Packing up and moving out...

For reasons, I'm closing up shop at this blog and moving over to http://personal-blog.fixermark.com.

Feel free to check it out!

I'll be leaving this one up so as not to break links, but it will be receiving no further updates.

(It took six steps to put that image in. Boy, will I not miss that.)

Why we even bothered to leave the trees

“But you are telling me, Susan, that the ‘Society for Humanity’ is right; and that Mankind has lost its own say in its future.”

“It never had any, really. It was always at the mercy of economic and sociological forces it did not understand — at the whims of climate, and the fortunes of war. Now the Machines understand them; and no one can stop them, since the Machines will deal with them as they are dealing with the Society, — having, as they do, the greatest of weapons at their disposal, the absolute control of our economy.”

“How horrible!”

“Perhaps how wonderful! Think, that for all time, all conflicts are finally evitable. Only the Machines, from now on, are inevitable!”

And the fire behind the quartz went out and only a curl of smoke was left to indicate its place.

~ Asimov, Isaac. "I, Robot". pp. 147-148. Available online: http://ekladata.com/-Byix64G_NtE0xI4A6PA1--o1Hc/Asimov-Isaac-I-Robot.pdf

Antonio García Martínez on Trump

I read all of Chaos Monkeys so you don't have to so I could bring you this, the author's take on the Cambridge Analytica scandal. This is a quick, heavily-editorialized summary of the Afterword of my edition (May 2018).

In the author's opinion, Cambridge Analytica didn't have much impact. Their system of political profiling is basically astrology for political wonks; it has the same pitfalls as advertising models that try to decide if you want to buy a BMW because you're living in Iowa and working at a pet supply store (which is to say, those models aren't proven out).

The Russian interference existed, but likely had little impact given their numbers. They had more organic spread than the ads from other sources, but we're talking some hundred million reshares on a network that hosts trillions of posts per year.

The far likelier contributor to a Trump campaign victory was Trump's team themselves using Facebook's advertising tools to their maximum efficacy. Trump's own ads team has proven more than capable of getting people hype about him (these are, after all, the people who have been successfully selling Trump as a brand for decades). The metrics on how the Clinton campaign used online advertising are far bleaker: less microtargeting, less message-tuning, less use of the tools. I find this surprising given the success the Obama campaign had with online tools, but perhaps I shouldn't; the general story of the Dem party in 2016 was one of hubris, and I probably wouldn't be surprised to learn Clinton decided to kick all of Obama's good tech people to the curb and bring in her own coterie.

In particular, Trump's campaign took advantage of Lookalike Audiences, which is a FB feature that lets you start from a seed of users you want to target and builds out an ad targeting model along the friend network. Cambridge Analytica is doing astrology, but "Republicans are friends with Republicans" is just true, and has become ever more true as America cracks along its political stress-lines. 

So the executive summary:

1. Trump's ad team worked their asses off to craft a message that resonated with potential Trump voters.
2. Because Facebook makes it easy to reshare, those voters spread the message hard, for free.
3. Meanwhile, both the Clinton campaign and Democrat voters (relatively-speaking) slept on getting a message spread (mostly, I think, because they already "knew" Trump was such an obvious no-choice that they didn't need to burn the energy). Everyone in their social networks was already voting for Clinton, so no need to advocate. While everyone in the Trump social networks was not already voting for Trump, so people who'd got hype spread the world harder.

In short, Trump's win was like a small-town store getting curb-stomped by the arrival of Walmart because Walmart brings out the marching band to announce their presence and the mom-and-pop knows everyone in town already knows 'em so they don't need to advertise and, anyway, who would shop at Walmart, they're obviously evil.

I'd like to say "Lessons learned," and I guess we'll find out.

... One more point worth mentioning, given where we are in 2021: our author mentions that when they were building the ad networks that Trump's team leveraged so effectively, basically nobody discussed politics. Those systems were designed to sell shoes, not commanders-in-chief. If you watch Facebook's current behavior after both 2016 and a January 6th insurrection attempt organized mostly on its network and Twitter's, always keep in mind: you're watching the behavior of a huge communications platform that well-and-truly did not see this coming and desperately wants it to be someone else's problem (because selling shoes is profitable but contributing to the dissolution of the world's largest democratically-elected superpower isn't).

I left Google for many reasons. One of the ones that looms over me perpetually is my feeling that when they were also faced with these questions, their response in aggregate as a corporation was "We'd rather not think about it." The remembered paraphrase of a quote from one of the company's two founders echoes in my brain, and I wish I'd had the foresight to write it down verbatim. The gist of the message (during a sex scandal related to, if memory serves, Google+) was that this founder didn't want to be dealing with a political scandal; he wanted to be making cool tech and solving problems. As if those are separable concerns.

