It is a "no brainer"!

Consider :

mircea_popescu Did you check/sign the copies ?

mod6 They are not signed at this time. The build script in its current form will pull the dep from deedbot.org and check the SHA512 against what is hardcoded into the script. If it matches, we continue, if not we die. I could create a clearsigned manifest that could reside on deedbot.org that could be also pulled down, verified and used.

mircea_popescu Hm. Yeah what I'm thinking is, since this "we gotta import crap" thing is going to continue, might as well put some sort of deed process into it.

mod6 I'm a bit hesitant to "sign" a file outright that I don't have carnal knowledge of -- say openssl - at least without a disclaimer that says "I am only confirming the SHA512 of this artifact is ABCDEF1234... This does not mean that I have read that code and it ``fits in head''."

mircea_popescu Hence why it'd be a deed rather than a v diff.

mod6 So was thinking a clearsigned manifest could do the trick there.

mircea_popescu Yeah, it would in this instance, but it'll become unmanageable in short order. Because it's not just one such item.

mod6 So, a clearsigned manifest that holds the URL and the SHA512 that I attest is correct then, deedbotted?

mircea_popescu What i'm thinking is : the binary/payload in question, base64'd, deedbotted, and the build script modified to take an optional parameter to "allow deedbot import from known signatures" and then it can have a $ifdef for "buildoot"="deed.soandso", and it knows that if the flag is on, it goes to where deed so and so is and checks it, debases it, unzips it etc. Make any sense ? Could have a standard disclaimer up top, have it ignore #s or w/e.

mod6 One caveat here, I want this to be the last release of the build script -- so I don't wanna do any heavy lifting here. Would rather put such effort into the makefiles instead.

mircea_popescu Makefiles also works yes. I'm thinking more in the mid term than for the next version necessarily. At least this'd allow some basis for proper management of this mess, rather than current adhocness. (I'm not saying you're making a mess, I'm just saying - we're stuck with all this grandfathered in bullshit, such as boost, openssh, who the fuck knows what else even. Qt ffs.)

mod6 Makefiles will also solve alf's complaint about "shouldn't pull these from the web at all."

[...]

asciilifeform What has mircea_popescu been smoking?? There is no qt in TRB. The deps are strictly: 1) gcc 2) some libc (musl works ok) 3) boost 4) openssl 5) bdb.

mircea_popescu Just sayin'! At some point, there actually was, iirc, or was it the xwidgets w/e that thing is called ?

asciilifeform Before the great cleansing.

mircea_popescu I was making a point omaigerd.

Now test yourself : what point was I making, omaigerd ?

Once you have the answer, consider this :

mircea_popescu asciilifeform does it wurk ?

asciilifeform not yet

asciilifeform fighting with db

asciilifeform mircea_popescu wordpress barfs MOUNTAINS of 'deprecated: xxxxxxxxxx'

asciilifeform php crapolade.

mircea_popescu yup.

asciilifeform it fills MOST OF THE SCREEN

mircea_popescu i've been ignoring it ever since accidentally got upgraded.

mircea_popescu http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12140559/error-with-htaccess-and-mod-rewrite

Thursday, 14 July, Year 8 d.Tr.

Io la conoscevo bene

Io la conoscevo benei tells the story of a ditz in 1960s Castellammare. You know, the place all the mobsters came from. The mobstermecca.

She has a dayjob - as an incompetent hairdresser, making piddly squat for jackshit effortii. The owner of the little hairshack is displeased with her performance as a hairdresser. He fucks her naturally, mechanically, as something you kinda have to do to your property, like trimming the hedges say. He's displeased with her performance as a cumrag, also - but that's okay, she's displeased with his, too!

She has a nightjob, too - showing patrons the way into a cinema, along with another ditz. And she's looking for more jobs, which is how some silver tin tongued mortodifame introduces her to an old man from whence she picks up a little job modelling boots - for which she shows up in all the get-up of a dutchess.

She has a boyfriend, of course, a nutty vagabond who asks the waiter to feel up his girlfriend, and takes her for a coito nel bosco along with a comrade and his capture - a foreign girl speaking remarkably good Italian (har har). She envies the foreign girl - for what she perceives her freedom and her better social standing. Somehow in her small brainbox hosting an even tinier brain this makes sense. She gives the boyfriend a hard time, of course, but that doesn't actually go all the way to not putting out. Besides, it's okay, he leaves her behind, stuck with the motel bill she can't pay.

And on, and on, and on in this manner. She's pretty, and she's young, and she's just smart enough to play a length of plywood. Which she does. At some point a man she meets purposefully holds up a mirror to her ; but she doesn't understand of the strange movement in the glass anymore than a cat understands of a calendar.

The end.

This film readily qualifies Pietrangeli among the masters of his craft, for so much tension generated out of so little pretense is rare enough a sight.

———1962, by Antonio Pietrangeli, with Stefania Sandrelli [↩]"But won't they make me seem older ?"

"Are you kidding ? All the old hags get them to appear young. Err..." [↩]

« Two theoretical alternatives

Lxs ninxs »

Category: Trilematograf

Sunday, 14 August, Year 8 d.Tr.

Introducing the Negro Mate

Do you remember my urban negro ? Here's further details : they mate!

And speakling of negros mating :

That "caballero" references the horse, amirite ?

Hanbot aka Our Lady of the Snark captured in an excessively opulent & prestigiously luxurious environment. Life is so unfair.

Nevertheless.

When I said Argentina is just a little further down the same exact path the US is taking these days I wasn't even kidding. Above the pompously named "Institute for Scientifical and Technological Research for Defense" - you know, the kind of "defense" that makes other people want to defend themselves also. They can't really afford it, but that's ok, the paint on the billboard is new.

The same, from the side.

Malvinas Argentinas, damnit!

« The Pedoepiphany

MiniGame (S.MG), August 2016 Statement »

Category: La pas prin lume

Thursday, 01 September, Year 8 d.Tr.

Introducing [P]ermanence

Motto: Recall [V]ictory ?

[P]ermanence should be the world's first AAIi. It'd consist of :

An ircii bot for communicating with The Lordship.

A box acquision module.iii

A cryptographic module.iv

Av Bitcoin node in a secure configuration, with wallets.

The functionality contemplated here is that upon receiving a $boxdeploy command from an acceptable signature, [P]ermanence responds within a reasonable timeframe with login credentials, delivered much in the manner deedbot presently provides OTPs.

The OS environment in which [P]ermanence itself runs, as well as the environment in which it creates accounts is tbd, with the mention that absent a homomorphic encryption solution, spreading the data in some sort of encrypted database model across physical machines would be probably the best solution. In any case the first goal of [P]ermanence hardening is to make an attacker unable to obtain usable data from subverting n/2+1 machines at any given moment ; and for [P]ermanence to self-destruct if it ever loses n/2-1 machines at any point. Whether these two conditions can be satisfied by protocol rather than by promise is the most important determinant of the utility of the whole shebang.

Ultimately, [P]ermanence must be capable of disabling, completely and for any desired interval up to permanently, any computing infrastructure, such as operated by any individual or group however defined, up to the total of all installed computing infrastructure operated by anyone anywhere. This "any" knows absolutely no bounds, if in the future someone somewhere makes a computing anything outside of the Internet, [P]ermanence makes a nuclear sub and glasses the spot.

Obviously, throwing all this together out of and on top of all the leaky "modern" software is a taller order than making a proper Bitcoin. Nevertheless, [P]ermanence is necessary and unavoidable, so might as well start thinking about it. The goal of overpowering the entire world may well seem far fetched, but the strict reality of the matter is that, much as in the case of the very Bitcoin that spawned the Republic, we actually have all the tools required. It's not a matter of great leaps of faith or imagination being required (except perhaps as pertains to homomorphisms), but merely a matter of patiently, diligently and correctly applying things we already mostly understand and mostly have.vi

To arms! And may we all live to see a world which harbors no intelligent life outside the WoT.

———Autonomous Artificial Intelligence. [↩]To be supplanted with gossipd later on. [↩]At first, this can consist of a simple list of IPs and root credentials. Eventually to be expanded to include an actual mechanism to rent dedicated servers from companies ; to score the providers according to its own, (self-revised) rules, and to find them in the first place (which later task will include running a complete web crawler, exactly like Google - only better). Even more eventually to supplement this with active 0-day discovery and exploitation. [↩]To replace SSH entirely. To be based on the eventual winner of TMSR's cipher competition. [↩]The grammatical singular implies nothing about actual implementation. [↩]Mention of the LOIC, because. [↩]

« Random visuals from someplace

The Phuctoring »

Category: Bitcoin

Friday, 29 April, Year 8 d.Tr.

Illustrated Tapenade

Since Black Mirror made it to US cable I for the first time in my life heard about fine things for thin people such as Provencal dishes etcetera. And so therefore, since I have a digital camera as well as dishes and a blog, behold!

First, you core a bunch of black olives. Don't mind the cherries and other things, they're not integral to this discussion.

Then you add pine mushrooms (Suillus granulatus, aka weeping bolete) preserved fresh in olive oil to about a third of your cored olive volume ; as well as capers and anchovies to taste.

The whole thing then goes into a very fine grinder, to be rendered to absolute paste, which you eat spread on bread made at home that very day.

Goes quite well with the light Romanian whites, or with whatever else in the vein of Chardonnay, Sauvignon Blanc, maybe even Pinot Gris, almost any demisec rose etcetera. If you're also serving red meat it can definitely take a full bodied, Malbec-ish red like the Argentines favour.

Salud!

« blackmirror.nosedive.final

Awful offal waffle falafel »

Category: Lifespiel

Monday, 21 November, Year 8 d.Tr.

Ideological History of the Republic

Prologue. Minigame (MPEx:S.MG) is now maintaining frozen copies of various linux distributions.i

Why would a private company involved in videogame development maintain frozen copies of OS distros ?

