Month: February 2023

With friends/employers like this…

Elon Musk backs Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams following racist tirade

Elon Musk has deployed his 130 million-follower Twitter bullhorn to come to the rescue of a beleaguered cartoonist dumped by hundreds of newspapers across America for having delivered a virulent racist tirade.
The Twitter and Tesla chief responded with his own controversial thought stream over the weekend after the mass termination of the Dilbert comic strip from US newspaper titles. Its creator, Scott Adams, recently denigrated Black people as a “hate group”, advising white people to “just get the hell away” from them.
“The media is racist,” was Musk’s response to the widespread decision to terminate the Dilbert strip. “For a very long time, US media was racist against non-white people, now they’re racist against whites and Asians.”
He went on to compare US media with elite educational institutions in America where he claimed the “same thing happened”.
It was also reported that Musk deleted a tweet in which he responded to a comment from Adams about his comic strip being dropped, saying, “What exactly are they complaining about?”

Yeah, when you’re in a racism controversy for calling black people a hate group, I feel like having a white man born in South Africa during the Apartheid era defending you for being racist isn’t the best look… But if we’ve learned nothing else about Elon Musk since he took over Twitter, it’s that caring about optics isn’t his strong suit, otherwise he probably wouldn’t have done this:

One of Elon Musk’s most loyal Twitter employees has lost her job amid a fresh wave of brutal lay-offs.
In November, Twitter product manager Esther Crawford – who led the controversial Twitter Blue subscription service – went viral after sharing a picture of herself dozing in a sleeping bag on the floor at Twitter HQ.
“When your team is pushing round the clock to make deadlines sometimes you #SleepWhereYouWork,” she tweeted at the time.
The photo generated a huge amount of interest, with many blaming her for supporting a “toxic” workplace, and others claiming she’d soon lose her job anyway, given Twitter’s recent lay-off blitz.

The latter were correct, as 200 Twitter employees (about ten percent of the ones who haven’t lost their jobs yet) got the axe the other day and Esther’s efforts for Elon were rewarded by him including her in the cull. Quoth Esther herself on Twitter:

Well, fair play to her if she thinks it was still worth it, but looking at it from those sidelines she mentions… it really wasn’t, Esther. Your devotion to Glorious Leader got you nowhere in the end, you were just as expendable to Elon as the thousands of other erstwhile Twitter employees he’s cut since taking over Twitter. Not going to celebrate you being out of work, but also let’s not pretend you meant anything to him…

Dilbert down the drain

A few months ago, the comic strip Dilbert was dropped from publication by 77 American newspapers. This news came as a shock, because who knew there even were still 77 newspapers left in the US? Anyway, news has further come through that a bunch more newspapers have dropped the strip, leading us to the inevitable if baffling conclusion that there must actually be more than 77 newspapers in the US, and a bunch of them were still printing Dilbert for some reason. The 21st century is confusing, isn’t it?

Also sprach USA Today:

Interesting use of the word “recent”, implying that USA Today didn’t have a comparable problem with discriminatory statements Scott Adams has made before this latest outburst he had about black people. There seems to be some debate about exactly how and when Adams (who once described himself in 2017 as “left of Bernie Sanders”, according to his Wiki entry) turned into a complete shithead, but the fact that he has been one at least since the Trump candidacy is clear.

Wiki points us to this old blog entry where he claims he was getting death threats for daring to say nice things about Trump while living in California, so he publicly endorsed Hillary Clinton to shut people up while nonetheless claiming in said blog post that the latter was driving the country to all-out race war. And then he overcame his terror of these alleged death threats by endorsing Trump again a few months later and descending into abject stupidity and saying shit like a Clinton victory would mean there would never be another male president. Just like Jodie Whittaker ensured Peter Capaldi would be the last male Doctor…

…Oh. Well, what about this prediction?

Well, unless the Lamestream Media is doing a really good job of hiding things, most of America survived 2021 and police funding went up. And Scott evidently mistook a movie plot about the elites hunting working class people as actually being a blueprint for what liberals want to do to conservatives in reality.

I took the above screenshot myself, incidentally, on this 25th day of February 2023 CE; not only is Scott Adams wrong about shit like this, he’s happy to leave evidence of his wrongness up for future generations to behold… and then to be wrong about it again:

If at first you don’t succeed, eh. Worked so well for Harold Camping and William Miller, didn’t it? Of course, there’s a good chance lots of people will be dead by the end of this year, too—living people do have a tendency to stop living at some point after all—but I suspect few if any of those deaths will be directly attributable to Sleepy Joe…

“Nothing but a number” my arse

Just saw this headline for a story on the Atlantic website:

I’m not a subscriber so can’t read the full article, but I can tell you that subheading if nothing else is a load of shit. I don’t think I’ve ever felt myself being any younger than I am and I certainly don’t now. If anything I find myself feeling maybe 20% older than I actually am, which is currently 48 so I feel like I’m much nearer 60 if not even more than most people my age probably do. Having a stroke at 34 will give you that sort of perspective on yourself, I suppose.

