The promised/threatened podcast is coming into shape! I did a great interview with a guest tonight. What I’m going to do is combine that with just me talking for a few minutes about leftist cults and how to avoid them. I’ve been meaning to do a post on that for a while anyway.
OK I have it done! I’m going to publish it on Monday but would anyone like to listen to it before then and tell me if there are any horrible problems with it? If so let me know and I’ll give you the MP3 download link. It’s way longer than I thought it would be at an hour, but I underestimated how labor intensive it is to edit down audio.
Thank you so much @rush-keating who checked it out and gave me some great feedback!
I uploaded the first episode to libsyn and I’ll update here when it shows on iTunes and Stitcher and so on.
If things go well I’ll eventually set up a Patreon to cover the costs of the libsyn hosting (only $5 a month) plus the cost of doing transcripts, which I really need to be doing for Deaf/HOH folks. I can’t do that now, but if I can keep a regular podcast going, I’m going to commit to transcripts. I don’t ever want to run ads though… ugh, I hate them.
It was a good episode tonight even if there were a lot of gut punches. Jeffrey Wright’s performance in particular was great, and they didn’t even give him a Big Moment or anything but he killed it.
– Emily’s fate sucked and I wished it had gone differently. She existed for character development for William and deserved better than that.
– Elsie is left in the middle of god damn nowhere and that sucks. But also being offscreen is probably the safest spot she could be. But also I want to see her in the story. Conflicted.
– Bernard knocking Ford out of him was great but brings up even more questions about what is happening with him(?) in the future.
– I would like Maeve back fully on screen soon. She was the most entertaining person and part of the show this season, so having her just lay there in pain is
– Clementine is back yay! Clementine was turned into a walking robot bomb Nay!
– Teddy’s fate was inevitable. He would never hurt Delores but what she did to him was unforgivable. He was too quiet and conflicted these past few episodes so it makes sense he went out. At least he told her why before doing it, so she knew the repercussions of things. Wondering what will happen next.
william and dolores: kill hosts and humans indiscriminately and say so loudly without giving a fuck. want hosts to wake up but want things their way. are resentful and violent about westworld and struggle about whether to stay or leave
them: ford made them this way
bernard and maeve: help hosts and humans alike. let them choose. just want to get the fuck out of westworld to survive
them: maybe? they’re? the? real? villains?
There are people who read Bernard as a villain????
I feel like
Akecheta and Dolores represent the two extremes.
Akecheta
represents the dream of a peace. He believes that there is a place free of blood and violence, a place where they could be safe. A beautiful but an impossible dream. Dolores on the other hand represents fury and wrath, The name Deathbringer suits her well for I can see her ending humanity. It’s a small chance but with the knowledge of the most powerful people on our planet Dolores can wreck an untold amount of damage on our world. Perhaps end it as well but it will always be a Pyrrhic victory. Bernard on the other hand seems to represent the middle path.
Meanwhile I think Maeve is the future. I think she is going to be the one to inherit the world left by the other three(i can’t see either of these three surviving)
I know like half my blog now is me lamenting the Westworld
subreddit, which I’m aware is a pathetically hopeless and irrelevant enterprise,
but if I don’t vent I’ll snap and start dropping f-bombs and invective and get
banned. So you have to endure me.
I am peeling my own eyelids off my face at some of the—I kid
you not—“Oh man, I don’t like what they did with the Man in Black, now he
really is a psychotic irredeemable murderous toxic nightmare”—are you
dfadhdhGDSAJDGASJK KIDDING ME I AM GOING TO HAVE A STROKE
There is still a small but regrettably vocal subset of people
bitching that he and his ilk are not really “bad guys” because the hosts are “just
robots” and—
you know, if they’re not going to listen to me and the 7,000 words
I’ve typed on the guy being a malignant narcissist from day one—not just
face-heel-turn Man in Black, but William, sweet William, who reduced Dolores to
his own narrative prop from the moment she swooned into his arms,DAY ONE WILLIAM—at
least listen to the show, which spent an hour last night telling you he was like this all along. Which is
great. I love that the show is Going There.
What possibly produces this level of dissonance I have no
idea, but if male gamers ages 18-35 are indeed an over-represented demographic
in this community, there’s my prime suspect.
Oh yeah, you laugh. Enjoy whatever dream you think you’re living in. When this is all done, I’m gonna expose your research project, along with you. Everything you are, everything you’ve done, it’s gonna come to light. I’m gonna make sure of it. And when it does, I’m gonna lock you up.
