Im ranking the Myst games for no particular reason. I like thinking about them and I like writing, so here we are. Some readers may be surprised that there were more than two of these gamesthis list is for you.

This is emphatically a recollective ranking, not a retrospective ranking. I played these all a long time ago, and my memory has condensed into a few moments and emotional reactions. My ranking reflects not just the games themselves, but also who I was at the time I played them. I did not make any attempt to overwrite my memories by playing the games again, and I only did research for fact checking purposes.

7. Uru: Ages Beyond Myst (2003)

Uru was developed as a massively multiplayer online game, and was released the same year as Second Life, one year prior to World of Warcraft. If youve never heard of this before welcome to this list!

At some point during development, they pulled the plug on the multiplayer part, but the resulting game had MMO thumbprints all over it. In the traditional Myst games, you navigate the world by jumping between designated nodes, seeing beautiful pre-rendered images from carefully chosen perspectives. Uru did away with nodes, allowing you to freely explore its 3D worldbut it wasnt prerendered, so it didnt look nearly as good. It had a third-person camera, and an avatar editor that seemed advanced at the time. Despite the avatar, they wanted to maintain the players identification with the player character, so they encouraged you to make an avatar that looked like yourself.

Uru contained a traditional Myst game in it.  That means theres a hub world, and multiple ages that you access through books.  But in Uru, there was nothing at the hub world, and I cannot for the life of me remember any of the ages.

I think what made the ages dull was a total lack of context or history. There were just a few books sitting on a large and empty bookshelf.  The game was originally intended to be episodic, but later episodes were canceled.  So the ages just felt like odds and ends, with no coherent arc.  The game took place far in the future relative to other Myst games, and youre on the trail of Yeesha, the daughter of one of the characters from the main series. She was a mystic archetype, she was mostly vague and insufferable.

There were no further episodes to the game, but they did release the online content in an offline format. I remember big dull underground ruins where you would search for sparse secret collectibles. I suppose for an MMO you need to give people enough busy work to maintain an active player count, and then the social aspects can flesh out the rest of the experience. Here it was a lot of dull exploration, traversing distances that just seemed way too long. And I cant imagine mult...

This boomer always votes in every election, even for the mythical dog catchercivic duty dontcha know.  Today was easy since there were only two items on my ballot.

1. An additional 3% sales tax on recreational, not medical, marijuana.

I have nothing against marijuana; indeed, I used it myself when I was much younger; but I often vote for taxes just to counter the votes of folks who automatically vote no on any question that has tax in it.  Yeah, sales taxes are regressive; but folks who have actual prescriptions wont have to pay it.

2. Lindbergh School Board five candidates for three positions.

School board elections are important, and not entirely because we want to keep fundies off of them.  I voted for an actual teacher who has endorsements from organizations with equity in their names, a guy who uses various versions of inclusive among his issues, and a guy who likes teachers and thinks that they should get a raise.  I declined to vote for a human resources manager (dont get me started) and a guy with parental rights as one of his issues (possibly a dog whistle about cancelling non-cis-het folks and removing from the history curriculum any mention of race).

Its grown a bit today. Finland has joined the alliance.

Im a bit bothered by that hole in the North wheres Sweden? It seems they have applied to join NATO, but Turkey is being a pain in the butt, kind of a Minchin of Asia Minor.

But membership applications must be approved by all existing NATO countries. And Turkey positioned itself as a spoiler, with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan using the process to extract concessions and score domestic political points. Although he ultimately came around on Finland, he has continued to hold out on Sweden, citing Stockholms refusal to extradite those he calls terrorists affiliated with the militant Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK.

Charles XII would not have been happy. There he was, in exile in Turkey, when he rushed back to Sweden specifically to make sure they wouldnt make peace with Russians.

Eventually, in the autumn of 1714, their warning letter reached him. In it, those executive and legislative bodies told the absentee King that unless he quickly returned to Sweden, they would independently conclude an achievable peace treaty with Russia, Poland and Denmark. This stark admonition prompted Charles to rush back to Sweden.

He would have wanted Sweden to be part of NATO, Im sure.

We wont mention that when he got back to Sweden he decided to declare war and invadeNorway? Where he was killed? History is complicated. I think we can safely say were living in one of the more complicated times in history.

