unbibium

Comparing troublemaking cartoon kids.

2026-05-14T00:08:42Z

read a few Calvin and Hobbes comics recently, and I no longer sympathize with Calvin as I once might have. He seems utterly malicious to me. And I chalk that up to me being in middle age, childhood is an old foreign land I barely remember.

Why, then, do I still sympathize with Bart Simpson? He's twice as dangerous by any metric, but I still feel bad for him when he gets in trouble, which is all the time.

Maybe that's it. I don't remember seeing Calvin in detention very often. Meanwhile entire episodes are about Bart getting shipped off to France, to military school, to juvenile hall, etc. Getting caught is as much a part of his identity as causing trouble.

and, that fear of getting in trouble, that's followed me into adulthood, that's evergreen.

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Pluribus and social skills

2025-12-14T16:31:21Z

I've been watching Pluribus for a while, and I love it so far.

I mostly want to talk about how it's subverted the usual TV "mystery box" formula that's been the bane of television for years. Sometimes, TV producers want to ration the information they give us, and the usual way is to put a big fat mystery box in the pilot and then spend seven seasons tickling our nethers, only to make up something unsatisfying in the series finale.

In Pluribus, the subject matter is: the entire world is basically acting as one person now, and any normal person could spend a whole day just asking about how that works. Like "is there any functional difference between talking to different people?" "do you still close the door when you use the bathroom?" "Is there literally anyone in a bank right now?" "Is there literally anyone in a comedy club right now?" "What's the network latency between Albuquerque and Tokyo?"

We're halfway through season 1 at time of writing, and I know that Carol has just spent all of the "Got Milk" episode doing all this detective work among the deserted streets of Albuquerque. But I'm still thinking about the episode "Pirate Lady" and the meeting on Air Force One. The first private meeting between half of the unjoined. And they all have more information than Carol about what the plurbs have been up to. And the episode "HDP" where Carol shares her hard-won discoveries with Monsieur Diabate, who already knows about it, and tells Carol what she's been missing out on.

This isn't to say that Carol doesn't ask them anything. Most of the time, she just interrogates specifically to find ways to fight them.
Episode 2. Asks if there's any pockets of unjoined in places that might have heroes. Asks if there's any scientists among the English-speakers.
Episode 3. Asks if there's any scientists among the non-English-speakers.
Episode 4: The lie detector test with Larry, the reveal that the joining might be reversible, and the subsequent enhanced interrogation.

And when she hurts them, she asks about that.
Episode 2: How many did I kill just now?

Sometimes she asks questions only to interrupt the answer.
Episode 1. Asks "what happens when I say no" and then hangs up.
Episode 3. At the end, asks "what's so great" and instead of making space for an answer, she makes up her own assumptions about what the answer is and rants about them.

"The Gap", follows the two grumpy characters, as they spent a month defying their adversary in their own ways. Carol living it up as the Last Woman On Earth, and Manousos nearly getting himself killed in the IRL Mario Maker troll level. And neither of them learning a damn thing about their adversary. As the audience, we have no idea what the plurbs have been up to, or what the other unjoined have learned about them.

Contrast with Kumba. Now, I'm no expert on poker, but, like, winning the big pot with a royal flush, playing five-card draw? I think we're meant to learn that Kumba can't actually play poker, probably learned the rules that morning. Any gambling expertise in the hive was probably dedicated to stacking the deck to keep Kumba from losing immediately. And yet, I think we'll find that he's learning a lot about their limitations just through the natural course of his fantasy LARPing. For example, why couldn't the Bond villain stay in character while everyone else clapped?

The next episode is titled "Charm Offensive", suggesting Carol might actually start working on her intelligence-gathering game. Will she be able to open her mind? Will she be able to stop herself from immediately turning her first lead into a disaster? That'd be like Wiley E Coyote catching the Roadrunner. But anything can happen in a show like this. The possibility space is limitless.

