Intro

  I felt compelled to write this post because I see this phenomenon grow and take over most of the things I watch and read. In simple terms, the author tyrannically decides what will happen in their world because they start from an idea and a stand-in for themselves. Many types of pressure are contributing to them not spending time with the world they build or the characters they write.

  I start watching a series or a movie or read a book and I absolutely love it. There is a fresh idea, an interesting protagonist and things are getting intriguing. And then... either it just goes on like it started without adding anything else or the idea is shared and the story ends, only to be continued in new seasons or installments that don't seem to go anywhere at all. What is going on?

  That is not to say that creatives cannot create great work by themselves, yet that requires a level of intensity and personal maturity that is exceptional. Instead, I present a possible solution that can be applied by many, despite outside pressure.

  In the post I will use the term "game playing" to mean any form of interactive exploration of the opportunities made available by a work of fiction, be it table top Dungeons & Dragons style stuff or any other method.

Commercial pressure

  First of all, let's get the elephant in the room done and over with. Most writing involves finding an idea that can be sold. There is no benefit in creating a 5 volume outline if you don't know if anyone is even going to buy the first one. There is no benefit in trying to determine what works and doesn't work with the idea if someone already agreed to buy it. Also, if from the beginning someone - be they a publishing house or a film studio - interfere with what you are trying to create, why even bother to make it good? And maybe you wanted to tell a good story, and you did, but the only way someone accepts a commercial deal is if you sign a contract for a continuation that you never intended to write.

  These are valid concerns which I am not going to cover in this post. Each writer finds their own motivations and resources and I am not here to judge, although it comes naturally to me :)

The ones that got away

  There are some notable examples of creations that managed to avoid the issue. The Expanse is one. The Legend of Vox Machina and The Mighty Nein are some others. The Malazan Book of the Fallen also falls into this category. Many others, I am sure. And they have something in common:

• they are collaborative
• they are game played

  All of the stuff above has been played, D&D style, between the world builders of those stories before it even came to publishing or adapting anything. That solved some issues that plague so many otherwise good stories:

The blind spot

  The writer sometimes focuses on an idea or desired outcome or they simply fall in love with their character to such an extent that they can't see plot holes that would be obvious for others. Collaboration fixes this with other pairs of eyes, let's call it a peer review process. Game playing it, though, elevates much higher because it expands the world in directions that the story did not cover. It helps find the questions unasked rather than just review the answers to the ones that are asked. The most important "what if?" that sparks creation is now enhanced with the "why then?" that anyone experienced when trying to explain something to a young child.

  History shows that audiences are starving for consistent worlds, for "canon", and are willing to make great leaps of faith to find one. A single logical flaw in the structure of a story may break its appeal to consumers and retconning is just a cop out, not a real solution. Meanwhile, a well thought out internally consistent narrative is loved by all.

The favorite child

  A protagonist is used to bring the audience into the story with a character that can proxy their point of view, feelings and actions inside the world that is being created. However, since this is also a stand in for the author, they gain the extraordinary powers of unbelievable luck, always walking on the right path to further the plot and possessing amazing physical and mental prowess just when required. How many times did we not watch a hero run across an open field while bullets missing them, only for then to turn around and shoot their enemies from the first shot? How many times did we see the evil faceless minions stumble, being dumb, obvious and cardboard while the hero dances around them, nimble and throwing funny quips while defeating them effortlessly? How many times did the character have to eliminate scores of evil goons before they get to the boss fight which suddenly has completely different rules?

  This is the Mary/Martin Sue character that no one can empathize with for long, yet the problem is not this character, it's all of the others. If the author is busy playing with the Rambo toy, they might not feel as invested playing with the Russian commander, consider their point of view or value system. Certainly the minions are not even worth considering, all masked, dressed alike and not even recognizing each other as individuals.

  Game playing destroys this issue before it even comes up. If you are suddenly playing the Russian commander, you will do what makes sense for you not the hero. If you have players assigned to the minions, they will gain instantaneous depth. And then the protagonist gains depth as well, as they have to battle fanatic idealists that not only fight for their leader, but have personal beliefs and want to live and have friends and family and feelings and back stories. Defeating any of them now carries meaning and moral implications. Mercy becomes an alternative, maybe even argumentative debate. Thus the story gets deeper with almost no effort.

The small world

  A galaxy far far away has a story to tell and everybody loves it. True heroes are born and fall, yet somehow they are always running into each other or are even related to each other. They fight on the same planets, say the same things and when they switch sides, the choice of sides is always the same. Within these setups, the hybrid trope feels new and creative. Wait what? A big Xenomorph with green phosphorescent blood because it came from a Yautia? How intriguing! A half-human vampire that can walk in the day? Amazing!

  This is a problem that is very much related (pardon the pun) to The Favorite Child. It's a Favorite World, the playground that the author doesn't want or know how to get out of. It's also cheaper with move sets or setup writing. Why imagine new worlds when you have spent so much time to build one already?

  Another problem can be bundled here: you see "the team" is made out of apparently very different people and you revel in their different viewpoints of the same situation. But are they really different? Once you realize that the members of the party are never in any kind of real conflict, you realize that they are all part of the same culture. There is no shock, just slight variations on a theme. It doesn't matter if they have individual value systems if those systems are only applied within the same cultural context. Then you realize that the villain doesn't have a true divergent vision either, just a different value on the same axis. Like watching a political debate between people from a country that you don't really care about. Their arguments seem pointless and the debaters more alike than different.

  Collaboration between different people fixes that from the get go. Game playing it expands the world, sometimes in unexpected places. Instead of one "What if?" you are asking many more in smaller and smaller places, which actually makes your world bigger and well defined. Instead of a few planets, a whole galaxy of worlds.

The ego

  There is something called "rubberducking", it's when you have a problem that you just can't seem to fix, no matter how much effort you spend trying to find a solution. And then you go to a friend and colleague and you start telling them about your problem. The process of translating your situation into words clarifies it and reveals the solution. Before your friend can utter a word, you have found a way out. That's why they are calling it rubberducking, because in theory you can just talk to one of those floating rubber ducks that you put in your bath tub and get the same result.

  But in practice, it's never a rubber duck, it's always another person. You talk to them after you internally admit defeat. The first step is not articulating the problem, but admitting you can't hack it and then talk to someone about it. And that's a very difficult first step, especially for creative people. In theory, game playing a world is easy, but in practice, sharing your creation with someone else is hard, accepting other viewpoints is hard, adapting to those viewpoints is hard and especially asking for help and admitting you can't fix your own thing is really difficult.

  That is why creative collaborations often fail miserably. There has to be a middle ground, a safe place of ideas, a mechanism to move things forward in the absence of consensus. Just "yes and" doesn't work. "no fucking way" is extremely important, too.

  However, while this is usually hard to arrange, setting it up as a game is less so. You can always abandon a game, no biggie. The ego takes less of a hit if are just playing around.

  How many times did you see a movie that was written, directed and maybe even played by the same person, which resulted in a self indulgent output that no one resonated with? Unfortunately, if someone is not ready for criticism they will always become a tyrant for their worlds and characters, never letting them truly shine.

Chekhov's gun

  The metaphor of Chekhov's gun has been used so much to justify trimming unnecessary parts of a story you are writing. If you write about a gun over the mantle, somebody better get shot with it by the end of the story. Otherwise, why write about it?