But even in my early 30s before The Incident, I was aware of myself being in my early 30s much as I am now painfully aware (and it frequently is literally painful) of being in my late 40s and on the downhill slide into the next decade. I was something of a late bloomer as a social individual (not having money to go places and do things didn’t help); when I latched onto the Sydney goth scene (thanks aus.culture.gothic) in 2001, I was already 27, and finally doing things most people would’ve already been doing for 5-10 years by that age. But even so, I wasn’t deluding myself that I was 5-10 years younger than I actually was, I knew I was 30-something and quite comfortable with that.

Though once you have an illness in your mid-30s that most people (including me before it happened) generally associate with the rather more elderly, your perception of your own age kind of alters, or at least mine did. But I appear to have always projected myself as being older than my actual age, at least online; back around 2001 or so I was a member of a now long-gone forum, and I remember one thread where we were talking about our ages, and quite a few people were stunned to find I was only in my mid-20s rather than my mid-30s (at least one of the other board members was amazed to find he was older than me). I seemed to come across like that. Perhaps I still do.

But who knows, maybe my own perception of these things is just screwy. I see some people on Youtube (D’Angelo Wallace being one) who I get the impression of being maybe in their early 30s and I’m kind of shocked to find they’re a decade or so younger than I thought. (And I feel faintly appalled that they’re so many years younger than me and so much smarter at the same time. Bastards.) And there’s one particular person on Mastodon whose posts I often see when I go through the local feed who I would’ve placed as being in his 20s. He’s thirteen. He’s barely started high school, never mind university where I thought he might be. That’s the sort of thing that makes me feel even older than I already do…

The Erotic Nightmare of the Daleks?

Here’s a slightly perplexing triple bill I found via Twitter. It’s not even so much the mix of films, though that’s odd enough; I could imagine The House That Dripped Blood and the Dalek film showing together cos they were both made by Amicus (technically the latter is an Aaru production but that was just Amicus posing under another name for some reason), but adding the Romero film into the mix gave the whole thing an… interesting if not traumatising flavour. But the thing that the original poster highlights is the “An erotic nightmare” tag… which I suspect may have been meant to refer to House (though that’s still a stretch), but its placement certainly makes it look like it’s about the Dalek film. Which… no?

That said, you may well find Dalek stories to be perfectly erotic and arousing. In which case, please get the hell away from me, you freak.

What won’t Zuckerberg profit from, though?

Over the years I’ve seen and reported a bunch of shit on Fessebouc and Instagram that they’ve refused to do anything about cos their “community standards” are shit, so the Graun reporting that Meta have taken money for ads from the Australian Christian Lobby, Advance Australia and Family First Australia is kind of revolting but not even remotely surprising. The fact that they’ve got a corporate float in the Sydney Mardi Gras tomorrow, on the other hand…

Albert Kruger, CEO of Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, was contacted for comment.
Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras has previously defended the involvement of corporations in the parade. Kruger said last week that corporate floats make up just 14% of the total floats and they were chosen carefully by the organisation.
“We choose partners who reflect the values held closely by the LGBTQIA+ community,” he said.“Mardi Gras partners have been loud advocates for the community, and their support has been pivotal in bringing about lasting social change, such as in their support for the Same Sex Marriage Post Survey just a couple of years ago.”

With all due respect, Albert, the organisation is clearly not choosing its corporate friends carefully. I have no interest whatsoever in Mardi Gras as such except when people I actually know have been in the march; I don’t identify as a member of the queer community so it’s pretty much irrelevant to me. But as an observer with lots of friends who do count themselves as such (at least one was a 78er, in fact), I get the criticism of Mardi Gras having become too commercialised. Corporate sponsorship is one thing, I’m just not sure giving them a parade float in return is the right thing… especially not when the corporation is running ads against the people MG is about. Regarding which…

A Meta spokesperson said the Australian ads were currently under review.
“At Meta, we want to make sure our platforms are a safe and inclusive space for the LGBTQIA+ community, ​​and work hard to find the balance between allowing people freedom of voice, while ensuring we minimise harm,” the spokesperson said. “We’re reviewing these ads and will take appropriate action if they breach our policies.”

