Threads can brag about hundreds of millions of users and more daily signups than all of Bluesky, but its recent feature sprint shows competition is having the desired effect. Bluesky’s best move would be to ship true, easy federation ASAP. Easier said than done, I’m sure, but the sooner the better.

I recently posted a photo of my cat on Bluesky, as any serious person does on a growing social network. While carefully preparing the post (again, I am serious person) I asked four different LLMs for alt text to include with the photo. They all did okay, but as you can see Claude went pretty hard…

▶️ Once in a while, I remember that the overwhelming majority of human beings prefer everything Coldplay did after Parachutes over that absolute gem of a record, and I realize that I should’ve known when that thought first occurred to me that I was in one of the darker timelines.

I told myself I wouldn’t participate the discourse, but everyone who voted for Trump had enough information to know this was a likelihood and they did it anyway. Each and every one of them shares responsibility for those will suffer or die as a direct result of RFK Jr. running HHS if he’s confirmed.

I was sad to read that Radio Free Fedi is shutting down early next year. It got me thinking about how easy it is to spin up awesome stuff on the Fediverse. On the one hand, that’s awesome! But on the other, it means that stuff often outgrows the metaphorical bandwidth of its creators pretty fast.

Chris Geidner writes at Law Dork that progressives should be litigating “narrow challenges brought on conservative grounds — using the reasoning of the right, […] fighting with the tools that can work.” This is the way. Forcing liberal arguments through conservative courts won’t …

Oh the privilege of naivety, or the naivety of privilege, or something

Great to see Andy Kim win the former Menendez seat in the Senate for New Jersey.

Adam Kotsko, grousing: The beginning of my frustration came early last week, when the entire site was aghast at a Financial Times column that said Bluesky was an echo chamber. I’m a fan of Bluesky, but I chuckled at the idea of all of its users being upset about it being called an echo …

I don’t pay much attention to polls, so I had no idea Nate Silver had gone so far down his own rabbit hole. It’s so bad that he thinks polling based on, wait for it, the data, takes “an incredible amount of guts.”

Practical AI tip: When someone sends me a PDF calendar (😡), I ask Claude to process the info into ICS format. For my kids' daycare snack calendar, I say: Please convert data from each day to one all-day event, like: Snacks: AM: Cheerios / PM: Crackers And I get the excellent result pictured here.

With Omnivore being acquired by Eleven Labs and shutting down, I recommend Readwise Reader. You can still self-host Omnivore, but I think Readwise is worth its ~$100/year price, though all-in Apple users might prefer GoodLinks for a simpler but still well-designed alternative at a much lower cost.

And just like that, someone I have idolized since I was a young child shows themselves willing to deliver our republic to death by authoritarianism.

Here’s a real form someone I know who makes more than minimum wage was recently asked by their employer to sign: I understand that for calculation of overtime, my contractual hour rate with Employer is set at minimum wage, which is the wage that New Jersey Department of Labor sets, or the Federal …

“Michael Keaton Enters the SNL Ring” youtu.be/CJGNX31DI… It’s one of the better films of the last several years. 10/10, no notes.

Sam Cole, writing at 404 Media about Matt Mullenweg’s ongoing, unforced founder mode flameout: “We were unaware that Matt redirected sign-up emails until current Automattic employees contacted our support team,” a spokesperson for Blind told me, adding that they’d “never seen a CEO or …

Abhorrent CEO or not, a lot of really incredible people at SpaceX achieved a really incredible thing with the Starship launch/Super Heavy catch, and it was awesome to show my kids and see the excitement in their eyes. youtu.be/b28zbsnk-…

Amazon killed API access for one of my favorite apps, price tracker DropScout. Its developer, Daniel Kramer, writes on Mastodon: Amazon has pulled my API access and the app is non-functional as a result. I’m looking for find a solution but the future doesn’t look good. Apparently it’s against …

The 1999 movie Sleepy Hollow is, to my mind, the film to watch during the transition from early autumn to the Halloween season. It captures the dreary, de-saturated feeling you get, on the east coast of the U.S., anyway, when you realize there won’t be another day without a chill in the air …

😑 Sometimes, when I've really had it with my kids, I just look them right in the eyes and tell them, with the most stern and serious expression I can muster, "There will be no fourth chances!"

Matt Mullenweg is a litigator’s worst nightmare — please stop talking in public about the subject matter of the litigation — but presumably Wordpress' lawyer Neal Katyal knows what he’s doing and doesn’t expect the PR blitz to cause problems.

I’m no conspiracy theorist, but I find it strange that my Google TV with Chromecast started outputting green static and weird noises on every input of my LG CX the day before the all new Google TV streamer is set to go on sale…

⌚ Dear watchOS 11, I didn't stand when you suggested I should, so why did you tell me I did a great job getting closer to my stand goal? Confusedly, Joe

Watching these “network state” clowns fail will be fun, but that shouldn’t overshadow the predatory nature of their worldview.

Sometimes I’m writing a Very Serious Blog Post™️ and then I have an intrusive ‘90s thought. For example, I love and hate the fact that, probably for the rest of my life, every time someone says “I don’t wanna wait” I have no choice or free will at all and I just sing 🎤 for our lives to be OH-ver 🎤

Matt Webb wrote about his open source in-page chat tool, cursor party: “If you’ve visited my actual website, rather than reading by email or whatever, such as reading this very post, you may notice somebody else’s cursor pass by as you’re reading.” It’s a wonderful, playful, …

Today there was a cybertruck parked at the daycare where parents park to drop off their kids. I’m wondering if I should put my tie on after drop-off because, like, how self-important do ties seem these days, right? But then there’s a literal human person driving a cybertruck to drop off their kids.

