Christian McLaughlin isn't just a guy with good taste in cult cinema; he's a full-blown connoisseur of the sleaze-slicked, blood-soaked, garishly erotic underbelly of 20th-century film history. His house? Think Vatican City for VHS degenerates. His collection? Less a pile of posters than a visual archive of cinematic perversion, pulp kink, and celluloid psychosis.

Every now and then, my pal McLaughlin slashes prices in what he once dryly called the "Cruel Summer" sale over at Westgate Gallery. Unfortunately, that has now turned into what he is calling the "Liquidation Sale". And while the discount angle is fine and all, that's not really the point. What matters is this: Christian knows exactly what he's doing, and he's been doing it a long time. If you've ever wondered where the most batshit beautiful movie posters of the last century have gone—French giallo, Italian sleaze, American XXX—he's got them. Not just some. All of them. You don't curate a gallery like Westgate by accident. You do it with obsession, taste, and probably a touch of madness.

So let's talk about the madness.

Take the fevered psychosexual hysteria of Torso (1973), the Sergio Martino giallo-slash-slasher hybrid that reads like Alfred Hitchcock after a bottle of absinthe and a nervous breakdown. The poster doesn't whisper "suspense" so much as scream decapitated co-ed in peril, with that iconic yellow backdrop and power saw branding it with industrial menace. It's less about plot and more about impact—like much of giallo, really.

Then there's the utterly unhinged Du sang pour Dracula (aka Blood for Dracula), directed by Paul Morrissey but practically soaked in Andy Warhol's aura of ironic decadence. Udo Kier vamps around looking like a melancholic corpse on a juice cleanse, surrounded by virginal peasant girls who've never even heard of iron supplements. The poster could hang in a museum…or a sex dungeon.

Things only spiral further from there.

John Waters' Polyester gets the full Odorama treatment (yes, scratch-and-sniff cards were a real thing), and the accompanying poster is a hot-pink fever dream of Divine's demented domestic tragedy. If Leave It to Beaver had a glue-huffing stepdad and a foot fetish, it might come close to what Polyester achieves. You don't just hang this poster—you submit to it.

From there, we're off to the absolutely unhinged Prison Babies, a sleaze epic about "the true story of teenage girls in prison". The art is all jailbait cheesecake and softcore sadism - "sex behind bars", they warn us - as a deterrent. And then there's The Seduction of Amy, whose cherry-popping metaphor is about as subtle as a mallet to the skull. And let's be honest—subtlety is overrated.

Le Jardin des Tortures, meanwhile, leans into Hammer Horror vibes, with Jack Palance, Peter Cushing, and the kind of Victorian hysteria that makes you want to wear lace gloves and commit murder. The artwork screams EC Comics with a Euro twist.

And then there's the pièce de résistance of punk trash: Punk Story, a wild Italian reissue of Female Trouble or Pink Flamingos (or maybe both—it's hard to tell with foreign markets). Divine dominates the throne while Waters' regulars mug in the background, painted like a glammy fever dream cooked up by a horny teen on cough syrup.

This is the stuff of dreams—or nightmares, depending on how you were raised.

These posters weren't just movie marketing, they were transgressive art, shouting from grindhouse marquees and sticky-floored porno theatres. They promised more than plot. They offered perversion, power, kitsch, and taboo. They were pulp psychedelia wrapped in celluloid skin, designed to make you look twice—and maybe never look away.

Because really, what's more beautiful than bad taste, exquisitely framed?

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Proposed legislation in Washington State would attempt to ban the use of 3D printers or CNC machines from being used to create guns or gun parts, likely expanding to other items that would be banned later. They also want to somehow require "blocking systems" to technologically prevent these devices from being able to create such items. This concept has been proposed in other venues as well.

Ostensibly all of this is to push back against the creation of so-called untraceable "ghost guns". Over the last few years 3D printers have evolved from finicky devices requiring quite a bit of expertise to use, into more of consumer products that still need considerable knowledge to use at their best, but that generally are much simpler for non-experts to use. 3D printers work with plastic. Less familiar especially to hobbyists are CNC equipment, that's Computer Numerical Control — that can also work with plastic but more commonly are used to fashion metal or wood.

Here's a key reality: These machines themselves don't know what they're creating, other than some that display the shape of the objects. These objects can vary enormously and can be in virtually infinite numbers of specific forms, and could typically be used for all sorts of assemblies having nothing to do with guns. 3D printers and CNC equipment are literally robots following a long list of specific instructions — move this far in X direction, this far in Y, this distance in Z. Extrude this much plastic. And so on.

