#Eminence Technology

[eminence-technology]

How to Become a Full Stack Developer: A Complete Guide

With today’s fast pace in the digital world, the demand for full stack developers has gone through the roof. Full stack developers are those versatile professionals who can deal with both the front-end and back-end developments. They become very valuable to any tech team.  How to Become a Full Stack Developer This article is for beginners who wish to start a career in tech. It is also for…

[mehmetyildizmelbourne-blog]

Substack Mastery Book: Chapter 5

Editorial Excellence and Practical Tips for Self-Editing Newsletters for Cost Effectiveness and Reader Satisfaction Image designed by Dr Mehmet Yildiz at digitalmehmet as the artifacts of Substack Mastery Book Dear beta readers, thank you for your valuable feedback, which will refine this book and help me create a valuable information source for fellow writers. Now that you have learned the…

[supreme-leader-stoat]

With proper Space Age Cosmere just over the horizon, from what we've seen, Sanderson is very good at making the cultures he already had us fall in love with fucking infuriating from an outside perspective. Like damn, with Sixth of Dusk and The Sunlit Man, Scadrians are a bunch of fucking bitches, aren't they?

[ratnakarlavu]

Ratnakar Lavu - A Dynamic Corporate Strategist | Behance

Ratnakar Lavu, an eminent business executive, has been at the forefront of revolutionizing the intersection of technology and commerce.

[charliemack]

ok as promised, i watched conclave

wrote down my thoughts and impressions as I went, live-blog style except i was blogging at myself

posted here for those who might care to see them, but below a readmore as it got a bit long. and, em. emotional

please know, i don't need answers to the questions I've made notes of here I already googled them. Also be warned, I never learned to spell and I'm not about to start now

oh dip john lithgow is in this, that bodes well /s

(look up the fancy papal ring)

There's angels in the walls

those glasses are doing nothing for StanTucc, gotta turn down the sexy somehow i suppose

(look up vatican death face keenex)

ok yeah a dude from the terror directed this, it's got pomp frotting all up against bruising mundanity. wax seal interposed with squeaky gurney wheel. good stuff

the heartbeat sound of the gurney clicking back and forth in the back of the ambulance SOMEBODY ISN'T FULLY DEAD YET somebody's getting ready to haunt the narrativvvvve

i will never not be obsessed with ancient institutions having to adapt to modern technology. Updating the security so they can't eavesdrop via lasers against the glass? Nuns on a motorcoach? Cardinals with wheeled luggage? Pile of '00s desk phones on terra cotta tiles? Cardinal with a bright red phone case?? Spectacular (I accept this is an American affectation, we have comparatively few ancient things here and our institutions tend to update themselves very very quickly)

Eminence Tedesco can slap my impudent hands any time he likes

ok yeah a dude from the terror directed this because it's black, white, red, and gold where the terror was black, white, navy, and gold

Oop here we go, intrigue starting

I'm sorry the travertine floors are gorgeous and I want them

LOL nuns in a commercial kitchen. magnificent

Oh ho ho the lost heir emerges, the tropes are hungry

(look up in pectore)

Hello Mr Lost Heir i mean Surprise Cardinal Benitez sir you have beautiful hands

Oop he praised the nuns, he's going to do very well

Oh WOW 25 minutes in and we got our first racism (or at least the first one I picked up on) 😬

Bellini: "I don't want the papacy" mmmm sure Jan

Lawrence the code switcher, speaking italian, speaking latin, calling Tremblay "Joe" - gotta respect it

There are wings in those walls

The fucking .... what is that, a Nespresso? Wild

Goodness but the set design on the dormitory here. I've been in meat lockers that were more hospitable

Well hello close-up silhouette shot. Trying not to make a theme of it but it's very clear the guy who did this also did the terror

Ralph Fiennes' eyes are doing so much heavy lifting here they should get second billing in the credits

The repetition of the ornate costumes such that the finery gets lost and we're left with a background texture that is also living people. Not to belabor the point but yeah a dude from the terror directed this

"Let me speak for the heart for a moment" -> me and everyone else in that room: this guy would be a really good pope probably

I am really impressed that all these red capes and hats are the same red, modern technology is a miracle

Normally an ominous bolting of a door would make me nervous but these guys all seem like they get along really well so it's probably fine

Are they gonna burn the ballots YESSS tHEY BURNED THE BALLOTS this is spectacular

We hear the crowd, we don't see the crowd. I see what they're doing here

Well that was the most circuitous way to tell that story, mr aide person Ray, but full points for building the tension

I wonder if the little motor coaches that ferry them to and from the dormitory will be electric someday

The holy father's ... turtles

OH this is delicious. In the span of six lines of dialog Benitez has flipped the situation around from Lawrence asking him about his health to Lawrence making a confession to him. SPECTACULAR

OH NO Disappointed StanTucc face, anything but that

These vote tallies are gripping. I'm gripped.

Ohhh the color story here. Lawrence you do not belong in this room. This is a room for the nuns, the chairs are blue, the walls are blue, the light is blue, the curtains are blue. His red cape and cap scream violence in a way his tone cannot overcome (I know blue=Mary, that's not the point that's being made here)

Ayedemi what did you doooooo

Wings in the walls again. And now also eyes of judgement

Ah. That's what Ayedemi did.

"So I still have hope" -> wow.

Another magnificently efficient scene. Twenty lines of dialogue? And a man convincingly goes from bluster to weeping

The candidates at empty tables while the fifth vote tally is a delicious choice

Oh look it's Bad-News Ray, also known as Drabs-of-Expedition Ray. I love this guy I wanna be this guy

At this point I feel like we're seeing Lawrence as a man in an extremely stressful administrator's job, a job he's had for a very long time, juussst edging right up to the upper limit of what he can reasonably handle. Sure hope the pot doesn't continue to boil - or something happens to diminish his fortitude

Those're some really lovely gold bedlinens there, Benitez. I guess we can speculate as to who the housekeeping staff are pulling for

There are pointed spears and arrows in the walls

Even the login screen in the nun room is blue, spectacular

And now comes Lawrence into the Blue Nun Room but this time without his red cape, and when we press into the close-up shot we can't see his red cap either. Excellent camera angles happening here

What's in your emaillllls, Sister Agnes??

