manish vij

Dawn of the Goobertruck

Cybertruck’s not just ugly, its name is unbelievably poseur. Guy pretending to be an engineer named it “cyber,” which is nails on a blackboard to techies :D

That prefix is used by DOD, old guys in suits, and ’80s fakey hacker flicks. It’s not just Elmo being déclassé, it’s a public confession he doesn’t know tech. It’s like if the mayor of SF called it “Frisco.” He might as well have named it Backtracing the VB-Truck.

Goobertruck’s as crude as Elmo Twitter, and for the same reason: his robotaxi fraud. It made Tesla execs so much money, they stopped pushing back on his terrible ideas; it made him enough to catch and kill Twitter. Got enough rope to go full petard.

Social sites are aggressively mid

Reddit’s aggressively mid. Social filtering means you can distribute the work of clipping trolls, but you also clip anyone a minute ahead of conventional wisdom.

Post that ICE automakers will get ruined by EVs, you get a hail of downvotes. When Wired posts the same a week later, it becomes the new CW :D

This depends on the sub, but—post any title with flavor, all the comments are about the title alone. No one clicks through, so the comment quality isn’t worth the time to post.

Then there are the random Hacker News mod bonks for calling Zuck amoral or Elmo a scammer, Reddit and Twitter spam filter fails, mods randomly not approving innocuous posts.

T•••• / Elmo get one thing right: own your own site, make your own rules. Don’t sharecrop on someone else’s, especially not Zuck’s :D Just use them for distro.

Why comedy is liberal

Horror is conservative because its essence is fear, comedy’s liberal because its essence is play.

Comedy’s puckish, punctures the pompous. Authoritarians love rank, comedy only uses it to punch up. Otherwise it’s flat, you’re as good as your set / script / essay / bit.

A liberal horror flick would invert the reactionary horror formula where only being chaste, sober and cautious makes you the final girl. Stray moments of joy would be power-ups, not creature beacons.

Horror’s fun, but you wouldn’t want to live that way. A sunset? Chomped. Cuddling a baby? Chomped. Defensive bunker. Partition babies.

A rational calendar

Daylight Savings

Daylight Savings Time is so artificial, it’s never even lined up with the fall equinox around Sep. 21. You used to set the clock back in Oct, now Nov 🤦🏽‍♂️

Also shifts solar peak and peak heat an hour off noon and 2 pm (thermal lag). Weird distortions.

Oddly, start of DST (second Sunday in March) is roughly aligned with spring equinox 🤔

Pope Greg’s Drunk Astronomy

Just scrap it, time and clocks should align with our local star. The year should end on winter solstice, none of this drunk-pope crap :D

Using an errant Catholic calendar is especially hilarious because they threw an inquisition against Galileo. Point at random on a map, you’d land on a civ a thousand years before Jesus that knew the shortest day of the year :D

India, Babylon, Greece, Egypt, Persia, hell, maybe even the Mayans could supply a better calendar.

Why February has 28 days

A Roman king…

decided to give February the short stick… when the Romans honored the dead… stuck with an unlucky [even] number of days…

The earliest Roman calendar had only 10 months… agricultural society… wasn’t much need to keep up with… months during the winter… [Discover]

Jan-Feb were timeless.

Designing a rational solar calendar

~365 days only divides evenly by 5 months × 73 days, or vice versa. Lunar ~30-day month is more convenient.

12 × 30 = 360, leaving 5 days. We assign these to alternate months, since the actual lunar cycle is 29.5 days.

So months 2, 4, 6, 8, 10 are 31 days. Others are 30 days. Feb isn’t weirdly short.

Solar year is actually 365.25 days. So we still have leap years. Month 12 has 31 days every 4 years.

Year starts at winter solstice, mid-year is summer solstice. Equinoxes are ends of months 3 and 9. Now it all lines up (25 / 50 / 75%).

Repeat this exercise for moon and Mars :)

Naming it

Using my rational solar calendar, but giving its parts goofy names: “Now in the year of our Lord 7E7, on the eleventy-first of Kevin…”

‘It Lives Inside’

I generally enjoyed the well-made It Lives Inside, but: You’re a teen out to see a movie during Halloween season. Do you want to see a rote horror flick with a slight cultural twist, or do you want a fresh auteur to really go ham on a novel premise?

