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You should be using an RSS reader:

RSS basically works like social media should work. Using RSS is a chance to visit a utopian future in which the platforms have no power, and all power is vested in publishers, who get to decide what to publish, and in readers, who have total control over what they read and how, without leaking any personal information through the simple act of reading.

And here’s the best part: every time you use RSS, you bring that world closer into being!

— Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr

Earlier, I asked if anybody knew of a good news portal — Apple News, Google News, Yahoo News, MSN Start? I didn’t get an answer.

I believe, perhaps irrationally, that I want a mix of news from multiple sources before diving into newsletters from the WaPo, NYTimes and local papers. And I want that mix to immediately show me major US and global breaking news.

Google News has a lot of clickbait. Apple News has a good mix of stories at the top of the app, but it gets into clickbait quickly, and the app itself is terrible on the Mac. I’d like to see Apple News move to the web like Apple Maps has done.

Goodbye Capacities, hello (again) DevonThink

I tried Capacities, a note-taking and knowledge-management app, for about two weeks, but then gave it up. The user interface is confusing, I accidentally deleted a few notes, the subscription is a bit pricy ($15/mo.) and I’m wondering whether I’ll lose access to my information if and when the subscription ends.

I also encountered bugs. Sync was unreliable, and the app got the date wrong when linking the daily notes and notes supposedly created that day.

Capacities has built-in AI features. I never used them.

I’m now once again using DevonThink for document management, writing, and note-taking. DevonThink has a very busy, brutalist interface that takes a while to learn. But I’m familiar with DevonThink from using it heavily in the 2010s.

And DevonThink works. I’m tired of this round-robin game where I try different document management and note-taking apps and then give up and switch to something else or switch back to something I tried before.

A couple of advantages that DevonThink has over other apps I’ve tried, including Capacities, Obsidian (which I used for about three years), logseq and Roam Research: DevonThink supports folders as first-class citizens (DT calls ‘em “groups” but they are very folder-like.) Those other apps start from the premise that folders are obsolete and users should use tags and links between documents to organize documents. But my brain thinks in folders. DT supports tags and links, too, but its group system is first-rate.

DevonThink also supports Microsoft Word, PowerPoint — pretty much any document format that your Mac, iPad or iPhone can work with. Those other apps are built around Markdown documents, and anything else is an afterthought.

Of course we can tax billionaires:

Taxing the ultra-rich isn’t like the secret of embalming Pharaohs – it’s not a lost art from a fallen civilization. The US top rate of tax in 1944 was 97%. The postwar top rate from 1945-63 was 94%, and it was 70% from 1965-80. This was the period of the largest expansion of the US economy in the nation’s history. These are the “good old days” Republicans say they want to return to.

— Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr

“Class of ’84: When Cyber Was Punk.” In William Gibson’s “Neuromancer,” published in 1984, the market and hustle culture are the only values that matter. Those themes make the novel timely today, 40 years later, and explain why the cyberpunk genre lives on.

When we remember “Neuromancer,” we remember cyberspace and the noir story and characters, and those overshadow the sharp satire. The same applies to Neal Stephenson’s 1992 novel “Snow Crash.”

I reread “Snow Crash” a few years ago and was surprised and delighted to find much of it is funny. People took the book so seriously.

I loved “Snow Crash.” I admired and respect, but did not enjoy, “Neuromancer.”

Sam Kahn captures the zeitgeist of every decade from the 1880s to today, one paragraph at a time.

1940s — Dapper, cool under pressure, dedicated to duty. Gregory Peck’s Frank Savage in Twelve O’Clock High, chatting amiably with his driver, having one last cigarette, and then tossing it aside, switching to the backseat and becoming all of a sudden a hard-driving, no-nonsense Air Force General.

When I first heard “every accusation is a confession,” I thought it was just political joke. I’ve been shocked the extent to which it’s the literal truth.

I just ordered business cards. What next? Will I send a fax? Will I receive a memo in a pneumatic tube?

Right-wing terrorists, led by Trump, are making death threats against local government officials, FEMA workers and even TV weather people in Florida and North Carolina. It’s part of a rising idiocracy.

Misinformation is too technical, too freighted, and, after almost a decade of Trump, too political. Nor does it explain what is really happening, which is nothing less than a cultural assault on any person or institution that operates in reality. If you are a weatherperson, you’re a target. The same goes for journalists, election workers, scientists, doctors, and first responders. These jobs are different, but the thing they share is that they all must attend to and describe the world as it is. This makes them dangerous to people who cannot abide by the agonizing constraints of reality, as well as those who have financial and political interests in keeping up the charade.

— I’m Running Out of Ways to Explain How Bad This Is, by Charlie Warzel at The Atlantic

I went door to door to get out the vote for the Democratic Party this afternoon. I did 15 out of 47 houses in the neighborhood. I would have done more but I got into conversations with the neighbors. We have many Harris/Walz signs in front yards.

