2022
The Real History Behind ‘The Woman King’ | The Agojie Warriors of Dahomey. By Meilan Solly at Smithsonian Magazine.
The movie’s depiction of the Agojie army of elite women warriors is true-to-life. But Dahomey in real life was a brutal, imperial autocracy and enthusiastic supporter of slavery and the slave trade.
We liked the movie—much better than “Black Panther,” which I thought had too much superhero folderol. “The Woman King” was about 30-45 minutes too long, but most movies today are.
A secularised Jewish American thinks about celebrating Christmas. As a secularized Jewish American, I relate.
Ben Werdmuller: Christmas, the eighth night, and me.
I’ve had essentially no personal encounters with anti-Semitism in my own life—that I’m aware of.
Matt Stoller: Private Equity Gave Your Bank Password to Hackers
Francisco Partners and Evergreen Coast Capital Corp own LastPass. They raised prices, and then fumbled security. You had one job guys!
…
At this point, it’s time to recognize that ownership and management of software firms by private equity is itself a security risk.
Busloads of migrants dropped off at vice president’s DC home on Christmas Eve
The Bible literally says not to do shit like this. Matthew 25:31 and following.
In rural Georgia, an unlikely rebel against Trumpism. By Stephanie McCrummen at the Washington Post.
Johnson, a 33-year-old white electrician with no college degree from rural Georgia, rejects hate.
I can’t decide whether I think this is a great profile, or whether it’s patronizing and elitist.
We watched the first episode of the first season of “Yellowstone.” We liked it. It’s like “Succession.”
There should be a Yellowstone/Succession crossover.
And it should have Doctor Who, too. Because everything is better with the Doctor.
I migrated my mastodon account to micro.blog but decided I don’t like micro.blog as a mastodon client because micro.blog doesn’t show boosts and I like seeing boosts. So I figured fine I’ll just use my mastodon account to read, and continue posting to micro.blog. But then I found that when you migrate a mastodon account the old account is disabled. So I re-enabled it and now I’ll just go back to what I was doing before and syndicate my micro.blog posts to mastodon.
Except now all my old mastodon followers are following me on micro.blog, which is what I wanted but maybe not what they want? But what’s done is done.
For my next trick, I will saw a person in half. Can I get a volunteer from the audience?
From my journal, this day in 2013:
We still haven’t seen the two female cats we had that since we uncrated them yesterday, other than Julie seeing the shadow of ears when she looked under the bed. But during the night I heard meowing and felt little feet walking on me in bed. I assume that was the cats;Julie has never gone in for that kind of thing before.
We still have the cats. They are fully visible now.
I just migrated my mastodon.social account to micro.blog—which had the side effect of deactivating my mastodon.social account. I’m not sure I like that.
All of this is experimentation. The fediverse is in early days. We’re still figuring it out, collectively and individually.
I don’t think I am the target audience for Andor. Unless you’re supposed to fall asleep halfway through the fourth episode and then your wife wakes you up to let you know the credits are on and it’s time to turn off the TV. If that’s what Andor was going for, they nailed it.
A house down the street has a Santa hologram in the living room window, which I’ve never seen anywhere before. Either that or a creepy guy in a very realistic Santa costume.
