Mitch's Blog

Cyclosporiasis would have been a great name for a 70s jazz fusion band.

A friend who started following me on Facebook when Minnie was a puppy told me he did not realize, at first, that Minnie is a dog. He thought Minnie is my wife. He saw me post about how Minnie puked and it was disgusting and he thought it was disrespectful to say such things about one’s spouse.

Minnie has made a great recovery. She’s eating regularly and gained back a bit of weight. She seems happy and alert.

When she got sick, I cut her back from our usual  3-1/4-mile morning walk to about 1-1/4 plus another third of a mile at bedtime. She seemed to be feeling pretty good this morning so I increased her to more than 1-1/5 miles and she did great — even had energy left over for zoomies. I don’t know if we’ll ever get back to 3-1/4 miles — but I don’t know that we won’t.

Our time together is limited. She’s a 13-year-old medium-sized dog with kidney failure. But we’re enjoying the time with her while it lasts.

I received an email at work this morning, following up on a recent article. The email starts, “Hey, half-bald motherfucker.” I love hearing from fans.

by @dave

“Now, it wasn’t AI that killed all that. Social networks like Facebook and Twitter were the main culprits, especially once they started treating corporations like users and users like product, sacrificing quality for quantity. AI just danced on our grave.” : ehandbook.com

Minnie sleeps in my home office and she had a special surprise for me when I came in this morning to wake her up.

She is a senior dog now.

We’re going to start buying Nature’s Miracle Advanced Stain & Odor Eliminator in 55-gallon drums.

If joyriding a stolen backhoe on San Diego streets and knocking over signs and a planter is wrong, I don’t wanna be right.

This post by Manton Reece makes me want to focus my online activity on my blog at mitchwagner.com and the associated daily newsletter. “Blogging is the backbone of the open web,” Manton says. This post by Cory Doctorow reenforces the point, though it’s only peripherally about social media. Cory is mainly talking about opportunity costs. If you’re doing one thing, you’re not doing something else.

Nonetheless, I’m active on a variety of other social platforms, because that’s where people are.

I struggle with Facebook. On the one hand, it’s where most of my friends and family are. On the other hand, Meta is toxic and the software is unpleasant to use. I know from experience that if you ask people to follow you on another platform, mostly they don’t. So I’m not leaving Facebook anytime soon, though I want to. Here’s my Facebook page

I like Mastodon. I see a variety of topics and my account is on an instance that supports up to 2,000+ characters, which is a limit I can live with. Here I am on Mastodon.

I’m losing interest in Bluesky. My feed seems to be all politics, all the time. Also, chopping posts into 300-character chunks seems like useless busywork. Here I am on Bluesky

I like Tumblr, but it seems to be in decline. I don’t think Automattic, the current owners, will shut it down soon; I think the CEO has a personal interest. But they’re not investing in it anymore and it shows. Here I am on Tumblr

Threads is surprisingly enjoyable. I read, but don’t post there. I want to reduce the number of social media platforms I’m active on. If I start posting to Threads and get likes and responses, I’d be more likely to feel hooked.

I was losing interest in Twitter even before Elon bought it. I canceled my account a few months later, as a political gesture. I reactivated later because I occasionally want to check posts that require a login. During the interim, I lost all my followers. That’s fine – I have no interest in becoming active on Twitter again. I’d like to reduce the number of social platforms I’m active on, and Twitter seems like an easy one to stay away from.

I like Reddit but posting there is a pain. A large percentage of my posts get deleted by moderators for reasons that seem silly to me. So I don’t bother posting much. Reddit seems like a platform I could cut from my daily use.

I’m also on LinkedIn, professionally. Here I am on LinkedIn

Writing in 2017 about the perils of self-optimization:

The past 14 years have regularly featured junctures where I had to get rid of something I liked doing so I could do something I liked doing more. Some of that was low-hanging fruit (I haven’t watched TV regularly in more than a decade), but after getting rid of the empty calories in my activity diet, I had to start making hard choices.

…

Some of these choices were tough. I have all but given up on re-reading books, despite the undeniable pleasure and value to understanding the authors' craft, which is easier to unpick on subsequent readings. But I have more than 20 linear feet of books I’ve promised to read for blurbs and reviews, and reading those books _also _teaches me something about the craft, _also _brings me pleasure, _also _makes me a better reviewer, and also makes me a better citizen of science fiction, who contributes to the success of worthy new books.

I am rediscovering the pleasures of re-reading books.

Some social media tools – like Facebook – make for fun (if problematic) socializing, and all social media pays some dividend to authors who are hoping to sell books and activists who are hoping to win support, but Twitter also teaches me to be a better writer by making me think about brevity and sentence structure in very rigorous ways (and from an activist perspective, Twitter is a better choice because it, unlike Facebook, doesn’t want the web to die and be replaced by its walled garden) – so Twitter is in, and Facebook is out.

This essay has got me thinking about opportunity costs, particularly regarding social media.

London Gatwick introduces robotic parking service. Autonomous robots park your car while you head to the terminal with your keys.

“The US Department of Justice is attempting to prosecute an Atlanta resident in connection with the movement against the police training center known as Cop City because he had GrapheneOS on his phone, an open-source operating system that enables users to enter a passcode and wipe a phone clean,” writes Timothy Pratt at The Guardian.

GrapheneOS uses a feature called a “duress password.” If police demand the password to your phone, you give them the duress password instead and it wipes the phone clean.

When Tunick arrived in Atlanta, agents questioned him about child sexual abuse images. “Tunick asked four times during the interrogation to speak with a lawyer, but was rebuffed each time, according to courtroom testimony. Additionally, the agents produced no warrant and did not read Tunick his rights.”

“I Don’t Know How You Can Look at Minneapolis and Say They Are Better for Choosing Reform Over Revolution”. Hamilton Nolan interviews journalist Justin Ellis, author of the book “The Cruelty of Nice Folks,” about Minneapolis, the failures of white liberalism, and defunding the police.

Google Is Building an A.I. Fence Around the Internet It Once Championed. As Google incorporates more artificial intelligence into search, people are spending more time on Google. Website operators are crying foul.

Why Do We Expect Ancient Romans to Have British Accents in Movies?

Penn professor Emily Wilson thought she’d sell 1,000 copies of her ‘Odyssey’ translation. She sold more than a million this year alone, thanks to Christopher Nolan.

The Last Days of the Southern Drawl. “Young people are losing their southern accents. By the end of my life, there may be no one left who speaks like my father outside the hollers and the one-horse towns.” By Annie Joy Williams at The Atlantic.

Measles Cases Hit New Record in U.S., as Stupid-Americans Reject Vaccines. Via John Gruber on Daring Fireball, who quotes Isaac Asimov: “There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that “my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”

ME (leaving offsite meeting): “Where can I wait for an Uber?”
HER: “Where did you park?”
ME: “What?”
HER: “What?”
Then we talked about insomnia. I knew I’d found another member of the tribe.

I’m currently running a test of whether I can work in back of a moving uber without getting nauseous. I can’t read while in a moving car but so far working on a laptop seems to be ok

I know that business etiquette has grown more relaxed over the years but I think starting meeting by puking is still a faux pas.