Prime Day: still not a holiday.

You may recall that I've expressed frustration in the past with social media sites with advertising algorithms that misjudge my interests. Like that time Facebook tried to sell me socks with photos of my pet on them. Well, I came across this add recently and can only conclude that the algorithm has not improved in the interim. 

I'm dubious, but by all means, tell me the crazy thing Sophie. 

And here I've been going to work at
a job like some kind of chump...

It's from a business coach called Sophie Howard, and this specific scam involves--sorry, did I just--you know what? I'm going to stand by "scam." This particular scam she's trying to sell people on involves you paying her to coach you on how to make money by publishing ebooks on Kindle. "I'm not a writer!" She pretends you protest. Well, first of all, yes you can, anyone can. Look at me. Second of all, Sophie says that doesn't matter. "How might this be possible?" you might reasonably ask. 

Writing: traditionally the
worst part of writing. 

Well, luckily, Howard's website has the answer:

"You don't have to be a writer to have a Kindle publishing business. In fact, YOU DON'T HAVE TO WRITE A SINGLE THING! [caps hers] It's possible to generate income from ebooks you don't write yourself."

-Sophie Howard, explaining

a totally legitimate business

So, couple of things. For one, publishers don't traditionally write books themselves, right? Like, writers have agents and agents work with publishers and look, I'm not an expert, but like, that's how publishing works. It's how it's always worked. Simon and Schuster didn't write Stephen King's new book. Stephen King did. Probably before breakfast. 

Pictured: Stephen King, seen here rattling off a couple
novellas in the time it takes you to read this caption.

Above: Grist for the mill.

My point is Howard is correct, you don't have to be a writer to publish something. But you should probably be familiar with the publishing industry. And you know, books in general. I'm not taking her course, because again, scam, but I think I'm piecing together what her schtick is. I think she's explaining how to "publish" public domain material on Kindle. You know, crazy cheap nonsense ebooks that clog up ebook sites? Now you know how they get there.

And it all sounds, I don't know, ethically dubious? If something's in the public domain it, by definition, belongs to everyone and anyone can use it freely. Sure, that includes copy/pasting it into a PDF document or whatever, but that doesn't make you a publisher, it makes you a middleman or uh...what're those organisms that live off of other organisms? 

Isn't it about time you made Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility work for you?

A pyramid scheme? Now that's just
being unfair. It's more of a triangle.

Her site if full of testimonials from people who generate income by doing this and, I mean, I can't blame them. The death throes of capitalism are brutal. But there's just something gross about selling other people's work, you know? Sure, I gather some of these people are indeed writing and selling their own work as well, and good on them. But I'd really like to know how much they're paying Howard's coaches--she doesn't coach you herself--and how it compares to the money they're making off Amazon. 

But whatever, I was talking about the algorithm that dropped this into my feed and how it has once again failed to see me. You know, as a person. It may be insensitive of me to say this so close to Prime Day, but Amazon, with it's cancerous effect on the economy and ability to reduce artistic work to content, is a lot of what's wrong in the world today, and I'm not sure why the algorithm thought I'd be interested in Sophie Howard's weird plagiarism scam.

I have notes: first, if you're going to hold it over two days, it should be Prime Days.
Also, please stop using the word epic. Beowulf is an epic, this is free shipping and twenty
percent off the plastic that's eventually going to end up as part of the Pacific garbage patch.

History: it's whatever you want it to be!

In a magnanimous move, Oklahoma's superintendent of schools has agreed to allow teachers to talk about the Tulsa Massacre. You know, as long as they don't mention how motivated by racism it was.

No state motto huh? May I suggest:
"The Willful Ignorance State."

It was a great show, but I don't love that
we're learning more about our history from
HBO than we are from actual history classes.

