In my review of Rock & Rule, I stated that it’s an adult film with no adult content.

This is not true; I saw an edited cut. According to the Rock & Rule wiki (??!), a version exists featuring brief nudity from Debbie Harry’s character, Angel. (Described below by an anonymous superfan, who gets way too into it. The Zapruder film wasn’t this obsessively analyzed.)

For most of the film, Angel wears a conservative but stylish red blazer over a black top with matching black pants, boots and a gold belt. After Mok enslaves and drugs her, she is forced to wear a very skimpy outfit for her involuntary performance at his concert. The outfit is a dress with a bare back and a front narrow enough to expose the sides of her bare breasts. The lower half of the dress is two fabric panels in the front and the back divided by slits up to her pelvis on either side, exposing her legs to the top of her hips. Also, Angel is not only going in her bare feet, she also isn’t wearing anything underneath her dress. We can see she’s bare underneath when the breeze periodically causes the fabric panels to lift, exposing her bare tush and the creases of her pelvis. This especially happens when she is singing to the demon and the back panel of her dress flips up, revealing her bare bum.

Can the coast guard mount a rescue mission for this man’s keyboard? It’s clearly drowning in its operator’s drool. Additional credits to society chime in the comments.

Based on her haircut, general appearance, it looks like they actually modeled her at least somewhat on Debbie Harry, who provided her singing voice.

Nothing gets past Sherlock here.

Angel’s brown” fur is actually her skin. After all, “fur is skin” exists according to TV Tropes & Idioms. So her sexy, thick, buxom, toned body is exposed.

A compelling argument, backed by citation. Can I suggest a career as a lawyer? You’ll be spending a lot of time in courtrooms either way.

Yeah, I think she and would get along well to being friends and having fun as girls. Her natural personality reminds me of a lot of the I usually hang out with. You rule Angel girl!!!! <3 :)

You shouldn’t think that, because Angel’s not your friend, or even a real person. She’s a cartoon mouse. Parasocial fixations on fictional characters are unhealthy, and you should make some real friends.

By the way, reading the heart ASCII <3 requires that you tilt your head to the right, and the smiley emoticon :) requires a tilt in the opposite direction. When the two appear back to back, you’d technically have to whiplash your head 180 degrees to read the text. Pretty painful, and if you did it fast enough, it might even prove fatal.

This could be used as an assassination method. Copy and paste “<3 :) <3 :) <3 :) <3 :) <3 :) <3 :) <3 :) <3 :) <3 :)” into an email, send it to your enemy, and see if they snap their spine. Or maybe that’s not how it works, maybe you’re supposed to imagine that the smiley is tilting its head. Can smileys be killed this way? Let’s try. :) :( :) :( :) :( :) :( :) :(. There. I just rocked and rolled it to death.

You’ve heard about this, or will: James Gunn was dismissed from the production of Guardians of the Galaxy 3.

First, condolences. I don’t often talk about this, but I was fired from a multi-million dollar movie production too. To get technical, I was “fired” in the sense of never being hired for one, but still, the wound is fresh.

What led to his firing? Some tweets, years old. Some are innocent, their context snipped away by sélecteur Mike Cernovich (a far right figure who apparently wanted Gunn fired). A couple were clearly jokes.

This scandal has provoked opinions, most of them bad. So far, nearly everything I’ve read about the firing of James Gunn is united in missing the mark.

“Why joke about that sort of stuff?” Why not joke about it? People joke about all manner of things. “It’s offensive!” Thank you, @JudenGrinderPepe1488, for being the voice of moral guidance we sorely need. “It trivializes pedophilia!” No, it doesn’t, dumbshit. It’s transgressive humor, which means it relies on shock and outrage. If pedophilia is trivial, the joke does not work.

