An Artemis II astronaut on his way to the moon had to call tech support to troubleshoot a Microsoft Outlook failure. There is no escaping Outlook.
More than 25,000 self-proclaimed citizens have pledged their allegiance to the southern California micronation of Slowjamastan, where Crocs and reply-all emails are forbidden.
Donald Trump’s spiritual adviser Paula White-Cain compared the President to Jesus Christ during an Easter lunch at the White House. Good thing we’re not Iran, which is ruled by religious weirdos.
Michael Chabon writes an open letter thanking his seventh grade English teacher, Ms. Goode, who changed his life. Chabon describes how she assigned the class to write a story. Chabon had just read the Sherlock Holmes pastiche “The Seven Percent Solution,” by Nicholas Meyer, and was inspired to write his own Holmes pastiche.
“I decided that Holmes and Watson would take on Professor Moriarty, who had built an ironclad warship to terrorize the seas, and that they would naturally be helped in this mission by Captain Nemo, from ‘Twenty-Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.’”
That sounds like a pretty damn good idea for a story.
Chabon endears himself to me by namechecking Philip Jose Farmer in a footnote — Farmer is one of a couple of dozen writers who had a prominent reputation in 20th Century science fiction/fantasy and who seem to have been largely forgotten today. Farmer was one of my favorite writers — particularly his Riverworld series — and Chabon reminds me that there are still a few of Farmer’s books that I have not read.
ServiceNow claims a salesman “overachieved” and is not entitled to commissions on more than $27 million sales, according to a lawsuit filed by the salesman.
I’m inclined to withhold judgment on who’s right here. The lawsuit has excessive truthiness.
Christian Nationalism Is Thriving, and “We Should Be Concerned." By Hamilton Nolan
JD Vance says aliens are ‘demons’ — With war escalating in Iran, gas and grocery prices soaring, and U.S. airports in chaos amid a partial government shutdown, Vance thought it was a good use of his time to appear on a podcast to share his deranged UFO theories and obsession.
Market participation is exhausting
Society is optimized for people who love to haggle and think you should haggle for everything, says Cory Doctorow.
“For these people, cheating is just bargaining by another means. They embrace bizarre concepts like ‘revealed preferences,’ the idea that if you say you’re dissatisfied with a bargain, but you accept it anyway, you have a ‘revealed preference’ for the deal. In other words, if someone sells their kidney to Sheryl Sandberg in order to make the rent, they have a ‘revealed preference’ for having only one kidney – and if they sell their privacy to Sheryl Sandberg in order to stay in touch with the people they love, they have a ‘revealed preference’ for having their data extracted and exploited by Facebook.”
‘I Think That MAGA Is Dying’: Inside the Youth Movement at CPAC. “At a sparsely attended Conservative Political Action Conference, young Republicans were eager to start the post-Trump era.” By Nathan Tyler Pemberton at the New York Times
Maybe MAGA is dying — but will be replaced by something worse. These young Republicans still seem attached to nativism and LGBTQ-phobia, with resurgent anti-Semitism added to the brew.
On The Enshittification of Audre Lorde: “The Master’s Tools” in Tech Discourse
The enshittification story, at its most powerful, describes a process by which platforms that once served users well came to exploit them. But this framing assumes a prior state of genuine service, a golden age of the open internet, that was for many people never particularly golden. The early internet was structured around the assumptions of its architects: predominantly white, male, Western, educated, and abled.
— Tara Tarakiyee.