Spooky talking cats! Unpleasant right-wing self-help! Haunted trams! Demonic spiders! Donald Trump winning the election! All the scariest things you can imagine and some things you really shouldn’t imagine!
Yes, the spookiest tale of horror, and positive thinking is here as a special download by clicking this link:
Go on – try it! You won’t regret it! Well you might regret it…possibly you will regret it but you’ll have had fun! Maybe.
Wooooooooo!!!!!!! The ideas are only connected by fear and anxiety and not by reason or logic!!!! Wooooooooo!!!!
An American version of a Scotch beer. Not bad, despite the can. http://www.ratebeer.com/beer/moylans-kilt-lifter-scotch-ale/1578/
[A bit late posting this]
Dragon Con replied via twitter to my last post on the odd fluctuations on the Dragon Con Awards website. It is an odd sort of explanation – as if people might get confused by a news article clearly from August.
Anyway, I asked about when nominations might open and…no reply…
As I sat in the south gazebo, hitting refresh on voxopedia’s ‘Recent changes’ page, I noticed from the corner of my eye the household cat walking pensively in circles. Perturbed by this uncharacteristic behaviour I approached him cautiously whilst holding my phone in the forlorn hope of capturing an amusing cat video with which to entertain the Internet.
“There is no point trying to take a video,” said Timothy who was still circling what appeared to be a North Korean bootlegged Surface Pro, “Twitter is closing down Vine.”
I swore in frustration. Once again, I had missed engaging with a social media outlet before it had slid into obsolescence or was cancelled. It was MySpace all over again. If felt cross enough to vent my anger on a Compuserve forum.
“Stop looking so sullen. Your ineptitude at picking social media trends has done wonders for my share portfolio,” bragged the cat, still orbiting the knock-off tablet, “Any social media outlet you aren’t thinking of using is usually a good bet.”
“I’ll use my powers for good and sign up for Gab!” I cried.
“Never mind all that – I need you to think of an ending for my book.” grumbled the cat, who now sat on his haunches in front of the specially cat-adapted keyboard.
“Your book?” I asked. Timothy’s book? I had announced Timothy’s book some weeks ago and it was originally going to be a domestic drama called the “Confusing Walrus” based on unsubtle plagiarism of a John Scalzi space-opera, which had led to some excitement among Timothy’s inexplicable following. The capricious cat had then forced me to retract that announcement because the supposedly “finished” book was now going to be a cook-book called the “Collapsing Souffle”. No sooner had I done that, than it became clear that Timothy had written nothing but an outline which read:
rite book. make flappypants dror cover
Yet, here we were – weeks later – and unless my eyes deceived me, Timothy had a long document open on his Pyon-Yang derived computer.
“Why this is great news!” I said saidingly “I can’t wait to try the recipes!”
Timothy looked at me as if I had taken leave of my senses.
“Recipes? Recipes? I don’t write ‘recipes’. Do you think at this time of national crisis, people want recipes? No, no, now is the time for action. Now is the time for me to break silence and intervene in the US election.”
“You already intervened – you were briefly Hillary Clinton’s running mate, remember?”
Timothy dismissed that comment with a wave of his paw. “This book contains a distilled account of my personal philosophy. It explains how Donald Trump also shares my mental powers that allow us to achieve greatness.”
Suspicion grew in my chest. “Let me look at that cover,” I exclaimed in an exclamatory fashion pulling the fake tablet over. “As I thought! You’ve just taken some Castalia House nonsense, scribbled out ‘Mike Cernovich’ and written ‘Tim T Talking Cat’ instead.”
“That is merely a suggestion. The main question is whether I should end the book by saying ‘that is why I am so awesome’ or, and think this over before you answer, ‘that is why I am so great'”
“The second one!” I cried, “Very topical!”
And that dear readers, is how I learnt of Timothy’s new book.
Don’t count the plot holes. Don’t think too much about how the bad guys capacity to fight good wizards seems very situational. Nigh on impossible not to wince at the racist cliches of oriental-exoticness juxtaposed with only one Asian actor. Ignore some slightly stilted dialogue. Don’t concern yourself with Cumberbatch’s odd American accent (is it actually odd or is that it just doesn’t sound like him?) Don’t worry about the new age nonsense – you knew the movie was about magic when you walked in there.
The story isn’t complex. The acting is fine. The humour is less sharp than Iron Man and less frequent than Ant-Man. But…
It does all really work. The fights are tense and the magic is spectacular. The effects are both gratuitous and absolutely necessary. The visuals keep playing with wild symmetries and a psychedelic aesthetic that feels like 2016 technology applied to 1966 imaginings.
