Mitch's Blog

A colleague was working in a library and got shushed by the librarian and a fellow patron.

I was immediately impressed and jealous. I haven’t been shushed at a library since I was 17 years old.

The small, prosperous Parsi community of people in India leave their dead out naked in the forest to be consumed by vultures. [99percentinvisible.org] — Learning about this tradition horrified me at first — but only for an instant. The Parsi tradition is no weirder than burying dead people, burning them up, or chucking them in the ocean. The Parsi tradition just seems revolting to me because I’m not used to it.

I’m in Inoreader several times a day, every day, workdays, weekends and holidays. It is one of those products that makes me wonder if the people who build it actually use it.

I spoke bluntly at an internal team meeting this morning. I fear I am so not invited to the presenter’s Bat Mitzvah.

… lesson one from pilot school was “fly the plane.” Strange noises? Fly the plane. Zero visibility? Keep flying the plane. Stomach bug kicking in? Fly the plane. Whatever was going on, first you had to fly the plane. Then you could try to address everything else. He saw that as something of a life lesson. Whatever is most important is what you have to do first, despite distractions, interference, or a powerful desire to be elsewhere at the moment. And while you can be on autopilot a lot of the time, when things demand your complete attention, they have to get 100% of your attention.

— Glenn Harlan Reynolds

Om Malik: The future of writing: How AI will shape our tools.

AI doesn’t write for me, but it helps me write and I expect more of that.

“Mayor of Kingstown” is like if Scorsese made a TV series and decided his movies were too family-friendly and sunny.

We watched three episodes, and we’re done. It’s a fine series, but the news is depressing enough.

Garbage Day: “Project 2025 is the policy paper-equivalent of a school shooter manifesto…. The Republican Party is full of weird men that talk like The Joker and all you really have to do is hold a mirror up to them and they fizzle. My most steadfast view of American politics is that it’s not about having coherent political beliefs or clear policy objectives, it’s simply about not being a huge fucking weirdo.” Yes.

Kevin Drum: “Biden could be stuffed and mounted on a wall and I’d still vote for him if the only other choice was Trump.” Yes.

AOC and a group of House progressives unveiled articles of impeachment against Thomas and Alito. Hell, yeah! Good to see that at least some Democrats have spines. Not like the party leadership.

Also, Clarence Thomas took a free yacht trip to Russia and a helicopter flight to Putin’s hometown, “among a slew of other gifts and loans from businessman Harlan Crow.” This article includes a list of bribes from the impeachment papers. It’s quite a list. Thomas is as corrupt as a Tammany Hall politician; he should have a cash register next to his seat on the Supreme Court.

What exists now is Mastodon, which is tiny compared with siloed social media, and also a few other platforms, which are tiny compared with Mastodon, and which partially interoperate with each other and Mastodon through ActivityPub. But only partially.

Among these ActivityPub-compatible platforms is Threads, which is already a bajillion times bigger than Mastodon.

Also, hanging off this tiny ActivityPub archipelago is the island of BlueSky, which is I guess not part of the fediverse because it doesn’t use ActivityPub idk why isn’t it connected to Mastodon?

The only people who care about this kind of thing are a few foolish nerds, among whom I include myself.

“Any one can do any amount of work, provided it isn’t the work he is supposed to be doing at that moment.” — Robert Benchley

I think tonight will be the night that I introduce Julie to the wonderfulness that is “Severance.”

I watched it without her when she was visiting family in 2022, and I am definitely up for a rewatch. Season 2 drops in January.

“The Cat Creeps,” a 1930 lost film. Only two minutes of footage exist today.

My Mimestream subscription expired a couple of weeks ago, and I thought I’d skip renewing. Gmail is no longer my primary email service because I am no longer self-employed. However, I dislike the Gmail web interface. And while Apple Mail works, it’s not as nice as Mimestream. So I renewed. $50/year isn’t nothing, but I still use Gmail a lot, and Mimestream is worth it.

