I love it when some random commenter drops some big block of knowledge like this, about art forms that most people dismiss.

The “break” in “breakdancing” comes from the use of the breaks in songs by DJs. Very cool.

I remember maybe in fourth or fifth grade when breakdancing was at its peak popularity. My grandfather asked me if I liked breakdancing. I said that I couldn’t do it, but it was very fun and creative.

He got angry because I liked “black dancing and music.” Except he didn’t use the term “black.”

This article contains some technical inaccuracies, some hand-waving to distract and make people look the wrong direction, and some outright falsehoods – in other words, the average net neutrality article from Wired.

I’m guessing that Wired is probably getting paid by someone to write these articles. Otherwise, there is no real explanation for it. Ignorance just isn’t enough to account for the frequency of their appearance and the inaccuracy of the “facts,” or the common irrelevant misdirections.

I don’t really have the patience to demolish the inanity point by point, but all the talk about content delivery networks really has nothing to do with net neutrality and the current debate over what ISPs are doing, which is attempting to extort money from large bandwidth users (and eventually, of course, others) by artificially bottlenecking traffic.

Technically speaking, there are two main ways to bottleneck traffic. First, there are various methods to actively do so. For instance, I could on a Cisco router use a committed access rate to rate-limit an interface(s) using a QOS group. (If that has no meaning to you, which it shouldn’t, don’t worry about it. Not really important.)

The second method is passive bottlenecking. For instance, I could put in a 100Mbs hub from 1996 where a 10GE switch should be. This is effectively what the ISPs are doing – they are refusing to provide the infrastructure on their side that would allow traffic to flow properly between a backbone provider (which Netflix et. al are on the other end of) and the ISP.

Content delivery networks – which have been around since Akamai was founded in 1998 (part of another inaccuracy in the article) – are a distraction and fairly irrelevant to this discussion.

Historically (as a commenter mentions), ISPs have welcomed caching servers in their data centers because it provided better service to their customers.

Now the ISPs have decided to charge large content providers for putting these servers in, or having a more direct connection to the ISP network, or both, while passively degrading the traffic that has not been paid for. In the past, they would have begged (or even occasionally paid for) these caching servers.

This will spread, of course, because the point is to turn the internet into cable television where you pay for packages, such as the “$89 a month package – includes Amazon, Ebay, and ESPN!” or the “$99 a month package – included Netflix and Hulu in 4K!”

This is the end goal.

The ISPs are using the leverage they have to achieve this, and Wired even while criticizing them a bit is enabling them by spreading inaccurate and/or irrelevant information.

I like this comment about Wired and its approach, which sums it up better than I could:

Does Wired not realize they have an educated tech savvy crowd that they are trying to trick? Do they not realize that it’s business suicide to become a clear enemy of your customers? Who will they advertise too if they have no readers?

As in many areas, Wired, being part of the establishment, only likes to examine options that are friendly to the established and along already-set paths. This article examining it in a larger context is but another example of that.

For instance, why is internet access not a public utility? Why are CDNs not available to all at decent prices? Why is our country the only one who can’t seem to do any of this correctly? Why is internet access in the US so terrible even compared to much poorer countries?

These are questions that do not defend the status quo, so they are ones that Wired will never ask seriously.

Many people – usually those beaten down by ill-considered academic theory – believe that if something is entertaining, it cannot be art.

That only in misery, in slogging through the 800 page book with no plot and vague characters, in watching that six-hour Italian movie of a static shot of a bridge, can true art be found. And in this case “art” means that no enjoyment is allowed to be had, because the very act of enjoying something means it is then by definition not art.

I reject this utterly. It is absurd, but it is the dominant paradigm in intellectual circles.

It’s interesting to consider works and styles often considered vile and low becomes high culture after a time – for instance, Shakespeare’s (and many other) plays, and novels themselves.

Luckily, academic thought has very little influence on public perception of art or its creation (though maybe if it prevented another Thomas Kinkade, more sway would be good). There must be standards for everything, I guess, but my standard simply must be more intellectually comprehensible than that of a hipster record store clerk snorting at the albums people bring to the counter to purchase simply because they like something other people like.

Of course, someone holding a gun to your head like that means they have no training.

Anyone with training would stand at the very least four feet away from their captive – too far away for them to rush or knock their arm aside.

In reality, if someone trained wants to kill you, they will. You will never see the weapon until it is too late. People trained to kill are also trained to never show the weapon until the very last moment.

No one with training goes running around like in movies waving a gun. Or a knife.

Life isn’t a fantasy. If someone trained is targeting you and wants to kill you, they probably will easily. Simple as that.

In every other situation, having a gun only hurts you.

This guy is unbelievably fast.

The problem with pulling a gun on someone is that you might run into someone like him, and then you are dead (and no, people this fast aren’t always the “good” guys).

Ha, yes, this is most literary novels.

She also skewers YA novels pretty effectively, too.

But this is just hilarious.

“It’s complex because parties are where you’re supposed to have good times, but we never do,” I said.

“Yes,” he said.

“Uuuuuuughhhh,” I moaned, and then all of my bones fell out because of alienation, and I flopped to the floor like a fish, and I went “uuuuuuggghhghghghghgh again.”

