Mitch's Blog

I’ve decided to take a break posting links here. By nature, they’re ephemeral. And they’re not by me. Also, many of the links I post are political, which sets the wrong tone for my blog.

If you like the links, you can find me on other social media:

Facebook.com (I don’t do politics there much)
Tumblr
Mastodon
Threads
Bluesky (invitation only—let me know if you need an invitation)
Newsletter

I post a lot of memes, vintage photos and other found media on those other platforms. You may enjoy them.

I also sometimes post about business matters on LinkedIn.

At some point in the future, I may change my mind about posting links here. I frequently try new things on blogging and social media.

I was just reminded of New Year’s 2000. I was an editor on a tech newspaper. We searched desperately for someone—anyone!—that got bit by the Y2K bug.

For years, our cat Lulu has pestered Julie at night and left me alone. I was OK with this situation. I did not feel neglected.

But recently, Lulu decided that my side of the bed makes an excellent staging area for pestering Julie.

Note the timestamp on this post.

I’m going to see if Lulu will let me get a little more sleep now.

Writing a datasheet for a networking product, I typoed “brogrammable” instead of “programmable” and now I’m visualizing a networking product that is programmable but only by dudes who smell like Axe body spray.

I walk Minnie every day for an hour and a half. We go 3.2 miles in that time. If we went at her pace, we would take the same amount of time to go 10 feet and every millimeter of that distance would be thoroughly sniffed.

I was going to get a tattoo on my 50th birthday, but I would’ve needed to decide what pattern to get, decide what part of my body to put it on, and research and find a good tattoo artist and that seemed like an awful lot of work.

An alternative would’ve been to join the Navy, get drunk, and get a tattoo in Manila done by a drunken tattoo artist with a dirty needle that would give me hepatitis. That is still an option.

The cashier asked me how I was doing and I said I’m good how are you and he said I’m good how are you and I said I’m good how are you and that was almost a Groundhog Day type situation.

“Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves” is “Guardians of the Galaxy” meets “The Princess Bride.” It stars Chris Pine, Michelle Rodriguez, and Hugh Grant. Fun.

Of all the great mysteries of the universe, I would like to know just one thing: When I’m walking the dog, how does she decide where the perfect spot to pee is?

It seems to be a rigorous selection process.

Thinking about a time I was sitting with a small group of people, and one of the women in that group invited us to a party at her house and said we would be free to use her backyard pool.

She added: “Swimsuits. Are. Not. Optional.”

And I thought, “But I do not want to go swimming.”

And that was when I realized that I had become a boring person.

In another online community, somebody asked for the title and author of a story about humans encountering another race that seemes to live a simple agrarian life. When asked how they generate electricity, or other questions about advanced technology, the agrarian person responds that they don’t know. 

Later, it becomes clear this other race is far advanced of humans, with great psychic powers. Asking them about electricity and such is like asking us about the best kind of wood to rub together to start a fire—something our distant ancestors knew but almost nobody today does. 

Other people on the community had their guesses, even asking ChatGPT. But I said to myself, “That sounds like a story I read when I was a kid. The author was John Campbell.” And I did about 15 minutes of Googling and replied thus:

Sounds like “Forgetfulness” by John W. Campbell, writing as Don A. Stuart, in Astounding Stories, June 1937 https://archive.org/details/Astounding_v19n04_1937-06_-ibcbc_fiche-paper

I am feeling hugely badass about this successful act of Internet research. 

The original questioner misremembered at least one key detail: The star travelers aren’t humans—they are aliens from a civilization in the distant future. They land on a planet called “Rhth” (get it?) and believe the simple agrarian folk to be the degenerate descendants of a once mighty high tech empire. They pity the simple agrarian folk, but then learn better. 

The above link is worth following for the ads alone. The magazine has a gajillion small ads, and they are all like this:

I remember when I finally laid my hands on a reproduction of a 1939 Astounding Stories magazine. I had read so many essays by Isaac Asimov and others that talked about how the 1939-45 era of Astounding was the Golden Age of science fiction. At last! I thought. I have found a precious document!

And I opened the magazine, and my eye fell on the face of a shocked-looking, open-mouthed boy with the headline, “Did you say JOCK ITCH?!”

Also: Ads for anthropological studies of Polynesian sexual rituals. I suspect those studies did not appear in proper peer-reviewed scientific journals.

I’m beginning to think that carrying a distraction machine in my pocket might not be a great idea.

‘Screams Without Words’: How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on Oct. 7: A Times investigation uncovered new details showing a pattern of rape, mutilation and extreme brutality against women in the attacks on Israel.