Oh. That's tidy

Lawrence without his red cap now, and we can't see what's in the walls. Only the red runner on the floor (just like in a children's hospital)

OH. OH OH OH GOSH. Literal seal, literally broken. That was a deeply visceral sound effect

A delightful scene humanizing a holy and unknowable (cuz dead) figure. Aspirin. Rubber bands. Breath mints. Dirty eyeglasses

Sister Agnes is gonna beat Lawrence up and down that hallway or so help me. The spear points in the walls are facing upward now, we are in vigilant watcher mode

There are ghostly dead roots in the walls

Lawrence is a spectacularly lonely man, I think. Most priests are, but I think he is lonelier than most. Probably cuz he can't pray right now

oo-woo what's this in the headboard

Bellini you old grouch. Lawrence is right, by the way, pessimism is the refuge of a coward

GET 'EM AGNES HELL YEAH. The holy photocopier of revenge, that's delightful

(look up mendacious)

Hahhhhh get 'em Agnes. Go on Tremblay, deny it now

WOW

There are swirls of emotion behind Bellini in the walls, and tidy columns and rows of ordered distress behind Lawrence. In the walls

Tedesco has absolutely gorgeous hair, sir, please, tell us your secrets

HOLY SHIT

Oof

WOW

oh

.... sorry I need a moment

And we're back.

A quick comment: even here, in this scene, we don't see the crowd. Only the actions of the crowd. We are well and truly sequestered.

Nuns on the move! That bodes well, I'm sure

The walls are pillars now

Humans as texture. Flowing around a water fountain. Lovely

Tremblay's glasses are broken. Very nice visual

OH gosh Benitez looks like he wants to throw up

And here's Exposition Ray. With 15 minutes of runtime left

Clinic for what, said no one ever

OH

I stand corrected

(I thought it was AIDS)

I need another moment

OK, had to go do the dishes and walk around a bit but that is ... ok. Two words, and they are everything. I want to write a dissertation on this moment because ... because ...

I'm really glad this movie got made.

And that it was made this point in time, in particular

In a slightly lighter opinion: I'm shocked this came as a spoiler, with all the posts I've seen online. In retrospect I think I might've seen a post or two about intersex but .... wow. Just, wow

He has really beautiful hands

From personal experience: Benitez is correct. To exist between the world's certainties, so to speak, is a very powerful way of being human

We hear the crowd. We don't see the crowd.

His Holy Father's Turtle ohhh be nice to the turtle please

I am fascinated by the smoke-making machine. Was that a custom job? Is that a standard piece of equipment I was previously unaware of?

We hear the crowd. We don't see the crowd.

The walls are watching, and they seem unkind

But the birds are singing, and the nuns are happy. So maybe things will be ok?

[ameliafuckinjones]

Reading this article about how the James Bond films/books embody the 5 stages of grief that British society/a generation (especially the author who lived during the twilight years of the empire) went through after the loss of the empire and how Bond is supposed to represent the British pov and its new role on the world stage as America assumes the role of superpower and engages in a cold war with Russia. It talks about the nostalgia and anger and resentment that the author channeled through his writing at each stage the empire was taken apart (From Indian independence to the Suez Canal crisis). The article suggests that the books/films engage in the fantasy of Britian (or British agents) still being capable and perhaps a bit better than their American counterparts despite America's technological and economic dominance. Also, the constant fantasy of being the only one who can save America and the world. I kind of like it because in a way it fits my own personal head canons about how England came to view his relationship with America, paired with the constant need to give into fantasy/delusions and illusions at odds with reality which kind of goes with his astrology (Neptune in his first house):

I love entertaining the thought that England doesn't start being truly angry with America until AFTER his empire falls and America replaces him. Before that, he viewed America how one might view an aggressive chihuahua: a bit annoying and perplexing, but easy to ignore or placate. That is no longer the case post-WWII, and it pisses him off to no end. He compensates by trying to take a more dominant role in their relationship, though on the social/personal level. He did become a bit more dominant/aggressive on a geopolitical level during the Falklands War, when America under Reagan tried to caution the UK from going to war over the Falklands and England basically said "fuvk OFF" and then America ended up siding with him ANYWAY and he hadn't felt that alive in YEARS.

In my mind, modern England as a character is a bitter old man who still holds in his heart an insatiable lust for a "larger than life" existence with no outlet for that lust in the modern world (where he is no longer the Empire) and it is driving him insane. Comparatively (and to a go a bit off tangent) America is being driven insane by anxieties over his pre-eminence as the worlds first superpower -a role he believes he wasn't ready for though he'll never give England or anyone else the satisfaction of knowing that- and his own mortality due to being so young and in his mind in much more danger of seizing to exist in comparison to older nations (though in truth he shouldn't worry so much, after all France is still around and he literally went through a death and rebirth during his Revolution. It takes a lot to completely disappear a nation).

[racsow]

Here lies my full thoughts on the Electric State movie adaptation released earlier this month. I knew it was going to be bad, but this is almost impressively so.

Mild spoilers for both the book and the movie, though the book isn't overly plot reliant and the movie is eminently predictable within five minutes of watching

Let me begin by saying the fucking up of the film's source material is a feat not easily accomplished. Simon Stålenhag is a brilliant artist and writer. His illustrated novels are at once sinister and sentimental. They deal with childhood wonder and the broken promises of the real world; with humanity as society and individual. They are about love and loss and the blurring of those lines in retrospect. All this is depicted in some of the most gorgeous, haunting art I have ever seen. He has written five books. I recommend them all.