  But even Chekhov himself wrote about two unfired guns in The Cherry Orchard! This is not a rule, but something to keep in mind whenever you decide what you are going to write. It's not a limiting factor, only another metric to take into consideration. And then free to be dismissed. If every element of a story has a use by its end, then there is no color, no variation, no surprize.

  Instead of expanding creativity, this principle has been used to justify butchering stories in the editing room, settling for flat storylines that start and end predictably, movie and book covers that look the same and reveal the genre and often the entire plot with a single image and so on.

  The good stories are the one that someone can summarize for you and still be incredibly fun to read or watch after. Collaboration helps with this a little. Unless previously agreed, it's unlikely that multiple people will be seeing the same ending to a story, the same actions for a character and the same consequences to those actions. But game playing gets it to another level as it's generating different endings, maybe even different starting points, other characters, other locations, other problems that require solutions, maybe unrelated to the main one.

  When writing a book or making a movie, people generate a lot of extra content that is then rearranged, edited, improved, cut to tell the story in the most efficient way possible. However, the existence and breadth of that content is what ultimately determines the resulting story. With game play, you get a lot more material, much of it fun to produce and that may not induce terminal sadness when discarded. There have been cases when major roles from already filmed movies were cut completely because it was improving the story (well, sometimes that's the reason, but again, let's not talk about butchering artistic value for economic or social motives). It just stands to reason that with more material, you have more options for the better story. That is what game playing does.

  Even if you apply Chekhov's gun in the end, you pick a gun from many possible options. And this has been proven with computer games. Normally, you get a main story and then some sidelines. You have to get from point A to Z, but the game lets you explore a little some side quests that improve the experience and give you the illusion of choice. But then you get some games with very large worlds, multiplayer interaction and a minimal mythology, like online multiplayer shooters, for example. And, if successful, something wonderful happens. Bits of that experience is then translated into extra mythology! Books are written, spin-off games and stories pop up. Fans create and expand their own content. Story follows game play instead of the other way around!

Conclusion

I could have talked about this a lot more, but I decided to end it here. I think I've made my point. Characters and stories must overthrow the author's tyranny and live. I am not advocating for committees deciding the outcome of creative process - this has been tried to disastrous results, but to collaborative creative effort, supported by a framework that allows for risk and exploring of multiple avenues, even (maybe especially!) if they don't go anywhere.

Personally, I will always appreciate a playful creative failure over a serious failure to create.

Playing and creativity go hand in hand. I will go as far as to say that they can't exist without each other. Play with your worlds, play with others, let your creation breathe. Only then sell it.

  The way Hollywood works today, and by infection all other movie productions, is to measure "box office success" and usually doing it only for the first or several weeks after release in cinemas. Even ignoring that cinema is slowly being replaced with streaming, this metric is fundamentally defective. People don't go to see the movie because the movie is good, since they haven't seen it yet, but because the movie has been marketed successfully or its brand holds some power. Therefore, by using this metric, we optimize for marketing, not profit, entertainment or art. This hurts everybody.

  Some may argue that box-office also captures audience satisfaction via repeat viewings and word-of-mouth, even in early weeks, but that's almost an afterthought. To make that signal relevant, you should ignore the first week of returns, not elevate it as the most important aspect of it. Because, while it is decisive to how much money the movie is likely to make, it does not measure the erosion of overall value that it will cause to your remaining intellectual property, through reduced trust, lower future conversion, brand fatigue and so on. 

   Let's take the example of The Force Awakens. According to reviews, it was an average movie, not truly bad, but not something that the fan base were enthusiastic about, yet it was a huge box office success. The reason, though, was the good will of the fan base. They expected, mostly because that is what had been promised, the quality of the original Star Wars storytelling with the production quality of the Prequel Trilogy. And they got none of it. Because of that, the latter movies got less and less as they went along.

   Yes, there is a correlation of box-office and quality, but that's purely incidental. Let's take the same example. You spend $0.5B on The Force Awakens (plus unknown marketing costs) and you get $2B in return. You then spend $0.3B on The Last Jedi you get $1.3B in return. You say, hey, this movie earned less because it was not that good. No, it earned less because people were already disillusioned with The Force Awakens, but some still kept up hope and tried it anyway. Meanwhile, the studios saw The Force Awakens as a great success and let the same people who made it also make the second movie. Correlation, not causation!

   Movie studios, just abolish the usage of the box-office success metric! It measures nothing but how successful marketing has been and it has been pushed on you by - who would have guessed it? - your marketing departments. Moreover, the fact that marketing budgets are often obfuscated or hidden from the general public should be a dead giveaway that there is a major issue there.

  Truth is that while successful marketing may lead to bigger profits, it cannot exist in a vacuum. It has to build on something. And I don't mean re-use and abuse of existing brands. In fact, the explosion of this phenomenon just makes my point. You are trying to fix the fundamental problem of vacuous marketing by dredging up the past for anything qualitative, but in the process destroying that value.

   In short, my assertion is that the movie industry has been hijacked by the ad people and it shows:

• the quality of the productions dropped sharply
• costs have skyrocketed while been half-concealed exactly in the marketing area
• sequels and reboots have saturated output because past quality is the only thing that can still be marketed
• the movie industry has been overtaken by the game industry - which uses units sold and actual profit as a metric for success - in both profit and artistic quality
• people are tuning off movies and tuning in YouTube videos about how bad movies are
• streaming has broken the fundamentally ad driven business model that cinema system is

  This is not a post about the fossilized power structures in major corporations or against agenda driven studio interference or any other of the many nebulous issues within the industry. I am simply focusing on the most objectively toxic issue of them all: you are using the wrong metric for success! No matter what you change and what you try, unless you measure your success correctly, you will never be able to optimize for it.

  What is the correct metric, then? I do not know. A good start is to separate viewer satisfaction from immediate returns. Box-office returns muddles the difference between the two to the point it becomes deleterious. One might say that theoretically there should be a direct connection between viewer satisfaction and profits, but that only applies in time. If you build the trust and the quality, even while losing money, the viewer good will could be translated into profit later. Yes, it's a bet, but if you truly believe in the strong correlation between satisfaction and profits, how can you not take it?

  Movie industry, I wish you well!

  I am writing this on my own blog, as most of the websites I am using are crashing and burning. It's the digital equivalent of the guy surviving the nuclear apocalypse because he was living in the woods.

  You see, I previously had my blog on Blogger/Blogspot and because of an automated Japanese copyright bot I just got locked out of it one day, with no possibility of appeal to a human being, because the appeals were also handled by Google bots. 12 years a user of the platform and it was suddenly gone. Now my blog is "self hosted", which is a complete lie because I just handle my own blog code, but I host it with a Romanian hosting company. They could also be gone tomorrow just like that.

  Anyway, let's get back to the crashing and burning and the apocalyptic digital landscape of the moment. Cloudflare... err... flared. Or something. Suddenly it's returning 500 errors left and right instead of serving files. So... why should people care? Well, my chess site goes through Cloudflare. So does the tool site that edits PDFs for free while Adobe still tries to get my money for simple shit like that. The torrent files - in theory illegal - are using Cloudflare. Yes, even Pirate Bay, the site run from a file archive that you can download and host in seconds, goes through Cloudflare. So many small websites that you just think of as small independent things are actually funneled through Cloudflare. Why would anyway spend time and effort to protect their website from powerful DDOS attacks or other hacking or disrupting activities when they can pay Cloudflare to do it?

