We have now watched episode two of The Last of Us. The special effects just get more and more disturbing.

Taking a break and on to episode three. I’m sure this one will be relaxing.

We enjoyed the first episode of “Last of Us.” But I’m disappointed that’s apparently all the John Hannah we get.

Everything needs more John Hannah.

We watched the first episode of “The Last of Us.” Can I expect to unclench anytime soon?

The grass at Lake Murray is tall after all the rain we’ve had, and yesterday I saw a golden retriever enjoying the grass so much–creeping through on its belly, and then rolling over on its back and writhing with its legs waving in the air.

At first, I thought the dog was enjoying the feel and smell of the grass, but it seems equally likely it found a carcass or a nice pile of poop to roll around in and cover itself with the smell.

LinkedIn just showed me a suggestion that I should follow Dr. Bronner’s for opportunities–the company is based here in San Diego.

What do you think–should I do marketing for organic soap? Maybe I could rewrite their label copy?

We took a break for a few months after watching the end of season one of “Succession,” because the story seemed complete. But now we have watched episode one of season two.

Those poor raccoons.

I’m going to say “don’t forget to like and subscribe!” instead of “good-bye.” When leaving social dinners, ending meetings, before hanging up the phone, at funerals. It’ll be my “thing.”

Discord and I disagree about when it’s appropriate to send me notifications, and about how to customize notifications.

I’m learning to use Midjourney for a work assignment. This is my professional headshot, modified with the prompt “sitting at the counter of a diner drinking coffee with a cigarette smoldering in an ashtray in the style of Edward Hopper.”

That was fast. I started a new job in September and was let go about 10 days ago.

You know the business cliches: “It was a bad fit” and “it was a mutual decision”? I used to think those cliches were bullshit. Now I see those two brief statements are the best way to sum up my experience on that job.

I’ve already got a couple of promising leads on full-time jobs, one ongoing freelance assignment, and am looking for more.

I posted the following to LinkedIn this morning:

I’m available for writing and editing work in marketing and journalism, specializing in enterprise and telco cloud infrastructure, networking and applications. I’m available for both full-time and freelance work.

My focus is on showcasing the intersection of technology and business—how organizations can use technology to deliver business value, using tech to find new revenue, reduce cost, and eliminate the hassles of keeping their technology infrastructure running (or, translated into marketing language: innovation, digital transformation, and reducing CAPEX and OPEX for overall reduced TCO).

I have more than 30 years of experience. Contact me at mitch@mitchwagner.com and let’s talk about how I can bring that rich expertise to your business.

View my writing portfolio: <authory.com/mitchwagn…>

The best possible use for a mini-USB cable

From my journal, this day in 2014:

A group of teenagers rang the doorbell last night. I went down the stairs to answer. The leader, a girl about 15, explained they were a group from the Baptist church down the street. They were playing a kind of scavenger hunt. The object was to go door-to-door looking to trade an object for another object. Did we have anything better than a keychain?

I thought about it. Nothing came to mind. Hold on I’ll check, I said. I went back up the stairs.

I looked in the basket by the front door. A tube of suntan lotion? No, Julie said that was some kind of boutique suntan lotion. A reflector armband that did not actually reflect? No.

I looked on the coffee table. There was a mini-USB cable from a recent electronics purchase, still neatly bundled. I have a million of those from various gadgets. They’re nearly worthless. To me. Maybe a non-geek wouldn’t think so?

I went out the front door and called down the front stairs. “Is a mini-USB cable better than a keychain?”

“Yes!” said the girl. I went down the stairs and made the trade.

I asked them if they’d heard about the guy who played a similar game and ended up eventually trading from a paperclip to a house. The girl said no. I asked how I would find out how everything came out. The girl said, well, if I heard shrieks of delight coming from the church I’d know they won.

I never did find out how it came out.

I'm relearning how to read books

I’m in the process of relearning how to read books, particularly novels. I’ve gotten so accustomed to reading articles and essays online that my skill at reading books has atrophied.

