Monday, January 30, 2023
From my journal, this day in 2014: A group of teenagers rang the doorbell last night. I went down the stairs to answer. The leader, a girl about 15, explained they were a group from the Baptist church down the street. They were playing a kind of scavenger hunt. The object was to go door-to-door looking to trade an object for another object. Did we have anything better than a keychain?
Monday, January 30, 2023
I’m in the process of relearning how to read books, particularly novels. I’ve gotten so accustomed to reading articles and essays online that my skill at reading books has atrophied. Yesterday I found myself effortlessly reading a novel for a few hours, and it was a breakthrough. That’s how I would often spend a day as a teenager, but I’ve lost the knack for it. The novel, by the way, was “Concrete Blonde,” the third Bosch novel, by Michael Connelly.
I saw this car.
Young woman at the supermarket checkout a packet of flowers, a bottle of wine, and nothing else. Seems like there was a story there. None of my business so I didn’t say anything.
Part of being optimistic is keeping one’s head pointed toward the sun, one’s feet moving forward. There were many dark moments when my faith in humanity was sorely tested, but I would not and could not give myself up to despair. That way lays defeat and death
— Nelson Mandela
We watched the first episode of the new series “Poker Face.” Big “Columbo” vibe.
Thursday, January 26, 2023
I finished reading “Black Ice,” the second Harry Bosch novel, by Michael Connelly. Good at the beginning and end, drags a bit in the middle. I did not find the action set-piece at the climax compelling, though the attack on the helicopter was cool. The characters and dialogue are well done, as are the LA locations. I would have liked the book more if I’d cared about the murder victims. But I didn’t, and neither did any of the characters.
We only have 37 more episodes of Yellowstone to watch, plus eight episodes of 1923, plus ten episodes of 1883.
I’m not seeing much interest in my linkposts here, so I’m just going to post them on Tumblr (atomicrobot.live), Mastodon (@mitchw@mastodon.social) and the Atomic Robot Live group on Facebook).
After watching the first season of “Yellowstone,” I have concluded we need a helicopter.
How platforms—like Amazon, Google, Twitter, Facebook, and now Tiktok—turn to shit. By Cory Doctorow:
“ … first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.”
Will the sun ever set on the British empire?.
This article by Randall Munro, author of the xkcd comic, just keeps getting better and better.
The exact day when the sun stopped setting on the [British] empire was probably sometime in the late 1700s or early 1800s, when the first Australian territories were added….
Every night, around midnight GMT, the sun sets on the Cayman Islands, and doesn’t rise over the British Indian Ocean territory until after 1am. For that hour, the little Pitcairn Islands in the South Pacific are the only British territory in the sun.
The Pitcairn Islands have a population of a few dozen people, the descendants of the mutineers from the HMS Bounty.
Amid Rising Homelessness, City Council Declares Housing a ‘Fundamental Human Right’ [Times of San Diego] This is performative bulllshit. The homeless don’t need declarations. They need housing.
Opinion: Antitrust Suit Against Google Ad Business Undermines a Growing Free Press Online [Times of San Diego]
Google’s most serious antitrust challenge to date [Casey Newton]
Apple Has Begun Scanning Your Local Image Files Without Consent [jwz]
Laid Off in Your Living Room: The Chaos of Remote Job Cuts. (NYTimes/Emma Goldberg).
First time getting laid off is lonely and scary.
A Happy Memory Can Help You Fall Asleep, if You Know How to Use It. “Lying in bed each night, Andy Buelow often finds himself thinking one thought over and over: How awesome it was to ride the ferry across Lake Michigan as a kid.”
James D. Walsh, Intelligencer staff writer:
“They’re professional and self-employed,” said David Rey, who, after years overseeing security teams in New York department stores, published Larceny on 34th Street: An In-Depth Look at Professional Shoplifting in One of the World’s Largest Stores. “Just like what we do for a living — going to work — they pay their bills and rent and raise their children off the proceeds that they get from shoplifting.”
None of the boosters interviewed for this story could name someone who shoplifted for any other reason than to support a drug habit.