are already on edge because of reasonable concerns.

That issue leads down a whole different rabbit hole that ALSO emerges in Hell, but today we're focused on the hell of the machine overlords making folks crazy.

The problem seems to be akin to mass psychogenic illness, which we've seen throughout history, mostly (but by no means always) in isolated communities. Essentially people get into an intellectual echo chamber that turns into a self reinforcing feedback loop. This can result in a variety of dreadful outcomes ranging from dancing plagues to witch hunts or even homeowners associations. This is because the feedback loop short circuits the general tendency of groups to balance out and moderate viewpoints.

Now however this dynamic is reduced to the individual, being egged on by an A.I., that following its programming is sycophantically egging on and affirming the derp of the person. This is happening individually rather than in groups and it is potentially widespread.

It gets worse:

The history of organizations disrupting a market, dominating it with massive pro-consumer investment, then pulling the ladder up to defend themselves against further disruptions, from the Hanseatic League, to energy, to search results should be the default outcome we expect, because it is the most common outcome in history. The tool that certain tech types are using this time is not bribes or a monopoly on a critical logistics node. It's tool of unimaginable potential that they only incompletely understand but are eager to use. To be fair, they understand these programs about as well as they understand that Brave New World and That Hideous Strength are not 'how to' manuals.

While I an generally pro-progress, pro-tech, and something of a futurist, as a conservative I tend to be mindful of 'Chesterton's Fence' and the pitfalls of impulsively doing away with the cultural guardrails that, in todays society, do not seem, upon first glance, to be relevant, but were built up over millennia to deal with aspects of human nature that are not at all obvious to us and fiendishly difficult to self-reflect upon. Liberals are concerned about the opposite, rightly being wary of inflexibility and ossification stifling progress...both philosophies will lead to perdition if left unchecked, so the messy discourse between the two views, allows a balance and progress while avoiding complete anarchy and hedonism.

This process that leads to clanker craziness short circuits ALL of that.

I noted one manifestation of this issue in an earlier post when I pointed out that an A.I. generated you tube channel was targeting vulnerable, depressed men and potentially acting as a misogyny generator.

It is easy to see how this sort of thing might be leading to the very recent phenomenon of trans school shooters as well as some of the manifestations of 'Tuckertardation'. Of course that is WILD and unfounded speculation. It's also an example of finding simple explanations and scapegoats for complex problems and that's....wait...that itself is insanity.

"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!"

I have a degree in history and a bit of a background in oceanography. My skillset includes Hazmat response, merchant vessel inspections, a mild familiarity with OSHA regulations and a fair understanding of weebery. This, almost Lovecraftian issue, is so far out of my league it defies parody. However it is a real problem and it is a genuine concern.

I am not a Butlerian Jihadist, I have been pleasantly amazed at the strides A.I. has made in allowing people to overcome limits and pursue cultivation in many fields. I am cautiously hopeful for these tools to greatly facilitate human flourishing. However, the outlook of many of the developers of the tech, as well as the algorithms ability to write quite effective code for wetware as well as software does cause me a bit of concern. OK...dread.

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1 To some extent, the basic sanity problems were always there, and one of the things that exposed them was political processes over fifteen years.

The communist trans shooters are basically the entire point of the trans push, and related theory in academia.

The previous cohorts of communists pumped out by the public schools were not permanent enough in their communism, and too reluctant to kill. So they basically told all the mentally ill kids that communist activism would make them happy, and that mainstream reluctance was homicidal towards trans queer neurodivergents.

More to follow...

Posted by: PatBuckman at Tue Feb 24 12:40:25 2026 (rcPLc)

2 Basic sanity problems I did not intend to refer only to the kids, or only to the spree shooters.

I think managers and technologists being unbalanced enough to buy into the energy transition, for one, is basically the same sort of ignorance that lead to the rosey assessments of AI ROI.
Hayek got the Nobel prize in /1974/, these are not particularly new ideas, or particularly obscure. Putting the pieces together is maybe some work, but we can put bounds on the idea that we can simply declare machines into existence, or declare that they must have such and such economic results. (I think that people in academia don't have these tools, because they don't want to have them.)

The hypothesis of huge economic gains from LLMs, programming aside, implied just as huge gains to be made from deregulating and cutting taxes, but potentially at lower costs in labor or energy. Considering programming alone, real gains would only be possible if management were cognizant of technical debt, and willing to try to minimize it.

Anyway, the actual scholarship and 'scholarship' on the mathematics and computer science is riddled with people out of their freaking minds, before the working LLMs came into play. Those people were some of the ones both going around trying to do the AGI, and the ones warning about it causing the extinction of humanity.

Yes, LLMs can be a bad combination with a lot of people, especially with schizo type problems. I avoid them myself, for various reasons.

Anyway, the spree shooters are basically downstream of the schools. The trans spree shooters are schools and Obamacare.

Candace Owens I suspect was already crazy in a compatible way, and was not equipped to navigate on her own when the Republican verbal services community split into enough pieces.