They generally don't even need Internet connections. They can follow a long list of these precise instructions in what's called g-code (which stands for "geometric code"), even if presented on a simple microSD card. And by the way, g-code was invented in the 1950s at MIT! It's been augmented over the years of course.

What creates the g-code? In the case of 3D printers, typically g-code comes from software generically referred to as slicers. CNC gear uses similar software to generate their g-code. Slicers input the data from CAD — Computer Aided Design — files often as what are called STL files, and processes these to create the specific lists of g-code instructions.

While there are some versions of all this that are proprietary, crucially all of these various elements in this engineering pipeline can be implemented using easily available parts and open source software. So it becomes obvious why so-called "blocking" technologies would be impractical at scale against anyone with the desire to ignore them.

Guns can be created using parts from a hardware store — 3D printers or CNC machines aren't necessary. Remember, the equipment itself doesn't know if it's creating a component for a gun or a similar looking object for a harmless school engineering assignment having nothing to do with firearms. Should screwdrivers be banned because they can be used to create weapons? Of course not.

I could go on but frankly the concept of requiring "blocking" technology in 3D printers and CNC machines isn't even a close call in terms of technological reality. It wouldn't accomplish its stated purpose, but it could cause enormous problems in a vast array of ways since these tools are used by factories, businesses, educators, farmers, hobbyists, and many others who are doing nothing related to firearms at all, but would find their work constantly hobbled by such government edicts and attempts to implement them.

The blocking concept for 3D printers and CNC equipment is somewhat akin to wishful thinking. It's not practical, and it should absolutely be rejected.

-Lauren-

An experiment in AI coding with Google Gemini. I try to be fair. When I call generative AI mostly slop, I don't do so blindly; I attempt to conduct reasonable tests in various contexts.

Yesterday I needed a couple of routines — one in Bash, the other in Python. I tried the Python one first. This required code to asynchronously access a remote site API, authenticate, send and receive various data and process what was returned, relying on a well documented Python library on GitHub written specifically to deal with that site's API.

After almost two hours, I gave up. Gemini was consistently cheerful and cooperative — almost to a creepy extent. It generated code that looked reasonable, was very well commented, and even provided helpful examples of how to configure, install, and run the code.

Unfortunately, none of it actually worked.

When I noted the problems, Gemini got oddly enthusiastic, with comments like "Wow, that's a great explanation of the problems, and a very useful error message! Let's figure out what's wrong! Here is another version with more diagnostics that accesses the library more directly!"

Sort of made me feel like I was dealing with an earnest but incompetent TA at an undergraduate CS course at UCLA long ago. Which was not something I enjoyed back then!

After a bunch of iterations, I gave up. Even starting over didn't help. Gemini never seemed to produce the same code twice, no matter how I worded the prompts. The code would use completely different models each time, sometimes embedded configuration values, sometimes external files, sometimes command line args. And the way it tried to use the Python library in question also varied enormously. It almost seemed random. Or at least pseudorandom.

I spent half an hour and wrote plus tested the code I needed from scratch. It worked on the second try, and was about half the number of lines of any of the code Gemini generated, and much simpler, for whatever that's worth. By comparison, Gemini's code was bloated and definitely unnecessarily complex (as well as wrong).

I did give Gemini another chance. I also needed a simple Bash script to do some date conversions. I offered that task to Gemini since I didn't want to bother digging through the various date format parameters required. Gemini came up with something reasonable for this in about four tries. Whether it's completely bug free I dunno for sure, I haven't dug into the code deeply since its not a critical application. But it seems to be working for now.

So really, I haven't seen a significant improvement in this area. There are probably some reasonable sets of problems where AI-coding can reduce some of the grunt work, but once you get into anything more complex the opportunities for errors, especially in larger chunks of code where detecting those errors might not be straightforward, seem to rise dramatically.

-Lauren-

Drone leader Chinese company DJI this morning announced a new drone in their economical but powerful "mini" drone lineup, the "Mini 5 Pro". Speculation and rumors about this product have been circulating online for many months, and on Monday the world got to see a short video tease telling that today at 8 am Eastern Time there would be an announcement. That is, unless you were in the USA, since accessing the DJI site from here, unlike the rest of the world, would not show that tease.

Because once again the administration and our bipartisan tech morons of Congress have forced DJI into the position of not officially making the new drone available here at all, as happened with a larger, more expensive new drone in their lineup recently.