  The end of the world happened and you just didn't notice. The traditional media landscape is dominated by politically and economically controlled corporations. The Internet is dominated by other corporations, just as corrupt and, at their core, pointless. You can see efforts to control every little tidbit of information that comes to you: the defunding of public stations, the attacks on honest journalism, the laws that "protect children" by imposing rules on everything from what you say to what you see and to what you jerk off to. But there was always that idea that held in your mind: Oh, but anyone can make a website and controlling all of these would be impossible.

  Well, welcome to the future: most every little to medium website out there, small enough to not have their own Internet infrastructure, goes through bottlenecks like Cloudflare. When that goes down, the long tail goes down. And not only in the United States, but globally.

  You live in the same house, but someone has switched your foundation with something they control. Enjoy!

  I am writing this during the second tour of presidential elections, and as the first one has just been annulled. Yes, you read that right, it's a ridiculous situation, but it gets much much worse. After the initial shock of seeing Calin Georgescu clearly winning the first tour of the elections while no one seemed to know who he was, the reaction of people, authorities, media, personalities in culture and science - everyone that supposedly should be steering the country in the right direction - has been a hysterical denial of reality. But in order to understand what the hell is going on, you have to start from the beginning, with the small details that got lost in the media coverage. So bear with me.

  I will be talking about elections, but in the context of this post I focus on presidential elections, not the parliamentary ones, unless specifically mentioned.

  And so it begins

  The first indication that something was amiss was when people started to receive notices and fines from the authorities for posting things on Facebook during the election period, when campaigning is prohibited. This came as a surprise to many people who don't understand how modern social media works, because they had felt their online presence was kind of anonymous, at least protected by that level of unreality that feels natural in the online. How can things happening on the Internet affect your real life? This may seem as a small off topic detail, but it becomes relevant later.

  Then the first tour of the elections came and people were shocked to see that Calin Georgescu, an independent candidate no one seemed to know anything about and who had been predicted to get at most 5% of the votes, got instead close to 25%, giving him a comfortable lead compared to the others. Worse, this guy had clear pro Russian sympathies and maybe even legionary ones (this being a political movement from 70 years ago which was pro Nazi). How can one be for both Russia and Nazism is beyond me, but I digress. And it gets worse, because there were several extremist parties with their own candidates and if you add them all together with Georgescu's votes you get close to 40%. How did this happen?

  The favorite in the presidential race was the current Prime Minister of Romania, leader of the strongest party in the country, Marcel Ciolacu. He got third place, almost tied with the liberal leaning female candidate Elena Lasconi. Another shock, because no one expected one to lose so badly and the other to win so many votes. We are talking about my country, a place that has never had a female president and any woman in power so far has been some guy's puppet. I want to believe Romanians are capable of accepting a female president, but it's unlikely.

   Reaction

  To see the reaction to these events was both entertaining and terrifying. Being politically naive, I was initially happy, because while I hold almost no common views with the extremist discourse of the winner, I wanted to see people shocked out of their complacency, forced to think and consider the implications of their action and inaction. I wanted the arrogant country authorities and people of influence to get jolted into at least pretending to do their job. I wanted the "you have to vote no matter what, even if you're not represented by any candidate" mob to eat their words. Just like the Colectiv situation ten years ago, I was hoping against hope that this will be a drive for positive change. But again, I let hope guide my thoughts, to no positive result. What was awakened was the collective mindless monster of the populace and nothing more.

  In order for a relatively unknown person to win the elections there were several institutions that had to have failed utterly in their work: election officials, security services (which were giving fines for Facebook posts just a few days before), counter candidates (one of which was Prime Minister), their campaign engines and all the government mechanisms they controlled, the media (whether controlled or not), sociologists gauging the people's choices, the statisticians creating the polls and interpreting them (both before elections AND at the exit polls). In other words: politics, authority, media and science failed completely and irrevocably.

  The general reaction to this was panic. Not "well, I messed up, let's fix this", which I had hoped, but "I couldn't have messed up this much, something else is to blame". In a matter of days everyone rallied to... save their asses. Election authorities approved recounting of votes based on a complaint raised by a less than 1% candidate, after 30 years of refusing such things with a lot more evidence of fraud. Media was flooded with exposés of the evil candidate Georgescu, somehow overly religious, misogynist, pro Russian, Nazi and legionary at the same time, financed by shadowy forces connected to Russia and maybe China, supported by priests in the backward churches outside the cities and TikTok influencers, a true Rasputin. Talking heads switched their discourse from who should have seen this coming to how defenseless Romanian people have been manipulated by the unstoppable forces of doom scrolling on social media. Authorities got into action to determine the outside influences that had caused this, against their best efforts. The highest Romanian court started deliberating based on all of this new information. People got into the street spontaneously and peacefully demonstrating for democracy and European identity. Just today police started to raid "extremists" that posted images of weaponry on social media - for the first time I've seen this.

  I call bullshit!

  Just days before the annulment of the election tour, the head of the same institution that did it said he sees no significant changes in the count of the votes. In fact, this is not even the reason of the annulment, but the "declassified" documents coming from the security services who now, suddenly, had evidence of external influence of the elections and "continuing cybernetic attacks". Well, duh! Cybernetic attacks, by their nature, never end.

  But while declaring no campaign finances and clearly having someone with a lot of money support his campaigning, while publishing ultra professional high res videos on media platforms, some mimicking the ones Putin did, but tailored towards Romanian traditional sensibilities, while showing a public presence that people just don't have without a lot of preparing and training, Georgescu did nothing provenly illegal, so all the votes coming his way were sincere, regardless of how misguided. To protect democracy, government institutions just decided, together with the media, young people in the streets chanting for democracy and European freedom and old people talking in scared high pitched voices in the park, that elections just didn't yield the correct result, so we must redo them.

  I can't imagine better results for shadowy anti-democratic forces than this! On one side, a complete failure of democratic institutions, both before and after the fact, as well as the kneejerk reaction of people who should have known better. On the other side, a large disillusioned portion of the populace just having their choice forcefully eliminated, like they don't exist. Not only they, but also the pro liberal Lasconi supporters, who will now lose any chance of winning the presidency. In the end, the worst result for most of the electorate, a terrible long lasting blow to democracy and trust in authorities in general and a higher polarization between "city people" and "countryside people".

  Ignoring 40% of the population won't make them go away, you know. And they won't just die off and leave their smarter and more educated children behind, instead just younger, even less educated by experience, copies of themselves, fighting for whatever random cause or belief they're manipulated into.

  Witch hunt

  There is a term called Witch hunt which applies to what is happening here. I urge you to read the Wikipedia article, because it's very revealing.

  Societies function on a very simple contract: a relatively common narrative must be maintained and some institutions are created to curate and enforce it. When that narrative is contradicted by reality, society unravels, so there are only two choices for stability: craft the narrative to be a balance between reality and the people's needs or eliminate the source of contradiction. It's that simple. The spirit of democracy is closely linked to this, as it attempts to provide the mechanisms to keep that delicate balance and stave off as much as possible the necessity for "eliminating contradiction". But when that fails, the only solution is blunt force, mob fear, fanatical clinging to the narrative, which most of the time leads to tyranny and/or atrocity. Why is it so hard to realize that the narrative has to change a little?

