Mark's Personal Blog

Tron: Ares is a good movie (and we don't need more Tron movies)

Sat, 15 Nov 2025 15:40:45 -0500

So I saw Tron: Ares and I didn’t hate it.

Oop, sorry, that was heresy and I’m being banished to the Game Grid now.

I’m sure this surprises nobody, as I’m kind of in the key demographic for this movie. But it’s worth noting that more importantly, I think I liked it better than Tron: Legacy. It may have told a better story for its era. Because that’s the hard thing about this franchise: there are 43 years between the first movie and this one; nearly half a century.

Bad Obsession: On the Death of a Thirty-One-year-old White Male American

Thu, 11 Sep 2025 19:05:00 -0400

I did not know the dead man.

To be sure, I knew of him. He was a prolific writer and speaker. A rising-star luminary in conservative circles. He said many things about transgender people, about race, about immigrants, about private ownership of firearms. But I did not know him.

I wonder about him though. I wonder how much comprehension he had of what happened to him. That kind of injury… It isn’t long until your brain can’t think thoughts anymore. It’s an expensive organ. Doesn’t take a lot of drop in blood pressure for it to shut down consciousness for survival behaviors. Did he get that he’d said the last thing he’d ever say? I wonder.

The Case Against Facebook

Sun, 19 Jan 2025 22:53:35 -0500

There has been, if you will, a bit of a shift regarding people’s opinions of Facebook.

I’m currently completely logged out of it, in keeping with the boycott running between January 19 and 26. I’ll see how I feel about logging back into it after that. I have to admit that with a few specific exceptions (hi, Star Trek Shitposting) and, of course, my circle of actual acquaintances from real life, it hasn’t interested me as much as it used to.

Explorers

Tue, 18 Jul 2023 20:53:12 -0400

Stelrae perched at her desk, puzzling over the learning tablet in front of her. She stared at the symbols shown on it: on one side, a wheel of glyphs, spinning continuously, each representing a species in the great Galactic Council. On the other side, the glyphs were arranged in a shape like a tree. The branches of the tree waved to and fro, glyphs dangling from it like a rainbow of fruits, save one: a glyph near the center that seemed to stay still. It was a humanoid figure made of lines, with a circle at the top.

The Videogame Sequel Doctor punches up Tears of the Kingdom

Fri, 09 Jun 2023 22:15:32 -0400

Okay, everyone, Tears of the Kingdom. I'm telling you, this game... Should write itself. The first one was an instant hit, sold 29 million copies... This should be pretty straightforward. Basically, we're doing a simple thematic evolution on the original game. We want to do all the stuff with the exploration and the... Uh, can we help you?

I Don't Know How It Gets Better

Tue, 06 Jun 2023 22:41:21 -0400

I have literally nothing to say that will make this better.

We buried my mother-in-law last week. Ten years ago, a man who had had many terrible years decided it was someone else’s problem and shot her. Shot several people. People he’d never met. Through absolute heroics on the part of a trauma team less than a quarter-mile from the shooting, she lived. You could say she was “lucky,” but I’m not sure there’s a kind of lucky that leaves you permanently startling at every loud sound and going to surgery after surgery trying to patch together the lungs and blood vessels that the bullets ruined.

Parable of the Silence

Wed, 10 May 2023 19:13:54 -0400

And so God, who knew all things and was all things, decided that there should be Existence. And so She created Existence with pieces of Herself.

First, she created the Things. And to them She gave the Laws and the most simple purpose: to be those Laws. She gave water “wetness” and it knew how to be water. And She gave space “distance” and it knew how to be space. Thus all Things were given their purpose and that was their Gift from Her, the piece of Her they carried with them.

His Noble Phantasm is 'Olive Garden'

Fri, 24 Feb 2023 08:01:25 -0500

Mark's Gallery of Facebook Infractions 15: Sith Lives Matter

Tue, 01 Nov 2022 08:15:35 -0400

Context: discussion of the relative merits of Star Trek and Star Wars.

Facebook’s TOS seek to create a welcoming environment for all people: the LGBTQ community, science fiction fans, Count Dooku…

The Story of CTU part 3 - Canceling the apocalypse

Mon, 04 Jul 2022 08:00:00 -0400

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

Today’s story seems appropriate for a July 4th; it starts with the formation of a new government and ends with fireworks.

With a new government established, people could turn their attention to the last challenge: stopping the meteor. We had seven days to do it, and no shortage of challenges. The first one was the famine.

Feeding people is a thankless job

The graphs tell the story better than words. Eco servers generate statistics that can be seen by accessing the server over HTTP. Looking at the Sea Otter server’s graphs, we find a story told of players, justifiably, giving up.