The Electric State book is his third work, and to me, his most compelling. That stands for both the art and the actual prose. While Stålenhag's visual pieces are undoubtedly what he is most known for, I've found myself enjoying his written word more and more, even in translated English. The book speaks to abandonment, to the disenfranchised, to the consequences of unchecked consumerism and mindless entertainment.

Speak of the devil...

It would almost be funny (if it weren’t so depressing) that Netflix took such a story and ground it into the Marvel-blockbuster mold, eviscerated any remaining shred of ethos or emotion, and drowned it in Hollywood prestige. Electric State, the movie, is a 320 million dollar shit taken directly on its source material, and I mean that in multiple ways.

PLOT

The first and most egregious transgression was the butchery of the story. The two iterations are related only in the most basic terms; Michelle, a young orphan, goes on a journey to find her long lost brother. Stålenhag's themes of childhood disillusionment, the cataclysmic effects of rampant consumerism, of a society that turns to mindless stimulation instead of dealing with their problems, and the world that attitude creates? Gone.

I struggle to comprehend the boneheadedness of whoever rewrote the plot for the movie. I understand that if you’re trying to make a movie as widely comprehensible as possible, the mysterious worldbuilding of Stalenhag is not compatible (perhaps something we should have thought of before, hmm?). He explains very little about the state of the world, except for how it affects our characters.

But there is concrete worldbuilding if you can infer it. I can only conclude that the writers simply didn’t. Instead, they gutted the entire plot in favor of a bland Robot Revolution Blade Runner schtick that has been done to death and back. And don't even ask if they did a compelling twist on it... because you know they didn't.

The plot details are so catastrophically assbackwards that my gorge becomes bouyant thinking about them. They are also so plentiful I would never finish this post. Instead, I am going over the central aspects of Stålenhag's work that Netflix fucked over.

WHITEWASHING THE MILITARY

In the film, Michelle is an orphan because her family died in a car accident. This is actively sanitizing her origin in the books, removing not only complexity but also Stålenhag’s criticism of the military industrial complex. In the book, Michelle's mother was in the US Air Force, and served as a neurocaster pilot during a global war where the technology was first used. As a side effect of the experimental tech, she (and hundreds of other pilots) developed an addiction to a chemical called neurine. The army fired her without compensation or help for the affliction they gave her, and she eventually died of an overdose, leaving Michelle and her brother orphans. They stayed with their grandfather until he, too, died of chemical exposure from his job assembling war drones, at which point the siblings were forcibly split up by CPS, and Michelle was sent far away to be fostered, while her brother was kidnapped and experimented on by the government. I struggle to conceive of what the purpose of removing this backstory could possibly be, apart from relieving the story of its commentary in order to be more digestible. Because that's what art should aspire to be, after all.

WHITEWASHING CONSUMERISM

The dystopia we see in Stålenhag’s book is not a typical nuclear wasteland. It is generally still as functional as it ever was. It is simply that consumerism has progressed faster than in our world. People have checked out with neural headsets that drown their brain in formless pleasure while the world slowly decays around them. Cities are silent. Gargantuan corporate machines lie in ruins. There is no “Robot Revolution,” no “Electric State” as they claimed in the movie. The war was one fought by world powers that left their countries devastated, and capitalism swallowed up the remains.

The neurocaster headsets were kept in the film, but became a cheap “phone bad” metaphor, again scrapping a far more interesting concept. In the book, it becomes something else; something far stranger and more silent. The eeriness of the apocalypse Michelle travels through is that it’s full of people. They’re just not doing anything. Humankind has checked out, sending their minds to be entertained in gigantic server farms in the Rockies. And slowly, a hivemind emerges from this neural coitus occurring on a planetary scale; a kind of ur-sapience that is entirely beyond human minds...yet fundamentally human. Hordes of people move silently through the dark, their headsets connected to strange new machine gods in the night. The people are notably smiling, at peace. Perhaps it’s better this way is a thought that comes to mind, after going with Michelle through the cruelty of the world before.

WHITEWASHING QUEER RELATIONSHIPS

One of the rare few things I see people enjoying about this movie is the implied relationship between Chris Pratt and his male robot companion. And I am all for more representation! If representation was the goal, however, what's baffling is that they entirely removed a far more integral queer relationship: that being of the protagonist, Michelle!

In the book, a large portion of Michelle's reflections goes to her first romantic partner: another girl named Amanda met in foster care. Amanda and Michelle's connection is one of the few moments Michelle remembers feeling safe and happy after her family was torn away from her. She has a few months where life seems tolerable. They are each other's refuge against the world. And then Amanda breaks up with her, after it is implied she was forced to undergo conversion therapy by her father, an abusive priest. This is the moment that made Michelle who she is in the present day, a huge turning point for her character, and it's just... erased in the film. Interesting that they removed a clear, central, complex queer relationship to replace it with a barely mentioned implication between secondary characters. This is a deliberate and fucking cowardly change. They straightwashed the protagonist, removing core events and character aspects so that bigots in the audience won't be challenged.

DEFENSE & FINAL THOUGHTS

There is sparing defense of this movie; most equate to “it’s not great, but it’s just fun! Can’t a movie just be fun?” And I say, absolutely. Simple fun is not a sin. Entertainment is not a sin. If this were the latest Marvel movie, I would not be writing this.

I am pissed because Netflix specifically adapted a work whose entire message is the dangers of mindless entertainment; of formless pleasure, and absolutely especially mindless entertainment peddled by powerful corporations!! It is about the lethal flaws and base cruelties of humanity; blind greed and misery; and fighting for love in the face of it all. The movie ignores all of that; assassinates the characters and completely bastardizes the story and themes. It at best utterly stupid, and at worst malicious.