It Lives Inside is Puritan in the American horror fashion (kid with doobie is a goner), but falls prey to the same thing it accuses its heroine of: pointlessly wanting to whitewash itself and fit into a samey genre.

To be clear, I’m not saying it should be more Indian—it’s already culturally reactionary, following that American horror trope. I’m saying importing more of the original folklore is one way the movie could be more novel in the US.

(Horror is Puritan because fear is conservative. If there’s a moment of joy at a party, all those kids are getting chomped. The lizard hind-brain speaks and it wants to be under a nice, safe rock.)

The pishach monster from Indian folklore manifests as a very American horror template, from the art style in a previous victim’s notebook to the creature design.

Of course, these monsters never make evolutionary sense as actual predators. Why is this invisible, over-powered flesh render quietly fasting for Karwa Chauth in some girl’s closet? They only make sense as anxieties monetized by jump scares.

The most universal monster anxieties are echoes of our prehistory past, when lions, bears and sabertooths actually did prey on humans. Before our Chinese cousins invented gunpowder, before we wiped out the California state beast.

To maximize ticket sales, it might make sense to reflect the anxieties of the American target audience. But why not ride on xenophobia in addition to fear of predation? Why not a wicked-looking golem from Indian folklore?

This flick’s concept of soul-eating and possession are Christian, not Hindu; the monster design is from the Spirit Halloween remainder bin, and it laughs like the Predator. The title track, “Teeth” by Mallrat, is sleek and Western. Only the faint outline of the folklore remains, nearly invisible like the monster itself.

It’s shabby treatment for a monster that’s a metaphor for Indianness. Samidha, facing a demon from the old country that can live inside its victims: “Everything I wanted outside of me is inside”

The movie should’ve gone harder on “the monster feasts on immigrant angst” since its PG-13 horror stuff is rote. So much stuff to unpack there.

Count Abdulla explored its brown × genre (horror-comedy) premise better. What Lives Inside is apparently artistic self-doubt.

In more detail

Conceptual problems aside, the movie was fun and slick, keeping in mind that I watch everything at 1.7× speed.

The monster discriminates, savaging others but only eating desis made tasty by our incredible food. Transmits itself between desi kids like a brown The Ring.

The real monster is Samidha after her high-school whitewashing, her words cut deeper than fangs.

Brown and black characters don’t die first 👍🏽

All the non-desi characters call the monster a “pishaash.” French-inflected mispronunciation undefeated.

Bengali director, Punjabi and Tamil leads: all flattened to generic N. Indian Hindu, mirroring the flattening of the monster lore to generic Christian American. But the deity is Durga, who’s more Bengali than U.P.—?

These horror-movie tropes depend on parents and kids not talking. Indian-Ams talk about the major stuff, big crises, and a desi kid wouldn’t run off after a demon alone.

Dad Vik Sahay’s Hindi is atrocious, not realistic.

De-yetifying herself :)
The most desi thing Samidha does
Who sends their kid to school in America with tiffins?
Checking for curry smell, the whitewash is strong in this one
Subtitler thinks prayer day is a named holiday :)
ABCD religion
Calc is genetic?
Olive branch to the white market
“Say something in Hindu”
The worst Hindi you’ve ever heard :)
🏳️🏳️🏳️
🏳️🏳️🏳️
The real monster
If only she had a FineWoven case or a thermos
Why is Samidha leaving the demon-slayer goddess puja?
Things no immigrant parent would say
Western bhoot
Kachcha maans, raw meat

Wiki clone needs proofers
Camaro, pickup 🏳️🏳️🏳️
A pivotal iPhone flashlight
Monster (2023)
Oh yeah, this kid’s a goner
Dancing the invisible bhangra with the pishach
Mom is literally the exposition for the monster
Indianness is the real demon
Black teacher explains Indian culture to Indian kid: white liberal achievement unlocked ✓ :)
Western art style
Yeah, I’m mapping flashlight to the Action button
Kid explaining Indian culture to her mom: brown liberal achievement unlocked ✓
Christian voodoo
Christian blerg
The defense mantra is too basic, should’ve gone tantric
Layers and layers of guilt, delve into this
Pishach wastes veg feast. That’s it, kill that f—r
Subtitler thinks routine prayer before meal is chanting
Veg forced to eat raw meat is the real violation