2024 November❮❮prevnext❯❯

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Photos of me by others:

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Sam Alito Got Knighted... Just Like The Founding Fathers EXPLICITLY MADE UNCONSTITUTIONAL

Cool, cool.

Strict originalists my ass.

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The best way to find out if you can trust somebody, is to trust them.

Sort of an anemic month for music. A lot of fun hiphop though.

4 star:
* Weird Friends (We Don't Even Live Here) (P.O.S)
* Little Lion Man (Mumford & Sons)

3 star:
* I Go To Work (Re-Recorded / Remastered) (Kool Moe Dee)
* Intro (The xx)
* The Power of the One (feat. George Benson & Williams Singers) (Bootsy Collins)
* Right Key, Wrong Keyhole (Doctor Stovepipe)
* Battle (Gang Starr)
* Minnie the Moocher (Dance Version) (Cab Calloway)
* They Won't Go When I Go (Stevie Wonder)
* More Than This (Roxy Music)
* Grand Theft Auto (Da Shootaz)

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AHAHA somehow I convinced myself that the time change had happened, like as I slept?
I was pretty convinced of it too. But the even dumber thing was, I must have been thinking it was an hour jump forward. (8:30AM? Heck, it must have been replacing the old 7:30AM)
I was going to say, I was surprised this ceiling-projector clock I got automatically adjusted itself. (I think the one it replaced would, but it was a fiddly gadget overall.) Had an extremely bad idea for a scifi story where sinister forces mess with the main character by fiddling the time for automatically adjusting clock.

Now I have nothing to blame for my bad time management this morning!

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Michael Davis smuggling on the 80s version of the Smothers Brothers:

The one thing most Americans can agree on is that a large portion of the population seems to be trying to destroy the country. We just can't agree on which portion it is.

Still true today.

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Marty, stay here with me... happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.

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People say that jealousy is the greatest enemy of love. They're wrong. The greatest enemy of love is boredom.

There's a reason why forty, fifty, and sixty don't look the way they used to, and it's not because of feminism, or better living through exercise. It's because of hair dye.

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One of the unexpected realizations to come out of my forties is that being human is often largely ridiculous. This, and that how we experience romance at age fifteen is more or less the same as romance at eighty-five. The assumption that we ever move on from giddy insecurity in the face of attraction to some more stoic and balanced response seems to me either an illusion created from a vacuum of storytelling, or the triumph of cynicism. Actual maturity, I've come to suspect, is largely just succeeding at not letting the injuries of your childhood debilitate you, which is the great challenge of life. As Larkin says, "An only life can take so long to climb / clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never." We're all mostly just sending the same messages back and forth to each other from puberty to death, the only difference as we go (hopefully) being that we do so with a better understanding of what we want, what we need, and the ability to ask for it directly and walk away from it more quickly when it doesn't serve us.

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In Paris, cinq à sept, five to seven, is also slang for the after-work affair. It refers to the hours between leaving work and arriving home when one might theoretically take part in a sexual rendezvous.

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I wake up hours later, sore from my night of dancing. From being twisted and contorted to accommodate another person's body. I feel used up in exactly the right way. Destroyed in the way Hemingway meant it, "the good destruction...the way we're made to be destroyed."

Funny how Hemingway is showing up on my radar so much the past few days (the movie "Hemingway and Gillhorn", then a bit of a documentary talking about his gender play later in life)

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Ellie has laid out a table of food. A planche of sliced, cured meat, three types of cheese, one of which is now oozing onto the board. A small jar of jam. And a focaccia she has just pulled out of the oven. We add the bottles of rosé we picked up at the Monoprix before we boarded the train and the baguette I bought from the *boulangerie*. *Une tradition*. They are made to be eaten, not stored. The image of the Parisian walking and biking through the city with their baguette in hand or bike basket is one of those instances when clichés exist for a reason. When I visited Paris in 2015, not long after the terrorist attacks, I had coffee with a Parisian who recounted how, during the two-day search for the terrorists, they had all been confined to their apartments except to go out and get their baguette.

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"I like to always leave the house prepared for things to take a turn toward enjoyment."

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For a long time Melissa and I used a shared Google Doc for a grocery list - it was great that it was real time and all, but kind of fiddly - hard to click the little checkboxes, and Google Docs is slow on a phone. So I made up a simple grocery list webapp.