Which is weird because it's usually referred to as the Tulsa race massacre, the Tulsa race riot--a misleading description since riots rarely involve air support--or the opening scene from the Watchman TV series. Speaking of, it's like super embarrassing for us, as a country I mean, that before HBO came a long, a lot of Americans had never heard about the time in 1921 when a white mob killed three hundred Black residents of Tulsa and burned thirty-six blocks of the city to the ground, right?

Pictured: Ryan Walters, seen here
taking time away from a very intense
beer pong tournament to rail against
the woke agenda and coastal elites.

Why, yes it is. I went to public school in the north so I'd a least heard about it before, although it was definitely framed as a "race riot" and relegated to footnote status at best. But you know what's even more embarrassing? This guy Ryan Walters, the aforementioned superintendent in charge of Oklahoma's schools who said last week that the Tulsa Race Massacre wasn't racially motivated despite it being right there in the name.

"...I would say you be judgmental of the issue, of the action, of the contest, of the character of the individual, absolutely. But let's not tie it to the skin color and say the skin color determined that..." 

-Ryan Walters, the guy somehow

in charge of education in Oklahoma

"Actually, suggesting that race was a factor 
kinda makes you racist against white people."

-Walters's argument

Look, I'm not an historian, but should we absolutely tie the Tulsa massacre to racism. And I say this because violent goons who half-heard a garbled story about a white guy who thinks he might have seen a Black nineteen-year accidentally step on a white girl's toe as he boarded an elevator, took this as just cause to murder hundreds of innocent people and set Tulsa on fire leaving ten thousand people homeless, were absolutely motivated by race hatred and saying otherwise is dishonest and dangerous, Ryan.

I mean, it's not exactly off-brand for a sad chapter in American history to have its basis in racism. In fact, I think most of our sad chapters have their basis in racism. At least the ones that aren't rooted in misogyny. Or homophobia. Or transphobia, or xenophobia--you know, it's starting to sound like a lot of our problems can be traced back to white guys being dicks. Wait, you don't suppose that's why white guys like Walters, who are themselves dicks, don't want anyone talking about it, do you?

 Pictured: that time the U.S. government forced tens of thousands of
people at gun point off their land for completely non-racist reasons.

-Oklahoma schools

Today in my quarter Canadian caveat:

Pictured: ermine-trimmed, porphyria-
addled last King of America and 18th
century dreamboat King George III.

I am, as I may have mentioned before--and frequently, and unsolicitedly--a quarter Canadian. My grandmother and great-grandmother, for whatever reason, quasi-legally immigrated back in the twenties or something, but my Canadian-ness actually comes with an asterisk. My Canadian ancestors were themselves Americans who fled to Canada during the Revolution. Yup, they were on Team George III and wanted nothing to do with ungrateful colonists whinging on about their stamp tax or whatever. 

It's basically phrenology, which
 is also famously racist. 

I mention this because while I put zero stock in the idea that someone's ancestry confers certain personality traits--because that's like, textbook racism--I do feel a certain eye-rolling annoyance at certain American traditions, particularly on a day like today, where were all supposed to feel, I don't know, patriotic of something? I guess I'm glad we won the war and don't have to curtsy whenever Charles III and Queen Camilla happen by, but I'm also not going to put on a stetson and listen to Lee Greenwood.

A lot of this has to do with the fact that the political right has un-ironically coopted most of the traditional symbols of American culture despite being the book-banning, trans-bashing, gun-humping examples of everything wrong with our culture. The flag, the bald eagle, 9/11. Those weird 9/11 t-shirts with bald eagles crying while a flag waves in the background, it all screams "lock her up" and Let's go Brandon memes.

I mean, are eagles even biologically capable of shading tears?

Pictured: kids playing with fireworks.
Because freedom or something.

The other part of it is that some of our traditions, particularly around the Fourth of July are, and I don't think I'm alone in feeling this way, dumb. Just, aggressively dumb. Take fireworks for example. They're bad for the environment, can start fires, freak out pets, and can seriously upset people suffering from PTSD. Not to mention the fact that they're incredibly dangerous if you don't know what you're doing and most of the people setting them off in their back yards don't know what they're doing.

