Ezra Klein: Democrats Have a Better Option Than Biden. Biden is a great President, but he’s running a lousy re-election campaign. Polling shows him losing to Trump. The solution, says Klein, is for Biden’s closest advisors—people like Barack Obama and Chuck Schumer—to convince Biden to stand aside and not seek re-election, and then to choose a new candidate at the convention.
The New York Times explains the controversy around the 2023 Hugo Awards, hosted by China
The Hugo Awards, a major literary prize for science fiction, have been engulfed in controversy over revelations that some writers may have been excluded based on their perceived criticism of China or the Chinese government.
Suspicions in the science fiction community have been building for weeks that something was amiss with last year’s awards, which rotate to a different city each year, and in 2023 were hosted in Chengdu, China. Now, newly released emails show that the awards were likely manipulated because of political concerns.
Also:
“The Hugo Awards tried so hard to appease the Chinese government they circled back to being racist by preemptively disqualifying Chinese diaspora,” Xiran Jay Zhao wrote on X.
The Cluetrain Manifesto is turning 25.
The Marine Corps credited Mawhinney with 103 kills as well as 216 ‘probable’ kills that could not be confirmed because of the dangerous conditions in which the shootings happened…. The Oregon native recorded all of the kills before he turned 20….. Serving as a sniper “was the ultimate hunting trip: a man hunting another man who was hunting me,” Mawhinney told the Los Angeles Times in 2000. “Don’t talk to me about hunting lions or elephants; they don’t fight back with rifles and scopes. I just loved it.”
Today’s memes: This is love
Superman II (1980) featured some ground breaking special effects, in particular the battle between Superman and the supervillains General Zod, Ursa and Non and here is special effects designer Derek Meddings (1931-1995) on the model “battle” set of Superman II. For his work on Superman (1978), he was awarded a shared Special Achievement Award for special effects by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and shared the Michael Balcon Award of the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA). He was also nominated for the 1980 Academy Award for Best Visual Effects for his work on Moonraker (1979), for the 1990 BAFTA Award for Best Special Visual Effects for Batman (1989), and posthumously for a 1996 BAFTA Award for Best Achievement (in special effects) for GoldenEye (1995). via
Facebook just sent me notices that it removed two of my posts for violating its rules. It won’t show me what those posts are so I don’t know how I violated the rules, therefore I can’t modify my behavior to be more in line with Facebook terms of service.
RSSParrot turns your Mastodon timeline into an RSS feed reader.
If you’ve been laid off – and especially if you’ve been laid off for the first time – you will blame yourself for being laid off. This post is just for you, and it can be summed up as this: you’re probably facing the consequences of someone else’s mistakes.
Upper management makes bad decisions, and employees face the consequences:
The decision-makers at companies making these layoffs sound like Lord Farquaad from Shrek: “Some of you may die, but that’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make.”
Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr: How America’s oligarchs lull us with the be-your-own-boss fairy tale. The gig economy, DEI and ESG are the latest iterations of a 70-year-old PR campaign to convince Americans that Big Business is their friend.
Bose introduced pricy open-air earbuds that sit on your ears, rather than in them. Bose is touting the devices as being comfortable enough to wear all day.
I already find my AirPods to be comfortable enough to wear all day. But I don’t because it would be weird, battery life isn’t up to all-day use and I can’t think of a reason why I would want to do that.