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Yesterday I unplugged as much as I could from social media and national political news, to the extent that’s possible for someone like me. I felt pretty good about that so I think I’ll see if I can do the same today.

Alas, my idea of “unplugging” looks like a normal person’s “fanatically online.”

I am trying to at least partly unplug from the national political news today.

Micro.blog, the service I use to host mitchw.blog does not support likes and reblogs. Micro.blog proprietor Manton Reece @manton decided deliberately to not support likes or reblogs, because he sees those as contributing to social media toxicity.

I fundamentally disagreed with Manton when I started on Micro.blog, but I have come around to his view about “likes.” They’re just noise. I try to avoid looking at them on my posts. I do still sometimes click a like on other people’s posts. Other people seem to like “likes,” so why not?

But I still think reblogs are great. They are a primary means of sharing content on Mastodon, BlueSky and especially Tumblr. I don’t mind that I can’t publish reblogs on Micro.blog — linking, cutting-and-pasting and screenshots are fine. But the fact that Micro.blog won’t show me boosts on Mastodon keeps me from shutting down my Mastodon account and just relying on Micro.blog as my presence in the fediverse.

This blog is a dog's breakfast

Dogs start the day with a spoonful of Alpo or some other canned meat on top of a heap of patented, vitaminized kibble. In no time the meal is gobbled down and the dish licked clean and, like as not, poked noisily about the kitchen like a hockey puck, amid waggings. But I can recall another era, when every dog took a quick first look into his dish, to see what was in there. It was different each morning, but might contain a last chunk of pot roast or ham hock, plus gravy, from the previous night’s dinner table, a scraping of scrambled eggs, a slice or two of stale bread, leftover lima beans or spinach, a fresh but limp carrot, a splash of milk, and a half-bitten doughnut. It went down just as fast and probably did no harm, but what I’m getting at here is the old phrase “a dog’s breakfast,” because that’s what this book is. A mélange, a grab bag, a plate of hors d’oeuvres, a teenager’s closet, a bit of everything. A dog’s breakfast.

— Roger Angell, “This Old Man: All in Pieces.”

I have found a simple fix for a pebble in my shoe since I resumed blogging in earnest a few years ago: Finding some way to signal to people that I’m posting almost entirely the same things on my blog and all my socials. Today, I saw the easy answer on Nick Heer’s blog pxlnv.com : Instead of saying “follow me… “ say “follow this blog.” Problem solved! I have added the appropriate text to my blog header.

A new bill would grant Marco Rubio the right to declare any U.S. citizen a terrorist supporter based solely on their speech, and revoke their passport. “In March, Secretary of State Marco Rubio stripped Turkish doctoral student Rümeysa Öztürk’s of her visa based on what a court later found was nothing more than her opinion piece critical of Israel.” The proposed law would give Rubio similar power over U.S. citizens. theintercept.com/2025/09/1…

Is ‘The Pitt’ Really an ‘ER’ Spinoff? Michael Crichton’s Estate Says It Is.

Nicholas Kulish at The New York Times:

In February 2020, the actor Noah Wyle decided the moment was ripe to bring back his most successful television character, Dr. John Carter from the hospital drama “ER.”

Mr. Wyle wrote an email to John Wells, who had served as the showrunner on “ER,” to propose a “character study in the vein of LOGAN, PICARD and JOKER.” He described his idea for the show as “a 12-episode Hulu limited series, where we take another look at the guy who showed us the world the first time,” adding: “Darker and grittier. Aged. But still him.”

“Get a few band members together,” he suggested to Mr. Wells, “and write a beautiful new song in an old and familiar key.”

From the kernel of that idea emerged the hit HBO Max hospital drama “The Pitt"….

I find this question of copyright law fascinating. When does using genre tropes trend over into copyright infringement? A serialized TV show set in an emergency room is going to have to follow certain story formulas. It’s going to be fast-paced, will use a lot of medical jargon, etc.

My gut feeling as an Internet lawyer is that “The Pitt” is going to lose this one if it goes to court. No one is disputing that “The Pitt”’s creators and the Crichton estate were in talks to make an ER sequel. And Noah Wylie plays the main character, an ER attending physician.

As the article points out, it ended up being a better creative choice to not have the show be an ER sequel. When you create a sequel, it’s creatively limiting — cameos and guest spots by former stars, and so forth. Hard to maintain the fourth wall of viewer disbelief.

Also: copyright should not extend 17 years past the death of the author. “ER” should be in the public domain. I am firmly a Doctorovian on this matter; copyright is a brilliant invention and should be limited, as America’s Founders intended.

Also: We love “The Pitt.”

Also: Noah Wylie’s character on “ER” vs. “The Pitt” are internally inconsistent in a fundamental way: John Carter on ER was heir to a fortune who, by the end of the series, was running his own clinic with the support of that fortune. His character on “The Pitt” is head of the ER, but he answers to the hospital bureaucracy and is apparently living on his doctor’s salary. Different people.