#bob cesca

[youtwitinmyface]

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Robert B. Hubbell Newsletter

[porterdavis]

Quote of the Day

Ridiculous that Biden needs to be flawless to win but Trump can literally try to overthrow Congress, kill thousands of Americans due to his COVID response, get indicted on 91 criminal counts, rape women, threaten humanity by ignoring the climate… and still be competitive.

Bob Cesca

[enddaysengine]

Gonna run A Cosmic Birthday as a solo adventure using MGME2. Here’s me blorbos:

Sublime Chemistry - Barathu Envoy - What if Gordon Ramsey was a jellyfish?

Jahir, Warden of Past and Future - Kasatha Witchwarper - Precog

Cesca - Shirren Operative - Swarm Exile

Jo Bob - Prismeni Goblin Solarion - Living battery on a goblin. What could go wrong?

[haveyoureadthisscifibook]

Book 1 only for all of these.

Humans are weird, I have the data by Betty Adams

Clean Sweep by Illona Andrews . This is a complicated one genre wise, because there are vampires and werewolves and witches, but they're from alien planets, werewolves are the result of genetic modification, vampires have advanced tech, etc. So fantasy would make sense too?

Cluster by Piers Anthony

Proxima by stephen baxter

Prime Suspects: A Clone Detective Mystery by Jim Bernheimer

The Atlas Six by Olivie Blake

Nova Express William Burroughs,

Famous Men Who Never Lived by K Chess

Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang

The Supernaturalist by Eoin Colfer

Reset by Sarina Dahlan

Omnitopia dawn by Diane Duane

The Dreaming Void by peter Hamilton

Valor's Choice (Huff, Tanya)

Eye to Eye (Jinks, Catherine)

Revan (Karpyshyn, Drew)

Babel (Kuang, R.F.)

The Wandering Earth (Liu, Cixin)

The Merchant of Death (MacHale, D.J.)

Maybe Next Time (Major, Cesca)

The Host (Meyer, Stephenie)

Cloud Atlas (Mitchell, David)

Wild Massive (Moore, Scotto)

Nyxia (Reintgen, Scott )

Revelation Space (Reynolds, Alastair)

Robots vs. Fairies (Parisien, Dominik)

We Are Legion (We Are Bob) (Taylor, Dennis E.)

Spin (Wilson, Robert Charles)

Artifice (Woolfson, Alex)

Androne (Worrell, Dwain)

hello! many of these are queued.

the following are in formats or genres that I’m not currently accepting for this blog:

Ted Chiang’s Stories of Your Life and Others is a collection of (very good) non-linked short fiction.

R.F. Kuang’s Babel is fantasy.

Robots vs. Fairies (ed. Parisien and Wolfe) is a collection of non-linked short fiction.

Alex Woolfson’s Artifice is a graphic novel.

and I had questions about the following:

Olivia Blake’s The Atlas Six appears to be fantasy �� is there something in later books that would make it science fiction?

William S. Burroughs, Nova Express — you said book 1 only, but Nova Express is book 2 of The Nova Trilogy. did you want Nova Express specifically or did you want book 1, The Soft Machine?

Liu Cixin, The Wandering Earth — this appears to be the title of a short fiction collection containing the title story. has the story itself been published in standalone format (outside of a magazine/similar)? if so, could you or someone else point me towards it?

D.J. MacHale, The Merchant of Death — while parallel worlds are integral to the Pendragon books, my impression is that the handling of them (and of travel between them) is primarily fantastic rather than scientific/science-fictional. could you, or someone else, clarify the extent of the science fiction aspects of the series?

[marlowinc]

[clexa--warrior]

In the earliest days of the Trump crisis, just about a month after the inauguration, I received the horrifying news that my best friend and podcast partner, Chez Pazienza, had died of a drug overdose.

This article was originally published at Salon

It was the evening of Feb. 25, 2017, and the shock still hasn’t quite worn off. In fact, I ask myself nearly every day what Chez might’ve said about the most recent atrocity committed by the chief executive. I’ll never know for sure, but there’s something comforting in that exercise, imagining how he’d frame this dark ride with equal parts Gen-X angst, stinging Bourdain-ish erudition and artistically worded blue streaks that would’ve made George Carlin applaud.