Consider the basic situation : a new user hears of Minigame's product, and wishes to try it. What do we do now ?

If the object were a physical item, such as a shovel, or a particular kind of dildo, the evident approach would be to describe the item. Whether stated in terms of materials, geometry, production process, however effectual and convenient, such description will suffice.ii

Intuitively this should work even better for abstract items, such as a computer program - describe it and you're done. So how shall we describe it ?

"Here's the source code, compile it and run it" is tempting, of course - if for no other reason, then because that's what "everyone does". This in turn because at some point illo tempore it actually worked, or at any rate worked well enough, or mostly worked or whatever it did. I have no idea, I wasn't there and didn't see it ever work.

For instance, "Eulora runs fine on Ubuntu". But what does this mean ?

I have a machine running Ubuntu 10.04. Eulora runs fine on this machine. According to "canonical", which isn't anybody, Ubuntu 10.04 is "no longer supported". What does this mean ?

It does not mean anything.

Meaningless as it is, in pratice it has nevertheless the effect that synaptic (which also isn't anythingiii) tells you that Firefox 20.0 is "the latest" version of Firefox (and if you delve into detail, it also tells you that Ubuntu repositories no longer existiv). This is especially funny in that Firefox 20.0v only handles TLS 1.0.vi

Confronted with this situation, I downloaded the latest firefox and

cp -rv * /usr/lib/firefox/

which resulted in a broken installation "that wouldn't start" (in human terms - that complained about missing gtk-3vii). So I checked to see which is the latest version of firefox that still uses gtk-2, downloaded that,

cp -rv * /usr/lib/firefox/

again and thereby obtained an installation of firefox that could use current ssl thus being able to read all (as opposed to most) https pages.

For the sake of fully understanding this preliminary example, test this on one of your own slavegirls. Give her a machine running Ubuntu 10.04 ; demonstrate to her that the firefox there current is not able to load a certain page ; explain to her why this is ; and task her to resolve the matter.

I am deeply curious whether your slavegirl can in fact resolve this.

If she can then she can certainly have those implants, and anything else she wants ; because she's one of those, readily worth thousands of Bitcoin on the auction block, except for the detail that no one owning one ever seems willing to part with her for any reason.

If she can not, she's just like everyone else, which is to say normal. And here's the strategic decision : does your notion of "publishing" go along the lines of gossipd, "only the qualified may meaningfully ever hear of this", or along the lines of signatures, "anyone should be able to do this" ?viii

If you decide to define "publish" correctly, then "a game publisher" is necessarily involved in an activity whereby the normal, and not the exceptional, can try out its published product.

Yet if your description of your product is "download the source, compile and run", you are implicitly importing in there the normal user's OS, whatever it may be.

This import is in no substantial way different from linking a library dynamicallyix : should it be changed later, by anyone for any reason, your program will receive the new functionality as it is rather than the functionality you yourself observed and tested against as it historically was.

This is the hole through which the night comes in. Small groups operating with little remanencex will be of course tempted to replace say [ with something carrying a viral payload - very deeply evident tampering. Large groups with significant expectations of remanence will however prefer much more subtle breakage.

Consider a very plainly evident example : once such a group managed to hijack the government and replace some portions of the definition of the workplace with nonsensexi, you were somehow burdened with an obligation to... upgrade! The "workplace" definition changed, and now your behaviour with regards to it has to change. There are numerous other examples - the definition of marriage for instance changes all the time ; and the definition of "owed" changes whenever convenient as well.

There is a lot of power in the ability to impose change, derived from the fact that as "revolution" is strictly running in a circle around a peg, then the sum over infinity of all the various discrete revolutions comes out as 0, yet throughout that infinity the "revolution" process spun someone's circle. The whole "progressive" nonsense is very strictly speaking an engine implemented out of chumps, and so yes it has a power rating as it generates work over time.

It then necessarily follows that in the quest to deny power to outsiders and maintain it for oneself, a company will opt to deny the possibility of change to nobodies, and invest resources into making this denial stick. So Minigame is maintaining frozen snapshots of historical linux distros, to deny random third parties the ability to force it to change ; and perhaps if needed to leverage this ability in order to force those third parties to change themselves.

Ideological History of the Republic.

[March 2013] A concise explanation of the functioning of inflation in socialism is unearthed. While in no sense novel, this snippet will nevertheless prove extremely influential in shaping Republican thinking for many years to come.

[March 2013] Some people discovered the soi-dissant "Bitcoin developers" are idiots. The unpleasant matter languished for many months in this stage.

[October 2013] Research into the strength of the RSA basis for Republican process begins. It will yield many interesting results over the years (Imperial attempts at unhappening it notwithstanding).

[October 2013] The growing gap between Justice in the ideal and the working of the imperial courts attracts notice.

[April 2014] The Web of Trust is conceptually introduced. The terminology is not novel ; the correct defintion however is.

[August 2014] A process starts whereby the inept party is to be denied the "change" source of power.

[August 2014] There can be only one Bitcoin ; there's no such thing as "cryptocurrencies".

[November 2014] The first mention of "TRB" to denote Bitcoin ; the first mention of PRB to denote the PRxii ersatz dates from December 2015.

[November 8th, 2014] The Republic is proclaimed independent, and sovereign.

[December 2014] A foundation to oversee the freeze process of the Bitcoin code is enacted.

[January 2015] The Republic quashed the "canonical" of Bitcoin. The rout underwent denial for many months, because apparently the Empire is very ill prepared to even conceptualize it may be denied.

[February 2015] The Republic acquires a supply of pogos to mitigate problems with imperial control of hardwarexiii.

[March 2015] The problem of static linking being unavailable in contemporary software first comes to the fore ; buildroot version of Bitcoin becomes available later the same month.

[July 2015] Political time is denounced as foreign to the Republic.

[July 2015] TRB reference implementation is first released.

[August 2015] V-genesis, by a wide margin the most important event in the history of computing, and perhaps human culture generally.xiv

[January 2016] A fundamental rejection of cultural "diversity" is declared, through the venue of rejecting support for xenoscript.

[March 2016] The rejection of UTF-8 becoming ever more acute.

[May 2016] RSA was confiscated from the imperial stooges.

[October 2016] Evolving understanding of the problem of social hierarchy results in an unequivocal rejection of the humanity of common people.

Did I omit anything ?

———Do you have any fucking idea how bloated these are, by the way ?

We are talking terrabytes of data here. Why ? Can you even vaguely guess what the fuck would be in Ubuntu that'd legitimately consume hundreds of Gigabytes of storage medium ?

A page is about 2k bytes, uncompressed. A book is about half a MB. A whole wall covered in shelves is a Gigabyte or maybe two if you have really long walls. Really, Ubuntu legitimately contains enough stuff to cover many hundreds of walls with shelves ?

Are you sure it's not just the necessary result of the ontological void screaming in the tiny empty skulls of a million pointless flies ? [↩]The reader inhabituated with thinking in the proper sense, and habituated to instead substitute a mishmash of soundbites (obtained from "trusted"1 sources) may readily imagine that the solution would rather be an offer to "sell it to him".

This is nonsense, albeit satisfactory to a certain kind of narrowly minded self-interest known by idiots as "capitalism", which it pointedly isn't, and by everyone else as "ESLtard corporatism".

For one thing, I can't promise to continue delivering the product for as long as there may exist those who hear of it ; nor can I promise I'll be willing to send it to them wherever they may be. The former is a very marked problem with many items that actually matter (in stark contrast to the sorts of items that normally interest the sort of subhuman idiot we're here discussing, which are as an universal rule without known exceptions neither interesting nor important2). The latter might in principle fall foul of who knows what impedance mismatch3 between the communication of information and the communication of specified physical items.

For all sorts of reasons, some but not all of which have to do with the scandalously obscene imbecility of amoebas masquerading as human beings, you may discover at any point that "deliver an item" is a poor response to "state a question".

------

1 Such as for instance from "the media", always understood as the government's agitprop machine exclusively ; such as from "community consensus" (aka fecal matter) ; such as from inept wordplay and so forth. The chief property of the Markov-chain based "thinker" is that his software is not verifiable in any objective sense ; but merely enacted through practice. Hence the subhumanity, not as an insult but as a cold, hard fact : it can not be said that his activity is either intentional or directed, making the average, hard-working, law-abiding, tax-paying, married-with-children citizen a sort of mollusc, not a sort of human. Hence the need of the idiot for the state : a super-entity to absorb and roll into one huge ball all the various (uncountable and subjectively impredictable) failures of the amoeba ; then "handle" them in bulk, which universally reduces to the emission of unbounded, unbacked promises as to the future (generally in the shape of fiat "currency" whenever available), promises that by definition and necessarily can't ever be satisfied.

2 The need for bell-bottom pants, smartphones, tamaguchi scl ends with the going out of the Kink High generation that thought it's swag. It's true that it was impossible to get laid properly without disco hair or a spoon for up your nose in the 70s. Nevertheless, their pointed absence today does not preclude anyone from getting laid (arguably - on the contrary). This is because the avatars of the idiot are irrelevant to the world, a mere coat of paint, entirely indifferent to the function of the painted thing. Meanwhile the need for a telescope is universal, and while the telescope may be superseded by better technology, the need for it never subsides. Should the new technology fail (such as for instance through a separation of domain from the old, that only becomes observable later ; or such as through failure of a production factor, that unexpectedly becomes unavailable) the telescope will be manufactured again as it was before. It will not however be needed again as it was needed before - it was needed throughout, and to the same degree. A man's education is not "needed now and again", but factually needed in everything he does, whether explicitly or implicitly, it's there ; and similarily items of interest, be they physical or ideal, are just as needed in their final implications, replacements, alternatives scl as they are in direct presence.

