Chick Tracts (99% Invisible). Jack Chick was the Leni Riefenstahl of comics. Chick devoted his life to using comics to witness to non-Christians. His gorgeous, kitschy art, combined with messaging that was often homophobic and Islamophobic, makes the tiny comics simultaneously masterpieces of pop culture and terrible hate speech.

Study: Cities with Expensive Housing Have Highest Rates of Homelessness timesofsandiego.com/business/…

I’m trying to swear less, but I’ve got to say “no shit Sherlock.”

Do kids in New York still play stickball, skelly, and hopscotch? Or has that gone the way of rolling a hoop with a stick?

Plausible Sentence Generators. Cory Doctorow finds an AI chatbot is an excellent tool for helping to draft scary threatening lawyer letters.

Louis Vuitton is fighting a trademark application by a maker of garden tools because the fashion company claims it’s trademarked the letters L and V. (Techdirt)

No Relief: Temps Reach 122 Degrees as Heat Bakes Mexicali, Border Communities (Reuters / Times of San Diego)

Tiny Awards, a celebration of the small, playful, and heartfelt web (waxy.org)

Elon is paying far-right influencers, including Andrew Tate, to post on Twitter (Taylor Lorenz / The Washington Post). Paying a guy who was charged with rape and human trafficking seems like not the best way to make your service attractive to advertisers.

More than 100 people were stuck at Agatha Christie’s house for seven hours _(Devon Live) And then there were 99….

Riley Moore, a US House candidate backed by Kevin McCarthy, made six appearances on virulent antisemite Michael Scheuer’s podcast. (Media Matters / Eric Hananoki)

Scheuer isn’t dog-whistling. He flat-out hates Jews and says so publicly and repeatedly, and has called for the assassination of US political leaders, including Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Joe Biden, and Hillary Clinton.

Via Boing Boing

I’m looking into joining the Freemasons.

Vulcans really are jerks.

The shuttle was huge. It was big enough to serve as a Starfleet Academy party bus. Just hang a disco ball from the ceiling.

Was Spock human long enough to try California burritos and pizza? Because if he thought bacon was great….

Is distributed computing dying, or just fading into the background? (Ars Technica/Andy Patrizio) “Distributed computing erupted onto the scene in 1999 with the release of SETI@home, a nifty program and screensaver … that sifted through radio telescope signals for signs of alien life.”

Superman: Legacy and What It Takes To Be a Great Onscreen Man of Steel (Den of Geek / Joe George)

I saw these steps while walking Minnie a few days ago. They’re beautiful and my knees hurt just looking at them.

Even the old guys at the park were wearing ankle socks with their shorts, rather than full-length socks as I was. I need to level up my exercise fashion game.

Walking the dog this morning, I wore baggy checked cargo shorts, black calf-length socks, white New Balance sneakers, and my sweat-stained white Tilley bucket hat.

In other words, I was a thirst trap.

Steven Vaughan-Nichols: I’ve used social networks since the 80s. Threads is the most annoying one I’ve tried. (ZDNET)

Threads’s egregious privacy policy (which SJVN provides more information about here) and its current lack of a web interface are the reasons why I’m sitting Threads out. For now at least; I may change my mind at any moment.

I expect I’ll wait until micro.blog supports Threads cross-posting. Either that, or wait until Threads supports ActivityPub, and then I’ll merge my Mastodon, Micro.blog and Threads activity, as I do now with Mastodon and Micro.blog.

It was at this moment that I decided to switch off Apple News notifications on my phone.

Jews, Christians and Satanists are taking legal action to protect reproductive freedom, claiming—rightly—that abortion bans are an imposition of religious beliefs by the state.

Cory Doctorow: “Jewish religious texts clearly state that life begins at the first breath, and that the life of a pregnant person takes precedence over the life of the fetus in their uterus.”

The “religious liberty” angle for overturning the overturning of Dobbs

Everyone Has ‘Car Brain’. “Online communities dedicated to criticizing cars and the people who love them have developed an insult that … kind of makes sense.“ (The Atlantic / Kaitlyn Tiffany)

Twitter is burning, Bluesky is smug. Where is the best place to do your pathetic doomscrolling? (The Guardian / First Dog on the Moon)