Eliot Higgins, who founded Bellingcat, an investigative journalism organization, said he intended the sequence of 50 images as satire. The sequence included a chain of images that showed Trump breaking out of prison and going to McDonald’s, writes Chris Stokel-Walker for Buzzfeed News
Seems to me to be a bad idea for a journalist to do anything to jeopardize their credibility. Journalists shouldn’t intentionally create deepfakes–not even as a joke, which this seems to have been–or do April Fool’s Day practical jokes, or appear in fictional movies as themselves.
Reading about logseq as a possible alternative to Obsidian. Or maybe complementary?
RIP Bobbi Ercoline, who was photographed wrapped in a blanket, in the arms of her boyfriend, on the iconic Woodstock album cover. She married that boyfriend; they were together 54 years until her death Saturday.
People trust celebrities, politicians, and social media personalities, and discount scientists as corrupt.
Scientists are often wrong, their work should be scrutinized and debated vigorously. But over the past three years, people with journalistic status and little training and influence on infectious disease are shaping public debate.
And “scientists and public health experts are often cast as not to be trusted, captured by vested interests, lacking common sense, and out of touch with what most Americans think and believe.”
Recent headlines are wrong: Masks work to protect against Covid, and strong evidence points to a Wuhan market origin, not a lab leak.
The Self-Appointed Covid Experts Are At It Again. By Gregg Gonsalves at The Nation
Poop, whiskey, and trademark law. The Supreme Court hears a surprisingly difficult case about poop jokes, in Jack Daniel’s v. VIP. By Ian Millhiser at Vox.
Daniel Lavery has a third dog, named Mr. Wilson, “a brief loan from a friend on vacation, and not a permanent addition.” Neighborhood adults are dubious.
Small children have been more enthusiastic, as the addition of Mr. Wilson has united some of the most beloved of childhood pastimes: counting to three, noticing a new thing, more dog, informing their parents that something about the daily environment is now different than it was yesterday, and pointing.
This essay is delightful.
Antisemites have a long and paradoxical history of supporting Zionism.
White Christian nationalists in the US and Europe see Israel as a model ethnic state, and see Jews at home as pollutants.
Peter Beinart at Jewish Currents: Antisemitic Zionists Aren’t a Contradiction in Terms
“You do it once when you’re drunk, then it becomes part of your life." Meet the Secret Society of People Who Piss in the Sink. By Miles Klee at Rolling Stone.
They have a thriving subreddit because of course they do.
A message for folks who follow me from Mastodon
Micro.blog, the outstanding service I use to post here, just implemented a feature that lets users migrate their Mastodon followers to follow a Mastodon account. I plan to do that with all my ActivityPub followers here—move y’all to @mitchw@mastodon.social—unless I hear a great outcry of “no no please no!”
If you’re following me from Mastodon, you’ll see longer and better formatted post excerpts, and you’ll see my boosts, which you currently do not see here. And I will see when you boost or favorite one of my posts.
Why am I doing this? When I launched this blog late last year, I saw the Mastodon integration, I thought, “Great! I’ll just use mitchw.blog as my primary Mastodon account.” But almost as soon as I did that, I decided it was a bad idea. Mastodon is Mastodon and blogging is blogging and the two should be mixed carefully.
And now I have a chance to reverse that error, and I plan to do so ASAP.
Unless, like I said, I hear a groundswell of protest.
To be honest, I don’t think y’all will notice a difference. Unless you’ve added me to a Mastodon list, in which case you should add @mitchw@mastodon.social to that list instead.
And let me put in a plug here for micro.blog, which is an excellent, inexpensive service for lightweight blogging.
I enjoyed the first episode of “Lucky Hank,” a dark comedy starring Bob Odenkirk as the chair of the English Department of a mediocre and minuscule northeastern college. He is going through a midlife crisis. It’s based on a novel I thoroughly enjoyed by one of my favorite writers, “Straight Man,” by Richard Russo.
Julie hated the episode. We are negotiating whether she is required by our marriage bylaws to give the show one episode more or two before she nopes out.
We saw a bobcat on the paved trail while I was out walking the dog at Lake Murray this afternoon.
It was about 50 feet away and moving perpendicular across the trail at a fast trot, so I only saw it for a second or two. It wanted very little to do with us. The feeling was mutual.
It was at the end of our walk. Minnie was very alert until we got to the car a few minutes later. So was I.
“Toilet meal” is the Japanese practice of eating meals in “toilet rooms”—public bathrooms—to get a little valuable alone time, or because they don’t have anybody to eat with and they don’t want to be seen eating alone. wikipedia.org
“The Mariko Aoki phenomenon (青木まりこ現象, Aoki Mariko genshō) is a Japanese expression referring to a sudden urge to defecate that is felt upon entering bookstores.” wikipedia.org
If I was a Mandalorian, I would wait until the other Mandalorians were eating, and then I would say “this is the way” to them, so they would have to say “this is the way” back with a mouth full of food.
If I was a Mandalorian, I would wait until the other Mandalorians had their helmets off, and then fill their helmets with cottage cheese.
I would be an unpopular Mandalorian.
Now, guys with zero game can try their luck with CupidBots. For $15 a month, an AI algorithm will pick out women for them on their dating app of choice, based on their previous swipes…. The AI then masquerades as the man behind the dating profile, and continues to talk and flirt with its unsuspecting target, until the woman agrees to a date or to share their number. At that point, the app sends a notification to the user telling them about the date it just secured for them. And no, at no point does the bot disclose its nonhuman nature.
I like to feel that I can tell an apple from a pear, and I don’t expect from the pear what I might expect from the apple. In other words, if I’m reading Conan the Conqueror I’m not demanding that it be Middlemarch.
How to help friends and employees living with long Covid cnn.com