I'm sure there's a billion of these out there, but I had some particular preferences:
* very easy to check off things on phone
* works on this ANCIENT iPad I now have set up as a permanent screen in the kitchen
* no chance someone is going to start trying to charge me a subscription
* items to get are sorted by the section of the store they're in
* you can add a comment to an item
* recently checked off items (in the last 60 minutes - arbitrary but effective) show up as crossed off items below
* older items are sorted alphabetically

In the interest of UI simplicity there are a few weirdnesses: no actual "checkboxes", you can only edit the section or note for an active item, and only delete an archived item, but honestly I think got the UI just right for our needs.

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Tragedy struck the slopes of Mount Rainier this week when a stranded hiker had to eat the people who were rescuing him just to stay alive.

I also liked unused joke ""Mike Flynn's much publicized attempt to break every record in the 'Guinness Book of Records' got off to a rocky start this week when his recording of 'White Christmas' sold only five copies." And he makes me want to install a diner booth in the dining room.

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MAGA Logic:
* Giving water to people waiting in long ass polling station lines - PROBABLY VOTE TAMPERING
* Running an lottery scam to buy votes - JUST FINE
(no wait, it's... a job hiring process, because if it was the lottery it claimed it was it would be illegal in Pennsylvania? JFC)

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All Hail Prez Covfefe, I guess.

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Income growth, unemployment, GDP, deficits, corporate profits, stock market - historically all fare better under Democratic watch than Republican. (good think only inflation matters huhr huhr)
So with the pattern, we'll have a few more decent years til whatever emboldened republican shittery has kicked in.

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You are awakening to the
same country you fell asleep to.
The very same country.
Pull yourself together.
And,
when you see me,
do not ask me
"What do we do now?
How do we get through the next four years?"
Some of my Ancestors dealt with
at least 400 years of this
under worse conditions.
Continue to do the good work.
Continue to build bridges not walls.
Continue to lead with compassion.
Continue the demanding work
of liberation for all.
Continue to dismantle broken systems,
large and small.
Continue to set the best example
for the children.
Continue to be a vessel of nourishing joy.
Continue right where you are.
Right where you live into your days.
Do so in the name of
The Creator who expects
nothing less from each of us.
And if you are not "continuing"
ALL of the above,
in community, partnership, collaboration?
What is it you have been doing?
What is it you are waiting for?

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What an awesome decision Citizens United was. Aren't unlimited political ads improving all our lives? Don't the rich deserve to be heard?

The 2016 election saw $6 billion in total donations, and that number ballooned to $15.1 billion in 2020. The projected total for 2024 is $15.9 billion.

One study found that candidates in the U.K. and Germany bring in one-fortieth the amount of U.S. candidates on average, and Canada's 2021 federal election brought in a meager $69 million in donations, total.

(Factoids via Cracked Trivia)

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"Seduction is a lie, and as we get older, we get tired of lies," said Figaro. "We know them all and they're not amusing anymore."

Seduction is a sweet story, and if the listener wants so much to hear it, then it is no lie. Seduction is a mutual endeavor in which I conspire with a woman to giver her an opening to do what she wants to do without reminding her that this goes against her principles. A woman's principles and her desires are constantly at war, and if there were no one to seduce a woman, she would have to figure out how to do it herself. Her principles call for her to remain aloof and uninterested until she meets a man who makes her faint. Her desires are otherwise. She wants to say, "That man, there. Unwrap him and send him over here so he can love me." She cannot say this. So I try to help her. I say, Zerlina, I would like to hold your hand for two minutes and then you could shoot me and I will die a happy man.

She laughs, but she does not turn away. She rolls her eyes. She says, "Oh, phoo." She gives me her hand.

I say: The greatest tragedy is to be cut off from intimacy, from touch, which is the most human of languages, Zerlina, and the most honest. There is no lie in a touch, a caress, never. The language of the body is the language of the purest truth.

She is amused. I put my other hand on her shoulder. She turns and leans against me. "You're something," she says.

Zerlina, I say, there's a bottle of champagne waiting on ice at the Olympia Hotel, and a couple of dozen oysters. When we get there, we'll order up a big salad in a wooden bowl, with basil and spinach and fennel and cilantro and radicchio, and we'll have it with olive oil and vinegar and pepper and garlic. Then a steak tartare, with chopped onions and an egg yolk. And then we'll undress quickly without shame, as adults, and jump into the big bed and amuse each other as only adults can do. And afterward, we'll eat an omelet. And then do it again.