I’m convinced, however, that it wasn’t really an overdose that killed him. Sure, it was the weapon of choice, but it wasn’t the ultimate cause of death. Chez possessed the ability to foresee this Trump crisis stretched out in front of him — maybe not the specifics, but a general concept in his big brain for the horror show that was awaiting us. I believe it was the crushing reality of not only being force-fed a Trump presidency every day but also covering it professionally that forced him to drift back to his old addictions to ease the pain. And I wish more than anything that I could have stopped him.

Nevertheless, Chez could clearly see the incoming abuses, the crimes, the ungainly nonsense, the recklessness, the racism, the petty vindictiveness — all of it.

In 2015, he accurately forecast that Trump, if elected, would spitefully withhold federal funding from regions that refused to support his cruel whimsy. Naturally, we’ve watched this play out with Puerto Rico, California and most recently Pennsylvania, where Trump, this week, threatened to withhold funding for the commonwealth because of Gov. Tom Wolf’s COVID plan. In Trump’s view, responsible leadership is worthy of punishment because it makes him look bad by contrast, while incompetence, mainly his own, is routinely lionized.

Trump’s blinding dumbness in the areas of history, the Constitution, the presidency and democratic institutions has infected him with an ugly, bastardized view of his job description, inflamed by his own biases and whatever he’s picked up from watching cable news. He’s a presidential dilettante, even now, nearly four years into the gig.

His wafer-thin understanding of presidential leadership contributes to his most self-defeating misapprehension: that he’s only the president of the red states. Everyone else is the enemy, even more so than our actual overseas adversaries — surely more than Kim Jong-un and Vladimir Putin, whom Trump praises more often than many of his fellow citizens and colleagues. The rest of us are only useful to him as punching bags and targets for his screechy, obscene, misspelled tweets and, more recently, his fascist police force. The upside of his deformed view of the presidency is that if he loses this election, it’ll partly be because he refused to expand his support beyond his loyalists.

This is one of the reasons why he felt compelled to cheat in the 2020 election by attempting to blackmail the president of Ukraine into smearing Joe Biden — a plot that ended with Trump’s impeachment and trial in the Senate. After all, how could he win re-election with only 40-44 percent popular support without making up the difference … somehow?

His relationship with his disciples is a match made in hell, given that his Red Hat fanboys have an equally stunted view of the presidency. I assure you, they’d never allow Trump-style behavior from their doctors, their kids’ teachers or, hell, their airline pilots. If they hadn’t been so badly brainwashed by the conservative entertainment complex, they never would have gifted the nuclear codes and the immense power of the presidency to such an unstable, erratic, incompetent political tourist who has utterly failed to grow into the job and rise to the occasion — who has failed to accept the intense gravity of his post. As Barack Obama said in August, “It’s because he can’t.”

At no other time has that been more evident than in Trump’s response to the pandemic. For the first two years of his presidency, many of us sat on the edge of our seats wondering when Trump would be seriously challenged either by a military threat, a terrorist attack or a global pandemic. From the moment Hillary Clinton conceded, I suspected this buffoonish greenhorn would be put to the test and fail badly. I never imagined that his reaction, untethered from experts, would be quite this calamitous.

His response to the hurricanes that collided with Puerto Rico represented a harrowing preview of how he’d handle the pandemic. I was convinced at the time that he was at least temporarily unaware that Puerto Rico was even part of the United States. I mean, how could he have been so thoughtless and unsympathetic to actual Americans? Turns out, he probably knew — he just didn’t give a shit. Never before has a modern president behaved so callously toward a devastated population of his own people, hurling paper towels at their heads as if he were firing a T-shirt cannon at a college basketball pep rally. Today, the island territory continues to rebuild despite Trump’s reprehensible indifference.

America is better than this. We’re better than him.

There have to be consequences for his indifference to the destruction in Puerto Rico as well as the 225,000 casualties of COVID-19 (and counting). Neither should have happened here. But this is what it looks like when the president and his people fail to do the paint-by-numbers things in response to a crisis — things that so many other presidents managed to achieve. Had Trump listened to the experts at the CDC and WHO, thousands of Americans would still be alive today and we might have been free and clear of this blight by now. Instead, Trump listened to the entertainers on Fox News, not to mention the shrieking voices in his head, convincing him to abandon the effort at exactly the wrong time — in April, at the initial height of the infection curve.

Before giving up, he applied travel restrictions to China, but it was too little too late. Forty thousand people arrived in the United States from China by flying through Europe and landing in New York, magnifying the catastrophic outbreak there. After that, Trump did nothing else to slow the spread, making George W. Bush’s 2005 response to Hurricane Katrina look masterful by comparison. Now, eight months into this disaster, Trump continues to ignore the rules, ignore safety protocols and ignore the experts, holding maskless, undistanced rally after rally, fueling his own ego, even after being infected himself. And there’s no end in sight.

