pinder

The Dublin street layout engineer I've trapped in my basement: if you aren't smart enough to solve my Riddles Three and find the ancient cornerstone, older than your fucking country, upon which I've etched a tiny cipher that, when cracked, reveals what street you're on, then you shouldn't be in fucking Ireland [spits out blood]

Which like, ok fine. you’d assume the numbers go in order one way, and the letters go in order perpendicular to that.

the first 40 minutes or so pass with many a delighted exclamation. stan lee was credited & i’m told blade was a marvel property, which is news to me. i’m thoroughly enjoying myself. the cop familiar gets the shit beat out of him & tells blade to check the fridge. the wind roars as the scene transition fades to black.

in fades a helicopter. a man with long dark hair on crutches emerges from it. i do not immediately recognize the man, but from the crutches & the hair i immediately go “morbius??”

they assure me he isn’t morbius. i accept that they don’t want to admit he’s morbius for some reason (maybe they just don’t want me to think blade is in the mcu?) as the entirety of michael morbius’s backstory plays out on screen.

i repeatedly ask “okay but this is literally morbius right” and “why are you doing this” as it becomes increasingly clear that we are now, somehow, watching Morbius (2022). everyone continues to insist it’s Blade (1999) until finally i ask “how long were you planning this” and logan says “you wanna know how long” and gives me a screenshot

>First, we’ve discovered that about a quarter of all the internet connection in or out of the house were ad related. In a few hours, that’s about 10,000 out of 40,000 processed.

>We also discovered that every link on Twitter was blocked. This was solved by whitelisting the https://t.co domain.

>Once out browsing the Web, everything is loading pretty much instantly. It turns out most of that Page Loading malarkey we’ve been accustomed to is related to sites running auctions to sell Ad space to show you before the page loads. All gone now.

>We then found that the Samsung TV (which I really like) is very fond of yapping all about itself to Samsung HQ. All stopped now. No sign of any breakages in its function, so I’m happy enough with that.

>The primary source of distress came from the habitual Lemmings player in the house, who found they could no longer watch ads to build up their in-app gold. A workaround is being considered for this.

>The next ambition is to advance the Ad blocking so that it seamlessly removed YouTube Ads. This is the subject of ongoing research, and tinkering continues. All in all, a very successful experiment.

>Certainly this exceeds my equivalent childhood project of disassembling and assembling our rotary dial telephone. A project whose only utility was finding out how to make the phone ring when nobody was calling.

>Update: All4 on the telly appears not to have any ads any more. Goodbye Arnold Clarke!

>Lemmings problem now solved.

>Can confirm, after small tests, that RTÉ Player ads are now gone and the player on the phone is now just delivering swift, ad free streams at first click.

>Some queries along the lines of “Are you not stealing the internet?” Firstly, this is my network, so I may set it up as I please (or, you know, my son can do it and I can give him a stupid thumbs up in response). But there is a wider question, based on the ads=internet model.

>I’m afraid I passed the You Wouldn’t Download A Car point back when I first installed ad-blocking plug-ins on a browser. But consider my chatty TV. Individual consumer choice is not the method of addressing pervasive commercial surveillance.

>Should I feel morally obliged not to mute the TV when the ads come on? No, this is a standing tension- a clash of interests. But I think my interest in my family not being under intrusive or covert surveillance at home is superior to the ad company’s wish to profile them.

>Aside: 24 hours of Pi Hole stats suggests that Samsung TVs are very chatty. 14,170 chats a day.

>YouTube blocking seems difficult, as the ads usually come from the same domain as the videos. Haven’t tried it, but all of the content can also be delivered from a no-cookies version of the YouTube domain, which doesn’t have the ads. I have asked my son to poke at that idea.

See, I LOVE the National Parks. I always have a pass. I got to multiple parks a year. I LOVE them, and always viewed them as this unambiguously GOOD thing. Like, the best thing America has done. 

BUT, I just finished reading this book called “I am the Grand Canyon” all about the native Havasupai people and their fight to gain back their rights to the lands above the canyon rim. Historically, they spent the summer months farming in the canyon, and then the winter months hunter-gathering up above the rim. When their reservation was made though, they lost basically all rights to the rim land (They had limited grazing rights to some of it, but it was renewed year to year and always threatened, and it was a whole thing), leading to a century long fight to get it back. 

And in that book there are a couple of really poignant anecdotes- one man talks about how park rangers would come harass them if they tried to collect pinon nuts too close to park land- worried that they would take too many pinon nuts that the squirrels wanted. Despite the fact that the Havasupai had harvested pinon nuts for thousands and thousands of years without ever…like…starving the squirrels. 

There’s another anecdote of them seeing the park rangers hauling away the bodies of dozens of deer- killed in the park because of overpopulation- while the Havasupai had been banned from hunting. (Making them more and more reliant on government aid just to survive the winter months.) 

They talk about how they would traditionally carve out these natural cisterns above the rim to catch rainwater, and how all the animals benefitted from this, but it was difficult to maintain those cisterns when their “ownership” of the land was so disputed. 

So here you have examples of when people are forcibly separated from their ecosystem and how it hurts both those people and the ecosystem. 

And then when the Havasupai finally got legislation before Congress to give them ownership of the rim land back- their biggest opponent was the Parks system and the Sierra Club. The Sierra Club (a big conservation group here in the US) ran a huge smear campaign against these people on the belief that any humans owning this land other than the park system (which aims at conservation, even while developing for recreation) was unacceptable. 

And it all got me thinking about how, as much as I love the National Parks, there are times when its insistence that nature be left “untouched” (except, ya know, for recreation) can actually harm both the native people who have traditionally been part of those ecosystems AND potentially the ecosystems themselves. And I just think there’s a lot of nuance there about recognizing that there are ways for us to be in balance with nature, and that our environmentalism should respect that and push for sustainability over preserving “pristine” human-less landscapes. Removing ourselves from nature isn’t the answer. 

Audio: So I was at a tractor-pull one time (yes, I am exactly the kind of redneck that goes to tractor-pulls) and this guy showed up, I guess with his boyfriend, um, I’m not a 100% sure. But he was wearing, uh, pink cowboy boots. He had homemade cut-of jean shorts, he had a, uh, flannel crop top, and he had a pink John Deer trucker hat.

Anyway, one of the rednecks behind me was looking at this guy and he’s like ‘I don’t know why anybody would come to a tractor-pull dressed like that’ and the OTHER redneck who’s behind me goes ‘LISTEN, if he wants to come to a tractor pull dressed like that, it’s his GOD GIVEN RIGHT. What the FUCK do you think freedom, EARL?’ and now I really want a pride bumper sticker that says ‘What the FUCK do you think freedom means, EARL?’

Image Descriptions: six pride flag bumper sticker designs that each state, in all caps “What the fuck do you think freedom means Earl!?” In order, the pride flags are: Rainbow (Gay/General Pride), Bisexual, Lesbian, Pansexual, Transgender, and Asexual.