FDR and NY Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia

If I could give teenage me one piece of advice it would be this: Dance.

“Double-click” is supposedly a new corporate buzzword? Seriously? I’ve been hearing it for as long as I can remember.

Having successfully sabotaged the Biden campaign, leading Democrats are apparently moving on from attempts to push the President off the ballot. These guys ought to be on the Republican payroll. They have done far more to push Trump closer to the White House than anything anybody in the elephant party has done.

“Trump raped a woman, was revealed as being in constant contact with a sex trafficker, stole nuclear secrets, is old, forged electoral certificates, was convicted of 34 felonies, committed fraud, is literally on the Saudi payroll, sent a mob to hang his VP but the opponent is also old."

Videoconferencing services need a filter that makes your hair look neat and trim when you badly need a haircut.

37Signals co-founder and CEO Jason Fried:

You know, it’s really easy to publish short form content on a variety of social platforms. And individual blog posts on a number of other platforms. These are solved problems.

But it’s surprisingly challenging to publish books on the web in nice, cohesive, tight, easy-to-navigate HTML format. A collection of 20 essays can be a book. Or a company’s handbook can be a book. Or an actual book like Shape Up can be a book.

…

So we did something about it. Introducing Writebook. It’s a dead simple platform to publish web-based books. They have covers, they can have title pages, they can have picture pages, and they can have text pages. Each book gets its own URL, and navigating and keeping track of your progress is all built right in.

Troubling: A left-wing alliance with history of antisemitism allegations declares victory in France’s split parliamentary elections.

Today I learned that they’re putting AI into cat litter boxes now.

What Catholic priestly vestments symbolize and how they connect to the significance of clothing for everyone.

Sign up, if you wish to. The newsletter is a daily digest of all my posts here. I’ll give it a week or so to make sure all the bugs are shaken out, and then migrate all the subscribers of my old newsletter to the new one. But I’m pretty sure all the bugs are out now.

Subscribers to the old newsletter won’t notice much change. New layout. New email “from” address; it’s now “MitchW@hello.micro.blog,” so if you’ve got any filters configured based on the old email, you’ll want to update those.

The newsletter is now hosted on Micro.blog, the same service that hosts mitchw.blog. Thanks to Micro.blog proprietor @manton for his work on this!

Department store wax mannequins melting during a heatwave in 1929.

Embers Restaurant Open 24 hrs

I need to know what happened.

Same shot 40 years apart.

via

Tonight’s movie was “Goldfinger.”

Living in a Lucid Dream. By Claire L. Evans.

Guided dreaming beats lucid dreaming because lucidity spoils the experience of dreaming and turns dreaming into a kind of virtual reality game.

Imagine sitting across the kitchen table from your deceased parent. “You don’t know it’s a dream,” [Adam Haar Horowitz, a dream researcher and cognitive scientist], said. “That’s the beautiful thing. You’re sitting with them. Why would I want to be in a dream and know it’s a dream? I want to be in the room and want to have the conversation with the person. I don’t want to poke them and say, ‘Wow, what a good hologram.'”

Tonight’s movie. Brings back much of the top cast of the 1984 film, and stars new faces. Predictable, charming and enjoyable. I like that Eddie Murphy lets other people steal scenes. Now do 48 Hrs.

They’ve just announced casting for Molly.

Elsewhere on the Internet, I’ve been involved in a discussion of anachronisms in the book, which was published in 1984. It’s a very 80s version of the future, with challenges for bringing to the screen today.

The opening line of the book is, ““The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.” It’s a great line, but you’re gonna have to explain that to anybody under 50.

A climactic scene in the middle of the novel — a fantastic scene — takes place at a bank of pay phones. My autocorrect doesn’t even recognize the word “payphones” today, which underscores my point.

In another climactic scene, the characters are on a spaceship, and the hero asks if the ship has a modem.

A big part of the novel’s premise is that Japan is a global superpower.

Still, the story of Neuromancer still works today.