Win or lose, his bungled, herky-jerky reaction to the pandemic will be remembered as the defining failure of his presidency, and it’s the No. 1 reason why he deserves nothing but ignominy and prison.

Rather than accepting the challenge and rising to meet it, as any other president would have, he’s spent all these months of national stress, uncertainty and illness not comforting or proactively leading the American people, but whining, whining and whining some more about how COVID ruined his presidency. Solving the pandemic could have been his greatest achievement — but Trump always makes things worse for Trump. Undermining himself and then playing the victim when things go sideways is the only thing he’s good at.

He possesses the most brittle ego of any president since Richard Nixon — one of many character flaws that undermine his self-identification as a manly alpha. Indeed, he’s nothing more than an easily-ruffled snowflake who constantly bellyaches about how “unfair” the world treats him — you know, the alleged billionaire president. So unfair.

Donald Trump has redefined what it means to be an empty suit. He talks an enormous game, but in reality his entire record is composed of failures and stolen successes. He claims to understand things he’s never able to explain openly or in any detail. Accordingly, he’s obsessed with repealing the Affordable Care Act, but only because it was Barack Obama’s signature achievement, not because it’s bad policy — and it’s not bad policy, he just says it is and his fanboys believe him.

If challenged, I’d wager a year’s salary he couldn’t name anything in the law beyond the mandate and the coverage for pre-existing conditions. I’m sure he doesn’t know about the myriad consumer protections or the mandatory benefits, or how the low-income subsidies work or the Medicaid expansion or the marketplaces — none of it. Yet he’s seeing to it that the entire thing is obliterated mid-pandemic when Americans need coverage the most. He definitely doesn’t know that coverage for pre-existing conditions is made possible, for example, by placing caps on premiums and co-pays, while banning rescission and lifetime limits on coverage. Worst of all, he doesn’t know that many of his own voters are covered today because of the ACA.

Between the pandemic and the possible repeal of the ACA, America is physically sick. And because of Donald Trump, we’re spiritually sick, too. He doesn’t understand that the president sets the tone for the nation. He’ll never grasp that the way he communicates influences the way we communicate with each other. His constant firehose of crapola encourages others to let their hatred, racism and obnoxious, crazy-eyed antagonism fly freely — playing out in our public spaces and on our social media platforms every damn day.

Trump has debased the presidency, replacing decency and humility with unearned self-praise and horrendous sadism. Our nation’s most cherished values and institutions have been randomly crushed by this 90-foot kaiju monster for too long. His constant antagonism has turned father against son, mother against daughter, family against family. Over what? The damaging misadventures of a political fraud — a garish old brat who bankrupted his businesses, defrauded Americans with his sham foundation and university and is currently bankrupting the U.S. treasury while establishing himself as a Putin-style kleptocrat.

In 1860, our nation nearly crumbled under the weight of slavery and secession. Today, our nation is on the verge of collapse under the weight of a painted-up clown whose performative fascism has led to the extrajudicial murder of American citizens on American soil; the use of Homeland Security as a secret police force tasked with assaulting Americans in advance of awkward photo-ops; the use of the Department of Justice as a personal law firm; taxpayer revenue as a personal slush fund; and, worst of all, the construction of internment camps for Central American migrant children, where some have been raped by American guards. Rivaled only by the pandemic response, the Trump Cages are the most disgusting and unforgivable aspect of this presidential crisis.

The 2020 election is about ending all that, while beginning the process of a second Reconstruction — rebuilding our government in a way that guarantees this will never happen again, while convening a Trump Crimes Commission to hold the perpetrators accountable. Part of that process is about remembering what happened here, in this era. There will be voices who insist we should move on and forget about all this ugliness. We would do well to ignore those voices. The minute we forget the damage he’s inflicted upon us all, the next Trump will be waiting to strike.

Indeed, the only way to move on is to punish the crimes and plug the holes. We have no choice but to use this dark ride — one that took my friend Chez and many thousands of others — as an opportunity to repair the gaping Trump-shaped craters in the system exposed and exploited by this unqualified, disgracefully unpresidential and obviously unglued president. If Joe Biden and Kamala Harris successfully oust Trump, a week from today, the Trump crisis will be on its way to ending, while the hard work of cleaning up the mess will begin. In both the election and the aftermath, we cannot fail. Everything depends on what happens next.

