Sorry for the long absence. I was in hospital for 3 months over the last year. In a nutshell, I had PSC and needed a liver transplant. After some rough times, it seems I’ll live and can keep on making … Continue reading →
Last night we got our first proper extended look at Paramount+’s long-awaited Halo: The Series, the latest in a long line of attempts to bring the Master Chief out of video games and into live-action. But not only is the new show about to be the biggest attempt to do just that, it’s also going to be diving into Halo…
Chromebooks är inte kända för att vara spelmaskiner. Datorernas ofta relativt klena prestanda lämpar sig inte för mer krävande spel och plattformen saknar utbudet som finns för Windows.
Androidspel går dock att köra och numera kan de som har snabbt internet göra Chromebooks till kapabla spelmaskiner genom strömningstjänster som Stadia och GeForce Now. Google verkar dessutom vilja satsa på Chromebooks med ren spelfokus.
Redan för två år sedan påstods Google arbeta på att ge Chrome OS officiellt stöd för Steam, lokalt. Nu har det upptäckts tecken på tre kommande Chromebooks med eventuell spelfokus och RGB-tangentbord, varav en förväntas bli del av Legion-serien från Lenovo.
Det var länge sedan vi hörde något om Steam för Chrome OS, men om ryktet om Chrome OS-baserade speldatorer stämmer är det möjligt att vi får se en lansering senare i år.
In his novel Men at Arms, Terry Pratchett detailed the “Sam Vimes ‘Boots’ theory of socio-economic unfairness,” which crisply explained how expensive it is to be poor. In short, “A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time,” Pratchett wrote, “while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.”
Now, the Pratchett estate has given Jack Monroe, a writer in the UK, permission to use Vimes’ name for the Vimes Boots Index, a price index that will track the “insidiously creeping prices of the most basic versions of essential items at the supermarket.”
Monroe has been documenting the rising prices of basics for over a decade, and wrote in The Guardian about the launch of this new index. In a recent Twitter thread, she gave countless examples of the drastic price changes for staple foods:
Woke up this morning to the radio talking about the cost of living rising a further 5%. It infuriates me the index that they use for this calculation, which grossly underestimates the real cost of inflation as it happens to people with the least. Allow me to briefly explain.
Terry Pratchett’s daughter, Rhianna, told The Guardian: “Vimes’s musing on how expensive it is to be poor via the cost of boots was a razor-sharp evaluation of socio-economic unfairness. And one that’s all too pertinent today, where our most vulnerable so often bear the brunt of austerity measures and are cast adrift from protection and empathy. Whilst we don’t have Vimes any more, we do have Jack and Dad would be proud to see his work used in such a way.”
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Sometimes it’s better to light a flamethrower than curse the darkness. https://t.co/tx2DEXrshG
I love how well you've treated me, but I don't want you to ever do it out of fear. You don't have to read my mind. And I'll love you --and treat you well -- even if you guess wrong sometimes.
Encanto, the latest Disney animated feature about the magical Madrigal family, has been getting a lot of attention since it hit the Disney+ streaming platform. That attention is well-deserved—the movie is loving and vibrant, and features songs by Hamilton composer Lin-Manuel Miranda himself.
While all the songs are catchy numbers, one of them—“We Don’t Talk About Bruno”—has become so popular that it’s ousted Frozen’s “Let It Go” as the highest-charting song from a Disney animated movie in 26 years.
According to Entertainment Weekly, “We Don’t Talk About Bruno” (which you can listen to in the video above) reached No. 4 on the Billboard Hot 100 list this week, a milestone it achieved because people out there streamed it 29 million times (!) and purchased 8,000 downloads of the tune.
“Let It Go” from 2013’s Frozen was the Disney tune that previously held this honor, when it hit No.5 on the Billboard charts in April 2014. The only other Disney animated songs to make it into the top five are Aladdin’s “A Whole New World,” Elton John’s version of TheLion King’s “Can You Feel The Love Tonight” and Vanessa Williams’ rendition of Pocahontas’ “Colors of The Wind.”
“We Don’t Talk About Bruno” is a song about Bruno, the son of the matriarch of the Madrigal family who has already left under ignominious circumstances before the movie starts. Miranda composed the lyrics, and others on the song’s credits are Carolina Gaitán, Mauro Castillo, Adassa, Rhenzy Feliz, Diane Guerrero, Stephanie Beatriz, and the Encanto cast.
