Never Trust A Corporation To Do A Library’s Job

Posted by Andy Baio

As Google abandons its past, Internet archivists step in to save our collective memory

Google wrote its mission statement in 1999, a year after launch, setting the course for the company’s next decade:

“Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”

For years, Google’s mission included the preservation of the past.

In 2001, Google made their first acquisition, the Deja archives. The largest collection of Usenet archives, Google relaunched it as Google Groups, supplemented with archived messages going back to 1981.

In 2004, Google Books signaled the company’s intention to scan every known book, partnering with libraries and developing its own book scanner capable of digitizing 1,000 pages per hour.

In 2006, Google News Archive launched, with historical news articles dating back 200 years. In 2008, they expanded it to include their own digitization efforts, scanning newspapers that were never online.

In the last five years, starting around 2010, the shifting priorities of Google’s management left these archival projects in limbo, or abandoned entirely.

After a series of redesigns, Google Groups is effectively dead for research purposes. The archives, while still online, have no means of searching by date.

Google News Archives are dead, killed off in 2011, now directing searchers to just use Google.

Google Books is still online, but curtailed their scanning efforts in recent years, likely discouraged by a decade of legal wrangling still in appeal. The official blog stopped updating in 2012 and the Twitter account’s been dormant since February 2013.

Even Google Search, their flagship product, stopped focusing on the history of the web. In 2011, Google removed the Timeline view letting users filter search results by date, while a series of major changes to their search ranking algorithm increasingly favored freshness over older pages from established sources. (To the detriment of some.)

Two months ago, Larry Page said the company’s outgrown its 14-year-old mission statement. Its ambitions have grown, and its priorities have shifted.

Google in 2015 is focused on the present and future. Its social and mobile efforts, experiments with robotics and artificial intelligence, self-driving vehicles and fiberoptics.

As it turns out, organizing the world’s information isn’t always profitable. Projects that preserve the past for the public good aren’t really a big profit center. Old Google knew that, but didn’t seem to care.

The desire to preserve the past died along with 20% time, Google Labs, and the spirit of haphazard experimentation.

Google may have dropped the ball on the past, but fortunately, someone was there to pick it up.

The Internet Archive is mostly known for archiving the web, a task the San Francisco-based nonprofit has tirelessly done since 1996, two years before Google was founded.

The Wayback Machine now indexes over 435 billion webpages going back nearly 20 years, the largest archive of the web.

For most people, it ends there. But that’s barely scratching the surface.

Most don’t know that the Internet Archive also hosts:

That last item, the software collection, may start to change public perception and awareness of the Internet Archive.

Title screen from 1988’s Neuromancer. Soundtrack by Devo. Yes, really.

Spearheaded by archivist/filmmaker Jason Scott, the software preservation effort began on his own site in 2004 with a massive collection of shareware CD-ROMs from the BBS age.

After he joined the Internet Archive as an employee, he started shoveling all that vintage software onto their servers, along with software gathered from historic FTP sites, shareware websites, tape archives, and anything else he could find.

But actually using old software can be rough even for experienced geeks, often requiring a maze of outdated archival utilities, obscure file formats, and emulators to run.

In October 2011, Jason Scott wrote a call-to-arms aimed at making computer history accessible and ubiquitous — by porting classic systems to the browser.

“Without sounding too superlative, I think this will change computer history forever. The ability to bring software up and running into any browser window will enable instant, clear recall and reference of the computing experience to millions.”

The project started attempting a Javascript port of MESS, the incredible open-source project to emulate over 900 different computers, consoles, and hardware platforms, everything from the Atari 2600 and Commodore 64 to your old Speak & Spell and Texas Instruments graphic calculator.

Two years later, it was all real.

In October 2013, the Internet Archive tested the waters with the Historical Software Collection, 64 historic games and applications from computing history playable in the browser. No installation required — just one click, and you were trying out Spacewar! for the PDP-1, VisiCalc for the Apple II, or Pitfall for the Atari 2600.

By Christmas, they launched The Console Living Room, nearly 3,000 games from a dozen different consoles. Popular systems like the ColecoVision and Sega Genesis were represented, but also obscure and hard-to-find consoles like the Fairchild Channel F and Watara SuperVision.

A year later, they launched the Internet Arcade — hundreds of classic arcade games emulated with JSMAME, part of the JSMESS package.

Earlier this month, the Archive made headlines with the latest addition to its collection: nearly 2,300 vintage MS-DOS games, playable in the browser.