Don’t ever hand your phone to the cops. “Digital IDs make it tempting to leave your driver’s license at home – but that’s a dangerous risk.”

No matter what, teaching people they can add their IDs to their phones means some people will inevitably leave the house without physical ID, and that means creating the opportunity for cops to demand phones — which you should never, ever do. Technical details of your digital ID aside, handing your phone to a police officer grants law enforcement a lot of power over some of your most intimate personal data.

Jamie Zawinski: Mosaic Netscape 0.9 was released 30 years ago today:

According to my notes, it went live shortly after midnight on Oct 13, 1994. We sat in the conference room in the dark and listened to different sound effects fired for each different platform that was downloaded. At some point late that night I wandered off and wrote the first version of the page that loaded when you pressed the “What’s Cool” button in the toolbar. (A couple days later, Jim Clark would go ballistic in a company-wide email because I had included a link to Bianca’s Smut Shack.)

What’s the best news portal? Apple News, Google News, Yahoo News, MSN Start, something else?

Rereading replies on Bluesky I now see that I was wrong to compare Florida’s extremist religious government to the Taliban, because it implies that what Florida is doing is un-American, rather than an official action by the third most populous state in the nation.

Harris faces new urgency to explain how her potential presidency would be different from Biden’s.

Bullshit. “Urgency” from whom?

This is an issue for the journalists in the Washington press corps who have been locked in a room smelling each other’s farts for 25 years.

For the rest of us, the choice is clear: One choice is someone who we can hope will be a transformative President — a Roosevelt or Lincoln — someone who can lead the rebirth of a declining nation.

Probably not.

She’ll probably govern as a conventional politician and avoid burning down the house for another four to eight years, at which time we get to do it again.

The other choice is a violent psychopath who smears poop in his hair, along with his couch-fucking sidekick.

So yeah nobody gives a shit if Harris is different from Biden.

“The unborn” are a convenient group of people to advocate for. They never make demands of you; they are morally uncomplicated, unlike the incarcerated, addicted, or the chronically poor; they don’t resent your condescension or complain that you are not politically correct; unlike widows, they don’t ask you to question patriarchy; unlike orphans, they don’t need money, education, or childcare; unlike aliens, they don’t bring all that racial, cultural, and religious baggage that you dislike; they allow you to feel good about yourself without any work at creating or maintaining relationships; and when they are born, you can forget about them, because they cease to be unborn. It’s almost as if, by being born, they have died to you. You can love the unborn and advocate for them without substantially challenging your own wealth, power, or privilege, without re-imagining social structures, apologizing, or making reparations to anyone. They are, in short, the perfect people to love if you want to claim you love Jesus but actually dislike people who breathe.

Prisoners? Immigrants? The sick? The poor? Widows? Orphans? All the groups that are specifically mentioned in the Bible? They all get thrown under the bus for the unborn.

— Dave Barnhart

The pulpy fun of Heinlein’s “Methuselah’s Children”

The book is about a group of long-lived people who have been living secretly pretending to be just like everyone else.

They reveal themselves, are persecuted, flee in a spaceship with a newly invented FTL drive, and have adventures out in the galaxy with aliens. The book is dedicated to E.E. “Doc” Smith, it’s the most pulpy thing Heinlein ever wrote, and it’s really surprising what outright fun it is to read. I never think of it as being one of my favourite Heinleins, but I thoroughly enjoyed every minute of reading it.

— Pulp adventure and nothing wrong with that: Robert Heinlein’s Methuselah’s Children. Jo Walton at Reactor.

Like Walton says, I don’t think of this as one of my favorite Heinleins, but it’s a great read. I haven’t read much super-science from the 1930s, but “Methuselah’s Children,” published in 1941, is a throwback to the era when sci-fi writers were tossing stars around like snowballs.

I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I’ve watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time like tears in rain.

Instagram and Threads moderation is out of control . I was curious what “crackergate” is. Now I know.

I am baffled by journalists and influencers who were burned by Musk and who ran for shelter to another service run by an amoral billionaire.

This has nothing to do with my politics or ethics. I use Google and Apple products, shop at a chain supermarket, buy from Amazon, and so on. But I don’t stand on a rug when somebody at the edge is waiting to give it a good hard pull.

I’ve reactivated my Mastodon account after a brief experiment suspending that account and using Micro.blog as my primary Fediverse outpost. While Micro.blog is great, Mastodon is better at being Mastodon, and it turns out I like both.

Also, I’ve suspended my Micro.blog ActivityPub support. I continue to use and like Micro.blog, but not for that.

If you’re reading this from Mastodon, this has been nearly invisible to you. Mastodon and Micro.blog let me easily move followers between accounts.