Make your decisions accordingly.

Ghostbusters: Afterlife—bustin' doesn't always make you feel good. Do it anyway.

[Spoiler warning: I'm going to be talking at length about plot points in Ghostbusters and Ghostbusters: Afterlife]

I'm a huge fan of the original Ghostbusters movie, and as I've gotten older it's only come to mean more to me. I began my software engineering career working at small startup. And Ghostbusters is a weird comedy about, of all things, a tech startup. Three guys, having discovered a novel technology under-appreciated by the academia they're ensconced in, go into business for themselves, build it brick-by-brick and job by job, and make their way from obscurity to saving the world when a need for their technology is discovered that nobody had predicted. So many bits of the movie resonate with me: the anxiety of leaping from academia to industry, the cobble-together lifestyle of pulling all-nighters in whatever office space you can afford, the thrill of landing your first client, and the need, when someone asks you if you are a god, to say "yes."

And to listen to the new guy, because he knows what's up

This movie was brilliant. It's also an artifact of its era and I don't think it could be made again. Not only because not all the cast is with us anymore, but because the world of today is... Different, from 1984. 

This is why I'm very impressed with Ghostbusters: Afterlife.

I'm going to talk at length about what works in Afterlife, what impressed me about the direction the story took, and why I'm glad this movie was made. It's easily the best movie I saw in 2021.

But first, a couple digressions to set the chess pieces on the board.

Of the horrors we cannot comprehend and the subversion of the trope

There is a sub-genre of horror, most famously associated with early 20th-century author H.P. Lovecraft, that explores the idea of the incomprehensible. Not things too difficult to comprehend, but things fundamentally incompatible with comprehension—things as incompatible with human cognitive faculties as the vacuum of space is with human respiration. Lovecraft lived in an era of scientific marvel—during his lifetime over half of the homes in the US became outfitted for electric light—and it was a time when people talked seriously about whether there was anything science could not do. The Lovecraftian formula for supernatural horror was to start with a premise of "Yes, not only are there hard cosmic limits to what we can experience, but merely probing too deeply into the edges of reality risks destroying the questioner, like an ant curious about a tailpipe." But he explored even grimmer themes of utter helplessness in a cosmos not centered on humanity's existence or non-existence... As we might bury or drown an anthill without even noticing, might there be cosmic forces out there that could eradicate our fragile species without even a thought paid to our fates?

On the plus side, Frank no longer cared he'd missed a mortgage payment this month.

The climax of Ghostbusters taps into this trope and subverts it brilliantly. Gozer, the monster at the end of the movie, is clearly inspired by cosmic horrors like the works of Lovecraft and other authors. It's an ancient god known by the Sumerians, which we learn from the mad ramblings of a possessed man exists in and through dimensions beyond our own. The Ghostbusters, having pieced together that an apartment complex in New York was the work of mad cultist Ivo Shandor who wished to summon Gozer to destroy humanity (more on him later), arrive at the scene of a massive disruption too late to stop Shandor's decades-long machinations: the summoning focus his apartment complex is secretly built to serve as has done its work, and an incomprehensible horror has come to tread this world.

... and it promptly gets shot in the face by four scientists wielding death rays.

"Nobody steps on a church in my town."

One of the things that really works in Ghostbusters is this ending. It's brutally, unapologetically hopeful, a comedic rejection of the Lovecraftian premise: if we are smart enough and work hard enough, not even the incomprehensible chaos from beyond our world can stop us. We'll just out-science it. We're good enough. Save girlfriend, world loves us, cue credits.

The movie had a sequel that recapitulated this theme (big evil, comprehend it, get out in front of it, save world... This time though with the power of love), a couple of TV shows, and a reboot that basically re-trod the ground of the first movie with some tweaks (fake-out final boss, bigger budget for the final battle). They basically all say more or less the same thing as the first movie, though the second movie introduces an interesting wrinkle: to justify resetting the status quo, we establish in act 1 that even after saving the world from an actual apocalypse, the world more-or-less forgets about our heroes. They have to take on side-jobs because busting ghosts (and accolades from having done so) don't pay. 

Good job saving the world. Anyway, the going rate for birthday party appearances is...

Put a pin in this idea, right next to that Ivo Shandor pin. We'll come back to this later. Meanwhile, let's talk about some more monsters.

Of Stephen King, cosmic horror, kids on bikes, and unfinished work

Two years after Ghostbusters, hyper-prolific horror novelist Stephen King published It. King wrote in many sub-genres of horror and was no stranger to the cosmic one; indeed, It's titular... It... is an alien creature burrowed under a town in Maine that kills children and feeds on human fear. Complementary to its predatory nature, It can shapeshift and is able to tap into a person's mind to draw out the thing that will terrify them most (to maximize their nutritional value). It also possesses a kind of mild stupefying effect on adults; with rare exceptions, most adults don't take It seriously or can't understand the nature of It's threat, even while It's literally devouring their children.

