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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In anticipation of this week's National Spelling Bee (hooray!), a website I visit regularly, Language Log (languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu), has posted a list of "America's most misspelled words in 2026" as compiled by a website I have never visited, Unscramblerer (unscramblerer.com). The good news is that it's still just May, and there's plenty of time remaining before 2027 for us to get better at tomorrow, which, apparently, we love to put an extra m in. Americans are a generous people.

It seems the list was compiled by an Estonian, so it's mostly interesting as a lens for how outsiders interpret how Americans use our own language, at least as filtered through Google (the source of unscramblerer's data). For example, in their explainer, they call out the difficulty American spellers have with silent letters, giving the example of the "silent" c in schedule. As an American, I can definitely say that particular c isn't silent to us, though they're correct not to ask us to spell scissors. Unscramblerer also seem to think we struggle with color. Is this really a list of misspelled words in the King's English? We already knew British people talk funny, so it makes sense they would spell funny, too.

Even outside of those context clues, I'm not sure I have a great deal of faith in the rest of their list. Their "most common" misspelled were bougie (hooray, Marxism!), favorite, and through. The first is obviously already slang (though, again, in my experience, I've found it far more common in UK exports than native to the States), the second commonly drops the silent o when used in pidgin and comic strips, and even McDonald's prefers to drive thru. Granted, those are more fun than what I suspect remains the real worst offender: its / it's. I know the difference, yet its something I still type wrong all the time.

According to the list, the most commonly misspelled word in the state of Georgia (as in Oklahoma and Wyoming) was Chihuahua, which coincidentally happens to have been the question to the Daily Double answer "In Northern Mexico, a capital city, a state & a desert all have this name" in yesterday's episode of Jeopardy!. I'm pretty confident that I can spell that one (hooray, dogs!). I checked, and I have posted the word in three previous Wriphe.com blog posts in the past twenty-one years, so even if I have misspelled it, I've hardly done so commonly.

To be thorough (thourough? thorogh? Thoreau?), I double checked for Wriphe.com posts with common misspellings of Chihuahua and found none. However, Google tells me the most common misspelling is Chiwawa, and I'm quite sure I would never type such a thing intentionally. So if I misspelled it in here somewhere, which remains possible as spelling is not among my stronger suits and I can be very creative with my typos, it probably looks something more like Chihuahuah with a completely unnecessary extra h. As a generous American, I do so love to make things more complicated than they actually are.

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I just spent the last three hours trying to play a video game called Disco Elysium. If you haven't done that, don't.

Mechanically, the game is part painfully dull point-and-click roleplaying game, part existentially crushing choose-your-own-adventure visual novel in which your character's health is measured by both physical and mental punishment absorbed. That description makes it sound more fun than it is. In my first attempted playthrough using the game's predefined "Thinker" archetype, my hungover protagonist, a depressed police detective, encountered the decaying corpse he'd been assigned to investigate and promptly quit the force. Game over.

In my second playthrough, I knew to avoid the body and instead questioned some witnesses. There was only one that can be interacted with: a stoned kid throwing rocks at the body. The brat belittled my detective skills, and I lost my will to participate in society. Game over. Gee, this is fun.

Deciding that the game had suckered me into playing a character with starting Morale that was too low ("Thinker" being the default option in the menu), I decided to start over with a customized character. Only, the user interface doesn't really hold your hand through this, and pressing the wrong button twice, I was suddenly starting the game again, going through the same startup dialog with the same shitty Morale as before. I have to give the game credit for making the menus as irritating as the in-game environment. That's commitment!

So I started a fourth time, this time successfully placing all of my available stat points into the two key survival attributes, Psyche and Physique. I also decided to chose only roleplaying dialog options that seemed to be delusionally optimistic. And it worked! When I got to the body, I successfully pushed through the first round of gag-reflex vomiting and was rewarded with a short quest to find some ammonia to mask the decay. But the stench was still overpowering, and I lost Morale. Calling into my precinct, I truthfully reported I was missing my badge, was ridiculed by my squad mates, and lost Morale. In between insults, I discovered I had also lost my gun and lost Morale. Pushing on with the case, I spoke to the person who reported finding the body, who was rude to me, and I committed suicide. Game over. Game deleted.

Seriously, what's the point of something like this? I only played the game because it was A) critically lauded and B) free. But I paid too much. While, yes, this game has a unique artistic vision, that's not enough to declare it a worthwhole (much less recommended) gaming experience. Who are these video game critics whose lives are so amazingly satisfying that they enjoy "playing" fatalistically depressing video games? Life is awful enough without this kind of masochistic shit in it.

