Hey, I finally found one of the games that I played constantly during the 1980s. It’s Sub Battle Simulator!

I loved that game so much. Here’s what some of the screens looked like. Today, it doesn’t seem that great but for the time it was pretty advanced in its commitment to giving you some sense of realism.

Now if I could just find that game that I used to play on the Apple where you both played on the same keyboard, and you fired through walls and such to eventually try to have a clear shot to the other player. I think it had bows and arrows for the weapons? I have no interest in playing any of these games again, am more just curious about what they were.

I normally do not watch or recommend video talks, but this one with Sadie Plant is very much worth watching. It’s from 1994 (so when she mentions “the matrix” she is not talking about the one with Keanu Reeves) and she discusses the cult of the virtual, feminism, immateriality and idealism, the desire for “escape from the meat” and many other topics. Though long, it’s great, and she’s nerdy-charming, so that helps.

I think some of her assertions and associations are wrong or misguided, but I admire someone who is actually thinking rather than parroting what a million other people are saying. She is right about many things that people are almost just now coming around to — 25 years later.

I got quite a lot of pushback a few years ago when I asserted that prudishness was increasing. The evidence is everywhere, though. Not hard to find at all, and countervailing evidence difficult indeed to discover. Here’s some more of that prudishness.

It doesn’t surprise me.

12 years ago, when I was in the best shape of my life, people told me I “looked to skinny” because of the muscle definition.

9 years ago when I was 80lbs overweight & in the worst health of my life people told me I looked “big and strong”

NONSENSE.

— Jimmy Lee (@InnerFirePod) December 31, 2018

We are normalizing eating disorders, and I am not referring to anorexia or bulimia. Those are only normalized in a relatively-small part of the fashion world.

No, now we’re choosing to normalize the eating disorders of obesity and overconsumption. And if you are obese, you are sick and getting worse — just slowly. This world of shaming the fit is not an improvement. It’s becoming verboten to even show a person who’s in shape in an ad or on a web page; another area the corporations and corporate propaganda have completely won. I still wish someone would do a thorough investigation of where the Fat Acceptance orgs get their funding. I’d bet my entire life savings that it’s largely food companies.

I've seen people being conflicted about works entering the public domain and I feel this is exactly what many of us feared, that this twenty-year stoppage would start to be considered the norm instead of a weird exception. Copyright is *supposed* to expire.

— Stacey Lantagne (@StaceyLantagne) January 2, 2019

Exactly. The purpose of the copyright law is to benefit the public (at least as the founders intended it), not to enrich corporations and creators. The temporary monopoly of copyright was in the service of the larger goal of benefiting the public and the nation, not the ultimate reason for copyright to exist.

Corporations want you to think about this exactly backwards: that copyright exists to benefit them, not the public. This has been an extremely successful propaganda effort to invert this meaning in the public mind. Copyright was always about striking a balance between the greatest number of works being created and the benefit to the public of those works being available in the public domain as soon as possible.

I think on balance it’d be better if copyright didn’t exist at all (along with other societal reforms), but an acceptable compromise would be 14 years with the possibility of a 14 year extension. (By the way, something like 99% of works earn just about all that they will ever earn in the first five years of their availability. Absurd 100+ year copyrights only benefit corporations, not creators or the public.)

Corporate propaganda is so pervasive that I am in awe of its power to control society.