What’s the derivation of the phrase “hard-boiled” to describe a person or fictional character? When was it first used?

In my earlier review of two favorite 1940s science fiction stories1, I avoided using the phrase “hard-boiled” to describe the heroes, even though they have many of the characteristics of hard-boiled heroes: Tough-minded, street-smart, fast-talking, and working the streets of early-20th-Century New York.

I didn’t say “hard-boiled” out of a vague conception that the phrase connoted a propensity toward brutal violence, which was not characteristic of those characters.

After posting, I wondered where the phrase “hard-boiled” came from and came upon this excellent Quora post from Paul Vargas, who states his credentials this way: “I researched 20th Century journalism as part of my doctoral studies.”

Vargas explains that the “hard-boiled school”

… was coined in the early 1930s to describe a group of writers of whom Dashiell Hammett was regarded as luminary (see The New York Times Aug 11 1935.) This ‘hard-boiled school’ depicted emotionally hardened characters in an uncaring world driven by money, power and sexual desire. The Encyclopaedia Britannica cites Hammett as the inventor of the genre and calls ‘Fly Paper’ (1929) the ‘first truly hard-boiled story.’ Other critics have disputed this. Ian Ousby regards Carroll John Daly (1889-1958) as the author in whose writing the hard-boiled elements first combine. The question is still open as ‘hard-boiled characters’ and crime-ridden urban landscapes prefigure ‘the hard-boiled school’ by some 30 or 40 years.

The phrase as a descriptor of human character goes back to thelast quarter of the 19th Century, Vargas says

Journalistic usage of ‘hard-boiled’ in the early 1900s connoted brutality and usually designated hoodlums. The phrase grew in usage after WW1 with the high-profile prosecution of ‘Hard-Boiled Smith,’ a US drill instructor accused of treating recruits with brutality. The case opened a widespread journalistic discourse on the use of brutality by the US army and police and the term ‘hard-boiled’ was one of its keynotes. ‘Hard-boiled’ really took off and almost everything was being evaluated for its potential. There were hard-boiled criminals, and hard-boiled towns, and there was hard-boiled talk and even hard-boiled items of clothing. Movie man Pat Dowling was remarked upon as wearing a hard-boiled hat (Moving Picture World vol 43 Mar 13 1920 p1779.)

In the 1920s, we start to see the phrase used to describe “tough and unsentimental characters without brutality.”

Read the whole post, which goes into more detail and includes scans of historical newspaper and magazine pages. Interesting and fun to read!

  1. Revisiting a childhood favorite story: ‘Dreams are Sacred’ still delights and “I’ll be a pie-eyed emu!” Re-reading Alfred Bester’s 1942 story, “The Push of a Finger” ↩︎

Roger Zelazny was a demented genius who could squeeze words until they sang.

— “Beautiful, poetic, and experimental: Roger Zelazny’s Doorways in the Sand,” Jo Walton on Reactor.

“Doorways” and “Roadmarks” are two of my favorite Zelazny books. His major works — “Lord of Light” and the “Amber” series — are great, but “Doorways” and “Roadmarks” are special to me, I think in part because the stakes and scope are relatively low.

Some friends and I have taken to calling Threads “the gas-leak social network” because that is the basic experience of using it: Everyone on the platform, including you, seems to be suffering some kind of minor brain damage.

— Max Read, writing several months ago. Threads is not different today and yet I enjoy it. Other people’s pointless low-stakes drama is often entertaining.

Well, that's disturbing

Fat Bear Week, the annual competition held by Katmai National Park in Alaska, had to take a brief delay last week after one of the fat bears, 469, ate another one of the fat bears, 402. I guess, I did not know that bears eat other? But apparently, it’s a thing.

— Ryan Broderick

Facebook is a vector for AI-generated disinformation about federal post-hurricane relief

Meta simply does not give a shit anymore. Facebook spent most of the 2010s absorbing, and destroying, not just local journalism in the US, but the very infrastructure of how information is transmitted across the country. And they have clearly lost interest in maintaining that. Users, of course, have no where else to go, so they’re still relying on it to coordinate things like hurricane disaster relief. But the feeds are now — and seemingly forever will be — clogged with AI junk. Because you cannot be a useful civic resource and also give your users a near-unlimited ability to generate things that are not real. And I don’t think Meta are stupid enough to not know this. But like their own users, they have decided that it doesn’t matter what’s real, only what feels real enough to share.

— Ryan Broderick

I changed the domain for Mitch's Other blog to mitchellaneous.net, which I am stupid pleased about

mitchellaneous.net, aka Mitch’s Other Blog, is where I’m posting memes, vintage ads and photos, and other found media. I don’t imagine many people will bookmark mitchellaneous.net and return to it. It exists primarily as a publishing platform to share posts to a newsletter and several social media services, powered by Micro.blog, the great service that hosts both this blog and that one.