Finished reading: The Fellowship Of The Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien 📚 By the end you know all the players, some have already been lost, others have played out their parts, and still more have shown the true good in their hearts, and the depths of evil the Ring may inspire them to should they come to …

Bluesky’s Trust & Safety decisions may not please everyone, but they’re clearly thinking them through in good faith. While nothing is perfect, a primarily public data store subject to moderation by obfuscation (requiring API work to get at certain moderated data) strikes a thoughtful …

I’m no employment lawyer, but an (allegedly) inconsistently applied policy of ominous non-compete reminder meetings when your best creatives post stuff to their personal accounts sounds…problematic. It’s also an efficient way to inspire them to leave, and that’s exactly what Becca …

The Princess Bride, 1987 - ★★★★★ (contains spoilers): This review may contain spoilers. This is the first time watching it with the kids. They were enthralled from the initial sword fight on, though we did skip the fire swamp, the “Booooo!” lady, some torture, and much of the burning-giant-in-a-trenchcoat scene. To me, it’s still true that the idea …

Jelly Roll was a compelling interviewee on the New York Times Interview, and while I haven’t listened to his music yet, I intend to. But I’m posting to warn anyone who turned the interview off after Jelly Roll inveighed against voting: he walked that back in the final minutes of the podcast episode, …

Fun milestone: my son is exactly calling-every-man-with-a-white-beard-Gandalf years old. 🧙‍♂️

This 1956 promotional video is a time capsule of New Jersey when my parents were kids. This Technicolor color film was produced in 1956 for the New Jersey Bell Telephone Company, and based on a 1953 John T. Cunningham book This is New Jersey. It’s surprisingly light on corporate propaganda. …

Can anyone make an argument that the VP should be anyone but Buttigieg? And I mean an argument that would make sense to someone who doesn’t listen to the Politico Playbook Daily Briefing every morning. He has: ✅ name recognition, ✅ policy chops, ✅ resume, ✅ sparring experience, and ✅ a thick skin.

Today, after a typical barrage of dad jokes during a break from playing with my kids, my niece told me I am saved in her phone as “Joe Ross Cringe Uncle.” She even showed me the contact card to prove it. She and my wife both thought I would, and should, take it as an insult. I did not. 🤪

Linked Links: Google Docs Can Import and Export Markdown by Michael Tsai Maybe I’ll use Google Docs more often now that it can copy/paste and import/export Markdown. I still remember using it for hours at a time throughout law school, but most firms maintain their vise grip on Microsoft Word. …

I never found Letterman funny, and he comes off as mean and a little bigoted in this clip with the late, great Richard Simmons. But Simmons has a ton more charisma than Letterman, outshining him in a 4-minute clip produced by Letterman’s own team.

Everyone who has ever traveled by airplane has at least one infuriating story, including me. But when I missed a scheduled flight on American Airlines last week, the customer service person put me on the next flight with none of the fees, up-charges or judgment that I was expecting, and it was nice.

Oral Argument for Hachette Book Group, Inc. v. Internet Archive – CourtListener.com This oral argument before the 2nd Circuit about the legality of Internet Archive’s controlled digital lending program is a great listen, regardless of what side you support. Find all the litigation filings here. …

Sure, Elon, I’ll go right ahead and disable my privacy related extensions…

Laurens Hof, writing in Episode 73 of his Last Week in Fediverse newsletter: What makes the situation with rumours of Mastodon leaking private messages so interesting to me is that the original posts that contained the rumours got significantly more engagement than the corrections. So it seems to …

Louisiana classrooms now required by law to display the Ten Commandments | CNN Politics I haven’t looked into yet, but my first thought is that this middle finger to the Constitution has the stench of Leonard Leo and his ilk all over it.

🦎 What are some good dinosaur apps and games to learn and play with your kids on iOS? I’m happy to pay for good apps, I just want to avoid scams and low-effort nonsense.

🔗 Rich Idiot Tweets Nick Heer has a great post about the vapid coverage of vapid Elon Musk, but this bit from the end of Heer’s post struck me as the perfect Twitter bio for Musk: words from the fingers of a dipshit

Now that Spotify’s family plan costs $20/month I don’t have much incentive not to switch to YouTube Music, which comes with the YouTube Premium I’m already paying for. I’m also giving the Tidal 30-day trial a shot, but that would be $22/month for a family plan.

⌨️ A quick MS Word tip: Press control + shift + F9 to remove all hyperlinks in a selection of text. You may need to include the Fn or equivalent key if you're a keyboard nerd using several layers. This is handy for work because while I'm writing briefs I like to keep the citations hyperlinked for …

Oliver & Company, 1988: Watched on Saturday June 1, 2024.

Alito's intellectual honesty: 

I’m in a weird headspace about the Supreme Court’s right wing wearing their partiality on their sleeves. I’m supposed to be mad about it, like lots of liberals. But I think it’s a kind of honesty and, in its hubris, exposes the vulnerabilities of the right’s more longterm jurisprudential …

TenBlueLinks.org shows you how to make Google’s old school, AI-free search filter, called, and this is true, Google Web, the default. I’m not a fan of Chrome on iOS, or anywhere really, so I added the &udm=14 suffix to the Google action I use in Drafts and shared it to the Drafts directory.

🪶 This is only my opinion, but it is one I strongly hold: Tom Bombadil is equal parts omnipotence and ADHD.

Godzilla × Kong: The New Empire, 2024: Watched on Tuesday May 14, 2024.

My Neighbor Totoro, 1988 - ★★★★★ (contains spoilers): This review may contain spoilers. We watched this with the kids for Mother’s Day and they loved it. We were worried some of the characters would look scary to their Disney sensibilities, and at first they probably did, but the kids acclimated quickly and fell in love with Totoro. I can’t wait to …

🔗 Apple Will Revamp Siri to Catch Up to Its Chatbot Competitors Tripp Mickle, Brian X. Chen and Cade Metz report at The New York Times that: The decision came after the executives Craig Federighi and John Giannandrea spent weeks testing OpenAI’s new chatbot, ChatGPT. The product’s use …

🔗 Does the Statute of Limitations Ever Apply in Legal Malpractice? Hey look, my employer has a blog about the kind of work I do, and I wrote a thing for it.

I wore transitions (™️?) lenses for a year and half in my late thirties and no one close to me loved me enough to punch me in the face and force me to replace them. I’m not saying I don’t take responsibility, or that I’m not loved at all, just maybe not enough.

