Before upgrading to my new MacBook Air, I am being responsible, updating the operating systems and making sure my backups are all up-to-date. But really I just want to hold-my-beer this bitch and let Migration Assistant rip.

My new MacBook Air is here!

My current machine is a 2018 MacBook Pro. It works fine,although of course it’s slow. But I have to reboot several times a week—twice in one morning last week—and this suggests to me that it’s going to die on me at any moment and leave me possibly unable to meet deadlines. Better to arrange the transition on a schedule more under my control. So I pulled the trigger on an upgrade last week.

The old Mac has just 8 GB of memory and a 13" screen. The new machine is 15"/24GB/2TB. I’m looking forward to having that bigger screen to spread out on when I take the MB off my desk and use it elsewhere.

But now I’m on deadline and don’t even have time to open the box!

Excellent post from Cory about how widespread corruption in public institutions leads to anti-vax, MAGA and other conspiracy theories.

“Conspiratorialism and the epistemological crisis: We may not know what’s in the box, but we can tell if it’s been damaged in transit.” pluralistic.net/2024/03/2…

The revolving door of senior personnel between regulatory agencies and the companies they’re supposed to regulate means that the agencies don’t do their jobs.

The FAA has been overlooking problems with Boeing planes for years and we’re seeing the damage in headlines now.

Likewise, while vaccines are safe and powerful enablers of public health, Big Pharma lied for decades about the safety and efficacy of opiods, so it’s reasonable for people to disbelieve everything Big Pharma says.

Few of us are qualified to judge the safety of vaccines, medications, buildings and airplanes, but we can look at the regulatory process and see if it’s sound. And that process is broken. Corrupt.

Facebook and TikTok aren’t to blame here, the fault lies in the failure of government.

If the Biden Administration has been tackling this problem, I’m not aware of it. That doesn’t mean I support Biden’s re-election less, because Biden’s done a lot of good and in areas where Biden has failed, Trump would be a thousand times worse.

Photos of the original McDonald’s in in Illinois, which opened in 1955, and has been preserved as a museum, showing what it was like to dine there back then. [businessinsider.com]

The “Reitoff principle”: Why you should add “nothing” to your work-life schedule. [bigthink.com] — Taking time to do nothing, and letting your mind wander, is important to productivity and living a good life.

The Reitoff principle is the idea that we should grant ourselves permission to write off a day and intentionally step away from achieving anything.

William Shatner is 93

Kevin Mims makes the case that Shatner is a superb actor, and his much-parodied over-the-top style was due to a couple of factors: TVs at the time had small screens and often lousy picture and audio quality; performances had to be big because the medium was small. Also, Kirk and Spock were a duo; Kirk had to be loud to offset Spock’s stillness.

[quillette.com]:

While a lot of TV actors were trying to mimic the mush-mouthed vocal delivery of big-screen movie stars like Marlon Brando or James Dean, Shatner went in the opposite direction. He enunciated his words carefully and broke his sentences into bite-sized pieces, making each clause a separate unit of delivery. He would speed up his cadence at times, and then bring it to a near halt. Shatner’s unique speaking style has been parodied countless times. Among living actors, probably only Christopher Walken’s line delivery has generated more parodies.

Also:

It isn’t just a coincidence that names like Richard Matheson, Harlan Ellison, and Rod Serling crop up frequently in discussions of Shatner’s career. Academics frequently celebrate the work of various American literary schools–the American ex-pats of the so-called Lost Generation, the writers of the Harlem Renaissance, the Beats–but few literary salons have influenced American popular culture as profoundly as the Southern California fantasists who were all brought together by Rod Serling for his Twilight Zone series and later worked on other fantasy and sci-fi shows, including Star Trek.

Go read some Vernor Vinge

Noah Smith [noahpinion.blog]:

Vinge was perhaps the most technologically visionary sci-fi writer of the past 50 years — a worthy successor to H.G. Wells and Isaac Asimov. And yet in some ways he excelled even those august predecessors. Vinge imbues his characters with an emotional depth that very few sci-fi authors can match, and his plots are consistently complex and engaging. He’s the rare writer who really could do it all.

In the early part of his career, Vinge was a staunch libertarian, but over time he came to see that government is essential to keeping society functioning and preserving freedom.

My encounters with Vernor Vinge

I used to enjoy doing panels at science fiction conventions. Fear of public speaking is supposedly the most common fear, but not for me. I’m the opposite. I love public speaking, though I rarely get opportunities. So, for a few years, I leveraged my meager cred as a tech reporter to get myself put on panels at science fiction conventions. Those panels often focused on AI, and Vernor Vinge was often a speaker at those, too.

