Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

When do we start airlifting the women and children out of Texas?

People are complicated. Love is not.

I’d try pessimism, but it probably wouldn’t work.

I’d like to think you all would remain faithful to me if i ever tried to have some of you killed.

So it was an October Surprise A Day, like an Advent calendar but for crime.

Shallow, uninformed, and lacking identity

Accused of treason; bitches about the ratings. I am in awe.

Let’s delete this post and never speak of this again.

Historically it was a little unusual for the president to be an incoherent babbling moron.

Take hopelessness and turn it into resilience.

I’ve spoken to my cat about this, but it doesn’t seem to do any good.

Make the republican party small enough to drown in a bathtub.

Militantly superior in their own minds…

Since when do we limit our critiques to things we could do better ourselves?

“But what about the lurkers?”

I know this must be bad for Joe Biden, I just don’t know how.

They fucked up the fucking up of the fuckup!

And now I have baud making fun of me. this day can’t get worse.

The revolution will be supervised.

I’m going back to the respite thread.

Republican obstruction dressed up as bipartisanship. Again.

Damn right I heard that as a threat.

Americans barely caring about Afghanistan is so last month.

Nothing worth doing is easy.

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Friday Night Open Thread: Twitter Never Gives the Suckers An Even Break

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Whenever I see a photo of Jack Dorsey, I imagine Gimli the Dwarf announcing ‘He’s the cousin we don’t talk about.’ But he *does* understand his user base!

The Verge seems dubious about this latest Advanced Tech Move:

… On one hand, NFT profile pictures could be viewed as an incredible technology integration adding real utility for verified digital items. Alternately, it’s an unmissable signal pointing out the people that you should block or mute before they try to sell you some of their blockchain receipts.

No matter what your opinion of easily reproduced digital trinkets is, Twitter is integrating them in a way that separates ridiculous images of cartoon apes that have been right-clicked for use as standard profile pictures from ridiculous images of cartoon apes that are connected to blockchain tokens by adding a special “soft hexagon” shape around them…

Despite Twitter’s list of wallets, there are people who think it isn’t doing enough to verify the provenance of NFTs. As Adam Hollander points out, Twitter’s setup and hexagon logo only checks to see if there is an NFT connected to the user’s wallet — it doesn’t check or tell viewers if that NFT is verified as belonging to a high-profile collection (like the Bored Ape Yach Club, for example). You could go through the same right-click save exercise mentioned above, mint the image as a new NFT, and on your profile page, it will look identical to that of a person who has ownership of the verified image.

The only way someone can tell if your NFTs are actually from the collection that they appear to be is to click on your profile picture and check the details. Otherwise, a fake BAYC toke (like this one) looks at first glance just like the officially minted one (here). Twitter’s head of consumer product marketing Justin Taylor says this is on purpose, and that “We don’t want to limit this to just verified collections, that would be wrong, and non supportive of the broader nft movement. Anyone SHOULD be able to mint anything and make it their nft.”…

SURE ENOUGH…

Why do they laugh at my mighty sword?!?…

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Tuesday Morning Open Thread: Eccentric Orbits

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Tuesday Morning Open Thread: The Full Wolf Moon

(Arlo & Janis via GoComics.com)
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Why do so many people assume ‘we’ have an endless backup supply of nurse-NPCs, teacher bots, and the little green army men from Toy Story?

Be afraid! Be very... wait, what?

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Monday Evening Open Thread: The CryptoBros Who Want to Own Dune

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My personal suspicion is that the end goal is some variation on ‘NFTs’, which may or may not involve ‘money laundering’ but quite possibly premises some variation on ‘affinity fraud’.

Verge, understandably, is kinder towards the Spice Collective:

Last year, a collective of cryptocurrency fans pooled millions of dollars to buy a copy of the story bible for director Alejandro Jodorowsky’s legendary never-made adaptation of the novel Dune. After winning a November auction, the group voted last week on a direction for the project and got promptly roasted online for allegedly not understanding what they’d bought. Their plans included an animated series inspired by Jodorowsky’s Dune, and as any good collector likely knows, buying a commemorative copy of a script or storyboard doesn’t give you the right to shoot your own version.