I realise that many people don’t find Gunn’s humor funny, and don’t comprehend how anyone could. Let me attempt an explanation: when you joke about pedophilia, the goal is not to get a laugh but to provoke a shocked “ew!” response in your audience, which is isomorphic to humor in the minds of some people. In the same way, people eat chili peppers, not because capsaicinoids taste great, but because the burning sensation on your tongue is pleasurable. Maybe you don’t find it funny. This is because you’re trying to read a language without the necessary vocabulary. I think jazz is unlistenable, but this isn’t jazz’s fault: I’ve been trained to process music in certain ways that, unfortunately, have welded my brain shut to Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk. Your sense of humor was shaped by things, too, and when you judge something as unfunny, it judges you back.

You should still understand that firing people for jokes is wrong. After all, someday a person with power won’t understand one of your jokes.

But there’s an even more annoying sentiment being expressed, mostly from the political left. They are attempting to finesse some sort of culture war story where where unprincipled right wing conservatives are getting leftists fired in bad faith, something that would never happen in reverese because only the left has standards and decency and honor and (heavy breathing commences).

This narrative collapses under five minutes of investigation, but that isn’t the point. Cernovich did not fire Gunn. He does not own Disney, is not on their board of directors, and has no power over them whatsoever.

Disney fired Gunn.

Twitter’s remedy is “don’t pay attention to trolls like Cernovich”, which isn’t a solution at all. Bad faith actors are everywhere, and someone else will pull the same stunt tomorrow. Playing whack a mole with individuals is a waste of time in an ecosystem this vast: and Gunn-esque firings will continue to happen until we think systemically.

This requires a sidetrack into another topic: computer viruses.

In my lifetime, I have seen an interesting shift in who we blame for viruses on the internet.

In the 90s, we blamed the creator of the virus. When your computer got infected, you felt personally slighted, as if hax0rkid69 did the equivalent of leaving a bag of flaming shit on your front porch.

In the 00s, a shift happened, and we blamed the user. It was grandma’s fault for not recognizing that the .jpg had a hidden .exe at the end of it. Partly it was the fact that the era of personal “you got pwned by hax0rkid69!” attacks were over. Viruses relatively bland and anonymous, as if they’d achieved sentience and were programming themselves, and most had goals of marketing or theft rather than blind destruction. Mostly, it was learned helplessness. There were so many that trying to drop the hammer on individual virus creators was futile. The only way to stop them was for grandma to learn how to use her damned computer.

But in the 2010s, another shift happened. Nobody blames virus creators, or grandma. Just as we accept that viruses exist and will never go away, we also accept that incompetent users exist and will never go away. If your defense model relies on everyone exhibiting pluperfect competence, you have failed as a security engineer.

Now, we blame the system.

Scott Alexander recently commented that Apple’s MacOS contains an autocorrect that works on medical terms (such as changing “duloxetine” to “fluoxetine”). Apple fans arrived to point out that this can be very easily switched off…and the backlash was amazing, and inspiring. It’s not the responsibility of several million end users to navigate around Apple’s potentially life-threatening incompetence. The responsibility rests with the creators of the system. What makes more sense, solving a problem in O(n) or O(1) time?

This is an evolution of thought that should be applied to bad-faith actors getting their political opponents fired. Blaming Cernovich is bass-ackwards – the equivalent of getting mad at a script kiddie who infected your computer. Blaming Gunn is equally counterproductive. He would still have his job if he hadn’t sent those tweets, but he couldn’t have known those tweets would cost him his job when he sent them, just as grandma can’t reasonably be expected to check her emails for .exe attachments. Additionally, “those tweets were unacceptable but James Gunn deserves a second chance!” is a subcategory of “blaming Gunn”.

The only people handling this correctly are the ones blaming the big mouse.

Gunn had the misfortune to work in a system that is both increasingly risk averse and sensitive to PR scandals. This isn’t unreasonable: PR scandals are one of the few things a big corporation cannot control. Fortunately, there’s a ready solution: make it so that firing people for Twitter jokes leads to an even bigger PR scandal. That’s a risk companies need to be even more averse to.

Bitcoin (as conceived by the vaguely Galt-like figure of Satoshi Nakimoto) was supposed to be the next evolution of money. What were the earlier evolutions?

