jwz

A friend told me they were planning an October rewatch of classic horror movies. I said, "So just Hammer, huh?" They said, "...what?"

Ok, so, some of you never studied, and don't know about Hammer Horror. I have made you an introductory playlist.

These are some of the greatest, campiest horror movies of the Twentieth Century. This is the classic Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing era of Dracula movies. You've seen the t-shirts even if you haven't seen the movies. At the time these were considered low budget trash, just a hair shy of pornography, BUT / AND they are fantastic! They have a look that is so consistent and when someone in this modern world references it, you are immediately "guy pointing at TV meme", it's such a thing. There's something so distinctive about their lighting and color. When you see that particular too-bright red blood on the lips of a bouffonted showgirl in a negligee, you know what you're in for. The costumes, the hair, 1830 by way of 1962. It's a whole thing.

Anyway, here is where I suggest you begin. They made like a hundred movies over a couple of decades and they are not all winners, but these are some absolute winners that are worth your time:

Christopher Lee:

• Horror of Dracula (1958)
• The Brides of Dracula (1960)
• Dracula Prince of Darkness (1966)
• Taste the Blood of Dracula (1970)
• Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires (1974) -- also a Shaw Bros. kung fu movie!

The "Carmilla" movies, lezzzzzzbians:

• The Vampire Lovers (1970)
• Lust for a Vampire (1971)
• Twins of Evil (1971)

Other vampires and/or witches:

• Vampire Circus (1972)
• Captain Kronos Vampire Hunter (1974)
• The Devil Rides Out (1968)
• The Love Witch (2016) -- not Hammer, but a remarkable tribute to.

There's so much more, but I feel this is a solid intro. (If you are about to say, "How could you have left out this essential Hammer film?", I am listening.)

I overheard some kids at the club the other day talking about their favorite vampire movies. One of them said: "Underworld... and last year's Nosferatu I guess?"

Never studied. Never. Studied.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

All Hallow's Eve, Sat Oct 31 The Crow, Thu Oct 29 Why 2K, Fri Oct 30 Rocky Horror, Thu Oct 15 Project X, Sat Oct 17 Ravefurrest, Sat Oct 10 Gotham City Follies, Mon Oct 12 From Dusk `Til Dawn, Sun Oct 18 Hazbin Hell-Tel, Sat Oct 24 Lots of stupid shit going on lately, but let me try to talk about some good stuff for a change... It's October, and that means that Ribley the Skeleton is back up, and we have a full month of Halloween goodies for you. Let's do this kind-of out of order to hit the big ones first:

Halloween Week:

• Thursday October 29, Devil's Night Eve: an encore screening of the 1994 Brandon Lee classic, The Crow, followed by a costume contest and a dance party featuring and inspired by the movie's epic soundtrack.

• Friday October 30: Why 2K, our 90s/2000s throwback night, also featuring a costume contest with Dr. Kingfish.

• Saturday October 31st is the big event, our 25th annual All Hallow's Eve, four rooms of music, and consistently the best costume contest you're gonna see in San Francisco!

October Pre-gaming:

• Next Thursday, October 15: The Rocky Horror Picture Show -- a live screening featuring a live performance by The Bawdy Caste. This is the full audience participation experience! (If you don't know what that means, ask your grandparents.)

• Next Friday, October 17: Project X: Haunted House Party with 2010s hiphop.

• And I guess a furry hyperpop dance party is Halloween-adjacent? That's this Saturday, October 10: Ravefurrest.

We also have burlesque, of course:

• Monday October 12: Hubba Hubba Revue's Gotham City Follies;
• Sunday October 18: Hubba Hubba Revue's From Dusk 'til Dawn;
• Saturday October 24: Hazbin Hell-Tel, a Hazbin Hotel-themed burlesque / drag show.

"...and, Frog."

Normally I reserve my vitriol for the slopbros for my personal blog, but this has become extremely DNA Lounge-related of late, as I shall explain. (This counts as plumbing-related, the internet being a series of tubes, full of toxic slop.)

As you may be aware, our web site is being constantly, relentlessly hammered by AI scrapers. I am spending an absurd number of hours just trying to keep things barely functional under this brutal onslaught. It's not only us, obviously; this toxic blight covers the entirety of the Internet. These companies are the absolute worst fucking parasites our society has yet created, and if you work for one, I am begging you, in my best Bill Hicks voice: kill yourself. "Just a thought, just trying to plant seeds."

But why do I bring this up now? Because our web-hosting bill is normally between $600 and $800 per month. Except suddenly it's now $3,500 per month, entirely because of all of these piece-of-shit AI model-training robots incompetently scraping all of our text and images, repeatedly, as fast as they possibly can; ignoring our requests to stop; and lying about who they are. And I have no solution, other than "don't have a web site any more".

(Now at least one of you is teeing up a "Well why don't you just" comment right about now. Oh you sweet summer child. I've been doing this longer than you've been alive. Hush. Just hush, you.)

Fundamentally these AI companies are now charging me to train their models for them. I am now being billed $2,700 per month, $32,000 per year, so that their spicy-autocomplete plagiarism-machines can suck the blood out of everything I've ever created and shit it back out. And no matter how many ways I try to say "I would prefer not to," they just. Will. Not. Fucking. Stop.

This cost-shifting is what these methane-breathing, hollow-eyed money-ghouls gleefully refer to as an "externality".

So, seriously, if you work for an AI company, "You are the ruiner of all things good. You are Satan's spawn, filling the world with bile and garbage, you are fucked and you are fucking us; kill yourself, it's the only way to save your soul."

