Fake Security, Real Costs

With the non-shitty versions of Firefox which still supported proper extensions, I could right-click a link and open it in another browser in nearly no time. This is impossible in the new “improved” Firefox. It used to be two quick clicks, like this:

Now the process is:

1) Copy the URL (which is harder as it’s all hidden now).
2) Open the other browser.
3) Do shortcut for new tab (keyboard or button).
4) Paste into browser bar and either do “paste and go” or hit enter.

It seems somewhat minor I admit but I just timed it and the easier way when Firefox worked correctly took me less than one second and the crappy new way takes me seven seconds. In other words, the more “secure” Firefox causes me to spend seven times longer to do the exact same task. This is something I do probably 10-20 times a day so if I take the average and say I do it 15 times, the “better” Firefox is costing me an extra 90 seconds a day.

There are 365 days in a year. Therefore, the new Firefox is costing me 32,850 seconds a year, or 547.5 minutes a year, or a little over nine hours a year. And that’s one extension, and not even my most-commonly used one!

Fuck Mozilla and fuck the Firefox developers.

Sโ€™envoyer en lโ€™air

And the weird thing is that this absurd assertion is primarily a liberal take! The conservatives react unhelpfully, but they at least understand how strong the sexual urge is (yes, in both women and men) and how it’s an actual need in the vast majority of humans.

I really don’t know why liberals have such trouble distinguishing immediate needs (air, food, water) from other needs that are just as vital but not immediately and obviously harmful due to their lack. It seems like they must be lying when they’ve told various groups things like, “No one needs sex/love/social acceptance,” etc (Some liberals do even claim no one needs social acceptance, usually when talking about incels or undesirable men). How can anyone possibly believe any of this and say it with a straight face?

Aella is exactly right here. We’d never tell anyone, “You don’t need friends or social relations with anyone.” It’s equally cruel and heartless to tell anyone, “You don’t need sex or lovers or sexual contact with anyone.” What an impoverished world some people wish to live in.

Idented

I’m just rehashing, essentially, the works of several different philosophers here, so don’t think any of this is original — though I’m restating their points quite differently.

Anyway, identity bullshittery and the digital age go hand in glove. They are complements of each another and catalyze one another as well. Existing as we do more and more as avatars in the digital realm, one’s identity (like gathering armor and apparel in an RPG) becomes relatively of greater import. This identity construction and maintenance is a way to make one’s self distinct and to belong to a tribe at the same time. Furthermore, it gives one the feeling of “choosing one’s choice,” even though the actual choices at hand are carefully constructed and very limited in nearly all ways — but it appears expansive, and that’s what people care about.

In this digital netherworld that is liminal to the meatspace one and where both are merely in a darkening umbra beneath an algorithmic monolith, identity is the constrained yet “chosen” marker of who one aspires to be, what one aspires to achieve, rather than what one is. And because this aspiration now is all we have, it’s defended even unto death itself — real death, not an avatar with a hundred lives defeated by a pixel balrog.

This is why identity is so powerful and so dangerous.

ID Bull

Aella is right. What’s next, only a waitress can play a waitress, only a welder and play a welder?

Identity bullshitery is just absurd and it hurts the people the “liberals” believe they are helping.

Margaret

I just watched it because it had Margaret Qualley, but this might be the best ad I’ve ever seen in my life:

Lord that’s big fun. Would be nothing without Qualley, though. (Part of it is that it’s rare that a really beautiful woman can ever give way to complete outlandish zaniness, and Qualley is more than fine with that and even seems to enjoy it a lot. I think that’s why comedians [male and female] tend not to be very beautiful, but I’d love to see Qualley do some real physical comedy. I bet she’d kill it. To be clear, I like Qualley because she’s beyond talented. She’s also undeniably beautiful; even I can see that.)

Spontaneous

These days, if a movie doesn’t show me something new I just turn if off. I don’t have the time to waste.

I did not turn Spontaneous off.

Can a film both be gruesome and warm-hearted, grim and yet hopeful? If you’d asked me that before I’d watched Spontaneous I would’ve said probably no; that any such effort would be a tonally-confused blunder of a film.

Well, Spontaneous pulls this off and has some great lines to boot. It’s like a comfy blanket warmed by fresh blood, a cozy coffin of a movie. Under the surface it’s about the absurd expectations and responsibilities, absent any real power, that we as a society place on adolescents and how we are content to just let more than half of them disappear into what for them (and for us) amounts to societal nothingness when they inevitably fail. That it’s just expected, that they’ll de facto pop out of existence, and that even for the ones who don’t, how we all just disappear from one another’s lives like we hadn’t spent the last 15 years seeing one another every day.

The movie asks also, in a world where we all know with certainty that we are going to die, how do we survive that next day and the next after that?

The only real criticism I had of the film is that it needed better editing. Some scenes went on too long, and re-arranging the order of some of them would’ve made the film a lot more effective. For instance, the graveside scene should’ve been the film’s coda rather than the rather-more-celebratory beach house scene. It would’ve been far more hard-hitting that way, and ended the film on a more complete emotional note.

That said, Katherine Langford turns in a believable performance of insuperable grief and despair, and she echoes one of my favorite lines of Lorde’s in the film: “It feels so scary, getting old.” Of course, Lorde was 16 when she wrote that line, and I think those years are harder on people than many adults want to admit; that’s what makes it a good lyric, after all.

Spontaneous reminds us that life is for the living, and it does that by showing us the unprettiness and inevitably of death, and how it’s always there, biding its time or not, just around any corner, over our shoulder, one tremulous touch away from eternal oblivion. And that’s always our fate, no matter what. What do you do when you truly realize that?