Not to sound like a Luddite, but these AI data centers have gotten out of control. I live in Coweta County, Georgia. I've lived here for decades. In all that time, we've had zero data centers. At the current moment, there are plans to build five. I'm no statistics major, but that seems like a big increase.

The locals are not particularly happy about this sudden spurt of this particular kind of development. To be honest, the locals are rarely happy about any development that doesn't bring them a new restaurant, but they are very not particularly happy about this. Last weekend, people stood in line for hours at the park up the street from my house (on Jefferson Davis Parkway, if that gives you any idea of my county's usual politics) to sign a petition they hope will force their suddenly development-friendly elected officials to quit ignoring our torches and pitchforks and finally have a public referendum on the matter.

It's noteworthy that most of the land those data centers want was until recently zoned "Rural Conservation." For refence, the Coweta County Georgia Code of Ordinances Appendix A Article 7 defines a "rural conservation district" as... oh, hell, just read it:

The rural conservation district is intended to provide for agricultural land use, and low density single-family residential land use in an area of Coweta County shown on the future development map as the rural conservation area. Agricultural land uses include farming, forestry, horticulture, wholesale plant propagation, dairying, ranching, and equestrian activities. Rural residential land uses include rural homestead lots, and low density rural residential developments designed to preserve woodland and open land along Coweta's roadways, to preserve primary conservation land: river or stream corridor, areas of vulnerable groundwater recharge, floodplain, steep slopes, habitat of endangered species, archeological sites, cemeteries, and burial grounds, and to provide neighborhoods with their own private, yet common, recreation areas.

Does any of that sound like the place anyone was ever planning to put a resource-intensive information warehouse? But who doesn't want a shiny new water-guzzling, 800-acre data center next door to their low density single-family residence? And as for preserving river or stream corridors and areas of vulnerable groundwater, the developers themselves have asked for 1,010,000 gallons of water per day. If that sounds like a lot, that's because it is. It's 13% of the Coweta County Water & Sewerage Authority's current production ability for only five new businesses, which is the equivalent of all the existing CCWSA customers donating 33 of our gallons of water per day to our thirsty new AI overlords.

In defense of the Board of Commissioners, the data centers are promising that once they are up to speed, they'll pay an astonishing $176 million in property taxes. Considering that the county took in less than $76 million in property taxes in 2024, that also seems like a pretty big increase. Assuming the data centers are telling the truth — AI would never lie to us — that's a lot of money to turn down. Who needs equestrian activities when you can ask a computer to turn you into a cartoon character for a social media post? With all that money, at the very least the county will be able to afford to pay the CCWSA to find us some extra water somewhere. I hear the arctic is melting.*

*Superman Month Sidebar: Speaking of "our national water crisis," Eric Brockovich (heard of her?) has lately been crusading against data centers like these in large part because of their "substantial" water usage. Her 2020 book on the subject of is titled Superman's Not Coming, which is both disheartening and, I hate to say it, accurate.

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I was recently gifted several issues (Volume CXLV, Numbers 3-6) of The Saguache Crescent, the newspaper of record for Saguache, Colorado, for 145 years and counting. (Still just 35¢! Cheap!) It has a delightful engraved, four-column masthead of the sort they just don't make anymore.

I've been told that natives (by which I mean the descendants of white settlers who now populate the region) pronounce "Saguache" much the same as I pronounced the name of the ubiquitous Swiss wristwatch of my 1980s childhood: Sa-watch. Wikipedia says there's a bit of confusion about what exactly the word means in the original Ute language. It's either "sand dune," "green place," "blue earth," or "blue water." Maybe all of the above? In any event, it sounds like a nice place. No wonder people have been writing and reading about it for so long.

Wikipedia also alerted me to the fact that The Saguache Crescent is the only known newspaper in the world still printed on a 19th-century Linotype machine, something that's pretty obvious when you have one in your hand. Back before you watched the news on your phones, kids, they used a keyboard to assemble physical letter molds into lines that became the printing slugs that were inked and applied to paper. Because the final slugs were a single block of lead, typos—which might have been your fault but just as easily could have been the fault of a finicky machine, something no computer will ever admit to—were forever. It's charming in hindsight.

Once you go looking, you'll find plenty of web articles explaining that The Saguache Crescent is run by one man, "DEAN I. COOMBS, Publisher," as a labor of love. He prints one paper a week for his modern community of about 500 people, obviously reusing slugs as often as possible. All of which explains why all four editions of the paper in front of me contain the same misspelled headline:

"VD Love Lettesrs at the saguache public library."