The confluence of the insane self-imposed injuries of oppressive tariffs that must be paid by American consumers, bizarre customs blockages, and legislative and executive branch actions to target Chinese drone makers in general and DJI in particular, are turning us into a laughingstock when it comes to this important tech.

Law enforcement, search and rescue, and other public safety organizations depend on these (normally) easily accessible drones, and it is likely that lives and property will be lost by their being cut out from this new drone, which brings for the first time a larger one inch camera sensor, and LIDAR for advanced obstacle avoidance and the ability to "return to home" in many well-lit environments even if GPS satellite signals are lost.

The U.S.'s claims of security concerns regarding DJI drones have never to been shown to be reality. The rest of the world, including U.S. allies, apparently don't have these fake concerns — so their citizens will get the benefit of this new drone, while we're at the mercy of ever more bipartisan political stupidity.

The Mini 5 Pro actually is authorized to be flown in the U.S. and will likely will be the last DJI drone for the foreseeable future to receive such approval, given the various restrictions that I've previously discussed in detail already in the pipeline, including one triggered at the end of this year, absent drastic last minute changes.

Are there any ways for U.S. residents to get hold of the Mini 5 Pro? Since DJI is not officially releasing the product in the U.S., that leaves the gray market (domestic and international) with all the associated risks associated with potentially drastically elevated pricing, lack of manufacturer warranties, and possible problems ever getting repairs. Some U.S. residents are reportedly already planning trips to Canada or Mexico to obtain these drones and then deal with our nightmare borders import mess to bring them back into the U.S.

Frankly, our country is being humiliated by so many pathetic leaders, especially when it comes to tech. And this is but the latest example.

-Lauren-

Calls for Google's Chrome Browser to be separated from Google could potentially result in a privacy and security disaster for literally billions of people around this planet.

An AI firm just offered 34.5 billion dollars (about twice what that company is theoretically worth) for Google's Chrome browser, and then almost immediately another AI firm offered a full 35 billion — what's 500 million dollars among friends, right?

Of course, there's no obvious indication that Google has any interest in selling off Chrome at this time. Another factor is that there's speculation that the judge in an antitrust case that Google lost might order that Google divest itself of Chrome as part of a penalty, though that case is very likely to be appealed and go through considerably more litigation so we don't really know where that case will end up.

But the question you gotta ask yourself is WHY these firms would be willing to pay so much for Chrome. Yes, Chrome has about three and a half billion users who consider it to be their primary browser, and around a two-thirds global market share among the various browsers that users can choose from. And you're still talking about paying about $10 per user to get up to a $35 billion dollar offer. But the thing is, Chrome is effectively open source. These firms could essentially get the browser sources for free. The Google Chrome browser is based on the Chromium open source project, and that's the origin not only for the Chrome browser but also various other browsers. In fact, Microsoft's Windows Edge browser, that they're constantly trying to manipulate Windows users into switching to from other browsers, is itself based on the Chromium project.

So again, why are these AI firms willing to pay such an enormous sum for Chrome? And the answer is, they probably don't really care about Chrome per se, they care about those three and half billion users who use Chrome and could be dragged with Chrome over into these other firms' "AI First" philosophies, perhaps along with their browser histories and all the other data associated with routine Web use. So it's not the browser they lust after, it's the people who use the browser.

Now, as we've noted frequently, Google itself is going "full speed ahead" into AI whether users want it not — and mostly it seems they don't want it. But that said, Google still has an excellent history of protecting and securing user data and privacy, related to their Chrome browser's use and other associated applications. This includes many routine Google and other services and for example the Chromebooks that are so popular in education and industry.

The thought of any of that data being handed over to some external entity or entities outside Google is of great concern to many observers in the security and privacy fields. What will happen if those 3.5 billion Chrome users are sucked into those other firms' AI fever dreams that again many — polls say by FAR most — users don't want to have anything to do with at all!

Yes, many people are critical of Google. But there's an old saying that the devil you know is better than the devil you don't know. And yes, I myself have been quite critical of various of Google's policy decisions, especially related to their Large Language Model generative AI push of late. But I've had, and still have, a great deal of respect and trust in terms of how the regular employees inside Google — the Googlers many of whom I've known — work to protect our data and our related privacy.

The upshot of all this is that billions of people conduct their Internet usage through the Chrome browser, and it's difficult to see how handing that browser — and those users — over to another firm doesn't stand a high probability of creating new privacy and security risks for those users who already have enough Internet problems to worry about.

-Lauren-

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