Cursed adapters - click at your own risk
Also, Dad Thriller follow-up and a fun real-estate surprise!
You’re reading Read Max, a newsletter about the future, action movies, and occult technology. This is a Friday edition, a roundup of links, videos, reader mail, stupid riffs, and other ways to waste your afternoon. Have a good weekend. I’ll be back with another column on Tuesday.
Nothing brought me quite as much joy this week as this TikTok video, from user @maddy_deee:
For people without a technical background, HDMI is an interface for transmitting audio and video from a source (like a laptop or Apple TV) to a destination (like a monitor or TV), and a hose is an interface for transmitting water from a source (like a water line) to a destination (like a garden bed). @maddy_deee has home-printed an adapter that connects the hose to HDMI, allowing him to both transmit video and audio signals to the water line, and to transmit water to his laptop.
You’ll see in the replies to that tweet many people describing it as a “cursed adapter.” I disagree. It is a blessed adapter, but to understand why, we need to understand what a “cursed adapter” is.
A “cursed adapter” is an adapter or converter created to link interfaces that have no business being linked together. Twitter user @foone is an expert in the “cursed adapter” space, documenting in their threads the unsettling horror of cursed adapters available for purchase online. Here for example is an XLR-to-pneumatic-air converter that on first blush purports “to convert between compressed air and balanced stereo.” What the converter is actually for, as @foone explains in the thread, is sex machines/dildos.
Why do cursed adapters exist? If you go to a hardware store around Christmas, especially in an area where people tend to go wild with their decorations, you may see signs like this:
People will chain long strings of holiday lights together, only to end up at the wall outlet with the “female” end of the lights. Rather than restring their lights, they bundle up and head to the hardware store, hoping to just buy a simple male-to-male power adapter, allowing them to plug their lights in quickly and easily. What they do not know is that power cords with two male ends are called “suicide cords.” If you plug a suicide cord into your wall, the other end is live and exposed, and will likely kill you if you touch the metal prongs, among other dangers.
So, a responsible hardware store will tell them to turn around, go home, and re-do their Christmas decorations. Amazon has no such compunction:
There’s a good meme about this, BTW:
Why is Amazon selling male-to-male power cables? Why do they even exist? Well, because shoppers want to buy them. People looking for quick-and-dirty ways to plug their house into their generator, or to fix a hastily planned Christmas-lights situation, are searching for male-male cables. Out on the other end of the Amazon platform are drop-shipping businesses and electronics manufacturers, receiving this signal, shrugging their shoulders, and meeting an apparent market need. This is the logic behind the cursed adapter. It is the wretched effluence of the platform ecosystem.
This is not the case with @maddy_deee’s HDMI-to-hose converter. It’s not a useless or dangerous object. Unlike many cursed adapters, it works perfectly well: it transmits water from the hose to the HDMI port. It wasn’t built to satisfy some imagined need expressed by lost souls searching AliExpress. It was printed as an expression of humanity’s promethean will to mastery. For that reason, we can call it blessed.
Two essays on the work of the Marxist ecologist Andreas Malm, one by James Butler and one by Adam Tooze, both published in this week’s London Review of Books, make for bracing reading. Butler:
Malm frequently observes that climate inaction is a recursive cycle: the longer emissions continue, the more dramatic efforts at mitigation and adaptation must be. As inaction gradually closes off all possible options save the most extreme, political turbulence is inevitable. Inaction from politicians is understandable: significant blocs of voters reward progressive climate rhetoric, but it is less clear that they reward action itself. Beyond the political class, explanations are harder to find. Perhaps the extended temporal frame of climate change invites procrastination, or we are wired to expect basic homeostasis, both political and ecological, or merely prefer immediate personal comfort to the disruption of real change. Malm himself prefers to draw attention to the overwhelming difficulty of confronting the carbon system as a totality, both intellectually and politically.
Tooze:
Given how remote the goal of comprehensive decarbonisation is, it is less the aim than the manner of politics that matters. Given the reality of the underlying conflict, division and strife are not to be regretted, but embraced – an essential Leninist lesson. To adopt an antagonistic stance is to do no more than respond adequately to the situation. As Malm and the collective conclude in White Skin, Black Fuel, ‘if nothing else, the anti-climate politics of the far right should shatter any remaining illusion that fossil fuels can be relinquished through some kind of smooth, reasoned transition ...A transition will happen through intense polarisation and confrontation, or it will not happen at all.’ From this point of view, the question isn’t whether liberal activists do or don’t want to engage in sabotage. If we keep to our current course, sabotage is coming. If it isn’t directed from the top, it will bubble up from below. The question is whether the mainstream climate movement can ready itself for the agonising dilemmas to come. Can it sustain its coherence and momentum in the face of crisis, violence, division and, quite likely, defeat?
There’s a fun surprise in this listing for a lovely “1920s colonial with international flair” in Yonkers, asking $995,000. Click through the pictures — marvel at the well maintained interior — the beautiful ceilings — wait for it – wait for it…
This week’s newsletter on the topic of Dad Thrillers generated a significant and passionate reader response. Thank you to all who suggested contenders in the comments and over email. The list has been updated to include:
The Negotiator and The Siege (“Movies Where Cops and the Guys They're Trying to Catch Are Not So Different, Simply Two Sides of the Same Coin”)
Extreme Measures (“Movies About Doctors in Distress,” a new category also featuring The Fugitive)
Arlington Road and Conspiracy Theory (“General Boomer Psychosis and Paranoia”)
Ransom (“Movies Where the Bad Guy Is a Disgruntled Cop or Soldier”)
Still under consideration: Russia House, Chain Reaction, Volcano, The Rainmaker, Lethal Weapon 4, and The Insider.
Emails and comments included some intriguing theorization from experts and scholars kind enough to engage. A particular concern for many was understanding the end of the Dad Thriller and the transition to the 21st century. Reader Avi Z. suggested further investigation into some high-profile Hollywood failures at the turn of the millennial:
I think Affleck’s failure to become Jack Ryan is crucial of course, but Reindeer Games was an ultimate dad thriller failure and the fact that Sum of all Fears went all big budget and no one cared about Changing Lanes is still important — also its pretty clear that kung fu also killed the dad thriller.
In the comments, Dan L. posited another culprit:
I think as important as Bourne here is CSI: the dads got older, started watching way more TV, and Bruckheimer nailed the formula. The dad thriller became the dad procedural.
CSI was actually pretty great, wasn’t it?
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This analysis of "cursed adapters" is great . . . reminds me of the time I, at age 14, bought a midi keyboard at a garage sale. Having no way to plug it into my guitar amp, I went to a car-stereo store and asked if they had a midi-to-1/4" phone jack adapter. The patient clerk had to explain to me what midi was and that what I wanted was impossible.