Her hand twitches in mine, and I guess that I have touched a chord- "This is the best time of year for oysters," I say in a low voice, "and one should never eat them without erotic plans for later."

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the good news i got laid last night , the bad news is like.. everything else

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A really good picture looks as if it's happened once. It's an immediate image.

While at least once I observed German's extremely detailed household recycling obligations first hand, mostly I like a bin for "those missing couple of years"

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When you're 17 or 18, you want girls, but all they do is play with you. And then, when they discover sex, they don't want to go to a movie or out for ice cream anymore. It's just 'Let's do it. Let's do it.'

(via ChatGPT - which amusingly writes it then censors itself, but it's the only source I can find of this quote but it's pretty close to what I remember seeing somewhere)

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@Columned_: Every once and a while i remember this Xbox ad

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Memories are not only in the brain, human cell study finds - it's probably possible to take that finding a bit too poetically, but it is a beautiful thought.

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(right up there with his quote "Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face") Thinking about the game "Super Pac-Man"... a bizarre, playful, abstract, convoluted, artistic mess of a sequel.

Most notably, alongside the normal power pellets that turn the ghosts blue and let you eat them, there are green super pellets... when you eat those Pac-Man doubles in size and can bypass the locked gates, while the ghosts stretch and squash and can be passed by unharmed.

I never realized that that was supposed to represent Super Pac-Man taking to the sky until I read it somewhere. The game doesn't doesn't have a lot of internal consistency about that; the gates can be flown over but the walls still confine movement, ghosts I guess are also being flown over but if you combine the flight with a normal power pellet they will be eaten (Super Pac-Man swoops down just to gobble them up, maybe? Doesn't seem extremely heroic) Similarly, I have trouble seeing the squish and stretch of the ghosts as a crude form of "perspective" from Super Pac-Man's aerial view... to me it all felt more like a big drug trip, with the ghosts just freaking out over this giant Pac-Man.

When you combine all that with the way each maze is full of items rather than the abstract dot pellets of the original... its status as the "truer" sequel (i.e. designed by the original creator Toru Iwatani) than the more subdued Ms. Pac-Man (which came out earlier the same year) is really something. Especially since the original Pac-Man was so beautifully minimalistic, and in fact they left Pac-Man abstract on purpose - as Iwatani says

There was the temptation to make the Pac Man shape less simple. While I was designing this game, someone suggested we add eyes. But we eventually discarded that idea because once we added eyes, we would want to add glasses and maybe a moustache. There would just be no end to it.

(That quote from an interview with him in "Programmers at Work", now available online)

Here's a good video going more into the history of it: At around 9 minutes in it gets into the intermission screens, which kind of match the abstract, artistic vibe of it all, playing with visual size and scale with narrative as more of an after thought. (I guess that reflects the original's approach, though Ms. Pac-Man told more of a story.)

I dig, you dig, we dig, he digs, she digs, they dig.
It's not a beautiful poem, but it's very deep.

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gearing up the Boston Clown March (along side "The Men's March" anti-choice activists. ) join in tomorrow late morning! we'll have kazoos and some spare noses and wigs!

"What type of legacy would you like to leave behind when it's all said and done?"

"Well, I don't know, I don't believe in the word 'legacy'. I just think that's another word for ego.That's just some word everybody grabbed onto. Now it's used every five seconds, it means absolutely nothing to me. I'm just passing through, Imma die, and it's going to be over. Who cares about legacy after that? What a big eg--so Imma die? 'I want people to think I'm this', 'I'm great'...no, we're nothing. We are dead. We're dust. We're absolutely nothing. Our legacy is nothing."

"Well thank you so much for sharing that. That is something that I have not heard before - someone say that as an answer."

"Can you really imagine somebody say I want my legacy to be this when way when I - you're dead. You think someone really wants to think about you? 'I want people to think about me when I'm gone' Who the fuck cares about me when I'm gone."

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However, it's the ratio of ingredients that makes a hot toddy the perfect relaxation refresher, and we like MyUSImmigrantLife's approach: nine ounces of water, in honor of the front nine where Buck teaches Bobby about life; half a lemon, signifying the sourness of Buck's better half; and whiskey, honey and cinnamon to the drinker's best taste, since Buck always plays fast and loose with the sweet, the spicy and the boozy parts of life.