The Story of CTU part 2 - people, therefore drama

Mon, 27 Jun 2022 09:00:00 -0400

The story I’m going to tell here is delicate, biased to my vantage point alone, and deals with drama. As such, standard disclaimers apply:

While I’m not censoring names (because everyone involved is using gamer handles anyway), remember that real human beings are on the other side of these names. Don’t seek them out to harass them.
Take this tale with a grain of salt; it’s only one side of a story (and even as far as I can see it, there were no evil people, merely misaligned goals).

Kelvin is a player I’d met on the previous server cycle, the one I joined late. Good guy, who’s primary fun in the game appeared to be establishing and organizing a government to allow people to coordinate. The way Eco works, if players build a seat of government and some relevant policy-control buildings, they can establish laws and organizational structure. Laws are (generally) voted into force by the population and, once active, are enforced by the game engine; for example, a popular one on many servers (and one Kelvin included) taxes people one coin for chopping down a tree, but refunds that tax if they also chop down the stump and gives them a few fractions of a coin if they clean up the tree debris that’s left over by a felled tree (thus encouraging loggers to maintain a clean work environment, which fosters rapid regrowth of any deforested areas). With such policies, you can create some nice soft incentives for players to cohere and operate as a group, which is great for coordinating to stop the meteor.

The Story of CTU - when I made a fake college in a video game

Mon, 20 Jun 2022 08:00:00 -0400

Eco is an interesting Minecraft-esque game where a society gathers together to try and build a community from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle to a modern town, through crafting, trade, and politics. Also, there’s a meteor that is going to destroy everything in twenty days unless you stop it.

“Don’t mind me, pretend I’m not even here.”

The game has a few twists on the Minecraft style. For starters, your player can only do things they have the skills to do. Skills are unlocked via a two-step process:

You Should Play Video Games!

Sat, 02 Apr 2022 20:11:42 -0400

My hobby: resurrecting old meme formats one last time.

Why I Do FIRST

Thu, 17 Mar 2022 22:01:48 -0400

The FIRST Robotics competition has come again to California, PA, and once again I’m here, working with a team this time, doing their best to win the thing. They’ve spent a quarter of the year building a machine to do the tasks, a quarter of a year building and tuning and testing. The first practice run was an objective disaster; nothing the robot was designed to do worked, a critical piece of infrastructure (a camera that identifies the target on the field) utterly failed to work as designed (and tested, in the relative quiet and comfort of the machine shop). The team was disheartened, downtrodden, yelling at each other.

This Place Has Everything

Tue, 15 Feb 2022 17:01:24 +0100

“The most happening spot in the whole solar system is this hip young planet called ‘EARTH’. This place has everything. Nitrogen-rich atmosphere, a magnetosphere, plate tectonics, a sun. Dance the night away as the planetary rotation spins you around in twenty-four hours. If you’re feeling thirsty, partake of the liquid water covering 70% of the surface. And be on the lookout for this amazing new thing called ’life.’”

Privacy Policy

Sat, 12 Feb 2022 09:06:28 +0100

Privacy Policy

last updated: 2022-09-03

Overview

General Principles

I don’t value your privacy (as much as you do)

Your responsibility, mate, not mine. If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.

… but I’m not in the habit of intentionally causing grief

This policy attempts to find middle ground between my needs and wants as a site owner and your needs and wants as a pseudonymous Internet stranger (because you can’t be anything else to me at this level, since I haven’t collected enough data to know who you are on account of trying to respect your privacy). I also make a token effort to adhere to the spirit of the GDPR, but since best-practice there is a moving target I have no idea if I succeed. If you are an EU user and care about such things, this is my disclaimer on that topic. In particular, since I hate consent pop-ups more than I love privacy, I’ve done my best to avoid the need for consent pop-ups, but it is possible I have fallen short. To that end, this site will not ask you if you consent to cookies because it does not use cookies. That should make everyone’s life a little simpler.

Why We Even Bothered to Leave the Trees

Tue, 01 Feb 2022 15:35:00 +0000

“But you are telling me, Susan, that the ‘Society for Humanity’ is right;
and that Mankind has lost its own say in its future.”

“It never had any, really. It was always at the mercy of
economic and sociological forces it did not understand — at the whims of
climate, and the fortunes of war. Now the Machines understand them; and no
one can stop them, since the Machines will deal with them as they are
dealing with the Society, — having, as they do, the greatest of weapons at
their disposal, the absolute control of our economy.”

“How horrible!”

“Perhaps how wonderful! Think, that for all time, all conflicts are finally
evitable. Only the Machines, from now on, are inevitable!”

