April 17, 2021
— Ace Open Blog
Color
In the mid-aughts at Virginia Tech I took a handful of classes with the late Stephen Prince, a film scholar with a particular focus on Kurosawa (along with others). One of the courses I took with him was a survey course of the history of movies, and he started the first class by stating one of his primary objectives: to convince us that black and white was beautiful.
My generation had never grown up in a world where black and white film was normal. Black and white films were either old or special projects that were more art-house than blockbuster. We weren't conditioned to see black and white film as just another way to tell cinematic stories. Instead, we were conditioned to see them as inherently different and, often, inferior.
The movement from black and white to color film as the standard in movie making took decades. It wasn't like sound where The Jazz Singer caused a huge sensation and within five years ever studio was exclusively making talkies. Color had existed since the earliest days of motion pictures, but it was an incredibly expensive and laborious process to get even short films by someone like Melies colored. Black and white was the standard out of necessity, and it can take a lot to get people out of their ways.
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— Ace Open Blog
Goal: Black can force mate in 3 moves
Hint: A discovered check gets the ball rolling
7k/pp2Q1pp/5r2/P2P4/3Pb1P1/4Ppq1/1P1R3N/2r2R1K b - - 0 1more...
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— Ace Open Blog
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— Open Blogger
A while ago, I asked a question about pruning my rose bush. My daughter had planted it many years ago, but she's moved out now so it's mine to take care of, and I got around to pruning it a week before the Big Texas Freeze in February. I was afraid that the combination of the pruning and the freeze might have killed it, but this morning I got my first bloom of the year.So red!
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— Open Blogger
"Third Wave Antiracist tenets, stated clearly and placed in simple oppositions, translate into nothing whatsoever. . .
The revelation of racism is, itself and alone, the point, the intention, of this curriculum. As such, the fact that if you think a little, the tenets cancel one another out, is considered trivial. That they serve their true purpose of revealing people as bigots is paramount—sacrosanct, as it were. . .
I write this viscerally driven by the fact that all of this supposed wisdom is founded in an ideology under which white people calling themselves our saviors make black people look like the dumbest, weakest, most self-indulgent human beings in the history of our species, and teach black people to revel in that status and cherish it as making us special. Talking of Antiracist Baby, I am especially dismayed at the idea of this indoctrination infecting my daughters’ sense of self. I can’t always be with them, and this anti-humanist ideology may seep into their school curriculum. I shudder at the thought: teachers with eyes shining at the prospect of showing their antiracism by teaching my daughters that they are poster children rather than individuals.
My interest is not "How do we get through to these people?” We cannot, at least not enough of them to matter. The question is "How can we can live graciously among them?” We seek change in the world, but for the duration will have to do so while encountering bearers of a gospel, itching to smoke out heretics, and ready on a moment’s notice to tar us as moral perverts.Well, one way is to make sure they don't have power over you or your kids. One of them has just lost some of that power. More on that a little later. But here's another idea:
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— Ace Open Blog
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— Ace Open Blog I have no idea. If this posts and anyone can read it, well, bear in minds the wisest words of Winston Wolf. (look it up yourself, fags)
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— Pixy Misa
Top Story
- Get FLoCed: Nobody wants to work with Google on their new IOPAAS platform (invasion of privacy as a service). (The Verge)
Brave blocks it; Vivaldi blocks it; Firefox blocks it, and Mozilla is run by Stalinists; Opera doesn't specifically block it but doesn't support it; the DuckDuckGo extension and mobile browser block it; Microsoft and Apple appear to be planning to block it but don't want to come out and say so.
Google is planning to stop supporting third-party cookies next year, meaning that evil ad-tracking scum vermin will need to find a new way. FLoC was Google's plan for this, but everyone hates it. Third-party cookies had uses beyond privacy violation; FLoC does not.
I had to give up on third-party cookies a long time ago because, technically, mu.nu is not a valid domain name - or at least wasn't at the time. The second-level domain must be at least three characters long. So I couldn't set cookies for mu.nu, either for the domain itself or as third-party cookies for subdomains to implement single sign-on.
Speaking of managing sites, you can also opt your site out of Google FLoC regardless of what browser your readers prefer. If you're using one of the common web servers or proxy servers it should only take a minute or two; that page provides instructions for Apache, Nginx, Caddy - we use Nginx and Caddy - Varnish, Traefik, Lighttpd, and more.
I've done just that for all sites hosted on this server.
I haven't done it yet for sites hosted on the main server because it's still down.
Kopi Luwak is coffee where the raw beans pass through the digestive tract of a civet before being roasted and ground. I am not making this up.
Art by Bangzheng Du.
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April 16, 2021
— Ace Open Blog So tonight I thought I'd do all Texas memes. Yee-haw!
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— Ace
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