3 Consider the illustrative case of some idiots (who for reasons unknown, convincingly misrepresented themselves as "in charge") deciding "pgp is a munition and may not be exported". The "ban" (more properly speaking, the self-important aferations of irrelevant nobodies) were circumvented in fact, but the impedance mismatch is confirmed, not anulled through being resolved : there evidently was something there to resolve (which is, obviously, the main driving force pushing the subhuman amoeba in the way of actual people - it aims to exist through inconvenience). [↩]A "gui"/foreskin over apt-get, whatever. [↩]Just for fun : if you remove all its built-in nonsense (which 404s because "canonical" deliberately deleted it all, in its doomed quest for relevancy) ; and then insert a broken line in the ppa list, it dies with a permanent

E: Malformed line 34 in source list /etc/apt/sources.list (dist parse)

E: The list of sources could not be read.

Go to the repository dialog to correct the problem.

E: _cache->open() failed, please report.

pop-up window. You can't however "go to the repository dialog", because synaptic closes immediately after you close the pop-up. So you can, with trivial effort, put the synaptic "easy to use" "GUI" "UX" "just like Windows" etc blabla into a smashed state from which it can not by itself recover.

This is the deep reason canonical isn't anybody : you can't become somebody by taking a tool, such as a piece of software, and painting over the seams so it no longer works. Very nice and a pat on your artistic head for the coat of paint, but no, your "artistic car" that has lost the use of the trunk is not a car anymore, nor useful. It's just a very large paperweight, of the exact same substance as those idiotic "gifts" you kept making for your mother during art class until you grew up enough to figure out that nobody wants chunks of clay or papier mache or whatever the fuck it was your daycare at the time pushed upon you.

None of this matters, of course, because nobody actually uses synaptic for any purpose that isn't "eee look what the Down's kids did, isn't it cute how they think they're part of this species" ; and even if someone somehow did use it, they'd still just nano /etc/apt/sources.list and fix it there directly. Which is the tautologic point : nobody uses the GUI/foreskin versions because a) they don't work1 and b) they aren't actually useful, or by their own lights (as seen in their non-working state) ever actually used by anyone.

------

1 In this context "work" means reliably, in protocol rather than promise variant of reliably. Which is to say that it is not possible for them not to work ; rather than they mostly seem to generally work, more or less. [↩]Does any software actually need 20 major revisions for any conceivable purpose ?

Because Firefox is going to beat the 50 soon enough. [↩]Quick likbez if you've not been following the "login state implemented over stateless protocol" lulzfest ongoing (for close to three decades now!) over at mongoloid "developer" farm : TLS was introduced because "SSL" (which is ambiguously a name for the protocol-nonsense as well as the nonsensical implementation thereof) v3 was utterly broken.

You understand what is being said here ? The third version of a thing built out of enough hubris to name itself the same as the thing it implemented was fundamentally and irreparably broken. Something like USG.Ford coming out with a car named Car 3.0, that fails to move on its own, and it is discovered that this is nothing short of a fundamental problem, for instance because the retarded islanders involved made the engine block out of pressed wood. And they painted it "metal". It looks just like an engine block, alright ? They got a little confused! And should that example be too wild for you to swallow, consider instead the actual lived case of USG.LM producing a "LCS" out of pressed shitboard.

So TLS was introduced, and guess what ? TLS 1.0 is fundamentally and irreparably broken. So you have to use TLS 1.2 or whatever now ; but the good news is that "online commerce" sites such as Paypal moved the deadline for the change : it was supposed to be this summer, but they moved it to Autumn 2017.

Who told this collection of fowl and cattle that they are people like you and me, and why did they ? [↩]"GTK" is this other shambling horror we shan't discuss, other than to say there's absolutely no reason it needs major version revisions. The fact that it has three means it will never stop having them, and consequently that it fails at its only purpose in life. [↩]This distinction figures prominently in the gossipd spec as well as discussion around it.

There are two fundamental modes of practical cryptography, one of them being "signature", as typified by deedbot, a situation where anybody can verify the truth of a sentence for the cost of a process ; the other of them being "gossip", as typified by the yet-inexistent gossipd, a situation where nobody can verify any truth, but merely allocate levels of trust.

These two modes are primitive - much like Bitcoin is the primitive of money - which is to say they are universally present in all fields whether the practitioners are theoretically advanced enough to recognize this or not yet (much in the way energy and mass are present in all physical interaction, whether the people involved are aware or not, and irrespective of what derivative nomenclatures they may be using).

It would stand to reason that only the first mode can be properly called "publishing". Tentatively, the second could be called "releasing", enacting both these terms into linguistic centrality, as they cover the most important distinction in extant human culture. [↩]There's ample discussion re dynamic linking, and its practical problems as well as the political implications thereof which you are expected to be familiar with ; and which this article systematizes. [↩]The term comes directly from the "memory" in game-theoretic modelling of interaction. If you are likely to run into the entity again, it has significant remanence in your system. [↩]From the logs,

mircea_popescu funny how deeply aware they are of the power transactions occuring. as per the current kink high, "giving boy power" = bad ; but giving women very similar power over, eg, "whether fuck jokes are acceptable in the workplace" is doublespent as "fairness" or "equality" not as a power grab.

mircea_popescu because hey, cheerleader suits have been around forever but boys still managed to control themselves ; whereas joking about coworker's boobs has not been around forever nor could anyone expect subhuman females to control self.

[↩]Which might mean either "public relations" ie, substanceless form ; or else "power rangers", in reference to some long forgotten neckbeard idiocy. [↩]This major issue readily links to the problem of change as an instrument of imperial control ; but there's also plans. [↩]See also lord Vulpes' excellent intro. [↩]

« How to handle "trans" sexuality

The war with the "press" »

Category: Cocietate si Sultura

Sunday, 09 October, Year 8 d.Tr.

I have no more title ideas. Come back tomorrow.

On second thought, let's just call it Titola. The title I mean. Geddit ?

Did you say... ssh ?!

"And that building slice sir, should it be horizontal or vertical ?"

You realise this is a hotel, do you ? Let me show you how I know it's a hotel :

Yeah, that's right, by the granny knickers.

And since we're doing details off the walls of the hotel-prison, here :

Roro sounds like a perfect drag queen name (in reference to what she does after she sucks you off, evidently) ; "te amamos" is a collective affair, as the love life of drag queens traditionally isi. Now add cock and cock together : Convicted to Poverty, a film about the life of a boy named Elliot, trapped with his (working) mother in a hotel-prison set aside by the mores and social practices of some rudimentary city of the distant colonies specifically for this kind of people.

Ever been this high up ?

So this little gazebo is organised inside as a production studio (mostly decor, you'll need gensets to power serious equipment). They have maybe a coupla square meters in three-ish levels, cut off into rooms more or less with a splendid view outside, the perfect spot to shoot "refined" ads for "upper mass market" "luxury" products. I now know the woman in charge of it, so if you're looking for location...

Oh, what's that, you have it rough in the cubical farm, Mr. Elliot ?

Such fate like an innocent child little did you know the horrors that'll mark you for life you'll always remember that memory.

And in closing, allow me to regale you with the Titere Museum.

———Recall Divine's "How much did you pay to get in here ? 10 bucks ? Ok, eight is to see the show and two to fuck me after. Come by the dressing room, I'll be there 'till Christmas!" [↩]

« The Story of Elliot Rodger. By Elliot Rodger. Adnotated. Part Five.

The Story of Elliot Rodger. By Elliot Rodger. Adnotated. Part Sex. »

Category: La pas prin lume

Friday, 26 August, Year 8 d.Tr.

I don't think you understand how credit cards "work".

People in the habit of using their brain often laugh at poorly specified, horrendously designed, shodily implemented altcoins, and for good reason - there's apparently no shortage of these end products of an ambitious process which included no thinking whatsoever. Credit cards are perhaps the most egregious example of them all.

According to the whitepaperi, a credit card is a paper wallet which may contain one single address. The address is composed of 16 numeric digitsii, which are usually formatted with three dashesiii, and it is secured by a "secret" private key which is... four digits long. To further securitize this secure security, a three digit super-key is printed on the back of the paper wallet in question, and that's it, you're good to go!

How is this abomination to be used in practice ? Oh, that's simple - just like its users. For instance you can walk up to a machine, stick your paper wallet into it, and then type the private key. Yeah, that's right, you type your private key into a big box you don't own, nor control in any way, and can't inspect. What protects you from the owner of the machine selectively scamming ? A shoddy, slow, bug ridden, unauditable, ad-hoc reimplementation of the common WoT.iv And if the operator decides to charge your card twice, or fifty billiard times, the best you can do is call an Indian. They'll be thrilled to listen and eagerly try to help! Have you tried rebooting your credit card wallet sir ?

What protects you from someone spying on you while you put your private key in ? Nothing. This actually happens all the time, it's called "credit card fraud" - because evidently making the world's worst altcoin and pushing it on naive people is no kind of fraud. Fraud is only when the wind blows over a rotten reed, not when the reed was rotten in the first place!v

But suppose you don't want to do that. What else can this altcoin be used for ? Why, you could pay for your meal! Like, walk into an eatery, hand over your paper wallet to an overworked, underpaid, sub-minimum wage worker who depends on tips to survive and works such impossible hours in such miserable conditions he's about 17 times more likely to abuse psychoactive substances than the general population. Then you tell them your private key. The private key to your only public address which holds all your funds. What prevents them from making a copy ? Nothing whatsoever, this also happens all the time (credit card fraud, remember). What prevents the eatery from double charging ? The WoT which they don't call a WoT, nor does it really work.vi

How about forgetting all this silliness and just using your own computer to make payments, you ask ? Why of course! The credit card altcoin has a system for you to do just that, whereby... you send your public address, along with the secret key and the super-secret key to someone's server. In plain text.vii What prevents anyone and everyone from spying on you ? Why... nothing, of course. They'd... they'd never dare do that! And the fact that they dare, each day every day, to the tune of billions doesn't prove anything! Hillary Clinton 2016!