If you want to decide for yourself whether Bruno should be discussed, you can watch Encanto now on the Disney+ streaming platform.
An app that visitors to the 2022 Olympics Games in Beijing are obligated to download is also a cybersecurity nightmare that threatens to expose much of the data that it collects, according to a new report.
Wrote this up on Twitter just now; archiving here for posterity. Because this is a Twitter thread, please note that the very first graf below is referring to the screen cap of text below it.
So, I do have a take on how this movement functions, strictly as a practical matter, and involving the Hugos and other awards. I will share it with you in further tweets in this thread.
1. The modern corps of acquiring editors, in both NY publishing and in short fiction, has SIGNIFICANTLY more women and/or (out) LGBTQ+ folks, and more diversity generally. Stories they buy reflect their interests, and the sales numbers are good, so they keep at it.
2. When the Puppy nonsense happened, people committed to more diverse storytelling either entered or re-entered the Hugo voting pool to counteract the Puppy brigade. When they were routed, Puppies and their sympathizers flounced. Those interested in more diverse stories stayed.
3. Generally speaking, the stories over the last few years written by more diverse storytellers and selected by more diverse editors are *really fucking good*. The table stakes for award consideration are higher these days, and all writers have to step up to this new level…
… white dudes are not excluded from the Hugos or other awards (said the white dude who had a Hugo nod last year), and they win their share. But the operative phrase is “their share.” The field is wider now, and better, and the default to them has decreased significantly.
Sandifer is correct that this shift is as significant as any that has come before, and possibly more so, because previous movements were still largely about white dudes. But I would suggest it’s not only about the aesthetics of today’s SFF; it’s also the MECHANICS of the field…
… WHO is acquiring, WHO is voting and WHO is writing — and how it’s selling and making a mark in the larger culture. Diversity in each case has broadened the field, in what’s bought, what’s read and what wins awards. As a field we’re better for it. It starts with the editors.
Final note: Because the aspects of this new shift are as much about the state of the industry as they are about the aesthetics, I strongly suspect this is not so much (or merely) a “movement” as simply(!) the new normal in the field and the basis of further growth.
As a postscript, I wrote about some of this before in this essay here, and particularly point 4:
Those clouds look hardly ominous at all! Actually, what’s really ominous is that they have not budged for hours. They’re just lurking there to the south. We’ll see if they make a move when nightfalls. If you don’t hear from me tomorrow you’ll know why.
If you live in Windcrest, a city northeast of San Antonio, the days of getting pulled over by the cops for breaking certain traffic laws—shame on you, but no judgement here—are over. Police will just text you a warning or ticket. And hey, if you’re a good driver, they may even send you a thumbs up.
Panasonic has announced plans to offer a four-day workweek to employees in Japan in an effort to improve productivity and attract better workers, according to a new report from Nikkei Asia. The move comes after the Japanese government made official recommendations to private employers in 2021 that included a shorter…
I feel like I’ve lost my goddamn mind, but we’ll get back to that point soon. Let’s start with this. Two things seem to be true at this moment in the pandemic:
First, that our numbers are higher than they’ve ever been, in most cases not just by a hair’s breadth, but often by two, three, even four times their previous peaks.
Second, that we are doing less now to mitigate cases than ever before.
This happened alarmingly fast. Delta took a couple months to simmer here. Omicron, the dominant variant, boiled as soon as it hit the stove. It rolled over us in a matter of weeks, not months. Hey, we flattened the curve — just in the wrong fucking direction, as our leap in cases is now a billionaire’s rocketship, launching straight up and into orbit.
