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.)
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.
I’m being called a fuckhead on BlueSky for comparing Florida’s forced-birth extremists to the Taliban.
Apparently, this is offensive to the Taliban.
I’m OK with that.
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.
Florida’s Taliban government is threatening to criminally prosecute TV stations that air an ad advocating repeal of the state’s fanatical abortion ban. Republican claims to support free speech and Constitutional originalism are cynical lies and always have been.
“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.
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.
Bill Wells, the Republican running to unseat my Congressional Rep, Sara Jacabs, is going hard for the deranged MAGA vote. Wells has a powerful Florida man vibe.
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!
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.
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.
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.