Am I ranting because I'm angry? Damn right, I am. If nothing else, I should praise Disco Elysium for making my blood boil at the time I wasted on it, because that red-hot rage against the dying of the light is life-affirming in ways that Disco Elysium is very much not. It needs psychiatric help and deserves my pity, but narcissistic emotional terrorist that it is, it has gone out of its way to make me hate it. I hope it goes and fucks itself.

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There is a restaurant a few miles from my house that is built in a literal pit. You can barely see the marquee sign from the road level, and, if you aren't already on the lookout for it, the building might as well be invisible. The property was built many years ago for a now-defunct family dining concept, and in the years since, one business after another has occupied the property for a brief couple of years, gone out of business, and been replaced by another business.

Driving past the building this weekend (and seeing only two cars in the parking lot), I caught myself wondering how much longer it could possibly stay open before it closes and the pattern repeats itself. Then I realized that the current business, a steakhouse, has been in place since 2020. That's six years, actually about average for the lifespan for a restaurant and even more impressive considering the Pandemic and malingering economic concerns.

Should I pretend that I didn't notice its longevity? When it does inevitably close, as all restaurants eventually must, should I still roll my eyes and quip that I was correct that their location doomed them to failure? Do I need to be right so badly that I'll ignore reality to salve my wounded ego? What would that sort of denial accomplish?

The restaurant is a success whether I want to admit it or not.

Let that be a lesson to myself: you need to recognize when you've allowed your biases to corrupt your thinking, because otherwise, in addition to the loneliness of living in your own alternate reality, you also just might stave to death.

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7/2577. More Than a Secretary (1936)
I keep confusing this movie with Skyscraper Souls, which was the last movie I watched in 2025, probably because both are about a professional woman who falls for a cad. In this one, Jean Arthur gets her man, but he's really not worth it, Jean.

8/2578. Cinema Paradiso (1988)
A very well told story about the early life of a man who falls in love with cinema itself. I read there's a director's cut that adds a bunch of story about the man's later life, but that could only possibly make this worse. Sometimes less really is more.

9/2579. Only Angels Have Wings (1939)
Jean Arthur again (TCM's Star of the Month), here with Cary Grant in an adventure tale about the early days of flight. Very entertaining.

10/2580. The Love Light (1921)
Less entertaining. It's kind of a silent version of The English Patient if that movie had been duller and taken place in the shadow of a light house. The last reel, with its a kidnapping and shipwreck, may have been necessary for a "happy" ending, but as much as I dislike The English Patient, it certainly knows that some endings shouldn't be happy.

12/2582. The Devil and Miss Jones (1941)
Not the one from the Golden Age of Porn. That's The Devil in Miss Jones. This one is a thoroughly delightful romantic comedy (starring Jean Arthur again) that is definitely worth watching. But be very careful when you're googling it at work.

More to come.

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The only downside to watching over two hundred hours of Olympic coverage in recent weeks is the constant bombardment of advertisements for the latest entry in the Georgia governor race, Rick Jackson. Apparently, he's a billionaire, and I only know that because A) he brags about it in his ads, and B) he bought ads in seemingly every possible commercial break. From someone who likes to remind us that he's a self-made billionaire, that doesn't seem like a very effective use of money.

The story of his by-his-bootstraps, up-from-foster-care wealth isn't the only thing I've learned from his commercials. He's also really into cutting taxes. A billionaire who doesn't want to pay taxes? How novel. I wonder if neither of us pays, which one comes out ahead?

To be fair, it seems everyone in the race wants to cut my taxes. Getting rid of income tax is a hot topic in Georgia politics right now. I say "right now," but it's a fact of life that no one ever wants to pay taxes. And, as an added bonus, if the state government doesn't have any money, then they don't have to worry that some of that money might be spent on people who "want to sit on your butt, binge watch Netflix, and scarf down Cheetos," to quote the Rick Jackson on my television. What kind of worthless scum likes watching movies and eating delicious snacks? Fuck those losers!

It would be disingenuous to call Rick Jackson an outsider in Georgia politics. He has long been a prominent (and deep-pocketed) donor to state and national Republicans. His late entry into this election indicates he doesn't think he's getting his money's worth from the current candidates. Though I'm no fan of his recent vow to become "Trump's favorite governor," I have read enough about Jackson to suspect he's probably a better human being than his vainglorious attempt to buy an election would indicate. It's nice to think that there are very fine people on both sides.