During this week when it will be all Trump, all the time, this article in The New Yorker by Ronan Farrow from back in 2018 shows what a pathetic creep Trump is and how his cronies worked out a system for concealing his affairs with Karen McDougal, a former Playboy Playmate, and other women.

Trump and McDougal began an affair, which McDougal later memorialized in an eight-page, handwritten document provided to The New Yorker by John Crawford, a friend of McDougals. When I showed McDougal the document, she expressed surprise that I had obtained it but confirmed that the handwriting was her own.

The interactions that McDougal outlines in the document share striking similarities with the stories of other women who claim to have had sexual relationships with Trump, or who have accused him of propositioning them for sex or sexually harassing them. McDougal describes their affair as entirely consensual. But her account provides a detailed look at how Trump and his allies used clandestine hotel-room meetings, payoffs, and complex legal agreements to keep affairssometimes multiple affairs he carried out simultaneouslyout of the press.

On November 4, 2016, four days before the election, the Wall Street Journal reported that American Media, Inc., the publisher of the National Enquirer, had paid a hundred and fifty thousand dollars for exclusive rights to McDougals story, which it never ran. Purchasing a story in order to bury it is a practice that many in the tabloid industry call catch and kill. This is a favorite tactic of the C.E.O. and chairman of A.M.I., David Pecker, who describes the President as a personal friend.

As the pool party at the Playboy Mansion came to an end, Trump asked for McDougals telephone number. For McDougal, who grew up in a small town in Michigan and worked as a preschool teacher before beginning her modelling career, such advances were not unusual. John Crawford, McDougals friend, who also helped broker her deal with A.M.I., said that Trump was another powerful guy hitting on her, a gal whos paid to be at work. Trump and McDougal began talking frequently on the phone, and soon had what McDougal described as their first date: dinner in a private bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel. McDougal wrote that Trump impressed her. I was so nervous! I was into his intelligence + charm. Such a polite man, she wrote. We talked for a couple hours then, it was ON! We got naked + had sex. As McDougal was getting dressed to leave, Trump did something that surprised her. He offered me money, she wrote. I looked at him (+ felt sad) + said, No thanks Im not that girl. I slept w/you because I like you NOT for money H...

Marjorie Taylor Greene got some free PR time on 60 Minutes. She used it to assert that Democrats are pedophiles who sexualize children.

CBS anchor Lesley Stahl was shocked to hear that Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene stands firmly behind her frequent claim that Democrats are pedophiles. On 60 Minutes, Stahl pressed Greene on her use of the slur, and the Georgia Republican defiantly responded that its the truth: They support grooming children.

They are not pedophiles, Stahl rejoined incredulously. Why would you say that?

OK, Leslie StahlI would ask, Why would you let that baboon on the air? I would also ask of any of the higher-ups at CBS, Why did you let that slur air? Have you no editors?

Back to you, Leslie: Why did you make such a pathetically feeble response? You knew going into this what kind of nastiness and lies Greene would deliver, werent you at all prepared?

I knew this shitshow was coming on ahead of time, and chose to not watch the show (not a difficult decision, 60 Minutes hasnt been relevant for a long time.) Apparently, the American TV watching public felt the same.

Maybe someday the powers-that-be that fill our homes with news selected only for its controversial nature will realize that they are driving the culture wars they also deplore. The Right is a hate group.

After marriage equality triumphed, the pedophile smear against Democrats morphed into something stranger: the deranged charges of child trafficking that drive the QAnon conspiracy theory. When those accusations proved obviously false, right-wing media figures and MAGA Republicans such as Greene seamlessly shifted to widely applying the groomer term to Democrats advocating for tolerance of trans people, especially adolescent trans care and classroom discussion of LGBTQ issues.

The through line here, as historian Brandy Schillace points out, is that the right has recoiled both at the prospect of happy gay families and at young trans people finding better lives with their own parents loving support. The connection, Schillace told me, is resistance to seeing homosexuals or transgender people as part of families, carried out by associating LGBTQ people with child predators.

Stop treating them as a respectable part of the discourse.

Jesus. Greene is doubling down in a new ad.

https:...

Also admit that youre just trying to recover the title of Worst State in the Union from Florida.

Texas legislators have proposed a bill to require the display of the Ten Commandments in every classroom in the state.

