We’ve watched 7 episodes of the 13-episode first season of the 2004 “Battlestar Galactica” and I’m underwhelmed. It’s fine. Entertaining, but not living up to the fan enthusiasm.

I feel like B:G is a first draft of “Expanse.”

Does the series get better?

Two theories about Biden, comprising four strained metaphors

There’s a conspiracy theory going around that billionaires are pulling the strings to destroy Biden so he doesn’t raise their taxes. I’m more than halfway to believing this theory.

A less tinfoil-hat theory: Leading Democrats and journalists pushing Biden to resign are caught up in inside-the-Beltway elitism combined with getting swept up in the dominant narrative.

Inside-the-Beltway elitism lends the afflicted person to engage in five-dimensional chess when all they need to do is keep their eyes on the road and hands on the wheel. Voters knew who Biden was when they voted for him in 2020.

Julie and I are in a YouTube rut — the algorithm keeps throwing videos I don’t want to watch. What are some YouTube videos and channels you like. Under 15 minutes per video because life is short and rounded with a sleep and who has time for long videos not me.

My newsletter migration is complete! (I think)

I think I have successfully moved my mailing list from Mailchimp to Micro.blog. If you’re reading this in email, you’ll know I did it right. If you don’t see this post, please message me and I’ll get it straightened out (hahahahaha — I make a funny, yes?).

Here’s where you can subscribe to my newsletter. It’s a daily digest of posts I make here.

Micro.blog is the service that I use to host mitchw.blog. I recommend it.

Thanks to @manton for making the process (relatively) easy. A couple of bumps but probably nothing at all to someone with a bit more skills than I have.

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.

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

“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.

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.

The fediverse does not exist

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.

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.

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

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

37Signals, the company behind Basecamp and HEY, is introducing Writebook open source software for publishing books on the Internet

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.

My new newsletter is ready for signups

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!

“Recent research on lucid dreams suggests that consciousness exists along a spectrum between sleep and waking, between hallucination and revelation, between dreamworlds and reality.”

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.

Neuromancer is coming to Apple TV

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 switching newsletter hosting to Micro.blog

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.

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.

“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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.