😠 Google’s connected speakers and hubs are actually useful (unlike Alexa and Siri…), but it’s really hard when you’re super angry about something and have to mumble “Hey Google …” through gritted teeth. Just let us change the wake phrase. (Yes I know some devices/command combinations don’t require a …

🔗 Trump VP contender Kristi Noem writes of killing dog – and goat – in new book | Books | The Guardian I’m not quoting from the review or her memoir because Noem is deplorable, and because, somehow, it’s worse than the headline suggests. When people tell you who they are, believe them.

💙 About to watch the long Bluey episode with the family… will update afterward…

😠 If your iPhone on iOS 17 becomes unresponsive, be warned: You may lose that day’s photos if you decide to force a reboot before getting them off the phone. This happened to me today. I lost three photos of my son being cuter than any other son in the world.

🔗 Some legal malpractice cases are bogus, and many are defensible. But some are, well, not, which is apparently how State Bar Court Judge Yvette D. Roland in California viewed the misconduct proceedings against John Eastman, the now-disbarred architect of the 2020 fake electors nonsense. (PDF)

🔗 Manton Reece - An update on the pricing update Micro.blog is such a great value. Like omg.lol, Micro.blog is a positive community built by people who didn’t see exactly what they wanted on the web, so they decided to make it.

Bilby, 2018 - ★★★★: This short is, indeed, extremely cute. But it's also impressively executed in terms of the writing and the animation. Parenting pro-tip: Shorts like this one are good to keep handy for when you need to extinguish a tantrum without starting a longer watching session.

👑 That feeling when you've been reading The Hobbit to your kids and your four-year-old daughter insists, and I mean INSISTS, that the friend she made recently at dance class, whose name she had trouble remembering until just now, is named Thorin

🔗 QuickLink Opener – FlohGro I do something similar (even in name), with quicklinks.lol, but Floh Gro’s solution using an action in Drafts for iOS is faster, and private.

🔗 Manton Reece - Recommendations and blogrolls on Micro.blog I’ve long meant to get a blogroll up on this site, and it’s another testament to the fact that I’ve chosen the right community that it was recently integrated into Micro.blog, including auto-updating, public OPML and JSON …

Bilbo is, ever was, and ever shall be, my people. “Back now to the Mountain!” cried Thorin. “We have little time to lose.” “And little food to use!” cried Bilbo, always practical on such points. – The Hobbit, Chapter 15, The Gathering of the Clouds, by J.R.R. Tolkien

🔗 U.S. versus Apple: A first reaction – Six Colors I haven’t read the complaint yet, but this was… not what I expected Attorney General Merrick Garland to have his people focused on…

🔗 Scholarfy | Google Scholar bookmarklet by Johan Ugander This is a useful bookmarklet to move a standard Google search to Google Scholar. I use it with modified version I made with ChatGPT to search an exact phrase, for use in searching for legal opinions. Here’s “my” code: …

🔗 32-Bit Cafe The best part about the 32-Bit Cafe is that we’re trying to move the internet forward productively in the ways we can make an impact, participating in the creation of web services, websites, and weird, wacky web projects. We want to bring back the idea of personal websites to …

The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, 2013: Watched on Tuesday March 12, 2024.

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, 2012: Watched on Friday March 8, 2024.

⚖️ It is an uncharacteristic misstep, in terms of both litigation strategy and public relations, for Apple to poke the EU bear by terminating Epic’s developer account. Whether Apple is right about Epic's intentions is irrelevant. This move looks petty and, worse, calculated to avoid exactly the kind …

😔 Yahoo is accelerating its enshittification of Engadget, in a move that really surprises absolutely no one because, well, it's Yahoo: "Engadget, which is operated by Yahoo, will lay off 10 employees, according to people with knowledge of the situation who say staff were “blindsided” by the …

Chris Geidner at Law Dork has the best explanation of why the 5th Circuit’s jurisprudence has become so, to use a legal term of art, whacky: At the end of the day, there are essentially three groups of active judges on the Fifth Circuit: There are “mad vibes” judges, legally conservative judges, …

The top seven free apps in the news category of the iOS App Store are a mix of proudly user-hostile mismanagement, fear mongering, hyperlocal hate, and Nazi monetization.

🔗 Haier hits Home Assistant plugin dev with takedown notice Bill Toulas, writing at Bleeping Computer: Targeting open-source software developers tends to backfire for companies, as others fork or clone the code repositories to prevent the projects from disappearing. At this time, the Haier home …

☄️ I’m watching this Yaccarino interview very long after it occurred, but time has not dulled the stings of how uninformed and naive she was about Twitter and Musk. It’s hard to believe a seasoned executive fell so far so fast, but there’s no denying the descent when you’re standing in the crater… …

Stop turning awesome apps into internet noise machines: The news aggregating app Artifact is shutting down. Jarrod Blundy wrote at his blog HeyDingus: I do wonder if it would have had a brighter future without the ability to add comments. I never engaged with that social aspect of the service, and I expect it contributed massively to its complexity and …

Finished reading: Charlotte’s Web by E. B. White 📚 — ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ Skip and dance, jump and prance! Go down through the orchard and stroll in the woods! The world is a wonderful place when you’re young. It sure is. What a hell of an amazing book to relegate to the unjustly dismissed …

📱 Someone please tell me which non-leather bifold wallet case to get for an #iPhone 14 Pro, preferably in pink. Extra points for MagSafe compatibility but it's not required.

🤖 Don’t bother giving your three-year-old a comprehensive 10-minute explanation of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s early career up to The Terminator, featuring one of the absolute BEST accent performances of your LIFE, because, honestly, they aren’t going to appreciate it at all.

