Blackmoor Vituperative

I did not love “Spider-Man 8: No Way Home“, but I did think it was interesting. I am not sure making the villains more pathetic was a good choice for this kind of film. I think it’s worth seeing, though.

Fun with voice recognition…

I asked Google to play “Hello, it’s me” by Todd Rundgren, on YouTube, on my downstairs speakers. It played some weird song I had never heard before, but I liked it. Then it played another song I had never heard before, and I liked that one, too. The third one, too! (I have linked to that one below. I have since learned that it was a huge hit everywhere other than the USA.)

That was the first song I looked up as it was playing. After that, I just let it play for a while. Then I noticed there was a theme. Five or six sings songs in a row (at least) seemed to be about robots in a children’s amusement park, and they all seemed kind of sinister…

We’re not so scary if you see us in the daylight
You’ll be so happy just as long as you survive the night

“Survive The Night” — “Five Nights At Freddy’s”

I looked up a few of those songs, and they are all from a game called “Friday Night At Freddies”. I’ve heard of the game, but I’ve never played it or heard any of the songs from it. From what I have heard so far, it has a killer soundtrack.

I think passwords are the “rotary telephones” of this century. They will have to go away, as soon as someone (probably in Europe, for various reasons) invents something better and then it gets adopted by several large companies and/or countries. But until then… long passwords, 2FA, and trying to get out-of-date security policies to be updated (obsolete policies such as requiring passwords to “expire”, which DECADES of security research have demonstrated make passwords less secure).

Avengers: Endgame…

Society dealing with a 50% loss in population is nothing — NOTHING — compared to the mass starvation and tragedy that would result from a sudden 100% increase in population after society has adapted to the previous 50% population loss.

Today you have two children. You have a job, and you can feed them.

Tomorrow you have another unemployed adult in your household, and two more children to feed.

How does that feel?

And that’s if you are lucky. If you aren’t, you (SUDDENLY — to you it seems five years have gone by in a moment) are a single adult with a child, and you have no job and nowhere to live. And there are THREE BILLION people who, like you, weren’t here yesterday. Good luck finding a job or a place to live.

Avengers: Endgame is the beginning of a tragedy the likes of which the world has never seen.

“I have absolutely no idea what we’re doing here, or what I’m doing here, or what this place is about. But I am determined to enjoy myself.”

If you have a cat fountain, please keep it clean. You must disassemble and clean the fountain, including the pump, every time you refill it with water. Every. Time. That means taking the little magnet impeller out and cleaning that (including the hollow center of it — use a pipe cleaner or a very thin brush), and the hole where the impeller goes in the pump. Clean EVERYTHING, EVERY TIME. If you don’t, slime and junk will build up, which is bad for the cat, but will also prevent the pump impeller from spinning. I really can’t stress this enough: disassemble and clean EVERYTHING, EVERY TIME you refill it.

I also fill the fountain with a diluted bleach solution and let that soak, every month or two, just to thoroughly disinfect the thing (and then rinse it a dozen times before setting back out for the cats). Some people use vinegar; I prefer to use bleach for that.

So… okay, I interrupt my reports of the previous moment’s heart-rending injustice (which is 87% likely to be something found exclusively in the United States Of America), to talk about a show I like, and to also share an unexpected heart-rending.

I am currently watching “Upstart Crow” on BritBox on Roku, and I am on the “Christmas Lock Down 1603″ episode. Thus far, it has been a humourous coddangle of an episode, to enjoy over an evening’s thrillop and quentish. But what’s this? Will (Mr. Shakespeare, to some) says this…”I haven’t seen my family in months. I missed my father’s funeral. I never even got the chance to say goodbye!”

–record scratch–

Hold on: is Harry Enfield (the actor who plays William Shakespeare’s father) DEAD?

So I paused the episode, typed all of this into futtington Facebook, and then googled “Harry Enfield”…

Mr. Enfield is alive and well (as far as Wikipedia knows). So why would… oooooooh… (google “John Shakespeare” …) ah, John Shakespeare died in September 1601. And this, of course, is “Christmas Lock Down 1603”. Hang on, there: are we to believe that London has been experiencing a plague lockdown for … ah. Never mind.

KATE: After all, while we be locked in our homes, there be no land cleared, no rivers damned, no forests felled. Nature has its moment and all God’s creatures a year without fear that man will destroy its very habitat.

KATE: That has to be a good thing, doesn’t it?

WILL: Yes, Kate, it does. But it brings me no comfort, child. Because even if humanity has by some miracle used this time to take stock of the things that actually matter, and if perhaps nature has been given momentary relief from its brutal servitude to man, it won’t make any difference.

WILL: Because the second this is all over and humanity is free to roam once more, we will be exactly as shallow and facile and selfish and destructive as we ever were. We will have learnt nothing, Kate. Nothing. Because frankly, we never do.

The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

“The Second Coming“, W. B. Yeats, 1919

Fun fact! Yeats went on to embrace fascism and authoritarianism — the “passionate intensity” of “the worst“. “The Second Coming” is the most compelling proof I know of that an artist is not their art — and if we insist on conflating the two, or on depriving ourselves of great art by less-than-great people, that it is we who suffer for it.

Yeats, after all, is long dead, and quite beyond our reproachment.

What had me thinking about this was, of course, the results of the election yesterday, in which the “the worst” — angry, hateful, and completely detached from reality — won virtually every election.

I am glad that I don’t have children. The United States is a dumpster fire, and it won’t get better in my lifetime.

If it ever does.

I’ve spent the last week or so watching the 4K extremely-high-definition blu-ray of the extended 11 hour “Lord Of The Rings” trilogy. The difference between this and the DVD is truly breathtaking. And the trilogy itself is, of course… it has no peer.

I am glad that I lived to see this.

“School choice” is to education what “right to work” is to worker rights. The powerful get more power, at the expense of everyone else.

If one were cynical, one might even think that was the goal.