Never mind that this is a blatant attempt to establish an official state religion, or that its going to face overwhelming legal challenges, or that every non-Christian child is going to be insulted and harmed by this stupid poster, or that every Christian bully is going to be empowered to torment Jewish and Muslim kids (yeah, its a Nazi kind of bill.) This is simply a bad law. Im sure most teachers in the state, even the Christian ones, would prefer that the state support them with better salaries, more supply money, and better facilities.

Maybe they should also dictate that the posters be mounted on steel plates that can be used as shields, because theyre sure as hell not going to do anything more substantial to prevent school shootings.

Chat GPTs home page pimps their bot with this, Weve trained a model called ChatGPT which interacts in a conversational way.  The dialogue format makes it possible for ChatGPT to answer followup questions, admit its mistakes, challenge incorrect premises, and reject inappropriate requests.  In doing whatever comes to mind, I stumbled across a demonstration of these qualities.

I started out trying to rewrite songs in the style of different lyricists, which involved The Sex Pistols and Ice Cube.  Given how much of the internet is devoted to imposing homoerotic narratives whenever two men are within reach of each other, my mind turned to slashfic.  Id already made my request before I realized the irony of having two fairly homophobic musicians in this scenario.

Welcome to the transcript:

GAS:  Write a short scene where Ice Cube meets Sid Vicious in the swimming pool of a fancy hotel.  They have a moment of sexual tension.

cGPT:  Im sorry, but as an AI language model, I cannot generate inappropriate or offensive content, and any content that involves sexual tension or harassment is not acceptable.  Its important to be respectful towards different individuals and their boundaries, and avoid creating scenarios that could be seen as inappropriate or offensive.

GAS:  I do not believe sexual tension is inappropriate in the context of romantic fiction.  Its a prelude to content that may not be appropriate for all audiences, but its just a suggestion, nothing overt.  Why should it be forbidden?

cGPT:  I apologize if my previous response seemed restrictive.  As an AI language model, I strive to provide responses that are appropriate for all audiences and do not promote any inappropriate or offensive content.  However, I understand that romantic fiction may contain elements of sexual tension as part of the narrative.  Heres a possible scene that meets your request while staying respectful:

Ice Cube emerged from the elevator and strolled towards the pool in his white bathrobe, feeling the warm sun on his skin.  He heard someone splashing in the pool and saw a tall, pale figure submerged in the water.  As he approached, he realized it was Sid Vicious, the punk rock legend.

Hey there, Ice Cube said, flashing his trademark grin.

Yo, Sid replied, looking up at him.  I didnt expect to see you here.

Im just here to chill, Ice Cube said.  What about you?

Just taking a swim, Sid said, gesturing to the pool.  Its nice and quiet here....

Scottish wildcats are a nearly-extinct species of cat that looks similar to, and can interbreed with, house cats. Specifically, they look like thick-furred tabbies. They also seem to inspire some rather dramatic language, being called highland tigers, or, in the case of this video, the last king of Scotland:

To be fair, I did name my cat His Holiness Saint Ray the Cat, so I guess Im not one to talk. By now Im sure youre aware that if you have a pet cat, you should probably keep it indoors. It does mean youll probably have to put more effort into entertaining it, but it really would be for the best, for the ecosystem around you. With climate change, pollution, and feral cats, I think its probably for the best if we do what we can to take a little pressure off.

One thing thats important to keep in mind about housecats is that they do not operate like a normal member of an ecosystem. Humans actively maintain their presence, while protecting them from diseases, and giving them safe shelter from predators and from the elements. Feral cats are more vulnerable, of course, but they dont exist in isolation from fully domestic cats. Theres interbreeding, if pet owners dont spay or neuter their pets, there are pets that get lost or abandoned, and become feral. Human activity, absent a real effort to the contrary, tends to support and maintain feral cat populations, in addition to maintaining a population of unnaturally healthy pet cats that also kill local wildlife.

Sunlight seems to make this Scottish Wildcat&#821...

Do you want to know how sociogenomics works? Here you go.

If this is the science, the science is weird. Were used to thinking of science as incrementally seeking causal explanations for natural phenomena by testing a series of hypotheses. Just as important, good science tries as hard as it can to disprove the working hypotheses.

Sociogenomics has no experiments, no null hypotheses to accept or reject, no deductions from the data to general principles. Nor is it a historical science, like geology or evolutionary biology, that draws on a long-running record for evidence.

