Year: 2023

Outage Update

The Arkhaven store went down for eight hours yesterday thanks to an entire server room crashing hard at the external service we were still using for the site. Ironically, that is the final piece which is not on one of our own servers – despite the error messages, you may have noticed that Infogalactic is considerably snappier these days – but the store will be both a) faster and b) mirrored before the end of the month.

Fortunately, the site is robust enough that while no new orders could be entered during that time, no subscription orders were lost. So, if you had a subscription that was scheduled for renewal during that time, it was successfully renewed as soon as the outage ended. All is well.

Thanks to the devs for staying on top of this and quickly ascertaining, within 70 minutes of the outage occurring, what had happened and who was responsible. And to the Library team as well, who noticed and reported the problem within five minutes of the servers going down.

Speaking of technical matters, we anticipate having some very good news for you on that front soon.

UPDATE: Speaking of outages, Arktoons will be down for maintenance for a period of time this afternoon/morning.

DISCUSS ON SG

The War on Christmas 2023

The current phase of the War on Christmas began with the desacralization of the Christian holiday, which combined an attempt to create alternative secular carols with the creation of alternative fake holidays like Hannukah(1), Festivus, and Kwanzaa.

However, it’s very clear that as the Greatest Generation has mostly died out and the Boomers have become increasingly irrelevant, the younger generations are not falling for what has always been an anti-Christian psychological operation.

It’s interesting to see how the subversive attack on how Christians celebrate Christmas was considerably more successful than the attempt to wage open war on the holiday by pushing alternatives to it. In fact, it now appears that the attempt to push alternatives on the population has backfired, by making Christians cognizant of the importance, if not the necessity, of defending their own holy days.

Merry Christmas, everyone.

(1) While “the festival of lights” is a legitimate rabbinical holiday that has been celebrated by religious individuals for centuries, the ethnic “Hannukah”, as it is presently advertised in the USA, and, to a lesser extent, the UK, is no more historically genuine than Festivus or Kwanzaa.

DISCUSS ON SG

Anger is the Tell

It’s never very hard to notice when people are defensive about the choices they have made concerning the way they live their lives. They overreact, usually in an angry and hostile manner, and more often than not, in response to their own actions.

You can usually judge whether or not a lifestyle choice is wrong by how angry.and defensive its practitioners become when you say that they’re making a bad choice.

Here’s an example, and it wasn’t even a judgment, but an assumption I’d made on Facebook about a couple with a child not being the parents because they weren’t wearing wedding rings.

So I figured the woman was the parent and the guy was a boyfriend.

Some woman I went to high school with went totally berserk in my comments. How dare I make that assumption! Oh, I must think I’m perfect! What a judgmental asshole! You don’t have to be married to raise a child you both created!

On and on, stalking every post Id made that month alerting everyone to what an asshole bigot I am up on my high horse.

I just laughed and deleted it all, didn’t even respond. She was living with some guy she’d had a kid with and I think he had kids from another woman. I guess I hit a sore spot.

But if she was comfortable with her choices, my simple generalization wouldn’t have made her raging mad. At most she would’ve felt a little annoyed.

People often think the anger comes from others judging them, but it’s not that they’re being judged. It’s that deep down they KNOW they’ve made the wrong choice. That’s why the real or perceived judgment stings.

Spacebunny has noticed this, particularly with regards to parents who don’t homeschool their children. They know the option is suboptimal for their children, and when it isn’t a matter of necessity, the mere fact of someone else making a different choice makes them proactively defensive:

This is one hundred percent true.

Another example is homeschooling – when I started homeschooling I would get asked why I chose that path – honesty would get them immediately defensive of their choice and then, instead of listening to me, they would start telling why they would/could never do it and blah, blah, blah. To which I generally responded “I don’t care, I didn’t ask you, you asked me.”

DISCUSS ON SG

Total Domination

3 Minnesota Vikings
0 Las Vegas Raiders

I’d love to be able to say that the Purple People Eaters are back, but in truth, the game was the epitome of a battle between two overmatched third-string quarterbacks. It wasn’t so much a defensive struggle as a display of complete offensive ineptitude, as well as the lowest-scoring game since the infamous Snowplow Game of December 12, 1982 without the excuse of being played in a driving blizzard.

I don’t think I’d ever seen multiple 2-and-17 situations in a game before. And all three quarterbacks combined for an average rating of 64.5. That’s not QBR either, that’s the old school rating that tops out at 158.3, and in which Brock Purdy currently leads the league at 116.1.

In other NFL news, a once-burning question has been resurrected. It has to be asked in light of the man’s 3 TD, 311-yard performance in a victory over Jacksonville with playoff implications.

Is Joe Flacco elite?

UPDATE: This is how elite he is. Per ProFootballTalk:

The situation is unprecedented. Coach Kevin Stefanski named Flacco the starter for the rest of the season. Even though Flacco isn’t really on the team.

Now that’s what you call “leverage”.

DISCUSS ON SG

Sunday Arktoons

PAPER DOLL VERONIKA Episode 89: View from high altitude

AFTER ATLANTIS Episode 17: Power snapped

FULL OF EYES Episode 60: Medallions 1/4: Along the Path

THE SAGA OF THE NANO TEMPLAR Episode 10: The Sheikh is Waiting

AESOPS FABLES Episode 24: The Swallow and the Crow

TREASURY OF TALES Episode 30: The Golden Goose

BOVODAR & THE BEARS Episode 25: The Key, I Think

CHATEAU GRIEF Episode 322: Hard Like Case

QUANTUM MORTIS Episode 58: Costa Nova

Black Doctor Who

What a brave, stunning, and totally unpredicted move by the BBC! What a triumph of inclusivity, equality, and creative genius! And when the show’s ratings start next season in the loo and go further downhill from there, we’ll all know that it is the unmitigated racism of the British people that is solely responsible for its failure.

Ladies and gentlemen, the 15th Doctor Who!

The sad thing is that Black Doctor Who is actually a concept that could be more than a little entertaining, except it would require actual black people to write and produce what would essentially begin as a parody in the vein of the 1970s films. I mean, who wouldn’t think a gangster Time Lord traveling around time with a blinged-out Tardis full of smoke and skanked-out street entrepreneurs wasn’t at least moderately amusing? Especially if Flavor Flav was the Black Doctor.

Or better yet, Snoop.

But I doubt there is a single British screenwriter who would even dare to imagine writing such a script, and certainly none working for the BBC.

DISCUSS ON SG

The Concepts of the Day

These two useful concepts, one a neologism, the other an aphorism, stem from the same SG thread, which may be of interest to those who have read, at a minimum, both Taleb and Gladwell, but which I will not cite here due to the inevitability of various tangents.

Syncreto-retardery: Relative cognitive incapacity. Syncreto-retardery should not be confused with literal retardery of the below-70 IQ variety, although it is worth noting in this quantified context that the midwit stands no closer to the VHIQ and UHIQ than the literal retard does to him. And let’s not even get started on the average…

VDDQ: “If you admire a man’s books, ignore his Twitter account.”

Very, very few men, myself included, find it easy to ignore the flattering requests for one’s opinion about a wide variety of subjects of which one knows nothing. I do my best to ignore these requests and I’m usually successful in doing so the first two or three times I’m asked. But it can be difficult to resist the temptation to at least say something that sounds more or less reasonable when faced with repeated requests for one’s thoughts on the issue du jour, even when those thoughts are nonexistent.

We wouldn’t think half so well of Aristotle or other great historical thinkers if a) they had social media accounts and b) we had access to them.

DISCUSS ON SG