In fact, it's illegal to sell them in a lot of places, but people just drive somewhere they're not illegal, drive home, and blow their fingers off. 

This terrifying mishap is from 2022, but I mean, I'm sure
someone's going to be reckless with explosives this year too.

The challenge: tell me I will fundamentally
disagree with you about everything
without opening your mouth.

And you know what else is dumb? The clothes. I know it's the same mentality behind wearing Christmas sweaters or sweatshirts with a turkey on them, and that's whatever. I've always thought dressing up in themed holiday ware was at best a red flag, but when I see someone decked out head to toe in the Stars and Stripes, there just this vibe that they think they're somehow more American that the rest of us. Like it's a contest of something. But I mean, money says they can't name all the State capitals. Oh, and it also suggests that they're going to want to tell me about the dangers of vaccines.

And lastly, though perhaps dumbestly, the hot dog eating contest. Did you know that this was an annual tradition? Because it is and I can think of nothing more American than a competition to see who can force down the most processed pork tubes while school lunch programs go dangerously underfunded. Except perhaps that same competition having separate categories for men and women. 

This year's winners of the men's and women's divisions: Joey Chestnut and Miki Sudo
respectively. Although, in many ways, everyone one. And in many more ways, this contest
makes me incredibly grateful to be able to claim to be at least partially Canadian.

Legitimacy schmischmitimacy

Last week the super-legitimate Supreme Court--whose credibility is totally not in question--handed down its incredibly just decision that any business owner is now allowed to discriminate against anyone based on their firmly held religious beliefs no matter how misguided or flatly contradicted by the actual textual basis of said religion. 

"The steak? I don't think so. You'll have the tempeh sliders. I'm actually
a vegan, and your order conflicts with my deeply held whatevers."

-Some waiter

"It says that where? Where? You know, 
I'm getting real tired of this Cathy."

-Jesus

Cool. But it's come out now that the plaintiff, Lorie Smith, just made up the thing she was complaining about, so they're going to throw this out, right? Smith, who runs a company that makes websites for wedding, wanted to become a hero to shitty people everywhere by noting on her site that she won't make websites for the gays because the Bible famously forbids it. Huh? No, of course it doesn't, that's absurd, and Smith is just using her religion to shield her from accusations of homophobia, but whatever, here we are. Anyway, she was told she couldn't sue the state since no one actually asked her to make a gay wedding site.

Pictured: Lorie Smith of 303 Creative seen
here...uh...does anyone want to tell her
what the Bible says about getting tattoos? 

So rather than wait for the inevitable onslaught of gay betrotheds who want to force a Right-wing goon to craft a website for their special day, Lorie Smith just made one up. Or at least someone did, but they used an actual person's name and phone number to submit a request. The individual, called Stewart, was and is straight, already married, and did no such thing. Also, he himself is a web designer, so even if he did suddenly decide to leave his wife and marry a dude, he wouldn't need Lorie's dumb company anyway. But I guess nobody ever bothered to check any of this out until now. 

Above: That time Brett Kavanaugh
cried because people were mean to him.

And wouldn't you know it? Smith's case happened to go before the Supreme Court at a time when its ability to decide cases has been hopelessly skewed. Skewed by a rapidly diminishing Conservative minority who, feeling the cold fingers of irrelevancy around their throat, leveraged downtick races and re-drawn district lines to put a non-popularly elected President in a position to fill three seats. Two of which were stolen.

So a year ago, when John Roberts complained that people were questioning his Court's legitimacy, it's not just because we disagree with the decisions. We do, we absolutely do. But it's also because his Court's decisions are often wrong, strip Americans of hard-won liberties, and are being decided by people who lied about what is and isn't settled law and shouldn't on the Supreme Court to begin with. 

Oh, and didn't this guy take bribes? Like for years?

You're going to need a smaller boat.