Indeed, it is children, not adults, who stop It. In addition to cosmic horror, It lives in a sub-genre of adventure story that has only recently been uniquely identified and named: "kids on bikes." Because of an interesting interplay of phenomena in the US in the latter half of the 20th century (Americans leaving farms and moving to suburbia; the labor economy reacting to the postwar sex-agnostic workforce and Reaganomics by flattening wages, pulling both parents into the labor market to maintain a middle-class lifestyle; the bicycle boom of the '70s; desegregation widening the circle of friends a kid might have from school, both culturally and geographically), the late '70s and early '80s saw a wave of adolescents self-entertaining by meeting up on bicycles and going adventuring. A whole slew of books and movies featured young protagonists on bicycles getting into adventures—often supernatural adventures involving things adults, trapped in the rat race of work and maintaining a middle-class lifestyle in a world of accelerating complexity—could not or would not see, just outside of their civilized streets of houses fronted by well-manicured lawns. It is in this genre; after his brother is killed by the monster, Bill Denbrough befriends a whole slew of outcast kids who realize the bad things that happen in the town match a pattern, encounter and confront the monster, and perform a ritual that defeats it. They discover that though It is a cosmic horror, there are rules it must obey, and they can be exploited. And they defeat It. Save girlfriend, cue credits.

... halfway through the book.

And nothing bad ever happened to them ever again

The trope subversion that It dabbles in is that the monster's defeat did not destroy it. A plot point established in the first half of the story is that It feeds on the town in cycles... Every 27 years, It stirs from sleep and visits despair on the town. Twenty-seven years after It's defeat, deaths begin again. And though they are now adults, with lives of their own, the "Loser's Club" finds their way back to the town to fight It again. Not all of them survive this time, but their sacrifice is met with success; though they pay dearly, they seemingly destroy It permanently this time. It will take no more children from the town. But the scars they bear from the experience are permanent.

Of a movie displaced in time but very, very modern

Our chessboard is now assembled, and we can begin moving the pieces.

Ghostbusters: Afterlife is a movie with a far more dramatic tone than its predecessors. While it has funny moments, it isn't a laugh-per-scene comedy in the way the first two and the reboot are. Set in an extremely-intentionally-out-of-the-way town of Summerville, we encounter the family of Callie and her two kids, Trevor and Phoebe, who have pulled up stakes to settle accounts on a farm owned by Callie's estranged father. The town knew little of the farm's owner, calling him "The Dirt Farmer" and explaining that he bought weird equipment but basically kept to himself. He made no money and, the locals assume, died of a heart attack. The money is significant; a recurring theme through the movie is poverty, between Callie's need to squeeze money out of her father's farm and the general state of the town as a former mining town with very little by way of a local economy.

Don't worry; it's just a name

The old abandoned mine, it turns out, is very significant and immediately meaningful to viewers who know their Ghostbusters lore. "Shandor Mining Co." is soon revealed to have been owned by the same cult that built the Gozer temple / apartment complex in New York. As Phoebe learns about the town and begins to experience supernatural phenomena in her new home, she discovers her legacy: her grandfather was Egon Spengler, one of the four Ghostbusters and the primary inventor of the science of trapping ghosts. 

Aided by an adult mentor—a seismologist who cares more about the town's mysterious earthquakes than anyone else in town and is familiar with the now-mostly-ignored story of the near-apocalypse in New York City in 1984—Phoebe, her brother, a bored girl from town, and another local kid with a penchant for the supernatural piece together what is happening: Ivo Shandor had set up the mine as a second focus to summon Gozer, and it's working. But it's been blocked by Egon; having discovered the threat they defeated in New York is not destroyed, he rigged a device to suppress it and was working on ending the Gozer threat permanently when one of his devices failed, letting the ghosts reach him.

The major pivot of the movie occurs after Phoebe and her brother severely damage downtown chasing a stray ghost with their grandfather's equipment (having never learned the Peter Venkman trick). Stuck in jail with one phone call, Phoebe calls the phone number on the old television ad from the first movie and discovers it still connects to Ray Stantz. But Ray explains why Egon was facing the threat of the mine alone: like so many startups, Ghostbusters folded. A victim of their own success, after the Manhattan cross-rip and the Vigo Incursion, supernatural phenomena died down and they couldn't justify the cost of running a business to chase ghosts. Peter and Winston left when they couldn't pay the bills; Ray and Egon had a falling out that culminated in Spengler taking off to Summerville alone with the hardware, leaving Ray with the debts and no tools to clear them. This betrayal echoes Callie's feelings of betrayal by her father, who was obsessed with his ghosts and abandoned his family.