One panel turned out to be just me and him. It was the last panel of the day on the last day of the con, and yet the room was packed. “All these people here to see me, I said. “Poor Vernor. Gosh, I hope he doesn’t feel bad.” jkjkjk They were there to see him. We sensibly turned it into a Q&A with Vernor, with me asking a lot of questions and trying to minimize my contributing my own opinions. Which is hard for me, because I have so many opinions and would feel selfish if I did not share them promiscuously.

I did another panel with about a half-dozen people, including Vernor, David Brin, a renowned physicist who has done groundbreaking research into AI, and me. Again, I realized that the people in the room were not there to see me. How can I contribute? I said to myself. And I answered myself: A panel is a show. Every show needs a villain. So when it was my turn to present, I took my iPhone out of my pocket, held it up for the audience to see, and said, “This is my iPhone. It doesn’t know who I am when my finger is wet. You’re telling me this thing is going to achieve superintelligence in a few years? Pfui. The Singularity is bullshit.”

Vernor, who was sitting next to me, turned to me and his face lit up. He was delighted.

In the 2000s and early 2010s, I attended one or two SF conventions per year and encountered Vernor walking the floors of the dealer room, checking out what was for sale while I did the same. We’d stop and chat for 15-30 minutes. I always enjoyed our conversations, and I think he did, too—it would have been easy enough to escape if he did not. I wish I’d taken the opportunity to get to know him better.

Researchers analyzed digital archives of an obscure document thought to have been written by Shakespeare’s father and learned that it was actually written by the Bard’s sister. [phys.org]

Shakespeare had a sister?

Overheard: “As you age, it’s ridiculous how fast bird-watching creeps up on you. You spend your whole life being 100% indifferent to birds, and then one day you’re like “’is that a yellow-rumped warbler’”

California regulators want to protect indoor workers from oppressive heat. Politicians are blocking the protections. This is part of a nationwide trend. [kpbs.org]

For seniors, medical care can be a slog, but there are ways to rein it in. [washingtonpost.com] — Scheduling appointments, going to and from and managing treatments takes a lot of time.

Fresno High School in California limits kids to two seven-minute bathroom breaks per day and tracks student bathroom breaks with apps. [govtech.com] — We’ve streamlined the school-to-prison pipeline by turning schools into prisons.

“Every year, back comes Spring, with nasty little birds yapping their fool heads off and the ground all mucked up with plants.”—Dorothy Parker

I tried using the AirPods Pro as sleep earbuds. That didn’t work.

It started off well. I put the AirPods in my ears and tried lying down in bed to see how it felt. I’m a side-sleeper. I laid on my left side. Felt good. Right side. Felt good. Used the Dark Noise app to play background noise into the AirPods. Noise cancellation worked well enough; it muffled but did not stop sound in the room.

Then the trouble started.

The AirPods Pro have a safety mechanism to prevent you from pushing them too far into your ear. As I laid in bed on my side, the weight of my head began pushing the AirPods Pro deeper. They started to beep. That woke me up—but not fully awake. Just awake enough to move my head a bit so the beeping stopped.

This seemed to repeat dozens of times until I woke up enough to get the AirPods out of my ear. I couldn’t get back to sleep so I sat up for a bit until I got tired enough and went back to bed.

If you’re a back-sleeper or belly-sleeper, sleeping with the AirPods Pro will probably work well for you.

Have We Reached Peak AI?

Edward Zitron’s apocalyptic vision [wheresyoured.at]:

Every bit of excitement for this technology is based on the idea what it might do, which quickly becomes conflated with what it _could_do, allowing Altman – who is far more a marketing person than an engineer – to sell the dream of OpenAI based off of the least-specific promises since Mark Zuckerberg said we’d live in our Oculus headsets.

…

I believe that artificial intelligence has three quarters to prove itself before the apocalypse comes, and when it does, it will be that much worse, savaging the revenues of the biggest companies in tech. Once usage drops, so will the remarkable amounts of revenue that have flowed into big tech, and so will acres of data centers sit unused, the cloud equivalent of the massive overhiring we saw in post-lockdown Silicon Valley.

I fear that the result could be a far worse year for the tech industry than we saw in 2023, one where the majority of the pain hits workers rather than the ghouls who inflated this perilous bubble.