And I know I'm old-fashioned, but I'm going to blame the lingering nostalgia inspired by this Old West newspaper for causing me to wonder why in the world the Saguache, Colorado, public library is getting love letters from Venereal Disease.

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My mouse has started to report random double clicks, and my keyboard has begun occasionally ignoring me when I press the letter "e". Traitors!

So while I work on finding replacement parts, I'll keep today's post short and just give you something I was saving for a later post: the gift of pornography. Ear pornography.

Centerfold

Na-na na-na-na-na, na-na-na na-na-na-na.

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Lately I've been playing Sniper Elite 5, a stealth shooter set late in World War II that gives players the goal of essentially killing as many Nazis as you can before they kill you. It's extremely cathartic.

I've played the previous entries in the series, and this is the first one to give you the option of sneaking up to humanely "pacify" an unaware enemy soldier by putting it to sleep. You're not materially rewarded for this, so why is it in here? To save me some ammunition? That's why the game gives me a knife!

Don't get me wrong. I certainly see the value in mercy and nonviolence, even in role-playing wartime video games. But I thought the point of setting your shooter against the Axis in WWII was that you could murder all the Nazis you wanted. Dead Nazis are the original guilt-free snack.

There aren't any noncoms or children, so what am I to make of this mechanic? Is the game trying to remind me that digital NPC Nazis are people too? I don't want that thought floating around my head while I'm trying to liberate virtual France; war isn't possible without dehumanization. I have noticed that the Nazi AI never chooses the "pacify" option when confronting me. Perhaps that's the moral here: He who hesitates to kill a computer-generated Nazi is lost.

Of course, it's also entirely possible that I'm overthinking this. Whether fighting Nazis, zombies, criminals, demons, or mutated Objectivists, sometimes a video game mechanic is just a video game mechanic. Pull the trigger, stupid.

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I've been so down about the recent behavior of what currently passes as "government" in the country I was born into that I got the idea to cheer myself up by doing something good for my fellow man that I had never done before: I would donate blood.

Why hadn't I done it before now? Inconvenience, mostly. And some anxiety about the whole process. And, of course, in my town it's run by the American Red Cross, an organization I've had a bit of contempt for ever since 2001 when they had a hard time appropriately handling the flood of donations intended for Twin Towers victims. (And then Hurricane Katrina. And then Sandy. And so on.) But their being the only game in town, my choice was either to sign up to give blood there or feel bad about thinking about and then not giving blood. One of those options is clearly better than the other.

So I signed up online Sunday for the Monday evening blood drive, but when I showed up, they had no idea I was coming. Someone had penciled-in my name on their printed itinerary sheet, but the computer didn't recognize me or my driver's license. Eventually they had to type into their software everything that I had typed into their website the night before. You have to applaud that sort of organizational efficiency.

Then I had to wait. For an hour and a half. To be fair to them, I overheard someone say they were short of phlebotomists (only three), so I wasn't the only one who had to wait a bit; I was just the only one who had to wait so long. Donors scheduled for appointments an hour after mine went in before I did. The nice ladies at the front desk (who spent much of their time talking up the quesadillas they were offering to all donors), realizing I had been sitting in the waiting area so long asked if I would like them to inquire from the nurses within where I was in their waiting list. I asked if it would make any difference. When they said no, I said don't bother. I got through it by telling myself what a good, selfless thing I was doing. (Martyrdom has its privileges.)

When I did finally get in, the actual donation process itself took about three times as long as my paperwork had told me to expect. The phlebotomist had a hard time getting anything out of me. He said that maybe I wasn't hydrated enough (despite my drinking so much water in the past two days that I was peeing every two hours) and maybe the vein I had presented wasn't large enough (despite my having given him his choice). I don't mean to criticize the guy who was clearly having a long day; maybe it's just hard to get blood out of a stone.

Anyway, I did it. Blood donated. I hope it helps someone. (I half expect the Red Cross to find a reason to throw it out.) I'm not sure whether it made me feel any better, but at least I got a blog post out of it. I really don't know if I'll do it again. Even for quesadillas.

Also for what it's worth: there were three Walters scheduled for the day, all in the building at the same time. I go years without bumping into other Walters. I guess this whole time they've all been waiting in line to give blood.

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107/2418. Venom: Let There Be Carnage (2021)
The original Venom surprised me by being more of a buddy cop movie than I expected, but this one drops the ball as dumb, unnecessary, computer-animated setpiece-driven action. I never liked Carnage in the comics, either. Pass.

