A missed opportunity with The Onion buying Infowars and announcing their plans? What if they quietly acquired & published real critiques of gov’t, political parties, oligarchs' documented corruption and lies? One might succeed in Judo-ing the conspiratorial distrust that isn’t entirely unfounded among some... dcdispat.ch https://dcdispat.ch/2024/11/14/a-missed-opportunity.html
Thank you, Noah.
I watch us
in our last, most honest minutes
putting bread on credit, double-
bagging bleach and ketchup, trying
to keep what we love alive.
http://versedaily.org/2013/thebelt.shtml
I still struggle with achieving the right balance of exposure to my local nuclear fusion reaction. Sometimes it is due to my own bad choices, but often I can blame systemic causes. Regardless, I managed a good starting dose this morning and it made a difference.
I slowly became good at a sort of GTD style of managing my email inbox. Not quite Inbox Zero, but a healthy total count can be managed on a hand or two. Not as good with browser tabs. Painfully declaring tab bankruptcy today. All those novel links, essays, news articles… ‘til we meet again.
The Heritage Foundation’s Kevin Roberts can suck it. The vertical playground at Swampoodle is one of The Childe’s favorite places to play.
It is near several places we make regular errand runs to and, in addition to climbing fun, it provides him a vantage point to observe the train traffic coming in and o... dcdispat.ch https://dcdispat.ch/2024/08/16/the-heritage-foundations.html
A lot of security in my neighborhood (or the adjacent one, anyway), including out of town police known for instigating violence with demonstrators, to protect a war criminal running out on a warrant for his arrest.
That we are. Just got shunted the long way around on my childcare run because of a massive security perimeter to protect, not arrest, a genocider with an ICC warrant. NYPD are in DC to support the US Capitol Police in managing the perimeter. Gave all the anti-occupation/apartheid/genocide demonstrators I saw out honks and raised fists of solidarity.
Caught up with the most recent episode of Maron’s podcast & enjoyed the bit in his usual rambling opening where he called out Trump on not citing his sources, being a coward for not giving credit to Hitler.
https://overcast.fm/+7lcxgAnuo
Enioying one of the longest running podcasts I know—one of those things that predated the term—radiozero.us from Rick and Rose of the Posterchildren. In one earbud while swapping in for the other parent who returned from shopping with The Childe sleeping in the car. Catching up on their first hand Steve Albini memories https://radiozero.us/2024/05/10/memories-of-steve/
Gratified for @ben@werd.social’s essays on smart, low-cruft, standards-based web development of late. As a (former?) web developer I was both discouraged by the mountain of frameworks+related things that seemed to be the default starting point for projects I saw, and certain that while there are new things for me to learn, what I was seeing dominate was not the best. Ran into a former colleague who is a real pro still doing agency-based web development and he seemed to agree.
A good trick is not being too high on being present, when one is lucky enough to experience that, to not capitalize on what you might notice.
I don’t think I’ve learned that trick yet.
I haven’t been to a punk show in a while, let alone one at 9:30 in the morning. It was of course, all ages—and my Childe’s school Spring Pre-K/Kindergarten concert.
I do want more aggressive antitrust action from the Department of Justice, including in the industry’s Apple is in, and possibly against Apple itself with well-crafted, technical and market literate arguments, if applicable… but calling Apple a monopoly still seems like a stretch. This DoJ action seems lik... dcdispat.ch https://dcdispat.ch/2024/03/21/i-do-want.html
I’ve been knocked on my ass a bit this week, and it’d probably be better for my mental and physical health to not consume SOTU coverage, but, bless the anti-genocide demonstrators who seemed to force a motorcade detour on the way to the Capitol tonight. It barely counts as close, but this is the closest I... dcdispat.ch https://dcdispat.ch/2024/03/07/ive-been-knocked.html
[Before we put these questions to a sperm whale unit, we’d have to think hard about whether we’d act on the answers. Kristin Andrews told me a heartbreaking story about a chimpanzee named Bruno who was taught sign language at the University of Oklahoma. Bruno was encouraged to build his whole life around the practice of asking humans for things. But after a few years, the scientists’ grant ran out and he was transferred to a different facility. When one of the lab’s scientists visited him there, he was distressed to see that Bruno seemed upset. He kept signing Key and Out. The scientist had taught th... dcdispat.ch https://dcdispat.ch/2024/02/26/before-we-put.html
I pay for Apple News+ partly because the ad experience is better than the open web. If it weren’t for that, I’d prefer Apple just be a payments middleman negotiating micropayments on the open web. It could be a better walled garden—give me Books features like highlights and notes!
Christmas is the only time my wife lets me pipe jazz over the household Sonos without objection. I make a playlist and sneak in some things that aren’t on swinging Xmas streams—sometimes tracks that aren’t at all seasonal.
Or I let SomaFM do it for me—they love to play.
Shame on The Guardian. They took the coward’s way. They could have done the work of linking or adding the context they suddenly feared was missing. Meanwhile, these words, whatever each of us make of them, will only proliferate more—Barbra in full effect.
https://www.theguardian.com/info/2023/nov/15/removed-document
The spookiest thing about my son’s Halloween costume—a monster truck—is the carbon footprint of both the imagined thing, and the construction of the costume itself (so much plastic—but we are re-using a cousin’s costume, so there’s that).
It is, literally, an electric powered thing with a battery pack to ... dcdispat.ch https://dcdispat.ch/2023/10/31/the-spookiest-thing.html
Maybe someday I will again travel solo (and not for work). As it stands, it’s before dawn in Seattle. I am “awake” with my very East Coast time-zoned toddler watching the nth episode of Super Kitties. This has been true for a while already this morning. And sure, I’m still grateful if bleary-eyed.
I believe in truth and reconciliation, full accountability of each and every one of those with power or who exercise violence, and in a zero state solution.
Maybe someday we’ll learn.
On what little patch of Earth will be left that we hope to sustain.
Far up the river, 22 years ago, daydreaming and looking out the window “that’s not how you land at Albany,” or a thought to that effect.
Well it wasn’t where it landed.
I will not forget that, and all the hell that ensued that day and for decades to come. It isn’t over.
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