I’m thinking of changing the domain of this blog as well, to mitchipedia.org. It’s now mitchw.blog, of course, but I soured on that domain a while ago. One reason is because “MitchW” isn’t one of the names I use in life. I use “Mitch” or “Mitch Wagner.” People who knew me when I was a child call me “Mitchell.”

Also, I love blogging but I don’t like the word “blog.”

On the other hand, is “mitchipedia” too cute?

I own mitchwagner.com, and formerly blogged there, but I decided a few years ago to put a slight distance between my professional identity, which is tied to that name (my real name) and the stuff I post here. Now mitchwagner.com is just a placeholder site.

Another option would be to give this blog a domain tied to a catchy name, like Daring Fireball or Scripting News or Pluralistic. But all the names I could think of seemed to be either too bombastic or too cute. And so many of the good domains are taken now.

Happy 30th blogiversary to Dave Winer

Here’s a profile of Dave, by John Naughton at The Guardian: The blogosphere is in full bloom. The rest of the internet has wilted.

Dave’s blog, Scripting News, is one of my favorite blogs, and it’s the blog I’ve been reading daily for longest.

Naughton:

“Some people were born to play country music,” [Winer] wrote at one stage. “I was born to blog. At the beginning of blogging I thought everyone would be a blogger. I was wrong. Most people don’t have the impulse to say what they think.” Dave was the exact opposite. He was (and remains) articulate and forthright. His formidable record as a tech innovator meant that he couldn’t be written off as a crank. The fact that he was financially secure meant that he didn’t have to suck up to anyone: he could speak his mind. And he did. So from the moment he launched Scripting News in October 1994 he was a distinctive presence on the web.

A left-wing 2028 Democratic primary challenge is essential for Democrats

Hamilton Nolan: “Run a Left Wing Democratic Primary Candidate in 2028. No Matter What. Stopping the party’s rightward drift means having a real primary.”

The scariest possible outcome of the 2024 presidential contest is a Trump victory. The second scariest outcome, however, is a scenario in which center-right, anti-Trump voters pour into the Democratic Party and elect Kamala Harris and then proceed to pull the Democratic Party to the right.

Nolan makes these points:

#NeverTrump Republicans like the Cheneys are supporting Harris and may stick around in the Democratic party after 2024, pulling the party to the right.

Joe Biden’s leftward swing was due to pressure from Sanders, his allies, and their supporters. The Democratic Party became afraid of the Left.

But now Harris is afraid of Trump, his supporters and conservatives.

Primaries are the right time to challenge party leadership and force change in direction.

Regarding Dave Winer’s @davew@mastodon.social assertion that journalists should view people writing on the Internet as sources, rather than their competitors: I had this ongoing argument with a friend and colleague who was a very traditional journalist — he later went on to work for the New York Times and then Bloomberg. This was in the 2000s, when blogging was hot, and I was pro-blogging while he was a blogging skeptic.

I eventually stopped arguing with him when I realized that good-faith bloggers criticizing journalists were angry at journalists for not acting like journalists should. It’s fine for random people on the Internet to say random things, but journalists should be reporting what’s actually happening, not just repeating the random things that random people say on the Internet.

Dave also discusses WordPress’s potential as an infrastructure for the social web: “… underneath the cluttered user interface is a strong foundation that you could build any kind of writing software on.” The cluttered interface eventually drove me away from WordPress, and I now describe it as an Internet publishing and commerce platform that incidentally does a mediocre job of supporting blogging.

On this morning’s walk, I saw my first Trump signs of the season. There were many campaign signs for both parties, including one house with many Harris/Walz signs, topped by a Harris/Walz flag on a flagpole, which I have not seen before.

Directly across the street was a house with a lot of Trump/Vance signs. That’s gotta be awkward.

If the stories are great, it doesn’t matter much if they’re true

I found myself this weekend thinking of a friend, sadly deceased for a few years, who frequently told fantastic stories, usually about his sexual exploits. After a time, I began to wonder if my friend was fabulating. After more time, I decided I didn’t care — his stories were great.

I started thinking about my friend yesterday after reading this obituary of Jay J. Armes, a flamboyant private investigator with hooks for hands, accused of lying about many aspects of his colorful life history.

This is one hell of a lead sentence:

Jay J. Armes, a flamboyant private investigator who lived on an estate with miniature Tibetan horses, traveled in a bulletproof Cadillac limousine with rotating license plates and had steel hooks for hands, including one fitted to fire a .22 caliber revolver, died on Sept. 18 in El Paso.

— Jay J. Armes, Private Eye With a Superhero Story, Dies at 92, by Michael S. Rosenwald at the New York Times

The world’s oldest termite mound is 34,000 years old

Franz Lidz at the New York Times: “Scientists recently found the planet’s longest continuously occupied termite colony in an arid region of South Africa. It dates to the time of the Neanderthals.”

