I would argue that 18 innings of baseball is entirely too much baseball. No one should be subjected to that much baseball, especially when there’s more baseball no less than 16 hours later.

As previously written, I fell asleep during the last time the Blue Jays played in the World Series. I woke up when it was all over. I regret that I didn’t fall asleep during this year’s World Series game 3 marathon. 

Had I slept I wouldn’t have been (silently) screaming at the bar television and, later in the night, my phone, at the coaching decisions of the Blue Jays’ manager. After a couple of substitutions due to injuries, Schneider started substituting players — even fan favourite Kirk, who had a three run homer earlier in the game — for players with some minor statistical advantage in very specific situations. Players that couldn’t hit. When those situations didn’t pay off and the Jays’ bullpen blew the lead, the Jays were stuck with these lesser hitters and a worse catcher for eleven more innings. 

There were moments in the last half of those 18 innings where, maybe, if Kirk or Barger or anyone else had stayed in the game and hit an extra base hit, instead of a strike-out, the outcome might have been different. If the manager had stuck to his starters and not over-managed scenarios in the 8th or 9th or 10th, maybe the game could have been won.

There’s a metaphor there about the current state of our over-managed neo-liberal hellscape. Somewhere.

The Blue Jays bounced back and won the next two games to come home with a 3-2 series lead. They couldn’t finish. Centimetres decided those games. A broken bat. A freeze frame slide. A stuck ball. A missed strike.

After a month of marinating on the series it can be written that it was the most painful Toronto loss – in a city used to losing – since, I would say, the 1993 NHL Campbell Conference finals. Also against Los Angeles (Kings), it was a loss that was at least offset by a Blue Jays World Series repeat that same year.

There is no offset this year.

I’ve been following the protests at Microsoft, against its direct support for genocide, since the keynote disruption back in May. Though there have been some internal protests at other tech giants, the ones at Microsoft were especially vocal and resilient. They kept at it despite corporate retaliation. Many protestors were fired. Microsoft even went so far as to block all internal emails that mentioned Palestine. The executives probably thought they were smart to block emails based on keywords within a company full of engineers that make the tooling that lets you block emails based on keywords. It was no surprise that an employee managed to bypass it, reaching thousands.

Every few months there is an article about how this young person at Microsoft or Google or whatever has retired early after saving most of their salary and not buying frivolous things on a mere $400,000 a year salary, so the bravery score for some of these protests is maybe a little lower. Sure, some risk having to leave the country or have much lower paying jobs and risk being blocklisted, though we’re under no illusion that the 12-year Azure veteran that quit in protest wasn’t well compensated. The commendation is that while other silicon valley corporate stooges largely remained quiet, Microsoft employees in particular kept speaking up and kept protesting.

At the end of September, it looked like they won: Microsoft blocks Israel’s use of its technology in mass surveillance of Palestinians (The Guardian). 

Though if you read their actual statement, a standard corporate boilerplate about “customer privacy” and “terms of service”, it’s difficult to buy their bullshit. Was it a win? There was no apology. Fired employees weren’t hired back. There was no comeuppance. They brushed aside their direct support, their CEO literally met with Israeli military officials¹, as a ToS violation.

Not long after news about Microsoft’s rivals emerged: Revealed: Israel demanded Google and Amazon use secret ‘wink’ to sidestep legal orders (The Guardian.) 

The pessimist in me sees a superficial PR move. Microsoft didn’t win the $1.2bn Israeli contract, losing to Google and Amazon, and that likely set plans to move that data out. There was resentment. The other cloud providers were more than willing to have a wink wink agreement with the Israeli government and with the Guardian investigation Microsoft couldn’t deny their way through it so they probably forced the migration out sooner. It was a T&S violation, yet Microsoft never said that those wiretaps were deleted. They were moved. Do other terms of service violators get that luxury?

The current “ceasefire” in Palestine is a semantic twist where what is meant is that Palestinians need to cease while Israel can keep firing. They want you to move on and forget. Microsoft is playing the same game, hoping the PR of stopping this one thing will somehow wash away the blood from all the logistical support it keeps providing Israel. Microsoft is IBMing its way through genocide. All of big tech is.

I think that in such a vindictive society as Israel’s it’s telling that after cutting ties with this program there was little Israeli blowback to Microsoft. Instead, it’s ranked as one of the best tech firms to work for in Israel.

Pressure needs to be kept up. They are scared. Even in their content divisions, as was shown in this funny bit from the Outer Worlds 2 press cycle (archive):

We’ve had absolutely no pushback or messages from on high [Microsoft] telling us don’t do this, or make sure you do this.”

[…]

Before we get further, a Microsoft rep interrupts to note that the company’s latest statements on the matter can be found online, and that they wanted to keep the conversation with Obsidian “focused on the game.”

And their silence about the fascist regime’s Halo imagery: Not Commenting Is Commenting - Aftermath

Like so many other cowardly and complicit tech CEOs of this age, and the companies they lead, Microsoft’s actions (or in this case, inaction) has done nothing today but remind us of something we already know: we should be spending our time and money elsewhere.

Which, yes, it’s true, though unfortunately in this era of consolidation it’s often unavoidable as so much content and infrastructure has been swallowed up by these megacorps. Sometimes you’ll lose out on content from creators incidentally caught in this web.

Though if you really want to avoid Microsoft, this single sentence from a Verge headline should really light your fire: Microsoft’s AI-powered copy and paste. AI-powered copy and paste. 

AI-powered copy and paste. 

