Hehe, this tickles me.
In the rush to make sure that people are represented as much as possible because boo racism, you’ve created a bunch of software that groups people by skin colour.
Or, in other words: racist software.
Nice going, everyone!
Since apparently the word “Rohypnol” is simply too offensive to be sung on youtube, I present the actual video for Baby’s Got A Temper by The Prodigy:
They fucking renewed Alex Kurtzman’s contract?!?
There’s an old saying that I think is apropos here: “Never Attribute to malice that which can be attributed to stupidity”
I suppose technically I had jumped the gun on trek: I saw the malice and interpreted and called it out as such. But I suppose, technically speaking, until today, you could have made the claim that it was just stupidity, and that CBS had accidentally hired Alex Kurtzman as a TV showrunner rather than as filler for a septic tank system.
But today proves that it wasn’t stupidity at all, it was definitely malice. CBS’s goal is to kill off Star Trek.
But there’s still one part of it that I still don’t understand: Why renew Kurtzman’s contract? He’s already killed it off pretty effectively already – does he really need another 5 years?
I suppose it has been around for a long time and it’s got a habit of being revived and renewed. So if you hate Star Trek and you want to kill it off and make damn sure it stays dead, you might extend Kurtzman’s contract. That would make sense I guess.
While I’m here, I should post the poster that I made a while ago for RedLetterMedia’s excellent 5-hour series of reviews of picard:
I’ve been watching this show called For All Mankind. It’s glorious. One day there will almost certainly be a blog post here gushing about it. It has the potential to be my favourite TV show ever. I’ve told pretty much everyone I know about it.
But it’s an Apple TV show, so I can’t ethically recommend any legitimate means of watching it.
Today, I decided to do a thing that I do every now and then: make a good-faith effort to find a way to reward creators of content like this in an ethical way.
In other words, I want to buy For All Mankind on DVD or bluray.
So I decided to hit up apple for a chat to ask them when it’s coming out in a format where it can actually be purchased (as opposed to rented, which is what you get when you “buy” it from Apple TV), and unencumbered by DRM.
That went about as well as you’d expect.
The TL;DR version is that Apple won’t even discuss the possibility of you buying one of their shows on DVD without you providing your personal information. Much less actually release a show on a medium where you can actually buy it. Not only that, but they insist on using misleading terms like “buy”, and “purchase the content legitimately” even when called out on it. I guess they do deserve some minimal number of points for consistency.
So, if you want to watch For All Mankind, the most ethical way I can recommend to watch it is by using The Pirate Bay. You get very high-quality web-download rips there regularly every week.
And I really do recommend watching it. It’s great.
Dear Ronald D Moore: Your show is really great. I’d love to give you and your production company some money to support it’s ongoing creation, but Apple refused to help me with that. If you want to reach out to me and let me know how I can do that, Please do. I’d happily pay premium prices for a box set, I’ll be all like “shut up and take my money”. Thanks.
Here’s the chat log in full:
(well, almost full. This is the last screengrab I took. It was very close to the end of the chat. After this it was pretty much just “well, thanks for nothing I guess? Bye.”)
I’ve been reading The Register for close to 20 years now. Certainly well over 15.
They have been getting less and less impartial, and thus worse and worse at journalism, over the years.
And today I found out that their comment moderation is also totally fair and unbiased. For instance, check out this totally offensive post that they censored:
As you can see, I was totally out of line and very offensive here.
To add to this hilarity, it turns out that the person moderating comments on the article is the same guy who wrote it. Totally fair and not at all a recipe for a little fiefdom of echo chambers.
And as if that wasn’t enough, this comment was censored in such a way that there is no visible mention on the website that a post has been censored. Usually on their site, any moderated post will be replaced with a message saying “this post was removed by a moderator”. So it turns out that not only do they censor any even mildly critical viewpoints, they do it using a special censorship mode that they have implemented, so that nobody can tell that they’re basically nazis.
And that was the day that I stopped reading the register. Chris Williams, their editor in chief, is a little hitler wannabe.
Nice one, ABC. That’s some top-notch journalism right there.
Firstly, I’m struck by the neutral tone of this article reporting on this…uh… “extra-legal”… murder. And I find myself wondering what the tone would be like if it was a nuclear scientist in a western country who had been killed. I can’t help but agree with the phrase “shameful double standards”. This was an act of terrorism, pure and simple.
Secondly: What, you couldn’t afford to have an actual interpreter translate the tweet?
Nah, rather than wait an hour or two and spend maybe a couple of hundred bucks on having an actual interpreter give an actual translation of what was actually said, we’ll just run the tweet through google translate! And hey, if google translate returns something clearly nonsensical, we’ll just edit that part out!
Nice one, ABC. I can see why you’re in favour of making google and facetube pay for the media they link to. With reporting of this high caliber it’s clearly worth it.
…and since images of text (particularly PHOTOS OF PRINTOUTS OF DIGITAL DOCUMENTS! WTF?!?) are the done thing now, no more of this pesky text that can be read semantically and parsed by machines and accessed by blind people, I’m not going to actually write much in the way of commentary here, I’m just going to post some images full of text:
I feel like maybe this news article I read literally 2 days earlier might also be relevant somehow:
“Be the change you want to see in the world! Smite those capitalist pig-dogs! By…uh…buying our book bundle!”