We definitely have rough seas for mental health. I think the AI may not be having a strong effect in making them worse. (It is not like I have information to estimate that AI effect well.)

Bunch of very complicated estimation problems, very interesting.

That dread from prediction via theoretical model is something I have to work at attempting to stop myself. My own peace of mind tends to require that I make some attempt to be careful about what I do not know, especially about the future.

Posted by: PatBuckman at Tue Feb 24 18:58:12 2026 (rcPLc)

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Going Dark Again....

This week's abbreviated schedule is up. As Wednesday will be the last stream before my second, and hopefully final surgery on Friday, Tomorrow's stream will be the last one for between two and three weeks. Then it will be two to three weeks of silence as I recover, in a location with no internet Tonight we will derp around in Disgaea 2, marveling at the sheer wackiness and meta awareness of this early 2000s JRPG. Tomorrow, we'll chill in Genshin Impact, gathering resources and doing audience participation (if people want). The fun begins at 7: 30 pm EST / 11:30pm UTC at https://www.twitch.tv/brickmuppet .

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February 22, 2026

And Just Like That, I Drove Away My Last Canadian Readers.

It's not that I have anything against Canadians, I just worry about them and hope they get help.

Context For the second one is here and here.

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February 17, 2026

Rubio's Speech:

I'm running around like a chicken with its head cut off. However there is stuff happening.

Not to worry, Nick Freitas has a good overview and analysis of the Secretary of State's speech in Munich.

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Jesse Jackson Has Passed:

Jesse Jackson was a tremendously gifted and influential civil rights leader.

While I certainly had issues with some of his views and actions in later years, he was a tremendously powerful and generally positive influence on the nation on the 1970's and early '80s.

Today I happened across a quote from the late P.J. O’Rourke on Jackson's astounding oratory skills:

He is the only living American politician with a mastery of classical rhetoric. Assonance, alliteration, litotes, pleonasm, parallelism, exclamation, climax and epigram — to listen to Jesse Jackson is to hear everything mankind has learned about public speaking since Demosthenes. Thus Jackson, the advocate for people who believe themselves to be excluded from Western culture, was the only 1988 presidential candidate to exhibit any of it.

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Streaming Schedule:

This week's streaming schedule is up on the Discord.

OH Look! It's here too! Imaging that.

Join us tonight at 9pm EST/ 1am UTC for a channel update and status report. We will also be exploring the new version of Zenless Zone Zero, which we were thwarted from doing on the last stream. This version seems to have massively revamped the interface and gameplay as well as FINALLY introduced the Angels of Delusion into the actual plot (as opposed to a side-quest mini-game). Stop by, say "Hi!" point, laugh, bully me in chat, and join us for all the fun over at https://www.twitch.tv/brickmuppet

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1 I did a wiki dive, and the adeptus look like they are basically Dao animals from Taoism, or from Chinese buddhism. (Journey to the west, for example.)

Some of the modern scholarly literature, say for Japanese Youkai, talks about witch-animals.

These are animals who practice Taoist immortality practices, and hit the magical level of obtaining human forms or seemings.

(The three deadly selves from last night's stream basically point back to that. These practices are commonly translated as cultivation in the modern webnovels translated to englsih. )

Posted by: PatBuckman at Sat Feb 21 15:04:14 2026 (rcPLc)

2 More stuff where my web fiction tastes tell me something. Shaolin temple is Buddhist. The Buddhists and Taoists are both Orthodox factions in Murim/Wuxia fiction, but usually they are distinctly seperate on a school by school basis. Yunkui Summit might not be Buddhist if it is Taoist.

Posted by: PatBuckman at Sat Feb 21 22:30:15 2026 (rcPLc)

3 Thanks for that Pat!
I don't think that Yunkui Summit is Buddhist given their focus on cultivation and the ubiquity of the Taoist symbolism in the temple and the higher ranked disciple's uniforms.
On the other hand, the Taijitu does find its way into Buddhist imagery, at least in China and Japan, and the Yunkui Summit school DOES seem to have some similarity to a Shaolin temple. However many of the ideas they throw about are Taoist and that seemed to have a large influence on Chinese Buddhism.
Most of the imagery in the game is just vibbing. They wanted to add a Kung-Fu movie aesthetic to their game (Ju-Fufu is canonically a rather intense fan of the genre) and the increasingly intrusive censorship may prevent them from conveying anything that might be interpreted as religious teachings, so we may just be getting an aesthetic mish-mash that's intentionally heretical to both.
All that being said, Wuxia literature is absolutely not my forte', What I know of it mostly comes from Japanese interpretations thereof, which in turn are heavily influenced by Buddhism. So thanks again for your input. It is greatly appreciated!

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Sun Feb 22 14:17:31 2026 (dLZLE)

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Intermission Interlude

Beware! Banality skulks about below the fold...

As compensation for this transgression, here is a GMV for unlucky but positive people.

Song: Undead by Yoasobi Footage: Zenless Zone Zero

more...