What prevents the server in question from being compromised ? Why, there's a special organisation dedicated to giving out a little icon they can put on their webpages. Yes, that's right, just like in the days of Altavista and Jukt Micronics, they get a little gif trophy! At least it's not animated.

What prevents the server in question from retaining your private key and then being later compromised ? Oh, that's easy, credit card altcoin wallets expire. Your lord will provide you with... another credit card altcoin wallet upon the expiration. You can even keep your public key, they'll just issue you new secret and supersecret keys. What's not to love ?!

Well, perhaps the fact that in a doomed quest to "prevent fraud", the lords of the alt-republic implement all sorts of idiotic policies, ranging from randomly and arbitrarily "rejecting" credit card altcoin wallets to see what happens (laugh all you want - but it happened to Bahamas, and it happened to you) to requiring pictures with a halibut on your head.

Credit Card Altcoin user completing almost last and final KYC verification step

Credit Card Altcoin users verifying their iden-titty.

The special streamlined identity verification process for Credit Card Altcoin businesses

The only thing this idiocy has going for it is that it's widely used. This happens to also be the only thing this idiocy has going against it - as the moral obligation of every thinking man to "defraud" this nonsense (in the sense of separating the idiots involved from any sort of usable contents they may be carrying) becomes ever more obvious to the thinking men in question, the credit card altcoin will cry foul, be forked and the the forks forked, but eventually wither and die.

Because when it comes to money, there can only be one.

———What'd an altcoin be without its whitepaper! [↩]16 numeric digits means there's a total of almost ten billiard combinations available, from 1 to 9`999`999`999`999`999. For comparison, the standard address as currently implemented by Bitcoin allows 1`461`501`637`330`902`918`203`684`832`716`283`019`655`932`542`975 combinations.

Try it out on your own computer : divide the former by the later to get for your own benefit the same 0 everyone gets when they try to compute the % of the standard the credit card altcoin actually implements.

Yes, I'm sure fresh minds unused to mathematics will readily be persuaded by arguments to ignorance in the vein of "sixteen digits is such a humongously large lot it is enough to boggle my puny brain and so should be enough for everyone". That such persuasion is a common occurence doesn't change the fact that sixteen digits are barely enough to count the neurons in a working hominid brain. They come to almost 6 bytes, which is a as ridiculous in cryptography as it is in penis inchery.

I suppose the only reasonable move here is to dub the credit card altcoin "the billiard standard" and move on. [↩]It should perhaps be pointed out that in practice the credit card public address has a lot less than the sixteen digits meaningfully availabe. For instance when Bahamas inadvertently leaked his credit card public address while cutting in line, the 4147-20 lead surprised no one, as having a "select" credit card which requires $25 mn with the bank while officially declaring assets in the 500k to 1mn range with that same bank is standard practice in banana republics.

For comparison, the standard as implemented by Bitcoin consists of 25 bytes, with a leading type specifier (=1), and a trailing 4 byte checksum (equal to the first four bytes of a double sha256 calculated over the payload). The payload itself is 20 bytes long, equal to the result of a ripemd160 hash. The 50 digit number discussed in footnote ii above refers to this payload, whereas the supposed 10 billiard space of the credit card public address readily reduces to "almost one trillion" once the protocol identifier and checksum are stripped off. Which should be "enough for everyone", especially if you stop having children. Apparently the SSN debacle has taught no one anything. [↩]Problem ? Ah, but it's ok, because everyone involved pretends to not know what the WoT is and then it's all good, right ? [↩]This bizarro alt-view of the credit card altcoinheads might perhaps explain their psychotic reactions surrounding the Etherape - inhabituated as they to nonsensical "rules" of the alt-world they inhabit, dentistry appears painful and to be avoided, while not brushing one's teeth appears the height of sensible, slothful self-management. [↩]If the agent defrauds you, you can't leave them a negative rating. You have to go to one of the official lords of this system and convince them the agent defrauded you, as they're the only ones allowed to negrate. The system is also entirely opaque - you can't see how many negrates the agent has, only the lord in question can. To you it is presented, and you're required to act as if, every agent is just as reputable as every other. Let's stop here, before going into the abundant available detail as to just how broken the "convince a lord of this alt-republic" process is. [↩]Notwithstanding all the ridiculous kludge built around the attempt to pretend otherwise, credit card based ecommerce still happens in plaintext. [↩]

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Category: Bitcoin

Tuesday, 18 October, Year 8 d.Tr.

I am firmly against universal franchise.

The title says it all, but what does it mean ?

I believe a vast majority of things that crawl out of woman belong obeying orders for their entire life without let or respite and without alternative ; and I believe that whether that entire life turns out short, unhappy, incomfortablei, painfulii or otherwise makes very little difference and isn't (nor should be) anyone's concern.

The foregoing stands for most whites as it stands for most blacks ; for most women as it stands for most men ; and for most humans selected by whatever objective measureiii equally well. "Om nu te nasti, om devii" means that no one is born a person. You become a person - and if it were easy everyone'd do it. But it's not easy, and most everyone doesn't do it.

The franchise attaches exclusively to personhood, and for this reason :

Most bipedal lifeforms, with or without feathers or flat nails, may not own property. This isn't some sort of conventional interdiction, it's not the case that some "we" won't let them. This is merely the recognition of a fundamental characteristics of the subhuman object : it lacks the ability to own. It just doesn't have that property, much like an opaque vase is not transparent. Exactly as a turtle lacks the ability to fly. Most "people" may not own anything for the exact same reason turtles can't fly anywhere ; and just as is the case with turtles - trying to emulate flight by launching them in the air is absolutely always injurious, for them as well as the environment.

Most bipedal lifeforms, with or without feathers or flat nails, may not form opinions. This isn't simply "may not vote". Literally, they get no say, there's nothing that may proceed from their arbitrariety because lacking the franchise means they lack arbiter. Whether they engage in sexual congress or not is up to the other party. Whether they go to eat here or there ; or whether they eat at all is not up to them.iv Absent franchise, the notion of "liking" a movie or a song is without meaning, and bereft of any interest.v

In short, most "people" aren't. Anything. Most "people" aren't anything. Most "people" aren't people, first and foremost ; and it all follows from there.

Confronted with this statistical truth, the safest move for any individual is to assume slavery as a subjective identity. This because a person that sees himself a slave is at the worst an eccentric, and universally benign ; whereas a non-person that sees himself enfranchised is universally an idiot, by definition a danger to himself and others, and the only available incarnation of evil.

Among the millitantvi idiots the unexpressed and thus unexamined view holds currency that supposedly slavery is a taint, from which one can never recover ; whereas idle pretense to personhood is a sort of duty, cvasi-religious in nature. This happens to be exactly contrary to reality, like pretty much everything else the millitant idiots ever came up with. Slavery actually is the path to personhood ; the alternatives are all magic, and work about as well as magic, but slavery works like technology works. Meanwhile idle pretense put forth on the shaky basis of absent personhood is both very expensive to maintain (all delusions are - but this one's the worst) and an absolute bar to actual individuation and eventual enfranchisement.

I also believe this is the fundamental gender difference - that males mature towards the franchise ; while females mature towards competent slavery id ipsum, with exceptionsvii ; and I am absolutely certain that systematic definitions of the franchise (be they by blood, or skin tone or spoken language or anything else in this vein) are suicidal, the conceptual equivalent of a steamship whose engine is designed to plug into the sink tap.

That'd be it.

———In- is the privative by the nature of things whereas un- is the privative by evolution of phenomena. Hence you say "Undressed woman" and "Indistinct noise" rather than "Indressed woman" and "Undistinct noise" - the woman can be dressed and certainly at some point was ; the noise is not distinct by its nature nor ever could have been otherwise. This is and also why you say both "indecisive" and "undecisive" as the case may be. [↩]As Poincare (not the matemathician, the other one) aptly observed, an avoidance of human suffering can never be the goal of policy, because the only certain way to ensure the desired result is also the simple way : kill everyone. This is, incidentally, exactly the regime under which you're belabouring today. Can you feign surprise convincingly ? [↩]See this discussion of what that means ; and while at it see also this. [↩]The Latin anecdotal retelling of this is "Si tum, inquis, dives est tum cenare potest cum cupit - si pauper, tum cenare debet cum potest." unduly particularizes the matter - of course most people will be poor, and of course poverty here is not a situation but an identity, and of course its meaning is absent optionality. [↩]Which is why the only answer to the "opinions" of anodyne unperson masquerading as a "blogger" is "nobody cares". [↩]Those uppity slaves that aren't merely content with posturing for themselves, but aim to also persuade others. [↩]Which exceptions are so common in a society at ease as to practically equal the rarity of successful male maturation. [↩]

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Category: Cocietate si Sultura

Saturday, 24 September, Year 8 d.Tr.

Hustle & Flow

Hustle & Flowi is a very earnest, and a very credible production from the apparent expert entomologist (now that Tarantino hung up his boots). Craig Brewer understands black culture, or Southern culture, or humanity or whatever the hell he understands. Well.

There's one major disruption in the construction - to wit I do not believe a pimp that never hit his girlsii will have thrown out the main bitchiii in her underwear + toddler. Just like that, bam. Tings dun work dat way, mang.

That aside, the hustle flows, convincingly, smoothly. There's a tradition where everyone in movies pisses on computer kids, as if they didn't exist, which manifests in the insanely poor quality of footage that includes computers. Seriously bitch, you've been typing for two minutes and didn't touch the spacebar once ? With all fingers lined up on the F line ? Hurr. (To not even get in the blinkenlichten and assorted nonsenseiv.) There's a very similar tradition to piss all over music, with the most improbable bullshit misrepresentation of how that works, very much in the same insanely offensive manner computing is misrepresented.

Well - this film doesn't do that. Not at all. They actually take the craft they depict so seriously, the one-offs they made for the purpose of being filmed in the making actually escaped into a career of their own - as musical pieces! Can't argue with that.