Eddie Murphy is making a fourth Beverly Hills Cop movie, with Judge Reinhold and John Ashton. Looks good! Here’s the trailer.

On a private community, someone said they’ve just started watching “Babylon 5” on Season 2, and they want to know whether the show stays good.

I replied:

My memory of B5 is that the first season was wooden but there was something about it that made me stay with it. Seasons two through four were excellent.

As for the fifth season: As I recall, the series was initially supposed to go five seasons, but the showrunner, J. Michael Straczynski, got the word that the show would be canceled after four seasons. So he rushed Season 5 to an ending a half-season early.

Then JMS was told whoops, never mind, you get another half-season.

And that’s the way it looked to me onscreen—the first half of the first season was rushed and talky, as JMS was telling viewers information he would have shown if he had the proper amount of time.

Then the second half was just padding and bloviation. A main storyline involved a beautiful woman telepath falling in love with a male cult leader. He had Fabio hair. It just didn’t work for me.

For me, a lot of the fun of Babylon 5 was going on the Lurker’s Guide to Babylon 5 website the morning after each episode aired to see what little easter eggs and plot tricks were hidden in each episode. The website is still online, so somebody just watching the show can have the same fun.

We started a rewatch not long ago, but it didn’t work for either of us. Maybe if we’d started with the second season we would have liked it more?

A spinoff series, “Crusade,” had Gary Cole, which is a plus in any TV show or movie. He played a heroic starship captain. It would have been EVEN BETTER if he’d done the whole thing as Lundberg, his character from “Office Space,” with the contrasting-collar shirt, suspenders, coffee cup, glasses and “Yeah, I’m going to need you to go ahead and… “

I did not love the series but I liked the mix of epic fantasy and space opera. Which I guess is a common trope but not one I’ve encountered before or since.

I do remember one gag I quite liked from that series: a character is a member of the secret Thieves Guild, and this becomes important to the story. Gary Cole confronts her and demands to know why she never told him this. And she rolls her eyes and says, “What’s the point of being a member of secret society if you go around TELLING people about it?” As I recall, the character who was a member of the thieves guild wore a sexy catsuit but her manner was pure Gen X slacker, like Daria Morgendorffer in spaaaaaaace.

‘The Gilded Age’ Shows the Virtues of Inauthenticity: John McWhorter discusses how the characters in “The Gilded Age” would have really sounded and why it’s better that they talk like modern, 21st-century people.

Parker died in 2010. Here’s what Sarah Weinman wrote about him at the LA Times:

Robert B. Parker, who died Monday in his Cambridge, Mass., home at age 77, spent his final moments doing exactly what he’d done for almost four decades: sitting at his desk, working on his next novel. He didn’t concern himself with looking back. Instead, he wrote, and in the process irrevocably altered American detective fiction, forging a link between classic depictions and more contemporary approaches to the form.

Steven Axelrod at Salon:

Parker taught me to appreciate scotch and soda, stand up to bullies and finish the extra set of sit-ups. He taught me how to make a fast meal and break into a window by chipping out the glazing. He taught me that solving a case has more to do with poking at a situation waiting for things to happen than finding clues. He made Boston appealing (even without a GPS). More than that, he made adulthood appealing, for three generations of my family – my brilliant, alcoholic father, my hesitant pre-adolescent son, and me. Someone once remarked that I was always in search of father figures. Maybe it’s true. I know I lost another one on Monday morning.

He died at his desk, writing. That’s the way any writer would want to go. The police said there was no sign of foul play. That was oddly disappointing, a brackish dousing of reality. A writer found dead at his desk in a Parker novel would spark another fascinating case for Spenser and Hawk. Susan would chime in with the psychiatric angle: an angry editor? A pathological fan? A jealous mystery writer? They would track it down, between runs along the Charles and workouts at Henry Cimoli’s regrettably gentrified gym. (It has potted plants now.)

“He died at his desk, writing. That’s the way any writer would want to go.” Respectfully, that’s romantic nonsense. Parker himself—who thought of writing primarily as a job—might roll his eyes at it. Still, Parker died doing something he loved, and that’s not a bad way to go. Too young, though. We should have had 20 more years of books from him.

Alison Flood at The Guardian:

Parker, who would publish up to three books a year, said he would write 10 pages a day, often not knowing “who did it” until near the end of the book. “I don’t rewrite, I don’t write a second draft,” he said in a 2005 interview. “When I am finished, I don’t reread it. Joan [his wife] reads it to make sure I haven’t committed a public disgrace, and, if I haven’t, I send it in. Then I begin the next book.”