"Egon Spengler can rot in hell"

Upon seeing the threat posed by Gozer, learning the cavalry isn't coming, and losing Callie and the adult mentor to recapitulation of the possession arc from the first movie, the kids realize the adults aren't going to fix this and they kids-on-bikes themselves a plan to cancel the apocalypse. The plan comes within range of failure, and is rescued at the last second by the arrival of the original three still-living Ghostbusters assisted by an apparition of their fourth partner. The day is saved, and... Nobody knows. Save girlfriend, sure, but world... Doesn't really know they exist. The entity known as Gozer came through to our world. It nearly started an apocalypse. But it didn't happen on top of a skyscraper in New York, so only a handful of people know.

A very serious comedy

There's a lot to unwrap in this movie. I think this movie fits a trope we've seen from a couple other films in recent years, most notably Star Wars: The Last Jedi. I don't have a name for this trope yet, so for now, I'm going to call it "The retired hero." When Rey finds Luke Skywalker, he refuses to train her because he has seen no good come of his ability to train Jedi. He's given up on that entire path; closed a chapter in his life. But the galaxy stubbornly refuses to care what Luke Skywalker thinks his role is.

Galactic fascism on the rise? That's rough. Have you tried this green milk?

Ghostbusters: Afterlife is also a tale of heroes in retirement. With one exception—who was killed for it—those who saved the world in the past are done saving the world. They don't even perceive a threat. But the threat is real, so it's up to some children to strap on unlicensed nuclear accelerators and go set things on fire. Phoebe and the gang kick ass and are so much fun to watch, but there's an undercurrent of disquiet in a kids-on-bikes tale... When literal children have to wield death rays, the adults in the room done effed up.

Pictured: Ass-kicking and fun
Also pictured: child endangerment

The part of Afterlife that stuck with me was Ray turning his back on Egon. Venkman and Zeddemore I could get; Winston was clear from scene 1 that a steady paycheck was key to his involvement, and Peter was already shown to have bowed out in the second movie when things got rough. But Ray and Egon were always on the same page from the first time we see them. They both knew ghosts were real, cross-dimensional events were real, and apocalypse cults could start an apocalypse. What on Earth would make Egon leave everything else behind and dedicate his life to a solo project setting up the biggest ghost trap ever built without Ray coming with him?

The movie never says (and given that Ray gives us the narrative, I'm going to play the "unreliable narrator" card and say if he said things he regrets, he's not going to admit it to a stranger, even Egon's granddaughter). But I'm going to go out on a limb and make my own assertion:

Ray's an optimist and he couldn't handle the truth.

So, Egon looks at information about Gozer and concludes the apocalypse isn't canceled yet. He has inklings, but not enough hard evidence. He brings it to Ray. And Ray's response? Relax, man. We already beat Gozer. We won.

We're already heroes.

Egon had to leave, because Ray couldn't accept the monster wasn't dead.

There's a powerful sense of abdication of responsibility in the face of hardship that undergirds Afterlife. Egon leaves his family to pursue his mad quest to stop Gozer. The Ghostbusters give up on the thing they're best at because nobody will pay them to do it. Shandor Mining Co. gave up on the whole damn town in pursuit of their apocalypse.

Oh yes, Shandor. Who was he? Egon tells us in the first film.

After the First World War, Shandor decided that society was too sick to survive. He wasn't alone. He had close to a thousand followers when he died. They conducted rituals up on the roof, bizarre rituals intended to bring about the end of the world.

Ivo Shandor. A man from the 1920s. A man who sought the apocalypse.

A man who gave up on humanity.

Stories are for the audience

As a rule, I prefer sequels where there is a different story to tell in the same setting to re-treads. In many cases, I'd rather a property lie fallow than see it dragged out and puppeted around if there's nothing new to say. At first glance, Ghostbusters: Afterlife says nothing new that the first one didn't. The beats—discovering the tech, putting a four-person crew together (they even map near 1-to-1 to the original crew), discovering the threat, the keymaster and gatekeeper, and working together to stop Gozer—are the same. But that's a surface-level similarity; it's just the Ritual of Chud necessary to call out the monster and beat the monster.

Ghostbusters was, and is, a brilliant and hilarious movie. The comedy is spot on, the premise is absurd, and underneath it all is a beautiful tale of competence and hope, of beating the odds and what we can do when we put our minds and shoulders to it. Literal apocalypses can be cancelled and heroes made.

As Ray says to Phoebe, "It was the Reagan years."

