Mitch's Blog

Only 90s Web Developers Remember This. The halfway point of this essay is where my Web development skills end.

Your Local Epidemiologist: How to (and not to) boost your immune system

Works: “A balanced, nutrient-dense diet,” sleep and hydration.

Doesn’t work: Getting re-infected; dietary supplements (for most people) including Vitamin C, Vitamin D and probiotics; cold plunges; nasal breathing; saunas.

How Cory Doctorow cured his writer’s block:

… the key turned out to be the realization that while there were days when (in retrospect) I wrote well and days when I wrote poorly, and days when I _felt _like I was writing well and days when I felt like I was writing poorly, they weren’t the same days. I could write great material even when I felt like I was writing shit. I could write shit when I felt like I was doing the best writing of my life.

Helpful for any kind of skilled work.

People who spend a lot of time posting to social media often spend time going through their follower list and getting rid of the spammers and bots. I’ve never seen the point of that. As long as the bots aren’t interacting with my account, or otherwise getting in my face, I say let ‘em be. I have other things to do with my time.

No doubt many or perhaps most of my social media followers are bots. Doesn’t bother me. As long as I know real people are following my posts and enjoying them, that’s sufficient to keep me going.

I also distribute these posts via a newsletter. One day I checked the stats there and saw the newsletter had thousands of subscribers, and was growing fast. I was quite pleased.

Then a while after that I looked at the subscriber list and saw that many of those subscribers were bots. So I figured out how to prune the bots, and found that the actual number of human subscribers I had was 24.

Twenty four. Not 24,000 or 2,400. Two dozen.

Sad-face emoji.

The newsletter is up to about 26 subscribers now. But at least a few of those 26 subscribers seem to enjoy the newsletter, and it’s set-and-forget for me—runs automatically—so I’m happy to keep it going.

By the way, if you want to subscribe to the newsletter, you can do that here. Just think—your action alone can increase the subscriber base by nearly 4% and that’s quite an accomplishment!

“Brand New Key” is actually a song about sex! Holy shit!

The word of the day is “pharmacovigilance.”

Penn Jillette Wants to Talk It All Out

I was going to move to France with my girlfriend and be a beatnik existential writer — she broke up with me, I was very upset, I said, “Fuck you,” and went to Clown College.

On the importance of agreeing on consensus reality:

We can argue forever about gun control — whether that’s a good idea or a bad idea, including what the framers thought — but if we can’t agree that the shootings happened, then we can’t talk.

Also:

As a good friend of mine said, “I don’t mind being called an asshole — I don’t want to be an asshole.”

He talks about renouncing libertarianism; Bob Dylan; the Smothers Brothers; the risk of monetizing hate, aggression and outrage; Jewish identity; why he doesn’t speak out about Israel and Hamas (pretty much the same reason I don’t); the Three Stooges; fame; ambition; Donald Trump; and why, despite numerous problems, the world is better off today than it has been.

Downworthy: A browser plugin to turn hyperbolic viral headlines into what they really mean:

• “Literally” becomes “Figuratively”
• “Will Blow Your Mind” becomes “Might Perhaps Mildly Entertain You For a Moment”
• “One Weird Trick” becomes “One Piece of Completely Anecdotal Horseshit”
• “Go Viral” becomes “Be Overused So Much That You’ll Silently Pray for the Sweet Release of Death to Make it Stop”
• “Can’t Even Handle” becomes “Can Totally Handle Without Any Significant Issue”
• “Incredible” becomes “Painfully Ordinary”
• “You Won’t Believe” becomes “In All Likelihood, You’ll Believe”