David Boreanaz will star in a Rockford Files reboot. I am looking forward to this. David Boreanaz is perfect for the role.
But nobody uses answering machines anymore. Text messages wouldn’t be the same.
Changing how I handle blogging and social media (again)
I vibe-coded a thing! I coaxed Google Gemini to modify the template for mitchwagner.com to hide a specific category of posts from the home page. I’ve been wanting to do that for a couple of years but lacked the skills — I was able to do it in less than two hours with Gemini (including a lunch break lol).
The category is Mitchellaneous — it’s where I post memes and other Internet curiosities. I had been running that on a separate blog for a few weeks; now it’s all here. And folks who were signed up for my newsletters will now just receive one newsletter with everything (which is how I did the newsletters until a couple of weeks ago when I made the switch to two blogs and two newsletters).
Over the years, I’ve had a few ideas for how I want to handle blogging and social media, but haven’t had the coding chops to implement those ideas. With the help of AI, maybe I can finally do it.
Next up: Can I change my newsletter template so all the Mitchellaneous posts go at the end? Hold my beer….
ICE is preparing to spend $38 billion this year on a network of concentration camps to incarcerate 100,000 people. This is obscene. They are the American Gestapo. Fuck ICE.
An 88-year-old grandmother flew for the first time, on a plane piloted by her grandson. She also took Dramamine for the first time.
I love the idea of a single app that reads RSS, Bluesky and Mastodon timelines, all in one place. I have tried Tapestry, Reeder and the Micro.blog timeline and none of them seem right for me. Am I missing an app that does what I am looking for?
People don't give Gene L. Coon and D.C. Fontana enough credit for Star Trek
When attempting to critique the values of a long-running franchise like STAR TREK, it’s important to draw a distinction between superficial issues and structural ones.
“Superficial” in this sense doesn’t mean “minor” or “unimportant”; it simply means that an issue is not so intrinsic to the premise that the franchise would collapse (or would be radically different) were it changed or removed. For example, misogyny has been a been pervasive problem across many generations of STAR TREK media, which have often been characterized by a particular type of leering-creep sexism that was distasteful at the time and has not improved with age. However, sexism and misogyny are not structural elements of the TREK premise; one can do a STAR TREK story where the female characters have agency and even pants without it becoming something fundamentally different from other TREK iterations (even TOS, although there are certainly specific TOS episodes that would collapse if you excised the sexism).
By contrast, the colonialism and imperialism are structural elements — STAR TREK is explicitly about colonizing “the final frontier” and about defending the borders, however defined, of an interstellar colonial power.
Also:
People don’t give Gene L. Coon enough credit for interrogating the Federation. I know it’s gotten better in recent years and fandom seem to be more willing, on the whole, to credit him and the equally fantastic D. C. Fontana with - quite frankly - doing much more than Roddenberry ever did during TOS’ original run, but it’s still not enough.
Interesting, enjoyable and thought-provoking. Read more: larasramblings.tumblr.com
We need a new amendment: The right to bear phones
The nation’s founders worried that if the state had a monopoly on weapons, its citizens could be oppressed. Their answer was the Second Amendment. Now that our phones are the primary weapons of today’s information war, we should be as zealous about our right to bear phones as we are about our right to bear arms. To adopt the language of Second Amendment enthusiasts, perhaps the only thing that can eventually stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a camera.
Watched: A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms S1E1, The Hedge Knight A pleasant surprise! I thought I had enough of Game of Thrones, but this tale of Ser Dunk, a threadbare, sad-sack knight, is good-looking, light and enjoyable. We will keep watching.
Minnie in a raincoat is giving a vibe like Ralph wearing the bunny suit in “A Christmas Story.”
Minnie has a raincoat now.
As far as I can see, the only thing the national Democratic Party is good for is sending text messages asking me for donations. You want my fucking money? Do something!
The Horse Girl Fandom Is Melting Down Over Armpits: “Armpits are an advancing contender in the crowded field of “non-censored and ironic ways to be a pervert online….. " — Ryan Broderick (third item at the link)
The Problem With Measuring Bad Bunny's Super Bowl Halftime (And Everything Else)
Ryan Broderick (second item):
… even something like the Super Bowl, arguably the last television broadcast everyone in America sits down to watch together (in theory) is not immune from the larger shift towards non-linear short-form internet content. And, as we’ve seen almost every month since we started compiling metrics for platforms like YouTube and Twitch, the most viral language west of China’s Great Firewall is not English, but Spanish.
A comfort blanket for the managerial class
Ryan Broderick writes about a long, apocalyptic post by an AI CEO named Matt Shumer:
the “artificial general intelligence will destroy the world” narrative is a marketing strategy. It’s the same thing we heard about crypto and metaverse, both of which were meant to mimic how we think the release of the iPhone felt….
The opening of Shumer’s big AI essay is actually not about AI at all. It’s actually about COVID, specifically the creeping fear that, well, something big was happening. “Think back to February 2020. If you were paying close attention, you might have noticed a few people talking about a virus spreading overseas. But most of us weren’t paying close attention,” he wrote. “I think we’re in the ‘this seems overblown’ phase of something much, much bigger than COVID.” Which is, beyond AI, the defining philosophy of Silicon Valley — or, even, America — in the 2020s. That you are, simply, not aware of something important that is about to happen, a sort of COVID phantom pain. And once you see it, you’ll start seeing it everywhere. “You are running out time,” “you will be left behind,” “you are not noticing what’s happening.” The only thing Big Tech is selling us is their own unprocessed trauma back to us. It’s not a revolution. It’s a comfort blanket for a managerial class that still can’t fathom that all their tech and wealth couldn’t protect them from the pandemic.
I went to a Super Bowl party yesterday at the Masonic lodge. This was my first Super Bowl party in many years. Maybe ever.
I barely watched the game. I talked with people. I ate about 75 pounds of food.
12/10 would supe again.