108/2419. Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie (2016)
I wasn't a fan of the AbFab television show because Edina and Patsy were just horrible people. The movie leans into that, hard. But it also attacks the hypocrisy of a society that judges unequally based on age, sex, and income. I have to admit that I found more than a few things to chuckle at.

109/2420. Woman's World (1954)
Woman's World is more than a little reminiscent of Executive Suite (which also stars June Allyson), though with more emphasis on the spouses of the would-be executives. This one is also more comedic with the added benefit of Lauren Bacall being her glamourous self. (Not a knock against Executive Suite. It's got snarky Barbara Stanwyck, and I do like snark. They're both good!)

110/2421. The Cases of Mystery Lane (2023)
112/2423. The Cases of Mystery Lane: Death Is Listening (2024)
These are essentially television detective procedurals with a variation on the sitcom cliche of a clueless husband paired with an inexplicitly competent wife. (Arranged marriage?) They're a bit formulaic and silly, but so were the five seasons of Hart to Hart.

111/2422. The Singing Marine (1937)
Dick Powell is the title marine, and the script requires him to be both extra naive and extra worldly, so it never quite comes together. There's not much to recommend here other than Powell's excellent singing voice.

More to come.

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88/2399. Jazz Ramsey: A K-9 Mystery (2024)
The "canine" in the title of this Hallmark mystery is a red herring. Yes, there is a dog, but it has no chemistry with the actress playing "Jazz," and it only serves a narrative purpose of finding the murder victim... in the ventilation system of a school. Even a human nose would have detected that. Despite the fact that Jazz is supposed to be a dog trainer and the dog her foster animal, the dog is rarely seen again, not even when Jazz is worried about her own safety after being attacked by the supposed murderer. Ugh. Not recommended (even though I solved it almost immediately, or maybe because I solved it almost immediately).

89/2400. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024)
I enjoy Anya Taylor-Joy so much, she almost made me appreciate Fury Road. But not quite. The entire post-apocalyptic dystopia scenario is just too grotesque for me to enjoy any of the many, many murders that take place there. Also, unlike Fury Road, this one feels too artificial, too computer-generated, like a sadistic cartoon. Ick. And what's up with Chris Hemsworth's fake nose? It's obviously still Hemsworth, so I spent all the time he was on screen wondering why they were trying to disguise his nose and not his six-pack abs. Bad decisions everywhere.

90/2401. Nelly Knows Mysteries: A Fatal Engagement (2024)
Finally, a charming Hallmark mystery movie in 2024. Yes, it plays out mostly like a police procedural with one quirky book-loving mystery fan and one by-the-book detective, and the perpetrator's identity is as obvious as ever thanks to the twists the script and editing take to obscure their own tracks. (Hint: it's always the one the movie goes out of its way to excuse.) However, the actors do seem to be genuinely enjoying themselves, and that goes a long way, especially when there's a murder afoot.

91/2402. Breathless (1960)
Sure, I watch a lot of made-for-television Hallmark mysteries, but I'm cultured. I can watch New Wave French cinema, too! I always use Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass as my example of how once-strikingly influential art seems mundane to modern eyes because of the many imitators that followed, and that analogy applies here. So many significant elements of this film would make their way into the work of Scorsese and Tarantino and others that Jean-Luc Godard's much-ballyhooed Breathless can often feel... well, boring is the wrong word, but maybe unnecessary. I certainly don't understand why Godard made many of his choices, but I cannot deny that they certainly leave a lasting impression.

More to come.

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When an old man dies, a library is burned with him.

I occasionally worry about what will happen to this blog when I'm no longer alive or otherwise capable of maintaining it. No one owns anything in the virtual realm, and all sites (and all the knowledge they contain) evaporate like mist as soon as they are no longer profitable enough to maintain the energy cost of their digital existence. Since I have selfishly chosen not to have any children of my own that I can emotionally manipulate into keeping Wriphe.com alive in perpetuity, I probably need to accept the fact that once I'm gone, any evidence that I wasted so much time at a computer keyboard will be gone, too.

Which makes me wonder, what will the world really miss? Is the minutia evidence of my life really worth preserving? To answer that question, I climbed a mountain and asked a wizened sage... no, just kidding. I wrote a script that sorted and counted all 550,000 words I've recorded in the past 21 years to see if they gave me any indication of the site's value. (Note that my quick-and-dirty script returned many character strings you won't find in a dictionary, like movie titles, odd proper names, web addresses, and "g-g-ghost.")

