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 launched, let me know if you have any tips or tricks for someone considering the move!
💬 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 aging. A lot of faking/masking/figuring stuff out for the first 30 years, then the last ten years steadily moving toward where I am now: how could I possibly be bothered to be anything but myself?
I originally posted this to my Mastodon account.
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)
Tuesday, July 25, 2023
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 by the Ice Man himself, though anyone who has seen Val Kilmer’s autobiographical documentary Val will instantly notice that Kilmer basically just walked onto the Maverick set dressed as he always dresses to greet company these days.
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!
The kicker? The performer, Joseph Castanyer Alonso, is the cellist of the Royal Stockholm Philaharmonic Orchestra. Piano isn’t even his primary instrument. Wild.
🍿 Prey, 2022 - ★★★★ (contains spoilers)
Friday, July 21, 2023
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 if you have 1987 Arnold Schwarzenegger, or 2022 Amber Midthunder, you will have a movie worth your time, and worthy of a theater run.
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.