Chuck Palahniuk (apparently pronounced “palawnik,” which I could render in IPA), “Why Isn’t He Budging?” (in Stranger Than Fiction), which consists of nothing but quotes from Andrew Sullivan:

In many ways I do feel like this book [Love Undetected] is a real attempt to draw a line under a certain part of my life and try and move on. And I didn’t feel I could do that without writing it, so it had sort of a purgative effect. It probably comes across like that, too. It came up like puke. Even the abstract stuff came out like puke. It got to the point where I realized I wasn’t going to finish it because I had nothing to say about friendship, for example, then I just [makes puking noise], [and] in two weeks wrote that last thing. Just three to four hours per day just speed-writing.

Three semicolons in every sentence, id left not just unchecked but unnoticed (and unedited). No fag has ever been more indulged.

Mestizo homosexualist author Richard Rodriguez interviewed by the best in the business, as I can attest from having been on his show:

STEVE PAIKIN: In our remaining moments here, let me put the focus back on you for a bit. Because you are an openly gay man who lives in San Francisco, California.

RODRIGUEZ: I’m not a gay man. I’m a morose man…. Charlie Rose said “Do you think yourself as a gay writer?” “No, I think of myself as a morose writer.”

— Morose. Why morose? You seem like a perfectly happy person.

— When I was closer in age to you, probably younger, I went through the AIDS crisis and I helped… Oh, I’m not going to get into this too much. But I helped about 40 men die. And I knew how to do that…. Nobody told us how to do that… You learned how to do that. […]

I think something died in me from those years, that there is still – it comes welling up, a sadness so deep. I did a piece in the New York Times called “Nakedness in a Digital Age” in which I talked about being in a car with five gay men in the ’70s. We were driving down the peninsula of San Francisco to a prep school. We were going to be judges of an essay contest. And we were like clowns in a circus in this little car, all like this in the back seat. And I remember somebody was putting a hand across to reach for something. I forget what. And I remember the touch of his sleeve, which was cashmere. The windows were steamed up. So much life in that car. Within five years, everybody in that car was dead. […]

In some real sense, I’m not gay. I’m queer in the sense that I had a wonderful childhood. I was so free because I wasn’t heterosexual. I could do anything…. The next night [boxer Bobby Chacon] went to fight, and that’s when I saw him fight. And the auditorium was filled with these Mexican labourers from the fields, the braceros. Men who work with their arms, brazos. And everybody was standing for the 12 rounds. Man, they were engaged in a kind of struggle that was so elemental and primal. And at the end he was the victor. You should have seen his face. And I thought to myself as I walked home that night that there would be no one at school I would describe this to, or even my erotic interest in this boxer. No one. […]

I realized one day – you were my best friend in grammar school – that I was in love with you. [You] had a beautiful face. And one day I threw a rock at that face to make you go away. And that night our mothers talked on the phone, and there was this laughter, and I knew that the mothers had decided that boys will be boys. Boys will fight with boys, and it was OK. But if they had only known that the reason I threw the rock at Bobby was because I was in love with him, bang, would the ceiling come down.

Brendon (not Brendan) McNaughton is a young Canadian artiste. He has the McNaughton build, by which I mean his brother James still pushes bobsleds. (James manfully supports his manfully artistique brother.)

Brendon McNaughton explores how technology is transforming social and economic structures across the globe. He uses innovative technologies such as 3D printers, 3D scanners[,] and robot arms to create his work.

All right, fine. But by any standard, this is the artwork, not the marble pawn by itself.

In fact, it looks better when hauled by a forklift.

Defend Europe (sic) vs. German antifa.

Please make your selection now.

Easily my favourite rat bastard among many is Michael Malice (no relation).

On Episodes 11 and 16 [and, later, 27] of his chat show “YOUR WELCOME” (sic), Malice provided a list of variously his “favourite” books or books one ought to read.

(RSS [or just of those episodes].)

1. Ron Chernow, Alexander Hamilton

2. Not Robert Caro’s books on Lyndon Johnson, as suggested by a caller and summarily rejected

3. “If you are right of centre, this is downright pornography”: Thatcher: The Downing Street Years (YouTubé)

4. The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression; Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar; Gulag: A History; Revolution 1989: The Fall of the Soviet Empire

5. “I would say this trio are the redpill trio”:

   1. The Blank Slate

   2. The Righteous Mind

   3. The Idea of Decline in Western History

6. Within the Frederick Copleston nine-volume history of philosophy, Volume 7: The Germans (not its actual title); also From Luther to Hitler; Max Sterner, The Ego and Its Own (“you like his tone because it’s very fuck-you and, you know, just very fuck-everybody”).