Therefore, I assume Jackson would be pleased to hear that many, many, many repeated viewings of his life story have already left an impact on my life. I'm so sick of his commercials that I have nicknamed the mute button on my remote the "Rick Jackson button."

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Today's hot take: despite what Kellogg's says in their current commercials, milk should not be "ice cold."

"Ice" is a fancy word (from Old English) for frozen water (32°F or colder, although the Old English preferred to measure temperature by testing whether water was solid enough to support their cans of furniture polish). Milk is mostly water, freezing at about 31°F, so there's not a lot of wiggle room between ice cold milk and frozen milk. And frozen milk is lousy (as the Old English can attest; back in their day, frozen milk meant frozen cows). There's a reason no one puts ice cubes in their Rice Krispies. In addition to being too crunchy, they're also too quiet. (No mooing.)

I like milk probably twice as much as the next guy, and yes, of course milk should be stored and served cold, but modern refrigerators are good enough for the job without additional solid-water support. Ice wagons went out of fashion with the Old English.

Which raises the question of what ice has to do with any part of breakfast? Neither bacon, sausage, eggs, tomatoes, mushrooms, beans, potatoes, and tea (the traditional English Breakfast) nor porridge and leftovers (the Old English breakfast) are tastier if cold. And no American wants their pancakes, waffles, oatmeal or coffee served cold, much less ice cold. If you ask me, there shouldn't even be ice in a cup of juice. Especially orange juice. Only a monster would put ice in their orange juice.

Maybe the best solution is if everyone could agree from now on to hold all the "ice." If it only manages to make any situation worse, what good is it? If you want to eat a lousy breakfast, that's your prerogative, but keep the "ice" to yourself, you assholes.

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Every day we awaken to find that the world isn't even the place it was the night before. Predictably, that constant instability has led to fear, fear to anger, anger to hate, and hate to suffering. The goal should be to try to curtail that path, not accelerate it. Any man can only take so much injustice, cruelty, and bad taste before hopelessness wins.

Which is why I'm demanding that Kroger return to its previous recipe for Bread and Butter Chips.

Back in the good old days, the ingredients were listed as "Fresh cucumbers, sugar, water, vinegar, and less than 2% of: salt, spices (including mustard and celery seed), calcium chloride, turmeric extract (color), gum arabic, natural flavors." The result: deliciousness!

But now? Kroger pickles have become a "Product of Vietnam" with ingredients "Cucumbers, sugar, water, vinegar, salt, mustard seeds, celery seeds, gum arabic, natural flavor, turmeric oleoresin (for color)." Those may look like small changes (just 3% more salt and 2% more sugar), presumably to keep the price down, but they translate to soggier, sweeter, inferior pickles. Blech. I'll never underestimate the value of calcium chloride again.

If I have to watch as the United States sides with corporations, racists, and the enablers of pedophiles over the welfare of its own citizens; disavows medical and climate science; scuttles the global economy; turns its back on former allies Europe and NATO; solicits bribes from criminals and tyrants around the globe; murders people in international waters and its own streets; and bullies media conglomerates, law firms, and astronauts to deny its immoral behavior — you know, all the things 78 million American people voted for in 2024 — then at the very least I should be able to enjoy my favorite pickles as the legacy of the America I used to know crumbles around me. If you can't find joy in the little things, what's left?

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In the Year of the Pandemic, 2020, "friend" Keith gifted me a copy of the video game The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt for PC. Keith likes it very, very much. I did not like either the first or second Witcher games, and after playing for a grand total of 6 hours, I decided I liked The Witcher 3 just as little. This is how I summed up that first experience for him back then:

So far there's only 1) a lot of talking with a bunch of characters who are all fucking assholes I want to kill (especially protagonist Geralt), and 2) me getting my ass handed to me (which isn't entirely unsatisfying because it means Gerald has died too).

Sounds like I had fun, no? But for various reasons, including a new and deep appreciation for another game from the same studio, Cyberpunk 2077, and the lingering doubt that I hadn't given it a fair enough shake the first time around, I decided I'd try Witcher 3 again on the Xbox this past week. My mistake. I made it a full 8 hours this time.