A technical breakthrough, the games are played on the popular DOSBox emulator, ported to Javascript by one brilliant, talented engineer.

The experience of clicking a link and playing a game you haven’t seen in 25 years is magical, and many other people felt the same way.

News of the MS-DOS Game Collection got widespread media coverage, including The Washington Post, The Verge, and The Guardian, with thousands of people hitting the site every minute.

Millions of people are discovering software they’ve never seen before, or revisiting games from their past. People are making Let’s Play videos of 30-year-old games, played in a Chrome tab.

When this launched, there were dozens of confused comments from people wondering what old videogames has to do with Internet history.

In my mind, this stems from mistaken perception issues of the Internet Archive as solely an institution saving webpages.

But their mission and motto is much broader:

Universal access to all knowledge.

The Internet Archive is not Google.

The Internet Archive is a chaotic, beautiful mess. It’s not well-organized, and its tools for browsing and searching the wealth of material on there are still rudimentary, but getting better.

But this software emulation project feels, to me, like the kind of thing Google would have tried in 2003. Big, bold, technically challenging, and for the greater good.

This effort is the perfect articulation of what makes the Internet Archive great — with repercussions for the future we won’t fully appreciate for years.

But here’s a glimpse: last week, one of the JSMESS developers managed to get Netscape running on Windows 3.1 with functional networking. All of computing history is within our grasp, accessible from a single click, and this is the first step.

I played Solitaire while I waited for Trumpet Winsock to connect to the Internet. In a Chrome tab.

It’s not just about games — that’s just the hook.

It’s about preserving our digital history, which as we know now, is as easy to delete as 15 years of GeoCities.

We can’t expect for-profit corporations to care about the past, but we can support the independent, nonprofit organizations that do.

Title screen from Abandoned Places: A Time for Heroes, an RPG from 1993 I’ve never heard of, but started playing within ten seconds of seeing the title for the first time.

This post was originally published in January 2015 on Medium as part of The Message.

Pirating the 2015 Oscars: HD Edition

Posted by Andy Baio

In January 2004, the Los Angeles Times published an article headlined “Screener Ends Up on the Internet,” a story about the recent leak of the Something’s Gotta Give screener copy intended for Oscar voters.

This headline struck me as laughably clueless — like reading “Local Man Views Pornography On Internet” — but the MPAA statements inside were even more surreal, claiming it “marked the first time a so-called screener sent to an Oscar voter had been made available for illegal copying.”

Anyone who’d spent ten minutes on Usenet in the early 2000s knew this was nonsense. Oscar screeners leaked regularly and reliably, often with watermarks intact, typically around December and early January when they were mailed to Academy voters.

So I did a little digging and found that all but one of that year’s 22 nominated films were already online.

A decade later, it’s become an annual ritual for me.

On the morning the Oscar nominees are announced, I roll out of bed, load up some tabs, and start doing research into every nominated film.

The result is this Google Spreadsheet encompassing all 413 Oscar-nominated feature films for the last 13 years.

A glimpse at the data for this year’s nominees. Here’s the full version.

Along with the official U.S. and Oscar screener release dates, I include the leak dates for each major way that films typically find their way online:

  1. Cam. The old standby, a handheld camera in a theater. The worst quality, and increasingly uncommon.
  2. Telesync. Typically, a cam with better audio, often from headphone jacks in theater seats intended as hearing aids.
  3. Telecine, R5, PPV, Webrip, and HDRips. The terminology and sourcing’s changed through the years, but these are all high-quality rips with solid audio and video. (Generally speaking, Telecines were ripped from original prints distributed to theaters, R5 from “Region 5” DVDs sent to other regions to combat piracy, PPV from advanced pay-per-view sources, Webrip from early online releases like iTunes, and HDRip from a variety of sources, but typically from HDTV.)
  4. Screener. Great quality, usually intended for media or competition review, but can leak at any point in the distribution chain, often with watermarks intact. (As Ellen DeGeneres knows well.)
  5. Retail. A rip from the official retail release.

And then I use a little spreadsheet magic to calculate tables with a bunch of stats tracking how many films leaked online and how quickly.

Yes, this is my idea of a good time. I’m great at parties.

DVD In An HD World

In April 2004, the MPAA was already crowing about a decline in screener piracy, citing their watermarking technology and FBI assistance to increase accountability.

This was the start of a decade-long battle against screener piracy, but a funny thing happened in the last couple years:

Screeners weren’t declining then, but they’re declining now. But not because of increased accountability, watermarks, or new DRM technology.