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Reubens vs Kaufman

2023-08-04T14:43:34Z

as I'm reading about the early history of Paul Reubens' career, I see some parallels to Andy Kaufman. The first iteration of Pee-wee was a stand-up comic who had only been performing for a few weeks and mostly brought out funny toys he bought. The first iteration of Kaufman's Foreign Man was a stand-up comic who did incompetent impressions but the punchline was a perfect Elvis impression. Both appeared on The Dating Game in character.

The key distinction seems to be that Kaufman's performances were based on disruption and jerking the audience around. in the Dating Game appearances, for example, Foreign Man spent the whole time failing to understand the rules, complaining that he couldn't see the girl, etc. But when Pee-wee appeared, he earnestly attempted to win with the weirdest possible answers. And because he was sitting between two 1970s pickup artists, his schtick aged better than his competitors' actual personalities.

Despite all the hype in the 1990s leading up to that Jim Carrey movie, I don't think Kaufman's "commitment to the character" was as successful as other character actors. When Pee-wee Herman appeared on Letterman, nobody mentioned Paul Reubens. When Super Dave Osborn appeared on Letterman, nobody mentioned Bob Einstein. When Max Headroom appeared on a talk show, nobody asked about Matt Frewer. When Kermit the Frog appeared on TV, nobody mentioned Jim Henson. When Tiny Clifton appeared on Letterman, Dave's first questions were about whether he's really Andy Kaufman, and I suppose the joke was that Bob Zmuda was playing him that time so audiences would seek a resemblance to Kaufman and not find it. But that's not what appearing on talk shows in-character was all about.

I bring up Super Dave because he kind of split the difference. He was a big stuntman parody of Eivel Knievel with an Asian caricature sidekick. He had kind of a Clifton-like inflated ego. But he was sympathetic with audiences because his stunts failed. Not like Knievel's did, more like Wiley E. Coyote's did. And, like Pee-wee, he lived in a magical world parallel to our own and invited us in. Clifton just lived in Vegas.

I don't think we appreciated Reubens the way we appreciated Kaufman, because Kaufman died young, while Reubens lived long enough to get arrested and have his mugshot posted.

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Captain Pike's fate

2023-05-27T14:10:23Z

i posted this as a reply to a post which asked if anyone else was weary of how Pike's looming delta-rays accident keeps coming up in Strange New Worlds.

( spoilers for Discovery S2, Strange New Worlds S1 )

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silicon valley disillusionment: Kevin Rose edition

2022-07-24T15:58:13Z

When I was growing up in the 1990s I called BBSes and they had these text files describing how to build strange hacking devices and programs, how to hack the phone system, and other interesting things of varying legality. Sometimes it was just ideas for pranks and exploitation at K-Mart or McDonald's. See textfiles.com for examples, if it's still up.

In the 2000s, there was a cable channel called TechTV, and a show called The Screen Savers which was basically about emerging technology and online culture, hosted by Leo Laporte. And there was a young employee of the show named Kevin Rose whose first big segment was about the port 139 exploit in Windows. He gained a reputation as "the Dark Tipper", with the kind of stuff we used to see in BBSes. And this was how I knew him for many years, as he expanded his role on the show, as the Screen Savers was replaced with Attack of the Show with him as host, and as he and his AotS co-host Alex Albrecht hosted the video podcast known as diggnation, despite Rose living in SF and Albrecht living in LA at the time.