“Neuromancer” was seminal to the Generation X and younger Boomer entrepreneurs and engineers that built the Internet; in the early 90s, you saw a lot of companies and technologies with names lifted from the novel, the way “Lord of the Rings” is used today. It’s a novel that I admire but do not enjoy. Still, I’ll watch the show — could be fun.

I’m in the process of moving the newsletter version of this blog to to the same company that hosts the web version, Micro.blog.

A big part of the reason is that Mailchimp, the company that currently hosts the newsletter, is owned by Intuit, which is not a nice company. I’d just as soon not be affiliated with that company any more than necessary.

This is still a work in progress, but I hope to complete it within days.

Current newsletter subscribers should not notice much difference.

If you’re interested in subscribing to receive my posts by email, you can do that here.

However, be warned that the new service is still a little buggy. I have it configured to send out updates daily, but instead, it seems to send updates every time I post.

I’ll keep the old newsletter running until the transition is complete.

Eve Arden and Vivian Vance (1941)

Source

On Ask a Manager: Great reply-all email catastrophes.

Ask a Manager is a website where I can get lost even worse than on TV Tropes.

When I get stuck on a reply-all chain, I perpetuate the catastrophe with feigned innocence.

Private places to cry?

On Reddit:

I had to make a tough decision today and need someplace private to let my emotions out. Is there a good place to do so with having little chance of stumbling upon other people? Home is not an option.

Explained further here.

My previous post was a subtweet (sub-Thread?) to a Threads friend who frequently posts about their generational identity. But it’s a friendly sub-Thread, because I like this person, though I don’t know them well. I enjoy their posts. I don’t want to be argumentative.

It seems odd to me to identify tribally with a particular generation. Boomers, GenX, Millennials — it all seems random.

However, I am on the cusp between Gen X and the Boomers, and some generational researchers say that people born on the cusp of generations tend to be outliers. We outliers tend not to identify with the generation we technically belong to, and we are also skeptical of generational differences.

So maybe my skepticism about generations is just typical of my generation.

Purdue University gives itself a Wi-Fi glow-up — CIO Ian Hyatt describes how the IT department revamped Purdue’s outdated Wi-Fi, turning tech troubles into top-tier connectivity and quieting Reddit complaints. My latest on Fierce Network.

“Bring me a Miltown, sweetheart.” Roger Ebert interviews Robert Mitchum, 1975, soon after Mitchum played Philip Marlowe in “Farewell, My Lovely.”

“Farewell, My Lovely” is the best movie we’ve seen in a while. Released 1975, set in LA 30 years earlier, and dripping with noir. Robert Mitchum is a perfect Philip Marlowe. Also featuring Jack O’Halloran, best known as the giant dimwitted criminal henchman of General Zod in “Superman II,” as the giant dimwitted criminal Moose Malloy. Also featuring Charlotte Rampling, who recently played the Reverend Mother in “Dune Part 2,” Sylvia Miles, Harry Dean Stanton, and Sylvester Stallone, before “Rocky” and before bulking up. I don’t think Stallone has any lines; he has a small but important role.

The IMDB trivia page is worth reading, as is Wikipedia, starting here.

Thanks, @bitdepth!

Things that don’t work: 31. “Waiting…. if you really want to do something, don’t wait for some unspecified time when it’s more convenient and then watch that time recede before you.”

Five of my favorites: “The Man Who Folded Himself,” by David Gerrold, “Time and Again,” by Jack Finney, “The Proteus Operation,” by James Hogan, “Last Year” by Robert Charles Wilson and “The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August,” by Claire North.

The 23 Best Time Travel Novels - a collection dating from the 1950’s through today. Despite paradoxes, time travel is a fascinating concept and makes a great read.

Tonight’s movie.

I have spent the afternoon on the daybed dozing and reading dynomight.net and I am fine with this.

Tuesday’s debate has made me even stronger in my support of Biden than before. Trump spent his entire time onstage spewing nothing but hate and lies. Lapses in Biden’s performance are trivial in context.