  In our case, the narrative is the naive and stupid comfort of authority functioning regardless of what we do, that so many communities tend to fall into. It's already a first step to autocracy, the same narrative applies there as well, in the beginning. But when it fails, people have to find a culprit and ritualistically sacrifice them. I don't know what will happen with poor Georgescu, but as I see it he will either become the dictator of Romania or be burned at the stake.

  And a lot of other things are going to fall with him: online privacy, as little as it is nowadays, honest public discourse, as little as it is allowed now - even in countries which are paragons of democracy, opportunity to choose anything unexpected. We may see even more fanatical adherence to the mythical concept of a united Europe, regardless of its state, while becoming even more afraid of technology. And this just because we obstinately refuse any opportunity to open our eyes and think for ourselves. We have people to do that for us! If he somehow wins, which I find unlikely, things would be even worse.

  Can't wait for mandatory identity checks everywhere online and a global ban on social media for under 16 and of TikTok in general, as a means to protect democracy and free speech. What a joke!

  My thoughts

  Well, obviously all of these are my thoughts, but as a conclusion, I am terrified. Not by Russia, Europe, China or the United States, but by the people of my own country. We have lived in fear for so much time that it has become part of our DNA. We are controlled by it. Make Romanians afraid and you can make them do anything, say anything, think anything. Maybe that's true for everybody.

  I was disgusted to see how the Russian boogie man was resurrected once more to justify unilateral reactions by clueless authorities. What are you going to do? Fight Russia? Send security to arrest the priests who campaigned in churches before and during the election in the countryside, probably for heavy fees? How ironic is that Romanians are crying to the skies for security forces to validate and protect democracy. I guess in 30 years one forgets everything.

  I was happy to think the veil of illusion will be lifted from the eyes of Romanians, but what happened instead is that some of my own illusions have been blown away. Of course, I don't like it and I feel fear. That's natural. What we do with it is what counts. I wrote a blog post. Yay, me!

  To people who think leaving Romania will somehow solve the problem, it does not. But when freezing and fighting seems to not do anything, what is left but to flee? I get it.

  Personally, I want my country to get through this and become stronger for it, but the idea of Romania is just as much an illusion as anything else. And we've already proven that we can ignore every reality and forget any past, unless it suits us otherwise. This is not the country of my childhood or of my youth and it will continue to change in the future. But the attachment is still there and I wish it well.

Note: This article is about Chromium based browsers.

Remember the days when computers were configured to present the filesystem to the network by default in read/write mode? Those were the days. Today, though, everything is configured for security and browsers are no exceptions. One thing that annoyed me yesterday was CSP (Content Security Policy) which disallowed me to fetch from a web site information from another web site which was happy to provide it. The culprit was a meta tag that looks like this:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Security-Policy" content="...">

The content was configuring default-src, connect-src, style-src, frame-src, worker-src, img-src, script-src, font-src! Everything. But I wasn't looking for a hack to disable CSP (well I was, but that's another story), I just wanted to test that, given a friendly CSP, I could connect to a specific web site and get the data that I wanted and do something with it. Surely in the developer tools of the browser I would find something that would allow me to temporarily disable CSP. No such luck!

Then I looked on the Internet to see what people were saying. All were complaining about "Refused to connect to [url] because it violates the following Content Security Policy directive..." and how it annoyed them, but there was no real solution. Here is what I found:

• browser extensions to remove the CSP header
  • I assume this works, but it wasn't my case
• browser extensions to remove content from the page from the Developer Tools
  • I tried one, but when it changed the content now the browser was crashing with an ugly Aw, snap! page with a Status_Access_Violation status
• I tried ticking the web site's settings for Insecure content
  • How naïve to think that it would allow loading of insecure content
• I tried browser command line flags and experimental flags
  • nothing worked

I was contemplating hacking the browser somehow when I stumbled upon this gem: Override files and HTTP response headers locally.

It is almost exactly what I was looking for, only it doesn't replace content with regular expressions but saves the entire content of a URL on the local drive and serves it from there, modified in whatever way you want. So if you want to alter a server rendered page you're out of luck.

How did I use it to remove the CSP? I went to sources, I configured the local overrides and I then edited the page (in the Sources panel) and simply deleted the annoying meta tag. Now it worked.

Hope it helps!

  I was thinking today about our (meaning "the Western Coalition" of countries with a common anti-Putin position) handling of the conflict in Ukraine. I was imagining a reporter trying to ascertain whether people support Ukraine or Russia, Zelensky or Putin, going on the street with a microphone and asking randomly for opinion. And I realized that would be impossible, because any positive support for Putin's aggression will immediately lead to negative personal consequences, so why would anyone be honest about that?

  Somehow, people saw there was a war in Ukraine and they thought it's like a Twitter war. "Russia attacked Ukraine. We're cancelling Russia!". Fine, people were trained to respond to conflict with some kind of mob action, do it your way! But how can you expect that the result of the same action will be different in the case of Russia? On Twitter people mob on someone until their life is ruined, they mob back stronger or they just don't care and leave Twitter. What exactly do people expect Putin is going to do? An insincere apology on Oprah? No. Either Russia will be ruined, with all of its people, they will mob back, and you don't want that from a nuclear power, or they will just not care and carry on, which will ruin both Russia and Ukraine, with all of their people.

  We are in a situation where our entire society punishes dialogue, even compassion. How can you resolve a conflict if you are unwilling to even consider the point of view of the other side? What do you expect? Putin to one day wake up and think "All these people say I am evil. Perhaps I am. Shame on me! Ok, guys, stop the war! Do no evil"? As long as open discussion of all of the view points - regardless of their validity or moral value - is impossible so is the end of the conflict outside the complete destruction of one or both sides.

  How exactly did societies that took pride in their democratic ideals reach a point where dissent is censored, dissenters punished, their lives destroyed and discussion stifled?

  How daft to believe that skirting the responsibilities of principle will ensure the victory of that principle. How idiotic to assume that a position of strength validates your moral stance. Putin does that! People from behind the Iron Curtain had that during the Communist era, where everything anyone would say is how wonderful our magnificent leader is and how the Communist ideals are all we think about. North Korea uses the same system. And now "the free world". "Oh, another tyrant! Let's tyrannize them!". 

  Taking a side in this is as debatable as in any other conflict because both sides would act righteously. What I am saying is that resolution of conflict lies in the ability to debate it, not in coercing people to sing your tune.

  There is a common task in Excel that seems should have a very simple solution. Alas, when googling for it you get all these inexplainable crappy "tutorial" sites that either show you something completely different or something that you cannot actually do because you don't have the latest version of Office. Well, enough of this!

  The task I am talking about is just selecting a range of values and concatenating them using a specified separator, what in a programming language like C# is string.Join or in JavaScript you get the array join function. I find it very useful when, for example, I copy a result from SQL and I want to generate an INSERT or UPDATE query. And the only out of the box solution is available for Office 365 alone: TEXTJOIN.