And the fire behind the quartz went out and only a curl of
smoke was left to indicate its place.

~ Asimov, Isaac. “I, Robot”. pp. 147-148. Available online: http://ekladata.com/-Byix64G_NtE0xI4A6PA1–o1Hc/Asimov-Isaac-I-Robot.pdf

Antonio Garcia Martinez on Trump

Tue, 28 Dec 2021 16:57:00 +0000

I read all of Chaos Monkeys ~~so you don’t have to~~ so I could bring you this, the author’s take on the Cambridge Analytica scandal. This is a quick, heavily-editorialized summary of the Afterword of my edition (May 2018).

In the author’s opinion, Cambridge Analytica didn’t have much impact. Their system of political profiling is basically astrology for political wonks; it has the same pitfalls as advertising models that try to decide if you want to buy a BMW because you’re living in Iowa and working at a pet supply store (which is to say, those models aren’t proven out).

Ghostbusters Afterlife: Bustin' doesn't always make you feel good. Do it anyway.

Mon, 06 Dec 2021 17:00:00 +0000

Spoiler warning: I’m going to be talking at length about plot points in Ghostbusters, Ghostbusters: Afterlife, Star Wars episode VIII, and Stephen King’s It

I’m a huge fan of the original Ghostbusters movie, and as I’ve gotten older it’s only come to mean more to me. I began my software engineering career working at small startup. And Ghostbusters is a weird comedy about, of all things, a tech startup. Three guys, having discovered a novel technology under-appreciated by the academia they’re ensconced in, go into business for themselves, build it brick-by-brick and job by job, and make their way from obscurity to saving the world when a need for their technology is discovered that nobody had predicted. So many bits of the movie resonate with me: the anxiety of leaping from academia to industry, the cobble-together lifestyle of pulling all-nighters in whatever office space you can afford, the thrill of landing your first client, and the need, when someone asks you if you are a god, to say “yes.”

In Honor Of the Galaxy's Favorite Dangerous Murder Hobo

Mon, 25 Oct 2021 02:26:00 +0000

This Is the Year of Linux on Desktop

Thu, 21 Oct 2021 14:03:00 +0000

The promise: “The modular, single-purpose, interface focused design of the GNU/Linux architecture means infinite customizability. Any configuration you want is within your grasp.”

The reality: “You changed your window manager and now your laptop no longer goes to sleep when you close the lid.”

Chatty Charon

Wed, 13 Oct 2021 01:50:00 +0000

Mark's gallery of Facebook infractions 14 (celebrity edition): brown Jesus is hate speech, I hear

Mon, 11 Oct 2021 13:00:00 +0000

No updates from me this week, but Wil Wheaton managed to catch some downtime for sharing a meme that was circulating for a day, followed by some very personal thoughts on the topic. His post has since been restored; after review, Facebook conclueded it does not violate community standards.

He wrote about his experience of having that entire thread suppressed by Facebook and catching a ban here: http://wilwheaton.net/2021/10/white-fragility-in-action

Mark's gallery of Facebook infractions 13: Those who don't spam history are doomed to repeat it

Mon, 04 Oct 2021 13:00:00 +0000

Infraction: Spam. Comment removed.

I’m honestly stumped on explaining this one. In a discussion about the comedy of Gene Wilder, Facebook decides it’s spam to link to an image of a letter he wrote regarding costuming for his character.

Anyway, the letter’s pretty neat, and the nice thing about my blog is I get to decide what counts as spam.

Marks Gallery of Facebook Infractions 12, guest edition: the past comes back

Mon, 27 Sep 2021 13:00:00 +0000

The most hilarious thing about this one is that it was a reshare of a meme shared a year ago. Not too terribly surprising that the acceptability window is a moving target, but be warned: Facebook accepting something in the past is no guarantee it’s still acceptable.

Tie Fighters Are for Coddled Children With Money

Mon, 06 Sep 2021 16:05:00 +0000

So, let’s talk about Star Wars.

TIE fighter pilots have a reputation for being insane. This is well-earned; the TIE is famously powerful but famously fragile, little more than a couple guns strapped to some wings and a pair of engines, with not even enough hardware left for a life-support system. TIE pilots basically operate under the philosophy that if you’re good enough to never get hit, you don’t need shields. They’re the elite of the Empire’s sky power and they know it… Only 10% who enter the academy ever become pilots. Their craft even lack a hyperdrive, supported as they are by their operating bases and motherships.

Mark's gallery of Facebook infractions 11, guest edition 3: won't someone think of the Congressional procedures?!

Mon, 06 Sep 2021 13:00:00 +0000

A ban for a friend.

