Wisconsin things to read: Preview, FFFF Offense (chart), FFFF Defense (chart), Podcast

Something's been missing from Michigan gamedays since the free programs ceased being economically viable: scientific gameday predictions that are not at all preordained by the strictures of a column in which one writer takes a positive tack and the other a negative one… something like Punt-Counterpunt.

PUNT

By Bryan MacKenzie
@Bry_Mac

You know what sucks? Computer reboots.

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Maybe this is just Old Man speak, or perhaps selective memory, but I don’t remember regular forced reboots occurring this often ten years ago. Or even five years ago.

Back in the day, you loaded a piece of software, and that was the end of it. Now, you’ve got patches and updates and new versions and system config changes every four days. Microsoft used to drop in once every once in a while, like Santa if Santa brought you a broken, less fun, less intuitive version of the toy he brought you last year. Now, they’re like an ex who keeps drunk-texting you at 10:00 in the morning every day.

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[After THE JUMP: This was written twice so that Skype could get back some market share]

Which is fine. If software companies constantly want to tinker with their stuff, Florps-style, great. You do you. If you want to change all of your app icons to look the same for no particular reason whatever. You’ve got a dev team the size of Turkmenistan, so there’s no reason they can’t play with their food.

Because reasons

But they don’t just hum along quietly in the background. Every change comes with a note from the operating system announcing “NOTEPAD HAS MADE A SYSTEM REGISTRY CHANGE, AND MUST REBOOT. YOU HAVE 90 SECONDS TO SAVE YOUR WORK AND SAY GOODBYE TO YOUR LOVED ONES. PACK ONLY WHAT YOU CAN CARRY.” Best case scenario, you get to save, close, and re-open everything you were doing when they decided version 327.169.2 had to be fully operational RIGHT THE HELL NOW. And god help you if you are in the bathroom when that happens, or you will return to a freshly rebooted laptop.

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Two authors on this blog lost content to Alpaca Reboot Out Of Nowhere this week. Earlier this year, I myself lost several hours work on a project because I had the temerity to leave for lunch without saving six versions in three separate repositories with a copy held in escrow at Iron Mountain.

My pet theory is that Microsoft’s A.I. has gotten so good that it can tell when your work is bad, and it is secretly nuking it when it gets too far out of whack. Like Deep State Clippy, it’s looking at your work and saying “it appears you are trying to write an article; would you like to try again, but this time without all the run-on sentences and overall suck?”

You don’t want this smoke

It’s felt like Michigan has been in a cycle of reboots for the last three years. Every time they seem to get some momentum, NOPE START OVER. Every time they start to string some thoughts together, hold up, gotta pause for a bit here. Michigan has been at this screen since they gave JT the first down:

The last two weeks, though, feel different. This isn’t an annoyance. This is some Blue Screen of Death stuff. The kind of thing where you don’t know what happened, but you start to wonder whether you are now the proud owner of a blinking paperweight.

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Still, maybe that isn’t the worst thing? Michigan has been 8 inches from the screen yelling at the spinning icon for too long. The expectation that things would get back up and running any minute now has been debilitating. Michigan needed to step away from the keyboard for a bit. They needed to acknowledge that some of those documents aren’t recoverable, and that some shit is gonna have to start from scratch.

This week is the first week of the rebuild. Holy crap is there a lot of work to do, but the temptation to keep pushing ahead to achieve that one last little breakthrough or find that one missing piece has been shattered. They start anew, starting today.

And, hey, if that’s what is going to happen, what better opponent than one who has just been infested with malware, performed an illegal operation and had to shut down? Michigan 35, Wisconsin 24

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COUNTERPUNT

By Internet Raj
@internetraj

There is no doubting the indelible and massive economic, political and cultural imprint that Facebook has left on our society. On Facebook, elections have been won and lost; governments have been propped up and overthrown; and viral misinformation has sown seeds of chaos and accelerated ideological polarization across our communities. Almost everything about Mark Zuckerberg’s multinational social media conglomerate—the good, the bad, and the ugly—has already been deconstructed, reconstructed, and scrutinized by everyone from pundits to scholars to 60-year-old crazy aunts with a penchant for never checking Snopes.

But I don’t want to talk about any of that. I want to talk about a piece of Facebook history that has been relegated to a short footnote in a lengthy tome, but something that I haven’t been able to shake from my mind for over a decade.

I want to talk about the Burger King Whopper Sacrifice.

Whopper Sacrifice was a promotional Facebook app released by Burger King in early 2009. The idea was deliciously simple: install the app, unfriend 10 Facebook friends as a “sacrifice”, and then receive a free coupon for one free Whopper. The app also had one additional, deviously addictive twist that further propelled its short-lived virality: your 10 selected friends would receive a public notification that they had been “sacrificed” all in the name of 1/10^th of a mediocre fast food hamburger.

Citing privacy reasons, however, Facebook shut the app down in ten days, but not before the app was installed 60,000 times and over 200,000 Facebook friends were deleted. The app challenged the Facebook’s core tenet—building and not destroying your social network—with a concept that was devastating in both its simplicity and its savage brutality: can you imagine waking up in the morning and receiving a notification that your Freshman year roommate sacrificed you for an economic equivalent of 37 cents?

I’m not going to lie; I, too, gleefully participated in the Whopper Sacrifice. It was cathartic to Marie Kondo my friend list and, in the process, see that annoying lab partner from Chem 125 who didn’t contribute anything to our group projects go up in virtual flames. The most twisted part about my participation is that I installed the app to sacrifice 10 “friends” and didn’t even claim my free Whopper. Look, I’m not proud of it.

And yet here I am, 11 years later, fondly reminiscing about the cyber destruction that was wrought in the name of shitty frozen meat patties.

Why?

Because I look at the product of Michigan football in year 6 of what was supposed to be a revitalized Golden Era ushered in by Ann Arbor’s own prodigal son. Year 6 of a run that was supposed to be littered with Big Ten championships, thrilling victories over OSU, annual beatdowns of MSU, and routinely being in the conversation for the College Football Playoff. Instead, I’m watching frustrating offsides after offsides; DPI after DPI; CBs getting burned after CBs getting burned; broken run identity after broken run identity; coaching faux pas after coaching faux pas.

Burger King was on to something; there is definitely something liberating and cleansing about making a public severance of ties with something you supposedly care about. Last week, as Michigan’s historic loss to Indiana wound down, I issued my own Whopper Sacrifice, this time directed to the maize and blue:

I’m not watching another Michigan game this season I’m too old for this shit it’s 4am I’m about that LPONE life now

— raj (@internetraj) November 7, 2020