😕 Thanks to Casey Newton mentioning it on the #HardFork podcast and my having no judgment regarding the apps I try, I downloaded an app called bonk. Join the whatever this is and find me at https://bonkbonkbonk.app/friend/joeross …

iPhone as geek guardrails : Here’s a reply I posted to someone I follow on Mastodon who, on being issued an iPhone by their employer for work calls, was wondering why anyone chooses it over other options when, for example, it’s hard to sideload something as simple as a custom ringtone: Look I need guardrails and I’ve known …

🤨 Is it true that despite paying for the special upgrade I can't set the #ChatGPT iOS app to default to 4 instead of 3.5?i

Princeton Public Library.

Dear Lawyers Still Manually Numbering Paragraphs: Stop it. Here’s a tutorial: Place your cursor where you intend to begin the numbered section of your pleading. Click the numbered list button in your word processor. Repent, and feel your soul become lighter. Yours, scoldingly, Joe

🎮 Bluey: The Videogame, for real life?! Yup. https://youtu.be/S-PYqMxXKKk

⌚ Audio recordings are an overlooked way of keeping memories with your kids. Mine are both under 4 and, while pointing a phone camera at them often changes their behavior, a surreptitious audio recording is easy to do. I've got some great stuff that I'm almost certain an attempt at photos or video …

⚖️ Okay maybe I'm just a hopelessly biased defense lawyer but can anyone read this and tell me with a straight face that the plaintiff didn't set this up...

⁉️ I’m curious: has anyone else recently seen excessive outgoing #DNS requests on their network from #Wyze cameras? This was a known issue a while ago but I thought they had fixed it. I've noticed unusual spikes in the past 60 days or so, and when I blocked Wyze and its related domains using …

🎸 I’ve played an acoustic guitar for and with my two kids since my oldest was born a few years ago, but today I plugged an old electric of mine into an amp for the first time in maybe ten years and the kids loved it, and it reminded me that there’s music-making at the core of me.

🤢 It's not a great headshot. I look so... unfamiliar with the "Smile!" command. And thanks to a moment of poor judgment, and Gravatar, it'll be all over the internet until I decide to change it again. Which will likely be soon... (Yes, I know it's not attached. That was intentional...)

⚠️ So I’m going to do a real blog post about this when I find the time, but today I discovered that my router’s admin panel is accessible via a combination of selecting the right IP and appending a string of numbers to the name of the HTML page that contains the admin panel. The string is the same …

🐎 Julia Glassman, writing at The Mary Sue (with major #spoilers for the newest batch of episodes): What makes this show so great is that it isn’t afraid to employ writing that’s savvy enough for adults to enjoy. Bluey navigates real conflicts, while her parents—the delightfully flawed Bandit and …

Sherlock Holmes giving serious Nardwuar vibes in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle📚: My name is Sherlock Holmes. It is my business to know what other people don’t know. This particular quote, for nerds who know, is from adventure number seven, The Adventure of the Blue …

😠 I’m looking at the Be Our Guest dinner as my wife and I finalize our plans for #Disney World and I need someone to tell me why the menu at one of their top restaurant experiences is so vegetarian-hostile. Pan-roasted zucchini? Really? Disappointing.

⚖️ From a report at Law Dork by its proprietor, Chris Geidner: Starr issued an “administrative stay” on Thursday that will last for 30 days while he considers the airline’s request for a stay of the order pending its appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. Judge Starr is having …

Introducing Quicklinks.lol: The other day, er, morning, er, very early morning, I posted about a little project I did instead of sleeping called Quicklinks. It’s essentially just a list links I visit whenever I take a break or have some downtime. That’s it. That’s the whole thing. I published it for my …

😑 So if one had, hypothetically, selected all of the files in the .txt/.markdown notes folder in their iCloud Files all, and mistaken the “duplicate” button for a “copy” button, is there an app or solution to de-dupe the folder from iOS?

The Web Worth Paying For: I was listening to Celeste Headlee interview Anil Dash on the latest episode of the Slate podcast What Next: TBD, and Dash said something about the kind of web communities we should build, and encourage, to combat the rise of white supremacy among wealthy and influential tech leaders and the …

Grounds For Sculpture.

Rat’s Restaurant.

So, 40 commits later, you can star my insomnia on GitHub. I should have been cleaning, or sleeping. Instead, I made a webpage. Then I made a second webpage, identical to the first, except links open in the same tab, for all the weirdos out there who like that sort of thing.

💻 The MacBook Air I'm posting this from is older than I'll admit in polite company, so I've been eyeing the new 15-inch Air, and today Amazon is selling the base configuration - in all colorways - at a $200 discount.

👍 Apropos of my earlier post about considering migration to a different Mastodon server: Notes from a Mastodon migration - Erin Kissane's small internet website

🚆 Right now I do ActivityPubs primarily from mastodon.social. But I’m researching migration and reading about other folks’ experiences. I love omg.lol as a whole and social.lol is where I probably belong, but it’s daunting to move. If you decided to migrate here from another server when social.lol …

💬 So the Gummi Bears show from 1985-1991 was both something I think I saw in its entirety during its original run (I was born in 1983), and something I completely forgot had ever existed.

Avon-by-the-Sea Beach.

Author and actor Miranda Keeling posted this on Mastodon, where she frequently posts interesting fragments of conversation she overhears in everyday life: Woman in a supermarket: Fake it til you can’t be bothered anymore, and then just be yourself. This has been one of my core experiences of …

I saw The Toaster Museum linked to over at Hacker News and immediately thought of John Siracusa (@siracusa). Here’s some great context for why I immediately thought of him, by his friend and Accidental Tech Podcast (@atp.fm) co-host Casey Liss (@caseyliss).

Associated Humane Societies.

I have some more Bluesky invite codes. But I’m 40 and married, so I don’t just hand a code to the first internet user that smiles at me. Bluesky servers can use the invite tree in moderation decisions, so I do at least some vetting of folks before I send them a code. No hate/harassment/anti-vax etc.

