The Process

Also, forgotten:

1970: These crazy hippies think they can make power from the air and sun. Ha!

1980: We have solar-powered calculators now. That’s all it will ever be useful for.

1990: Solar power might be used someday for really low-power applications, but nothing else. Wind is pointless altogether.

1998: Wind and solar is way, way, way, too expensive to use for anything ever, and if you say anything else, you are crazy and banned!

Lood

Computer Files Are Going Extinct.

I miss files. I still create many of my own, but increasingly, that seems an anachronism, like using a quill rather than a pen. I miss the universality of files. The fact they can work anywhere, be moved around easily.

I agree with this and hate it. It’s the droolers fully gaining control. Once you lose files, that means that your data can (and absolutely will) be taken from you at any time.

I will never, ever, use Google Photos, AirDrop, etc., because it does change your files. It reduces their quality and probably sends them to China, too. Anything that changes my file without my permission is a big hell to the fuck no.

The droolers have won an indisputable victory, I am forced to admit. But I will have the last laugh when they inevitably lose all their data and I have mine still. I will never use any cloud service because that means when they decide to delete your data, it’s just gone.

Satanic Panic

Let’s talk about Satanic Panic. Another film that a lot of people didn’t understand — the usual passel of progressives and the like. It is, essentially, about the parasitism of the rich on the rest of society, the Boomer abandonment and disdain for their own children, and how the affluent both utterly depend on and despise the lower classes.

Ruby Modine as Judi and Hayley Griffith as Sam. Modine was excellent as the daughter of the coven leader.

For instance, in one scene Rebecca Romijn (great as the villain Satanist cult leader) says to her daughter, “I gave you the greatest honor, and you spat inย my face. Your generation doesn’t understand sacrifice.” This “greatest honor” she’s referring to is her daughter having her body torn apart crotch-first as she births the demon Baphomet. Remind you of any rich Boomers you know?

The protagonist gets involved in this mess when she delivers pizza to a rich person’s house and becomes enraged when he stiffs her out of a tip on the large order. A lot of reviewers seemed to see all of this as coincidental or grace notes — meanwhile, it’s all making some fairly obvious (to me, at least) social commentary.

The movie is full of great little moments like that, such as the demon-summoning coven being run like a self-help or MLM group with the cultists chanting lines like, “Are you ready to make an investment in your future?”

The best part is when Sam the protagonist recycles a cheap line some guy had thrown at her to manipulate her into doing something she didn’t want to do. She, however, puts the line into service into tricking a demon into letting her go.

Best lines from the movie: “You go to Mill Basin a delivery boy, but you come back a delivery man.”

And:

“We’re going to hide in here like scared little bitches because they can turn your liver into fire ants. If they find us, they’re not going to kill us. They’re gonna do shit that you can’t comprehend. And they’re not going to stop until you’re strapped naked to a barbed-wire altar with the 15-foot beast of Gehenna and his double-pronged demon dong walking out of your cooch chute like it’s a revolving door of ground beef.”

Also, it was directed by a woman, Chelsea Stardust, which I suspect made it a far better movie given the content and the subtext of the even greater sacrifices women are supposed to make to the patriarchy even at the top of the heap.

Recommended. It’s short, it’s fun, and it has a lot to say.

VHF

The Netflix content delivery network passes 100Tb/s at peak.

HOLY FUCK.

That’s 12.5 terabytes a second. For comparison, and back of the envelope, the Netflix CDN passes as much data in a second as all humanity had generated in written form up until about 1960. One second.

Group Non-hug

Krav Maga. Yes, all the bros love it, but it works.

The truth is that there is little you can do to defend against groups unless you are a world-class fighter. It’s just not possible. Two people, maybe, if you get lucky. Three or more? No. Your only hope is to brutalize the first person so badly and so quickly that the others lose heart. But mostly, you’re just fucked. Running is really all you can do.

That’s just reality. Life isn’t a movie. You aren’t a superhero. If a group wants to hurt you, most likely they will.

Tric

And you thought I was kidding when I said they’d even be coming for your refrigerator and electricity one day.

It’s not a conspiracy in the formal sense, but it is the rich and the near-rich looking out for their own interests — with the full cheerleading and support of the “progressives”. In a world (as they see it) of decreasing resources, the more they can propagandize you to voluntarily relinquish any convenience or luxury, the easier it is for them.

Expect to see more of this. A lot more. It’s already ramped up an incredible amount in the last couple of years. Soon enough, I expect every third article in the NYT and similar to be about eating bugs, living in the pods, giving up electricity and air conditioning and the like.