Termites are masterful soil engineers capable of erecting cathedral-like edifices out of dirt, saliva and feces. To create and maintain their homes, they become miners, masons, scaffolders, plasterers and roofers. Working together, they don’t just build simple nests; they install air-conditioning, central heating and even security devices.

…

Termites eat, process and excrete organic matter, enriching the quality of the surrounding soil. “Their mounds increase the depth, nutrient and moisture status of the soils, which results in the mounds often supporting more vegetation than the soils surrounding the mounds,” said Catherine Clarke, a soil scientist at Stellenbosch University who collaborated on the new study. “So they increase the productivity of semiarid landscapes and likely make these landscapes more resilient to climate change.”

Court rules that a 12-year-old’s pizza delivery from Uber Eats canceled her parents’ right to sue Uber after an unrelated car accident

A New Jersey couple sued Uber after a crash left them severely injured. An appeals court ruled that they had agreed to settle disputes out of court when their 12-year-old daughter used the Uber Eats app to order a pizza.

Lola Fadulu at the New York Times:

A New Jersey couple was heading home from dinner in an Uber in March 2022 when their driver T-boned another car, leaving them with serious injuries, including spine and rib fractures.

The couple, Georgia and John McGinty, of Princeton, N.J., sued Uber nearly a year later. Now, their effort to bring the case to court could be hampered by a terms-of-service agreement that they say their 12-year-old daughter signed while ordering pizza using Ms. McGinty’s Uber Eats account.

A New Jersey appeals court found last month that the agreement’s arbitration provision – which says that most disputes between Uber and its customers must be litigated privately – was “valid and enforceable,” reversing a lower court’s decision that would have allowed the couple’s personal-injury lawsuit to be heard by a jury.

An in-depth profile of Kamala Harris’s estranged father, the economist Donald J. Harris

The Harris father and daughter live just two miles apart, but rarely speak. NYTimes:

Interviews with more than a dozen friends and former colleagues of Dr. Harris reveal two notable themes. First, Ms. Harris’s father, a Jamaican-born emeritus professor of economics at Stanford University, has been a critic of mainstream economic theory from the left but is hardly a Marxist.

Second, Dr. Harris has been a mostly absent figure from his daughter’s life but not an irrelevant one. Well before she set out on her political trajectory, her father was racking up achievements and, like her mother, setting a high standard that in retrospect helps explain Ms. Harris’s own ascent.

Trump accuses the elder Harris of being a Marxist, which is bullshit, like everything Trump says. But his policies are most definitely leftist and helped shape a decade-long economic boom in his native Jamaica. So if Harris did learn economics at his knee, that’s a plus for her.

I love the idea of the Surfed app, which records and organizes your entire browsing history and bookmarks. I haven’t found a use for it. And according to this review, it’s buggy as heck.

"Under the Dome": Stephen King’s small-town allegory for Trumpism

Stephen King’s Under the Dome nails how Trumpism functions at the most elemental of levels — Rick Perlstein at The American Prospect

The 2010 novel, which foresaw Trump by five years, is the story of a small town in Maine that gets cut off from the rest of the world when a supernatural dome is dropped on top of it. In the tradition of political fiction, the town is a microcosm of America. The primary action of the novel isn’t supernatural; it’s about the town’s most successful businessman, a car dealer, who “does what strongmen always do when crisis strikes” and uses the crisis to become a bloodthirsty, brutal dictator.

I love how Grammarly improves my writing, but I hate how intrusive the desktop app is. It gets in my face, overlaying my writing and app controls. It’s worse than Clippy. Is there an alternative?

There are strong moral and ideological reasons for everyone to join a union. But I would be satisfied if everyone joined a union for a much more pragmatic reason: Your money, that you made with your work, is right there on the table in front of you. Do you want to pick it up? You need a union. Or the rich people get it. That’s it. The people telling you that you don’t need a union are the same ones who will take that money off the table, and put it into their own pockets.

– Hamilton Nolan, “Your money is on the table. If you don’t have a union, you can’t have it”

Yesterday, I went to the La Mesa-Foothills Democratic Club meeting and wrote postcards for Democrats in swing states. If Harris loses, blame my lousy handwriting. I also picked up a few lawn signs to add to our curbside display and received instructions and door hangers for door-to-door canvassing.

"I'll be a pie-eyed emu!" Re-reading Alfred Bester's 1942 story, "The Push of a Finger"

“The Push of a Finger (free Gutenberg download) by Alfred Bester, was my second go at reading a story that I loved when I was 12 years old. I re-read it this past weekend, and very much enjoyed it. (Previously: Revisiting a childhood favorite story: ‘Dreams are Sacred’ still delights.)

