Tag: history

Might as Well Start October With a Zombie President

In H.P. Lovecraft’s America, Halloween seems almost redundant, but we can all try our best to get in the festive spirit anyway. Between the cults and the plague, any horror movie you watch this time of year seems downright sunny by comparison. And now most of our leadership exists in a Red-Wedding-cliffhanger twilight of infection. I told you guys, zombie apocalypse.

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I’ve been sucked into the cult of Cultist Simulator!

I got the game off Steam for an early birthday present for myself, in keeping with the spirit of an Autumn person. I haven’t been able to put it down since! This led to my writing up a review / guide / journey through Cultist Simulator at my GeekyDomain gig – not once, not twice, but in three parts.

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The Invisible Nation

As the United States witnessed firsthand in the 2016 election, technology is now as good as the prime mover in US politics. From the flap over Clinton’s emails to Trump’s impulsive Twitter rants in the wee hours of the night, and from the Facebook ecology of political posts in the months leading up to November 8th, 2016, to the self-organizing flash mobs of protesters and rioters that emerged after the fact, that election was shaped by electronic communication more than any election before it.

We’ve become more aware of that in the past four years, but it was creeping up on us then.

Which raises a very pertinent question: Just how much is high-tech media going to shape the world? Will we become a race of hyper-sentient empaths? Are we all merging into a hivemind?

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When anybody in the world can transmit any amount of information to anybody else in the world in a split second, all barriers have been lifted. There’s really no practical difference between the average person now and an omniscient being, at least as far as an ancient Biblical author would have conceived it. Each of us carries in our pocket a device granting us powers that, one hundred years ago, would have been seen as nigh on godly.

But that’s the trouble with a planet full of omniscient gods: They become a royal pain to boss around. Yet we need to regulate this space now, right now!

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Nice Demon Fetish You Have There

I may get around to talking about the rest of gaming news, but it’s going to be hard to get past this first. In my GeekyDomain gig I’m obligated to talk about game trends. Recently when I browse Steam, one game kept shoving itself into my face over and over. Judging from its top-rated position, it seems to be the hottest (oh God stop the puns already!) free casual game lately.

I’ve been tricked into playing a game about seducing demons

So I tried it, beat it even (it takes minutes), and found out what the big deal was. Helltaker is an indie dating sim about assembling a harem of demon girls, after some obligatory puzzle and bullet hell elements. And you, all you depraved people, you wretched goblins made me play that just to see what all the fuss was about.

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So now we know why half the fanart base has been taken over by devil girls eating pancakes lately. And honestly, even if I’m not down with this particular scene, I get it, I really do. I even analyze why in that post.

But that doesn’t mean that I quit finding all things concerned with Satanism and Hell to be side-splittingly hilarious. I love how Zdrada has a cross necklace. It’s amazing how well one indie Polish developer managed to capture Western humor so adeptly. That’s vanripper if you want to follow him to see what devilment he gets up to next.

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I See Nobody Calling Me Elitist For Advocating Science Now

UPDATE 3/7/21: The proverbial picture worth a thousand words:

UPDATE: Dr. Fauci just said everything you’re about to read here in a vastly different number of words and more diplomatically, FSM bless his soul. He did that on CNN in an interview, 8/5/2020, but it’s a reiteration of what he says in this article. He remarks that anti-science sentiments are just “for reasons that sometimes are inconceivable and not understandable.”

Likewise, his family continues to get death threats merely to pressure this brave man into shutting up. That’s a point where I can express some solidarity with his situation, having confronted the exact same phenomenon for the exact same reasons when I started blogging.

Now on with the original post…

None of you reading today will have much reason to believe this. Indeed, most of the evidence is washed away from the Internet now. But I was once one of the most hated figures on the web. That was because, in the early 2000s, I was one of the few people advocating for science literacy via computing literacy.

Nobody wanted to listen then. Don’t Make Me Think was a bestseller. Command lines and hacker tools were held up as something holding people back, something to be avoided, in books like The Design of Everyday Things. Nick Bostrum proposed that we might be living in a computer simulation, and the entire Internet instantly agreed that this was ironclad fact, brooking no argument. Ray Kurzweil wrote book after book about how Artificial Intelligence would make computers “wake up” any day now, and the Singularity would be nigh. Matrixism was treated like a real religion by people who could not tell Wachowski brothers’ movies from reality.

Yes, all of that happened in the 2000s!

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New at GeekyDomain: Shaver Mystery and Congruent Insanity

Over at my new favorite arena, GeekyDomain, I got the chance to dive deep into one of the great literary mysteries in fandom, the Shaver Mystery stories published in postwar Amazing Stories magazine. At first, it seems like the tale of a harmless nut who happened to be able to turn his hallucinations into a good story. But it grows into something baffling and just a little bit unsettling. Lemuria isn’t the only place with monsters roaming the landscape, it turns out, but the demons in our collective consciousness might be the scariest of all!