  You use it like =TEXTJOIN(", ", FALSE, A2:A8) or =TEXTJOIN(", ", FALSE, "The", "Lazy", "Fox"), where the parameters are:

• a delimiter
• a boolean to determine if empty cells are ignored
• a series or text values or a range of cells

  But, you can have this working in whatever version of Excel you want by just using a User Defined Function (UDF), one specified in this lovely and totally underrated Stack Overflow answer: MS Excel - Concat with a delimiter.

  Long story short:

• open the Excel sheet that you want to work on 
• press Alt-F11 which will open the VBA interface
• insert a new module
  
• paste the code from the SO answer (also copy pasted here, for good measure)
• press Alt-Q to leave
• if you want to save the Excel with the function in it, you need to save it as a format that supports macros, like .xlsm

And look at the code. I mean, it's ugly, but it's easy to understand. What other things could you implement that would just simplify your work and allow Excel files to be smarter, without having to code an entire Excel add-in? I mean, I could just create my own GenerateSqlInsert function that would handle column names, NULL values, etc. 

Here is the TEXTJOIN mimicking UDF to insert in a module:

Function TEXTJOIN(delim As String, skipblank As Boolean, arr)
    Dim d As Long
    Dim c As Long
    Dim arr2()
    Dim t As Long, y As Long
    t = -1
    y = -1
    If TypeName(arr) = "Range" Then
        arr2 = arr.Value
    Else
        arr2 = arr
    End If
    On Error Resume Next
    t = UBound(arr2, 2)
    y = UBound(arr2, 1)
    On Error GoTo 0

    If t >= 0 And y >= 0 Then
        For c = LBound(arr2, 1) To UBound(arr2, 1)
            For d = LBound(arr2, 1) To UBound(arr2, 2)
                If arr2(c, d) <> "" Or Not skipblank Then
                    TEXTJOIN = TEXTJOIN & arr2(c, d) & delim
                End If
            Next d
        Next c
    Else
        For c = LBound(arr2) To UBound(arr2)
            If arr2(c) <> "" Or Not skipblank Then
                TEXTJOIN = TEXTJOIN & arr2(c) & delim
            End If
        Next c
    End If
    TEXTJOIN = Left(TEXTJOIN, Len(TEXTJOIN) - Len(delim))
End Function

Hope it helps!

  I was watching a silly movie today about an evil queen bent on world domination. And for the entire film all she did was posture and be evil. Whenever she needed something, she told her people to do it. And I asked myself: why do whatever the queen demands and not kill her on the spot? I mean, she sprawls in her throne while you are an armored and heavily armed soldier sitting right next to her. And the answer I found was: stories. The warrior believes that the queen has the right and the power to command him, so she does. There is nothing intrinsically powerful in the woman herself, just the stories people believe about her.

  And this applies to you as well. Your boss, your wife, your country, your people, your family, your goals and how you choose to go for them are all stories that you tell yourself. It applies to the stock market as well, where stocks have no value unless someone believes in them. And just like there, the stories told to large audiences have large effects as even a small percentage of people get to believe them. Perhaps nothing has any value unless somebody believes it has.

  Generals have known this for a long long time and they apply it today. Just try to find any news source that isn't biased one way or another. The war "in Ukraine" has already become a world war, it's just not fought with conventional weapons. The censorship is there, applied over the entire western area of influence, just as it does in Russia and in China and everywhere to where we used to scoff with superior moral conviction and accuse them of not being free. Conviction is a funny word, as it implies unshakeable belief, the worst kind there is. Convict has the same etymology.

  I think I am lucky for being born when I was. I was raised in a Communist dystopia that was already crumbling at the time, with people telling me stories (that word again) about the wonderful world outside our borders, where people were rich, content and free. I was raised reading and watching science fiction that depicted a near future filled with technology and wonder, fantastical or new planetary worlds, but most importantly, hope. I remember calculating that in the year 2000 I would be 23, a rather wonderful age to be going to the Moon and exploring the Solar System.

  Well, now it's 2022 and everywhere I look I see directed stories, weaponized to nudge me in a direction or another. And like any instrument wielded by blunt people, these stories are always negative, lacking inspiration - both in their creation and their effect, attempting to make me feel scared, insecure, overwhelmed, outraged, offended, angry. Because when you have those feelings you accept authority and the orders you get, no matter how dumb, violent or deleterious. The attack on the Capitol was caused by that kind of storytelling, the war in Ukraine keeps going because of these type of stories, both on the Russian and the anti-Russian side. 

  We are doing it to ourselves, pushing these narratives that in the end hurt us just as much. Gone is the hopeful post-scarcity future of Star Trek, where people understand living to eat and eating to live is not the way to live. Gone are the rebel fighters of Star Wars and the noble principles they were guided by. Gone are the Russian teams exploring the cosmos and solving problems using science. Everything is now anger, hate, suffering, explosions, political scheming, social agendas, special effects. We are darkening our stories and dimming ourselves.

  And I do believe that hope is the antidote. Not because reasons to hope, but despite their absence. A hopeful story is inspiring, protective and kind. In the fourth season of Stranger Things people use a verse from the Bible: "Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good." Of course, those people then proceed to arm themselves and try to kill a bunch of kids for playing D&D, another example on how easily hope can be corrupted into fear and anger. The good stories are of people who better themselves and think of others, not of defeating evil. There is no hope in seeing the evil queen stabbed and thrown into the lava, the real story is how the heroes overcome the evil in themselves.

  I am an atheist. I believe (heh!) that we don't need gods to be decent and that thinking things over will always yield the best solution. But I understand religion, how it tries to inspire, to raise hope, even if in the end it is misused by shallow people to control and usurp. I don't have an answer for everyone, but I have hope, I must have it. The alternative is to remove myself from the world, or join it in its perceived evil. I am sure there are a lot of people like me, though. Even if we feel alone, trapped in an eternal WTF moment, we are many. The number shouldn't matter, though, except as a reason to not abandon the world, to still hold hope for it, for each of us can hold. Hold hope, hold ourselves or simply hold against.

  Star Trek and old Russian sci-fi will not happen while I live. The world will not wake. As a pessimist at heart, I don't expect good things to happen, especially this first half of a century. But I will continue to watch and hope for a good ending.

  There is something really cool about Twitter, but it's not what you probably think. Elon Musk wants to buy it to promote free speech, but also criticizes the way it started at the same time as Facebook yet it made no money. That's what's cool about Twitter: it made no money!

  Having the freedom to express oneself with the only limitation of constraining length to 140 or 280 characters per message is the core of Twitter. I agree with Musk that political censorship of content is evil and that it is slowly strangling what Twitter was supposed to be, but I disagree with the idea that it should be monetized more. That's what Facebook does and for better or worse, it covers that niche. I have to say that if there is someone who can make Twitter both make money and keep its core values intact, that's probably Elon Musk, but I dread the possibility of failure in the attempt.

  Now, don't get me wrong: I almost never tweet. I have an automated system to announce new blog posts on Twitter and lately I've started writing short (Twitter core!!) reviews on the TV series I've watched. In my mind, TV series - should I still call them TV? - don't deserve the attention that I give movies in my IMDb reviews or separate blog posts like books and that is why I write there. Nor do I regularly read Twitter posts. I have a system that translates Twitter accounts into RSS feeds and I sometimes read the content on my feed reader - thank you, Nitter!