But apart from it being a bit late for that, obviously the ads didn’t breach your policies, cos the company accepted money to run them. Or if they did (and the way the article describes them makes me think they should’ve done, especially since one was apparently actively spreading misinformation), then the company just didn’t care. Neither of these alternatives makes Meta look good in this case. And even if Mardi Gras has been partners with them since 2016, it doesn’t make MG look great right now either…

Up yours, wipe moralist

What’s Jurr Durr complaining about now?

FUCK ME DEAD this is ridiculous even by HIS limited standards. I mean… yeah, using less paper towel and so forth isn’t going to save the world; saving the world will require holding corporations to account for their practices and governments to give a shit more than individuals not using so much bogroll and the like. But the idea that, you know, being asked (like, not even being forced) to use less paper towel in a public bathroom constitutes “petty tyranny” is absurd even for someone who believes just not being an arsehole to other people when he doesn’t have to is an unacceptable imposition. It’s not a hundredth as petty as his own impotent rage…

Foolstencroft MUFFs it!

Once upon a time (since 1952) there was a Melbourne International Film Festival, and once upon a time (around 2000) they rejected a film called Pearls Before Swine by a filmmaker called Richard Wolstencroft. So, because the latter is a grown adult and not a big sooky pissbaby, he started his own event just a few months later to showcase his film and his mates’ films, the Melbourne Underground Film Festival, or MUFF for short. Like I said, grown adult.

I remember following this bullshit back in the day cos at the time I was doing the film show on 2SER so kind of had to stay abreast of this sort of thing, cos it was a kind of big film culture event and we were supposed to be interested in that sort of thing on the show. As such, I’ve been following it on and off for 20+ years now, whenever it’s come back into the news. Which it just did again the other day:

Travis is a friend of various other friends of mine, one of whom is a filmmaker (hi Chris) and retweeted this, which is how I discovered the current situation. It is, incidentally, not just “someone else” who snapped up the name. But more of that in due course. This will be a long one…

Continue reading “Foolstencroft MUFFs it!”

The point misser

Spotted this while going through some Tumblr archives:

This is from a scene in The Tingler, one of William Castle’s gimmick horror films (the first film about LSD, too). And it’s a black & white film. And I’ve seen black & white stills from black & white films colourised before, so I’m not really surprised by this one. But Castle actually filmed this scene in colour. The woman goes into the bathroom and hallucinates this blood-covered arm rising out of a bath full of blood, and the blood is red on screen; to get the effect, Castle shot this bit in colour but painted the whole set white and grey and black (and gave the actress similar makeup) to make the red splatter stand out. This is how it actually looks (as screenshotted from my blu-ray copy; the picture above is evidently a production photo from a different angle):

Imperfect (the colour film was of evidently poorer quality than the actual b&w stock) but not ineffective. In any case, though, colourising a picture of this scene from the film strikes me as a bit odd, cos the point of it is that it is actually in colour. Judith Evelyn wasn’t wearing a red dressing gown. I wonder how old this colouring job is (there’s some obvious damage to the picture) and how it was done.

Can’t stand the rain

A wet time in the old town last night; according to WeatherZone, Sydney got hit by some 22,162 lightning strikes on Tuesday. Yikes. Got the above photo from the Guardian website cos I thought it was quite impressive. I’ve had no issues with lightning, unfortunately the rain has been another matter… as I discovered last night there’s a couple of holes somewhere in my bedroom through which the rain was coming in. Yikes again. Hoping the weather holds off for a while, cos I can’t get someone to come out here until next week to see where the problem is and what to do to fix it… ugh.

Rollermania redux? Maybe not…

I’ve seen some… counterintuitive live music lineups before—Sisters of Mercy and Public Enemy, Pantera and Powderfinger (even allowing for the latter being a bit heavier in its earlier days, that was still bizarre), Dire Straits and Talking Heads— but I don’t think I’ve ever been as confused as I have by this:

…in which THE BAY CITY ROLLERS headlined a post-punk/goth festival in September 1983.

The organiser claimed to have decided to add them as a bit of light relief at the end of the first day (and to replace Howard Devoto, who had apparently pulled out despite still being advertised), similar to when he hired GARY GLITTER (!) for the second Futurama a few years earlier. The difference was, Gary was having an unlikely revival at the time among the post-punk crowd who remembered their glam roots (so it made a sort of odd sense after all to have him headline that sort of show), the Rollers… were not. Morrissey and co. refused to perform when they discovered Les and co. were the new headliners, and the crowd weren’t impressed either, with lots of bottles and cans and glasses being flung at the Rollers. Until finally McKeown snapped and threw one back, and wound up getting arrested as a result. Not quite the light relief I think John Keenan was hoping for; wonder if this had anything to do with the six year wait until the next Futurama…