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Reading this sci-fi book, autobiography of a murderous robot artist, and it has this passage on a martian dialect

Before we tackled videos of the actual Martians talking about their lives, we first had to learn their language. It was an American dialect, spoken with a North Iowa accent, but the vocabulary had undergone deep changes: Mars or Martian was now Marty, a man was a brudda or a Marty-brudda; a woman was a snap. Food was spew; dinner was grabbin the barf-bag; a car was a goodwheel or a can; whiskey was Budapest; gin was goose; beer was parthenogenesis; all amphetamine-related drugs were monkey bread; antidepressants were furze; tranquillizers were Circassian chicken; sleeping pills were weenies; cola drinks of any type were jissom; poison capsules (sold openly and quite legally in the colony) were Sylvesters; a hand-scrubbed floor was a murph; wages were greengage; racing imaginary horses was purplesnow; a message from Earth was a plywooder. Knuckle keys, for some reasons, were called wurpy.

Anyone know what the "knuckle keys" are? (ironically ChatGPT is trying to tell me they're low brass instrument parts (but seems confused if they're closer to valves or spit keys))

UPDATE: friend Matt McIrvin thinks probably something like brass knuckles, which would make sense.

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VR Humor:

via

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I played musical lead for the pro-choice Boston Clown March, a lively counter-protest to the "Men's March". Here is a quick clip from the bandstand... us colorful clowns look to be having more fun than those drab ones.

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I don't like talking about my past as much as you guys do.

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Most folks really seem to want a single company to do things for them. I feel the way people are overwhelmed now, AOL would've beat the internet.

Interesting point about "Web 2.0" overall. I still prefer Indie Web for stuff though, like https://kirk.is is still my blog, even though I crosspost everything, and it's great to have it as a permanent record of things that I control. You're not going to believe this but the skin tone of these two faces are the EXACT same color.

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Playing Jr. Graphic Designer for my band's business cards...

. . . anyone can do any amount of work, provided it isn't the work he is supposed to be doing at that moment.

Or as the following essay Structured Procrastination by John Parry puts it "However, the procrastinator can be motivated to do difficult, timely and important tasks, as long as these tasks are a way of not doing something more important." Personally I've always liked the term Procrastination Jujitsu.

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I don't know when the trick will get old but I love doing online birthday greetings by having ChatGPT make up a "custom" birthday day illustration... this was one of my recent favs

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FoSO suggested we have a day trip to the Harvard Art Museums When I think about fully stocked fridges with lots of drink, I think about how Keeping your refrigerator stocked will get you many women.

I definitely lean progressive and left, but it's the kind of left that tries to see things from the "other side's" perspective some times - if the people are of good will and intent, and still have some flavor of empathy and not just "got mine, fuck you", then I find it useful to examine what the difference is in starting assumptions that make people lead to such different conclusions.

This some times leads to a feeling of "the answer is somewhere in the middle" which can lead to even worse versions of centrism and a sliding Overton Windowas truly outlandish claims from the other side slide the "center" over.

But my recent internet buddy Scott pointed out: even in basic mathematics it's important to separate a "mean" average (i.e. add everything up, divide by the number of things) from a "median" kind of average (the point where half the values are lower, and half are greater.) And while it's not the same as numeric analysis, when looking for answers that are probably some kind of blend, keeping in mind mean is not median might be useful... John Sladek's "Tik-Tok" is broad societal-parody sci-fi featuring a murderous robot - what if the 3 Laws of Robotics were just a suggestion...

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Some Eastern mystic, currently in vogue with his teletext aphorisms, wrote, 'Metal cuts meat, but does not comprehend it.' Who cares? I thought. Sometimes cutting was enough.

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Hornby had pushed his plate back and was lighting a cigarino as he explained to the company his theory of supply and demand in the Art market:
'Just give them what they want, in the orifice they specify.'
Various orifices emitted chuckles. Jockeline said, 'Hornby, sometimes I suspect you have an artistic bone in your body.'

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two words stuck together like two honeymooners, like the two pieces of animated meat now waving goodbye from the car as they drive off. On their honeymoon, where they can be pure meat trying to create more of itself. Meat wants to overpopulate the earth and destroy it, that is meat's goal.

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See, that's just wrong. Obviously the right goal is "increase shareholder value", duh. A friend pointed out maybe I'm like Maggie in Runaway Bride - she never knows what kind of eggs she wants, because she always just goes with what her guy likes.