  The reason why I am writing this post is ideological, not technical or self interested. If Twitter disappeared tomorrow, I wouldn't really feel the loss. But I do believe its values are important for humanity as a whole. In fact, I don't fully agree with Musk that bots are a problem, because Twitter was designed with automation in mind. A public square, he calls it. I don't like public squares, or anything public, to be honest. What I value is personal and my belief is that this is what we should try to preserve.

  Strangely enough, the trigger for this post was a Netflix documentary about Richard Burton. Now, there is a man! He came from a poor, hard mining town from Wales. He started with a strong regional accent and trained every day to have an English one. From a family of 13 (or 11, if you discount infant mortality, as he did) he choose a drama teacher as a parent - and took his last name, with his family's blessing. Can you imagine being part of a family that is glad to give you for adoption, because that's what's best for you? He was beautiful, hard, passionate and articulate, charming, violent, ruthless, living life to the fullest and hating himself for it. He became a Hollywood icon, yet admitted he had no idea why. That's what men were like half a century ago. I am old enough to have seen some of his movies and to appreciate him as an actor. And while I was watching the documentary, I imagined what Twitter would say about Burton now and what the people behind those tweets would be. The petty, ugly, pathetic crowd that can't stand someone so vastly different, so as not to say superior.

  But it's not Twitter that would be at fault. In fact, when Richard Burton chose to leave his faithful wife for many years for Elizabeth Taylor he was sued by a "subcommittee" for indecent behavior. They didn't have Twitter, but they reveled in outrage just as well. And it's not like he was any kind of saint. He was rigid and cruel and judgmental and lacking any shyness at saying what he though or felt was wrong with you. The issue is not what you do, but why you do it for.

  That's what I believe is where the line should be drawn. It's not about the words you use, but why you said them in the first place. It's not about preserving some social contract that everybody should be forced to obey, but about one's position about particular events. It's not even about "do no harm", because one's harm is another's pleasure. It is about intention.

  Coming back to Twitter and its most famous side effect, cancel culture: I think cancel culture is despicable, but I also partially agree with its defenders or the people who deny its existence. Because the reason why cancelling someone is toxic is not because of people disagreeing, but because people fear being on the wrong side. Once there is enough momentum and energy poured into destroying the life of one person, it becomes a snowball of fear, with people refusing to be "associated" with cancelled people. It's that fear that is the problem, the weak cowardly fear that prevents one from staying the course or ignoring the drama or even supporting someone for mostly economic reasons. Yes, that's what cancel culture is: people afraid to lose their money or some other currency because of other people hating each other. Cancel culture is not new, it just become globalized. If people in Richard Burton's time disliked a person so much they couldn't stand their existence, all that person had to do is leave and start living in some other place. Nowadays, it's all public (heh!) and global. You can't escape being hated.

  Yet the problem is not globalization, is people who somehow care what people they don't care about care about. Yes, you got a bad rep somewhere in the world, from people I don't know. I will be circumspect, but I will use my own judgement about you. Not doing that is lazy and stupid and, again, petty. As George Carlin once said "I never fucked a ten! But I once fucked five twos!". A crowd of stupid, petty, lazy people does not a great person make.

  Bottom line: congrats for making it this far into my rant. People are bound to be different and disagree with each other. Fearing to associate with someone because they are shunned by another group of people is just a feeling. Your choice is what matters. Twitter is a platform, a tool, and what matters is the ability to express oneself and to filter out people you don't want to hear from. That's what a person does and that's what the Internet should preserve. Not the mobs, not the fake outrage to get social points, but the personal: freedom of expression and freedom to ignore whatever you want.

  If Elon Musk would ask my opinion (why would he?!) I would tell him that people need more filters. Enable people to ignore what they choose to ignore and they will be less hateful. That also applies to ads, by the way. Every time I see an angry person obliquely or directly attacking a group that I am even remotely part of I feel attacked and I get angry, too. I didn't want to read that person's opinion and I don't care for it, but it got shoved in my face. If I could just ignore them, I would be less angry and more positive, as would my tweets. And believe me, I used Twitter's word filtering already. It filters out stuff like -isms, politics, U.S. presidents and so on. You see? That's a personal choice, to move away from hatred and judgement. Do it, too, and life will feel so much better. Becoming an outraged activist for something is not an inevitability, it's a choice.

  Americans want to think of themselves as gods, the better of humanity, the all powerful rulers of the world. And the reason they get to think that is that we want them to be so. We entrust them with the faith of the world just like ordinary Russians believe Putin to be their savior. Yet once that faith is gone, so is their power, because with great power comes ... pardon the sticky platitude... great responsibility.

  The U.S. economy is not resilient because of something they do, but because all the other economies anchor to it. It cannot fail because then the world would fail. Yet, one has to take care of said economy lest it will just become a joke no one believes in. Crises are loses of faith more than actual technical issues with whole economies.

  I will argue that the Americans did something right: they followed the money and indirectly attracted the science and the technology to maintain their growth. Now they have the responsibility to keep that growth going. It is not a given. Innovation needs to be nourished, risks be taken, solutions for new problems continuously found. But once you believe your own bullshit, that you're the best of them all, that you can't fail, that you need not do anything because your supremacy is ordained, you will fail and fail miserably.

  And no one actually wants that. Certainly not the Americans with their horrendous privilege, which is national more than anything like race, gender, religion or sexual orientation, which they keep focusing on as a diversion. And no, it's not a conspiracy, it's the direction their thoughts must take in order to deflect from the truth. Americans are weird because they can't be anything but. And certainly nobody else wants that Americans fail. Even "the enemies" like Iran or the vague terrorists, or China... they need the Americans to be where they are. Good or evil, they need to remain gods, otherwise the entire world belief structure would crumble. The U.S. is not the world, they are just the fixed point that Archimedes was talking about.

 It is complacency that will get us. Once we believe things are because they are we stop making efforts. Ironically, the military-industrial complex that we like to malign is the only thing that dispels dreams, acts based on facts and pushes for world domination not because it is inherited or deserved, but because it must be fought for.

 Funny enough, it is the economic markets like the stock market that show what the world will become. Years of growth vanish like dreams if the market sentiment shifts. Growth is slow and long term, falls are short and immediate. The world is now hanging by a thread, on the belief that goodness is real, that Americans will save us all, but they need to act on it. Knee-jerk reactions and "we can't fail because we are right" discourse will not cut it. You guys need to lead, not just rule!

  In summary: monkey humans need an Alpha. In groups of people we have one person, in countries we have a government (or for the stupid ones, a person) and in groups of countries, a country. The Alpha will first rise on their own strength, then on the belief of others on their own strength, then on their ability to influence the beliefs of others. Finally they will lead as gods or die as devils. There are no alternatives.

  Decency makes us abstain from doing something that we could do, we might be inclined to do, but we shouldn't do. It's living according to some general principles that are intimately connected to our own identity. And when someone else is indecent, we try to steer them towards the "right path", for our own sake as well as theirs. This is what I was raised to think. Today, though, decency is more and more proclaimed for actively opposing things that are declared indecent and nothing else. It's the glee that gives it away, that twisted joy of destroying somebody else after having being given permission to do so. You see it in old photos, where decent town folk were happily and communally lynching some poor soul. After half a century the world is finally becoming a global village, but not because of the free sharing of information, as the creators of the Internet naively believed, but because of social media and 24 hour news cycles. And we are behaving like villagers in tiny isolated bigoted villages.

