Spotify Wrapped has proven hugely popular, and now everybody is doing it. I’m getting year-in-review notifications from many of the apps and services I use. I hope my urologist doesn’t want to get in on the action.

The only thing better than Walton Goggins is noseless Walton Goggins.

“[Rob Reiner’s] films have a certain comedy style … a sweetness and toughness…. Stand by Me is not just about four kids coming of age before junior high school — they’re going to see a corpse. If John Hughes had made Stand by Me — and I’m not knocking Hughes — they would have been searching for a convertible.”

— Rob Reiner, ‘When Harry Met Sally,’ ‘The Princess Bride’ and ‘Stand by Me’ Director and ‘All in the Family’ Actor, Dies at 78 in Apparent Homicide (Report)

RIP Rob Reiner and his wife in an apparent homicide. How terrible. He was a great talent and a mensch.

Ferris Bueller’s Day Off came out the summer before I was a senior in high school, which meant when I watched it I was very much oh, here’s a role model. Not for the skipping of school precisely; I went to a boarding school and lived in a dorm, skipping days was a rather more complicated affair than it would have been in a public school. But the anarchic style, the not taking school more seriously than it should be taken, the willingness to risk a little trouble for a little freedom — well, that appealed to me a lot.

Before you ask, no, I did not, become a True Acolyte of Ferris. I lived in the real world and wanted to get into college, and while at the time I could not personally articulate the fact that inherent in Ferris’ ability to flout the system was a frankly immense amount of privilege, I understood it well enough. Ferris gets his day off because he’s screenwriter/director John Hughes’ special boy. The rest of us don’t have that luck. Nevertheless, if one could not be Ferris all the time, would it still be wrong to have a Ferris moment or two, when the opportunity presented itself? I thought not. I had my small share of Ferris moments and didn’t regret them.

…

There has been the observation among Gen-Xers that you know you’re old when you stop identifying less with Ferris and more with Principal Rooney (this is also true when applied to the students of The Breakfast Club and Vice-Principal Vernon).

— John Scalzi, “The December Comfort Watches 2025, Day Twelve: Ferris Bueller’s Day Off”

I liked but did not love “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.” I loved “The Breakfast Club,” and am a little abashed at that because I saw it when I was 25 years old — well older than the target demo. Y

es, I did come to sympathize with Principal Rooney over time; yes, he’s a loser, but he’s also a civil servant, almost certainly underpaid, trying to do his job, and undermined by a privileged teenage punk. And, as Scalzi alludes to in a comment, Jeffrey Jones, who played Principal Rooney, is a registered sex offender, which colors my view of Principal Rooney and his other roles. Notwithstanding Jones’s personal choices, he’s a talented character actor.

Principal Vernon, on the other hand, is a petty little bully. No sympathy. What kind of loser threatens a high school kid with, “You mess with the bull, you get the horns?” On the other hand, Paul Gleason, the talented character actor who played Vernon, seems to have been an all right guy, who praised his teenaged “Breakfast Club” costars.

Look, I’m not trying to say that new technologies never raise gnarly new legal questions, but what I am saying is that a lot of the time, the “new legal challenges” raised by technology are somewhere between 95-100% bullshit, ginned up by none-too-bright tech bros and their investors, and then swallowed by regulators and lawmakers who are either so credulous they’d lose a game of peek-a-boo, or (likely) in on the scam.

— Federal Wallet Inspectors, by Cory Doctorow, @pluralistic@mamot.fr

John Varley died two days ago on December 10, 2025. A great many will mourn him as a science fiction writer whose work they enjoyed. But this misses his moment.

In the mid-1970s, Varley exploded into science fiction like a phoenix. His “Eight Worlds” stories were set in a future where hyper-powerful aliens have killed everyone on Earth as a threat to its whales and porpoises and humanity survives everywhere else in the Solar System. Despite this bleak background, the stories were bright and inventive. People change gender on a whim. Wealthy and glorious cities turn to shacks and hovels when their holographic fronts are turned off at night. People bank their memories so that, upon death, they can be restarted with new memories. He wrote so many major stories per year that, in a resurrection of an old pulp-days practice, some had to be published under a pseudonym.