Top Gun: Maverick, 2022 - ★★★★ (contains spoilers): This review may contain spoilers. Sure, it’s a couple hours of Tom Cruise being paid millions of dollars to do stunts literally everyone else in the world would have to pay millions of dollars to do. But nails the fan service, the tech, and the physics. And it’s fun. Also, it includes an appearance …

Threatening to take away your customers’ fake merit badges if they don’t pay more isn’t a business. It’s barely a grift. It’s how a lonely bully enforces the closest thing to social relationships he can possibly attain. But at least we can call the post-mortem when this all explodes “the X-Files.”

Obviously this is incredible, full stop. But if you’re trained in the craft and the composers, this must be one of the most delightful things you’ve seen in a long, long time. And those animations! youtu.be/WRfsibwR5… The kicker? The performer, Joseph Castanyer Alonso, is the cellist of the …

🍿 Prey, 2022 - ★★★★ (contains spoilers): This review may contain spoilers. A Predator movie is only as good as its protagonist. The dialogue can mostly suck, as it does here. The CG effects can look like trash, as they too often do here. The plot can be an early colonial-American choose-your-own-adventure story, as it (mostly) is here. But …

One bit of Casey Newton’s latest Platformer piece, on how Threads can survive the calm after the storm, must have many social media pros searching their feelings. I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of social media managers suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.

I need Mrs. Meyers to answer for the fact that her “Compassion Flower” handsoap scent has me routinely smelling like I think Axe body spray is a legitimate thing for a 40-year-old person to smell like.

Kaya’s Kitchen.

Avon-by-the-Sea Beach.

I was going to treat reddit like Facebook, visiting every 1 or 2 months to see what was going on. But reddit leadership are so hostile to the most engaged users that I think it’s time to delete my account, which sucks. Reddit removes years of chat and message archives from users' accounts | …

💬 💬 Okay, I'm trying again to see if I can set it up so my updates on status.lol are imported to my Micro.blog and syndicated out from there.

Elon Musk is the answer to the question: What if we gave MRAs, incels and wannabe MAGA Big Deals™ billions of dollars and Peter Thiel’s cell phone number?

List of Indie Dev Sales Events Matt Corey put together a list of developers holding sales in an indie software version of Amazon’s Prime Day: Below, you’ll find a list of over 100 (🤯) Indie apps that are offering discounts for Indie App Sales, July 11-12! Each of these apps is developed by an …

Mark Frauenfelder, writing at Boing Boing: A recent study of sleep loss and depression found that one night of total sleep deprivation generally worsens mood and emotional regulation in healthy individuals, but induces a temporary lift in spirits for some individuals with depression. . . . The …

Firefox address bar modifiers - the tilde.institute wiki: The address bar has become our entry point to the internet these days. Firefox in its default configuration does some sort of smart guess on what you type there. If it resembles a URL then the browser makes that request. If not, it sends the …

Breakfast at Monmouth Junction Kitchen

I’m trying out a new cross-posting method, this time using the #RSS feed for a new “status” category in Micro.blog to cross-post to other services, like Mastodon and Bluesky. If it works, I can leave cross-posting deactivated by default on regular posts. (take 2…)

I guess we’re supposed to shit on Threads. Skepticism is valid. But they already collect data from Instagram users. And you can always deactivate or delete your account: help.instagram.com/139886812… I’m giving it a chance, but the forced algo. timeline is probably a dealbreaker for me.

My daughter shushed me while we watched Carl Sagan’s “Pale Blue Dot” today and I’ve never been more proud of anything than I was when she told me, quietly and politely, but firmly and resolutely, to “just be quiet for a minute and listen to the man talk about space.” Edit to add: She’s only 3 years …

Neil Gaiman liked a post of mine on Bluesky. It was actually a re-post of one of his own posts, and he’s famously interactive with folks on social media, so I’m not exactly special, but it’s fun to see! ::: growling at my negative internal monologue monster :::

This was supposed to post to my Microblog via OwnYourSwarm but I don’t know how to set up my theme etc. to make it look like a checkin and I’d appreciate any help #MicroBlog / #IndieWeb / #micropub geeks can offer. (I fished for help with this about a month ago but there were no bites.)

The early nerd gets the… something. I’m tired.

🎧 “The One” by Taking Back Sunday (2023) ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️: It’s good. I’m happy it’s good. It came from something sad: “This song came from a riff that bassist Shaun Cooper wrote the day he lost his grandmother while she was in a nursing home at the start of the COVID pandemic.” But it’s something more than sad. This line especially gets me: Still, the …

📷 Found my old Fringe hoodie while putting some stuff away. It’s pretty beat up, but a great reminder that it was one hell of a good show.

I do not want spoilers but I would appreciate anyone seeing Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny giving me a 👍🏻 or 👎🏻. I’m going to see it in the theater either way, but Crystal Skull was… fine. I’m just hoping the last Indiana Jones film with Harrison Ford is much better.

The Supreme Court has struck down the Biden administration’s student loan forgiveness in Biden v. Nebraska (PDF). I haven’t read through the entire opinion yet, but it appears the majority relied on the entirely fictional and opportunistically deployed major questions doctrine. More at SCOTUSBlog.

Narwhal dev declining to answer whether he made a deal with Reddit is him confirming he made a deal, as is Reddit’s line that they don’t disclose discussions. Some will pay $4 to $7 a month for their favorite Reddit app, but most won’t, or can’t. Can’t fault narwhal for surviving, but it feels icky.

SkyBridge is a server that connects Mastodon to Bluesky, enabling the use of some Mastodon-only apps with your Bluesky account. Today I noticed that, at least in Ivory for iOS, you can access Bluesky feeds via the Mastodon lists screen. (I still have some Bluesky invites if anyone’s …

There are so many wonderful #iOS apps for Mastodon1, but Ivory is still my favorite. Just need it to add quote posts so I can point my #ADHD Eye of Sauron at a category of nerd stuff other than Mastodon apps. Mastodon’s official iOS app has better two-tap moderation options than most …

Do you realize how much of Live Aid Freddie Mercury spent playing air guitar? Just one of the true gods of rock, air guitaring for what must have been half their 21-minute set, one of the best rock sets of all time, in front of 72,000 people. You love to see it. youtu.be/PLIAp5nr0…

😁 Hey thanks @jmj@social.lol for the tip on getting my status.lol crossposting to Mastodon working again! Everyone on social.lol should check out Joanna’s app status.log: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/status-log/id6444921793

📚 Finished: The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (1980), ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️: Yesterday I finished reading The Restaurant at the End of the Universe by Douglas Adams. ️Maybe not as ruthlessly original as, well, the original, but better than a Vogon poem. Let the naysayers say their nays. Sure, it’s no Hitchhikers, but nothing was before, and nothing will be again. Unless …

Now I have three Bluesky invites. Let me know if you’re interested!