Yesterday I found myself effortlessly reading a novel for a few hours, and it was a breakthrough. That’s how I would often spend a day as a teenager, but I’ve lost the knack for it.

The novel, by the way, was “Concrete Blonde,” the third Bosch novel, by Michael Connelly. I loved the TV series and hear the actors' voices in my head when I’m reading.

Young woman at the supermarket checkout a packet of flowers, a bottle of wine, and nothing else. Seems like there was a story there. None of my business so I didn’t say anything.

Part of being optimistic is keeping one’s head pointed toward the sun, one’s feet moving forward. There were many dark moments when my faith in humanity was sorely tested, but I would not and could not give myself up to despair. That way lays defeat and death

— Nelson Mandela

We watched the first episode of the new series “Poker Face.” Big “Columbo” vibe.

My review of “Black Ice,” a Harry Bosch novel, by Michael Connelly

I finished reading “Black Ice,” the second Harry Bosch novel, by Michael Connelly. Good at the beginning and end, drags a bit in the middle. I did not find the action set-piece at the climax compelling, though the attack on the helicopter was cool. The characters and dialogue are well done, as are the LA locations.

I would have liked the book more if I’d cared about the murder victims. But I didn’t, and neither did any of the characters. I find that essential in a crime story—do I actually care whether the murderer is caught? Are there any emotional stakes?

In the first Bosch novel, Connelly seems to be finding the character, but now Harry Bosch is fully formed, and very much like the character in the tv show, which we love.

Read another? Sure, why not? Connelly has written 37 crime novels, all in the same universe, so that will keep me busy a little while.

We only have 37 more episodes of Yellowstone to watch, plus eight episodes of 1923, plus ten episodes of 1883.

After watching the first season of “Yellowstone,” I have concluded we need a helicopter.

Tiktok’s enshittification.

How platforms—like Amazon, Google, Twitter, Facebook, and now Tiktok—turn to shit. By Cory Doctorow:

“ … first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.”

Will the sun ever set on the British empire?.

This article by Randall Munro, author of the xkcd comic, just keeps getting better and better.

The exact day when the sun stopped setting on the [British] empire was probably sometime in the late 1700s or early 1800s, when the first Australian territories were added….

Every night, around midnight GMT, the sun sets on the Cayman Islands, and doesn’t rise over the British Indian Ocean territory until after 1am. For that hour, the little Pitcairn Islands in the South Pacific are the only British territory in the sun.

The Pitcairn Islands have a population of a few dozen people, the descendants of the mutineers from the HMS Bounty.

Fort Walgreens The recent spike in shoplifting is both overblown and real. And almost everyone is profiting from it (including you)..

James D. Walsh, Intelligencer staff writer:

“They’re professional and self-employed,” said David Rey, who, after years overseeing security teams in New York department stores, published Larceny on 34th Street: An In-Depth Look at Professional Shoplifting in One of the World’s Largest Stores. “Just like what we do for a living — going to work — they pay their bills and rent and raise their children off the proceeds that they get from shoplifting.”

None of the boosters interviewed for this story could name someone who shoplifted for any other reason than to support a drug habit.

Eggflation is just more price-gouging. Cory Doctorow: One company controls the US egg industry, Cal-Maine Food, and it’s making record profits—up 65% net year-over-year.

In its communications to investors, Cal-Maine’s eminently guillotineable CFO Max Bowman attributed the monopolist’s good fortune to “significantly higher selling prices” and “our ability to adapt to inflationary market pressures.”

Dumb and shameful until it’s not

Ryan Broderick at Garbage Day says Web 3.0 is here. It’s not “the blockchain-backed cyberlibertarian free-for-all, where internet access is predicated on using crypto wallets to buy and sell digital assets” or the metaverse. It’s AI.

Now, you might say, “Ryan, A.I. is completely overhyped. Generative-A.I. art tools can’t even figure out how many fingers people have. There are all kinds of legal and ethical problems around this technology. It’s exploitative. It’s wildly insecure. We don’t even fully understand what it will do to our brains, yet. And there is a new dumb company every day hawking worthless A.I. fixes to problems no one actually needs to solve.” Well, fun fact: That was true of Web 2.0 too! In 2013, I used an app called Foursquare to check-in to a dive bar in Greenpoint every weekend via the geotargeting on my phone so I could get free tater tots. Everything on the internet is dumb and shameful until it’s not.