This one is very similar to a ban I took earlier this year, which suggests to me that Facebook is over-constraining on keyword bans for “[violence-word] the [congress-word]”. Understandable after January 6th, but someone could stand to bother to differentiate words for actual human beings in Congress from words for Parliamentary procedures.

Sword in the Stone is bad and my favorite Disney movie

Mon, 06 Sep 2021 05:40:00 +0000

I think my favorite Disney movie has terrible structure, but I love it for being a unique artifact.

Behold, the ideal make hero. You may not like it, but this is what peak narrative looks like

Disney movies lean heavily into the monomyth of the hero’s journey. With very few exceptions, we follow a protagonist (often a princess) who finds a call to action, leaves home, faces trials and an abyss, grows to overcome these things, and finds their way home, permanently changed. Cinderella with her ball, Ariel with her legs and the affection of the man she fell in love with, Flynn and the truth ENCOM buried… They’re all brought on a magical journey to attain the unattainable, to overcome the impossible, and to seek their heart’s reward.

No, you cannot force the city to keep up your racist monument because we said in 1890 that we'd be racist forever

Thu, 02 Sep 2021 15:19:00 +0000

Given that I’m currently cooling my heels in Zuck jail for suggesting that there is no quantity of statues that exceeds the value of one human life, this ruling feels like a tiny bit of vindication.

https://www.npr.org/2021/09/02/1033595859/virginia-supreme-court-remove-statue-robert-e-lee-confederate-richmond

NPR reports “The Supreme Court of Virginia ruled Thursday that the state can take down an enormous statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee that has towered over a traffic island in Richmond for more than a century and has become a symbol of racial injustice.” This decision had been blocked by injunctions related to two court cases. Today, the state Supreme Court tossed both cases for lack of standing, lifting the injunction.

Mark's Gallery of Facebook Infractions 10: you're in the jailhouse now

Mon, 30 Aug 2021 13:00:00 +0000

Context:

Mark's gallery of Facebook infractions 9: extremism

Mon, 26 Jul 2021 14:00:00 +0000

Reshared from an acquaintance.

I’d be fascinated to know how Facebook is going to use the data they collect from this. I’d assume it will feed into a pattern recognizer for “extremism-like typing.” Interesting that it leaves the definition of extremism up to the viewer.

Marks Gallery of Facebook Infractions 8: Gronp edition

Mon, 19 Jul 2021 14:00:00 +0000

<content type='html'>

The offending image that FB chose to block a ~98,000-member group for was this:

Marks Gallery of Facebook Infractions 7: Guest edition 2

Mon, 12 Jul 2021 14:00:00 +0000

Unfortunately, I have no additional context on this one. Seems like it’d be more helpful to people trying to avoid violating the TOS if an indication of what TOS was violated could be given though.

A Brief Cogitation on Thread-Safe Memory Access

Tue, 06 Jul 2021 17:01:00 +0000

Hey, I’ve got an idea. Let’s you and me write a couple programs and share data between them. To share the data, we’ll both open a file. Now, we’ll just scribble bits we want to share into the file and read them out as we need them.

“Bad idea,” you say?

“Very likely to result in data corruption,” you say?

“There’s a reason we have database engines,” you say?

“Sure, but only if we do it in a very well-defined structure, such as ‘Only one program can write in, only one can read out, and the file is a stream, not random-access’”, you suggest?

Marks Gallery of Facebook Infractions 6: Guest edition

Mon, 05 Jul 2021 14:00:00 +0000

Transitioning now from my own infractions, I will now be bringing you infractions sent to me by other people or that I have observed.

Beginning with a bit of culture clash: when the algorithm meets military camaraderie.

At first glance, I can very much see why both the algorithm and a human might think this is a bad thing. But I’d hope either of the two would be able to pull definitions for phrases from common sources.

Cyberpunk 2077 is bad (unless it's performance art)

Thu, 01 Jul 2021 11:40:00 +0000

I’m finding it enjoyable to consider Cyberpunk 2077 as a work of art involving the creation and consumption of the commercial product in addition to the game itself. A cyberpunk cyberpunk experience. A game about videogames, if you will.

“Better ask yourself that question. Do you want to spend the rest of your days hunting bugs? Or fuse a handbag to your palm and ship the game?”

Mark's gallery of Facebook Infractions BONUS ROUND 5! I DONE GOT GOT AGAIN!

Tue, 29 Jun 2021 02:02:00 +0000

So I thought I would only have four of these to show you, but no. Because I broke my new rule about commenting on other people’s posts, and immediately…

Context was someone sharing a copy-paste meme about how we must support our local businesses, because mega-corporations don’t sponsor Little League teams. The links are to stories about teams sponsored by Walmart, the Little League org in Clark, NJ that has several corporate sponsors, and an image of the sponsorship page for a local FIRST Robotics team, including such local nmes as “Verizon,” “American Eagle,” and “Google.”

