Your CoronaVirus Reading and Gaming Update

New posts at GeekyDomain, in which I give up trying to avoid talking about CoronaVirus and face it head on:

Things CoronoaVirus Has Taught Me About Apocalyptic / Dystopian Sci-Fi

Now that I’ve seen what a real doomsday scenario looks like, I’ve drawn some comparison with classic sci-fi apocalyptic tropes. Those Mad Max biker gangs have to go! Ditto the heroic and adventurous daring-do; our greatest quest is for toilet paper. Also, you can stick anarcho-capitalism where the corona don’t shine. However, 12 Monkeys and Stephen King’s The Stand called the shots right on the mark.

If you’re ready for my characteristic dark humor to take the edge off the CoronaVirus pandemic, head there. I’m told that I’m good at this kind of thing.

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I Can’t Believe It’s Not Unix!

DISCLAIMER: This post originally appeared in another technology blog that is now defunct. It is reprinted here with permission.

In the year 1969, Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie led a team of programmers at Bell Labs to develop the Unix operating system, which was to be a successor to Multics. It proved to be a smashing success in the growing computing field and became the standard for operating systems for the next two decades. In the year 1991, a Finnish programmer name of Linus Torvalds had an itch to develop a Free and Open Source (FOSS) port of Unix, and announced his intentions on Usenet mailing lists leading to a famous debate with one computer science professor Andrew Tanenbaum.

We today know Linux as the root of the Android operating system, dominant in the tablet and smartphone market by as much as 85%. But what many people don’t realize is the huge amount of other attempts that were made to create the perfect Unix-like operating system. Like settlers braving the snow to lead a wagon trail out west, the early days of computing marked many attempts to forge a settlement in the digital wild west, and many met defeat. The players in this epic saga might surprise you.

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What is Internet Filtering?

DISCLAIMER: This is an old post taken from my previous geeky technology blog. It is preserved here for hysterical raisins (it was popular at the time).

What with the concern over the proposed Internet filtering policy that is supposed to be put into place in Australia, we thought this would be a good time to bring this subject up. Our point here is not to enable people to commit crimes, nor to say that they should commit crimes. Our point is that (a) filtering doesn’t work, and (b) if honest, law-abiding citizens find Internet filtering interfering with a legitimate task, it should not only be their right, but their duty, to subvert the faulty measure.

This information will also prove valuable to those within schools, businesses, and other organizations that filter Internet usage. Although, we of course can’t be held responsible if you get fired or expelled for using this information. And we can’t believe we just had to write that, but not everybody reading this is living in a free country.

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For your Christmas catching-up: The Impeachment of Donald J. Trump

Here it is Christmas Eve, and I’ve JUST NOW shoveled my way out from under my workload to pay attention to my own site for a change.

I know most of you want to think about this like you need a hole in your mistletoe, but I promise it’s funny and enlightening. The Impeachment of Donald J. Trump examines where we are, how we got here, where we might be going, and – are you sitting down for this? It actually explains things so they make *some* sense!

It’s a defining Christmas for the Trumpster. Lots of soul-searching is due (though we may be sure none will be undertaken). If ghosts of Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon, and John McCain visited him tonight, that would be most fitting.

 

eCommerce Marketing: How We Misread the Internet Audience

By now the Internet has chewed up and masticated the infamous Peloton exercise bike ad. For you people in the future visiting to soberly learn the lessons from the Ghosts of Christmas Ads Past, here’s what that was all about:

The Internet reaction to this ad is a textbook case of unexpected backlash

Everybody mocked it. And lest you be tempted to think “there’s no such thing as bad publicity,” Peloton’s stock actually fell 10% due to bad press from the ad.

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Who Needs Halloween When You Have The Real Life Horror Of China?

Yeah, so there’s a new post up at 123ish.com, about the current situation with Hong Kong’s protests and China. It came onto our radar when it involved the gaming community via the Hearthstone fiasco, when a tournament player got suspended for making a little demonstration in support of Hong Kong’s struggle for liberation from China.

I went into covering that story intending it to be light-hearted satire, poking a jab at Blizzard Entertainment and making a few swipes at dictator Xi Jinping and his Winnie the Pooh resemblance. But once I started reading up on what the hell is really going on in China, the story got too grim. Be advised, that link goes to some stomach-churning stark reality. Hong Kong is protesting because it doesn’t want to be subject to Chinese control. After seeing just a taste of what’s going on there, can anyone blame them?

