🔗 Purple Heart Army veteran self-deports after nearly 50 years in the U.S.
Juliana Kim at NPR:
So, Park booked his flight and spent his final days in the U.S. — playing one last round of golf with his friends, savoring Hawaii’s famous garlic shrimp, and enjoying time with his children and 85-year-old mother.
" I have to accept the fact that this is probably the last time I’ll see her," he said.
Any government, any official, and any voter who supports this is a national disgrace.
My kids, three and five years old, are asking about comics. Give me your family-friendly recommendations!
#comicbooks
I don’t think I’ve ever seen Craig Federighi as nervous as he was in this interview where Joanna Stern asked difficult but predictable questions about why, so far, not even artificial intelligence has been able to render Siri mildly useful.
🔗 The WSJ Editorial Board found the unanimity of some recent “culture war” SCOTUS decisions surprising. But it’s not: the liberal justices tend to be principled, while the conservatives tend to torture the Constitution for predetermined ideological outcomes.
(Full article here)
It’s sad that Pocket is shutting down, and more sad that the spammy “discovery” nonsense Mozilla shoehorned into it, as far as I can tell as a Trojan horse for ads, is going to stick around in some form.
If you like the Drafts app by Agile Tortoise, check out this action I published to use your draft text to search the TestFlight beta tracking website departures.to.
Cheers to @FloGroh, whose open URL in current line action I adapted mine from (and who has a ton of other awesome Drafts actions).
When Billy Eichner likes your comment on his TikTok and then replies with a ❤️, you post that shit on your blog so when your kids are grown, after their reverence for you has been eroded by the knowledge that you were only ever just a dude, yes a dude who loved them infinitely, but also a dude who, like most other parents, didn’t really ever have a clue what he was doing, anyway, you post that shit so after that, there is a place for them, together with all of posterity who have the eyes to see, to gather and bear witness to your meager but enduring glories.
See also: Jeri Ryan favorited a post of mine in 2023.
Alito’s dissent from the Supreme Court’s recent benchslapping of Trump is a preview of the kind of subservient drivel we will see more often if a majority of SCOTUS persists in placing country above king. I predict Trump will eventually declare he is bound only by the decisions of Alito and Thomas…
I added a page to my site that lists the URLs necessary to add common search engines to your browser, including several Google Scholar searches that lawyers, law students, and other folks may find useful. Let me know if you find any bugs or typos.
My wife is beautiful and brilliant and I’ve never deserved her, but also her shopping lists, usually written on random envelopes, look like they’re torn from House of Leaves.
Trump is intentionally and unapologetically empowering child predators. And, by extension, so is every person who voted for him. That is not an opinion. It is an irrefutable fact.
Note: The phrase “sad weirdos” is aimed, with love, at fellow users of Letterboxd, where this review was originally published.
I know I’m supposed to shit on this movie with the rest of you sad weirdos who watch things we hate for two straight hours.
And sure, you could have done much better giving Neal Blomkamp $10 million and a long weekend to make this.
And sure, I could have written better dialogue, especially for the sibling interactions at the supposed heart of the movie, on an all-night instant coffee bender.
And sure, it was a mistake to give Chris Pratt the only direction he obviously received, which was “Starlord, but less good.”
And sure, hiring Giancarlo Esposito and Colman Domingo to be low-res faces was a profound waste of profound talents.
But, I am not sorry to say, I enjoyed the movie. It could have, should have, been much, much, much better, given the quiet, transcendent horror-nostalgia of the source material. But as stuff-I-watched-while-folding-laundry goes, it could very easily have been worse.
Also published at: Letterboxd and Trakt
Trishla Ostwal, writing for AdWeek about Perplexity’s sponsorship of right-wing jackass Ben Shapiro:
The deal, structured as an annual partnership for 2025, marks Perplexity’s first native ad integration with a media outlet.
It’s not just that Perplexity chose to advertise with one of the loudest anti-American voices in the country, it’s that they chose to make this their first native ad integration with any media outlet.