I hold no delusion that the Russo brothers actually cared about being true to the vision of the artist. They fundamentally did not understand the book, and admitted as much themselves! This is a direct quote: "We just looked at the images, and the story that he unfolds in the graphic novel. It is very opaque. It’s kind of hard to understand it. You get it in glimpses." Dear lord, its almost as if... as if... It's being subtle with its storytelling! God almighty, make it stop! The board is going into conniptions!

There’s also the fact they used AI for voice acting work, or that they've stated that generative AI is "inevitable" in creative industries, or that they neglected to even mention Stålenhag in trailers until public backlash. Simply put, Netflix and the Russo brothers don't give a shit about respecting, elevating or adapting art. They don't give a shit about creating something that makes the heart resonate or breaks the brain out of its mold. They don't care about voyaging into the burning core of the soul, about evoking things too difficult or powerful to describe outright. They aren’t interested in saying anything at all.

What is even the point of all this? There's a simple answer. It’s in the promotional articles surrounding the release of the film (the ones before it came out). They vary, but there’s one fact you cannot avoid:

The Electric State is one of the most expensive movies ever made. It is the most expensive Netflix movie ever made. That is what headlines latch onto, because there is nothing else this movie can flaunt to justify its existence. Three hundred and twenty million goddamn dollars.

There is a world where money equals passion. A world where it equals skill, pathos, and most of all, where it equals good art. It is a world inhabited solely by streaming service CEOs and Disney execs, and is therefore to be avoided like an outhouse with a wasp hive down the hole.

The Electric State is a wonderful book. It is resonant, it is beautiful, it is dreadful and melancholic. It speaks to the dark, heavy seabed of the soul. It drips with fog and fear, whispers about monsters of our own making and sends you spiralling into the dark with only the dimming ember of love to tell you where or what you are. It is a haunting dirge for humanity.

The Electric State is a repugnant movie. The blind idiot forces of greed which Stålenhag decried have stripped his story bare, ran it through algorithmic filters and focus testing until what is left is a pallid mass-market blockbuster wearing the flayed skin of an artist's passionate work. It is notable only in that it is symbolic of the "art industry," (a phrase I find near antithetical), one where stories are marketed on their prestige, their price tag, where content is dully manufactured according to standard, packaged and shipped out to be half-watched at two times speed. Because this is not about art, about stories, about people. For them, it never was.

[victorluvsalice]

Happy Birthday Newt!

@dont-offend-the-bees I know you said "no pressure," but I wanted to mark the occasion with at least a short fic -- and you telling me your potential plans for the day ended up giving me an idea for a quick little thing that also functions as a pun delivery system. :p Enjoy!

--

“Think we could pilot a Jaeger together, mate?”

“What? Of course we could! I don’t know if you’ve noticed, Charles, but by the criteria given by the film, we should be eminently drift-compatible! Granted, given when we died, I’m sure there would be a bit of a learning curve when it came to mastering the technology–”

“Like a few smashed-up buildings?”

“Perhaps – but we’d get the hang of it fairly quickly, I’m sure.”

“Yeah – we’d be aces at the whole ‘beating up giant horrible sea monsters’ thing. Can’t be any harder than dealing with some of of the ghosts we’ve run into.”

“Mmm – I’d imagine it would actually be easier than a few of our more – difficult cases. The ones you couldn’t solve with judicious application of your cricket bat.”

“Yeah, I know. Shame we can’t get one of these things for the agency, eh?”

“I don’t think our budget allows for a multi-story mechanical war machine powered by our combined minds, I’m afraid.”

“You sure? I’ve already got the perfect name for it.”

“...let’s hear it.”

“Sherlocked-And-Loaded.”

“Charles.”

“Good, right?”

“...yes.”

[darkmaga-returns]

The World Council for Health has issued a warning after renowned experts concluded that billions of people who received Covid mRNA “vaccines” are now facing a “ticking time bomb” of looming deaths, disease, and injuries.

While global health bureaucrats and pharmaceutical giants continue pushing Covid mRNA shots, new revelations about the chemical delivery system used in these injections are raising serious red flags.

At the center of the controversy: lipid nanoparticles (LNPs).

LNPs are microscopic synthetic fat particles used to deliver mRNA into human cells.

Originally sold as cutting-edge “safe and effective” technology, these LNPs are now under scrutiny for potential long-term toxicity, metabolic disruption, and triggering of autoimmune or neurodegenerative conditions.

Despite these concerns, after billions were injected with unvetted nano-tech, Pfizer, Moderna, and government regulators are stonewalling even basic safety questions.

One basic question that remains unanswered: How many LNPs are in a single Covid “vaccine” dose?

When eminent German researcher Maria Gutschi tried to find out, she got a disturbing response.

Gutschi hit mRNA “vaccine” maker Moderna with a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request.

[unwelcome-ozian]

Weaponizing violence. With alarming regularity, the nation continues to be subjected to spates of violence that terrorizes the public, destabilizes the country’s ecosystem, and gives the government greater justifications to crack down, lock down, and institute even more authoritarian policies for the so-called sake of national security without many objections from the citizenry.

Weaponizing surveillance, pre-crime and pre-thought campaigns. Surveillance, digital stalking and the data mining of the American people add up to a society in which there’s little room for indiscretions, imperfections, or acts of independence. When the government sees all and knows all and has an abundance of laws to render even the most seemingly upstanding citizen a criminal and lawbreaker, then the old adage that you’ve got nothing to worry about if you’ve got nothing to hide no longer applies. Add pre-crime programs into the mix with government agencies and corporations working in tandem to determine who is a potential danger and spin a sticky spider-web of threat assessments, behavioral sensing warnings, flagged “words,” and “suspicious” activity reports using automated eyes and ears, social media, behavior sensing software, and citizen spies, and you having the makings for a perfect dystopian nightmare. The government’s war on crime has now veered into the realm of social media and technological entrapment, with government agents adopting fake social media identities and AI-created profile pictures in order to surveil, target and capture potential suspects.