Can't argue with much, actually. Guy who did something bad and consequently feels guilty and also happens to be holding a gun shoots it without thinking at some rando who surprised him. This is generally how it goes. Guy who made it doesn't give a shit about yet another wanna-be fan with a hometape up his sleeve. Quite how it goes. Guy trying to make it can't care less about who's the prisoner and who's the guard - he just wants to give someone his shit. So it goes.

I could say that I'm vaguely displeased by the man who does assert his will over his woman ; but then when she bends and brings him cookies fails to giver her a cookie of her own. Don't do that shit, it's stupid. But I'm not going to say that, because honestly... there's not that much better stuff to watch out there.

———2005, by Craig Brewer, with Ludacris, DJ Quals. [↩]These do exist, yes. [↩]You know that's what she is after three seconds of watching her bark. It's what they do, see ? [↩]You seen Swordfish ? You know, the worst film ever made ? In which Travolta (at the absolute top of his non-acting anti-game) explains how he... protects our way of life. You know, say the bad guys bomb a church - he bombs ten. That'll show em! Which is why he has to bomb a bank see, to steal the money to finance the church bombing. So really, if the terrorists bomb a church of ours, he bombs ten of theirs and a bank of ours. Logic!

Now let's quote :

- So how did you do it?

- Do what?

Break the code.

I dropped a logic bomb through the trapdoor.

No, you didn't. You didn't have time.

- What'll you have?

- Scotch.

- You can do better than that.

- I used a password sniffer.

Uh-uh. How did you do it?

I don't know exactly. I see the code in my head. I can't explain it.

They are discussing, for the record, the "breaking" of a... 128bit code. Through keyboard manipulations. In the space of... one minute (Did you know that the top hackers can do it in a few hours ? Well this really good hacker can do it in a minute. Through hitting ? in a ftp session repeatedly, or somesuch.)

So yes, no time for dropping the logic bomb through the trap door ? Use a password snitcher. And make sure you backtrace it! They never tell you the true shit in movies, see, for fear you start doing it and then where'd The Man be. But here on Trilema we give the show away : if you ain't got time for logic bombs through the trap foors, by all means sniff your password drawer - but whatever you do, please, for the love of all that is jolly, make sure you've backtraced it.

Oh, and contrary to what those oppressive white males fulla priviledge over at the CS department might have told you, computer programming isn't a rational process. Jus' gotta feel dem vibes naimean ? You show 'em Rakim, dun let no-one put you down now dawg! [↩]

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Category: Trilematograf

Thursday, 10 November, Year 8 d.Tr.

How to participate in the affairs of The Most Serene Republic

This article is no longer relevant to current affairs. It is preserved here for purely historical reasons, which is to say in order to help you internalize your impardonable failure.

~ * ~

The Republic's rapidly expanding population and economy offer numerous opportunities to participate for an ever-increasing demographici. Here's a run-down.

Difficulty : Beginner

I. You could read the logs. A ball of yarn approximately 22`352`146 words to dateii (roughly twice the size of Trilema, which of course you've read, yes ?), the logsiii recount the entire history of the Republic, and in the process provide the only, winding, intricate stairwell into its very heart : the forum. That the republic readily exceeds the literate production of the combine of "modern democracies" should be unsurprising ; that they, sorry shelters of the stunted, ever manage to reach its quality is altogether dubious. See #trilema for life support.iv

II. You could play Eulora. It's a MMORPG, its currency (ECu) is directly pegged to Bitcoin, it's allegedly fun. Certainly beats dicking around with Bitcoin faucets by a damn sight. See #eulora for live support.

III. You could pay your taxes. It's true that various rottinculo are delinquent in their fiscal obligationsv, but it's equally true they have no voice in Republican affairs.

Difficulty : Intermediate

IV. You could stand up a Bitcoin node. mod6 has created a complete set of tools making life much easier for the beginner-intermediate. He also maintains a public node list, and he's always looking for testers. You will need a dedicated server and some bash skills.

V. You could learn how to program correctly, such as for instance by writing your own Vvi implementation, or by standing up an irc botvii, or by following the excellent manuals produced by the Lordshipviii. Bear in mind that it is deemed unethical within the Republic to write code if you haven't actually learned how to write it first, and that orcs' claims to have taught you something often turn out fraudulent upon examination.

VI. You could write for Qntra. All it takes is a write-up of a news item, which you then submit to BingoBoingo. Accepted stories entitle you to S.QNTR shares, which currently trade at ~0.00005 BTC per.ix

VII. You could evangelize. This is a thankless and mostly pointless task, today as ever in history. Nevertheless, there exist groups of mutually-supported idiots, perpetuating themselves through active denial of reality -- exactly in the manner subhuman groups befouling the Americas centuries ago told themselves inept stories about the world that failed to include Europe in all its majestic glory. Fine examples of such stone-age tribes call themselves "lesswrong", or "Something Awful", or "PUA community" or what have you. The Republic provides sufficient ideological basis to completely destructure any claims the primitives misconstrue as their own ideologies (feel free to fall back on #trilema for dogmatic support should you need it), and consequently any attempts to maintain whatever local hierarchy in power over the respective cow herd will have to be political. Prepare to be banned (sort-of like being burned at the stake irl), secure in the knowledge that no half-naked savage ever has, or ever could, withstand the might of the Republic once we finally get around to arraying against them. It's our lord's will!

Difficulty : Advanced

VIII. You could establish your credentials with the Republic. Understand that your being a doctor, lawyer, University professor etcetera buys you very little. Upper-middle class achievement may be sufficient to impress the parents of one's beloved bride, but unless we have already mentioned you by name what helps is actually being a head of state or somesuch.

IX. You could participate in design discussions. Such as for instance re gossipd recently, but these pop up with some frequency. Mind that VIII above is there for good reason -- if you're nobody on a stick and lack the mental flexibility required to make sense you'll be landing yourself in the soup in short order.

X. You could do your own thing. It's probably a bad idea to go out on your own before you achieve your accoladex, but afterwards you're more than welcome to eg reinvent lisp. Outside of some very moderate scheduling constraints you're your own master in the Republic. Which is exactly as it should be.

———It will eventually be the case that everyone can participate in the Republican affairs -- but that "everyone" specifically excludes a large portion of people alive today ; so that the barrier to the eventual realisation of "everyone can participate" is exactly the de-realisation of a good portion of the components of "everyone" today. I hope this footnote is ominous enough, seeing as it makes the physical destruction of idiots a literal goal of the Republic. [↩]That date was September 2016. You get the idea. [↩]log.mkj.lt ; btcbase.org/log/ ; logs.bvulpes.com ; your name here. [↩]While at it, might as well register your pgp key with deedbot. To achieve this, place your (ASCII-armored) public key into wotpaste, then send deedbot a private message (via /query deedbot ) consisting of "!!register [the wotpaste url you obtained before]". [↩]The USG owes well over a million for FY 2015 and a similar amount estimated for FY 2016. [↩]See Lord Vulpes' likbez. V is a fundamental part of the intellectual future of humanity. No other item accessible to you today is. [↩]And in the process learn an incredible lot about the strengths and weaknesses of your preferred stack, as well as your other assumptions. See the spec ; and remember that this task has a strange mirror quality to it, in that the less of your own understanding you expose, the less you learn. [↩]Such as his Lordship asciilifeform's FFA guide (Ada) or her Ladyship diana_coman's eucrypt guide (C++). [↩]Qntra is temporarily offline while the republic's ISP is being built. [↩]Current lordship list. [↩]

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Category: Bitcoin

Monday, 19 September, Year 8 d.Tr.

How to handle "trans" sexuality

Apparently the long-neglected basic education of ESLtardsi makes the explicit expression of such banality necessary, so here we are.

The most important point to always keep in mind is that transsexuality is the direct equivalent of dressing up like a clown.

The above fundamental truth can not be escaped, nor should be elided, as it informs the entirety of the discussion and is inseparable from it. So :

Expecting that your sexual partners and closest friends accept the fact that you enjoyii ...

Dressing up as a clown

"Being" "transsexual"

Sane ? Reasonable ? Acceptable ?

Yes.

Yes.

Expecting that the general population (including your parents and other relatives) accept the fact that you enjoyiii ...

Dressing up as a clown

"Being" "transsexual"

Sane ? Reasonable ? Acceptable ?

Dubious.

Dubious.

When participating in a social functioniv ...

Dressing up as a clown

"Being" "transsexual"

Sane ? Reasonable ? Acceptable ?

No.

No.

Pretending your identity is predicated onv ...

Dressing up as a clown

"Being" "transsexual"

Sane ? Reasonable ? Acceptable ?

No.

No.

Expecting people generally care to discuss topics strictly of interest to those who ...

Dressing up as a clown

"Being" "transsexual"

Sane ? Reasonable ? Acceptable ?

No.

No.

Misrepresenting irrelevant detail of dress and manner as political, or as a civil rights issue, whether that irrelevant detail is ...

Dressing up as a clown

"Being" "transsexual"

Sane ? Reasonable ? Acceptable ?

No.

No.

Pretending your life is so hollow and your mind so empty that your central preoccupations are tepid minutia on the level of ...

Dressing up as a clown

"Being" "transsexual"

Sane ? Reasonable ? Acceptable ?

No.

No.

Hopefully this clarifies the matter in a theoretical perspective, so violence will cease being necessary.

———Retards, ie, people whose mental development is behind average for their biological age, who speak English as their single language. ESLtards. [↩]They're your friends, which means you selected them, which means they should be able to stand you as you are. If they don't, you're more of an idiot than previously thought, pick better. [↩]They're stuck with you, and have no particular reason to like you, or even stand you, or make the slightest effort. In general they don't give a shit, but sometimes they get fixated on specifics. Stop getting your obnoxious, smelly biosack in their way and all will be well. [↩]Unless it's a clown convention, a specifically clown-friendly wedding, some sort of carnival etc, wear a fucking tie.