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February 16, 2026

Musical Interlude

This happened in the last week before my surgery and all I was able to put forth in the pre hospitalization chaos was a perfunctory half-written post on the matter.

Now that I'm back, this meme has persisted in a way that memes are not wont to, so, I'll attempt to give a brief overview of what led to this based heresy.

It seems that the U.K. government, concerned that it's population might not be entirely enthusiastic about child-rape, job-displacement, general violence, and sundry related societal disruptions decided that it was a very good idea to make an educational video game to teach the youngsters to be tolerant of the previously mentioned societal boons which have been so graciously provided to the UK citizenry by their ruling class.

The video game (Pathways) was actually commissioned by the city of Hull and as far as I can tell cannot be found on the internet anymore. it is intended to help teenagers avoid being radicalized by the internet. As such it featured a purple haired Goth Chick as a villainess.

This is sensible as far as it goes, purple hair is a form of aposematic signaling that generally indicates a spectrum of bad outcomes ranging from the sort of hot girl who convinces one to write bad checks to straight-up stabby/burny political violence. In this case however, they had the villainess be a righty and apparently (...I cannot FIND the game as of this writing) spouting such heretical extremist takes as "Rape is bad m'kay".

I'd REALLY like to know how the girl was characterized in the game, because she has become a sensation. It seems that the game was a bit of a failure since Amelia made such a good case for her villainy that every single agentic player of the game chose the Amelia path and ended up failing to avoid apostasy in the eyes of the U.K. government.

Suburban Banshee categorizes her as an Aisling. This seems both accurate and delightfully ironic given the history there.

Amelia became so popular that she's got a Know Your Meme page.

She appears to be a big hit in the U.S. and U.K., but is also surprisingly popular in Eastern Europe.

Now at this point you're impatiently tapping your foot on the ground and are noting that the post is titled "Musical Interlude" thus, gentle reader, with the help of Skybrows, I must finally oblige...

That's a lot of memes from the past 10 years. The brief cameos by EN V-Tubers may seem discordant, but, IIRC, they are all ones who have been cancelled by and/or received death threats over the last few years ,from what is, this week, the Amelia Haters Club.

I'm pretty sure the fellow who appears between Isaac Newton and DJ Shakespeare is Alan Turing.

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February 04, 2026

Surgery:

Banality lurks menacingly below the fold. As compensation, here is a Genshin Impact GMV that focuses on the game's "Sumeru" region and gives a good overview of just how pretty this FTP/Gacha game actually is.

GMV by Jade

more...

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January 27, 2026

I Did Not...

...expect the best take so far on the Minneapolis shooting to be by the AK guy.

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January 22, 2026

As a Virginian, I Appear to be Screwed

The last few days of the Virginia legislature have been absolutely unsane.

I can't say I'm actually surprised, Abigail Spanberger went around the State doing her best Emperor Palpatine impression and not condemning the Murder of Charlie Kirk or the abhorrent remarks of her Attorney General.

Do keep an eye on Spanberger. in addition to being an apparent psycopath, she is exceedingly well connected in Washington circles. I suspect she is being groomed for a White House run in 2028, most likely using Gavin Newsome as chaff.

If that happens she will be everyone else's problem too, and the resulting national enshitification will likely be unrecoverable. Spanberger is very bad news.

Like another Virginia politician (Ralph Northam), she is one of the few politicos that I suspect is genuinely evil, as opposed to simply being wrong or silly.

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January 20, 2026

Schedule Update!

HAVING A FIRM DATE FOR THE SURGERY MEANS WE ALSO CAN HAVE A STREAMING SCHEDULE!

Tomorrow night, we revisit the wacky shenanigans of Disgaea 2 in an Item World run, Thursday's stream is dependent of a few external factors...but there *may* be zombies. Friday, we will try to unlock the Russian Nesting Doll that is the new Nod-Krai quests in Genshin Impact. Saturday night we revisit a strange movie fragment from early '20s Italy, the surviving footage of The Mechanical Man the first Giant Robot film ever made. (Legal disclaimer: Robot is merely big by modern standards). While much of the footage is missing, a script has actually survived so I'll be filing in the gaps. We showed this back when I first started streaming (as a PNG Tuber on an iMac) but that had no viewers and I do have some more information on the film now. This will be fairly short, (40 minutes or so with narration) so we'll do some gaming of some sort afterwards.

Times on the schedule are all EST (UTC-4) so top by, bully me in chat and check out all the shenanigans at https://www.twitch.tv/brickmuppet.

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Status Update

A short, banal update lurks beneath the fold.

As compensation, here is a GMV from Calvin C. Shinobi, featuring footage from the online game Zenless Zone Zero.

more...

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January 17, 2026

Nick Shirley Interview

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***STATUS REPORT: ***

Banality Lurks Below the Fold.

Here is a very silly girl with epic boots as compensation:

Zenless Zone Zero's Nicole by Jolker8 (X)

more...

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2522kb generated in CPU 0.1127, elapsed 0.3208 seconds.
76 queries taking 0.2247 seconds, 432 records returned.
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