the-firebrand

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Rice terraces at sunset.

Nagasaki, Japan.

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a beast from the west by Sangyeob Park

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if youre feeling suicidal that just means there are zero downsides to declaring yourself king and waging a campaign of conquest against the world you cannot bear to live in

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I rewatched it a little while ago and I was surprised that Idris Elba didn't jettison the Australian guy when they were fighting the two monsters by the rift. I distinctly remember that happening when I watched the movie years ago - one of the monsters had them dead to rights, Idris Elba sent the Australian up and took control on his own. The Australian guy surfaced and was all distraught and then his dad talked him down over the comms.

I remembered exactly how the scene played out but it didn't happen, so I guess I got Mandela'd.

As for the nuclear reactor thing, the Russian one was also nuclear powered iirc but they got taken out early to set up the stakes for the mid-movie fight. The Australian one was supposed to be the more modern advanced model so there was probably something like it was easier to run on another non-nuclear power source, and none of the monsters they had fought to that point had an EMP attack.

I just saw Pacific Rim for the first time. I had fun, but I really have some problems with the story.

How was Gypsy Danger the only mech with a nuclear power plant?

If they had to punch the monsters because their blood was too toxic to just shoot them, why is there a thriving monster salvage business? We're even told how useful the monster parts are for things like agriculture.

Why didn't every mech have swords?

How did the white guy not even know they had a hidden sword while being carried up by the pterodactyl? He literally said "we're out of options!"

If that jet engine on their chest was a powerful weapon, why didn't they use it against the monsters that grabbed them previously?

Why weren't escape capsules set up early in the movie if they were so important to the resolution of the story?

The whole premise was based on Drift Compatibility being so impossibly rare, but that black guy and the Australian can just work together without problems?

The worst to me, though, was how it wasn't the two old guys going on a suicide mission to save their "children". That to me feels thematically better. If nothing else, the older black guy should have forcibly jettisoned the younger Australian and detonated the bomb on his own.

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'cattle roundup,' 4000 b.c. cave painting pictured in life magazine, february 18, 1957.

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Fernand Pouillon, Hôtel Corne d‘Or, Tipasa, Algeria, 1968

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I know the Harvard thing is going to get rolled back and within the next 24 hours a bunch of courts are going to tie it up in red tape but I genuinely think cancelling international student visas would be good for Americans for many reasons.

I'm not saying this in a "burn it all down" kind of way, Mrs. Firebrand works in academia at [Prestigious University] as a program director for their graduate machine learning program. At least 75% of her students are international, if all student visas are cancelled her program would need to drastically restructure to stay viable. All this is to say that doing this would put a big dent in my household income and I would be materially impacted, and I still unreservedly support it.

But I keep coming back to that DOGE kid who used ML to translate that Roman text, who they scooped up from Nebraska. That guy should have been a prime candidate for Mrs. Firebrand's program, but I know that the faculty lead who has the ultimate say over admission decisions would NEVER admit some guy from the University of Nebraska, especially not when he has his pick of foreign students from top US universities, along with the best schools in Europe and Asia. But that guy was obviously a wunderkind and we as a nation, a culture, should have given him the opportunity to cultivate his talents in one of the best programs in his field that this country has to offer.

My wife has told me that her program has a real problem recruiting American students because the less prestigious state school programs offer much lower tuition, and why would they blow through their scholarship budget trying to tempt Americans (specifically American men; they do bend over backward to get American women through the door, but in ML that pool is pretty small) when they can just get a foreigner to pay full price and contribute to the university's coffers?

A blanket ban on foreign students means Americans don't have to compete for places in American institutions with foreigners, and when they graduate they don't have to compete with foreigners for jobs. Universities won't have the golden goose of wealthy foreign students paying full price so they can't set their tuitions at exorbitant levels that heartlanders couldn't dream of paying off even with lucrative six-figure careers. And America cultivates native, homegrown talent in people who aren't just going to do their OPT at McKinsey or Morgan Stanley or whatever the fuck and go home with a hefty USD bank balance to convert back into their native currency.

And yeah I know that cancelling international student visas for even a year would cause a lot of universities to fold because they rely on those foreigners paying full freight, but tough shit. We probably have too many colleges in this country as it is, and if a percentage of them go under, and there just aren't as many university seats to start with, maybe we can roll back some of the credentialism that's run rampant in this country for three generations and counting. Maybe we'll get back to a point where you can get an admin assistant job without a bachelor's degree and three years experience.

No country should sell out their future to foreigners at the expense of their citizenry (and certainly our geopolitical rivals wouldn't, though they're busy taking advantage of the fact we do). If we want Americans to succeed, we need to prioritize Americans. How many other people are out there like that DOGE kid, overlooked geniuses in flyover country or just lacking the means to access the elite schools that should be competing for them? How many crowns are lying in the gutter in this country, just waiting for someone to pick them up and cultivate them? And if cultivating our homegrown talent that means we stop letting in foreign students who treat our country as an economic zone to be exploited, and the overbloated academic industry takes a hit, good.

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This is an improvement! For a little while there the time horizon was 4-6 months!

So now that both journalists and White House staff are all coming out and hurriedly coming clean on the whole Biden was a Senile Cancer Patient in Office and We All Knew It thing, I just wanna say that I think it's funny how we've gotten to the point where the only difference between something being an insane, dangerous, far-right conspiracy theory and a mainstream news headline is about two years.

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Something I've noticed in the more modern literary fiction I've read lately (i.e. published 2022 or later), and I think most notably in books where the writers are British/Irish, is that quite a few authors are eschewing dialogue markers entirely.

Now the Brits were already on thin fucking ice with me for (among other things) using ' instead of " for marking dialogue but this is a step too far.

I want to know what MFA program is telling all these people not to mark their dialogue in any way except via context, because this has to be institutional. It is too stupid to be something that has come about organically, even for a class of people as mentally deficient as the modern British literati.

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The stone floor of a church in Brittany, France comes alive with color as morning sun filters through stained glass. photo: Jim Richardson

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My gym recently "upgraded" their treadmills to a new model, and I really don't like them because they only have two physical buttons - start and stop. Every other bit of functionality is done via buttons on a touchscreen.

If you want to increase or decrease speed or incline, switch a metric, anything that isn't turning the belt on or off, you have to tap it on the screen. This isn't too bad if you're setting your pace and the view up as you begin a run, but it becomes a massive problem trying to adjust anything mid-workout.

Half the time, the touchscreen buttons aren't terribly sensitive or responsive, probably to ensure you don't accidentally throw everything off with a stray bead of sweat. But the other half of the time, the buttons are absurdly sensitive and everything is thrown off by a stray bead of sweat, causing the screen to flip out and cycle through all these different menus. By this point there's usually enough sweat on the screen/one's hands that it makes navigating back to the info you want an difficult task even stationary, to say nothing of keeping your rhythm while running at a good clip.

This doesn't happen every time I use the treadmill, but it happens often enough, like at least 1/5 times, that it has to have been a known design pain point. I know I'm not exactly adding anything to the anti-touchscreen debate that hasn't been said before, probably more eloquently, but I'm baffled how a manufacturer could make this product and say "Yeah that's good." Except clearly there's a market for it, the Average Consumer needs everything ipad-ified, physical buttons are scary and confusing!

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Morte dell'Europa.

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UFO Photograph ~ Switzerland (1975) by Billy Meier ~ The flying saucer that would later hang in Fox Mulder’s office

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Picture painted by Zdzisław Beksiński, 1979

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