Screeners aren’t leaking because they don’t matter anymore.

Think of it this way:

If you’re in a scene release group—one of the underground bands of misfits with names like SiMPLE, EVO, or TiTAN you see tagged in every torrent — you’re competing with dozens of others trying to release films online as quickly as possible, at the highest possible quality.

If you’re the first to release a highly-prized film in a high-quality release, you win bragging rights over every other group.

A release that’s lower quality than one already leaked by someone else? Completely worthless. A cam isn’t great, but a telesync is better. A telecine is marginally better than a telesync, but a watermarked screener? Much, much better.

But here’s the thing: screeners are stuck in the last decade. While we’re all streaming HD movies from iTunes or Netflix, the movie studios almost universally send screeners by mail on DVDs, which is forever stuck in low-resolution standard-definition quality. A small handful are sent in higher-definition Blu-ray.

This year, one Academy member received 68 screeners — 59 on DVD and only nine on Blu-ray. Only 13% of screeners were sent to voters in HD quality.

As a result, virtually any HD source is more prestigious than a DVD screener. And with the shift to online distribution, there’s an increasing supply of possible HD sources to draw from before screeners are ever sent to voters.

On December 27, Foxcatcher leaked online in HD quality by the release group EVO with hardcoded Arabic subtitles, a pretty strong indication it wasn’t sourced from a screener.

EVO released a new version without subtitles on January 6, captured from a 1080p source and released as a WEB-DL.

Even if someone did manage to get a copy of the Foxcatcher DVD screener right now, it’s unlikely it would ever be released. It’s garbage compared to either of these two releases — standard-definition and likely littered with watermarks or other dumb security precautions.

Now, in 2015, Oscar-nominated films leak online as quickly and consistently as ever.

Of this year’s 36 nominated films, 34 already leaked online in some form — everything except Song of the Sea and Glen Campbell: I’ll Be Me.

But only 36% of those were leaked from screeners, down from a high of 89% in 2003 and 2004.

With the caveat that there’s a month left before the Oscar ceremony, the chart below shows the percentage of screeners that have leaked online by Oscar night since 2003.

What the MPAA Thinks Is Leaking

Percentage of screeners copies that leaked before Oscar night

Seems to be trending downward, right? The Academy must finally be winning the war against piracy! Huzzah!

Not so fast.

Here’s the percentage of films that have leaked in any high-quality format — whether ripped from the web, pay-per-view, retail or screeners — before Oscar night.

What’s Actually Leaking

Percentage of films available in high-quality format online before Oscar night. Note: The 2015 percentage will almost certainly go up before Oscar night.



Already, with a month to go before the ceremony, 92% of this year’s nominated films have already leaked in DVD or higher quality, more than last year. (Inevitably, this number will rise in the days leading up to the ceremony.)

The big change: A staggering 44% of this year’s crop of nominees leaked as a high-quality rip from some source outside of traditional screeners or retail releases — the highest percentage since I started tracking films in 2003.

The insatiable appetite for HD video led pirate groups to find new pipelines for sharing films before they even reach voters’ mailboxes, and in much better quality. These new sources for HD leaks, lurking anywhere from mastering studios to the mailroom, may be much harder for the MPAA to find than leaks from their own members.

Pirates are now watching films at higher quality than the industry insiders voting on them.

The industry’s reliance on DVDs for review copies, combined with their insistence on watermarks and other irritating security measures, made them undesirable in an HD world.

But the studios may not have a choice. Academy voters are an older crowd — the average age is 63 — who may not own Blu-ray players or be comfortable watching screeners online. If studios want their films viewed, they’re stuck stuffing DVDs in envelopes.

Eventually, the industry will need to adapt to digital distribution as DVDs die along with the oldest generation of voters.

Until then, Academy voters hoping to review HD films at home will have to do like the pirates do — grab some popcorn, turn down the lights, and fire up BitTorrent.

Notes on Methodology

For my spreadsheet, I include the full-length feature films in every Oscar category except documentary and foreign films — even music, makeup, and costume design.

I use IMDB for the release dates, always using the first available U.S. date, even if it was a limited release.

All the leak dates are taken from VCD Quality, supplemented by dates in ORLYDB. I always use the first leak date, excluding unviewable or incomplete nuked releases.

The official screener release dates are from Academy member Ken Rudolph, who kindly lists the dates he receives each screener on his personal homepage.

Questions, corrections, or additions? You can find me on Twitter.

(Note: I originally posted this article to The Message on Medium.)