Weinman again, writing about the final Spenser novels, which were not Parker’s best work.

… spending time in Parker’s company these last several years was akin to attending a concert by Frank Sinatra or Ella Fitzgerald late in their careers: There was just enough juice to revisit the standards, and it hardly mattered if the tone warbled into an echo of former melodious glory.

Politico: John Fetterman isn’t the politician you thought he’d be — and he doesn’t care. Fetterman gives a hell of an interview.

Demand for Abortion Increased Under Florida’s Ban. Anti-Abortion Activists Think Another Ban Will Fix This. Keep digging, Republicans.

After crime writer Robert B. Parker died in 2010, his estate hired several writers to continue the multiple series Parker wrote in his lifetime.

I’ve read six of the Spenser novels by Ace Atkins. They’re enjoyable but frustrating, like seeing a cover band of your favorite group. Beatlemania rather than the Beatles.

A good writer will occasionally surprise you—write something completely unlike them. But a writer hired to write like someone else will, if they do a good job, never surprise you. They always write just like the writer they’ve been hired to write like.

I don’t mean to be harsh on Atkins. He was hired to do a job and he did it well. And I’ve put one of his original books on my to-be-read list.

I’m going to set this as my virtual background for Zoom calls. It will create the right professional impression.

On the Fresh Air podcast: Barry Manilow reflects on writing songs — and making the whole world sing.

Before becoming a hit singer-songwriter, Manilow composed jingles for TV commercials. He wrote, “Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there” and “I Am Stuck On Band-Aids, And A Band-Aid’s Stuck On Me.”

He also played the accordion as a boy.

I think every Jewish and Italian boy cannot get out of Brooklyn, N.Y., unless he learns how to play the accordion. There’s a guard at the Brooklyn Bridge…. And you have to play “Lady Of Spain” before you can go over the bridge. Everybody I knew played the accordion - badly. I happened to - you know, because I was more musical than the rest of my friends, I kind of got through “Hava Nagila” and “Lady Of Spain.”

… there are people who play the accordion and actually make it sound good. I was not one of those people.

They Spend Thousands Decorating Homes No One Will Ever Go Inside.

Sarah E. Needleman at The Wall Street Journal:

Newcomers are upending the once-fusty dollhouse scene—decking out wee abodes that could belong in the (mini) Hamptons

So far this year, Michael Hogan has spent more than $5,000 on metal bar stools, a curved sofa and other modern décor to furnish a newly built home he’ll never live in. That is because the dwelling is so small it is better suited for a resident the size of a mouse.

Hogan is among a new cohort of dollhouse devotees who are shaking up how grown-ups indulge in the classic children’s hobby. Instead of outfitting old-timey homes with old-timey décor, they are assembling contemporary miniature abodes packed with tiny versions of trendy trappings sold in stores such as IKEA and West Elm.

Some enthusiasts are “shaking up tradition by embracing artisans who use 3-D printers, design software and laser cutters.… Others prefer to stick with only classic tools such as tweezers, razorblades and glue.”

Emily Brouilette, 46, grew up in a four-floor Victorian built in the 1800s. When she got into dollhouse collecting a few years ago, she invested in an ultra-industrial domicile resembling stacked shipping containers…. Her most prized miniature purchase to date is a framed poster of her favorite band, the Rolling Stones, that measures a little more than an inch in height and width. A tiny copy of her husband’s favorite book, “Moby-Dick,” rests on a tiny night stand. “I wanted my mini house to very much reflect me and my husband living there, though mini versions of us would be kind of weird,” she says.

The photos accompanying the article are wonderful.

The Rest Is History podcast: Victorian Britain’s Maddest Mystery . Roger Tichborne, a 25-year-old aristocrat and heir to a fortune, died in a shipwreck in 1854. “His mother, certain of her son’s survival, advertised extensively with a tantalising reward for her son’s return. Twenty years later a rough, corpulent butcher from Australia named Arthur Orton arrived in Europe and declared himself to be the long lost heir. The trial that ensued captivated the public…. " Writer Zadie Smith discusses the case, which is the basis of her new historical novel, “The Fraud.”

The Imaginary Worlds podcast looks at Doctor Who’s regeneration, which began nearly 60 years ago as a gimmick to replace a lead actor whose health was failing, and has become central to the Doctor’s story, “about an alien being who is striving to be better but keeps overshooting the mark."