As with “Dreams Are Sacred,” the Bester story is still entertaining. Like “Dreams Are Sacred,” the hero is a street-smart, wisecracking New York newspaperman with a brain in his head and abundant common sense. Published in 1942 in Astounding Science Fiction, “The Push of a Finger” is set a thousand years in the future, but the situations and language are straight out of a screwball comedy or noir movie from the 40s.

The hero is Carmichael, one of a dozen reporters for as many different newspapers assigned to the mysterious Prog Building in New York, where the technocrats who run the world issue pronouncements to preserve the Stability that has been the rule of civilization for centuries. The reporters are a brawling, fast-talking bunch, but they keep to their roles. By the rule of the Stability, every newspaper must have a balancing newspaper on the other side, and every decision by the ruling technocrats must be met by full-throated agreement by one newspaper and equal denunciation by its opposite number.

Carmichael finds a way to sneak into the mysterious Prog Building and discovers an event that will destroy the universe in a thousand years. “The Push of a Finger” has a similar gimmick to the far more famous “The Sound of Thunder," by Ray Bradbury, which ran in the far more upscale Collier’s magazine in 1952: The cataclysmic change in the future can be prevented by a trivial change in the present. Carmichael leads a team of technocrats in finding out what that minor, precipitating event is and stopping it.

I’m making the story sound more bombastic than it is. Bester was always a playful writer, fond of wordplay, absurdism and doggerel. In “The Push of a Finger,” a crowd of students at a demonstration chants

Neon
Krypton
Ammoniated
FitzJohn

and that bit of verse has been stuck in my head for days. (And now it’s stuck in yours. Um sorry I guess.)

Later, one of the characters exclaims, “I’ll be a pie-eyed emu!” which proves to be important.

Bester seemed to be drinking from the same creative well as the Beats (Kerouac, Ginsberg, etc.), but a decade or two earlier, and pinning his writing to a scaffolding of pulp science fiction.

Bester’s best-known novels were “The Demolished Man” (1953), a murder mystery in a society of telepaths, and “The Stars My Destination” (1956), a retelling of the Count of Monte Cristo in a society where people have the power to teleport from one location to another by sheer force of mind.

The politics of “The Push of a Finger” are typical of science fiction of the day and maybe of the U.S. at that time. The world of the future was going to be highly organized, centrally planned, and run by technocrats, just as the real world was at that time. It was 1942 – World War II was raging, the Depression was just a few years earlier, and the great nations of the world were highly centralized machines governed by technocrats. Surely that would continue forever. That’s the way Isaac Asimov wrote, and even Robert A. Heinlein, later an icon of libertarianism, featured centrally planned societies in his early stories, published at about this time.

I didn’t talk abut racism and sexism in “Dreams are Sacred” and I don’t have much to say about it here. Both stories are typical in that regard for pulp science fiction written and published in the 1940s. Race isn’t mentioned, women are nearly in the background, LGBTQ and disabled people don’t exist.

Something odd along those lines that I did notice: In the American pulps of the 40s and earlier, characters almost always had Anglo or European names: Carmichael, Pete Parnell, Steve Blakiston, etc. This was the norm back then, and I grew up in the 70s immersed in stories from that period and didn’t think twice about it. But re-reading those stories today, the high percentage of Anglo names (and the missing women and nonwhite people and disabled and LGBTQ people) stands out to me as weird. I’m not saying this to condemn the writers of that era; they were living in their world just as I live in ours. But it’s odd and unrealistic.

Bester was a giant of science fiction when I was a young fan in the 70s, and all science fiction fans then would have heard of him and most would have read him. Now I suspect he’s nearly forgotten by anybody under 50. Sic transit gloria mundi.

"The West Wing" turns 25

Fresh Air:

25 years ago, the TV series The West Wing premiered. It was a behind-the-scenes look at a fictional White House. We revisit our interviews with show creator/writer Aaron Sorkin, and actors Allison Janney, who played C.J., and John Spencer, who played Leo McGarry. They talk about the show’s signature walk-and-talk and the quippy, rapid-fire style of dialogue.

Allison Janney describes herself as “five feet 12 inches” tall and said she had difficulty landing roles until her late 30s. Now, she said, “I get cast as either the smartest person in the room or the drunkest person in the room.”

We’ve re-watched the first and second episodes recently, and I think we’ll stick with it.

How phones became the camera for everything

Daring Fireball’s John Gruber in conversation with The Verge’s Nilay Patel about the iPhone, camera photography and more. It’s a wide-ranging interview – more than two and a half hours – but listening flew by, because Gruber and Patel are outstanding speakers.

One particular point jumped out at me: The camera has become a primary input device for iPhones. Cameraphones are now multipurpose machines used to record a wide range of video and photos: Hollywood movies, fine art photography and videos, family milestones such as a child’s first steps and weddings, casual photos (“Hey, look at this!"), and serial numbers on consumer purchases. And the phone is expected to excel at all those things.

