Via City-Journal, we get possibly the best distillation of the current suicidal stupidity on the right:

If you condemned the Antifa/Black Lives Matter violence that took place around the country in 2020, as all conservatives did, then you must condemn the Trumpist riot at the U.S. Capitol in 2021. Period.

By the exact same token, you must condemn firefighters who break windows and smash doors to rescue people from burning buildings. There is no “whataboutism” here; the moral, social and political contexts are worlds apart. The breach of the Capitol was a justified act of civic virtue. The Antifa/BLM riots were violent terrorist acts. Period.

[I whipped this up in HTML, because I intend to footnote it, but it’s unreadable with the stupid text styling of this theme. here is a PDF of the same table, perhaps more readable.]

Nine days ago, Elon Musk surpassed Jeff Bezos as the world’s richest man. Four days ago, Bezos returned the favor. The next day, Bezos rubbed it in with a successful rocket launch:

“Elon, you sad little man,” Bezos scoffed. “Your rockets all look like dildos. Only mine looks like a real dick.”

(Blue Origin engineers fondly refer to the Bezos design as “Blue Origlans”.)

It stopped working in Firefox a while back. Chrome had native support, so I used Chrome exclusively for Flash games.

Chrome dropped support for Flash yesterday. Doesn’t mean there will be no further maintenance updates or bug fixes. It means Chrome will never run Flash in the future under any circumstances, due to “security issues”.

Seems to me, a fellow ought to be allowed to take his own chances with “security issues”. There’s a big healthy baby getting thrown out with the bath water here.

Adobe Flash was the medium for millions of hours of human endeavor, effort which produced irreplaceable art. We’re talking about thousands of videogames, some of which were truly ground-breaking.

The N-Game, a physics platformer, was an artistic medium of its own. Hundreds of contributors turned in levels, many of which must have taken days to perfect, and could take days to make a successful escape.

Nitrome.com turned in hundreds of games. They maintained an unimaginable standard of quality in their product. Super high quality original art and music in every offering. Above all, Nitrome offered a bewildering array of original game concepts. Physics, geometry, logic, rhythm…Nitrome’s games were mind-bending and always something new.

There were hilarious ultra-violent cartoon games like Alien Hominid and Dad’n’Me. And then there were the easy time-wasters, like GoOgLeY’s Raiden X or Bum Lee’s De-animator.

All pretty much gone now. There’s a preservation project which uses an emulator called ruffle to play archived Flash content. Maybe their archive includes Nitrome games, which would be good. But it can’t simply archive the N-Game; there was a database of custom levels.

Google could have provided some kind of off-ramp, here. It wasn’t worth their time, I guess. They used to be the search engine of choice; now they’re making the internet disappear, chunk by chunk and person by person.

(Image found at Ace.)

I was a professional software developer for about ten years, years which happened to coincide with the early internet boom. The living was easy, so easy compared to today. If you got bored, you could kick your boss in the nuts and have a higher-paying job lined up before there was time to clean out your desk. Management generally couldn’t tell the difference between when you were goofing off and when you were running the company. The trick was to run the company and goof off at the same time. You’d still get a raise without even asking for it. Such was the demand for talent back then, even uncredentialed talent like mine.

I spent eleven months with an outfit called MeasureCast. This would have been in about 1999. MeasureCast was the first startup I worked with, and we had a money-making angle in the time of opportunity. Internet radio, something like what YouTube is today, was a new and rapidly-growing market. As in many emerging markets at the time, there were two major competing technology stacks: whoever got there first, and Microsoft. Real Media got there first and developed the RealPlayer, the first commercially-viable online audio streaming application. Microsoft came after with the Windows Media Player, which we referred to as WiMP.

At that time, there were no “major media platforms” online. Google was the best search engine; that’s all Google was. They weren’t evil yet; their main user base was geeks needing technical information. Wikipedia and Facebook and all the rest were unheard of, undreamt of.

