Wednesday, September 4, 2024 →
Things I saw walking around Oceanside with a friend
This artful birdhouse
Retro-futuristic signage
Beach cabanas
This mural
Sophisticated political discourse
Another mural, in a nice courtyard
Wednesday, September 4, 2024 →
I went for a walk in Oceanside with a friend, and in the parking lot, there was a long line of tough-looking guys with leathery skin and tattoos waiting to pay. I gave them my lunch money out of force of habit.
Wednesday, September 4, 2024 →
Apple needs to stop trying to make HEIC a thing
jwz: “Happy Bell Riots day to all who celebrate.” According to a 1995 Deep Space Nine episode, “one of the most violent civil disturbances in American history” occurs in San Francisco the first week of September 2024.
But:
Even when imagining a dystopia, Star Trek somehow still manages to come up with something that is better than our actual lived reality.
📷 Here’s something I saw while walking the dog.
This car has seen some shit.
📷 This morning while walking the dog, we saw this shih tzu wearing shoes.
Love a dog wearing shoes.
Automattic is moving Tumblr to a WordPress back end — Interesting! There’s currently no mass-market platform for personal blogging. WordPress used to be that, but now it’s a hairy, often difficult-to-use publishing platform. Tumblr has the potential to fill that gap.
Moving to WordPress would be an opportunity to add ActivityPub support, which Automattic talked about doing years ago but hasn’t followed through on. I’d also like it if they fixed Tumblr’s broken RSS feeds.
Writing prompt: “A loving, married couple wake up one day to find that they have returned to their high school days, when they were the most popular student and the class geek." Enjoyable flash fiction.
Every time I pop open the self-view when I start a video meeting, I look like I just came off a Sterno and methamphetamine bender.
Charles Stross: "They don't make readers like they used to"
Friday, August 23, 2024
Meaty, thought-provoking post on how the act of reading genre fiction has fundamentally changed since he and I were young.
… the public understanding of fiction itself is changing, and with it, the types of fiction which are commercially (or even socially) viable going forward.
Three fictive seeds germinated during the 1970s, and we’re now living in the fifty year old forest they gave rise to. Forests coevolve with ecosystems, and now we’re seeing the consequences.
Those seeds were: Dungeons and Dragons (which sparked the whole field of Role Playing Games, which constitute a wholly new mode of fiction in which the story emerges through a collaboration between the GM and the players–the GM provides guidelines and mediates between the player characters and their environment, but doesn’t dictate their lines): computer games (which are similarly interactive, but the map or procedural generative content is established before the players arrive): and the first of the big superhero movie franchises (notably the original Christopher Reeve Superman movies, which, starting from 1979, dragged Superman–and then the rest of the DC universe, with Marvel in its wake, out of the comic books and onto cinema and TV screens).
I was an English major in college in the early 1980s, and then it was breathtaking, revolutionary and controversial to suppose that the author was not the ultimate authority on their own work — that readers and authors were coequal creators. Only the greatest minds of literary analysis were capable of comprehending that rarified thought, and many considered it blasphemy.
Now, the idea is commonplace, and every 14-year-old fan is just as great an authority on the Marvel Cinematic Universe as Kevin Feige.
The transitions in the art of genre reading might go a long way to explaining why 99% of the sci-fi and fantasy being published today just bounces off me. Even the award-winning stories. Maybe even especially those. I fail to connect with them. And yet, when I was a teen, I consumed science fiction voraciously.
(Does anybody under 60 even remember Theodore Sturgeon anymore? Poul Anderson?)
The Harris-Walz tech policy platform is still bad
Mike Masnick at Techdirt:
It’s not batshit crazy, like the GOP plan, but it’s still generally bad. It’s the kind of thing that is going to lead to a lot of wasted time and effort as moral panic know-nothing “we must do something” types push out bad idea after bad idea, while people who actually understand how this stuff works have to do our best to educate against the nonsense.
The Arkansas Supreme Court upholds rejection of abortion rights petitions. Just keep digging, Republicans.
To infinity — and beyond! Nokia to extend 4G wireless to the Moon. My colleague Dan Jones reports.
After deciding he is the arbiter on who is truly Black, Trump now gets to decide who’s truly Jewish.
… history does not offer positive stories about political leaders who decide that they can evaluate the legitimacy of Jewish people and their families, suggesting that those who fail the evaluation should be cast out.
Trump is hosting a fundraiser for domestic terrorists who assaulted cops on Jan. 6
Michael Fanone, a former Washington, D.C., police officer who suffered a heart attack after being repeatedly tasered by one of Trump’s followers on Jan. 6, said Americans cannot afford to forget what happened that day. “Wake the fuck up, America,” he told HuffPost. “This is who Donald Trump is, a sick motherfucker who fetishizes violence committed on his behalf.”
I’d like to read Robert E. Howard. I sneered at those books and their fans during my prime teen science fiction and fantasy reading years. But I was so much older then — I’m younger than that now.
Also, today I learned that the Cimmerians were real.
… the business world has a well-worn playbook that they roll out whenever anything that might cause industry to behave even slightly less destructively is proposed. What’s more, we keep falling for it. Every time we try to have nice things, our bosses – and their well-paid Renfields – dust off their talking points from the last go-round, do a little madlibs-style search and replace, and bust it out again.
— Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr, Corporate Bullshit
Court to cop: Someone observing all the laws is not “probable cause” for a search.. By Tim Cushing at Techdirt.
Tim Cushing at Techdirt: Age verification laws are just a path towards a full-on ban on porn, a proponent admits.
Mask bans disenfranchise millions of Americans with disabilities. Medical exemptions are nothing more than Band-aids
Wednesday, August 21, 2024
I’ve been masking consistently in public since 2020, when the Covid-19 pandemic began, because I have a kidney transplant and will take immunosuppressant medication for the rest of my life. Unfortunately, my lifesaving medication also makes me more susceptible to infectious diseases like measles, the flu, and Covid-19. Even when people like me are vaccinated against the virus, we are at higher risk of being infected and are more likely to experience adverse health outcomes, including hospitalization and death.
The legislation in Nassau County and elsewhere primarily targets people who wear masks to hide their identity while committing crimes or during public protests, specifically against the ongoing genocide in Palestine. Masks are defined as any facial covering that disguises the face, and facial coverings worn for religious or health reasons are exempt. But people like me, who wear masks for health reasons, are disproportionally affected by these bans even when they include medical exemptions.
That’s because although the Nassau mask ban contains provisions for people who mask for medical reasons, it is up to the police to determine whether someone has a medical reason for masking if they are out in public. This means that enforcing the ban is subjective and will disproportionally impact Black people and people of color, who are more likely to be stopped by police and are also more likely to wear masks to prevent Covid. This is in part because Black and Latinx Americans are more cautious in their approach to the pandemic, reflecting the higher hospitalization and death rates in these communities. The Nassau mask ban as it is written is reminiscent of a “Stop and Frisk” law, which allows police to temporarily detain, question, and search people without a warrant.
This isn’t just localized to Nassau County; mask bans have been proposed or passed in multiple states, including North Carolina, Ohio, and California.