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.

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.

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.

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

Worth reading all the way through.

Miller Time - Penny Arcade:

Fall Release

Every new revelation in the Tyre Nichols case is worse than the one before it:

When Memphis, Tennessee, officers stopped and mortality attacked 26-year-old Tyre Nichols on Jan. 7, 2023, it was not until weeks after Nichols’ death that seven officers were fired, and five were charged with second-degree murder, as well as a slew of other charges. Only six of the officers fired have been named. The former officers charged are Tadarrius Bean, Demetrius Haley, Emmitt Martin III, Desmond Mills Jr., and Justin Smith. All five officers charged were Black.

Shortly after video of the Nichols “arrest” became public, it became clear that the sixth officer, not charged, was white. This was due to the visual evidence of a white hand holding a Taser, and then using it on Nichols. That hand reportedly belonged to Preston Hemphill. Why Hemphill was fired but not also charged in the attack has remained a mystery.

Neuralink’s hygiene practices called into question | Boing Boing:

Pesky regulations interfering with Progress…

The alleged violations could have put humans at risk of exposure to hazardous germs, including drug-resistant bacteria and a potentially life-threatening herpes virus.

jwz: New Tech Bingo:

Daring Fireball: Making Our Hearts Sing:

Android enthusiasts don’t want to hear it, but from a design perspective, the apps on Android suck. They may not suck from a feature perspective (but they often do), but they’re aesthetically unpolished and poorly designed even from a “design is how it works” perspective. (E.g., Read You doesn’t offer unread counts for folders, has a bizarrely information-sparse layout, and its only supported sync service was deprecated in 2014. It also requires a frightening number of system permissions to run, including the ability to launch at startup and run in the background.) And as I wrote yesterday, the cultural chasm between the two mobile platforms is growing, not shrinking. I’ve been keeping a toe dipped in the Android market since I bought a Nexus One in 2010, and the difference in production values between the top apps in any given category has never been greater between Android and iOS. And that’s just talking about phone apps, leaving aside the deplorable state of tablet apps on Android.

I’ve tried Android devices many times over the years, mostly as a tablet for the rare things I wanted more control than iOS gave on iPads… iPadOS has largely negated the things I wanted from Android to begin with, but there were 2 things that always kept me from doing more with Android.

1. The software blows. Not just in look-and-feel, but in functionality and stability, and even discoverability. I'd try things many writers said were "best of class" and they were dumpster fires.
2. OS - Most of those tablets never got a major OS update beyond what they shipped with. At least one proposed it would support the next upgrade at the time I bought it, then quietly erased that from the product page when it came time to deliver... Samsung, Lenovo, Acer, major brands that should be able to deliver compelling devices and just ... moved onto the next thing instead. Compare this with Apple who just released OS updates for devices released 13 years ago.

Daring Fireball: Meanwhile, Over in Androidtown:

Google’s Android system software and first-party apps try. (The Chrome Android app in particular is iOS-caliber. Not iOS-style, but iOS-caliber, in terms of fluidity, originality, and attention to detail.) The Instagram app for Android tries. But for the most part, it seems like third-party Android apps don’t even try to achieve the look-and-feel comfort, fun, and panache of iOS apps. It’s a weird thing. The chasm between how iOS and Android apps look and feel is growing, not shrinking. The opposite happened with the Mac and Windows back in the ’90s. Windows itself and Windows software in the Window 3.x era were just awful. Starting with Windows 95, the gap closed significantly. Spending a few hours perusing the state of the art in Android Mastodon clients gives me the distinct impression that Android is forever stuck in its Window 3.x era of UI polish and design. It’s rough.

Some great compilations of current research about COVID-19 | Boing Boing:

Here are some terrific compilations of the latest research studies on COVID-19, if you want to stay informed, learn more, or share with friends and loved ones.

Recommend clicking through and then clicking through, imporant things to know to gauge your own personal comfort to risk level, because for most people I guarantee they aren’t making good choices about it.

Daring Fireball: Samsung’s Plans for XR Devices:

Translation: Just waiting to see what Apple launches.

Why Not Mars (Idle Words):

The goal of this essay is to persuade you that we shouldn’t send human beings to Mars, at least not anytime soon. Landing on Mars with existing technology would be a destructive, wasteful stunt whose only legacy would be to ruin the greatest natural history experiment in the Solar System. It would no more open a new era of spaceflight than a Phoenician sailor crossing the Atlantic in 500 B.C. would have opened up the New World. And it wouldn’t even be that much fun.