RIP Vernor Vinge

Vernor Vinge, father of the tech singularity, has died at age 79 [arstechnica.com]

I had an opportunity to talk with him several times, and always enjoyed our conversations. He was down-to-earth and liked hearing contradictory ideas, which I, as a singularity/AGI skeptic, was able to easily provide. He liked a good laugh.

Vinge invented the idea of the Singularity, though Ray Kurzweil gets credit, and the idea has long antecedents in occult beliefs. He wrote many good novels and stories, and at least one brilliant novel, “A Deepness in the Sky.” His 1981 novella “True Names” pioneered the concepts of cyberspace and virtual reality, and anticipated the 2020s practice of “doxxing.”

He was local to San Diego, and although I only ever saw him at cons, I sometimes thought about just ringing him up and seeing if he might like to get a cup of coffee.

It’s taken her 11 years, but Minnie now has me trained to let her back in the house from outside in the yard.

ME: “You are REALLY into grabbing my junk.”
HIM: “Sir, I am a urologist.”

I just activated the new, beta ActivityPub integration for my Threads account. We’ll see where this goes. I’m reluctant to commit too much to Threads because of Facebook’s deep history of making its products wonderful at first and then gradually enshittifying them over time.

Just Out There Running For Prez As A Straight Up Mob Boss [talkingpointsmemo.com] — “Trump is a sending a powerful signal that as long as you stay loyal and don’t cross him, even if it means serving jail time, you will be protected. Your loyalty counts, it’s noticed, and it’s rewarded.”

Tapping around in the Lose It app yesterday, I learned that I’ve been using the app since 2009. I weighed 271 pounds then and today I weigh 165. Lose It has been a big help to me in losing weight, keeping it off, getting healthy and staying healthy. [loseit.com]

I’ve been futzing with saved sessions, tab stacks and tab groups in the Vivaldi browser. Tab stacks seem to be better than tab groups because they’re easier to create and they stay visible. Sessions seem to be the same as bookmarks but bookmarks are for old people so let’s give them a new name.

I tried the API version of ChatGPT, which is supposedly more flexible and less expensive, but it’s tempermental. The last straw was its failure to genetate an image with an aspect ratio of 7:4. So it’s back to the $20/mo. pro plan on the web.

US DoJ v Apple

Is Apple a monopoly? Does it engage in illegal anticompetitive behavior? Perhaps. But I’d rather see the Justice Department go after the healthcare monopolies that are literally killing people.

Tim Cook gave the wrong answer when he said that guy’s Mom should buy an iPhone. Cook should have pointed out that the guy and his Mom could use Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Instagram DMs, Signal, Telegram or a bunch of other options to share videos between the iPhone and iPad.

Green bubbles

Only idiots or children think “green bubbles” make somebody else inferior. Apple is not responsible for the existence of idiots and children.

We’re an Apple-only household. Between us, Julie and I have three Macs (soon to be four—I have a MacBook Air on order), four iPhones (only two in use) and three iPads, as well as various accessories. We are loyal Mac customers. And do you know what I say to Android, Windows and Linux users? I might say, “Good morning,” or “nice weather” or “Have you seen Dune 2?” Or I might ask them whether they like their devices, because I’m interested in that kind of thing. I don’t work for Apple marketing, I don’t think people who use other platforms are inferior. I assume they are making the right choices for them.

Here’s a moderation tip I observe on the GEnie online service more than 30 years ago

If you have people on your service who like to argue and use insulting language, give them a place where that’s OK. Many of these arguers and insulters will prove perfectly civil outside that little playground.

I recently stumbled across a subreddit called /r/stupidpol which describes itself as a “Subreddit focused on critiquing capitalism and identity politics from a Marxist perspective.” A better desription would be “liberals are stupid.” I was called “Blue MAGA” and an “idiot.” I was not angry; I understood the rules of that place and modified my behavior accordingly.

That said, Redditors can be a rough crowd, and if you’re going to post or comment there, you need to be ready to be insulted.

Reddit's I.P.O. Is a Content Moderation Success Story

Kevin Roose/nytimes.com:

The site’s journey from toxic cesspool to trusted news source illustrates the business value of keeping bad actors at bay.

Elon Musk and other MAGA wingnuts decry moderation as censorship, but:

  • Only Nazis and trolls want to be on a platform with Nazis and trolls. Fortunately there still aren’t a lot of Nazis out there—not enough to sustain a big business. I don’t like being on platforms with political scolds; that’s true even when the scolds agree with my politics.
  • Even Nazis and trolls don’t want to be on a platform that’s only Nazis and trolls.
  • Moderation is arguably the business that social media platforms sell. They’re selling access to a pleasant place for people to visit. (This observation is not original to me, or, I think to Roose—at least it’s not a point he’s making in this article.)