Weaponizing digital currencies, social media scores and censorship. Tech giants, working with the government, have been meting out their own version of social justice by way of digital tyranny and corporate censorship, muzzling whomever they want, whenever they want, on whatever pretext they want in the absence of any real due process, review or appeal. Unfortunately, digital censorship is just the beginning. Digital currencies (which can be used as “a tool for government surveillance of citizens and control over their financial transactions”), combined with social media scores and surveillance capitalism create a litmus test to determine who is worthy enough to be part of society and punish individuals for moral lapses and social transgressions (and reward them for adhering to government-sanctioned behavior). In China, millions of individuals and businesses, blacklisted as “unworthy” based on social media credit scores that grade them based on whether they are “good” citizens, have been banned from accessing financial markets, buying real estate or travelling by air or train.

Weaponizing compliance. Even the most well-intentioned government law or program can be—and has been—perverted, corrupted and used to advance illegitimate purposes once profit and power are added to the equation. The war on terror, the war on drugs, the war on COVID-19, the war on illegal immigration, asset forfeiture schemes, road safety schemes, school safety schemes, eminent domain: all of these programs started out as legitimate responses to pressing concerns and have since become weapons of compliance and control in the police state’s hands.

Weaponizing entertainment. For the past century, the Department of Defense’s Entertainment Media Office has provided Hollywood with equipment, personnel and technical expertise at taxpayer expense. In exchange, the military industrial complex has gotten a starring role in such blockbusters as Top Gun and its rebooted sequel Top Gun: Maverick, which translates to free advertising for the war hawks, recruitment of foot soldiers for the military empire, patriotic fervor by the taxpayers who have to foot the bill for the nation’s endless wars, and Hollywood visionaries working to churn out dystopian thrillers that make the war machine appear relevant, heroic and necessary. As Elmer Davis, a CBS broadcaster who was appointed the head of the Office of War Information, observed, “The easiest way to inject a propaganda idea into most people’s minds is to let it go through the medium of an entertainment picture when they do not realize that they are being propagandized.”

Weaponizing behavioral science and nudging. Apart from the overt dangers posed by a government that feels justified and empowered to spy on its people and use its ever-expanding arsenal of weapons and technology to monitor and control them, there’s also the covert dangers associated with a government empowered to use these same technologies to influence behaviors en masse and control the populace. In fact, it was President Obama who issued an executive order directing federal agencies to use “behavioral science” methods to minimize bureaucracy and influence the way people respond to government programs. It’s a short hop, skip and a jump from a behavioral program that tries to influence how people respond to paperwork to a government program that tries to shape the public’s views about other, more consequential matters. Thus, increasingly, governments around the world—including in the United States—are relying on “nudge units” to steer citizens in the direction the powers-that-be want them to go, while preserving the appearance of free will.

Weaponizing desensitization campaigns aimed at lulling us into a false sense of security. The events of recent years—the invasive surveillance, the extremism reports, the civil unrest, the protests, the shootings, the bombings, the military exercises and active shooter drills, the lockdowns, the color-coded alerts and threat assessments, the fusion centers, the transformation of local police into extensions of the military, the distribution of military equipment and weapons to local police forces, the government databases containing the names of dissidents and potential troublemakers—have conspired to acclimate the populace to accept a police state willingly, even gratefully.

Weaponizing fear and paranoia. The language of fear is spoken effectively by politicians on both sides of the aisle, shouted by media pundits from their cable TV pulpits, marketed by corporations, and codified into bureaucratic laws that do little to make our lives safer or more secure. Fear, as history shows, is the method most often used by politicians to increase the power of government and control a populace, dividing the people into factions, and persuading them to see each other as the enemy. This Machiavellian scheme has so ensnared the nation that few Americans even realize they are being manipulated into adopting an “us” against “them” mindset. Instead, fueled with fear and loathing for phantom opponents, they agree to pour millions of dollars and resources into political elections, militarized police, spy technology and endless wars, hoping for a guarantee of safety that never comes. All the while, those in power—bought and paid for by lobbyists and corporations—move their costly agendas forward, and “we the suckers” get saddled with the tax bills and subjected to pat downs, police raids and round-the-clock surveillance.

Weaponizing genetics. Not only does fear grease the wheels of the transition to fascism by cultivating fearful, controlled, pacified, cowed citizens, but it also embeds itself in our very DNA so that we pass on our fear and compliance to our offspring. It’s called epigenetic inheritance, the transmission through DNA of traumatic experiences. For example, neuroscientists observed that fear can travel through generations of mice DNA. As The Washington Post reports, “Studies on humans suggest that children and grandchildren may have felt the epigenetic impact of such traumatic events such as famine, the Holocaust and the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.”

Weaponizing the future. With greater frequency, the government has been issuing warnings about the dire need to prepare for the dystopian future that awaits us. For instance, the Pentagon training video, “Megacities: Urban Future, the Emerging Complexity,” predicts that by 2030 (coincidentally, the same year that society begins to achieve singularity with the metaverse) the military would be called on to use armed forces to solve future domestic political and social problems. What they’re really talking about is martial law, packaged as a well-meaning and overriding concern for the nation’s security. The chilling five-minute training video paints an ominous picture of the future bedeviled by “criminal networks,” “substandard infrastructure,” “religious and ethnic tensions,” “impoverishment, slums,” “open landfills, over-burdened sewers,” a “growing mass of unemployed,” and an urban landscape in which the prosperous economic elite must be protected from the impoverishment of the have nots. “We the people” are the have-nots.

The end goal of these mind control campaigns��packaged in the guise of the greater good—is to see how far the American people will allow the government to go in re-shaping the country in the image of a totalitarian police state.

[eminence-technology]

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[neutrinobunny]

One Thing About Earth That Isn’t Completely Terrible--Part 1

The boy was cold, and hungry, and tired.

The boy was hurt, and sick, and scared.