Call me petty, but I just can't help enjoy a headline that begins with "Billionaires disappointed..." In this case, the rest of the story is "...after superyachts banned form Naples port" and I think the Germans have a word for what I'm feeling:

I'd like you to meet my good friend Gunther Schadenfreude. 
Here he is raising a glass to my shameful joy.

Pictured: Arnault's 110 meter floating
symbol of everything wrong with capitalism.

Evidently, the city of Naples, Italy, has recently banned yachts measuring over seventy-five meters from stem to stern or just under two hundred, fifty feet front to back for the metrically and nautically challenged (like me, I had to look those up). It's ostensibly a security measure, although I can't find anything explaining why. The end result here is that the world's current richest man, Bernard Arnault, tried to dock his one hundred-ten meter yacht in Naples and heard a word I suspect he's not been used to hearing after passing the billion-mark: "no." 

When the revolution comes and these guys
are being led to the guillotines and they ask
what they did to deserve this fate, it's this.

The boat? Yacht? Superyacht? Like I said, I'm not nautically inclined, but it's called the Symphony--because of course it is--and cost the billionaire one hundred and fifty million dollars of money, plus an additional fifteen million per year to operate. It features eight staterooms, a crew of twenty-seven to cater the the every whim of up to thirty-six passengers, a pool, and a helicopter pad. Superyachtfan.com goes on to gush about how the Symphony is eco-friendly because it uses thirty percent less energy than a comparable yacht. Yes. A comparable yacht.

Hey, do you know what would be a hundred percent more eco-friendly than sailing a rich dude and his friends around on luxury yacht with caterers and a helicopter pad?

"Damnit, another wildfire. If only more billionaires would follow
Bernard Arnault's noble example and buy marginally more energy efficient
superyachts, we could finally get climate change under control."

-exactly zero fire fighters ever

Above: the people of Naples scrambling to
grab some of the money rich yacht people rain
down upon them whenever they sail into port.

According to The Guardian article, the riches aren't taking it lying down. Their source at the Port of Naples says they are getting "letters from magnates" complaining about how they and their superyachts used to bring money and jobs to the city, not to mention fame, and that this ban is robbing the good people of Naples of the pleasure and prestige of their presence. Which, I mean, if you can think of anything more entitled than billionaires railing against the injustice of them having to dock somewhere else when vacationing in southern Italy, I'd love to hear it. 

Again, maybe I'm being petty and maybe this is sour grapes or something, but the planet is on fire and I pass tent city full of homeless people on my way to work every morning, and Bernard Arnault is sad because Naples won't let him park his glorified party boat. So maybe sell the Symphony, buy a less ludicrous yacht and I don't know, plant some trees or something? And maybe do it before we all wise up and grab the pitchforks and torches?

"Or the city of Naples could just give in and give me what I want.
I am, after all, the richest man in the world. Like, the entire world."

-Bernard Arnault, on the great injustice that has been 

visited upon him and his friends with superyachts.

Who doesn’t love things from vats?

Soon you'll be able eat a chicken whilst looking it right in its beady, uncomprehending eyes. Which, I mean, is a horror show on the surface, but I don't know, hurray for science?

What? They wouldn't know. In fact, my incredibly low estimate of bird
intelligence is a key factor in my (usually) being comfortable eating chicken.

Articles about this keep describing the vats
as something like what brewers use, but I'm not
sure that's making this any less gross sounding.

To be clear, I would never do such a thing, and really, no one would. I'm just saying it will soon be theoretically possible thanks to the U.S. Department of Agriculture giving their approval to two companies to market lab-grown meat. Lab-grown meat, for those who are either unfamiliar or horrified at the very premise, is still meat, just cultivated from cells that are taken from a living animal and then grown in a tank full of nutrients. Next, the "meat" is formed, uh, somehow, into something approaching the texture of meat without the quotation marks.

Not that a situation being unsustainable
has ever stopped us before. Like, not once.