The second decade of the 21st century is a different time. Ghostbusters: Afterlife takes what is still a modestly absurd premise but uses it—as any good science fiction does—to talk about some truths that are hard to look at directly. Afterlife is a story about what we value vs. what we pay for. It's a story about evil never being defeated, only disarmed for now. It's a story about the kind of world-saving that doesn't make people into famous heroes, but merely saves the world. And it's a story about what happens when people give up. And what happens when people don't.

I can't imagine why stories like that would resonate right now.

Underneath the comedy, Ghostbusters is a movie about not giving up. It spits in the face of the idea of unstoppable horror. It cries out to an uncaring and destructive ancient god, summoned by the folly of men from the past, that we have the tools; we have the talent.

Ghostbusters: Afterlife is its sequel.

In Honor Of the Galaxy's Favorite Dangerous Murder Hobo

 

This is the year of Linux on the desktop

 The promise: "The modular, single-purpose, interface focused design of the GNU/Linux architecture means infinite customizability. Any configuration you want is within your grasp."

The reality: "You changed your window manager and now your laptop no longer goes to sleep when you close the lid."

Chatty Charon

 

Mark's gallery of Facebook infractions 14 (celebrity edition): brown Jesus is hate speech, I hear

No updates from me this week, but Wil Wheaton managed to catch some downtime for sharing a meme that was circulating for a day, followed by some very personal thoughts on the topic. His post has since been restored; after review, Facebook conclueded it does not violate community standards.

He wrote about his experience of having that entire thread suppressed by Facebook and catching a ban here: http://wilwheaton.net/2021/10/white-fragility-in-action

This is a good case reminder that Facebook controls the entirety of conversations on Facebook. If you don't want to risk things meaningful to you disappearing because they're on that platform, don't put them on that platform.

Mark's gallery of Facebook infractions 13: Those who don't spam history are doomed to repeat it

 Infraction: Spam. Comment removed.

I'm honestly stumped on explaining this one. In a discussion about the comedy of Gene Wilder, Facebook decides it's spam to link to an image of a letter he wrote regarding costuming for his character.

Anyway, the letter's pretty neat, and the nice thing about my blog is I get to decide what counts as spam.

https://news.lettersofnote.com/p/part-of-this-world-part-of-another

Mark's gallery of Facebook infractions 12, guest edition: the past comes back

The most hilarious thing about this one is that it was a reshare of a meme shared a year ago. Not too terribly surprising that the acceptability window is a moving target, but be warned: Facebook accepting something in the past is no guarantee it's still acceptable.

TIE fighters are for coddled children with money

 So, let's talk about Star Wars.

TIE fighter pilots have a reputation for being insane. This is well-earned; the TIE is famously powerful but famously fragile, little more than a couple guns strapped to some wings and a pair of engines, with not even enough hardware left for a life-support system. TIE pilots basically operate under the philosophy that if you're good enough to never get hit, you don't need shields. They're the elite of the Empire's sky power and they know it... Only 10% who enter the academy ever become pilots. Their craft even lack a hyperdrive, supported as they are by their operating bases and motherships.

They are coddled babies. They don't know the meaning of madness.

Look at these absolute children

Consider: Sienar Fleet Systems fabricates TIEs by the tens of thousands. While they are, indeed, the lowest-bidder on an imperial contract, they've had thousands of opportunities to correct and perfect the design. Each obsidian, gleaming machine is the pinnacle of a mass-production process: perfectly engineered to specification, spare parts and supplies readily available, supported by the wealth and expertise of a galaxy-spanning empire.

No, if you want to see real madness, you look at an A-wing pilot.

"Fear is a luxury of the comfortable and the TIE pilot"

Consider: in contrast to the legions of TIEs rolling off a Sienar assembly-line daily, A-wing pilots are helming a ship that fell off the back of a Kuat Systems delivery truck. Then it was grabbed by some freelancer engineer with a chip on their shoulder and maybe a certification on some planet and retro-fit with a hyperdrive and completely new engines and, hell, while we're in here, let's just rip out the astromech slot too, who can afford one of those? This is the souped-up back-alley Honda to the Empire's unending legion of mass-produced Fords. Every A-wing pilot is at least an amateur flight mechanic, because you need to be to keep the damn things in the sky. It may be spec'd superior to the TIE fighter, but all those pieces break down so often that there's never any guarantee an A-wing shows up to the fight without a couple guns and some expensive dead weight where a deflector array should be.

Then these absolute mad-lads-n-lasses get in their flying coffins and take on the biggest military power in the known universe, with only their rage at injustice and a pair of Borstel RG-9 laser cannons to wield.

"Mondays, am I right?"