At least they open sourced Zork. I guess?

1. “The company said its executives, including Nadella, were not aware Unit 8200 planned to use, or ultimately used,” Oh, really? They literally came to you saying they needed to store lots of audio files. Plausible deniability means you are either lying or stupid, because what would you think those audio files were? From an Israeli military unit? Murderboot audiobooks??

Related Links

What's Being Tested on Palestinians Will Be Used on the Rest of Us (capital & empire) 

This has been said many times over the years, and with each passing year it becomes more apparent how true it is.

Again and again, Palestinians urged the West to stop saying “ceasefire.” Nothing has stopped. “Ceasefire” is a word Western governments use to calm their own publics, not one that reflects the reality on the ground, they said.

“You’re not just fighting for us,” countless Palestinians told us. “You’re fighting for yourselves.” What’s being tested on Palestinians today, many warned, is what the capitalist class intends to enforce on people everywhere tomorrow.

SCOOP: Apple Quietly Made ICE Agents a Protected Class (migrant insider) (archive)

The decision effectively treats federal immigration agents as a protected class — a novel interpretation of Apple’s hate-speech policy that shields one of the most powerful arms of government from public scrutiny.

Online Mentions Of Canadians’ IDF Service Are Disappearing (the maple)

The Maple is doing good work documenting this.

Below, you’ll find a list of soldiers whose profiles contain links to pages mentioning their Israeli military service that have since been deleted or altered. We’re not suggesting the named individuals were responsible for these changes. The names with asterisks beside them are ones who have served in the Israeli military since Oct. 7, 2023.

Elon Musk Really Doesn't Get 'The Lord of the Rings' | WIRED (archive)

“Attaching yourself to Tolkien is part of a larger psychological phenomenon,” says Emma Vossen, a Tolkien scholar and assistant professor of Game Studies at Brock University in Ontario, Canada. “Those who wish to oppress need to see themselves as underdogs (i.e., Hobbits) to justify their actions and values to themselves. It’s very similar to the way the far right uses and abuses the bible to justify their actions.”

Vladimir Guerrero Jr. Is A Canadian Hero | Defector (archive)

The above doesn’t touch on it but the huge attention the Blue Jays received in the fall brought with it the usual bands of grifters and racists. One recurring thread was that Vladimir Guerrero Jr. isn’t Canadian because “he don’t speak English good.” Mind you, he was literally born in Canada and is a Canadian citizen. 

There is a hidden privilege to a stable life. For a very young Vladimir Guerrero Jr. life wasn’t as stable, much like the Expos, and that meant going back to the Dominican Republic. He grew up there, and split time in the USA, and… still is Canadian.

If you let people put conditions on Canadianness then you open the doors to right wing American rhetoric, nationalists, racists, and those that want to define being Canadian as being vassal to the USA (if not absorbed.) We can’t let that shit fly here. If a $300 million dollar superstar that was born here isn’t safe from it, what hope do the rest of us, who grew up on shitty Tim Bits, and Telefrancais, and Hockey Night in Canada, and constant repeats of “Life is a Highway”, and were not born here, have?

Listen to this

In the early 1990s Soichi Terada, along with Shinichiro Yokota, formed the label Far East Recording in Japan. Inspired by electronic genres coming out of the USA and UK at the time, like house and hip-hop and jungle and d&b, he released a bunch of singles and albums fusing those sounds with local Japanese influences. They mostly stayed within Japan, obscure to anyone outside.

Under the alias Sumo Jungle, his more d&b focused music caught the ear of a game director at Sony and Soichi Terada, already a Playstation fan, was given the opportunity to make the music for what would eventually become Ape Escape. The game was a hit, a showcase for Playstation’s new Dual Shock controllers, and spread Terada’s version of d&b around the world and into many kids' bedrooms.

For many people outside of Japan, Soichi Terada was known for being the Ape Escape composer. And in its own way this was hugely influential. There is a very specific type of d&b nostalgic revival two decades later specifically tied to Playstation aesthetics (in parallel to another d&b/jungle revival more connected to its UK dancehall origins.)

Outside of Ape Escape, Terada remained obscure. Around 2014 London’s Hhatri (“History has a tendency to repeat itself” a good name for a reissue label but also something that is becoming a recurring theme in my writing) reissued some tracks. The following year Dutch label Rush Hour followed up with an expansive compilation of early Far East Recordings, including some by Shinichiro Yokota, and like Ape Escape it became a huge hit.

Almost instantly Terada was thrown into international renown. He was being booked to DJ around the world, he was releasing new music, he was acknowledged as a pioneer of “J-House”. A genuine feel good “you love to see it” scenario for a man long known only as the Ape Escape guy.

It’s been 10 years now and a 2025 edition of Sounds from the Far East was released a few weeks ago with a digital bonus track “Into the Desert” and it’s been my jam heading into December. A mellow, almost alternative universe SEGA Genesis soundtrack, J-House voyage flying under the banner of YMO’s influence:

((( My favourite piece of Terada lore is that he worked on a big Sony RPG project, and finished a lot of music for it!, back when the big thing on consoles was cinematic Japanese Role Playing Games. In general, the post Final Fantasy VII era. Sony wanted something first-party and threw a lot of money on the project. It was so expansive that the director had a mental breakdown and disassociated from reality. The project was shortly cancelled.

A lot of non-archivist folks throw around the term “lost media” to refer to something you can find on YouTube. That entire soundtrack, and whatever art was created along the way, is true lost and hope some of it surfaces someday. )))

Until some other time,