A Dark Future loomed uncertain.

A Bright Past Lay behind a Wall of Loss.

The boy fell into a fitful sleep as the craft flew across the stars to his new home.

*****

In a Nest of Thoughts

Hopes, Fears, and Desire

A Small Creature Huddled

Made of Dreams and Fire

With Eyes of Blue Flame

He Stared Into Space

And Tried to Remember

His Mother’s Face

-------

In an unassuming building on Chancery Lane, in a Solicitor’s office remarkable only for its very unremarkableness—at least on the surface—sat a man with a problem.

Not an issue in and of itself.  Problems were the Solicitor’s bread and butter.  Solving problems was his profession; making sure that the will of his superiors was executed in a manner just so.  It had been so during the Imperium, serving at the whims of this Clan or that as the Trion Queen’s favor shifted, and it was his profession now, under the strictures of the Revolutionary Regime.  The people in charge might change, but the machinery of the Trion Empire never did.

Generally, though, he was given a LOT more to work with.

On a screen that could be cleverly concealed within his desk, using technology that wouldn’t be found on Earth for decades, was displayed a series of muddled reports and blurry pictures.  The dossier for an Exiled Imperial Clansman, from one of the more highly placed noble houses…

‘Vislor Turlough’  

…and it contained a mere fraction of the information and instructions he would have normally received for even a minor disgraced functionary.  It was slipshod.  A rush job. And was forcing HIM to do a rush job.  Because he had received said dossier as an emergency communique at open of business that very morning, and the Imperial Clansman in question was due to be dropped on his doorstep within the hour.

The lights in his office flickered briefly, and he grimaced.  When he’d set up in this building, extensive modifications had been made, due to the…unusual…requirements of his equipment.  But due to some quirk of the wiring, occasionally it played merry hell with the lights.

In the midst of perusing the dossier for scraps of something to work with, the Solicitor’s morning had been spent calling in favors, scrambling to direct funds, berating couriers, and cobbling together the necessary paperwork to set up the slimmest of cover stories. No time for anything elaborate, he would have to use the boy’s actual name. One small stroke of luck, ‘Turlough’ actually transliterated quite well from the original Trion, to an uncommon, but not unknown, Earth name. ‘Vislor’ less so, but it couldn’t be helped. And since he planned to place the boy in a Public School, where it was common to be addressed by family name…a second stroke of luck, since he’d recently made connections with an eminently suitable public school. Direct enrollment would delay the need for housing or minders, one less thing to worry about right now, though something would eventually have to done about holidays and half-terms.  The term had already started, but the administration of Brendon School had proved quite amenable in the case of his last charge…

The Solicitor smiled sourly.  It was unfortunate that Vislor Turlough was being sent to him now and not six months ago.  The last identity he’d created would have been perfect. ‘Charlie Gibbs.’  Water-tight documentation, a foster family of embedded Trion Agents, weeks of language immersion and cultural orientation. All wasted on a relative nobody. The son of someone who had angered someone, even though the family had supported ‘the right side’. 

That was definitely not the case for his new charge:

The Father had been exiled to an abandoned colony world, accompanied by a younger son.  Which was to be expected.  The oddity was that the family hadn’t either been kept together, or more likely, that the elder son hadn’t been held as a ‘guest’ of the Revolutionary Regime, a hostage for good behavior.  Especially since the Mother, who had been killed during the early stages of the fighting, was a grandniece of the disposed Queen.  

The Solicitor frowned. It didn’t make sense. This inconvenient boy was not only aligned with the Old Regime as a matter of politics or policy, but under the right circumstances, might be heir to the throne! Reason enough for the Regime to put him out of the way, if not have him killed outright, but then the same could be said for the younger son as well.  So why was Vislor Turlough specifically being tucked away on a backwards planet like Earth?

The soft click of the intercom brought him out of his musings. “Sir, your appointment is here.”

The Solicitor deactivated the screen, and collected the results of the morning’s efforts into a cardboard folder.  It wasn’t everything, but it would have to do. “Thank you, Miss Carillon. Send him in.  And I think that tea will be in order in…30 minutes?”

“Of course, Sir.”

The Solicitor pulled out a legal pad and made a show of jotting down notes.  An elementary power play, but one that worked.  Make the other party feel as though they were interrupting something.  Put them on the back foot.    

The door swung open, and the boy stepped inside. 

“Close the door behind you and sit down, please.”  He pointedly did not look up, continuing to scribble.  The sound of the latch would be his cue to look up.

Silence.

The Solicitor waited, for what seemed like an agonizingly long time, but was probably less than a minute. Playing games.  He didn’t want to give the boy the satisfaction, but he didn’t want to waste time either.  Stern was the way to play it.

“Young man,” he raised his head and started to stand. “I asked—”

The lights flickered, and the Solicitor froze, mouth agape.

<Why are you looking at me like that?> **Overtone-Confusion. Undertone-what is wrong with me**

…and then the lights steadied and the spell was broken.  But that brief moment was enough for the Solicitor to understand what the boy was, and why he had been so neatly tucked away.

<Why do you all keep staring at me?> **Overtone-Fear. Undertone-something about the light isn't right**

And that the boy had no idea.

Someone was playing a high-stakes game, and he was staring at the Ace in the hole.

[scotianostra]

The Bell Rock Lighthouse, off the coast of Angus, was first lit on the 1st of February 1811.

Over 200 years after it was first built, the Bell Rock Lighthouse still stands - proudly flashing its warning light. Eleven miles out to sea off the east coast of Scotland, it is a remarkable sight - a white stone tower over 30m (100ft) high, rising seemingly without support out of the North Sea.

In fact, it is precariously poised on a treacherous sandstone reef, which, except at low tides, lies submerged just beneath the waves.