I thoroughly, fundamentally, disagree with this… Because the point is not only the destination, but the journey, but preferably by public institutions not private companies.

The lead up and execution of the NASA era of space exploration was littered with innovations which found application outside their own mandate, which drove technology forward across industries. This is exactly the kind of thing that should be done for the Public Good.

• via kottke.org

Fairy Tale as MFA Antidote - by Lincoln Michel:

I often start my MFA courses with a discussion of fairy tales. It seems an obvious place to start, since fairy tales are some of humanity’s oldest stories and likely the first stories that my students remember reading as children. But I also love starting with fairy tales because they violate more or less every single rule of fiction writing that is drilled into us in creative writing classes.

Instead of “show don’t tell,” fairy tales prioritize telling over showing. Instead of demanding “round characters,” fairy tales embrace flat ones. Instead of logical “worldbuilding,” fairy tales operate with a surreal dream logic in abstract settings. Instead of starting “in media res,” they start “once upon a time.” Instead of “telling the story only you can tell,” fairy tales ask you to retell stories that have been told for centuries. So on and so forth.

• via kottke.org

The real problem with our national debt is nothing like what Republican debt scolds say it is:

In the 1950s, wealthy families had an effective tax rate (what they actually paid, after deductions, etc.) of around 50%. The rich paid about half of what they made. Since Ronald Reagan, and then George W. Bush, and then Trump enacted one Rich Man’s Tax Cut after another, what the wealthiest pay has shrunk drastically, to an average effective tax rate of 8.2% over recent years, less than many middle-class Americans. What does this have to do with the debt ceiling, or the federal debt in general? I’m glad you asked.

In Ohio, a ‘normal’ couple secretly runs a homeschooling network to indoctrinate kids into Nazism:

The central project for most neofascists is to restore the place of unapologetic white supremacism to its former dominance in American (and global) society, so many of their activities and strategies involve finding ways to insinuate themselves as a toxic presence within the functioning components of working democracy so they can hollow them out and displace them with their own. Whether it’s the local police, or local and state politics, or environmental activism, or Republican politics, or even athletic events, the growing ranks of Hitler-loving neo-Nazis keep finding new ways to worm their way into the mainstream mix.

And then there is education. Especially education. Hatred of what they call the “Jewish” or “Communist” public education system in America has long been a cornerstone of neofascist beliefs, and their advocacy for removing the children of movement followers from public schools and homeschooling them dates back to at least the 1980s. And as we can see from the recent exposure of a neo-Nazi Ohio couple’s “Dissident Homeschooling” operation, it’s alive and festering on social media today.

Secret Service releases study on mass shootings: It’s economics, misogyny, and conspiracy theories:

The last two weeks have brought back the reminder that mass shootings in the United States continue unabated. In their wake, the Secret Service published a 60-page report on Wednesday that details the data they have about mass attacks. The study, conducted by the U.S. Secret Service's National Threat Assessment Center, examines 173 mass shooting incidents that occurred between 2016 and 2020. Each attack included in the report resulted in at least “three or more individuals injured or killed across public or semi-public spaces, including businesses, schools, and houses of worship.”

First off - The fact that there were 173 incidents over 4 years should be a sign we have a problem.

Notable statistics/predictors:

• 96% of the attackers studied were male, 3% were female, and 2% were transgender. (IE This is a dude thing)
• 72% of attackers experienced some kind of financial stressor sometime prior to the attack.
• Just under 20% of attackers had an “unstable housing” situation at the time of the attack.
• While there was a large age range, the average age of an attacker was 34 years old.
• 41% of attackers had a history of “engaging in at least one incident of domestic violence.”
• Less than a quarter of those firearm attacks involved guns acquired illegally.

Demographics wise, the breakdown pretty much represents the racial diversity of the nation: (IE Dude problem not a race problem)

• 57% of attackers were white.
• 34% of attackers were Black.
• 11% of attackers were Hispanic.
• 4% of attackers were Asian.
• 1% of attackers were American Indian.

Remembering Challenger:

37 years ago today, I watched this happen in real time while my class crammed in around a tiny TV. For all intents and purposes it was the end of an era of NASA, and the death of an innocent dream of space exploration for me.

Supreme Court failed to disclose that guy who signed off on leak report is on their payroll:

CNN reports that the court has “longstanding financial ties” with former Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, who Chief Justice John Roberts tapped to endorse the leak investigation that found no leaker and let the justices and their spouses off the hook. Chertoff has a contract with the court for security consultations that has “reached at least $1 million.”