🔵 Now I have three Bluesky invites. Let me know if you're interested!

CEO Steve Huffman’s bumbling, slow-motion destruction of reddit would be a huge loss to collective knowledge on the web. Without the ability to append “reddit” to most queries, Google Search is mostly worthless unless you’re looking for sponsored content or SEO-abusing nonsense results.

My 3-year-old just asked me if Mark Hoppus is me on this video of Blink 182 playing I Miss You at Coachella 2023.

I took this photo tonight while leaving work at 18th and Market Streets in Philly. It doesn’t really show how thick the air was, and it’s only slightly better at home in Princeton. Be safe everyone.

Jeri Ryan, the actor who plays Seven of Nine on various Stars Trek, favorited a post of mine on Mastodon today. That’s it. That’s the whole blog post.

“Lawyers’ vile emails exposed” Sometimes I write a long, angry blog post about a thing, fully intending to post it all for the world to see, but then I save it to my journaling app, and just post a link to what prompted the angry draft while I decide if I should make my angry thoughts public, …

It’s a whole vibe.

Oldest Search - Search for the oldest result on internet This is one of those things I just love about the internet, a fun, simple thing, done well. The oldest result for my name is a 1982 NY Times obituary on Joe E. Ross, another New Jersey native, of Car 54 fame.

I verified myself on nostr which required logging into cpanel, creating a json file, editing my .htaccess, and using a CORS tester. It was exhausting. THEN I found out if I don’t give some guy on the internet like 1 USD worth of bitcoin from my lightning wallet, whatever the hell that is, …

Markdown images are an anti-pattern | daverupert.com Dave Rupert doesn’t see a place in Markdown for images, and I agree. Just use an img tag. But his good point and my agreement with it aren’t really the reason I’m sharing a link to his post. I’m sharing it because he writes …

Craig Hockenberry, announces ‘Blank’ for Apple tvOS I’m happy to announce the release of a new tvOS app called Blank. It turns your screen black and keeps it that way until you press any button on a remote. Seriously, that’s all it does. Simple and useful.

Mac Gmail client Mimestream reaches 1.0 Jason Snell, writing at Six Colors: If you’re a Gmail user, Mimestream will be a revelation. Since it was built from the ground up to understand Google’s approach to email, it doesn’t suffer from the weird workarounds required to map an IMAP protocol metaphor …

🌞 I have two Bluesky invites if anyone is interested. However, I’m only considering requests from people who will swear never to call posts on Bluesky… what lots of people on Bluesky are calling them. It’s not okay.

I have two Bluesky invites if anyone is interested. However, I’m only considering requests from people who will swear never to call posts on Bluesky… what lots of people on Bluesky are calling them. It’s not okay.

Moon, 2009 - ★★★★★: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ (5 out of 5 stars) This is the last one for today, I promise. Another rewatch, Sam Rockwell’s performance puts this movie on a level with The Martian.  I know they’re very different movies, but, for my money, Moon does at just as much with fewer/older VFX and a much lower budget. How much …

Annihilation, 2018 - ★★★★: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ (4 out of 5 stars) I can confirm in watching this movie again that it is ambitious, original and has a fully committed cast. If you like sci-fi and somehow haven’t seen Annihilation yet, do yourself a favor and watch it.

The Menu, 2022 - ★★★: ⭐️⭐️⭐️ (3 stars out of 5) I don’t regret watching this and I would certainly recommend it to certain people, but I’m not sure I’ll ever need to watch it again.

I’ve been playing around with using OwnYourSwarm and the idea of posting only certain checkins publicly on my Micro.blog. If anyone has any experience with it, especially with ironing out weirdness/rookie mistakes, let me know!

D&R Canal.

Checked in at D & R Canal @ Kingston

Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, 2023 - ★: ⭐️ (1 star out of 5 Wouldn’t watch again, wouldn’t recommend The story was incoherent except as a forced setup of Kang and of passing of the Ant-Man-tle to Lang’s daughter.

Camp Taylor. Checked in at Camp Taylor. A campfire in the daylight. (@ Camp Taylor Campground, NJ, USA)

Justice Gorsuch, during #SCOTUS oral arguments in Counterman v. Colorado, displaying a kind of intellectual dishonesty that must have had Alito beaming proudly in the direction of his more junior colleague (Originally shared at Mastodon)

Castle in the Sky, 1986: Watched on Sunday May 14, 2023.

Checked in at Camp Taylor. Another night, another shot of the sky through the trees (@ Camp Taylor Campground, NJ, USA)

Checked in at Camp Taylor. Camping with some family to celebrate my upcoming ██th birthday.

I love the big overlap in the user communities at omg.lol and Micro.blog. There’s something about both platforms that draws a certain kind of geek and I think it’s great.

The sky through the trees (@ Camp Taylor Campground, NJ, USA)

Neil Gaiman announced season 2 of Good Omens on Bluesky today. I enjoyed season 1 which, though it had its faults, was a really pleasant display of the chemistry between its leads, David Tenant as the demon Crowley and Michael Sheen as the angel Aziraphale.

Currently reading: The Restaurant at the End of the Universe by Douglas Adams 📚 I’m reading this one with the kids at bedtime. I definitely do a bit of light word replacement here and there, mostly where death or sex are mentioned. But it’s fun, especially with the 3-year-old, who can understand …

Please stop inviting heads of state to Bluesky ⟶ The Verge’s Elizabeth Lopatto reports on Bluesky’s refusal, for now, to allow national leaders on the platform. (This was originally auto-posted via RSS from Pinboard but I had to edit it because the actual link didn’t come through. I’m experimenting …

🗨️ Re-installing the twitter app… just for a bit so I can complain to Dropbox about their gross downgrading flow dark patterns…

Mandibles, night-blooming jasmine, and in-utero memories. These are the things a great Nic Cage interview is made of.