That said, Reddit is not a business success. It’s 15 years old and still hasn’t made a profit.

And since the summer crackdown, Reddit’s volunteer-led forums are seeming exploitative. Reddit no longer seems to be operating in good faith—if it ever was.

Building an “online local chronicle:” a website that would list facts and news about a location, such as a city or town, in chronological order, as a complement to news sites and Wikipedia [doc.searls.com]

Here’s something I saw on a 2017 business trip to San Francisco: The retro-futuristic lobby of the Hyatt Regency San Francisco.

The hotel was a primary location for two movies I loved: Mel Brooks’s “High Anxiety” and “Time After Time,” where Malcolm McDowell plays a time-traveling H.G. Wells.

I have no doubt that Adam Mosseri and his team are talented, hard-working and sincere about making Threads a great citizen of the fediverse. And I have little doubt that they will change those intentions or be replaced when Threads hits the final stages of the “embrace, extend, extinguish” cycle.

Filipino police freed hundreds of slaves toiling in a romance scam operation [theregister.com] — One worker, who tipped off police, was “promised a job as a chef. Police said he bore signs of torture in the form of electrocution marks.”

Thomas Friedman: What Schumer and Biden Got Right About Netanyahu [nytimes.com] — Israel needs a plan for peaceful coexistence with Palestinians after the war, and Netanyahu has nothing to offer.

A conversation with Stephanie ‘Snow’ Carruthers, Chief People Hacker at IBM X-Force Red [securityweek.com]

Her partner planned to attend DEFCON. She went with him, more for Vegas than DEFCON. But after falling asleep in a reverse engineering malware presentation (“It went completely over my head,” she explained) she was encouraged to go and find something of more interest. She did, and found a lock-picking village. Within a couple of hours, she had picked her first lock.

via

17 percent of Americans report experiencing long Covid. That is an extraordinarily high number of sick people. [usnews.com]

“How Are You? Just Give Me Your Stock Answer. No, really. I want to know your stock answer." [ironicsans.beehiiv.com] — Me: “I’m good. You?” Or, if the other person asks first, I just say, “I’m good.” Except often I forget and say, “I’m good, you?” leading to an infinite “How are you” loop.

My editor won’t sent me to to KubeCon in Paris, France. She says if KubeCon comes to Paris, Texas, she’ll talk about it.

It’s sunny and clear and I just got a weather alert to expect severe thunderstorms in 40 minutes. WTF?

The air does smell ozoney, though.

I’m trying to be more mindful about adding articles to my read-it-later list. It becomes just another to-do list to add stress to my brain. I want to stop adding “that might be interesting” articles to the list. But that’s hard to do because those articles, well, might be interesting.

My latest on Silverlinings: Oracle climbs to the hyperscaler A-list — Oracle’s growth and multi-cloud strategy elevates it to the big leagues. Its deeper partnership with Microsoft will burnish the Crimson Cloud Conglomerate’s shine.

Read to the end for a failed comparison to “Goodfellas.”

I tried steel-cut oats for my morning oatmeal and the texture was like tiny styrofoam pellets. Not recommended.

Something I saw while walking the dog.

This would have been a fantastic photo if not for that frickin green blurry stick photobombing the right side.

LED light bulbs have gotten great—inexpensive, energy-efficient, bright and reliable.

Kevin Drum: We are living in a golden age of light bulbs. [jabberwocking.com]

Wirecutter: It doesn’t matter if you turn them off when you leave the room. The energy usage and financial cost is trivial. [nytimes.com]

Via Jason, who says: “LED light bulbs are like every conservative outrage— once the fight against them is won, we all move on and just live in a better world.” [json.blog]

Two weeks ago, executives from TikTok’s U.S. operations flew to their company’s international headquarters in Singapore with good news. They told bosses that after years of battling over its fate in the U.S., the popular video app wasn’t in imminent danger of being banned in its most important market.…

— How TikTok Was Blindsided by U.S. Bill That Could Ban It. [wsj.com]

I’m half-bald. I don’t see myself getting a hairpiece, even if they are realistic now. I just get my hair cut down to 1/8 of an inch and wear hats to protect myself from the sun when I’m spending a long time outdoors. And because I like hats.

How Toupees Got So Realistic That Young Guys Started Wearing Them. [robbreport.com] — My feelings on toupees, hairpieces and baldness treatments for men are complicated.