Mark's gallery of Facebook infractions 4: Yes, sex is still taboo, even when it's famous

Mon, 21 Jun 2021 14:00:00 +0000

Heh heh… Heheheheheheheh.

Okay. No disagreement on my end about this one. Context was a thread on how a Star Trek fan group had some content that was real, real inside-ball (heh) from the point of view of new members. I think this scene (and line in particular) strikes exactly the right tone, and I love this song… The way it exhorts and revels in the lifestyle described while also highlighting the lifestyle is some hilarious tail-eating nonsense.

Marks Gallery of Facebook Infractions 3: wat

Mon, 14 Jun 2021 14:00:00 +0000

Okay, this one is baffling to me. Context is predictably heated discussion about US government in modern times. But why this violates community standards, I still don’t know. Was it because I used the word “kill?” Because I impugned the utility of Congress (Facebook, dears, I know you have a hard job, but I can’t fathom how it could be considered even surprising speech when someone calls a government branch with a 31% approval rating “sclerotic and useless”)? Because I suggested that the executive was ruling by EO because Congress can’t do its job?

Pull the Lever

Wed, 09 Jun 2021 19:37:00 +0000

Blew up one of my development systems today by pushing the checkbox that says something else but means “Definitely blow up the system.”

A major part of the art of software design lies not in knowing what features to add, but what features to remove or omit.

Mark's gallery of Facebook infractions 2: stepped right into this one

Mon, 07 Jun 2021 14:00:00 +0000

Okay, in fairness, this one’s on me. I already knew from other people’s experiences getting booted that “Men are trash” was basically an auto-jailing. But in the moment, with a friend complaining about how the vast bulk of the men she was interacting with were basically being just the worst, I sought to commiserate and forgot the rule.

On Videogames

Sun, 06 Jun 2021 16:27:00 +0000

Me, an intellectual: “Videogames are simulation engines where people derive pleasure from the stimulus-response loop of acting within the parameters of that simulation. It tickles the same pleasure centers that evolved to ensure our early-sapient ancestors were rewarded for getting better at hunting a day’s meal beyond the calorie intake.”

Shigeru Miyamoto, an actual game designer: “The plumber’s best friend is a dinosaur and he rides the dinosaur because how cool would it be if your best friend was a dinosaur you could ride?”

The Human Side of System Security

Sun, 06 Jun 2021 15:24:00 +0000

One of the most important things to remember about the business of technological systems is that there are two sources of rules: the info-physical ways the systems can interact with each other, and the ill-defined network of human interaction with those systems.

These are truths people who break systems come to learn: while some system breaches involve zero-day exploits or novel undocumented interactions, far more involve guessing where some key politician went to high school or convincing some front-line customer service rep with too much security clearance for their training that if you don’t get into your son’s email right now, you just know the kidnappers will murder him, here’s his account name, can you please help?

Apparently Trump Thinks He'll Be Reinstated as President By August Because the MyPillow CEO Told Him He Would

Fri, 04 Jun 2021 16:51:00 +0000

From the Daily Beast

… at this point, can we just elect Mike Lindell in 2024 instead of Donald Trump? It appears the former President is delegating to his knowledge, and I can’t imagine he’ll do more harm than a second Trump term.

Ironically It Was the Homophobes' Boat That Was Flaming

Wed, 02 Jun 2021 20:59:00 +0000

Don’t drive your boat too hard, folks.

And, y’know, don’t be a huge asshole to someone flying a rainbow flag too. That’ll decrease the odds you’ll overdrive your boat.

Marks Gallery of Facebook Infractions 1

Tue, 01 Jun 2021 02:52:00 +0000

This is what got me a 3-day suspension.

I contested it, but decided not to follow through; I doubt Facebook’s review board cares about nuance like conditional statements. Context was discussion of the risk the US may collapse as a political entity in our lifetimes under autocratic rule.

VPM debuts "Page's Kitchen"

Mon, 31 May 2021 14:14:00 +0000

Missed this news by a couple days, but Virginia Public Media is doing a series called “Page’s Kitchen” which is a look back on the work of singer / songwriter Page Wilson, former host of Out O’ the Blue Radio Revue on Virginia public radio. I loved listening to his work as a kid.

Worth a listen to if you’re interested. Next show is June 5 at noon and re-broadcast 8PM (Eastern time).

A Day at the Beach

Sun, 30 May 2021 14:59:00 +0000

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

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