If You Build It: I’ve been poking around Bluesky and it seems like they’ve really opened up the gates over there. I’m seeing far more familiar names and avatars. And everyone seems cool, as long as you can avoid the crypto/web3 nonsense. (This isn’t about Jack, or any of weird takes he’s been dropping …

As I said on Bluesky itself: This is… not a good idea at all…

🎧 "It’s a Pleasure to Meet You" by Motion City Soundtrack: You are not alone We’ve all had our battles with darkness and shadows I’m here to let you know It’s a pleasure to meet you Today is all we have So try for a moment to break from the torment And sing this to yourself It’s a pleasure to meet you (find it where you listen)

I’m trying out cross-posting from Micro.blog to Bluesky. Come & say hi if you’re over there. There are more people there all the time, but there aren’t many of my people (read: users of Micro.blog & omg.lol) there yet. (I’m also cross-posting to all the others services I’ve added because why …

🟦 If you’re on Bluesky, come say hi. I’ve found some cool people, but it’s a … different vibe than my other communities, for sure. https://bsky.app/profile/joeross.me (Shout-out to @maique@social.lol for the invite! I don’t have any yet, but I’ll pay it forward when I do.)

For and Against Bluesky: Point against Bluesky: Already it’s recommending I follow crypto bros, as if no one who works on this app has ever read my bio, which states, in pertinent part: I’m giving this place a chance. You all better keep the crypto sh*t out of my face, and my feed. Point for Bluesky: I made my handle my …

💻 Of course I'm putzing around on omg.lol

📱 Having fun rebuilding my Drafts app groups and actions from the ground up.

📻 Listening to the National Security Law Podcast https://www.nationalsecuritylawpodcast.com/episode-233-this-episode-was-not-written-by-chatgpt/

😁 Every time I visit omg.lol or social.lol I find a new fun thing to try. This time it’s status.lol and the neat app status.log by @jmj!

App recommendation: Workflowy: Workflowy is easily one of my favorite #productivity apps. I’ve been using it for years for work and personal stuff and it fits my brain. It’s great for work as a place to keep, for example, a list of causes of action, together with their elements and defenses. It’s also where I keep the cases I …

Elliot: The Littlest Reindeer, 2018: Turned this off in the first ten minutes

Riders of Justice, 2020 - ★★★★: It both is and is not the movie you think it is, and both in the best way.

FUMC Ideas: Sunshine Pieces Daniel Isn’t Real Near Dark Don’t Look Now Next Door Enter the Void High Tension Gaia The Greasy Strangler …plus 6 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Truth or Dare?: A Critical Madness, 1986 - ★★: Awful… awfully wonderful

CODA, 2021 - ★★★: Awful family places burden of their livelihood on daughter for her entire life and finally decides to let her be her own kid as she leaves for college. It was good but it was kind of missing that one show stopping, jaw dropping song that the third act of any movie in this vein kind of demands.

Black Widow, 2021 - ★★★: It’s worth a watch for the chemistry between the sisters - you don’t see a lot of effective portrayals of sisterhood in action movies - and David Harbour is a lot of fun. Edit: the pig scene was totally unnecessary and gross.

The Suicide Squad, 2021 - ★★★★: A lot of people love this movie for the same reasons a lot of people hate this movie. It simultaneously shamelessly indulges in the same clichés and tropes that it’s constantly subverting. A lot of people just want it to pick whether it’s going to shamelessly indulge or it’s going to subvert but I …

Don't Look Now, 1973 - ★★★★½: The non sequitur implementation of the ending cost half a star but the film is visually stunning and narratively bold. I can’t say what movies clearly took inspiration from it without giving it away, but you’ll probably know right away after you watch it.

Starry Eyes, 2014 - ★★★: Watched on Tuesday July 20, 2021.

The Peanut Butter Solution, 1985 - ★★★: You will not know where it’s going until it gets there.

FUMC History: The films watched by the FUMC, in order. Martyrs The Peanut Butter Solution Starry Eyes Cigarette Burns Hereditary

Cigarette Burns, 2005 - ★★★: Watched for the FUMC.

House, 1977 - ★★★: Well you should all watch it once. Watching it alone was disorientating and left me wishing I had someone to share the experience with but it was a hell of ride. Go in blind and don’t ask of it any more than it is.

A Quiet Place Part II, 2020 - ★★★★★: I try to be stingy with 5 stars but this movie deserves it. The writing, direction, acting and SOUND DESIGN are as good as the first and in some areas even better. The main flaw that bugged me was SPOILER ALERT: The day one flashback was really only there to remind us who JK was on the first one …

C'est la Vie, 2016 - ★★★★: I watched a few of his shorts tonight but this was my favorite.

Beau, 2011 - ★★★: There’s so much more to be told here.

The Strange Thing About the Johnsons, 2011 - ★★★: Yes it’s disturbing but there’s nothing supernatural about it.

Martyrs, 2008 - ★★★★: Watched on Wednesday July 21, 2021.

Come and See, 1985 - ★★★★: Brutal and unrelenting, once is enough, but it’s also necessary.

Near Dark, 1987 - ★★★★: It’s worth a watch despite the lame performance of the male lead. Henricksen and Paxton are wonderful, and Bigelow’s makes the thing a visually classic and novel experience at the same time.

The Amusement Park, 1975 - ★★: These are all things I have seen happening to Oder folks. It’s a sad sad movie whose true horror is the inevitability that we may all face one or more of these deep indignities if we are lucky enough to grow old.

Sunshine, 2007 - ★★: The star power is impressive, with Michelle Yeoh and Chris Evans and Cillian Murphy and Rose Byrne. The story is Event Horizon light and not one of Boyle’s best by a long short but it’s a beautifully shot film.

