Just watched the Supergirl trailer again. Melissa Benoist really fucking kills it. Even though I feel like I’ve seen all of the first episode, I don’t care. I’ll still watch it.

That transition from goofy awkwardness to increasing assuredness is really hard, and she manages it in a trailer. That’s impressive.

The show kind of reminds me of Tina Fey’s new show, if Kimmy Schmidt had superpowers. Hooray for the return of sincerity, and for women on TV.

I probably identify with stories like that more than most because that is in fact the story of my life. I was a really really awkward, gawky, weird misfit and I turned out pretty okay.

Still can’t fly, though. I’m working on that.

I’m surprised by the feminist hatred of the new Supergirl trailer.

I can’t quite explain it, though I’ve read a few analyses of it. They all seem to be utterly clueless about the mythos and devoid of any real critical understanding. Yes, the trailer deals in archetypes but the whole point and focus of the Superman and Supergirl mythos is archetypes.

I think part of it is also that nearly everything is expected to be dark and brooding these days. People react poorly when they don’t get that. The trailer was in a mode that hasn’t really been seen since the 1960s, which I believe throws people off.

Supergirl is supposed to be just finding her feet. She is not supposed to be sure of herself, or immediately ready to take on the world. That’s partially what the story is about; finding her confidence and own reasons for being exceptional. I find this “I’m a badass and always have been” utterly boring in male characters, so not sure why feminists are expecting it here in a woman right away where it’d also be utterly boring?

I actually watched the trailer twice because I quite enjoyed it. It was refreshing and complete alteration of the tenebrous bullshit that passes for depth these days.

Supergirl in the comics was dorky and goofy, especially at first. And Melissa Benoist pulled that off very, very well. I was impressed. I will probably watch it just for her. Here’s a good analysis about why there is so much dumbassery about the Supergirl trailer.

A lot of people it seems just search for reasons to be offended, on every side of the aisle.

Did I think it was perfect? No. But did I think it deserved to be trashed as some anti-feminist woman-hating work? No.

I’ll tell you what: real woman-hating is easy to find. It’s where they don’t put any women in anything at all.

This is why we can’t have nice things, people.

(BTW, if you liked the Supergirl trailer, you’ll almost certainly like the show iZombie. It has the same tone, is far better than I expected and Rose McIver is great in it.)

No, alas.

Also not a troll and not satire.

What a world we live in.

Journalists write these articles and provide no context.

What Lily Hay Newman should’ve explained is that public IPv4 addresses are handed out by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority. They generally issue blocks of IP addresses to large corporations and ISPs.

This is what has been exhausted. There are no more of these large blocks remaining to assign to Level 3 or Cogent or IBM.

These large companies further subdivide IP address blocks for various purposes. For instance usually when I’ll set up a company that uses for example Cogent as an ISP, I’ll request a /28 block. This means I’ll get a contiguous block of 16 public IP addresses, 14 of which are usable*. It’ll look something like this: 173.65.128.16/28.

These IPv4 addresses have not run out. Believe me if you request a block of IP addresses from Cogent, you’re gonna get ’em as long as you pay the money.

Eventually however ISPs and other large companies will run out of these IP addresses to issue. But contrary to what you’ve heard that is not likely to happen soon and even if it does, there are ways around it.

Also there are a lot of companies that hoard ridiculously-sized /8 blocks of IPv4 addresses. That’s 16,777,216 addresses. These were issued before it was known the internet would explode in popularity and now these corporations refuse to return these blocks to be re-issued. They should be forced to, in my opinion.

If these /8 blocks were to be returned, it’d ease the IPv4 address scarcity problems for a good while.

Anyway, IPv6 hasn’t been widely adopted mainly because it is a huge piece of crap designed by engineers clueless about nearly everything.

Here’s what an IPv4 address looks like: 10.100.50.20

Easy. Not too bad to remember.

Here’s what an IPv6 address looks like: 2001:db8:100:f101:210:a4ff:fee3:9566

Get all that? Yeah, me neither. And I have actually used IPv6 in the real world. (And it sucks.)

But to get back to the main point, IPv4 addresses are indeed in short supply. But not in the way you’ve been told and it’s not some huge danger that threatens us all, and there are things we could do to mitigate the problem if we wanted to.

*Really good network engineers will know that I am not being entirely accurate here.