On the one hand, it seems like foolish vanity, insecurity, a wicked waste of money and conspicuous consumption.

On the other hand, if you don’t like your body, you should absolutely change your body.

The road from “I agree; the cat will never sleep in our bed” to “Of course she smacked you, that’s her pillow” is shorter than many imagine.

— @quinncummings [threads.net]

Why people are falling in love with AI chatbots. [theverge.com] — Generative AI is transforming dating apps and spurring real people to romance AI bots. On the Vergecast, hosted by Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel, with reporter Emilia David.

One company lets users set up AI chatbot versions of themselves and then the chatbots talk with each other to decide whether the originals would make good romantic matches. Presumably the people make the decisions, after reading transcripts or summaries of the chats, and the bots are not matchmaking directly.

Looks like there’s a TV series in the pipeline based on the 1993 novel “Manhattan Transfer,” by John Stith, who was active on GEnie back in the day. [imdb.com]

A massive alien ship rips Manhattan out of the ground and brings it on board, along with its 2 million inhabitants. Is this some sort of cosmic zoo exhibit, part of a scientific experiment, or perhaps fresh groceries for the aliens?

It was a fun book.

The cast list includes Casper Van Dien, who starred in “Starship Troopers” (1997), and is heavy with Star Trek alums: Doug Jones (Cmdr. Saru, “Discovery”), John Billingsley (Dr. Phlox, “Enterprise”), Tim Russ (Tuvok, “Voyager”), Walter Koenig (Chekov, the original series and movies).

I don’t see any mention of the series other than this page, so it’s anybody’s guess whether it actually comes to anybody’s screen anytime.

An app called Bless Every Home, backed by some of the biggest names in evangelical circles, is mapping the personal information of immigrants and non-Christians to conduct door-to-door religious conversions and “prayerwalking” rituals.[newrepublic.com]

Nerdy Saturday morning: I’m messing around with having ChatGPT write Drafts actions to automate formatting text for blog posts.

I’ve succeeded in having it create an action that formats link posts on mitchw.blog the way I like them, with the link at the end of a paragraph showing just the domain as the text of the link. For example

I’m now working on converting Markdown to a plain text format suitable for publishing on Facebook and other text-only platforms.

If I can get that working, the next thing I want to do is get ChatGPT to write a Drafts action that will suggest line breaks for Mastodon threads, and eventually BlueSky and Threads.

I wanted to be able to automatically update my daily note in the Obsidian app with a list of documents that I’ve updated that day. That list would be a good approximation of things I got done that day. I found this, which seems to do the job.

On the limitations of writing for the fediverse

Ben Werdmuller:

I’m not bullish on squeezing long-form content into a microblogging platform, whether on Mastodon or X. Long-form content isn’t best consumed as part of a fast-moving stream of short updates.

Yes! This is an ongoing source of frustration for me. I often write posts that are 600-1,000 characters. That’s not long-form by real-world standards, but it’s slightly too long for Mastodon, Threads, Bluesky and the micro.blog timeline, and the resulting posts are ghastly.

Facebook doesn’t have those length limitations, but it also doesn’t permit simple hypertext like links, blockquotes, headers and boldface.

Tumblr is a full blogging platform, without length limitations and with great support for hypertext and embedded media. But it has user-interface and community conventions that seem to be offputting to most people. Also, Tumblr seems perpetually on the verge of shutting down.

I want to publish once, and allow anyone to read what I write on whatever platform they like. Dave Winer calls this “textcasting,”, and it’s a great idea, though he focuses on the needs of the writers and I’m focused on the needs of the readers. (I imagine Dave might say the needs are the same.)

Also, the Web doesn’t seem to have a universal standard for letting folks know you’ve replied to or mentioned them in an article — nothing like @mentions on Mastodon or Facebook tagging. So for this post,, I guess I’ll tag Ben Werdmuller and Dave Winer in Mastodon or Threads, as well as Manton Reece, who builds and runs micro.blog and whose post flagged Ben’s comments to me.

These limitations are frustrating! Why can’t everything be more fluid?

Cory Doctorow: “Bullies want you to think they’re on your side: Bosses (not migrants) take workers' wages, and corporations (not readers) want writers' money." [pluralistic.net]

You know what’s an excellent thing to do when you’re having trouble sleeping? Go through your notes apps and clean up the scraps of ideas for posts.

And now, back to bed to see if I can stack Zs for a couple of hours until the alarm.

I keep bags of dog treats next to the bags of dried fruit that I put in my cereal in the morning. The packaging looks very similar. That is going to make for an interesting breakfast for me one day.