So I figure there's like 3 types of Maggies:
1.⁠ ⁠Maggies who have egg preferences and repress them
(I think this is the case in the movie - IMDB says she loves Egg Benedict)
2.⁠ ⁠Maggies who never properly grow and figure out what they like
3.⁠ ⁠Maggies ... who just like a lot of different kinds of eggs. Each brings something new to the table and like any is better than no eggs at all.

I think I'm in that third category - a guy who's good at really appreciating lots of stuff - but who knows. I know with some exes, they didn't get that feeling of they were the eggs I needed above all others, that they were cherished for what they uniquely brought to the table.

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So... I picked up that gauntlet. And I've LOVED wearing it. If that's what you do with a gauntlet.

Catching up on old WIREDs - the part usually most worthwhile are the essays at the front (and the six-word sci-fi stories at the back) Paul Ford is one of the more reliably good writers, here he was writing on Mounjaro and Ozempic, and contrasting it with his earlier very geek-forward approach to losing 100 lbs, which he then gained back.

I have zero moral qualms about any better living through chemistry, but it seems like there's always a side-effect or two or three, or some long term un-good-ness. Often it's a worthwhile or necessary trade-off, but still, you have to be thoughtful about it.

And of course, the usual round of "possible side effect" disclaimers for any drug are so annoying, so often you'd think if you experienced them "could be the drug, could be life, could be something else. Plus those "possible side effects" are like the Terms + Conditions, you get so used to tuning them out that you don't know what real and/or likely problems they might be concealing.

(What's interesting is the other positive side effects claimed for some of these new diabetes/weightloss drugs. Like sometimes you get hope that they're making up for some evolutionary biochemical dead-ends we're stuck in...)

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Oh wow - by coincidence, it's the 30th Anniversary of HotWired, WIRED's website. (I have a copy of Hotwired Style: Principles for Building Smart Web Sites that I picked up a few years ago for that retrovibe.)

Here are some quotes from an oral history of the site...

In my defense, while I had a role in inventing the cookie, I would not have combined advertising and cookies. In fact, when somebody proposed, "Hey, you could assign a cookie to somebody, serve that ad from a third-party site, keep that cookie so you can follow where they go across different sites," my response was, "Yeah, if you're a psychopath."

I remember talking to people and they'd be surprised at Webmonkey: "Isn't that proprietary? Don't you have this advantage because you know all this? Why would you give all that away?" We were like, "No, no, no, everybody's got to know how to build the web." Back then, I felt like no websites were competitive with each other.

We thought the internet was going to be good for people. We were wrong.

I still feel like literally anybody with an idea can start hacking on the web or making apps or things like that. That's all still there. I think the nucleus of what we started back then still exists on the web, and it still makes me really, really happy.

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Here is a good example of the kind of "LOL fire the science guys" thinking DOGE is going to bring on us.

There is real danger in fucking around with the idea that expertise doesn't exist, and finding out......

Commission for my nephew - Happy T-Day!

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Thoughtful and poetic Wired Advice column on digital memories - the takeaway maybe is to know how to share them.

Being in the back half of my life, I'm glad I've done a decent job, both of storing and sharing. A quarter century of personal blogging! It means a lot. If you only look to the future and don't respect the past, you're only going to get poorer as time goes on.

Or you sign in to a long-abandoned Yahoo account only to discover that an entire decade of email correspondence has disappeared.

I think that happened to Melissa

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It takes something more than intelligence to act intelligently.

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What so annoys people about the media is not its rudeness or its stupidity but its sanctimony.

I think that's true for the left in general- and this last election cycle you've seen it run up against the old American ideal that Asimov warned against, thinking that expertise doesn't exist "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge".

And that's the thing for me - I am very into not judging, so I don't judge the left for being sanctimonious when they judge the right - like I think they're basically right about more things than they're not, but that sanctimony vibe can be a killer. Sometimes I wonder if I spend too much time browsing 2 or 3 meme sites that reliably have pretty decent but not usually great stuff. Then I run into a banger like this.

I watched Deadpool & Wolverine - there's a weird line:
"With the whole multiverse thing, it's not great.
It's just been miss, after miss, after miss.
Wizard of Oz did the multiverse first and they did it best.
The gays knew it, but we didn't listen."
So, there were the books, an early b+w movie, THE movie, The Wiz, Return to Oz, and Wicked. But is it really an exemplar of a multiverse?

2024 November❮❮prevnext❯❯