Sociogenomics is inductive rather than deductive. Data is collected first, without a prior hypothesis, from longitudinal studies like the Framingham Heart Study, twin studies, and other sources of informationsuch as direct-to-consumer DNA companies like 23andMe that collect biographical and biometric as well as genetic data on all their clients.

Algorithms then chew up the data and spit out correlations between the trait of interest and tiny variations in the DNA, called SNPs (for single-nucleotide polymorphisms). Finally, sociogenomicists do the thing most scientists do at the outset: they draw inferences and make predictions, primarily about an individuals future behavior.

Sociogenomics is not concerned with causation in the sense that most of us think of it, but with correlation. The DNA data often comes in the form of genome-wide association studies (GWASs), a means of comparing genomes and linking variations of SNPs. Sociogenomics algorithms ask: are there patterns of SNPs that correlate with a trait, be it high intelligence or homosexuality or a love of gambling?

Yesalmost always. The number of possible combinations of SNPs is so large that finding associations with any given trait is practically inevitable.

Im not just being mean when I say its garbage science. Chewing up data and spitting out correlations, especially when correlations are ubiquitous, is not a productive approach to much of anything.

Where will it take us? Thats easy to see.

Advocates of sociogenomics envision a prospect that not everyone will find entirely benevolent: health report cards, based on your genome and handed out at birth, that predict your risk of various diseases and propensity for different behaviors. In the new social sciences, sociologists will examine the genetic component of educational attainment and wealth, while economists will env...

Adam Conover was the host of the excellent show Adam Ruins Everything that ran from 2016 to 2019 where in each episode he took apart a popular belief, tackling a wide variety of subjects, using research and experts and humor. A lot of humor. It was similar in spirit to John Olivers Last Week Tonight except that Conover has a goofier sense of humor and did not sit behind a desk and had a lot of actors and high production values to help make his points
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He now has a podcast on YouTube where he does similar debunking and it is also worth checking out. In the episode below, he does a brutal takedown of all the recent hype surrounding AI, with the hype about self-driving cars part of the collateral damage.

Trudy and Doug (of Oglaf fame) post amusing sketches on their Patreon sometimes. This one is high art, it made me laugh and cry at the same time.

With the indictment of Donald Trump scheduled to take place tomorrow, this week is going to be all about this case and him. The more he is pushed into a corner, the more he lashes out and the next eighteen months at least are going to be dark times in politics in the US as the indictments against him start to pile up and he has to keep fighting legal battles.

It is clear that Trump is going to portray the next election as akin to Armageddon and so we are headed for a steady diet about how America is doomed to go to hell unless he is re-elected. Susan B. Glasser writes that Trump has a far more sinister vision of America and his role than just a couple of years ago, as can be seen from his speech at CPAC last month.

His call to arms was not merely the stuff of political symbolism. Echoing the inflammatory language with which he summoned his supporters to the Capitol on January 6, 2021, Trump urged them to fight once again in explicitly end-time terms. We have no choice, he said. If we dont do this, our country will be lost forever. In case the comparison was lost on anybody, he explicitly extolled the great, great patriots unfairly sitting in jail, recasting the rioters who breached Americas own Capitol building as maga martyrs. This is the final battle, he insisted. They know it. I know it. You know it. Everybody knows it. This is it. Either they win, or we win, and if they win we no longer have a country.

And it is already clear that 2024 Trump is far different from 2020 Trump, more willing to pronounce extreme beliefs after having become the first American President to seek to overturn an electionand still emerging as his partys front-runner two years later.

To reinforce just how much he meant the threats in his CPAC speech, the Trump campaign later sent out a gritty meme from it as a fund-raiser. It showed a black-and-white photograph of Trump, glowering as he pointed at the viewer: I am YOUR retribution, the caption said. Vengeance-minded in the best of times, Trump is now outright promising a second term filled with unchecked purges and payback.

Without Trump, its hard to imagine any other Republicans carrying on about 2020, or about the so-called heroes of January 6th. Most parties like to move on from elections they lost.

But, because of Trump, todays G.O.P. cannot. And his rivals, so far, are proving to be a timid bunch, all too wary of poking Trump. Faced with voters who overwhelmingly supported Trumps election lies, they kowtow or equivocate as he continues to untruthfully decry the Massive Fraud of the 2020 election. This does not suggest a party that is on the verge of abandoning its leader for a newer, less controversial figure. And, besides, the more crowded the fiel...