The “True Grit” movies came up in a conversation so I went down an Internet rabbit hole

This 2010 article in The New York Times includes a conversation with Charles Portis, the author of the novel on which the movies were based:

Portis’s characters have a self-conscious manner, a homespun formality of speech, that comes from the effort to inhabit grandiose roles: lone avenger on a quest; nefarious outlaw; besieged moral exemplar. If that sounds like a description of Cormac McCarthy’s characters, the great difference is that Portis finds comedy in the aspiration to heroism, and his characters are forever plagued by a suspicion of their own ridiculousness.

Portis, who died in 2020, was called reclusive, but it seems more likely that he just didn’t like self-promotion, doing interviews, publicity, celebrity and the other trappings of fame.

The Washington Post describes how Portis became a writer: It started when he attended college after military service.

“You had to choose a major, so I put down journalism…. I must have thought it would be fun and not very hard, something like barber college — not to offend the barbers. They probably provide a more useful service.

Do you prefer video on or video off for remote meetings?

I prefer video on but I would not demand it. And I don’t even tell colleagues I prefer video on because I don’t want to pressure anyone.

If most people’s videos are on, I turn mine on—and vice versa. It’s an etiquette dance I find mildly annoying, like when you see someone you haven’t seen in a long time and you have to choose between a handshake and a hug.

I’ve been WFH for literally decades. When I’m WFH, T-shirts and sweatshirts are appropriate attire for almost all meetings. Sometimes, when I’m introduced to a new client, I’ll throw on my “Zoom shirt,” a blue Oxford button-down otherwise thrown over a chair in my home office.

Early in the Zoom era, I wondered why many folks wore hats on meetings. And then I realized: They were working from home, didn’t comb their hair, and still had bedhead. This is not usually an issue for me—I’m half-bald and have my remaining hair in a Generic Middle-Aged White Dude Buzzcut.

Why Do So Many Coffee Shops Look the Same?

On the Decoder Ring podcast, host Willa Paskin interviews writer Kyle Chayka, author of “Filterworld: How Algorithms Are Flattening Culture.” He discusses how the Instagram algorithm has made public spaces more generic and we have come to prefer those spaces.

In today’s episode, Kyle’s going to walk us through the recent history of the cafe, to help us see how digital behavior is altering a physical space hundreds of years older than the internet itself, and how those changes are happening everywhere–it’s just easier to see them when they’re spelled out in latte art.

[slate.com]

Adolfo Ochagavía is an “undercover generalist." [ochagavia.nl] To find work as a generalist, he says, you need to present yourself as a specialist.

I have found this to be true. Don’t tell people you can do anything. People don’t need “anything”—they have specific problems that need to be solved. Later, when they learn to trust you, you can branch out with more general work.

The Cult of AI. Writer Robert Evans returns from CES in January with a “sinking feeling” about the “unhinged messianic fervor” surrounding AI. [rollingstone.com]

High-speed grocery-shopping is my superpower. I should put it on my LinkedIn profile.

I just got off the phone with AT&T customer service.

Years ago, I accidentally slammed a car door on my fingers.

The two experiences were extremely similar.

Sleep is weird and magic.

We sleep more than we do anything else.

We spend a third of our lives in a state of death, much of that time dreaming, wandering around in a spirit world. Much of that dreamtime we are not even ourselves.

Then we wake up and spend the rest of our lives pretending we live in a rational universe that makes sense.

I walk across the deck between my office and the kitchen a million times a day, and sometimes, when I leave the kitchen, Minnie is lying outside my office door. She clearly wants something, but I have never been able to figure out what it is.

Into my office with me? No. Pats? She’s fine with pats, but that’s not what she really wants.

I go inside and close the office door with her outside, and she clearly looks disappointed.

I finally figured it out just now: She wants me to go back to the kitchen and let her in. So I did.

I wish she’d give me a treat when she has successfully trained me in a behavior.

I cannot be arsed to keep up with culture wars bullshit now. Like, there is a young woman named Sydney Sweeney who is I guess famous for something and is super-attractive and hot and she wore a low-cut gown on TV and this killed wokeness?

Also, the Congresswoman who gave the Republican rebuttal to the State of the Union is a Stepford Wife and she made up a story about sex trafficking in the US under Biden that actually happened in Mexico 20+ years ago?

I’ve seen articles pointing out exactly where the Royal Family photos were clumsily edited, and I still don’t see the problems. I guess I just have a bad eye for that kind of thing.