It really is everything you might want out of a Doctor Strange movie. Fights occur on astral planes, in Inception-like mirror dimensions, and in invading hell-dimensions. Everything is pompous but in a way that commits to pomposity knowing that this is the right way to achieve the higher sense of being in which ‘fun’ will be achieved.
I really, really liked it.
[To be honest, I’d watch it just for all the reflection symmetry]
Why, I’m glad you asked that question, disembodied voice that writes the blogpost titles. My new favourite Voxopediapage is:
LIST OF ASIAN MEN’S INVENTIONS: http://infogalactic.com/info/List_of_asian_men%27s_inventions
[Update] Sadly, I didn’t webarchive it and then apparently it went off in all sorts of weird directions, redirects and then was removed. The page and the changes don’t appear in Recent Changes but does appear in the Deletion Log http://web.archive.org/web/20161028183909/http://infogalactic.com/info/Special:Log/delete
RIP List of Asian Men’s Inventions! For a brief moment, you forced us evil leftists to mock Voxopedia rather than ignore it.
[Update 2] Here it is http://infogalactic.com/info/User:Rectified/List_of_Asian_men%27s_inventions and archive http://web.archive.org/web/20161028185016/http://infogalactic.com/info/User:Rectified/List_of_Asian_men%27s_inventions
In an exciting development, the ‘News’ section has now gone back in time and apparently expunged the August announcement of the actual awards presentation. The most recent news is now from April.
Page as of the date of this post: https://web.archive.org/web/20161026185753/http://awards.dragoncon.org/news/
Previous version October 23: https://web.archive.org/web/20161023020538/http://awards.dragoncon.org/news/
Don’t worry though, this is not some Orwellian re-writing of history: the recipient page and the front page still list the winners.
I’m inadvertently becoming a feature on Voxopedia’s talk pages: http://infogalactic.com/info/Talk:Miles_Mathis
Idris (talk) 23:15, 25 October 2016 (UTC)
Excellent. Vox Day’s First Law manifest. Camestros Felapton, go look at the experiment on Youtube. Two ball bearings, two plastic tubes. It’s as simple as 1, 2, 3… Galileo.
Vox Day’s first law is that any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from insanity. In other words, sometimes the alt-right are just SO smart that what they say appears utter nonsense. This leads to Camestros Felapton’s corollary:
In general things indistinguishable from nonsense are actually nonsense.
Anyway, the video in question appears to be this one:
It rambles on a bit but the gist of it is this. The guy rolls ball-bearings down two plastic tubes. They both start with the same slope, then they go straight for a bit, then one tube goes off in a roughly circular horizontal loop and the other one carries on straight.
The ball that goes through the loop decelerates because physics. The ball that goes straight decelerates less because again, physics. Consequently the ball on the straight path travels further in the same time than the one in the curved path. Aha! Says the guy, the ball on the straight path has traveled four diameters of the circle in the time it has taken the other path to travel the circumference, so pi equals 4 for motion!
No, it doesn’t. The balls are traveling at different speeds, so they don’t cover the same distance in the same time. The ball in the loop has to travel slower because of Newton’s first law of motion: traveling a loop requires a force to act on it (to change direction) and the forces in play have to decelerate the ball, hence it has to slow down MORE than the ball on the straight path. Making the second ball travel in a circle by a different method (e.g. deflecting its path with a magnet) would lead to a different answer.
Meanwhile, elsewhere on Voxopedia more women have gone missing. [Thanks to Mark for spotting this]
Kitty Joyner is the lead picture for ‘engineer’ on the Wikipedia page
Look, she has a slide rule and everything! Sadly her presence was just too confusing for the poor folks at Voxopedia. Maybe that big circular gizmo in the background didn’t look pi=4 enough. So, to prevent fainting and to protect sensitive dispositions, Joyner has been replaced by Oliver Heaviside
Phew!
Meanwhile, Vox has given us all permission to laugh http://voxday.blogspot.com.au/2016/10/let-them-laugh.html
I must confess to a vice: I have a ghoulish fascination for dysfunctional ideas. Sad to say some, like global warming denialism or racism can feel depressingly ubiquitous. Others are a tad more rarefied – like the occasional defenders of geocentrism. Yet the finest, most exotic of the misapplications of intelligence must be mathematical-crackpottery.
To push truly odd mathematical ideas takes real skill and perseverance. First of all it is hard to find the space which encompasses enough people to know enough about the area of maths you are disputing to understand what you are disputing, yet not so much about the topic to see why you are talking nonsense.
