Wis[s]e Words – Page 20 – Ceci N'est pas Un Blog

La jeunesse emmerde le Front national

Published on June 28, 2024Leave a comment

How can it be that this song and this slogan from it is once again relevant, forty years after it was first sung?

I love Bérurier Noir and this song, but it’s fucking frustrating that the same issues they sang against back in 1985 are still alive and kicking now in 2024. François Guillemot gets it exactly right her in this interview in The Guardian:

Because it comes at a really dangerous point in French history. It feels like we are at the turning point, and I don’t want people like Bardella and Le Pen take power because they will be dangerous.

It was easy to chant against Jean-Marie Le Pen because he was almost a caricature of a far-right politician: he was very bourgeois, very racist and that made it easy to stand up to him. His daughter, by contrast, changed her looks and has been very strategic in detoxifying the party’s image, for example by condemning antisemitism.

She and Bardella have managed to attract voters who are not ideologically formatted like the skinheads of the 1980s. These voters are ras-le-bol, fed up with the old way of doing things. They want to topple the system. I see it in a place like Lyon, where I now teach history at the university: inside the city, most people vote left or centre, but on the outskirts it’s mostly the National Rally.

I think Macron has to shoulder most of the blame. He had everything in his hands to create real change, but his arrogant management of the state managed to turn a lot of people against him. And with his unpopular pension reforms and the new immigration law he opened the door for the National Rally, because he normalised their ideas. The media, who have helped de-demonise the National Rally and played up Bardella as a pop star, have not helped.

The past four decades all through Europe and America we’ve seen our political choices being steadily reduced to one between cynical centrists slowly destroying the world to enrich their friends and literal fascists promoted as their main opposition as they’re less dangerous to the status quo than anything even vaguely leftist. Whenever anything on the left has had even a small change of getting near power it is stomped to death (cf. Corbyn) while people like Trump, Farage and Le Pen are activily promoted. So now in France you have a choice between Macron, already executing the sort of policies Le Pen would kill for and Le Pen, but at least there there still is a leftist movement to oppose both. In the UK meanwhile the only thing you can chose is the colour of the tie the leader of the crackdowns and austerity party will wear, while in the US it’s between genocide Joe and cheeseburger Nazi Trump. Forty years of neoliberal centrism really has achieved a lot.

Dumb fucks doing comics criticism

Published on June 24, 2024Leave a comment

This asshole really thought he was qualified to critique Haus of Decline’s comics for having too much text, so he crossed out everything he thought was unnecessary so it would make a better meme:

A Haus of Decline four panel comic in which Basil crossed out most of the text

To add insult to injury, he then said that notorious Nazi Stonetoss makes better comics. Various other numbnuts then jumped on the bandwagon and one of them produced the ‘improved’ comic:

The same comic with all the text removed

Which I’m grateful for because it clearly shows that without the original text, this cartoon is neither funny nor coherent, but is just a collection of random images. You only know what it is saying if you read the original.

This whole episode is yet another example of the eternal centrist need to hand it to the Nazis (Stonetoss in this case) and desire to attack trans women, as Haus has recently come out as one. (Fun activity: check the thread and quote tweets to see how many people suddenly are able to use they/them pronouns to misgender Haus.) Lurking in the background, the idea that all art should be propaganda and should only be judged on how effective it is according to cretins. And you wonder why the US is sliding into fascism even without Trump being elected yet…

I never knew Guido Crepax did history illustrations

Published on June 17, 2024Leave a comment

Because my mother volunteers there, I have been frequenting the local church’s charity bookshop. One of the books I bought there the last time was a pop history volume I remember from my parents’ bookcases, about the ancient Greeks, which I literally read until it fell apart as a child. Browsing through it to sate my nostalgia I found something surprising, a familiar looking signature in the two page illustration of Createan bull jumping:

An illustration by Guido Crepax which shows the ancient Cretean sport of jumping over bulls

Tucked away on the bottom left there it was: “G. Crepax”. In case you’re not as familiar with European comics, that’s Guido Crepax, the Italian cartoonist who is best known for, as the Lambiek Comiclopedia linked above calls it, “his depictions of elaborate and aesthetic erotic fantasies”. Once I noticed it was him it was quite obvious: compare the illustration above with the Shell advertisement shown on the Comiclopedia e.g. I bought two volumenes of the series (7000 Jaar Wereldgeschiedenis) and both have his illustrations. No actual credits are given in either but the style is unmistakeable. A really fun thing to discover some four decades later.

In a better world we could all follow our obsessions this way

Published on May 7, 2024Leave a comment

Everybody has played Tetris right? I remember when my little brother got the original Gameboy for his birthday and that was one of the games he also got for it: everybody in our family played it. Simple but addictive, something you play for five minutes or an hour and you can put down again.

But of course there are always people who get obsessed even by this. Ever since it first came out on the Nintendo Entertainment System, people have been trying to beat it. But what does that even mean? That’s what this video tries to explain by diving into the history of people trying to beat Tetris:

This is not normally the sort of thing I’m interested in, but I got it through a Twitter recommendation or maybe it showed up in the Youtube algorithm and I ended up watching it when it struck me that this was the future we had always been promised. This is basically the sort of shit the people in the Culture fill their days with. Beating Tetris really doesn’t matter, it’s neither useful nor will advance your career but it is something that people rather than AI excel in: stting yourself arbitrary challenges as part of play. Throughout the sixties, seventies and eighties the assumption always was that automation meant we would need to work less and would have more leisure time to fill, but instead we got shittier jobs for worse pay. In a better world everybody could be a Blue Scuti and follow their obsessions like he did.

You’ll never work on something as cool as this

Published on May 4, 2024Leave a comment

Voyager 1 stopped sending engineering data back to Earth last November, so NASA developers had to figure out a way to reprogram fifty year old software which also is literally located outside the actual Solar System:

The team discovered that a single chip responsible for storing a portion of the FDS memory — including some of the FDS computer’s software code — isn’t working. The loss of that code rendered the science and engineering data unusable. Unable to repair the chip, the team decided to place the affected code elsewhere in the FDS memory. But no single location is large enough to hold the section of code in its entirety.

So they devised a plan to divide the affected code into sections and store those sections in different places in the FDS. To make this plan work, they also needed to adjust those code sections to ensure, for example, that they all still function as a whole. Any references to the location of that code in other parts of the FDS memory needed to be updated as well.

If this doesn’t make you jealous as a software developer…