The Jessica Fletcher problem?

The ratio of income to bills is way lower on our side than YouTube’s.

We need that money more than they do.

Are you talking about some heist on Nintendo’s blueprint vaults?

Because IP infringement is never theft.

So Nintendo is suing them over the monster design similarities? I thought it was a patent suit, not copyright.

I have to think the reality is more about wishful thinking. My path to naturalism was coming to terms with bad news, specifically my own mortality. Not just that, but any legacy I might leave is going to be extremely brief.

(Of course, in recent times I learned that Pythagoras didn’t actually work out the Pythagorean theorem, rather one of his cult minions did and attributed it to him. And it’s quite possible that the same theorem was known by cultures that were millennia older, so even brilliant Hellenic mathematicians are forgotten.)

When we’re raised to believe in heaven, and then find out that all our hopes of salvation are dubious, it’s tempting just to pretend that believing in Jesus will make it so like clapping for Tinkerbell. Confronting our absence of spirit or divinity, especially in light of 20th and 21st century understandings of the the universe (it’s huge and we’re microbes on a speck of dust), especially as the human species is on the brink of self-annihilation (a run of 250,000 years, contrast to the 2,000,000 of Homo Erectus, or the Tens of Millions of some dinosaurs), really makes life feel like a candle-flame in the wind.

I remember FD2 in my…thirties, I think, and noting that the pile-up started with the flying logs (which seemed to fly like balsa but hit like tamarack) and was the combination of a lot of things going wrong (which was consistent with theme of death as a petty shit that toys with you before finishing you off.) Really, most of the movies felt more like a vindictive gamemaster, unless the players signed up for being teens in a slasher flick.

On the other hand in the eighties, I remember a 24+ vehicle pile-up on the San Bernadino freeway, my mom investigated as a paralegal. It started as a car stalled in thick fog, and bunches of drivers driving way faster than was safe considering the short visibility. It really showed that the weakest link was, indeed between steering wheel and seat.

That said, industrial accidents are quite normal thanks to the drive of profits leading companies to try to sue OSHA or lobby the department (or lobby congress to defund OSHA), and yes, a lot of them emerge from companies choosing to not adhere to all the precautional requirements, and then having their infrastructure implode like a Seagate submersible.

We have a lot more mad engineering than mad science, though there’s a moral hazard when you hire common workers to take the physical risks.

ETA: Full disclosure, I might be biased in my view of death. In 2011, one of the contestants in an air race in Reno had a malfunction that veered the plane into the grandstands. Bunches of injured. Nine Eleven died, including my cousin, and I had to contend for a long time with the reality that an airplane dropped out of the sky to smack my cousin and kill him. (His son, a boy at the time, and the son’s friend survived because my cousin shielded them with his body.) I write about the incident here, recalling the incident shortly after Alan Rickman and David Bowie had recently died.

Death is not an antagonist, or an anthropomorphic being one can negotiate with or trick or flee. It’s just a thing that happens when your parts can no longer sustain your vitals. Nothing requires sacrifices of life, even when situations might limit survival (such as the Titanic’s lifeboat accommodation of 1,178 survivors, fully loaded, in contrast to a passenger load of 2,209). Life is a thing, and when it can no longer continue, death happens.

For-profit tooling tends to get usability right

Until enshittification happens and the photo-editer that’s turned into the shorthand slang for editing a picture is suddenly an unaffordable subscription.

If we crowdsource such tools, or otherwise make them FOSS then they dont fall into that trap. Even one that sells out can be split off back into a FOSS project.

For those who want a proper dose of horror / terror

Sony will pirate from anyone who isn’t Sony. Same with Time-Warner. Same with Columbia. Same with every studio, every label, every publishing house.

Absolutely no-one in the industry takes piracy seriously until it’s their own stuff being pirated by someone else.

Moreover, they all are used to Hollywood accounting, in which lawyers try to justify not paying someone for work whenever they can.

Hollywood. You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villany.

Chelsea Manning was having a rough time during her imprisonment after her data dump. So it’s become kind of a common very special episode.

I use mph because that’s what the speedometer reads. But mile/min² is easy to compute by dividing mile/hr/min by 60. Once the starting and ending speed are converted (assuming impulse is a constant) the law of accelleration neatly applies.

Israel and the U.S. are both looking for ways to decouple Hezbollah from Hamas.

Decoupling Bibi from Israel would actually speed the peace process even more.

I mitigate my personal sense of failure with a corresponding failure of society to allow me (or anyone) a fraction of a chance.

As my cat reminds me, there is no legitimate judge of success or failure: We live, until the moment we cease to live, and then we simply are not.

Sin and crime are artificial constructs of ministerial systems. If you want to worry about right and wrong, do so in context to yourself, your neighbor and your community. This is where real help and real harm occur.

Also no war but class war. We’ve nothing to lose but our chains. ACAB. Etc.

Actuarial consultation, obviously.

At the risk of outing the extreme perversity of my sick mind, I present the following math problems for your edification and enjoyment…

TW: Age-play

All participants are adult, even when otherwise is implied. Cat magic.

Yes, they are real math problems. I wrote up a bunch for a failed scene decades ago.

Enjoy.

Travel: On a road trip daddy is letting Tiffany steer the car. While Tiffany bounces softly on daddy’s lap, daddy is casually accelerating six miles per hour per minute. How far to they travel from the point they’re going 30 mph to when they’re going 90 mph?

Snack Time: Leslie is eating an enormous double-scooped ice-cream cone while Brenda is sucking on a huge Popsicle. Leslie’s long licks up the side and along the top of her two scoops each average 8 seconds and 5 such licks consume an ounce of ice cream. Meanwhile, Brenda’s sucking strokes are only 4 seconds long. But the juice-bar is so big she can only contain 2 inches of frozen fruity goodness in her mouth at a time. It takes 20 such strokes for Brenda to wear away an inch of her tasty treat. If Leslie’s ice cream cone is 16 ounces and Brenda’s Popsicle is 9 inches long, and it takes Leslie just as long to eat the cone as it does Brenda the last two inches of Popsicle, then which girl will finish their snack first, and by how much time?

Sleep Time: On Friday night, Teresa has a slumber party with six other girls. Daddy takes 30 minutes to tuck Teresa in, plus 5 minutes each to tuck in the other girls at the party, except Veronica with whom he takes 45 minutes. Daddy also takes 20 minutes to tuck in Teresa’s little sister, Holly, and an hour to tuck in Teresa’s older sister, Barbie. At what time does Daddy have to start getting girls ready for bed in order to have them all in bed by 10:00 pm?

Have you played Pokémon and PalWorld? One is a pit-fighter-trainer where the other is a base-builder. Or does the capturing of creatures and the similar art style make them too much alike?

In a truly competitive capitalist market there should be room enough for both. But Nintendo wants their players to be obligated to own only Nintendo approved products.

About as special as an arrow on the screen that points towards your destination (Sega, Crazy Taxi ). Not saying that’s particularly special either. The US Patent Office has allowed for some pretty broad-reaching patents, which fuels our patent-troll problem, as well as giving large companies legal grounds to interfere with each other’s innovation.

IP law has become so far removed from serving its original intent (according to the Constitution of the United States) we’d be bette4 off with no IP protections rather than the licensing system we have. Not that anyone is near doing something to fix it, or unfuck the courts that are unable to rule consistently about it.

I’m reminded of a conversation with my Dad.

DAD: <by phone> Let me know if your aunt calls. Otherwise I’ll meet you in the lobby in a half hour.

ME: Roger that. Call you if I hear from Aunty, otherwise downstairs at 10:30.

DAD: <Shows up at 10:30> Hear anything from Aunty?

ME: No joy.

DAD: …No joy in Mudville?

When my quirky personality creates wave interference with your quirky personality.