Friday Ephemera

WTP: Yes, that is indeed where I got the link from. I should have given credit.
The “complexity kills” theme is one that has long worried me: “How much will it cost to implement that cool idea? And to maintain it? How much will it cost to re-engineer it as the components and tools it is built upon evolve? Can it be maintained by ordinary software programmers? Will we actually document it enough to allow new employees to understand it? And so on.”

Begs for a Camelot parody
Heh. Indeed.
When people tell me “We don’t have time to document this” or “Why bother documenting when documentation never keeps up with the changes anyway?” I reply “Compare the cost of documenting today to the cost of research plus documenting five years from now when the original team is gone” and “Even very good programmers can have trouble figuring out what they did a year ago, so maybe you’d better only write code that can be maintained by very average programmers.”
Everybody loves to do something new and shiny, but nobody wants to do maintenance, or even think about maintenance. Hence the deteriorating infrastructure in New York and Chicago.

Another how-to-not-win-friends:
Old: We waz kangs.
New: Blacks are the real native Asian people.
All together now: Self-destructive, psychotic delusion.

Yet another example of Little Britain getting it 100% right. Bitty.
P.s. the BBC would probably prefer to forget about this article they actually wrote themselves about certain characters:-
Whether it be taking afternoon tea together, or visiting the ballet, Emily and Florence are just two ladies going about their ladylike business, like any other normal ladies.
True, Emily used to play left back for QPR, and Florence has a moustache, but make no mistake, these are real ladies, and definitely not a couple of rubbish transvestites. Merci beaucoup!<\i>

[ Salutes Capt Nemo ]

Catholic university discovers a new original sin.

Snatches back Daniel’s free napkin, hands it to Nemo.
I have no wish to seem ungrateful, but could I please, perhaps, have a fresh one?

Biden’s Brezhnev vibes. I’d been thinking about a Brezhnev parallel for some time now. But never mind Biden’s senility; what does it tell us about the corruption of a ruling class that would promote him for president? Not just corruption, but madness.

This is an I Can’t Breathe which will not appear on t-shirts and posters. There will be no protests.

The AMA forcing doctors to utter pious leftitutes instead of clear english is pretty clever. If the truth is that more blacks lose limbs due to diabetes that is not controlled, it is so much less informative to blame it on oppression than on not following doctor’s orders. And how is it exactly that white racists force black people to ignore self-care? It boggles the mind.

It’s really not the ruling class that worries me. It’s those, most of whom are (or once were) close personal friends…
You have a very good point, although I sometimes remind myself that most of these people were “educated” into their evil ideas by our ruling class.
…still support/endorse/see nothing wrong with BLM, George Floyd, etc…
Indeed. If I had more ambition I would write an essay titled The Libertarian Case for Totalitarian Leftist Tyranny, but why bother? There are enough non-satiric examples out there. Good Lord, I even knew a libertarian who could not bring himself to condemn a man who gave material (material!) support to European Antifa types.

“But this is a food desert!”
“The Safeway closed because of all the thefts and vandalism and armed robberies. And then that checkout clerk was shot to death.”
“Fuck you, whitey!”
“There are a few small grocery stores here where the Mexicans and Arabs shop. Owned by Mexican and Arab immigrants, too. Lots of healthy fruits and vegetables. At low prices. How come you don’t shop there? Instead of going to KFC and Burger King? For the price of a Happy Meal you can get a huge bag of rice.”
“They’s racist, fucker!”
“No, they just don’t like being robbed.”
“We’ve gotta right to rob them!”
“Welcome to the Hell that you made for yourself.”

Yes of course: the AMA TRYING to get doctors to use wokespeak.
My point about losing limbs to diabetes was exactly that: whites have no control over black people taking their meds or not. It is absurd to blame such outcomes on “oppression”.

