Facebook, Google Give Police Data to Prosecute Abortion Seekers:

As abortion bans across the nation are implemented and enforced, law enforcement is turning to social-media platforms to build cases to prosecute women seeking abortions or abortion-inducing medication — and online platforms like Google and Facebook are helping. 

Through data collected by online pharmacies, social media posts, and user data requests from law enforcement for message and search logs, cases for prosecution can be built against women for seeking abortion — and it has been happening since before Roe was overturned.

It’s time to take back control of what we read on the internet - The Atlantic:

Crapwalled article, but TL;dr - Use RSS to subscribe to feeds of sites instead of relying on reblogs on social media.

Bad Projection Is Ruining the Movie Theater Experience:

But the picture problems predated COVID-19. Many can be traced to 2009, when theaters swapped their film projectors for digital ones, made primarily by Sony, to show the original Avatar. Studios were excited about the switch because it meant they could save money by distributing movies over the internet instead of mailing around heavy film prints. Theater owners were excited because digital projectors could be programmed to run on their own without human projectionists to start them up and switch reels.

Those projectionists, though, were highly skilled engineers and troubleshooters. Now that multiplexes use automated projection, problems fall to house managers, who, in this age of austerity, may be the same overworked employees ripping tickets and selling popcorn. If an error is serious or demands more than a wiped lens or system reboot, it might have to wait a couple weeks for a visit from a technician — or even longer if nobody complains.

Daring Fireball: CPAC Speaker Michael Knowles Calls for Transgender People to Be ‘Eradicated From Public Life Entirely’:

Keith Olbermann, in a reply to Knowles’s tweet:

You should get the fuck off the stage and apologize, asshole. This statement is your life from here on in.

Shove your hatred and bias and Nazi dreams up your ass, Motherfucker.

Olbermann took the words right out of my mouth. It’s sophistry to argue that transgenerism can be “eradicated from public life entirely” without eradicating transgender people. Eradicate is a Nazi word — one step away from exterminate — and totally means completely, absolutely, entirely. Watch the video. This is Nazism, and the only proper response to Nazis is to punch them.

Daring Fireball: Josh Marshall: ‘The Deep Archeology of Fox News’:

In a broad sense it all comes back to Stephen Colbert’s iconic line from his Colbert Report alter ego: “It is a well known fact that reality has a liberal bias.” U.S. conservatives couldn’t/can’t see that, or refuse to see it, and instead operate on the assumption that all journalism — and science — that points toward liberal conclusions is ideological.

J.K. Rowling’s transphobia: A history - Vox:

J.K. Rowling’s supporters frequently claim the author has never actually said or done anything transphobic. It’s a position you can see on social media, in the pages of the New York Times, and even on a new podcast with Rowling herself.

It’s also an easily debunked lie.

Daring Fireball: Tweetbot and Twitterrific Face the Cliff:

You surely recall that last month, in a fit of pique, Elon Musk spitefully pulled the plug on third-party Twitter clients with no notice whatsoever, in the most chickenshit way imaginable. Twitter didn’t even make it official that third-party clients had been banned until a week of confusion and dread had passed.

I went the route of stopping my Twitterific subscription and deleted the app - I had plenty of value when Twitter allowed it to work, so I felt no need to punish the devs. Linked article covers more detail of what you might want to do and why.

Report: US Pedestrian Death Rate Increased 9x Faster Than Population During COVID – Streetsblog USA:

U.S. drivers killed 3,434 people on foot in the first six months of 2022, an increase of 5 percent over the same period the prior year — and a staggering 18 percent increase over the number of walkers who died in early 2019, the last year before the pandemic, according to the latest fatality estimates from the Governors Highway Safety Association.

MAGAbert | Boing Boing:

Regarding Efforts By You, In Inferior Person, To Cancel Me, A Genius:

Your reaction shows what is wrong with society. Specifically: when I, a genius, speak, you, a mediocre person, should listen, and appreciate. That's what freedom of speech means. When you react by criticizing and shunning me, you demonstrate your contempt for freedom of expression. Freedom of speech means I talk and you listen respectfully and make occasional soft noises of affirmation, whether it is on one of my YouTube videos or when I initiate foreplay by explaining why women are overrepresented in engineering. When you don't, you are part of the mindless mob, heirs to the tradition of people who condemned Socrates and crucified Jesus and were really quite rude to that thoughtful young man Nick Fuentes.

18 Chartreuse Cocktail Recipes Spotlighting the Herbal Liqueur | PUNCH:

In late January, a letter circulated on social media announcing that the Carthusian monks, who have been producing Chartreuse since 1605, will be limiting production and allocating their bottles in an effort to devote more time to monastic life. “We look to do better and for longer,” reads the memo, which also considers the costly environmental impacts of production and distribution of the beloved herbal liqueur. Tim Master, Senior Director of Specialty Spirits Marketing at Frederick Wildman & Sons, a Chartreuse distributor, has verified the letter.

Swalwell calls out Matt Gaetz for dangerous political stunts:

"Mr. McClintock (R-CA), I am not kidding you, Mr. McClintock said, ‘Well, it's not like we're going to invite somebody who committed murder.’ No, he literally said that. ‘It's not like we're going to invite somebody who committed murder.’

“Okay. Well, who did Mr. Gaetz bring? He brought Corey Beekman. Corey Beekman in 2019, was in a standoff with the Michigan police after he was arrested and charged with murder, assault with intent to commit murder and two counts of felony firearm possession.”