R.U.R. reimagined: Adapting Karel Čapek’s 1920 science-fiction play about a robot uprising

“It’s not Jersey Boys!” A conversation on the Take Me To Your Reader podcast with Matthew Zrebski, director and adapter of a contemporary English-language update to the 1920 science fiction play “R.U.R.,” by Karel Čapek. The play was where the word “robot” was coined.

So many people I know hate retirement until they get a hobby that requires them to work. They join a board and do tons of work, or they start crafting and making tables. They do that work and then they relax and have their glass of wine and they have a really nice day because they actually were productive. I think we, as humans, are designed to be productive.

Bluesky's Jay Graber on restoring user control and breaking social media stagnation

Make Identity Central Again, with Bluesky’s Jay Graber. Bluesky’s vision is that your identity is the same across social media services, and you would be able to move your following and follower list from one service to another, like phone number portability but for social media.

“Social is really starting to stagnate because we’re in this trap where users are locked in and developers are locked out. And we need to open that up again,” says the Bluesky CEO in an interview with Mike McCue on the Dot Social podcast.

Something I saw while out walking this morning.

Auto-generated description: A heart-shaped plush toy with the words SNIFF ME written on it lies on a textured surface.

No, I will not sniff random objects lying on the sidewalk.

Here’s something I saw while walking the dog. Google cannot explain this sign.

On the Core Intuition podcast, hosts Daniel @danielpunkass Jalkut and @Manton Reece have a more nuanced view than mine on the WordPress/WP Engine dustup.

A more generous interpretation of Matt Mullenweg actions: He sees Automattic contributing enormous resources to WordPress development and his competitors at WP Engine are coasting off that work and money.

I don’t think anybody’s covering themselves with glory here.

Revisiting a childhood favorite story: ‘Dreams are Sacred’ still delights

I had a blast Sunday re-reading one of my favorite stories from when I was 12 years old: “Dreams are Sacred,” by a writer named Peter Phillips. It was easy to track down — a quick Google search on the title (which fortunately I remembered) led me to the Internet Archive and a complete scan of the magazine where it was first published: Astounding Science Fiction, September, 1948

The story holds up — it’s exciting, fast-paced and funny.

The hero is Pete Parnell, a fast-talking wisecracking New York sportswriter who is recruited by his friend Steve Blakiston, a psychiatrist, to help with an experimental technique that could cure the madness of a science fiction and fantasy writer named Marsham Craswell. The writer has fallen into an unconscious fugue state and is trapped in an endless dream scenario from his own stories, which resemble Conan the Barbarian or Barsoom.

Fortunately, Blakiston has invented a machine which allows one person to enter another’s dream. Parnell is tapped for the job of curing Blakiston because Parnell is the fastest-thinking and hardest-headed person Blakiston knows.

Supporting characters include a friendly cop with an Irish accent straight out of cartoons, a surly cab driver and a sexy lounge singer.

I found the story every bit as enjoyable as I did when I was 12 years old. Old-fashioned? Sure! That’s part of the fun.

Phillips, the author, was no New Yorker — he was English. He was a newspaperman who wrote about two dozen science fiction stories. He died in 2012, age 92. In addition to “Dreams are Sacred,” he also wrote another story I loved when I was a boy, “Manna,” about a stack of canned super-food that gets transported accidentally back in time to a medieval monastery. Hilarity ensues.

More on Phillips here, including some wonderful old magazine and book covers.

Astounding Science Fiction, the magazine “Dreams are Sacred” appeared in, was founded in 1930, with the delicious title, “Astounding Stories of Super-Science.” Beginning in 1939, under editor John Campbell, Astounding published groundbreaking writers including Isaac Asimov and Robert A. Heinlein. The magazine changed its name to Analog Science Fact & Fiction in 1960 and still publishes today, under the name Analog Science Fiction & Fact.

Also last weekend, I re-read another favorite from the same period, “The Push of a Finger," by Alfred Bester. And I downloaded one more, “Farewell to the Master,” by Harry Bates, which was the basis for the movie “The Day the Earth Stood Still.”

I read all three stories when I was a boy, in the fat, two-volume anthology, “The Astounding-Analog Reader," which I checked out of the East Northport Public Library about a dozen times, every time I was in the mood to re-read it.

All three stories have newspapermen as heroes. I guess those stories made an impression — I have made my career in journalism of one form or another for my entire life. (In addition to those stories, I also devoured Superman, Spider-Man, and especially the Mary Tyler Moore Show and Lou Grant. I wanted to be Lou Grant when I grew up. I still do.)

The Internet Archive’s fight to save itself.

Legal battles with publishers Hachette and the Universal Music Group threaten to destroy this priceless repository of media history, which includes the Wayback Machine and a lot more.