See? Horror show, right? Well, yes, but as unappetizing as that sounds, bear in mind that gruesome way meat has been produced up until now. Like, don't do this--sweet merciful God, don't do this--but you could do a search right now for a video on how slaughterhouses work. So between the environmental impact of the meat industry, and the ethical issues that come along with eating animals (no matter how dumb they are), meat is looking increasingly unsustainable. 

Do I sound like I'm trying to convince myself? Because I am. And I mean, it's probably safe. A similar cultivated meat (another, not really better term for it) has been available in Singapore since 2020, and nobody's mutated into bird-people, so it's probably fine. 

Fine, nobody's mutated yet.

Again, that's trillion with a T.

Yeah, move over CHOAM.

Yeah, sorry, talking about video games again, but crying poverty when you're like the fourth most valuable company on Earth and consequently, the known universe is pretty weak, right? I mention this because this week Microsoft, you know, the hardware/software maker behind Windows, operating system you probably use at work even though it's kind of garbage, was bemoaning its third place status in the home video game market to to the Federal Trade Commission.

Pictured: Microsoft, seen here asking
the FTC for some more gruel.

But why would they do such a thing, and how could anyone possibly feel anything approaching pity for a company worth two point four trillion--that's trillion with a "T"--dollars of money? The why is that it's a strategy to convince regulators that the world needs another massive merger. Microsoft is trying to buy Activision Blizzard, a games developer (Warcraft, Diablo, that Overwatch nonsense all the kids were into a couple years ago), for sixty-seven billion dollars, and sure, billion with a "B", but still, a preposterous amount of money. As for the who's buying it--buying their story that is--I don't know.

Given that both Microsoft and Sony have been consuming developers for years now like giant Katamari Demacy balls of everything wrong with capitalism, I suspect the FTC will eventually give in. 

It's a game where the object is to accumulate so much stuff that the gravity
of it becomes so intense that it coalesces into a star. Why? I don't know, 
but it kind of feels like an analogy for consumerism.

Isn't this how all competitions in the
history of competition works?

What's interesting here is the suggestion on the part of Microsoft that their Xbox is some struggling niche console in desperate need of Activision Blizzard just to stay competitive:

"Xbox has lost the console wars, and its rivals are positioned to continue to dominate...Xbox has consistently ranked third in consoles behind PlayStation and Nintendo."

-Microsoft dunking on themselves

It should have been all over for them during
the "Red Ring of Death" period, and yet they
lived to fight, and complain, another day.

Which, I mean, I'm sorry, I'm no economist but a couple of things here. First, the fact that the industry has consistently supported three of more platforms for more than twenty years is something. The phrase "console wars" was first thrown around in the 90's when Sega and Nintendo were the only real contenders. Since the first Xbox's introduction in 2001, there've been three and Microsoft's been able to hang in there for decades, even being in first place at least once during the 360 era, and that despite the console itself famously overheating on the regular.

This may be lingering bitterness from
The Console Wars, but Sonic is and always
was, shallow and overrated. There, I said it.

And another thing, in what world is letting already giant companies get even gianter good for consumers? Like, again, not an economist here, but they're making the case that they need Activision Blizzard if they're ever going to beat their rivals, but is the FTC's job to help Microsoft sell Xbox's or is it to ensure a fair and competitive marketplace? Back during the Console Wars of the 90's, I was definitely a Nintendo kid, and I'm sure nostalgia and familiarity are why I still am, but I like Xbox too and have always preferred it to Playstation as a platform. But isn't this how capitalism is supposed to work?

I'm not saying that capitalism is great, and until someone invents replicators, I don't have a better idea. But for a company who's inconceivable wealth and profit is built on exploiting this system, it just feels a little gross that they're now pointing to their bronze medal status--a place they've held since Brittney Spears was big--as a reason the FTC should let their Katamari get even more out of hand.

Someone's working on that right? It'd solve a lot of problems...