The actual situation seems more ambiguous than some critics are suggesting. The Dune story bible’s owners, known as Spice DAO (short for “decentralized autonomous organization”), appear perfectly aware they don’t own Dune itself. Instead, they’re committing to an original series “inspired by” the book. The whole scheme might help illustrate why art can’t be reduced to a neat series of copyright licenses — rather than simply showing that “crypto bros aren’t sure how rights work.”

That said, a lot of them probably aren’t…

Spice DAO outlined its future plans in an inaugural governance proposal that was approved by 95 percent of token-holding voters. In addition to electing a four-person core management team, it commits the DAO to a set of four goals between January and March of 2022: “gain physical custody of Jodorowsky’s Dune book by arranging shipping and storage,” scan every page of the book, hire a social media agency, and “present a film treatment and budget by Roble Ridge Productions for the original animated limited series inspired by the book for a community vote.” (The series was previously announced in December.) On Twitter, Spice DAO noted that it planned to “sell it to a streaming service” in the long term…

Spice DAO obviously wouldn’t need to own a copy of the Dune bible to make a Dune-like series that wasn’t explicitly derived from Jodorowsky’s work. But I haven’t seen public statements indicating that the central parties involved believe otherwise. From the outside, the auction purchase looks plausibly like a publicity and funding strategy, not a botched attempt to buy a copyright. After all, anybody can write a script indirectly inspired by Jodorowsky’s Dune — if you want yours to get noticed, hooking up with a group of fans to purchase a rare collector’s item isn’t a bad gambit.

It’s unfortunately hard to tell how many people backing Spice DAO are on the same page about what they’re funding. Ryan Broderick’s Garbage Day newsletter, for instance, outlines some significant confusion around voting, copyright, and what “adapting” the script should mean…

So, I guess, if you’re a big fan of Dune and/or cryptocurrency, this is an exciting opportunity to advance new visions of an sf masterwork. And if you’re not, well, there’s plenty opportunity for multiple amusing-from-the-outside train wrecks?

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Saturday Morning Open Thread: ‘Without Imperfections, We Would Not Exist’

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… “The situation is a blinking Code Red for our nation,” Biden said, citing unusually high winds, prolonged drought conditions and the late arrival of snow as responsible for creating “a tinderbox.”

The president visited the Louisville neighborhood of Harper Lake, now covered in snow, to witness burned-down houses, charred trees and husks of torched cars from the Dec. 30 Marshall fire.

“I can’t imagine what it’s like to be in this neighborhood,” Biden said, and see winds up to 100 miles per hour and flames approaching. He praised the residents for their “incredible courage.”…

Biden, even more than most presidents, has made a point of visiting disaster areas such as hurricanes and wildfires to console the survivors, and the United States has experienced a high number of such events during his first year…

… The speech is normally timed for January, and occasionally for February. The delay is driven in part by a busy legislative calendar, a winter spike in COVID-19 cases from the more transmissible omicron variant and the upcoming Winter Olympics, which ties up broadcast network time…

Biden first addressed a joint session of Congress in April 2021, about 100 days into his time in the White House, which he used to promote twin infrastructure and domestic spending bills. Biden signed a slimmed-down and bipartisan version of the infrastructure proposal into law last year in crowning first-year legislative achievements. The larger expansion of the social safety net passed the House, but Biden has struggled to secure enough Democratic support in the Senate for passage.

An address to Congress in the president’s first year is not an official State of the Union address, and Biden’s April speech bore little resemblance to one because of strict COVID-19 protocols. It was marked by limitations on attendance, with no guests allowed, and lawmakers seated on both the floor of the House chamber and the galleries above. Officials said pandemic precautions for this year’s speech were still being worked out, though they expect it to look more like a traditional State of the Union address than last year’s remarks.

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Wednesday Evening Open Thread: SCIENCE!

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New frontiers in grifting?

And speaking of opening new vistas… someday the Media Village Idiots might be able to get out of their little glass bubble — or at least be able to ride the bubble out into the big world:

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Saturday Evening Open Thread: Extremely Fungible NFTs

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Sure, we may be spending the first Saturday night of the new year online, but at least we’re not as dementedly ONLINE as some people…

… PAYC announced its launch in early December with a loose mission statement promoting decentralization and denigrating “rich douchebags” who had (allegedly) taken over the original ape market. It called back to CryptoPhunks, a similar project that flipped and resold expensive CryptoPunks images earlier this year. Early arrivals could mint left-facing apes for free starting December 28th, while others paid a fee of .042 ETH (currently around $157).