I wondered, after reading the AdWeek piece, what Perplexity would have to say about Shapiro. It… did not go well for him:
There is evidence suggesting that Ben Shapiro frequently employs rhetorical techniques that can be characterized as deceptive or misleading. […] While Shapiro’s style resonates with his audience and is effective in certain contexts, these patterns suggest a reliance on rhetorical strategies that may prioritize winning debates over substantive engagement with complex issues.
While it’s nice that Perplexity is, at least as of this writing, honest about Shapiro’s intellectual chicanery, I deleted my Perplexity accounts and removed the app from my devices. I’m trying to be more proactive about listening to people—and companies—when they tell the world who they are.
It will take a while, for example, to excise Google from my digital life, but the process is underway, and I don’t want to start incurring that kind of techno-ethical debt with any new companies with demonstrably flimsy standards if I can help it.
(Via Mediagazer)
Gin Blossoms can still rock it out, and Follow You Down was one of the first songs I recorded from the radio to make a mix tape.
I hope Facebook’s executive team are investing in some quality knee pads… 🔗 bloomberg.com
This review may contain spoilers.
The big laughs come and go, but I’m just a sucker for Craig Ferguson so I was smiling the whole time I watched I’m So Happy, available in full on his YouTube channel. I thought his mini-rant about context and not filming on phones was well done, especially because, in context, his “attack” on young millennials lands well in that context (though, at 41, I'm an elder millennial, so who really knows), and he extends a few olive branches qualifying the more critical stuff. He always knows when he is a bit too close to any given line for audience’s comfort and, like Bill Burr, seems to revel in it.
If anything, the special just makes me miss his show.
ProPublica is keeping track of the Musk lackeys systematically dismantling much of the undeniably flawed but unmistakably necessary federal bureaucracy. (via Heidi Li Feldman)
🔗 Ben Nacar is an incredible pianist who, I recently learned, does an annual video surveying the classical music that left copyright protection that year. The video he did this year features music from 1929, all of which is now in the public domain.
The purveyor of Kagi, the indie search engine, on a new pricing feature:
In months where you don’t utilize any searches on your plan, we will automatically apply a full credit to your account for that month. This credit will be applied to your next billing cycle, effectively covering your subsequent month’s subscription at no additional cost.
I used the base plan in the past, and after I exhausted my 300-search monthly allowance in about three weeks, I swapped all my default search engines, with some frustration, back to Startpage.
I then proceeded to basically forget about it for the next month. I suspect I’m not the only one, and that’s probably what catalyzed this feature.
I have vacillated for a while between Kagi, Startpage, DuckDuckGo, and Brave Search – search engine comparison is the new to-do app comparison for my dopamine-starved brain. Kagi feels superior to the others, but even at $5, I’m just not sure the value sufficiently exceeds what I can do with the others, given the right ad blockers and keyboard incantations.
Akshay Kulkarni, Shaurya Kshatri and William Burr reporting at Canada’s CBC News:
B.C. Premier David Eby has announced immediate countermeasures in response to incoming U.S. tariffs, saying the province will take action to protect B.C. workers and businesses. […] As an initial response, Eby said he has directed the B.C. Liquor Distribution Branch to immediately stop purchasing American liquor from Republican-led “red states” and remove the top-selling brands from public liquor store shelves.
You love to see it.
Rusty Foster at Today in Tabs (https://www.todayintabs.com/p/illegal-and-separately-unconstitutional) has some good advice on how to approach what I refer to as the malevolent-jackass express.
https://joeross.me/2025/01/29/rusty-foster-at-today-in.html
Rusty Foster at Today in Tabs has some good advice on how to approach what I refer to as the malevolent-jackass express:
First, deny this regime your compliance whenever and wherever you can, in ways as large or as small as you are able. Defend your communities, especially the most vulnerable—trans people, queer people, the chronically ill, immigrants, ethnic and religious minorities. And above all, seek to depose any officeholder, political appointee, bureaucrat, or business leader who cooperates with this criminal administration, as well as any who fail to effectively oppose it, by any means available to you.
🔗 Mike Masnick is always a must-read, but his recent piece calling bullshit on Zuckerberg’s “move” of Meta’s moderation teams just proves how important his voice is as we all buckle up for a four-year ride on the malevolent-jackass express…