The treacherous reef on which it stands is in the North Sea, between the Firths of Forth and Tay, some 12 miles south of Arbroath and 14 miles south east of St Andrews. The red sandstone outcrop is 435m long and the lighthouse is founded on the main section, 130m long and 70m wide, and only 1.2m above the surface at low water spring tide.

The reef was known originally as Inchcape Rock or Cape Rock. According to tradition, in the 14th century the Abbot of Aberbrothok (Arbroath) placed a floating bell on it to warn mariners, hence its present name. Legend has it that sometime later a Dutch pirate removed the bell but he was later shipwrecked and perished on the same reef. The rocks were dangerous to ships sailing along the east coast of Scotland and by the end of the 18th century the need for a lighthouse was clear.

A severe storm in December 1799, in which about 70 vessels were wrecked, prompted Stevenson to propose a beacon-style lighthouse on six cast iron pillars.

Stevenson submitted a scale model of his idea to the Northern Lighthouse Board in summer 1800 — accurate physical modelling was to become something he often employed subsequently on important projects.

Stevenson drew the inspiration for his lighthouse design from the Eddystone Lighthouse, off the coast of Cornwall.

Built 50 years earlier by John Smeaton, this was a milestone in lighthouse design. Shaped with the now classic wide base, tapering to a narrow tower (Smeaton had modelled it on an oak tree he had witnessed defying a storm), it was the only off-shore structure that had until then managed to survive for any length of time against the constant battering of the seas.

Stevenson elaborated on this design. His lighthouse would have to be higher, over 30m (100ft), if it was to survive the cruel waves of the North Sea. He also incorporated more efficient reflectors, using the latest oil lighting technology, which would make his beacon the brightest yet seen.

But the Northern Lighthouse Board rejected the plan outright; in their eyes Stevenson was attempting the impossible, and besides, it was going to cost the huge sum of £42,685 and 8 shillings.

The rock had to claim another victim before the Board revisited Stevenson's plans. In 1804 the huge 64-gun HMS York was ripped apart on the rock, with the loss of all 491 crew. The NLB could delay no longer. Britain's most eminent engineer, John Rennie, was invited to give his advice.

Rennie had never actually built a lighthouse, but the Board was so impressed by his record that he was given the job of chief engineer. Robert Stevenson was to work as his resident engineer.

History does not record Stevenson's reaction to the news, but it must have come as a bitter blow to this ambitious young man. What history does record is that the structure on Bell Rock came to be known not as Rennie's but as Stevenson's Lighthouse.

Work started in 1807 and what followed was a four-year epic, with work severely restricted by tides that on occasion submerged the rock’s surface to twelve feet. The offshore activity only proceed during the summer months, and even then only with difficulty. Poor weather in the summer of 1808 allowed only 80 hours of work were completed.

To avoid time lost in shuttling workers to and fro Stevenson built a temporary wooden “Beacon House” on the rock and this served as both a base of operations and living quarters for fifteen men. As this structure (see illustrations) was also exposed to storms during the construction period, residence on it must have in itself have been a nightmare. During the winter months Stevenson kept his crews busy ashore, dressing the individual granite blocks needed for the tower. The total number required was some 2500 and all were drawn to the dockside by one of the unsung heroes of the project, a horse called Bassey.

The lighthouse came into service in 1810 and was to fulfil its purpose very effectively. Between then and 1914 only a single ship was lost on the rock, a steamer called the Rosecraig that ran aground during a fog in 1908, fortunately without loss of life.

The light has now operated for 212 years and has undergone many significant and ingenious upgrades and changes, some of them even being undertaken by non-Stevenson engineers. It was a manned light for 177 years, the lives of those keepers on their temporary Alcatraz being a source of equal fascination

The lighthouse was manned until 1988, when the station turned automatic and the last men were withdrawn.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Dinkclump Linkdump

I'm on tour with my new novel The Bezzle! Catch me TONIGHT in LA (Saturday night, with Adam Conover), Seattle (Monday, with Neal Stephenson), then Portland, Phoenix and more!

Some Saturday mornings, I look at the week's blogging and realize I have a lot more links saved up than I managed to write about this week, and then I do a linkdump. There've been 14 of these, and this is number 15:

https://pluralistic.net/tag/linkdump/

Attentive readers will note that this isn't Saturday. You're right. But I'm on a book tour and every day is shatterday, because damn, it's grueling and I'm not the spry manchild who took Little Brother on the road in 2008 – I'm a 52 year old with two artificial hips. Hence: an out-of-cycle linkdump. Come see me on tour and marvel at my verticality!

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/16/narrative-capitalism/#bezzle-tour

Best thing I read this week, hands down, was Ryan Broderick's Garbage Day piece, "AI search is a doomsday cult":

https://www.garbageday.email/p/ai-search-doomsday-cult

Broderick makes so many excellent points in this piece. First among them: AI search sucks, but that's OK, because no one is asking for AI search. This only got more true later in the week when everyone's favorite spicy autocomplete accidentally loaded the James Joyce module:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/02/chatgpt-alarms-users-by-spitting-out-shakespearean-nonsense-and-rambling/

(As Matt Webb noted, Chatbots have slid rapidly from Star Trek (computers give you useful information in a timely fashion) to Douglas Adams (computers spout hostile, impenetrable nonsense at you):

https://interconnected.org/home/2024/02/21/adams

But beyond the unsuitability of AI for search results and beyond the public's yawning indifference to AI-infused search, Broderick makes a more important point: AI search is about summarizing web results so you don't have to click links and read the pages yourself.

If that's the future of the web, who the fuck is going to write those pages that the summarizer summarizes? What is the incentive, the business-model, the rational explanation for predicting a world in which millions of us go on writing web-pages, when the gatekeepers to the web have promised to rig the game so that no one will ever visit those pages, or read what we've written there, or even know it was us who wrote the underlying material the summarizer just summarized?