PHAYC launched shortly after with a tongue-in-cheek website describing the project as “a limited NFT collection where the token itself offers no membership and no allegiance,” an inversion of the promise made by BAYC creator Yuga Labs. One PHAYC community member described the project to CoinDesk as “a satirical take on the current state of NFTs and members of the NFT community who might be taking the NFT market a little too seriously.”

Somewhat ironically, PAYC and PHAYC have since fought on Twitter over which one is the authentic Bored Ape Yacht Club ripoff, with PAYC’s founder referring to PHAYC as a “cash grab fraud project.” PHAYC charged people to mint its apes, and CoinDesk reports that it took in around 500 ETH (or around $1.8 million) in sales. By contrast, it says PAYC earned around 60 ETH (or roughly $225,000) from its paid sales…

Pivot! Ugly pics are soooo 2021 — unreadable words are the new 2022 hotness…

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E. O. Wilson, R. I. P.

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Edward O. Wilson has died. Carl Zimmer’s obituary at that link is a fine, fair accounting of his extraordinary life and the profound influence he had and still has on ecosystem and evolutionary biology.

Wilson was a complicated man and led a complex intellectual life.  He was an exceptional field and experimental researcher, showing that in a molecular age there remained a huge amount to learn about the natural world at the level of the organism and the ecosystem. And he was a hugely important contributor to evolutionary theory, most famously responsible for developing core ideas in sociobiology. I can say this from personal knowledge: among all the brilliant investigators of nature I’ve had the ridiculously good luck to meet, he had the greatest passion for the living world, a seemingly limitless capacity for focus, fascination, and awe in the face of the biosphere.

E. O. Wilson, R. I. P.

He was, as Zimmer documents, also someone given to reasoning past his evidence, applying his ideas to human behavior, culture and society in ways that were easily turned into echoes of pernicious biological determinism. Zimmer argues, correctly, I think, that a lot of the criticism of Wilson/sociobiology as eugenics-in-modern-dress misread what Wilson wrote and thought; still, he pushed further into that argument that most remember or acknowledge especially in a now, mostly forgotten book co-written with Charles Lumsden. ISTM it’s fair to say that in his key ideas he found a hammer, and for a considerable while, nearly everything in the living world looked like a nail.

And (again, as Zimmer notes) Wilson was a ferocious academic battler–of necessity during the sociobiology wars of the late 70s and the early 80s, and by inclination before and after.  Je was an ambitious man who achieved an enormous amount and screwed up in sometimes major ways along that journey.

But taken all in all he was a profoundly rich and important thinker and researcher who spent a lot of time trying to do as much good as possible in the world, especially in defense of biodiversity and a planet capable of supporting not just us but the extraordinary wealth of living things with which we share this rock.

I have just a couple of personal remembrances.  Here’s the one that always makes me smile:

The first time I interviewed him was in 1983 or 4, when I was a very and unjustly confident young reporter, wanting to talk to him about his ideas about the coevolution of genes and culture (that now mostly forgotten book). He invited me to meet him for lunch in his lab–he’d bring the food.  So I came up from New York and made my way to Oxford St. in Cambridge. He met me at the door and we sat down at a mostly cleared lab bench in the first of several connected rooms where he studied his beloved ants.  He handed me a sandwich and we started to talk.  I was three or four bites into my tuna sandwich when I focused on the tube running just below eye level between us, running from one terrarium to another at either end of the bench.  There was some motion there. I focused for a second, missing what Wilson said for a sentence or two.  He followed my eyes to the parade of insects marching along the tube, and told me the species (now long forgotten). I grinned in acknowledgement, and then had to choke back a laugh…

…as I realized that I was having lunch with perhaps the one person in the country who brought his own ants to a picnic.

He got the full mileage out of his four-score-and-ten. We should all do as well.

And with that: thread, open, be this can.

Image: Albert Bierstadt, Tropical landscape with fishing boats in the bay, undated, before 1902.

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