Also: " … the internet is giant machine that turns harassment against women into advertising revenue."

And Mutekimaru, a Japanese YouTuber, “created a system that lets his fish play Pokémon.”

Well, last week, the fish were playing the newest Pokémon release Pokémon Scarlet. The problem is the game is very buggy and during the playthrough it glitched out and the game crashed, but the fish continued controlling the Nintendo Switch’s buttons. The fish opened up the Nintendo Store, bought a game, and, for a brief moment, flashed their owner’s credit card number on the screen. Whoops!

The Reality of Being a Parent With a Controversial Past

Lily Burana wrote a bestselling memoir about her life as a stripper. Now she’s the mother of a four-year-old.

Our cultural fondness for outlaws is context-specific: Everyone loves a badass, but no one loves a bad parent.

…

we Parents with Pasts plead for the clemency of kindness, for assumptions of our inherent normalcy. After all, we wrestle our kids’ pants on one leg at a time, just like everybody else.

Julie and I went for a walk and saw this house around the corner. It looks nice.

Jacobin: A Marxist View of Tolkien’s Middle Earth

J. R. R. Tolkien’s fantasy world is a medieval utopia with poverty and oppression airbrushed out of the picture. But Tolkien’s work also contains a romantic critique of industrial capitalism that is an important part of its vast popular appeal.

Also: race, gender, and sex in Middle Earth.

Good morning. Here are your daily ducks.

That strange quality of light you’re seeing in this photo is called “sunshine.” We have not seen it here in a while. True fact: San Diego was once famous for it!

Everywhere on Earth, from Europe to China to Africa to Australia and the Americas, is dominated by Europe or its legacy.

The whole world is either Europe, a European colony, or conquered by Europe or the US (a European colony).

That’s all coming to an end now, says Ian Welsh.

And it’s happening so fast we can see it.

The Death Throes Of The World Europe Made:

[Conflict with China] is about whether a non-European power will be allowed to remake the world Europe made. … It is an existential threat to European rule, and it is being treated as such. The “yellow peril” has arrived.

In 30 years, will Mandarin be the the new English? The new lingua-Franca? The language everyone has to know and that you can, if clumsily, get by on almost everywhere?

Absent a major war, likely nuclear, or civilization collapse, I find it hard to see a scenario where China doesn’t become the most important global power.

In Santee, which is a few miles from where we live, 17-year-old Rebecca Philips says she saw a naked “adult male” in the local YMCA dressing room. The naked person was reportedly a transgender woman. Philips later appeared on Tucker Carlson, the story got picked up by the New York Post and Gateway Pundit, and now a local right-wing wannabe-demagogue is claiming Antifa is going to target the community for violence and their people will “send them [effing] packing.” And the Y is closing early for fear everything will blow up.

Can everybody just chill here? And not go on Tucker Carlson or get ready to send people [effing] packing?

Santee YMCA Closing Early, Fearing Rally Clashes Over Teen’s Report, Trans Rights (Times of San Diego/Ken Stone)

“I’m a man who appreciates it when food dares you to eat it.”

I am quite enjoying the AwkwardSD newsletter, from fellow San Diegan Ryan Bradford, who shares a review of a spaghetti dinner from By The Bucket, a chain of restaurants that serves spaghetti by the bucket.

My 11-year-old nephew declares it’s “not bad!” and I agree. I’ve spent more money on grosser things in my life…. Overall, we’re vaguely satisfied with the food and lowkey happy that it didn’t kill us.

You Don’t Know How Bad the Pizza Box Is. The delivery icon hasn’t changed in 60 years, and it’s making your food worse.