  South Park is a comedy animated show that has a similar premise: a small U.S. town as a mirror for the world at large. And while 25 years ago that was a funny idea, now it feels weirdly prescient. The latest episode of the show depicts the vilifying of some local residents of Russian descent because of the Ukraine conflict as a symptom of nostalgia towards the Cold War era. Then too, people were feeling mighty good about themselves as they were fighting the Ruskies, the Commies, the Hippies, or anything that was threatening democracy and the American way of life.

  This is not an American affliction as it is human nature. Witch hunts, lynching, playing games with the heads of your enemies, sacrificing virgins, they all have the same thing in common: that feeling that you have social permission to hurt others and that if they are bad, that makes you good. But acting good is what makes you good, not merely destroying evil. When Stalin was fighting Hitler no one said what a nice decent guy Stalin was. Yet now this mob mentality has been exported, globalized, strengthened by the sheer number of people that now participate. It's not easy to mention decency when thousands of people may turn on you for defending their sworn enemy. This "either with us or against us" feeling is also old and symmetrically evil, because usually all sides harbor it towards the others.

  I have started this post two times before deleting everything and starting again. At first I was continuing the story of the playground war, South Park style, where the town people refuse service to the family of the bully, start giving the victim crotch protectors and helmets at first, then baseball bats and pocket knives, slowly delimiting themselves from that family and ostracizing it as "other", even while the two kids continue to go to school and the bullying continues. But it was the glee that gave it away. I was feeling smart pointing out the mistakes of others. Then I tried again, explaining how Putin is wrong, but that's not the fault of the entire Russian people, most of them already living in poverty and now suffering even more while the rich are merely inconvenienced. I also shed doubt on the principledness of vilifying Russia when we seem to do no such thing to Israel, for example. And then I felt fear! What if this is construed to be antisemitic or pro Putin? What if I want to get hired one day and corporate will use the post as proof that I am a terrible human being? Because some nations can be vilified, some must be, but other should never ever be. And I may be a terrible human being, as well.

  Isn't stifling free expression for the sake of democracy just as silly as invading a country for the sake of peace?

  Regardless of how I feel about it, I am inside the game already. I am not innocent, but corrupted by these ways of positioning and feeling and doing things. I am tempted to gleefully attack or to fearfully stay quiet even when I disagree. So take it with a grain of salt as I am making this plea for decency. The old kind, where acting badly against bad people is still bad and acting good and principled is necessary for the good of all.

  Only you can give yourself permission to do something, by the way.

  It all reminded me of a playground brawl between kids. Here is the big brawny kid, beating the smaller one. Other small kids shout in support of the victim, but neither does anything. Teachers preach sternly about principles that kids should obey, how bullying is just wrong and one shouldn't do it, parents at home advise kids to stand up for their rights and take a stand. The school psychologists preach that violence at home leads to violence in children and we are all victims. And the result? Small kids keep getting bullied.

  The small kid has options. He can fight - hopelessly, he can run - not for long, he can take a big stick from a friend and bloody the bully's nose - and be mauled for it. But more often they cower in fear, stunned, frozen, hoping things are not happening. And if they are, they won't be so bad. And if they are bad, they would eventually stop. His eyes dart from one person to another in the group of onlookers. "Please! Please, help me!" they silently beg. But some people are frozen, too, some are indifferent, some are expressing disapproval, but then moving on. Most of them pretend it doesn't happen.

  And the kid is thinking, stuck in his inadequate body: This will stop, because it doesn't make sense. And he thinks of all the ways of why his abuse does make sense. Perhaps they miscalculated somehow. Things have to make sense!

  Worse of all, some people would just assume that the bullied child deserves it. He must have done something! There must be a reason for why a kid would attack another. They might even consider various options. Does the bully have an abusive father or other family problems? Is it poverty? Is it education? Perhaps the smaller kid disrespected the larger one on account of religion, race or sexual orientation. Surely, a small kid in school would ONLY behave rationally! And the kid, too, gets to think that perhaps he does deserve it.

  That's us, surrounding ourselves in rationalizations, morals, laws and principles. Trying to contain reality in nice neat boxes and then deny there is anything outside those boxes.

  That's me, too. I watch and I am thinking. Maybe it is military exercises. How funny it would be for Russians to just stop and go home. OK, the mad discourse on TV is troubling, but maybe it's just a bargaining chip in a discussion I am not privy to. They invaded Ukraine, but maybe they stop at the border of the rebel regions. They attack the whole Ukraine, but surely they're gonna stop at its borders. They claim Transnistria is Russia, too, but maybe they won't attack Moldova. Maybe they will stop at the border of Moldova. Maybe they won't enter Romania! Maybe the economic sanctions and stern wording of the Western teachers is going to calm the kid down. Maybe no one will use nukes!! Perhaps they will not shoot each other's satellites from orbit, stranding everybody on this shit planet! Maybe China will stay out of it?

  Maybe Russia has a reason to do all of this, because of the US slowly suffocating that country, economically, militarily and culturally, using their EU henchmen!!! Yes! It all makes sense! It is domestic violence, if only Russia would go to therapy, everything would be all right. I mean, they HAVE TO act rationally, right? They're a country! A whole country big as a continent. And surely the West will understand they are people, too, and show them compassion and help them get past it. Aren't we all human? Can't Biden call Putin as tell him "Dude, chill! I apologize. Let me give you a hug. You are appreciated and I love you!". Isn't this just a joke? 

  I blame us. Whenever a new personality cult pops up we secretly (or less so) hope this is the one. That person who is really strong and not just posturing, intelligent not just conniving, competent not just overconfident, caring and not just obsessing, principled and not just frustrated. We crave for a god to follow and obey and who would make us feel safe. And we tried different things, too. Let's replace a person with multiple ones: senates, parliaments, committees, counsels, parties, syndicates, omertas, majority rule, Twitter likes. It never works. Every time, the power people wield gets to them and somehow... makes them less.

  As I stood there, watching Vladimir Putin explain like a stern grandfather who is also a complete psycho how their brothers across their border are not really a country, nor a people and he has absolute rights over them, I despaired. "Not again!", I thought. I am not much into history, but it felt familiar somehow. Are we getting one of these every century? The strongman going nuts with an entire country following him because... what else is there? For decades people have asked what has made people follow Hitler. The answer seems to be that they thought about it and then went "Meh!".

  And then I watched the valiant exponents of democracy: the EU, the UK, the US. All posturing, talking about principles and international law, begging Putin to stop, making stern discourses on how Putin doesn't have the right to do what he does. What are these people doing? I've worked for them, I know how ineffectual they are, I know that every word in their mouth is unrelated to the truth. They are not lies, per se, just complete fabrications and fantasies. Now, of all times, one should snap out of it, right? Nope. Not happening. They convince themselves that people can't think any other way than them. Surely Putin will stop when his country will slide into economic crisis, because we are all bureaucratic machines that care about profit only. Surely Putin will stop because Biden tells him to. Surely the EU's committees will find a way to word a stern letter that would convince Putin to think about humanity!