And also!

If you are using this AI bullshit -- in any way -- this is what you are supporting. Every time you "just" plagiarize something "a little bit" because of some halfassed excuse you tell yourself like "but I can't do it myself, uwu smiley emoji" instead of, you know, paying an actual human artist, you are part of why DNA Lounge is being hit with this $32,000 bill. That's you. You voted for that. That's bad and you should feel bad. And more than that, you should STOP.

For example!

Not too long ago, we had this one particular event, that was very successful. It was a rental, and the promoters took in over $40,000 of ticket sales at the door, and yet they still chose to use "AI" for their flyer, and for the printed banners they hung around the venue. For them it was apparently a bridge too far to toss $200 to a local artist. Too expensive. Can't possibly afford it. Let's use the plagiarism machine instead, extruded artwork-adjacent pink slime is good enough. No one will know, nobody cares, fuck it.

I am begging you: don't be that guy.

We had a leak in the main men's room by the urinals. It turns out that one of the urinals has some kind of internal leak, and it's a spot-welded mess, so we weren't able to get in there with any kind of sealant. It probably has to be replaced. And, in the intervening two decades, it turns out that these urinals have become unobtainium. While the model shows up in some catalogs, you can't actually get them. Someone theorized that it may be because of newer water-conservation requirements; who knows.

This makes me sad primarily because these urinals look exactly like Cybertrucks (vice versa, actually) and pissing on a stand-in for an Incel Camino brough me some amount of joy.

There don't seem to be any stainless steel urinals out in the world that aren't cheap junk, so I guess we'll have to go with porcelain this time, against my better judgment. TBD.

Anyway, having pulled that urinal, we were still getting a leak from somewhere. Oh. Well there's your problem:

See that growth in the pipe? It looks slimy but it's as hard as concrete. It is crystalized urine. It is rock candy made of piss!

The first plumber we called in told us that the pipe was done for and he wanted to tear up the entire floor to replace it out to who-knows-where. That would have been an $11,000 job even before repairing the floor. "Oh, you got your pipes wet, you see, you can't get them wet, now we'll have to amputate."

Second plumber said, "Nah, I'm gonna go at it with a hydrojet and an auger, I can probably break that up." And he did! So getting rid of our piss crystals was "only" a $1,200 job.

Back in the 90s there was this disgusting cinnamon liqueur called Aftershock: it was kind of like Fireball, but the gimick was that it had rock candy in the bottom of the bottle. Anyway, someone left a bottle of this crap at my house once, and it sat in my cabinet for like a year at which point I realized that the entire bottle had turned to rock candy: there was no liquid left, just gross cinnamon sugar crystals.

Thinking of this for no reason in particular.

Please enjoy jwz mixtape 260.

Lyft has to pay out $272 million for the fraud they perpetrated on their employees from 2016 through 2020!

But then in 2020, they spent $200 million to make that fraud legal, so now they won't have to pay that again in the future!

According to methane-breathing money-ghouls who run our world, this was a great investment: they could have just spent an additional $50M/year on salaries, but now they legalized an across-the-board salary reduction that pays itself back in only 4 years. Half that, actually, because they went halfsies on it with Uber! Someone's getting a raise.

This goes way beyond "a fine is a price".

Lyft is set to pay a historic $272.5 million settlement to resolve allegations around misclassifying its drivers as independent contractors instead of employees:

("allegations")

San Francisco City Attorney David Chiu said it was "the largest wage-and-hour settlement in California history." [...]

That's a time before voters approved Proposition 22, an Uber- and Lyft-funded ballot measure that classified ride-hail drivers as independent contractors, meaning they would not receive the benefits and wage protections afforded to other workers. The gig companies spent more than $200 million on the measure.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

Krysten Ritter on the hellsite:

Previously, previously, previously, previously.

Let me just take a nice long sip of this beverage and then open up my web-hosting bill for last month...

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

Dear Lazyweb, any idea why XScreenSaver thumbnail images are no longer showing up in System Settings on macOS 27? Works fine on macOS 14.7. The .saver bundles have "Resources/thumbnail.png" or @2x files. I've even tried using the exact file from "/System/Library/Screen Savers/Random.saver/Contents/Resources/[email protected]", no luck. But here's a mystery: that file looks like this:

but what actually shows up is this:

So where's that second image coming from?

Previously.

Jason Koebler:

One of the most heated discussions occurring on X at the moment is about the ethics of a GitHub project in which a person is running Saw-like "torture" and "pain" experiments on a series of locally hosted large language models, causing a series of effective altruists and people who believe LLMs are sentient to beg GitHub to delete the project on the grounds that the AI is suffering and that this glorified text adventure game is somehow cruel. [...]

In the wake of all this, several meme coin cryptocurrencies about the torture chamber have launched. Anyways, LLMs are not conscious and should not be personified; the harms that humans using AI are causing to other humans is enormous, and is actually worth your time.

This was funnier when it was a science fiction story -- fiction -- about the "first human upload", written in the style of a Wikipedia article: Lena by qntm.

AI God knows what you did to The Sims, and you're gonna be in trouble. All these Pac-Man ghosts lost... like... tears... in the rain...

Anyway, which kind of AI booster are you: the kind who's a fraud, or the kind who thinks they own millions of slaves?

Also, this is fine: "You're Not Crazy": A Case of New-onset AI-associated Psychosis.

Previously, previously, previously, previously.