Saahil Desai at The Atlantic:

A pizza box has one job—keeping a pie warm and crispy during its trip from the shop to your house—and it can’t really do it. The fancier the pizza, the worse the results: A slab of overbaked Domino’s will probably be at least semi-close to whatever its version of perfect is by the time it reaches your door, but a pizza with fresh mozzarella cooked at upwards of 900 degrees? Forget it. Sliding a $40 pie into a pizza box is the packaging equivalent of parking a Lamborghini in a wooden shed before a hurricane.

It’s the Coolest Rock Show in Ann Arbor. And Almost Everyone There Is Over 65. At the “Geezer Happy Hour,” the “silver tsunami” has been dancing for decades.

Joseph Bernstein at The New York Times:

ANN ARBOR, Mich. — Every Friday night from September to May, at an off-campus nightclub in this thriving college town, a group of die-hard music fans gathers to dance to some of the most devoted live bands in southeast Michigan. There are women in skintight red dresses, long-haired men sucking down bottles of beer and couples flirting in the alcove outside the bathrooms.

In fact, just one thing distinguishes the crowd from nearly any other rock ’n’ roll show in a small city in America: Almost everyone is over 65.

OK, two things: The show always starts at 6:30 p.m. and ends at 9 p.m., in time to get to bed at a reasonable hour.

Minnie and I did a 4+ mile walk in heavy, chilly rain yesterday. She seems fully recovered.

Day One at Rikers Island

… the most horrible thing about being locked up is that you are being dehumanized on a daily basis. They practically stamp a number on you. In order to navigate the experience, you have to normalize the dehumanization. You have to buy into it in order to survive. That is the most horrible thing about being locked up. You’re never the same person again. Once you internalize it, you project it outward. If you are being dehumanized, that’s how you treat other people. That, to me, is the essence of incarceration: having to buy into the dehumanization.

— Graham Rayman and Reuven Blau at Esquire

If you ever connected to the Internet before the 2000s, you probably remember that it made a peculiar sound. But despite becoming so familiar, it remained a mystery for most of us. What do these sounds mean?

The sound of the dialup, pictured

9 years ago today

  • High temperature was 91 degrees.
  • I was in talks for a job at Light Reading.
  • I was in the midst of a long and extraordinarily difficult process of trying to get Minnie housebroken. I attached her leash to my belt and kept her with me at all times when we were home.

Notes from 2023:

Even here in San Diego, a high of 91 is noteworthy. Here in 2023, we’re in the middle of days of chilly weather and heavy rain.

The Light Reading job was great – in some respects, the high point of my career – most of the time.

Even extreme dog lovers say that raising a puppy is hell, and they forget how bad it is from one time to the next. I felt low and worthless from my inability to do a simple thing like housebreak the dog. If we adopt another dog, it will be an adult.

Minnie was having occasional accidents until she was nearly 3 years old, but now she is extraordinarily self controlled. I have occasionally brought her directly from my office, where she sleeps, into the house, without letting her run around outside first, and discovered that hours later she still had no urgency to go out.

Political labeling considered harmful

Journalist Mike Masnick at Techdirt avoids naming politicians' party affiliation unless it’s essential to the story, because, he says, everybody then starts arguing on the basis of team rather than issues.

Maybe it makes sense for all of us to do the same in political discussions: avoid labels like Democrat, Republican, liberal, conservative, progressive, MAGA, lefist, and so on. It’s just a lot of tribalism and name-calling.

Clearly, you often have to use labels. For example, right now, there’s already a lot of talk about the 2024 Presidential election, and if you’re talking about a particular candidate, you often need to say which party nomination he’s seeking, especially if the candidate is not well known on the national stage.

But much of the time, the labeling is just alienating–especially when you’re not talking about a politician or influencer, and you’re just regular citizens interacting.

I think about this kind of thing a bit. I think two existential threats facing the US today are the Republican Party and partisanship, and I am very aware of the inherent contradiction in that belief. Maybe taking a minimalist approach to labeling is a good step toward reconciling that contradiction.

An indigenous tech group asked the Apache Foundation to change its name.

Brian Behlendorf, a co-creator of the popular web server, said in 2020 that he chose the name out of a romantic image of the Apache tribe having fought nobly against a conquering aggressor. The problem, says Natives in Tech is that there isn’t just one Apache tribe, there are eight. And they’re not extinct—they’re still around.

Notably, a stereotypical “pure, reverent, and simple” depiction (i.e., a “noble savage”) “distances Indigenous people from modern technology, the very thing the [Apache] foundation represents,” Natives in Tech writes.

We just started watching this show “Jellystone” with Kevin Costner and we’re still waiting for Yogi Bear to put in an appearance. Maybe in a later season?

A couple of weeks from now, I’m taking my first business trip since December, 2019. It’s more than 400 miles. Given the state of air travel lately, I believe I will walk.

WINDOWS: Your fingerprint couldn’t be recognized. Try again with a different finger.

ME: Yeah, sure, I’ll just dig around in my serial killer souvenir box and see if I have a spare.

Laid-Off Workers Are Flooded With Fake Job Offers.

“Virtual hiring and remote work have made it easier to swindle job seekers."

Here are scam warning signs, according to author Imani Moise at The New York Times:

  • Misspellings and others errors in recruitment sites.
  • Interviewers who won’t do video or even phone calls—they insist on text chat.
  • Employers who want you to pay upfront for computers and other equipment, and promise reimbursement.
  • Scam employers will ask for your bank account and social security numbers during the interview. The time to give out your bank account number is AFTER you’ve been hired, for direct deposit of your paycheck.

The Social Security number is a tricky one for me—I can maybe see legit reasons to ask that during the job interview process. Indeed, I can’t remember whether I’ve been asked that before being hired on any jobs I’ve had—maybe I have been, and gave it out.

Exit.

Libertarians such as Peter Thiel dream of escaping society, and they’re tearing society apart to do it.

Hari Kunzru at Harpers:

If freedom is to be found through an exit from politics, then it follows that the degradation of the political process in all its forms—the integrity of the voting system, standards in public life, trust in institutions, the peaceful transfer of power—is a worthy project. If Thiel, the elite Stanford technocrat, is funding disruptive populists in American elections, it’s not necessarily because he believes in the wisdom of their policy prescriptions. They are the tribunes of the “unthinking demos.” If the masses want their Jesus and a few intellectuals to string up, it’s no skin off Charles Koch’s nose. Populism is useful to elite libertarians because applying centrifugal force to the political system creates exit opportunities. But for whom?

…

Fueled by the pandemic and the crypto boom, such exit schemes have multiplied. Bitcoiners look for an escape from financial oversight and transhumanists look to escape their bodies, while rich preppers design personal lifeboats to escape from social collapse. Some exit evangelists, such as the investor Balaji S. Srinivasan, are still touting the project of a new nation of “cloud first, land last.” Others are just making sure that in the great supermarket sweep of life, they get to fill their shopping carts before their neighbors do.

A lot of rain today here in San Diego. Flooding hundreds of miles north of us in Santa Cruz and south to Santa Barbara.

Montecito, a community in Santa Barbara about 200 miles north of us, was evacuated.

No significant damage here so far, but a lot of rain.

The learned helplessness of Pete Buttigieg [Cory Doctorow]

Obama and Trump were patsies for the airlines, Biden is worse. Holiday snafus involving Southwest and other airlines are just the latest example of a dysfunctional industry and regulators.

Buttigieg is the Secretary of a powerful administrative agency, and as such, he has broad powers. Neither he nor his predecessors have had the courage to wield that power, all of them evincing a kind of learned helplessness in the face of industry lobbying.

Contrast Buttigieg’s Transportation Department with the muscular FTC under Lina Khan, who knows the law and uses it for the American people.

Why The American Radical Right Is Powerful And The American Left Is Meaningless.

Ian Welsh:

You have power in electoral politics when you can deliver or deny votes and money and get people elected or un-elected. That’s the bottom line.

Also:

[The radical right] have power because they have solidarity and they expect and get results from their representatives. The American left refuses to use power when it has it, and its members just want performative leftism from the likes of AOC. They don’t want or expect results and they display little solidarity, and that why for over 50 years the left in the US (and the UK) has staggered from defeat to defeat.

I don’t know how Welsh feels about the phrase “virtue signaling,” but it comes to mind here.

On the cutting edge of insurrectionist terrorism

Brazil riots weren’t a repeat of Jan. 6. They were an escalation, says Ryan Broderick at Garbage Day.

Broderick, an American who usually writes about internet culture, lives part of the year in Brazil.

Broderick:

Trump supporters dream of bringing America back to a vague fictitious past, some combination of the Reaganite 80s and a 1950s America that only existed in magazine ads. Bolsominions are much more specific. They want to bring back a military dictatorship and they’re not afraid to say it.

Also:

It feels like America is actually the country least prepared for the existential fight against authoritarianism that lies ahead.

For instance, Brazil’s current President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, or “Lula,” reacted quite differently yesterday than the US government did two years ago. Lula declared that the rioters were terrorists and triggered a state of emergency and arrested over 1,000 of them immediately. I told a few Brazilian friends this morning that we let our insurrectionists go home afterwards and they looked at me like I had just grown a second head.

We watched “The Thin Man” Saturday night. Second time for me, but I had nearly forgotten it. It was delightful.

I think I’m only going to watch movies made in the 1930s from now on.

Advantage to working from home: When you’re completely stuck creatively, you can clean the massive amount of dog shit that you got on your favorite casual shoes.

Disadvantage to working from home: If you work in a proper office building, you’re not as likely to get massive amounts of dog shit on your favorite casual shoes.

I used a stiff brush, a worn-out toothbrush, and a thin stick. Wet down the brush with warm water, scrub with dish soap, put on the shoes and walk around in the grass for a bit, then take off the shoes and repeat. Use the toothbrush and thin stick to dig in the treads. It’s not magic; it takes a while.

According to the Internet, WD-40 works instead of dish soap, but we don’t know where the WD-40 is.

Important note: When doing the “walking around in the grass” part, don’t step in more dog shit!

Insomnia is not so bad if you have something to do to pass the time. When I have trouble sleeping, I like to imagine every possible awful thing that might happen to me or Julie.

Things I saw while walking the dog 📸

This yard decoration. Clever and patriotic!

These pretty, painted rocks

This house with a cozy looking sitting area on the roof.

This school. “Geckos” does not seem like an inspiring team name.

This nice garden.

This Lambo parked in front of a house. It doesn’t look like the kind of house that would have a Lambo in front.

These cars. WTF do these bumper stickers mean?

This tree.

These cars. Two different cars, not parked close together. I wonder whether the owners are friends.

Dead Santa hanging from the house with the “itty bitty titty committee” sign in front.

This flag. I thought it said “one nation under Gog.” Who’s “Gog?” I said.

Why the [expletive] can’t we travel back in time? [Ars Technica/Paul Sutter]

No known law of physics forbids time travel to the past.

Either time travel to the past is possible, or there’s some fundamental, basic physics we still don’t understand.

Either possibility is exciting.

“It’s obvious that the Universe is telling us something important… we just don’t know what it’s saying.”

I saw this dog at Lake Murray. He would like to say hello, and for you to admire his eyebrow.

Coolio talked about ancient aliens, and making big investments in the metaverse and crypto, in an impromptu podcast interview before his death. [Billboard/Gil Kaufman]

The Coolio interview was bonkers—and poignant. The rapper said he expected he’d be long dead before climate change became a concern. Then he died a month later.

I expect climate change to be a concern long before I’m dead, and I’m only a year older than Coolio. It’s already a concern.

I’ve googled for more about the hidden continent occult belief that Coolio discusses. I haven’t found anything.

The podcast series, Crypto Island, was excellent. Sadly for the host/creator, PJ Vogt, most of the work on the series seems to have been done before the FTX debacle, so series is now obsolete.

Apparently you can re-use 2017 calendars this year, which is funny to me because I have a 2017 calendar hanging up on the wall next to my bed. I stopped turning pages April of that year, and it’s been April, 2017 in the vicinity of my bed ever since.

I saw this SUV while walking the dog. I feel better knowing we’re protected.