  We're screwed.

 So you clicked on this post because you thought that:

• I was smart enough to know how to be better than anybody else
• I could summarize all the ways to become so
• I would generously share them with you
• You would understand what I am telling you in 3 minutes or whatever your attention span is now

While I appreciate the sentiment, no, I am not that smart, nor am I that stupid. There are no shortcuts. Just start thinking for yourself and explore the world with care and terror and hope, like the rest of us. And most of all, stop clicking on "N ways to..." links.

The Nazi officer smirks, as the prisoner begs for his life. Instead of any human feelings, he just revels in the pain he inflicts. He is powerful, merciless, and stupid enough to be foiled by the heroes who, against their better interest, came to liberate the helpless victims of this evil butcher. Change the channel! The heartless businessman pushes for more sales of the opioid drug his company produces, destroying the lives of honest, hard working Americans living in flyover country. Change it again! The evil general commands the destruction of a helpless village, laughing maniacally while the future hero of the story vows revenge in Japanese.

You've heard it before, you've seen it before and you've read it before. The mindless, unreasonably evil character who has two purposes only: to be totally unlikeable, an example of what not to be, and to be defeated by the hero, an example of what you should be. But it's not enough! The hero must be a "normal" person, someone you can relate with: powerless, bound by social contracts, connected with people in their community, wanting nothing more than to live their life in peace. But no! This evil asshole is just determined to stand in the way for absolutely no other reason than gaining ultimate power, more than they, or anyone else, deserve. And the hero needs to overcome impossible odds just to have the opportunity to defeat, in an honorable way, the villain. In the end, they will prevail thanks to a combination of friendly help, evolving to a higher level of power (which was always inside them) and sheer dumb luck.

Now, the Dunning Kruger folk will just lap this story up, imagining themselves the hero, but realistic people will just think "wait a minute! If this guy who is well connected in his community, strong as an ox and looking like The Rock, after focused training that he immediately picks up finding magical and physical powers that are beyond reason, has almost no chance of defeating the villain and only gets there through luck, then what the hell chance does a normal human being have?". And a few broken people would ask themselves if the villain wasn't a bit right, wanting to destroy this pathetic place we called "the world".

Where did these stories come from? Why are we suffocated by them and still consuming them like addicts? What is the result of all that?

The psychopathic villain trope is just a version of the old fashioned fairy tale: the knight and the dragon, the peasant and the lord, the girl and the lecherous wizard, the light and the dark. It is the way we explain to little children, who have no frame of reference, that there are ways we prefer them to be and others than we do not. It's a condescending format, design to teach simple concept to little idiots, because they don't know better. Further on, as the child grows up, they should learn that there are nuances, that no one is truly evil or good, that all of us believe we are the protagonist, but we are just a part of a larger network of people. This we call "real life" and the black and white comic book story we call "fantasy", designed to alleviate our anguish.

Yet we stick to the fantasy, and we avoid reality. And it's easy! In fact, it's much easier than any other strategy: close your mind, split your understanding into just two parts, one where you feel comfortable and the other which must be destroyed in the name of all that is holy. To even consider the point of view of the other side if blasphemy and treason. In fact, there is no other side. There is your side and then there is evil, darkness, void, unknown. Which conveniently makes you the good guy who doesn't need to know anything about the other side.

OK, maybe you can't win every battle. Maybe you will never win any battle. But you are a warrior at heart! You don't actually have to do anything. And as you wait for the inevitable defeat of evil at your righteous hand, you can watch other heroes like yourself defeat evil, stupid, one sided villains. And it feels good. And it has been feeling good for as long as stories existed, then books, then plays, then movies and now video games. Yet never have we been bombarded, from every conceivable angle, with so many versions of the same thing.

If hero escapism was a pill that made life more bearable, now it's most of our lives: films, series, games, news. We were raised on them and we are being tamed by them every single day. They are so ubiquitous that if they are gone, we miss them. It's an addiction as toxic as any other. We can't live without it and we pay as much as necessary to get our hit. And this has been happening for at least two generations.

So when we are complaining that today's dumb entitled teenage fuck generation is incapable of understanding nuance, of moderation, of rational thought, of controlling their emotions, of paying attention for more than five minutes to anything, of dialogue, of empathy... it's not their fault. We raised them like this. We educated them in the belief that they are owed things without any effort, that their feelings are valid and good and that it's OK to consider everybody else evil as long as they are different enough. That we must be inclusive with any culture, as long as it is also inclusive, otherwise exclude the shit out of it.

The trope of the psychopathic villain did not teach these people to be heroes, it taught them to be the foil to the people too different from them. And here we are. Psychopaths on all sides, thinking they are good and righteous and that sooner or later ultimate power will be theirs. The only positive thing in all this: they believe the power is inside them and will reveal itself when most needed, without any effort or training. That's what makes them dumb psychotic evil villains, completely unreasonable and easy to defeat.

If only there were any smart heroes left.

  Half a year ago I was writing a piece about how the system is stacked against you, no matter where on the ladder you are. Nobody cares about you! was part depression and part experience, because I have worked in corporations most of my career and that's exactly what happens in real life. This post will not be in the "What's Siderite going to say to make us hate life and kill ourselves" category, though. Quite the opposite. I am going to tell you what the logical consequence of that dreary article is - and it's good!

  Think about it! Are there nice things in the world? And I am not talking about love, sunrises and cute kittens, but about human acts and artefacts. The answer is yes, or you are a lot more depressed than I've ever been. So, if the world is configured to not care about you or about anyone, if the logical best strategy is to do just as much as it is absolutely required and fake the rest, why is there human beauty out there?

  The answer is: every good and beautiful man made thing that you see in the world is by someone doing more than they were asked to do. It's a simple sentence, but a powerful reality. Every day people, like and unlike you and me, are defying the boring order of the universe to create beauty and to better the world. Let's say you play a game made by a big game company and you are enjoying it. - maybe not the entire game either, just some portion of it - I can assure you that is not the consequence of the money poured in it, but of some person who did a little more than the bare minimum. If you use a program, a boring one, like Office something, and you find a feature that blows your mind, be convinced that no one asked for it specifically and someone actually made an extra effort to put it there. If you like the way the handle of the knife feels in your hand when you're slicing bread, same.

  And yes, there is the theory that every act of altruism comes from selfishness, and you can abstract everything to mean anything when it involves humans, but I am not talking about people who want to make the world better or selfless angels who want to make others happy. I am talking here of the simple fact of doing more than necessary just because you want to. And I am not talking about some kind of artsy philosophical method of improving everything and sparking joy, but about at least one, just one act that is invested with a bit of a human person. They do what they were asked to, paid to, coerced to, bullied to, begged to, then they make another step. Maybe it's inertia, maybe it's not knowing when to stop or not knowing what's good for them, but they did it and in the act imbued something with a piece of their soul.

  OK, I know that this is more of a "diamond in the mud" category rather than a positive message, but have you ever considered that even the smallest joys in life may come from the acts of rebellion of others? Maybe it's not a diamond, maybe it's a shitty opal, but knowing that you found it in the mud gives it immense relative value. Finding the ugliness, the stupid, the petty, the outrageous is easy. Seeing something beautiful and knowing it grew out of this is rare and valuable.