Podcast host Eric Molinsky says the source of regeneration’s narrative power may be that we all change over time and when we look back on our past selves they seem like other people.

I went around and around the house looking for my phone, searching the usual places again and again, and finally got down on my hands and knees with a flashlight next to the bed and discovered the black phone had fallen off the nightstand and into a black shoe.

Ryan O’Neill: Let me repeat that back to you.

One of the most effective communications strategies I use is repeating back, in my own words, what was just explained to me.

I do this sometimes when doing interviews, but I find the people I’m interviewing will interrupt me to make the point themselves, or elaborate on whatever point I’m repeating back.

The Hyperloop was always a scam.

The tech industry’s move into transportation was not only a failure; it was an active campaign to deny the public access to better transit and trains because the billionaires of Silicon Valley don’t personally want to get around that way. The Hyperloop was one part of that, but so were the Boring Company, ride-hailing services, and self-driving cars. The Hyperloop’s failure provides a lesson we’re learning far too late: that Silicon Valley won’t deliver us a better world if they can’t find some way to profit off it.

What Happened When the U.S. Failed to Prosecute an Insurrectionist Ex-President. Historian Jill Lepore: After the Civil War, attempts to prosecute Jefferson Davis bogged down in politics, racism and legal pettifogging and went nowhere.

“100 little ideas: A list of ideas, in no particular order and from different fields, that help explain how the world works."

These kinds of lists are catnip for me.

Luxury Paradox: The more expensive something is the less likely you are to use it, so the relationship between price and utility is an inverted U. Ferraris sit in garages; Hondas get driven.

The Middle Ground Fallacy: Falsely assuming that splitting the difference between two polar opposite views is a healthy compromise. If one person says vaccines cause autism and another person says they don’t, it’s not right to compromise and say vaccines sometimes cause autism.

Focusing Effect: Overemphasizing factors that seem important but exist as part of a complex system. People from the Midwest assume Californians are happier because the weather is better, but they’re not because Californians also deal with traffic, bad bosses, unhappy marriages, etc, which more than offset the happiness boost from sunny skies.

I encounter the Focusing Effect regularly. I live in San Diego and do business with people from all over the world. I think they think my life is just surfing and campfire parties on the beach with Gidget.

“Bertie Sheldrake was a South London pickle manufacturer who converted to Islam and became king of a far-flung Islamic republic before returning to London and settling back into obscurity."

I saw this sign on the ground next to an impressively large poop.

It’s All Bullshit: Performing productivity at Google.

Journalist JS Tan, writing at The Baffler, argues that Google has become a cesspool of bullshit jobs—engineers rewarded for building projects that are never deployed, or deployed and quickly abandoned, and bloated middle management. The company is trying to change its culture.

I’m reminded of Cory Doctorow’s observation that Google only ever built 1-1/2 products—search and I forget what else. It bought its ad business, which was like Jed Clampett luckily striking oil in his backyard. Google also bought other businesses that have been successful for it: YouTube, Google Maps, and Waze. (Maybe Gmail is the half-business of which Cory speaks?—Google did develop that.)

Google’s spectacular failures with Google Glass, Google+ and Google Reader, to name just three examples, suggest a company whose innovative powers are far more hype than reality. On the other hand, it’s no mean feat for Google to build and maintain its vast, global infrastructure of data centers and subsea cables, and keep its businesses—acquired or otherwise—successful.

I have seen the Doctor Who Christmas special and I have thoughts (SPOILERS)

Ars Technica rates 20 time travel movies by entertainment and scientific plausibility.

What modern science has to say about time travel can be summed up thusly: You can travel to the future, but you probably can’t travel to the past, although to be honest, we’re not really sure.

Their list includes a personal favorite of mine: “Time After Time” (1979), starring Malcolm McDowell as time-traveling H.G. Wells, Mary Steenburgen as his plucky feminist 1970s galpal and David Warner as Jack the Ripper.

The IMDB trivia page for “Time After Time” does not disappoint.

All four of the real H.G. Wells’ children were still alive at the time of this film’s release.

…

Malcolm McDowell listened to recordings of H.G. Wells to prepare for the role. According to him, Wells’ voice was high-pitched and Cockney-accented, so he decided not to imitate

…

The movie’s title inspired Cyndi Lauper’s song “Time After Time”, when in 1983 she browsed through a copy of TV Guide for “imaginary song titles”.

…

A deleted scene featured Wells meeting a punk who was playing extremely loud boom-box music on a bus in San Francisco. [Director] Nicholas Meyer later reused this idea in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986).

