Fucking knock it off, people. Blogs exist for a reason. Stop being awful.
Fighting the privacy wars, state by state: Treating Congress as damage and routing around it.
An excellent and informative rant by Cory Doctorow. Includes such choice turns of phrase as:
Basically, Congress only passes laws that can be sandwiched into 1,000-page must-pass bills and most of the good stuff that gets through only does so because some bought-and-paid-for Congressjerks are too busy complaining about “woke librarians” to read the bills before they come up for a vote.
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As Congress descends further into self-parody, the temptation to treat the federal government as damage and route around it only mounts.
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… there are so many would-be supervillains who just can’t stop themselves from monologing, and worse, putting it in writing.
Roald Dahl Can Never Be Made Nice (The Atlantic / Helen Lewis)
In Order to Keep Our Editorial Page Completely Balanced, We Are Hiring More Dipshits (McSweeney’s / Mike Skerrett) “We believe that the truth lies in the middle. The exact mathematical middle. This holds true no matter how far right ‘the right’ actually is. You know all those things that John McCain said in 2008? Sorry, liberals: that’s left-wing now.”
AI-generated fiction submissions are inundating science fiction magazines. Some 35% of the stories submitted to Clarkesworld monthly are AI-generated. (Boing Boing / Thom Dunn)
Don Lemon’s statement wasn’t just sexist–it was stupid. Why should Americans trust a news organization that features this clown?
Don Lemon receives “formal training” before returning to CNN after “woman in her prime” comments (Boing Boing / Carla Sinclair)
I’m burned out on superheroes, but I could get enthusiastic about a Superman movie starring Henry Cavill that preserves Superman’s optimistic spirit and nobility.
Matthew Vaughn thinks Zack Snyder wasted Henry Cavill as Superman (Boing Boing / Devin Nealy)
Ben Stein is sad that there isn’t a “large African-American woman” on his syrup bottle (Boing Boing / Mark Frauenfelder)
Original iPhone from 2007 auctioned for $63,356, topping prior sales (Ars Technica / Scharon Harding)
Karen Green received the iPhone in 2007 as a gift, but she never even opened the box, because she’s a Verizon customer and the iPhone was then locked to AT&T.
Elsewhere on the Internet, a friend started a discussion of the Danny Dunn books, which I absolutely loved when I was a kid.
In the series, which started in 1958, Danny Dunn is an all-American boy living in the all-American college town of Midston. He lives with his mother, who works as a live-in housekeeper for Professor Bullfinch, a scientist at the local university and is a grandfather-figure to Danny. The boy hero and his young pals have adventures with the inventions Prof. Bullfinch brings home—a time machine, a computer, antigravity paint, a miniaturization ray, and so on.
Danny’s pal includes a girl named Irene who’s a budding physicist, and a sidekick, Joe Pearson, who’s a boy poet. Notably for a series that started in the 50s, Irene keeps up with the gang.