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.
Apple needs to stop trying to make HEIC a thing
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.
📷 Here’s something I saw while walking the dog.
This car has seen some shit.
📷 This morning while walking the dog, we saw this shih tzu wearing shoes.
Love a dog wearing shoes.
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.