Gunpowder Milkshake, 2021 - ★★★: Watched on Thursday July 15, 2021.

Furious 7, 2015: Watched on Friday June 4, 2021.

Fast & Furious 6, 2013: Watched on Thursday June 3, 2021.

Fast Five, 2011: Watched on Wednesday June 2, 2021.

Fast & Furious, 2009: Watched on Tuesday June 1, 2021.

2 Fast 2 Furious, 2003: Watched on Saturday May 29, 2021.

The Fast and the Furious, 2001: Watched on Friday May 28, 2021.

Synchronic, 2019 - ★★★: As usual, this directing duo puts an interesting new spin on a very old kind of story. It’s a worthy addition to the time travel category.

Sound of Metal, 2019: A stunning movie. I don’t know how well it portrays being deaf, but it moved me with its portrayal of being someone who can hear who suddenly starts to lose that hearing.  SPOILER AHEAD: The scene in the bed where he realizes she has moved on and is so much better for it and he tells her it’s okay …

Parasite, 2019 - ★★★★: I can’t remember when I watched this but it was a while ago. It was incredibly strange and disturbing and worth watching if those things don’t scare you off.

The Lighthouse, 2019 - ★★★★: Buy the ticket, take the ride, smell the farts, be disturbed and left with a lot of questions and a day or so of your inner monologue speaking like a drunken Shakespearean character

Earwig and the Witch, 2020 - ★: Abrupt ending, animation not great, decent first draft of a story and movie at best

Promising Young Woman, 2020 - ★★★★: Everyone woman should watch it once. Every man should watch it two or three times. I dinged it a star because there’s a part that’s hard to watch because I wanted something different to happen but make no mistake: this movie deserves your time and your attention and your full comprehension.

A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, 2019 - ★★★★: It simultaneously puts every cynical fight you ever may have had about Mr. Rogers to bed an also manages to humanize him by showing that he was not above pain. The journalist is a stand-in for every kid that grew up in Mr. Rogers and still became kind of cynical and jaded. Hanks is arresting as …

Hope Gap, 2019 - ★★: Depressing but it has heart. Ending sucked.

Save Yourselves!, 2020 - ★★★: It’s worth watching but the end was huh?

Togo, 2019 - ★★★★: This was surprisingly true to the facts I could find. It’s hard to maintain a couple hours of mostly one man yelling “GOOD DOG” at running dogs, but Dafoe does it with aplomb. I liked it a lot, especially as an adventure movie with some scary bits that’s also meant for kids.

Wild Mountain Thyme, 2020 - ★★★: I guess, based on what the critics say, I’m not supposed to admit I liked this movie, but fuck it. I’ve spent a hundredish minutes on far, far worse films that didn’t delight me one millionth as much as this one did.

Ad Astra, 2019 - ★★★: Brad Pitt was very good in a role I don’t think anyone would expect him to excel in. Beyond that it’s not a great movie and bafflingly underused Ruth Negga and Natasha Lyonne.

Wonder Woman 1984, 2020 - ★: Oof. That did not go well.

Hubie Halloween, 2020 - ★★½: It was exactly what I thought it would be. Don’t review this thing like it’s suppose to change cinema forever. Watch it like your favorite musician is doing another tour after a long weird solo career and they’re just playing the hits you loved in high school. It’s harmless fun and should be easy to …

Midnight Special, 2016 - ★★★: Great bones but a criminal underuse of Kirsten Dunst, overuse of Adam Driver, who is great but whose plot is muddled and doesn’t really justify his kind of gravitas.

One Cut of the Dead, 2017 - ★★★★: Despite how it looks at first, it’s not a horror movie but it’s absolutely worth a watch, especially if you like indie movies. I won’t ruin it by saying more.

The Peanut Butter Falcon, 2019 - ★★★★: Great performances from the main dudes and the main lady, but the end was too abrupt

Project Power, 2020 - ★★★: The actor that plays Robin is really good. Her hoodie being Robin colors is an nice touch. It’s worth watching once.

Host, 2020 - ★★★½: Perfectly paced and does the horror via video call thing very well.

Jurassic Park, 1993 - ★★★★★: Still a great watch all these years later.

Trans characters in the first big video games of 2017: Trans characters in the first big video games of 2017 Laura Dale, writing at Polygon: The past month of AAA video game releases might be the most interesting I have ever experienced as a trans woman, meaning someone who was designated male at birth but is now living as female. While far from perfect …

DOJ internal watchdog to investigate FBI's Clinton inquiry: Justice Dept. internal watchdog to investigate FBI’s Clinton inquiry The inquiry by the Justice Department's inspector general, likely to keep open the wounds of the bitter 2016 presidential race, will focus on whether "policies or procedures were not followed" by the FBI and Justice …

NBC stupidly shutting down Breaking News app, service: NBC stupidly shutting down Breaking News app, service The decision, as it often does in the media business, came down to revenue. "Unfortunately, despite its consumer appeal, Breaking News has not been able to generate enough revenue to sustain itself," Ascheim said in the letter supplied by NBC …

FCC abides by GOP request, deletes everything from meeting agenda: FCC abides by GOP request, deletes everything from meeting agenda Wheeler's attempt to impose new set-top box rules that help consumers avoid paying cable box rental fees may also be doomed. Consumer advocacy group Public Knowledge sent a letter to Trump today urging him to side with consumers …

NJ law would require pet stores sell only rescue animals: NJ law would require pet stores sell only rescue animals John C. Ensslin reports for The Record: New pet stores in New Jersey would be allowed to sell only cats and dogs obtained from shelters, pounds and animal rescue organization under a bill the state Senate passed Thursday. The bill still has …

NJ lawyers need a social media policy for employees: NJ lawyers need a social media policy for employees Jennifer Marino Thibodaux of Gibbons writes: The subject attorneys were retained to defend a town and its police sergeant in a personal injury action. One attorney directed his paralegal to conduct Internet research about the plaintiff. The …