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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.

The fediverse needs to be more than clones of existing social media

… 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.

Here's What You Discover When You Walk Every Block in New York City

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.

📷🤪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.

Auto-generated description: A young woman with long, light hair is seen making a nervous or uncomfortable expression.

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.

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

A Wikipedia dive on ships named “Enterprise”

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.

I’ve been using my iPhone as my webcam and it works great

I have been using use a feature called Continuity Camera to turn my iPhone into a webcam and I’m very happy with the result.

When it’s time for me to start a video call or meeting, I take my phone out of my pocket and put it on an inexpensive magnetic mount on top of my display. My MacBook automatically connects and I’m in the meeting using my phone’s rear camera.

I previously had this Logitech webcam (was $70 when I paid for it and now it’s $60) and that worked fine, but the video quality on the iPhone is better.

Continuity Camera supports a few special effects, but I’ve only used one of them: Framing adjustments. My home office is a cluttered mess, and videoconferencing often shows too much of that. Using Continuity Camera’s built-in controls, I can zoom in so other meeting participants see just my face plus enough surrounding office background to look natural. I can also pan or automatically recenter to get my face in just the right location.

The magnetic mount I use to attach the iPhone to the display is this one. ($23). It’s made of metal, and it rests securely on top of the display without adhesive or screws. The mount uses the phone’s MagSafe magnets to hold the phone in place. Mounting the phone takes about 30 seconds; just position the phone in place on the mount and magnets do the rest.

Of course, because I’m using the phone’s rear camera for the meeting, I can’t see the screen to see what I look like. But the Continuity Camera software on MacOS mirrors the camera view to my Mac.

This system has one significant drawback: I can’t use the phone when I’m using it is a webcam. This is usually not a problem, because most things I need to do on the phone are things I can also do on the Mac. I do occasionally get a notification on the phone that doesn’t show up on my Mac; for example, from the Amazon app. When that happens, I just wait until the meeting is over and deal with the notification then.

📷 Julie and I went to Old Town, where we saw these T-shirts. I was tempted to buy a couple but decided I’m not badass enough. Perhaps an aspirational purchase.

How to make diner coffee: a delightful Reddit thread

A delightful Reddit thread from a former foreign student who studied in America and misses diner coffee.

… I used to study abroad in the states and I miss those coffees from american diner. I know it’s shitty to some people and I’m no connoisseur and I just enjoy what I enjoy. Does anyone know how to make them? I have little to no coffee-making knowledge.

The answers do not disappoint:

… 92% of diner coffee is about the thick walled mug that has been washed 12,000 times in the last 6 years.

The coffee taste and smell is ingrained the cup. It’s like 75yr old cast iron cookware.

Serious answers:

… Use a basic drip coffee maker and a medium roast, pre-ground coffee like Folgers or Maxwell House. Measure 1 to 2 tablespoons of coffee grounds per 6 ounces of water, depending on your strength preference. Place a paper filter in the coffee maker’s basket, add the coffee grounds, and fill the water reservoir with filtered water. Brew the coffee and serve it in a thick-walled ceramic mug, which is very common in these diners

You forgot “let age 1-2 hours in the carafe on the burner before serving.” It’s really the key, even when I do high end coffee in a high end drip brewer it tastes like diner coffee after an hour or so.

It gets that extra burnt kind of flavor that is the hallmark of diner coffee. The old bunn o matic. It takes me back to hunting trips with my grandfather and stopping at the rural diner out in bumble and having diner coffee and bacon and eggs or pancakes the crack of ass in the morning. Lol. Good times.

What happened to utopias?

We dreamed about utopias and created utopian communities in the 19th Century. Why’d we stop?

Rohit Krishnan:

What was the magic in the 1800s, that many somehow internalised the belief that a few people could come together and figure out the perfect society? Enough that day convinced their followers to move across the known world to try and build something from scratch. An entire economic ideology, political ideology, way of life.

This is the type of ambition that we don’t see anymore. Even the undercurrent of the possibility of the belief is clouded in questions about feasibility and desirability and minimum viable product. In skeptical questions and rational inquiry that nevertheless stubs out the little flames of spirit.

Why is that? Why is it that there was a time in our history not so long ago when smart intelligent people legitimately thought that they had the ability to recreate paradise, and then moved heaven and earth to make it so.

This doesn’t seem to happen anymore. Our culture is not suffused by people thinking they can make humans better, or that they can create a utopian society. We seem stuck in incrementalist thinking, or sometimes believing in technology to help save us when we’re not busy blaming technology for having created a world that we need saving from.

“Goblin band is an attempt to replicate the collective creative energy that happens on tumblr and take it to the fediverse.” Looks intriguing. There’s a lot I love about Tumblr but I dislike that it’s steadily moved away from the open web and toward social siloing, like Twitter and Facebook.

Why Dining Rooms Are Disappearing From American Homes

M Nolan Gray at The Atlantic

The dining room is the closest thing the American home has to an appendix–a dispensable feature that served some more important function at an earlier stage of architectural evolution. …

Americans now tend to eat in spaces that double as kitchens or living rooms–a small price to pay for making the most of their square footage. But in many new apartments, even a space to put a table and chairs is absent. Eating is relegated to couches and bedrooms, and hosting a meal has become virtually impossible. This isn’t simply a response to consumer preferences. The housing crisis–and the arbitrary regulations that fuel it–is killing off places to eat whether we like it or not, designing loneliness into American floor plans.

…

The transition from the classic dining room to the great room mirrors the changes in gender norms and family formation that have occurred over the past 125 years. The dining room emerged in the early 20th century, when an ascendant upper middle class hired migrant laborers as servants. Many American homes from that era were designed around creating a separate sphere for “the help,” with sectioned-off kitchens, laundry rooms, and servants' quarters….

In households where servants were unaffordable, domestic work fell to women. Separate dining rooms and kitchens thus reinforced the segregation of male and female spaces, while allowing generations of newly minted homeowners to ape the design norms of yesteryear’s elites.

…

“For the most part, apartments are built for Netflix and chill,” Bobby Fijan, a real-estate developer and floor-plan expert, told me. “The reason the dining room is disappearing is that we are allocating [our] limited space to bedrooms and walk-in closets.” Even though we’re dining at home more and more—going to restaurants peaked in 2000—many new apartments offer only a kitchen island as an obvious place to eat.

This is partly a response to shrinking household size. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the share of one-person households more than tripled from 1940 to 2020.

We eat our meals at our computers or the TV. I’m a little ashamed to admit that. I read this article at my Mac over lunch.

Former President Donald Trump led House Republicans through a gripe-filled closed-door meeting on Capitol Hill on Thursday, airing grievances about his legal and electoral challenges, attacking his critics in the room, and only briefly addressing policy matters like abortion and taxes, according to multiple GOP lawmakers in the room.

— CNN

Trump doesn’t care about abortion, taxes, immigration and other issues Republicans care about. He only cares about revenge.