Founder Brewster Kahle made a fortune in the 90s dotcom boom, and funneled much of that money into the Internet Archive (though it should be noted that he’s not living like he’s taken a vow of poverty — he owns a sailboat and docks it at a “tony yacht club.")

Kate Knibbs reports at Wired:

“The story of Brewster Kahle is that of a guy who wins the lottery,” says longtime archivist Jason Scott. “And he and his wife, Mary, turned around and said, awesome, we get to be librarians now.”

The day I read this article, Sunday, I had previously downloaded a 1948 issue of the pulp sci-fi magazine Astounding Stories so I could re-read a story there that I loved when I was about 12 years old, “Dreams Are Sacred,” by Peter Phillips.

The Internet Archive needs to be preserved, and if that means passing a special law to protect it, then so be it. The shareholders in Hachette and Universal Music Group can pay for it by skipping a day polishing the gold toilets in their mansions.

Mark Zuckerberg criticizes Apple for keeping a closed ecosystem but does the same with Facebook and Instagram. Pot, kettle, black.

Indeed, the Apple ecosystem is far more open than Meta’s platforms.

To be fair, Meta is a champion of open source software and hardware. But its services are closed and locked down and Meta is aggressive about keeping it that way.

Brazilian courts wanted seven accounts suspended and for X to pay fines. Instead of doing that, Musk publicly fought with the country’s supreme court, got the app banned, and allowed thousands of users to set up accounts on competitors Threads and Bluesky only to end up suspending the accounts originally flagged, paying the fines, and also is now paying even more fines. It’s invigorating to watch a true genius at work.

— Garbage Day

The FTC has documented in detail how big tech companies flagrantly violate user privacy. Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr comments:

⁠I understand the reflex to greet a report like this with cheap cynicism, but that’s a mistake. There’s a difference between “everybody knows” that tech is screwing us on privacy, and “a federal agency has concluded” that this is true. These market studies make a difference – if you doubt it, consider for a moment that Cigna is suing the FTC for releasing a landmark market study showing how its Express Scripts division has used its monopoly power to jack up the price of prescription drugs:⁠⁠

⁠⁠https://www.fiercehealthcare.com/payers/express-scripts-files-suit-against-ftc-demands-retraction-report-pbm-industry⁠⁠

⁠⁠Big business is shit-scared of this kind of research by federal agencies – if they think this threatens their power, why shouldn’t we take them at their word?

— “Tech monopolists use their market power to invade your privacy”

I'm giving Capacities a try as a possible Obsidian replacement

I downloaded Capacities previously, watched some videos, and read some documentation, but I never actually did anything with it. And now I have — created a few documents, which Capacities called “Objects.”

It feels like Capacities is Obsidian 2.0. It does less than Obsidian, but it seems to do all the things I want it to do and perhaps all the things most Obsidian users need. Capacities is not easy to figure out, but Obsidian seems to require programming skills to make the most of it, and Capacities does not require those kinds of skills.

In the past, when I’ve switched to new productivity software, I attempt to build an organizational system early on, but this time my rule is to wait until it’s hard for me to find something or do something, and then add the bare minimum organization to fix that problem. I’ve got a couple of dozen documents in Obsidian now; I’m not going to sit here and attempt to figure out a system that will scale up to hundreds or tens of thousands of documents.

I like Capacities. It seems to do all the things I do in Obsidian, but easier. Like moving from a command line to a GUI. On the downside, it uses a block editor. I do not like a block editor. We’ll see if I can adjust.

Question for those of you who are familiar with both applications: What do I need to know about changing my Obsidian methods and workflows to suit Capacities? I write research reports and articles, each requiring days or months to research and write.

ME: [Closes MacBook, looking guilty, as Julie enters room]
JULIE: “What were you looking at?”
ME: “Nothing! I was just sitting.”
JULIE:
ME: “I was looking at home repair tips!”
JULIE:
ME: “I was shopping for a gift for you!”
JULIE:
ME: “Fine! I admit it! I was looking at porn! Nasty, filthy, disgusting, kinky, perverted porn!”
JULIE: “Don’t give me that! You were looking at productivity videos on YouTube again!”
ME: [ashamed] “Yes. Yes I was.”

Something I saw while walking the dog: Neighbors set up this sprawling little toy village on the front lawn of a condo complex. There is a lot going on!

Auto-generated description: A whimsical garden scene features a variety of small, colorful figurines and decorations set among rocks and greenery.

When I migrated from mastododon.social to Micro.blog yesterday, I thought I might set up a read-only Mastodon account for accounts I want to keep up with. Then I thought nah. Simplify. One fewer social platform.

Also, I’ve switched off automatically syndicating posts from Micro.blog to Tumblr. For the few posts I want in both places, I’ll just cut-and-paste ‘em there manually.

Simplifying!