Yes, streaking may be okay, in some contexts. Streaking junior league baseball will put you at the mercy of society : if it's made up of relatively advanced, civilised people they'll mock you mercilessly and laugh you out of town. If it's made up of UStards, they'll flay you alive.

And by the way, you can stop pretending already. Just about everyone knows why you go around claiming to be a girl. It doesn't work either, does it. [↩]Your identity is not within your purview. [↩]

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Category: Trilenciclopedia

Saturday, 08 October, Year 8 d.Tr.

How to fix global warming ?

The title doesn't discuss the currently hallucinated nonsense, obviously. But in principle, as an engineering problem, were global warming actually occurring at some point in the futurei, how could it be fixed ?

As fortune has it, we actually have the technology to offer a complete solution for this problem! Observe :

I. Trigonometry. The total output of the Sun is currently 3.846 * 1026 Watts. The Earth's radius is 6.535 * 106 to 6.384 * 106 meters, because it's slightly bent from use. The distance from planet to star is, roundly 1.5 * 1011 meters (a value basically known to the Ancient Greeks, by the way).

Thanks to Thales of Miletus (who showed an early and apparently prescient preoccupation for the Sun and shadow) and some of his friends, we can calculate (with some approximation) that the angular projection of something like the Earth seen from the Sun would be dmin / πrii at the narrow and dmax / πriii perpendicular on it at the thick. Altogether, the Earth would cover a fraction of 1.937551034 * 10-10 of the total radiative sphere of the Sun at the distance where it hangs out, resulting in an expected share of the total solar radiative power W of 3.846 * 1026 * 1.937551034 * 10-10 = 7.451821276764 1016. This compares favourably with the total energetic consumption of humans on Earthiv (at 1.19208 * 108 Wattsv) in the sense of being a two hundred million times higher.

Should however the orbit of the Earth be one single kilometer further out, the above calculations would change, the figure 1.5 * 1011 being instead replaced with 150`000`000`001vi, which would result in projections of 0.00001386770071 and 0.00001397168194 respectively, and 1.937551036 * 10-10 instead of 1.937551034 * 10-10 altogether, which would result in a drop of solar energy incident from 7.451821276764 * 1016 to 7.451821284456 * 1016, for a net loss of 7.692 * 7 Watts. Which again compares favourably with the total energetic consumption of humans on Earthvii at 1.19208 * 108 Watts : it is more than half!

To put this result in simple terms :

Every kilometer added to the radius of Earth's orbit reduces Earth's share in the Sun's radiative output by an energy equivalent to 64.5% of all energy used by humans.

II. Physics. The total mechanical energy for a planet with a mass going on an elliptical orbit around a star of a larger mass will be

W = -G (M * m) / (2 * rviii).

Doing the mathix we find that Earth's mechanical energy in current orbit is 2.6425275864000003 * 1032 whereas its energy in a one kilometer higher orbit would be 2.6425275687831497 * 1032. The difference, known among the Bilderberg group and other conspiratorial circles as 1.76168506 * 1024, is a good proxy for the sort of effort that'd be necessary to realise that kilometer orbit change.

Supposing for the sake of argument that we had available one thousand yearsx, the instantaneous power to deliver that total energy would then be 1.76168506 * 1024 / 1000 (years in a millenium) / 365 (days in a year) / 24 (hours in a day) / 3600 (seconds in an hour) = 5.5862666793505 * 1013 Watts.

This compares disfavourably with the total energetic consumption of humans on Earthxi at 1.19208 * 108 Watts, in the sense that the thousand-year budget for Operation Orbit Hopping would be 48`935 trillion dollars per year (about three thousand times the current fantasyxii US GDP) if we use electricity prices as a measuring stick.

From which it follows that saving the Earth from its ultimate fate of a runaway greenhouse effect requires first increasing industrial output at least a hundred thousand times above the present levels - if not two hundred thousand times for good measure. Then a base upon which a solution to the problem could in fact and productively be applied would be available -- and once it is available solutions aboundxiii.

The good news is that there's at least a hundred million years left until this whole global warming thing has to be taken seriously. Judging by the rate of industrial power growth over the past three centuries, it is not much of a jump to expect that by the end of this first million years the problem will be well in hand, leaving a further ninety-nine million years to be productively spent in urination contests on the graves of some anodyne XXIst centuryxiv idiots who thought themselves a lot more momentously important than their faulty britches warrant.xv

III. Contributors to saving Earth : Thales, Newton, Rockefeller si, cu voia dumneavoastra, ultimul pe lista...

———Global warming of the actual sort is very likely to occur sometime during the next billion years. It won't be man-made then, either, but Sun made as well.

The Sun has been growing larger and hotter for the past three or four billion years, exactly as any star of its kind, type and age is wont to do (look up main star series, it'll be an interesting read as to the virtues of stereotypes in practice).

Usually this growth is smooth over time, but occasionally it jumps, with the jumps getting names such as "Permian-Triassic extinction event" or "Great Dying", consisting of over 95% of marine species becoming extinct over a very short period - perhaps as short as a few millenia.

The problem with the star getting hotter is that all planets that support life must have water in liquid form on the surface and an atmosphere, whereas that liquid water within an atmosphere is prone to a positive feedback loop whereby as the temperature increases the vapor content of the atmosphere increases which in turn increases radiation capture which in turn increases temperature which in turn. Consequently there exists an inflection point whereby a slight increase in radiative output of the star results in a specified planet going from a phase where it has oceans to a phase where the oceans have been vaporized leaving Utah in their place and the water is slowly being photodissociated in the atmosphere so the hydrogen can be blown away into space.

In short, the conditions prerequisite for life are really a lot less likely than you thought. [↩]= 6.535 * 106 / 3.141592654 * 1.5 * 1011 = 0.000013867700706. [↩]= 6.535 * 106 / 3.141592654 * 1.5 * 1011 = 0.000013971681936. [↩]Out of which any "anthropogenic global warming" must necessarily be powered. [↩]Converted from IEA key energy statistics figure for "Final energy consumption" given in yearly TWh through the process of dividing by 24 (hours in a day) and then 365 (days in a year). [↩]Prior to Bitcoin, such numbers were inconceivable -- but by now constant daily practice has us well used. This observation is relevant to an ancient question : what is Bitcoin disrupting ? Everything. Stupidity. These are the same thing. [↩]Out of which any "anthropogenic global warming" must necessarily be powered. [↩]Let's pretend the above used 1.5mn Km value is also the semi-major axis of the elliptical orbit, because why not, seriously. [↩]Sun mass aka M taken 1.989 * 1030 ; Earth mass aka m taken 5.972 * 1024 ; and G = 6.674 * 10-11. [↩]The narrowest of time windows at the scale here considered, see also footnote one above. [↩]Out of which any "anthropogenic global warming" must necessarily be powered. [↩]Bear in mind these'd be turkey dollars not bezzle dollars. Real dollars that counterparty actual value, not the fictitious sort of USG printolade that pays for imaginary airplanes that don't fly or littoral "combat" ships that can't move. [↩]Accelerating rocks in the right direction, pointing ion beam engines in the right direction... on it goes, really. [↩]0.0021st millionth year [↩]There will never be a universal convention to reduce industrialization, because the republic will never participate in such insanity. [↩]

« First Eulora Hackathon

The problems of [the female notion of] sacrifice »

Category: Gandesc, deci gandesc

Wednesday, 28 December, Year 8 d.Tr.

How to cut the wallet ?

The direct lead to this article was discussion continued since yesterday. The fundamental basis for it is the observation that the job of the wallet sits in tension with the rest of TRB's use and function, and this tension must be resolved.

The two identifiable ends of the dubious chimera in question are the node and the wallet. The job of the node is to connect to others via the Internet, and to exchange information with them.i The job of the wallet is to prevent others from connecting via the Internetii, which makes the tension quite evident. Getting in the way of a clean cut is the unfortunate circumstance that the wallet actually needs some knowledge of the state of the world.iii

There were to date three approaches proposed, as follows :

I. That the wallet become strictly a signature mechanism, as exactly homomorphic to PGP as possible ; the operator will create the transactions he wishes signed elsewhere (practically speaking, on the node), will convey them over through the method of his choice, the wallet will sign them and the resulting bytepile will be ferried over and be injected into the node.

This option then requires that most of the work involved in transaction creation (importantly - the coinbase selection!) will be done by the node, which is definitionally a low security environmentiv. What's worse, the logical implementation would then have wallet function maintain continuity with the present nonsense, with "more secure" functionality being available as an optional (ie, disusedv) add-on. We might stubbornly insist to call it "the true wallet", but what's in a name ?

II. That the wallet become a solipsistic node. As per previous discussion, fixing the horrible format of the inherited Bitcoin will allow the operator to inject coinbases he owns into his own wallet at leisure (a node can safely track addresses and produce a digest - this is no loss of security). The wallet will then proceed to optimallyvi select coinbases for an arbitrary payment, sign it, and spit out the resulting transaction ready to be conveyed to a node.

This wallet will not "automatically" discover new payments incoming ; but it is my considered opinion that the conflation of the wallet and of that functionality is dumbvii.

III. That the wallet become separated from the node. To quote the author,

a111 Logged on 2016-11-02 03:16 ben_vulpes: log/2016-11-01

Wednesday, 02 November, Year 8 d.Tr.

How to correctly value forked chains ?

Let's start with something else.

Suppose you buy Felippe Berio olive oil, or Liquore Strega, or any other definite item. For whatever reasons - because you like the taste, or the texture, or the end results, or what people think of you when you do, or what you think people think... anything whatsoever, really. The devil himself knoweth not the thought of man, and we have the intelligence to not in the slightest care.

Suppose one day some people - maybe ex employees of the outfit in question, maybe its competitors across the street (which may be the same thing), maybe the true and original inventor of the witch or the older brother Berio named Luigi, anyone whosoever, for it doesn't matter one iota, forks it. So now you have on the market "Liquore Strega"-original and "Liquore Strega"-verdadero ; extra virgin, pure and mild olive oil Felippe Berio and extra virgin, pure and true olive oil Luigi Berio.