As his career progressed he tapered off the "Dark Tipper" stuff despite the demand from the likes of me. He hosted a more explicitly underground show called thebroken with co-host Dan Huard. The intro had this kind of campy cyberpunk "heroes on the run" thing. He started the show with him and his co-host each opening a 40. They started strong with a street segment where they hacked WiFi and even broke first-generation WEP encryption. Then they had this weird segment where Ramzi, a "hacker" correspondent, just downloads Bonzi Buddy over KaZaa while crazy foreign music plays in the background. And after that, they describe how to get a free pizza by trailing a walk-in customer, writing down their name and order, and impersonating that customer over the phone while complaining to the manager.

man, what a scummy show in retrospect. But it was all stuff that '00s me was happy to let slide. Why shouldn't we all just break into encrypted WiFi? Why shouldn't we laugh at funny foreign man doing bad acting? Why not lie to minimum wage employees and franchise owners to steal pizza? Indeed, I was able to wash my hands of all this because I was too lazy to actually try this stuff.

His heart wasn't in it anyway, and he made two more episodes: a short "oops, all Ramzi" episode and an interview with Kevin Mitnick. For years, people clamored for him to keep the show going, and he always gave excuses like they couldn't get Ramzi back.

Eventually they put out episode 4, and their way of apologizing for the long wait was a two-minute sketch where both hosts stumble are incapacitated by marijuana. The rest of the show continued the theme of tacky fratboy culture. The campy cyberpunk intro had a strip club scene now, and strip club scenes are scattered throughout to break up the long technical segments. The first segment was completely illegal cell phone jamming with a "don't do this in America" fig-leaf disclaimer. After another Ramzi bit about removing DRM, they do a bit about hacking the X-Box 360 to play backups, which includes this part where they stand outside of a Blockbuster, in Blockbuster uniforms, and tell their audience send pirated DVDs back to Blockbuster's DVD-by-mail service as revenge for getting "fisted" by the brock-and-mortar stores. Boy that aged like milk didn't it. There were credits, and then 5 minutes of bloopers where they showed how hard it was to make the funny foreign man say "dat ass".

Rose and Huard also put out a serious tech show with none of the GTA shit called Systm, which I think only had one or two episodes. I can't find it on YouTube, but I remember they had a circuit diagram with a debouncer on the first episode. I may still have a T-shirt I bought to support the show. His production company, Revision 3 Studios, would go on to make other stuff.

At some point, Kevin Rose got on the cover of BusinessWeek in shabby clothes for a "dot-com kid gets rich" story about Digg. Rose hated the cover, and Digg's fortunes didn't last.

I lost track, but at some point, Kevin Rose resurfaced an "angel investor"... and he'd still appear on This Week In Tech every so often.

and then, I heard Kevin Rose did the Joe Rogan podcast. this was back when Rogan was just a comedian with a super popular podcast, a lot of MMA expertise, a few ill-considered opinions, but was still many years away from becoming a full-fledged tool of the alt-right.

And he spent the first twenty minutes talking about keto.

I don't know why that felt like a revelation, or what it revealed, but I knew that I was no longer one of what Kevin Rose was. The geek species had diverged, into nerds like me, and tech bros like him.

All the TechTV alums were early adopters of bitcoin, but most fell by the wayside, as it became known how impractical it was as a currency, how wrought with fraud and crime the industry was. A few years in, Leo Laporte lost the password to his wallet, and it became apparent that his story was more common than the successful cash-out. But Rose stuck with it, to the point that Laporte doesn't want to give him airtime right now.

and I wonder, was Kevin Rose really a cyberpunk gray-hat hero who stuck it to the Man, only to become one of the Man's tools of financial dominance? Or do his old thebroken episodes betray ethical blind spots that were always there, and society has just disintegrated enough that our latest generation of capitalist sociopaths can exploit them? Are those ethical blind spots endemic to tech culture, ever since those 1980s text files telling us how to steal services from phone companies and mess with K-Mart employees?

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Good Place finale thoughts

2020-01-31T16:24:30Z

If you haven't watched The Good Place, I recommend it wholeheartedly. The first three seasons are on most streaming services.

( Good Place finale spoilers )

this is fun.

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Picard prediction based on episode 2

2020-01-31T16:13:05Z

You can't denote your own cutoff point on Facebook, so I'm posting here.

( Spoilers for Picard S01E02 )

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