Anyone who could buy a little bandwidth could run an internet radio station and charge for advertising. People were doing it, but it was a new economy and nobody knew how to price the advertising. Howard Stern went on the radio and complained about the situation. Here was this rapidly-expanding market and nobody could figure out what to pay anybody.

Supposedly, the future CEO of MeasureCast was in the shower, or at least in the bathroom, when he heard Stern’s broadcast. And he got a bright idea. Internet isn’t the same as broadcast media. Internet is transactional. Why not develop a service that can log all the transactions in a database for truly accurate analysis and reporting? Why not measure the audience?

That’s what we did. And we did it in a non-evil way. It never occurred to us to try to sell the audience; indeed our data practices wouldn’t have enabled it. We did some demographic analysis, but we did it in an above-board and consensual way. We weren’t screwing anybody. All we were selling was the numbers.

We got partnered up with some of the bigger stations, and for a while there we were the only people in the internet radio business who actually knew what was going on. There was no competition coming up from behind, but there was what you might call a legacy competitor, Arbitron.

Arbitron was ubiquitous, basically a national monopoly on market analysis of traditional broadcast radio. Arbitron is now a subsidiary of Nielsen, the industry standard for market analysis of television since time immemorial. Arbitron was a multi-billion dollar business with headquarters in LA at the time.

Arbitron was not on a technological footing to get anywhere near us. Their audience sampling had been conducted at cost and with some inaccuracy, by means of surveys and the like. Suddenly here’s a market where you have a competitor whose data is absolutely hard, and he seems to be getting it for free. There was no way for Arbitron to compete. Sure, they were big and we were small, but then again a party balloon is way bigger than a needle. We were grinning ear to ear, working round the clock.

Came a time when Arbitron had to make a public comment about the threat we posed, in some industry journal or other. “We’ll outlast them,” they said.

And they did. Here’s how: they made internet radio illegal.

Arbitron was founded in 1949, just a little too late to have done market research for Goebbels. Music publishers, show producers, and broadcast networks hung on their every word for decades. Rumor in 1999 was the company was worth $2 billion.

Power and money find each other, and Arbitron had power. They knew everybody from Roy Disney to Sonny Bono. They could afford lobbyists, junkets, etc.

They changed Federal copyright law so that users of internet radio had to pay a royalty of five cents per track per listen. That’s not a typo: that actually happened in early 2000. That measure killed every single internet radio station instantly. Not only was the royalty not market-sustainable, there was no way to collect such royalties at the time. There still isn’t one. Perhaps that’s because no-one needs it.

Real Media went under. A round of funding fell through at the eleventh hour. I was laid off in the first round, the others held on for a while. MeasureCast ended up being acquired by Arbitron in a fire sale.

And now GoOgle makes shitloads of money by charging for advertising to view unauthorized copyrighted content. They opened up that revenue stream just as soon as they could assume control.

Going up against an incumbent is tough.

She will not suffer the troubles ahead of us. Mark Steyn has a lengthy and moving tribute here.

I was never a regular follower or big fan of Ms. Shaidle. I was never in contact with her personally. I didn’t even know she was an important film critic. I thought of her as an obscure blogger.

But I remember her name. Any time she popped up on your radar, the impression stuck. She was strange, extremely eloquent, and very pissed off at you and me.

I mean that as the highest praise. Kathy Shaidle’s anger wasn’t the braying of the mob; it was more like the anger of God. Righteous, and implying love as its own reflection. It drove her work; it shined through even when she was trying to be mellow. YOU COULD DO BETTER is what they ought to inscribe on her tombstone.

I’ll shed a tear or two for Kathy Shaidle, and say a prayer or two for the bereaved.

UPDATE: turns out what they’re going to put on her tombstone is GET OFF MY LAWN! That is not a joke. Oh Kathy, we hardly knew ye.

I found this link at Ace a couple days ago. It’s a real-estate listing for a house in Detroit.

