I’m ready for a lodge meeting last night, dressed in the solemn dignity befitting a Master Mason.
And yes that is a toilet off to one side. Grow up.
Kenmei builds the data foundation for autonomous telecom networks on Microsoft Fabric. Kenmei is developing an intent-based agentic AI solution for network operations. The emerging player is backed by operators Telefónica, MasOrange and Andorra Telecom and partners with Microsoft. It faces competition from … well, everyone. My latest on Fierce Network.
Bonus: In this article, I reveal yet another of many vast, gaping holes in my pop culture knowledge.
A friend points out that I have “journalist” and #DEI in my Bluesky profile, which could explain why I’m getting blocked. I also have he/him in there. I had completely forgotten — it’s been a while since I edited or looked at my profile. Mystery solved. and no I’m not going to edit my profile to remove the offending phrases. Sensitive snowflakes who might be triggered by those words and phrases will be punished by being deprived of my dad jokes and stupid memes.
Every few weeks I get a Bluesky notification that someone has blocked me. There is no reason for anyone to block me on Bluesky; I seldom reply or @-mention anybody and when I do I don’t criticize or even disagree.
I think I’m on a shared blocklist — but, again, why?
The only thing I can think of is maybe somebody’s distributing blocklists of leftists. But my political influence is slight.
This is puzzling.
I brilliantly deleted all the subscribers to my newsletter without having a current backup. Fortunately, I had a backup from late May, so I restored from that.
If you unsubscribed since late May, please accept my apologies and I’m afraid you’re gong to have to unsubscribe again.
If you subscribed since May, well, you’re not seeing this so I’ll just try to beam telepathic apologies in your direction.
The government is very upset that people are criticizing it for shooting innocent mothers to death in the street. DHS stalked and intimidated a man who protested against state-sponsored killing, issuing him a “WARNING NOTICE” as flimsy as the nonjudicial “warrants” it uses now to bust into people’s homes…. It’s both deadly serious and deeply unserious. What are they afraid of? Well, we already know. Accountability in any form."
"What I Saw When I Peeked Over the Edge of Consciousness"
NYTimes writer Jessica Grose visits an unusual conference.
Near-death experiencers are the best dancers. I could identify which attendees at the annual conference of the International Association for Near-Death Studies have been to the brink, because they moved their bodies with un-self-conscious abandon, ripping up the floor of a tent on the grounds of a suburban Chicago Hilton.
Also:
In the weeks since I returned* from the conference, my mind has kept drifting back to a woman I spoke to, Hailey Georgia Harris…. [She was] striking and poised. She had a shaved head and a bright pink backpack. She told me she was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2019 and had been getting treatment ever since, though the disease has progressed from Stage 1 to Stage 4. She is 44 years old and has two sons.
As she began to process her mortality, Harris started listening to people recounting their near-death experiences. “I didn’t have the right words for it at the time, but I would find myself listening to them in the car, and then it became like a nighttime ritual, where I would put them on and I would go to sleep, and I didn’t really share that with anybody, but it just brought me profound peace,” she said.
She felt that after her diagnosis, she hit what she called an edge, “where you can’t go back, but people expect you to go back to your normal life within your circle, your tribe, but you also have one foot into the other side.”
How Markdown took over the world.
By Anil Dash:
Nearly every bit of the high-tech world, from the most cutting-edge AI systems at the biggest companies, to the casual scraps of code cobbled together by college students, is annotated and described by the same, simple plain text format. Whether you’re trying to give complex instructions to ChatGPT, or you want to be able to exchange a grocery list in Apple Notes or copy someone’s homework in Google Docs, that same format will do the trick. The wild part is, the format wasn’t created by a conglomerate of tech tycoons, it was created by a curmudgeonly guy with a kind heart who right this minute is probably rewatching a Kubrick film while cheering for an absolutely indefensible sports team."
A look at the history behind the musical “1776.” It’s surprisingly accurate. youtu.be/ZAHEUe7UV…
The Ringer’s Rewatchables podcast discusses “48 HRS," starring Eddie Murphy and Nick Nolte. “This is my favorite movie ever. It’s indefensibly racist and got more racist every year.” Me too — I love this movie and yeah it is, as the young people say nowadays, problematic.