The most common word at Wriphe.com: the

No great insight there. The is the most common word in the English language, which is no big surprise considering that it is the only definite article in the whole darn language. According to Wikipedia, it accounts for "seven percent of all printed English-language words." For comparison, it currently accounts for only about 5% of Wriphe.com. Heck, all first person singular pronouns (I, me, mine, my) combined make up only 3% of Wriphe.com! I guess I don't talk about myself enough.

After stripping out the top 50 most common English words (according to the same Wikipedia source), I get the following list:

1. my (3,110 occurrences)
2. it's (2,045)
3. about (1,847)
4. like (1,840)
5. me (1,769)

Ok, fine. Maybe I do talk about myself enough. Yeah, nobody in the future is going to need all of that.

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As I type this, the South Park episode in which Cartman inherits a million dollars and uses it to buy an amusement park (which causes Kyle to lose his faith in God) is on the 33-inch 16:9 ratio flatscreen LCD television beside my computer. According to Wikipedia, that episode, "Cartmanland," first aired on July 25, 2001. That's almost twenty-three years ago!

I distinctly remember watching the broadcast of the debut episode of South Park ("Cartman Gets an Anal Probe") on Comedy Central on basic cable via our communal 24-inch 4:3 ratio CRT TV in the apartment I shared with friends and former classmates Matt and Randy in unincorporated North Druid Hills. Matt had invited our old high school classmate, Tabitha, over for the evening, and she was absolutely appalled by the course humor, which, of course, only made it funnier. That was August 1997, and I was already in my second college.

To put those dates into perspective, I also distinctly remember watching the 20ish-inch wood-paneled TV in our family's basement as channel 46 (on the UHF dial) weatherman Denny Moore, wearing what we would now call Trekker cosplay, hosted a New Year's Eve 1980-something marathon of original Star Trek episodes. Although I'm not entirely sure of the year, I am sure that whatever year it was was definitely prior to The Next Generation being a thing.

The point of that being that in hindsight, there was less time between the date of that rerun marathon and the original broadcast dates of those Star Trek episodes than there has been between between now and 9/11.

Honestly, I'm starting to think that the real difference between the past and the present is that there were barely 3 seasons of Star Trek and South Park has a contract to keep making episodes into its 30th season. The Good Old Days were a very brief time indeed.

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Maybe I've just been in a mood lately, but there are 2 movies I watched in recent weeks that played with my mind. Since I'm still thinking about them, I'm just going to skip ahead of my regular list and list them now.

129/2295. For All Mankind (1989)
It's a documentary about the NASA Apollo program comprised almost entirely of 1969-1971 footage. Personal note: before he helped create me, my father helped create SkyLab — yes my nutty father was once a legit rocket scientist — so there has never been any doubt in my life about whether or not man set foot on the moon. And I'll never not be amazed that I now carry around in the palm of my hand a computer with more processing power than Houston Mission Control had then^[1]. Watching NASA footage, it's mind-bending to be reminded just how big and empty space is and just how fragile our position is in it. It's amazing how determined so many of us humans are to push one another off this life raft. I'm as guilty as the next guy at letting daily life get us focused on the petty things; we can all do better.

133/2299. Little Lord Fauntleroy (1936)
Yeah, yeah, it's a fantasy children's fantasy movie where an American orphan becomes British nobility and is unchanged by the experience, but what struck me while watching was just how good Li'l Fauntleroy is and how his goodness makes life better for everyone around him. (It's a pretty Dickensian concept, sure, but there are also echoes of Fauntleroy in Harvey Comics' ultra-altruistic "Poor Little Rich Boy" Richie Rich.) There are certainly bad people in the boy's world — a dramatic plot requires them — but he doesn't let their bad behavior influence his. As my Catholic aerospace engineer father often said to me during my formative years: right is right if no one is right^[2]. Don't let him hear me say this, but he's right about that. The high road may be harder, but if you let them drag you down to their level, you're just another snake.

^[1] An "Apple iPhone 12 Smartphone... [is] about 900 million times faster than the Apollo 11 guidance computer." https://blog.adobe.com/en/publish/2022/11/08/fast-forward-comparing-1980s-supercomputer-to-modern-smartphone

^[2] According to https://fauxtations.wordpress.com/2015/02/27/st-augustine-and-rightwrong/, this is a paraphrase of a quote by G.K. Chesterton, creator of the Father Brown mysteries: "Right is right, even if nobody does it. Wrong is wrong even if everybody is wrong about it." However, so far as I am aware, my father never read Chesterton, so it may well be that he is quoting some other source, maybe even ancient aliens. With him, one can never tell.

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