At the very least, China’s torture of Falun Gong members amounts to a modern-day Inquisition, except even Torquemada never got sadistic enough to harvest organs from subjects while they were still alive. The treatment of everybody else in China isn’t exactly winning any human rights pageants either. The continued censorship of most of the world by China through corporate proxies is added salt in the wound. We are all living under China’s bootheel already, whether we know it or not.

Xi Jinping is a modern-day Hitler, and in some ways he’s even worse. This is no laughing matter. China must be stopped now. Why is the rest of the world turning a blind eye?

Faster than I could post, new stories of horrors and atrocities are coming out of China by the day. Read well, because we can do something about China now, or we can all look forward to a “re-education camp” tomorrow.

I wasn’t taking boycotts against Blizzard and other companies seriously before. But now, I’m going to have to at least think it over. If the price of doing business in China is kowtowing to this savage, monstrous regime, then it is not worth it.

UPDATE: A Redditor explains the culture of fear inside mainland China. He, too, points out “Chinese government may be the most powerful totalitarian regime in human history.” and “The West has tolerated CCP for too long.”

UPDATE: NGO Human Rights Watch now declares China “a global threat to human rights.” HRW executive director Kenneth Roth states: “Beijing has long suppressed domestic critics. Now the Chinese government is trying to extend that censorship to the rest of the world. To protect everyone’s future, governments need to act together to resist Beijing’s assault on the international human rights system.”

 

Let’s Talk About Terpenes…

Let me give you one word for your future career, young people. (*Leans in with portentous whisper*): Terpenes.

Terpenes are going to be huge, folks. Have you accepted terpenes into your heart as your lord and savior? Over at my DabConnection gig, I’ve been talkin’ some serious terpene turkey. I started out trying to illuminate this curious corner of cannabis chemistry because I see a lot of questions about them, and not much answers. I ended up falling into a research rabbit hole and starting writing up encyclopedia-type entries on the top terpenes in cannabis. Meet some of nature’s most whimsical organic compounds, after the jump.

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New at 366Weird: Let My Puppets Come (1976)

Yeah, I’ve been so crazy busy lately that I can hardly find the time to view a whole movie, let alone review one. But I did manage to return to the vineyards of 366 Weird Movies to become one of the first web authors to review Let My Puppets Come (1976), a puppet porno-comedy.

Now you’re probably thinking it was a parody of The Muppet Show? Nope, Kermit and his pals debuted after this movie’s release! Or perchance you expect it to be a rehash of ground already well-trod in Peter Jackson’s Meet the Feebles? Nay, this was 13 years before Feebles saw light of day! Seeing how it was so far ahead of its time, it’s doubly disappointing how tame it is.

Anyway, puppet porn. If that’s your bag, enjoy!

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MTG Arena has the worst ad for anything, ever

Well, I’m more than on-record as a long-standing Magic: the Gathering geek. But that’s the paper cards. When it comes to the electronic offerings of Wizards of the Coast trying to replicate their paper game in video media, there’s no point in trying to be nice about it: They all stink on ice. After a token attempt to get MTG Arena to run on ANY device I own by ANY means necessary, I lost interest, as I have so many times before. So dismissed has been the video game interpretations of MTG from my consideration, that this is my first time talking about them at all, anywhere.

But have you seen this new MTGArena ad? I saw it on YouTube and was too paralyzed with horror to hit the ‘skip’ button. Good GAWD, people, what the WTF were you THINKING???

There’s so much gone so wrong to unpack here, I barely know where to start…

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New at 123ish.com: It’s Time To Embrace The Bio-Tech Age!

We live in a dark new age of science denial. From anti-vaxxers to anti-GMO to climate change denial, science is under attack on so many fronts at once that the prospect of progress seems doomed. And in the middle of all that, I’m demanding that we go full warp speed ahead on bio-technology.

Yes, we may have a bumpy path resolving some of the stickier ethical questions of genetic engineering and cloning, but it’s a journey well worth taking if it rewards us with cures for disease, better agriculture, and perhaps a cure for human rock-headedness. Dare to dream!

More of my pro-science advocacy: