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NASA Is Training This 17-Year-Old Girl to Become One of the First Humans on Mars

Better than dying on the Space Shuttle, I suppose.

BEHOLD:

Search Google for Emmanuel Olusoji Ishola.

My intended move-out has been delayed somewhat by all the hookers and blow I've been availing myself of as a result of having received my check for my completion of the Fresco Logic FL2000 USB-VGA Adapter macOS function driver.

While my driver shipped to Fresco's OEM customers about a month ago, I don't think it's available to end-users yet. Once it is, I shall ensure that you sorry lot are the very _first_ to know.

ThorCon Molten Salt Reactor can be safer safe and scalable to 100 GW within a decade

Nvidia GTX 1180 to Use New High-Speed Connector: What You Need to Know

Quadrupling Wealth with a ten billion person Global City

Japan's Video Game Bars Are In Danger

14m2s video: TWITCH VICTIMS

Polygon article: Streamer Amouranth is latest example of ‘Twitch thot’ harassment problem¹

In summary (since you may not be arsed to watch a 14 minute video), (some... many?) girl streamers wear skimpy clothing and cultivate a fanbase on Twitch and other streaming platforms. People, mostly young men (or boys with the parents' credit card), shell out lots of money² to get attention from these streamers, despite getting far less for their money than what a camgirl would show off. The streamers are often accused of violating Twitch's terms of service by "accidentally" shaking their ass, showing major cleavage, actual nudity, and other on-camera mishaps (you can look for compilations of these on YouTube if you want). However, Twitch tends to overlook these infractions (which are lucrative for Twitch since scantily-clad girl gamers drive traffic and Twitch gets a cut of the stream's ads or revenue), while punishing males more regularly for their bits of nudity and terms of service violations, sometimes including things that are done/said on entirely different platforms.

In this case, the streamer repeatedly lied on camera to portray herself as single, fueling the fevered dreams of her fans. She also revealed that she lived in Houston, TX (making doxxing her an easy task), and filmed inside of a gym (identifying it, since it was getting phone calls) and lied about it to the gym's employees and manager until she decided to leave. None of this is justification for being harassed or really so bad at all (lying to grift some horny kids and acting like an asshole in a private establishment aren't exactly crimes), but after being called out on her deception by fans and apparently harassed/"doxxed", she found a ready-made ally in the form of a lazy gaming media outlet.

^{1. Polygon appears to have made itself resistant to archive.is, but not archive.org.}

^{2. Apparently, lots more money than I expected. One of Amouranth's fans donated about $10-13k. Yikes.}

Why you should care: You don't have to, but it's another fascinating look at how millennials make a buck online these days.

Similar drama:

Pewdiepie vs. Twitch streamer Alinity

TanaCon (one big unmentioned detail is that the venue was intended to hold about a thousand, not the ~5,000 that tickets were sold to, so the event was doomed from the start and there are layers of lies involved)

Come to think of it, I keep on forgetting that Twitch is a subsidiary of Amazon now.

Sorry I haven’t written, but I’ve been spending all my time working on my cookbook. I’ve even gotten way behind on my reading; there are four copies of F&SF I haven’t even cracked open yet.
        It isn’t the TTL Cookbook, someone else wrote that one a few decades ago. I highly recommend it, if you can find a copy. It describes how all the circuits in a computer work, down to the individual components within the chips; transistors, capacitors, resisters, etc.
        This cookbook is a culinary cookbook. Five hundred old family recipes covering breakfast, lunch, brunch, deserts, drinks, and snacks, an herb and spice guide over twenty pages long, hundreds of illustrations, and detailed information about people, places, things, and histories connected to many of the recipes.
        The recipes themselves come from a cookbook my grandmother’s family compiled a few decades ago. Many come from popular southern restaurants that were owned and run by family members.
        It’s almost ready for publication. I need to take a few more photos at Humphrey’s Market tomorrow and add them to the book, but other than that it’s finished and ready to have bound copies printed.
        Now I can get back to science fiction.

Scarlett Johansson’s Casting as Transgender Man Draws a Backlash

Scarlett Johansson faced a storm of criticism this week after it was reported that she would play a transgender man in a movie, a year after she drew scrutiny for taking on a role that was originally Japanese.

The newly announced film, “Rub & Tug,” is based on the real-life story of Dante “Tex” Gill, who ran a string of massage parlors that were fronts for prostitution dens in the 1970s and ’80s.

The online backlash was led by transgender actors, who argued that such casting decisions take opportunities away from members of marginalized communities.

[...] The actress faced further anger online after the website Bustle published a statement from an unidentified representative for Ms. Johansson that said, “Tell them that they can be directed to Jeffrey Tambor, Jared Leto, and Felicity Huffman’s reps for comment.”

Scarlett Johansson faces firestorm amid news she will play a transgender man

Trans Actors Slam Scarlett Johansson Rub & Tug Casting

Scarlett Johansson's Defense of Her New Role as a Trans Man Is Only Fueling Critics

Scarlett Johansson

Guy,

Detaining and separating families at the border isn’t just horrific – for some tech companies, it’s profitable.

Microsoft is one of those companies. They sell Azure, a cloud computing service that does everything from file storage to facial recognition, to ICE and make millions – $19.4 million to be exact – off of ICE’s deportation machine.

Tell Microsoft to divest from ICE immediately and to quit profiting off of deportation-industrial complex.

When the news hit that families were being separated at the border, and children were being held alone in cages at secret ICE facilities, Microsoft was quick to walk back their role in equipping ICE with technology. But make no mistake, they touted that their Azure service was “mission critical” to ICE’s operations.1

Now Microsoft wants to distance themselves from ICE’s cruel detention policies, but that’s hard to do when they’re making millions off of Trump's inhumane immigration crisis.

If Microsoft is truly morally outraged2 by ICE’s actions, they’ll walk the walk and cancel their contract with the agency and stop profiting on deportations. Tell Microsoft to divest from ICE immediately.

Thanks for taking action,

Reuben and the team at Watchdog.net

My reply to Reuben:

You guys are deluded. Microsoft and Evil Corp are synonymous. Bill Gates worships the Almighty Dollar, and so does the corporation he founded. Like IBM before them, Microsoft would have collated data for Adolph Hitler and his Third Reich.

Besides which, I approve of detaining unwanted invaders at the border. If you insist, I suppose we can throw the kids into the same prison in which we detain the adults. Your call.

$ echo "Just _once_ in _every_ man's life he just _has_ to bust loose and '$ sudo rm -rf *'."
Just _once_ in _every_ man's life he just _has_ to bust loose and '$ sudo rm -rf *'.
$ sudo rm -rf *
Password:
$

Amy Coney Barrett Is Allegedly a Member of a Religious Group That’s Been Called a “Cult”

The Supreme Temptation of Amy Coney Barrett

Trump should nominate Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court to save his presidency

The dogma lives loudly within you.

Not for the first time, the thought has occurred to me that an empire, defined as any nation with an expansionist and/or colonialist system of existence, bears several striking resemblances to parasitic and parasitoid species. Beyond simple resource theft, I speak mostly of parallels to how these organisms often lose functions from their own genomes in favor of allowing the host to perform them instead...and their subsequent complete dependence on said host species. When the hosts either die out or move on, the parasite too withers and dies.

There has been a pattern throughout history of analogous processes taking place in imperialist nations. What chiefly concerns me here is the effective outsourcing of both manufacture and raw-material procurement, beyond what is necessary due to said resource not existing natively or lack of infrastructure at home. Rome, in its middle and latter days, relied on grain imports and slave labor. Britain's loss of India had much to do with its economic dependence on its colony, for textile manufacture for example. And I don't think I need to paint you a picture of the effects of globalization on the US's economy, specifically with regard to wage depression and overseas flight of production.

What all these have in common is that the people at the top are essentially trading the vitality and independent function of the nation they rule--and make no mistake, the golden rule, that the guys with the gold make the rules, is and has always been in full force--for their own personal enrichment. Whether it be kings or CEOs of multinational corporations with US headquarters, the end effect is the same, because the concentration of power is the same.

(Incidentally, this is why the Citizens United decision was such a complete disaster and why lobbying itself ought to be illegal: making money does not always coincide with the interests of the nation, and very often opposes them in a global society.)

So...where does this end? Eventually, the empire in question allocates more resources to maintaining its "interests" (read: colonies) overseas and across borders than it does internally. And the citizens of the empire, especially the poorer ones, suffer more and more over time. There grows, between the moneyed powers and the average citizen, a great, impassible chasm, a gap of not just material wealth but of anomie and hopelessness. The laws and law enforcement apparatus turn inward, protecting not citizens from criminals, but the haves from the have-nots. Long-term planning by the ruling class for the good of the nation becomes not just impossible, not just unthinkable, but outright mocked. The average citizen completely loses faith in the institutions of the nation, and with good reason, for they have become an enemy and they see the citizens as such.

Add to this that no empire ever truly got its power and resource base by above-board, honest, peaceful means--with the possible exception of the Marshall Plan, and even that struck me, all the way back in sixth grade, as a particularly cynical piece of international brinksmanship. Empires have terrible karma. They become ringed with enemies, many of whom may at one point have been allies. Foolish decisions regarding allies and trade and warfare are made. Eventually, the global order shifts...and the empire in question, overextended beyond endurance, demoralized from within, decadent and incompetent and decrepit from decades of internal misrule, is vulnerable and weak and *completely* unable even to see the coming seismic shift as it happens, let alone respond to it after the fact.

Time flows like a river. History does not repeat, but it does rhyme. Care to guess where the US is in this pattern?