Nicolas Ceausescu and the Crowed Band name
Sorry but I saw it, had to say it

[Rebecca Eckler]’s a very real person
[eyes Steve E suspiciously] Have you ever written for the National Post?
the millennial and Gen Z nebbishes put the final touches on […] Windows 11…
The thing I find most annoying about the quadrennial Bitching About The New Windows (which has happened for all of them, including the ones now considered The Best Windows Evar) is that they’re never about anything substantial. It’s always just bitching about the desktop shell, and while the usability of the default shell is certainly a factor, it’s also the easiest part of the OS to swap out for something else.
Everybody loves to do something new and shiny, but nobody wants to do maintenance, or even think about maintenance.
Much of the problem is that the industry is filled with amateur autodidacts who work short-term contracts. They’re deep in the Dunning-Kruger effect, and never stick around long enough to have to maintain their own code, much less anyone else’s, and so they never learn from their mistakes. When Agile first reared its ugly head I took one look at it in horror and said “this is just bullshit by lazy developers who don’t want to do any of the boring quality work and have turned their laziness into a ‘project management methodology'”.
The difference between then and now is that people recognised low-budget schlock for what it was
My experience has been that fans of 1970s-1980s SF TV and movies are quite likely to view their obsessions as Great Literature full of Immortal Truths and Brilliant Writing. For every Darmok on the Ocean or In the Pale Moonlight there were literally hundreds of Spock’s Brains or every episode of Voyager.
sci-fi and fantasy adventures shy away from PG or even soft-R ratings, because it’s the relatively older savages movie marketers are targeting. This was already the case in the day of Wrath and G’Busters, and has only gotten worse.
I…what? Wrath of Khan and Ghostbusters were both rated PG on release, and Disney has been quite upfront that every blockbuster they make is rated PG-13 to maximize the gross because they know the lion’s share of the box office comes from children. I have no idea what point you’re trying to make.
Just off the top of my head, Robocop (1987), the first three Terminator movies, the first three Alien movies, Total Recall, They Live, Starship Troopers, Predator, Blade Runner were all rated R.

Planned spin-off series include The Very Secret Diaries, Elf Lust, Goblin Girl, and There’s Something About Dwarves.

“Low-brow but intelligent, hmm, that might be part of the problem.”
No, that’s what the complaint is. Mass-market movies which didn’t aim to be all high-falutin’ and arthouse used to at least treat their audiences as grown adults. Grown adults looking for a couple of hours of silly, innocent entertainment, but adults nonetheless. There is no contradiction here.
“But the movies exist although they’re hard to hear about in the roar of mediaclutter.”
Again, that’s precisely the complaint.

I haven’t listened to Critical Drinker or the other ‘casters and ‘tubers, because something tells me odds are they natter on, and I don’t want that in my ear. A written essay you can skim; of recent years I haven’t found one worth more than quick skimming and soon forgetting. Hope springs, however, and one of these times will blossom.
This. For the most part. I did find that Critical Drinker piece to be worthwhile. Yet amusing that the examples were from low-brow ST and not, say, Places in the Heart or some such touchy-feely low/middlebrow. And yes for obvious reasons but still. To me the problem is very real and I lay it at the feet of how hyper-hyper-PC Hollywood has become. Just look at the characters in a movie, their age, sex, ethnicity, etc. and you (or at least I) can tell where the plot is going, who’s the real good guy, who’s the real bad guy, what the “moral” or lesson will be. Of course this didn’t happen overnight and is not a 21st century phenomenon. I see it in many movies of the early 70’s, slowly getting thicker and thicker. Sure, you can pick up such leanings in movies going back especially to the FDR era but there was pushback then so they knew they could only go so far. And even back then they were (overtly) pro-American or pro-Western civilization. This “Oh, this is how it’s always been” excuse making is BS. The slow, and recently not so slow, turning up the boil on the frog..

pst is right about global markets. This is why the Fast and Furious and Star wars films do so well overseas–not that much dialog, simple plot, lots of action.
There are in fact many award winning japanese movies that are very hard for western audiences to relate to. (dir kurosawa only one I canthink of if even that is right).

Embrace the power of “and”, as they say over at Instapundit, pst314. I think the world has become more like America (otherwise they wouldn’t care about your movies at all) but, simultaneously, America has become more like the rest of the world. They’ve both shifted towards a point somewhere in the middle. And since there’s more rest-of-the-world than there is America, that point is, sadly, closer to them than it is to you.
That’s the trouble with not being an imperial power. When Britain ran half the world, we could say, “You can have the benefits of our culture, but if you continue to burn women alive on their husbands’ funeral pyres, we’ll hang you”. Granted, we didn’t get a hell of a lot of gratitude in return, but it beats, “Here’s the latest Superguy movie and PhoneOS. We didn’t see anything. Can we have some TVs that were totally not built by slave labour because that would be bad?”

PING! Here’s something to maybe make you feel a bit better.