56 pictures, 3200 square feet of madness. Salvador Dali with a government grant couldn’t turn in anything this insane.

I was clicking back and forth through the slideshow, wondering what kind of mind, what kind of person could possibly create this? Obviously money was no object. But this person also must have worked like a slave for years, all to make a house you can’t live in because you might track dirt on the hallucinations. Thousands of hours must have gone into it.

Picture 30 caught my eye. It’s not like the others. This room is not “put together” the same way as the other rooms. There’s something kind of permanently unfinished about the whole setup.

There is a bed in the room, with a velour-looking bedspread. About ten more such bedspreads in their original plastic packaging are stacked in what looks like a hallway.

There is a gigantic porcelain sink in the room. Next to the sink is a desk. Who puts a sink next to the desk? The sink is not set up for grooming, personal care or cooking. There is a sit-stool in front of the sink, and a paper towel dispenser.

There are 32 rolls of paper towels next to the sink. The occupant of this room sits in front of this vast sink, unable to see himself in the mirror, and does…something which consumes paper towels by the truckload. There is also a tidy drying rack for what appear to be face cloths.

One odd thing about this listing is the bathrooms outnumber the bedrooms four to three. Somebody really digs their indoor plumbing. So, a clean freak who throws out his bedspread if he sweats in it?

Everything here points to obsessive-compulsive. Once you see it that way, the whole experience takes on a kind of darkness. You notice that some of the layouts are obsessed with symmetry and balance. And the totally antiseptic cleanliness becomes oppressive. The cleaning bill for this place must be on par with the Smithsonian.

I’m always grateful when somebody does a freakazoid thing that expands my ideas of human potential. But I’m pretty sure I’m glad I wasn’t the guy who decorated that house.

I know it’s late times to be talking about politics in America, but we have a little politicking left to do before the shit truly hits the fan.

Step One, a step that can be accomplished by traditional means without violence, is the utter annihilation of the Republican Party. Sure, King George the Third was a glibbering moron and habitual tyrant, just like any Democrat. But the highest gallows in the land was built for Benedict Arnold.

Never vote, donate or contribute to the GOP again on any level. Abandon them, maroon them. Let them know their enemies are more powerful than ever, and now they have no friends.

Every post in this series will feature the same themes:

• We are in a fight.
• Fights are scary and can freak you out.
• Losing control is scary and can freak you out.
• Do not think you can fight for control and win. Control is lost.
• You will have to break the law. You will be exposed.
• Do not fight out of anger. Do not kill.
• Do not put yourself in a situation where you might have to kill in “self-defense”.
• Don’t fight to regain what was lost. It is futile to make the past the future.
• Learn to shove.
• Learn from the enemy.
• Partner with law enforcement if you’re lucky.
• Don’t hurt yourself.
• Don’t fight to terrorize the enemy. Fight to gain public sympathy.
• They have the institutions. We have the terrain.

In accord with all this, you can shoot most any Republican in the street and be free without bail before sundown. Half the people will cheer, the other half will shrug, and the remaining half won’t even notice it in their news feeds.

The Nashville Bomb was fuel-air. Knuckledraggin links a breathless news release that this perp must have been a real rocket genius and they have no idea how he achieved the right chemical balance and the electronically-timed ignition.

Bullshit. You don’t need an electronic timer when you go up with the bomb. As for achieving the right fuel-air mixture, Knuckledraggin’s commenters have various ideas, some of which are simple and probably reliable.

If you think you’re so fucking smart you figured out exactly how this Vaporized Vandal did the deed, maybe your best hold is to shut the fuck up. And if you have it mind to “roll your own” like a fucking terrorist, do everyone a favor and make sure nobody other than you gets killed.

Maybe you think you’re in a war. Maybe you think it’s time to go kinetic. I guarantee you a campaign of random murder will not win. Apparently the Nashville Bomber understood that, though it’s anyone’s guess what he was trying to accomplish.

It just makes them mad: