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People who wear short pants and long sleeve, heavy sweatshirts in chilly weather are monsters.

“I can’t go here. It would be too easy for him to pick up if I go here.” — The dog, looking for a place to poop while we’re out walking.

"… the App Store’s financial success is the worst thing that’s happened to Apple this century. It’s a distraction at best, and a profound corruption at worst." — John Gruber @gruber@mastodon.social

Gruber raises a good point here. The App Store, and general locked-down nature of the iPhone, is Apple at its controlling worst. I should have a right to install whatever software I want on my iPhone, repair it or pay someone else to do so, and modify it however I like, or pay someone else to do so. The limits on my ability to control my phone should be the law and public safety. Apple should not be allowed to make the rules here.

And don’t accuse me of going full Elon here. A phone is not a social network.

We don’t need a new global town square to replace Twitter. We already have one: The Web.

The web is the world’s town square.I t’s been right there along along, and Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc., are all just layers on top of that web.

Nobody owns the web. If somebody like Twitter or Facebook puts a fence around their part of the web, that fence is just two feet tall. You can easily climb over it. If you’re not doing that, it’s because you’re choosing not to.

Mastodon is a great service. It’s not that hard to use. If you can figure out Facebook, you can figure out Mastodon. Learning to drive is harder and most of the people complaining about Mastodon being hard to use can already drive.

Mastodon is part of the much larger “fediverse,” which includes other services, which are less popular than Mastodon.1 Services join the fediverse by supporting a protocol called “ActivityPub.” It’s all very much like the way different email services interconnect with each other, and you can message from your Gmail account to another person’s Microsoft Outlook account without any difficulty.2 Already, we see WordPress blogs can be part of the fediverse, and a small blogging service called micro.blog, which I use, communicates with Mastodon using ActivityPub.

Right now, we’re not seeing a fediverse boom—we’re seeing a Mastodon boom. That needs to change. For the good of the web town square, people need to embrace that they can choose a variety of services that can all talk with one another.3 Mastodon is just one of those services.

@manuelmoreale makes similar points.

  1. And Mastodon itself is pretty unpopular, compared with Twitter, which is in turn unpopular compared with Facebook or YouTube.) ↩︎

  2. For an even better comparison, imagine if WhatsApp and Apple Messages could talk with each other. They’re similar but not identical—you’d lose some features but mostly you could communicate just fine. ↩︎

  3. Kind of like the way your can read a Substack newsletter in email or on the web, and likewise you can get email updates on WordPress blogs. ↩︎

I like that micro.blog doesn’t support likes or reblogs. On Facebook, Tumblr, and Mastodon, I’m trying to pay very little attention to my likes and reblogs without comment.

Likes and commentless reblogs are sometimes useful. Sometimes a friend I haven’t heard from in a while likes one of my posts, or somebody famous likes or reblogs something, both of which are good to know. But most days, likes and reblogs without comment are just noise.

I wish Facebook, and Mastodon would just give me a daily report on likes and reblogs that don’t have comments. I don’t need or want that information in realtime. Tumblr lets me set something like that up with filters, but it could be easier.

micro.blog’s intentional lack of support for likes and reblogs is just one way it’s different from Mastodon. Here’s a good article from @manton describing why micro.blog is not Mastodon, even though you can connect between micro.blog and Mastodon.

Hi, @manton! Feature request for micro.blog: Let me import my Mastodon follower list, which I can already do when switching Mastodon instances. Right now, I’m syndicating my micro.blog posts to my mastodon.social account. Importing my follower list would be even better.

Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr: How Apple could open its App Store without really opening its App Store.

Apple will be required to open the iPhone to competing app stores, according to reliable reports, which is a huge deal and runs completely counter to Apple’s iPhone strategy since 2007. But Apple could still pull a fast one, unless regulators are smart, says Cory.

Apple “fights for its users when doing so is good for its shareholders. But when something is good for Apple shareholders and bad for its customers, the shareholders win, every time.”

Hearing Wendell Pierce say “fuuuuuck” in an early scene of S3E1 of “Jack Ryan” makes me want to watch “The Wire” again.

While walking, the dog and I saw this mobile axe-throwing setup. Because is it really the holidays without axe-throwing?

The right believes in absolute free speech for everyone they agree with.

Soon as I saw the headline cross Mastodon, I checked my twitter account. Still active. I feel snubbed.

While out walking the dog late this afternoon I saw a little four-year-old girl wearing a beautiful green Christmas dress with a red bow on it. She was getting out of the car with her Dad, coming home from daycare I guess.

This was the same little girl I’d seen one morning a week or two ago, getting into the same car with her Dad. That morning she was wearing an elf costume, and was delighted to show it off for me.

So today I said to her, “Don’t you look pretty!” The dog, meanwhile, wanted to say hello, so I took a step or two slowly toward the girl and her father, keeping an eye on the situation.

This time, the girl was not delighted. Her face slowly started to crumple, and she clutched for her Dad’s leg and started to wail. So I backed away.

I don’t think she was afraid. I think she had just had a busy day, with a lot of stimuli and was overwhelmed.

“Kid,” I wanted to say. “A lot of the time I feel just like that.”

Years ago, two friends of mine, one at the CIA, one at the Pentagon, advised me to delete the app. So I don’t want to position the concerns about TikTok as an extreme position. Having a Chinese-owned social media app embedding itself into our lives is not without risk. But it’s worth noting that the things we fear from Chinese software companies—privacy invasions, data selling, democracy disruptions—are things that American social media companies have been doing with our full cooperation. It’s also worth noting that American social media companies have a particular interest in reducing competition from global players, and they’ve never faced this kind of a domestic business threat from a China-based company. In other words, the pressure to ban this outside app could be coming from inside players.

— Dave Pell, NextDraft, Tok Bottom

The idea that “if you’re not paying for the product, you’re the product” is utter nonsense. The factor that determines whether a company will treat you like the product is whether they can get away with treating you like the product. A company that is disciplined by neither competition nor regulation will extract value from you in every way it can get away with.

— Cory Doctorow, Plato Would Ban Ad-Blockers. He was a dick.

I have just disabled micro.blog’s cross-posting to my main mastodon account, and will instead use micro.blog’s native ActivityPub support. If you want to follow me on Mastodon, you can do so on @mitchw@micro.blog.

This situation is permanent. Until I change my mind. Which could be never. And could be in, like, an hour.

But if you follow me on mastodon, you should probably do it on @mitchw@micro.blog. One reason to do that is that the posts are formatted a little nicer that way.

micro.blog doesn’t show me who’s following me, who likes my posts, and who boosts them. I don’t even get numbers for those statistics. Doing without this information will be character-building for me.

I can’t make up my mind whether I want to cross-post from micro.blog to my primary mastodon account—as I am doing now—or simply use micro.blog’s built-in ActivityPub support. I go back and forth.

When I’m not cross-posting, I boost my micro.blog posts to my mastodon account manually, which maybe sounds like a hassle but it’s actually no big deal

I also can’t decide whether to redirect mitchw.blog to micro.blog.

This back-and-forth is pretty typical for me with regard to blogging and social media. I seem to like fiddling with my setup as much as I like posting.

Crypto Was Always Smoke and Mirrors: The fall of FTX shocked everyone. Except this guy.

The world of cryptocurrency is rich with eccentric characters and anonymous Twitter personalities. So perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise that one of the early figures who called attention to the problems with Sam Bankman-Fried’s cryptocurrency exchange, FTX, is a 30-year-old Michigan psychiatrist who investigates financial crimes as a hobby.

He’s James Block, and he runs a crypto newsletter called Dirty Bubble Media.

Block, a vehement crypto skeptic, has spent the past 18 months doing forensic blockchain research. He uses open-source tools to follow flows of money between crypto companies, repeatedly demonstrating how shadow banks and nefarious scammers inflate the value of worthless assets in order to generate enormous wealth that exists only on paper.

Charlie Warzel interviewed Block for The Atlantic.

Block: The AMC-meme-stock thing is a good example of how this can happen. People buy the stock of a semi-worthless company because they have this idea about short squeezing, or whatever. They are not financial experts and have a loose or maybe even wrong understanding of how finance works, and want to try to move the market. Crypto takes this abstraction a step further, because there’s nothing linked to it at all. There’s no economic activity in this space. There’s nothing produced by these companies. In fact, it’s a negative-sum game because of the cost of running the blockchains alone—the computational cost is tremendous. The amount of time and money people put into just running these things is tremendous. And they produce nothing of value. There’s a reason these massive companies aren’t all using blockchain for their processes: It is incredibly inefficient. And realistically, who actually wants their financial information public and visible to everybody?

…

Warzel: Do you think most entities in the crypto space are insolvent and know it, and are just pretending right now, post-FTX?

Block: Absolutely. That’s because of what I said earlier about crypto. There’s no value created by any of these companies. It’s all just moving money from Person A to Person B.

Support Railroad Workers Fighting for Humane Conditions and Paid Sick Leave.

The RR workers get NO sick leave and NO regular schedules! They are always under their bosses’ thumb. COVID shows how important sick leave is. Inhumane schedules, and denying sick leave, especially during a pandemic, increases illness, deaths, and disparities, especially among people already vulnerable to Covid.

Sick leave and humane scheduling will not ruin the companies financially. Paid sick leave only amounts to 3.5% of the industry’s soaring profits; in fact, over 50% of their revenue is profit.

— People’s CDC

“Is there such a thing as accidental praxis? Because as much as I hate oligarchs, in a million years I could not have figured out a way to trick one to walk on stage and get booed for ten minutes straight by the proletariat.”

Speaking as a former comedian, it’ll be interesting to see how this plays out. Because … have you ever had 10,000 people hate you TO YOUR FACE before? Because I have. And humans aren’t wired for that.

I’d note that the 10,000 people hating me to my face were actually just stonily silent while I ate it on stage while opening for a musical act. And while I laughed it off after .. it was rough. And I’d been working for years at that point. But BOOING?!

And for a *narcissist*? Just saying – expect some serious whiplash crazy coming over the next week.

— John Rogers @jonrog1

h/t jwz

The service I use to track of TV and movies to watch, trakt.tv, has been down for two days. They post occasional updates on Twitter. The latest just says their main database crashed two days ago at 7:30 am PT, and they’re working around the clock to fix things. Good luck!

Idea for a crime novel about a man who steals a yarmulke from his male sibling. Working title: “His Brother’s Kipah.”

Contrary to all good writing advice, sometimes I like to use baroque, sesquipedalian language where monosyllabic verbiage will do.

Orphaned neurological implants. By Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr.

Second Sight, a company that makes ocular implants, sold out to another company that doesn’t want to be on that business, leaving users blind and with crippling vertigo. Not the first time a neural implants company has done this to users.

Medtech startups are like any other startup. “… when a startup fails, investors try to make back some of their losses by selling the company’s assets to any buyer, no matter how sleazy.”

The solution: Neural implants should be open hardware, and users should have legally protected right to repair.

Cory:

Opponents of this proposal will say that it will discourage investment in “innovation” in neurological implants. They may well be right: the kinds of private investors who hedge their bets on high-risk ventures by minimizing security and resilience and exploiting patents and user-data might well be scared off of investment by a requirement to make the technology open.

It may be that showboating billionaire dilettantes will be unwilling to continue to pour money into neural implant companies if they are required to put the lives of the people who use their products ahead of their own profits.

It may be that the only humane, sustainable way to develop neural implants is to publicly fund that research and development, with the condition that the work products be standard, open, and replicable

Heavy rain when walking the dog this morning. The dog didn’t like it. Neither did I, but only one of us had a choice about being out there.

A few weeks ago, I was communicating with a 26-year-old colleague, talking about increasing work demands in the face of an oncoming launch. I started to say, “I definitely picked the wrong week to quit sniffing glue.” Then I stopped myself, because I thought she probably hasn’t seen the movie, and doesn’t know about the national panic in the 1970s where kids were supposedly huffing glue to get high.

Enjoyable article about Generation Z’s struggle to adapt to communication style in the office workplace, particularly on Slack and email.

Gen Z came to ‘slay.’ Their bosses don’t know what that means.. By Danielle Abril at The Washington Post.

Gen Z gets rococo and complex in its use of emoji, and they interpret full sentences ending periods as passive-aggressive.

Like every generation before them, they adapt to the older generations’ communication styles. And the older generations adapt to them.

I was standing on the sidewalk outside the pet store tapping on my phone. An old guy walked by very slowly, pushing a walker, with oxygen cannulae in his nostrils, wearing a jaunty Tyrolean hat.

“What did you do before you had those things?” he said.

I didn’t miss a beat. “Stared at the wall.”

He continued walking slowly on, laughing out loud.

— From my journal, this date in 2016.

I’ve been sleeping better for the past month or so. I attribute to more consistent bedtimes and wake times, reduced life stress and cooler bedroom temperatures. Even though summer nights here in San Diego are cool, our bedroom stays warm, and I think next summer I may return to my energy-wasting summer habit from the early 90s of sleeping with the a/c on, under a heavy blanket.

Common wisdom says you should avoid screen time before bed, but I have not found a correlation between screen time and insomnia.

What you can learn about sleep from truckers

Stephanie Vozza at Fast Company:

[Dean Croke, principal analyst at DAT Freight & Analytics, an on-demand freight marketplace] says the body is programmed to sleep twice a day, at night and again eight hours after you wake. The second sleep should be a 30-minute or a 90-minute nap to take advantage of the sleep cycles and avoid waking during deep sleep.

Having a bedtime is important. Croke recommends to trucking companies that they have drivers start work at the same time every day.

Starting work the same time every day encourages a fixed bedtime.

If you have a week that wears you down, Croke says you can make up for it on the weekend.

“The brain is incredibly resilient,” he says. “You’ll bounce back quickly if you’ve got two periods of good sleep at the end of the week. I call it the ‘two and seven rule.’ Get two periods of consecutive sleep each week to get rid of the sleep debt from the previous week.”

After two periods of good sleep, the brain washes away that sleep debt, and you can start Monday morning fresh.

Sleeping in on weekends runs contrary to a lot of other sleep advice I’ve read, but I believe it. With regard to sleep advice, a lot of folklore gets passed as science.

Freedom of reach is freedom of speech.

The online debate over free speech suuuuucks, and, amazingly, it’s getting worse… Billionaire dilettantes have their own stupid definitions of all kinds of important words like “freedom” and “discrimination” and “free speech.” Remember: these definitions have nothing to do with how the world’s 7,999,997,332 non-billionaires experience these concepts.

— Cory Doctorow, @pluralistic@mamot.fr

What if failure is the plan?. danah boyd has been studying social media for decades, with a particular focus on young people and other marginalized groups. She applies her insights to the current state of Twitter, with asides on the global war on terror and the real cause of the collapse of local journalism (it wasn’t the internet, Google, Facebook, or Craigslist that killed journalism. It was financiers hungry for the physical real estate—land—that newspaper offices occupied).

I’ve been viewing events at Twitter as an entertaining shitshow with little real world consequence. It’s fun to watch an arrogant billionaire fail spectacularly and publicly. boyd provides sobering perspective.

It is a cold and blustery day here in San Diego. We had brunch with friends. I walked the dog before the rain started. I am spending the afternoon on my keister, reading and blogging, with Julie and the dog. Then I will have dinner and watch some tv. An altogether splendid day.

Also, Julie bought a bag of googly eyes. ⬅️⬅️⬅️ We professional writers call this “burying the lead.”

Blogging is its own form at this point. It isn’t an essay. Nor is it a scholarly article. It has no length requirements: a blog post can be a sentence, a paragraph, 500 words, twice that, or twenty times that. Neither does blogging come with expectations of frequency. Some folks blog daily; others multiple times a day; others twice a week; others unpredictably, as a kind of clearinghouse for random ideas or thinking out loud.

Blogging is the shaggy dog of internet writing. It’s playful, experimental, occasional, topical, provisional, personal, tentative.

— Brad East, Substack vs. blogging.

Yes to this. Also, blogging and posting to social media are different forms of expression. Twitter is obviously different, with its character limitations.

Interestingly, US newspapers from the 19th and early 20th centuries read like blogs. This was before newspapers standardized on the neutral voice from nowhere. They were livelier and had more personality.

Molly White: On anti-crypto toxicity.

I don’t think anyone should be pressured to be nice to evil people. But I think the belief that anyone who engages in crypto is evil has become rampant, and has been used to justify hate towards people who don’t deserve it. There is no doubt that there are plenty of evil people in crypto, but there are a lot of people in there too who, should you care to dig deeper, are after a lot of the same goals that you might be.

…

If you feel the urge to “cyberbully” someone in crypto, direct it at the powerful players behind crypto projects that are actively taking advantage of the vulnerable. Or, just as reasonably, direct it at the powerful tech executives, venture capitalists, elected representatives, and lobbyists who have contributed to the untenable situation we find ourselves in. Or the policymakers and governmental agencies who have failed to uphold their duty in regulating crypto and enforcing existing regulation that would protect people from rampant fraud. But not the artist who hoped to earn a few bucks selling their digital art in what is otherwise an extremely difficult field, or the person who hoped that maybe a lucky crypto buy could help them dig out of crushing debt just a tiny bit faster.

Where Veteran Rockers Go to Reinvent Themselves. How the Hudson Valley and the Catskills became the home to grunge icons, ex-punks and one-hit wonders. By Sal Cataldi at The New York Times.

“Being a dentist up in Woodstock, with all these great musicians, is a pretty great second act. And what other dentist can say he is in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame?”

When you live in a semi-arid climate and you only drive a couple of times a week, you can go for years without driving in heavy rain, and then you find out your wiper blades have turned into ineffectual shoelaces.

We watched the first half of “Spirited” last night, because I thought I was in the mood for a lightweight Christmas movie, but it turned out I was not – or at least not that one. Julie wasn’t feeling it either.

So instead, we watched the first episode of “Three Pines,” which turned out to be very good and entertaining.

“Three Pines” is a murder mystery, like about three quarters of the shows we’ve been watching over the last few years. But this one is not British for a change. It’s set in Quebec, and stars Alfred “Doc Ock” Molina.

So far, it’s like “Northern Exposure” but French and with a murder.

Yesterday I mistakenly had coffee at four in the afternoon. I thought it was decaf. But I slept soundly last night anyway. Makes me wonder what other superpowers I have evolved.

I saw these ducks do this mildly surprising thing at Lake Murray.

The New Yorker: Cory Doctorow Wants You to Know What Computers Can and Can’t Do.

A conversation about the “mediocre monopolists” of Big Tech, the weirdness of crypto, and the real lessons of science fiction.

…

This will all be so great if we don’t screw it up.

By Christopher Byrd.

Cory also talks about the limitations of perfect productivity: Once you’ve pared away all the unimportant tasks in your life, everything left is important and there’s nothing left to pare.

Fortunately, this is not a problem for me. I waste plenty of time!

I’m very impressed that Cory was featured in the New Yorker.

The promise and the peril of ChatGPT. By Casey Newton.

Reading about the potential for abuse here, I found myself thinking about the classic science fiction story “A Logic Named Joe,” in which author Murray Leinster predicts the consumer internet in 1946. One of the computers on the network gets a little wonky and starts answering questions on how to commit murder.

People are already using ChatGPT to get answers to potentially lethal questions.

Less significantly, ChatGPT could potentially be the end of Google and industries that have grown around it—advertising and search engine optimization. Google gives search results, but ChatGPT provides answers.

Yes, It’s Censorship: Stop picking that nit, it’ll never heal. A few big companies, including Apple, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Twitter, monopolize public discourse, setting the rules for what we’re allowed to talk about.

Cory Doctorow:

The decision to make our “digital public square,” into a privatized, monopoly-friendly corporate shopping mall whose owners can wield the power of the state against rivals who dare to compete with them may not violate the First Amendment, but it sure as hell isn’t good for free expression.

Ancient Rome did not fall. It was destroyed from within, by the same forces we see playing out in America today. By Barry Gander, a self-described “Canadian from Connecticut,” on Medium.

While walking, the dog and I saw these houses with the holiday spirit, and this car 🦮📷

Eugene from Wednesday is my role model. I’m going to wear a retainer and keep bees.

A new Indiana Jones movie, starring 80-year-old Harrison Ford? Sure, why not?

Here’s the trailer.

I’ve seen criticism of the trailer and of all the movies after “Raiders.” And much of that criticism is valid.

But the best reaction to the trailer was from Jason Kottke: “Ok fine I will watch one more Indy movie.”

I have enjoyed every Raiders movie, even “Temple of Doom” and “Crystal Skull.” I have no doubt we will watch this one and enjoy it.

The parts I enjoyed in “Temple of Doom” were the little kid and the girlfriend, who screamed very fetchingly.

Marion stole the movie in “Crystal Skull.” She had all the good scenes.

About that trailer: The bullwhip scene is classic Indiana Jones: “Look at me I am doing this swashbuckling thing… Oh shit that was a really bad idea.” All conveyed with his face and body language.

That scene is a visual response to the swordsman scene in the first movie, only this time it’s the other guys who have the guns.

South Dakota Bans Government Employees From Using TikTok. The Countless Other Apps And Services That Hoover Up And Sell Sensitive Data Are Fine, Though.

Karl Bode at Techdirt:

… policymakers freaking out about the Chinese potentially getting access to TikTok user data are the exact same people who’ve fought tooth and nail against the U.S. having even a baseline privacy law for the Internet era. These are the exact same folks that created a data broker privacy hellscape completely free of accountability, and advocated for the dismantling of most, if not all, regulatory oversight of the sector. The result: just an endless parade of scandals, hacks, and breaches.

Now those exact same folks are breathlessly concerned when just one of countless bad actors (China) abuse a zero-accountability privacy hellscape they themselves helped to create.

Dave Pell is on a roll on NextDraft today:

”At 8:10 p.m., more than nine hours after his family reported him missing, a passing tanker spotted the man near the mouth of the Mississippi River and alerted the Coast Guard." NYT (Gift Article): A Man Fell From a Cruise Ship. And Survived. “Mr. Grimes, whose family described him as an exceptional swimmer, had treaded in 65- to 70-degree water for hours, withstanding rain, 20-knot winds and three- to five-foot waves in the Gulf of Mexico, where bull sharks and blacktip sharks are common.” (That actually sounds better than how I imagine cruises.)

Also:

”To prepare for the depths of winter when food is scarce, many animals slow down, sleep through the cold or migrate to warmer locales. Not the common shrew. To survive the colder months, the animal eats away at its own brain, reducing the organ by as much as a fourth, only to regrow much of brain matter in the spring." This is not unlike my experience being on and then getting off Twitter.

Elon Musk gets mail. “Akiva Cohen, an attorney representing 22 laid-off Twitter employees, sent a letter to Twitter and Elon Musk (shared, of course, on Twitter): ‘If basic human decency and honor isn’t enough to make you want to keep your word, maybe this will…. ‘” By John Gruber on Daring Fireball.

Elon is getting to the “… and find out” bit.

“Robert Moses Is A Racist Whatever.”

Jason Kottke blogs about an interview with Robert Caro, author of “The Power Broker,” a definitive biography of urban planner Robert Moses.

Moses’ racist vision for New York transformed the city, literally paving over Black neighborhoods with highways.

Moses came along with his incredible vision, and vision not in a good sense. It’s like how he built the bridges too low.

I remember his aide, Sid Shapiro, who I spent a lot of time getting to talk to me, he finally talked to me. And he had this quote that I’ve never forgotten. He said Moses didn’t want poor people, particularly poor people of color, to use Jones Beach, so they had legislation passed forbidding the use of buses on parkways.

Then he had this quote, and I can still hear him saying it to me. “Legislation can always be changed. It’s very hard to tear down a bridge once it’s up.” So he built 180 or 170 bridges too low for buses.

…

Robert Moses had always displayed a genius for adorning his creations with little details that made them fit in with their setting, that made the people who used them feel at home in them. There was a little detail on the playhouse-comfort station in the Harlem section of Riverside Park that is found nowhere else in the park. The wrought-iron trellises of the park’s other playhouses and comfort stations are decorated with designs like curling waves.

The wrought-iron trellises of the Harlem playhouse-comfort station are decorated with monkeys.

One detail I remember from stories about Moses: When he died in 1981, nobody attended his funeral. Even white people hated him.

What weird food habits did you have in your family when you were a kid? If you’re a parent, how would your kids answer that question?

I’m remembering that one summer when I went to day camp where the kids brought their lunches. My mom made a big batch of hamburgers on Sunday, and froze them, and so I had a desiccated frozen hamburger for lunch every weekday.

On good days the hamburgers were fully thawed.

My mom was great, and she was a wonderful mother, but she was not a good cook most of the time.

This made me happy this morning

This morning while walking the dog I saw one of the neighbor men in front of his house, getting ready to take his three-year-old daughter to school. I shouted, “Good morning,” as we do, and he smiled a little and nodded back, distracted.

I saw the little girl. I shouted, “Good morning!” to her.

She struck a pose, facing me, standing up straight, with her arms stretched out at her sides and her head held high.

Then I saw that she was wearing red tights, and a green top with triangular notches along the bottom.

“You’re an ELF!” I shouted, and she grinned broadly and nodded.

I hope your day is as happy as hers.

How can the Democrats claim to be pro-union and pro-labor and also do this?

The bill that the House passed forcing railway workers back to work requires the workers to take a deal they voted to reject before, giving them only one sick day a year.

US House Passes Bill Forcing Railway Workers Not to Strike

Ian Welsh:

People’s backs are to the wall. Since about 1980, the predominant policy in the US has been to immiserate workers, especially wage workers. This was possible because the New Deal and post-war eras had made workers well enough off that they had some surplus which could then be stolen from them.

But now a lot of people are up against the wall. Many full-time workers, especially at places like Amazon, live in their cars or tents, for example. There is nothing left to give.

People with nothing to lose are dangerous.

I have become fastidious about washing my hands, maybe even OCD, but I have also decided the dog and cats are sanitary, and I am still entirely clean if I have been petting the animals and letting the dog lick my hands and face.

That’s how it works. It’s just science.

I have become fastidious about washing my hands, maybe even a little OCD, but I have also decided the dog and cats are sanitary, and I am still entirely clean if I have been petting the animals and letting the dog lick my hands and face.

That’s how it works. It’s just science.

“You’ve got to vaccinate people against the hate”

MetaFilter: In Russia, China, Iran, and the United States, autocracy is stumbling and liberal democracy is looking resilient. (But in the US at least, the far right isn’t taking no for an answer.)

Noah Smith: “… although liberal democracy is the GOAT, each generation is driven to fuck around and find out.”

Also Smith: “People love to think of themselves as the inheritors of a great civilization. But I’d rather think of myself as the ancestor of a great civilization yet to come!”

Also Smith: We’re entering another period of conflict between great world powers. In those conflicts, there are no good guys, only bad guys and less bad guys. Hopefully, we’ll be the less bad guys this time.