We were all dazzled. His work was full of impressive new ideas. And, outside of the Eight Worlds sequence, he wrote things like “In the Hall of the Martian Kings,” which resurrected the possibility of intelligent life on Mars after the Mariner probes had apparently disproved that. Or “Air Raid,” which made air travel terrifying again.

His novel Titan looked to be the opening of a classic trilogy.

Briefly–for almost a decade–John Varley seemed to be the new Robert Heinlein.

And then, alas, he went to Hollywood.

— Flogging Babel: John Varley, 1947-2025

Dacher Keltner, a professor of psychology at the University of California at Berkeley, contends that Americans and the English smile differently. On this side of the Atlantic, we simply draw the corners of our lips up, showing our upper teeth. Think Julia Roberts or the gracefully aged Robert Redford. “I think Tom Cruise has a terrific American smile,” Keltner, who specializes in the cultural meaning of emotions, says. In England, they draw the lips back as well as up, showing their lower teeth. The English smile can be mistaken for a suppressed grimace or a request to wipe that stupid smile off your face. Think headwaiter at a restaurant when your MasterCard seems tapped out, or Prince Charles anytime.

— National Smiles, The New York Times

Question for my micro.blog chums: How do you find old posts about a topic? Imagine you are a fan of the TV show “Severance,” and you write about it occasionally over a few years. One day you want to find all your “Severance” posts — how? Search?

Stop Hacklore is a website to help fight myths about digital security, with advice on using public WiFi (it isn’t dangerous), QR codes (also not dangerous — it’s essentally the same as clicking a link), changing passwords every 90 days (unnecessary — and can actually be dangerous) and more.

Visions of the Future Should Come With an Expiration Date. Charlie Jane Anders: “One thing that strikes me is weird about classic science fiction is how soon many of its predictions came false.”

I’m checking to see how Reddit and Tumblr embeds look on the blog and in the newsletter. They look good on the blog. We’ll see in the morning how they look in the newsletter.

Due to unforseen circumcisions
byu/Final-Ad-2033 inBoneAppleTea

The Articles of Interest podcast with Avery Trufelman is doing a series on U.S. military uniforms and gear, and its cross-influence with civlian style, mostly men’s. Most of the series focuses on the 20th and 21st centuries, but it reaches back to the 1700s and 1800s. Start here with Chapter 1: The American military uniform.

Military gear and civilian outdoor gear are closely linked, and in the late 1700s and 1800s, being a manly U.S. man meant going out and killing an animal, skinning it and making it into an outdoor suit yourself. That was the theory. In reailty, you’d hire a Native American woman to do that.

Marco Rubio orders the State Department to return to using the Times New Roman font because the previous official font, Calibri, is “wasteful DEIA.” This is a small step in the MAGA eugenics program. They don’t just hate brown people; they also want to eradicate anyone else they’ve decided is genetically inferior, such as disabled people — in this case, people with reading disabilities, who find sans serif fonts easier to read.

As humanoid robots enter the mainstream, security pros flag the risk of botnets on legs.

A woman in the UK who suffers from schizophrenia thought her refrigerator was trying to communicate with her and she hospitalized herself. Turns out the message was an ad for the TV show “Plur1bus.” The message read “WE’RE SORRY WE UPSET YOU CAROL,” in creepy black letters on a yellow background.

The schizophrenic woman is named Carol, which is also the name of the main character of “Pluribus.”

Even a person without mental illness would be alarmed if that person was named Carol and their refrigerator sent them a creepy message using their name. This was a bad decision for an ad.

UPDATE: The only evidence I’ve been able to find for this is a single Reddit post. I’m going to hypothesize that this is a hoax, unless I see some other evidence.