Click through for bonus content:

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You Gotta Fight For Right To Anything

Well, it’s revolution time in America again! What took it so long?

Around the nation, the Black Lives Matter movement has inflamed the nation and swept around the Earth. While I don’t hold out hope that much permanent will be gained, let me go on the record as saying I support it 100%, and Civil Rights for anyone, anywhere, at any time. Pictured in the banner: Graffiti in the Seattle “Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone,” summing up the national attitude right now.

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But in the meanwhile, I’m scrambling to select topics in my usual venues that are both on-point for the clients’ interests and relevant to today’s headlines. For instance, did you know that geek culture was founded on Civil Rights activism? From Star Trek to The Munsters to Night of the Living Dead, promotion of equal rights for all races, genders, beliefs, and lifestyles has been at the root of our most cherished institutions of sci-fi and fantasy fiction.

UPDATE: Actor Tim Russ gives his thoughts on what makes Star Trek tick, points out exactly the same parts I do without saying the phrase “Civil Rights.”

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The Zombie Apocalypse Is Over : The Zombies Won

All of us nerds made zombie apocalypse jokes at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. I’m not so sure we’re joking any more. I’m sure as hell not.

Whenever I have braved the Outside World to forage for supplies lately, I get closer and closer to getting into a fight myself. I grew up in the mean ‘hoods of south L.A. so I’m no stranger to rumbles. I’m not scared for myself, but I had hoped for a more peaceful coast to retirement in a tranquil suburb by now.

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You can clearly distinguish Team Human from Team Zombie

Team Human are the people who believe in science and reason. They wear their masks and gloves, use sanitary wipes and disinfectant, and keep their distance. They respect the store employees. All of us are out to go about our business quickly and efficiently with the least amount of drama.

Team Zombie isn’t buying any of that. They don’t wear protective gear, and make it a point to get into everybody’s face around every corner. They’re hostile and confronting. They scoff at our “imaginary” pandemic and vaccines and all of our “so-called” science. They’re out to pick a fight at every opportunity.

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Dissecting the Fallacies of the COBOL Programmer “Crisis”

I’ve been way too busy to address the story when it first broke, but that’s how the burrito’s been rolling around here lately. Briefly, here’s the sequence of the story which made my blood boil:

  • COVID-19 pandemic hits
  • World recession (if not depression) hits
  • An unprecedented number of citizens in US file for unemployment
  • US government issues economic stimulus checks so the economy doesn’t go boom
  • IRS, banks, and other institutions report a crisis: they can’t help people fast enough because their machines are using… COBOL!

This triggered an avalanche of ignorant technology story headlines the likes of which haven’t been seen since Y2K.

“Wanted urgently: People who know a half century-old computer language so states can process unemployment claims!” screams CNN.

“Government systems written in the old COBOL computer language are blocking us from our cash!” gurgles ZDNet, the FOX News of tech media.

“Unemployment checks are being held up by a coding language almost nobody knows!” valley-girls The Verge.

“An ancient programming language is suddenly in demand thanks to the pandemic!” derps Salon.

It’s been going on like this for weeks. The drooling stupidity dripping over these stories is inexcusable in the year 2020. The media, let us never forget, is chock full of stubbornly anti-intellectual reporters who flat out refuse to learn because what’s the money in reporting an accurate story?

So, for those of you just joining us (because everybody else lies to you), allow the World’s Oldest Blogging Hacker to explain this mess…

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Try To Understand This: There Are Evil People

UPDATE 04/19/20: Readers have uncovered a massive, coordinated asstroturf campaign to spread fake news and rally a denialist uprising about the CoronaVirus. Buzzfeed concurs, noting ties to a special interest group.

See, I told you it was deliberate, not ignorance! Listen to your prophet next time.

As I write, 04/04/20 (or 04/04/20 for you Europeans), the world is in the grips of – wait for it – the CoronaVirus / COVID-19 pandemic. Worldwide cases: 1.1M, worldwide deaths: 64K, US cases: 300K, US deaths, 8K. Compare those numbers as you read this to see how we did.

The US is currently the most-infected country in the world. At a rate of one thousand people dying per day, we will soon match and surpass the countries where the virus has taken its deadliest toll. Currently that’s Italy, at 15K deaths. The US can catch up to that number by next week at this rate.

In the middle of all this, we still have a shockingly high denial factor.

We could go on all day of course, but that’s enough examples for now. At this point, either the reader has turned away, or else I’m preaching to the choir. Because reality is politicized. So it’s time we looked at how it got that way.

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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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