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If teachers could indoctrinate students, more people would use apostrophes correctly.

— Adam Rothman

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I feel like watching the final episode of a Star Trek series should be more of a special occasion. Like I should dress nice. In a Starfleet dress uniform.

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📷 Something I saw while walking the dog.

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Welcome to your test blog! You can create new posts here to test theme and design changes.

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Here’s something groovy I saw while walking the dog.

School bus painted deep purple with a platform on top and the logo "The Love Bus" in a groovy 1960s font on the rear door. Alternate angle of the same school bus, painted deep purple with a platform on top and the logo "The Love Bus" in a groovy 1960s font on the rear door.

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Today’s memes: I cannot help you with printer issues

via via
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I’m getting spam text messages from the Easter Bunny.

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Here’s something I saw while walking the dog

Artsy photo of the front yard of a suburban house. Dominating the foreground is a cute wire sculpture of an insect face. In the background, a blue-and-white minivan and house, slightly blurry.
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On the limitations of writing for the fediverse

Ben Werdmuller: I’m not bullish on squeezing long-form content into a microblogging platform, whether on Mastodon or X. Long-form content isn’t best consumed as part of a fast-moving stream of short updates. Yes! This is an ongoing source of frustration for me. I often write posts that are 600-1,000 characters. That’s not long-form by real-world standards, but it’s slightly too long for Mastodon, Threads, Bluesky and the micro.blog timeline, and the resulting posts are ghastly.

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Today’s memes: so excited to start my new job here at the Mutant Animal Weaponization Program 🤗

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Cory Doctorow: “Bullies want you to think they’re on your side: Bosses (not migrants) take workers' wages, and corporations (not readers) want writers' money." [pluralistic.net]

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You know what’s an excellent thing to do when you’re having trouble sleeping? Go through your notes apps and clean up the scraps of ideas for posts.

And now, back to bed to see if I can stack Zs for a couple of hours until the alarm.

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I keep bags of dog treats next to the bags of dried fruit that I put in my cereal in the morning. The packaging looks very similar. That is going to make for an interesting breakfast for me one day.

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The “True Grit” movies came up in a conversation so I went down an Internet rabbit hole

This 2010 article in The New York Times includes a conversation with Charles Portis, the author of the novel on which the movies were based: Portis’s characters have a self-conscious manner, a homespun formality of speech, that comes from the effort to inhabit grandiose roles: lone avenger on a quest; nefarious outlaw; besieged moral exemplar. If that sounds like a description of Cormac McCarthy’s characters, the great difference is that Portis finds comedy in the aspiration to heroism, and his characters are forever plagued by a suspicion of their own ridiculousness.

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Do you prefer video on or video off for remote meetings?

I prefer video on but I would not demand it. And I don’t even tell colleagues I prefer video on because I don’t want to pressure anyone. If most people’s videos are on, I turn mine on—and vice versa. It’s an etiquette dance I find mildly annoying, like when you see someone you haven’t seen in a long time and you have to choose between a handshake and a hug.

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The White Castle System of Eating Houses [99percentinvisible.org]. White Castle, founded more than a century ago in Wichita, Kansas, invented the American system of fast food.

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Why Do So Many Coffee Shops Look the Same?

On the Decoder Ring podcast, host Willa Paskin interviews writer Kyle Chayka, author of “Filterworld: How Algorithms Are Flattening Culture.” He discusses how the Instagram algorithm has made public spaces more generic and we have come to prefer those spaces.

In today’s episode, Kyle’s going to walk us through the recent history of the cafe, to help us see how digital behavior is altering a physical space hundreds of years older than the internet itself, and how those changes are happening everywhere–it’s just easier to see them when they’re spelled out in latte art.

[slate.com]

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Adolfo Ochagavía is an “undercover generalist." [ochagavia.nl] To find work as a generalist, he says, you need to present yourself as a specialist.

I have found this to be true. Don’t tell people you can do anything. People don’t need “anything”—they have specific problems that need to be solved. Later, when they learn to trust you, you can branch out with more general work.

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The Cult of AI. Writer Robert Evans returns from CES in January with a “sinking feeling” about the “unhinged messianic fervor” surrounding AI. [rollingstone.com]