There is no long life here. There is no glory. There is the fight and its inevitable end. TIE pilots may have a death wish, but A-wing pilots know that wishes only come true if you put the work in. A-wing pilots have death plans. They have a death mortgage with a 2% return on investment, and they're interested in refinancing.

Also worth consideration:

• A-wings, unlike TIEs, have hyperdrives, because a malfunctioning hyperdrive is just one more exciting way to die in space.
• TIEs are shaped like jaunty accessory wear. A-wings are shaped like coffins.
• TIE flight school has a 90% washout rate. The Rebellion will hand a fighter to a farm-boy; their "flight school" is whether that farm-boy comes back.
• A-wings were originally designed for astromech assistance, but it was removed to make room for missiles. In lieu of an astromech, A-wing pilots just have half their thruster vectoring motors malfunctioning at any given time so they don't have to think about them.
• The TIE name, it is commonly known, stands for Twin Ion Engine. The A-wing is named after the sound the pilot makes when they're doing their job.
• A TIE fighter never took out Home One by crashing into its bridge

Demonstration of correct pronunciation of "A-wing"

A-wings: For when you want to die in space, but mommy and daddy couldn't afford an Imperial Academy education.

Mark's gallery of Facebook infractions 11, guest edition 3: won't someone think of the Congressional procedures?!

 

A ban for a friend.

This one is very similar to a ban I took earlier this year, which suggests to me that Facebook is over-constraining on keyword bans for "[violence-word] the [congress-word]". Understandable after January 6th, but someone could stand to bother to differentiate words for actual human beings in Congress from words for Parliamentary procedures.

Honestly, perhaps I should consider "Facebook cannot differentiate between people and things" to be more disquieting than I currently do.

Sword in the Stone is bad and my favorite Disney movie

I think my favorite Disney movie has terrible structure, but I love it for being a unique artifact.

Behold, the ideal make hero. You may not like it, but this is what peak narrative looks like

Disney movies lean heavily into the monomyth of the hero's journey. With very few exceptions, we follow a protagonist (often a princess) who finds a call to action, leaves home, faces trials and an abyss, grows to overcome these things, and finds their way home, permanently changed. Cinderella with her ball, Ariel with her legs and the affection of the man she fell in love with, Flynn and the truth ENCOM buried... They're all brought on a magical journey to attain the unattainable, to overcome the impossible, and to seek their heart's reward.

And then... There's Wart.

Our uh, hero, ladies and gentlemen?

As heroes go, Arthur from The Sword in the Stone is... Tough. He barely fits the model. This has much to do with the source material... Sword in the Stone is based on T. H. White's "Once and Future King," which tells the rest of Arthur's tale in the rest of the book. But Sword in the Stone chronicles only the tale from Arthur meeting Merlin to Arthur becoming king as a result of pulling an inextricable sword from the stone and anvil in London.

Arthur's path through the story has parts of a hero's journey. There's a call to action, sort of (he meets Merlin, who tells him Arthur's now his student). He leaves the threshold by, uh, going home with a wizard in tow. He does undergo several trials (chased around by a fish, chased around by a squirrel, chased around by a hawk). And he stands up to his father-figure in Sir Ector, which costs him his squirehood... For a time, until fate intervenes to take out Hobbes off-screen (a character we never meet). He faces the abyss by... doing the thing he was training to do, which is become a squire. This so infuriates Merlin that Merlin leaves, whereupon Arthur goes to London, accidentally finds a magic sword, and becomes king. He never wanted to be king, so he begs his mentor to return, and Merlin does, in a blast of magic and Bermuda shorts. And we close there, with Arthur now the once and future king and Merlin his mentor.

It's a weird story because Arthur spends most of it along for the ride. He transitions from student to squire to king without seeking any of these... The world is happening to him. He's fated to be who he will be, and nothing he wants can stop it. He's the protagonist, but he's not really the hero of the story. In fact, he's more of a McGuffin if anything. He's not even the first character we see in the tale. In fact, the first character is...

Oh no. Oh no no no no no no.

Merlin... Merlin does want things. We establish what he wants in the first scene, where he wrestles a well for gravitational supremacy. He wants a world better than the one he's living in. And he knows it's possible, because he has foreseen it. Merlin is "a soothsayer... A prognosticator." He has the gift of foreknowledge of (and apparently, we eventually learn, access to) the future past the medieval world he's living in, where everything is "complicated" and the strong prey upon the weak. In many versions of the tale of Arthur, Merlin's foreknowledge is a curse, not a blessing, and we seem to play it as such here... He is forever grumpy and dissatisfied, knowing of a world that is not and could be, if only people weren't so... Medieval.