Much of the action of “Time After Time” takes place in the Hyatt Regency San Francisco, as do a few scenes in Mel Brooks’ “High Anxiety.” I stayed in the same hotel in 2017; it hadn’t changed much, other than becoming deliciously dark and gloomy. A monument to 70s futurism.

One quibble with the Ars Technica list. Authors Jennifer Ouellette and Sean M. Carroll rightly praise the first Christoper Reeve “Superman,” including Gene Hackman’s “marvelous selection of outrageous wigs,” but add:

We’re knocking off a point for the cheesy “Read My Mind” spoken song as Superman takes Lois Lane (Margot Kidder) on a romantic flight over Metropolis, which has aged poorly.

No, that scene did not “age poorly.” It was always terrible. It was cringe in 1978 and it is cringe today.

Now I want to see “Superman” again, to enjoy Hackman, Ned Beatty and Valerie Perrine hamming it up as villains.

Reading “A Christmas Carol” as antisemitic is pretty easy. The main character, Ebenezer Scrooge, is a moneylender who doesn’t celebrate Christmas. Full stop there. But there’s more: the name Ebenezer is Hebrew, deriving from the phrase eben ha-ezer, meaning “stone of the help.” Scrooge’s dead friend and former business partner, Jacob Marley, sports a fully Jewish moniker – his first name one of the Jewish forefathers, and his Hebrew family name meaning “It is bitter to me.” Scrooge not only doesn’t observe Christmas festivities, he hates it. He’s a mean and nasty guy, and Dickens even gives him a “pointed nose” to boot.

— Forward: Is ‘A Christmas Carol’ antisemitic or humanist?

The supermarket did not have Chianti. I talked to four employees, and they did not know what Chianti is. (“Candy?”) Does no one watch “Silence of the Lambs” anymore? What do hippie college students use for candleholders if they don’t have Chianti bottles?

We saw this festive holiday display of leg prostheses. Please enjoy it.

The premise of the movie “Noelle” is that Santa Claus is a family business, with each Santa passing the pom-pom to his son. A few months ago, the last Santa died, and the responsibilty to pilot the sleigh falls on son Nick, who doesn’t want to do it and is terrible at it. Nick’s sister, Noelle, advises him to take a weekend to relax in someplace warm, and he does so—and disappears.

Now everybody in the North Pole is mad at Noelle. “Noelle” continues the tradition of “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” in portraying most of the denizens of Santa’s village as jerks.

Noelle tracks Nick to Phoenix, where Nick has reinvented himself as a yoga instructor, and she attempts to get him to return to the North Pole and fulfill his responsibility.

All of this is in the movie trailer, and if you watch the trailer, you can figure out how the movie ends.

Noelle is played with, well, elfen adorableness by Anna Kendrick of the “Pitch Perfect” trilogy, which I haven’t seen, and the 2009 Great Recession dark comedy “Up in the Air,” starring George Clooney as a consultant who specializes in laying people off. I did see that one—on the day I myself got laid off—and loved it.

Nick is played with gormless charm by Bill Hader, of “Saturday Night Live” and “Barry.”

Also featured are Shirley MacLaine as a grouchy elf; Julie “Airplane” Hagerty as Mrs. Claus; and several scene-stealing CGI reindeer, particularly a little white reindeer named Snow-Cone.

Kingsley Ben-Adir plays a divorced father facing his first Christmas alone without his family, in a storyline that’s surprisingly moving for such a fluffy movie.

Both Julie and I enjoyed “Noelle.”

“Noelle” is the latest of my ongoing series of completely avoiding important or consequential entertainment, because the news is consequential enough, inspired by John Scalzi’s December Comfort Watches.

Here’s Scalzi’s review of “Noelle.”, from which I learn that “Noelle” was written and directed by Marc Lawrence, who also wrote and directed “Music & Lyrics,” which starred Hugh Grant as a washed-up 80s pop music star who experiences a career comeback as a songwriter after he meets and partners with aspiring lyricist Drew Barrymore. “Music & Lyrics” is a solid romantic comedy—like “Noelle,” it’s fluff entertainment—and also a surprisingly thoughtful exploration of the value of fluff entertainment. I’d like to see “Music & Lyrics” again.

“Some thoughts on the real world by one who glimpsed it and fled." Bill Watterson’s 1990 commencement speech at Kenyon College.

Plumshell:

Lately, I’ve been realizing the value of having something that excites me enough to jump out of bed for it. So, I’ve decided to fully immerse myself in whatever comes next, knowing that these enjoyable times might not last forever.