   “God, I have a lot of German books on this list. That’s interesting”

7. “This is a must”: John Patrick Diggins, Mussolini and Fascism: The View from America

8. Albert Camus, The Rebel and The Myth of Sisyphus (also his biography [“I’m blanking on the author”]): “how intensely he believed in doing the right thing no matter what the costs are”

9. Auschwitz (mentioned on both episodes, complete with the same anecdote)

10. Arthur D. Morse, While Six Million Died: A Chronicle of American Apathy

11. A Government of Our Own and An Hono[u]rable Defeat

12. The Illusion of Victory: The True Costs of War

13. Tokyo Vice: “A lot of people I know who might or might not be on the spectrum just don’t like fiction. So a good nonfiction book reads like a novel. And this is one”

14. Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Thurston (“A very admirable human being”): Her era “was when downtown whites – leftists – found black people interesting, and as soon as the Depression hit they threw them in the garbage. So it’s a fascinating look at that time”

15. Intellectuals and Society by “the best conservative writer, in my view,” Thomas Sowell. (“Isn’t that a terrible cover?”)

16. Mapplethorpe: A Biography “because at different points he’s super-racist.” “At the time, photography was not regarded as something that could be art. It was regarded as… I dunno”

17. What a Plant Knows

18. Reagan and Thatcher: The Difficult Relationship: “yet you never hear about Regan and Thatcher winning the Cold War and liberating half the world peacefully, which I would say may be the greatest achievement ever.” (Two citations of Thatcher, but none of Claire Berlinski on Thatcher)

19. David Pietrusza, 1948

20. Luc Santé, Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York: “he talks about all these people who, if conservatives had their way, wouldn’t even be mentioned at all”

21. The Death and Life of Great American Cities

22. A Renegade History of the United States and A History of the American People (Paul Johnson)

23. Mark Skousen, The Making of Modern Economics: The Lives and Ideas of the Great Thinkers

24. Steven Goldberg, Why Men Rule: A Theory of Male Dominance

25. Camille Paglia: “She doesn’t have any really accessible books. She’s a great, great talker” (but cf. her disco-classics list)

26. Rise of the Warrior Cop

27. The Tree of Gnosis: Gnostic Mythology from Early Christianity to Modern Nihilism

28. The Closing of the Western Mind

29. Henry Mayer, All on Fire

30. The Liberal Reformers (“and the second half is terrible”); not apparently the exact title

31. Amy Borkowsky, Statements: “a ‘humour’ book – in form, it is ‘humorous.’ But as you read it, there is no humour there. It is perfectly humourless even though it is purporting to be a humour book”

32. Denis Johnson, Jesus’ Son (“and this book is beautifully written”)

33. Ayn Rand: “you have to read her books in order or you are going to be a very bad person” (Anthem, The Fountainhead, then Atlas Shrugged), all of which you can easily look up yourself

34. Julian L. Simon, The Ultimate Resource 2 “goes through every environmental claim ever, using government data, and shows they’re all bullshit”

35. (UPDATE) On Episode 27, Malice interviewed Edward Stringham, whose books Anarchy and the Law and Private Governance Malice also recommended

See also

• Harvey Pekar and illustrator Gary Dumm documented Malice’s early life in Ego & Hubris – itself now a collector’s item, though easily borrowed from the library.

• Are Michael Malice better than other people? (Yes.)

Plunk down this apparatus in a courtyard at the Venice Biennale and the auction price would crest €3 million.

(Via ☛)

The annual article on how good Eudora was has now been published. I’m in it, though I wish I’d been consulted, if only to deliver quotable quotes.

Eudora equivalent, current era: Overcast

Eudora was a dream and it’s clearly not going to be replicated.

But Overcast has all the transferable hallmarks of Eudora: It’s a life-changing application written by one cantankerous male that bestows enormous power over hundreds of podcasts and thousands of episodes.

Life has been simply dreadful without Eudora. This will be our fate without Overcast.

There are other face-recognition systems, even on telephones, but Face ID on the iPhone X will be the gold standard to beat. Hence it becomes an amusing parlour game to imagine ways to defeat this still-unreleased technology.

Update

(2018.05.13) In retrospect I feel stupid about this post in a couple of ways.

• A sure sign I shouldn’t be writing something is hoping it gets noticed. I hoped this got noticed. It didn’t.

• The overall tone is too exhaustive (borderline exhausting) and overly enthusiastic.

• Like everyone, I didn’t apply rational thinking and didn’t come up with the environment where Face ID is sure to fail, and proved to do so: In the ultraviolet bath of a tanning bed. Absence of light was never going to be an issue.

Much later, I bought an iPhoné X and found Face ID is defeated by my Mountain Equipment Coöp shades.

References

• Apple released a security white paper (PDF) that was banged out in Pages, has widows and orphans, is not a tagged PDF, and has no business being anything other than HTML. (Corporations operate under the delusion that a PDF is more real, more official, more credible, or less likely to be silently edited.) So I created an HTML version.

  (Apple support document with slightly different claims.)

• Many photos via Manshooter Photography’s Folsom 2017 album.

  (This is what “diversity” is really good for: Gay fetish photos as defeat vectors for face recognition. Not quite gay CEO Tim Cook’s cup of tea, I expect.)

• I ran these by a noted security expert, with no expectation of or even a request for an attributable comment, and didn’t get one.

Now we can look at some use cases. [continue with: Defeating Face ID →]