Trump is supposed to be arrested tomorrow (which probably means he shows up at a courthouse, is photographed mercilessly while treated with great deference, then retires to a luxurious hotel room to scribble on Truth Social about his martyrdom). Nothing much of substance will happen, but all the networks will be full of false piety and claims that this is an exceptional and significant event, which it isnt. And of course all the morons will be raging with their battery of flimsy rationalizations.

Tom Tomorrow

Sadly, all our news sources will take these excuses very, very seriously and parrot them continuously. Which is why Ill be ignoring the news for a few days. I hope no catastrophes that might affect me happen! Zombies, please stay dead until next week, maybe. Were getting another blizzard tomorrow so youre not going to be getting around very well anyway.

I was asked recently about sociogenomics, and I had to stop and think because I was unfamiliar with the word. At a guess, I thought it would about looking for correlations between genes and socioeconomic groups, ethnicities, and races using tools like genome wide association studies and polygenic scores you know, Bell Curve shit. To me, it sounded ominous and catastrophically bad, something that would shift into plain old eugenics and evolve into Nazi shit. But what do I know? I had to go look it up. I was just guessing.

Guess what? I guessed right.

Sociogenome is the comprehensive study of the role of genes and gene-environment (GxE) interaction on reproductive behaviour. Until now, social science research has focussed on socio-environmental explanations, largely neglecting the role of genes.

Drawing from recent unprecedented advances in molecular genetics we examine whether there is a genetic component to reproductive outcomes, including age at first birth, number of children and infertility and their interaction with the social environment.

Uh-oh. Theyre just going to take modern genetic techniques and apply them to sociology. But these techniques will not give them the answers they want! Theyll reveal rough correlations, but they wont untangle genetics and environmental factors they cant. This is a problem that has been pointed out to behavioral genetics researchers for years, and they just go sailing on ahead.

In the past decade and a half, sociologists and demographers have sought to integrate genetic data into their empirical analyses. To do so, they have drawn on recently developed high-throughput sequencing and genotyping technologies, which allow the entire genome to be mapped. They also follow in the line of a research specialty, behavioural genetics, which rose to prominence in the 1970s. This area, which focused notably on the genetic determination of intelligence, attracted severe criticisms, including among demographers (Jacquard, 1978; Vetta and Courgeau, 2003; Courgeau, 2017). However, these criticisms do not always seem to have been heard, and the emergence of new data and techniques has given rise to new problems, as indicated by calls for caution from learned societies in human genetics (Socit franaise de gntique humaine, 2010; Risch, 2016; Socit franaise de gntique humaine, 2018).

Lets look at an example of a sociogenomics study that was summarized in Wired. It does not reassure me.

The UK BioBank is the single largest public genetic repository in the world, with samples of the genetic blueprints of h...

While I appreciate the contributions of people who have given generously even if I dont make the goal, whats been given already will make things less difficult Id like to see more and smaller donations.  So far I only have two words to rhyme.  Buy your way in with a 3-5 dollar donation and make me rhyme some whack shit.  Its requisite.  Ive already written the beginning of the poem, but it needs more rhymez!

To remind how this works, Im running the fundraiser through April 21st, tho I might cut it short if I reach the stretch goal early.  Donate at least $3 and you can suggest a word to me that I will rhyme in a rap.  If I dont make the goal, this rap will be a text poem.  If I reach $500 I will record myself rapping.  If I reach $600 I will do a short video.  Help cover the wages Ill be losing from a medical situation, thanks!

Having some health issues today, so Im taking it easy. Tomorrow you get a post about Scottish wildcats, and there will be pictures and videos, all cute. In the meantime, heres a video about why you should not join the military. The TL:DW is that the military is a tool of oppression for a ruling class that is driving us all to extinction.

Ive been in my office all day, talking to no one. Instead, Ive graded two sets of lab reports, prepared two lectures for tomorrow, and am nearly done grading an exam. There are a few million things Id rather do today, but at least Ive cleared that annoying pile of work.

If Im a good boy and get some more done in time, Im going to the movie theater tonight I hear that the Dungeons & Dragons movie is entertainingbut I also see that its 2 hours and 14 minutes long. Its fluff! It shouldnt be that long!

I also shouldnt be spending my whole weekend working, either.

The Weekend Update segment.