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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • In the Wizard of Oz, Glenda the “Good” Witch is actually a ruthless drug kingpin.

    She used her magic powers to summon a tornado and then merks the Wicked Witch of the East with Dorothy’s house. She then puts WWotE’s shoes on Dorothy in order to make her a target for WWotE’s sister, the Wicked Witch of the West. Glenda then uses Dorothy as a stooge to bump off WWotW, thereby putting herself in control of Oz’s vast fields of opium poppies, and cornering the entire opium trade.

    It doesn’t make sense any other way. Glenda could have told Dorothy to use the ruby slippers to get home at literally any point, but instead sends her on a wild goose chase, and uses her as a blunt instrument to take out the only other bases of power remaining in Oz: the WWotW, and the Wizard, who Dorothy exposes as a fraud. Only then does she tell Dorothy to click her heels, and poof: everything is all wrapped up with a bow, and Glenda’s hands are clean. Her two main rivals are dead, and the Wizard is fleeing Oz in disgrace.

    It’s some fucking Kaiser Söze level shit.











  • Did the mushroom learn to control a robot, or did the scientists figure out how to connect a robot to a mushroom in such a way as to make the regular processes happening inside the mushroom trigger a set of robot legs? Because the article makes it seem like the mushroom is intelligent and has agency, and was thus far only lacking the proper robot body in order to express that; but the video makes it look like the legs were all pumping in unison, and the resulting movement was more or less coincidental.






  • Ulysses is a rough one. There are some novels that are so dense that you have to have already read it through once before you can really read it for the first time. I think Ulysses might take three or four.

    I started reading it after hearing Robert Anton Wilson talk at length about why he loved the book. He made it sound amazing. And having read it, and read about it, I get why the people who love it really love it. It’s a meticulously crafted, ultra dense, heavily embroidered, masterwork of English literature. You can spend years and years reading and re-reading the book, picking apart layer after layer, and still find new elements to explore, and new threads to pull, which still all end up being perfectly internally consistent. It’s really an amazing literary achievement.

    But it fucking sucks to read for the first time.

    You need like a companion reference book, the Internet, a French to English dictionary for one of the chapters, and a map of Dublin. It’s not entertainment; it’s a project. And honestly, I’ve found it a lot more interesting to listen to Ulysses experts explaining the book than it is to actually read the book itself.



  • This bullshit was basically my first experience with Windows 11 when I got a new PC last year. Literally, “Why is my internet so slow? What’s this OneDrive thing? Oh, holy shit fucking stop Jesus Christ!”

    Just automatically started uploading everything on my hard drive to an account I didn’t set up, without even a prompt telling me it was happening, and no obvious way to make it stop. I didn’t even know Windows had added a cloud storage option. I actually had to completely uninstall OneDrive to finally make it stop.

    I might have liked having a native backup service in Windows if it was like, “Hey look at this handy cloud storage tool we’ve added to Windows! Would you like to pick some files to save?” But as it is, it might as well just be another piece of spyware.

    There’s a big long list of reasons why I hate Windows 11, but this OneDrive shit is the thing that’s making me think maybe it’s time to ditch Windows for good.