Visions of the Future Should Come With an Expiration Date. Charlie Jane Anders: “One thing that strikes me is weird about classic science fiction is how soon many of its predictions came false.”
I’m checking to see how Reddit and Tumblr embeds look on the blog and in the newsletter. They look good on the blog. We’ll see in the morning how they look in the newsletter.
The Articles of Interest podcast with Avery Trufelman is doing a series on U.S. military uniforms and gear, and its cross-influence with civlian style, mostly men’s. Most of the series focuses on the 20th and 21st centuries, but it reaches back to the 1700s and 1800s. Start here with Chapter 1: The American military uniform.
Military gear and civilian outdoor gear are closely linked, and in the late 1700s and 1800s, being a manly U.S. man meant going out and killing an animal, skinning it and making it into an outdoor suit yourself. That was the theory. In reailty, you’d hire a Native American woman to do that.
Mitchellaneous CLXXXI: Four things I saw on the Internet
Mitchellaneous CLXXX: Five things I saw on the Internet
Marco Rubio orders the State Department to return to using the Times New Roman font because the previous official font, Calibri, is “wasteful DEIA.” This is a small step in the MAGA eugenics program. They don’t just hate brown people; they also want to eradicate anyone else they’ve decided is genetically inferior, such as disabled people — in this case, people with reading disabilities, who find sans serif fonts easier to read.
A woman in the UK who suffers from schizophrenia thought her refrigerator was trying to communicate with her and she hospitalized herself. Turns out the message was an ad for the TV show “Plur1bus.” The message read “WE’RE SORRY WE UPSET YOU CAROL,” in creepy black letters on a yellow background.
The schizophrenic woman is named Carol, which is also the name of the main character of “Pluribus.”
Even a person without mental illness would be alarmed if that person was named Carol and their refrigerator sent them a creepy message using their name. This was a bad decision for an ad.
UPDATE: The only evidence I’ve been able to find for this is a single Reddit post. I’m going to hypothesize that this is a hoax, unless I see some other evidence.