Once, money didn’t exist, and nobody needed to it exist. Early man was apparently a fission-fusion society, with all of its members able to provide the means of their own survival.

Then our brains grew bigger, our toolmaking more sophisticated, and a problem emerged: some new skills took a long time to learn. It was no longer possible for one person to be good at everything. We began to specialise – some dug storage pits, some wove nets, some fashioned spears. Humanity went from being freestanding pylons to a truss-frame bridge, each member relying on the other members to not fall down.

We began to trade our skills, establishing the first economy. Contrary to common belief, there isn’t much reason to think early man made use of a “barter” economy, with goods traded directly for other goods. The more common scenario was likely a economies based on gift-giving (as is seen in hunter gatherers today). Either way, with lots of gifts, and lots of giving, everyone received what they need.

But barter and gift based economies have a weakness: some things can’t be easily swapped or traded. If I make hats and you make houses, how are we supposed to transact? Do I get a house and you get a hundred hats? Do you get a hat and I get a half a retaining wall? Suppose you can’t begin building my house for six weeks, when the weather improves, but you want your hat right now? Is there any way we can conduct business?

Yes, but first we need a way of storing value. Suppose we take all the pebbles from a beach, and distribute them evenly among the tribe. If I make you a hat, you give me a pebble. If you build me a house, I give you a hundred pebbles. If you can’t build my house for six weeks, then I have assumed risk (you might not build the house), so maybe you’ll agree to only take eighty pebbles as payment for your work. Skilled and valuable people will be rewarded with lots of pebbles (proxies for hats, and houses, and fish). If your supply runs low, then perhaps it’s a sign that you’re taking more from the tribe than you are giving.

The system works so long as there are a fixed number of pebbles in circulation. It breaks down instantly if I walk further down the coast, discover a new beach nobody knows about, and put hundreds of pebbles in a wheelbarrow. Now my store of pebbles no longer matches my input of labor to the tribe. The market is distorted, people will lose faith in it, and the stability goes away. Maybe a fish is worth one pebble, maybe a thousand.

The requirements of money are manifest: it must be rare, hard to fake, and testable. In other words, you have to be able to trust it.

Money in the United States is issued by the Federal Treasury, and has sophisticated anti-counterfeiting measures, including a 3D security ribbon, a pair of matching serial numbers, and a watermark visible under UV light. It is hard to copy. I’m reminded of how Egyptian pharoahs would engrave their accomplishments on limestone, and sometimes they’d chisel out the names of the old pharoahs and replace them with their own. The Ramisside Dynasty ensured against this by carving their achievements in five inches deep into the stone. Trust is the heart of everything.

For centuries, most of the world used precious metals and stones. In other parts of the world, work-based currency was used: Oliva carneola snail shells painstakingly ground down to size, and threaded through with beads. They were labour intensive to make that nobody could crash the market with sudden injections of volume.

But using physical items as money has its own problem, and it’s a sneaky one that doesn’t seem obvious at first: deflation.

Economies usually grow. This is a very predictable fact about them. Populations increase (adding extra labour input), technology improves (adding a labour multiplier) and infrastructure improves (facilitating trade). And if there’s a fixed number of snail shells in circulation, each of them becomes capable of buying more and more product.

The result? People start hoarding snail shells, because if they spend them, they’ve traded an increasingly valuable item for a flat line. The economy slows down, because not enough people are actually using the currency.

In recent centuries, most countries have passed from a metallist system (where money is backed by precious metals) to a fiat system, where pieces of paper are valuable essentially because the government has decided that they are. This allows fine-tuning, and intricate control. If the economy is deflating, the government can introduce more money.

The only issue, again, is trust. How much do you trust your government? Do you think they’ll look out for your best interests? And even if they do, how much longer do you think your government will continue to exist for?

The fiat system seems to work. The grass grows and the trains arrive on time. But it’s hard not to feel like Wile E Coyote running off a cliff into empty air.

Bitcoin was supposed to be the next evolution of money. Unfortunately, at some point this new transitional form ended up at the bottom of a tar pit. More later.