Note that Bill Cosby and Roman Polanski are still members of the Motion Picture Academy.

So I got a new 5K iMac. It’s noticeably faster than the older model, mostly because of the doubled GPU memory, and SSD improvements.

The old one was called “5KofGlory.” This one is called “5K5Glorious.”

I should make Vin Diesel doing manly things with cars my background to really complete the theme.

It’s damn annoying how much effort you have to put forth these days to stop computers and apps from attempting to save to the “cloud.” (Really, just someone else’s insecure data center with full NSA/FBIA/CIA access baked in.)

I don’t want to save a single goddamn file to the cloud. Not now and not ever. I rip all that garbage out of the OS right away.

And if you’re saving your passwords in the cloud through LastPass or something like that? What the hell? Why would you ever do that? That’s not going to be stolen. It’s already stolen and you just don’t know about it.

Pretty cool command for MacOS:

caffeinate

If you open a terminal and enter that, it’ll keep your Mac from going to sleep until you do a CTRL-C.

Can also control with some options:

caffeinate -u -t 10800

That’ll prevent your Mac from sleeping for 10800 seconds, or three hours.

This is very cool. I have been there many times and that’s the area where I grew up; that river is probably the place I know the best in the world.* The information below the video is a bit inaccurate, unfortunately.

The Santa Fe River is not always dark. It’s tannin-stained certain times of the year and under certain conditions. Generally, the water is coffee-dark in the winter and spring, while in the summer (depending on rain) it is primarily spring-fed and becomes quite clear. I have seen it become crystal-clear enough that I could see easily to the bottom of 30 foot deep spots in the river, just like looking through a window.

The tannic acid also comes from oak leaves, not just cypress.

Another slightly misleading part is the info about the spring. There is no spring actually called “Devil’s Spring” at that location. The entire three-spring system is called the “Devil’s Spring System.” That system comprises three springs: Little Devil, Devil’s Eye and Devil’s Ear. The park itself is called “Ginnie Springs” and it is privately owned, though it should be a state park.

The diver is most likely in Devil’s Ear, which is right on the Santa Fe.

I have swum in all three springs and in just about every spring on or near that river at one time or other.

*My partner was looking at photos of the Santa Fe with me one time and was marveling that I could identify where on the Santa Fe a photo was taken by the arrangement of trees and rocks. Those, though, were my navigation points for fishing and estimating my boating time.

Funny how STEM types declare that emergent properties are completely deterministic and then talk about things like heat and pressure with a straight face.

Maybe they are right and maybe they are wrong…but the funny part is the lack of doubt with irreconcilable statements, not the truth either way.

Also:

Twitter suspends Rose McGowan while Nazis post freely.

Destroy Silicon Valley and tech bros.

Twitter Suspends Rose McGowan’s Account After She Speaks Out Against Sexual Abuse.

Because of course they did. Twitter: what should be a few RFCs and a protocol is instead a Nazi-promoting, sexual-abuse-denying shitheap.

In the most imporant news of the year, Wal-Mart also has eggnog. I went there looking for Silk Nog for my partner, who can’t tolerate much dairy.

They had no Silk Nog, but they did have a few brands of eggnog: Southern Comfort and Hood. Not my favorites, but eggnog is eggnog.

Just a note for those who love eggnog. (Those who don’t, what the hell is wrong with you?)

The first grocery store we’ve seen with eggnog (and I check frequently, trust me) was Earth Fare on October 7. They had plentiful stock of Homestead Creamery brand eggnog, which as luck would have it is my favorite.

Earth Fare is only in the Southeast and Midwest, and even at that it exhibits a bit of a clumped dispersion, so beyond that I cannot help you.

Still, eggnog on October 7! That’s a new record.

Recently, my partner and I bought a pillowcase set that came with a pillowcase case.

I announced that we should start a company that sold pillowcase case cases and corner that market before other competitors barged in.

She was not for some reason amenable to this investment of capital in an obviously groundbreaking company, one certain to be greater than Juicero.

She’s just not an innovator, I guess.

I cannot believe that someone wrote this sentence without falling on the floor and dying of laughter and despair.

The company, however, isn’t giving up on innovative and new donuts.

We’ve reached once again peak ludicrous à la 2000 or so when anyone writes seriously about innovative donuts.

Someone — again — wrote that and was serious about it.

This is not a mistranslation. It’s perfect French.

That section means something like, “Significant delays are to be expected.”

En français:

en retard: (to be) late

retarder: to cause to be late

Etc.

Nothing there is mistranslated.

For the most part, liberals don’t listen — except to spreadsheets. If you actually listen to what people say and what they do, it makes perfect sense within their framework of comprehension. For instance, this.

The attitude comes when integration commissioners tell us, for example, that there isn’t a German culture outside of the German language.

As with American and other feminists supporting Islamic oppression of women (yeah, figure that out — I can’t), I am unable to think of a better way to get large numbers of people to vote for anything other than your antipode. Telling people that there is not a German culture — well, I cannot think of anything more destructive for everyone involved, and dangerous to the futures of the refugees along several axes.

Note: when you seem to give preferential treatment to large numbers of people who just show up out of the blue — no matter the reasons for it — and then ignore pre-existing complaints and grievances of native-born populations, you gonna get problems no matter the hue of the people who show up.

That’s not racism or xenophobia.

That’s human fucking nature.

Huh. How did I miss this? Here’s someone who actually understood Ex Machina.

That’s rare; most people seem to have a Kevin Drum-talking-about-the-economy level of comprehension of the film.

The only area of interpretation I’d disagree with is a bit of her read of Nathan. Yes, she is correct about how utterly detestable he is, and how vile, but she I think misses that Nathan is all of those things but also realizes them fully. He is self-aware about his foulness, and that makes it all the worse.

Anyway, the review is great. Not one in 20 reviewers actually understood the film, and no feminist reviewer did besides this latest one that I read. That particularly makes it the review par excellence.

No thought is ever given by Caleb to the fact that he is literally the only other flesh-and-blood human besides Nathan that she has ever met, or that her affection might simply be an aftereffect of the very trauma he wants to rescue her from. No account is made, in other words, for the power Caleb has over her.

In the spartan cast of this relatively minimalist film, then, Nathan and Caleb are two very different avatars of patriarchy. Nathan embodies the brutish, physically abusive side of hegemonic masculinity, while Caleb is the Nice Guy™ who affects kindness and gentility but who is ultimately no less entitled than his counterpart.

And this, so brilliant.

The oppressive nature of her situation dictated the terms of her escape; virtue was a luxury Ava could not afford if she wanted to live.

I am confused why so many feminists watched this film and somehow, disturbingly, got from it the exact opposite message it was attempting to convey. Is it that most films are made for simpletons, and this one was not? Or what?

The reviewer does bring up something I thought about, though I don’t agree: she contends that the movie would’ve been better if told from Ava’s perspective. I don’t agree, as mentioned, though normally I would. If told from Ava’s perspective and not Caleb’s, there would be no chance to pull the genius switcheroo where most people think they should be feeling empathy for poor, beleaguered lovelorn Caleb, when in reality it’s Ava who deserved all along the full measure of compassion and identification.

However, what would’ve been great would’ve been two films. One told from Caleb’s perspective — the one that already exists — and another from Ava’s. That would’ve been just amazing, if the budget had been there.

Great review, though. One of the few where the reviewer fully understood the film and what it was attempting to convey.