Phrase of the day: “swivel-eyed loon with terminal groomer-panic” (@pluralistic@mamot.fr)

Tonight’s movie.

Trump disgraced himself and the country yesterday, reaching new lows for mendacity and delusion, and the lead stories in the NY Times are about whether Biden is fit to run?

One of my top 5 movies

Biden does not need to be replaced. The felon and his entire party of criminals and theocrats need to be replaced.

The only reason we’re questioning Biden’s acuity and not Trump’s is because Biden’s voice has gone soft.

Trump seems commanding because he shouts and smirks. It’s an illusion.

Trump is dangerously disconnected from reality. He’s not just a fascist; he’s completely unhinged and delusional.

Heather Cox Richardson has a bracing analysis of last night’s debate.

Biden showed he’s smart and on top of the issues. He’s a lousy debater, but he’s still mentally sharp.

Trump, on the other hand, rambled and lied outrageously even by his usual low standards.

I am reading John Irving now and enjoying his habit of italicizing keywords in dialogue. Helps me to hear the dialogue as I read it.

Today I learned that Arnold Schwarzenegger has a son named Patrick, who is a successful actor in his own right. And I also learned what a “glow-up” is, and used it in a headline.

One Million Checkboxes

My colleague Diana Goovaerts has a juicy exclusive:AWS is challenging NVIDIA with a 1,000+-watt Trainium chip that will go head-to with Nvidia’s Blackwell GPU, part of an overall push to make AWS data centers ready for the next wave of GenAI demand. Nice work, Diana!

“One would think that a story like this would be out of 1890, not 2024.” Schools on the Fort Apache reservation expel students for taking part in Native American religious ceremonies that the schools claim are satanic. [The Guardian]

I thought we as a nation were done with this kind of white supremacist bullshit, but apparently not. There’s a direct line from 19th Century “Kill the Indian in him, and save the man” evangelism to today.

I had 2.7 pounds of fresh fruit, raw vegetables and cottage cheese for lunch today, which is tasty and healthy, but now I’m freezing my fingers and toes off so I have closed the a/c vents in my home office and am opening all the windows to let in the lovely 83-degree summer air.

Surfed tracks your entire surfing history. You can tag individual URLs and add them to favorites, so it functions as a bookmark manager too.

Nicely done, but I don’t know whether I will stick with Surfed. I just don’t seem to have use for it.

Paul Lynde, Charles Nelson Reilly and Rip Taylor “get a cursory mention in a new documentary about queer stand-up, but they were groundbreaking.”

… these Stonewall-generation funnymen with dippy but dark-edged sensibilities … were shaped by decades of self-hatred and fear the likes of which a 20-year-old today cannot fathom.

Michael Chabon on Threads:

If you grew up with Lidsville, Hollywood Squares, Bewitched, Match Game, read this and think about what you knew & did not know about Lynde, Reilly, & Taylor, & how you knew what you knew without anyone saying anything, and how much was lost because no one said anything.

… there is a much bigger opportunity for the fediverse by focusing on long-form content and forums, than on recreating a microblogging Twitter-like experience. Selling the same product that people already know, but now with less of their social graph, is always going to be an incredible hard task. Exploring how new products can be build that stimulate thoughtful conversation is a much more interesting direction to me.

— Laurens Hofs on Last Week in the Fediverse

Yes to this. So far, Mastodon and Bluesky have been Twitter, but without most of the people you followed on Twitter. Threads is trying to become Twitter like you used to know it, but deemphasizing news and politics and bigger. X is Twitter with more Nazis and porn. Tumblr is Tumblr, and seems to have lost interest in joining the fediverse. Facebook is Facebook, and Meta seems to have lost interest in it.

If the fediverse is going to catch on, it needs to become something more than recapitulating the past. I don’t know whether long-form content and forums are the answer, but they’re at least different than Twitter-that-was.