If you're unfamiliar, the game is 33% guiding your obtuse horse through bleak war-ravaged countryside modeled on the original Grimm brothers fairy tales (you know, the ones where witches pick their teeth with the bones of sugar-glazed abandoned children), 33% talking to assholes, and 33% being ambushed combat. I'll admit up front that even on the console I'm still bad at the combat. Very bad. Literally every type of enemy I have encountered in the game has killed me at least once. Some of them have killed me three, four, or more times. I'd finally had enough when the game sent me to a cave to be ambushed by a little goblin and his evil magic shadow... who together proceeded to kill me eight times in a row. With enough effort, I'm sure I could find the right tactics to eventually kill him (just like I eventually survived the mob of bandits who ambushed and killed me nine times in a row) and be rewarded with information on how to make killing him easier in future encounters. But I could get as much enjoyment from slamming my fingers in a car door, and I certainly don't look forward to whatever trick the game is planning to use to kill me next.

The only up side to this is that it appears to be a shared experience; if you Google reviews of this game, they will universally mention the lackluster and frustrating combat mechanics. That's definitely a feature, not a bug.

So if you're not supposed to play this "adventure" game for the killing, what's left? Those same reviews, including Keith's, universally applaud the storytelling. I cannot agree. Maybe I've never gotten deep enough into Geralt's quest to piss off everyone he meets, but I cannot buy in. Granted, this is a common Walter problem, especially with movies; I don't like spending any time with unpleasant characters. Does the story get great if I make it to the end? Sadly, like the number of licks it takes to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop, I'll never know.

Related side note: The characters most relevant to the story are all physically attractive (compared to most NPCs, who look like lepers who bathe in pig shit). And the cutscenes are frequently constructed with a pornographer's eye for finding ways to show these attractive characters naked. (I've never seen so many bare breasts in a video game that wasn't specifically about bare breasts.) Therefore, I'm suspicious that many of these glowing story reviews are influenced by something other than shallow characterization and the repetitive "fetch quest" plotting.

Now, I've been playing video games since before the country's first pandemic (1981's "Pac-Man Fever") which means I've played a lot of games. Maybe I'm getting soft in my old age, but with so many games available, I don't understand why anyone would spend the time to get better at this one. Keith, I don't know who hurt you badly enough that you find this kind of torture entertaining (you do know that the Internet is full of naked tits on demand, right?), but I'm done with The Witcher no matter how many they make.

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As I usually find when I already have an inkling of the correct answer, Google's AI response is wrong. (Is it ever right? What's the point of having access to the accrued knowledge of the human race if you never actually read it?)

I've read a lot of Superman comics, and I know that Superman has a yellow S-shield on a cape. However, I'll grant that not a lot of people actually read comic books anymore, Google apparently included. I'll also grant that Superman's cape in the influential 1940s animated Fleisher Studio cartoons was solid red (to make the animation easier and less costly), a trend that has been followed often in animated adaptations for similar reasons. But every live-action adaptation since Kirk Alyn's 15-part 1948 Superman serial has an S-shield on his cape. Maybe Google needs to watch more television.

Google's obviously wrong answer sent me looking through old comics for the real answer to my question of its first appearance, and the earliest I could find the cape shield in my copies of The Superman Chronicles reprints was in the historically significant¹ untitled Superman story² in Action Comics #13, cover dated June 1939, published on April 14, 1939.

Here's a sample panel, easily found in a Google Search™ (once I knew what I was looking for):

And, as if I needed any further confirmation, here are the issue's indexer notes from the fantastic (and Google-able) Grand Comics Database (GCD), online at comics.org since 1994:

The "S" symbol first appears on Superman's cape. ... Paul Cassidy is credited with adding the "S" symbol to the cape (but it only appears in some panels and not others), and the pencils and inks here look like his work. Note in particular the odd flying poses of Superman in panels one and five of the final page, which are characteristic of Cassidy. He claimed that [Superman creators Jerry] Siegel and [Joe] Shuster gave both he and Wayne Boring free reign to interpret the scripts as they liked.

Old school library for the win. Why did you make that so hard, Google?

¹ Action Comics #13 is most famous for being the first appearance of Superman's first recurring super villain: a bald criminal mastermind who vowed to "use this great intellect for crime" who called himself The Ultra-Humanite. (What, did you think it was Lex Luthor? That second-rate knock-off wouldn't show up for another 12 months.)

² The original publication has no printed title, which is not uncommon at the time. Modern reprints often refer this story as "Superman vs. the Cab Protective League," named for a protection racket organized by, you guessed it, the Ultra-Humanite. His criminal genius obviously didn't extend to naming things.

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