And Merlin is also burdened with a purpose. He knows Arthur is coming his way, and he is to guide the boy to "his rightful place in the world" (put a pin in that; we'll return to it). Whereas Arthur's variant of the hero's journey starts with him going home, Merlin accepts the call to action by packing his whole home into a suitcase and moving into a drafty, leaky tower to do his work.

We have trials, where Merlin faces not whether his power is sufficient to protect his ward, but whether he's imparted enough knowledge for Wart to save himself. Except when young Arthur becomes faced with a threat he can't face himself, a sorceress of equal power to Merlin. At which point, Merlin blows in as a literal force of nature to stand between the boy and mortal peril (Hero, from the Greek ἥρως. Meaning "protector," "defender"). He puts his life on the line to save this kid from certain doom, and does so in a way that still teaches a lesson, for teaching is his role in this boy's life.

The guy that faces this might be the hero of the story, is what I'm saying.

After these adventures and trials, Merlin faces the abyss by... His student becoming a squire. 

"Good news! I'm gonna clean armor 'til I die of plague!"

Donning the "fine monkey suit for polishing boots." Embracing the identity imposed upon him by the medieval world. Merlin challenges his decision, and Wart's response... "I'm lucky to be Kay's squire. I'm nobody."

After all that work. All that tutelage. Fighting the most dangerous sorceress in the kingdom.

"I'm nobody."

Merlin doesn't take it well.

When you need some me-time but also you're a wizard

... and here the movie breaks down, even in this interpretation. We never find out what happens to Merlin in Bermuda. Something convinces him to come back. Somehow, he decides (even sitting in Bermuda, in the twentieth century!) that medieval London is where he'll be needed. So after Arthur accidentally kings himself, Merlin comes back.

These are his thinking shorts. He wears them for thinking.

He takes up a position advising Arthur, roll credits.

So it's still not a great movie, structurally. It's a fun movie. The animation is glorious, the characters were well-voiced and well-animated, the action is iconic. I loved it so much as a kid I burned a hole through a tape at the wizard's duel. But I love it for being a unique artifact.

Arthur... Is a fixed point in time. Nothing Merlin does actually pushes him towards this "rightful place in the world;" had Merlin not intervened, Arthur would have been Kay's squire, likely would have screwed up bringing Kay's sword, and gone to the churchyard for the sword in the stone anyway. Fate is making him king... Will make him king.  Unavoidably. Inexorably. Once and future. 

I think Merlin knows this. Merlin can do nothing to change this. Merlin can't change whether he's king. What Merlin can do, the only thing he can do, is shape him into King Arthur. Prepare him. Make this boy, so ill-equipped to lead a nation, into a leader. Raise a wise man from a child. Share a vision of a slightly brighter tomorrow, so that his choices and his leadership might guide his people towards it, even stumblingly, imperfectly, partially. He might not bring them indoor plumbing or electricity, but perhaps it's in the power of a King Arthur to create a kingdom where the strong do not prey upon the weak. Better than the kingdom he was raised in.

Imagine you knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that some random kid would become President. You had no control over this aspect of fate; that is a fixed point, unchanging. What would you do? You'd help him become the best damn kid he could be, that he may become the best President he can be.

Among the people cared for by teachers now, someone will be the next President. Someone will become CEO of every corporation that will exist. Someone will become a Supreme Court Justice. A general. A priest shepherding thousands or tens of thousands. The mayor of a city where millions live. This is guaranteed. As long as we have humanity, we will demand leaders; as long as we have this society, we will have these kinds of leaders. We can't stop this. But what we can do is our best to ensure that all of these will become the best human beings we can possibly help them be.

I love The Sword in the Stone because the hero is the teacher. I want more of those stories.

No, you cannot force the city to keep up your racist monument because we said in 1890 that we'd be racist forever

Given that I'm currently cooling my heels in Zuck jail for suggesting that there is no quantity of statues that exceeds the value of one human life, this ruling feels like a tiny bit of vindication.

https://www.npr.org/2021/09/02/1033595859/virginia-supreme-court-remove-statue-robert-e-lee-confederate-richmond

NPR reports "The Supreme Court of Virginia ruled Thursday that the state can take down an enormous statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee that has towered over a traffic island in Richmond for more than a century and has become a symbol of racial injustice." This decision had been blocked by injunctions related to two court cases. Today, the state Supreme Court tossed both cases for lack of standing, lifting the injunction.

Individual rulings from the state court:

• Gregory v. Northam—"The granting instruments relied upon by Gregory, the 1887 Deed and the 1890 Deed, do not plainly state an intent to create an easement in gross, and the circuit court did not err in concluding that they do not do so... Thus, Gregory has no property right, related to the Lee Monument, to enforce against the Commonwealth."
  