Block With Abandon

Posted by Andy Baio

Last week, my friend Jessamyn rounded up a list of Internet Resolutions from the writers of The Message, the blog/zine/thing I contribute to on Medium.

I don’t normally make New Year’s Resolutions, online or off, but I made an exception this year. Here’s mine:

“Block with abandon. I spent far too many emotional cycles last year on people arguing with me in bad faith, diving into arguments that could never be won. At some point, I stopped arguing and started blocking. I blocked hundreds of randos who insulted me or threatened people I admire— sea lions sauntering their way into my attention — and turned the Internet into something I could love again. Never. Again.”

As of today, I’ve blocked 603 accounts, the vast majority of those in the last three months.

Last month, I threw a Lazyweb request out into the ether:

Within seconds, Phil Renaud replied:

A few days later, he delivered Twitter Quicker Blocker, a Chrome add-on that does one thing beautifully: it turns blocking into a one-click process from the Twitter website. (Two weeks later, Brian Henriquez made his own as a learning exercise.)

Here’s what that looks like:

For me, this was enough to make Twitter usable again. For those facing heavier abuse and harassment, tools like Block Together, GG Auto Blocker, and The Block Bot are out there.

Ideally, Twitter would provide better tools for managing your experience and coping with Internet assholes, but until then, I’m grateful to all the devs trying to make things better.

Playing With My Son

Posted by Andy Baio

There’s a classic Steve Martin bit from A Wild and Crazy Guy…

“I got a great dirty trick you can play on a three-year-old kid… Whenever you’re around him, talk wrong. So now it’s like his first day in school and he raises his hand, ‘May I mambo dogface to the banana patch?’”

I’m not sure if it’s a great idea to take parenting advice from 1970s standup albums, but this always made sense to me.

If you have a kid, why not run experiments on them? It’s like running experiments on a little clone of yourself! And almost always probably legal.

It’s disappointing how many people have children and miss this golden opportunity, usually waiting until they’re in their teens to start playing mindgames with them.

Before my son was born in 2004, I was prepared. I’d brainstormed a long list of sociological and psychological experiments with friends and coworkers, ready to unleash my inner Milgram on my unborn offspring.

My original plan was to raise him thinking he was living in a computer simulation, but sadly, my wife vetoed it. And any other potentially harmful, but funny, life-altering scenarios.

But I managed to sneak one in anyway.

I was born in 1977 — the same year the Atari 2600 was released and a year before Space Invaders. I was lucky enough to be born into the golden age of arcade gaming, and played through each subsequent generation as I grew up.

My son Eliot was born in 2004 — the year of Half-Life 2, Doom 3, and the launch of the Nintendo DS. By the time he was born, video games were a $26B industry.

I love games, and I genuinely wanted Eliot to love and appreciate them too. So, here was my experiment:

What happens when a 21st-century kid plays through video game history in chronological order?

Start with the arcade classics and Atari 2600, from Asteroids to Zaxxon. After a year, move on to the 8-bit era with the NES and Sega classics. The next year, the SNES, Game Boy, and classic PC adventure games. Then the PlayStation and N64, Xbox and GBA, and so on until we’re caught up with the modern era of gaming.

Would that child better appreciate modern independent games that don’t have the budgets of AAA monstrosities like Destiny and Call of Duty? Would they appreciate the retro aesthetic, or just think it looks crappy?

Or would they just grow up thinking that video game technology moved at a breakneck speed when they were kids, and slammed to a halt as soon as they hit adolescence?

On Eliot’s fourth birthday, I started him with a Pac-Man plug-and-play TV game loaded with arcade classics — Galaxian (1979), Rally-X (1980), Bosconian (1981), Dig Dug (1982), and of course, Pac-Man (1980) and three sequels, Super Pac-Man (1982), Pac-Man Plus (1982), and Pac & Pal (1983).

Until the moment he picked up the joystick, part of me secretly dreaded he’d have no interest in it.

In the days leading up to his birth, I’d jolt awake in a cold sweat from nightmares of raising a six-year-old athlete, begging me to go outside to play football or baseball or some other dreaded physical activity.

Crisis averted.

He got better quickly. Six weeks later, he was beating my high scores in Dig Dug and regularly getting to higher stages of Pac-Man and its sequels.

I picked up another plug-and-play TV game — Ms. Pac-Man, Galaga, Mappy, Pole Position, and Xevious — and we played through the games together.

When we got bored of those, we hooked up my old Atari 2600, and we played through my collection of lo-fi gems like Asteroids, Kaboom!, Adventure, Combat, and (yes) E.T., but most didn’t hold up well.