There's a catch, though : one set comes in bottles worth a litrei ; the other set comes in bottles worth a quartii. How do you price the bottles ?

Suppose you believe Luigi Berio oil to be exactly equal and equivalent to Felippe Berio oil. In the situation where "a bottle" of Felippe Berio weighs one liter, and costs 1`000 units ; whereas "a bottle" of Luigi Berio weighs one quart, and costs 983 units, it is therefore rational for you to prefer buying Felippe Berio oil, because it is rational to pay 1 per cubic centimetre of the thing you want rather than 1.039. That's a four percent discount, right ?

Suppose you believe Liquore Strega to be exactly sixty-nine times better than Whore Street oops I mean Liquore Strega. If the former comes in litre bottles and the latter comes in quart bottles, for this reason the prices of the two must match so that if every liter bottle of Liquore Strega costs 1`000, then each quart bottle of Liquore Strega must cost exactly 13.71. Should it cost more than that, it's expensive for its contents (according to you). Should it cost less, it's cheap for its contents (also according to you).

Money is exactly the same, a bottle filled with desirable fluid, and so consider the case of Ethereum vs Ethereum : for one "a bottle" takes ~3640 GH/siii to fill and costs 0.0193 per ; for the other the sameiv bottle takes 510 GH/s to fill and costs 0.0028 per. Therefore, if you believe the two chains to be the same thing, the per-CC value of ETH is ~0.000005 whereas the per-CC value of ETC is 0.000005. Shit, let's count zeroes... yeah, same.v

Note that I've not made any mention as to whether the forked chain's some random scamcoin or Bitcoin (nor, for that matter, of the monstrous legal liability MIT's agents have created for MIT, the hedge fund). It was irrelevant to the discussion up to this point, we could just as well have been discussing olive oil juice or sweetened grass tincture.

Nevertheless, as far as the MIT pet project to sink Bitcoin is concernedvi, the market seems to have spoken, and its voice seems to be saying : "each scamcoinvii is just about equal to each other scamcoin, ceteris paribus". This is not altogether a senseless view ; and so always remember : when hiring fortune tellers, never hire the "best". Always hire the cheapest.viii

———Which is to say one cubic decimeter. It has nothing to do with gallons and other orcish crap, these are civilised measuring units, aaaite ? [↩]Arbitrarily ~0.964 litres. [↩]Data via snapshot of fork.ethstats.net. [↩]It is the same bottle, however you define it, seeing how the two chains produce coins in the same exact way. That's one of the important properties of a fork : it produces "same bottle", specifically and deliberately so as to allow this comparison to stand. [↩]If you wish to go into detail it's 0.00000549 vs 0.00000530, but you can not go into so much detail : the numbers that we are using are rounded, to three-four decimals in each case. This means the most precise result you could hope for is maybe two digits, indicating bailout-chain to be slightly more expensive, but probably should settle on a single digit, in which case... [↩]See Bitcoin prices, Bitcoin inflexibility for your own cultivation. Not like the present wasn't predicted years ago by the powers that are and always will be. [↩]Ie, not-Bitcoin. [↩]There is no "best", but even in places where no such thing as best may exist, cheapest can still be established. [↩]

« Millennial problems.

My First Bitcoin, or How Do I Get Some Satoshi ? »

Category: Bitcoin

Tuesday, 26 July, Year 8 d.Tr.

How to best cultivate jealousy.

Are there butterflies where you live ?

Are there butterflies where you live, the sort that come through the open balcony door to liberally lie on the sprawled hair of the girl you're fucking, even as you're doing it ? The sort that fly softly on jello wings, stirring and sinking in the sweet springly breeze ?

Does the mint flower to welcome the butterflies where you live ?

Cherries at two bucks a pound ; chicks at two words the gaggle - the sort that don't have to be told it is on them to cook, breakfast and all ; and well.

Are there lizards where you live, tiny little almost translucent creatures, scattered everywhere on the bare rock, emerald green eyes sparkling in the sun ?

Where do you live ?

« The Savages

Happiness »

Category: Zsilnic

Wednesday, 30 March, Year 8 d.Tr.

How I convinced some jailbirds I'm more demented than they could ever hope to be.

This is a translation of an older Romanian article, Cum am convins niste puscariasi ca-s mai dement ca ei. In reading it you're asked to kindly allow for the fact that marginal, small, homogenous cultures are not readily understood standing on the avatars of the larger, central, homogenizedi mess, precisely because they still contain interesting nuggets and other rigid impaction that have long been grounded into dust elsewhere.

So sometime in the 90s, doesn't matter exactly when, I was abroad, doesn't matter exactly where, because some guys, doesn't matter exactly who, just got out of coop, doesn't matter exactly how. I believe you're completely edified on the basis of this introduction, isn't it ?

Mkay, and being people generally happy for them, seeing how liberation seemed originally improbable, as well as them being happy for themselves, for idem reasons, obviously there was a party. For which party X was going to provide the place and Y transport them (because you realise... and if you don't, all the better), Z supply the consumables and there was I left behind, lame duckii, to bring the chicks.

The chicks, right ? Not the whores, not the whores, not the whores, not the whores.iii But the chicks. You'll remember the detail ? For it's important.

So therefore I didn't call my girlfriends to call their girlfriends to come fuck. I didn't call my partners in pornography to bring some girls straight from the studio and perhaps also cams, because parties yield great material. I didn't start conversations with cab drivers and receptionists in downtown hotels, didn't buy the small ads paperiv to look for massage parlours nor did I go slumming to pick them up right in the street. But what did I do ?

Oh... what I did...

I called an agency of kids party stuff. Cinderellas for birthdays, Snow-whites, Woody-Woodpeckers, Chips & Dales, Toamesv & Gerris, stuff like that. A very likable cucoana answered, with the voice of a matron and the slightly ironic benevolence of a woman that lived among tweens her entire life. She didn't seem all that astonished I want one of each, which is to say one Snowwhite, one Woody Woodpecker, one Chip 'n one Dale. Given that Snow-white was also Cinderella, so I couldn't have both, and similarly the chipmunks and the cartoon cat and mouse and so on. So, four girls total, seven roles in the book, you're following along yes ?

I insisted she must send only females, she set me at ease that she only hires girls anyway, for "boys are unreliable". Unfortunately the joke that "well, pour acid on them then" doesn't work in that language.vi

And so at ten hours postmeridian, seven girls, one tallish and dark haired (Snow white), two freckled, gingery sisters (the rodents) and another very joyous blondy all together rang a door somewhere. Doesn't matter where.

Damn, the faces fell off these dudes.vii So, the doorbell rings, I say, "aaaa, the girls are here". Hooting and hollering. I open the door, they come in. I close the door. Momentary suspension. I lock the door, with all the chains. Everyone, quietly, looking through large eyes. Four girls more or less of college age, dressed in plushie suits. A dozen men, some recently escaped, some soon to go in. Some shaved, some not so much. And me, trying not to bend laughing.

It was perhaps the funniestviii party of all time. I was reminded of it by the assistant-hiphoper Cosmin Maricari, through an extemporaneous remark otherwise very comme il faut, just like himself.

The incontestable advantage of old age.

———The difference between homogenous and homogenized is the deep reason why, while most crystals have an apparent color other than white, nevertheless most crystal streaks white. Water is homogenous, and thus transparent ; milk is homogenized and thus opaque. Diamond is homogenous and thus valuable ; coal is homogenized and thus dusty. On it goes.

Homogenous social constructs, such as nations, have structure built on similar parts ; homogenized social constructs, such as empires, have no particular structure, a weakness which is compensated through abundant verbalized nonsense (aka, ideology, "corporate values", what have you), all built on the basis of dissimilar parts ground down. [↩]In the original, sontic-sontic is an onomatopeic of "walking with a limp leg" based on repeating the Romanian transduction of Hungarian sontika, which means lame. Romanian does a lot of this, cf "lopitaule mascat" etc. [↩]Not my fault your language's boring. [↩]90s. Before GPS, cellphones, before your mom was posting selfies on "her internet" ie Facebook... [↩]Romanian feminine, grows tits right on proper nouns! [↩]It works in Romanian : to rely on is "to put basis on", "a pune baza" which "baza" is directly how you say base in a chemical context. So... if you can't put any base, why not try some acid... [↩]Romanian idiomatic denoting supreme, earth shattering surprise. "His face fell off". [↩]Romanian "haios" is directly derived from chaos, scandal, ruckus. But the happy, laughing type. [↩]

« No Se Fia

Nobody could have foreseen their using a woman as a weapon »

Category: Lifespiel

Sunday, 26 June, Year 8 d.Tr.

How #bitcoin-assets was born.

Since inquiring minds wish to know, and the usual suspects are engaging in their usual mendacity, allow me to reproduce below the complete story :

**** BEGIN LOGGING AT Tue Apr 10 01:35:41 2012

Apr 10 01:36:39 <mircea_popescu> now looky, the reason i left otc is idiotic "policy". i will drag this chan up to par with otc in time, but i really don't want to hear anything of the sort.

Apr 10 01:36:43 <mircea_popescu> think that works for you ?

Apr 10 01:38:44 <kakobrekla> of what sort

Apr 10 01:39:00 <mircea_popescu> yea good question, i guess im a little touchy.

Apr 10 01:39:22 <mircea_popescu> basically, the ideea is this : trade depends on people being able to talk about whatever the hell they feel like.

Apr 10 01:39:32 <kakobrekla> i think you misunderstand me

Apr 10 01:39:41 <kakobrekla> i was not oposing the talk

Apr 10 01:39:49 <kakobrekla> im glad there is some chatter

Apr 10 01:40:02 <mircea_popescu> aha. yea, my bad. as i said, my nerves are a little strained.