With this new variant came the assumption that it is a milder form of the disease, and from that single assumption arrived a number of decisions. The CDC changed all its policies in a sudden, confusing barf of protection reductions. (Though in fairness, Carl Bergstrom notes on a Twitter thread that, despite the piss-poor communication, there might be some value in these changes.) The CDC’s head, Rochelle Walensky, offered a (correctly) maligned soundbite, explaining that “the overwhelming number of deaths, over 75%, occurred in people who had at least 4 comorbidities. So really these are people who were unwell to begin with and yes, really encouraging news in the context of Omicron.” Never mind the fact that comorbidities such obesity, diabetes, depression are not uncommon, particularly as one enters middle-age (and never mind that were they uncommon, it is not actually encouraging to be told that you are unwell and will be the ones to bear the brunt of the disease that nobody is protecting you from). The Biden administration has relied on vaccines and mandates, but not fully — they refuse, even still, to make vaccines a requirement of domestic flights. And the current business mandate is being challenged in the Supreme Court, with a not-unreasonable chance for it to fail. There are supposed to be tests coming to us by mail, though I’m not sure when, and we’re not even sure how well the home tests detect Omicron, particularly in its early stages. There exists little clarity on what anybody is doing, which mostly means, nobody is doing anything.
From this, you can feel the lack of leadership and the loss of focus and good communication cascading out through the populace like a wave of surrender. Masks? Fuck ’em. Gone! Gone. I mean, to be clear, they were gone mostly when the CDC botched that communication early on, but here, now, I go out and I don’t see a mask on a face. Not from anybody. Not even as our cases are triple where they were in this county. Vaccine mandates? Temporarily gone, and probably full gone soon enough, with no seeming plans to introduce them. Testing? Quarantine? Isolation? Contact tracing? Can’t find tests, and the CDC has changed who should get them. Quarantine and isolation is already limited now, and for the most part here, parents and workers are subtly encouraged in schools and in jobs to just… casually not test at all because if you test, you might find it, and then your kids might not be in school (THE HORROR) and you might not get to come in to do your job (OH SHIT) and so maybe, y’know, I dunno, don’t go looking for COVID and you won’t find it. (This, a particularly Trumpy echo.) Contact tracing? Hahaha. Haha. Hahahhahgaaaaaaah yeah nobody is tracing shit anymore. It’s on you if you wanna do that. Good luck.
And from all this has cascaded a particular attitude, even among people who were once maybe careful, who are vaccinated and are not necessarily thoughtless people —
The attitude is, I give up.
It’s, “I don’t like this anymore, so I’m not going to do it.”
It’s, “Well, we’re all going to catch it anyway, gotta live my life.”
It’s, “I don’t want to hear anymore about how the bridge is out, I’m just going to accelerate the car and assume they’ll put the bridge back up before I get there, or at the very least, I’ll just jump the ravine in my Toyota Camry.”
They are bored with the pandemic.
They are tired of it.
They don’t want restrictions.
They don’t want to stop or even slow down.
And it has led to this peculiar, troubling moment —
Cases are worse than they’ve ever been.
And people are done caring.
If you ask them, they will say — to go back to the beginning of this — oh, I hear Omicron is mild. Is it? Is it mild? Maybe. It may be milder. I know a lot of people who have COVID — more now than cumulatively throughout the entire pandemic — and they’re all vaxxed and boosted and experiencing a relatively mild sickness. Of course, when you realize that before now, there was Delta, and vaxxed/boosted people did not catch Delta easily, it starts to feel like it’s weird to call Omicron — which is kicking down the doors of your body’s protections — milder. Is it mild? It’s mild in that it doesn’t seem to lead to as much hospitalization and death, though that’s not the only metric by which we live. A lot of the people I know who have or had Omicron experienced a rough ride, even if it didn’t include an ambulance ride. Hospitalizations have not yet made the epic leap with the case rates, though hospitalizations are usually a couple-few weeks behind, and deaths behind that. And even still, hospitalizations are boiling over (yes, even with kids) and our healthcare system is wobbling toward collapse, and none of this even seems to consider the unknown potential of Omicron to lead to Long COVID, which would be a mass disabling event that would create some of those pesky comorbidities the CDC is so eager to dismiss. Does COVID significantly increase the chance of developing Type 1 or Type 2 diabetes in children? Seems like it does.
If you’re starting to feel like, “Hey, maybe this doesn’t sound good,” check this out:
Let’s go to Buzzfeed, where they asked experts to clarify some of the questions about kids and COVID. (Please, no jokes here about Buzzfeed — they have a pretty robust journalistic wing, and have at times done some fantastic reporting.) In this article, you will find first this:
‘“You don’t want colds passed around schools either, right?” Rutherford said. “But on the other hand, one of the reasons we have preschools is so parents can go work. That’s a benefit of it. And if you send them home every time they sneeze, you’re going to have a lot of unhappy parents.”’ Rutherford said it makes sense for schools to continue to follow whatever pre-COVID sickness policies they had in place, with an added layer of COVID testing for children with more severe upper respiratory symptoms. But he said this testing should be rapid, not PCR, which usually takes multiple days to deliver results.