It was time to move on to the next generation.

Four months into the experiment, with Eliot not even 4 1/2 years old, we’d jumped to the 8-bit era.

I loaded up an emulator and we started working our way through the NES canon.

At first, he sat on my lap and we took turns playing. Usually, he’d take the controls, but I’d step in for the tricky parts.

By age 5, he could beat some parts of moderately-difficult platformers like Super Mario 3.

By age 6, he was beating entire games on his own. He finished The Legend of Zelda on his own, and then finished the very difficult second quest with some mapping assistance.

We’d finished Super Mario Bros. 1-3, Mega Man 1–6, Castlevania 1–3, Rygar, Contra, and Duck Tales.

It was time to level up again.

I never owned a Super Nintendo or Nintendo 64 — I’d moved on to PC gaming by then — so many of these games were new to me.

We played through Link to the Past and Super Mario World, and discovered some lesser-known gems together that became all-time favorites.

By the beginning of 2011, we’d moved on to the N64. The beginning of the 3D era on consoles didn’t age well in my eyes, but Eliot didn’t seem to mind. We beat the brilliant Ocarina of Time and Majora’s Mask, and fell in love with the criminally underrated Rocket: Robot on Wheels.

By the time he turned seven, Eliot had collected every star in Super Mario 64.

After that, we skipped straight to the 2000s. On the PlayStation 2, we played through ICO, Shadow of the Colossus, and the original Katamari Damacy, released the year he was born.

The experiment was complete.

This approach to widely surveying classic games clearly had an impact on him, and influenced the games that he likes now.

Like seemingly every kid his age, he loves Minecraft. No surprises there.

But he also loves brutally difficult games that challenge gamers 2–3 times his age, and he’s frighteningly good at them. His favorites usually borrow characteristics from roguelikes: procedurally-generated levels, permanent death, no save points.

One of his favorite games is Spelunky, easily one of the most difficult games I’ve ever played. Paste Magazine called it “a game with ‘hard’ carved into its very being.” I’ve never beaten it. I will probably never beat it.

A month after his eighth birthday, he beat Spelunky on his own.

But Spelunky isn’t like other games. Eliot may have beaten the game, but there’s a second, much harder ending — by going to Hell.

Tom Francis explains:

“To complete Spelunky, you just have to survive 15 randomly generated levels and then trick the final boss into killing itself. To get to hell, though, you have to perform a series of specific rituals in a specific order, using unique objects that crop up in different places each time, and then defeat the boss in a particularly audacious way to use his death as a stepping stone to the underworld.”

It’s one of the most difficult feats in gaming. I only know a couple people who have done it. For Tom Francis, it was “the hardest thing I’ve ever managed in a video game… It only took 41 minutes, but it took me hundreds of hours of play — and about 3,000 deaths — to learn how to do those 41 minutes.”

Three months ago, Eliot beat Spelunky the hard way. The game’s creator, Derek Yu, thinks he may be the youngest person to have done it.

After beating Spelunky, Eliot was ready for a new challenge. He asked me to buy him a new game he found through YouTube — Nuclear Throne, Vlambeer’s action roguelike-like known for its relentless difficulty. A week later:

Nuclear Throne, like many indie games developed by a tiny team, has a very old-school aesthetic.

And this, for me, is the most interesting impact of the experiment.

Eliot’s early exposure to games with limited graphics inoculated him from the flashy, hyper-realistic graphics found in today’s AAA games. He can appreciate retro graphics on its own terms, and focus on the gameplay.

The lo-fi graphics in games like VVVVVV, FTL, or Cave Story might turn off other kids his age, but like me, he’s drawn to them.

My hope is that this experiment instilled a life-long appreciation for smaller, weirder, more intimate games in him.

So I gave my son a crash course in video game history, compressing 25 years of gaming history into about four years.

At this point, you’re probably either thinking I’m a monster or a pretty awesome dad. Maybe a little of both.

That’s okay with me. My son is amazing, he loves video games, and more than anything, he loves playing them with me.

Ready, player two?

It’s about ethics in video game parenting.

I first published this post in December 2014, as part of The Message, a publication on Medium.

Six months later, I spoke about it in front of an audience at GEL, a conference in New York City.

Black Lives Matter

Posted by Andy Baio

Jay Smooth’s new The Illipsis video for Fusion on rioting in Ferguson was so powerful a debunking of a common racist trope, I felt compelled to transcribe it in the hopes more people would read it, quote it, and pass it on.