“Bluuuuughhhhh,” he agreed, and he was so alienated that he disappeared and stopped existing. What even is the self.

You’re read 95% of all litfic right there. Now go write an essay.

Almost all novel and movie plots have to be unrealistic (even the “true” ones) because the world is far more complex than can be portrayed on screen or in text.

Much (most) must be distilled, elided, eliminated, or condensed.

I am far more forgiving of “plot holes” than most as they aren’t usually plot holes, really – I just assume something happened off screen or off page that the work didn’t have time to show.

That doesn’t excuse bad plotting, though.

Really, though, reality is full of “plot holes.” Why did WWI happen? Plot hole. Why did Germany invade Russia in WWII? Plot hole. Why did America elect George W. Bush twice? Plot hole. I could go on.

We are far more forgiving of the plot holes in reality than we are in fiction, for some reason. Perhaps because we have little choice.

Thinking about the Reddit changes, it’s almost certainly prepping for a sale. That’s the only reason to do something so destructive.

I predict Reddit will be acquired/sold within the next 6-9 months.

Reddit – whether you like it, hate it, or just don’t care about it at all, just had its Digg moment. More info on that here.

This will destroy most of the commenting communities there. I think this is being done to please advertisers, but it will just end up nuking the site.

So if you hate Reddit, rejoice! It doesn’t have that long left to live unless this is reversed.

I’ve noticed a large decrease in interpersonal openness in society, even as we’ve gotten more communications technologies.

This is found society-wide, not just in gender relations – for instance, with how kids generally are not permitted any unscheduled time alone without parental supervision these days.

I remember back in the 80s how very often older girls (13-19 age range) would flirt with younger guys like me to give us practice in dealing with women, and probably to boost their own egos too I’d guess. I’d bet this doesn’t happen at all anymore, and if it does it’s much, much less frequent now. Anecdotally, I saw it frequently in the 80s, and I have not ever seen it since.

Then, it was considered utterly normal and was actually really helpful to me and a lot of men to know how to talk to people to which we were attracted, and not to be intimidated.

These days, it’d probably be considered child molestation or some such bullshit.

I’m not nostalgic for the 80s, but people who do not remember that time well have trouble understanding how vastly different society felt then. Things are definitely better now, especially for gay people and other minorities.

But how to quantify how much more open and approachable people were then? It’s nearly impossible. Because to modern people, it just doesn’t make much sense as the world has changed so much.

I don’t have any real idea exactly why it’s happened, but it definitely has. Things that would have been utterly normal for women or men to do in 1984 would now be likely to get one arrested.

Interesting how society can change so quickly, and how people born after 1980 (who are just slightly too young to have more mature memories of what it was really like) deny that it could have ever really been that way.

The most likely denouement for humanity is extinction within ~10,000 years.

The next-most-likely endpoint of sorts is that humanity is subsumed or absorbed by its computing devices, and the vast, vast majority lives in some sort of simulated world.

I’d put the extinction chances at about 90% within 10,000 years and 99.9999% within a million years.

Not only is this whole damn thing stupid, but the grammar – the attempted use of medieval forms of English – could not be more wrong.

All of the faux-Medieval grammar is atrocious, but what the hell is up with number 4? “Thy” is always a possessive.

Also, “thou” at the time was used informally though unlearned idiots insist on using it formally today. “Ye” or “you” was the formal usage. “Thou” was reserved for friends or as an insult.

What’s weird is that sometimes, some anachronistic words are used correctly.

I know that it’s a terrible attempt to riff off the King James bible version of the 10 Commandments, but that does not excuse the atrocious grammar or the misogynist content.

World Cup. What a bore. Any game that allows a 0-0 draw as something that happens regularly is the biggest snoozefest since recreational sedimentation and cementation watching.

Do not read Robogenesis by Daniel H. Wilson.

I thought it would be an easy, effortless read and it was. Unfortunately, it also read like a newspaper report of some other novel, by a better writer.

It seems to have been written solely to capitalize on the success of the preceding novel, and is a rehash of sorts of that work with none of the original’s charm or plotting. The viewpoint jumps from character to character, but all of the character’s internal voices seem nearly the same.

And in a novel that could’ve been filled with interesting ideas about how cybernetically modified humans might fit into society and what that means, there are many explosions and poor descriptions of military maneuvers that would never occur the way they did in the novel.

I cannot un-recommend this work enough. The author might know something about robots, but he doesn’t know a thing about military strategy, humans, or plot.

The fat acceptance culture which seems to get more zany all the time would do better to spend its time and money investigating and resisting why obesity has soared so incredibly much in the past 30 years rather than becoming some sort of ridiculous parody of itself.

I realize that since I’ve been able to successfully and relatively easily lose a lot of weight myself that I have less sympathy for that whole movement now, but it seems rooted in failure to me.

I don’t think shaming or discriminating against obese people is right, though, and I don’t do it.

And the fact is that obese people don’t tend to make it to advanced old age, so don’t actually cost the medical system much extra (because they die earlier and more quickly due to obesity-related issues).

So whatever, not sure why I am even posting this as it’s boring even me. I’ll stop now.