Because, ha ha, yeah, exactly, you can’t be too STRICT with this shit, right? But then:
‘About 20% to 40% of teens who get infected may develop long COVID, said Blumberg. “In younger children, it’s less, but we don’t have good numbers on that.”’
Wait, wait, what? Fucking what now? Twenty to forty percent? Uh, first, that’s a huge unknown gap between those two numbers, but even on the low end, that’s one out of five teenagers.
But we’re just like, nah, fuck it? Ha ha, eat shit, teenagers!
Now, I want you to go check out the CHOP guidance for the new year — Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, a generally reputable source on all things children-health-related, yeah? They begin their piece by noting how COVID has pushed the healthcare system to its limits and how dangerous it is, yadda yadda yadda, but then they land on their actual guidance, which begins with:
‘With evidence that COVID-19 is becoming a milder infection in most children, and at a time when all adults and youth in K-12 settings have been offered vaccination, our PolicyLab experts and CHOP clinical leadership have reached a consensus that preserving as much in-person schooling as possible outweighs the risks of infection to children and school staff at this stage of the pandemic.‘
To translate: keeping kids out of school for any period is a sickness greater than COVID.
And here, again, is where I reiterate:
I feel like I’m losing my mind.
Am I losing my mind? Are you?
I sure feel that way.
I feel like someone just told me 2 + 2 now equals 22, and a lot of people seem to agree with that, even though we all know math doesn’t work that fucking way.
I feel like I’m seeing and hearing how bad the pandemic is presently, how the systems are straining, how teachers and healthcare workers are quitting in droves and are pushed to their limits, how friends and family are seeing workplaces and schools hamstrung by all this shit, and then, at the same time… I’m seeing nobody do anything about it. Like, not a fucking thing. In fact, less is being done.
We acknowledge, oh yeah it’s not good, and then we just keep doing what we were doing. No slow down. Only acceleration. We will violently shoulder our way through this pandemic, because we are so done with it, even as it is clearly, clearly not done with us. Schools are open because jobs are open because the economy must be fed. And people defend it. Like they’re people who know they’re in the Matrix and they defend it. Everybody’s Cipher from the first movie, YEAH I LIKE THE TASTE OF THE STEAK, FUCK YOU. Long Covid? Ennh, fuck it. Masks? Fuck it. Restrictions, lockdowns, any mitigation efforts? Fuckity fuck it all. We give up. Game over. Get COVID. Who cares. ISN’T IT TIME WE ALL GET IT, says Agent Smith as he coughs into your mouth.
It feels like gaslighting not from a single-source, but in a miasma that surrounds you. It’s area-of-effect gaslighting. You feel like you wanna say, “Hey things seem really bad right now, maybe we should give things a pause,” and then you get a look like, WOW LOOK AT MISTER LOVES-THE-PANDEMIC OVER HERE, CHECK OUT THE PLAGUE FETISHIST, THE MASK-HUMPER, THE GUY WHO REALLY LOVES HURTING CHILDREN BY SUGGESTING THEY NOT GO TO A SCHOOL WHERE HALF THEIR PEERS ARE OUT, HALF THE TEACHERS ARE OUT, BUT THAT’S FINE IT’LL MAKE THEM TOUGH. It’s like we’re trying to John Wayne our way through a global pandemic, like we can bootstrap it. I mean, sure, kids are barely vaccinated. But jobs! Jobs. Jobs jobs jobs. Gotta churn that crank. Gotta turn out the widgets, and you can’t churn widgets unless your kids are in school. Feed the beast!
(Here I recognize that yes, some kids do need to be in school, not just for education and social development, but also for food. But it’s also worth recognizing that these are systemic failures, in part, and punishing them by forcing them through a boiling pandemic comes with its own obvious deleterious consequences.)
It’s like we’re done with the finding out part and want to get back to the fucking around part, even though it’s not usually supposed to go in that order.