[the-insidious-dr-grey-matter]

Na na na na na na na na Batman! If you sang that, thank Adam West. Damn, I loved that show. Still do.

[antoine-roquentin]

Miniature panics about what photo apps are doing with the personal data they collect happen fairly often. This January, there was a firestorm around Facebook’s “2009 vs. 2019” or “10-Year Challenge,” after Wired reporter Kate O’Neill argued that the meme had been planted as a trick to get Facebook users to create a data set for machine learning. She implied that Facebook’s userbase had been bamboozled, writing:

“Imagine that you wanted to train a facial recognition algorithm on age-related characteristics, and, more specifically, on age progression (e.g. how people are likely to look as they get older). Ideally, you’d want a broad and rigorous data set with lots of people’s pictures. It would help if you knew they were taken a fixed number of years apart—say, 10 years.”

This theory was debunked by other reporters who pointed out that Facebook already has tons of photos of its users — with timestamps — and doesn’t need your help in turning them into a workable dataset. Certainly most people know this on some level, but something about the intimate invasiveness of having your selfies picked through strikes a nerve.

In January 2017, people were antsy about the Chinese photo-editing app Meitu, which also had a fairly racist “hot” filter and was full of code that could pull sensitive identifying data from users’ phones. Most alarmingly, it collected geographic data, and if it couldn’t access it through traditional GPS coordinates, would extract it from the metadata of the photographs its users were taking. All that data was being sent to China, which was cited as particularly disturbing.

However, as The Verge’s Russell Brandom pointed out, much of this attempted data collection was blocked by Apple’s operating system (for iPhone users), and though the rest of the stuff really was invasive, it was most likely used for advertising — not for identity theft or some other malicious scam. In other words: It’s wise not to download it, just like it’s wise to download as few apps as you possibly can and not use Facebook or Google for anything. But the panic, both in that case and in this one, arguably has a tinge of xenophobia as well.

A tweet from New York magazine contributor Yashar Ali that says, “Btw you all know FaceApp is a Russian company, right? Just making sure,” has been retweeted more than 5,000 times as of this writing, though the fact that the app is based in Russia has nothing to do with its privacy violations. Salon contributor Bob Cesca also tweeted, “The company is based in St. Petersburg, Russia,” as though that were, in itself, a mark against it. A PBS News Hour producer tweeted five times, “FaceApp uploads your photos to Russia.”

Several journalists have pointed out the strangeness of this argument, including Splinter’s Libby Watson, who tweeted, “I don’t understand what nefarious thing people think the Russian government is doing with FaceApp data. They’re going to use your photos of your brunch to hack the Florida voter rolls?”

Still, the Russia panic will not be stopped. The Democratic National Committee’s chief security officer issued a warning today to presidential candidates not to use the app, telling them “If you or any of your staff have already used the app, we recommend that they delete the app immediately.” (What would be the point of deleting it if you’d already used it! This question was not addressed.)

This isn’t to say that you shouldn’t worry about photo apps. Just that you’d do well to worry about them all pretty much equally. Facebook can figure out if two people know each other by looking at the metadata of photos uploaded in a small time frame in a small geographic area and then comparing the scratches and dust on the lens of the camera that took them. Shutterfly, like Meitu, pulls GPS coordinates from its users or, when that’s blocked, tries to harvest geographic information from the metadata of their photos.

The photo storage app Ever, which promised “free, unlimited private backup of all your life’s memories,” turned out to be using the photos to train facial recognition software, as reported by NBC News this May.

It is definitely weird that FaceApp is retaining your photos for possible “commercial use.” I assume this is so it can continue using them to train new AI-based features, but who knows? Maybe you are Russian stock photography now! However, the biggest motive for FaceApp to collect your information is most likely ad targeting, and the motive to make a scary face-aging filter is likely just to jack up downloads so that more people are dumping info into the data set. There is really no reason to believe that the Russian government is doing something scary with pictures of your face.

“The world is rich in available data — most of it given freely without even the need for a dastardly meme conspiracy theory — and much poorer in attention span,” New York magazine’s Brian Feldman wrote during the Facebook “10-Year Challenge” controversy. “The time a person spends on a site uploading a photo for a meme is likely much more directly valuable to the site than the data from the photo would be.”

