Month: February 2024

And in Oolong news…

You remember Neuralink, don’t you? You remember the 1500 animals that died in the course of experimenting on them? Well, as you may see above, Oolong is now claiming to have taken the next step; I was wrong the last time I posted about this, cos I said he didn’t have FDA approval for human testing when he actually had got it a few months earlier, and he’s apparently acted on that at last.

I say “apparently” because, well, this tweet appears to be the only evidence of it happening at all. Neuralink’s own Twitter account is conspicuously free of any statement on the subject, the “recipient” hasn’t been identified, and I’m just perplexed by the absence of hype. This tweet has been, you know, it. Kind of weird that people are just accepting this story on the face of it without, you know, evidence, though I have seen a few people wondering what Elon might be trying to distract us from with this amazing news, and someone may have found out:

“Unacceptable migration of contaminated ground water is present” is quite a way of putting it. Tesla’s fuckup is, as far as I can see, getting rather less coverage than Musk’s putative neurosurgery success, but maybe it just needs more time to circulate. Either way, if this operation did happen, and I somehow feel it didn’t, I hope the proud owner of a new brain chip has a happier ending than Oolong’s monkeys…

Parenthetically, one of the responders to the Brian Tyler Cohen tweet I posted at the start of this made some snide remark about how at least Elon admits he wants to microchip you. Which is not an entirely bad point, but, really, if you’re going to be like that about it, one might further add the reason why Bill Gates doesn’t tell you about microchipping is that HE ISN’T DOING THAT TO YOU. Fucking paranoids, man…

Swift boating again

As I’ve said before, I’m not particularly a Taylor Swift fan, but I certainly am greatly enjoying the American right’s current meltdown over her:

This video’s particularly good, cos the commentator blasting the idiots losing their shit over Swift works for Fox, which has been obsessed with her in recent times. A sample:

As others have observed, Fox is so outraged by Tay Tay that they’ve been forced to admit CO2 emissions are a bad thing (and in any case she has apparently purchased carbon credits to offset hers). The real lunacy, though, has been the “speculation” about her being some sort of government asset; and I put that in quotes because I don’t think even the clowns at Fox seriously believe it themselves, but they’re desperate to make their idiot viewers do so:

Right-wing activists have indulged in baseless speculation that Swift’s romance with Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce — a kind of ur-American couple of football star and wholesome pop icon — is a contrivance engineered by Democrats, or perhaps the NFL, to trick unsuspecting Americans into boosting Super Bowl ratings or voting for Biden in November.
A version of that theory aired on Fox News in mid-January, when host Jesse Watters floated the idea that Swift was a government asset engaged in psychological warfare. He suggested that the runaway success of her Eras concert tour was aided by the Defense Department. “Have you ever wondered why or how she blew up like this?” Watters asked viewers. (He allowed that he had no solid evidence: “If we did, we’d share it.”)

So what aided her success before all this? Her Wiki entry notes she’d sold 37 million records in the US by 2019, which is kind of well before her recent blowup on the right. And Time included her on their 100 most influential people list for the first time in 2010. She is indeed making truly preposterous sums of money off the Eras tour, but it’s not like she’s come out of nowhere to do it. Still, if this “speculation” is unserious (and Watters basically admitted as much), I think their terror at Swift’s potential influence is genuine; the idea that she might actually encourage people to vote for Biden, or indeed to vote at all. And I’m sure her being of the female persuasion only makes things worse for them. I’ll finish off with this image I spotted on Tumblr today that I think sums it all up:

So how is the reading plan going?

Remember I was experimenting with a reading plan I found on Bluesky? I suppose now we’re staring down the barrel of a new month, I should look at how I’m going so far.

So, in the fifth week of the year, I’ve just finished book number five. That’s pretty good. I’m keeping to the “one book a week” rule on average.

Non-fiction for the month: Monster She Wrote. This one’s quite easily done.

Classic of the month: Tarzan. “Classics” is such a vexed issue, and I’m contemplating a post on that subject, that I did consider either Black No More or the Cornell Woolrich collection could technically count as the classic for January, but Tarzan‘s in the 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Lose Your Eyes book so I suppose that makes it “more classic”…

Short story per day: THIS, somewhat to my surprise, has been the bit where I’ve fallen down. I haven’t read one story every day, though when I’ve missed a day I’ve made up for it by reading two the next day, so it actually works out, I should have read 366 individual stories by the end of the year… but yeah, I’m finding this hard. Cos I’m not used to reading quite like this; I obviously can’t read most books in a single day so I need to pause at some point and resume it later, but I’m still used to reading multiple chapters in one sitting. I don’t usually approach collections of stories in this one-at-a-time way, I read one and then I want to read the next on straight away. You know, like a “normal” book.

Also, it means that I’m reading more than one book at a time, which is definitely something I don’t think I’ve ever done before. I have, in the past, put one book on hold then read another book before going back to the first one, but I wasn’t reading both of them simultaneously, I was focusing on one at a time. And I can’t really do that the same with this approach, my attention is being divided to some extent. I’ll certainly stick with it, cos the plan is otherwise having results; maybe it’ll get easier…