I have found people’s preferences for hot and cold beverages do not deviate based on the weather.
I’m a hot coffee man. 100 degrees out and the a/c is broken? Don’t care. Bring me my hot coffee.
Similarly, an iced coffee drinker will drink iced coffee during a North Dakota winter.
I went to the La Mesa-Foothills Democratic Club event last night, and they had a coffee urn out with the usual fixings. Normally, I am a coffee snob who buys gourmet beans, grinds them at home and drinks it black, but last night I poured a cup of the institutional decaf, added coffeemate and a packet of Splenda, and it was delicious. It was so good that I had two more. I told the organizer that if he had accidentally mislabeled the regular coffee as a decaf, I would give him a call at 3:30 in the morning to let him know.
Trump is telling us that we need to “get over it” about school shootings.
A major podcast network supporting Trump is supported by big Russian money. I’ve seen their alleged talking points – it’s basically the Trump campaign party line.
There are credible allegations Trump took $10M cash from the Egyptian government.
We know he was openly accepting payoffs during his Presidency – it was widely discussed at the time. Even he talked about it.
He’s also an admitted sexual predator. He’s on tape admitting it and those tapes have been widely and publicly played. Around two dozen people said they are his victims. He was sued over it, lost and the judge said he’s a rapist.
He’s a convicted criminal. Dude’s a felon, no different from a guy who sticks up a 7-11.
Add this to his mishandling of the Covid crisis. No matter how serious or trivial you think Covid is and was, you can still look at Trump and say he failed. Either it was a horrible pandemic or a hoax. Either way, Trump failed to protect us.
Also, Trump supports the people who tried to violently overturn the 2020 election results, and murder Nancy Pelosi and Mike Pence. He calls them political prisoners and is hosting a fundraising event for them.
On the other hand, Kamala says she worked at McDonald’s. But it’s not on her resume. So did she REALLY work at McDonald’s?
I can understand why undecided voters are finding this such a difficult decision!
An Informant Exposes The Inner Workings Of The Ku Klux Klan [Fresh Air]
Joe Moore, a former Army sniper turned FBI informant, shares how he infiltrated the KKK and helped foil a plot to assassinate then Sen. Barack Obama. Moore explains how hate groups are growing. His new book is ‘White Robes and Broken Badges.’
Real-Estate Shopping for the Apocalypse
Patricia Marx writes for the New Yorker about her tour of bunkers in which people can survive the apocalypse in comfort.
After weeks of scrolling, I found a handful of dream hideaways on the market whose sellers were willing to let me take a tour. There were two bunkers in Montana, one of which sleeps at least ninety; a prepper bunker in Missouri that features an inconspicuous entrance and a conspicuous arsenal of guns (not included in sale, but makes you think twice before criticizing the kitchen-countertop choice); a defunct missile-silo site in North Dakota; and a twenty-thousand-square-foot cave in Arkansas used by its previous owner to raise earthworms. (Favorite bit of real-estate marketing copy: “The worm room speaks for itself.”)
I compare myself to other people too much. Other people are much better than me at not comparing themselves to other people.
Things I saw walking around Oceanside with a friend
This artful birdhouse
Retro-futuristic signage
Beach cabanas
This mural
Sophisticated political discourse
Another mural, in a nice courtyard
I went for a walk in Oceanside with a friend, and in the parking lot, there was a long line of tough-looking guys with leathery skin and tattoos waiting to pay. I gave them my lunch money out of force of habit.
jwz: “Happy Bell Riots day to all who celebrate.” According to a 1995 Deep Space Nine episode, “one of the most violent civil disturbances in American history” occurs in San Francisco the first week of September 2024.
But:
Even when imagining a dystopia, Star Trek somehow still manages to come up with something that is better than our actual lived reality.
Automattic is moving Tumblr to a WordPress back end — Interesting! There’s currently no mass-market platform for personal blogging. WordPress used to be that, but now it’s a hairy, often difficult-to-use publishing platform. Tumblr has the potential to fill that gap.
Moving to WordPress would be an opportunity to add ActivityPub support, which Automattic talked about doing years ago but hasn’t followed through on. I’d also like it if they fixed Tumblr’s broken RSS feeds.
Writing prompt: “A loving, married couple wake up one day to find that they have returned to their high school days, when they were the most popular student and the class geek." Enjoyable flash fiction.
Every time I pop open the self-view when I start a video meeting, I look like I just came off a Sterno and methamphetamine bender.
Charles Stross: "They don't make readers like they used to"
Meaty, thought-provoking post on how the act of reading genre fiction has fundamentally changed since he and I were young.
… the public understanding of fiction itself is changing, and with it, the types of fiction which are commercially (or even socially) viable going forward.
Three fictive seeds germinated during the 1970s, and we’re now living in the fifty year old forest they gave rise to. Forests coevolve with ecosystems, and now we’re seeing the consequences.
Those seeds were: Dungeons and Dragons (which sparked the whole field of Role Playing Games, which constitute a wholly new mode of fiction in which the story emerges through a collaboration between the GM and the players–the GM provides guidelines and mediates between the player characters and their environment, but doesn’t dictate their lines): computer games (which are similarly interactive, but the map or procedural generative content is established before the players arrive): and the first of the big superhero movie franchises (notably the original Christopher Reeve Superman movies, which, starting from 1979, dragged Superman–and then the rest of the DC universe, with Marvel in its wake, out of the comic books and onto cinema and TV screens).
I was an English major in college in the early 1980s, and then it was breathtaking, revolutionary and controversial to suppose that the author was not the ultimate authority on their own work — that readers and authors were coequal creators. Only the greatest minds of literary analysis were capable of comprehending that rarified thought, and many considered it blasphemy.
Now, the idea is commonplace, and every 14-year-old fan is just as great an authority on the Marvel Cinematic Universe as Kevin Feige.
The transitions in the art of genre reading might go a long way to explaining why 99% of the sci-fi and fantasy being published today just bounces off me. Even the award-winning stories. Maybe even especially those. I fail to connect with them. And yet, when I was a teen, I consumed science fiction voraciously.
(Does anybody under 60 even remember Theodore Sturgeon anymore? Poul Anderson?)
The Harris-Walz tech policy platform is still bad
Mike Masnick at Techdirt:
It’s not batshit crazy, like the GOP plan, but it’s still generally bad. It’s the kind of thing that is going to lead to a lot of wasted time and effort as moral panic know-nothing “we must do something” types push out bad idea after bad idea, while people who actually understand how this stuff works have to do our best to educate against the nonsense.