Take it away, Jay.

Jay Smooth:

So, I want to talk for a minute about human beings and about riots.

This past Monday night, while we were all sitting there waiting for that blow that we all knew was coming and hoping that we might be wrong just this one time, I said on Twitter that, “The fundamental danger of a non-indictment is not more riots, it is more Darren Wilsons.”

That thought struck a chord with a lot of people; it was linked to more than any tweet that I’ve ever made. But later on that night, we saw some things happen in Ferguson. We saw some unrest, we saw things you could call rioting.

And when that happened, a bunch of other people on Twitter were delighted by the idea that that heartache and grief and rage gave them a social media “gotcha” moment.

“So who’s the real danger now, Mr. Social Justice Warrior? You see all those thugs out there? You see how you people act? What do you have to say now?”

Well, here’s what I think now: I believe what I said. Now, more than ever.

And if you think what happened on Monday disproves what I said, you didn’t understand what I was talking about.

I wasn’t happy at all about what happened Monday night. I hate to see people pushed that far. I hate to see people’s community, family businesses destroyed. I hated seeing that.

But I’m also clear that if you ask me to weigh one against the other, we are weighing the destruction of property against the loss of a life. And if you value some people’s property more than the life of a black child, we’re not on the same team.

And regardless of that, for us to even discuss caring about one or the other is presenting a false choice because they’re not in opposition to each other. One is a byproduct of the other.

That unrest we saw Monday night was a byproduct of the injustice that preceded it.

This is not a choice, this is a cause-and-effect relationship. If you’re worried about the effects, you need to be thinking about the cause.

Riots are a thing that human beings do because human beings have limits.

We don’t all have the same limits. For some of us, our human limit is when our favorite team loses a game. For some of us, it’s when our favorite team wins a game.

The people of Ferguson had a different limit than that.

For the people of Ferguson, a lifetime of neglect and de facto segregation and incompetence and mistreatment by every level of government was not their limit.

When that maligned neglect set the stage for one of their children to be shot down and left in the street like a piece of trash, that was not their limit.

For the people of Ferguson, spending 100 days almost entirely peacefully protesting for some measure of justice for that child and having their desire for justice treated like a joke by every local authority was not their limit.

And then after those 100 days, when the so-called “prosecutor” waited until the dead of night to come out and twist that knife one last time, when he came out and confirmed once and for all that Michael Brown’s life didn’t matter, only then did the people of Ferguson reach their limit.

So when you look at what happened Monday night, the question you should be asking is how did these human beings last that long before they reached their human limit?

How do black people in America retain such a deep well of humanity that they can be pushed so far again and again without reaching their human limit?

How do we keep going through this same cycle? Because that’s the thing, it’s not just these 100 days. It’s the 100 times this cycle played out before Michael Brown.

The thing about that tweet I sent out Monday night? That tweet wasn’t really from Monday night.

I made the exact same tweet a year and a half ago about Trayvon Martin. The exact same tweet, word for word, all I did was switch out the name.

And that’s how sick, that’s how predictable and sick this white supremacy Groundhog Day is that we live in. You can literally, word for word, have the exact same conversation, year after year, and just switch out the name of the black child we lost.

There is nothing more exhausting or more inhumane than black America’s eternal cycle of being shocked but not surprised.

When you have to go through your whole life with all your muscles tensed, waiting for the same blow to come again and again, knowing it will hurt a bit more each time precisely because you always know it’s coming. And then you have to teach your children how to go through the same cycle.

That’s the definition of torture. Those are not fit living conditions for a human being.

So when I see President Obama say he has “no sympathy” for people who destroy a car? I’m sorry, but I do have sympathy for them.

I’m not happy to see them doing it, but human beings have limits.

When I watch that footage of Michael Brown’s mother out there crushed and heartbroken and I see her family talk about burning this thing down, I’m not happy to see that, but I don’t think we should be making excuses for that. I don’t think we should be explaining that away.

I don’t think there’s anything to be ashamed of. That is real life. That is what happens when you treat human beings this way.

So if you hated what you saw on Monday night, if you hated seeing those human beings pushed past their limit, you need to do something about the government, the justice system, and the institutions of policing that do not treat them like human beings.

If you watched the news Monday night and didn’t like the effects, you need to do something about the cause.

You, I, we need to go out there and make this country into a place where black lives matter.

Liked this? Go follow Jay Smooth on Twitter and go watch everything he’s ever made. It’s time well-spent.

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