Here’s the thing: whether or not these obsessions lead to something useful in work or life isn’t the main point, although they often do. More importantly, as various monks and philosophers say, the greatest happiness for humans is to live in the moment.

Apparently, when humans have free time, they tend to stress over the past and future instead of focusing on the present.

Thus, those who discover a hobby they can deeply immerse themselves in are fortunate….

Tyler Cowen: Is Bach the greatest achiever of all time?

Stackexchange discussion: Can Microsoft Flight Simulator help me learn to fly (or make me a better pilot)?

Ace Atkins bids Robert B. Parker’s Spenser farewell. After 10 novels, Atkins looks back at what makes the Boston detective character so compelling.

The Surprising Possibilities of See-Through Wood. Transparent wood is tougher than transparent plastic and glass and has potential practical applications in smartphone screens, insulated windows and more.

How the press manufactured consent for never-ending COVID reinfections. Continual reinfection was not the “new normal” Biden advertised. How did we get here?

Why Do We Build Houses in the Same Way That We Did 125 Years Ago?

Walking the dog in the park this morning, I saw a runner wearing a Santa hat, a runner wearing a Christmas sweater, and a pack of bicyclists that included one wearing a rope of Christmas lights around his neck—the old-style, big teardrop-shaped lights.

Every once in a while, I pick up a call from an unidentified caller rather than letting it ring through. It’s almost always a telemarketer or other variety of scammer. And then I’m disappointed because I can’t think of a way to mess with them.

Maybe I should take improv classes?

I’m intrigued by Dave Winer’s distinction between conversation and publishing. He’s talked elsewhere about blogging as a kind of thinking out loud.

BlueSky upgrade: Now you can see Profiles and posts on the web without logging in, and it also supports RSS feeds.

I want a single client for all the Twitter spinoffs: Mastodon, Bluesky and Threads all in one place. RSS and Tumblr too. This step by BlueSky is a step in the right direction.

This was a pain for me to figure out but once I got it figured it, it was simple.

Use the line tool. Instead of clicking and then dragging—which will draw a single line—click at the start of your shape, then click on the next corner, and then the next corner, and so on until you’re done.

To close the shape, your final click should be on the starting point. You can customize with the fill tool—if you do, then when you close the shape, you’ll automatically get a color fill.

Use the curved-line selection for wavy edges, and the straight-line selection for nice, straight edges.

If you don’t close the shape, you end up with a multi-point or wavy line instead.

Here’s a video that shows you how to use the line tool with clear written instructions in the extended caption.

I should illustrate this with screenshots but I need to move on now. Maybe another time.

I needed to draw an L-shaped box for a diagram. I spent an hour trying to figure out how to draw it using Excalidraw. I found this YouTube video. I then had to figure out why the audio wouldn’t play. I had this problem yesterday and thought I had resolved it but I guess not.

After ten minutes of that, I tried a different video and the audio played just fine.

Aha, I said to myself—audio does not play because there is no audio.

I scrubbed back and forth in the video trying to figure out what they were doing. No luck.

Then I expanded the caption and discovered there are also detailed instructions in the caption. Hooray!

I fiddled for about two minutes and got a nice, L-shaped box.

That was easy! I declared to myself.

Conclusions:

1. YouTube instructional videos for software are evil. Please, please, please just give me written documentation with diagrams, and maybe the occasional animated GIF to illustrate where to click and mouse around and so forth.
2. That’s really weird usage of the word “easy.”

Ted Gioia at The Honest Broker: In 2024, the Tension Between Macroculture and Microculture Will Turn into War. Alt creators such as YouTube stars and Substack authors are overtaking traditional media, and traditional media is oblivious to the race.

Charles Stross: Tech Billionaires Need to Stop Trying to Make the Science Fiction They Grew Up on Real

A Knight’s Tale is the Best Medieval Film (No, Really)

One of the things I absolutely adore about A Knight’s Tale is that it makes no pretense at historical accuracy anywhere within its length.

— John Scalzi

Another one for the to-rewatch list.

I think Democrats wake up every morning and they look at the calendar on the iPhone and it says January 6th. The date never changes. And then they get into an electric vehicle and go get an abortion.

— Kellyanne Conway

I like to have coffee first but otherwise can confirm.

Federal Judge Blocks New California Law Banning Concealed Handguns in Public Places. I bet U.S. District Court Judge Cormac Carney does not allow guns in his courtroom, other than sheriff’s officers and police.

Trump vows to amp up the Hitler talk

A fanatical Ohio prosecutor charged a woman with abuse of a corpse after she had a miscarriage in a restroom.