To safeguard healthy twin in utero, she had to ‘escape’ Texas for abortion procedure | MPR News:

The email hit her inbox on Monday, September 26 at around 9 in the morning. "It's so much worse than I imagined," she wrote in her journal. "It's trisomy 18. It's Edwards Syndrome." Online, she read that about 90% of fetuses with trisomy 18 die before birth, and those that do survive usually only live for a few days. "I just want to throw up. I can't even come up with words to describe how devastating this is," she wrote.

A few hours later, a genetic counselor called her. “It just gets worse,” she wrote after that conversation. “Basically, every day that Baby B continues to develop, he puts myself and his twin at greater risk for complications, preterm birth, etc. But she can’t say much – she was careful about what she even said."

Japanese Manhole Covers Are Beautiful:

The Case For Shunning - by A.R. Moxon - The Reframe:

There has to come a point when we finally insist to take the evidence before us and to draw moral conclusions—because unless we do, we won’t ever be able to address the problems before us. If we don’t make moral judgments about speech, we’ll find ourselves on a treadmill of discourse, always running but never getting anywhere, endlessly compelled to apply an indestructible skepticism to the evidence, and an indestructible credulity to specious conjecture and lies.

It’s time for us to understand people for what they insist on being. To understand that participation with the popularized genocidal urges gripping our country is an unacceptable moral failing, as is support for the politicians and pundits who are pursing it, as is membership in the political party around which it is organized and energized. To understand that unforgivable moral failings deserve not our ears, but our backs.

Believe people when they tell us who they are - If we did that sooner, Scott Adams finally saying the quiet part out loud wouldn’t really be a surprise.

Wokers Paradise – DORK TOWER 27.02.23 – Dork Tower:

The Courtyard – cabel.com:

This apartment building is near my house. Built in the 50’s and remodeled in the 2010’s, to the credit of whoever rehabilitated the building, they kept the courtyard. And they landscaped it nicely. As part of the landscaping, there’s a large area of rocks in the center of the courtyard. And to someone living in this building, this courtyard rock garden became a canvas.

The making of Ice Cubes, an open source, SwiftUI Mastodon client. | by Thomas Ricouard | Feb, 2023 | Medium:

A great nuts-and-bolts read on the making of a solid app. If you’re curious about building software for Apple stuff, this is a great overview of how it all works.

The making of Ice Cubes, an open source, SwiftUI Mastodon client. This is the beginning of a series of articles about the making of Ice Cubes

Nazi parade met with circus clown music | Boing Boing:

This past weekend, a group of neo-Nazis in Gera, Germany decided to take to the streets for a parade in support of Putin's invasion of Ukraine. Little did they know, the locals had other plans. Instead of responding with anger or violence, they organized a counter-protest that included playing humiliating circus music — a creative and humorous response that effectively undermined the neo-Nazis' message.

Give the clowns a soundtrack.

In Order to Keep Our Editorial Page Completely Balanced, We Are Hiring More Dipshits - McSweeney’s Internet Tendency:

Here at the New York Times, we believe that all sides of the story should be tolerated and explored, from white supremacists being actually kinda cool if you think about it, to people who believe that saying college campuses should be less PC is somehow an interesting use of 1,000 words. That’s why we’re expanding our editorial staff to include more dipshits. Because everyone, no matter how intellectually lazy their conservatism, deserves a column in our newspaper.

It Is Journalism’s Sacred Duty To Endanger The Lives Of As Many Trans People As Possible:

The Onion folks - Obviously satire, re: editorial choices at major outlets and the attempts of their journalists to reconsider the harm they do.

We just made Quentin up, and that’s okay. It doesn’t mean stories like his aren’t potentially happening everywhere, constantly. Good journalism is about finding those stories, even when they don’t exist. It’s about asking the tough questions and ignoring the answers you don’t like, then offering misleading evidence in service of preordained editorial conclusions. In our case, endangering trans people is the lodestar that shapes our coverage. Frankly, if our work isn’t putting trans people further at risk of trauma and violence, we consider it a failure.

We stand behind our recent obsessed-seeming torrent of articles and essays on trans people, which we believe faithfully depicts their lived experiences as weird and gross. We remain dedicated to finding the angles that best frame the basic rights of the gender-nonconforming as up for debate, and we will use these same angles over and over again in hopes that this repetition makes them suffer. As journalists, it is our obligation to entertain any and all pseudoscience that gives bigotry an intellectual veneer. We must be diligent in laundering our vitriol through the posture of journalistic inquiry, and we must be allowed to fixate on the genitals.

It is against free speech to stop us from fixating on the genitals.

And poignantly:

All great journalists, and even those lesser journalists who don’t work for The Onion, eventually ponder why we do what we do. Is the point of reporting to illuminate the world around us, so that we may make meaning of it? Or is it to cause people in minority groups to question their humanity and persuade others to demonize them? We know where we stand, proudly dreaming of genitals.

Research shows that trans people are over four times more likely than cisgender people to be the victim of a violent crime. We salute our colleagues across the media who are working tirelessly to make that number even higher.

—The Onion Editorial Board

You’re not going to believe what I’m about to tell you - The Oatmeal:

Worth reading all the way through.

Akamai Nukes Linode Brand - Tao of Mac:

Linode’s success and brand name came from reliable, cost-effective servers managed by knowledgeable people,

Nearly every tech blogger/podcaster I follow has praised Linode for years - This is brand self-destruction.

Miller Time - Penny Arcade:

Fall Release

Michigan rep. to GOP mass shooting-enablers: “F*ck your thoughts and prayers.” | Boing Boing:

Summed up well.