One of the longest running blogs cataloguing and debunking examples of bad maths is Mark Chu-Carroll’s Good Maths – Bad Maths blogs: http://www.goodmath.org/blog/
It has been around for some time, originally on Science Blogs, then at Scientopia and now self-hosting. He has been debunking in good humour some very, very odd ideas.
Here is an extract from a 2010 post which amused me: http://www.goodmath.org/blog/2010/11/16/grandiose-crackpottery-proves-pi4/
Someone recently sent me a link to a really terrific crank. This guy really takes the cake. Seriously, no joke, this guy is the most grandiose crank that I’ve ever seen, and I doubt that it’s possible to top him. He claims, among other things, to have:
- Demonstrated that every mathematician since (and including) Euclid was wrong;
- Corrected the problems with relativity;
- Turned relativity into a unification theory by proving that magnetism is part of the relativistic gravitational field;
- Shown that all of gravitational/orbital dynamics is completely, utterly wrong; and, last but not least:
- proved that the one true correct value of pi is exactly 4.
I’m going to focus on the last one – because it’s the simplest illustration of both his own comical insanity, of of the fundamental error underlying all of his rubbish.
Ah, Miles Mathis, the pi equals 4 guy. To be fair, Mathis was trying to be provocative and his claim was more specifically about pi equaling 4 when circular motion was involved. Yet it is still nonsense and as Mark Chu-Carroll says, very grandiose nonsense.
The guy in question really does need to be read to be believed, and I’m willing to entertain the idea that it is a very clever spoof or very complex humour. Take this piece on his various enemies: http://milesmathis.com/david.html
This post will be an ongoing reply to selected critiques of my new book, The Un-unified Field. The first negative review of the book has just been posted at Amazon UK, so I take this as the beginning of my science counter-critiques. I have been looking forward to this moment, as many can imagine. I am already well-known—some might say notorious—for my counter-critiques on my art site. For almost a decade I have been making the current art critics look very bad. Using Whistler as my model, I have responded directly to the various writings of the status quo, taking on all the big names, including Greenberg, Saltz, Schjeldahl, Hughes, Danto, Carey, and Hickey. But until now my science site has been a different sort of beast. I have attacked physics and physicists, not science critics. I have written and published science papers, not polemics. Yes, my science papers contain a bit of polemics, but I could never have included them in a folder titled “counter-criticism.” I have not only been criticizing science, I have been doing science. I have not just analyzed, I have corrected and predicted. Now, however, I able to use my polemical skills, sharpened by a decade of art fights, in the field of physics. If these science critics had bothered to read any of my art or science papers, beyond “a passing glance here and there,” they might not have stuck their necks out. But they have stuck their necks out and will continue to, of course, and this will provide me (and perhaps you) with decades of new fun.
I can’t help feel like I’m reading a mish-mash of both John C Wright and Vox Day but with an extra dose of grandiloquence.
Speaking of Vox Day…
…meanwhile…
…over at my new favourite encyclopedia…
There are various edits going on at Voxopedia. A lot of it is alt-right PC renaming of things, removing CE from dates and putting AD back in, swapping out “pro-choice” for “abortion legalization”. There seems to be lots of minor edits on topics related to Croatia but…aside from Castalia House related things not much in the way of new pages.
However, one of the more prolific editors “Rectified” has been working on some new content – content that wouldn’t make it into Wikipedia.
Ladies and gentlemen: The Miles Mathis page! http://infogalactic.com/info/Miles_Mathis
I have seen the future of the big fork!
As El Sandifer has pointed out, the encylopedia lacks a decent user base. Of the user it has picked up only a small proportion are editing. Because most topics already have entries (from Wikipedia) all the ‘fun’ work has been done. What is left is the drudgery of keeping the thing up to date.
But then what? Well, the Mathis page shows the way. The alt-right hangers on (or perhaps the alt-right internet constituency) is not just frustrated by leftwing gatekeepers but any and all gatekeepers. Wikipedia is hated not just because of some progressive choices when it comes to naming things or deleting topics but because it constrains behaviour. Specifically it constrains the behaviour of privileged brats and that kind of constraint (not just from Wikipedia but in general) is targeted by alt-right angst.
So Voxopedia has notability guidelines but thos guidelines will be used (at some point in the future…) to rank pages. Hence, a Miles Mathis biography page can be a thing. Not only that but there doesn’t seem to be any rules against editing/creating a page on yourself.*
So here is a future for “Infogalactic” if it last – a vanity encyclopedia not just for Vox but for Vox’s followers.
Camestros Felapton 