A majority of the Rhode Island school districts with “1-1” programs
where each student is issued a laptop have a blanket policy of spying on
the students and everything they do on their laptops, during, before
and after school hours, on or off school premises, without any evidence
(or even suspicion ) of wrongdoing.
The schools analogize this to school locker searches, in which students
are denied any Fourth Amendment protections. But that (very dubious)
principle is being stretched beyond the breaking point, as school
lockers are in schools, whereas these laptop searches are being carried out remotely, everywhere, anywhere.
This isn’t so different from the policies asserted by employers who require workers to take devices home,
then assert the right to spy on them using those devices, installing
their own certificates so they can stage “man-in-the-middle”
interceptions of private sessions between employees and their email
providers, financial institutions, etc.
Employers say that employees should just maintain two separate
constellations of devices, one personal, and not conduct any personal
business on them. This is at best unrealistic, and at worst cynical
bullshit. Every study conducted of these situations shows that no one –
not careful lawyers, not secrecy-conscious spies, not criminals, not
government employees – can reliably separate their work and personal
business on separate devices.
Worse yet is the idea – further normalized by the school districts –
that your employer has the absolute right to spy on everything you do
while you’re on the job. If intercepting and reading your personal email
is fair game, then why not install hidden mics in the parking lot to
listen in when your spouse drops in to discuss their cancer diagnosis
during a tense one-on-one by the car?
Schools have long been accused of serving as a kind of training ground
for the depredations of the industrial workplace – regimented places of
silent sitting in neatly squared-up rows where even going to the toilet
requires permission and a clanging bell signals the start and end of
your tasks. But this is some next-level 21st century stuff.
The ACLU of Rhode Island points out that rich kids will get to bring
their own devices to school and opt out of the surveillance. They’ve
drafted model legislation
that “would limit when an administrator or third party can remotely
access devices to instances where there is reasonable belief that
misconduct, as spelled out in school policies, took place, or if a
warrant is present.”
ACLU-RI raises the spectre of the Lower Merion School District, a story I broke in 2010,
in which the wealthiest school district in America issued mandatory
laptops to its students, then secretly operated their webcams to shoot
thousands of covert photos of disfavored students – in states of
undress, asleep, awake, at home and at school.
On June 18, 1983, the orbiter space shuttle Challenger was launched from the Kennedy Space Center in Titusville, Florida. Among its five-person crew was
Sally Ride, a physicist, astronaut, and the very first American woman in space.
Dr. Ride sits in the aft flight deck mission specialist’s seat during deorbit preparations (x).
Sally was born in Los Angeles, California on May 26, 1951.
She was an eclectic student at her private high school, Westlake School for
Girls; she excelled in both science and English and was also a
nationally-ranked tennis player. She graduated from Stanford University with a
bachelor’s degree and then stayed on to receive her master’s and PhD in
Physics. It was while she was a student at Stanford when Sally first came
upon the newspaper ad that would change her life. In 1977, NASA published an ad in the
Stanford student newspaper seeking women interested in becoming astronauts.
Over 8,000 women applied, but only six were chosen and Sally was one of them.
In 2015, Sally’s partner Tam O’Shaughnessy published a photobiography of Sally’s life which included never-before-photos of her childhood (x).
After being accepted by NASA, she worked for over two years
as a ground-based capsule communicator and specialized in developing the
program’s “Canadarm” robot arm. The greater public was only introduced to Sally Ride when it was announced that she would be joining the Challenger team. Sally was
subject to an unforgettable amount of misogyny by the media, with journalists
asking her now infamous questions like “"Will the flight affect your
reproductive organs?“ and “Do you weep when things go wrong on the
job?” but through it all, she stayed resilient and never let the frenzy of
attention affect her. On the 1983 space mission, Sally operated the crew’s
robotic arm and managed the communication satellites. She would partake in
another mission aboard Challenger in
1984 before retiring from NASA in 1987.
Ride (left) with partner O’Shaughnessy and their dog Gypsy, 1985 (x).
Despite the public clamoring for information and personal
details about this new feminist icon, Sally was notoriously silent about her
private life. It was only after her death on July 23, 2012 that it was revealed
that she was a lesbian and had been together with her partner, Tam
O’Shaughnessy, for over 27 years. For years after Sally left NASA, she and Tam
co-wrote children’s science books and operated the Board of Sally Ride Science
together, which focused on encouraging young girls in STEM fields. Today, Sally
is considered to be not only the first American woman astronaut, but also the
very first LGBT person to ever go into space.
Rush's tumblr archive 