Cory Doctorow’s “Red Team Blues” is the most exciting technothriller about a 67-year-old accountant you’ll read this year 📚

“Red Team Blues,” the latest novel by the prolific Cory Doctorow, is a gripping technothriller about billion-dollar cryptocurrency crime. I don’t often encounter fiction that pulls me in as hard as “Red Team Blues” anymore—I’m a jaded reader. But “Red Team Blues” kept me up well past my bedtime on more than one night, and I staggered around bleary-eyed at work the next day. I should send Cory a bill.

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Cats are always disappointed in you, whereas dogs always think you’re amazing and you’re disappointed in yourself for failing to live up to their high regard.

Just a reminder that ALL the sticks in the forest are free. Go out and get yourself a cool stick. You earned it!

I’ll just switch notetaking apps and/or task managers and then my life will be perfect, right?

The 65 newest series and movies to stream right now - The Washington Post.

Some of these are already on our watchlist, and I’ve bookmarked a bunch of trailers for others.

Tonight I wiki’d and googled about the Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon stories 📚and their author, Spider Robinson. The bar travels through time and space1 but its home base is Route 25A, in Suffolk County on Long Island, which is just a few miles from where I grew up. Robinson went to the same college I did, State University of New York at Stony Brook.

Then I wiki’d my home town, Huntington Township on Long Island, and was surprised to learn about many notable people who came from there, all of which I immediately forgot, because it is late and I am tired.


  1. Like the TARDIS on Doctor Who, if the TARDIS was a bar. ↩︎

Noncompete clauses and related employment agreements are indentured servitude.

Noncompetes epitomize MLK’s “socialism for the rich and rugged individualism for the poor.” They’re a way for employers to operate in a command economy where the power of the state can be mobilized against uppity workers who dare to seek a better deal…. “

— Cory Doctorow, How workers get trapped by “bondage fees”

📷 Julie and I walked around Hillcrest today.

📚I reread “Snow Crash, recently and recommend it. It gets better with age.

When people talk about “Snow Crash” today, all they talk about is the Metaverse. But there is a lot going on in that novel, and the Metaverse is only part of it.

I was pleasantly surprised to be reminded that the novel is satire. It’s funny. People talk so seriously about the book that I had forgotten. I laughed out loud at the payoff to the joke about the dog.

📷 Minnie and I hiked the Father Junipero Serra trail yesterday.

ChatGPT Is Already Changing How I Do My Job. By Farhad Manjoo at The New York Times.

Guillotinable. The bit about the dog isn’t even the worst thing this narcissistic dipshit said. Not even close.

CEO Celebrates Worker Who Sold Family Dog After He Demanded They Return to Office

In his memo announcing the cuts Peretti took full responsibility, writing “I also want to be clear: I could have managed these changes better as the CEO of this company and our leadership team could have performed better…” which is why 180 other people will be getting fired instead of him. He’s learned so much, and going forward he’ll bring a new spirit of collaboration and humility to the AI garbage he replaces them with.

Rusty Foster on the BuzzFeed News shutdown

I’ve been using Day One for journaling since 2011. It will be interesting to see where Apple goes with this.

Apple will launch a journaling app in iOS 17, but that’s bad news for some devs - Ars Technica

California Isn’t Special: California’s housing problem isn’t what you think it is

Jerusalem Demsas at The Atlantic: California’s housing policies are the same as everywhere in the US, but population pressure has made the housing situation here far worse. In blue and red localities across the country, researchers find a “California-style” preference for single-family homes, hostility to density and renters, a tendency to segregate types of development (industrial, commercial, and residential), and a default toward delaying or blocking the construction of new homes, whether affordable or market-rate.

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Thanks for being obsessed with us, America. Red State conservatives don’t hate California for what’s bad about California. They hate California for what’s great about California.

I’d love to see a Star Trek miniseries focused on young James Kirk, in his first posting to a bridge crew.

I always preferred the TV series Kirk to the movie Kirk. In the series Kirk, follows the chain of command and obeys orders, even when he thinks the orders are stupid. Movie Kirk is a cowboy. So let’s call the series “Ensign Kirk.” We know that Kirk in Starfleet Academy was a grind, so how does he transform from that to the swashbuckling youngest Captain of a Constitution-class starship in Starfleet history?

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