  
• Taylor v. Northam—"The Taylor Plaintiffs’ claims are based upon two premises... Second, that the Governor is constitutionally prohibited from ordering the removal of the Lee Monument from the Circle because a joint resolution passed by the General Assembly in 1889 states the Commonwealth’s current public policy and it strips the Governor of his authority to have the Lee Monument moved from the Circle.  Rightfully, neither premise survived the circuit court’s scrutiny... We conclude that there is sufficient evidence to support the circuit court’s ruling that the purported restrictive covenants are unenforceable, even without considering the 2020 Budget Amendment, and that the terms of the 1889 Joint Resolution are not binding on the current Governor and did not strip the Governor of his authority to order the removal of the Lee Monument from the Circle."

The tl;dr is that the ground was deeded to a private association to build the statue in 1887, and then donated the land to the Commonwealth of Virginia in 1890 (because, obviously... Better to have state tax money pay for it than pay taxes to the state for maintaining the statue privately). The Court has correctly recognized that there is no takesies-backsies on that grant one-hundred-thirty years later when the state decides the circle would be better used for something other than a giant monument to the general who fought tooth-and-claw for the right of people to own other people. Nor can a resolution under which property was transferred to the Commonwealth 130 years ago constrain the actions of the Commonwealth with that property in the present. Furthermore, statues are speech, and a 130-year-old covenant cannot constrain the speech authority of the modern government.

This is, I think, one of the most interesting parts of these cases: that plaintiffs only recourse for any standing whatsoever is something the government said 130 years ago, when none of the plaintiffs were even alive. This is a situation where the oft-misquoted wisdom of Benjamin Franklin nearly applies: "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary [free statue], deserve neither Liberty nor [a free statue]." The Court rightly recognizes that it isn't even within the power of the state government to constrain its own freedom of expression in perpetuity; no government of the Commonwealth can guarantee that a future government of the Commonwealth won't tear down any statue it owns.

We don't build monuments for the dead. We build them for the living. This one has outlived its usefulness, and the state Court agrees.

I lost faith in the government process in Virginia decades ago and never expected to see this day. It feels good to be this wrong.

Mark's gallery of Facebook infractions 10: you're in the jailhouse now

 

Context:

... so, y'know, reblog if you would burn down the statue of liberty to save a life. ;)

Mark's gallery of Facebook infractions 9: extremism

 Reshared from an acquaintance.

I'd be fascinated to know how Facebook is going to use the data they collect from this. I'd assume it will feed into a pattern recognizer for "extremism-like typing." Interesting that it leaves the definition of extremism up to the viewer.

Mark's gallery of Facebook infractions 8: Gronp edition

The offending image that FB chose to block a ~98,000-member group for was this:

So, nobody precisely knows what happened here. As far as I am aware, FB gave no official explanation and unbanned the group about 3 days later. The likeliest explanation I've heard is that it misinterpreted the image of the lead singer's guitar as a firearm held in the hand of Creed-Dathon here.

I don't envy Facebook the task of applying its TOS to images; that is, traditionally, the easiest way on Facebook to hide a TOS violation from auto-moderation (encode it in an image so text-based recognition misses it).

Part of me is suprised that a group with nearly 100,000 members doesn't automatically trigger a manual pass before banning the entire group when the system detects a potentially violating image, but I don't know the scale Facebook's operating at; perhaps 100,000 is small-time from their point of view.

Mark's gallery of Facebook infractions 7: Guest edition 2

 

Unfortunately, I have no additional context on this one. Seems like it'd be more helpful to people trying to avoid violating the TOS if an indication of what TOS was violated could be given though.

a brief cogitation on thread-safe memory access

Hey, I've got an idea. Let's you and me write a couple programs and share data between them. To share the data, we'll both open a file. Now, we'll just scribble bits we want to share into the file and read them out as we need them.

"Bad idea," you say?

"Very likely to result in data corruption," you say?

"There's a reason we have database engines," you say?

"Sure, but only if we do it in a very well-defined structure, such as 'Only one program can write in, only one can read out, and the file is a stream, not random-access'", you suggest?

... We should all probably stop thinking multiple threads touching the same memory without either programmer-constraining disciplines or resource-consuming protections is ever something we should do.

Mark's gallery of Faecbook infractions 6: Guest edition

 Transitioning now from my own infractions, I will now be bringing you infractions sent to me by other people or that I have observed.

Beginning with a bit of culture clash: when the algorithm meets military camaraderie.

At first glance, I can very much see why both the algorithm and a human might think this is a bad thing. But I'd hope either of the two would be able to pull definitions for phrases from common sources.

Anyway, if you're USAF, be cautious talking shop on Facebook.