We just… deflated.
I don’t have any great conclusion here. I only write this because I want it written somewhere that I feel like I’m losing my mind. And maybe I am. Maybe I’m the wrong one.
It’s just — what the fuck.
I am blown away. Once we celebrated our healthcare workers and teachers, once we at least tried to band together and flatten the curve (if in our limited way), but now we’re like, nah, fuck it. Nah. Just nah. I mean, sure, other countries are addressing the problem. Sure, if we had just cooled our heels for two, maybe three weeks, we could’ve taken this sharp rise and spiked that volleyball back to the ground. But this is America. We do everything bigger and better. We’ll make this the biggest spike the world has ever seen. We’ll never let it go. We learned to stop worrying and love the COVID.
Mission Accomplished. That’s the banner COVID is hanging right now.
It won.
And we are good with that.
And now imagine:
Just wait till climate change really gets going. Every day is already a new story about how FIRE AND SNOW HAD A BABY AND A NEW ATMOSPHERIC RIVER IS DROPPING A BOMB CYCLONE OF HUMID HELL WASPS ON BOTH COASTS, and already we’re like, ennnh but fuck it. But I’m sure it’ll be fine. We’ll develop renewed patience just in time, I’m sure. Any time now. Any. Time.
(As a PS, I apologize if this feels like a bummer. But I honestly feel pretty anxious not just about the pandemic, but also about our sudden acquiescence to it, and I really wanted to talk about it somewhere that wasn’t just Twitter. It required unpacking and so here I am, unpacking. I will get back to fun writing advicey stuff soon. Buy my books or I die. Bye.)
Season two of Star Trek series Picard is set to arrive on Paramount+ next month, but the show’s still in production, keeping to a schedule structured to film seasons two and three back to back. Or it was in production until this week, when the sci-fi show temporarily ground to a halt for exactly the reason you’re…
Did you know Kristofer Hivju, AKA Game of Thrones’ Tormund Giantsbane, is in season two of The Witcher? This might be news to you even if you’ve watched the entire season (here’s your warning for very mild spoilers for the latest episodes of The Witcher), as Hivju had some serious prosthetics he donned for the show.
Hivju played Geralt’s old friend Nivellen, a magical man who was cursed to look like a boar and/or a bear. The transformation is so complete, however, that it’s easy to not realize Hivju and Nivellen are one in the same.
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I, for one, had no idea that was Hivju under all those prosthetics until I stumbled upon the video above, which goes into detail how the show’s visual effects team created Nivellen, who Hivju describes as “a kind, funny, secretive kind of guy.” (Spoiler—he’s a horrible guy as well.)
About halfway through, you see Hivju getting rigged up in prosthetics, which includes a full bodysuit made off a mold of Hivju’s actual body. The actor’s performance, however, went beyond the Nivellen suit—Hivju worked with a movement coach to try to incorporate how a bear and/or boar moves into his performance (though how a bear and/or boar would be able to throw a knife is a bit beyond me).
And while Hivju had a full prosthetic bodysuit, the show did use CGI for his face. “I didn’t manage to make my face look like a boar,” he says. “I tried, though.” Hivju did wear what looked like the mask from a football helmet on set, which held a camera that captured his facial expressions for the CGI team.
Another Witcher actor who had to don a major monster costume was Basil Eidenbenz, who played the Witcher Eskel. Eskel eventually turns into a tree creature called a leshy, and had to undergo his own time in the makeup chair to get the look right. Check out that process below, which he posted to his Instagram.
Anti-vaccine activists have spent the past few days spreading lies about Betty White, the beloved actress who passed away at 99 years old on Dec. 31. But contrary to internet rumors, Betty White didn’t die after getting a covid-19 booster shot.
In the UK I grew up in there were only three ice cream flavours - vanilla, chocolate and pink. For sophisticates, there was something called Neopolitan which was vanilla, chocolate AND pink. In squares.
Baskin and Robbins turned up when I was about 17. Terry and I liked the idea that Adam’s world was always behind the times, because of Adam, so even if it was 1989, his world was mostly 1950-1975.
I’ve just had to refresh my US Visa because I’ve been out of the US for so long. I wonder if people out there know how many vaccinations you need to be allowed to enter the US to live…