For a more direct comparison: Snapchat, which has struggled for years, basically only gets spikes in downloads when it introduces a new borderline-offensive feature. When it introduced its gender-swap filter in May, daily downloads shot up from 600,000 to between 1 and 2 million. Snapchat collects geographic information too, and accesses private messages and photos as well as contacts. We’re just not panicking about it because it’s American and we’ve already accepted it.

[posttexasstressdisorder]

LOL...that’s just what I called ‘em a coupla days ago! 

They’re a buncha fuckin’ GOOMBAH MAFIOSO FUCKUPS!!!!!!

[arlengrossman]

MARKET MADNESS

Why is the stock market soaring amid a pandemic? Because Trump thinks that may save him

By Bob Cesca/ Salon.com/ July 24, 2020

All told, Donald Trump is a bit of an expert at blurting things that force the markets to bend to his will. And he’s engaging in similar shenanigans now, while Americans are dying by the thousands.

Before the pandemic and accompanying economic calamity…

[theblackpodcast]

1/28/18 - Phoenix And William With More Becky Raps.

1/28/18 – Phoenix And William With More Becky Raps.

Wine Cellar News And Comment 1/28/18 Phoenix And William

https://winecellarmedia.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/1-28-18-second-episode.mp3

5 killed shooting at Pennsylvania wash.

[willpollock]

White House Comm Stumbles | Barlett's Good Friends | @MattyBRaps Gets 'Gone' & More—CrankyYank Vol. 64

White House Comm Stumbles | Barlett’s Good Friends | @MattyBRaps Gets ‘Gone’ & More—CrankyYank Vol. 64

https://twitter.com/joshtpm/status/890685958340972544

https://twitter.com/BrianKarem/status/890618567237947394

Life has have gotten a lot less Spicier in the White House briefing room.

Sean Spicer’s resignation came the same day that Trump hired Anthony “Mooch” Scaramucci for Communications Director. And breaking just yesterday, Reince Priebus is out as White House Chief of Staff.

The turmoil in…

[stuffbhappenin]

And the responses to Trump’s 4th of July speech pore in, just like the rain that poured down on it.

Freedom loving Americans find it regrettable that not a single classic movie from liberal Hollywood depicts when the George Washington Army successfully manned the amperts, ranned the ramparts, and took over the airports. https://t.co/6jsiyOwbf8

— Ben Mankiewicz (@BenMank77) July 5, 2019

In a curious development in the history of the American revolution, it appears we had an as yet undiscovered yet decisive factor in turning the tide in favour of Washington’s Army: the failure of the Royal Airforce to secure critical airfields in 1781 :) https://t.co/uRN25dh8U2

— Kevin Rudd (@MrKRudd) July 5, 2019

He said the army took over the airports in the War of 1812, and that’s how we got the Star Spangled Banner. I’m pretty sure he was in a fugue state, Ari. https://t.co/SFhhjWZqXB

— Bob Cesca (@bobcesca_go) July 5, 2019

Trump’s misreading of basic facts of US history he appeared to encounter for the first time on the teleprompter led him to claim that Congress named the Continental Army “after” George Washington, who defeated Cornwallis “of” Yorktown, and the US army took over “airports” in 1814 https://t.co/CMYhbGwqeC

— Robert Mackey (@RobertMackey) July 5, 2019

Fact check: there were no airports in 1775.#MoronPresidenthttps://t.co/OxwhMT6htV

— Democratic Coalition (@TheDemCoalition) July 5, 2019

The worst part is where he left out the part where Space Force 1 teleported Washington off the Hindenburg just before the Japanese bombed it. 

[newsrustcom]

The Bob Cesca Show Podcast: Comedian Jen Kirkman Talks About DACA, Trump And The 'Pee Pee Tape'

The Bob Cesca Show Podcast: Comedian Jen Kirkman Talks About DACA, Trump And The ‘Pee Pee Tape’

Today’s topics include: Comedian Jen Kirkman is here today; Catch her ‘All New Material Girl‘ tour starting this week; Back from vacation; Trump and Sessions rescind DACA; Trolling the Left; Cable news and declaring Trump to be presidential; The Pee Pee Tape; Trump’s second Houston trip; Bernie trolls vs Trump trolls; the 25th Amendment; Michael Cohen is the center of the Russia conspiracy;…

[blogology]

“Trump's form of fascism may not look like earlier models — but it's the real thing and it's happening right now.” .. (quote Bob Cesca) .. (cartoon Stuart Carlson)