A friend reminds me that I started getting healthy and fit after I attended a science fiction convention in around 2007, and saw that a third of the fans in attendance were using mobility scooters. I saw that for my own not-too-distant future if I didn’t lose weight and start exercising.

And so I did.

A few years after that convention, I attended another and was satisfied when I climbed a short flight of stairs two at a time.

That’s not something I’d do today. My wind and muscles would be able to do it easily, but my knees would protest.

Hello again, micro.blog! It’s me, Mitch Wagner, getting a fresh start on a new blog.

If you follow me on atomicrobotlive you can keep right on doing that, or you can just follow me here. I’ll explain what I’m doing later. I’m still figuring it out myself.

27 years in California and sometimes I’m still amazed by palm trees. 📷

Would you like to see a one-minute video of Minnie running around the backyard and digging? Of course you would. 📷

My home office needs a name. I am choosing between:

  • The Room Where It Happens
  • The Cockpit
  • The Boom Boom Room
  • The Dangerous Exotic Bamboo Tiki Lounge and Bowling Alley

Robert A. Heinlein’s Red Planet was the gateway drug to books for me. My 3rd grade teacher, Miss Kaufman had a little area of bookshelves in the corner of her classroom. I read Red Planet and a biography of Helen Keller and was hooked.

I told that story on Facebook a few years ago and in 2018 I heard from Miss Kaufman. She said she remembered me well. Holy crap. Mind-blowing for me. I imagine it was for her too – she remembered an 8-year-old boy and now she was messaging with a 57-year-old man, who was typing to her from a hotel room in Florida. But I expect she’s used to that by now.

I think my Heinlein addiction finally subsided, within the last three years or so. The supply is exhausted – he’s not writing any more – and I’ve reread everything a million times. I still do love history though.

There was a new Heinlein published in the last year or two – a previously lost manuscript – “Pursuit of the Pankera.” Supposedly pretty good, but I’m just not highly motivated to read it. It’s an alternate version of “Number of the Beast,” one of my least favorite of his novels.

This house has a dinosaur in the yard. The dinosaur wears a nametag. His name is Burt. 📷

Out of curiosity, I rewatched “Dance of the Dwarfs,” a 1983 low-budget horror-adventure that was in heavy rotation on cable TV around the time it was released. Back then, cable TV didn’t have a lot of content to choose from, so you saw a lot of the same thing over and over. I ended up seeing this movie a few times then, and then not since.

It’s based loosely on “The African Queen.” And I mean, very loosely. A then-famous actress named Deborah Raffin plays an anthropologist, who hires drunk helicopter pilot Peter Fonda to fly into the jungle to investigate legends of a race of pygmies. The cast also features John Amos as a witch doctor. The location is unspecified, but I expect it’s Latin America based on the supporting cast of Latino stereotypes – bandits, street urchins, servants and a couple of hookers.

I don’t know if it’s a good movie, but I enjoyed seeing it again. Raffin is leggy and gorgeous. She does what the role requires of her. Fonda plays a down-on-his-luck drunk very well, in a stained luau shirt and tropical white pants; you can almost smell him. There are a couple of nice comedy bits, some decent action sequences. Raffin screams piercingly, but she is also an expert shot and thinks her way out of trouble. The monsters, when finally revealed, look cheap. Raffin and Fonda have no chemistry – you can understand why she comes to like and respect him, but not why she falls in love with him, other than that’s what the script requires.

The director, Gus Trikonis, did TV and exploitation movies. He started his career as a dancer in the movie “West Side Story,” and was Goldie Hawn’s first husband. His latest IMDB credit is 2001, on a TV series with the delightfully cheesy name. “18 Wheels of Justice.”He does a good job on this movie, there are some nice shots of the helicopter in flight with the jungle below. And the helicopter itself is gorgeously decrepit.

I watched the movie over several days. It goes well with lunch. I do not expect to watch this again; there are too many other options for entertainment today. But if it’s 1983 and you’re looking for something to watch, “Dance of the Dwarfs” is a good choice.

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