Chuck Schumer seems useless. He makes Neville Chamberlain look like Rambo.
It’s a dog food slop breakfast.
I love this image of reading. We’ve all been there, if not with a donkey in tow.
Source: [Pursuit of knowledge under difficulties] by Wordsworth Thompson, chromolithograph (L. Prang & Co.), 1878., Library of Congress, Popular Graphic Arts Collection, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2016649779/.
My Kindle Paperwhite is a tank. Twelve years old and still fine. It takes 30 seconds to open a book from the main menu, but once that’s done page-turning is fast and smooth. Nicely done, Amazon.
Musk forced out the head of the FAA ten days ago, after the FAA fined SpaceX for failing to comply with safety regulations. Trump appointed a replacement today — after the D.C. disaster.
Trump’s Transportation Secretary, Sean Duffy, is a former contestant on MTV’s “The Real World” and worked as a host on Fox Business. “The other top-ranking Trump Cabinet member tasked with dealing with fallout from the crash is Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who is also a former Fox News host.”
Like the saying goes: When a clown moves into a palace, he doesn’t become king. The palace turns into a circus.
Eight days ago, Trump proudly proclaimed he “ends DEI madness” and “restores excellence and safety within the Federal Aviation Administration.”
Trump’s delusions killed hundreds of thousands of Americans in his last term in office. He’s just getting started this time.
I see that OpenAI is claiming DeepSeek improperly harvested data. Must be terrible to have other people profit off your work.
I poked around on the fanfiction archive AO3 for a few minutes last night
I have never explored AO3 much, but I saw a mention of it on Tumblr and figured, why not take a look?
I cast around in my mind for my all-time favorite TV shows to see if there might be fic for them. I thought of “Hill Street Blues.”
“No way there is ‘Hill Street Blues’ fic,” I thought. “That show’s been off the air more than 30 years, and it’s barely been on streaming.”
But I was wrong. There is “Hill Street Blues” fic. JD LaRue and Henry Goldblume seem to be popular characters.
Maybe I’ll check for old-time radio fic. “The Jack Benny Show.” “Fibber McGee and Molly.”
Replicating social silos, but with open protocols, is the wrong answer
I have a blog hosted on Micro.blog, and I’m active on BlueSky, Tumblr and Mastodon. I post mostly the same things in all those places.
I go back and forth on the issue of whether to post natively to all those platforms or just post once to Micro.blog and move on, relying on Micro.blog’s excellent built-in cross-posting tools to spread the word to the other places.
Every solution I’ve found is unsatisfactory.
The social Internet needs a model similar to podcasting, where folks can publish on whatever platform they prefer — Micro.blog, Facebook, WordPress, Ghost, Tumblr, Mastodon, BlueSky, Facebook, LinkedIn, Threads, whatever — and other folks can read on whatever platform they prefer, and everything is readable in native format. Dave Winer calls that textcasting.
Instead, we seem to be replicating proprietary silos but using open protocols, which is better than proprietary silos with proprietary protocols. But it’s far from ideal.
Mike Masnick: The ATProtocol is a technological poison pill that sabotages enshittification. Even the potential of competition serves to protect against BlueSky following Twitter’s trajectory.
Bringing back the Pebble watch
Pebble founder Eric Migicovsky wants to bring back the smartwatch his company invented. He wants to build a simple smartwatch with an e-paper screen that’s hackable, doesn’t do too much and has a long-lasting battery.
He doesn’t want to fix or upgrade the original Pebble because he says it still works just fine. Indeed, he still wears one, and has a boxful of spares.
I’d be a potential customer if they can get it working well with the iPhone. I love my Apple Watch, but I only use its most basic features: Notifications, weather, very basic fitness tracking, telling time and alarms.
I don’t do anything fancy with my Apple Watch, and I’d be happy with something that does a lot less, costs a lot less, and has much longer battery life.
Also, the Pebble was and still is a nice-looking watch. Cute and gadgety. Not a piece of fancy jewelry like a high-end mechanical watch, but it looks nice for everyday wear. Having one of those on your wrist brands you as a nerd, and you can instantly bond with fellow nerds.
How to Take Heart From What Really Worked in the First Resistance
Theda Skocpol at The New Republic:
Marches and lawsuits are fine, but the real wins over MAGA last time were powered by grassroots activists pushing from thousands of districts across the country.
Grassroots resisters successfully fought Trump during his first term by focusing on how policies hurt local communities and real people.
“You spend too much time reading…. You know more stuff that don’t make you money than anybody I know.”
― Robert B. Parker, Mortal Stakes
I will get kicked out of the Apple nerd club for saying this: Usually, I write reports in Markdown and convert them to Word before submitting to my editors. But I’ve been writing a report in Microsoft Word today, and it’s fine. It’s easier than converting, which always needs a lot of manual fixing.
Leslie Nielsen and the Meaning of Life
Josh Marshall reflects on Leslie Nielsen’s transformation from a forgettable 1950s-era B-movie leading man to the star of “Airplane” and the Naked Gun movies.
It wasn’t just that Nielsen wasn’t a comedy actor. Nielsen specialized in a genre of mid-20th century American male screen roles from which all traces of comedy or irony were systematically removed through some chemical process in pre-production or earlier. He was the straightest of straight men. That’s what made his comedic roles – playing against that type or rather playing the same type in a world suddenly revealed as absurd – just magic.
There’s a great life lesson here about hope and the unknown, I’ve always thought, for those willing to see it, whatever our age. When Airplane! premiered, Nielsen was 54 years old, well into mid-life and at a stage when most of us are thinking more about what we have accomplished than what we will. It is certainly not like Nielsen had been any sort of professional failure in life. Far from it. He’d worked successfully as an actor for three decades. And yet not only was the story not over; it was really only beginning.
Years later, after his true calling as a comedic actor was widely recognized, he told an interviewer that rather than playing against type, comedy is what he’d always wanted to do. He just hadn’t had a chance. This makes me think of a gay man who only lets himself come out in the middle or late in life and yet still has a chance – enough time – to live as himself.
Very relevant to me personally. I’m at a time of life when most people are thinking about retiring and yet I feel I have so much to do!