The family of an Israeli woman kidnapped by Hamas is suing the Red Cross over ignoring the needs of captives.

Deborah Cohen at The Atlantic: IBM has a history of more than a century of innovation.

The company was the Watson family business for 60 years, and offered lifetime employment, though it’s recently been sued for age discrimination.

The System/360 mainframe, announced in 1964, was one of the greater products of the 20th Century, as important as the Model T. The System/360 introduced computing architecture that ran across a line of computers—some bigger and more powerful, and others smaller, meaning users could re-use their software between different models in a line.

The company’s technological accomplishments are still recognizable as the forerunners of the digital era, yet its culture of social responsibility—a focus on employees rather than shareholders, restraint in executive compensation, and investment in anti-poverty programs—proved a dead end. A mashup of progressivism and paternalism, communalism and cutthroat competition, the once ballyhooed “IBM Way” was, for better and worse, inextricably intertwined with the family at the top.

JULIE: “I’m going to try a new herb and rice.”
ME: “I don’t think I should be eating rice.”
JULIE: “Not rice. Spice. Urban spice.”
ME: “Oh, ok. Sounds good.” (pause) “What’s urban spice?”
JULIE: “Not urban spice. Herb. And. Spice.”

Julie, exhausted, fainted.

Threads is getting an API. This seems to be separate from ActivityPub. I’m looking forward to this being implemented—I haven’t been posting to Threads as much as I do elsewhere, because doing it manually is inconvenient . @manton, have you seen this?

I am quite enjoying John Scalzi’s December Comfort Watch movie list and have added about half the titles to my to-be-watched-list.

I’m done with challenging and important entertainment for a while. The news is challenging enough nowadays.

We went to the San Diego Natural History Museum Sunday, which proved to be a personal milestone for me—my first time receiving a senior discount.

My chagrin at having the word “senior” applied to me was offset by getting a discount. So, um, yay I guess?

The Everywhereist: Every Relationship In Love, Actually, Listed In Order of How Dysfunctional They Are.. I love this movie and agree with every criticism against it, including this one.

RIP Luiz Barroso, who pioneered the modern data center for Google and made the modern internet possible. Until Barroso, data centers were populated by enormously powerful and expensive computer servers. Barroso instead used massive numbers of relatively inexpensive, disposable machines.

“… we must treat the data center itself as one massive warehouse-scale computer,” Barroso said.

Barroso was one of those immigrants that Republicans say are vermin polluting America’s blood.

Sivraj and Me. Phil Gomes created a personal AI advisor using GPT Builder, with a sarcastic personality based on Jarvis from the Iron Man movies.

This is brilliant. I’m going to try something like it.

Humans are a basically civilized species. We know not to go barefoot in restaurants, treat our friends’ living rooms like landfills or nap on the shoulder of our office cubicle mate. And yet, as soon as we step inside an airport or onto a plane, our manners seem to vanish. Perhaps it’s the delirium of travel or the belief that everyday rules do not apply to vacations, much like calories don’t count on holiday and foreign currencies aren’t real money. Or maybe there has never been a canon for proper passenger behavior — until now.

— The 52 definitive rules of flying

Amazon is asking workers experiencing financial hardship to write to the company mascot (named “Peccy”) for help.

Amazon would rather ask its workers to humiliate themselves instead of paying living wages.

Meanwhile, founder and chair Jeff Bezos is worth $172 billion, and the company tripled its profits to $9.9B in its most recent quarter.

John Scalzi has a delightful short essay on “Die Hard," a movie that works so well because of its wonderful cast. Even small parts get their moments to shine.

And of course “Die Hard” created thousands of variations and ripoffs. My favorite “Die Hard” variation is “Paul Blart, Mall Cop.” The way I remember it (it’s been a few years), Paul Blart is a hero–and he was a hero all along: Courageous, loyal, and ingenious.

Thankfully, Scalzi spends only a little time on the question of whether DH was a Christmas movie. That was a good joke the first year it came up but enough already. Sometimes the Internet can be like a four-year-old that just wants to keep telling the same knock-knock joke over and over and over and over…..

Christine Baranski and Cynthia Nixon in the last scene of The Gilded Age. Oh boy.

Merry Christmas from these grizzly bears at the Natural History Museum at Balboa Park.

The iPhone’s Notes App Is the Purest Reflection of Our Messy Existence.

If you want to know who someone truly is—what they eat, what books they read, what movies they watch, or how furious they get inside their own minds—you should probably check their Notes app.