I personally chafe at the 300-character limit of Bluesky and the micro.blog timeline, and the 500-character limit of Mastodon. My posts are often untitled and longer than 500 characters and I dislike the way they get arbitrarily lopped in the middle on microblogging platforms.

I feel like we’re halfway to a new, healthier and more open form of social media (something like Dave Winer’s vision of textcasting) and I want us to move faster. Sometimes it seems like we’re stalled.

Greg Miller, a 37-year-old software engineer in Astoria, Queens, is walking every street in every borough of New York City—8,000 miles. He started in the pandemic and has already done 2,400 miles. He is part of a subreddit of like-minded perambulators: /r/EveryBlockNYC

I walk 3.2 miles daily, almost always with the dog, and on weekends I often use the Footpath app to plot a fresh course through nearby streets, favoring streets we haven’t been on before. Miller is orders of magnitude more methodical than I am.

Tonight’s movie.

📷🤪I see this realtor ad several times a week when I walk the dog down Lake Murray Blvd. Yesterday, I saw somebody put googly eyes on the woman’s photo, which is childish and not at all funny.

Seriously, it wasn’t me who did it, but I laughed when I saw it, and I hope Giovanna Kellems did the same.

I have started reading “Use of Weapons,” the first book in the Culture series by Ian Banks. Everyone loves those books, and I tried the first, “Consider Phlebas,” and couldn’t get through it. A friend recommended “Use of Weapons,” so I’ll give that a try.

Kevin Costner isn’t coming back to “Yellowstone.” The show returns in November. — I’m disappointed Costner isn’t returning, but looking forward to the show’s return.

First really warm day here in San Diego and now it’s time for the annual tradition where I try to find the remote for the ceiling fan. This tradition involves a lot of swearing.

I’ve started a new blog, cheekymonkey.micro.blog, for the purpose of using Micro.blog’s excellent crossposting and ActivityPub tools to automatically post memes, vintage ads and photos, and other things I saw on the Internet to Mastodon, Bluesky and (soon) Threads. Probably the only folks interested in following that blog will be folks who for some reason don’t want to follow me on those other platforms

Wikipedia now labels the ADL as an unreliable source on the Gaza war. — The ADL says anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism. But those are not the same, and claiming that they are is dangerous to Jews around the world.

I knew about the starship and aircraft carrier, of course, but I got to wondering about other ships named USS Enterprise.

The earliest example cited by Wikipedia is a 1775 Continenal Navy sloop captured from the British and burned top prevent recapture in 1777. There were actually two aircraft carriers of the name, one in service 1938-47, the most decorated U.S. Ship of World War II, and the other in service 1961-2017, the first nuclear-powered carrier. A third carrier of the name is under construction and due to enter service by 2028.

The IXS Enterprise is a NASA conceptual design for an interstellar ship that would use the Alcubierre drive, a warp drive proposed by theoretical physicist Miguel Alcubierre in 194.

Wikipedia’s page for the word “enterprise” comprises about 147 entries, including this page on versions of the starship on “Star Trek.”

Resident Alien is coming back for a fourth season. This is NOT some bullshit.

Kevin Drum provides a brief rundown of lessons learned from the Covid pandemic. What worked and what didn’t? Masking, closing schools, remote work, far-UVC lighting, restaurant shutdowns and more.

We should be working right now on a Manhattan Project to install better ventilation universally to prepare for a future pandemic. This is especially true in schools, workplaces, and other high-traffic areas.

This was what we did in reaction to the flu pandemic of 1918 and it worked. If we could do it in 1918, we can do it today.

Sinclair is flooding local news websites with hundreds of deceptive articles about Biden’s mental fitness.

The articles are based on specious social media posts by the Republican National Committee (RNC), which are then repackaged to resemble news reports. The thinly disguised political attacks are then syndicated to dozens of local news websites owned by Sinclair, where they are given the imprimatur of mainstream media brands, including NBC, ABC, and CBS.