If we stop writing the web, AIs will have to summarize each other, forming an inhuman centipede of botshit-ingestion. This is bad news, because there's pretty solid mathematical evidence that training a bot on botshit makes it absolutely useless. Or, as the authors of the paper – including the eminent cryptographer Ross Anderson – put it, "using model-generated content in training causes irreversible defects":

https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.17493

This is the mathematical evidence for Jathan Sadowski's "Hapsburg AI," or, as the mathematicians call it, "The Curse of Recursion" (new band-name just dropped).

But if you really have your heart set on living in a ruined dystopia dominated by hostile artificial life-forms, have no fear. As Hamilton Nolan writes in "Radical Capital," a rogues gallery of worker-maiming corporations have asked a court to rule that the NLRB can't punish them for violating labor law:

https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/radical-capital

Trader Joe’s, Amazon, Starbucks and SpaceX have all made this argument to various courts. If they prevail, then there will be no one in charge of enforcing federal labor law. Yes, this will let these companies go on ruining their workers' lives, but more importantly, it will give carte blanche to every other employer in the land. At one end of this process is a boss who doesn't want to recognize a union – and at the other end are farmers dying of heat-stroke.

The right wing coalition that has put this demand before the court has all sorts of demands, from forced birth to (I kid you not), the end of recreational sex:

https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2024/02/getting-rid-of-birth-control-is-a-key-gop-agenda-item-for-the-second-trump-term

That coalition is backed by ultra-rich monopolists who want wreck the nation that their rank-and-file useful idiots want to wreck your body. These are the monopoly cheerleaders who gave us the abomination that is the Pharmacy Benefit Manager – a useless intermediary that gets to screw patients and pharmacists – and then let PBMs consolidate and merge with pharmacy monopolists.

One such inbred colossus is Change Healthcare, a giant PBM that is, in turn, a mere tendril of United Healthcare, which merged the company with Optum. The resulting system – held together with spit and wishful thinking – has access to the health records of a third of Americans and processes 15 billion prescriptions per day.

Or rather, it did process that amount – until the all-your-eggs-in-one-badly-maintained basket strategy failed on Wednesday, and Change's systems went down due to an unspecified "cybersecurity incident." In the short term, this meant that tens of millions of Americans who tried to refill their prescriptions were told to either pay cash or come back later (if you don't die first). That was the first shoe dropping. The second shoe is the medical records of a third of the country.

Don't worry, I'm sure those records are fine. After all, nothing says security like "merging several disparate legacy IT systems together while simultaneously laying off half your IT staff as surplus to requirements and an impediment to extracting a special dividend for the private equity owners who are, of course, widely recognized as the world's greatest information security practitioners."

Look, not everything is terrible. Some computers are actually getting better. Framework's user-serviceable, super-rugged, easy-to-repair, powerful laptops are the most exciting computers I've ever owned – or broken:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/13/graceful-failure/#frame

Now you can get one for $500!

https://frame.work/blog/first-framework-laptop-16-shipments-and-a-499-framework

And the next generation is turning our surprisingly well, despite all our worst efforts. My kid – now 16! – and I just launched our latest joint project, "The Sushi Chronicles," a small website recording our idiosyncratic scores for nearly every sushi restaurant in Burbank, Glendale, Studio City and North Hollywood:

https://sushichronicles.org/

This is the record of two years' worth of Daughter-Daddy sushi nights that started as a way to get my picky eater to try new things and has turned into the highlight of my week. If you're in the area and looking for a nice piece of fish, give it a spin (also, we belatedly realized that we've never reviewed our favorite place, Kuru Kuru in the CVS Plaza on North Hollywood Way – we'll be rectifying that soon).

And yes, we have a lavishly corrupt Supreme Court, but at least now everyone knows it. Glenn Haumann's even set up a Gofundme to raise money to bribe Clarence Thomas (now deleted, alas):

https://www.gofundme.com/f/pzhj4q-the-clarence-thomas-signing-bonus-fund-give-now

The funds are intended as a "signing bonus" in the event that Thomas takes up John Oliver on his offer of a $2.4m luxury RV and $1m/year for life if he'll resign from the court:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GE-VJrdHMug

This is truly one of Oliver's greatest bits, showcasing his mastery over the increasingly vital art of turning abstruse technical issues into entertainment that negates the performative complexity used by today's greatest villains to hide their misdeeds behind a Shield of Boringness (h/t Dana Clare).

The Bezzle is my contribution to turning abstruse scams into a high-impact technothriller that pierces that Shield of Boringness. The key to this is to master exposition, ignoring the (vastly overrated) rule that one must "show, not tell." Good exposition is hard to do, but when it works, it's amazing (as anyone who's read Neal Stephenson's 1,600-word explanation of how to eat Cap'n Crunch cereal in Cryptonomicon can attest). I wrote about this for Mary Robinette Kowal's "My Favorite Bit" this week:

https://maryrobinettekowal.com/journal/my-favorite-bit/my-favorite-bit-cory-doctorow-talks-about-the-bezzle/

Of course, an undisputed master of this form is Adam Conover, whose Adam Ruins Everything show helped invent it. Adam is joining me on stage in LA tomorrow night at Vroman's at 5:30PM, to host me in a book-tour event for my novel The Bezzle:

https://www.vromansbookstore.com/Cory-Doctorow-discusses-The-Bezzle

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/23/gazeteer/#out-of-cycle

Image: Peter Craven (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Aggregate_output_%287637833962%29.jpg

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en

[andmaybegayer]

There's a really weird transition point where sound becomes wind and in the middle there you get infrasound. You might try and define sound as "movements in the air in the range of frequencies your ears can hear" but pretty objectively there are these very low ranges that register in other parts of your body that we still internalise as sound. I like the rotatory subwoofer as an object that opens your mind to this, it's such a mechanical way of producing sound, the idea of "vibrations" barely enters into it at all. You could totally push a DC audio signal to a rotary subwoofer and it's basically the only kind of driver that could faithfully reproduce it.