Alexandra Petri: GOP baffled that ‘We Don’t Care if You Die’ is not a winning slogan

I have a short observation about last night’s “For All Mankind.” I posted it elsewhere because spoiler.

Jason Snell @jsnell@zeppelin.flights makes the case for clipboard managers—software that saves a history of what you copy to your clipboard.

I find clipboard managers to be essential. The lack of a clipboard manager on the iPad is a big reason why I find it difficult getting real work done on those tablets.

My earliest memory of using a clipboard manager was the late 1980s. 35+ years later, a clipboard manager should be standard on the Mac, iPad and iPhone. Instead, it’s a third-party add-on for the Mac and you can’t get one at all on the iPad and iPhone.

Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr: How the NYPD defeated bodycams. “NYPD leadership were accountability’s adversaries, not its partners.”

Police control bodycams in New York—as they do in other cities, including Minneapolis (site of the George Floyd murder); Montgomery, Ala.; Memphis—and they use that control to protect murderous, brutal cops.

Bodycams could be a source of accountability for cops, but for that to be true, control over bodycams would have to vest with institutions that want to improve policing. If control over bodycams is given to institutions that want to shield cops from accountability, that’s exactly what will happen.

And it’s exactly what does happen.

I hate to say I told you so but Death’s hand rests on the shoulders of some of the largest Western telecom equipment cos. Steve Saunders predicts imminent shake-out in the telecom vendor market.

Are Red Hat, VMware selling multi-cloud snake oil?

I bought supermarket coffee beans yesterday—and like them. My status as a coffee snob is in grave danger.

At the supermarket today I was in line at the cash register behind a rotund voluble middle-aged gentleman who chatted up not one but TWO middle-aged women, also in line. He laughed “HURH HURH HURH” with every sentence. A real John Candy “Planes, Trains and Automobiles” vibe.

I also saw another gentleman, sinewy build, with leathery skin, wearing plaid shorts, a sweatshirt, a leather tyrolean hat and a small knapsack on his back. His clothes were weathered and so was he. It was a good look.

Apple buried the setting in WatchOS 10.2 for re-activating swiping to change watchfaces. You need to go into the Settings app, and then Clock -> Swipe to Switch Watch Face. And you need to do it on the Watch itself, not in the Watch app on the phone.

My latest: Cloud cost-consciousness is having a moment. Companies are rediscovering cost awareness, which Amazon CTO Werner Vogels calls a “lost art.”

Twitter Is Just Running Ads for Stealing Semen Now

What if it learned from its training data that people usually slow down in December and put bigger projects off until the new year, and that’s why it’s been more lazy lately?

As ChatGPT gets “lazy,” people test “winter break hypothesis” as the cause

Why candlepin bowling took off in New England — and not anywhere else

Terry Gilliam and Jonathan Pryce on making “Brazil.”

“Robert De Niro prepared to play a plumber by watching a brain surgeon.” …

De Niro agreed because he was a Python fan, Gilliam cast his daughter but she cut her hair off in protest and Pryce needed a wig as he’d just been playing a friar with a tonsure.

“Ask a Manager” says “this is the best office holiday party date story of all time.”

It’s EVEN BETTER THAN THAT.

I’m glad to see work is continuing on ActivityPub support in Tumblr (here’s a statement on Tumblr from CEO Matt Mullenweg), and also not surprised to find there isn’t much interest in WordPress ActivityPub support.

Most people who want something with ActivityPub support just go to Mastodon. At least for now.

We brought Minnie in for a good dog wash for the first time in too long. We tried a new place. They did a good job, but they used perfumed shampoo on her, and now my office, where she sleeps at night, smells like a New Orleans whorehouse.

“… blogging never died…. journalists just stopped paying attention.”

— What if the Twitter replacement isn’t a Twitter clone?

The race to 5G is over — now it’s time to pay the bill

AI is transforming literary analysis and could help us uncover insights into our own minds, according to Ted Underwood, an English professor at the University of Illinois.

Bruce Schneier: The Internet today has been an engine for mass surveillance, and AI will potentially result in an explosion of spying. “Mass surveillance fundamentally changed the nature of surveillance…. Similarly, mass spying will change the nature of spying.”

Shakespeare’s First Folio is “arguably the most important secular book in western culture…. Were it not for the First Folio, we wouldn’t have half of Shakespeare’s plays today."

Bruce Schneier: It’s easy to think of generative AI as a friend rather than a service, making us vulnerable to profit-seeking corporations. “AI models, controlled by large corporations, inherently prioritize profit over ethics.”