Apr 10 01:40:14 <kakobrekla> my comment was not hostile

Apr 10 01:40:26 <mircea_popescu> k. sorry :)

Apr 10 01:40:28 <kakobrekla> just wanted to brag over normal 'american' -otc

Apr 10 01:40:32 <kakobrekla> but it doesnt fit

Apr 10 01:40:33 <kakobrekla> :)

Apr 10 01:40:39 <kakobrekla> its fine

Apr 10 01:40:48 <kakobrekla> irc is sometime hard to understand

Apr 10 01:40:54 <mircea_popescu> well ya.

**** ENDING LOGGING AT Tue Apr 10 04:15:54 2012

The whole context for this being that nanotube turned jwz in the middle of an ideological dispute between me and gmaxwelli, and I moved on.

So, to be perfectly clear : #bitcoin-assets was born out of my fertile loins, and on a purely ideological basis. The end.

———Which you can count this as yet another example where "MP was right, and his opponent got beaten with the ugly stick by history", as it happens to be just that. [↩]

« The life and times of one Phil Daian, aspiring nigger & apprentice cocksucker

Eminescu. Totally a genius. »

Category: Bitcoin

Thursday, 23 June, Year 8 d.Tr.

Here's where you forget about "wind power" as an alternative source of power.

Intro :

BingoBoingo mod6: When do you think it would make sense to dam the Mississippi river to generate hydroelectric power for mining?

mod6 Yesterday.

BingoBoingo Nah, need more Hodl first. Also friendlier locals to work with.

mod6 There are dams already, There is one I was just looking at in Minneapolis while standing outside in -20 weather. Looked reasonable to me! haha.

BingoBoingo Those dams are weak though. I'm talking south of the Ohio river confluence

mod6 wikipedia.org/wiki/Hennepin_Island_Hydroelectric_Plant

assbot Hennepin Island Hydroelectric Plant - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia ... ( http://bit.ly/1ZMqhxX )

mod6 Ah, yah, I'm sure bigger and better ones would be a good thing, at some point. Around here, and especially in southern MN & all over Iowa they have HUGE wind turbines in place.

BingoBoingo I'm talking make 3 gorges look like Hennepin island.

mod6 wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_Iowa

assbot Wind power in Iowa - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia ... ( http://bit.ly/1ZMquRG )

mod6 Apparently 5688 MW in '14

mircea_popescu Cool, 5GW over their lifetime will be just enough to cover the energy cost of hauling in replacements.

Mathro :

5688 MW over a year comes to 9 * 10^16 Ji at a perhaps overgenerous 50% average capacity.

meanwhile the GGEii is 1.2 * 10 ^ 8 J and the freight ton-km per GGE comes to about 100iii.

So therefore if wind power additional capacity takes 110 tons per newly installed MWiv and that tonnage has to be moved on average 10`000 kmv, then the installation in question took 5688vi * 110vii * 10`000viii / 100ix * 1.2 * 10 ^ 8x = 7.5 * 10^15 J in transportation energy costs alone. That's right.

Read it and weep : newly installed wind power generating capacity costs 8.33 % of the energy it will produce in the first year to merely transport the parts throughout the supply chain (should it work that full year at 50% installed capacity on average and require no servicing or part replacement).

Basically - it has to work the first month just to cover the taxi fare.

If you're at all familiar with how industrial processes have worked throughout the history of human civilisation, you have to be aware transportation costs have been historically quite stable at about a tenth of the manufacturing cost. And no, we didn't count any of the energy costs involved in you know, actually manufacturing anything, we're just counting moving parts around.

The reason it works economically is because you're running the whole thing out of oil. That's it, and that's all. Wind power is alternative in the sense that begging mommy for more money is an alternative to daddy's allowance. Should daddy move on, your "alternative" is going to be worth exactly as much as the dysfunctional brain that propels you through life on the dubious strength of strong convictions formed on a single data point.

———The Joule, I'll have you know, is the unit of measure for energy, which is what everything is all about. No, not power. Forget power. [↩]Gasoline gallon equivalent. [↩]Ie, you can either move 100 tons one km or one ton 100 km for a gallon's worth of standard gasoline. Actually, the correct figure is 98, but whatever. [↩]The average turbine delivery comes to something like 2MW / unit, and the average weight thereof comes to about 221 tons. One of the more commonly deployed items - GE's 1.5 MW is 164 tons. (And for the record : the thing consists of a 35.5 m blades spinning atop a 64.5 m tower, for a maximal clearance of 100 m. The blades sweep a vertical airspace just under one acre.)

By the way, ever wondered why there's ten billion sources on the webs about how much power is involved in wind generation, but scarcely any discussion of the weight involved ? Must be due to #totallynotacult, weight just doesn't matter like power does. Right ? Discussions should always be kept safely within, and decisions must be always made on, the safe basis of a single data point. Don't go for two - you might find things you don't want to hear in the storm of racist confusion & domestic terrorism that might well ensue. Be safe out there! [↩]This figure seems to you exaggerated merely because you think in terms of moving the finished product from the manufacturer to the final location. While it's true that that distance is usually under (if close to) to 1000 km, it is also true that the parts have also be moved to the factory, and yes that cost counts (and yes for the whole weight - it's not like GE magically enacts matter out of the void). Those parts would not be freighted around if the turbine weren't being made, and the metals and other raw materials from which they were made similarly wouldn't be carried from wherever meteors deposited them in the crust to wherever it was convenient to erect the steel plant and so on. A fair "transportation only" figure would probably be futher still in the five digit range (as real-life industrial processes are even more complicated than their Euloran counterparts), but let's let it be. [↩]MegaWatt count [↩]Tons needed for each installed MW. [↩]Distance each ton has to go. [↩]Ton-km per GGE factor. [↩]GGE energetic equivalent. [↩]

« The top 3 best self-introductions in #bitcoin-assets to date

The Tarantino Terminal State ; also known as Gauss' Queasiness in a different field. »

Category: Gandesc, deci gandesc

Monday, 25 January, Year 8 d.Tr.

Happiness

Happinessi is the story of a family, in the very long tradion of family sagas. It's broken into pieces according to the mores and habits of the time, but once reconstructed it goes something like : The patriarch no longer wants anything to do with his wife. He's just sick of her, generally and unspecifically. There's an old whore circling him, but he's not actually interested. He's just old, and thoroughly disgusted of the world, and can't be bothered anymore. He had three daughters. One's an idiot. The other's an idiot. The third's also an idiot.

One of the three idiots is very sexy, and very conceited. Just as she enjoys a moment of clarity with herself and loudly admits all this, the phone rings - a very beta male tells her the exact same. She is his, instantly, smitten. Then they meet and well ... it doesn't work out. You should see the perfect embodiment of the beta in Hoffman's hands to really feel just how inadequate inadequate males are. That same fellow later has an ambiguous altercation with an overweight neighbour who also cut the doorman to bits and preserved parts of the carcass in her freezer.

The other idiot is a very housewife. She has everything : two children, one of which inadequate, the other still young. A husband that loves her but only fucks her after fucking little boys. She is very obedient and pleasant to him in bed, she tries her best to parent, and to gossip with her sister, but ... well ... Maybe in the next life.

The last idiot is a very borderline sleeve. She breaks up with her sexy sister's auditorial flame at the beginning of the movie, but that's ok, she gets set up with him at the end. She also gets entangled with a Russian cab driver, who keeps a very tidy Russian style house, complete with aggressive, beaten, blonde wife - very obedient, very well trained, and yet... - that serves the mistress just as she screams obscenities at both.

The scene where the serial rapist is questioned by his preteen son is worth anything. Both participants handle it superbly, and are for this and no further needed reason great actors. In writ :

BILLY Dad?

BILL Yes, Billy?

BILLY Everyone at school is saying things about you.

BILL Who is everyone?

BILLY Kids. You know. Everyone.

BILL What are they saying?

BILLY That you're a serial rapist.

BILL Oh.

BILLY And a pervert.

BILL You mean, like what they painted on the house?

BILLY nods.

BILLY Dad... did you... did you... with Johnny Grasso and Ronald Farber... ?

BILL Yes.

BILLY What did you... do?

BILL I... I touched them...

BILLY Whadya mean exactly... touched... ?

BILL I... fondled them.

BILLY What for?

BILL I couldn't help myself.

BILLY What else?

BILL I unzipped myself...

BILLY Do you mean... masturbated?

BILL No.

BILLY Then... what?

BILL I... made love...

BILLY What does that... mean?

BILL I fucked them.

BILLY What was it like?

BILL It was... great.

BILLY Would you do it again?

BILL Yes.

BILLY Would you ever fuck me?

BILL No...

BILL I jerk off instead.

BILL weeps.

The film certainly dares. While I remain unpersuaded of the veracity of this particular sceneii, the many others are deeply correct. Take for instance the seduction of the borderline by the Russian. He is playing the exact book of Russian lovemaking ; and she goes under like a chicken before the steamroller. Because yes, the 36 yo American girl is exactly indistinguishable from the Russian maiden, 7th to maaaaaybe 11th grade. Half that age. Similarly the beta creep, on the couch, it activates the feared receptors in the audience.

Altogether an excellent film. Ideally to be seen with an adult lover for balance, it's... un peu fort on its own.

———1998, by Todd Solondz, with Philip Seymour Hoffmann, Dylan Baker, Lara Flynn Boyle, Rufus Read. [↩]Because what the fuck do you mean "great" ? It's not great, it's miserable, at best.

But then again - that's strictly true about fucking a woman's stockings, miserable at best. The definition of perversity is exactly this, right ? The pervert thinks the miserable at best is actually great.

Perhaps. To borrow a word, the reproach seems somewhat too round. [↩]

« How to best cultivate jealousy.

Outrageous MP's guide to not being a poorfag »

Category: Trilematograf

Thursday, 31 March, Year 8 d.Tr.